March 20, 2016
Becoming Lin, by Tricia Dower
Although coming-of-age books tend to feature adolescent protagonists, Tricia Dower’s novel Becoming Lin not only demonstrates that such “becomings” can occur elsewhere (and even more than once) in a lifetime, but also represents an arrival for the author herself. For this book, Dower’s third—after the acclaimed 2008 story collection Silent Girl, which put feminist spins on Shakespearean narratives; and the 2012 novel Stony River with its sinfully delicious Peyton Place bent—is absolutely her finest yet. Becoming Lin is the kind of book that you’re sorry when it’s finished, bereft to leave behind a world that has held you so fast.
It’s a novel about the 1960s, about idealism and reality, about the narrow confines of a wife’s identity and that of a mother. Familiar themes, all of these if you’ve read books like Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellers or watched Mad Men, but themes made fresh with the nuances of the novel’s point of view, the carefulness with which these ideas are examined. In Becoming Lin, the prose is mostly inconspicuous, but what grips the reader is the evolution of Lin’s consciousness, and the complexity that arises from the absence of polarities—unusual for a history of a decade so constructed of extremes.
Linda Wise is sheltered, overprotected by her parents in their sleepy New Jersey town, particularly since her sexual assault years before (which occurred in the novel, Stony River). At the age of 23, she sees an opportunity for herself when she meets the charismatic Ron Brunson, a guest pastor at her family’s church one summer. Ron preaches social justice, and shares stories of his experiences on Freedom Rides, for which he spent time in jail. Ron’s values seem to accord with Linda’s own, but with the addition of the possibility of actual action, something she’s found hard-to-come-by in her hometown, studying at a women’s college toward a social work qualification. The two end up sitting side-by-side at a church dinner, and Dower marvellously constructs the dialogue that brings them even closer. Ron mentions to their table that his chances of getting a church of his own are lessened without a wife, who’s expected to take on (unpaid) roles in the congregation—among them counsellor or administrator-typist. Someone mentions he should put a wife-wanted ad in the newspaper, and Linda’s not quite listening to this.
“I type. I can do the bulletins,” she volunteers, with characteristic bad timing, in essence responding to the want-ad, and while the moment is awkward, Ron Brunson is game.
After a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Linda (who is happy to have her new husband truncate her name to the more sophisticated-sounding “Lin”) follows Ron to his congregation far across the country to rural Minnesota, where she soon finds herself playing the careful and conservative role of the minister’s wife—not quite what she’d signed up for. Typing bulletins is not even the half of it. Most troublingly though is her husband’s reticence to voice his opposition to the Vietnam War, a point of view that could put his job at risk. And here is where a lesser novel would have irrevocably split the couple, wife going off to radical pursuits and leaving her dull husband behind, but instead Dower has Lin give Ron the courage to realize that opposing the war is his duty as a minister and as a Christian. Theirs is a true partnership, however much a complicated one.
And it is complicated, this we know from the outset, as chapters for the first half of Becoming Lin alternate between two timelines, one of the newlyweds negotiating their new life together, and the other of Lin half a decade later, now a mother to a young son with whom she is moving to the nearby city of Hopkins to begin a new life for herself. A temporary experiment, this is meant to be, though the reader is not made privy to the details at the outset—we know that she and Ron are still married, it’s his name on her apartment lease, that he takes for granted she’ll return home to a year from then. And the story here is familiar to me as well, because I grew up watching Three’s Company and One Day at the Time on television—sitcom scenes of single moms and apartment complex social dynamics. Though the problems Lin is grappling with here—and so too are the other single mom friends she encounters—are not so easily resolved in neat half hour episodes. It’s a brave new world of women’s lib, access to abortion, and career gals, though the notions of justice that have followed Lin throughout her life continue—she’s working for a company in which promotion is not accessible to women employees; her friends contend with deadbeat dads who don’t support their families, she gets groped on busses and feels somewhat unsafe just walking around in her own life.
In the intervening years, Lin and Ron had been wrapped up in the anti-war movement, stirring up resistance from their neighbours and gaining the unfortunate attention of the FBI. Her faith in God and religion has wavered, her husband’s remaining steadfast, and this has become a great divide between them. Their year apart then is an attempt to bridge that space, Ron wishing her to take the freedom and responsibility she longs for, and again, it’s a strength of the novel that he remains (for the most part) a sympathetic character, their connection a true one, albeit one with weak spots and failings. And that the religious character (he’s such a square, man!) does not become the bad guy, that he too is on the side of social justice, but his position is complicated too, just like life is.
