December 7, 2010
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Lynn Coady's Play the Monster Blind
If I ever write a book, I would like Sheree Fitch to write a blurb for it. Though any “blurb” by Sheree Fitch would probably take the place of a whole back cover, but that would be all right. Because she would write something like, “Meet a world of big dog rage and oversized underpants, boozing, boxing, irreverence, complicated sex, cheap hotel rooms and searching men and women. Coady’s east coast of Canada , especially industrialized Cape Breton, is a landscape populated by the never get ways, the come from aways and the go aways. In Coady’s world there are razor -edged, truth-saying tellers; the smart and sassy, the off kilter and quirky and ordinary.” But only if I’d written Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind.
Play the Monster Blind was published ten years ago to much acclaim and bestsellerdom and, for some reason that stupefies anybody who has ever read the book, is no longer in print. Which is odd for a book so vital that the Giller-shortlisted writer Alexander MacLeod just six weeks ago cited it in an interview as one of his favourite collections. Chad Pelley’s affection for the collection was apparent in the interview he conducted with Coady just last summer, in which he remarked, “I loved every single story…”
In her review, Karen Solie called the book, “a sure-footed dance to the often painful music of the working class of the Canadian East Coast, a tough but graceful negotiation of the living rooms, bars, workplaces, and childhood haunts where violence and tenderness, hilarity and despair, belonging and alienation coincide.” Margaret Gunning writes in January Magazine that “Coady has a deeper-than-intellectual understanding of human ambiguity which resonates in her audience as a sense of recognition”. Jim Taylor noted in The Antigonish Review that readers “should rejoice in the humanity of the Cape Breton characters who come to life in her landscape.” Open Book Toronto called the book “a keenly observed, imaginative collection”. Play the Monster Blind received a starred review in Quill & Quire, which found Coady’s “emotional arm’s length narrative style” even stronger here than in her award-winning debut novel.
Margaret Gunning writes: “To label [Coady’s] fiction “comic” is to do it a great disservice, because there is always so much more going on: delicate underlayers, dangling nerve-endings and things noted and remarked upon that the rest of us are trying to forget. Without the belly laughs to punctuate the unbearable truth-telling, her work might be too uncomfortable to enjoy.”
I’ve read Coady before in a few anthologies, and also in her novel Mean Boy which delighted me back in 2006 and was one of my favourite books of that year. My experience with that novel and my love of short stories in general leaves me with every expectation that Play the Monster Blind will be a book that I love.
December 7, 2010
Our cities unfold
“…the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
December 6, 2010
Scientifically conclusive long-term effects of horizontal parenting
When I first began horizontal parenting, I admit that I was far more lazy than I was confident. For seven months, my child would only nap whilst lying on me, and I wondered if I was setting myself up to become a doormat (albeit a mattressy one). For ten months, my child spent most of many nights in bed with me and breastfed like a drunkard, and I wondered if this was going to be the rest of my life (plus, my shoulder hurt, but it was better than not lying down at all). Though I gave my child everything she demanded of me (because I was too tired to challenge an indomitable infant, and whenever we made it into a power struggle, she won every time), I wondered what kind of pattern we were be setting. Would I be that mother with the screaming toddler in the grocery store pleading for a small piece of our power-share? Was I falling down as a parent in failing to set boundaries with my six week old? Shouldn’t I be encouraging her to be an independent six month old? Was this the precedent, and now forever I’d give her everything she demanded with a screech?
The thing is though, and I know this now and I didn’t know it then, that your six week old is a whole other person three weeks later, and that six month old is such a more completely evolved amazing being in comparison that you can’t remember she was ever small. And then six months starts being small, because your baby is a year old, and a year and a half old, and she’s walking, and talking, and pouring you endless cups of imaginary tea. And you’re now negotiating with someone altogether different than that screaming newborn, and it is here where setting boundaries and discipline does become important, but now you’re dealing with a(n almost) person rather than a helpless creature. It’s a whole different game– certainly not an easier one, but one that is not very much affected by anything that came before.
