October 7, 2024
The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing
“How strange time is. The same patterns keep recurring, a helical sequence of war and sickness, from out of which emerged the same green-veined dream.”
For a book that’s about her own backyard, Olivia Laing’s THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE takes her reader everywhere and back through time as she tells the story of her restoration of an 18th century walled garden begun when she and her partner move to Suffolk in 2020, a year that becomes “that year.” As she moves through her own plague seasons, she draws connections to gardens in the minds of Milton (PARADISE LOST) and rural poet John Clare, changes and trends in English landscaping ( a word that, she tells us, began with art and paintings), of how the mid-Atlantic slave-trade was the foundation of so much wealth that shaped the English landscape (I am also reading Tanya Talaga’s THE KNOWING, from which I learn that those very same investors were reaping the rewards of the North American fur trades that would decimate the continent’s Indigenous peoples), and how gardens have also been at the forefront of movements committed to imagining better ways of organizing society, which seems especially pressing to consider in the sweltering summer of 2022 as parts of the UK burned and watering her garden, Laing thought, seemed like an irresponsible indulgence. And how new life took root in the brutal bomb sites of London after the Blitz, so many of these sites turned into parks, and she casts her mind too back to Mark Rumary, the famed UK garden designer who’d once owned her home (and lived with his partner back when, a neighbour tells her, “it wasn’t good to be gay”) and whose vision is everywhere in the garden still, Laing reflecting on her own childhood growing up with a gay parent in the 1980s, and what the garden must have meant to both of them as place of freedom and belonging. And there’s so much more than that, every single page bringing fascinating rewards and gorgeous insight, doses of hard reality coupled with vision and hope. The garden is never simply this or that, instead the garden is a place for both, and, and for the remarkable persistence of living things (gardeners among them).
September 24, 2024
HUM, by Helen Phillips
In Helen Phillips’ HUM, as with her previous novel THE NEED, the most unsettling parts of the narrative are those that are most familiar, and I don’t even mean the post-apocalyptic backdrop that certainly draws on the possibilities of our present (the forests have burned, May’s children have never seen strawberries growing on a plant, unhealthy air quality is a baseline, the heat is unrelenting, and society is structured on a network of AI systems called “hums”), but instead the anxiety underlying every sentence, an echo of the title. This is not so much a plot or character-based novel as a vibes-based novel, and the vibes are bad. Desperate for money after losing her job, AI developer May agrees to undergo a slight facial modification procedure that she believes is part of a counter-surveillance movement in a society where everything is tracked, and with the payout she splurges for tickets for her family to three days at The Botanical Gardens, a Disney-esque simulation of the natural world she so longs for: “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place.” May leaves her phone behind when they leave home, and makes her husband and children do the same (the children, like all children, wear gadgets on their wrist called “bunnies”), and May dares to suppose her family might have a reprieve from the relentless tracking and advertising from the devices they’re all attached to, but she comes to regret her choice when things go wrong and there is a chance her children might be lost to her. None of this description really doing justice to what’s going on here, to the force that drives the story forward, to the accelerated beat-beat-beat of May’s anxious heart as she struggles to hold her family, her marriage, her whole world together. Any parent who has ever considered picking up Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION will see themselves in May, and while all this might not sound so appealing (who really wants a mirror-image of their most stressed-out self?), Phillips’ taut narrative reads up fast and is utterly gripping, and is rooted in that part of the maternal experience that’s even more essential than worry, and that is love.