In essence, Lin has two becomings in this story, and it’s important to note that one is not necessarily the undoing of the other. That progress is a process, and so is it for feminism, coming in waves as it does, some change rolling back on other kinds, and there is contradiction and disagreement, which might look like disarray from a distance, but it’s a becoming, indeed.
October 17, 2022
Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso
The most fascinating, original, well crafted novel I’ve read in a long time is Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso, a novel whose premise—I will admit—didn’t grab me immediately, because it’s about a guy who’s stranded alone on an atoll in the South China sea, exiled by the Chinese communist government. All the things I tend to like best about novels are impossible in novels about people stranded in the middle of the sea—family drama, elaborate dinner scenes, bookshop settings, etc.—even if the guy on a atoll shares parallel chapters with a female US Navy officer who—for reasons as convoluted as the first character’s exile—has found herself marooned in an inflatable life boat, the sea around her rife with sharks and mines, about to wash up aboard a rusted out vessel belonging to the Philippines.
So how is this author going to pull this one off, you might ask?
To which I’ll reply with one single word: MASTERFULLY.
The book itself, it grabbed me at once, because oh my gosh, this is such a good one, built on the kind of premise that has to be pitch perfect to work at all, but it really is. By the end of the first chapter, I was absolutely hooked, riveted, Saso’s plotting and prose casting an incredible spell that held to the final page, resulting in such a strange and expansive novel, a story of geopolitics, about espionage, war, and ideology, and pain, and longing, and the necessity of living by one’s wits to survive impossible situations, about the impossible becoming possible, for better and for worse.
I’ve got no THIS BOOK MEETS THAT BOOK comparison here, because I’ve never read another quite like this one, a book so deftly imagined that I’m in awe of Saso’s talent, mind-blown by the creative skills required to even begin to imagine a book like this, let alone the technique required to execute it.
All I can tell you is that you’ve got to read it.
February 21, 2022
Bowling
One of the smartest and most affecting books I’ve read this year is Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks, which I’ve been thinking about all the time in the weeks since I’ve read it, how we think of time, and how we use it, and how we even imagine that time is something to be used. It’s a book that’s come around for me in a quieter season, when I’ve been stepping back from the hustle and taking time to recover after a rough couple of months. When I’ve been trying to come to terms with my own relationship to production and productivity, which is not quite the same as the cliched Instagram memes about the importance of rest and self-care, but is worth interrogating all the same.
Yesterday I went bowling. It’s the Family Day long weekend here in Ontario, and we went to visit my parents yesterday, going on a snowy winter walk with my dad in the early afternoon. Later on, we met my mom at the bowling alley, which is just the best place ever with its retro vibes and how instead of a refurbishment, they just decided to install black lights.
None of us knows how how to bowl, really, and even if we did, it’s five pin bowling, which I don’t think actually counts. My mom had asked for our lane not to have bumpers, but for some reason we ended up with them anyway, which was possibly for the best and meant the children had more fun…and not just the children. I hadn’t a clue how scoring works, and can’t believe that once upon a time you had to figure it out yourself on a scorecard with the air of a tiny pencil, but thankfully none of us were tasked with such a thing, because these days a computer does all the work, the numbers it was generating seeming altogether random. But no matter, because we were there to have fun, not for competition, which brings me back to our original point: none us actually knows how to bowl.
So there we were, hurling a small ball down the aisle, illuminated by black light while loud music played and the only thing you could hear over it were the cheers of the bowlers whenever anybody knocked down a pin, or got a strike, or (in the case of our group) when we failed to do either.
I actually managed to get a strike a few times, but bowling arm becoming more confident and effective as the time went by, and I was a little impressed with myself, but not entirely.
Instead, what I was thinking, was what a joy it was to while my time like this, playing a game with people I loved whose rules were seemingly arbitrary, bumpers making failing altogether impossible, the inconsequentiality of all of it so essential to the experience. As close as you can get to doing nothing while doing something. There was not a single stake except togetherness, and having fun, and it was so easy to be present, and then eventually, after an hour or so, we’d all had enough, so we took off our rental shoes and went home.
January 31, 2022
To Hold This Falling-Apartness
“We are at a time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like, and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalist, then whatever do today will have a positive effect on the future.” —Pema Chodran, Welcoming the Unwelcome
In September I wrote about the end of (my own) political contempt, about the way my ideas had shifted in the last few years politically speaking, my awareness that responding to political polarization and enmity with more of the same was only serving to make a bad problem worse and definitely wasn’t making anything better. I don’t know what the answer is to our current political divide, but I definitely know that digging in my heels, and burning bridges, and dying on hills, etc. isn’t it.