When my daughter was six weeks old and I was racked with guilt over my desire to buy an infant swing rather than rock her to comfort myself, somebody told me to do “Whatever works” and thereby set me on the road to horizontal parenting. I trusted the advice because it was easy, but eighteen months later I can now report with scientific conclusiveness that she was right. There are no harmful long-term effects to taking the easy way out in babyhood and shutting that screaming kid up however you can manage it. Hooray for soothers, and co-sleeping, and baby swings, and long walks in the stroller. Hooray for putting the baby to sleep in a sling, having her eat only avocado for a week, and for having the baby nap on your chest while you lie on the bed gyrating your hips to put her to sleep with the motion. (It works. How did I discover this works? I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.)
December 6, 2010
On reading independently
For me, the most fascinating thing about Canada Reads is how it’s everything to everyone. For me, a chance to pick up some obscure books I might just fall in love with; for others a chance to champion the books they’ve read already; for the more competitive among us, the fun of listening to panelists hash it out, employing nefarious strategies to ensure their own book’s dominance. And it’s interesting to me that the general vagueness with which Canada Reads Independently has been presented has brought forth much of the same variety of interpretations confusion.
There is one reason why Canada Reads Independently isn’t a chance to exclusively showcase books published by independent presses: I don’t think independent presses are in need of a special showcase. I thought a bit differently once upon a time, but I’ve evolved as a reader since then, plus I listened carefully when Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells once took me to task for segregation, and I realized that he was right. Independent presses in Canada are producing books every bit as good as, if not better than, in many cases, books being published by major publishing houses. This year’s Giller shortlist (and long list even) was a testament to that, and now everybody knows. Independent presses are amazing, and this is hardly news.
What I do want to do with Canada Reads Independently, however, is choose panelists who are well-read enough to know what’s going on in the CanLit scene beyond the Giller shortlist (whether that list happens to be indie-dominated or not), and I think I’ve done well with what we’ve come up with. Two books by indie presses, the CanLit stalwart is a book many of us haven’t read, an out of print book by a vital (and underrated) contemporary author, and a book usually only read in grad school (which is not necessarily to appreciate).
So officially indie or not, I still think we’re off the beaten track. Which is the very point of (my personal interpretation of) Canada Reads.
December 5, 2010
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
When I started reading Ann Beattie’s The New Yorker Stories last week, I was concerned I was doing it wrong. I’d never read any of Beattie’s stories before, and this collection of more than 40 stories written over 30 years might have been too much of a good thing. Surely, a collection like this meant to be savoured, dipped in and out of, but as I’m a little short on leisure these days, an overdose was my only option. And after the fact, I’m actually grateful, because these stories are small worlds constructed of tiny gestures, but the cumulative effect was to hit me with a wallop.
Beattie’s stories are very much fixed in their time, cars with make and year, characters listening to Sony Walkmans, a reference in a 1979 story to “a stereo as big as a computer”, a lot of pre-electric Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger playing on stereos, no matter the decade. This element of detail, however, gives the early stories the effect of a bad orange cover design. It wasn’t so much that the stories themselves were dated as were their backdrops, which made the collection difficult to settle into. But one or all of the following things happened: the stories got better, the sets got more modern, and I began to get a real sense of what Beattie’s work is all about (and this final effect is the very best thing, albeit an exhausting thing, about reading more than 40 short stories in a row).
Reading 40 stories in a row also revealed connections between them, providing the sense of what Beattie is all about. Revealing also that she only knows about seven men’s names, which are mostly Richard, that every dog is called Sam, and that dogs in general are a preoccupation. As are marriages gone sour (and there is no marriage that hasn’t), multiple husbands (though not all at once), children of divorce, deadbeats, misfits, and all the lonely people (who are sometimes justifiably so). At least three times, a character without use of a limb tries and fails to use that limb anyway, and is surprised by their failure. Betrayal, deception, sinister trespasses, and the kind of people who’ll break your heart over and over again.
There is a range to how these stories are constructed, many focused on the personal and the immediate, but the later stories in particular taking on a wider scope. In “The Cinderella Waltz”, a woman watches as her ex-husband breaks his boyfriend’s heart as he once did hers (and he’s breaking her daughter’s at the same time)’; in “Girl Talk”, a woman about to give birth confronts the reality of her lover’s family (and of her lover, and her whole life); in “In the White Night”, a couple still grieving the long-ago death of their child enact the inexplicable adjustments a complicated life demands of us: “Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before”.
