May 27, 2013
Reading in the here and now.
I just finished rereading A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym, which I remember reading for the first time about 3.5 years ago in my room with the lighting so dim I could hardly see the words, and there was a little baby napping on my chest. Oh, is there anything worse than a little baby napping on your chest and then feeling a coughing spasm coming on? I remember that too. Of the many ways in which I’m in limbo at the moment, reading-wise is one. I have the new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel waiting on my shelf, but it’s huge and I can’t make such a commitment to anything at the moment while I’m waiting for baby to begin to arrive. After baby comes, I will crack open Where’d You Go Bernadette, but I’m saving it ’till then. I reread Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin last weekend when I was sick. “What to read next?” is not usually a question I spend much time grappling with, as the books usually seem to be lined up for me, but not here and not now. Which is kind of lovely, a luxury–the only bit of this waiting in which I’m really revelling. And all I really want to do is reread. I think I’m going to pick up a Margaret Drabble next–the follow-up to The Radiant Way (my first and best Drabble…) which is A Natural Curiosity–I read it once the summer I got married. (I keep plucking these books off the shelf and they’re covered with dust.)
You might recall that my computer died in June 2009, with nothing on it backed up, including my list of Books Read Since 2006. Which means that I soon after started a new list, which is basically “Books I’ve Read Since Harriet’s Birth”. I updated it this evening–503 books read in my child’s lifetime. Not counting the hundreds and hundreds of books I’ve read to her.
And speaking of Barbara Pym, whom I am really anxious to reread all summer long, a fun online reading project will be taking place in celebration of her centenary on Sunday. Barbara Pym Reading Week runs from June 1-8, with giveaways and a virtual tea party even. Ideally, I’ll be lost in newbornhood by that point, or even pulling off my ultimate celebratory stunt (giving birth on the big day), but I think I may be rereading Excellent Women at some point in solidarity.
I do so love Pym, whose essence was Englishness, who knew much about nuance, psychology, tea, womanhood, longing and romance. But who perhaps knew less about motherhood, if this passage from A Glass of Blessings is anything to go by…
“We were in her bed-sitting-room after supper, and I had been telling her about Sybil’s forthcoming marriage and what an upheaval it was going to make in our lives.
‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘marriage does do that, doens’t it?–and death too, of course.’
‘But not birth.”
‘No–people seem to come more quietly into the world…'”
Which is not exactly how I remember it. But maybe I remember it wrong?
May 16, 2013
On book blogging and criticism
All my best opportunities usually come my way a week or two before or after I give birth, and you can’t say no. So at the moment, I am working on a review assignment I’m quite excited about, and I’m not remotely bothered that Baby will probably still be a little while in coming, because I have to get this article finished anyway. I am also pleased because from my post-partum stupour, I’ll see my name in print, and I imagine this will read as an encouraging sign from a world beyond (or behind) that I still exist, or at least that my writing does, somewhere. Anyway, none of this is really the point, which instead is that I’m thinking how much more time I spend on the books I’m reading for work than the books I read for fun, and what I’m missing. For example, the first time I read through this slim volume, I found it baffling and wondered how one was supposed to review a book one didn’t understand. And then I read it again, and again, and now all of a sudden I’ve got this ARC full of notes, crazy connections, ideas, and I’m working toward a spectacular synthesis of this short story collection which, you won’t believe it, won’t just be a summary of each of the stories contained within–who knew this was possible?
Now, fair enough, sometimes this isn’t possible. Some books are really as insubstantial as they appear at first reading. A lot of short story collections really are not very remarkable as wholes, or even in parts. I’ve been fortunate to have been assigned a book by a writer whose talent is extraordinary, and it’s this extraordinary work that has drawn me so deeply into this book I just skimmed across first time through. But it makes me wonder what would happen if I approached every book I read this closely, if I were this actively engaged, if all my unpaid reviews were as interesting and thought-out as this paid one is going to be. A few things: there is not time enough in the world, and the pay for my blog reviews is just the smallest bit, um, paltry for such dedication, and my blog is meant to be a kind of leisure for me, not labour. Also, for the past 39 weeks (and maybe even longer) I’ve been so so tired, but yes, I’ve be thinking about how much gets missed. What if the key to any book’s brilliance is just to read it enough times, to study it deeply enough? Of course, I’ve read enough terrible books to know the fault isn’t always mine, that there are terrible books indeed, that taste counts for something, that there are books and then there is *this book* I’m reading and writing in right now and which makes me consider the infinite possibilities of literature.