I will not meet rage and fury with rage and fury, because I am absolutely finished playing such a self-defeating game.
Instead, I take a deep breath, summon my inner Pema, and breathe out a genuine wish that those furious and foolish-seeming people on Parliament Hill (the ones who seem to be comfortable standing in the company of extremists and hatemongers; I’m going to imagine there is a distinction) and all those keyboard warriors who are sympathetic toward those protesters will somehow find relief from their anger and start looking for more meaningful ways to engage with their neighbours and their communities.
I will continue to direct my attention and efforts towards connecting with real people in my own community, instead of playing the unwinnable game of online arguments. (The game is rigged, you know. Engaging with bad content just boosts bad content. And listen, I’ve had to learn this the hard way.)
I remind myself that one news story is not the whole world and while egregious behaviour was taking place this weekend, all across the country there were people doing great work to get people vaccinated, to support their neighbours in need, and others were meeting friends, immersing themselves in nature, supporting local businesses, that most truckers were out there doing their jobs and keeping things going, and first responders were showing up, and nurses and doctors were continuing to do their jobs under such harrowing conditions as they’ve done throughout the last two years (although I am so happy to hear that Covid hospitalization rates are continuing to fall) and that from coast to coast to coast, people were doing things like visiting the library, and planning their gardens (because spring is on the horizon) and roasting marshmallows around a campfire with friends (that was me!).
None of this is to minimize the harm of what’s going on, but it’s definitely an effort not to maximize it. Attention is a legitimizing force, and I’m not playing that game either.
April 18, 2019
Troubling a Star, by Madeleine L’Engle
There are only two copies of Madeleine L’Engle’s Troubling a Star in the entire Toronto Public Library system, which made me wonder. The final book in the Austin series, published in 1994 which was 34 years after the series after the series debuted. It begins with Vicky Austin stranded on an iceberg in Antarctica…my hopes weren’t high. And so it was shocking that this was the book of all of them in the series that grabbed me and held me plot-wise, and that I loved it just as much as the other four.
Because while the idea of someone trapped on an iceberg didn’t intrigue me so much narrative-wise, I was all over a plot-driven novel of intrigued concerned with the fictional South American country of Vespugia. Vespugia? I’d not encountered Vespugia within the pages of a book since A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which is my favourite L’Engle novel and the one I’ve read over and over again. In that book, the country is on the brink of nuclear war, and Charles Wallace Murry is called upon to change the past in order to divert it with the help of a unicorn—which he does. By Troubling a Star, however, the country’s benevolent leader has been overthrown and replaced by a dictator, which has changed everything, and suddenly the country is unsafe, police and soldiers everywhere carrying big guns. Like all the books in the series, current events are the backdrop to the story—in 1994 with the fall of the USSR, L’Engle is aware of the precariousness of the new world order (possibly more than many others were at the time) and it makes sense that someone with her understanding of the universe would be able to see the dangers of the vacuum the emerges at the end of the Cold War (“Darkness was, and darkness was good. As was light. Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm,” from …Planet).
The story begins with Vicky becoming acquainted with her friend Adam Eddington’s great-Aunt Serena who, with grace and wisdom, fills a void in her life after the recent death of her beloved Grandfather. The family are back in their rural home after their year in New York and the summer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it’s an in-between year for Vicky, who is finishing her final year of high school and is still unsure of her plans for the future. So when Aunt Serena bestows upon Vicky the opportunity to join Adam (a student of marine biology) in Antarctica, she is wild about the idea. Except then she starts getting threatening notes in her locker warning her against the journey, which is very strange, and part of the reason she elects to ignore them.
But things get stranger fast, particularly when she arrives in Vespugia (because the journey to Antarctica is never direct) and begins to suspect that someone has gone through her suitcase, and Adam’s letters from the research station suddenly become cryptic and weird. Everybody travelling with her group begins to look suspicious, and Vicky is no longer sure if there is anyone to trust. Further, chapter begins with a few paragraphs of Vicky stranded on the ice berg, which is great because a) it means not having to read whole chapters about someone stranded on an ice berg and and b) that things for Vicky go so desperately wrong ups the tension and made me want to keep reading to find out how it happened.
