June 17, 2008

A False Inheritance

I was glad to read “Looking Backward: The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize”, whose link-to lit-blogs had been spitting out wildly about two weeks ago. It’s an essay, I think, that is ill-represented by sensational snip-snippy pull-quotes which read as idle bitching. “I don’t see where’s there’s any room for debating the fact that M.G. Vassanji can’t write,” is one example, and in fact even when this quote isn’t standing alone, I’m not sure Good’s examples substantiate it. Whenever a critic tries to pinpoint badness by tossing out random paragraph, I am rarely convinced. I don’t know much about aesthetics (“quite obviously,” you might be saying), but they sometimes seem as arbitrary as taste.

Like everything in Canadian Notes and Queries, however, the article broadened my perspective. My perspective going into it being this: I don’t like books being slagged off, particularly for their popularity (as what exactly are we masses supposed to be reading? and if we were reading something different, you wouldn’t get to feel so smug). I also thought that Late Nights on Air was magical, the best book I read last year (and I read a lot of books last year). I didn’t read Effigy or The Assassin’s Song from the Giller list, because I knew I wouldn’t like either of them, and I don’t understand why readers who probably had the same instincts went ahead and read them anyway. Prize lists aren’t required reading. I couldn’t think of a more boring kind of martyrdom.

I am also bothered by the Can-Lit criticism that takes down books for being either exactly what they are, or what they aren’t. Particularly when this criticism takes such a limited view of Canadian Literature in order to prove itself, for example the complaint that Can-Lit doesn’t do urban, when 16 out of the 20 Canadian novels I’ve read this year take place in cities and towns. I realize I’m just a small sample, but perhaps it proves that Can-Lit isn’t just any one thing, which I think is sort of wonderful. I have also noticed that this brutal criticism is a kind of brutish criticism, and that aesthetic arguments are turned up to render artless stories women tell.

Finally, I was reading this article at the same time I was reading Sharon Butala’s story collection Fever, which is all the things Can-Lit is supposed to have outgrown– about farmers and farms, about the prairies, so backwards-looking that history is perpetually present or on the verge of such a thing. It’s an amazing collection, which was even more apparent as I read it a second time, and I didn’t see where there was any room for debating that fact. That Sharon Butala is an incredible writer, that she writes about the place where she lives, and where lots of people live, and that our “inherited tropes” are still our stories, because so much never changes and it’s never going to change, regardless of whether we’re deconstructing our fiction or not. That we write about our geography because it’s still important, and history isn’t irrelevant yet, and I don’t think it’s even finished.

I swallowed my petty defensiveness, however, enough to properly come to understood Alex Good’s point of view here– the writers who get praised without even trying, and I get it. I was baffled by Divisidero, and I gave it much more credit than I might have if it had been first time novel (I’ll be rereading it this summer, and look forward to finding out if I see it any clearer). That the dominance of the big presses doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does it represent the quality Can-Lit that is available (and I see that now, particularly as I’ve read such great books by small presses this year). The limitations of the judges also– their backgrounds, their own connections. That perhaps the Gillers don’t reward the very best of Can-Lit, but I wonder if the complaint isn’t rather than choices are too mainstream. But I don’t know if the Gillers were ever supposed to be cutting edge. Also my favourite book from last year won, but then maybe that’s just me (though it’s not. An awful lot of people loved Late Nights on Air…)

Good’s most salient point, however– what he calls “the Giller’s most pernicious effect” is that that “the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian Literature should be.” And I see that now, that the problem isn’t this shortlist, but rather a lack of authenticity that is contagious. That we set out to write a Canadian fiction, and so we stick in the prairie, the combine harvester, crop failure and a dissatisfied wife. So that our fiction is put-on rather than organic, that we rely on the same tropes, those “inherited tropes” but the problem is writers who haven’t even inherited them. It would be different if they had inherited them– Sharon Butala has, and her fiction rings true and timeless, it does– but these writers are just trying them on for size. Which is different, and fake and false and boring. Writers not listening to their own voices, telling their own stories, but rather writing within such fixed parameters of what Good Literature is supposed to be. A problem perpetuated by the celebration of the same kinds of work time and time again.

It’s an important distinction, what is inherited and otherwise (though I realize it reads as arbitrary too), and upon it the argument swung round for me. I’m not sure Alex Good meant it to, or if he even meant the distinction at all, but the resulting synthesis seems infinitely sensible.

June 17, 2008

Moth Love

How strange are bookish connections, aren’t they? Of course, when I was reading Sharon Butala’s Fever last week, I could sense how it would relate to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which was coming up next. Similar themes of nature, landscape, agriculture, small towns, and the weather. I am two thirds through Prodigal Summer now, and on my knees to Kingsolver, who everybody else already knew was extraordinary, but it just took me awhile to find out. How wonderful to be reading this novel now, with the world around me so blooming, tonight out on my back deck with a cup of tea, and the trees all around, and the birdsong. I disappeared into my head, and into Kingsolver’s amazing imagination.

