September 5, 2008

Eden Mills & Weekend

We’ve got a packed weekend here, with three (3!) social engagements tomorrow: out for brunch, friends for tea (with a baby!) and then a friend for dinner.

On Sunday I’m off for the day to the Eden Mills Writers Festival with Rebecca Rosenblum. I am looking forward to hearing Rebecca read (from her forthcoming book, out in over a week), and other writers too, including Shari Lapena, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Mariko Tamaki, Susan Juby and Leon Rooke. Looking forward also to the announcement of the winner of the 2008 Literary Contest, particularly as my short story “Still Born Friends” is on the shortlist!

September 5, 2008

Marvelous Blog Find

Marvelous blog-find of the day is poet Evie Christie’s Desk Spaces, a gallery of Canadian writers’ work spaces. Thanks to That Shakespeherian Rag for the discovery.

September 5, 2008

Coach House Open House

I love Coach House. They keep publishing books I really want to buy and then love reading, which I think is a mark of achievement for an independent press. Tonight we attended the Coach House Open House tonight over on bpNichol Lane, and we had more fun than you think we would have standing around a parking lot. And not just because there were food and bevvies, or because there was a tour and a chance to see the printing press in action. And not just because we got to see Crissy Calhoun, Ivor Tossell and Julie Wilson either. And not even because we got take advantage of the book sale. (I bought The Girls Who Saw Everything.) But I would probably say that the fun was most definitely a culmination of all these things.

September 5, 2008

Choice

From Gary Younge of The Nation: “The fact is, Bristol could make the decision to keep the baby only because, in legal terms at least, she had a choice. A choice, as it happens, that her mother wants to criminalize… The woman who would like us to keep her daughter’s pregnancy a private matter is running for office so that she can make the pregnancies of other people’s daughters an affair of the state. ” (via Broadsides).

September 4, 2008

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

It is typical of the way that argument goes, of why argument is very rarely ever productive, when essayist Stephen Henighan responds to reviewer Nigel Beale’s assertion of “the market as a determinant of literary quality” by pushing the argument towards it most illogical conclusion: “So the great novelists of our time are Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling?” Because no, of course they aren’t, but there is definitely something to Beale’s argument (which I believe was in reference to Ian McEwen.) That sometimes a writer’s popularity can eclipse their literary merit can be demonstrated by Miriam Toews.

Not to suggest that Toews is in need of defending, of any assistance– her first novel Summer of My Amazing Luck was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, A Boy of Good Breeding and the memoir Swing Low: A Life were both McNally Robinson Books of the Year, A Complicated Kindness was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Award in 2005. But all this acclaim may have made Canadian Literature critics forget how fine a writer she really is, how good her writing truly is.

I say this because her work is the epitome of everything I hear critics calling for more of in Canadian literature (including Henighan): much of her fiction is utterly contemporary instead of backward-looking, she makes remarkable the lives of impoverished people who live in cities (and Winnipeg, no less), she has fun with language, colloquialism and the vernacular, pulling it all into pieces and then slapping it back together again. She addresses depression, drug addiction, poverty etc. but not as “issues”, these are stories. She does “gritty” but it sparkles, and though I believe Toews is one of the most exceptional writers we have working Canada today, she rarely gets such critical response, however much she is popular and racks up the awards (which I would argue, as most people would, are not quite the same as “critical response”).

Her latest novel The Flying Troutmans begins, “Yeah, so things have fallen apart.” The narrator Hattie Troutman returning home from a life in Paris that was unraveling anyway, in order to care for her nephew and niece. Her sister Min has been hospitalized with depression once again, and it becomes clear that Min’s problems have taken a toll on her kids– fifteen year-old Logan has been expelled from school for gang ties, and Thebes at eleven has ceased bathing, displays a manic chatter belying deeper problems and fears inside.

So they go on a road trip, driving across America in search of Logan and Thebes’s father. Because Hattie knows the kids need her, but she can’t cope with them on her own, or cope with them at all, she thinks, and there is no one else she can turn to. Min is back home in the hospital, “hooked on blue torpedoes” and last time Hattie had called the hospital, the nurse had told her Min didn’t even remember she had kids.

“But, said Logan, a fifteen-year old could technically live on his own, right?… No, a fifteen-year old cannot live on his own, I said./ Pippi Longstockings wasn’t even fifteen, said Thebes, and she–/ Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said./ And she was Swedish, said Logan./ So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn’t work here.”

And it doesn’t. These kids are all alone and they know it, and they know their mother wants to kill herself too. In fact they’ve exhausted themselves for months trying to keep her from doing so, and there is no safety net, solid or otherwise. How do you even be a kid in a world such as this one? How do you be a figure of stability to kids who know well there is no such thing.

“He asked me if I thought all this stuff was happening for a reason. /No, I said. I don’t think so.”

But yeah, just like Pippi, these people are characters in a book too, and because this is a book by Toews, this terrible reality is underlined always with humour. So that the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that.

One of Toews greatest strengths is voice, perfectly capturing the dry tones of her narrator Hattie, Thebes’s unceasing banter from the backseat, the unexpected breaks in Logan’s teenage reticence. Toew’s dialogue is fast paced, rich and real, and she is a kind of ventriloquist to create these different characters. And a sort of juggler or an acrobat (I’m not sure, someone who can do something awkward but with verve) to put these characters altogether and to make out of it a story so perfectly formed.

