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.

January 31, 2011

Found Press: Stories Everywhere

I am terribly impressed and very excited about Found Press which produces a quarterly digital literary journal whose contents can be purchased individually. They initially caught my attention because their first issue contains “Addresses”, a new short story by Cynthia Flood, whose The English Stories was one of my favourite books of 2009.

But they impressed me also because their issue is for sale at a price that makes sense for e-publications– short stories for 99 cents each. Seriously, it’s the next best thing to an actual book, and maybe it’s even better. And I love their treatment of the individual short story, each one with gorgeous cover art and an intriguing blurb. Cynthia Flood’s story was terrific, and I look forward to reading the other three by Danny Goodman, Kirsty Logan, and Lana Storey.

Downloads come from kindle or kobo, best-suited to one’s e-reader, but for those of us without such devices, a short story is still perfectly readable on a computer screen. And it’s such a good model, because we get to get what we pay for and pay for what we get, and then everybody wins. I love it.

If this is the future of e-pub, then definitely, sign me up.

January 30, 2011

By Love Possessed by Lorna Goodison

Full disclosure would necessitate me revealing that Lorna Goodison was once my teacher, but I’d be telling you this less to note the otherwise non-existent relationship between Lorna Goodison and I than to have you know that Lorna Goodison was once my teacher, and she was wonderful. And though she is best-known as a poet, her new book By Love Possessed is strange and beautiful, collected stories written over more than two decades, and I had the gorgeous benefit of hearing Goodison’s own voice in my head the entire time that I was reading it.

Voice is integral to the entire collection, whole passages consisting of disembodied dialogue, which breaks a cardinal rule of creative writing, except that the talk is as such that you can imagine exactly who’s saying what, and what they’re doing as they do. Each story also delivered in its own particular tone, dialect as a distinguisher of class and character (but not necessarily “Character”). The story is in the telling as much as in the stories themselves. The range of voices is immense, unsurprisingly for a collection written over such an extended period whose stories would first appear in many different places, and the range of stories is as well. But Goodison manages the effect of the whole to be harmony instead of cacophony, music set against the backdrop of her native Jamaica.

These are not stories written by someone with that rather ubiquitous label, “Master of the form”. I will bring forth no comparisons to Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant; Goodison has less mastered the short story form than put her own peculiar spin on it, rendering the collection full of surprises. Such as where she is going in a story like “The Helpweight”, two old flames meeting years later and speaking lines from a play, but the lines don’t mean what we think they do, though we get the gist of it a few stories into the collection, Goodison’s male characters often being charming cads capable of talking their way into and out of anything. Their women are long-suffering, worked to the bone. A sense of nostalgia imbues the entire collection, characters looking back over the years to mine how much they’ve lost (or how much they’ve found).

“The Helpweights” takes a woman to her breaking point, when the man who long ago broke her heart returns to Jamaica with his Irish wife. In “Jamaica Hope”, it is explained that “Jamaican man married because them tired” , and Alphanso becomes tired enough to finally say yes to Lilla. “Bella Makes Life” begins with the striking image of a woman who’s dressed like a checker cab, returning to her husband and children after working in New Yorker, and her husband finding her more and more changed every time. “By Love Possessed” is the Pushcart Prize-winning story of a mismatched couple, the woman of whom becomes victim of her own pride:
“She would have forgiven him for breaking her precious things; she would like to have been able to tell the story of how bad her man was and about the day he broke everything in her china cabinet and boxed her down the steps. But he was gone, so what was the point.”

The dialogue in “House Colour” is biting and ends on a perfect note. Love goes wrong in “Angelita and Golden Days” as “Slack Goes Cultural”. From “For My Comrades Wearing Three-Piece Suits”, delivered by a man in prison burdened by principles everybody else managed to shake off long ago, we go to “Mi Amiga Gran”, from the perspective of a teenage girl whose mother in America is always late sending money, and how the girl is not quite alone in the world yet. “I Came Through” wears its melodies on its sleeve, a retrospective via interview with a woman looking back at her long career as a singer, her troubled personal life, her betrayals, and her underlying strength.