I thought of Grace Paley’s work as I made my way through this collection, the way her preoccupations became definite, the way her characters all eventually became thrice-married alter-egos of their author. The way that Beattie’s stories were the kind that Paley’s Faith’s father wouldn’t have understood, wondering why she didn’t just write beginnings, middles and endings. Beattie similarly ponders connections to aging parents, and plays also with the metafictional element in her story “Find and Replace”, in which her narrator (who is a writer called Ann) confesses that all her fiction comes from reality:
“‘People don’t recognize themselves. And, in case they might, you just program the computer to replace one name with another. So, in the final version, every time the word Mom comes up, it’s replaced with Aunt Begonia or something.'”
One phrase at the end of “Summer People” goes far to sum up what Ann Beattie’s stories are all about, and how a restive reader might encounter them: “For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That way, the uncertainty would end.” But the uncertainly doesn’t in these stories, and novels these stories aren’t nor do they attempt to be. Here is story for the sake of story, for the sake of truth uncertainty provides. Another line from “Find and Replace” is an extension of this idea, and the very essence of the short story, of their perfection:
“You can’t help understanding. First, because it is the truth, and second, because everyone knows the way things change. They always do, even in a very short time.”
December 2, 2010
Wild Libraries I have known: Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch
Things must have changed in Peterborough since I lived there last, because this morning I took a look at their website and discovered that they were open every day. This surprised me, because what I remember most about the Peterborough Public Library (in addition to the donut shop installed near the newspapers in the late 1990s) was the number of times I walked up the steps to the library only to discovered it was closed.
Now, in reality, the Peterborough Public Library’s Delafosse Branch is up there with the moving sidewalk at the Spadina Subway Station, Ontario Place, and hope for the future– it’s just another one of those things there used to be money for once upon a time. When I consulted the Peterborough Public Library website this morning, I discovered that the Delafosse Branch is only open fifteen hours a week, and I remember it being under threat of closure once or twice before. But no matter.
I have never ever visited the Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch. However, with its exotic-sounding name, the illusion it gave of a library system with branches (multiple, instead of just one that was starved for funding), and the fact that my vision of it was never sullied by reality, the Delafosse Branch has become a stand-in for the library of my dreams. The Delafosse Library was open every day, and long into the night, had cozy fireplaces with nearby armchairs to curl up in, all the books in the Babysitters Club series, and the Anne books too. No one had drawn cartoon penises on its carrels, and the people who came in and slept all day on the study tables didn’t smell like pee.
The staff were well-adjusted, only the male librarians had facial hair, overdue fines flew away with wings, and the lost books were always where you left them. The library stools never had footprints. If you studied there, you were guaranteed to get an A. They were always dying to hire you as a part-time shelver. Mis-shelved books were unheard of, and the computers never went down. There were terminals enough for everyone to check their email. There was always a pen for you to borrow. They’d kept the card-catalogues in case anyone felt the urge to thumb through index cards, and many people did. Any book you needed you’d locate by climbing up a ladder, and the acoustics were such that though joy and laughter filled the place, no one ever had to say, “Shhh.”
December 1, 2010
Anvil Press Launch: December 8
Though there is nowhere I’d rather be than inside my house when it’s dark outside, next Wednesday I’ll be breaking with tradition and attending the Anvil Press Spectacular 5 Author Showcase. In particular, to see Kerry Ryan (remember her Pickle Me This Author Interview from earlier this year?) who will be (Toronto) launching her second book Vs.,which chronicles the foray of a bookish woman into the world of boxing. Poems which, according to Jeannette Lynes, “come at you like quick jabs of light – the writing is taut, worked over, sinewy, spare, and lean – but never mean. A delightful collection. What else can be said? These poems pack a punch.” I am looking forward to it.
November 30, 2010
2011 Canada Reads Indies Picks!
When I was deciding to do Canada Reads Independently again, it was mostly because of the Fantasy Panel I had in mind. Imagine a group of smart people, of book experts, each with diverse and formidable talent that collectively is more than a little awe-inspiring. What incredible books might such readers recommend? And then my Fantasy Panel came true– they all said yes. And came at this project with so much thoughtfulness and enthusiasm that I’m overwhelmed, truly honoured, and really excited to tackle a fantastic stack of books. Read below and I have no doubt that you’ll be excited too.
