July 15, 2012
Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the 6th read
I do make a point of often rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but mostly because it’s just that quite often I get the urge to do so. And it’s usually summer when I do, like last week on the coattails of Valery The Great. I read Slouching last in 2010, and wrote quite a bit about it. This time, my reading around was coloured by having read Didion’s new book Blue Nights last fall. I’ve already written about how much her new book is a response to the voice we hear throughout this book, to her 32/33 year-old self who imagines (in “Goodbye To All That”) that she’ll never be so young again, who has figured that “someday it all comes” and that it even stays.
And yes, it’s jarring to encounter Slouching… with the perspective of Blue Nights. I’d never thought about Quintana in the context of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay, but I wondered where she’d been, and noticed Didion herself in the essay more than I ever had before: “Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable.” I think of the simplistic way that Quintana herself is described in so many of these essays: “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Quintana was one when that essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” was written. It’s so odd that the normally astute Didion would ever imagine that any person, especially in their infancy, could be so known.
I reread this book with the perspective of Mad Men too, and Lucille Maxwell Miller in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” came right out of the world, even on the opposite coast. Same with the “Slouching…” essay, the disintegration the show begins to grapple with in Season 5, which ends with the beginning of 1967. And yes, this essay reminded me of the present too, as it probably ever will, but even more than it did when I read it two years ago:
“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snaked shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”
I understand the “Personals” essays better and differently every time. I love “Notes from a Native Daughter” which is a preview of one of my favourite Didion books, 2002’s Where I Was From. I continue to find “The Seacoast of Despair” completely incomprehensible, every single one of its references a blank space for me.
And, mostly profoundly, I think I have finally grown out of “Goodbye to All That”. I still think it’s as lovely as I ever did, but it no longer makes me want to hang yards of yellow silk from my windows and cry in Chinese laundries. I no longer think it’s romantic. It’s dawned upon me that the voice of experience in that piece is still so absolutely, so tenderly young. Blue Nights, of course, emphasized this point, but I probably would have seen it anyway. I still love the part where she writes, “I would stay in New York, I told him, for just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed for eight years.”
But I’m started to realize that who we were at 23 means less and less as we get older, and that the decade we traverse to get to 33 is still absolutely nothing compared to the journey just beginning. That we shall be made so young and stripped of our illusions over and over again.
April 26, 2012
On Girls Fall Down: "Like it's liminal between real and imaginary, you know?"
As it was when I first read this book in 2008, the plot is weak, but then plot is not the point in Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, which is this year’s One Book Toronto read and also one of the most evocative Toronto books I’ve read ever. And it’s been a funny week on my end, nothing dire, much that’s lovely, but just very busy and divorced from the strict routine my life is constructed around usually. Yesterday, I rode the subway so many times I bought a day-pass, and it was a strange thing to be reading this book on the TTC and carrying it through other places where some its most important scenes are set. It was a strange thing also to come home from a gathering where emotions were particularly heightened, and I kept thinking about the line on page 128, “our lives marked always by the proximity of others.”
It’s such an atmospheric book, and the atmosphere keeps stealing into my own. Today I felt like Alex does: “…everything now seemed to assimilate into the city’s larger narrative.” Or rather, the city assimilating into Maggie Helwig’s narrative. It’s remarkable, isn’t it, the curious places where fact and fiction meet. Today I encounter the newspaper headline, “Students, staff at Scarborough elementary school fall ill”. ““They did a thorough inspection of the school and carbon monoxide or any other airborne problems were deemed not to be the cause,” said… spokesman for the Toronto Catholic District School Board”. And even the abortion clinic scenes, and today’s attack on Canadian women’s reproductive rights.
“So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.”
And it’s funny because my reaction to this book upon first read was that the Toronto under siege depicted felt so foreign to me– I’d missed the SARS epidemic, and the big black-out. But Helwig’s city feels more familiar now, and not just the police brutality since this happened, or how much awful the world is in 2012 as compared to how it was in 2008 (which is much). More amusingly, there’s the scene where the pigeon gets into the hospital, which definitely means more since this happened (and the birds! How I have to reread Headhunter).
