April 1, 2007
Chick-Lit/Lit-Fic Showdown
In this post from a couple of weeks back, I took offence at this kind of attempt to blur the chick-lit/lit fic divide. By all means chick lit deserves to thrive, but the divide is important, and essential. All lit is not created alike, said I, and when the plots of two books from different sides of the tracks are so similar, here is a chance to pinpoint what distinguishes a work of chick-lit from one of literary fiction. And I suspected the difference was language primarily, so I read both books to be sure.
The literary book was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, and I’m going to call the other book MVM. You can find the book’s actual title by going back to my previous post, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to identify it and slag it off for being nothing more than what it purports to be– chick-lit. Because the author of MVM makes no attempt to blur the lit divide. She publishes under an exclusively chick-lit imprint after all, and the genre seems to have been good to her.
Upon first glance MVM does bear a resemblance to The Post-Birthday World. In the first book, character G finds herself inhabiting two realities as she is unable to make the choice between marrying her boyfriend in Arizona, and pursuing her career in New York. Somehow she gets both options (through a wish upon a star, I believe), and hilarity ensues. In PBW, at the choice of to kiss another man or not to kiss, Irina’s life splits in two and the reader follows each outcome in alternating chapters. As she is unaware of her dual realities, very little hilarity ensues, and as I wrote in my review post, what we have instead is an examination of intimacy, and the sombre reality that life is generally trying no matter which way you cut it.
I think it is unfair to compare MVM to PBW, but it wasn’t my idea. And yes, my hypothesis that language is the great divide between these two novels is partially true. Partially, because that divide is a veritable grand canyon, but nonetheless. Lionel Shriver’s book is a tad overwritten in places, and I did come away with a list of fourteen words I had to look up in the dictionary afterwards. Some of them were very good: post-prandial. Whereas in MVM the author does not rely so much upon words to emphasize ideas, but rather prefers to repeat phrases, in the manner of “He’s funny. He’s really really funny.” Or preface unbelievable ideas with “Hello?”, as in “The women make brunch while the men watch sports on TV. Hello, stereotype?” Which brings me to the question marks. Character G talks in permanent unspeak. Reading her first person narrative is sort of like eavesdropping upon the soliloquy of a rambling idiot.
There aren’t a lot of metaphors in this book, but here’s one: “I close my eyes, squeezing out the annoyance like that last drop of toothpaste”. G is able to dismiss the challenges of her new life in New York with a simple “Whatever”. She uses a similar ease to deal with the fact she is now inhabiting two alternate universes, consulting wikipedia to learn a bit about “quantum mechanics (whatever the hell that is)”. She learns that there are many theories of alternate universes and therefore her own strange reality might have some precedent. She says, “You can’t rule out something just because it can’t be proven, can you? There are like a million religions and none of them can be proven!”
The PBW is quite unsentimentally full of sex, description and analysis, while MVM tends to gloss over it. I will give you a sex scene verbatim: “Afterward we go to bed and I seduce him immediately. ‘That was fun,’ he says afterward.” Those two “afterwards” and an “immediately” in two sentences give you some sort of an idea of this books pacing, and the consideration allotted to its scenes. We have such devices as “As I sat waiting for my appointment, I thought about my entire life up till now just to get my reader up to speed without having to impart these details subtly”. We learn what G’s future mother-in-law thinks about her because the woman keeps expounding on G’s flaws when G is standing just around the corner. We know the mother-in-law has bad taste because she is partial to orange. We know that characters are surprised when their jaws drop.
For the first two third of this book, I hated it, and I very nearly abandoned it except I thought maybe it got better. It didn’t, really. I did like G’s “psycho roomate” however, who was very funny, but hardly a developed character and her tricks wore thin eventually. I also liked the plot twist as G’s maid-of-honour in one reality starts dating her ex-boyfriend in the other reality, and G’s resentment bubbles into both worlds. However she only deals with this by ignoring her maid-of-honour altogether, which doesn’t exactly make for compelling fiction. Oh, and the end? Hello, spoilers ahead! In the ends G learns that you can have it all and lives happily ever after. And (presumably) loses her best-friend/maid of honour.
This next paragraph would be diatribe on how truly crap is MVM, but I think I’ve made my point. PBW took me four days to read, and inspired me to think about the nature of choices, the possibility of destiny, different kinds of love and fulfillment, and what it means to share a life. I read MVM last evening and it made me depressed that such trite can pass for lit, chick or otherwise. As I said in my previous post, readers should demand better of themselves and their books.
April 1, 2007
Long live Skegness
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is another book I missed the point of as a teenager, and Jeanette Winterson’s celebration inspires me to read it again. Ian McEwan profiled in The Globe, and reviewed (favourably!) in The Guardian. Lionel Shriver is reviewed less favourably, and though I take the reviewer’s points about the troublesome language, I think she misses the nuances of the story. Further, this is a reviewer who disliked Shriver’s last book and seems to be unaware of the six preceding it. I don’t know if that is altogether fair. And though a subscription is required to read this article online, I did enjoy it in my print edition. How Britons don’t appreciate their “crap towns”, and a wee celebration of the British seaside. Long live Skegness.