A terrible revelation as I was reading this book: it’s uncanny, I’ve said with every one, how each of these novels so imbued with ominous tones of the late 20th century feels so timely now. But maybe it’s less uncanny than just really awful, that nuclear threats, authoritarianism, the omnipresence of dogma, violence and unrest, and chance of mass annihilations all feel so much of this moment: what a time to be alive. Environmental destruction is at the forefront at this book, the hole in the Ozone layer and everything. It anticipates global warming and how important the polar regions are and what bearing they will have on our climate future. And also the brutality and cruelties of nature, and that human beings are very much a part of that. “People who lived, on the surface, ordinary, decent lives also, without any sense of evil, fed other human beings into gas chambers.” In Vespugia, they come across ancient pyramids built by civilizations that were destroyed by colonization. Everything is connected, and nothing about the project of humanity can afford to be taken for granted.
I will admit that I didn’t completely pay attention to the details of the plot here, and some of it’s more than a bit absurd—but not as absurd as The Young Unicorns, which was thoroughly bonkers, so there’s the new standard. I think it’s amazing that this series, which is set in an approximately four year period, was written over 34 years, and manages to encompass massive global events and changes during that time. I know this is supposed to be L’Engle’s series that is doing more conventional things with time (as opposed to Wrinkle…) but it still blows my mind. Plus the ways that this series does (and also doesn’t) map onto the Time Quintet is mind-boggling. Is it the same universe? Are there infinite universes? And what does it mean that we ask these questions about a book that is fiction?
I am going to read The Arm of the Starfish next (which takes place just before A Ring of Endless Light) and then the books in the Polly O’Keefe series, which feature many of the characters I’ve encountered already in the Austin book—and I’m excited about that. The final book in that series is An Acceptable Time, which was published in 1989, which I tried to read years ago with the Wrinkle in Times series, but I see how I might not have appreciated it then. Perhaps I was always meant to wait until I was 40 and had done all the appropriate background reading first.
June 28, 2018
A moratorium on calling out pro-life campaigners for hypocrisy…
I would like to ask for a moratorium on calling out pro-life campaigners for hypocrisy. For their fervour at protecting the unborn all the while shrugging as actual human beings are deprived of health insurance, or for freaking out about the death of a zygote all the while living breathing babies are languishing in prisons after being removed from their parents at the Mexican border. For calling themselves “pro-life” even while they’re aware that all research shows that banning safe and legal abortion doesn’t lead to fewer abortions, but it leads to more women dying. These points being made as though these people aren’t aware of the flaws in their logic, as though lack of logic is the problem. As though the crime here is inconsistency, instead of a heartless disregard for women’s bodies and lives.
It occurred to me last week after reading this piece that there is actually no disconnect between wanting to deprive a woman access to reproductive health and leaving a migrant child in a cage at a Walmart-turned-Detention Camp. Both stances are about dehumanization, about a readiness to make somebody into “the other,” about a comfort with state control of bodies and freedom that results from a lack of imagination, from a certainty that “the other” is never going to be you.
(There is a difference between a personal discomfort with and distaste for abortion and actively campaigning for its restrictions and ultimate abolishment. Finding abortion abhorrent but understanding the role it plays in healthcare and in so many women’s lives is the definition of humane. On the other hand, becoming one of those anti-choice activists [who are so often young because most people who are grown up understand that life and the world is complicated] playing right into the hands of powerful and well-funded right-wing forces which are underwriting the entire movement in the first place is abjectly cruel, and ignorant, and, if history is any indication, is only going to make the world a more terrible place to live.)
I wrote this 18 months ago: In prioritizing the rights of a fetus you must necessarily steamroll over the bodies and lives of actual women. And this is the problem with being pro-life, not that you’ve failed a thought experiment or a rhetorical exercise, but that you’re comfortable with women’s bodies being made disposable. It says a lot.
I didn’t use to talk about abortion all the time. I didn’t used to have the word “FEMINIST” three times in my Twitter bio. When I had an abortion sixteen years ago, it never occurred to me not to take my access to this service for granted. That women were people deserving of equal rights, which included the right to control what happens to their bodies, was as obvious to me as, well, the fact that Black lives matter. I used to think that none of these points of view was remotely political, and instead just matter of being a person in the world, and not even a particularly decent one.
But the reason why I’m writing yet another post about abortion is because every day seems to give me another reason for not shutting up. Because there is an active movement to clamp down on these rights that years ago I was naive and lucky enough to think I could take for granted. It’s not even a conspiracy theory, guys, because they’ll tell you. They’re even proud of it, and they’re celebrating every time a person who doesn’t know any better goes out and elects a right-wing populist because of concerns about provincial debt.