May 1, 2013
When We Were Good by Suzanne Sutherland
We’ve come a long, long way, Suzanne Sutherland and I. We became familiar with one another after Harriet was born, and I used to the wander the neighbourhood in quiet desperation, baby strapped to my chest. Suzanne was bookseller supreme at my beloved local, one of the friendly faces that brightened my days back then. She liked to write, I knew, and I happened to be in the store the first time she received an acceptance to a literary magazine–I think it was Descant. She didn’t know I was editor of 49th Shelf when she started uploading amazing reading lists to the site, lists which confirmed that Suzanne Sutherland is undeniably cool (in addition to being lovely). Eventually, I became less desperate, Harriet got too big for her carrier, Suzanne got a book contract, and then moved on to a new job in editorial at Groundwood Books. I continue to adore the Book City staff, but I’ve never completely got over Suzanne leaving.
I’m overjoyed, however, to finally get my hands on her book, the YA novel When We Were Good. My experience of children’s literature is primarily through Harriet, and so I’m not so up on YA. But I do love Toronto books, so I was excited to read this one. More specifically, it’s a coming-of-age book about Toronto at the beginning of the new millennium, just when I was coming of age in the very same neighbourhoods, albeit quite belatedly (and truth be told, I’m still not done).
I am so pleased that my blurb appears on the book’s back cover (my name is on a book!!). It says, “Finally, the definitive Toronto novel for a new generation of readers. Suzanne Sutherland’s When We Were Good is an ode to the city, to music, and to falling in love.”
Check out Suzanne’s latest awesome list, Books That’ll Mess You Up Good.
April 29, 2013
On Passing Judgement
My favourite response to my “Stick Rage” post at Bunch Family was the person who wrote, “Save it for your personal blog, Kerry Clare. Clearly, you’re about judgement and singling people out, not bringing families together.” I laughed. “Clearly, you’re about judgement…” Man, I thought, you don’t even know. Because I am all about judgement. Really. This is why some people find me amusing to converse with, and I don’t know that I’m so singular in this characteristic because the people I like to converse with are pretty “judgy” as well. In the best way, of course, by which I mean that they are funny, don’t suffer fools gladly, have ideas and opinions and no qualms about expressing them.
This may be why I’ll never make it as a parenting blogger. “The world is so judgemental already. Let’s stop judging. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and actions.” This was a comment on a recent post at the blog Playground Confidential, and when I read it, I thought (and judged), “How positively uninteresting it must be to go about the world with that perspective.” I am troubled by this idea that women in particular must amass whilst cooing soft noises of mutual support and approval, because who actually does this? (Speaking of parenting blogs, I am also troubled by the sheer number of people who pass their lives by littering the the internet with sponsored blog posts about how much their domestic lives are assisted by Hamburger Helper, but that’s a judgement for another day.) Sure, everyone is indeed entitled to their opinions and actions (but no! even this isn’t true!) but therefore aren’t I perfectly entitled to find you an asshole, or an idiot? I’m even entitled to say as much. And you’re more than welcome to judge right back, but please don’t do so on the basis of me being judgemental because it’s an awfully terribly tiresome feedback loop and I don’t even care.
What bothers me the most about this whole “Let’s stop judging” approach is its dishonesty. It is a rare person who ever really pulls this off, and the rest of us are just whispering judgements to our friends behind your back. I’m not sure this is necessarily kinder than making pronouncements aloud. Now of course, to judge and to be vicious are not necessarily the same thing and the distinction between the two is important. But it’s a eye of the beholder thing, really, and haven’t we talked about this in terms of book reviewing a hundred thousand times? I’ve tried to work around this as a book reviewer by not reading or reviewing books I know I’m programmed to respond to with judgement instead of an open mind. It’s not worth my time, and neither the world’s to pollute it with my vitriol (this post and the one about stick families, of course, excluded. And can you tell that I am nine months pregnant? I have never been such a judger-naut! Or used so many italics!).
