September 22, 2013
Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert
While I was pleased that Shaena Lambert’s short story collection Oh, My Darling received a good review in The Globe and Mail recently, I couldn’t help thinking that the reviewer had kind of missed the point. That her stories-as-houses metaphor had failed to consider the construction of the book entire, that here the book itself is a house, well-built and with a strong foundation, which is remarkable for a story collection. I mean, it’s what a story collection should strive for, but many collections really do end up being haphazard piles of all an author’s publishable stories to date (and some of the stories not even that) rather than a proper whole, but Oh, My Darling really is, and a most impressive one at that.
And I love that, that here is a collection where I can tell you about the book, its themes, its shape, rather than just telling you the plots of three or four of the stories I liked best. Oh, My Darling doesn’t actually reference Clementine, which wikipedia has revealed to me is actually a satire (because who would write a song about a drowned girl whose feet were so big she had to wear boxes instead of shoes?) But its preoccupations are just as morbid, and so darkly humorously so at times that I am sure that Lambert knew about the satire. That tireless refrain, powered by blustery, lust-ery, souls laid bare. So much feeling for something seemingly shallow. Sound going nowhere. Just imagine how it would echo in a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mile…
The book is framed by two stories about middle-aged women whose lives are about to change with diagnoses of cancer, though this is a straightforward interpretation of two stories that are very different and not straightforward at all. Each experiences a kind of dissatisfaction with her lot, a sense of dread that is shared with characters in most of these stories. The dread is a beneath-the-bones kind of thing, hard to pinpoint, but it is mortality, it is death. (Everything rustles, and it occurs to me that Jane Silcott’s essay collection would be a fine nonfiction companion to this book).
“Welcome home” is the last line of the first story, “Oh, My Darling”, a greeting to the woman whose cancer is going to make her really aware of living in her body for the first time, an awareness that comes with age even without cancer. Bodies are so thoroughly inhabited throughout all these stories, and fitted with parts–never have I encountered so many vaginas in one text. Bodies are bound and unbound, bodies are revealed, mottled middle-aged bodies with wrinkles and scars and unfeeling abdomens whose nerve endings were never repaired after cesarian sections so long ago. Fragile, flawed and precious. Oh, My Darling.
These are stories of women mostly, usually ordinary, middle-class, each with her own particular tragedies, her own emotions and feelings which can seem so profound and yet are part of a larger scheme, un-grand in its scope. She has a yearning for something just out of reach, but only when she is distracted from day-to-day life. There are things to be done, and she does them, unable to articulate the feeling, the fear in her bones–something decidedly bodily. How do we fit into the world, into our lives, mother-daughter relationships which are freighted and fraught, the awkward symmetry of marriage, the stunning pain of loss. Kitchen-sink stuff, yes, but then there is a drag-queen who is the son of Nazi war criminals and walks on his hands, as well as a death by mountain lion, by which I mean that this collection will surprise you.
And I don’t mean that the stories themselves aren’t worth remarking on either. They are gorgeously, effortlessly crafted, and I particularly admired Lambert’s deftness with chronology, her ability to telescope back and forth through time to consider a moment from all angles, as well as the force of her omniscience. How she is able to zero in on a single detail, a moment, and the rest of the story is a sweeping symphony all around it.
September 11, 2013
Some thoughts about Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave
I recently read most of a very strange and fascinating novel by Jennifer Quist called Love Letters of the Angels of Death, a novel I had to ultimately quit because it was just a little too strange, mostly because the characters kept saying “dang” instead of swearing properly, and I just couldn’t get past that. But I was disappointed to run into trouble with the book because it really was remarkable in so many ways, and I keep bringing it up in conversations. Talking about this novel which is about a happy marriage, its curious second-person narration that makes so much sense upon the book’s conclusion (which I did read, though I skimmed bits in the middle), about how two people long-time married experience a kind of merger of self.
I thought of this book again this week as I read the stunning memoir Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, when I encountered this line near the end of the book: “I often think I utter Steve’s words, not mine.” Steve, Deraniyagala’s husband who died in Sri Lanka along with their two sons, her parents and hundreds of thousands of others when the tsunami hit that country’s coast on December 26, 2004.
**
I remember that “tsunami” was once a word I looked up in the dictionary, not long before December 26, 2004. In the years since, while it has also become every headline-writer’s go-t0 metaphor, the event in its enormity has remained something of an abstraction, cemented in history. And yet born of that hugeness, born of so much death and sprawling awful, is Deraniyagala’s slim memoir, so spare and deliberate in its prose.
