August 8, 2023
Yellowface, by R.M. Kuang
So, I can’t say I’d necessarily recommend R.M. Kuang’s Yellowface to anyone else who has a new novel coming out in 28 days, because it’s just a little too on the nose, a satire that’s so real about the pressures and cutthroat competition of the publishing industry, the high stakes and low odds which “have made it impossible *for white and nonwhite authors alike* [emphasis mine] to succeed…” (to quote from the novel’s white narrator, who steals a manuscript from her dead friend, an Asian-American bestselling novelist, whose CV is not entirely distinct from that of R.M. Kuang herself—there are so many complicated meta-layers of to this work!). Mostly though, what a white author who sees her own experience in this novel is quite likely to miss is that Yellowface is also a satire of the way in which white women are able to put themselves at the centre of every story, wholly accustomed to being “the expected reader” (to borrow a phrase from Elaine Castillo) of every narrative they encounter, and oh, Kuang plays some tricks with that tendency with both her characters and readers alike. Edgy and brilliant.
August 3, 2023
The Damages, by Genevieve Scott
So just say you wrote a novel about the toxicity of sexual politics in the 1990s with a campus setting, a novel with duel timelines, the contemporary story set against the #MeToo movement as the protagonist grapples with allegations of sexual misconduct against her former partner, the father of her child, and the allegations and their fallout stir up memories of a catastrophic event on campus more than two decades before during which the protagonist’s roommate went missing, creating a fallout that left the protagonist’s reputation in ruins and trauma she’s still just beginning to process…
Wouldn’t it be SO ANNOYING when Rebecca Makkai’s smash hit I Have Some Questions for You comes out just months before your pub date?
A novel whose description so uncannily matches your own (there’s something in the water!) and whose enormous success could possibly overshadow your own?
Thankfully, however, there is this: If you liked I Have Some Questions for You (and a lot of people did!), you should definitely pick up Genevieve Scott’s The Damages. And there is also this: The Damages is not derivative in the slightest and turns out to be its own specific literary creature, a book that held me rapt throughout, and also doesn’t suffer from the overstuffedness that weighed down Makkai’s book at times (though I ultimately felt that the overstuffedness of IHSQFY was deliberate, the point).
The Damages takes place at a fictional version of Queens University in the winter of 1998 during a devastating ice storm that cut off power, caused vast damage and left people stranded throughout the northeast of North America. The novel’s narrator is Ros, who’s trying hard to fit in during her first year at university and who is eager to distance herself from her earnest and wholesome roommate who is the antithesis of cool. But when her roommate goes missing during the chaos and upheaval from the storm, everybody around her declares Ros responsible for what happened, and this shatters the tentative place she’d made for herself in that community, leading her to drop out of school.
22 years later, set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ros and her son are isolating in Ontario’s cottage country as she’s also processing allegations publicly made against her ex-partner, a renowned children’s author. She’s forced to finally reckon with notions of her own culpability, her responsibility, and the possibility that perhaps she’s been a victim too. As with the best books inspired by #MeToo, she doesn’t come to neat conclusions, but instead engages with the mess of it all, teasing out the multitudinous threads, asking questions instead of claiming to have all the answers. A terrific read.
August 2, 2023
Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
The pieces of Wait Softly Brother—a novel about a writer called Kathryn who retreats to her childhood home in Ontario’s Hastings County after fleeing her marriage, she and her aging parents in a relationship of mutual irritation as she pesters them for details of her brother, stillborn before her own birth, desiring some kind of fragment to make the fact of his existence feel tangible, but her mother hands her a letter from a long ago ancestor instead who fought in the Civil War, Kathryn making up HIS story instead as a way to interrogate maleness and brother, and missing pieces of a whole, all the whole torrential rain is falling for weeks and weeks, the family farmhouse an island cut off from the rest of the world—culminate in the richest and most satisfying kind of story, a deep literary mystery. On dwellings, and dwelling, and wells and welling. So so excellent.
