May 21, 2010

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Does Attica Locke ever do atmosphere in her first novel Black Water Rising. It’s the summer of 1981 in Houston, Texas, and the temperatures are soaring, along with the oil prices, the one tied to the other as lawyer Jay Porter tries not to overuse the air-con so as to conserve gasoline. His wife Bernadine is just weeks away from giving birth to their first child, and Porter is barely earning a living practicing law on his own, in an office in a strip mall. One night on a boat cruise along Buffalo Bayou, as the two are celebrating Bernie’s birthday, they hear a gunshot and a scream from somewhere on the shore.

Porter’s first instinct is to stay out of it– the FBI file left over from his student activist past in the civil rights movement has taught him as much. Urged on by his wife, however, Jay jumps into the bayou and finds himself inextricably embroiled in a crime that involves some of Houston’s most powerful forces.

Locke ties the strands of this narrative together with ease– how the mysterious white woman Jay rescues from the bayou is connected to the labour unrest over which Houston’s dockworkers are threatening to strike. How Houston’s controversial new female mayor is connected to Jay Porter’s radical past. How Jay’s troubled early life is affecting Jay as he awaits the birth of his first child. What all this has to do with the fact that he’s always packing a gun, terrified of what lies around the next corner. Though he’s been terrified for good reason lately– since he pulled the woman out of the water, other people have turned up dead, threats have been made on his own life and his wife’s, and someone seems desperate for him to keep his mouth shut about what he’s seen.

There is always music playing in the background, or the late night talk-radio going out over the airwaves as Jay drives around town. All of this adding to the heightened atmosphere, sense of impending something, the pulse of the city over those sweltering summer days and nights. Locke creates and sustains terrific suspense throughout her narrative, displaying her screenwriting background. Car chases, gunshots and fights down stair flights drive the narrative forward. Porter is a compelling and layered character, a driving force in his own right. For the last couple of years, I’ve been afflicted with a late-onset thing for crime-fiction, and Porter is everything a reader could want from such a book.

Black Water Rising has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, perhaps by its un-literary nature a longshot. But I can see why it was included, and how the list is better for it. Locke defies all convention about the kind of fiction women are supposed to write, about what crime fiction is supposed to be like. Her characterization is strong, her prose is punchy, her maneuvering of plot a most impressive feat. This is a really good book, unputdownable, the only Orange Prize shortlister I’ve ever called my Dad about to say, “You’ve got to read this!”. It’s a book that proves that commercial fiction can be amazing, and that in itself is really accomplishment enough.

May 16, 2010

What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy

I’ve been devouring short story collections lately, one story after another without even a pause for breath in between. And then I read “What Becomes”, the first story in A.L. Kennedy’s new short story collection of the same name, and I had to put the book down for a while. The story, about a man who’s the only person in the audience at a small movie theatre, who’s been waiting for the film to start and then when it starts, it has no sound– the story was so brutally, heartbreakingly sad that I just needed a rest before I could handle another. Which was good intuition on my part, because the stories in Kennedy’s collection are unrelentingly bleak.

And yet, would it surprise you that the collection was also hysterically funny? In particular, the passage about gerbil installation: “You’ve had some right cowboys in here… Any chance of a cuppa once I’m done?” Kennedy’s characters are usually profoundly lonely, with a wry outlook, sharp intelligence and sense of humour that makes the loneliness even more tragic, because it’s clear how much they’re aware of their disconnect, that they’d probably make for fairly good company. So tragic yes, but still funny. Bleak plus hilarious does make for a vision that is quite singular.

