January 31, 2012
Packing snow
Harriet has been lusting after winter for weeks now, but the season really hasn’t delivered. It’s the last day of January, and only now have we received the supply of “packing snow” required for Snow Person construction. But Harriet was ecstatic, and we did have a good time rolling up all the snow in the backyard to make this guy. I explained to Harriet that he would not be long for this world, as our temperatures are tropical today, but I’m not sure that she really understood. “Remember how all the snow melted in Charlie and Lola?” I asked her, but she ignored me, and I really was being a bit of a downer. Though not unnecessarily– I just looked out the window, and our Snow Person is no more. My plan to distract Harriet away from trauma resulting from this situation will involve offering ice cream and chocolate. And it will probably taste better than what I found her eating when I finally dragged her inside (kicking and screaming) for nap time, which was dirty snow out of our garden using a long-abandoned, formerly-buried piece of sidewalk chalk as a spoon.
January 29, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
We assembled on Saturday morning around a table spread with enough brunch to feed several Vicious Circles, and quickly got to talking about the book, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. We were surprised that so many of us got through it, a hefty tome at 650 pages, a hefty tome whose bleak outcome is made clear by its title, and which became so unbearably sad to read around page 450. We speculated that part of the reason we were able to take our time as we read it was that none of us really wanted to get to the end. And one of us was so angry at the end, the lack of pay-off for investing one’s time in such a long book. “Well, that’s the way the world works,” we said. There are no tidy endings, and Murray deserves credit for making his novel reflect that reality. Though surely the world is not as bleak as the novel presents. There is far more beauty in the world than Murray shows, and in particular we remarked upon him driving home the point that the adults whom our messed-up children are in the care of are even more messed-up than the kids are. The parents in his novel are stereotypes, drunken mothers in jungle prints whose silicone implants’ sloshing is audible. There are good parents out there. Some of us even had them.
And speaking of stereotypes, we lamented that Murray did not see fit to instill his female characters with the same depth as the male, to write them with the same sensitivity. At the end of the novel, Lori’s character is given some dimension, but otherwise, the girls were the worst “shit girls say” stereotypes. Which is unfortunate because he writes about the teenage boys and their connections so beautifully, and the novel could have been so much richer if the girls had been half as interesting.
But this is the kind of novel whose approach to its subject matter could be used to explain away several perceived flaws. That we never see the girls in all their dimensions because this is a novel about a boys’ boarding school, and they’re so far removed from the girls’ experience. That the story itself seems dated because the school itself is a relic, as anachronistic as its atmosphere. Though we note that this is very much a novel of the present, and we think the novel is structured along the lines of the video games its characters are so immersed in. We remark that the characters’ trains of thought move seamlessly between the games’ narratives, and the actual world around them. We love so much about the boys at the centre of the story, the richness of their characterization.
A few of us are confused because we heard Paul Murray read at IFOA and were left with the impression that this book was funny, but it was so dark, so bleak. The blurbs and reviews also thought it was hilarious, which makes us think that maybe they didn’t read the book. Also, the novel was sold together in three volumes, and we wondered how we might have understand the book if we’d read it in that format, and that we might have read the first or second, and given up.
We liked the way that this novel spoke about grief, and history, and Ireland, while also subverting and complicating stereotypes on the last point. We thought Howard was ridiculous, sometimes amusingly so, but other times just frustratingly so. We loved the Bethani song lyrics, and when Lori sang into the phone. Some of us thought the glimmer of goodness, of wholeness, that Murray provides at the end of the book was enough. Others thought not so much. Some of us found part two pretty tedious, and the whole druid thing, and the secret room in the girls school, blah blah. Prime time for skimming here, but with the final section of the book, we were hooked again.
Books we talked about when we were talking about this book were The History Boys, This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath (which we think we’re going to putting on our to-be-read list). We were all pleased to have encountered a book we might not have read otherwise, and a book that was so good for discussion, whose flaws made for interesting and illuminating conversation. And then we helped ourselves to another serving of sausage hash browns, and turned our minds to extra-literary things.
January 26, 2012
But every day is Family Literacy Day!
Harriet and I reading, back in the day
As part of Family Literacy Day, my article “How to read so your kids will listen” is online at Today’s Parent, which I’m quite excited about (though I know I’m not telling any of you people anything that you didn’t know already).
Also check out also a list of expert-curated kids book recommendations up at Canadian Bookshelf.
And even if you caught it first time around, it might be worth revisiting the legendary time I dragged out Family Literacy Day for an entire week back in 2010, because there’s really some excellent stuff up there.