So this is the reason that I haven’t read Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska, though certainly it’s a book I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. As someone who has made a thing of writing honestly about motherhood and expressing the truth of my own difficult experiences with its early days, certainly I’m intrigued by Bydlowska’s project and by my own ambivalent response to it. And I was also intrigued by Sarah Hampson’s interview with Bydlowska, which dared to pose difficult questions and not just those that had been approved by Bydlowsk’s publicist. The interview was interesting, which is more than you can say about the interviews with her that have appeared elsewhere with their polite questions and predictable answers. I’m not even sure that it was journalistically troubling, because good interviewers are always very much a character in the story they’re telling. The problem, I suppose, would be if Hampson had been dishonest with Bydlowska in their conversation, had hoodwinked her somehow, but it shouldn’t be a problem that Hampson was honest in how she responded to the book. This book for which Bydlowska’s own honesty and bravery have been so celebrated; why is another writer meant to just shut up and be polite?
I similarly appreciated Lisan Jutras’ review of the book in The Globe on Saturday. I didn’t find the review to be judgemental, but found instead that Jutras approached the book (as well as her response to it) with questions instead of conclusions (and herein is the distinction between a critical review and a cruel one, I think), that she broadened the conversation, which is precisely what a book review is meant to do. (More italics. I can’t stop). She questions this reflexive response of terming female memoirists as “brave”, she questions her own fascination with Bydlowska’s story and her discomfort with this.
“I’m torn about this book,” is something that somebody wrote to me the other day, and I’m having trouble discerning how any reader could not be. It is a troubling, fascinating book that is worthwhile for the questions it raises, I think, and I find it odd that we would judge anybody for asking them. To ask those questions is not to be lacking in compassion, but it’s to be curious about a book, about the world. (I also think the whole, “But the reviewer doesn’t even mention the prose style” is a little disingenuous. Drunk Mom is not about its prose, or at least its marketers don’t think it is, so I think we can be forgiven for not playing along with that game. Very few of us stare at car accidents for aesthetic reasons. I also recognize that this book is meant to be intended to help and support those suffering from addiction, but then what are we meant to do with it, those of us who aren’t undergoing such struggles? Other than not read it. A book has to exist on its own terms and be more than a life preserver.)
Bydlowska is in no way unique for being a woman who has been publicly rebuked for her mothering skills. Just yesterday, I read the fantastic essay “The Meaning of White” by Emily Urquhart about her experience as a mother whose child was born with albinism, and I was aghast by the rage expressed in the comments: apparently Urquhart is hijacking her daughter’s story, is ableist, is making something out of nothing, is a white supremacist. There is something troubling about this mass jumping on the hate-train that almost makes me want to rethink my so-called judgy life, but then I’ve gone and judged already–we already know that internet commenters are morons anyway and are really none of anyone’s concern, not mine, nor Emily Urquhart’s, or Jowita Bydlowska’s either.
My point is that when you tell your story, people are allowed not to like it. And when that story is you, judgement is going to come into play when people don’t like it, even if you do something shrewd like decide your book is an “autobiographical novel”. “The main character in this book is a such a kind of person and what is the author’s intention in representing herself this way” is a legitimate line of thinking to pursue for a reader/critic, [albeit not a great basis for critical assessment] but we’re all avoiding that conversation for fear of being impolite. We’re avoiding so many conversations for the sake of politeness, actually, and I’m not sure our books are any better for it. I’d far rather read an honest review that posed provocative questions than one that sang the praises of bravery as a singular reason for any book to be.
March 14, 2013
Fake books and orange books
I am a little too excited about my latest blog post at 49th Shelf, which is a list of Fictitious Can-Lit: The Books that Never Were. I’ve made a list of fictitious books mentioned in several Canadian novels, cribbed book descriptions, and Stuart created book covers to accompany each one. Check out the post, and see how many of these books-in-books you’re familiar with.