Anyway, the unexpected connection being the next book I’ve got to read, which is The Sister by Poppy Adams. I’ve got an advanced reader’s copy which betrays nothing of its content, and so was I ever surprised to see that it’s UK title is The Behaviour of Moths. But I would have picked up that title without delay (precedent for good things with moths in their title includes The Peppered Moth and “The Death of the Moth”)! I discover now it’s about an entomologist– and I’ve been obsessed with entomology lit ever since I read “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf. Anyway, I am excited. Particularly as a third of Prodigal Summer is entitled “Moth Love”, and so I am very excited to see how else these books link up. And then after we celebrate the world some more with Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning.

June 12, 2008

Forgetting to bring a camera

I’ve got a train journey coming up this weekend, and I can’t decide what novels to take. Of course I’ve got a mess of magazines waiting– this week Walrus, London Review of Books, and Canadian Notes and Queries all arrived in the post. I’ll also soon have my mitts upon the New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue. But still, I feel a train trip takes a novel, and that periodicals won’t suffice. Mostly because no journey is complete without a novel irrevocably linked to it.

To and from California in Feb. was Arlington Park and Anagrams. To and from Montreal in Sept. was A Short History of Tractors… and Atonement. The last time I went to Ottawa, I read Sweetness in the Belly. Town House en route to England last June, and Bliss on the way back. Etc. etc. You see what I mean?

It would be like forgetting to bring a camera.

June 9, 2008

Expanding the possibilities

I was very interested to read “Women Behaving Boldly”, Sarah Liss’s argument that Sex and the City‘s female archetypes might have as their origin those of Alcott’s Little Women. I’ve not read Little Women for years and years, and I’m not sure that what I did read wasn’t abridged anyway, nevertheless, I’ll be (re?)reading the novel this summer. Liss writes, “Louisa May Alcott ’s proto-feminist tome has been a rite of passage for generations… [T]he March girls were complex and flawed, and they helped shape my understanding of the many facets of femininity.” As I reread, I’ll keep her ideas in mind.

A reader takes issue with Liss, however: “Have you actually read Little Women?” Claiming that Little Women didn’t celebrate feminist ideals, but rather quashed them. That Jo March was never accepted for her independent spirit, and those around her tried to tame her. Which might be right, I don’t remember now. But I suspect otherwise, for when I look back to impressions of Little Women, Jo’s spirit is all that I really remember. All attempts towards taming aside, Jo is Little Women (except for my impressions where Beth stands out, but they are only because she died).

I’d always associated Little Women with another female archetype-dependent television show, however, which was The Facts of Life. When I was seven and watched too much television, I came across an ad for Little Women in the back of another novel, read its plot synopsis, and figured these two quartets featuring girls named Jo must be intrinsically linked. It was only this chance to discover further adventures of a girl called Jo, I think, that led me to Little Women in the first place.

They were indeed a bit interchangeable, these Jo’s, except that one had sold her hair, and the other cultivated hers into an elaborate mullet. Both of them were everybody’s favourites though, and I can’t help but think I’m not the only one who found both of them integral to an understanding of self during these formative years. That there were alternatives to the kinds of girls we were supposed to be, expanding the possibilities to encompass most anything.

June 6, 2008

Boyish book binge (which is different from a bookish boy binge)

I’m on a short boyish book binge. Now reading Victory by Joseph Conrad, for reasons I’ve already mentioned. It’s really wonderful, actually, thoroughly enjoyable. My last memory of reading Conrad was loathing Lord Jim and never actually finishing it (which was actually part of the reason it took me so long to get around the Lucky Jim [no relation]), so I am pleasantly surprised. I suspect my dislike for Lord Jim, however, had something to do with nautical themes and me being twenty. I’ll be rereading Heart of Darkness this summer, and so I’m pleased that my Conrad context will be just a bit wider. Anyway, Victory. All day I’ve been struck by the line, “For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”

Next book on my list is Engleby by Sabastian Faulks, because Emily Perkins mentioned it in my interview with her. I am looking forward to that, and an author entirely new to me (and a buzzy one, because of James Bond).

So yes, two novels by men. As the last twenty-one novels I’ve read have been by women, this intervention was probably necessary. I do try to read men’s fiction once in a while, just to keep vaguely abreast of things. They’re not really for me, of course, but I do it for the sake of fairness. You’d be surprised how much good stuff there really is, actually, particularly once you move away from the more peculiar fixations (dogs, and cigars, and warfare). Some of it I can even identify with, though I’m not sure I’d call it literature exactly. There’s just never enough linoleum for it to qualify as that.