The Champion: Sheree Fitch
Toes in my Nose ( Doubleday 1987) was written for my children when I was in my twenties, published when I was 30 and I’m still doing nonsense and learning how to be writer. I’m thrilled my children’s books like Mable Murple (re-release 2010 Nimbus) are now available for Harriet and a second generation of readers, including my own grandchildren, but I’m ever eager to explore other genres and voices. Kiss the Joy As It Flies, first adult novel, (Vagrant 2008) , was shortlisted for the Leacock Award, found and keeps finding a solid readership. Lately, I explored a male point of view and teenage angst in Pluto’s Ghost (Doubleday, fall 2010). I’ve been working on another collection of adult poetry since Gooselane published In This House Are Many Women in 1992, but confession: I’ ve been hoarding a collection of short stories on and off for twenty odd years. I’m a storyteller at heart and the “story” is still my favourite genre to read , quite possibly because it hearkens back to that oral tradition I came to love so early on. Before I’m 59, I’m hoping I”ll have a collection I’ll try to publish. For education, honorary doctorates and all that awards stuff people put in obituaries (but were hard won and deeply appreciated), folks can go to www.shereefitch.com.
The Book: Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady 
I expect a lot from stories. I want them to knock me upside the head, crack my heart open and turn me inside out. I want a collection to make me laugh and cry and unravel me. To provoke. To haunt. To linger ever after in the inner circle of stories I keep tucked in the core of my being. I want stories with characters I’ve never met or characters I don’t necessarily like, but ones I can grow to understand, if not to love. Likewise, I like meeting characters I think I know until I scratch and sniff below the page and have to look again. Stories can be loud or quiet, they can be juicy or subtle, limn high brow, middle brow or low brow worlds, explore domestic drama or whiz me to exotic locales. Whether they are set in the past or in present, I also want them to be timeless.
Ultimately, however, I crave stories that leave me reeling– or maybe real-ing is a better. I want to have that aha feeling that, however briefly, makes me think I’ve seen deeper into the heart of things because the storyteller told a tale from that yearning place in the centre of themselves. They’ve dug into the minepit (mindpit?) from which a vibrant truth of theirs blasts forth and an authentic voice shines. Soul changing, shape shifting fiction. I want the book to vibrate in my hands. I want to feel the undistorted spirit of the writer present, while they are absent. Oh, yes, the creation should appear effortless not overwrought. No tell-tale scrubbing of the eraser.
Okay, so I would never have said it like that in grad school but my pick does almost all of the above.
Play the Monster Blind was published in 2000, ( Doubleday Canada) when Lynn Coady was thirty years old. (Proof again, like this year’s Giller winner, that chronological age does not discriminate when it comes to gifts of vision and a wisdom beyond years).
Coady’s prose has that edgy energy, a borderline cockiness I admire, and she’s wickedly funny. Her humour ranges from the wry to ribald, and her voice is versatile: upsetting and exhilarating. Forget gender-typical nice girls and cozy quilt-like feel good stories, strings of pearls, head nods to decorum or wombs of our own. Reader won’t find themselves cushioned by history, or strolling an art gallery or enjoying symphonies or even nestled in middle class suburban families with the kids at basketball games. Meet a world of big dog rage and oversized underpants, boozing, boxing, irreverence, complicated sex, cheap hotel rooms and searching men and women. Coady’s east coast of Canada , especially industrialized Cape Breton, is a landscape populated by the never get ways, the come from aways and the go aways. In Coady’s world there are razor -edged, truth-saying tellers; the smart and sassy, the off kilter and quirky and ordinary. From Paula Moron ( ball a more ‘n more ) to Nurse Ramona in the Devil’s Bo-Peep, to Jesus Christ, Murdeena, they are an unforgettable lot.
