January 24, 2012

The sense of a story

Last summer, Los Angeles Times columnist Meaghan Daum wrote about Jaycee Dugard and her story spun as a redemption narrative: “I detect a need on the part of the media to wrap her story up in a bow, to assure the public that she’s OK, to reinforce the central narrative of just about everything we see on TV: Change is possible, maybe even easy; that adversity can be overcome; and that, as Dr. Phil likes to say, there are no victims, only volunteers.”  When I read Daum’s piece, I couldn’t help but think of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the expectations that have been foisted upon her since her injuries last January, perhaps perpetuated by the very fact that she’d survived being shot in the face in the first place.

The narrative of her “recovery” though has been so remarkable for its falseness, for its abject denial of the realities of brain injury. Which can’t be wholly blamed on the media, I realize, because Giffords and her publicity team appear to have been much in command of her image over the past year, though I suppose theirs has been a fair response to having to endure what Giffords has in the public eye. If I were Giffords, I would want my audio edited too, my photos carefully posed, my dignity preserved, but this doesn’t change the fact of what many of us can read between the lines: that her story is a tragedy without meaning, without redemption. The miracle is that she’s still here at all, but she’s being pressed to make it more than that.

“Most art is more a matter of finding a few meaningful moments in an utterly plotless flow,” writes Rick Salutin in a recent column “Why the storytelling model doesn’t work.” He notes how inapplicable is story as a model in most kinds of culture, let alone as a metaphor for “Life Itself”. That we usually demand more than mere story from our greatest art, and yet journalists are still required to fit their own work into tidy story-sized packages (and tied with Meaghan Daum’s bow), distorting how the rest of us perceive the world around us.

All of which is true, of course, which doesn’t sit terribly well with me who has lived life so far turned to the novel in place of religion. How to reconcile this? Would the novel telling of Gabrielle Giffords’ story diverge sharply from the shape of a Diane Sawyer interview? Though I keep thinking that maybe story isn’t what Salutin has a problem with per se, but rather that he has a narrow definition of what story is, of its mereness. That perhaps the problem remains, as ever, with the tidy ending, with satisfying that yearning for redemption, both of which are actually a failure to acknowledge the way that story really works, and Life Itself for that matter. (And the simplest solution to this problem is the short story, but you already knew that.)

Penelope Lively’s latest novel How It All Began makes the case for story as Life Itself. Story, her characters remark, is forward-motion, one thing after another, driven by the reader who wants to see what happens next. “Narrative. But a contrivance– a clever contrivance if successful.” Real life, her characters acknowledge, is different from “the unruly world in which we have to live. One’s unreliable progress.” And yet Lively is putting these words in the mouths of her fictional characters to make the point that the novel (and art in general) is actually capable of assuming the shape of reality. That in both life and in art, we must make our way by investing happenstance with meaning after the fact. That story is simultaneously more simple and  more complex than how we commonly perceive it, but that it’s only a useful tool when we understand that it’s a tool after all.

Update: I’m reading Skippy Dies, and just came across the passage, “…stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.” But as with the Lively book, here is a novel that creates that sense of messy chaos. I don’t think it’s time to give up on story just yet.

Update to update: It occurs to me that I’m 550 pages into Skippy Dies, and that if there is no redemption by the book’s end, I am going to be very dissatisfied. That 600 pages of messy chaos is a mindfuck, and I really do feel like there has to be some kind of pay-off. So perhaps I shouldn’t situate myself too far away from the Dr. Phil-loving masses.

January 14, 2012

Rambling among the trees

“The purpose of this bulletin is to make it easier for people to become personally acquainted with our trees. It is believed that the securing of the interest of the people of the province in trees will be an aid toward an understanding of the importance to us of our forests, and thus pave the way for support of forestry principles.” –J.H. White, Toronto 1925

Which is from the preface to The Forest Trees of Ontario (1957 edition) which I found last winter in a cardboard box on Major Street and took home even though it smells like a basement. I love this book, though I confess I don’t know a papaw from a sassafras.