I’m also very excited about the Orange Prize longlist. I rarely read books based upon such nominations but I am also happy to have my own tastes confirmed when the books I’ve read already turn up on these lists. And with the Orange Prize, which is of course Orange no longer, but alas, my own tastes are confirmed more than with any other award. I haven’t read Kate Atkinson’s new one yet (I have pre-ordered it from my local, and waiting for the release day. New Kate Atkinson is an event, you see…), but am glad to see it there. And I have read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, and Zadie Smith’s NW, and they were among my top reads of 2012. Though I’m rooting for The Forrests in particular, because it’s a book that deserves so much more attention.
March 13, 2013
Good things take place.
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather, because it’s been sitting on my shelf for ages and because it’s mentioned in Isabel Huggan’s Belonging (and is blurbed by Huggan herself–I will read anything with Isabel Huggan’s name on it). I was leafing through it and was excited to see it contains a quotation from Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter, everything seeming so circular because I read Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona on the weekend.
I am not sure what it says about my intelligence (or, on the contrary, I know exactly what it says…) that Jane Gardam’s novels which are supposedly for young readers are those with which I’ve most appreciated. I’ve liked all her books, but they are all so strange. Or maybe what I mean is that Gardam throws her reader into the deep-end and one has no choice but to swim, swim, swim, and sometimes with all that frantic motion it is hard to really appreciate one’s surroundings. But I didn’t have to tread water as much with Bilgewater and A Long Way from Verona. These books also make it a bit easier to see what Gardam gets up to, and understand the other books–so much is withheld, truths aren’t necessarily so, narrators are unreliable.
Anyway, I loved A Long Way from Verona, though mostly for non-literary reasons. A few days ago, it occurred to me that there was an enormous chance that everything was going to be all right in terms of my health, and I’ve been feeling much better since then. And the end of the novel just underlined everything I’d been thinking, and hoping for (plus there is a postbox on the front cover of my copy). The last line is, “But like at the Novelty Machine, I just felt filled with love, knowing that good things take place.”
Indeed.
I was surprised to have a good night’s sleep last night, but I’m so glad I did, because the procedure was really not worth losing sleep for. I liked the surgeon who was really nice, and Stuart held my hand while he performed the biopsy (which apparently was totally disgusting, and I am sorry I didn’t get to see it. I always miss it when they pull things out of my body, and must rely on my husband for full reports). I do not have to wait for results, which is so good as it means we can enjoy the rest of our March Break week. I have an appointment to go back in two weeks to discuss results with the doctor, who told me that he thought the lump seemed pretty innocent. And I imagine that surgeons don’t say such things lightly. Sooner or later, and somehow, it seems that everything is going to be okay.
February 21, 2013
On my amateur theatre-going and literary criticism
Even though we would have much preferred to go bed at 7pm, Stuart and I dragged ourselves out the door on Friday night to see Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata at the Factory Theatre. And we’re so glad we did, because basically the show was 80 continual minutes of us laughing. Stuart and I aren’t the most sophisticated theatre-goers, not least because Stuart and I aren’t the most sophisticated anything. We’re always a little bit disappointed by any play that does not contain song and dance, and the highest compliment we could think to pay to Do You Want What I Have Got? was, “It was a lot like Alligator Pie!” (Which is a high compliment. Really.) Really, our immediate response to most theatre experiences is a gleeful exclamation of, “We are at a play!!” Definitely not an outing to be taken for granted.
Anyway, we loved Do You Want What I Got?, which was funny, smart and really well-executed. And it wasn’t just whimsy–there was meaning behind it too, that eternal story of the human condition, looking for connection in a crazy world. The show runs until March 3, and I’d urge anyone who can to check it out in the meantime.
There is a point beyond this, however, and it is what I take away from all of this in my position as literary critic/book reviewer. Now, Do You Want What Have Got? has received excellent reviews, but I’m always amazed by the criticisms that manage to turn up whenever I read a review of a play I loved. “How could the critic have noticed that?” I wonder. “Of all the things to focus on…” I think that criticism is really important, essential even, but part of me that feels that critics miss out on the unified experience, that they never get the pleasure of fidgeting in a seat and thinking, “We are at a play!!” It takes so much more to wow a critic, and that’s the critic’s loss.