April 1, 2007
Post-Birthday Republic
What a funny world books are, and what connections are made just by chance of choosing. I’m currently inhabiting a buzzy bliss coming off reading Carol Shields’ The Republic of Love which was just absolutely extraordinary. The buzzy bliss of actually reading it was intoxicating. This was one of the many books I first read as a teenager when I was not altogether thoughtful, and when I encounter them now I’m not quite sure what it was about books I enjoyed then, seeing as I missed the point of everything. Anyway, it was strange to read The Republic of Love on the back of The Post-Birthday World. It never occured to me how compatible they’d be, or how much Carol Shields and Lionel Shriver actually have in common. Think about it: both transplanted Americans, dealing with various labels of “women’s fiction”, and though Shields’ early career did come with some acclaim, both hit gold with their seventh novels. And The Post-Birthday World and The Republic of Love both consider those same quotidian details of intimacy and love. Women’s sexual lives feature prominently; neither author shies away from salty language. (I had forgotten how raunchy Carol Shields could get). Both writers embed their characters in careers and interests which inform the novels with a non-fictional dose of fact. The characters themselves are those “ordinary people” which Barbara Amiel figured in a 1977 review of Shields’ The Box Garden “will be the undoing of contemporary literature” (and thirty years later, I’d say undone looks pretty good). Lionel Shriver is often a difficult writer to know what to do with, but perhaps considering her in this light makes a great deal of sense.
March 28, 2007
The Republic of Spring
As a symptom of springtime, I’ve been oddly compulsive lately. I’m not sure if that’s the word I mean, but I saw a picture of a horse recently and now I’m determined to ride one this summer. I’ve never ridden (rode?) a horse in my life. A similar obsession has taken me over regarding Carol Shields. Now I’ve always loved Carol Shields’s work and she wrote the one book I could classify as a definitive favourite, and her short story collection Various Miracles is a masterpiece, I think. I could go on and on here. I intend to reread The Republic of Love soon. And I’m currently reading Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life, which is inspiring, interesting and wonderful. The quote below from Anne Giardini came from her essay (she is Shields’s daughter, and her beautiful piece is about sharing a love of reading with her mother). I think that as a woman who writes, and as a woman in general, there is so much to be learned from the life and work of Carol Shields. Like Laurie Colwin, I think, Shields was a writer who could capture joy.
Further signs of springtime, last night I could be found drinking too much wine on my front porch. We had to go in once the sun was gone because it was too cold then, but before that the world beyond the porch had been swarming with joggers, dog walkers, a skanky couple making out against a fence, neighbours, strangers, cats, cyclists, cars with the windows down, hipsters, nerds, babies and the elderly. It seems like everyone else was just as eager to get outside as we were.
My husband is on holidays this week, and we’re going out for a sushi lunch. Sugoi.
March 26, 2007
Straight back into the arms of a stranger
“Reading is usually thought of as a solitary act, although a reader in the act of reading is the opposite of self-absorbed. A reader journeys infinitely further from self than can be achieved in travelling across the globe or into space. A reader interrupted can be vague, disoriented; she has been returned abruptly, without benefit of decompression or debriefing, to one specific point in geography and time, from somewhere else altogehter. To admit to having been lost inside a book is not to resort to metaphor but to admit the turth. A reader reads blindly (even books that have been read before hold new directions and dimensions) and so must have confidence in the writer. Reading is like a game of trust in which one person falls straight back into the arms of a stranger whose job it is to catch the faller and hold her fast”. Anne Giardini, “Double Happiness”
March 25, 2007
Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label
I had book trauma this weekend. I don’t mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I’ve nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.
First, I’m now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain’t the tinternet grand?) I’ve not read Macaulay’s novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English “Catchwords and Claptrap” (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It’s simply lovely.
And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).
Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can’t think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it’s a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn’t get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we’ve renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn’t have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.
The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.
March 23, 2007
Full of the World
From The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly.
~His hard little hands hold a book– but never, ever upside down. Once he held a book upside down while reading and the warders made such fun of him that he retreated into his house in rage and didn’t go out to piss for hours. Now, by carefully examining the cover of the book and the first pages, he knows if the letters are right side up. On the threshold between his shack and the prison compound, the boy’s eyes maneuver over the page slowly, laboriously, like two ants carrying a piece of food many times their own size.
The candle gutters again on another draft of air, but the boy ignores it. He has a very important job to do now: reading. Letters make words and words tell stories. Books are full of silent stories. Chit Naing explained that to him too. It was the one thing he really understood, because the cage is full of storytellers, men talking all the time, telling their lives large and small about the time before the prison so they remember that world and the people Outside. That’s why prisoners and warders alike are hungry for books, these very ones, this wobbly altar of musty paperbacks. Without making a sound, they are full of the world.
The boy holds the book and believes it: I am reading I am reading~
March 23, 2007
Dreams
I implore you to read The Lizard Cage but you’d best not finish it right before bedtime, or your dreams will be strange. Mine certainly were. Otherwise, I have to cram some CanLit into my weekend as my TA office hours start next week and I’ll be marking the week after. I shall be reading Obasan and Elle. And now it’s totally spring, so we’ll spending this weekend throwing open the windows and roaming outdoors.
March 23, 2007
My non-response and my endorsement
I’m not going to respond to Orange Prize hoopla again, because I still feel the same way I felt last year and the year before. This year let me just say that I like anything that promotes good books, and as good books by women tend to be my favourite kinds, this list is usually the one I like best. The longlist is a brilliant selection of books to be read and three I’ve read already that wholly deserve to be included.
I’ve read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngochie Adichie, Alligator by Lisa Moore, and Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert. Each was extraordinary in its own way, I loved the first and third the best, and I am totally putting my bets on Adichie. If the right people her book, I think it could change the world.
March 20, 2007
Reality is Ralph
From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~