“When I’m in Toronto, I always drop in at the Monkey’s Paw Bookstore. Stephen Fowler, the owner, has an incredible eye. (I recently came back with a book of transcribed seance sessions, a history of women in uniform, a treatise on baking, and a book of party games for adults.) He had this book called the Native Trees of Canada displayed on a table. I flipped through it, and I immediately knew I needed to buy it. It was a government volume: unmediated and strictly informational. It was filled with very sterile, black and white pictures of leaves, placed on a grid for scale. While looking at them, I had vivid memories of picking at maple seeds on my front lawn, of wet leaves stuck to my shoes, of fallen leaves blowing through the screen door. I knew I wanted to paint them. “– Leanne Shapton, “The Native Trees of Canada”, Paris Review Blog, November 2010

Leanne’s Shapton’s book of paintings is Native Trees of Canada and it’s beautiful. And if there are two of us out there appreciating these old government-issued volumes, there are bound to be more. Which gives me faith in the world, actually, in readers and books, and the trees whose lives were given so that we can read pages. (Even old ones that smell like basements.)

Also, I have also discovered that the maple in our backyard is a black maple.

(See also my Tree Books list at Canadian Bookshelf, whose compilation brought Shapton’s book to my attention in the first place.)

“It is hoped that the bulletin will combine instruction with recreation for all who care to go rambling among the trees.” –J.H. White

January 10, 2012

On literary debate, and Stephen Henighan's When Words Deny the World

Whatever I was expecting from Stephen Henighan’s essay collection When Words Deny the World, I had not considered inspiration. But at its best, Henighan’s book made me want to be a better writer, to dare to root my stories in Canadian places, to consider the loss inherent in Canadian authors’ fixation on situating their books in foreign lands (and I’ve been there. Living abroad can infect a writers’ brain. Henighan, with his Latin-American stories, has been there too). It didn’t make me want to take back the chesterfield (as Caroline Adderson dared to do in her novel The Sky Is Falling), because that would be unnatural– “chesterfield” has never been part of my vocabulary, and sometimes I think Henighan is dreaming of a Canadianness that has forever been elusive. But he has made me aware of the peculiarities of being a Canadian writer, as distinct from a British or American one, and what it means to our language and to our literature to be marginalized by two nations we share a common language with.

And I get it now, I do, that debate about Canadianness and the Giller from last Fall, which was so offensive to some, but just seemed foolish to me– who cared where a novel is situated, is what I thought. A story is a story. And I still believe it, what a story is, and I’ve no wish to denigrate the celebrated Canadian novel that takes place in 1930s’ Germany, but I now have a better understanding of the importance of having novels that take place in the here and now. (Perusing my list of books read, I see no shortage of “here”, but a deficiency of “now”. Though where do we draw the line with this? Where does “now” officially begin? And, as I stated in my review of Big Town: A Novel of Africville, the past can actually give a whole lot of insight into the present. Which is not a new idea, I realize, but this review was a great opportunity to make the connection explicitly clear.)

Henighan’s collection failed to resonate with me precisely where I knew it would, however: when he calls for debate, moans about lack of debate, prescribes debate, and tries to debate. Because I don’t like debate, I don’t do debate. Conflict of any kind upsets me, which could be an indication that I’m feeble-minded, but at the same time, I know that readiness to debate is hardly a virtue. I don’t know that debate is useful.

Because this is what debate does, see, it simplifies things. It gives opponents the comforting illusion that there are only two sides after all and, even more absurdly, that one of these sides is right. (I say this kind of thing and get called a relativist. One time in which I got called this quite a bit was around the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we all know how well that went.) Debate renders the world into miniature, it turns real-life issues, serious matters, into a game, a question of logistics. And there are people who get off on it. It’s like war is. These things happen not to any particular end, but because there are people for whom it’s a pastime.

Nobody listens when they’re debating, nobody learns. Instead of listening and learning, there is plotting from clever rebuttal to the next, and it’s a closed cycle. Nothing happens. The kind of people who care enough to engage in debate are people so entrenched in their own beliefs that they’ll never change their minds.

And beliefs is exactly what it is. I’ve never been so much a relativist as I’ve been lately, ever since I joined a book club of remarkably intelligent women who’ve never once managed to arrive at a consensus on what a good book was (except the time we read Light Lifting. I’ve actually only heard of one person ever who didn’t like Light Lifting, and anyway, she was an idiot). Every month we meet and I walk in there with an idea of why the book does or doesn’t work, and I come up with all kinds of theories, arguments and points to underline my assessment, and my co-members show up in much the same fashion, but we rarely agree. And though it pains me to say it (because I really really loved Megan Williams story collection Saving Rome), I’m never any more right than the rest of them are.