Wave is the book I thought I couldn’t bear to read, but then such a claim is sort of precious because I always wanted to, a peeking through my fingers as I hid my eyes sort of thing. I listened to Deraniyagala on CBC’s The Sunday Edition last winter one morning as I fried banana pancakes, and found the way she told her story so impressive. She was so articulate, interesting, and I found nothing shameful in being witness to her pain, the way I might have with a woman less in control of her own story.
***
“That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths… In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles.” –Teju Cole
“Sometimes, usually when the weather is base and the freeways are black with ice and the commute takes too long, you try it on–my death. You take it in–shallow but still very much beneath your skin. It’s a tiny injection of grief and fear. It’s meant to protect us, like an inoculation. You stand in our kitchen as the sky outside gets darker, and you let this contrived, imaginary tragedy immunize you against real sorrow. In your imagination, you marshal the possibility of my death into the small, controlled sphere–one you hope cannot coexist in the same world as a truly dead one. It’s a bit like Halloween–playing dead, acting it out to keep real death away.” –Jennifer Quist, Love Letters of the Angels of Death
***
There are books I’ve read, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, Calvin Trillin’s About Alice, books I’ve read imagining some sort of usefulness, that they might possibly “fortify me for my own inevitable sorrows”. But they won’t, of course. You can’t read up on this sort of thing, prepare for it. Instead it’s more like what Quist writes about, these vicarious griefs something that we try on, a kind of dare. But then we close the books, put them back on the shelf. Maybe it’s that we imagine they’re fortifying wherein lies the attraction. But they’re just not. They can’t be.
Though perhaps they help us better understand how life is, its shape, to glimpse its darkest corners. There is is usefulness in this, I suppose, deepening our vision of the world around us.
What makes Wave intriguing as compared to other memoirs and what makes it so profound is that instead of Deraniyagala casting herself as central character, she tells the story as filtered through her own perspective, what she sees and feels rather than who she is, or what she has become (though we do get a sense of that). She writes, “And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is.” Her narrative exists to aid us in making that imaginative leap, in bridging the chasm between our experiences. Her self-effacement enhances this.
Though it is also a product of her tragedy–when she loses her family, Deraniyagala loses herself, and hers is the story of a reclaiming of her identity in the face of what has happened to her. So firmly anchored in her own perspective, we are to understand how time slows and spins in the immediate onset of grief, the confusion and the fury. She can’t bear to sleep for fear of waking and having to remember her loss all over again. She can’t bear to remember her family at all, can’t quite believe she ever had them, and it is years before she is able to return to their home in London, to confront what had been taken from her. The house is a museum, and she wants none of it disturbed. The pain of being there is overwhelming, and yet the pain of not having it to return to is worse. “I lost my shelter,” she writes, which seems to stand for everything.
This is the story of how she allows herself to remember her family and her love for them, to feel the pain of their loss because that pain is how she keeps them close to her. “I suspect that I can only stay steady as I traverse this world that’s empty of my family when I admit the reality of them, and me.” It take years for her to get to this point, and the book documents her journey closer and closer to the heart of the matter. And along the way, she brings her family back to life, her sons, her husband, her parents. She paints them each as distinct and striking characters, creating moments of levity that infuse her story with such light. It’s a story as sad as it is happy, what she lost underlined by what she had. Which doesn’t make it any easier that she doesn’t have it any longer, but neither are her loved ones thus entirely gone.
The key to this book, I think, and its usefulness for us, lies in a particular word that occurs at least twice. First, when she returns to her family’s London home and comes upon their back garden in early morning, the sight of a snail making its way across the patio table: “They would be so stirred by this.” Later, she writes about her husband who’d grown up on a council estate in East London, and his first trip to the Natural History Museum when he was six years old. At the sight of a life-sized model of a blue whale: “this was the most stirred he’d ever been.”
To be stirred then, to have our quiet disturbed. Perhaps this is why we should read this, or any book. A gentler version of Kafka’s frozen sea, and I like that. Not fortifying, but instead (and not merely) our reason for being.
