November 23, 2007

The Frost Fair

“No, what is remarkable about the Frost Fair is that it does not operate by the same rules that govern life on land. It is a phenomenon and is therefore free of the laws and practices of history. The poor and rich alike inhabit the same space, participate in the same sports and diversions, are, for a very brief moment in time, equal citizens of a new and magical world.” Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames

November 22, 2007

Spouts

Now reading Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost, which comes with music and intrigue and has me caught in its grip. More to come on that, and then I’m reading The Great Man by Kate Christensen. Before I start off on my non-fiction binge; I’ve got planned Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong, Villa Air Bel by Rosemary Sullivan, The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg, and finally Guns Germs and Steel because it’s about bleeding time.

And just as I’m on about Kate Christensen, Maud Newton gives us her recipe for brussels sprouts. Naturally. (Did you know the most mortifying incident of my whole life involved brussels sprouts? And a dog. Naturally). She will be posting more recipes by writers to come. How exciting. They were celebrating the Gardiner Expressway in the paper this weekend. How refreshing, and as you might know, I concur. Guardian blogger rereading Bookers past. Costa Prize first novel shortlist includes Gifted (which I’ve read) and The Golden Age (still ahead).

November 20, 2007

Because you've brought it up, on timelessness

So last week Russell Smith responded to Ken McGoogan’s essay “Tilting at the Windmills for Literary Non-fiction” and he did so much more strongly than I did. (I can’t find Smith’s column on-line, but I very conveniently have it here in paper form, headlined “In defence of the novel, and the test of time”). Oh Russell Smith, who came of novelistic age with the marvelous Muriella Pent. Russell Smith who is a walking defence of the novel.

Smith underlines the illogic of McGoogan’s thesis: that he says fiction shouldn’t be promoted because not enough people read it. Says Smith, “He seemed to be contradicting himself: If [non-fiction is] the most popular, then it’s the most popular. What’s his problem?” He questions McGoogan’s assertion that non-fiction better stands the test of time, and doubts whether Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition is truly a book people will “still” be arguing about in one hundred years. “Say, Ken, you wouldn’t be thinking of the furiously held opinions among Arctic historians, would you?”

The lesson, says Smith (invoking tea!), “is partly that we all live in our own little teapots”. But then Ken McGoogan has responded from his. Oh, Ken, who should have quit whilst he was ahead. His stompy reply doesn’t read so well: “[Smith] writes that I think novels are stupid, when I have had three published!!!” (Okay, exclamation marks mine). “Margaret Atwood wrote the intro to Frozen in Time!!!” And finally, without any modification, “As to literary longevity, Mr. Smith writes: ‘It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?’/ A fairer question might be: Ken McGoogan or Russell Smith? On that one, I’ll take my chances.” Oh, he better hope his name appreciates…

Literary longevity is about as easy to predict as the weather. Read Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and among the variety of ways you will be enlightened, you will learn how threatened was Woolf by near-contemporaries “The Edwardians”: Mr’s Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. That their work and reputations so seemed to overpower her own within her lifetime. How astounding, Virginia Woolf– she of the song, the movie, the collections, the cult. That she wasn’t always in fashion? Nobody writes songs about Galsworthy after all.

The point being that nobody knows how it goes, and the canon is all about fashion. But also to show what happens to non-fiction, as opposed to fiction. I am sure that today Mrs. Dalloway reads more similarly to how it did 80 years ago than “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” does, and this, my friends, is timelessness. Not that I believe timelessness determines value, but with the subject brought up already, I will say that fiction fits the bill in a way that non-fic never will. (And I am speaking in very general terms).

The context of a novel is fixed, while that of non-fiction is much more in flux. For example, the best book I ever saw was Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance by Rose, 1958. Which is not to say that non-fiction loses its value over time; no, I would say that value is added, for all it tells us about the past, and in particular about what we thought of the past in the past. But in this process, the text becomes more object than book– a relic even. Moreover we tend to judge it based on how much it got wrong, which is usually most things. And this isn’t timelessness, but rather time magnified.

Teapots indeed. Now, to bed.

November 14, 2007

Stuck in traffic

I am now reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is quality from cover to so-far, and I am so pleased to be a part of it. Another fabulous feature they’ve got is “Who’s Reading What” at their website, where contributors recommend books worth reading. My own suggestion is more than a bit embarrassing though, as I chose a little-known novel called Late Nights on Air. You’ve probably never heard of it– a very underground sort of book for those of us in the know. Note please: I made my suggestion ages ago, before anyone had ever heard of a Giller.

In other bits, Steven W. Beattie on blurring the lines between content and advertising. (I’ve found the whole world a bit unnerving since I read it.) Heather Mallick on Jan Wong’s new book Beijng Confidential, which I can’t wait to read now. RR is fascinatingly preoccupied by readers inside books. Ira Levin, whose Rosemary’s Baby my household was obsessed with earlier this year, has died at 78. And on the LRB: “a junk-free journal”. May I say also that the December issue of The Walrus is excellent, and if you buy it you won’t be sorry.

November 13, 2007

Thinking about Elizabeth Hay

I’ve been thinking a lot about Elizabeth Hay since Tuesday. How her novel came under such scrutiny in the days leading up to the prize. But first, two remarkable things about Hay. Did you remember that I quoted her here ages ago? Before I’d even heard of her, I picked her line “catching a ride on the coattails of literature” from her piece in Writing Life. I read the piece again tonight, and how it resonates. How I love her work, and can’t wait to get all caught up with it. Further, I love how Hay phrased an answer to one of her 12 or 2o Questions: “In my late twenties and early thirties, as the feminist I remain…” How perfect, the resoluteness of her position, and yet its mutability (which, of course, is only natural).

