November 28, 2010
Canada Reads Indies Sneak Peek
Canada Reads Independently is revealed on Wednesday, though I offer a (not particularly telling) sneak peek here. What a stack though, you’ll just have to trust me. I am very excited, and pleased that my Fantasy Panel stepped up with such aplomb. I can’t wait to read these books, and I do hope you’re inspired to read a couple of them too.
The deal with Canada Reads Indies is this: last year, the CBC Canada Reads list disappointed me, so I lined up some bookish folks to choose me a new one. For me, most of the fun of Canada Reads has been less the week of radio debates, but rather the recommendations from out of the blue, and the reading of the books and discussions with other readers, and so that’s what I focused on for the Indies. And though my list last year (and this year) did/do feature some independent presses, the “Independently” of my title is more about reading on my own terms (though I loved it very much when others joined me).
The rules are very lax– I keep asking for novels, and the panel keeps throwing up short stories, but that’s all right with me because I love short stories anyway. If you want to take part, you can read all of the books or some, but please do get in touch with your responses (or links to your reviews posted elsewhere). I am going to start reading my five books in the new year, but you can get started any time. I will be finishing reading by the week of the CBC Canada Reads Broadcasts, and inviting readers to vote for their favourite of the five. I will also be following along with CBC Canada Reads and reading some of the books from their list, because it looks interesting this year. It’s not so much that I have a problem with CBC Canada Reads as that I just love the whole idea and want to manipulate and monopolize it– surely you understand?
Anyway, I hope to be reading not so independently, and that the titles revealed on Wednesday pique your interest. Looking forward to plenty of bookish conversation and debate unfolding over the next few months.
November 28, 2010
How one guy is
“Fiction isn’t about guys and girls, or any other convenient category by which we can divide the population into large groups, except in the minds of people who can’t actually read. Fiction, unlike political rhetoric, is never about the general case. It deals in specifics. A work of fiction is never “about pornography”; it is about its own story, carried by its own internal logic and adhering to its own internal rules. The story may depart from reality in any number of ways, but we can only say the writer got it wrong if the work fails as fiction. And fiction’s sole obligation, beyond being interesting, is that it be accurately observed and true to its own rules. Fiction isn’t about how guys are; it’s about how one guy is.” –AJ Somerset, “Mine Clearance for Dummies. Or, What Kind of Idiot Writes About Porn”
November 26, 2010
Wild Libraries I Have Known: The Nottingham Central Library
In 2002, overwrought and in disgrace, I ran away from home (for the second time in one summer) to live in England and work for a while on a working holiday-maker’s visa. I ended up in Nottingham, which was neither here nor there, quite the Midlands indeed, because I lacked the wherewithal and financial resources to take on a city like London. I had $400 in my bank account, which dwindled to nothing before I got a temporary job stuffing envelopes at a driving school. I was living in a bottom bunk of a dormitory at a backpacker’s hostel, where the bathroom tiles crawled under your feet, and everybody was having sex with everybody else, except that I wasn’t and, for once in my life, this was purely a matter of choice.
So you can see that life was a bit unsettled, that there was no centre to cannot hold and things had already fallen apart. The point then was to put it all back together, and the reconstruction began with my library card. I can’t remember the day I got my card, or how it came about, but I imagine that it had something to do with a mobile phone bill linking me a Nottingham address (however transient). And then suddenly, I had a Central anything, an axis for my tilting world, which was beginning to be righted again.
For our first date, which was on a Wednesday night nearly eight years ago, my husband and I met at the bus stop in the photo above, in front of the Nottingham Central Library. It was from the library that I signed out novel after novel because I had no money for books, and even after I had money for books, I didn’t stop my library habit. Sadly, the only novel I vividly remember signing out was Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke, because there was so much vivid about that time that it’s all sort of a blur, but I remember that I was always reading. I remember rushing down to the City Centre on my lunch breaks to use the library internet for a fifteen minute block (and how could my internet habits have ever been that? When did it change, and why didn’t I notice?). To check my email, send missives home, check out the Globe and Mail homepage to see what was going on back in Canada, to update my early-twenties dirty-laundry-airing blog. I remember using the library to do research for an article I was determined to write and to publish, except that I didn’t know how to write or get published, and now I use that point as a gauge between here and now just to determine how far I’ve come.
It’s trite but true– the Nottingham Central Library provided me with shelter when the rest of the world was anything but. It provided me access, connection, and a place to belong, and I’m not sure what might have happened to me without it.
