January 10, 2011
The Bob Dylan of children's authors
“This may sound disingenuous, but here’s the thing: When you are a small child besotted with books, the books themselves– especially the ones you love the best–are autonomous things, concrete yet abstract, like the stuffed animals and building blocks that help you travel to places where only you can go. At bedtime, you don’t ask your mom, “Read me some E.B. White.” You ask for Stuart Little, or Charlotte and Wilbur. You ask for a dog story; for Pippi, Babar, or–nowadays–Toot and Puddle. Your favourite characters–you know them. From a mile away, you could spot the Man in the Yellow Hat, Mrs. Mallard, Olivia or Ferdinand the bull; but H.A. Rey, Robert McCloskey, Ian Falconer, and Munro Leaf–who the heck are they? Authorial celebrity is sabotaged yet further when picture books lose their jackets… they shed their authors’ biographies as well. Many prolific children’s authors are also prone to changing dance partners–that is, illustrators– making their books even harder to see as distinctly their own. (Dr. Seuss may be the exception to this rule. Children become aware of him as a uniquely creative individual, perhaps because they hear their parents call the guy “a genius”. He’s the Bob Dylan of children’s authors, too eccentrically, definitively… well, Seussian… to be confused with anyone else.) “– Julia Glass, “Roar and More” from Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Books.
January 9, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads Making Light of Tragedy by Jessica Grant
Though not essential to our discussion of Jessica Grant’s novel Making Light of Tragedy, you should probably know that it was my turn to host a meeting of the Vicious Circle, and that we had to make it a brunch affair because my apartment is too small to accommodate both such a noisy group of women and the sleeping baby that an evening would require . So the baby was banished to the museum for the morning, along with her father, even though there was an actual blizzard and he had to push the stroller through snow that came up to his knees. And even though there was an actual blizzard, the entire cast of the Vicious Circle made it through, even two mothers of newborn babies, and one of the said newborns too. My kitchen was drowning in a sea of snowy boots.
I’d chosen the short story collection Making Light of Tragedy, because I’d read Grant’s novel Come Thou Tortoise, and I’d heard her first book was even better. And because, while I’d liked Come Thou Tortoise, I’d suspected there was an even better writer struggling to get out there, and perhaps the story collection could shed some light upon her. That Grant’s talent might have been pushed further than the novel itself had permitted her to go.
We all agreed that the collection was an excellent book club book, which was a fine point to start from, but then it all fell apart from there. Incredible, the range of reactions, from a group of people who seemed to like the book all around. But one of us could scarcely get past the first story, for it was so wowing (her Journey Prize award winning “My Husband’s Jump”). And then a few others said if they hadn’t been reading this for book club, they would have abandoned it altogether after the first few stories, which would have been regretful for they so liked the stories that came later. All of us pronounced the book uneven, a bit too long. Unanimously, we decided that the book could well have shed “George the Third Wasn’t Mad Forever”. Some of us loved “My Husband’s Jump” for its rather incongruous grounding, but others determined it far too twee. One of us found “Della Renfrew” particularly tedious, but another defended it with line after, admittedly, hilarious line.
If you like your prose unadorned, this is not the book for you. But there were moments and metaphors that worked, that forced you to look twice but never took you right out of the story. There were experiments that were interesting but never quite worked– “Bellicrostic” (and, tellingly, only one of us bothered to find out if the word was real [and it wasn’t], though each of us meant to), “There I Am”. “The Anxiety Exhibit” also seemed like one of these, until you got to the very end.
The biggest problem with “Plow Man” was that this bereft middle aged man had the exact same voice as all of Grant’s slightly unhinged twenty-something female characters. The similarity in voice a problem throughout the book– the four narrators of “The Loss of Thalia” all sounded identical, for example. Yes, admitted the story’s one defender, but each one added a surprising layer of meaning. The jury was still out on the final and longest story, “Milaken”– a couple of us hadn’t yet finished it, but the story had its defenders too. Some of us had really liked “The Dean of Humanities”, though it was noted that we might not have liked it as much had it not been preceded by the more whimsical tales of the bunch– perhaps we were just relieved to be back in reality? (Some of us still think we would have liked it all the same.) One of us thought she’d got the male voice nailed right in “Taxation”. And “Ugly And” as well, the one story we all mostly liked all around.