By this, I maintain that “good literature” is relative. No one has ever been able to define it for me otherwise. Every time a critic speaks on any side, no matter how clever his argument and how couched in theory it is (and theory is also a simplifier), the argument stripped down is always, “I want more of the kind of books I like to read/write. I want books that reflect my background, and my reality. And I want those books to be celebrated too.” Of course, I don’t wholly believe this myself. I have my own conception of what great literature is, but I’ll also accept that yours is slightly different, even if I think mine is superior. We all think that.

Debate with an awareness of relativity could possibly be useful. At least it is at my book club where we listen to and are challenged by one another. None of us are so assured of the absolute rightness of our respective positions, though I don’t imagine that anybody actually is ever. Unless they’re deluded. There’s got to be that element of doubt that keeps the mind open. But debate requires a certain posturing, that you pretend that doubt doesn’t exist. It requires you to be fired up by your own self-importance.

Debating becomes less about reality than skewing facts to fit the argument. Or about deliberately misreading books so they’ll seem to say the things you want them to say to suit your purposes. Then you propose that the reason Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma wasn’t a commercial success outside of Canada was because it took place in a Canadian city (and oh my, anyone who’s read that novel could tell you that’s not why). Or you decide that John Berger and Jakob Beer are remarkably similar names, which means something. So that you end up proclaiming that only Wayne Grady and David Adams Richards are writing novels that reflect the way we live today (or at least how we lived in the 1990s. Perhaps things were more Grady/Richards-like then, and I’ve just forgotten). So that you forget that you’ve forgotten to include women writers in your canon. And your definition of “debate” begins to include you railing against curly haired women who look good in photos, and misreading/simplifying the work of Carol Shields to fit into a box called “Conservative Family Values”, and calling people names like Wasp, conservative, and bourgeoisie, all to suit some grandiose theory whose concoction began with a publisher who didn’t like your book once. (Or apparently did like it, but…)

See how quickly civility dissolves? Debate is a negative feedback loop. This is petty. We do it because it’s easy, and it’s momentarily satisfying, but real life goes deeper than that. This kind of discourse denies the world’s complexity, and that of literature too.

The alternative? Write an essay like Henighan’s “A Language for the Americas,” which posits that Canadian writers should use Latin-American writers’ use of language as an example for how to build a language of their own, an essay which, in the process of its arguments, inspires readers to pick up the works discussed, and think of their own language differently. An essay that takes us somewhere. Or what about a project like the Salon de Refuses. Or when you dissect a flawed novel in a national newspaper, do so on its own terms, rather than using someone’s art as an opportunity to extend an argument you’ve been having with nobody in national newspapers’ review pages for decades. Or find a way to write about the novels that aren’t flawed (please!), to celebate the writers who are doing it right and should be setting an example for the rest of us.

Debating for debate’s sake is all fine and well, but it will take a deeper and more meaningful engagement with reading, writing and literature to make our literature better.

December 12, 2011

A Jolly Old Elf

…and of course I’m talking about Abe the Advent Book Elf, who is facilitating passionate recommendations of new books every single day over at the Advent Book Blog. Check out my recommendation for Maria Meindl’s Outside the Box, which was one of my favourite books of the year. And then grow your Christmas list even longer by checking out all the others, and perhaps you might even submit a recommendation of your own!

September 6, 2011

On the Giller Long-Long List

I wrote a post last winter called “Ephemeral, yet eternal” in which I celebrated the good-but-not-great book. I wrote: “That [such a book] didn’t win prizes is not to say that it’s not a worthy book, but that a worthy book didn’t win a prize is also not to say it was robbed. Prizes are not the sole determinate of worthiness. And I’ve been thinking of this lately, considering the number of books I read that are considered unrecognized because they’re not short or longlisted by Giller and the like. The notion of the “snub”, the entitlement behind that notion, as though everyone deserves to be a winner. As though prizes were handed out on an assembly line, when really sometimes it’s the books that seem to be produced that way, so can you really be surprised when yours isn’t a winner?”