September 10, 2024
DEATH AT THE SIGN OF A ROOK, by Kate Atkinson
I didn’t know I liked detective fiction until I read Case Histories in 2005 (apparently purchased with a gift token I got for my 26th birthday!), following up my introduction to Kate Atkinson with her stunning, award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but I have been devoted to Jackson Brodie ever since, and the book turned me on to the genre in general, a genre of which Atkinson is very aware in this latest Brodie instalment, Death at the Sign of the Rook. And it’s true that self-aware detective fiction is having a moment. Maybe it’s not a golden age, exactly, but I’m thinking about Knives Out and Glass Onion, and Richard Osman novels, Only Murder in the Building. Death at the Sign of the Rook begins with a murder mystery weekend at a great house, Brodie himself turning up (there has been a snowstorm and he’s stranded) along with the team of actors playing the parts, and can you imagine what it would be like to run a murder mystery with Jackson Brodie in the room? Atkinson has talked about writing this book in lockdown and her desire to have some fun with the experience, which makes this a lighter Jackson Brodie than we’ve encountered for a while. What leads to the great house begins with a series of art thefts in Northern England, Ilkley, specifically, which is one of my favourite English towns (and which I only visited in the first place because I’d read about Betty’s in a Jackson Brodie novel, and Ilkley is the closest Betty’s location to where my UK family lives. And on my first visit there, I learned about Ilkley’s wonderful Grove Bookshop, which shows up in the novel twice!). Private Detective Jackson Brodie takes the case, and it overlaps with another case in which his protege Reggie Chase has worked, both cases also linked by vintage detective novels left at the scenes by a Agatha Christie-esque author called Nancy Styles. There’s a wacky family of aristocrats (as well as a reference to eccentric Englishmen not being as great as they seem, and Hugh Grant having a lot to answer for), a mysterious elder-carer (with a big bag), a vicar who has lost his faith and his voice, two sets of twins, a former soldier with PTSD and a prosthetic limb, and a murderer on the loose. And like everything Atkinson writes, the scale and pace are Shakespearean, references range from classical to contemporary, everything is just a little absurd, everyone so achingly human. I loved it.
September 3, 2024
AFTER THE FUNERAL, by Tessa Hadley
I’ve never read a Tessa Hadley short story before, just her novels (most recently, Modern Love, and mercifully I still have most of her backlist before me [though they’re not easy to come by—perhaps some of them were never published in Canada?], so I was excited about her new release After the Funeral because it was a Tessa Hadley book at all, and not necessarily because it was a story collection. And then I started reading it and then spent two days walking around exclaiming, “OMG THIS BOOK THIS BOOK THIS BOOK!” because this Tessa Hadley story collection is basically 12 Tessa Hadley novels in one, each story with a ballast that is decades of history and so much perfect detail, and possibly the mind was not meant to handle so much literary goodness in a single sitting or two, because it was seriously overwhelming (and possibly I’m hormonal), but also seriously wonderful, these stories so rich and satisfying, where so much happens, where so much and said and goes unsaid.
These are stories about departures and arrivals, and also odd little intersections that occur somewhere between the two. In a recent New York Times Review of another book, Dwight Garner cited a quotation by John Edgar Wideman, who’d written, “You don’t have to be very smart to write a review of a book of short stories… All you need to say is that some stories in the book are better than others,” but I can’t even say that about this book, because they’re all wonderful. The title story is about what happens to a family after the death of a father, about how long “after the funeral” really can be. In “Dido’s Lament,” Lynette encounters her ex-husband, and reads everything all wrong. “The Bunty Club” is about three sisters, now adult, coming together upon the imminent death of their mother. “My Mother’s Wedding” features the first of a few children in this collection raised by less-than-benign neglect, and the second appears in “Funny Little Snake,” in which a woman encounters her not-so-lovable stepdaughter for the first time and then her even less charming mother. Two adult sisters meet after years of estrangement and pretend not to know each other in “Men.” “Cecelia Awakened” is about a teenage girl on holiday with her parents who finally discerns her separateness from her family, and her family’s separateness from everything else, with gut-punchingly relatable lines like, “Those girls at the next table were silly, but they were worldly, she thought, trying out that world. They were in the world and she and her parents were somehow shut out of it.” In “Old Friends,” a tragedy could possible bring together a couple together, but it turns out the absence of the third in their triangle over pulls them apart. A dream of childhood is still as vivid to a grown man as the present moment in “Children at Chess.” “The Other One” is an epic in under 30 pages, the story of a woman who encounters a figure from her father’s past in an entirely different context. “Mia” is a portrayal of glamour from a teenager’s point of view and finally “Coda,” a lockdown story of loneliness, loss and longing for connection.