But I think basically I’ve just been overwrought this last day or so and that the weather has been funny, but still. What crazy things fiction can do to our minds, and the innumerable ways our stories appear to affect the world.
March 28, 2012
Funny reread
Funny reread of Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and I’m convinced that furious consumption was how it meant to be read, in fact, and that I got it right the first time. When I read 600+ pages in just three days because my life depended on it. This time, I picked it up again and I’ve been so busy the last week or so that I could only manage it in small amounts, amounts too small for me to get caught up in the story before I had to put it down again. And all that picking up and putting down was hard work for a book that was so enormous. I found myself skimming the surface of the narrative instead of getting lost inside it, and the surface of this novel is so many-sided that it was disorienting. I would much rather get lost in a wood than slide down a polyhedron. Also surprised to find the novel so much less “about” the things I’d thought it was about– fairy tales, childhood, families, Edwardian England, history etc– than embodying the things themselves. The effect is overwhelming. It’s a truly brilliant novel but I will have to re-reread it again when I’ve cleared enough space in my head to totally devote to it.
Anyway, I also have to read the biography of E. Nesbit now as per here, which I probably should have just done instead of rereading The Children’s Book. More insight into Byatt’s influences for the novel here.
March 19, 2012
It's time to reread The Children's Book
Harriet was scheduled to born on a Tuesday, and the Friday before, late in the evening, a copy of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book turned up at my door. I spent my last days without her, my last days alone, scrambling to get this book read because I’d been waiting for it for so long already, and it was so massive I knew I’d never get to it after the baby’s birth due to matters of weight and time. I finished reading it on Monday at 5:00, and don’t remember so much of the book itself save for the scramble, a fantastic race to the finish, which was wholly symbolic of life at the time (with no imagining of what would come after). So I’ve been intending to reread it ever since, an intimidating prospect because it’s still a hulking book, but so much of my reading lately– Joan Bodger, Arcadia, Among Others— has been gesturing toward it, so it’s time now. I’m excited. Because I’ve no idea what it is to read The Children’s Book when one isn’t scheduled to give birth on Tuesday. To read this book now as a mother myself, and with such a richer appreciation of children’s stories than when I encountered this the first time. Not quite three years ago, but how it seems a whole other lifetime.
February 29, 2012
Bookends: Joan Didion's Blue Nights and "On Keeping a Notebook"
As I read Joan Didion’s 1966 “On Keeping a Notebook” today, it occurred to me that this essay is the piece that is the bookend to her new book Blue Nights, and not The Year of Magical Thinking as so many critics have suggested. (I also don’t understand why no one talks about Where I Was From. I think it’s my favourite book of all of hers.)
But first, Blue Nights is not a book about Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo. So many readers have got that wrong too. As Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook”, “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of what we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.” Like everything Didion has ever written, Blue Nights is profoundly about herself. She’s not even opaque about it, but some readers are still so unable to get around the fact of a woman writing honestly about motherhood than they’ve been hypnotized into thinking motherhood is all that Blue Nights is about.
But yes, to read “On Keeping a Notebook” after Blue Nights is to invest the essay with a whole new level of meaning. “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” And then later, “…I have always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” In Blue Nights, Didion writes, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”
And then further on the essay when she addresses her notes, her compulsion to maintain these notebooks in order to keep in touch with the people she used to be, “paid passage back to the world out there”. She was 32 when she wrote this essay, which is the age I am now, and it’s an age at which you feel there are whole lifetimes behind you, and it’s so fascinating to consider these. 32 is an age where your preceding decade has changed life beyond all recognition, and you’ve finally sensed an order to it all. How, as the older woman in Didion’s essay tells her, “Someday it all comes.” And none of it has started to leave you yet; the future is all promise, and it’s here.
Blue Nights is a 77 year old Didion looking back at her 32 year old self who’d supposed herself older than she’d ever be again. In Blue Nights, she notes the boxes and drawers in her apartment stuffed with history, the notebooks, the stuff she’s been acquiring through her years, all items she’d once blithely advertised as “paid passage back to the world out there.”
