September 18, 2008
Like a treasure
“I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded and spread out before my eyes, in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the post the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence… Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a children crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark… I hoard all these letters like a treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship./ It will keep the vultures at bay.” –Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trans. Jeremy Leggatt).
September 17, 2008
How fortunate
Oooh, Giller Longlist. And I’ve read not a one. How fortunate, however, that only three of them are by women, and I can only ever be bothered to read books by women, so my bedside stack won’t stack too intimidatingly (and topple in the night and kill me in my sleep, etc.). Indeed, I did somehow find myself in a bookshop today, standing at the cash clutching The Boys in the Trees and Good to a Fault. I’ve been meaning to read the first one for ages, as it’s been recommended by esteemed readers Maud Newton, Stephany Aulenback and Rona Maynard. Of the second book, I know nothing, but the blubs were all by authors I liked, and so I thought, Why not?
September 16, 2008
Bibliophibians
Click on the comic for a clearer image. Comes from Wondermark by David Malki. Sent to me via Leah B (so thank you!).
September 14, 2008
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld, in her fiction, has a strange relationship with truth. First, her debut novel Prep, which I failed to love, that was famously marketed autobiographically, with photos from Sittenfeld’s high school yearbook. And now with her third novel American Wife, “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” Mrs. Laura Bush in particular, which has generated controversy as well as positive reviews. The latter entirely justified– this novel is exceptional.
Sittenfeld’s First Lady Alice Blackwell notes that “the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people… the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true– it’s staggering.” Though similarly staggering in my opinion is the faith these same people have in truth itself, that truth is even possible, all the while fiction is much-maligned and negated, treated as less-than real when it can be so much more so.
Though American Wife could have been a really cheap trick, a satire at best, Sittenfeld’s novel is neither. She’s not exaggerating the “looseness” of her inspiration, so that when I read about Charlie and Alice Blackwell, I didn’t have to think about George W. and Laura Bush. Charlie and Alice were characters enough on their own, and the circumstances of their lives different enough from the genuine articles that I didn’t find myself reading and connecting the dots. They both come from Wisconsin, which Sittenfeld evokes with a vividness I’ve never seen applied to the American Midwest, and Charlie’s family made their fortune in the meat industry. They have just one daughter, as opposed to the Bushes’ twins. Charlie’s father is not a former president, but had made a failed run at the position years and years before. The country invaded by American in 2003 goes unnamed. Etc.
I take from all this that Sittenfeld was not trying for an expose, a Primary Colours, or any kind of exploitation of Laura Bush’s life. But rather that she has been intrigued by Laura Bush, by her unique position and her elusiveness, the evidence that she is a far more complicated person than the public gets to see. And so Sittenfeld imagined herself into a position much like Bush’s, but not the same one– this story is Sittenfeld’s own. The character we get to know intimately as Alice Lindgren Blackwell is a singular creation.
Of course, so was Hillary Rodham Clinton, as depicted in her autobiography Living History. (I loved Living History; I admire Hillary Rodham Clinton). Sittenfeld fictionalizing that style of narrative, that pseudo-intimacy that springs up between autobiographer and her reader. “If I were to tell the story of my life,” narrates Alice Blackwell, “(I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course– one never is)…” But here we are holding the story of her life in our very hands, and our burdened hands, I note– at 55 pages, this book is as voluminous as any autobiography.
The story begins with Alice Blackwell’s question, “Have I made terrible mistakes?” and then sweeps back to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of small-town banker. The sheer normalcy of her life challenged by her unorthodox grandmother Emilie who lives with them, never does a bit of housework and spends her days smoking cigarettes and reading novels. It is from Emilie that Alice acquires her lifelong love of books. It is Emilie also who arranges Alice’s abortion (still illegal then), when she becomes pregnant in her final year of high school.