July 27, 2023
The Mythmakers, by Keziah Weir
Okay, hear me out: Lily King’s Writers and Lovers meets Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (which it directly references!), with a healthy and surprising sprinkling of astrophysics and consideration of the possibility of a multiverse. I LOVED this book, The Mythmakers, the fiction debut by Keziah Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair (who has British Columbia ties, so the book gets to be Canadian!). It’s about Sal, a struggling magazine writer whose life has just imploded and who is surprised, no, perhaps enchanted, to find herself within the pages of The Paris Review as a character in a story by an older author she’d met at a book launch years before. But then she reads the story’s introductory text to discover that the author, Martin Scott Keller, had recently died, and also that the story is an excerpt from his final novel, a long-awaited text. Well, naturally, Sal wants to read the rest of the story, and concocts a scheme wherein she connects with his widow under the guise of writing a magazine piece about the experience of discovering herself in fiction, but then the story becomes more tangled than that, too tangled for magazine piece, even long-form.
The Mythmakers is rich and absorbing, a fast gripping-thrill, but also deeply literary, about the nature of story and storytelling, and also the nature of the universe, and of marriage, and love, and the way myths—in particular that of the male genius—are propagated and upheld. It’s a story about art, and art-making, and science, and sexual politics, and gender, and it’s also slightly uncanny, it’s narrative voice hard to pin down, sometimes Sal, sometimes Martin, or Moira, his wife, but is it really?
Who’s telling the story? Who’s pulling the strings?
June 26, 2023
Believe the Hype
Wow, did Ashley Audrain’s The Whispers live up to the hype, and then some. (Most sophomore novel don’t!) It was reminiscent of Lianne Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty, a book I LOVED, but then managed to turn into a literary creature all its own with such complicated, deeply imagined characters whose stories were interwoven in ways that never stopped surprising me. The plot is propulsive and rich with suspense, but also poses some fascinating questions about women’s choices and women’s lives, motherhood and infertility. Such a fantastic read.
June 15, 2023
Some There Are Fearless, by Becca Babcock
I had such a visceral response and connection to Becca Babcock’s Some There Are Fearless, a novel that begins with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and concludes on January 8, 2020, as a Ukrainian plane is shot down in Iran, a day that lives as a portal in my own mind as “this very weird time,” which is fitting (and eerie, and interesting) for a novel that is all about fear, and anxiety, and our notions of controlling and mitigating risk.
Jess grows up in Cold Lake, AB, in the shadow of the Cold War, living just outside a military base. The Chernobyl meltdown absorbs her attention, and this preoccupation, coupled with her academic aptitude and her single mother’s push toward achievement, leads her toward training as an engineer and then a career with Maritime Energy in Nova Scotia retrofitting coal plants, with aspirations to one day work in the nuclear field and prevent disasters like Chernobyl’s from ever happening.
There are other cold wars in Jess’s life—her father has long been estranged from their family, her difficult mother’s fraught relationship with Jess’s brother fills their home with tension, and Jess’s own connection with her mother doesn’t get any easy once her brother leaves to go get a job in the oil fields, putting even more pressure on Jess to be the one who succeeds. She finds solace in the company of Adam, a fellow engineering student, however, and they begin to build a life together, although it’s not always easy for Jess to connect, but they establish compatibility and eventually they have a child, and I love the way that Babcock subverts expectations about how the emotionally distant Jess might be rocked by motherhood (and Jess subverts her own expectations too)—”How could love be spontaneously generated? How could a body feel so much, be so enraptured with another creature who, moments before, had only existed as a kernel and a germ, and who now, just now, breathed in the world, became the most precious thing in that entire world for her two parents? How?”
In a world with Three Mile Islands, and Fukushima Daiichi, it’s hard to relax—though Jess explains that the nearby Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant managed to avoid the same catastrophe that its sister plant was unable to prevent after the devastating 2011 Earthquake. And the illusion that she is eventually freed from, the trajectory of her story—which artfully braids together different timelines—is her gradual understanding that she’s not actually responsible for keeping the world safe, and that she can’t actually keep ill fortune from arriving at her doorstep, as her relationship with Adam falls apart, and her daughter undergoes testing for an “uncertain shadow” on her MRI. Jess can’t help but wonder if it was caused by the guided tour she’d taken to the Chernobyl zone nine months before her daughter was born, a risk exposure that seemed minimal and worth it at the time, but how do you ever know?