Abortion is the tip of the iceberg. It’s never been about fetuses—don’t you know that? It’s about controlling women, and limiting their freedom to make choices about their bodies and their lives. It’s the same impulse that tears a baby from her mother, and takes her away on a bus to a migrant camp. And I hope you will join me in resisting it at every single step.
March 11, 2016
Going for a Sea Bath, by Andrée Poulin and Anne-Claire Delisle
After a week sitting beside the ocean, it was a pleasure to return home to brand new book Going For a Sea Bath, by Andrée Poulin and Anne-Claire Delisle, and translated from French by Erin Woods. Although I’ll admit to being initially a bit wary of the book—as an avid reader of classic Canadian bath-lit, I’d noted a resemblance in substance and style to Eugenie Fernandes’ Waves in the Bathtub. But I was happy to find out that the resemblance is only skin deep, and while both titles make for excellent companion readers, Going for a Sea Bath is something all its own.
In terms of structure, pacing and general silliness, Going for a Sea Bath recalls early-Munsch. It’s the story of a little girl called Leanne who finds bath time too boring, and so her doting father runs down to the sea to find her creatures to liven up the tub. Beginning with a turtle, and moving onto eels, and anemones, urchins and clownfish, with eventually the marine menagerie becoming too much to handle—leading to the inevitable addition of octopi.
And by this point things are absolutely overflowing, but Leanne’s dad is not deterred. The page above, for obvious reasons (i.e. an octopus on the toilet, a hermit crab with toilet paper!—these perfect details in the illustrations feature throughout) is a favourite in our house, the point at which everything is totally out of control, and Leanne’s dad proposes they forego the bath altogether and jump into the sea, which is the most fun bath of all.
June 13, 2013
Hobbling Out in the World
We made it to the Farmers Market yesterday, my first outing since coming home from the hospital. I had to hobble there while clutching my incision, and for the first time ever, we had to implore our slowpoke daughter not to walk so fast, but we made it and it was lovely to be in the world, even if the soundtrack was a bagpiper dueting with steel drummer on a version of Jamaica Farewell. We also came home with strawberries and raspberries, so it was definitely worth the trek. I’ve elected to spend today in bed though, partly because I don’t want to overdo it, and also because Iris was up most of the night, scarcely sleeping for more than an hour at a time.
It still remains true how much easier this experience of having a newborn baby has been. Part of this is because we skipped the stage where Baby loses 11% of her body weight and breastfeeding is as difficult as it is constant. Iris had surpassed her birth weight as of Monday and she’s doing very well, bouts of misery aside (which can be attributed to diagnosis:Baby). Partly because we knew what to expect in terms of the all-night fussiness and the problems which have no solutions. (This time I have not once paged the midwife because the baby refuses to go to sleep.) I am not resisting having Iris in bed with us when required, which was a huge hurdle before–everyone had warned that it was the slippery slope to the end of life as we know it, but now I know that it isn’t. I have not googled anything newborn-related to seek advice from uninformed, hysterical women who are as desperate as I am, and as I result, I do not feel so desperate. The holy trinity of a queen-sized bed, my smart-phone in the wee hours and the placenta pills continue to bolster us. My husband who is not going back to work anytime soon. All these things are making these days quite different than the last time we went through them. Also the knowledge that these are probably the last time we’ll go through them. It seems to me that having a second baby is like getting a tattoo after all.
When we went out into the world yesterday, I was not surprised to discover it was still there. It doesn’t seem surprising that life has gone on normally while our family has been changed forever. Iris’s arrival has not so shaken the foundation of our existence as Harriet’s did, mostly because we were parents already and have not had to weather the explosion of becoming so, and also because Harriet herself ties us to the world, to the pattern of ordinary days. Stuart gets up in the morning and takes her to school, and she comes home with dispatches from the world beyond the four walls of my room. She demands meals and bedtime, stories read, games played. “Pay the most attention to me,” she demands, ever comfortable with voicing her needs. And so we have not been able to be sucked into that funnel cloud of newborn mania, crazed internet searches, middle of the night despair, logs of inputs and outputs. Downstairs we have the Hospital for Sick Children Baby Care book, and if you open it you will find the marginalia of a madwoman. There is a chapter on sleep habits, and I went through it with a pen underlining every single bit of text. Obviously, the notes were unhelpful, and I’ve not opened that book in quite some time.
Which is not to say that I didn’t cry this morning after being up all night when the bad baby still wouldn’t settle. But I had a nap and then I felt better, and I’m looking forward to walking a little bit farther tomorrow.