September 7, 2013
How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny
There is. Something. Something about the way Louise Penny writes. The style of her writing. The manner in which her sentences. Are formed. If I pay too much attention her prose makes me crazy, and yet I have so completely overcome these reservations that I am now the type who buys her book in hardback the day it comes out, as I did last week with How the Light Gets In. Such a delight for a book to be an occasion, and then to encounter neighbourhood friends who ask if I’ve finished it yet, who implore me to get in touch as soon as I do so we can talk about it. And when I finish the book, I understand why; How the Light Gets In is worthy of an occasion entirely.
Once again, we find ourselves back in Three Pines, the idyllic village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships so isolated that it doesn’t appear on any maps, where cellphone reception disappears, and to which murder is curiously common. They’ve got Chief Inspector Armand Gamache on speed dial there on their ancient rotary phones, a phone from which psychologist turned bookshop owner Myra Landers rings when an expected guest fails to arrive for Christmas holidays. Gamache is just days away from joining his wife for the holidays in Paris with their children, still dealing with desertion by his long-time friend and lieutenant Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and conscious that he’s a marked man by the corrupt forces high up in Quebec’s Surete police force. A trip out to Three Pines promises a reprieve, as the villagers grace him with their characteristic hospitality.
But as ever, the trip will be business, not pleasure. Gamache’s investigations reveal that Myra’s friend has been murdered, found dead in her home in Montreal. Myrna is loathe to reveal her friend’s deepest secret, which is that she was the last of the Oullette Quintuplets, five identical little girls who were once famous the world over. Could her background have something to do with her death?
Meanwhile, Gamache is still trying to unravel the web of corruption at the Surete. The few colleagues who are still loyal to him have come under threat through their investigations of the police department’s computer archives, and Gamache decides that Three Pines is the safest place for them to hide. Their investigations turn into a dramatic game of cyber-cat and mouse, culminating in a fantastic showdown between the forces of good and evil. Gamache has always believed that good will ultimately triumph, but this time will he be proven wrong?
What is the attraction of Louise Penny’s novels, my reservations with her prose still being what they are? I think part of it is the intimacy she creates, between reader and place in her remarkably evoked village of Three Pines. And also the intimacy between the characters themselves, so much between them that doesn’t need to be explained, allowing the novels to progress in ways that are surprising. And finally, the intimacy of her narrative, her shifting points of view which enable us to understand her world from a wide range of perspectives. Which is not to say that her readers know everything. In fact, in this book in particular, the plot is operating on a whole other plane that readers are not even aware of until an incredible twist at the conclusion, and I promise that you never see it coming.
On Penny’s website, she calls How the Light Gets In a culmination of the Gamache books so far, the pay-off. And while it really is a most fitting culmination, one can’t help hoping that it isn’t. As ever, Penny has left her readers wanting more.
July 22, 2013
“Like life is always fucking subtle”: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“I’m going to blog about that.”/ “I knew you’d say that.”
I am really excited about the forthcoming anthology Friend. Follow. Text. #storiesFromLivingOnline, which will include short fiction by Canadian authors including Jessica Westhead, Heather Birrell and Alex Leslie, featuring (I suspect…) stories which were some of my favourites from their collection–Westhead’s story that takes place in the comments section of a lifestyle blog; Birrell’s on an online pregnancy forum; Leslie’s comprised of descriptions of Youtube videos featuring a Bieber-like teen-pop sensation. Even Samantha Bernstein’s memoir in emails Here We Are Among the Living is part of this trend of authors using online and social media to change the shape of traditional literary forms, taking advantage of the uniqueness and peculiarity of online communication to contain modernity in their work, to say something new.
At first, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wouldn’t be the most obvious candidate to be part of this literary trend. Her previous novel Half of a Yellow Sun (which won the Orange Prize in 2007) was a sweeping epic novel about the Biafran War. She is the writer who brought me to Chinua Achebe. Adichie is Africa. She is history. Her scope is huge, when online communication can seem so ridiculous and small, so much lesser. And yet, it is also very much of this world, and it is the world that Adichie is concerned with. As she stated in a recent interview, “I love books that are social in the way that they engage with the real reality.”
In her new novel Americanah, Adichie’s protagonist is a blogger. Ifemelu is a Nigerian expat in America who has established herself as author of the blog Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. She is able to make a living from her blog through advertising and speaking engagements, and has also been made a fellow of Princeton University. Her blog attracts hundreds of readers everyday with such provocative posts as “A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor”, “Obama Can Win Only If He Remains the Magic Negro” and “Thoughts on the Special White Friend”. For Adichie’s purposes, however, the blog exists so she can include sharply-worded, strongly opinionated, polarizing ideas in her novel about race in America, ideas which have been flooding social media since George Zimmerman’s acquittal last week of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. The blog posts–humorous, pointed and passionate–read in tone and language as very authentic, and along with the novel’s references to Facebook, email, and an online forum about natural hair, infuse the novel with a fascinating intertextuality. The blog posts in particular give the novel an edginess that straightforward fiction might be too subtle to provide.