The collection is long and could stand to have been pared down a bit, and yet, I understand why it wasn’t, each story adding something unique to the whole. These are stories so absolutely invested with story that you might not even realize they were written by a poet, except, of course, for the language and the music it makes.

January 30, 2011

Found Clock

Behold, the clock we found on the curb today and it’s new home on my kitchen wall of interesting and colourful things. Beside, in particular, the souvenir tray from mid-‘sixties Toronto (skyline sans CN tower!) that we found on another curb about six years ago. Below that is a series of photos I took in a British supermarket cereal aisle. Mustn’t neglect the Blackpool tea towel either, or the bunting, the watering can and bucket mobile (which was the only thing of interest I could find at the worst bookshop ever), and you even get a glimpse of my gorgeous Tessa Kiros cookbooks on the right. Anyway, I like the clock. We didn’t have an analog clock before (and yes, they’re really called that. Which I find a bit strange) and I was concerned that Harriet would grow up to be analog clock illiterate. No more. I foresee many conversations about big hands and little hands ahead of us over cereal bowls and teacups.

January 27, 2011

Family Literacy Day!

Today is Family Literacy Day, sponsored by ABC Life Literacy Canada. Which, last year, we turned into a week-long celebration with author interviews, book recommendations, reading tips, a field trip and even a party/baby literary salon!! This year, we were a bit less ambitious and celebrated family literacy the way we do every day, by reading eleventeen storybooks over and over again, but this day is definitely worthy of a trip back through last year’s fun. And while we’re on the subject of family literacy, why don’t you check out the new entry up at the Literature for Life blog?

January 27, 2011

Wild Libraries I have known: Spadina Road (TPL)

I once wrote a love letter to the Spadina Road Library, when I was coming out of the throes of the post-partum life and incredibly grateful for how the library and its staff had supported me through that period. Eighteen months later, I think I can address the subject with the benefit of perspective, and I say this: If not for the Spadina Road Library, I would be dead, or something very close to it.

Self-serve checkout machines are being installed at libraries across the city, and it makes me sad when I remember the days when the Spadina Road libarians were the only human beings I spoke to. And I pity the poor library patron in the throes of her own personal something who has to make do with a device that scans and beeps, instead of the lovely men and women who recognized me, asked me how my day was going, told me that my acne-covered pickled pig of a newborn was adorable. The library became my destination in an otherwise aimless life, and it meant everything to me.

These days, my local library branch has become a portal to the world, the hub of my community. And living in a city of millions, community is so very precious, so hubs like this are terribly necessary (and take note, Toronto City Council. Every penny you spend on your library system builds a better city). When I go to the library, I run into friends from the neighbourhood, I meet the new friends we’ve made through the library’s children’s programming, I pick up the books I’ve reserved through TPL’s inter-library system which are delivered like a miracle to a patron’s local branch. I meet the librarian who I continue to credit with teaching me to engage with my newborn through songs and games, which can’t help but be the reason for how well we’re doing today. We may see Cindy working at the reference desk, who is only the fourth person in the entire universe that Harriet refers to by name (after Mommy, Daddy and Elmo). We check out CDs and DVDs, and browse the stacks for picture books, and cookbooks, and guidebooks for our upcoming trip to the UK.

The Spadina Road library has become a second home, and we’re not the only ones, because our little branch is always busy with school groups visiting, patrons using the internet, people studying, kids playing, people seeking information all of kinds, and also, yes, a few desperate people (like I once was) seeking a touchstone, the sound of a human voice, and never failing to find one.

January 25, 2011

It was striped

“‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ a hyper Jamaican woman demands.
‘No.”
‘I left it right here.’ She points where I’m sitting.
‘I didn’t see it,’ I say.
‘I left it right here. Did you see it?’ The cuffs of her jacket are frayed, buttons are missing. I look behind and under my chair, go back to Emily.

