January 13, 2009
On those unsympathethic females
Last week I read Christine Pountney’s novel The Best Way You Know How, which– apart from some ghastly clanking similes– was a pretty good read. Though on a personal level, I’d probably relate to any book about a Canadian girl who runs away to England to find a husband (and thank goodness I had better luck with my pick than Pountney’s poor old Hannah Crowe). But I was surprised to have enjoyed the book as much as I did, considering the mixed reviews. For as engaging and witty as Pountney’s writing is, I found Hannah Crowe to be as obnoxious as promised, but it occurred to me to wonder: do we have to like a heroine to like a book?
I wouldn’t have even though of Alice Munro, except by chance I picked up her selected short stories following Pountney’s book, and as I read the first two pieces (from Who Do You Think You Are?), I realized how much Munro’s Rose is like Hannah. Self-destructive, all her evil cards on the table, manipulative, immature, lacking self-confidence and self-esteem, and fascinated by the power she holds over her boyfriend/husband. Desiring to be dominated, but insisting on remaining indomitable.
I suppose it is Munro’s retrospective approach that casts Rose in a more sympathetic light, though if I remember from my most recent read, even in the later stories in the book, she never becomes wholly agreeable. Whereas the immediacy of Pountney’s narrative makes Hannah quite unbearable, and the third person narrative makes us witnesses to her blunders without the benefit of her perspective to cast the incident differently. Though the point is that Hannah doesn’t have this perspective, lacking as she is in self-awareness.
This all made me remember Kate Christensen’s comments about her novel In the Drink, which became marketed as “chick lit,” Christensen supposing all the while that she’d been, “consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre”. She explains, “I trace Claudia’s lineage through an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan…”
As the chick lit it wasn’t, Christensen’s novel didn’t succeed, and reader responses reminded me of the criticisms of Pountney’s book. Claudia, like Hannah, fails to win our sympathy, and to many readers, that was all she wrote. But now I’m wondering if “loser lit” is an exclusively male domain; is co-opting impossible? Is sympathy required of female characters in a way it isn’t necessarily of males, or does it have to be won differently? Is sympathy a demand female readers make that male readers might not? Are these female characters unsympathetic in a different way than the males, rendering them fundamentally disagreeable as literary characters at all?
No answers of course, as it’s late and I’m tired. But I’m going to be thinking about unsympathetic heroes and heroines this next while, and looking into the different ways they’re constructed. Any of your comments would be most helpful, so do leave some.
January 10, 2009
Me in This
My article on fact, fiction, Jonathan Bennett’s Entitlement and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is in the January/February issue of This Magazine, which is on sale now.
Update: Online here.
January 10, 2009
"Someone almost always dies in the end"
I am excited about Roughing It In The Books, a reading project by Melanie Owen and Alexis Kienlen, who are each attempting to read the entire New Canadian Library. It’s easy to take the NCL for granted now, but when the series started 50 years ago, it was unprecedented and it remains important. Certainly Owen and Kienlen will need to blow the dust off some of the texts, and it’s not going to be easy, but they’ll surely find some treasure and some books are guaranteed to be a joy. I’m looking forward to reading along (albeit vicariously), and no doubt they’ll inspire me to pick up a book or two.
January 10, 2009
New (Canada Reads) Books!!
I really believe that Ben McNally couldn’t have picked a better location for his bookshop than right next door to the building where my husband works. And I am very grateful for a husband kind enough to pick up the Canada Reads stack on his lunch break, just because I can’t wait another day for them. Four new books (because I owned Mercy Among the Children already)!! A couple of which I’d never have picked up otherwise, due to a variety of literary prejudices that I’m pleased to be challenging in the coming weeks. And unlike my usual reviews (where I only write about the books I like enough to do so) I’ll be reading with a critical eye, and ranking these five picks to find a winner. Then I’m looking forward to seeing how my opinion compares to the official panelists’, and to opinion at large.
January 10, 2009
Bear With Me: Live!
At year ago I read actor/comedian Diane Flacks‘ book Bear With Me: What They Don’t Tell Your About Pregnancy and New Motherhood, and knew I was ready to have a baby because I’d read the whole book and still wanted one. Flacks’ book was hilarious, entertaining, well written and full of really practical advice that I’ve found useful already. My husband has since read (and enjoyed) the book, and I’ve recommended (and lent) it to friends. So how overjoyed was I to see that Bear With Me is now a play currently being performed (by Flacks) in Toronto? I’m looking forward to seeing it this month. Check out Flacks’ piece on her show in The Toronto Star.
January 9, 2009
Before you were born
“It was around here that I once said, ‘I used to work over there, before you were born.’
‘When I was a baby.’
‘No, before that. Before you were born.’
‘When I was just a teeny-tiny baby?’
‘No, before you were even here. Before you were in my tummy.’
‘I was…. Where.’
‘You were just a twinkle in your Daddy’s eye.’
‘I not a twinkle. I NOT a twinkle!!!’ And she started to kick and squawk. I suppose I did sound a bit smug; a little complacent about the idea that she was once non-existent. Too tough, really, for any age, but especially tough for two.” –Anne Enright, “Being Two” from Making Babies
January 9, 2009
Pickle Me This jumps on the Canada Reads bandwagon
I don’t usually jump on reading bandwagons, mostly because my tastes are so conventional, I’m more or less riding along already. But for some reason I feel the urge to read all the Canada Reads books this year, and the urge has come with enough time for me to actually get to it. So I’ll be buying the books this weekend, and am looking forward to new discoveries. Stay tuned for my reviews.
January 8, 2009
Links and birds
Now reading The Darren Effect by Libby Creelman, which is fabulous, and I’m right in the middle with no idea of what comes next. Maud Newton speculates about why copies of Lush Life (which I reviewed last month) are so hard to come by. Dovegreyreader encounters The Robber Bride. On the history of stenography (subscription required). Jon Evans wonders why he shouldn’t write about Africa, which led me to “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina. A short story by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. And more on used books.
I watched The Birds on the weekend, which is based on a short story by Daphne DuMaurier (whose Rebecca I so delighted in last year). I’ve not read the short story but checked out the plot synopsis and it seems as though the screenwriter really only used the premise– and yet… Though this is a full length film, it seemed undeniable that it’s source material was a short story. What we know of the characters and what happens to them is really not the point, rather the point is the moment (which is so incredibly terrifying, tacky special effects aside). So interesting to me how clearly the short storyness remained. I’ll have to read the story and see if it came about itself similarly.
January 7, 2009
The Hieroglyphic Streets
Marvelous blog find of today is The Hieroglyphic Streets, for biblio and actual travellers alike. The site gets points for its gorgeous pictures, thoughtful book selections, and excellent organization. How about Montreal, Budapest, North London, or Japan. Indeed, take me away…
January 6, 2009
Thoughts about used books
(Via Bookninja): Should we be ashamed of buying used books online? The article discussing secondhand sellers who work through sites like amazon specifically, where you can get a book for a penny plus the shipping/handling costs. I have used amazon second-hand sellers to purchase books, though usually as a last resort because a) the book I wanted was available nowhere else including the library, and my local bookshops or b)I was a student and couldn’t afford it otherwise (and also couldn’t find it in my local bookshops. I always looked first, never missing out on a reason to visit a local bookshop of course, and also because once the shipping/handling was involved, a used book online or off was about the same price). I would suppose that buying new books this way (incl. review copies, which are often available before the book is even in stores) is more than a little tacky, however. But then it is only in the past two years that I’ve become so privileged to be able to spread my bookish dollars so lavishly– not everybody can afford to drop $40.00 on a hardcover in order to feel (deliciously) smug about doing the right thing.
A bookninja commenter makes the very good point that using the library at the very least would provide authors (in Canada) with a small amount of money through Public Lending Rights— nothing a writer could live off of, but it’s the principle.
The problem is not with used books, however, but rather the emptiness of the online exchange. The NY Times article makes a comparison between such exchanges and Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff’s “classic account of a woman in postwar New York who bought her books from a London shop she never saw” noted as being “ahead of its time.” But the whole book captures the rich exchange between Hanff and the booksellers at Marks & Co. Antiquarian Booksellers, who encouraged Hanff’s book buying habits for years and years, supplementing her own requests with their recommendations– in short, doing what local used bookshops are meant to do, which is fostering a literary community, albeit via epistle. Local is a decidedly a relative term, and Hanff’s story is not the same at all.
I enjoyed a piece on the Guardian blog last week about Britain’s charity bookshops. Suggesting it lessens the compunction of depriving authors of the royalties if you know a few quid is going to Oxfam instead. The article noting the impeccable organization of most of these shops, the skill of their clerks at spotting a special book’s value. There is a charm to their shelves, which will always feature a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Fludd. When I lived in England, I was an avid browser, and found many a treasure that brought me to the till. And I feel that authors did ultimately benefit from my purchases, or at least the ones who’re still publishing did, because these shops gave me a route to their discovery and so many of them I’m devoted to now.
Are there any cousins more distant than new books and used ones? One eventually becomes the other, of course, through a certain evolution, but takes on a new kind of value with the change, will become a different kind of cherished. New books have their crispness, their cleanliness, and their smell– their margins at least are a tabula rasa, and a reader can feel like an intrepid explorer venturing out to see the world. Whereas used books wear their history on their pages, with their stains, their own peculiar smells, and stray hairs stuck inside. The names written in and then crossed out on the inside cover suggesting the hands that may have flipped through these pages, the people who might have read them. Suggesting all the readers in the world.
Any reader with integrity will understand that used books have their place, that new books have quite another one, and the problem really isn’t the system at all. Rather, the problem is these supposed “sheepish” bargain hunters who keep bargain hunting anyway, and whose articles should probably be headlined instead, “I’m cheap and a bit of a wanker.”