November 25, 2010
The Difference of Value Persists
My essay “The Difference of Value Persists” is in Canadian Notes & Queries 80, on newsstands now, in which I write about Lisa Moore, Virginia Woolf, Barometer Rising, shipwrecks, placentas, Margaret Atwood, hysterics, and sock matching, and mean everything I say. The article before mine argues all the points I make in my piece, and this is one of the reasons that I love Canadian Notes & Queries. Also because it is the most beautifully designed magazine in the world right now, and I’m not even exaggerating.
November 25, 2010
Bedtime Story by Robert J. Wiersema
I was afraid to read Robert J. Wiersema’s new novel Bedtime Story because it contains a book within the book, which fascinates me in theory but usually frustrates me when it comes down to actually reading the book(s). Also because the book within that book is a fantasy quest narrative, which is usually a very good sign of a book that’s not for me.
I decided to read the book, however, in spite of my fears, because I have never quite forgotten how much I enjoyed Wiersema’s first novel Before I Wake. Also because it’s a story about a parent/child connection through reading, about the power of literature in childhood, and because Wiersema’s interviews at Kate’s blog and at Steven’s made it seem so interesting.
Christopher Knox is at an impasse– his marriage beyond repair, his eleven year old son at a distance, and he’s been struggling to write his second novel for so long that most people have forgotten he’d ever written a first. When he gives his son a book for his birthday, a used book, and not even Lord of the Rings which the boy had asked him for, it seems a typical misstep– the boy is disappointed, his wife once again has opportunity to reflect that Chris only ever thinks about himself. The book, however, proves surprising, transporting Chris’s son David into its fictional world, which is remarkable for a boy who’s always struggled with reading before.
The problem, of course, comes about when David is literally transported into the fictional realm, leaving his parents and medical experts bewildered by his unresponsiveness. Chris, however, is well-read enough to know that strange things can happen, and suspects that his son’s book is at the the root of what has happened, and so embarks upon a quest to discover the magic spell behind the text that has taken his son, to keep the book from enemy hands (including unscrupulous publishing types), and to find the key to the spell so he can reverse it somehow and return his boy to their metafictional reality.
At the same time, David is undergoing an analogous quest, crossing canyons and mountain ranges in search of the elusive “sunstone”. These passages were short enough that my interest rarely lagged, and made interesting by David’s awareness of his place in the fiction, and how he has to keep others from realizing that he is an imposter. Even more interesting, he is accompanied on his journey by the spirit of a boy who’d read the book before him and similarly fallen under its spell. Unlike the other boy, however, David’s journey continues because all the while his body sits empty at home, his father keeps reading the book, convinced (correctly) that continuing the story is essential to David’s survival.
Lots of interesting things are going on in the text. We are treated to no physical description of Christopher Knox, and his narration is first person while the others characters’ are third, the effect of all this being space for the reader to be enveloped by the story, similar to how David becomes the fictional Daffyd. The novel is also a bit too long, a twist too far, but is conscious of this– in the fictional realm, David remarks upon his fear that the story will keep going forever, questing for the sake of quest, and we can certainly empathize. Wiersema also takes advantage of fiction to make alternative realities possible– Chris’s wife’s Jacqui’s refusal to believe her husband’s theory of what has happened to their son begins to seem preposterous. The book’s magic is so solidly rooted in physical reality that all lines between realism and fantasy are blurred, and genre becomes any extraneous idea.
Bedtime Story is a novel to be enjoyed on multiple levels– a fast-paced thriller, ode to childhood reading, a testament to the power of literature and written word (which is always a kind of magic spell, however benign), a magical escape narrative, a heartening story of father/son relations, and there is murder, mafioso, and a mysterious library as well. It was truly a pleasure to get lost in this one for a while.
November 23, 2010
The Empire Within takes the QWF First Book Prize
Congratulations to Sean Mills for winning the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize for The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (and thanks to McGill-Queens University Press for livetweeting the QWF Awards— next best thing to being there). Mills’ book was one of the biggest surprises of the 25 books I read in the running for the award– I had no connection at all to the subject matter, or the author, and I was initially intimidated by it being an academic book, am wary of theoretical constructs and non-fiction certainly isn’t my first bookish love.
