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.)
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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.
June 25, 2024
SANDWICH, by Catherine Newman
On Sunday night, the evening before my 45th birthday, which is “halfway to 90,” as my youngest child keeps noting, that very same child’s tooth fell out, an occasion that was once momentous in our household, but has ceased to be. I ended up breaking a ten dollar bill with coins from her piggy bank in order for the tooth fairy duties to be fulfilled, and it occurred me that it won’t be long now before my tooth fairy days are behind me, which felt especially poignant since I was in the middle of Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a novel that is both a beach read about a Cape Cod family holiday and an exploration of the “reproductive mayhem” that is the female experience. Told from the perspective of Rocky, stuck between love and obligation to her elderly parents and her just-grown kids, all of whom have joined her and her husband at the cramped seaside rental as she grapples with hot flashes and menopausal rage, and long-hidden secrets come back to the surface.
“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still, and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course, You have to.”
This is a novel about the enormity of human experience, about ideas that are terrible, heavy and monstrous—the Holocaust, the Patriarchy. It’s about miscarriage, and death, and something called “vaginal atrophy,” and the fragile nature of the human heart, literally and otherwise. It’s about how to love is to lose, eventually, and how far away the overwhelming experiences of early parenthood (experiences that Newman documented in her own popular blog back in the day) eventually becomes, which seems impossible when you’re in it, and about the delights and frustrations of adult children, and the heartache of seeing one’s parents get old. And it’s all so fun, and so breezy, like your best friend is writing you a chatty letter (like a blog), you’ll even laugh, just as you will likely cry, and that balance is a seesaw too, and Newman gets it exactly right.
“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human… But also so terrible and ridiculous.”
May 29, 2024
Vigil, by Susie Taylor
If you think you know Newfoundland writing, then you need to know Susie Taylor, who has followed EVEN WEIRDER THAN BEFORE, her sparkling queer coming-of-age debut, with VIGIL, a book that’s even better, though it doesn’t sparkle so much as tremble, quake, and explode. It’s a collection of interconnected stories (and I’m going to declare it, don’t @ me) each of which really is a stellar example of the form, but the collection also properly satisfies the requirements of a novel, set against the fictional Newfoundland community of Bay Mal Verde, a place on the margins of geography, about people on the margins of society, their lives rattled by poverty and addiction. They’re tragic, but also funny, and familiar, the question of what happened to Stevie Loder at the centre of the plot. The title story opening the collection, about the impromptu memorial at the Ultramar after Stevie goes missing (“Someone had stuck a whole untouched Happy Meal on the growing pile of tributes…and the gulls swarmed the thing.”) Stevie is something of a perpetual loser (I wrote “something of” so I’d seem more compassionate), a scrawny kid who gets knocked around by the world, including his father and his friends, and grows up for more of the same, the story of his disappearance unravelling as the collection unfolds, connected to the respective narratives of characters including Joseph the garbage man, who runs a drug dealing empire, and the people in his employ, including local thug Kev Babcock, who we come to have sympathy for—but is Stevie so expendable? Perhaps. There is Ryan, who was friends with the other boys, but had a route out of town via university, which means that encountering him later in the story is gutting. Carter, whose practical younger sister is also drawn to Kev, but who (thankfully) is smarter than he is, and a meta kind of character called Susie, “that running girl,” who is not from Bay Mal Verde, but arrived in town with her girlfriend, drawing suspicion from that, but she’s alone now, running the trails and narrowly skirting danger, reporting what she sees (except for a pivotal moment when she doesn’t).
The stories in Taylor’s Vigil are a chorus, and they make a song that soars, the bleakness of their concerns offset by the vitality of the voices, and the shimmering moments of redemption woven like miracles throughout the text.
May 28, 2024
The Rasmussen Papers, by Connie Gault
“How strange it is that our lives are not usefully taken apart, not instructive in their compartments, but everything in one life is twisted inextricably with everything else, and it’s impossible to decipher it all.”
What a fascinating, sly, and tricky novel is Connie Gault’s THE RASMUSSEN PAPERS, Alissa York’s blurb conjuring the image of a fox with a quicksilver tip to its tail, and that’s it exactly. An urban fox, of course, out of place, slipping along the sidewalk and disappearing down into a ravine leaving no trace, as though it had ever been there. Like Gault’s unnamed narrator, an essayist hoping to write a biography of the iconic but enigmatic Canadian poet, Marianne Rasmussen, who concocts a plan to rent a room in the home of Aubrey Ash, on the cusp of his one hundredth birthday and Rasmussen’s former lover. Once ensconced, the narrator hopes, she will find her way to Ash’s papers and finally undercover the mysteries and crack the code of Rasmussen’s most famous work—but all this turns out to be more complicated than she’d supposed.
Who IS the fox, after all? Is it our unnamed narrator, or Aubrey Ash himself? Ash’s attractive much-younger brother, whom the narrator is drawn to? Is it the cocky young literary critic whose many affectations include a cravat, who—inadvertently or otherwise—sets the narrator’s plan in motion? Is it the patriarchy, the oldest of old boy’s clubs? Or the city of Toronto and its seedy downtown east side, desperate people parked in doorways or screaming expletives on public transit, something scrambled in their brains, perhaps, or maybe they just see everything more clearly than the rest of us.
I loved this novel, which reminded me of Carol Shields in the very best way—imagine the preoccupations of her novels Swann and Unless. About the problems of biography, literary mythology, women writing, bystanding, and the impossible challenges of giving form to the world and to life itself.