In the title story, the man in the movie theatre has left a troubled marriage in which so much has gone unsaid, in which the right things have never been offered at quite the right time. “Edinburgh” is the story of a man who owns an organic fruit and veg shop (“Sell organic food and imitation bacon, and suddenly folk thought you’d tolerate anything.”). He falls for a customer, and their love story is a trick of tenses– perhaps a used-to-be, a could-have-been, a never-to-have-been, or the still purely hypothetical. Regardless, it doesn’t end happy. “Saturday Teatime” the story of a woman’s failed attempts to clear her mind in a flotation tank (which is more like a “Flotation Damp-Cupboard”). “Confectioner’s Gold” the story of a couple who’ve lost everything in the recent economic collapse. “Whole Family With Young Children Devastated” is about a character who peers too much into the heartbreak of others, when she can barely help herself. In “As God Made Us”, a group of young with various physical impairments are asked to leave a swimming pool because they’re upsetting nearby children. “Sympathy” is a graphic one-night-stand in a hotel room, delivered solely with dialogue.

There is not a story among these that doesn’t pack a solid punch. Kennedy’s atmosphere is so vivid, her characters’ interior voices so deeply authentic, and though her prose doesn’t call attention itself, it is as perfect as the voices are. Her stories are constructed of details, right down to the grouting between the tiles on the floor, and the things her characters know, trivia netted or wisdom earned– the characters become people by this. Kennedy’s first-person narrators are so convincing that they must be the voice of the author herself, and yet the voices are impossibly various, so of course they’re not. And this is truly the mark of a stunning fiction writer, that what’s imagined is made so vividly real.

April 25, 2010

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

So what is it about these stories, about outsiders coming up the drive toward the stately home that’s past its prime? Daphne Du Maurier, and the Brontes, and even more recently in The Private Patient by PD James. It’s the romance, yes, and the world’s colliding that is so fascinating to watch, the pervasiveness of the British class system too, and the way in which these homes are universes onto themselves, complete with their own rules, what happens when the rules start to change. And yes, there is no better backdrop for a mystery– so many places to hide, stuff to steal, secrets to reveal, skeletons in the closet.

The same elements are at work in literary mysteries (whether they be detective stories or ghost stories) as in any literary novel. The driving force of plot, the withholding, the twists, the reveal, the unreliable narrator, the atmosphere– these are the reasons we’re taken by any kind of story, but in mysteries there’s nothing subtle about the way we’re being handled. So mysteries are remarkable in being novels pared down to their bones, but even more remarkable is their power to leave their readers paralyzed with fear. Mysteries make clear what a powerful object a simple stack of printed page can be.

Sarah Waters’ latest novel The Little Stranger is the least historical of her acclaimed historical fiction, taking place post-WW2 in Warwickshire. Her narrator is Dr. Faraday, called out to the isolated Hundreds Hall to attend to one of the maids. “One of the maids! I like that,” says the young master of the house, Roderick Ayres, when he receives the doctor. “There’s only the one– our girl Betty.”

Ayres himself had come through the war with considerable damage, and the same can be said of Hundreds Hall– most of the house is shut up, the land is being sold off, the house’s contents being sold as well to raise capital. Throughout England, the age-old aristocracy is faring badly by the mid-twentieth century, particularly under the heavy hand of a tax-grabbing Labour government. For Faraday, such decline is an awkward paradox– his mother had been a servant at Hundreds years ago, and he remains conscious of the immutability of his class, though circumstances have changed so considerably.

Circumstances have changed so much that he has quite a bit to offer the Ayres’– Roderick, his widowed mother, and his sister Caroline. Faraday begins to perform a medical treatment on Roderick’s damaged leg, visiting the house regularly in the process. He becomes so close to the family that he is invited  to a small party at the hall– the party itself an anachronism– though his conspicuous presence does not go unremarked upon by the guests (“No one’s unwell, I hope?”). His presence is a blessing, however, when tragedy strikes and he is able to save the life of a young guest. And as a series of bizarre events begin to unfold, Faraday finds himself more and more non-expendable until his relationship to the family begins to consume his personal and professional life.

