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.

January 8, 2013

Stymied already

It’s stymied already, my one reading goal this year to read more outside the CanLit bubble. I’ve spent the last while putting together the 49thShelf Spring Books Preview, and there is so much to look forward to. The whole list is more than a little coloured by my bias anyway, but in particular, I am excited for Marita Dachsel’s Glossolalia, Belinda’s Rings by Corinna Chong (because who can resist a book with a squid on its cover?), Helen Humphreys’ Nocturne, Bone and Bread by the excellent Saleema Nawaz, Claire Wilkshire’s Maxine, Every Happy Family by Dede Crane, Nancy Jo Cullen’s Canary, Studio St. Ex. by Ania Szado, Tish Cohen’s The Search Angel, and new Chevy Stevens!

December 30, 2012

2012: My Year in Books

For the most part, my year in books was a good one, but somewhere around October, it all fell to pieces. I blame my own circumstances for this mostly, but it’s true that books this Fall didn’t spark my enthusiasm as those from the Spring had. There was a time in the spring when I was so on a roll, not sure that there wasn’t a book in the entire world that wasn’t wonderful. By October, I’d stopped keeping track of the books I was reading, deciding I didn’t care about that sort of record anymore, though when I came out of my first trimester stupour, I realized I did, and spent an anxious hour putting my whole list back together.

I’ve already shared my books of the year. I’ve also read some poetry, though I never know how to talk about it here, so I don’t. Some of the best books I’ve read this year that weren’t new were Subject to Change by Renee Rodin, The House With the Broken Two by Myrl Coulter, So Beautiful by Ramona Dearing, Bilgewater by Jane Gardam and All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner. Like everybody, I loved Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. And the most amazing book I’ve read all year, the review that brought me more hits than any other I’ve ever written, Firebrand by Rosemary Aubert, “Loving the mayor is a bit like that”. Other notables of 2012 were Tanis Rideout’s Above All Things, Jo Walton’s Among Others, Kyo Maclear’s Stray Love, Noah Richler’s What We Talk About When We Talk About War, Alice Petersen’s All the Voices Cry, Zadie Smith’s NW, dee Hobswan Smith’s Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen, Miranda Hill’s Sleeping Funny, and Daniel Griffin’s Stopping for Strangers. And Isabel Huggan, the very best thing I found all year. I loved her two short story collections so very much, and have her third book Belonging lined up for not so far into the future.

I did not succeed in my 2012 New Year’s Resolution, which was to finally finish reading John Cheever’s collected stories. I am beginning to think that “collected stories” volumes are not necessarily reader-friendly. Or maybe the problem is simply me.

I’ve read 120 books this year so far, and may get two more in before the year is out, as I’m just about finished Ali Smith’s collection The First Person and Other Stories. 120 is less than I’ve read in years past, but then I’ve also been reading for work more than I ever have before. It has been a very busy year, bookwise, with less room to read for pleasure than I’ve ever known, what with the work stuff and the obsolescence of naptime, but then I also know that I’m lucky to be paid to read at all. And that I’ll probably be breastfeeding again in about six months time, which comes with its own agonies, but ample time to read (one-handedly, all night long [yawn]) is not one of them. I’ve also been too isolated in a Can-Lit bubble this year, and need to branch out beyond. In 2013, I plan to do something about that.

Anyway, long live books! Long live authors! Long live small Canadian presses, which publish most of the best stuff out there. I’ve spent the last two weeks reading indulgently, and it’s been a pleasure, reading for reading’s sake. The definition of holiday. And I’ve got some exciting books lined up for the new year–new Lisa Moore, new Kate Atkinson! Also getting around to the 2012 books I’ve been slow on–John Lanchester’s Capital, for one, and others. As ever, I am looking forward.

December 29, 2012

Treasures and others

I’ve decided to remain unabashed about my propensity to read only/mainly female authors, at least until most of the literary world clues in to the fact that they’ve got the same prejudice but just in opposite. And now, apropos of, um, something, a few highlights from the Globe and Mail’s year-end book recommendations list, which I always enjoy and has found me some treasures in years past.

From Robert Hough: “One of the best is Any Human Heart, by William Boyd, all the more so because the central figure is male – a growing rarity in an industry that falls all over itself trying to please female readers.” Charming.

Miriam Toews sells me on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, though I suspect Miriam Toews could sell me on anything.

Sarah Polley reads while breastfeeding! And while she recommends we read Anton Piatigorsky’s The Iron Bridge, which I really do want to read, but she notes we should wait ’til baby is weaned: “Generally it’s best to save books about how dictators become dictators for times when you are not lactating – this is something no one told me.”

From Ian Baruma: “Alas, this left little time for contemporary fiction, most of which seems to pale in terms of daring and ambition compared to Melville or Joyce…” Yawn. Though both he and Laura Penny recommend Moby Dick, and my feeling is that Laura Penny never steers one far wrong.

