October 18, 2007
Fiction is all right.
I thought Philip Marchand’s article “Why novelists are nervous” was sort of strange, the nervous novelists being John Updike and Philip Roth. Apparently Updike wrote a novel seven years ago that sold poorly and Philip Roth has remarked, somewhat self-deprecatingly, I thought, “The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.”
Oh Philip, fear not! Ben McNally and Book City’s J. Frans Donker are not worried about the status of literature in the slightest. Neither is anybody I know, most of whom devour fiction like it’s pie.
Marchand’s hysteria is the result of the International Festival of Authors now featuring nonfiction writers, Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe in particular. Which is interesting, I think. One of these writers, Gray, is prolific, acclaimed and, though I’ve not read her work, seems to write nonfiction about as literary as it gets. And then that the other three “nonfictioneers” are novelists first and foremost, which Marchand doesn’t even refer to. Granted we could make something terrible of the fact that market forces have pushed these writers to turn to nonfiction, and the hysteria could continue unabated. But I’d rather take the angle that perhaps nonfiction writers are those who should be nervous. Watch out Margaret MacMillan! The novelists are passing into your ranks. They’re injecting fact with fancy and, I would be willing to bet, the writing has never been so good.
October 17, 2007
Sitcom
Just purchased Sitcom by David McGimpsey. I heard about it on the radio this morning. I am interested in it because I’ve lately had some thoughts about The Facts of Life that might be brewing into something special. Further, because I recently learned that Kimmy Gibbler in real life went on into academia.
October 17, 2007
Overheard
“They’re all so creative, and I’m just in psych. I don’t know. I can’t create anything, but I guess I can tell you how fucked up you are.”
October 17, 2007
Clippings
Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I’m still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing’s The Good Terrorist in the future.
I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail‘s “Focus” section last weekend– this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that “it’s in our nature… to return to the street”. But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.
Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.
And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn’t like them. “Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion.” Isn’t she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.
See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains…). A column she’d written in 2001 called “Craving life in the face of death” moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I’ve got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I’ve saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don’t coincide, which is almost always.
But it’s also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you’d think.
October 16, 2007
The pageness of the page
I’ve been thinking about this conversation from Baby Got Books, regarding the effect of the internet and computers upon the art we create, and the ideas we generate. And I’ve realized that for me the computer is not so much a new medium, but simply an extension of a pen and paper. That though my computer is infinitely valuable for revisions and alterations, when it comes time to begin a new draft, I always make a brand new document. Retyping out my previous work is more time-consuming, but the new page’s blankness allows for so much more possibility. Also, that when I write, I keep my document small, at nearly 100% so I can see my whole document on the screen. I need my page to look like a page, as it would were it stuck inside a typewriter, so that I can see where I am at. For me, the pageness of the page remains essential, and still has yet to be replaced.
October 15, 2007
False Prophets
Now reading The Golden Notebook, on the back of a bandwagon. My reading is informed by essays on Lessing by Joan Didion and Heather Mallick, each from an opposing point of view. (I wonder what Mallick thinks now of her essay “Lessing is More” having been subtitled “Why Doris Lessing won’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature”, though the subtitle seems to be the only thing she got wrong in the entire piece).
Also now reading Margaret Atwood’s new collection of poetry The Door which is wonderful.
Finally, my first post “Encounters with Books” is now up at the Descant blog. A few bugs still need to be worked out over there, but I hope you’ll check my piece out, and that you enjoy it.
October 15, 2007
Bragging
May I just brag about my friends for just a moment please? That Erica G. successfully hosted her first dinner party last night, I was privileged to attend, and the company was so enjoyable I stayed out until the wee hours of morn? And that the amazingly multi-talented Erin Smith has designed the cover of a book? By which I mean a real book, which wasn’t photocopied and bound in my living room (because she’s done that too).
October 13, 2007
Summer
I don’t very often refer here to the bad days: to the month spent waiting for test results, for example, or to when my husband was so bored at work, he couldn’t be happy while he wasn’t at work. I don’t very often refer here to the bad days, however, mostly because we don’t have them very often. Because my test results came back negative, and Stuart got a promotion. Because we have had an extraordinary summer full of good fortune, and now that the weather outside appears absolutely autumnal, I can look back and be so grateful.
Of course it’s not all just a given: you’ve got to know enough to appreciate the day you’re in. And as a Canadian I know that sunshine is fleeting. From that first gorgeous day in April I knew enough to put on some shorts, to go outside and enjoy it. But the rest, oh the rest. Any season that begins with celebratory High Tea at the Four Seasons is bound to be exquisite. Frisbee in Trinity Bellwoods Park with Curtis, High Park Picnics before we had leaves on the trees, backyard barbeques with so many friends, the garden born, lobster dinners, and city rooftop summer nights.
Our trip to England in June was a magical story, beginning with the car rental mix-up when we got a Saab Convertible instead of an economy car. That countryside: Yorkshire Dales, Lake Windermere, the Pennines in a thunderstorm, and the seaside. Bronwyn’s wedding on the village green. The night we drove four hours from one side of the country to the other, with Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs and Rhianna on the radio, and there was family at the end of the journey. A week in which I ate scones and jam nearly every day.
This summer we were both working for the first time in over two years, and then suddenly my job became permanent and Stuart was appointed to a position that he loves. We had some money again, to get out of town or to enjoy town whilst we were in it. Trips to Toronto Island and the beach at the bottom of Spadina. To Massey Hall for Crowded House in August. Dinners out with friends, just because we wanted to. Our amazing Muskoka weekend back in July, with friends oldest and dearest. To Quebec for Susannah and Loic’s wedding, against the most gorgeous backdrop you could imagine. Trips to Peterborough to see my family, camping on the shores of Rice Lake, infamous Mothers’ Day drunken shenanigans. Montreal in September, and a whole new city to see. The trip on the train.
Summer stretched on this year, from April and into October. That’s seven months of perfect bliss– more than half the year, and we’re lucky just for that. And for the evenings which got colder and darker, and the crunch of leaves beneath our shoes. To wear scarves, and sweaters, and having knitting projects on the go. Oh for October, the best of both worlds. New shoes and warm jackets. To take long lingering walks, still holding hands without our gloves.
October 13, 2007
Run by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s new novel Run creates the effect of a snowglobe. First: the snow. A winter storm has coated Boston in white, and as the city’s former mayor Bernard Doyle and his sons Tip and Teddy emerge from a lecture, their vision is obscured. They can’t see enough to even understand each other, and in the midst of an argument Tip steps into the path of a car.
Next: the globe. Tip has been pushed out of the car’s path by a mysterious woman who is hit instead. Her young daughter Kenya, taking care to collect her mother’s scattered things, clearly possesses a wisdom beyond her eleven years, and through various circumstances she is taken into the Doyles’ care. And it seems that she knows them well, their unique history. In the limited construct of this globe, everything is connected.
Kenya knews that Tip and Teddy are the black adopted sons of Doyle and his late wife Bernadette, who also had an older son, whose own disgrace became his fathers’. As Kenya’s mother lies in her hospital bed, secrets are revealed, connections are established, chance is batted about, and lives change. Class and racial lines are underlined and also revealed as rootless. Patchett explores themes of family, the tragedy of motherlessness, she writes of goodness, and who it is we dream our dreams for.
Stepping away from this book, there are problems. Not the connections, necessarily, or the coincidence or chance– this is the stuff of real life, and rings false only in fiction. But the limitations of a story in a bubble are obvious– the outside world knocks at the glass, but it’s not invited in. Patchett is a wonderful writer whose exposition reads like a tale, but it also left me wanting to see her characters outside their confines. I felt as though this story was just stretching its legs.
But. Stepping away from this book, I say, I saw the problems. But I almost couldn’t do that– step away, put it down. Run was intensely readable from start to finish, enjoyable and not in a cheap way. Problems and all. These characters were sketched in such detail, there were moments of sheer beauty, the pace and construction of Patchett’s story was at times mesmerizing– yes, like that snow globe. The scene inside may not be life, but you shake it up and watch it anyway.