But my lack of connection to the subject matter meant that the book was altogether absorbing– how could I ever have thought I knew anything about Quebec in the ‘sixties when my understanding of its history began and ended with the October Crisis? How could I ever have had an opinion on French/English relations in Quebec and Canada having never understood the disparity that had existed between the French and English up until the mid-twentieth century? Mills deftly weaves civil rights, women’s rights and French language/cultural rights together, and frames his ideas in post-colonial theory which (get this, it’s unbelievable) actually enhances our understanding of the subject matter rather than needlessly obscuring it for reasons of academic discourse. He also makes illuminating connections between activism in Montreal, and better-known movements in Paris, post-colonial Africa, and in the United States, complicated by the fact that the Quebec French were colonizers as well as colonized.
I learned so much from this book, and so enjoyed reading it, and vividly remember the sunny afternoon in which I finished it, on the second last day of July… Unlikely summer reading, I know, but the bookish life is full of surprises. Anyway, well done to Sean Mills and all the other prize winners, and many thanks to the QWF for asking me to be a juror.
(Click here for a free podcast of Sean Mills’ walking tour of 1960s’ activist Montreal).
November 23, 2010
Talking In Circles and Coming Full Circle: Talking About Talking About Motherhood
Marita Dachsel’s first book of poetry All Things Said & Done (Caitlin, 2007) was shortlisted for a ReLit Award. Her poetry has been published in many Canadian journals, in a recent chapbook, Eliza Roxcy Snow (red nettle press, 2009), and as part of Vancouver’s Poetry In Transit Program. Currently, she is working on a novel as well as finishing Glossolalia , her second poetry book, in which she explores the lives of the polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS Church. After twelve years in Vancouver, during which she received both her BFA and MFA in Creative Writing at UBC, she now lives in Edmonton with her husband, playwright Kevin Kerr, and their two sons. Kerry: Marita, I think I’m beginning to change my mind. You see, I’ve been fascinated by narratives about motherhood since before I was a mother, and as I prepared to become one, I devoured the modern “ambivalent motherhood canon”.
But I’ve been reluctant to pursue such narratives myself. When I interview writers, I insist that their work is what’s important, and I avoid questions about writing and motherhood that would probably fascinate me as much. I worry that such questions would undermine the writers’ works, would undermine the individuals as artists, would undermine me as an interviewer and a reader. But I can’t shake a suspicion that these questions are important, that perhaps we just have to carve out a time and space for them. Or not. I’m not sure.
Did you feel any similar qualms as you embarked upon your Motherhood and Writing interviews?
Marita: When I first conceived of the Motherhood and Writing interviews, I had no qualms at all. I think that may have been because I really wasn’t aware of all the books written about motherhood and writing. I’m sure if I had dug a bit, I would have discovered them and not felt the need to start the interview series.
The interviews came from purely selfish place. I wanted content for my blog, but more importantly, I really needed to know how other writing mothers did it. My boys are twenty-two and a half months apart. When my second child was born, I panicked. I remember clearly breast feeding him while reading a biography of Margaret Laurence and having the terrifying flash that I would never write again. I knew I wasn’t as driven as Laurence was and couldn’t make the choices she had. My nascent career was over.
After my husband helped talk me down, I realized that of course my career wasn’t over. There were many, many writing mothers out there who were kind, loving, stable mothers. I wanted to talk to them simply to know how they did it. How does a mother balance all those things mothers do and make time to write. And I wanted to talk to women who were in various stages in their careers–from award winning to not yet published.
The project was supposed to be just for a year, but I’ve managed to draw it out longer, partly out of laziness and partly whenever I think it’s time to shut it down, I’ll get an email or a comment on the blog from some writing mother out there to thank me. It’s important, especially in those early difficult years, for those in the trenches to be reminded that they are not alone, that there are other women out there who are struggling, too. And, of course, that it will get better.
That said, recently I’ve begun to have qualms. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer in the trenches, or maybe because I’ve become sensitive that I might be contributing to the creation of a “motherhood ghetto”.
We would never ask a man how he manages to write while being a father, so why do we feel it’s relevant to ask a mother? Is it because there is an assumption that the woman is at home with the babies and that the man is not? And that if she isn’t, she should be? It’s insulting to both mothers and fathers. But I don’t know what I’d rather see–interviewers asking fathers what they ask mothers, or stop asking mothers what they don’t ask fathers.