Singular, vivid and compelling, every last one of them. This book came out ages ago in the US and UK and I’m glad to finally get a chance to read it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.
August 28, 2024
Peggy, by Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison
The two stories behind Rebecca Godfrey’s novel Peggy are interesting, first the biography of Peggy Guggenheim herself, the iconic art collector from a famous American family, and then Godfrey’s own experience working to complete her novel about Guggenheim before her death from cancer in 2022 and how, when she was unable to do this, her friend Leslie Jamison stepped in to finish the book. But as a reader who knows almost nothing about Peggy Guggenheim and who hasn’t read Godfrey’s work widely (I think I read Under the Bridge a long time ago), neither back story seemed necessarily resonant or pressing to me. Would Peggy be a book I really needed to to pick up?
But then I did, and I couldn’t stop reading.
And I finally understood the weight of Jamison’s task, and what a loss it would have been if this novel had never seen the light of day, because it’s just wonderful, imbued with a kind of magic, rich and artful, the prose full of light and surprises, Peggy Guggenheim so entirely alive on the page. We meet her at the beginning of Chapter 1, “Striped and shot, the tiger lay flat, and I stretched my hungry body across him. He was part treasure, part prey. Though we had so much, I often ignored the chaises and satin chairs, instead gathering my book and lying upon this tattered dead animal.” And it pretty much goes on like that, both extraordinary and so matter-of-fact, Guggenheim’s remarkable experiences including her provenance (“I am the daughter of two dynasties”), that her father went down with the Titanic, her life in 1920s’ Paris, being photographed by May Ray, a love affair with Samuel Beckett, that she was a patron of artists including Djuna Barnes and Emma Goldman, and would build a modern art collection that would become famous throughout the world.
A tragic figure in some ways, Godfrey also shows that Peggy Guggenheim was full of life and spirit, that she would eventually come into her own power, but some losses would never be overcome, and that she was a marvellously imperfect person, beyond ordinary (which is what she so longed to be) but also so achingly human, and that vitality is this novel’s chief appeal, that fiction can seem so real . Even fiction that’s messy and sometimes strange, mistakes and inconsistencies popping up throughout, not overwhelmingly but you notice. At the beginning we learn that Peggy and her sisters were living at the Waldorf-Astoria, but it’s the St. Regis on the following page (and in actuality, according to my internet sleuthing), and initially I was thrown by this—Jamison opted to leave most of Godfrey’s manuscript untouched, to not presume to edit, which seems like a strange call until you come to the line where Peggy is using her eye and describing some Impressionist works to her father: “These paintings look unfinished, but they’re deliberately haphazard.” And then her father points to the paintings and tells her that “all [she] need[s] to know…is that this is life.”
Peggy Guggenheim made art her life, and her life was art, and so too is this strange, beautiful and heartrending novel. Peggy is such a remarkable literary achievement.
August 20, 2024
SLOW DANCE, by Rainbow Rowell
My friend @meli_mello1 was a Rainbow Rowell fan, and when I was reading Slow Dance this weekend I kept thinking about how unfair it was that she’d never be able to read it, all those things a person is robbed of when she dies at 45 (not least of all, the chance to see her three daughters grow into the people she was raising them to be). The unfairness of this inspiring me to once again sign up for the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, for which I’m hoping to raise $1000 for Rethink, supporting young women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. I hope you will consider supporting my efforts!
