September 22, 2008
Yellowknife by Steve Zipp
“Atoms or embryos, was there any difference?/ His former self had viewed the world as an orderly place. The unknown was merely the unmapped. His new self had a different view. Scientists might catch the world in a net of invisible lines, but they could never be sure they were harvesting reality and not themselves. A lipogram was as meaningful as a seismogram, the paradox of the ravens as relevant to ornithology as to logic. Math was a human myth, physics a point of view. Justice, truth, and beauty were trees that fell unheard by other ears. Every being was a chimera. At heart the universe was a mystery.” –Steve Zipp, Yellowknife
Who is Steve Zipp? Which is hardly the mystery at the heart of his novel Yellowknife, but still the question is worth posing. How intriguing, this pseudonymical person whose book is as enigmatic as its author. The Yellowknife of the tale is the capital city of the North-West Territories whose law and order is maintained by the North-West Mounted Police– details revealing the reality we’re dealing with here is not straightforward. Though they do have license plates shaped like polar bears in Yellowknife, but that’s not the sort of thing quite plausible enough for fiction, is it?
Very little is straightforward in either Yellowknife-the-city, or Yellowknife-the-book. “Borders exist for a reason,” the novel warns us, and one reason is that when upon crossing this one, all bets are off. Dogs hijack snowmobiles, characters disappear beneath the ice, a Perfesser philosophizes at the dump, and tunnels down in the earth keep turning up in the strangest places. The legendarily mystical North a perfect setting for this kind of magic (which the book turns up and satirizes), juxtaposed in a perfectly readable balance with a (literal) grittiness one would expect from a place where the elements and mining factor so centrally.
The story takes place in 1998, a bureaucratic nightmare of a time as the territorial government is currently in the midst of splitting into two. Though not overly long, Yellowknife has something of a sprawl about it and sprawling indeed is the Cast of Characters, not one of them incidental. The novel’s shape is not particularly taut and some parts reach out into tangents left unresolved, but I still found my reading most satisfactory. The many characters actually populating this strange place, from the drifter whose car is destroyed by a buffalo, the gravid biologist employed by the government and specialized in voles, her fiance who presents her with a ring whose stone is coal. The shady dealer with an understandable fear of dogs and his numerous failed business ventures, one of many rushing for gold but coming up way short.
Yellowknife is one of those novels fat with allusion, giving readers the impression that nothing means nothing, even if it’s not altogether clear what means what. At its most accessible, the novel is a hilarious satire, silly and absurd, but signs are scattered throughout the text indicating something deep down and more profound– sort of like the universe itself.
-More on Yellowknife (with a link to download)
– Steve Zipp’s blog
September 18, 2008
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder
Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children’s writer. She’s written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, “I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was.”
In terms of Snyder’s writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, “Happily Ever After”: “She’s every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like.” I recognized Snyder’s poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains’ second chapter: “Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow.”
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.
Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy’s journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that’s not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.
Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there’s trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home…
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.
September 18, 2008
Indeed walrusy
“I spend a lot of my time thinking about it and a lot of time counting, counting how many men are mentioned, say, on the front page of a newspaper as against how many women, counting men in photographs of some new committee, counting members of Parliament. We all know that the number of women has slipped downward. So I seem to be bean counting all the time. It’s a great burden. It’s an irritation. I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I’m too conscious of it not to think about it.” –Carol Shields interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel in “Ideas of Goodness” from Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields
I quote because there is not one woman contributor listed in The Walrus’ table of contents for October/November. Which has happened before (when Heather Mallick was “struck by the Aspergian social inadequacy of this indeed walrusy magazine.”) As a subscriber, as well as someone who’s recommended this magazine to others, I am becoming disappointed and embarrassed. And bothered, that the best spin I can put on this is just that perhaps they haven’t noticed. The worst being their content criteria is excellence only, and perhaps women writers are excluded from that? But I don’t believe it.
I’ve found the magazine suffering lately from its dearth of women writers, not just in principle but in content. I maintain that women and men write differently, that literature and letters are richer for that, but The Walrus seems to have forgotten. A magazine in which I read every article every month, even what doesn’t interest me, because I suppose that I will learn something, that the piece is there for a reason. But lately I’m not so sure that I should bother. Because if the women aren’t there because no one has noticed, perhaps there’s not so much reason after all. Because if the women aren’t there and nobody cares, this isn’t the magazine for me.
Though I do fear becoming one of those frenzied “Canceling My Subscription” people. Must not do that.
September 18, 2008
Like a treasure
“I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded and spread out before my eyes, in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the post the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence… Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a children crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark… I hoard all these letters like a treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship./ It will keep the vultures at bay.” –Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trans. Jeremy Leggatt).
September 17, 2008
How fortunate
Oooh, Giller Longlist. And I’ve read not a one. How fortunate, however, that only three of them are by women, and I can only ever be bothered to read books by women, so my bedside stack won’t stack too intimidatingly (and topple in the night and kill me in my sleep, etc.). Indeed, I did somehow find myself in a bookshop today, standing at the cash clutching The Boys in the Trees and Good to a Fault. I’ve been meaning to read the first one for ages, as it’s been recommended by esteemed readers Maud Newton, Stephany Aulenback and Rona Maynard. Of the second book, I know nothing, but the blubs were all by authors I liked, and so I thought, Why not?
September 16, 2008
Bibliophibians
Click on the comic for a clearer image. Comes from Wondermark by David Malki. Sent to me via Leah B (so thank you!).
September 14, 2008
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld, in her fiction, has a strange relationship with truth. First, her debut novel Prep, which I failed to love, that was famously marketed autobiographically, with photos from Sittenfeld’s high school yearbook. And now with her third novel American Wife, “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” Mrs. Laura Bush in particular, which has generated controversy as well as positive reviews. The latter entirely justified– this novel is exceptional.
Sittenfeld’s First Lady Alice Blackwell notes that “the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people… the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true– it’s staggering.” Though similarly staggering in my opinion is the faith these same people have in truth itself, that truth is even possible, all the while fiction is much-maligned and negated, treated as less-than real when it can be so much more so.
Though American Wife could have been a really cheap trick, a satire at best, Sittenfeld’s novel is neither. She’s not exaggerating the “looseness” of her inspiration, so that when I read about Charlie and Alice Blackwell, I didn’t have to think about George W. and Laura Bush. Charlie and Alice were characters enough on their own, and the circumstances of their lives different enough from the genuine articles that I didn’t find myself reading and connecting the dots. They both come from Wisconsin, which Sittenfeld evokes with a vividness I’ve never seen applied to the American Midwest, and Charlie’s family made their fortune in the meat industry. They have just one daughter, as opposed to the Bushes’ twins. Charlie’s father is not a former president, but had made a failed run at the position years and years before. The country invaded by American in 2003 goes unnamed. Etc.
I take from all this that Sittenfeld was not trying for an expose, a Primary Colours, or any kind of exploitation of Laura Bush’s life. But rather that she has been intrigued by Laura Bush, by her unique position and her elusiveness, the evidence that she is a far more complicated person than the public gets to see. And so Sittenfeld imagined herself into a position much like Bush’s, but not the same one– this story is Sittenfeld’s own. The character we get to know intimately as Alice Lindgren Blackwell is a singular creation.
Of course, so was Hillary Rodham Clinton, as depicted in her autobiography Living History. (I loved Living History; I admire Hillary Rodham Clinton). Sittenfeld fictionalizing that style of narrative, that pseudo-intimacy that springs up between autobiographer and her reader. “If I were to tell the story of my life,” narrates Alice Blackwell, “(I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course– one never is)…” But here we are holding the story of her life in our very hands, and our burdened hands, I note– at 55 pages, this book is as voluminous as any autobiography.
The story begins with Alice Blackwell’s question, “Have I made terrible mistakes?” and then sweeps back to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of small-town banker. The sheer normalcy of her life challenged by her unorthodox grandmother Emilie who lives with them, never does a bit of housework and spends her days smoking cigarettes and reading novels. It is from Emilie that Alice acquires her lifelong love of books. It is Emilie also who arranges Alice’s abortion (still illegal then), when she becomes pregnant in her final year of high school.
The novel is broken into four sections, a chronology of key episodes. From Alice’s childhood, we skip ahead to her thirtieth year. She is a school librarian, content to be single, and about to purchase her first home when she meets Charlie Blackwell at a backyard bbq. As crass as she is reserved, a Republican to her Democrat, Charlie is also being pursued by Alice’s best friend, but he is unrelenting. And when she falls in love, the reader can see why– this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even “characters”; they’re people and they’re real.
Ten years later, Alice is a mother, more settled in her country-club lifestyle, but she has had enough of her husband’s drinking and general discontent. It is when she threatens to leave him that he finally cleans up his act, stops drinking and is Born Again. From there the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is clear (and what strange times we must live in, that this is the case). The last quarter of the novel a bit more ruminative than I would have liked, but I still couldn’t stop reading. The choices Alice has made as a woman and as a wife, during her “life in opposition to itself”, have come back to haunt her, and she must act in order to protect her husband and his presidency, of which she is inordinately tired.
That this fictionalized biography reads so true is down to the details, all the details, but the bookish ones in particular. Alice tells us the names of the books her grandmother is reading, every single title in a stack she buys for a young friend of hers, which includes books by Loises Duncan and Lowry, Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. Her daughter Ella reads Bunnicula on the flight to Charlie’s college reunion. Alice has John Updike in her handbag on her first date with Charlie, and she wonders if she’ll ever learn to read so sneakily at political conventions that no one will notice (and she is sad to never manage this). Of her husband’s religion, Alice says, “I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it… Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose– what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?– and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”
American Wife, for all its fiction, sheds a great deal of light on the Bush Presidency and on America. Sittenfeld answering the question, “How could this have happened?” That a man with such limitations could become so powerful, how any awareness of the enormity of his mistakes would make him all the more steadfast about continuing to make them, that the political is really only personal, because politicians are people. Not just in the “we wear sweaters and have children” sense, but in terms of blatant fallibility. How “this”/Bush could have happened is so truthfully imagined here, and isn’t imagined as close to truth as we can get?
Says Alice Blackwell, “What I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity.”
If only the cover
of American Wife did not feature a wedding dress though, and I can’t even think of why it does, since Alice Blackwell didn’t wear one to her modest nuptials. I fear the cover of this book will deter a man from ever picking it up, which is almost tragic, because this book is so rich, entertaining and important. Enacting Hilary Mantel’s assertion that “revolution is a daily task”, that the domestic is the heart of everything.
September 14, 2008
Unremarkable
Unremarkable weekend, whose highlight was the purchase of trackpants. Which was actually all I wanted from a weekend, we’ve been so busy lately. And also because I was reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I didn’t want to do anything but read it. Now reading I Know You Are but What Am I? by Heather Birrell, and I love it– does Coach House ever fail? A short kidlit kick after that, with Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh, and Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder. And then I have to read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because my husband’s been nagging me to do so for months.