But not entirely, of course. Being ill-informed and therefore wowed by mediocrity is really nothing to be proud of, and it’s probably better to be eternally dissatisfied. But still. I think critics have to strike a balance, to understand how the common reader/theatre-goer will be greeting the experience, what that impact will be. And I think the critic has to hold on to that wonder, that sense of, “Holy cow! This is art! I am lucky to be here.”
February 9, 2013
Ultimately, the way to read…
“Ultimately, the way to read Artful, and maybe every book after it, is to suspend belief as a reliable system, or else to begin to believe in only this: story. Believe in story’s uncanny ability to infiltrate. Believe in human interaction, and the plunge of vulnerability it requires. Believe in nothing (ghosts!), and by that act, believe in the possibility of everything, and everything as a possibility.” —Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
January 15, 2013
More on bad/good reads, and almost-didn't reads: Olive Kitteridge
I had some thoughts about Olive Kitteridge before I read it. I don’t know if I’d noticed that it had won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but I’d noticed the endorsement by Oprah on the over, which in my mind is a different thing entirely. My anti-Oprah bias is part of the reason that I’d never picked the book up even though it’s been sitting on my shelf for ages. Also, it was the sort of book like A Complicated Kindness whose blanket popularity had left me uninterested–the boring cover didn’t help either. I’d remembered that the popularity wasn’t so blanket and those who didn’t love it absolutely hated it. I could never remember who of Olive or Elizabeth was the title or the author either, “Strout” seeming as unlikely as “Olive Kitteridge” from certain angles. But I’ve been making serious progress through my to-be-read shelf, to the S’s even (because indeed, Strout Olive’s author was) and so it was finally time.
I must confess an enormous affinity for the “novel in stories”, though I confess it quietly because lovers of the novel are so often disappointed and/or frustrated by this strange hybrid form, and calling attention to it as a form at all makes short-story lovers furious in its undermining of the greatness of stories on their own, or side-by-side but unconnected. But then haven’t you read A Visit from the Goon Squad? The Juliet Stories? Lives of Girls and Women? The Elizabeth Stories? Then surely you get the point that the form is really something onto itself?
Carrie Snyder is quite illuminating on the “novel in stories” form: “The definition on the back of my book may be a marketing tactic, but it’s also accurate. I did structure each chapter as a story that could stand on its own. I did so very deliberately. I did it because I’m comfortable with the form. I did it because I like the gaps and leaps that stories permit. I like the cleanness of the form, the circularity, the interior singular coherence.
But just because each chapter works individually as a short story doesn’t alter the fact that the larger book is its own whole universe. It’s meant to be read from beginning to end, not piece by piece. It needs all of its parts to be complete. It unfolds chronologically. Its overarching plot-line tracks the development and changes of the same characters. It has themes that are woven throughout. It has peaks and valleys. Does all of this make it a novel? Probably. Sure. Why not?”
Olive Kitteridge is probably less novel than stories, and unlike Juliet its pieces had been written/published separately over a large span of time, but I still admire the sense of wholeness that comes from such a many-sided shape. The slight discrepancies in point of view, the inconsistency that brings the book its verisimilitude. Because people change over time, and they change depending on who is doing the watching, and a novel in stories shows all of that. A character from near and far, within and without and I love that.
Olive Kitteridge is a “good-read”, the kind that Kyo Maclear would like to stretch her muscles and read less of. But I do believe that Strout’s book in all of its lyrical realism can do everything that Maclear’s “bad-reads” recommends. However quietly and without intention to improve its reader, Olive Kitteridge shows that “life as dynamic and unsettling, full of moments of absurdity and disorientation, at times startling and unreal.” Just as rare and remarkable as the successfully-realized fictional invented universe is the fictional universe that looks exactly like the one I know. I’m still not done being disturbed, startled, and awed by the sight of life itself.
January 13, 2013
Is speculative fiction my "can't read"?