She writes, “In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems.”
She writes, “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
“It all comes back,” Didion writes in 1966, unaware of the shallowness of what she’d lost so far, convinced by the rhythm of her words. And Blue Nights is her realization more than 40 years later: there comes a day when it doesn’t anymore.
February 16, 2012
"It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way"
“It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world (located somewhere east of Westport and west of the Cotswolds) where Peter de Vries (punning softly) was forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolo Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master’s Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly (repeating all the while that Nabokov was the best writer of English currently holding American citizenship). Meanwhile, the Indian writers clustered in a corner punjabbering away in Sellerian accents (and giving off a pervasive odor of curry) and the Irish memorists (in fishermen’s sweaters and whiskey breath) were busy snubbing the prissily tweedy English memorists.
Oh, I had mythicized other magazines and literary quarterlies, too, but The New Yorker had been my shrine since childhood. (Commentary, for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites-all of whom were named Irving-worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirees amused me, but it was for The New Yorker that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages.” –Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
February 9, 2012
Of Myths and Mad Men: Rereading Joan Bodger's The Crack in the Teacup
It was only two years ago that I first read Joan Bodger’s The Crack in the Teacup, but revisiting it was an experience that was altogether new. First, because my interest in children’s literature has become so much deeper since then (mostly due to what I learned from reading this book the first time, and from Bodger’s other book How the Heather Looks) and also because of Mad Men. But we’ll get to that.
I do think that A Crack in the Teacup might be one of my favourite books ever. I read it over five days last week, and absolutely would not shut up about it. You will see. The beginning is a little slow, if only because Bodger’s childhood is spent at a remove from the rest of the world. Which is what makes it interesting of course, but she examines it in such minute detail, perhaps because these details of a happy time are so much more pleasant to examine than what comes later.
I think it is inevitable that one becomes a storyteller when one can write about her grandfather’s first wife who was killed in a shipwreck in 1877. Really, all the ingredients here are the stuff of storybooks: her mother is English, the daughter of a sailor whose third wife is a quarter Chinese, who grows up in a stately home surrounded by books but no schooling, spends her teenage years crippled after being flung from a horse, and then recovers enough to drive an ambulance during WW1 (without a license). She marries an American at the end of the War, moves across the sea, and has three daughters (with Bodger in the middle). Her husband joins the US coast guard chasing rum runners and leading ships out of Arctic ice after failed polar expeditions, and they spend the ’20s and ’30s moving up and down east and west coasts.
It was a happy enough childhood, rich with stories and lore, but also an isolated one. Bodger’s immigrant mother held herself apart from American society, and that the family moved around so much didn’t help matters. From early on, Bodger had a hard time fitting in, accepting authority, understanding how the world worked outside the Higbee family. There was also so much that was never talked about– her mother’s health problems, father’s infidelities, her own burgeoning sexuality, her yearning for the education her father didn’t feel was necessary for a daughter to have. Bodger and her sisters were being groomed to be ladies, roles none of them would easily fulfil.
Bodger’s college plans are diverted by WW2, she joins the army, and becomes a bumbling decoder (“I put my hand in the grab bag and pulled out a message about a place spelled Yalta. Obviously a mistake! I changed the Y to M.”) She goes back to school once the war is finished, and meets John Bodger, a graduate student and fellow veteran. She’s head over heels, and without a doubt that their life together will be a happy one as he completes his PhD (with her love and support, of course), and becomes internationally recognized as the brilliant mind he obviously is.