September 20, 2010
The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson
Caroline Adderson’s wonderful The Sky is Falling will not be outsmarted. The novel, in which Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist meets the short stories of Chekhov, is narrated by Jane Z., who opens the paper one morning to find a face she hasn’t seen in twenty years. The face belongs to Sonia, once Jane’s roommate, once a friend and possibly something more than that, and also a co-member of a movement campaigning for nuclear disarmament in the early 1980s. Sonia has just been freed from prison, after serving a twenty year sentence for a crime that will be the novel’s climax. The narrative flips back and forth between 1984 and 2004, as Jane explains what happened to her and her friends, and how her past connects with the very different life she lives now.
This is a novel deftly composed of fragments and allusions, whose construction is remarkably assured for this, and yet there are these moments throughout where something slips– a certain detail, an incongruency, we know one thing and then we’re told another–, and these moments take us outside the story for a moment. Poor editing, we can chalk it up to, and avid readers are encountering this kind of thing more and more these days.
And then. And then.
As I said already, Caroline Adderson’s novel will not be outsmarted, there are no slips. How Pascal was said to be a friend of Dieter’s, but Dieter doesn’t even appear to know him, and it’s not Adderson who’s slipped up here, but Jane, and her remarkably limited, unfiltered perspective. Or rather, a perspective that’s filtered solely through a lens of Chekhov stories and the Russian language she’s studying in her second year at UBC, and the stories are more real to her than her life is. She’s more of an agent in these stories, which she manipulates in her essays to suit her own political purposes, than she is in her own life where she is always on the periphery. She reads her life rather than lives it, and her readings are very often wrong.
Jane is the daughter of a Polish immigrant, she’s a foreigner in Vancouver where she has come from Edmonton for university. After a year of living three buses away from the campus with her eccentric aunt, she wins a spot in a shared house because she’s viewed as unthreatening enough to not steal somebody’s boyfriend. Here, she meets Sonia and the other housemates, all of whom have their own reasons for political action (and Adderson should be commended for her treatment of this ensemble cast). For Sonia, it’s a genuine desire to save the world (or perhaps to be the saver of the world, more particularly), and Adderson does a fine job of illustrating the heightened state of Cold War politics in 1984, with Star Wars, the Doomsday Clock, a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hanging by its eye-hole from a nail in the wall, and the Korean airliner that had been shot down by the Soviets the autumn before. To the insular group feeding off one another, all these were signs that the end was nigh, and to Jane, even more insulated within that insular group, it seemed her eyes were opening to reality for the very first time.
Twenty years away from all that, Jane is able to understand her own naivete– not necessarily that the end wasn’t nigh, but that she had a chance of changing any of it. She is just as powerless now as mother to a teenage boy who she fears is slipping away from her– it’s not his big leather boots she minds, or the piercings in his face, or his sullen friends, but that he’s becoming a stranger to her. Though Jane’s sympathy for teenagedom is admirable– Adderson has depicted the trappings of adolescence in a realistic way that would make Tabatha Southy proud. When Jane’s son finally seems interested in his mother, it’s only in her own surprising past, and Jane questions the ethics of using the allure of her past mistakes to connect with her son again. To what ends will he end up using her story?
The Sky is Falling is a great, smart and engaging novel that will appeal to Chekhov lovers, and make Chekhov seem appealing to the unconverted. Adderson’s allusions do not burden the story, but they serve to illustrate Jane’s lack of worldliness, and invest the whole novel with rich under-layers of meaning. The past and present strands of the story come together in a marvelously clever ending that both promises a brighter future, and also acknowledges that the thing about the future is that it’s always just escaping one’s grasp.
January 1, 2010
THE LINEUP (Canada Reads 2010: Independently)
My gang of celebity panelists and their excellent picks below, in alphabetical order by panelist. I am very excited about every single one of these books, and I hope my excitement gets a little contagious.
The Champion: Steven W. Beattie
Steven W. Beattie is review editor at Quill & Quire, and administrator of the literary site That Shakespearean Rag.
The Book: Moody Food, by Ray Robertson
Rock and roll novels are difficult to pull off. It’s hard to capture on the page the unkempt spirit of the music – its energy, its anarchy, its ethereal, emotional immediacy. Which makes Moody Food, an extended booze- and drug-fuelled odyssey into Toronto’s Yorkville (and beyond) in the 1960s, a fairly stunning achievement. The novel tells the story of Bill Hansen, an employee at the Making Waves used bookstore, who meets an itinerant musician named Thomas Graham, an American transplant decked out in a “white cowboy boots and a red silk shirt, all topped off with a white jacket covered with a green sequined pot plant, a couple of sparkling acid cubes, and a pair of woman’s breasts.” Graham (a figure loosely based on the real-life ’60s rocker Gram Parsons) enlists Bill and his girlfriend, Christine, to join him on his idealistic quest to create what he calls “Interstellar North American Music.”