So, yes, I am now quite conflicted. I hope that in the context of my interview series, the questions I ask aren’t insulting because that is the point of the interview. But I don’t think if I was interviewing a writer in another context, I would feel comfortable about asking about their relationship between writing and motherhood, unless the writer brought it up or it was clearly related to the writing.
Kerry: But yet, beyond domestic drudgery and “how does she do it?”, fascinating connections abound concerning art and motherhood. These interest me the most, and they’re questions that could serve to illuminate artists’ works and the experience of motherhood in general.
But there’s the matter of the ghetto, which you mentioned, and that, as Rachel Cusk mentioned in the introduction to A Life’s Work, that “motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Why do you think this is?
Marita: I think there are a few reasons and they’re interconnected. The first that popped in my head is that it isn’t paid work, it’s part of the spectrum of “women’s work” (this label makes me want to scream, but I’m using it anyway). Also, because it seems anyone can get knocked up and therefore become parents (which anyone who has struggled with infertility knows how false this is), there is no understanding that parenting is a difficult job. I mean, how hard can it be, right? Turn on the t.v. and feed them and the job is done, right? Um, no.
It’s also invisible work. In public, unless you are a mother or you’re at a child/parent place (playground, school, etc.) you really only notice mothers when their children are in melt-down mode. Mothers are noticed when they are “failing”. I don’t know about you, but once I became a mother, I noticed how invisible I suddenly became.
But there is the inherent sexism of women’s work, too. In a patriarchal society, women’s work isn’t valued work. For mothers, the outcome is important–we want children to become obedient, hardworking adults–but how it’s done isn’t important. The idea of the loving mother is celebrated, but please keep that mechanics of that behind closed doors. We want to see smiling mothers and quiet children–not the day to day drudgery.
All these economic and feminist reasons I’ve been obsessing about since I became a mother, but this morning I woke up with might be the most basic reason: because it’s shop talk. Who likes going to a party and have to hear workmates talk about their jobs the whole night? Maybe it’s that simple with motherhood. People who aren’t mothers don’t care because they can’t relate, don’t want to relate. The politics and theories don’t interest them because they don’t affect them. (Although, I think the politics of motherhood does affect the wider society, however I’m sure the banking industry has an impact on my life, but I don’t really want to hear about either.) It seemed like such a revelation this morning, but now writing it down to you, it feels a little weak. What do you think?
Kerry: I actually love that idea, that it’s shop talk– it is! And it’s easier to think of motherhood being boring for that reason rather than motherhood itself being inherently boring. And yet, putting motherhood up/down there with dental hygienisthood and geography teacherhood isn’t quite right either, is it? Or perhaps it undermines what I’m most interested in about motherhood– how it changes how we understand the world, how we understand our bodies, other women, our own mothers. Issues of empathy, bonding.
I think that motherhood is mostly boring for a reason you mentioned– that it’s so ordinary. Everybody’s mother was a mother, and a lot of daughters will end up being one too, and quite a few of them even managed to go about it without waxing ad nauseum on the subject. Without having conversations like these.
Do you think it’s a phase, this obsession with motherhood? You’ve mentioned that you’ve moved away from it as your kids grow out of babydom. Was it a necessary phase? A useful phase? And how do we make it about more than navel-gazing (which so much online conversation about motherhood, I regret, never manages to do)?
Marita: On a personal level, I think it is a phase, at least at this level of intensity. I wonder if it is a product of our society, this need to analyse it so much? I can’t imagine mothers of our grandmothers’ generation dissecting it so much. Is it because we generally have children at a later age? We’re having less children? We’re not as physically (and perhaps emotionally?) as close to our families as generations past, so it’s more foreign to us? So many questions I don’t know how to answer.
For myself it was both necessary and useful. I was the first of my close girlfriends to have a baby and other than my small, immediate family, I have no relatives in North America. My husband had some friends with children, but I wasn’t in his life during their early years. Despite always knowing I would have a family, I had no idea what those early years of motherhood would be like. I became obsessed. I think that’s normal.
I learned so much about motherhood, about myself. I especially needed to see my position as both a writer and a mother reflected back at me. It’s almost silly now to think how desperate I felt, how much I needed to see that yes, I could be both a writer and a mother. The day-to-day life of writers and mothers can be terribly solitary. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone.
How do we get past navel-gazing? I don’t know. Partly we need it to be navel-gazing, because we need to see ourselves, our situations reflected back to us by others, and how can we do that if we don’t talk about ourselves?