And then Late Nights on Air, which you might recall I read under a spell. I sang its praises loud and clear and proclaimed “a literary achievement” which I still believe, though I would concede the novel is imperfect. “Masterful” might be hyperbole, though what Hay did to convince me otherwise certainly was mastery of a sort. Do they give prizes for writers who are hypnotic?

Criticism towards Late Nights on Air tends to reference the relentless foreshadowing, which of course I noticed, but I bought it. Looking back upon the novel I see that the foreshadowing is an inevitable result of its nostalgic bent. Of course one reconstructing the past would underline all the signs they’ve missed, and this would also read strangely for a reader embarking upon the journey for the first time. Here, voice is much more significant than plot.

The “anti-climax” then? What culminates from all those signs of doom? About voice once again, I think. For what happens ultimately might be a let-down stylistically, but imagine having been there. Would that incident not resonate back and forth in time? Forever? Which is exactly what the voice is telling us it does.

And finally the ending, and its petering. (And how odd, by the way, is peter as a verb?) Though I do wonder if the novel could have been stronger had Hay left her characters alone back in time rather than bringing all of them up to date. But still, how could the novel not slow down as it does? How could anything that came after ever measure up to what went before? In the very first chapter it is stated that life was never more vivid than then. Surely Hay shows this?

There, I’ve finished my defending. Now I just can’t wait to read the novel once again.

November 13, 2007

Striptease

Lucky Jim, apart from being all it’s cracked up to be, has one scene containing an essential element missing from every other sex scene ever written: “Dixon twitched off his, then her, spectacles and put them down somewhere. He kissed her again, harder…” Oh, for lust in academia!

November 7, 2007

Non-fiction commitment

I’ve decided to push myself to read more non-fiction. Not just because of what Ken McGoogan said (of course not, I am just as disagreeable as he is), but more because of Jared Diamond. Because my diet of constant fiction is like eating solely chocolate when there is ice cream in the world. When I say that Guns Germs and Steel has grown a layer of dust on my bedside, I wish I was employing a figure of speech. Let the facts stand: I am an atrocious housekeeper, and terribly neglectful of all things non-fic. As a purported book lover, I shouldn’t have the nerve to fall asleep at night.

Carol Shields read Guns Germs and Steel. I learned this from the essay her daughter Anne Giardini wrote about her in The Arts of a Writing Life. To me it reads quite obviously from her fiction that Carol Shields must have appreciated non-fiction, for though her imagination was potent enough to dream her into the head of characters so disparate as Larry Weller and Daisy Goodwill Flett, something more would have been required to fill in the worlds around them. And to read Shields is to be immersed in these worlds, their details: mazes, mermaids, quilts and stones, and late night radio. See the quote below, on characters and jobs– that gap between what the novelist knows and what characters do, I think, is best bridged by reading. And gaining an understanding of how the world works, of course, is important not only for writers.

November 7, 2007

Work to do

“I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work… I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local cafe, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a brilliant hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner– what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.”– Carol Shields, Unless

November 6, 2007

Narratives and Polemics

I begin by noting that I like the redesign of the Saturday Globe & Mail. Everything I like best is still there, and then there are additional surprises. I like that Books now starts on its front page; somehow the section reminds me just an ickle bit more of Guardian Review (though of course it’s still nowhere as good). The “Endpapers” essay is interesting too: this week’s was “Tilting at the windmills for literary non-fiction” by writer Ken McGoogan. An engaging piece, as he offended me terribly, but then he won me over by the end.

My offense stemmed from McGoogan’s initial dismissal of fiction, and stemmed for two reasons. One: that fiction is my religion (I am not being facetious) and so I’m bound to get a bit defensive. In my whole life I’ve never found anything closer to magic than fiction, and I’m sorry but non-fiction has never done that trick. I truly believe that slowly surely works of fiction can change the world, and in very different ways than either of these books did.

Second, I was troubled by McGoogan’s assertion that fiction readings were dull, that he “vastly prefer[s] an on-stage conversation or interview, or better still a no-holds barred panel discussion.” He gives the example of Edmonton’s Litfest at which “Audience members challenged speakers and presented arguments. By crikey, they had come to participate”. Yes, but. I personally feel that a book is best enjoyed in one’s own company, but what is wonderful about a public reading is the opportunity to listen. I don’t get that very often myself. No challenges, arguments, thinking of clever questions and retorts, but just listening: passivity is not always a bad thing and many more people should practice it. The world is not always ours to be attacked, or critiqued, but some meet it this way perpetually. With fiction, not so much, and I think this is only positive.

I will have more to say this week on appreciating non-fiction (in regards to Carol Shields), but for now I am not sure I agree with McGoogan that the genre is always the underdog. Indeed non-fiction receives less attention, but aren’t sales doing just fine? Aren’t non-fiction writers sought after by publishers, or at least much more so than fictioneers? Does good non-fiction really need the promotion McGoogan is suggesting it lacks? This I do not know for sure.

What I do know is that McGoogan’s synthesis is perfectly wonderful, as he calls for his revolution. “First step: We divide fact-based literature into two broad categories– narrative non-fiction and polemical non-fiction…. Second step: We abandon non-fiction… We cease to define countless literary works by what they are not”. He sees the necessity for these genres to stand up together with fiction, for each to complement one another. No longer the dichotomy : “Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three.” How positively healthy that sounds, how refreshing. I love that idea, and how fortunate that I read far enough past the disagreeableness to get to it: a patience I learned, perhaps, from my life in fiction?

November 6, 2007

Expansion

They call it a “booktique” but I’m not frightened (yet); that Type Books is opening up a second location can only be seen as a good thing.