As someone with a Cold War fascination who has spent the last 18 months learning to live well again after experiencing debilitating anxiety, Some There Are Fearless really resonated with my own preoccupations, with my own challenges of making my way, as a person and as a mother, through our own particular age of anxiety. Blending beautiful writing with history and science, Babcock has created a rich and satisfying depiction of what it is to live in a world that is rarely steady.
June 12, 2023
Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change (I wrote about this in my 2017 essay about Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ADULT ONSET, a book that maps on to this one in surprising and interesting ways), but anyone who loves that city or calls it home is going to struggle with that, or maybe that’s even just the baked-in nostalgia that comes from being alive. I’m well accustomed to stories and images of “Old Toronto,” the kinds of photos that get shared in Facebook groups with names like “Long-Gone Toronto,” the kinds of images that Kamal Al-Solaylee writes about in his 2014 essay “What You Don’t See When You Look Back,” about the whiteness of these vintage scenes: “The pictures depict a world where only white people roamed the streets or were allowed into the frame. I can’t help but conclude that the friends who post them would have preferred it if Toronto had stayed that way: small town, white, exclusive and free from people who look like me.”
But in their new book, DENISON AVENUE, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes are doing something different, and in more ways than one. First, the book itself, which is double sided, one side telling the story gorgeously in Wong’s prose and poetry fragments, and the other with panels showing Innes’s drawings of Toronto “now and then,” now being about ten years ago—when Honest Eds was sold and the Kromer Radio property on Bathurst was going to be developed into a WalMart—and then during the years before it with a thriving Chinatown and Kensington Market, before these areas had become ripe for development and working class people could live a decent life downtown.
Within Innes’s contemporary drawings, a figure appears pushing a cart along the sidewalk, picking up cans and bottles along the way, a figure I didn’t even notice the first time I flipped through the book, which is the point of the book, about what remains invisible, and who gets to be seen, and heard.
The woman in the drawings is Wong Cho Sum who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and lived in a house with her husband on Denison Avenue until his death (when car sped past the streetcar doors on Dundas Street). Together they had built a steady and comfortable life with strong community ties, but in the wake of her husband’s death and the city’s changes (which are not bemoaned just because it’s change, but because these are changes that make life more difficult for Toronto’s poor and marginalized people, something Cho Sum has seen before as the city’s previous Chinatown was forced to move west when the area was redeveloped as New City Hall) she finds herself unmoored from the world around her.
To fill her days (or perhaps I mean her evenings and early mornings!) she begins collecting cans and bottles around local neighbourhoods, developing a route up and down streets that are familiar to me.
What I loved about this book was how it told the story of a changing Toronto from the perspective of a person of colour, a person who speaks very little English (in the book, Wong writes her dialogue in the Toisan dialect), which is a perspective I’ve never heard before. And similarly, though elderly women collecting bottles and cans are as ubiquitous in my neighbourhood as they are in Innes’s drawings, I’ve spent very little time considering these women’s perspectives, what brought them here, why they’re doing this—for Cho Sum, it’s to earn a bit of money, and give shape to her days, and for exercise. In so many ways, for me, Denison Avenue was absolutely a revelation.
And it was also just a tremendously moving story of strength and resilience, of love and courage, and friendship and community. (There is a swimming scene!! I just adored it.)
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change, but in Denison Avenue, Wong and Innes manage to capture a unique view of the city as it was for just a moment, all the while making their readers consider what the city might become if we think about what it’s true heart is, which is to say the people who live here.
June 9, 2023
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy
With the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History, Camille T. Dungy became one of my must-read authors, although I might have read her follow-up Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden anyway on the basis of that gorgeous cover (and oh my goodness, wait until you see the inside covers!!). Soil is a book about metaphors, but also about the thing itself and, to begin with, that this is the garden that Dungy designs and brings to life in the yard of her suburban home in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place where the propagation of native plants and a wild-looking garden is in defiance of home owner association standards about such thing as grass lengths, and Dungy and her family are part of the reason that culture begins to change.
This is a memoir about the labour (and setbacks) in cultivating diversity in our gardens, and beyond them. It’s also a story of receiving a Guggenheim grant to write a book whose progress is stopped up by the Covid-19 Pandemic and a ten-year-old child whose home schooling requires supervision. It’s about being a Black person and a Black mother in America in the wake of the 2016 election, whose fallout in a continuation of centuries of struggle and oppression, and what it feels like to be confronted by deaths of other Black people, those names like beads on a string over the past decade and more—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Like a rosary.
She quotes her father’s response to a (white) reader’s question about how Dungy could consider herself an environmental writer when she spends so much time writing about African-American history. Her father (Dr. Claibourne Dungy) answers, “For us, there is no separation between the environment and social justice.” It’s not one thing or another, but instead everything connection, our environment home to the world we choose to build here, and also to the natural elements over which we have no domain (or at least cannot even imagine we do) and here Dungy writes of wildfires across the state of Colorado during that already miserable plague year, where neither indoor air nor outdoor was safe to breathe in the company of others, and disaster seemed perpetually just shy of the doorstep.
This is a book rich with love, wisdom, and humour, a book about neighbours, about community, about marriage and love, about trying to save truckloads of soil from blowing away in a windstorm. It’s about climate change, and weather, and history, and botany, and place, and travel and belonging, and longing, and grieving, and persisting. It’s about faith.
“Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or it is the hope that what has not yet materialized might, someday, manifest… One of the hallmarks of faith is to believe in a promise and—though the promise has yet to come to pass, and may never in my lifetime be fully fulfilled—to find a way to carry on. To discover and honour what HAS come to fruition.
I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden, But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of the soil as well.”
May 17, 2023
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
I am infinitely grateful to whoever it was who inspired me to put this on hold at the library. OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, by Julia Armfield, was incredible, blending literary elements with horror to create a spellbinding tale of love and loss. The point of view moves between Miri and her wife, Leah, a marine biologist whose routine research trip goes wrong when their submarine sinks and is lost to contact. Six months later, Leah comes home again, but something is very wrong and Miri is unable to reach her, or get answers about what happened in the deep, a story Leah tells piece by piece in her part of the narrative. This is a novel infatuated with the wonders of the world, oceans and love among them. Creepy and compelling at one, a strange inversion of THE SHAPE OF WATER, and definitely one for readers who loved Melissa Barbeau’s THE LUMINOUS SEA, or anyone into JAWS. What a story!
May 15, 2023
Places Like These, by Lauren Carter
“I never though something like that would happen in a place like this,” is the thing people always say in local newscasts in the aftermath of tragedy, as though there were actually places in the world that immune to life itself, to its terrible, tragic unfairness, and inexplicability (and isn’t this part of the same reason people travel, to escape all that?) but, as Lauren Carter shows in her fantastic new collection Places Like This, life happens everywhere, on rural highways, far flung suburbs, northern towns, and abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. In the New York state spiritualist community famous for its mediums, a stuccoed church in Argentina, in the shadows of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood (“Carol did not tell her how she’d envisioned a slab of raw beef, glaring a wet red before purpling like an aged bruise. The expensive cut, one her mother would have rarely purchased at the downtown butcher shop with the creaking wood floor, the dusty cans of corn niblets and cherry pie filling.” ).
These are stories of sadness and longing, of wanting but not getting, but this—of course—is also life itself, and the collection is less bleak than it sounds, because these are stories of characters building a home and a finding a world within its realities, of finding love, spots of light, connection and meaning. Even in “places like these,” rich stories are possible, such as that of the couple whose dog is saved as the narrator’s struggling stepbrother begins to slip away; a widow keeps seeing her late husband; a woman glimpses the depths of her partner’s sadness when she goes home to meet his family; the couple together but emotionally worlds apart as they grieve a pregnancy loss, which is also the loss of so much love and so many dreams. I especially loved the three final stories in the collection, linked narratives about a group of women who’ve been friends since high school whose own ties are fraught, complicated, and irrevocable.
These are tough stories, rugged and hard, but there are also gorgeous moments of connection, of illumination—I keep thinking of a description of a drink in a character’s hand, “a bowl of light.” There are stories that shine.