We liked the title, though it didn’t bring the collection together (as the Plow Man wasn’t making light of anything, was he?). We thought the cover image was awful and horribly unappealing. That the collection wasn’t brought together by anything at all, and read very much as a collection of pieces that had first been published elsewhere, as opposed to something cohesive. Need a story collection be cohesive (and we thought of Sarah Selecky and Alexander MacLeod’s books)? Not necessarily, but perhaps the problem was that this one was far too long. Out with King George! And a few others we’d never agree on.
We talked about Burning Rock, and how difficult it would be to be in a writing group with Lisa Moore. That everyone’s prose looks crap beside hers. This led to a long, long discussion about the merits of Lisa Moore’s February, which the Vicious Circle appears to be disproportionately fond of. There was much praise for Jessica Grant’s caustic wit, for the two guns moment. But some of these pieces felt overly workshopped. We talked about how a few of us were going to read Come Thou Tortoise now, on the basis of Grant’s collection, having been previously put off on the basis of the talking tortoise (which works better than it sounds). And we talked about how having read this book, at least one of us wished Come Thou Tortoise had been better.
Aren’t people funny?
And isn’t agreeing to disagree always easier to do over sausages, pancakes and french toast?
January 9, 2011
"For never in our lives has anything so extraordinary happened…"
My friend Julia sent me a copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ essay “A Widow’s Story”, because the prose was “stunning”, and she admired Oates’ transition between past and present, and how “though the present is horrid (he’s dying), [Oates] knows, in retrospect, that it’s so much better than the future.”
I am so glad Julia sent it, because it’s a wonderful, devastating essay, but also, though it’s perverse to admit, because I have a thing for examinations of widowhood– also The Year of Magical Thinking, and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice (which was also a New Yorker essay before it was a book). Mostly because these are also fascinating examinations of long and enduring marriages, but, yes, because I can’t help it too– worst nightmares vicariously are the safest kind, a bit like staring at a car wreck, and also because I have this ridiculous notion that if just I read enough books, I could come to the moment prepared.
This final point bringing me to motherhood, which is where a similar plan has already failed me– I read enough books, but I read them all wrong. But, nevertheless, upon reading Oates’ essay, I had an ephiphany about the way that we talk about motherhood, or rather about how often we end up talking about motherhood. That these conversations about motherhood and widowhood are so often similar in approach and in tone. This I realized in particular when I read a line from just after her husband has died, ab0ut her amazement at the impossibility of such a thing occuring: “For never in our lives has anything so extraordinary happened between us…”.
For so many of us who are so fortunate, life doesn’t tend to happen to us. We live in a blissful, lucky, unaware state– what Oates’ describes as “the vanity of believing that somehow we [own] our lives.” Perhaps the most startling upset of new motherhood is the sudden awareness that we don’t, exactly. That another life owns ours and all at once, the world no longer bends to our wishes. That whole cliche about hearts outside our bodies as well, and though none of this has the same permanant rent as widowhood, there are parallels. The adjustment seems impossible.
Similarly, we are otherwise so insulated from the stuff of life, from birth and from death, which usually are enacted in the same place and restricted from public view, that these perfectly ordinary events do become extraordinary. Foreign, unimaginable, except for remnants we’ve gathered from movies and TV and the gulf between these scenes and reality makes the experience all the more difficult to actually process. The disconnect results in the fixation, the never-ending conversation– we’re putting the pieces together over and over again, hoping for something we’ll eventually recognize.
January 6, 2011
A Poem: Tea words as appropriated from Oxford Canadian Dictionary
tea. tea bag. tea ball. teaberry. tea biscuit. tea bread. tea break. tea caddy. teacake. tea ceremony. tea chest. tea cozy. teacup. tea dance. tea garden. tea house. tea lady. tea leaf. tea party. tea plant. teapot. teapoy. tea room. tea rose. tea service. tea shop. teaspoon. tea strainer. tea table. tea time. tea towel. tea tray. tea tree. tea trolley.
January 5, 2011
Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Confession: I’m not especially crazy about Jackson Brodie, the sometime-PI of Kate Atkinson‘s exceptional crime novels. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the guy either, but that I’ll automatically read any book he appears in has far less to do with the man than his creator. Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language, I only turned to crime (fiction) when she started writing it, and her crime fiction is as good as anything she ever wrote, including my favourite of her novels, the award-winning Behind the Scene at the Museum. The latest in her Jackson Brodie series, Started Early, Took My Dog, definitely doesn’t disappoint.
The novels in the Brodie series definitely stand alone, though first-time readers will find themselves wading through some treacherous back story. Jackson Brodie is the link between the books, not so much as the solver of the crimes in question, but as a magnet for incident, and co-incident. Stories have always happened around him, beginning with the murder of sister in childhood, which becomes his most formative experience.