Beneath Coady’s laser eyed scrutiny and sure hand, we read of folks groping in the dark, trying and often failing to connect with each other and fully inhabit their lives. They are souls partially blind to their all too often own monstrous natures as they stumble about like Boris Karloff in the move Frankenstein. Coady’s narrative stance seems at times like a shrug of amused wonder but there is a steady pulse of fierce compassion, the kind that comes from an awakened mind and a beating heart, present in every story.
As a reader, and writer, and yes, an east coast woman with a different background and range of experiences, the real triumph of this collection is the fearlessness and delicious joy which lifts these stories into a hard won kind of grace. Laughter as medicine. A ride not just a read. I think Canada needs to read Play The Monster Blind, so we can see parts of ourselves and/or each other as clearly and wisely as Coady does.
The Champion: Nathalie Foy
Nathalie Foy would almost always rather be reading. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three sons and piles of books that multiply at an alarming rate. Thankfully books have no expiration date. Nathalie is an occasional instructor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, and after being given Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by a student, she began collecting books about books and blogs about them at Books About Books.
The Book: Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King 
Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water is a delight. Each time I read it, I am newly charmed. It is brimful of offerings: part mystery and part coming of age, the story is peppered with red herrings and liberally seasoned with magic realism and social critique. There is tension throughout, and tragedy, but both are leavened by King’s inimitable comedic style. King has dialogue–and the non-sequitur in particular–down to a fine art, and one of the great joys of reading the book is how the characters come alive in their snappy exchanges.
Truth and Bright Water, an American town and a Canadian reservation, sit across from each other on the border between Canada and the U.S. The story takes place during Indian Days, as Bright Water prepares for the yearly deluge of tourists. There is also the homecoming of two former residents of Bright Water: the “famous Indian artist” Monroe Swimmer, whose art is one of the novel’s crowning glories, and the narrator’s black sheep of an aunt. Borders, revenants, the carnival atmosphere, family conflicts, ghosts and magic all make for exciting and dangerous territory, and we follow the teenaged protagonists, Tecumseh and his cousin Lum, as they negotiate it.
The narrator is Tecumseh, who often does not understand the significance of what he is telling us, and the deft handling of the ironic gap is another of the book’s delights. Thomas King’s novels are richly allusive, and it helps the reader to know, as Tecumseh does not, that the character Rebecca Neugin is real, a survivor of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, that there is more to a story than just the words, that things are not always what they appear.
In 2004, King’s Green Grass, Running Water was one of the final two books for the CBC’s Canada Reads, and one reason it got bumped was that several panelists called it a book for literature majors. To an extent, I agree. It is a book best read with the assistance of discussion, whether for a class, book group or CBC panel. Truth and Bright Water is a far more accessible novel, but it still makes us work and think. To my way of thinking, the very best books do.
The Champion: Chad Pelley
Chad Pelley is a multi-award-winning writer from St. John’s. His debut novel, Away from Everywhere, was a Coles bestseller, won the NLAC’s CBC Emerging Artist of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the for 2010 ReLit award and the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer of the Year award. His short fiction has won awards, been anthologized, and accepted for publication by leading literary journals such as Prairie Fire. Chad facilitates a creative writing course at Memorial University, sits on the board of directors at the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland & Labrador, runs Salty Ink.com, and has written for a variety of publications, such as The Telegram and Atlantic Books Today.
The Book: Still Life With June by Darren Greer
Still Life with June won the 2004 ReLit Award, was a NOW Magazine top ten book of the year, and a finalist for the Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Book Award. It’s also been optioned for film. I knew all that before I read it. What I didn’t know, but knew by page 9 or 10, was that this is one of the most innovative, original, memorable, and cleverly constructed novels I’d ever read.
It’s all there in Still Life with June: refined writing and a distinctive style paired with an engaging story. It also succeeds in pairing heavy subject matter with levity. Greer masks the sadder aspects of this story with a comedic tone, so that the dark side of the story feels all the more potent when he chooses to haul off that mask of humour. This is very effective. This novel is outright funny and downright grave: not something most writers could pull of so flawlessly.
In Cameron Dodds’ take on the world there are two kinds of people: “losers who know they are losers, and losers who don’t know they are losers.” Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file that he translates Darryl’s life into fiction, going as far as befriending the deceased’s sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.