The novel is broken into four sections, a chronology of key episodes. From Alice’s childhood, we skip ahead to her thirtieth year. She is a school librarian, content to be single, and about to purchase her first home when she meets Charlie Blackwell at a backyard bbq. As crass as she is reserved, a Republican to her Democrat, Charlie is also being pursued by Alice’s best friend, but he is unrelenting. And when she falls in love, the reader can see why– this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even “characters”; they’re people and they’re real.
Ten years later, Alice is a mother, more settled in her country-club lifestyle, but she has had enough of her husband’s drinking and general discontent. It is when she threatens to leave him that he finally cleans up his act, stops drinking and is Born Again. From there the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is clear (and what strange times we must live in, that this is the case). The last quarter of the novel a bit more ruminative than I would have liked, but I still couldn’t stop reading. The choices Alice has made as a woman and as a wife, during her “life in opposition to itself”, have come back to haunt her, and she must act in order to protect her husband and his presidency, of which she is inordinately tired.
That this fictionalized biography reads so true is down to the details, all the details, but the bookish ones in particular. Alice tells us the names of the books her grandmother is reading, every single title in a stack she buys for a young friend of hers, which includes books by Loises Duncan and Lowry, Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. Her daughter Ella reads Bunnicula on the flight to Charlie’s college reunion. Alice has John Updike in her handbag on her first date with Charlie, and she wonders if she’ll ever learn to read so sneakily at political conventions that no one will notice (and she is sad to never manage this). Of her husband’s religion, Alice says, “I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it… Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose– what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?– and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”
American Wife, for all its fiction, sheds a great deal of light on the Bush Presidency and on America. Sittenfeld answering the question, “How could this have happened?” That a man with such limitations could become so powerful, how any awareness of the enormity of his mistakes would make him all the more steadfast about continuing to make them, that the political is really only personal, because politicians are people. Not just in the “we wear sweaters and have children” sense, but in terms of blatant fallibility. How “this”/Bush could have happened is so truthfully imagined here, and isn’t imagined as close to truth as we can get?
Says Alice Blackwell, “What I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity.”
If only the cover
of American Wife did not feature a wedding dress though, and I can’t even think of why it does, since Alice Blackwell didn’t wear one to her modest nuptials. I fear the cover of this book will deter a man from ever picking it up, which is almost tragic, because this book is so rich, entertaining and important. Enacting Hilary Mantel’s assertion that “revolution is a daily task”, that the domestic is the heart of everything.
September 14, 2008
Unremarkable
Unremarkable weekend, whose highlight was the purchase of trackpants. Which was actually all I wanted from a weekend, we’ve been so busy lately. And also because I was reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I didn’t want to do anything but read it. Now reading I Know You Are but What Am I? by Heather Birrell, and I love it– does Coach House ever fail? A short kidlit kick after that, with Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh, and Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder. And then I have to read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because my husband’s been nagging me to do so for months.
September 13, 2008
Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Rebecca Rosenblum
Rebecca Rosenblum and I first met in Goldberry Long‘s kitchen one sunny September afternoon in 2005. I remember being impressed by her outfit, and intrigued to learn she worked at Harlequin. For the next two years, we were both part of the Creative Writing Masters Program at the University of Toronto, reading each others’ stories as part of a great workshop group and taking the “Virginia Woolf: Essays and Short Fiction” and “Literature and the Environment” courses together. Rebecca’s graduate thesis has evolved into her short story collection Once. She is as talented a writer as she is a friend.
We had this conversation on Thursday the 11th of September at a Toronto coffee shop, and, as ever, I was impressed by her outfit.
I: What do you see as the links between the stories in Once? Tell us about your book.
RR: Some connections are obvious- characters reoccur, come into each others’ stories, and also some locations reoccur. A lot of people moving through the same neighbourhoods, and in my mind passing each other on the street, being in each others’ worlds, and I think those are connections that a reader doesn’t necessarily need to get. I feel the stories are united by that, and by characters being in the same sorts of worlds. Some are in Toronto, in Montreal, some are in a place that doesn’t really exist. But they’re also kind of in the same places emotionally. It’s a book about younger people and people who aren’t fitting quite as well– and it’s not clear if that’s “yet”, if they’re going to get it together. There are a lot of possibilities inherent.