Is Hundreds Hall haunted by a poltergeist, or have its inhabitants been driven to mental illness by their surroundings? Is it the ghost of the Ayres’ first daughter Susan, who’d died as a child of diphtheria or is the house possessed by an even more malevolent spirit? Is Faraday’s ability to find rational explanations for what occurs at the house a sign of his own sound mind, or is he simply unwilling to acknowledge forces against which he is powerless? In fact, might his continued insistence upon those rational explanations be a sign that he might not be of such sound mind after all?

Faraday is a fascinating narrator, seemingly unconscious of his own role in shaping the narrative (both literally and circumstantially). The real story takes place beneath the one that Faraday tells, this made clear by Waters’ clever ending, underlining his complicitness in the story. Though the real story throws up far more questions than it answers, of course, Waters never entirely alleviating her book’s decidedly creepy and sinister atmosphere. There is no comfort there, no assurance, and the mystery never goes away, because nothing is fully explained. And it takes a masterful writer to create a narrative that so convincingly hangs like that.

April 21, 2010

Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller

K.D. Miller’s novel Brown Dwarf is a delicious secret. A slim volume, gorgeous to behold (and to hold! that cover. those thick pages. such an elegant typeface, perfect leading), it knows far more than it is telling. Rae Brand, a successful mystery novelist, turns to her own personal narrative in order to confront a pivotal event from her childhood. Though she’d been Brenda Bray then, lumpen outcast, daughter of a depressive, the character Rae Brand has been escaping ever since.

The novel alternates between Brenda’s story in third person, and Rae’s voice, addressing her childhood friend Jori. Though their relationship had not been a friendship exactly, the power dynamic far too unequal. Jori had been an outcast as much as Brenda, though for different reasons, and had seized onto the other girl, dominating her. Brenda had followed along with Jori’s scheme to catch an escaped serial killer hiding in the wilderness of the Niagara Escarpment, th0ugh what had gone on between the girls exactly is never entirely clear. Something sexual, other things even more complicated than that, and one day after Brenda leaves her in the woods, Jori is never seen again.

A brown dwarf, writes Rae Brand, is a character in crime fiction, the villain. Ugly, understated, far from the prime suspect because just too dull to be noticed, but this stigma is the brown dwarf’s ulterior motive. Particularly dangerous, because this character blends so well into the background, and Brenda Bray is such a character. Miller provides a particularly strong perspective of her personality but using the present-tense, second-person address, and showing us young Brenda in third person (this even more interesting when we understand that this is also filtered through Brenda/Rae’s point of view). The gap between these two presentations wide enough that Rae/Brenda still remains somewhat elusive, which is probably as intended.

Are we to trust Rae’s rendition of events? So much is going on between the lines here (and hence that leading, amazing!). Even the book’s main weakness could be deliberate– I didn’t find Jori altogether convincing as a character. She wasn’t meant to be authentic either, more of an Eddie Haskell type (and is there a more modern reference point than Eddie. Anyone?)– but Jori read like a substandard version of Cordelia from Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. But then mightn’t Brenda want us to see her that way? To block any light that Jori might have shone?

Brenda’s character turns out to be the real driver of the narrative, in a way that’s so subtle we don’t even notice until the climax. But is Rae Brand a better writer than we realize? Has she pulled the wool over our eyes altogether? Such gaps and ambiguity make Miller’s novel an engaging and absorbing read.

April 8, 2010

So Much For All That by Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver breaks all the rules– her best-known novel (and, perhaps, best full-stop) We Need to Talk About Kevin was epistolary, for godsakes. Her last novel The Post-Birthday World is as close to a choose-your-own-adventure for adults as you’re going to get. Her sinfully smart newspaper columns are always out to piss somebody off, and her other novels that I’ve read are uncomfortable, the end-results of fixations. She even dares to be a woman called Lionel.