It’s a book about a lot of things: the bonds and tensions unique to blood relations, a truthful and amusing exposé on the life of emerging writers, or even the ways cats have it knocked. But more than anything, it’s a novel about identity, replete with well-crafted and complicated characters, i.e very human characters. Every single character is in denial about who they are, and without giving too much away about the brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.
Most novels leave a reader with a memorable story, or character, or ending. Maybe you’re even struck by a distinctive new style or narrative structure, or the thematic meat of a book. Greer leaves you with struck by all of that. I would recommend this book over 95% of Canadian novels published this decade, and it’s one I’d adapt if I was a screenwriter. As a novelist myself, this novel made me fondly jealous I didn’t write it, and remains one of only 3 novels I’ve read a second time. The style, structure, and story complement each other to perfection; there is nothing I would change about this book.
The Champion: Carrie Snyder
Carrie Snyder is the author of Hair Hat (Penguin Canada, 2004), a collection of stories chosen for last year’s Canada Reads Independently. Her second book, a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories, is scheduled to be published in 2012, by House of Anansi. She blogs as Obscure CanLit Mama.
The Book: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant 
It is with some trepidation that I put forward Mavis Gallant’s collection of selected Canadian stories, Home Truths, published nearly two decades ago, and which carries a faint whiff of the old-fashioned.But I simply must. Though Mavis Gallant is a master of the short story form, with a brilliant mind that shines on the page, I am willing to bet that her books will never be chosen for CBC’s parallel competition. I am also willing to bet that many readers and fans of Canadian literature, who would be moved and delighted by her work, are unfamiliar with it.
Skip the essay that opens the collection, and make your way directly to the stories. (Read it when you’ve gotten to the end, and are familiar with her work. In it, Mavis Gallant defends herself as a Canadian writer; she has lived as an expatriate in Paris, France for most of her writing life, and one has the sense of a writer who feels snubbed by her country; I hope we are less parochial readers two decades on).
The stories themselves … brilliant, precise, particular, detailed, mysterious, elegant. Each is set in a place and a time rendered in immaculate detail: Montreal in the 1920s and 1940s, Northern Ontario after the second world war, Geneva of the 1950s, Paris, 1952. As with any collection, some stories will grab a reader more than others, but all have something to offer: think of it as a smorgasbord for the mind.
So many of the characters in these stories are alone, or nearly alone: children abandoned by parents, as in “Orphans’ Progress”; unprotected children who find a cobbled-together comfort: “Jorinda and Jorindel”; an immigrant mother and her child riding a train into a landscape that might as well be the moon: “Up North.” And so many of the stories are heartbreaking. They peel away the masks of sophistication, and evoke the primitive emotions we begin hiding from ourselves at a very young age. Yet one has hope for the characters, who have hope for themselves, and are possessed of reserves no one would guess of them: resourcefulness, determination, spirit.
What sets Home Truths apart, and the reason I chose it from among Mavis Gallant’s many marvelous collections, is its final section: linked semi-autobiographical stories about a young woman, Linnet Muir, who returns to the city of her birth, Montreal, and makes her life up with daring and courage. The character, though still a teenager in the first story, “In Youth is Pleasure,” is completely alone in the world; and yet she is not afraid. Her invention of herself, in “Between Zero and One,” is bold, but she does not consider it so: “I was deeply happy. It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones.” The Linnet Muir stories do not progress in linear fashion, yet they hold together effortlessly, in the accretion of images that create a lost world, and a remarkable character.
As a writer, I read Mavis Gallant often; more often than anyone else. She is who I turn to when I want to remember how stories work. My editing brain turns off and I surrender to a mind that is quicker and wittier than my own. Her writing is complex, layered, intelligent; yet I read her for pleasure, easily, and with the delight of eternal discovery.
The Champion: Robert J. Wiersema
Robert J. Wiersema is a writer, reviewer and bookseller. His first novel, Before I Wake, was a national bestseller and a Globe and Mail Best Book in 2006, and has been published in more than a dozen countries. His novella, The World More Full of Weeping, was shortlisted for the Prix Aurora in 2010. His latest novel, Bedtime Story, was published in November. He lives in Victoria with his wife Cori Dusmann, and their son Xander.