And wow, SLOW DANCE, just a beautiful, impossible, agonizing-at-times love story about two messed up weirdos who everybody always assumed were together in high school, but they were just friends. “Just friends” who were everything to each other, and so terrified of communicating that truth and daring to take things any further for fear of messing it all up and wrecking everything that they mess it all up and wreck everything. They both have different dreams of how they’re going to make it out of their North Omaha neighbourhood, Shiloh through Broadway stardom, and Cary through a career with the Navy, and how to weave those dreams together seems absolutely unworkable, and then they don’t even speak for 14 years until a reunion at their friend Mikey’s wedding, Shiloh divorced and a mother of two, Cary still dealing with his dysfunctional family, Shiloh living back at home with her mom. It’s like nothing has changed, but also everything has changed, and will it be possible for these two to find a way forward (particularly as they’re both determined to fling obstacles in their way so they won’t ever have to stumble upon such a thing unaware).
I loved this book. I loved these characters. A time machine, without the metaphysics. How did we get from there to here, and where are we going after?
August 16, 2024
Good Time
Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?
The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)
I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)
(This post was a Free Post on my Substack this week! Sign up to receive Pickle Me This directly to your inbox.)
August 1, 2024
SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck
One of my most frequent experiences of nostalgia is biblio-nostalgia, the longing to be returned to a particular book in a time and place that felt especially sublime. The August I read MALIBU RISING at a rented cottage and could not put it down, the long weekend two years ago when I read Jennifer Close’s MARRYING THE KETCHUPS at the beach, the particular camp chair I was slumped in years ago as I was hastily turning the pages of Amber Dawn’s SODOM ROAD EXIT (lesbians, vampires and abandoned roller coasters on the shores of Lake Erie, oh my!). And yes, while it’s only been a month, I’m still not over having read Shelby Van Pelt’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES on our camping trip over the Canada Day long weekend and—especially as we departed on another camping trip last Saturday—I felt the desire to have it happen all over again, the perfect book in the perfect place and time. But this is the kind of experience it’s impossible to manufacture; it either happens or it doesn’t.
But it did, because en-route to our campsite on the banks of Lake Huron, we stopped for in the town of St. Marys, precisely because it was home to a bookshop I’d never visited before, Betty’s Bookshelf, and the town turned out to be wonderful, the bookshop itself just absolutely perfect, stocked with excellent picks (including my own novel!), and every single member of my family left with a title we’d never heard of before.
Which for me was SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck, enthusiastically recommended by bookseller Wren, a book that MIGHT have been a hard-sell considering its premise (this is a novel about a newlywed couple whose plans go awry when the male partner is diagnosed with a rare disease in which he mutates into a great white shark, yup, really), but Wren promised me that this was a novel about love, and grief and life, and the mutation is a metaphor of sorts, and then I read the back and saw a blurb by none other than Shelby Van Pelt, and decided that this might be the closest I’d come to reading REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES for the first time all over again.
I will say that this is a very different kind of book, far more strange and lyrical, if similarly preoccupied by the desires of sea creatures and blurry lines between us and them, but it similarly hit just perfectly, and as I devoured it (I sound like a great white shark now; it was less bloody than that, I promise). Like Ann Patchett’s TOM LAKE, it’s also about a production of OUR TOWN, which I’ve now even read. This is a novel about the paths in life that take us places where our loved ones can’t follow, about how to face the unimaginable, about how some people are unlucky over and over, terrible patterns repeating, the unfairness of fate, the beauty that’s possible anyway.
I loved it. You should read it. Thank you to Betty’s Bookshelf’s Wren.
July 23, 2024
We Are Already Ghosts, by Kit Dobson
Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes. Except, of course, the children are growing, and parents get older, marriages end and new loves begin, and babies are born, and people die, and all of this flurry of action—in Kit Dobson’s cerebral and tremendously moving first novel WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS—takes place in the “corridors” between the narrative’s main sections, each corridor spanning a five year gap that brings us back again to the cabin that once belonged to Clare’s parents, where now she comes with her own family and those of her husband’s brothers. The novel begins in 1996 and returns us—at five year intervals—to the family at this place so removed from the world, and yet part of it enough that the world creeps in, and I’m thinking about the attraction of summer places like these, the places we return to, the illusion that anything can ever stay the same, or that any of us might outwit the human condition of being mortal, and how the reality of the matter can shock us every time. GHOSTS is an enveloping story of love and family, of parenthood, and also time, and CanLit tropes, and war, and history, and bears at the dump, and what it means to live on stolen land, and everything that’s eternal, and everything that isn’t, and I loved it all so much.