First published in 2003, the novel is many things: a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby; a vividly realized portrait of Yorkville in the 1960s; and a metaphor for the disillusionment of the generation that came of age pursuing a heady mix of peace, love, and marijuana smoke. Robertson has said, “I believe that no matter what artistic pursuits you have, you want to be regarded like a rock star.” Ambitious and ultimately highly moving, Moody Food is that rarest of all beasts: a great rock and roll novel.
The Champion: Rona Maynard
The first book that captured Rona Maynard’s imagination was I Can Fly by Margaret Wise Brown. The most recent was The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. In between, she has edited Chatelaine, written the memoir My Mother’s Daughter and contributed to the anthology Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother. She speaks across the country on the life-changing lessons she’s learned from difficult people, and blogs at ronamaynard.com. She believes that no one is ever too old to be enchanted by timeless words read aloud.
The Book: How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad
Ever since Katrina Onstad’s debut novel How Happy to Be kept me immersed throughout a cross-country flight in economy class, I’ve been urging friends to discover this neglected millennial spin on the mother of all stories, coming of age. Not that the jacket copy mentions that term. The adjectives scream modernity—hip, ironic, sardonic, sassy—as if the publisher doesn’t trust the Jaded Generation to give a snarky tweet for a young woman’s fumbling and belated struggle to start living like a grownup instead of a resentful kid.
Onstad’s journalist heroine, Maxime, is on the face of it a princess of irony—a pop culture maven with a perpetual hangover and an unsparing eye for the foibles of stars whose self-important pronouncements sell The Daily, “a paper so right that Hitler would have made the commute.” About to turn 35 and still partying like a commitment-phobe at frosh week, Max embodies the studied brittleness of a culture in flight from reflection and responsibility. She’s way too smart not to know it. A frequent guest on TV roundtables about the manufactured topic du jour, she sums up her requests this way: “Swing music is back, could you take an anti-swing stance? What do you think of Gap greeters? Is sex the new virginity? Virginity the new modesty?”
A former film critic for The National Post (speaking of right-wing papers), Onstad limns Max’s workaday world with deft comic flourishes that capture the navel-gazing nuttiness that’s now being packaged as news by aging hipsters in thrall to trivia. But there’s a lot more at work here than spot-on satire. Max’s studied cynicism conceals the fear and bone-deep loneliness of the still-unparented child she is at heart—daughter of a mother who died way too young and a feckless hippy father in constant retreat from his own grief. Among the many rewards of this incisive novel is the unsparing light it shines on baby boomers, whose own brand of narcissism paved the way for their children’s obsession with glossy nothings.
Max’s eloquently portrayed frustration with her trendy pastiche of a life makes her a poignant and compelling character. She knows exactly what she doesn’t want—the same old same old. But what can she embrace with her whole being? And does she dare take the risk? That’s the unspoken question posed by the return of an old boyfriend who would never fit in at a celebrity press conference. Max’s triumph—and Onstad’s—is that she makes the leap, and you root for her all the way. The best stories never do go out of style.
The
Champion: Melanie Owen
Melanie Owen is a writer, editor and social media consultant living in Calgary, Alberta. Recently most of her days are spent chasing after her toddler daughter and drinking too much tea but she does manage to get some reading and writing done every day. She has an unhealthy obsession with collecting the New Canadian Library paperbacks that were published in late 1960s/early 1970s in an array of garish colours – and has since started a blog about reading her way through them: www.roughingitinthebooks.com
Melanie can also be found at www.meli-mello.com
The Book: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso 
I told myself I wasn’t going to pick a New Canadian Library book for this but, lets be honest, what else have I been reading these days? Besides, I keep buying this book for people so obviously I love it and feel that if called upon to defend it I would be able to do so. I’ll be honest – this isn’t a happy book (no great NCL books are in my opinion) but it is good. I find that most people haven’t heard about this book or Martha Ostenso and they both deserve a lot more recognition. Published in 1925 this one takes into question the prudish morality of the day and is very much steeped in what was considered the Canadian realist literary attitude. There is a lot of – what I like to call – “nature going on”, meaning: talking about nature/weather in a metaphorical sense – no Can Lit classic could be without that. But it also seems to me that is must have been interesting time for women to write say what they wanted to say without being shunned too much. Lind Archer, the lead character, is definitely an independent woman trying to hold on to some of her independence while still living acceptably in the small community around her. Apparently Ostenso wrote the novel in six weeks for a novel writing contest and it is said that she wrote it with her married English Professor lover – who later left his family to be with her – and so maybe she wasn’t so interested in what the morality of the day was? Either way, it is a fantastic read and will stick in your mind for a long time.