The Flying Troutmans represents real development since Summer of My Amazing Luck, which also had a road trip at its very heart and is a fine novel, but Toews has gotten so much better, which is the ideal. Her ending here a perfect balance between happy and real, known and unknown, resolved and otherwise. Here is a novel that is a road trip to somewhere, which is more than enough to ask of a book.

September 3, 2008

Links and more links

The best thing we read all weekend at our house was “Just Two Clicks: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle” in the LRB. Hilary Mantel’s “In the Waiting Room” (not avail. online) was similarly awful, but beautiful to read. Katherine Parrish thoughtfully raises the topic of gender and The Salon Des Refuses, which I didn’t mention, but it certainly occurred to me: “John Metcalf’s excoriating indictment of the Penguin Anthology accuses the publishers of “pulling a Binchy,” comparing their choice of a mere practitioner like Jane Urquhart to a hypothetical decision to ask Maeve Binchy to edit a comparable Irish anthology. Why not Frank McCourt, I wondered… Whimsical women with their stories. Serious men with their ideas. Ahhh. The good old days.” Rona Maynard’s “Dear Governor Palin” is powerful and smart. And Lynn Crosbie on the resurrection of Brenda Walsh. Now reading Hilary Mantel’s novel An Experiment in Love.

September 3, 2008

Being Taken Places

Oh, how books do take us places. After reading Francine Prose’s Goldengrove last week, I absolutely had to watch the movie Vertigo. Which wasn’t a particularly good or convincing film all around, but there was something about it, how it came by its filmishness absolutely brilliantly, and was so thrilling to watch. How the movie and Prose’s novel informed one another; I absolutely loved it.

And then I finished reading Owen Meany, which became far less plodding halfway through. And yes, I understand that some of the plodding was a narrative device, but I think some of it could have been fixed by an editor. Still, I remembered why I’d loved it, which had been the very point.

Then onward to The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy. And I’ll say this– I think Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best writers I’ve ever read, ever. Out of children’s lit. and lit. the world over. I loved The Long Secret when I was young, and I could see why upon rereading– I was just as baffled and fascinated as I would have been the first time around, and not every kids book reread can do that twice. In both of her books I’ve read, Fitzhugh captures the awfulness and inexplicableness that is real life in a way I can only compare to Grace Paley (class differences of their characters aside, of course). In no way watered down at all, Fitzhugh renders that reality palatable for children, which is truly amazing. This is the kind of literature children deserve…

And how strange here to see the number of parallels between The Long Secret and A Prayer for Owen Meany— religious fanaticism, grandmothers, bad parenting, coming of age, summertimes etc. etc.– which would have gone unnoticed had I been reading in any other direction.

September 3, 2008

Delightful Things

This past weekend, because it was long, because it was summery weather, and because my sister-in-law was staying with us, we indulged in delightful things. Chocolate raspberry tarts at Dessert Trends, a sunny afternoon at Riverdale Farm, bbq indulgences (esp. corn on the cob and mmm that grilled peach blue cheese salad was good), a trip out of town to the Twenty Valley where we loaded up on gorgeous produce from a roadside stand, and then to Ward’s Island yesterday, to wade in the warm (!) and gorgeous Lake Ontario and dinner at The Rectory Cafe. All in all a perfect way to kiss goodbye the summer, or perhaps more to give summer a whole lot of temptation to stay. Just a little bit longer?

We’d been discussing Rosie Little earlier this week, my sister-in-law and I, having both fallen in love with Danielle Wood’s tales something fierce. And we were talking about the restaurant in Vancouver where Rosie has tea at the end of the book– The Junction Tea Room? (Which I cannot verify, as my downstairs neighbour has borrowed my copy for a holiday to Japan). And how we wished the magical tea room was real, but a fruitless Google search suggested it wasn’t. Alas. And then come Sunday afternoon in Jordan Ontario, we find the only parking space in down right out from of the Twenty Valley Tea House.

We had a brilliant afternoon tea there, sun pouring in through the windows. As at The Junction Tea Room, we got to select our own cups and saucers, mismatched and gorgeous. A hat racked mounted with chapeaus and feathers was there for our pleasure, should we choose to partake. Oh, the tea was delicious, the cakes and triangle sandwiches. Ok, there was no cream (no cream?!) but the scones were so moist and flavourful, none was really required. We ate in tiny bites, morsels, in that afternoon tea way that always has us come out stuffed. Afterwards, a browse in the gift shop, with tea goods for our pleasure. All in all, a superlative teaish experience. Even worthy of fiction…

September 1, 2008

Very Strange

When I realized in June that the colours of my dress coordinated so perfectly with a Miriam Toews novel, I thought it was a marvelous sort of coincidence. But what to make of it now, Toews’ new novel The Flying Troutmans such a perfect match for my other favourite summer dress? Have I failed to notice book designers rummaging through my closet for inspiration?

September 1, 2008

Her reading aloud had killed

“When Lydia was alive, my grandmother seemed content with her reading; either she and Lydia took turns reading to each other, or they forced Germaine to read aloud to them– while they rested their eyes and exercised their acute interest in educating Germaine. But after Lydia died, Germaine refused to read aloud to my grandmother; Germaine was convinced that her reading aloud to Lydia had either killed Lydia or had hastened her death, and Germaine was resolute in not wanting to murder Grandmother in a similar fashion.For a while, my grandmother read aloud to Germaine; but this afforded no opportunity for Grandmother to rest her eyes, and she would often interrupt her reading to make sure that Germaine was paying proper attention. Germaine could not possibly pay attention to the subject– she was so intent on keeping herself alive for the duration of the reading.” –John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany