March 8, 2009

(Almost) Definitive

Oh, this is good. Melanie from Roughing It In the Books gets a bit more definitive than I did about what she’d recommend for the nation to read. Her choice is Thomas Trofimuk’s Doubting Yourself to the Bone, which I’ve never heard of, and have requested at the library. And I’ve managed to narrow it down to two, which is the best I can do. Pickle Me This’s recommendations for Canadian books the whole nation should read is The Fire Dwellers by Margaret Lawrence, and Russell Smith’s Muriella Pent. The first because I bet you have strong opinions of Lawrence based upon having read The Stone Angel in grade twelve, and this might challenge some of them. The second, because it demonstrates that contemporary Canadian fiction can be fabulous to read, and different than anything else you’ve read before.

December 9, 2008

Top Eleven Picks of 2008

That any book was reviewed here during this past year means that I liked it enough to recommend it to you, though my very favourites are listed here. And of that crop, I’ve narrowed to eleven for the sake of conciseness. My top eleven of 2008 as follows:

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson: “If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.”

• American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: “…this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even ‘characters’; they’re people and they’re real.”

• The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews: “…the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that.”

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer: “That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.”

• Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith: “But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all.”

• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins: “Perkins has created a puzzle of a puzzle. I read this book in anticipation of the ending the first time, and then the second time I pored over the text in search of clues. But both times I was entirely caught up in both this extraordinary story and its more ordinary concerns.”

• The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala: “Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package.”

• The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear: “…this is rumination after all. The Letter Opener is primarily the story of Naiko’s own self-discovery, as she realizes her constructions of others through their objects tells more about her own self than anybody else’s. And this story is fascinatingly beautiful, a satisfying read.”

• Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated from French by Lazer Lederhendler: “‘Nothing is perfect,’ so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is… Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness.”

• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk: “So I was prepared for something Woolfian then, which in my experience has always required a different kind of reading. One in which you let the prose lead you where it may, but paying utmost attention. It’s a significant cerebral investment, and necessitates a period of adjustment upon returning to the real world once again.”

• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: “With a spirit threatening to fade when the monster dies, when all seems bleakest, but there is so much hope, and such a gorgeous ending: ‘and it is good.’ I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn’t sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling.”

November 12, 2008

Giller Hopes

Various circumstances conspired against my reading the entire Giller shortlist, one of which was the fact I had no desire to, but one book I did read was Mary Swan’s The Boys in the Trees. I’m in no place to say it deserves to win of the lot, but I do know that this is a book deserving of celebration. So of course I would be most pleased if it took home the prize tonight.

UPDATE: Alas, was not to be. But do read The Boys in the Trees anyway. Congratulations to Joseph Boyden, and perhaps read his book too?

September 28, 2008

Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

Rebecca Rosenblum is too close a friend for my opinion of her book Once to be considered impartial, and so however much I loved her book (which is very much), you needn’t be concerned with that. In lieu of my own opinion, however, I give you some from a few less biased sorts:

My husband Stuart says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever read short stories before that so stayed on my mind for days afterwards. “Linh Lai”, and “Pho Mi 99″, they’re stories, but they’re also whole worlds and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”

The Globe & Mail’s Jim Bartley writes, “Plot is the least of this intricate story. What matters, tickling the sense memory, is the prickling pleasure of Isobel’s tired feet freed to the air at bedtime; the sugary baklava stuck to its crumpled carton; the florid, chewing face of the tax teacher as he negotiates a wad of honey and nuts. Rosenblum builds and subtly rounds off a story arc, but the sustaining life humming all through this tale comes straight from the sensory input. In Isobel’s word-picture ramble, Rosenblum’s meanings arrive on the reader’s intuitions. Her art remains veiled. The quotidian is rarely so riveting.”

Daniel Baird writes in The Walrus, “Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality… These young characters’ futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent.”

From Christina Decarie in The Quill and Quire, “Each story stands alone, but Rosenblum sometimes weaves the characters in and out of each other’s lives, and when, say, the restaurant in “Route 99″ is revisited, it feels as good for the reader as it does for one of the characters, a single dad with kids in tow: ‘The buggy’s thin wheels wobble over every lump of snow, salt, ice, and Jake whined unintelligibly through his scarf. But it was worth it … I could smell fish sauve and cilantro, hear Koenberg’s rusty mutter’ … Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight.” — Christina Decarie

September 24, 2008

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

“Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street” is the definition of Kate Atkinson’s writing, I think. Her literary roots are deeper than deep, but she’s so fully aware of the actual world. So fully aware, as well, of how frequently these roots surface in life, of how relevant literature and literary-ness still truly are, and in the most unexpected ways and places.