I loved Katia Grubisic’s recommendation of Patrick Warner’s Double Talk, which I’ve been interested in and now I absolutely want to read.

And thank goodness for Lisa Moore: “I choose books by Three Wise Women…” Zadie Smith, which I already know is great,Christine Pountney, which I’m getting a feeling about, and you can always trust a reader who is recommend Elizabeth Bowen, oh yes, you can. I also think that if I spent the rest of my life only reading what Lisa Moore told me to read that I would probably be all right.

And Martin Levin was good enough to recommend one book by a woman, “the great Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter,” which I totally want to read now and Gardam is great indeed, though I am beginning to suspect that Jane Gardam is Martin Levin’s go-to woman writer (at least when conversation necessitates), what Woolf is to so many others, but at least he’s read her.

December 12, 2012

Book picks at Vitamin Daily

I’ve been recommending books left, right and centre lately (which doesn’t really make a change, does it?). Check out “Book Report: 5 picks for winter break” at Vitamin Daily for a particularly delightful selection.

November 19, 2012

Reading in the First Trimester

I have so much trouble reading when I’m 6-12 weeks pregnant. As I’ve done it twice now, I can say for a fact that I am the problem and it’s not necessarily the books I encounter, all of which seem to me to be absolutely intolerable. In my first trimester of pregnancy, I completely lack the patience required to overlook the (often obligatory) parts of any book that are intolerable, and understand its fundamental goodness. I can’t read a book that’s very long either, because eventually it becomes associated with nausea and even the thought of the book makes me want to puke. I have a similar relationship with Calgary– every time I go there, I’m 6 or 8 weeks pregnant, and I can’t even think about it anymore. And with Cloud Atlas, whose first pages I read in Calgary and therefore never again.

Another book I can’t handle is Cybele Young’s A Few Bites, which is so so good! But the book came into my life when I was six weeks pregnant and when Ferdie is presented with his lunch of broccoli, carrot sticks, and ravioli, my stomach heaves. I can no longer eat broccoli, which is bizarre because I’ve always loved it, but no longer, temporarily I hope. We’ve had to ask our organic food delivery to stop bringing it because every week I threw it out.

There is Nicola Barker’s The Yips, which I bought in Calgary but Calgary was not even the problem. The biggest problem I think is that it was not as good as Burley Cross Postbox Theft or Darkmans, and I was so unhappy (and feeling sick) while I was reading it. There were a few weeks where I hated everything, and not just books, but then I started reading A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence, and began to feel better. Correspondance and short stories were the trick I guess, fragments, and perhaps this was why I was so elated to discover Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories–finally a book to fall in love with. And the Susans anthology. And slowly, slowly, I was happy to find that I could love books again. (I am not sure that Calgary will recover so easily.)

So yes, this is a round-about way of saying that after being the first woman ever to have a baby three and a half years ago, I am going to pioneer the act of having a second at the end of May. Literary trauma aside, I’ve had a relatively easy first trimester and have been so grateful for Harriet’s mornings at school so that I’ve still been able to get my work done. Grateful too that we dragged out Harriet’s napping through the weeks when I needed it most. Also that emotionally, I’ve have a much easier time of it this time around–with a three year old running around, less apparent miracles are easier to believe in. I have faith this time, and it’s so refreshing not be crazy (though we’ll see how long the sanity lasts. In my experience, it comes in limited quantities only).

I am excited and terrified, and hoping that everyone who promised it would be easier second-time around wasn’t lying. I am really excited for Harriet to become a sister. And most of all, I just feel enormously lucky, that this decision whether or not to have a second child was one we had the freedom and good fortune to make for ourselves.

November 2, 2012

Where my tea rests

I don’t have a desk. In another life, I worked in a closet, but now the closet is stuffed with baby paraphernalia and there is no room for me and mine. Which isn’t bad, in fact it’s fine. For the past three years, I’ve made the western half of our couch my working home, which you’d be able to tell if you ever sat on it. The springs are shot. My seat is right beside the tall bookcase which houses authors A through H, with a table nearby to pile books and set my laptop on. Often, my husband is situated nearby too, which makes for an optimum working environment. I like it also because I get to work whilst lying down.

What I appreciate most truly, however, is the place where I rest my tea. From my Random House mug, of course, because what’s a point of a teacup if it isn’t enormous? But not so enormous that it can’t perch exactly within arm’s reach, right beside Anne Enright and Alice Thomas Ellis. I think my tea keeps really good company– the gorgeous spines of my Anne Fadiman books, and even Deborah Eisenberg. It’s always right there when I need it. But not so near within my reach that my flailing arms have ever knocked it over. Yet. Knock on (bookcase) wood.