Which is where Mad Men comes into play. Apart from a few years in California, the Bodgers spend the ’50s and early ’60s living in and around Westchester County NY, which is Cheever-country, the world of Mad Men. And though the Bodgers could not pretend to be the cookie cutter figures their suburban surroundings suggested, it”s the same backdrop, healthy kids and big green lawns, the war in the past now, educated mothers idle in the afternoons, philandering husbands, cracks becoming apparent in all kinds of veneers. It soon becomes apparent that not all is right with John Bodger: he struggles to hold down a job at all, has to give up his academic aspirations, begins to display signs of paranoia. Joan Bodger makes life-long connections with the women in her neighbourhood, many of whom have similary troubled marriages and dissatisfaction with their lives. But she doesn’t connect with all her neighbours:
“Bette told me that another woman in the neighbourhood was writing a book– a sort of update to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Her name was Betty Friedan. She lived just down the street from us; her little girl was in Lucy’s class. I telephoned her. I felt silly doing it, yet I longed to talk shop with someone. How do you manage to write with kids around? Betty Friedan said she was too busy to talk to every suburban housewife who called her.”
The book Bodger was writing, of course, was How the Heather Looks, the story of a trip her family takes to England in 1958 to rediscover worlds they only knew from storybooks, to make end paper maps come alive. A book whose portrayal of ideal family life belies the real story of her family– John Bodger would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, he and Joan would eventually divorce. Before their divorce, their daughter Lucy would die of a brain tumour, and their son Ian would battle his own demons, with mental illness and drug addiction. And throughout these tragedies, it is Bodger’s faith in story that enables her to survive. And not neat stories either, with beginnings, middle and ends, but rather the dark archetypal stories with no end that occur over and over in cultures all around the world, and which give our own experiences depth and meaning, that help us to understand the things that happen to us in our lives.
But story, of course, is useful in a more practical sense as well. Eager for diversions after Lucy’s death, Bodger becomes involved in an education program to promote graduation rates for black students in her town of Nyack NY. She realizes that although she lives in the very same town, she knows nothing about the lives of the black people around her. She starts sitting on the steps of a church in the black neighbourhood, armed with candy and picture books to give away (because by this time, she’s become a children’s book reviewer, and has plenty of review copies to spare), ready to make some connections. She quickly discerns that the picture books she’s brought are useless– they reflect nothing of the lives of the children she’s trying to reach, and many of the children don’t know how to relate to or connect with a book anyway. So she starts telling stories instead, and she’s good at it. Eventually a police man contacts her and says he’s concerned she’s going to stop telling stories when the weather gets cold. He’s with the NAACP and they want to help her out– could they get her an indoor place where the children can go to hear her?
Bodger uses what she learns from this experience to set up a free nursery school in the neighbourhood, and continues to learn about what children’s literature can do. She writes about the impact of black children seeing somebody like themselves in storybooks for the first time in Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, and about her own conversations with Keats about resisting their liberal impulses and acknowledging the childrens’ race. (“Not until we gave ourselves permission to see their blackness could these children give themselves permission to see themselves.”) Similarly about the powers of books like Where the Wild Things Are and A Apple Pie to encourage children to express their own feelings of rage, anger and aggression. To begin to tell stories themselves, to make the stories their own.
Her husband and son drift far away from her as she becomes more involved in early literacy and storytelling. Eventually Bodger leaves New York and for short time works for the library association of Missouri (where her ability to make waves is less accepted than it had been in New York, and she is eventually dismissed from her job, somewhat farfetchedly, for being “a communist pornographer” [and her second husband would jokingly complain of the false advertising of that title]). She head back east and works in editing and consulting for Random House, though still shell-shocked and heartbroken by the tragedy she’d had to weather: “Just a few years before, I had had a husband, two children, a house on the Hudson River. Wave a magic wand and I’m spending half my life in a one-room apartment in Greenwich Village, complete with cockroaches in the fridge and drug addicts on the stairs.”
On a business trip to Detroit, she sidelines to Toronto to visit the famous Osborne Collection of Children’s Literature. On June 18, 1970 (which was, I should note, thirty-five years to the day before I got married), she was standing under an awning waiting out a sun-shower when a man came up behind her and commented on her reading, which was Stuart Little. He wondered why she was marking up the pages with proofreaders marks, which he recognized because he worked in publishing too. “‘Anyone who would change one jot or title of EB White’s prose, I could have nothing to do with,’ he said.” The man was Alan Mercer, a writer and photographer, and the love of Bodger’s life. Within two weeks, they knew they would be getting married, Bodger resettling to Toronto and the two of them establishing a marriage of much support and love, but also independence. Mercer died in 1985 of cancer, and though the loss would ever be a scar she bore, she would never be as broken as she’d been before she found him. She tells him, “When I met you, I felt as though I were walking around with a gaping wound. You healed me.”