So it’s no surprise that her latest book, So Much for All That, appears to have a lot wrong with it at first glance. That it’s an “issues” novel, about a topic as timely as the American health care system, and their health insurance system in particular. That, like all Shriver novels, it’s populated by wretched characters who treat one another badly. That one character’s chief occupation is ranting about government control, and taxation, and “mooches and mugs” and these diatribes go on for pages, seemingly only furthering the novel’s political agenda. That nothing much actually happens in the novel, but rather the characters just talk about things that happened, so that expository dialogue is where the action is. That Lionel Shriver characters don’t talk like people– no one is that wry, particularly for multiple dense paragraphs, and nobody actually talks in paragraphs either.

So it will probably surprise you when I report that the book is wonderful. That nobody talks like Lionel Shriver characters, but I wish they did, and eavesdropping onto their conversations for 400 pages still wasn’t enough. That the whole book is conversation rather than action, but that conversation is so vibrant, so pointed and sporting, and brilliant. So Much For That is a satire, the old-fashioned kind. It goes up against the American system and Shriver offers 400 pages of smackdown with more than enough force to sustain itself. It’s a book with a job to do, but the narrative never falters. The plot is gripping, the prose is crafted, the story is sad, but (most essentially) it’s also hilarious.

Shep Knacker has been planning for The Afterlife, but for one here on this earth. For years, he’s been squirreling money away to finance early retirement and the rest of his life in some exotic place where the American dollar goes far. He’d sold his handyman business in the late ’90s and made a tidy sum which has been earning interest ever since, and though it’s a farfetched plan in theory, its achievable in practice. Due to Shep’s conventional streak, his inability to shirk responsibility, however, nobody actually thinks he’s going to follow through.

He’s just about to show them for once and for all, though, the airline tickets bought and he’s made the announcement to his wife (from whom he’s been distant lately) that he’s doing it, he’s taking off for Pemba Island to live out his (still innumerable) days drinking out of coconuts. He’s going, he tells Glynis, with her, or without her. “I do wish you wouldn’t,” she tells him. “…I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”

What follows is a year in the life of the sick, as Glynis begins treatment for an aggressive form of cancer (and Shep’s bank account for The Afterlife begins its steady depletion). Shriver pulls no punches in her portrayal of disease, and the details of Glynis’ ravaged body are absolutely horrifying. Unceasingly horrifying too, and I’ve never read such a portrayal of sickness. Though the portrayal is multiplied by three– Shep’s best friend Jackson’s daughter has been suffering with a rare debilitating disease since infancy, Shep’s father is elderly and beginning to decline, and then Jackson gets himself into a spot of trouble when elective cosmetic surgery on his penis gets botched. (Critics have questioned this final plot line; I actually kind of loved it, and it delivered the appropriate lightness I required to counter all the rest.)

Lionel Shriver’s books are always, however unconventionally, about family and relationships, and in this novel she shows how disease is a family affair. Moreover, how serious disease becomes the only family affair, and everything else is an extension of it. Her portrayal of Shep and Glynis’s marriage and how the cancer changes it (and the ways in which it doesn’t change it) are hearteningly rendered– Shriver writes a sex scene between them that is the most pointful, perfect and uncliched sex I have ever read in any book. Like every character in this book, Glynis is alternately hateful and sympathetic, a nasty piece of work who you’ve no doubt why Shep fell in love with. She pulls no punches either– sick of false sympathy, of friends who don’t bother (or are just scared to), unwilling to offer redemption to those who come seeking it from her. She is real, striking, scary and wonderful.

The book is bleak. I wouldn’t have considered stopping reading, but it’s a lot of misery to get through, but Shriver makes it all worthwhile with the most wonderful ending I could have imagined. Where there is justice, and goodness, and everybody gets what they deserve, and I’ve never known Lionel Shriver to be such an optimist (or a dreamer).

So it’s too bad this ending is the most storied part about the whole tale, but that’s the world’s fault, and not Lionel Shriver’s.