This year, as part of their mandate of bringing the public closer to the judging process, the people at the Scotiabank Giller Prize published a list of all the books that were eligible for the award. I had a bad feeling about this immediately. “My book has been nominated for the Giller Prize!” was how the spin went on a few posts on my Twitter feed, and it made me squirm with embarrassment, because of course the books hadn’t been. Books were on that list because they’d been submitted by their publishers for consideration  they’d been published in Canada within the eligible time period for submission. (Thanks to AJ Somerset for his correction.) I’d read a few books on that list and some were terrible. Some others were the good-but-not-greats I’d been talking about earlier. One was a non-fiction book, and therefore not even eligible to be there in the first place, which goes to show how much screening had really gone into the submission process. (Some were wonderful books. A few of those have even made it to the longlist, which looks like a really interesting one.)

My problem with this is that there are 120-some writers who this morning were made to feel like they’d lost something. Now some of these writers might have felt this way anyway, but this time they were really set up to have done so. That they had their chances at the Giller Prize publicized, when some of them really never had that chance in the first place. To the others who did have the chance, I suppose, it’s just proved mainly a disappointing exercise, because I bet they didn’t get too many book sales out of the experience (except for those lucky writers whose names happened to start with A or B and showed up on the front of the website).

Awards-culture has its benefits, it does. I’ve discovered some wonderful books because of it, so many books have been sold on its coattails, and it’s a fantastic chance for unknown writers to take centre stage (Hello, much of the Giller shortlist from last year!). But the downside is that awards continue to be the standard by which success is gauged, even when those of us who’ve read widely know that, speaking critically, this is not really the case. Because a) terrible books win awards and b) really wonderful books don’t. This happens all the time.

And yet regardless, there is this assumption of entitlement. When a longlist is revealed, the first thing so many authors think is, “Why aren’t I up there?” An author who publishes a good-but-not-great book is made to feel like he has failed by not being nominated for prizes, even if that good book is a real harbinger of wonderful work to come. (And sometimes even when it isn’t.) Even if that good book has connected strongly with so many readers who are looking forward to see what he does next. (And sometimes even when it hasn’t.)

There aren’t enough prizes to go around. If there were, they would cease to be prizes. Very few books are truly extraordinary. And prizes are subjective, by the way. They matter, but they don’t matter. For sixteen writers, today is a wonderful day, but it really has no bearing on the status of any Canadian writer who is not among them on the Giller list.

PS: If I ruled the world (which would be a dictatorship, certainly), first books would be ineligible for book prizes…

August 30, 2011

Here be (no) dragons

One day, after ages of it being beloved, Harriet suddenly refused to let me read Sheree Fitch’s Sleeping Dragons All Around. At that point, she was unable to articulate why, but it was still significant as the first time a book had been outright rejected (as opposed to, say, abandoned out of boredom, which is different).

She also wouldn’t let us read her The Lady With the Alligator Purse— we’re still not sure why. But by the time she’d gone off two books as various as Neil Gaiman’s Instructions and Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, I’d started detecting a theme. And by this time, Harriet had the words to explain: “Too scary,” she told us. Apparently it’s a fire-breathing dragon thing.

But how did she discover that dragons were scary? I’d certainly gone out of my way never to mention such a thing. In fact, I’d never mentioned that there was such a thing as “scary” at all, because little people are so open to suggestion, and I’ve been working hard on cultivating fearlessness. I don’t really do “scary” anyway, except when it comes to sensible things like diving off cliffs and tightrope walking. The closest thing I’ve got to an irrational fear is an extreme unease around dogs (which is not so irrational, I’d argue, because they’re equipped with teeth that could chew your face off), but I promise you that around a dog, Harriet has never, ever seen me flinch.

So this dragons thing has brought me to the limits of my powers, my powers of “cultivation”, and I get it that this is only the beginning of a very long education. And I get it too that it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that oversized fire-breathing lizards are probably best left undistubed between covers. (Interestingly, Harriet’s dragon aversion doesn’t extend to dinosaurs. She loves dinosaurs–plush, fossilized, wooden, Edwina, you name it.)

The thing is actually, that I fucking hate books with dragons (some excellent picture books aside). It’s true. I always have– when I was growing up, I never read a single book with a dragon on the cover. Which wasn’t really difficult to accomplish, because there weren’t many books with dragons on the cover. (My YA self would have been horrified by the popularity of science-fiction/fantasy today. And my adult self remains mystified.) A dragon on the cover was a kind of book design shorthand for “boring book for nerds”, and though I was certainly a nerd, I was the type of nerd who preferred books about pretty girls dying of anorexia or getting cancer.