In Started Early, Took My Dog, Jackson is living even further than usual on the fringes of the law, still recovering from the fraudster wife who stole his money, still pining for Louise Monroe up in Scotland, still connected to Julia who knows him better than anyone, and striving to be a good father to his children in spite of everything else that has happened.
But of course, his story remains on this novel’s periphery. At its centre is Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police officer who, in a moment of weakness, ends up with a child that isn’t her own, and then suddenly finds herself pursued by a variety of unsavoury characters. One of these characters is Jackson Brodie, who’s trying to track down the origins of Hope McMaster, a woman who’d been adopted thirty-five years before whose story is vaguely connected to Tracy’s through a social worker’s file. As in all of Atkinson’s novels, the past and the present are impossibly intertwined. Who was Hope McMaster? Who is the child in Tracy’s care? What are the Leeds police force still trying to hide after all these years? And who is the strange man who appears to be on Jackson’s trail?
I find reading Kate Atkinson to be a most intoxicating experience– her immersion in her characters’ thoughts, and how she does twists and turns like nobody’s business, and just when I think I’ve got it figured out, she twists it around again. She works coincidence in this way that makes me marvel at the world– not relying on it as a plot device as bad writers do, but instead coincidence is her entire preoccupation, her books are an examination of it. Her books are funny, smart, never saccharine. And they are dark, unflinching in their assertion that the world is a dangerous place to be a woman, the stories violent, gruesome at times, highlighting injustice, but then Atkinson’s narratives culminate in their own kind of justice– goodness triumphs.
So Jackson Brodie lives to fight yet another day, but even more importantly, Kate Atkinson lives to write another book, and how fortunate are we for that.
January 5, 2011
You have to be a speedy reader
I’ve long followed the dictum of Dr. Seuss who wrote in his great work I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, “You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.” I’ve also come under the influence of Art Garfunkel (naturally), who keeps an online list of books he’s read since 1968. (I wish I had kept such a list online. My own “Books Read Since 2006” disappeared with my hard drive in June 2009). And however much I enjoyed Steven Beattie’s post calling for slow, considered reading, for an end to the competitive reading fad (and, for those of you who get out more than I do, such a thing actually exists), I must now mount my own defence of the speedy read, because it’s the only way for me.
It comes naturally to me, reading books quickly. For a while, I tried to slow down, but it made me miserable. When I read, I find that I’m not racing to the next book as much as I’m barrelling through the book I’m in, and I love the momentum. I love taking in a book all at once, or as much as possible, in one sitting. Devouring, live and whole. The way blood pumps through my veins is how I like to read my books, pulsing, surging, singing, vital.
I love how reading one book after another illuminates the most curious connections. I love how reading quickly permits such breadth, and bizarre reading tangests for the fun of it: Barbara Pym, all the Mitfords, my Judith Viorst-a-thon etc., and still keep up on what’s current. I love how a book in a day means that the book was my day, inextricably tied, and therefore my books read list functions as a kind of diary.
And yes, I love my books read list (now Since May 2009), which doesn’t necessarily have to be numbered, I realize, but the numbers are something tangible I’ve built out of book after book. A commitment to reading lots isn’t always a commitment to reading too quickly– it means reading instead of any number of things, such as television, bedtime, or walking down the street bookless. It’s making reading a main priority, which is something to be celebrated. This kind of commitment can be a joyful one too, and not a chore. I am really happier reading (a good book) than when I’m doing most anything else in the world. It’s not a competitive sport with other people as much as with myself: I want to read all the worthwhile books that exist in the world, or at least as many as I can possibly manage.
Being a fast reader doesn’t mean I’m a bad reader, particularly because I’m conscious of the drawbacks to my furious reading pace. Which is the reason I started my books read list, for tracking purposes. Which is the reason I started blogging about books in the first place: to provide me with a space for reflection, a way to engage deeper with the books I come across. Which is the reason I make a point of rereading books as often as I do (and that’s the great thing about speedy reading: it gives us the time to do so).
It is possible for quality and quantity to be most excellent bedfellows. I will indeed be heeding Steven’s challenge for us “to read better: to be more sensitive, expansive readers, to enter more deeply into the text, to actively engage with books on an intellectual, aesthetic, and linguistic level”, but there’s just no way I’m slowing down, because I’m only getting started.
January 4, 2011
New website for Literature for Life!