January 18, 2010

Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch

Two and half days of my last week were spent in the absolute bliss of reading Sheree Fitch’s first novel Kiss the Joy as it Flies (shortlisted for the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour). I’d previously only read Fitch’s wonderful children’s book Kisses Kisses Baby-O!, but love it so much that when I discovered Fitch had written a novel for adult readers, I had to read it. Though I began reading with a degree of uncertainty: the story of Mercy Beth Fanjoy, who receives a troubling medical prognosis and decides to stage a clear-out of her messy life in the time she has left. This sort of formula could go either way, and very quickly in, I was pleased to find Fitch had gone in the right one, with sprightly prose and a narrative packing a punch. The novel is wonderfully original, although if pressed, I’d have to call it as Fannie Flagg meets Miriam Toews.

In Kiss the Joy as it Flies, it’s not so much plot that accelerates as the language itself operating on sheer gumption, and the spirit of Mercy Fanjoy picking up speed as she comes into her own. Though things happen– people die, hopes are dashed, love is born, battles are fought, illusions are shattered, triumphs are won, and lessons learned. The stuff of life with a wacky cast of characters who are constructed as types– religious zealot mother, loyal friend, hippie daughter, enigmatic dead father, sex god– but each of them excellently crafted with the most remarkable ability to surprise you.

Mercy Fanjoy is wholly embodied by Fitch’s prose. The fact of the disease that lurks inside her, and her buxomness, and her sexuality, and when she expresses milk from her engorged breasts into the bathtub during a flashback in which she remembers her teenaged, single-mothered, basement-apartmented self. Two decades on, Mercy has come a long way– she’s reconciled with her difficult mother, earned a university degree, she pens her own column in the Odell Observer, has raised her daughter, bought her own house, teaches a creative writing course, and has maintained a lifelong relationship with her best friend Lulu. She still holds a grudge against horrible Teeny Gaudet (who has since gone onto fame as bestselling author of the “Burt the Burping Bear” series of children’s books), but you can’t win them all.

Over the week she seeks to put her life in order, Mercy finds herself becoming unhinged, and emerging from a rut she’s been stuck in too long. In the end, just about everybody in her life surprises her, but she manages to shock them right back, tenfold. And while it’s raw, we’ll get our hearts warmed, and Fitch also pulls of a satire so slick, we can’t help laughing, and I suppose that this is what she means by “the sheer mad joy of all of it.”

December 9, 2009

On reading in 2009

It’s been a funny old year for me, reading-wise and otherwise. I don’t even know how many books I read in total, because my Books Read Since 2006 list was lost in the (Un)Great Hard Drive Kaputment in late June. I’d wager I’ve read about 100 books in total though, and I’m quite pleased with the fact that I’ve read 53 of them since my baby was born in May. Many of these books have frustrated me, however. Something has changed in the way I read– either the books have gotten worse, or I’ve become more demanding/less patient. This has been ongoing since I first got pregnant, and all the books I read in the first trimester made me nauseous. Since then, I’ve had no time for a book that does poorly what it has set out to do.

I think there’s a connection in that lately, most of my literary fiction (apart from big name authors) comes from small presses. Last year, I made an “indie list”, that was sort of an off-the-beaten-track best ofs, but this year small press books make up half of the books I liked best. My impression is that the big publishing houses have been focusing less on literary fiction, in producing it and promoting it. And perhaps this been an opportunity for small presses to pick up their slack, or at least receive more focus on the wonderful books they’ve been publishing all along. It just seems remarkably clear to me for whom the bottom line is something other than profit.

I’ve also seen less incredibly polished popular fiction with a literary bent– it’s been derided, but last year I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, or The Flying Troutmans and American Wife which managed to be delicious and literary at the very same time. The pop/lit. divide has seemed wider lately, much to the detriment of popular fiction in general.