The rest of the book narrates Bodger’s involvement with establishing the Storytellers School of Toronto, and also some of her travels. I found the end of the book less compelling than the middle, though I’m not sure it could have been any other way. And it’s fitting really– Rick Salutin is wrong and so is Diane Sawyer. Stories aren’t about endings at all, but about how they weave our experiences into the tapestry of human existence, and the strands twist and turn in incredible ways, and no connection is without meaning– so that it is significant that Bodger meets her husband on my wedding anniversary, how she connects the narrative of her own life to folk tales, about how her experiences are microcosmic of the mid-20th century with civil rights and the women’s movement. (I suppose it’s also significant that Ian Bodger was convicted of blowing up a police car last month to protest state healthcare cuts. There are no happy endings indeed.)
Another thing that has changed in my life since I read this book in April 2010 is that at least once a week I visit the Lillian H. Smith Library now, where the Osborne Collection is now located and where Bodger scattered her husband’s ashes after his death. (He’d wanted them scattered in the foundation for the opera house at Bay and Wellesley, which they’d be able to see from their apartment balcony on Church Street, but the opera house was never built. When the Lillian H. Smith Library was under construction, Bodger deemed the site a bit too far west, but otherwise perfect.) I finished reading The Crack in the Teacup last Sunday evening, and was under a Bodger-spell when we went to the library the following morning. We got there a few minutes early and went upstairs to the Obsborne Centre before the toddler program started. I wanted to see the lectern where the guestbook is kept, a guestbook I’ve even signed and seen so many times, but whose significance I’d never noted until I read this book again. Inscribed on a plaque upon it: “Alan Nelson Mercer, 1920-1985. He loved a good sentence.”
As Bodger writes of this library that is such an important part of my family life, investing this place with infinite meaning (and this is the stuff of story, don’t you think?):
“…I was finally allowed, after months of committee meetings, to present a Hepplewhite-style lectern where the guestbook would repose. The committee, of course, was kept ignorant of my grander plan: to make the airy, playful, much-used library building into a fitting mausoleum for a man who loved cities, loved book, and words, loved me.”
January 26, 2012
Firmly in the moment (and returning to the past)
It was strange how much I enjoyed spending the last five days reading Skippy Dies (well, as much as one can enjoy reading Skippy Dies), all 660 pages of it. Usually books that big make me unpatient, and I’m sure part of it was that Skippy was less demanding than, say, Great Expectations, but I really wasn’t in a hurry to finish (well, as much as one can not be in a hurry to be finished reading Skippy Dies). To be reading that one book for so long felt like time suspended, a chance for me to get caught up on book notes and reviews, and there was nothing so pressing for me to be reading just around the corner, so I could take my time. I had to take my time– the book is huge. And it was so very nice to be firmly in the literary moment and not already be anticipating the next thing.
Along the same lines of stopping to smell the flowers, I am delighted to begin some focussed rereading in the next while. For a long time, I spent every summer rereading, but during the summer of 2010, I was so busy reading books as juror for the QWF First Book Prize, and last summer I made it my mission to finally get my to-be-read shelf pared down. I’ve done a formidable job of the latter task, down to authors whose names begin with Q, and while I’d like to barrel through the rest of the stack, I feel as though I might put off my rereading forever. Further, time has fewer demands on me at the moment than it has for awhile, which also won’t last forever, and so the time is now to revisit books from way back when.
I’m looking forward to rereading the following over the next couple of months, most of which are titles that made an impact on me, but now it’s the impact I remember rather than the books themselves, and so it will be interesting to see if the impact remains. How have what I’ve read or experienced since first reading change my impression? What have I forgotten? Am I a more critical reader now? And does the rereading bring me closer to the person I was when I first encountered these? A few of these are books I can’t remember at all, and the reread might give some indication into how this might have come to be.