June 4, 2008

What I Need

I’m currently reading Carol Shields, whose work has always struck me as particularly subversive, and her letters and interviews make clear that this was consciously so. The anger in her final novel (and finest, in my opinion) Unless is palpable, directed, but appropriately complicated by the world we live in, and Shields’ understanding of it. But not loud, no, and not destructive. “I am trying to put forward my objection gently,” her narrator writes. “I’m not screaming as you may think. I’m not even whining, and certainly not stamping my lady-sized foot. Whispering is more like it.”

Of course, I don’t think that novels have to be subversive. I think that the miracle of novels is that they do such mulitudinous things, provide us with infinite horizons to discover, and I’m always a bowled over by those who claim to have these complex organisms wrapped up in a tiny box. Michael Bryson writes in The Danforth Review, “We need our inherited tropes to be broken down, deconstructed, challenged to the core, overturned,” but the thing is, I don’t. And it’s not because I’m stupid, or because I’m “middlebrow”, however much I might be both. It’s just that what I need is different.

I need work that takes our inherited tropes and builds upon them, expanding their infinite possibilities. I need construction. Challenge to the core, but bloody well make something of that challenge. Not necessarily to have things overturned, but at the very least surmounted. Make something. I need means to lead to ends, and I want to like where I have landed. I want to acknowledge where I started. I want power in whispers, so that I can really listen. No foot stomping, no sir.

May 29, 2008

Is it not too late to become a New Romantic?

My remarkable bookish encounters of late:

• With Once by Rebecca Rosenblum, upon seeing it now available for preorder at amazon.
• With Victory by Joseph Conrad, upon reading (in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers) that Joan Didion always rereads it before starting a new novel, and then says Shirley Hazzard, “[it] travels with me.” So I got it out of the library, and soon I shall read it soon.
• With Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which I just finished reading today, and isn’t it serendipitous that Baby Got Books has been interviewing said author? Part 1 today, and Part 2 follows tomorrow.
• With the unlikely trio of The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler by Ruth Warrick, 2001 Canadian Slavonic Papers, and Economics in a Canadian Setting by Mark Inman, piled and abandoned on a park bench outside Varsity Stadium.

May 27, 2008

Links for Today

Links for today: we’ve got Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife racking up great reviews in The Guardian and in The Toronto Star. (Read my review, and interview. An aside: very exciting, my copy of Perkins’ first book Not Her Real Name arrived in the post today.) Somewhat dissimilarly bookish, how to make a hardback into a handbag (via The Pop Triad) and I’m going to do it! Baby Got Books celebrates the death of the death of online criticism. Mrs. Dalloway Digested is funny. Hilary Mantel remembers 30 years of Virago. Lizzie Skurnick rereads The Girl with the Silver Eyes.

And one of the many highlights of my weekend was reading the actual printed Guardian Review, particularly Zadie Smith on Middlemarch. Citing Henry James’ 1873 review: “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Writes Smith, “It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”

May 10, 2008

Fiery First Fiction

Oooooh– Fiery First Fiction! A fantastic promotion by the Literary Press Group. Events are being held across the country, and I’m looking forward to attending Monday night’s in Toronto at Supermarket. FFF is promoting 14 first novels published by Canadian small presses. Buy one at participating independent bookstores and get a free durable book bag– I just got mine, and durable IS the word. I love it. Though I could only get one book today (I am trying to curb book buying habits to no more than one daily) so I selected Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña. And yes, I chose it by its cover, but I think I’m on to something good.

I was at the bookshop with my friend Bronwyn, which has always been one of my favourite experiences. She’d also brought her spare copy of Rebecca to pass along to me, so it’s been an evening of fine new acquisitions.

May 8, 2008

What I have been waiting for

Last night I got to attend the Kama Reading Series again, with superstar readers Lawrence Hill, Anand Mahadevan, Kelley Armstrong and Miriam Toews. It was such an impressive assemblage, though I must say the ladies stole the show. I hadn’t heard of Armstrong before, but she really took that whole “I write vampire fiction” thing and ran with it– she was fabulous. Truly, I don’t get enough vampire fiction. And then Miriam Toews– I’ve only ever read her incredible memoir Swing Low: A Life, which is one of very few books that have ever left me sobbing. So I knew she was a good writer, but I hadn’t yet been exposed to how funny this woman is. She was hysterical, deadpan, right-on, and I could have listened to her read for ages. I would like to pay her to sit in my house and entertain me. And now I absolutely have to read her fiction– what have I been waiting for?

This week I’ve been reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, and getting ready to tack a huge stack of periodicals that have arrived in the post. Also enjoyed rob mclennan’s essay “Rereading Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart at the Garneau Pub, Edmonton”.