May 24, 2024
Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan
Are Irish writers having a moment, beyond Sally Rooney and Tana French, even? (And Claire Keegan, and Louise Kennedy, and Caroline O’Donoghue.) Here’s another, Megan Nolan, whose second book is Ordinary Human Failings, a novel that’s agonizing exquisite, beginning with the death of a toddler on a London housing estate in 1990, all local gossip pointing toward a semi-feral 10-year-old as the killer, the second child belonging to an Irish family that’s never really seemed right, particularly since the death of the mother, Rose, leaving behind her husband, John, disabled by a workplace accident; eldest son Richie, a drunk; daughter Carmel, beautiful and hardened; and Carmel’s daughter, Lucy, neglected and wild. All the pieces fitting into place, or at least that’s how it seems from the perspective of newspaper reporter Tom Hargreaves, young and striving, hoping to land that big scoop that’s going to take him somewhere far from here. He ends up with the family and uses whatever tools he has on hand to get them to hand him their misery, share the pitiful story of how they all ended up like this, but he’s not as savvy as he seems, which is to say that he just doesn’t get it (in both senses) and Nolan shows each family member’s most vulnerable and private selves, the tender bits that nobody else has ever witnessed before, and that nobody like Tom will be able to exploit. Nolan renders these people as tragically, achingly human, their stories only ordinary ones, so the title goes, but this novel itself is quietly magnificent.
May 15, 2024
Death By a Thousand Cuts, by Shashi Bhat
The first time I read Shashi Bhat was her Journey Prize-winning story “Mute” in 2018, and I remember just feeling captivated by the narrative voice, being struck by the singularity of her character’s experience, and yet noting how much I could identify due to the specificity of her perspective and the choice of such essential details. A scenario that really gets under the skin, that’s really “cringe,” as the kids say. A little “Cat Person,” a little Sally Rooney, altogether timely in the age of #MeToo, but also I just read it and wanted more of literature that can affect me like that, and thankfully Bhat delivered with The Most Precious Substance on Earth, her excellent 2021 novel-in-stories, and now with her latest, Death By a Thousand Cuts, which is just devastatingly devourable and I read in a single day.
Naturally, every time I think of this book, the Taylor Swift song of the same name starts playing in my head, which I’m not sorry about. And I don’t know if Shashi Bhat is a Swiftie, but her literary preoccupations are not different from those in Taylor’s tortured poetry—her stories are about seeking and not finding, about the tedium of dating, about longing and wanting and disappointment, but there’s also a brutality to them too, a sting. (Let the wasp on the cover of the book be a warning.) As I was reading this book upstairs, I kept having visceral reactions to the stories, gasping in dread and horror, and members of my household were concerned for my well being, which says a lot for a book, that they can affect one in this way.
These are stories that will be appreciated by readers who aren’t even sure that they like reading short stories. And while I know short story lovers bemoan the form’s lack of wider and/or commercial acceptance, I get it too—as a reader I want something immersive, something deep and lush to sink into and get lost inside, the way I can inside a novel, but in these stories, I really can, so much richness, so much texture. As satisfying as the dripping fruit of the cover, but even better, because I can read them over and over again.
May 14, 2024
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes, by Adrienne Gruber
As I noted in the introduction to my Bookspo conversation with Adrienne Gruber, I’m not as preoccupied with notions of motherhood these days, or with essays about of motherhood, certainly not as much as I was back in the day when I was publishing my own anthology of essays about motherhood, when I was positively obsessed, and felt like I was working out pressing and essential existential questions with this obsession. The most surprising and disappointing revelation of that experience (along with many others that weren’t disappointing at all) being that motherhood is niche, never mind that everybody everywhere was born to a mother once upon time. But considerations about motherhood themselves are not as fascinated and universal as I’d supposed they’d be back when I was young, starry-eyed, naive and about to publish my first book. (Goodreads reviews for my most recent novel include comments from readers who were disappointed that motherhood factored so strongly into my book, and therefore they found themselves unable to relate to the story.) I think too about what older writers must have thought when I was in the heart of “discovering motherhood” era. And I’m not helping the cause by having now considered motherhood discovered and conquered, because soon it will be a decade since I last changed a diaper. But now Gruber’s essay collection Monsters, Martyrs & Marionettes has gone and got me right back into the thick of it. It’s tapped a nerve. “Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul.”
There is an essay in this book, “A Route That Does Not Include Your Child,” that is the nonfiction version of the “Hot Cars” chapter of my novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND. Gruber and I both, I suppose, too attuned to tension, to risk, to possibility (though it’s our job as writers), reading Gene Weingarten’s 2009 article “Fatal Distraction” in the Washington Post with meticulous attention. From the first page of my novel, “Parenthood, Jess observed from her perspective smack dab in the eye of the hurricane, was—if you were lucky— like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”
And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. She’s writing about legacy, about her own struggles with mental illness, and those of her scientist mother, and her grandmother’s cognitive decline. About how essays of motherhood turn out the essays about everything, about the most elemental parts of life itself, milk and sweat, and then a reviewer will turn around and write something like, “This dark comedy is not for the squeamish,” and question who would want to read a book like this.
Anne Enright has called motherhood “the place before stories start”, describing her surprise at finding it was not the sort of journey that one could send dispatches home from. I read Enright’s memoir MAKING BABIES when I was pregnant with my first child, and a decade and a half later I understand what she means. I’d never envisioned how those early days would come to seem like a journey I now cannot imagine having ever taken. “Did we really go through that?” Otherworldly. But this only makes writing down how it was all the more important, because otherwise it would be impossible to remember any of it in that unbroken sleepless blur.