Anyway, where have I discovered the books I liked best this year? I was been coaxed to read many after newspaper reviews– Caroline Adderson on Lisa Moore, and Lisa Moore on Lorrie Moore in particular, neither of which disappointed. And then there are bloggers: I read The Spare Room after DoveGreyReader’s review, and I read The Incident Report because of Melanie’s review (which was before its Giller longlisting). I read The Children’s Book after Steph wrote about it at Crooked House. The Lydia Peelle book after Lauren Groff recommended it on her blog. I only read The English Stories because I wanted to buy something from Biblioasis at Eden Mills, and that goes to show you never know, because it was one of my favourite books all year. Apart from that, my point is that bloggers sell books, oh, yes they do!

Surprising: so many short story collections here. I root for the short story, but I adore novels, but maybe short stories have better suited my focus lately. Unsurprising: all my favourite books were written by women. This doesn’t mean the men are rubbish, but I think I’ve only read two novels by men in the last six months, so better broaden my focus in the new year.

This list doesn’t mention The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon (which is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in foreign lands like America). Read my post on it: the book was absolute magic and blew me away, but alas, as it was not published this year, it doesn’t fit the bill. You should read it anyway, though.

My other favourite discovery was Barbara Pym. I can’t imagine what my life would have been had I not picked up Excellent Women at the Vic Book Sale and discovered how incredible her novels are. They’re so funny, smart and modern. I just finished read my second, No Fond Return of Love, and I liked it even better than Excellent Women. But I’ll be writing more about that later.

December 9, 2009

Pickle Me This Top Books of 2009

• The Believers by Zoe Heller. From my review: “In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible”
• Delicate, Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. From my review: “I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover’s bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect.”
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner. From my review: “This is a perfect novel. It’s also quite short, but… there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a “long conversation”. As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner’s narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder.”
• The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. From my review: “The Children’s Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt’s best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn’t mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here– a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don’t like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one– there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children’s Book is decidedly vivid and surprising.”
• February by Lisa Moore. From my review: “February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively “thought-like”– twisting, interrupted, irrational– as Moore’s style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It’s a rare thing– a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I’m taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere”
• The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. From my review: “Miriam’s strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie’s exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward).”
• The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. From my review: “Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, “That book is amazing. Buy it.” I said, “I’m going to. I’m reading her new book right now.” She said, “That’s just what I’m here to get,” and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. “It’s fantastic,” I said, because flawed or not, it is. And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore.”
• The English Stories by Cynthia Flood. From my review: “With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn’t even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what’s around every next turn.”
• What Boys Like by Amy Jones. From my review: “And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot? What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you’d never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails…”
• Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle. From my review: “Where Peelle is like O’Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you’ve been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic th
  an you’ve ever imagined. I mentioned the end of “Kidding Season” already, and can’t get explicit or I’ll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers’ awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. “Phantom Pain” has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.”

November 23, 2009

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

Perhaps Lydia Peelle’s stories seem a bit old fashioned because most of them are so blatantly about something. So that I finish reading one, for example “Phantom Pain”, exclaiming that the story was amazing, and when I’m asked what it was about, I can say, “A one-legged taxidermist and a mountain lion on the loose.” And then, naturally, whoever I’ve been talking to wants to read the story now.

A bit of their old-fashionedness also comes from these stories’ deep investment in history, and a focus on farming and the land. “The Mule Killers” is three generations contained in one single tale, which navigates changes in farming life (mule killers are tractors). “Sweethearts of the Rodeo” looks less far back, an elegy-that-isn’t-an-elegy to a summer two girls on the cusp of adolescence spent working on a horse farm. “Kidding Season” takes place in the present day, but recounts a troubled young man’s experiences working on a goat farm. In “Shadow On A Weary Land”, a motley collection of characters (one of whom is apparently communing with the spirit of Jesse James) search for treasure buried by James’ brother on property outside of Nashville that is rapidly being developed into subdivisions.

Peelle’s agrarian history is no idyll, however. A seminal moment in the “Sweethearts of the Rodeo” summer involves the head of a dead pony in the jaws of a dog. The ending of “Kidding Season” is so sickeningly devastating, you’ll read the final paragraph again and again, willing it to say something different. The narrator of “Shadow On A Weary Land” is an octogenarian stroke victim/former drug addict, and the yarns he spins are a product of his past.

“Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing” reminded me of Birds of America Lorrie Moore. The stories “Phantom Pain” and “The Still Point” paint the underside of the present day in stunningly vivid terms. “This is Not a Love Story” chronicles an abusive relationship, displaying a wonderful treatment of the “life as a flowing river” metaphor, when that river is a man-made lake that had flooded a town, and how there’s nothing else to do but go around and around. This story in particular undercuts any notion of the good old days: “But wasn’t it worth it?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you do it all over again?’/No, it wasn’t worth it, I told her. Not any of it./ Not one damn minute of it./Trust me.”

Peelle displays some self-awareness in “This is Not a Love Story”, her narrator a girl from Connecticut who in the early ’80s decides to become a photographer and “move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era.” Peelle, a native of Boston, might have been similarly naive when she moved to the South, when she started writing about the South, but her stories show she’s since learned that the dangers are elsewhere, that the long-gone era is an illusion, and relics aren’t the things you might have chosen to last.

But writing about the South, she treads on a dangerous tradition, and thus come the comparisons of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. There are moments when it feels like she might be striving toward these voices, but on the whole I would posit that, as an outsider, Peelle comes at the South from a unique point of view, and hers are even less elegiac than these writers’ non-elegies for a long-gone era that never was and never went.

Where Peelle is like O’Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you’ve been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you’ve ever imagined. I mentioned the end of “Kidding Season” already, and can’t get explicit or I’ll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers’ awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. “Phantom Pain” has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.

I like this book for the lines it crosses– Peelle’s history isn’t dead and buried, but keeps coming up again year after year (and kudos for that wonderful asparagus image in “The Mule Killers”). Which is perhaps where she gets her lack of elegy from, for its hard to elegize something so close to the surface. Peelle’s stories mix urban life and farm life, they’re stories of home and of the road (and neither of these so much like the home and road you read in books). I like that if you picked up this book, and read it straight through, you’d have a hard time telling whether it was written by a woman or a man, and in that ambiguity, I think, Peelle’s writing takes on tremendous power.

This is a stunning collection that deserves to be read and celebrated, and I think the one only leads to the other.

November 16, 2009

What Boys Like by Amy Jones

I’d previously read Amy Jones’ “The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches” in The New Quarterly, and as I read the story again in Jones’ new collection, I was hoping that this time the story might be different. This time, could it possiby have an ending that wouldn’t break my heart? It didn’t, though I was so hopeful that a little trick with italics caught me once again, and I dared to be tripped up by the same trick that caught me before.

And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot?

What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you’d never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails. The comic-strip touch suggesting a pop-cultural bent, and indeed, Jones’ characters listen to pop music, they play video games, sports is playing on TV, and references are tied up in zeitgeist.

Jones displays impressive range, writing in first, third and an impressively-executed second-person. Her characters are male and female, young and older than young, on the cusp, over the edge, or past the point of no return. They lead such desperate lives, and then there are these moments of grace– the pregnant lady who shares her peanut butter sandwich, the man who dares a young girl to be something, that Jenny goes home at all, Marty looking for bats in the garden, and all that love. The baby inside her. And when those who really get it had it coming anyway.

These are stories mostly of Halifax, in and around. In “The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches”, the first sentence tells the story: “There is nothing more unseemly than a pregnant widow at a funeral”. “Places to Drink Outside in Halifax” is the story of the first party of high school, drinking on Alexander Keith’s grave. In “An Army of One”, a woman attends the wedding of her male best friend (who she’s been sleeping with for years). “All We Will Ever Be” is two sides of a woman from the perspective of the man she’s just about to throw away and the other she’s just sinking her teeth into.

In each of these stories, premise is realized into someting vivid and whole. Amy Jones’ stories are easy to fall into, but complex enough that there is something new upon returning to them again and again.