I: Judging from these stories, what are your fixations as a writer?
RR: I’ve had some time to think about this and my first thing is people and that I’m a character-driven writer but more than that I’m interested in how people move into each other, pass each other. Incidental people who aren’t the great loves of your life, or you mother, daughter– [these people who] don’t have a fixed place but still matter. And because of that I’m interested in the places where we’re most open to [these connections]. I’m interested in writing stories in public places, like transit, which packs people in together. I’m interested in that.
I: What is it about transit?
RR: I love it so much. I’m from the country, as a kid I couldn’t go anywhere, was always failing my drivers test. If I got out on the lawn, there was only cornfields. So the freedom to go anywhere, to see strangers, which also doesn’t happen in the country. If there is a stranger, there is a reason for them to be there– they’re plumber, or the superintendent of the school. With transit there is a combination of freedom and the human aspect. And also the logic of necessity– I’m certainly not getting a car.
I: You write a lot about workplaces too. What about work do you find interesting?
RR: I’ve always found work a very challenging environment. As a teenager it was my first interaction with random people and it was really hard to have to do something you’re bad at, to have to do something you don’t like, and to have to turn off the rest of your life for eight hours. And I feel like that’s really often not acknowledged. A lot of novels take place between 6:30 and midnight, and it’s not really clear what goes on the rest of the day.
I: But then we want stories that are profound and wonderful, and the rest of the day can be so banal.
RR: Even if it is banal, it’s still creating a sense of self for the worker. “This is who I am” or, in reaction, “this is who I’m not”. Ideally, there are relationships- colleagues, competition, contact, you can’t escape that. I had a job once where I could and that was terrible. Doing freelance. Alone in my living room with no one to tell me what to do.
I: How do you see your title as relating to the whole collection?
RR: The title came about for a much earlier draft of the book, which was focused on the more magical stories. And I was trying to work against the idea of a fairy tale as being out of time and out of place and about people who aren’t really people but just archetypes. I wanted my more magical stories to be grounded in time, place, character. I wanted them to be about real people with extra stuff, like the ability to fly, but they weren’t lacking in character, history, or minimum wage jobs. “Once” was an answer to “Once Upon A Time”, putting time in a position that is specific and concrete.
I: I was also thinking “once” in terms of progress, transition. Once something happens, then something follows.
RR: I hope the characters are people in their lives, people moving, acting in their lives, and that something is going to come next. That they’re characters who’ve been somewhere before the first page of the story and they’re going somewhere after the last.
I: You once got annoyed by reading the following by Eudora Welty: “In a story you don’t go into character in order to develop him. He was born full grown, and he’s present there to perform his part in the story. He’s subservient to his function, and he doesn’t exist outside it.” Why do you disagree with this? But why do you think that Welty feels the way she does?
RR: I’m not that familiar with Eudora Welty, or her work. Of course there are writers who use story differently than I do, develop a theme, tight plot line– like Guy de Maupassant– not using fully developed characters, but a lot happens. These characters are a few strokes and you don’t need anything more to feel the poignancy of what happens. But I like stories where characters are more than the sum of their events. That’s the kind of story I want to read and the kind of story I want to write, and I guess it seemed like Welty thought that there was only one kind of story.
I: There are many overlaps between your stories– recurring characters and places. In your book you’ve created a miniature world with life going on, and I want to know, how does the imaginary world you’ve created differ from the actual one? What rules are different? What are the same?
RR: It’s really on a case-by-case basis. And the things that will work for one character won’t work for another.
I: Would Chilly Girl go to Pho-Mi 99?
RR: I wanted it to be clear that magic could exist in the world as we recognize it, but that it just might not have come up yet. So Chilly Girl’s condo party, and the view of the harbour- they’re all things that I’ve experienced. Or “Route 99” and “Linh Lai” and “Kids These Days” all overlap, “Route 99” and “Linh Lai” have incidents of magic but “Kids These Days” does not, and that’s the different way the lives of these characters are going.