Subtlety was an issue for me as I was reading Americanah though. While it was compelling, the story of Ifemelu and Obinze who begin as a couple in high school and each escape the “choicelessness” of life in Nigeria (for the US and UK respectively) to find their lives taking radically different trajectories, there was a hollowness to the secondary characters these two encountered. “Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” says Ifemelu’s first American employer of a trip to India. She eventually becomes a friend to Ifemelu but also seems to exist primarily as a mouthpiece for other such asinine pronouncements. Where was the depth in these characters, I was wondering, struggling to make sense of its lack in the context of Adichie’s talent as a novelist. Though could this be part of the novel’s satire, I wondered? And if we’re going to turn the tables, is not portraying characters of a certain race as stereotypical stock characters part of an age-old literary tradition?
There was more though. I love a book so textured that the answer to my criticisms are contained inside its very pages. I reached page 335 to find a tirade by Ifemelu’s boyfriend’s sister who is about to publish her first book, a memoir about growing up black in America. She explains, “My editor reads the manuscript and says, “I understand that race is important but we have to make sure the book transcends race…” And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.” Explaining an anecdote, she says, “So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not subtle. Like life is always fucking subtle.”
She continues, “You can’t write a novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them… have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.”
Blog posts, of course, are the very opposite of lyrical and subtle. Adichie has clearly found a way around the matter.
In some ways, Adichie’s novel bears a resemblance to Zadie Smith’s NW and it’s treatment of race and London, though Adichie shrugs off Smith’s experimental approach, preferring to focus on life as lived as opposed to its voices or the complexities of point of view. The story is the point, and the ideas contained within, instead of its delivery. Ifemelu leaves Obinze when she receives a partial scholarship to an American university, though the two promise to remain connect, to not be apart forever. She arrives in America, however, to discover that the reality of life there is radically different from what she’s seen on The Cosby Show or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She must find a job to make ends meet, but she’s not permitted to work legally and has difficulty finding a job under the table as her accent, her appearance, and her lack of American job experience continue to stymy her efforts. She slips into a depression and is just about to hit rock bottom, which would have made this a short book if she’d managed it, when things between to happen for her. In a sense, while Adichie does not portray America or the experience of its immigrants in an easy or flattering light, she does demonstrate that the American Dream is possible, while it is not for Obinze in the UK. Though it must be noted what an exception is Ifemelu–I don’t know if it’s more likely that your average Nigerian immigrant would become a Princeton fellow or a professional blogger. In fact the odds of anyone becoming a professional blogger are unlikely.
Meanwhile, Obinze’s American dreams are dashed in light of the September 11th terrorists attacks, when the US tighten their visa restrictions and make him ineligible for entry. He receives a temporary visa to England through his mother, a university professor, and when his visa expires, he remains in the country, working under the name and number of another man who’s helping himself to a portion of Obinze’s wages. He gets a job cleaning shit off toilets, and then delivering kitchens, performing the tricky maneuvre of always watching his back while trying to look forward and desperately cobble together a better future. (Here, Adiche’s explores the world of London’s underground job market for illegal migrants, as did John Lanchester in his novel Capital with his Zimbabwean traffic warden.) The ticket is an arranged marriage to a woman with an EU passport, which can be brought about with the right amount of cash (although the last time he tried this, they took off with his money). Plans fail, however, and Obinze is deported, brought home in disgrace only to discover that things are changing in Nigeria, that there is opportunity for a bright young man who is willing to play the system.
Obinze is established as a big man in Nigeria by the time Ifemelu returns after thirteen years in America, and he is by now married with a child. Neither has ever forgotten the other, though the reasons for their estrangement have become unknown or blurry with time. The stakes for their reunion are high, and in a sense Americanah‘s first 426 pages are just a prelude to this point. Because yes, this is a love story, but it’s a love story with an unabashed agenda, rich and compelling. And while Adichie confesses to not being a fan of experimental literature, it can’t be denied that with her third novel, she has broken new literary ground.