January 26, 2012
Our Best Book of the library haul: Sarah Garland's books
Still not sure where Sarah Garland has been all my life… An author/illustrator whose texts are not terribly interesting, but whose illustrations are so rich and jumbled with the stuff of every day life. Those of us who adore Shirley Hughes will find much to love in Garland’s “Coming and Going Series,” simple stories of ordinary adventures like going to the local pool, to playgroup, or having friends over for a cup of tea outside (until the rain comes and washes the party away). The houses are untidy, Mums are unravelled and pear-shaped, someone’s always putting on a cup of tea, and they live in a cottage and have an aga! (Yes, be still my English-fetishizing heart.) There is a certain vagueness to the plots which allows little people to project themselves right into the stories, and indeed, Harriet loves these books as much as I do. We’re besotted.
–Check out an interview Garland did in The Guardian when her books were republished in 2007.
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)
January 26, 2012
More about stories (and Skippy Dies)
“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories that things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole world…” –Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
January 24, 2012
The sense of a story
Last summer, Los Angeles Times columnist Meaghan Daum wrote about Jaycee Dugard and her story spun as a redemption narrative: “I detect a need on the part of the media to wrap her story up in a bow, to assure the public that she’s OK, to reinforce the central narrative of just about everything we see on TV: Change is possible, maybe even easy; that adversity can be overcome; and that, as Dr. Phil likes to say, there are no victims, only volunteers.” When I read Daum’s piece, I couldn’t help but think of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the expectations that have been foisted upon her since her injuries last January, perhaps perpetuated by the very fact that she’d survived being shot in the face in the first place.
The narrative of her “recovery” though has been so remarkable for its falseness, for its abject denial of the realities of brain injury. Which can’t be wholly blamed on the media, I realize, because Giffords and her publicity team appear to have been much in command of her image over the past year, though I suppose theirs has been a fair response to having to endure what Giffords has in the public eye. If I were Giffords, I would want my audio edited too, my photos carefully posed, my dignity preserved, but this doesn’t change the fact of what many of us can read between the lines: that her story is a tragedy without meaning, without redemption. The miracle is that she’s still here at all, but she’s being pressed to make it more than that.
“Most art is more a matter of finding a few meaningful moments in an utterly plotless flow,” writes Rick Salutin in a recent column “Why the storytelling model doesn’t work.” He notes how inapplicable is story as a model in most kinds of culture, let alone as a metaphor for “Life Itself”. That we usually demand more than mere story from our greatest art, and yet journalists are still required to fit their own work into tidy story-sized packages (and tied with Meaghan Daum’s bow), distorting how the rest of us perceive the world around us.
All of which is true, of course, which doesn’t sit terribly well with me who has lived life so far turned to the novel in place of religion. How to reconcile this? Would the novel telling of Gabrielle Giffords’ story diverge sharply from the shape of a Diane Sawyer interview? Though I keep thinking that maybe story isn’t what Salutin has a problem with per se, but rather that he has a narrow definition of what story is, of its mereness. That perhaps the problem remains, as ever, with the tidy ending, with satisfying that yearning for redemption, both of which are actually a failure to acknowledge the way that story really works, and Life Itself for that matter. (And the simplest solution to this problem is the short story, but you already knew that.)
Penelope Lively’s latest novel How It All Began makes the case for story as Life Itself. Story, her characters remark, is forward-motion, one thing after another, driven by the reader who wants to see what happens next. “Narrative. But a contrivance– a clever contrivance if successful.” Real life, her characters acknowledge, is different from “the unruly world in which we have to live. One’s unreliable progress.” And yet Lively is putting these words in the mouths of her fictional characters to make the point that the novel (and art in general) is actually capable of assuming the shape of reality. That in both life and in art, we must make our way by investing happenstance with meaning after the fact. That story is simultaneously more simple and more complex than how we commonly perceive it, but that it’s only a useful tool when we understand that it’s a tool after all.
Update: I’m reading Skippy Dies, and just came across the passage, “…stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.” But as with the Lively book, here is a novel that creates that sense of messy chaos. I don’t think it’s time to give up on story just yet.
Update to update: It occurs to me that I’m 550 pages into Skippy Dies, and that if there is no redemption by the book’s end, I am going to be very dissatisfied. That 600 pages of messy chaos is a mindfuck, and I really do feel like there has to be some kind of pay-off. So perhaps I shouldn’t situate myself too far away from the Dr. Phil-loving masses.