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
The Children’s Book by AS Byatt
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
All in Together Girls by Kate Sutherland
Anne’s House of Dreams by LM Montgomery
A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble
The Creation by E.O. Wilson
Various Miracles by Carol Shields
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
Slouching Toward Bethleham by Joan Didion
Headhunter by Timothy Findlay
The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger (for my Canada Reads nonfiction co-challenge)
February 1, 2011
Canada Reads 2011: Unless by Carol Shields
UK edition of Unless
I was thrilled when Carol Shields’ novel Unless made the cut for Canada Reads 2011, but also disheartened, anticipating how inappropriate a forum Canada Reads is for a novel as complex as this one. Anticipating also how easily this novel could be glossed over, dismissed in the name of Survivor-style competition. I passionately hope the debates will turn out to be otherwise, and to do my part towards this end, I wanted to add my own voice to the conversation. So this past weekend, I re-read Unless for perhaps the seventh or eighth time since I read it first in 2003. (April 20th, 2003, according to my note on the inside cover. Which points out also that I was residing on Silverdale Road in Nottingham at the time, the reason for my UK edition.)
I cannot remember what it was to first encounter Unless. I only know that I’ve reread it annually for at least the last five years, and that each time has added a whole new level of understanding to my reading experience. (Oddly, I’d normally say that re-reading a book “uncovers” meaning, but it feels different with Unless, as though the reading experiences were more cumulative. Though I suppose each uncovering is an addition as well, but a subtraction of went before is implied [detritus tossed into a pile] and that isn’t what I mean here).
I can tell what I’ve zeroed in on in previous readings, based upon the marginalia of past selves: that the novel is a tongue-in-cheek primer on how to write a Carol Shields novel (self-referential to the point where her protagonist’s novel begins, “Alicia was not as happy as she deserved to be” vs. the first sentence(s) of Shields’ first novel, which is, “Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am.”) and in fact, a very useful resource in that respect. I’ve noted the novel’s fragmented structure, and that one chapter was previously published as a short story. I’ve noted its themes of motherhood and female friendship, and the steadfast relationship between Reta Winters and her husband Tom, who had sex on the night they met. That at some point Reta remarks about annoyingly obtuse novels with stupid tricks like a chair in every chapter, but that there is (very nearly?) a chair in every chapter here, very specific chairs, all situated around the idea of the sitting woman. That I still don’t understand how the chapter titles relate to the chapters in question, or what the little words (words I use all the time) in fact mean, and I could think on them forever. I noticed lines about a woman’s place, about Women’s place– Mrs. as diminutive, about wanting and not having, about rage and stamping that lady-sized foot, and an exclusion from greatness. And I can identify with Norah’s overwhelming sense of being lost in the world: “And language. Well, you know. And branches of languages and dead languages and forgotten dead languages.” The sheer ungraspability of all of it.
It’s not difficult to imagine the criticisms that will be launched against Unless in the Canada Reads debates. (I say all this very hopefully. That fate will conspire to prove me wrong and that this book, no doubt the most interesting and definitely most essential of the lot, will prove to be the dark horse of the race. Fingers crossed. There’s even a man championing it, so the odds are better than they would have been.) Its plotlessness. The weakness of the main storyline, which is apparent to me at times (and I do get bogged down in the geographical details of Bloor and Bathurst, that if Norah is on the corner, than she cannot be near the subway entrance, which is further up the street and safely housed in Bathurst station, but anyway…).
That Reta Winters has a chip on her shoulder, so said a commenter on the CBC online forum a while back. Readers will complain that they could barely get through it (to which I will want to respond with a hardcover book to the head, because such a failure is your problem, not the book’s! Read better.) Someone will call this a woman’s novel (and forgive me, more parenthesis, but although I do believe that there are such things as woman’s novels, I don’t think the label is a good enough reason for a man not to bother to read one).
Canadian edition of Unless
The complexity of the novel became especially clear to me a reading or two ago, that although this is a feminist novel and Reta’s feminist ideas were feeding something within me, that the novel’s solution is not so simple. This time around, I underlined a part about Reta’s projection of her own experience– onto her daughter, her friends, her mother-in-law, the woman who lived in her house the sixties. The important thing to understand when reading Unless and finding Reta Winters somewhat tedious is that Shields has her protagonist turn out to be wrong– what a brave thing for a novelist to do. Reta’s daughter has not taken to the streets because she has been excluded from greatness, the woman who lived in her house was not a matronly housewife called Lillian but a university grad called Crystal, Reta’s mother-in-law is not suffering from much more than loneliness and some of this is Reta’s own doing.
Part of the problem with Reta, and with women, is of their own making. We see this in the conversations Reta has with her friends in which they’re eternally interrupting one another and therefore always just missing the point. In which Reta would sooner make up narratives than probe the ones in her own life. In which too many conclusions are being jumped to, not enough questions being asked. Even simple questions, like, “Tell me all about yourself, Lois.” We’re too busy talking and not doing enough listening, so that we’re missing obvious things. The big ideas are getting away from us.
And yet. Reta Winters wasn’t all wrong. That women appear to excluded from greatness was not the cause of her daughter’s breakdown, but it doesn’t change the fact that women are. The bean-counting, as Reta goes through magazine contributers’ lists and noticing glaring disparity. When she cites literary conversations in which nary a woman is mentioned, as though a woman has never written a book (“Now the nineteenth century. There were some interesting women writers then”). Books like The Ingenuity Gap (which has a cameo in Unless) and Outliers, which restructure the universe so not to include women all. Oh, how the three boys in my graduate English courses always owned the conversation, how a book like Moore’s February is dismissed as “teary hormonal paste, how The Walrus is a lad’s mag, but we have to pretend it’s general interest.
Reta is “partly-right and partly-wrong”, as was her husband Tom who’d theorized that their daughter was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Such doubleness being the revelation of Unless, that the world is so complex that two things can exist at once, and in fact, as Reta says earlier on in the book, “doubleness clarifie[s] the world.” That we are not so simple as us vs. them, men vs. the feminists. That instead of “versus”, we have words like unless, nevertheless, next, hence, so etc. Words not to set up binaries, but to connect ideas in an intricate fashion.
This time around, I also noticed Reta’s point that what she’s writing isn’t written on her word processor, but on her consciousness, and how this explains the structure of the book. How I continue to see each chapter as a meditation, Reta revisiting her situation, attempting to get close to the heart of the matter, but missing that elusive something every time (and sometimes most deliberately). I noticed the palpability of her sadness her in a way I don’t remember doing so before, the explosion of, “My heart is broken”. The book’s conflation of book narrative and life narrative– I love this. I thought about “Goodness” in opposition to “God” instead of “Greatness”, the polite curse of ladies, and what that might mean.
See, I dare you to talk about this book articulately in the space of three hour-long debates. I don’t know if it’s even possible, or if I’ll even be able to bear listening and what might be said against this book I hold so close to my heart. But I also dare you to find a book in the line-up with anywhere near the same richness, and I have a feeling you’d only come up short. So that if Unless can’t win Canada Reads 2011, then I’m not sure that any other book should.
November 3, 2010
Two old books: Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym and Anne of Windy Poplars by LM Montgomery
Last week I read Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn as I slowly (savouringly) make my way through her books. Quartet is the book Pym published after her years in the wilderness, the fifteen years where her work was considered unpublishable and her books went out of print. Her famous redemption came about in 1977 when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both (independently) nominated her as one of the century’s most underrated writers. Quartet was published not long after that, followed by The Sweet Dove Died, which had been written previously and was rejected and rejected and then was not anymore.