The earth reversed her Hemispheres–
I touched the Universe–
And back it slid– and I alone–
A Speck upon a Ball–
Went out upon Circumference–

‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ the Jamaican woman demands of another bottom-feeder. ‘I left it right here.’ She points at me again, and I know she thinks I’ve swiped it. ‘It was striped.’
‘I can’t see it anywhere,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘I left it right here. Striped.’

— from Lemon by Cordelia Strube

January 24, 2011

On Literary Blogs: A Passion for Reading

One of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me was being asked to speak about literary blogs on a panel for an “Arts Matters” forum, hosted by Their Excellencies, Governor General Michaëlle Jean and Jean-Daniel Lafond in December 2008. I traveled to Ottawa by train, arriving in an incredible snowstorm, and in spite of the weather, a good crowd turned out to the forum at the Ottawa Public Library. My adoration for my fell0w panelists was solidified on the trip back to Rideau Hall, and the group of us spent the next day and a half as the Governor General’s guests there, attending the Governor General’s Literary Awards the following evening. It was a magical experience, unreal to fathom now. Even more so now that we have a new Governor General and the old website has come down, my address on literary blogs along with it.

So I’ve reposted it on my own site, for posterity. You can read it here.

January 20, 2011

The kids books we've been enjoying lately

“There’s no doubt that the young adult novel is Fitch’s true metier”, writes Deirdre Baker in her Toronto Star review of Sheree Fitch’s latest book Pluto’s Ghost, and I have no truck with that, because in our house Fitch is queen of the board book (we discovered her via Kisses Kisses Baby-O), but her picture books own our hearts as well. In particular Mabel Murple, which is the reason  my daughter knows at least one colour. First published in 1995 and recently re-issued with vibrant new illustrations, Mabel Murple is the tongue-twisting story of a purple girl, all dreamed up. A skateboarding scallywag, skiing speed demon (on purple snow) with a purple teddy bear called Snickernickerbox (and he snores). A story of merry motorbiking through muddy purple puddles, and a delectable-sounded condiment called Mabel Murple’s purple maple syrple. A whimsical singsong, adored by everybody in our family.

I recently checked out Mem Fox’s website, and found out that she’d been to dinner at Judith Viorst’s not too long ago, and the idea of such a dinner party makes me a bit in love with the whole wide world. I’ve been getting a similar feeling from Viorst’s book Sunday Morning for ages now, with its amazing silhouette drawings by Hilary Knight. The drawings are what Harriet likes best about the book, and how she can pick out the cat and owl, and see all the rooms in the house at once with the fourth wall removed. She doesn’t get the jokes and the mischief yet though, which are my favourite parts. The boy who wakes up his brother with the noise like a soft machine gun, and how he walks around the house saying, “God, I’m hungry. God, I’m hungry,” because there are no grown-ups around to tell him not to say god. The fights with his brother, which are settled with a karate chop, and how they use their mother’s dress from the hamper to sop up spilled milk.

The Owl and the Pussycat with Stephane Jorisch’s illustrations is deeply weird, and weirdly imagined. Tough cat arrives from the wrong side of the tracks, and masses look on with stone faces, mostly because they’re all wearing masks. The owl and the pussy cat are oblivious to the spectacle they are, and decide to be married for too long they have tarried. Sailing away to the land where the bong trees grow, they finally find a place where a pairing such as theirs is accepted, and they end up dancing by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon. These illustrations are just subtly sinister enough that a child will never stop being fascinated by them, but they’ll also never be entirely sure why they are.

Finally, we love, love Elephant and Piggie. So does everybody, of course, but better late to the party than never. The latest in the series We Are in a Book (which I discovered via Nathalie Foy) does not disappoint. Gerald is thrilled to discover that he and Piggie are actually in a book (“That is so cool!”) until he learns that the book will end. That all books end. So together, he and Piggie come up with a plan to prolong their metafictional existences. It’s wonderful, and Harriet finds the simple language and exaggerated gestured in the illustrations absolutely hilarious. Stuart and I have about as much fun reading this to her as she has listening to us.