Motherhood is incredibly transformational, especially for those of us lucky enough to have been able to conceive, carry, and birth our children. The physicality of pregnancy and birth is so intense, so raw and life-changing. Birth changes you. You battle through this profound visceral event, and on the other side of it, you have a new title, a new job: mother. It’s crazy. Of course we’re going to talk about it, analyse it, try to make sense of it.
I’m curious about your desire to take beyond the navel, that’s my impulse too, but I’m not sure what the forum should be. Are you specifically talking about the online world?
Kerry: Oh, I’m talking about the whole wide world, but online in particular. I think that’s what I liked about your motherhood and writing interviews– that they were looking at motherhood in the context of something bigger, and that was so interesting to me. Perhaps I also needed a reflection of mother/writers, to know it was possible.
Whereas the whole mommy blog circuit was just depressing, uninspiring. Once I’d grown accustomed to being overwhelmed by my crazy blown-apart new life, I didn’t so much want that experience affirmed, as some bloggers delight in doing. Maybe I am unusual in this, but I wanted to believe in the possibility of something better, something more. That I wasn’t limited to this entrenched idea of motherhood– of being forever harried, depressed and stretched to the point of exhaustion. I mean, of course it was nice to know I wasn’t alone in the hardships, but when life is really awful, how much do you really want it reflected back at you? And how far can that kind of reflection really take you?
If we’re talking beyond navels, I’ve been really inspired by the work being done through the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI, formerly the Association for Reseach on Mothering). Their book Talking Back to the Experts was a real tool of liberation for me as a new mother, and I also appreciated Mothering and Blogging: The Art of the Mommy Blog, which gave me such an appreciation for what blogs about motherhood have done in particular for marginalized or isolated mothers. These books had me understanding my own experience in a wider context, and also addressing issues of feminism and motherhood and how these ideas support and contradict one another. That motherhood was a job that required a great deal of thinking, learning and understanding. Worthy of an area of academic study, even– I liked that.
I wonder if the level of analysis and need for understanding you so astutely addressed is particular to artists– writers tell these stories over and over again, but would an architect fixate on the narrative quite so much? Does our artistry give us the means to engage with motherhood as we do, or do you think it happens to everyone?
Marita: Thank you, I’m glad you liked the interviews! I think you nailed how we can take the discussion of motherhood beyond the minutia–by talking about it in relationship to something else. Perhaps that is why we talk about it so much now. Our mothers’ generation was fighting for our rights to be anything we wanted to be, and now, our generation is figuring out how to negotiate our place within so much choice and what that all means.
As a huge, sweeping generalization, there seems to be two types of mommyblogs. The negative, complaining ones you mentioned and then the ones on the other end of the spectrum, where everything is perfect and idealized. No chaos, all domestic bliss. It’s hard to be in that place, too. Neither options feel honest or a reflection of my reality. But I must to admit that I still read a couple regularly, and one of them is the “perfect life” kind. (However, if she didn’t post every day, I probably would stop that one, too.) I can’t read the negative ones at all.
Your last question is a hard one. My hunch is that most mothers want to reflect on motherhood, at least early on and I think that’s why mommyblogs are so popular. That said, artists have the creative vocabulary to fixate, which many people do not, but more importantly, it’s our job to fixate. A new mother who returns to work at her architecture/accounting/law firm has other work she’s paid to do, but as artists, one of our jobs is to obsess. So many artist-mothers that I know try to work from home at the same time as trying to be a SAHM. Both are full time jobs, so it makes sense to me that this obsessing ends up being reflected in our work to some degree. Writers specifically create narrative, so of course we’re going to examine and dissect how this new character is changing our personal narrative arc.
I believe that every experience we have somehow influences our work. I haven’t read Emma Donoghue’s Room yet, but my hunch is that it would have been a very different book if she wasn’t a mother. You’ve read it. What do you think? And do you think you can tell if an artist is a mother? Would you want to?
Kerry: I think an artist can imagine her way into motherhood, and I say this with assurance because I’ve read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I remember reading the novel The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele too, and being stunned to discover that Gabriele wasn’t a mother– it’s a funny, popular novel, but her depiction of mothering a disabled child is stunning. I asked Alison Pick if she’d made changes to how she wrote about parenthood in her novel Far To Go after her daughter was born, and she said she’d pretty much got it right the first time (and she did).
What was remarkable about Room to me was not how “right” Donoghue got my experience, but that she’d actually managed to articulate aspects of my experience I hadn’t before been conscious of– which is really incredible. I’m at home all day alone with Harriet, and I remember as I was reading that everything I said and did was taking on a new resonance. I had never realized (perhaps because Harriet is still so young) how much a mother constructs her child’s universe in the various real-world Rooms in which they find themselves– the womb, the empty house alone all day.
I think if Donoghue hadn’t been a mother though, Room would have had a different kind of emphasis. I recently read James Woods’ review of the novel in the LRB, and he wrote about its lightness, its readability, the cutesy focus on Jack– and how the actual story that inspired the novel would not have such a rosy tinge. Because of her focus on the mother-child bond, Donoghue was able side-step a horror story, the fact that an actual mother probably would not construct such a fair and happy world for her child, would have neither the tools nor the capacity to do so. Room is a fairy-tale, really. Perhaps as a mother Donoghue was unable to look the real situation in the face (and I can’t blame her). Her story is a hypothetical one rather than a particular one, and there is safety in that.
And I must say that you’ve just answered my question, Marita! Well done. You ask, “Can you tell if an artist is a mother?” and I think, perhaps, one can’t. (Though sometimes, with bad artists, you can tell when they’re not a mother cough cough Christos Tsiolkas). Which means that my longing to ask or not to ask questions to artists about motherhood is kind of beside the point of the art. Has more to do with my own life and my own interests at the moment than art itself. (Ah, sweet navel, nice to gaze at you some more…) Which doesn’t mean these questions don’t matter, and can’t be incredibly useful/interesting in some respects. But perhaps my aversion to dwelling upon them comes from a rational place?
I think, Marita, that we’ve come full circle, and in a satisfying way. Do you think so? Can you tell if an artist is a mother?
Marita: Yay! I’m glad I helped you find your answer. I agree, I don’t think you can tell if an artist is a mother, and one wouldn’t want to. There are things that only some mothers can know, like what let-down feels like, or when your water breaks, but those details are so small that they are insignificant when it comes to the creation of art.
Someone once told me to not write what you know, but write what you want to know. This seems rather relevant to this conversation. I’m more drawn to writing about certain subjects and themes at the moment (my polygamy project) because of motherhood, but I know I won’t only write about those for the rest of my life. As artists, it’s what interests us in the moment, and for some it is motherhood.
I do think, however, that we still need to have conversations amongst writing/artist mothers, even if it is simply to compare navels and say, yes, that’s normal too.
November 22, 2010
To become a card-carrying learner
“To be the holder of a library card is to take an early step towards citizenship. Before the bank account, before the drivers’ license, before the legally purchased beer, or the opportunity to vote, comes the chance to advertise one’s curiosity about the world. To become a card-carrying learner. Is there not something noble, something irreplaceable, in that?” –Susan Olding, “Library Haunting” in The New Quarterly 116. (Photo of Harriet, aged six weeks, the day her card was granted. Please excuse the baby acne. It was fleeting).
November 21, 2010
Lemon by Cordelia Strube
A long time ago, I decided that I’d had enough of youthful protagonists, who are always the smartest character in the room, whose ability to control their own narrative is unlikely for a teenager, whose cool detachment from matters at hand never quite belies a author’s conscious attempt to be writing something more than a young-adult novel, who keep being written into novels that have absolutely no subtext and therefore really don’t qualify as full grown-up novels. (I’m looking at you, Blue van Meer, Lee Fiora, etc. etc..) These characters for whom c0mparisons to Holden Caulfield are always invoked blurbishly, because it’s easy, but so inaccurate and positively blasphemous.
But then there is Lemon, narrator and protagonist of Cordelia Strube’s novel of the same name. A misfit in a broken world where all structures of authority have broken down– at one point, she pains at her friend’s mother’s innocence about what her daughter really gets up to. Lemon scoops ice cream in the food court. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption, her adoptive parents fell apart, and the sanctuary she found with a capable ex-stepmother starts crumbling after the stepmother suffers a breakdown.
Lately, the odd time I stumble onto a high school girl’s twitter feed, I can’t help despairing about what kind of world my daughter is going to have to come of age in. Lemon does nothing to assuage my fears, but her articulation of the problem is heartening– what are we going with a spectrum that moves from “princess” to “porn-star”? With her steel-toe boots and baggy clothing, Lemon is written off as a “dyke” by her classmates, exempting her from the mad scramble for acceptance enacted by her best friend Rossi who has sex with anyone who asks her (and those who don’t bother to), who pretends she likes it to make them feel good about themselves. Who feels utterly awful about herself, and then masturbates on a webcam because a Queen Bee asks her to, and when this gets broadcast all over the internet, discovers she’s been set up for a fall.