January 22, 2012
"Loving the mayor is a bit like that": Rosemary Aubert's Firebrand
Rosemary Aubert’s Firebrand is a Harlequin SuperRomance published in 1986, and that I discovered it via a footnote in Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto is to give you an indication that Harris’ book is chock-full of fascinating stuff. As is Firebrand, actually, which I would bet is the only Harlequin ever whose romantic lead has a painting of William Lyon MacKenzie on his office wall. This is a Toronto book through and through, dedicated, “To T.O, I love you,” and it shows.
It’s the story of Jenn McDonald, unassuming librarian (naturally), but she’s an unassuming librarian at the Municipal Affairs Library at Toronto City Hall (which, under our current city government, has been made to no longer exist). Which gives her a good vantage point from which to observe the city’s mayor Mike Massey (whose not one of those Masseys, the novel tells us), who Jenn remembers from the days when he was a rebellious young alderman and the two of them spent a memorable night together locked up in a police station after a protest.
When they meet again while watching the ice-skaters at Nathan Phillips Square, their original spark is rekindled and Jenn and Mike are drawn to one another. She is baffled by his desire, a man so far out of her league, but it turns out that he’s attracted to her down-to-earth qualities and her spirit, and as they argue about developing Toronto’s portlands and the preservation of the Leslie Street Spit, he can see that she’s a woman who can more than hold her own.
But loving the mayor isn’t all posh cars and white roses. It’s hard to love a man who’s already married to his job, and who is used to commanding all those around him. The path to true love doesn’t quite run smooth, and its bumps include a fierce debate on city council about Toronto police officers being armed with machine guns (Mike Massey is firmly against; his stance is unpopular at a time when officers are being shot with Uzis), Jenn receiving death threats, a custody battle with Mike’s ex-wife, and Jenn’s unresolved feelings with her husband. All this against a fabulous Toronto backdrop: first dates in Chinatown, their homes on either side of the Don Valley (with the footpath between them), Jenn shopping at the Room at Simpsons, galas at the King Edward, a protest near OCAD against arts cuts (including those funding The Friendly Giant, we are subtly told), a stroll together through the Moore Park Ravine, a political rally at the Palais Royal. Michael Ondaatje might own the literary Bloor Street Viaduct, but he’s got nothing on Rosemary Aubert for the rest of town.
It’s really quite a good book. This surprised me, though there are some who will rush to tell me that we all write off Harlequins too quickly, but I’m still pretty sure they’re not my thing. Because this book is a Harlequin, there are passages like, “Whispering, caressing, clutching, they continued, until Mike’s large, warm, immensely masculine body covered Jenn’s completely. Until the soft, shifting eagerness of her beneath him brought him to the brink of ecstasy. He asked. She answered yes. Oh yes.”
And then later in the mayor’s office: “Before her, all six-foot-four of him glowing in the soft window light, stood Mike, fully and gloriously a man. Hungry for her with a hunger that was obvious in every part of his huge body.” Which makes “300 pounds of fun” seem kind of paltry, no?
So there’s that, but aside from huge bodies, Aubert paints the city of Toronto with a vibrant specificity, and anyone who cares about our city’s literature (and municipal politics!) should definitely check out this book. The very best part of Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is its challenge of every prejudice as to what Toronto Literature comprises– the canon is more surprising than you ever imagined. And how fortunate we are that Harris’ book turns up Firebrand, which is out of print, hardly known, and hasn’t a single copy held by the Toronto Public Library. I would urge you to pick up your used copy on Amazon for a penny like I did while there are still copies out there to be had.
January 19, 2012
Mini-Review: How It All Began by Penelope Lively
I read this book for pleasure purely and have no time to review it here, but couldn’t not post anything about it in case you never learned how wonderful this book is and how much you have to read it. How It All Began is the latest by Penelope Lively, who I’ve loved ever since Moon Tiger. This is a story about story, about the chaos theory as applied to history, to life itself, to narrative. When Charlotte Rainsford is mugged in the street, a whole chain of events is set forth that forever changes the lives of people who never suspect the ways in which their worlds are connected. And it’s interesting because these characters spend the entire book reading books, talking about stories, and making clear the ways in which the way stories go in real life and the way they do in books is markedly different– all the while unsuspecting that they’re fictional characters themselves. Oh, that cheeky Penelope Lively who constructs her universes to be so much like the one that we know, and manipulates her people with such deftness that we can nearly forget she’s there, but not completely. I do adore her authorial presence, which is always felt, its charm, and her preoccupations with history and happenstance. There’s a Carol Shields reference in this one, which is not far off the mark. How It All Began is the best book Lively has published in ages (which is saying something, because she’s always pretty good).