I: But the end of “Kids These Days” was magical.
RR: That’s a story that went back and forth, and all over the place, and was terrible for a while. Some drafts had magic and some didn’t and those were the drafts that worked better.
I: Your work isn’t magical realism though. (Which I think is a funny term, because doesn’t all fiction require a suspension of disbelief?) Your stories have the effect of magic alongside realism. How does each inform the other?
RR: Yeah, with characters in any story, readers have to be able to believe in t
hem from scratch. We’ve never seen them, but we have to buy in to enjoy it, so to go one further and say they’ll do things we’ve never seen before– I don’t know if it’s so different.
I: But some readers have a problem with it. Personally I prefer your subtler magic, which sits alongside the realism.
RR: And I think that’s the way I’m growing up as a writer. I wrote this book over a long time and I had a lot of help and I think a lot of that learning was to reign the wilder points of fancy in and make them more meaningful.
I: I want to ask you about names– nicknames, unusual names. Names establish parametres in your stories. How do you name your characters? Do you ever change their names midway, and what effect does this have?
RR: I often will name the character the first thing that comes to me when think about them and assume this holds some organic truth. Often it doesn’t, but I feel really strongly about names, about my own name, and so it seems disrespectful towards characters to change theirs. Though sometimes it’s got to be done. It is great to be able to use all the names I want to use too– so many names it would be unfortunate to name your dog or your baby, but characters in a story are different.
I: What would you really like to say to the next person who asks when you’re going to try to write novels?
RR: I find it a very mean question– “when are you going to quit your job and do something else?” “When are you going to divorce that guy and marry something better?” When you’ve obviously made a choice or are in a position and you think its all right. It’s a very strange question to be asked. I think I would say, “That’s mean, leave it.” I think, “What’s wrong with what the stories, why do I have to do something else?” It’s not like I’d never like to write a novel, but it seems strange.
I: Amy King writes in her introduction to your work in the latest The New Quarterly that she was “astonished to learn that the life of the protagonist of [your story] “Fruit Factory” was perhaps not the life of Rebecca Rosenblum.” The story, she says, “is so evocative” that she feels “like she had snooped into [your diary].” Which made me feel better, that I’m not the only one. Because I usually know to observe (which might be to ignore?) the line between fact and fiction, but I remember sitting down with you a few years into our friendship, after thinking about this for about a year, and saying, “Listen, Rebecca. I don’t want to pry. Um, but did you lose somebody close to you?” And I was all set to hear about your tragedy. Because I’d read your epic-ish poem “Dead Boyfriend Disco” of course, and I was convinced that you’d been tap-dancing in your tub.
RR: That’s such high praise, what I aspire to. To make everything as real as real. So when you can convince somebody, that is a huge compliment. I try to be with the characters as much as possible, to be in their heads for weeks, months, years. To think out how their lives work. I don’t usually do research beyond thinking (which is easy to do on the bus) but sometimes I will try to track down things I’m not sure of. And I do use clothes, sandwiches and stray lines from my own life, if I’ve feel that connection. I don’t mean to say that I never write autobiographically, but I don’t like to .
I: But you do get asked about the role autobiography plays in your fiction. What do you think of these questions?
RR: I don’t think it’s helpful, or relevant, and yet when I read a book, I want to know too. When I read something and author bio is close to that, I want to know more about the connection. I don’t know why I want to know, but ideally I would like to think it’s because we care about the characters, about the stories, and we hope for more story. If it’s real, the story will keep going. That is the most positive spin I can put on it.
I: In your own life, what circumstances entirely unrelated to writing have made you a better writer?
RR: I think having a job helps so much. Just to be in the world for me is really important, which is what I didn’t like about freelancing.
I: I usually ask about influences in a general sense, but I’ve got a general sense of yours already. So I want to know more about what you learned about literature from Francesca Lia Block.
RR: Abundance, I think. And joy in words and the abundance of words. Just keep going, keep describing and if one adjective is okay, then maybe four would be amazing. And don’t just say they had dinner, but describe every condiment, and what they felt, and how it tasted as they kissed after. Certainly she’s not anyone people are talking about as a serious writer, but she has the energy that you don’t see very often, and maybe a kind of freedom to do whatever she wants because people are just going say “Oh she’s YA” and keep walking.
I: What are you reading right now? What’s up next?`
I: I love that book!
RR: You’re the reason I bought it. It’s validation for what I’m doing,–the doubts, that Annie Dillard has felt it too.
I: What upcoming book in your own reading stack are you looking forward to?
RR: Claudia’s Dey’s Stunt, which I know is amazing because I’ve heard her read from it twice, and I want to read the whole of it.
(Once is out September 15th.)
September 13, 2008
Oishi-desu, ne?
In Japan, one lives to eat, or at least one travels to eat, for every city or region is famed for some kind of delicacy which must be indulged in on a visit. (In our city Himeji, it was conger eel.)
It is also important that when you do travel someplace, to bring back omiyage— a (n often edible) souvenir– for friends and co-workers back home. It is a slight not do so, and every city– and the train station in particular– will have numerous gift shops full of such delights.
When we lived in Japan, I had a co-worker whose boyfriend was working in the city of Nagoya, and she’d often go to visit him on her days off. And though her visits were quite regular, she never dared an omiyage lapse, and she would usually bring us back uiro— the snack for which Nagoya is famed. Uiro is a sweet snack of pounded rice, loaded with sugar. It comes in a block that appears kind of waxy, has a consistency not dissimilar to cheese, and I love it. I am a uiro glutton, which was fine as most people were unable to get past its strange appearance and texture, so there was always plenty for me. I still keep an eye out for it in the Asian shops around the city, but not a sign of it have I seen.
Last month before our neighbours left for their trip to Japan, I’d asked if they’d be going to Nagoya. I was being a bit flippant– their trip would be a whirlwind, wedding and honeymoon all in one– and really I just wanted a chance to reminisce about the pleasures of uiro. But I should have known– Japanese people take omiyage very seriously, and any kind thing a Japanese person has ever done for me has been mindblowingly beyond the call of duty.
They got back this week, and we were hanging out in the backyard last night when I was presented a box of uiro. It turns out that their shinkansen had passed through Nagoya, making a brief stop. My neighbour asked the attendant how long the stop would be, and she said one minute and a half. My neighbour tells his wife, he’s going to chance it. He says that if he doesn’t get back on, he’ll take the next train and meet her at the end of the line. But he makes it. In 90 seconds, he managed to buy my heart’s desire, get back on the train, solidifying all suspicions I’d ever had regarding his superheroism. As well as his wife’s patience, their generosity and all-around infinite goodness.
So we’re savouring the uiro at the moment. Tiny slices, we want to make it last. What a fabulous surprise! It’s as good as I remembered.
September 10, 2008
Silent Girl by Tricia Dower
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is intriguing. However faulty, as of course merely having something to say doesn’t necessarily make one adept at the saying. A successful story is the result of various fortunate collisions, but I was thinking of the Fitzgerald quotation when I came across Tricia Dower’s story collection Silent Girl (Inanna). Stories pushed less for being stories than for what Dower has to say with them, how they “deal with a range of contemporary issues: racism, social isolation, sexual slavery, kidnapping, violence, family dynamics and the fluid boundaries of gender.”
I was interested also in the nature of this collection, its eight stories linked by a feminist theme. Each of them inspired by one of Shakespeare’s plays– for example, The Taming of the Shrew for a story of a kidnapped bride in Kyrgyzstan, Hamlet to show “Gertrude’s” side with the story, a widow left with a troubled farm after her husband’s death, and the comfort she finds in his brother. These allusions not necessary to appreciate these stories– my own Shakespeare could certainly use a brush-up– but just another example of the various collisions behind the creation of Silent Girl.