July 15, 2013
Bobcat by Rebecca Lee
(My copy has a blue cover, which I found much more appealing than this one.)
I had only read the first story in Rebecca Lee’s short story collection Bobcat before I’d ordered a copy of her novel from the bookstore. Why, I wondered already, had this collection not been more hyped? Not until it was awarded the Danuta Gleed Award a few weeks back did it really come to my attention. But one story was all it took for me to realize that Lee is a writer approaching mastery of her craft. As significant, I think, as the fact that she received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is that she received it 21 years ago. That Lee has had time to grow and develop as a writer so she’s no ingenue, but instead her writing reveals a maturity that is most admirable. Her grasp of these stories was so firm, and her voice so strong that I knew I’d be wanting more of it. I look forward to reading her novel The City is a Rising Tide very soon.
Rebecca Lee’s short stories share the same approach as Sarah Selecky’s, the same intimate first-person narration, close attention to detail that sets these characters as very much of this world (lines like “Lizbet basically knew how to live a happy life, and this was revealed in her trifle–she put in what she loved and left out what she didn’t”)–as well as dinner-party settings and fork on the cover. But on the other side, Lee’s marvelous telescoping endings and ultimate broadness of perspective remind me of the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. (I think “Bobcat” may join Lahiri’s “The Fifth and Final Continent” as one of my favourite short stories ever.) These stories were written over two decades and accordingly the collection lacks a certain cohesion, except for (and this is significant) the solidity of Lee’s voice.
“One of the things Strandbakken had been struggling to teach us was that a building ought to express two things simultaneously. The first was permanence, that is, security and well-being, a sense that the building will endure through all sorts of weather and calamity. But it also ought to express an understanding of its mortality, that is, a sense that it is an individual and, as such, vulnerable to its own passing away from this earth. Buildings that don’t manage this second quality cannot properly be called architecture, he insisted. Even the simplest buildings, he said, ought to be productions of the imagination that attempt to describe and define life on earth, which of course is an overwhelming mix of stability and desire, fulfillment and longing, time and eternity.” –from “Fialta”
Lacking a certain cohesion (which in a collection this good is less a criticism than a statement of fact), yes, but there are more than a few points in common. Three of these stories take place in academic settings. These are stories written with an awareness of history and not just a general contemporariness. They are filled with allusions and references to actual places, people, and things. Though “Bobcat” is like this least of all, the first story, about a dinner party and so tightly contained within four walls that the effect is claustrophobic until the story’s incredible ending in which the whole thing explodes. A hostess is acutely aware of the inner lives and workings of her dinner guests, so much so that she’s blind to her own destiny. The people in this story are so vivid and real, and the ending was both incredible and heartbreaking. “The Banks of the Vistula” is a 1980s’ Cold War story (“But this was 1987, the beginning of perestroika, of glasnost and views of Russia were changing. Television showed a country of rain and difficulty and great humility, and Gorbachev was always bowing to sign something or other, his head bearing a mysterious stain shaped like a continent one could almost but not quite identify” [and how I love that “almost but not quite…]) about a university student who plagiarizes a linguistics paper from 1950s’ Soviet propaganda.
“Slatland” is a peculiar story about a strange psychologist and his impact on a young patient who returns to him years later looking for him to translate letters her Romanian fiance is writing to a woman whom she suspects is her fiance’s wife. In “Min”, another Midwestern university student travels to still-British Hong Kong and is enlisted with the job of selecting him a wife, as her friend’s diplomat father is being faced with the morally ambiguous task of deporting Vietnamese refugees. In “World Party”, a female professor during the 1970s’ uses her relationship with her (perhaps autistic?) son to decide the future of a male colleague who has been accused of a sexually inappropriate relationship with a student. And the final story is “Fialta”, in which architecture becomes analogous to story-writing and a group of students enrolled in an elite mentorship program fall in and out of love with one another, learn, come of age and of self, and are each uniquely bound to their teacher for better or worse.
June 10, 2013
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Apparently Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was one of the biggest books of last year, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. Someone who was paying attention, however, was Stuart, who took note when I picked this book up in the store and casually remarked, “I’m kind of interested in this one,” and proceeded to buy me the book for Mother’s Day. I saved it for postpartum, because I had a feeling, and oh, what a good feeling it was. Two nights ago, Iris’s all night eating/fussy fits began, and I was so glad to have this book on hand. My mind is fuzzy and there is no way I could write a coherent review, but it’s an endorsement, I think, that on Saturday night when I was up from 12am until 5am feeding the baby, all I could really think of was, “Yes! I get to read more Bernadette!”.