I’m very excited about Literature for Life’s new website, which Stuart and I have been working on together for the past month. And now it’s done. It’s a gorgeous site for an excellent organization, which runs reading circles for pregnant and parenting teenagers in Toronto– go here to find ways in which you can offer your support.
I’m also looking forward to co-administering the Literature for Life blog from here on in. Hope you’ll stop in from time to time.
January 4, 2011
The eye of the storm
A while ago, I answered some questions for The New Quarterly‘s blog “The Literary Type” about new motherhood and my essay “Love is a Let-Down”.
An excerpt:
“The point is that the storm is. Yes, it passes, and thank goodness it does, but that passing means nothing when you’re living it. But I think acknowledging the storm itself does mean something, that you’re not merely failing to feel the right things, that other mothers have been there before. It would help to acknowledge these experiences as part of a natural process of adjustment. And this does not merely free a new mother from her isolation, but it also provides tangible evidence that the storm does pass, that such a promise is not simply platitudes, because so many of us have been through it, and here we are on the other side.”
Read the whole thing here. And thanks to TNQ’s Rosalynn, who is expecting her own baby any day now! Best of luck and congratulations. xo
January 4, 2011
Miscommunicado
Recently, I was speaking to someone who felt it necessary to commend me for having interests beyond my child, which sort of galled me, because I wondered what business was it of his where any of my interests lie. It continues to be very important for me to engage with the world in various ways, but what if it wasn’t? It is easy to make being a parent an all-consuming business, but I can think of worse things to be consumed by.
And then I was recounting this to a friend of mine who gave me her definition of an all-consumed parent, which is that friend who has a baby and never calls you again. Another, I suppose, would be the parent who is unable to talk about anything except their children (which would be fair enough if they ever asked questions about your own life, but they never do). The problem with these people, I would think, is not that these parents are all-consumed, but that they’re crappy friends, and totally rude. (Or maybe, maybe, they’re totally overwhelmed by new parenthood and require your support? Though this excuse should definitely come with an end-date).
Anyway, from all this discussion, it occurred to me how rarely any of us are ever talking about the same thing. How careful we should be in giving opinions, in taking things personally, and how important it is to be articulate. That perhaps so much of what divides us (and I am thinking of women in particular, for there is no group more division-prone, except perhaps the Protestant church) is quite illusory, and how easily we might be able to clear things up with a bit of conversation.
January 3, 2011
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
Stacey May Fowles, with her first novel Be Good, has a kind of become shorthand with Canadian critics for a new direction in Canadian Literature. No longer are we all languishing on the prairies, dying in childbirth as lightning strikes the barn and fries our last remaining cow, Fowles’ characters are unabashedly contemporary, her stories set in urban places, and usually have adjectives applied to them like “gritty”, “edgy” and “real”.
Though Robert J. Wiersema finds her work has precedent in his Canada Reads Independently pitch:
Fowles’ prose is reminiscent of [Raymond] Carver’s, almost clinical in its precision, not cold but incisive. Its starkness, and her frequently brutal insights, underscore a novel that is relentless in its pursuit of hard emotional truths. What does it mean to “be good”? What does it mean to be a friend? Where does one find meaning in a world seemingly devoid of significance? And what of love? In a way, Be Good revolves around love, about its levels, its possibility, its risk, and its impossibility.
Wiersema explains that the novel, which focuses on “a loose constellation of twenty-somethings… doesn’t so much unfold as it does explode in a narrative-impressionist flurry, jumping from Montreal to Vancouver, from character to character, across time and meaning. The initial sense of flurry, however, only momentarily obscures a tightly organized, thematic- and character-driven work which builds through pain and doubt and fragile joy and sexual violence to moments of catharsis and heartbreak.”
A review in Prairie Fire called Be Good “vividly authentic”, and Quill & Quire reported that “the novel offers a thoughtful examination of sexuality, relationships, and what it means to tell the truth.” At the TINARS site, Fowles has compiled a Be Good playlist (along with an interview). Fowles has already had some Canada Readsish experience, as Zoe Whittall defended her second novel Fear of Fighting for Canada Also Reads last year (which led to me reading the book a few months later). Read more about Be Good at Fowles’ 12 or 20 questions interview (including, “In Be Good I really wanted to focus on place as a character so really investigating geography was imperative to that. After all the lonely city living I’ve experience I’ve become mildly obsessed with what the urban landscape can do to a person.”)
Be Good has a Joan Didion epigraph, which means either I’m going to love it or really hate it. I’ve already become quite fond of the novel’s design, however, and if its contents end up being anywhere as well-executed, it’s probably going to be the former.