In June, I wrote this:
“Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-Enchantment” was an essay by Patricia Robertson in Canadian Notes & Queries 84, in which Robertson decried contemporary writers in general for their failure to imagine the world beyond the individual, and the failure of contemporary writing to be anything but tedious. Hers was an inspiring argument, even stirring, and yet… I’m not yet tired of the kind of novel she’s maligning. Domesticated fiction remains what I most want to read, and I’m not nearly finished with it yet. And I don’t even have a good argument as to why this should be the case, except that I think that with the reader taking an imaginative leap, domesticated fiction can do as well as the fantastic, or any other kind of literature, to “incorporate some of the wildness, the strangeness, the mystery of the world around us.” To show that we are indeed “participants in a vast web of being.”**
Last week, Kyo Maclear published a fantastic essay at 49thShelf shelf about embracing “the bad read”, celebrating the kind of fiction that doesn’t go down easy. She wrote, “Yes, bring on the bad reads. Bring on those lousy good-for-nothing novels that embrace novelty, possibility, and surprise. Let’s hear it for god-awful fiction that believes anything can happen—that captures the weird, the awkward, the complicated, the downright bizarre…you know, the really real…in all its ghastly glory.”
Her argument was not dissimilar from Robertson’s, but Maclear came at it from a different point of view that made me less defensive. First, because she does that brilliant thing that critics never do wherein she celebrates one thing without necessarily denigrating another. And also because her point of view is similar to mine, as a reader and writer of “lyrical realism.” Her rallying call stirred my heart, and every part of my brain registered how completely right she was. How could I feel any other way, considering how often I am frustrated by readers’ refusal to be challenged by fiction? And yet, I could only be stirred so far. I don’t know who or what could ever compel me to pick up a porcine allegory, let alone an erotic one. (I’m still too afraid to read Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead, for heaven’s sakes.) I want to be challenged, but I don’t want to be that challenged.
And isn’t that what we all find ourselves saying? When we throw up our arms and plead, “I’m 21 weeks pregnant with a small child and I only get the tiniest blocks of time to read in every day. Kindly leave me to read what I like. No sex pigs, please.” So yes, part of it is that I’m perpetually tired, as perpetually tired as every single human being on this planet is, but another part is that I cannot bring myself to be interested in a story unless human beings on this planet are what it’s addressing. Not just with books either–I can’t watch animated films unless its characters are people. I just don’t care. And I just don’t care about books depicting other worlds either, or other versions of this one. I liked A Wrinkle In Time, but only when they were at home, for example. The only part I liked in The Princess Bride is when Fred Savage is reading with his grandfather.
So now I’m doing that thing, denigrating an entire genre, but I’m not actually. I’m just clarifying the enormous gulf that lies between me and the kind of “bad reads”, anything’s-possible book that Maclear recommends. Perhaps if I weren’t too tired, I might do well to pick up some books from Leah Bobet’s Speculative Fiction Titles for Literary Readers list. Maybe what I’m suffering is not so attitudinal as a lack of a bridge? Why am I so afraid to take a leap?
But it’s not fear altogether. I’m not scared of speculative fiction necessarily (though the sex pigs, yes, sound terrifying) but I just don’t quite see the need for it. I’m still not finished with this world yet, and I don’t know that fiction is either. And while it’s a stunning achievement to construct a new universe, I think that any fiction writer does that whenever she sits down to write. I think that realism is perfectly capable of “embrac[ing] novelty, possibility, and surprise”. That last year, books by Anakana Schofield did this, and Zadie Smith, and Lauren Groff (though yes, she’s a genre blurrer at heart), and Annette Lapointe did this. Even Carrie Snyder’s book And these are the books I will challenge myself to read, though they don’t go down as easy as, say, A Large Harmonium by Sue Sorensen (which is so so so wonderful. Have I told you that lately?). For me, these books aren’t necessarily “good-reads” and they have passages and sections I have to read over and over to understand and appreciate what’s going on. Maybe one woman’s good-read is another’s bad-read, and speculative fiction is my “can’t read”? And really, what is reading for? And for whose sake? Do we have to save the world with book we pick up? And why ever wouldn’t we want to? And who’d ever have the time?
As ever, I’ve got no answers, but I look forward to more circular arguments and frustrations in a forthcoming post on Olive Kitteridge, naturally.
**Interestingly, there are responses to Robertson’s piece in the latest issue of CNQ. I haven’t read them yet, but look forward to doing so.