The Champion: Patricia Storms
Patricia Storms is an award-winning cartoonist, as well as an illustrator and author of picture books and humorous gift books. She was the artist for the 2008 TD Summer Reading Club, and recently traveled to Nunavut as an author/illustrator for the 2009 TD Canadian Children’s Book Week. Her newest picture book, ‘The Pirate and the Penguin’, was published September 2009 by Owlkids Books. “Wonderfully expressive faces, hyperbolic cartoons and the occasional use of speech bubbles combine to make the illustrations both quirky and fun”, writes Kirkus Reviews. Patricia lives and creates in Toronto, with her husband Guy and two fat cats.
The Book: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder:
Perhaps it’s unfair to pit a collection of short stories against a list of novels, but I couldn’t help myself – I am so smitten with Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat, it simply had to be my ‘Canada Reads 2010: Independently’ pick. The eleven stories in Snyder’s debut collection are charming, quirky, mysterious, and Snyder’s wry prose is sharp and spare. The teenager describing the adults who surround her at a summer barbeque: I hated them all, exquisitely. Or the young girl agonizing over her humiliation: I knew what my face looked like at that moment, the mouth in a stupid O, and I wished I could undo it and throw that face away. Tales of seemingly ordinary lives, subtly revealed to be discomforting and dark, are all delicately linked by a strange, mysterious man whose hair resembles a hat. People in these stories have secrets, are unhappy, unsettled, and it is the presence of the Hair Hat Man, like the lone stranger in a small Western town, who wakes them from their clouded slumber. In the story ‘Comfort’ the woman who finds the Hair Hat Man at her front door thinks to herself, “His presence, his hair hat, were uncalled for, an accident, a misfortune, a blemish on an otherwise clean, calculated day that should have held nothing but the ordinary reminders and warnings.” At first just a passing, quirky description, the Hair Hat Man moves closer into focus as the stories progress, until finally becoming fully formed in the second last story, ‘Missing’. Things are not always what they appear to be, people misunderstand, and are misunderstood; they lie to themselves and to others. The Hair Hat Man knows this only too well: “More people should be themselves; the world would be a different place.”
The Champion: Dan Wells
Dan Wells is a bookseller, publisher, editor, bookbinder and generally useless fellow who lives with his wife Alexis and two boys in Belle River, Ontario.
The Book: Century by Ray Smith
Ray Smith’s Century is one of the most important and neglected novels in our literature. First published in 1984 by Stoddart, it was immediately still-born, as the acquiring editor left the press and there remained no one to champion it. Books such as Century require a champion: if the Canada Reads institution – and surely it is, by now, an institution – worked, it would be books by the likes of Ray Smith, and not by already commercially successful writers such as Ann Marie MacDonald, which would get a bit of the limelight. The best thing about something like Canada Reads is the sense of discovery. But I digress…
Biblioasis re-released Century earlier this year as part of our Renditions Reprint series. Charles Foran wrote the introduction to
the novel, arguing it is among the greatest works of Canadian literature yet produced. Beyond a bit of word-of-mouth excitement on Twitter, no one but Steven Beattie over at the Shakespearian Rag took any notice at all. Beattie wrote, in part,that: “… the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners.”
Ray Smith has been at the literary forefront in this country since the 60’s, and I think it’s shameful that so few people know who he is. His Cape Breton is The Thought Control Centre of Canada, along with Sheila Watson’s Double Hook, heralded the introduction of the Canadian postmodern. His Lord Nelson’s Tavern — which we’ll re-release as part of our Ray Smith Reclamation project — raised the ante considerably. And Century blew everything open: it’s as if Musil or Walser or Mann immigrated to Canada. It’s an intensely moral, beautiful, horrifying, fearless novel. (If it is, indeed, even a novel. There are those out there who see it as a collection of stories.)
I’ll leave you with the last words of Foran’s intro: Ray Smith was, and still is, an artist of great seriousness and, I sometimes think, greater sadness still. Nearly a quarter century after its publication — that word again! — CENTURY continues to stand alone in Canadian Literature, apparently too singular, strange and unclassifiable. Out of this sad truth comes a happy one: the book remains to be discovered. Here it is.
