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.
November 5, 2007
It's always tea-time
“‘And ever since that,’ the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, ‘he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve got no time to wash the things between whiles.’”
—Alice Adventures in Wonderland
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
November 2, 2007
A literary map more than a person
From The Globe & Mail on Helen Oyeyemi: ‘Two books into the sport of novel writing, Oyeyemi still doesn’t think of herself as a writer because “I don’t write every day and isn’t that what a real writer is supposed to do?” Instead, she “would just as soon be called a reader because that is something I do every day.” She laughed. “I’ve gradually built my identity around books. I’m almost a literary map more than a person.”‘
November 1, 2007
Books before me
My friend Bronwyn once wrote me in an email, “I haven’t read Mrs. Dalloway because then I will have read it and I won’t be able to look forward to reading it.” I understand entirely. Me, I get a frisson of sheer joy every time I remember that I’ve still got unread Carol Shields before me. How I hate that the list is so finite (and ever depleting) but I still haven’t read Larry’s Party, A Celibate Season or her short story collections (except Various Miracles which is one of the most perfect collections I’ve ever read). I’ve been avoiding it all on purpose– what will I ever do when I am through? Read them all again, I suppose, as my annual reread of Unless has never failed to hold new discoveries. But still. Books before me, books which I’m sure to love– is there any greater joy? And Larry’s Party starts tomorrow…
November 1, 2007
Favourite short stories
Top ten short stories in The Guardian. I believe I’ve got ten of my own, in no particular order, because I’ve never met a list I didn’t like.
1) “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
2) “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
3) “Scenes” by Carol Shields
4) “Astonishing the Blind” by Jack Hodgins
5) “Wants” by Grace Paley (and everything by Grace Paley)
6) “True Trash” by Margaret Atwood
7) “Down At the Dinghy” by JD Salinger
8) “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” by Carol Shields
9) “Moral Disorder” by Margaret Atwood
10) “Feathers” by Raymond Carver
October 25, 2007
Point Form
Anansi‘s 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.
A new Mitford book is out today– a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can’t wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca’s? On here for how “no one will ever write letters like this again”.
Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: “In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub.”
I used to enjoy Maud Newton’s Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she’d published an interview with Sara O’Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children’s books I’ve ever seen.
October 23, 2007
Cancel intellectualism
Now devouring The Abstinence Teacher by Joe Perrotta (who wrote Election). Oh, I wish I could take a holiday from the rest of my life, and crawl under a duvet with a flashlight to finish it.
I am very looking forward to reading Eleanor Wachtel’s new book Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields.
Today I was flattered to read that The London Review of Books is “an esteemed, small-circulation literary periodical read mainly by academics and bookish intellectuals.” See, we get it at our house. But then I suppose any bookish intellectualism may well be cancelled out by Spice Mania.
I thought Anne Enright’s piece was fair, thoughtful, and honest, by the way. And I am also looking forward to reading The Gathering.