June 27, 2024
STROLL, by Shawn Micallef
Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church—lost to a devastating fire on June 9—was a sacred space, but not necessarily for the fact of it being a church, and I was thinking about this as I took in the widespread grief people were feeling in the aftermath, surprised too by the weight of my own grief. I am not religious, I don’t live near St. Anne’s, its iconic dome never factored into my personal cityscape, but I’d been inside the church once, years ago, when it was home to the Brockton Writers Series, and the experience was awe-inspiring, unforgettable. I’d also dropped at least one of my children for Girl Guides at the nearby Parish Hall, and I think it’s this element of community, of openness and accessibility, in addition to the treasures of its art and architecture, that made St. Anne’s a sacred space. The fact too of such an extraordinary building in a pretty ordinary setting—at the end of a row of houses in a residential neigbourhood, across the street from a chocolate factory.
The Ontario Science Centre—abruptly closed last week by a government that’s never earned our trust—is not so different, and public outcry at this loss has been just as intense. A centennial project built in a Toronto suburb by one of Canada’s most famous architects, the building is a testament to progress and technology, to the benefits and necessity of science education. I was last there three weeks ago as chaperone on a school trip, and as we rode the escalators up through the ravine—cardinals, redwing blackbirds and sparrows—I was as awe-struck as I’d been in the St. Anne’s sanctuary. Like St. Anne’s, there is nothing else like it, and to imagine it to be replaceable, even disposable. I can’t fathom the lack of vision required for that.
But maybe all places are a little bit sacred, places where people go and people are. Places which are homes to our memories, our stories, proof we cling to of some kind of solid foundations in the whirlwind of time.
And what a whirlwind it is!
I bought the updated edition of Shawn Micallef’s STROLL five weeks ago, and was not expecting to read it cover-to-cover. I thought it might be more aspirational, that it would be good company on walks I’d be unlikely to take, but then I started reading, and I didn’t stop. A walk a day. And while it’s still unlikely I’ll ever venture on a hike from Sherway Gardens, I’m curious now, and I’ve already made a trip to Bathurst and Lawrence inspired by Bathurst Walk. I especially enjoyed the walks about areas that are already familiar to me, deepening my connection to my own local geography, but I just as much loved reading about walks in places further afield, neighbourhoods with names like Bendale, West Hill, Willowdale, or the spot in the north of the city that, Micallef declares, brings him, “as close as I’ve ever come to feeling like…William Wordsworth, [wandering] through the rural Lake District in England.”
Cities, as Micallef knows, are never static, are layer upon layer of history and meaning, and his wild connections are my favourite part of the text: “When CHUM’s tight rotation allowed them to play Bowie’s ‘Rebel, Rebel,’ it would’ve been easy to pretend it was an homage to William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebel forces, whose advance was stopped here in 1937.” Or, regarding the O’Keefe Centre, which hosted Mikhail Baryshnikov following is 1974 defection from the Soviet Union: “That Cold War drama was able to play out down here because Victorian-era Torontonians decided to extend the city south of Front Street, where the original shoreline of Lake Ontario was located.”
Apart from a few exceptions (that North York trip for lunch at the United Bakers Dairy Restaurant), I’ve not yet gone far out of my way to partake in one of Micallef’s strolls, but reading the book has already changed the way I see my usual circuit. A trip to Harbourfront two weeks ago had me noticing how buildings around the ferry docks turn their backs on the city, because when they were built in the 1970s, there was very little city immediately for them to see. I saw the Gerrard Street gates to Chinatown on a streetcar journey up Broadview Avenue on Sunday, something I’d never noticed before. The way he writes about Dupont Street, “As with the servant’s side of a British manor house, things get taken care of on Dupont: it’s a working street that keeps the prettier parts of the city running.”
Even Dupont Street is sacred if you quint.