January 19, 2011

Canada Reads Indies 2: Be Good by Stacey May Fowles

I’ve developed an aversion for any book described as “gritty”, mainly because “gritty” has lately been synonymous with “badly written stories about troubled girls who exchange blow jobs for heroin”. As though addressing sex, drugs and self-harming is merit enough that the writing itself doesn’t have to be good, the book doesn’t have to be interesting. This whole approach also failing to address the reason why so many fictional girls are exchanging blow jobs for heroin, because, frankly, this is troubling, but I digress.

So I was relieved to find that Stacey May Fowles’ first novel Be Good had more going for it than sheer grittiness. The book is about two friends who struggle with their feelings for one another, and end up on opposite sides of the country in unsatisfying relationships. Hannah has just left Montreal to follow her boyfriend Finn to Vancouver, while Morgan has been traveling Europe on the dime of her older lover Mr. Templeton. The novel comprises a series of flashbacks and snapshots which culminate to the story from a variety of perspectives– Hannah’s, Morgan’s, her roommate Estella’s, Finn’s and Mr. Templeton’s, as well as that of disembodied narrative voice that seems to be curating the collection.

The propensity towards falsehood and self-delusion (the latter never as effective as the former) on the part of Hannah and Morgan, as well as the fragmented nature of the narrative, ensures that “what really happened” is never clear, nor does it need to be, and that it’s what characters think happened which is more important (and always fluid). Ambiguity, embellishment, storytelling and outright lies are narrative methods as valid as truth, and perhaps even more valid for their unwillingness to adhere to the limits that truth imposes.

Hannah and Morgan are trying on various to guises to discover what’s at their core, chasing after different fantasies of the kind of women they might actually be. They pose drinking on fire escapes, imagining the world throwing them admiring glances, enacting magazine shoots, an impression of unreality. They dress up in costumes, imagine that the self is composed of details like grape bubblicious, see themselves from the outside and work that image down to the smallest detail. They see their friends as accessories, every new scene a set-up, that the world can be so deftly manipulated, that the people are so plastic.

Be Good is a coming of age story, the turning point occurring with Hannah’s line, “Perhaps the issue is not what people see in me but rather what I see in them.” Which is a revelation from a woman of any age, really. To step out of gaze and take stock of where you are. Though of course the conclusion is not so simple– it’s never clear whether each of the separate perspectives are actually different narrators, as there is a sameness to the voices. And though Hannah is the wordsmith of the two, Morgan is a famous fabricator, and so it’s possible that the whole book was hatched in the head of either of them, imagining the self as seen through the eyes of others. This last point being what makes Fowles’ book more interesting than other grit-lit– with all that ambiguity, this story is solipsistic with a twist.

Which is in constrast with Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, whose narrator is entirely self-effacing, but the two books share much else in common. Both are coming of age stories in with the protagonist’s relationship to the story isn’t always clear, in which he or she knows more or less than he/she lets on. Both books play with ideas of superficial poses, the natives playing up their culture on Indian Days not so far removed from the girls on the fire escape. Both books also have an ambiguous relationship to truth and fact, and choose to overlook these items in favour of a good story. Truth and Bright Water is also quite gritty, also with lesbians, suicide, sex, drink, drugs and destruction, and both skim a facile narrative surface belying darker stories underneath.

It’s just that in King’s book, however, we know that the darker stories are certainly true, and no longer are these poses anymore. His story wedded to a long, long history, whereas Fowles’ book and their characters seem to exist outside of time. King’s subtext more substantial too, unsurprisingly as insubstantiality is Fowles’ preoccupation here, but if we’re comparing books (which we are), King’s comes out the richer. If we weren’t comparing books, however, these two would stand side-by-side, drawing fascinating connections from one another.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:

1) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King

2) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles