January 29, 2012

The Vicious Circle reads: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

We assembled on Saturday morning around a table spread with enough brunch to feed several Vicious Circles, and quickly got to talking about the book, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. We were surprised that so many of us got through it, a hefty tome at 650 pages, a hefty tome whose bleak outcome is made clear by its title, and which became so unbearably sad to read around page 450. We speculated that part of the reason we were able to take our time as we read it was that none of us really wanted to get to the end. And one of us was so angry at the end, the lack of pay-off for investing one’s time in such a long book. “Well, that’s the way the world works,” we said. There are no tidy endings, and Murray deserves credit for making his novel reflect that reality. Though surely the world is not as bleak as the novel presents. There is far more beauty in the world than Murray shows, and in particular we remarked upon him driving home the point that the adults whom our messed-up children are in the care of are even more messed-up than the kids are. The parents in his novel are stereotypes, drunken mothers in jungle prints whose silicone implants’ sloshing is audible. There are good parents out there. Some of us even had them.

And speaking of stereotypes, we lamented that Murray did not see fit to instill his female characters with the same depth as the male, to write them with the same sensitivity. At the end of the novel, Lori’s character is given some dimension, but otherwise, the girls were the worst “shit girls say” stereotypes. Which is unfortunate because he writes about the teenage boys and their connections so beautifully, and the novel could have been so much richer if the girls had been half as interesting.

But this is the kind of novel whose approach to its subject matter could be used to explain away several perceived flaws. That we never see the girls in all their dimensions because this is a novel about a boys’ boarding school, and they’re so far removed from the girls’ experience. That the story itself seems dated because the school itself is a relic, as anachronistic as its atmosphere. Though we note that this is very much a novel of the present, and we think the novel is structured along the lines of the video games its characters are so immersed in. We remark that the characters’ trains of thought move seamlessly between the games’ narratives, and the actual world around them. We love so much about the boys at the centre of the story, the richness of their characterization.

A few of us are confused because we heard Paul Murray read at IFOA and were left with the impression that this book was funny, but it was so dark, so bleak. The blurbs and reviews also thought it was hilarious, which makes us think that maybe they didn’t read the book. Also, the novel was sold together in three volumes, and we wondered how we might have understand the book if we’d read it in that format, and that we might have read the first or second, and given up.

We liked the way that this novel spoke about grief, and history, and Ireland, while also subverting and complicating stereotypes on the last point. We thought Howard was ridiculous, sometimes amusingly so, but other times just frustratingly so. We loved the Bethani song lyrics, and when Lori sang into the phone. Some of us thought the glimmer of goodness, of wholeness, that Murray provides at the end of the book was enough. Others thought not so much. Some of us found part two pretty tedious, and the whole druid thing, and the secret room in the girls school, blah blah. Prime time for skimming here, but with the final section of the book, we were hooked again.

Books we talked about when we were talking about this book were The History Boys, This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath (which we think we’re going to putting on our to-be-read list). We were all pleased to have encountered a book we might not have read otherwise, and a book that was so good for discussion, whose flaws made for interesting and illuminating conversation. And then we helped ourselves to another serving of sausage hash browns, and turned our minds to extra-literary things.

November 30, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Imagining Toronto

Last night, The Vicious Circle gathered in a the farthest reaches of the inner-city to read Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto (which was one of my favourite books of 2010).  We’d braved torrential downpour to be there (which now joins a major snowstorm and a temperature of 50 degrees celsius as weather we’ve braved in order to be Vicious in 2011). Curling up in the world’s coziest living room, lined with books (as is every room in that house), and well-supplied with cheese, we sat down and gossiped, and gossiped some more, and then it was time to speak of bookish things.

Imagining Toronto left us wanting to explore Parkdale, and wanting to read The Torontonians. We loved the way Harris acknowledges how much Toronto’s neighbourhoods are at different stages of similar narratives. We talked about Kensington, the Union Station of Toronto neighbourhoods, and  how much that neighbourhood had changed– apparently Sneaky Dees used to be a Pie Shop?

We loved the sense she creates of a walk around the city, the psychogeography. Learning the history of an area like Yorkville, whose reality is different from myth– Yorkville’s heyday wasn’t a long day. We liked the structure of the book for the most part, how she organizes by neighbourhoods. We note that Toronto books were how we learned about Toronto back when we were growing up in the suburbs and small towns. As Harris writes, a city unfolds from its telling, and culture emerges from narrative. We also realize for the first time that all of us grew up in the suburbs and small towns, none of us in Toronto at all. We note that we’re part of a homogenization of the city, in the age of “the myth of the monocultural suburb.”

Some of us took issues with categorical statements that framed the city in a way that was contrary to how we understand it. That the literary Annex is not dead, for one. Or that Little Italy is not the only neighbourhood in Toronto with connections to the Old World, when we’re thinking about Roncesvalles, Little Portugal, Corso Italia, and others.

We like how the book succeeds in doing what city books are meant to do– not describing the city, but recreating the city, becoming the city. We talked about Toronto as a city without an identity, and noted that it’s not that Toronto doesn’t have a creation myth, but that it hasn’t been immortalized. We talked about the nuances of the chapter on multiculturalism, and Harris’s ideas about multiculturalism being a process that begins with us engaging with tensions, acknowledging our own discomfort with one another.We felt the “Desire Lines” chapter was less successful, and wondered about its organization– parts about gay literature, sex work, pedophilia, and birth didn’t seem to fit together so well. We expressed discomfort with gay literature belonging with the rest, and also with the lack of nuance in the bit on sex work (and wondered why it didn’t fit into the chapter on Work). We wondered why the part about Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love and the the Shoeshine Boy might not have fit better into a chapter on Little Portugal. Why were these stories removed from the neighbourhoods in which they took place?

Imagining Toronto, we decided, functions as a remarkable starting point, and creates desire to go explore both the city and the its stories. We praised its balance of academic and accessible writing, and it was pointed out that Harris is writing about really complex ideas in this book, but delivers them in a way that is so readable and seems unconscious of their weight. We talked about this book being published by a small Toronto press rather than an academic press, and what an undertaking this must have been for Mansfield Press, and perhaps why the overall package is intimidating to behold– small text, no images. We noted that it must have been an undertaking for Harris as well, and that nobody had ever attempted to do this. We noted that Harris does it so well that even her footnotes were interesting. We wondered about books that were missing from the book, and the Toronto stories still to come. Some of us thought we’d check out the Imagining Toronto website, and we all look forward to seeing what Harris does next (and to reading Imagining Toronto Part II).

And then we started gossiping again, and soon the cheese was nearly gone.

November 2, 2011

The Vicious Circle Reads Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams

I’m coming out of first-person plural here, because I loved Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams without reservation. I’m coming to the tail-end of the busiest month I’ve had in years, and the space I’d carved out to read this book– sitting on the couch during Harriet’s nap times, holding the book open with my feet while I furiously knit up this hat— was like a gift to myself every day last week. The reading was a pleasure, the stories so diverse in their approaches to their subject, so strong, convincing, so funny, and underlined a lot of experiences from my expat days. I don’t think I’d enjoyed any other book as much that we’ve read for our club, unless it was a book written by an English novelist in the 1950s. It’s one of the best books I’ve read lately, and I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.

What being in a book club has taught me, however, is that there’s no telling with taste. And that taste is so much what we’re talking about when we’re talking about books, no matter how much we couch our arguments in aesthetics. I also know that being in a book club has made me a better book reviewer (and it has made being a book reviewer that much harder. I second-guess myself more often now. Which, for a book reviewer, is a good thing.)

Anyway, reactions were mixed across the board as The Vicious Circle assembled in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood of Toronto last Saturday morning. We were also dressed as literary characters for Halloween (and one of us was dressed as a genre)– I was wearing a 99 cent 54DD bra from Honest Eds, stuffed with Harriet’s plush balls as Georgina Hogg from The Comforters, but not the sexy version. There was lots of delicious food, and plenty of gossip, and even a baby, then we got down to the book.

It was boring, said one of us, and another of us was aghast. One of us had struggled for a while with not liking the characters, which was disturbing because she’s a better reader than that, but then she realized that she just didn’t care about the characters. That they were boring. That they were living in Rome, but weren’t engaged with the setting at all. They could have been anywhere. “But that’s just the point!” said another one of us, pulling out the old “I’ve got personal experience of it” trump-card, which is a stupid trump-card actually, because a book isn’t good just because it reminds me of when I lived in Japan.

The point though, that one of us continued, is that living abroad and being engaged with a place is exhausting, and can unsustainable, and that Williams’ stories reflect the frustration, rage, ennui and struggle of one who is living where she doesn’t belong. Fair enough, says another of us, but the stories were all the same, the same kinds of people, the same kind of stasis, the non-endings. Even though the characters were married, single, gay, parents, variously? But they all sounded the same, was the problem. It was also noted that the gay characters didn’t get to have sex, that Williams shut the door on their encounter, when it was flung wide open for heterosexual couples.

There was no consensus on best stories, though “Pets” probably was closest to it, particularly the strange pet shop owner. It was noted that Williams’ Italian characters were more interesting than her expat characters who seemed more like stereotypes. Though we also liked the story “Saving Rome for Someone Special” about the perils of living abroad with friends-of-friends always showing up to sleep on your sofa, and what happens when a girl arrives who is certifiably insane. There was some debate as to whether Jonathan is pathetic as he’s presented, and why exactly he’s presented as pathetic. It was felt the ending petered out the same way they all did.

We liked the wit though, the dialogue. We liked that a hamster died of being squeezed to death. We liked the end of “Motion”: “But that day, when her eyes finally fell on it, on Frank’s arrow made of dried corn stalks pointing right, she felt a startling surge of gratitude for being linked this way to another human being, and she followed it.” We weren’t nuts about the two stories that weren’t set in Rome. Some of us liked the first story very much, its “acerbic wit” and others found it frustratingly “mommish”. But then no, exclaims another. The point was what was going on below the surface, how she kept laughing at inappropriate moments and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

And so it continued, volleys back and forth over coffee and apple cake, and cupcakes, and guacamole (because there is always guacamole), and always, as always, a splendid time was had.

September 25, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Vicious Circle rocked The Junction last Thursday night, sitting out on a porch that was deep enough for all of us, on a September night that was warm enough to still be summer (until it got dark, and the chill set in, but it still wasn’t too bad at all). We begin with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and the character of Margaret. That she shows Amis’ limitations in creating female characters, and some of us were offended that she turned out to be such a manipulative, conniving minx, though others though her manipulative, connivingness at least showed a bit of agency and made her a less pathetic character (and just as hateful, therefore, as everybody around her). We weren’t sure exactly who she was– she was mousy in her spectacles, though she also flirts with beads and an arty wardrobe. Clearly Margaret is trying it on as much as anybody else is. Though Christine isn’t, or when she is, she’s covering up something more appealing– we note that she’s described as “unmanningly beautiful”, and that she takes on typical male roles in their relationship, and that she threatens him with her strength– we wonder if they’ll actually end up together? Also, we loved Carol Goldsmith, who underlines that Jim, sexually, is still an adolescent.

We thought the book was hilarious– Dixon’s unfortunate phone calls to Mrs. Welch in particular. Those of us in the know remarked that Amis’s send-up of academia was spot-on. Though we couldn’t figure out if Professor Welch was as dotty as he seemed– was there method to his madness? Was he an older version of Jim? Though we decided that he probably wasn’t because dotty or not, he did have passion for what he did, whereas Jim had passion for nothing.

We talked a lot about class– about how this slapstick comedy works in Britain in a way we’d find much less amusing if it were American. Jim Carrey as Lucky Jim, somebody noted, would be unbearably horrible, whereas Hugh Grant might be able to pull it off. We wondered why the cultural differences in terms of comedy, and determined that Britain is so firmly entrenched in a class system that there are so many more inviolable rules for characters to transgress. Hence the humour. Though one of us would point out that the American comedy that comes closest is the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

So what about class and Lucky Jim Dixon? What’s his background? He only mentions his parents briefly when he laments that he has not parents such as Bertrand Welch’s who’d put him up in a London flat. We learn that the universities are being opened up due to scholarship programs, and this is probably how Jim got there, though it’s pointed out that this expanded population has resulted in a lowered tone. Jim was in the war, was stationed well out of the way of battle up in Scotland, which is typical really for how things go, but it also means he’s never had a chance to prove himself (or be killed with a bullet blast). We thought about him in comparison with Arthur Seaton, a literary contemporary from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning— that both characters are locked in where they don’t belong. Then there’s Amis and the angry young men– Sillitoe’s Seaton was a bit of a departure from the other’s though, due to Sillitoe’s own working class origins.

Is class then the focus, that Jim is where he doesn’t belong? That he’s dared to transgress the bounds of his working class origins, and as a result he belongs nowhere. Though what is the class of the other characters, one of us asked? Do they necessarily come from better backgrounds, and it’s suggested that they don’t. That academia is rife with misfits, and Jim is a misfit amongst them, or outside of them, rather.

Though in Jim’s own words, “I’m afraid that’s a tall order. Explain my conduct; now, that is asking something. I can’t think of anybody who’d be quite equal to that task.” And from this we took that it’s possible to read into this book too much, that it’s really comedy at its heart, one ridiculous action after another, unstoppable once the wheels were in motion. That at his own heart, Jim’s an idiot, a passive and lazy asshole. We wondered about the title because so many unfortunate incidents happen upon Jim that we’re not sure how he could possibly be “lucky”, but he is, and the ending proves it. That he was on the right trajectory from the start: “It was luck you needed all along; with just a little more luck he’d have been able to switch his life to a momentarily adjoining track, a track destined to swing aside at once away from his own.”

Really, then, is this a book about faith?

August 24, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Hell by Kathryn Davis

There are some books that make us suspect rumours of the Vicious Circle’s awesomeness might just be overstated. And also that we chose our books back in March with a bit too much zeal and too little caution because, yet again, one of our books has conspired to kill us. This book was Hell by Kathryn Davis, whose cover made us think we’d love it, and we did love it, in parts, but in other parts it made us want to die, fall asleep, close the book and/or fling it against the wall.

One of us had a library copy of the book which featured a sticker on its spine that said, “Suspense”, and we figured that sticker had probably resulted in a lot of disappointment for some readers. “Part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story” says the back of the book, but we just didn’t get it. Long, long paragraphs of impermeable prose, and even when you took it all apart, the mechanics were generally unclear. Which doesn’t make it seem worth it after a while, to read those paragraphs over, and over, and over.

Some of us came to terms with this by reading it just once and letting Davis’ mesmerizing prose wash over with no concern with meaning. Others came to terms with this by not finishing the book. Those of us who finished the book positively hated the end, and resented Davis for taking the narrative away from the part of the story that most appealed. We liked the 1950s family story, which reminded she of us who’d just read it of Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels (except the people were less weird, and the narration was more so). We thought it was cool that this was a Hurricane Hazel story, because we’d never read one that was not Toronto-centric. Most of liked that the story was about the residents of an actual house and the residents of a dollhouse, and the lines between the two were always being blurred. Davis writes about the miniature, about the domestic and its detail. Did we know that medicine cabinets used to have slots in the back where used razor blades could be disposed of? And this is what a house is, an innocent-looking place until you get down between its walls and you find they’ve sliced open your wrist.

“Of course every house in the world, no matter how well-built, will eventually catch fire, blow up, wash away, get knocked down to make way for something new. No matter how durable a house, it isn’t immortal… For this reason the house is jealous of spirit and, as is often the case, becomes possessive. This is why houses are haunted and why, if you love the form of a thing too much, there’s really only one way out.”

There are many stories– the family with the alcoholic mother and philandering father, the eldest daughter who refuses to eat, and who yellow-eyed friend turns up dead due to mysterious circumstances. The narrative goes back and forth in time, and somewhere in time the father is elderly, incapacitated, and lying on the floor after having suffered a stroke. It also goes way back in time to a Mrs. Beetonish character called Edwina Moss whose daughter also refuses to eat and who is preoccupied by Napoleon’s chef. There is food everywhere, but it is disgusting. The domestic is much less heaven and hell, or it is heaven and hell, and the vision of hell is what makes us conscious of our own limitlessness, the magnificence of our construction, the nimbuses surrounding every single hair on our heads, whereas heaven is too finite. And if that doesn’t make any sense to you, know that it didn’t to any of us either.

But it did to somebody. There are readers who have loved this book, and express that it’s not going to appeal to everybody, and that it’s demanding, but the Vicious Circle failed to reap any of the rewards. Which made some of us shrug and say that if we can’t get it, it might not be a great book after all. Others are going to pick it up again sometime, because it might be one of those books that needs five or ten reads to be loved (Hello, Virginia Woolf! And you were worth it too!).

And then we threw our books down because it was still a summer night, the autumn chill distant enough that we can ignore the need for sweaters, and we poured another glass of wine and let talk drift away to other things.

July 22, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Hotel World by Ali Smith

It did not bode well f0r a fantastic meeting of The Vicious Circle. It had been hottest July 21 ever, and everyone was either away or unwilling to take on Ali Smith’s Hotel World, so there would be just three of us. But what a three we were! Each of doing our part to eat much cheese and cake and make up for the others’ absences, and there was so much conversation, bookish love and Ali Smith illumination.

I picked this book. I found it in a box on a curb ages ago, and it’s been kicking around ever since. Book club finally gave me a the push to actually read it, and as I did so, there were parts I loved. I was more forgiving with this flawed book than I have been with the other flawed first novels our book club has read recently, first because I’ve read Ali Smith’s second novel The Accidental and it’s wonderful, so it’s easy to forgive any novel that grew into that. And also because she’s Ali Smith– her talent abounds. Even if I hadn’t read The Accidental, it would be clear to me that this is an author whose talent is going to take her somewhere great.

But Hotel World? Not so great. One of us had barely been able to stomach it, and then the entire chapter without punctuation just proved to much. And the other of us began to read it only to realize that she’d already read it about five years ago but had no recollection, which is never a good sign. It’s an experimental novel, and it’s not quite pulled off– its fragments are too fragmented, and in places they come together in artificial ways, and there were so many things we just didn’t get. The book would probably demand a second reading, but none of us had come away with the inclination to go there.

But then we started talking about what we liked about the book, and the talk kept coming. The punctuation-free section that had so frustrated one of us had delighted another– finally, plot! It gave us so many answers to the questions the other sections had posed. We liked the humour, the absurdity. We thought about how Smith is like Nicola Barker, and also Kate Atkinson, though the latter is much more mainstream. Also, Hilary Mantel. We noted the morbid streak, the play with language, that language is not merely employed but is the story, that these writers know their tools. We wondered why all the British writers writing like this happened to be female. We wondered why nobody writes like this in Canada. It occurs to us that in Canada, no big publisher would take a writer like Ali Smith on. If there is a Canadian Ali Smith, she’s being publishing by a small press we’ve never heard of. We want to send out an alert to the big publishers in Canada– Ali Smith is what happens when you push a weird and wonderful writer who challenges her readers. People actually buy her! She becomes mainstream because her work is out there, and is therefore commercially successful. We realize that someone will answer that British publishing has such a wider readership that they can afford to push weightier writers. We will answer them that we don’t care. Ahem.

One of us brings out Ali Smith’s story collection The Whole Story and Other Stories, which two of us swear is her best, and we see that it is dedicated to Kate Atkinson, so the connection is definitely there. We think a bit about Muriel Spark, and remember that Smith wrote the forward to The Comforters, which we read last year. We spend a lot of time talking about the ambiguous parts of the novel that each of us had interpreted differently. None of us are entirely sure what to make of the final section. We all like this book much better than any of us did going in, and we’re so happy we read it, that we made the trek in this heat. We just decide not to discuss how much cake has been eaten between the three of us, but we’re not sorry about the quantity at all.

July 1, 2011

The Vicious Circle Reads: Everytime We Say Goodbye by Jamie Zeppa

There were just four of us at the most recent meeting of The Vicious Circle, held in splendid east-end backyard digs last Wednesday. And one of us had absolutely nothing good to say about Jamie Zeppa’s Every Time We Say Goodbye, and nothing bad to say about it either because she couldn’t be bothered, it wasn’t even worth the effort to hate. The book had done nothing for the fiction ennui she’d been suffering from of late, and so she would not contribute much to our conversation. However, two of us were partial to the book’s beginning, the story of Grace who has a child out of wedlock and must put her life together enough to demonstrate that she’s capable of taking care of him. They liked her free spirit. And then the fourth of us confessed that she did not like Grace’s story at all, that she’d read the first part of novel afraid she’d dislike the novel entire. Because Grace’s “free spirit” was just a way to avoid investing her with actual, complicating human qualities so that she could function as a device for the plot the author had envisioned. (We had this with last month’s book too– these ethereal female characters so that authors don’t even have to bother making them human.)

We were all in agreement that the ending of the book should have been chopped right off– the cult storyline. That the tidy ending was too much, and that the precocious young protagonist was annoying. That perhaps 2/3 of the novel could have been chopped off altogether (editor, where art thou?) and what we would have ended up with is the story of the young boy, the charismatic misfit who learns he’s adopted and acts out, but perhaps he always would have. And nature vs. nurture questions that fascinate, and perhaps the only genuinely complicated character in the book, Dean Turner who’s portrayal as a 14 year old boy about to fall off the rails rang so true. (The fourth of our group kept her mouth shut). This part of the novel demonstrating that Jamie Zeppa can really write.

This is a first novel, but unlike others we’ve read, it’s not Zeppa’s first book, and she’s got years of writing experience and life experience behind her, and this shows in the best part of the book. The structure of the novel itself was faulty, but the parts that were sound are indicative of a writer whose next book could be better, of a writer who’s a member of the “one to watch” club.

And then we started in on the ribaldry again, broke out the pie, and sat there talking and talking until we were talking in the dark, and it was finally time to go home…

June 1, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads: Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

All forecasts called for things to get really vicious last night as the Vicious Circle assembled to read a book that nobody seemed crazy about. The book was Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal, which we were prepared to go a little bit easy on, considering it was a first novel, but still, the book was hard to take in places. Viciousness did not ensue, however, mostly because the book failed to find a fervent defender for the rest of us to rail against.

It was thought that this was the kind of the book a character in the book might have written (and these were the kind of characters who like to sit in cafes and talk about the art they’re not making). We thought that this book’s author was robbed by her copy-editors, who did an atrocious job (and don’t even get us started on the semi-colons). And also by editors who would have picked up indescrepencies such as how Eli knew about what Lilia did when her hair got too long, except they weren’t together long enough for her hair to have got too long more than once. Or there wouldn’t be a ship in Montreal harbour in the dead of winter.

Montreal didn’t seem realized to us here. Two of us thought that Elise Moser’s novel As I Have Loved and Hidden It was a much better realized version of this novel. One of us though that the author was trying to cast the same spell that Claudia Dey cast in Stunt (with tightrope walkers and all) but she failed to. We failed to engage with the characters. And though Mandel did a good job in places of creating suspense, the big reveal was a bit anti-climatic. We didn’t get a sense that these were characters who lived in the world (which might have been okay if the spell had worked, but it didn’t). We thought that the idea of Montreal as a city unpenetrable to French non-speakers wasn’t realistic, we wondered about Eli taking travel advice from a woman who hadn’t lived in Montreal since she was 9, we didn’t buy the idea of Montreal as a sinking garrison, as a place where a dead language lives. It also made no sense that Eli only spoke English, because most PhD programs have a second-language requirement (and surely an aptitude for languages is an aptitude for languages, whether dead or alive). These were the practical considerations that kept bogging us down– like who was paying Christopher to drive around America for years and years? Or why was Michaela so consumed by her father’s accident when she’d lost him so many years before it.

In lieu of viciousness, we took up eating cheese, and then conversation drifted away and never managed to come back. Which was okay. It was the end of a hot summer day, and the sun was down, the air was cool. It seems every home we gather in is a particularly lovely, comfortable one, though we’re not sure if this is just a coincidence, or we make it that way. Nevertheless. We ate cupcakes, and strawberry pie, and we kept on drinking wine, and we kept having to lower our voices because the windows were open and we didn’t want to horrify the neighbours.

April 27, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads: Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe

We were concerned that Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah might have broken The Vicious Circle Book Club. We speculated at links between the book’s difficulty, our historically low turn-out, and that the majority of us present hadn’t managed to get to the end. “I made the mistake,” said one of us, “of judging the book by its page count.” 216 pages had seemed like a breeze to those of us who read as easily as we walk, until we tried to actually read them. Things Fall Apart this book was not: the text was dense, full of rambling parables, conversations in which speakers were not located, narration that shifted between characters’ points of view and omniscience, the plot (and there really was one) was obfuscated, and those of us who’d finished the book were still confused.

But of course Chinua Achebe is not in the habit of writing bad books, and we reasoned that there was method in his method. How do we approach it? Were we failing to give the novel credit for its roots in an oral tradition? Were we slighting the novel for failing to impose the narrative shape dictated by the Western canon? Also, we reasoned, this was probably just not a great book club book– not to be read once breezily and discussed over wine (and here we discover a book club’s limitation, we imagine). What were we ever do with it?

Things we discussed: that page 40 really was the gateway to the book’s readability; that Elewa’s miraculous sexual position was implausible (or perhaps Elewa was particularly spry); that we liked the characters a lot; we cleared up what had happened between Beatrice and Sam at the party; that we liked the scene at the public execution; and we really liked Beatrice’s character. We spoiled the ending too. And suspected that the book’s haphazard structure is a statement about the perilous nature of any political structure in a dictatorship. We talked  how this book corresponds with current events in North Africa and the Middle East. We compared Sam to Hosni Mubarak. The ideas of dictatorships– one characters statement that if Kangan had at least been a real dictatorship, then things actually might have got done. And the inevitability of what befalls the main characters in the end– that they were tragic heroes. But then the obfuscated plot plays out strangely against that inevitability of fate. In another form, this book could have been a John LaCarre novel.

Then we talked about how the book outwardly suggested that race was no longer an issue in the nation of Kangan, but inwardly was saying otherwise– that the post-colonial government had merely appropriated colonial structures. That the powerful characters were all powerful due to their colonial ties and Western education. That the book is also about class, religion, and sex. About the way that women are left to pick up the pieces in the end, Ikem’s revelation about women being the last resort, but how the last resort is always too late. (And his ideas about an embracing of contradiction being the beginning of true strength). And inevitability again– women are left to pick up the pieces here, but there are signs of change. The new baby who is named not by the patriarch, and who is given a boy’s name even though she is a girl. And then how everybody celebrates by singing the maid’s religious song, which none of us got our heads around, but alas.

So we were relieved to discover that The Vicious Circle wasn’t broken after all, and that there is a lot a book club can do with a book like this. That all of us came away with a deeper understanding of the novel due to insights from other readers, with this puzzle of a book closer to being solved. And then we drank more wine, and ate more lasagna, and some of us today are sorry that we didn’t help ourselves to a second slice of chocolate cake.

March 23, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads: Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod

This will be the most boring Vicious Circle recap ever– we loved this book. General comments included, “This is the best book we’ve ever read” and “This is the only book we’ve ever read that managed to write about stable relationships.” We marvelled that Alexander MacLeod has not had to exploit the unhinged in order to create compelling short stories, that his stories are about ordinary lives and the points at which those lives shifted and changed, and thereby the stories manage to tell the story of those whole lives before and after based on one single moment in time.

Perhaps we were all blissed out by the onset of Spring (which turned out to be a lie, by the way). It was a sunny Saturday morning in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, and the Toronto skyline was our dramatic backdrop. There was so much food, it was unfathomable (yet delicious) and the coffee was a-brewing. We had two babies in attendance. Just to set the scene.

Oh, there was some criticism, but we mostly forgot what it was. Really, this was the meeting at which The Vicious Circle totally forgot to be vicious.

“Miracle Mile”, it was noted by two of us, was the one story that didn’t seem to get better with rereading. (Three of us were re-reading the whole collection, and we liked it even more than the first time around). Its intensity was noted, which should have made the story’s ending much less surprising than it was. We loved “Wonder About the Parents”, in particular the part where the father is sent back into the truck stop men’s room to retrieve a baby outfit from the garbage can where it had been discarded covered with diarrhea. We did wonder about truck stop men’s rooms with change tables, but this one scenario was so absolutely irrational but made perfect sense– these are the things we do for the people we love. The helplessness of the parents, MacLeod’s depiction of the evolution of their love.

We also loved “Light Lifting”. Many of us noted that we’ve known people just like the characters in this story. We marvelled at how much a writer would have to know about the world in order to write a story like this, the details, like the effects of sunscreen on brick carrying hands. One of us was optimistic about the ending, and hoped terribly that things turned out one way rather than another. This story noted as a perfect example of MacLeod knowing when to step back and let the story happen, to be a voyeur. The steadiness of the voice that tells it– we note that the pivotal moment in this story is never the narrator taking that fateful first drink, which would have been a very easy plot twist.

“Adult Beginner 1” blew minds, and we talked a lot about endings. One of us is from Windsor, and noted how this story resonated as a result of that. Then we noted how it resonated as much for those of us who’ve never seen that Holiday Inn down by the waterfront. One of us who’d been stuck in an undertow once couldn’t quite believe how the story (the whole book?) had got right into her mind. We like how MacLeod writes male and female voices so perfectly. How the whole novel seems to be a mix of gender, a balance (which is rare). That some of us were nervous about reading it because it was perceived as a “male” book and were then surprised by the balance. That this is a book with something for everyone (and the one of us who’d given the book to everyone she knew for Christmas but had only just read it expressed relief that she’d ended up liking the book, and now knew she’d selected the right present.)

“The Loop” was also a very Windsor story. Also, like “Good Kids” after it, a story about nostalgia. How “The Loop” managed to be so very unsentimental, when it would have been so easy. How MacLeod wrote the creepy guy so convincingly. We remarked upon the line in “Good Kids” about the house that was a Bermuda Triangle for hopeful people. About how he writes about families of boys, how they beat the crap out of each other. How he’d nailed it so perfectly, those bands of brothers. Reggie was a bit Owen Meany, we thought.

And then “The Number Three”, which took the car accident and made it far more than a stock plot device. How terribly bad this story could have been, but it wasn’t. Some of us found the auto industry details a bit boring, others thought it was illuminating, the story behind every day objects that we never think about. The story was so sad, but the sadness was something true and more than itself. How this story (like all of them) exists on so many levels. How it’s about one thing, but so many other things at the same time.

We loved this book. We felt a bit sorry for every other book we’ve read lately, which seemed unfairly compared to this one. To ask another book to be Light Lifting was sort of a tall order, but still. One of us reflected that maybe she wasn’t sick of short stories after all. That instead she was “I’m tired of reading uneven collections where the stories are too dependent on quirks for them to be plausible and/or plot-worthy.” (Read her full review here.) There was so much more to MacLeod’s stories, so much more that even though we didn’t hate these stories, we still had a whole lot to talk about regarding them. Which is a rare thing. When consensus still makes for good conversation, but then, with the Vicious Circle conversation makes a point of being good.