The book comprises a mishmash of forms–letters, emails, newspaper articles, memos and more. It reminded me a bit of A Visit from the Goon Squad combined with a bit of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. It’s heart-felt, satirical, rich with the stuff of the world. Lines in parentheses, like, “This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.” Told from the vantage point of Bee Branch, a wise-beyond-her-years Seattle teen who lives in a decrepit former home for wayward girls atop a hill of blackberries with her father, a Microsoft developer, and her eccentric mother, Bernadette. We learn about Bernadette mainly from the point of view of other parents at Bee’s elite private school, other women bothered by Bernadette’s refusal to conform to their expectations of her. Bernadette is brilliant, agoraphobic, and her daughter adores her. We learn that in a past life, she found fame as an architect of buildings constructed from found-objects, but she stopped creating after a series of tragedies. And now suddenly, on the cusp of a family trip to Antarctica, Bernadette has disappeared. It’s up to Bee to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and find out where her mother has gone.
The perfect book to read in the middle of the night a few days post-partum is not to say the book isn’t really smart and satisfying. How wonderful to get the best of everything.
May 9, 2013
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Claire Messud’s latest novel The Women Upstairs is a book that rubs shoulders with so many others, in fact a veritable library which runs the gamut from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to Zoe Heller’s 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal. Although the latter novel is not referenced in Messud’s book, but rather by critics who haven’t read The Woman Upstairs yet and see implicit connections between these two novels about spinster schoolteachers with transgressing extracurricular connections, and who seemingly destroy their lonely lives with a subsuming obsession with another woman and her family. In Messud’s book, what is the scandal though? To which I answer that there isn’t one. Messud’s is a dark psychological fiction in which plot is not the point and not much really happens, but I dare you not to be captivated by her narrator’s voice, by this novel which begins in a fury: “How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”
The voice belongs to Nora Eldridge, age 37, not incidentally the very same age as Marianne Faithfull’s Lucy Jordan when she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car. And we are not to know until the novel’s conclusion just why she is so angry, assuming it’s mainly due to her dissatisfaction with her place in the world, her own invisibility the result of a life spent pleasing others. She doesn’t get to be “an Underground Woman” or even one of the mad-women in the attic (“they get lots of play, one way or another”), but instead she is “the woman upstairs”, “the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.”
“Nobody would know me from my own description of myself,” Nora tells us, though it soon becomes clear that her own description of herself is the product of her imaginings, that she has little insight as to how she’s seen by the world, or perhaps she’s making a case for herself in this novel, that she’s taking full advantage of this opportunity to finally make a sound. When a new student arrives in her class, she’s immediately besotted with him, and swept up in the exotic world of his parents, his mother Sirena an Italian artist and his father a Lebanese professor. She admits that she finds their foreignness intriguing, though the reader wonders if its real appeal is that the couple is unable to place her as the outcast she is, and if in their role as outsiders, she’d projecting her own self upon them. And indeed it’s true that Nora does a lot of self-projecting. Metaphors of fun-houses and trick mirrors run throughout the novel, things not being what they seem (Sirena is busy at work creating an installation of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland), but nothing is more tricky than Nora’s own narration, her fantastically unreliable point of view.
Messud’s novel is also structured as a fun-house, trap-doors and booby-traps springing up if the reader makes the mistake of taking Nora at her word. Which is a difficult mistake to avoid–Nora’s voice is so forceful, persuasive, she perpetually speaks in generalizations and second-person address designed to make us feel comfortable, familiar. “Don’t all women feel the same?” she asks, and you’d be hard-pressed not to respond with a nod, but then, no! There is no such thing as “all women” anyway, and besides, Nora Eldridge is clearly unhinged. On top of being an unreliable trickster of a narrator, she is also blatantly wrong, about so many things, but most notably in her insistence on regarding the world within the limits of gendered binary terms. In this way, the novel recalls Carol Shields’ Unless, another book in which an enraged female narrator stamps her ladylike foot at the systematic repression of womankind, institutionalized sexism which completely exists, but her singular focus upon this obscures a far more complicated reality. Which is not to say that Nora Eldrige’s or Reta Winter’s rage is misplaced, that either should cease their foot-stamping, but just that there is ever and will be ever more to the story.