The Book: Be Good by Stacey May Fowles 
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of my favourite short story collections. It features some of Carver’s finest work, including “Why Don’t You Dance” and “Tell The Women We’re Going”, and every story is parsed and clean and brutal, exploding in their final lines with savage emotional force and resonance.
It’s that collection – including its title, which when repeated aloud takes on the quality of a mantra — that comes to mind when I think about Stacey May Fowles’ debut novel Be Good.
The 2007 novel from the Toronto writer and essayist orients around the question of what it means to “be good” for a loose constellation of twenty-somethings, with close focus on friends Hannah and Morgan. The novel 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.
Fowles’ prose is reminiscent of 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. Fowles’ words are surgical, cutting through the defenses, laying bare the heart. Be Good is what we talk about when we talk about love, and about the brutal silence when the words just don’t come.
In one of the pre-pub blurbs, Michael Redhill wrote “Be Good announces the arrival of a wonderful new voice in Canadian fiction.” I couldn’t agree more.
November 29, 2010
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
The 2010 Gillers picked a book out of the blue for me, pushed me to pay it closer attention than I might have otherwise, and the payoff was enormous. This is literary awards at their very, very best (and also makes clear that “what sells” is self-fulfilling prophecy, marketing types take note). I was lucky enough to get my mitts on a Gaspereau Press edition of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, which meant that my book was a book of a book, hand stitched, thick paper, a dust jacket for a paperback. Such care; for me this is “what sells” and I bought it.
I pushed through the story in a way I might not have had the book not been so celebrated. There was a lack of precision in the language, a distance between the reader and the story, and I kept putting the book down and not rushing to pick it up again. But I think this was as the book was intended to be read, a long slow journey without a destination in mind. Because when we arrive at the end of the book, at our destinations, the answers are still not all apparent. By which I mean that if you’re reading to find out what happens next, you’re probably going to find this book disappointing.
An intimacy creeps into the story though, between these people and I, as two fighting sisters drive their ailing father across the country. Sisters are at each others’ throats, banding together only to rally against their father who keeps lighting up cigarettes and forgetting to open the window– the family dynamics are set in motion, and they tell us who these people are and where they’ve come from; we are there. That the sisters have constructed their lives out of pieces, and now they’re older, they’re both discovering that lives are pieces after all. When the narrator discovers her partner with another woman, she goes to be with her father where he’s living with Henry, a family friend. It was at Henry’s where she and her sister spent their childhood summers, on the banks of a lake that had flooded where a town used to be, and being there is to have an awareness of the drowned town, ever-present whether it can be seen or not.
Which serves as a metaphor for the story of her father, who is called Napoleon Haskell, and his relationship to Henry, whose son Owen served with Napoleon in Vietnam. During the summer the narrator spends with her father and Henry, she constructs the story of her father’s past, what happened to Owen, and what had happened to Napoleon to fracture the rest of his life into just pieces of pieces.
Throughout the story, Napoleon is hard at work on crossword puzzles, and these puzzles are an indication as to the novel’s construction. Blanks are filled in from clues, with their correctness not always assured, but the puzzle takes on its own shape anyway. The puzzles pieces include Skibsrud’s prose, sentences with their many, many clauses, as well as allusions to poetry and film, and concludes with a transcript from Napoleon’s testimony of what he witnessed during his time as a soldier. The transcript provides many of the answers the rest of the story had been withholding, and creates an altogether satisfying conclusion to the novel, which doesn’t provide all the answers, but the effect is very much of a whole.
The Sentimentalists is sentimental, unabashedly so, but perhaps if you don’t like sentimental, find a book with another title. Because I liked this book, which portrays the humanness of men at war, particularly during this time when we’re all being brainwashed to believe that “soldier” and “hero” are synonyms. I like what it says about history and story– that the former can never been captured, and the latter has wings of its own. I like the tender gruffness of its men, that love and poetry are what remains, that some things may be irreparable but that doesn’t mean they’re truly broken.
November 28, 2010
Recent Reviews
A couple of my reviews of books I’ve enjoyed are now online at Quill & Quire: see Breakfast at the Exit Cafe by Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds and Ape House by Sara Gruen.