How would such a collection work, I wondered. Stories can often be collected at random, but in this case where they weren’t, would some read deliberately? Would the “something to say” take priority over the saying? Were the feminist links sort of a stretch, or were they actually a part of the book’s construction?
The stories within Silent Girl are various, points of view from women of many ages, from different cultures and places. It is this variousness that makes the stories’ main links (Shakespeare, women’s issues– that “something to say”) particularly interesting, as the connections aren’t really obvious until we come out of the stories’ individual worlds, backing away to look at the book’s overarching theme. Which is to say that many of the stories in this collection are wonderful, stand alone, and it is only when they’re grouped together that their “issues” become relevant. Remaining secondary to the stories themselves, which is how it should be, but still adding a worthwhile dimension. Stories taking full advantage of collectivity to expand on the ideas each raises alone.
The title story is perhaps the strongest in the collection, bookended by the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Matsi the “silent girl” taken from Thailand in the aftermath of the former, living in New Orleans on the cusp of the latter, and working as a child sex slave. Her attempts at self-preservation are heartbreaking and heroic, and the spell never breaks Dower’s depiction of this child’s point of view so absolutely convincing. She must also be commended for a most spectacular narrative arc.
“Deep Deep Waves” manages to be as enveloping as it is troubling, the story of an abused wife whose role as victim is not so passive. Challenging perceived narratives of domestic violence (Dower here offering part of “a new mythology” she thinks necessary to move away from “locked gender roles and a patriarchal value system”), Sona implicates herself in her own story. In “Nobody; I Myself”, the narrator does the same but for different reasons, for love instead of violence.
Though it’s not all dark here either– “Cocktails with Charles” is charming, lively and funny at its heart, and a most delightful story.
Critically, however, and I’ve written of this before (Hello, Vincent Lam!), I’ve got an aversion to fiction requiring a “Glossary of Terms”. I feel any good story should have sufficient stuff to be filled out on its own, and though Dower’s glossary is not extensive, I note that the stories I found weakest are most cited. Perhaps with so much something to say, fact drowned the stories themselves, but this was only really troubling in the case of the collection’s final story. A longish allegorical distopian sci/fi bent, it wasn’t my thing anyway, but even less so considering the appendix. An allegory which puts a layer between the reader and the story, which is a shame after we’ve been so close to all the rest.
To finish reading Tricia Dower’s Silent Girl is to have the fortunate collisions continue, ideas emerging from the stories themselves, from their relationships to one another, and how they depict the status of women throughout the world. Making Shakespeare vital and relevant too, for as Dower writes in her afterword, “some things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time”. Plenty of valuable insight is also offered on Dower’s excellent blog and on her website for the ideas in her stories to continue their expansion.
For– and as Fitzgerald advised– however much the girl is silent, these stories have so much to say.
September 9, 2008
Once in the world
“I think,” writes Rebecca Rosenblum, of the moment she first saw her book, “once in a while, something can be exactly as good as you dreamt it would be.”
Rebecca’s story collection Once is now out in the world, and we spotted it yesterday in a stack at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. I bought a copy immediately, and soon after had the great pleasure of listening to Rebecca read from the first story “ContEd”. Pleasure even in spite of the rain, because Rebecca read so beautifully. She even made the sun came out, and so for the rest of day we were dry.
Afterwards, we saw every author I was hoping to see as noted in the post below. And also Dennis Lee, who didn’t seem to remember me from the time he came to my school when I was five.
- Click here to buy Rebecca’s book. She is not the kind of writer I promote because she’s my friend, but rather because she’s the kind of writer so talented I can’t quite believe that she’s my friend. Once should stocked in the shops by some time next week.
- Attend Rebecca’s launch if you can. Monday September 15, 2008 at 7:00. The Gladstone Hotel, Toronto.