Nora is threatened by her growing relationship with Sirena, her student’s mother whose thriving career as an artist challenges Nora’s own ideas about the limits placed on women by society. Nora is disappointed by the failure of her own artistic dreams, and Sirena‘s success suggests that this failure could fall more on the individual than on the society around her. But at the same time, Nora is also inspired and empowered by her connection to Sirena, by Sirena‘s attention to her. In their relationship, Nora finds herself as close as she’s ever been to the type of person she’s longed to be and the type of life she’s dreamed of living. Their connection is complicated, power ever-shifting between them, and it’s never entirely clear just who is being played.
The Woman Upstairs also reminded me of Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, another novel whose foundation is a most remarkable voice, another novel that was sparked by rage and thirst for revenge. In terms of subject matter although not as complex as a fiction, it also had me thinking of The Interestings, which I read recently, another book about friendship, about what happens when different types of people dare to mingle. And even The Great Gatsby–these books in which ordinary people glimpse another, better world and have the nerve to imagine themselves a part of that scene.
But what happens when the scene shatters, when it reveals itself to be a mirror and the character suddenly realizes that she was outside all along? Claire Messud’s Nora’s suggestion is to pick up the pieces and sharpen the shards, though whether she actually will or if this will be just another example of her fruitless longing is just a whole other layer of complexity underlying this formidable book.
April 25, 2013
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”–George Eliot, Middlemarch
“And didn’t it always go like that–body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.” –Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is so absolutely full of stuff, of the world, loud with that roar which lies on the other side of silence. Within the novel, we find echoes of its literary contemporaries–recent books like The Marriage Plot and Arcadia–and also more distant 19th century relations. And also the kind of stuff that fills up newspapers and magazines, cover-story “issues” like autism, gifted children, grief, depression, marriage, divorce, rape, third-world child labour, unemployment, and motherhood. So that on one hand, I can tell you that this is the story of a group of friends who meet at summer camp and whose ties grow and change during the decades that follow. But it’s also about the history of the last thirty years in New York and America. It’s about what it means to live history, and how characters change with their times. It’s about the democratic and egalitarian nature of youth, when friends could be duped into believing that they all have the same potential, that there is such thing as a level playing field, that it all comes down to talent and drive. Before it’s discovered that talent is mere, that being extraordinary is rare, and that factors such as money, connections, pedigree, physical and mental health, love, children, and luck come to define the path that a lifetime takes, and that those paths can lead in surprising directions.
At the centre of the story is Jules Jacobson, attending camp at Spirit of the Woods on a scholarship, perplexed and thrilled to find herself part of a circle of individuals who define themselves as “interesting”. She’s an outsider among them, yet she’s curiously accepted, which changes the way she sees herself. When the summer ends and she returns home to her family in suburbia, suddenly everything is mere, and the future (and the city) beckons in a way it never had before. She becomes part of the orbit of Ash and Goodman Wolf, brother and sister with inordinate privilege, is embraced into their family with the other “Interestings”: Jonah Bay, son a famous folksinger who squanders his own musical talent; Cathy, the dancer whose body has other plans for her; and Ethan Figman, whose talent for animation will catapult him to superstardom. The story moves through these different characters’ perspectives, and yet Jules remains its focus and we find her years later receiving Ash and Ethan’s annual Christmas newsletter (they eventually become a couple) with its extraordinary reports of their happenings, and being torn between love and hatred for her friends, contentment with her own more quotidian life and pure envy.
The structure of The Interestings is fascinating, the novel weaving back and forth through time without great shifts, effortless for the reader to follow and seemingly effortless for the writer too, though I can’t imagine that this was really the case. And yes, it is so interesting, a book so terrific to be absorbed in and whose end (at page 468) arrives too soon.
April 21, 2013
Cottonopolis by Rachel Lebowitz
In Cottonopolis, Rachel Lebowitz both imagines and recreates the global trinity that was created by the 19th century cotton industry–in the American South where the cotton was grown by slave labour, in Lancashire England where the cotton was produced in mills with their belching chimneys and inhumane working conditions, and in India whose own textile trade was violently supplanted by the introduction of English imports. Through a series of prose poems and found poems, Lebowitz draws tight the lines between these distant places, their connections to lives lived locally and globally, and the connections between economics, industrialization, and story-telling. She plants seeds of connection between those nineteenth-century factories “[u]ntil the 1980s is a wasteland of old chimneys. Until the clothes are made in China…”. This is not a story as distant in place and time as it might seem.