Fantasy books: here’s another place where I’ve come to the limits of my own powers. I just can’t get into them, though I’ve tried. And I think back and wonder if I’d been less dragon-phobic in my youth, maybe fantasy-appreciation would come easier to me. There are a lot of things I wish I’d spent most of my life being a lot more open minded about, hence the reason why I want to make Harriet’s literary horizons broad from the very start. I want her to read better than I did, but then she persists in having her own feelings about things. She persists in refusing to be malleable, in having fears and preferences and in being a person apart from me.

But also a person who is very much like me, which I’m not sure is more or less disconcerting.

August 18, 2011

Question about The Wings of the Dove

Coming up soon on my list of books to read is The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. I really love A Portrait of a Lady. Fairly recently, however, I reread What Maisie Knew and wished I hadn’t. Where does Wings… lie on a spectrum of these two books, in terms of difficulty and enjoyment? Should I give this one a miss, or is it worth tackling?

August 8, 2011

Every little bit of the story is true

I’m sure I’m not the only person who is watching the riots unfolding in London, and thinking about Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (but not the part about the pigeon). Also about the riots in Vancouver, and how books are the opposite of mob mentality. That these things are just as much about people being idiots (and how) as they are about a profound level of broadbased spiritual poverty and systemic discrimination– every little bit of the story is true. I think that it’s by reading fiction that I’ve learned to process events in the world with reactions that aren’t totally knee-jerk.

July 10, 2011

Tin Book

Because I’ve never stopped regretting not buying the book-shaped teapot I saw in England four years ago, there was not a moment of hesitation before I bought this book-shaped baking tin today. (I will admit, there have been moments of hesitation since. I have a feeling that collecting decorative baking tins is the beginning of a slippery slope to somewhere horrible, but alas, now it’s mine.) It’s a wide open recipe book, and the sides of the tin are the pages. I kind of absolutely love it, and it also means I can retire the baking tin upon which is printed a picture of Santa Claus looking like Satan.

I bought the tin at Madeleines, where we’d stopped in for our favourite watermelon sherbet en-route to the wading pool this afternoon. And after our successful wading pool sojourn, lovely Harriet (as usual) screamed the entire way home…

June 26, 2011

On reading and riots

Last week,  a young woman who’d been photographed taking part in the Stanley Cup riots posted an online apology in which she first claimed to take responsibility for her actions, and then indignantly outlined the reasons why blame cast her way was disproportionate: mob mentality, that she’d only committed theft and not arson, the theft was for souvenir purposes, she’d been drunk–nice try, works for rapists– and besides, the whole thing was completely out of character. (I think she may have since had some PR consulting, however. The indignant bits of the post have been removed, and she now reads as genuinely sorry.)

As I read the post last week though, I thought about how much this young woman still had to learn about atonement. That perhaps she was victim of a culture that fools us into thinking public apology trumps being good in the first place. I thought of her remarkable sense of entitlement, how her fierce impression of who she was did not seem at all changed by what she had done. And if she was right, I thought, that her actions that night had indeed been completely out of character, then that was only because she didn’t have any character.

Character, according to Joan Didion (in “On Self-Respect”): “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.”

I thought about the mob mentality which the girl claimed had swept her right up, and I sort of understood it. Though you’ve got to wonder about the kind of person who gets swept up in a mob in the first place. These are the kinds of people who think being alive is a spectator sport.

And I thought about how much I dislike the part of church services where a minister speaks, and the congregation responds in unison. How even fans at a baseball game singing the national anthem makes me cringe a bit, because in circumstances like this, we’re speaking automatically, not thinking about anything we are saying. It’s a different kind of mob mentality, and one that is benign, but then I start thinking about the Nuremburg Rally, like it’s all a slippery slope. On the rare occasions when I happen to be in a church, I don’t respond when called on. I listen instead. And the droning sound of everyone’s voices is always a little bit terrifying.

Naturally, I am being melodramatic, but I was also thinking about reading. About how reading can be a communal experience, how it’s an exchange between writer and reader, but mostly how the latter retains his individuality. The power of the reader to regard the text with a discerning eye, and to re-read so the text changes as he does. I’m thinking about how reading is the opposite of mob mentality, and that armed with critical skills to apply to the world, a reader is unlikely to be swept away by any such thing.

There are arguments against this, of course. Someone will always mention Mao’s Little Red Book. But I’m still thinking that to read well is to learn to reside inside one’s own head, and I think there’s such tremendous value in that.