Quartet is the story of four office mates (and what they do is quite beside the point. When the women retire, their positions aren’t filled. Days mostly hinge around brewing kettles and cups of tea) who are near retirement and who, through various circumstances, have each found themselves much alone in the world. And yet the four aren’t close either, which makes the story particularly interesting: what if the people who are closest to you hardly know you at all? And what if you’re fine with that?
Pym does a wonderful job of showing the discomfort of a person rather set in her ways who is forced to face a world that is changing. Though this makes for uncomfortable reading at times– I am not sure whether or not we’re meant to empathize with Letty when she leaves her flat because a family of Nigerians have moved into the unit below. Even Letty is not proud of her uncomfortableness, and I suppose this storyline is racist, but I also think it’s an honest depiction of very human situation. It’s not so much that Pym is racist, or her story is, though the character is, but that’s kind of the point. And I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason not to read the novel anymore.
Was hoarding a diagnosis in the 1970s? Because it’s all the rage these days, of course, but Letty’s co-worker Marcia was hard at it back in the day, filling the house she’d shared with her late mother with unopened packages of nightware from Marks and Spencer, stocking the cupboards with cans, and filling her garden shed with milk bottles (just in case there’s another war, and it’s the last war, where there was no milk without bottles). Pym manages to make Marcia’s affliction mildly amusing, actually, but it’s also sad. But not so sad– this is not a sentimental book. It’s not that lonely people are funny, or that funny people are lonely, but just that lonely people are, and I think it’s an idea that’s still incredibly profound.
**
I just finished reading Anne of Windy Poplars, which I’d been meaning to do since Kate posted about it ages ago. It’s a strange novel, the fourth in the Anne series (between of the Island and House of Dreams), but it was written after all of them. I don’t think I’ve read this book in over twenty years, but I have recently read two biographies of Montgomery and so have a better idea of its context than I did the first time. That Montgomery was being pushed by her publishers to give her readers more Anne, and so a novel like this was sort of cobbled together. That she was also limited it what she could do with Anne in this in-between story, because certainly nothing too profound could happen to her that would have to be accounted for in her already-established later history.
This novel takes place over three years in which Anne and Gilbert are living apart while she is working as principal of a high school in Summerside and Gilbert is studying at medical school. Much of the novel consists of letters she writes him, and I agree with Kate that these letters like nothing else express the true depth of their relationship. (Though unlike Kate, I never thought Gilbert was a dud. Perhaps that is because to me, he will always be Jonathan Crombie).
Because not much can happen to Anne then, this is an account of what happens to the people all around her– the people whose lives she touches, the curmudgeons she brings around, the wild people she manages to tame with her charm and by her wits. Some of these stories really are a bit much. We do see an Anne who is quite self-aware at times, and funny, remarking at one point of her tendency to meddle in the lives of others. This is less a novel really than a collection of episodes, almost short stories– it’s not so unlike The Blythes are Quoted in many respects, though of course Anne is much more central to what goes on. So many of the episodes are quite familiar to me from Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel which (please forgive me, and maybe I’m wrong because I’ve not seen it for a while) might be better than the book is. Which is not to say the book is bad, of course.
I had a similar problem with this book that I had with Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables, with Anne encountering Anne-like characters. In Windy Poplars, it’s the story of Little Elizabeth, the lonely child who lives in the forbidding house next door and dreams of forever escaping into “tomorrow”– with all her talk of fairies and poetic trees, she’s like Anne Shirley on speed, and really, how can there be two of them? The whole point of Anne, her charm, is that she’s one in the million. Diana managed to be her kindred spirit while being nothing like Anne, and truth be told that dynamic made a lot more sense to me.
About Diana, a sad note in the novel– Anne goes home to Green Gables and Diana scarcely registers. She has a new baby, and Anne remarks at one point that Diana is busy in a whole other world, and that’s the end of it, but I found it disappointing. They were kindred spirits after all! Interesting also to see Montgomery locating her story in a wider context– there are mentions of boys, including Gilbert, going out west to work on “that railroad” they’re building out there. References to Anne teaching The War of 1812, and noting how lucky they were that days of war were far behind them, which was doubly not true by 1936 when the book was published.