Many of the poems in Cottonopolis are classified as “Exhibits”, extrapolations of nursery rhymes, historical record, images, maps and items everyday and otherwise. Some echo the voices of those whose lives were made or broken by the cotton trade. The collection’s notes at the end of the book provide context and further explanation for what the poems themselves represent, and they add fascinating weight to this creative work and its stories.
But most remarkably for this book that uses language to build a museum is that the language itself is easily and unabashedly the work’s most remarkable aspect. I love the stories here, the history, but I can’t help but catch my mind on a line like “The trill of the/ robin, the trickle of the rill.” Or my favourite poem in the collection, “Exhibit 33: Muslin Dress” which turns language inside out in order to sew the whole world up into a tidy purse: “Here are the railway lines and there are the shipping/ lines. Here’s the factory line. The line of children in the/ mines. The chimney lines. There is the line: from the/ cotton gin to the Indian.”
April 9, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
I never got over Behind The Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson’s first novel which won the Whitbread Award in 1995 (“‘A 44-
I was ecstatic to learn, however, that her new novel would be a return to straightforward literary form. Well, not straightforward exactly, because Atkinson makes a point of taking form and exploding it into a million pieces. There is nothing at all straightforward about Kate Atkinson’s fiction, and what has always delighted me most about her literary novels is how covertly they’re all detective novels as much as Case Histories et. al. That there is ever such mystery at the core of her books–ghosts and dead bodies and things unexplained.
What is explained, however, what most readers will know because they start reading is that Life After Life comes with a gimmick. Think Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World, though not with parallel lives exactly but an array of them instead, strung together like a garland of paper chain dolls. Ursula Todd comes to life, then she dies, and then she’s born again and again, after each death returned to her beginnings, that night in 1910 when she comes into the world during a snowstorm. But then this isn’t even really the point, and here’s what allows Kate Atkinson to defy the bounds of genre: the point of this book isn’t the fantastic, but that it was written by Kate Atkinson and she’s wonderful.
I began this book with a strange sense of deja-vu (which was funny in itself because deja-vu is what it’s all about) because it reminded me so much of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I read four years ago when I was even more ridiculously pregnant than I am right now. The same depiction of the Edwardian middle-class family in a rural idyll (Todefright Hall vs. Fox Corner) with more children that it knows what to do with, some of whom are suspected to not really belong. And the banker father, fairy story references, connections to Germany. Both novels are setting out to do vastly different things, but in Atkinson’s I sensed an echo of the Byatt, and I loved that.
Ursula is born, Ursula dies, and then Ursula is born again, and while Atkinson does not explicitly spell out Ursula’s consciousness of her situation, her actions portray a dawning awareness that there is more to her life than just this one. This awareness manifests as strange sense of dread when she is young, that keeps her firmly on the beach where she’d drowned just a short lifetime ago. Her plight turns comical as she attempts numerous time to prevent her family’s maid from attending WW1 victory celebrations at which she’ll encounter the Spanish influenza and go on to infect Ursula and her beloved younger brother. Ursula eventually resorts to pushing her down a flight of stairs (thus saving the day), and ending up on a psychiastrist’s couch. Her parents are concerned with her oddness, her propensity for deja-vu.
Ursula comes up with clever ways of avoiding her previous mistakes, managing to make it through the 1920s and ’30s and only dying a handful of times. She falls in love, she has affairs, she stays single, she suffers a disastrous marriage, she is disgraced, she triumphs, she falters, and then is born again, determined to make her way. The connections and disconnections between Ursula and her siblings are particularly compelling. World War Two, however, proves to be an enormous impediment to Ursula’s lifeline. Again and again, she finds herself killed in the Blitz, and when she finally manages to skirt her particular explosion, other complications present themselves. Her fate seems determined to find her no matter how she goes out of her way to avoid it.
There is texture to a book like this, and the pleasure of seeing secondary characters from a wide variety of angles–Ursula’s mother in particular whose role in the novel’s conclusion was ingenious. Life After Life is a long book, as befitting a life lived over and over again, and I savoured its slowness, the returns to where I’d been before, places and people I was happy to revisit. I appreciated the specificity of its detail, the brilliance of its writing, its genre-blurring, its daringness in reframing the shape of a narrative, and yes, this is Kate Atkinson, so there is going to be that too.