Lemon remembers her friend, who “used to be an artist before she was a boytoy”. Whose body was used for handsprings and gymnastics, before it became disposible. She remembers when her classmates didn’t pull weapons on each other, and girls didn’t compete to give blow-jobs, and parents were capable of being a reassuring force.
Lemon is a bleak book, its home and school awfulness augmented by Lemon’s volunteer position in a pediatric cancer ward. Worst of all is that Lemon is simply an onlooker in an age of onlookers, powerless to do anything but just keep walking by, no matter how much what she faces disturbs her. Part of this is also her own survival mechanism– she has numbed herself to loss and pain, determined that by not reacting to anything, she cannot be hurt.
Things get way bad before they even hint at getting better, the narrative confirming all our worst fears about “the world out there”. And yet. Her one critical voice is a kind of beacon of hope, and it’s hilarious, smart and authentic. The world is crumbling around her, but Lemon calls it as she sees it, her point of view deadpan and refreshing. Her point of view is underlined by the books she reads, a gamut from Samuel Richardson to Catherine Cookson. Her mind is stuffed with trivia, which she uses to try to make sense of and provide context for the world around her, and the context is always just a little bit skewed– she’s only sixteen after all, so this youthful protagonist isn’t too good to be true, though a young reader would be less conscious of that then I am (and this is just one of many reasons why this is determinedly an adult novel).
With eight books behind her, Strube is perhaps far enough along in her life and her career to not have her young protagonist be her proxy. Perhaps it takes an experienced author to write young people really well? Though no doubt, there are exceptions to this, and I could encounter them forever, but Lemon is indeed a wonder. It’s deep entrenched in my mind, which is disturbing but fascinating, and I’ll not be forgetting this character any time soon.
Truly, one of the finest books I’ve encountered this year, and ever.
November 21, 2010
Viorst-a-thon completed
My week of Judith Viorst was radically different from what I’d expected. Sadly, her novel Murdering Mr. Monti was kind of dreadful– it turns out that Viorst can do wrong. Reading it was not entirely a lost cause, however, because it was a book by Judith Viorst and her main character was a version of herself, but the novel was trying to fit in too many plots and the whole thing fell apart (or maybe it didn’t? I skimmed the end. I’ll never know).
However it was fascinating to read the novel after reading her book Grown-Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know About Being Married. I really hadn’t supposed that a non-fiction book about marriage would the highlight of my Viorst-a-thon, and never realized I’d find a marriage guide so useful. I rolled my eyes through the chapter about couples who had second thoughts at the altar, who’d never talked about having kids until after they were hitched, who didn’t actually love their spouse but thought it was something they could work through… But then I got to the chapter about extended family and in-laws, and how to fit these relationships into our lives. Viorst writes of the necessity of married people separating themselves from their families of origin, but also how intergenerational ties are the foundations of and entire point of our marriages. How we all need to be grown-ups in order to have these relationships work. Then I read the chapter on how children affect marriages, and it underlined that Judith Viorst knows everything (except maybe, in her exuberance, how to structure a novel).
The marriage book is structured around Viorst’s poetry from her “decades” collections, and the novel plays with these same ideas about family and relationships, its narrator a nationally syndicated columnist who writes with the authority Viorst assumes in her self-help books. That the narrator is a version of Viorst is underlined by reading her memoir Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days: An Almost Completely Honest Account of What Happened to Our Family When Our Youngest came to Live with Us for Three Months. Viorst is the control freak she satirizes in her novel, and coping with the chaos of her son’s return how with his wife and three children is a lovely little book with plenty of reflections on the delights of grandparenting, the trials of adult parenting, and the frustrations of parenting full-stop. I particularly liked her chapter on the nonsense of modern parenthood, which includes not letting children cry, complicated car-seat straps, and getting rid of playpens (and of this point she throws her fist at the sky and demands of the universe, “Why, god, why?”).
In her poetry, her fiction, non-fiction and picture books, Judith Viorst is a chronicler of the foible. She sees the humour and tenderness of people at their worst, in their no-good, very bad days, the kind of days everyone has (even in Australia).