Atkinson’s first Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread award, and is one of the finest novels ever written in the English language. I liked her second novel Human Croquet a little bit better. In 2005 she shifted gears a bit with Case Histories, the first of her crime novels about Jackson Brodie, which I enjoyed as well as its follow-up One Good Turn. And now with the publication of the series’ third novel When Will There Be Good News?, I officially retire from asking, “When’s she heading back into real literature?” One bit of good news: Kate Atkinson’s new novel is as brilliant as anything else she’s done before.

There is a solidity to When Will There Be Good News? that was missing from the previous two Jackson Brodie novels. They were about coincidence, connections, the most unexpected links, and were both infinitely readable (devourable) but lacking the containment and control distinct to literary fiction. The shape of this novel is different, tighter, which is not to say standard or unsurprising. Mystery has always been at the heart of whatever Atkinson writes, and she is so deft at bending time and place to create just the right amount of space, to give clues but never answers.

The solidity comes from the novel’s more singular focus, on the disappearance of a doctor and her baby. The twist in this being that the doctor has not even been reported missing, but sixteen year-old Reggie Chase, the mother’s helper, is determined that something is not right. Which is usually the case for Reggie, whose mother is dead, whose scumbag brother has set scary thugs on her tail, who finds herself giving Jackson Brodie CPR after a train wreck. The wrong place at the wrong time, always, though this time the right one. Having saved Jackson’s life, Reggie refuses to absent herself from it, hoping to take advantage of his skills as a private detective to help find Dr. Hunter.

Reggie has ample reason to worry about her employer, though she doesn’t know most of it yet. That as a child Dr. Hunter had been the sole survivor of an attack that killed her family, and the killer has just been released from jail after thirty years. That Dr. Hunter’s husband is involved in shady dealings, burning down his businesses to collect insurance, and there’s every chance he’d pull a similar stunt with his wife. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe knows all this well, however, though she is surprised to find the case reconnecting her with Jackson, the two rather gruff police types having flirted with attraction in the previous book.

Reggie, the hard-luck A-level studying orphan is a marvelous creation, Homer on her lap and Corrie on the telly; she is indomitable, fearless and smart, and so funny we forget how perilous her situation is. That such a character, with that mouth and that attitude, is book-smart too makes for a perfect marriage between two equally brilliant but quite different things. In Kate Atkinson’s work, we can ask for that much, though Atkinson knows also there can be too much, so the world goes. “Just become something happens once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again,” and people like Reggie Chase, Louise Monroe, Joanna Hunter and Jackson Brodie know this. That the world doles it out unfairly willy-nilly, cruelty and brutality altogether ubiquitous, and to think otherwise is just naivete (and luck).

Jackson spends much of the novel unconscious or out of the picture, Louise Monroe serving as the crime solver, day saver. As strong a character as Reggie, she is funny and dry, wary of the world she sees through her work. Of her marriage as well, to a man she’s not particularly in love with, however he is good and safe. And she’s finding herself obsessed with women who’ve been victims of men quite otherwise, women like Joanna Hunter who’ve found themselves as prey.

What Kate Atkinson does with language, with allusion, I’ve yet to see another author do– it’s a kind of mastery. Her turns at genre writing demonstrating her ability to plot a plot, and she does that here better than I’ve ever seen her do before. The first of her crime novels in which “genre” is quite irrelevant, really. If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.

September 14, 2008

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld, in her fiction, has a strange relationship with truth. First, her debut novel Prep, which I failed to love, that was famously marketed autobiographically, with photos from Sittenfeld’s high school yearbook. And now with her third novel American Wife, “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” Mrs. Laura Bush in particular, which has generated controversy as well as positive reviews. The latter entirely justified– this novel is exceptional.

Sittenfeld’s First Lady Alice Blackwell notes that “the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people… the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true– it’s staggering.” Though similarly staggering in my opinion is the faith these same people have in truth itself, that truth is even possible, all the while fiction is much-maligned and negated, treated as less-than real when it can be so much more so.

Though American Wife could have been a really cheap trick, a satire at best, Sittenfeld’s novel is neither. She’s not exaggerating the “looseness” of her inspiration, so that when I read about Charlie and Alice Blackwell, I didn’t have to think about George W. and Laura Bush. Charlie and Alice were characters enough on their own, and the circumstances of their lives different enough from the genuine articles that I didn’t find myself reading and connecting the dots. They both come from Wisconsin, which Sittenfeld evokes with a vividness I’ve never seen applied to the American Midwest, and Charlie’s family made their fortune in the meat industry. They have just one daughter, as opposed to the Bushes’ twins. Charlie’s father is not a former president, but had made a failed run at the position years and years before. The country invaded by American in 2003 goes unnamed. Etc.

I take from all this that Sittenfeld was not trying for an expose, a Primary Colours, or any kind of exploitation of Laura Bush’s life. But rather that she has been intrigued by Laura Bush, by her unique position and her elusiveness, the evidence that she is a far more complicated person than the public gets to see. And so Sittenfeld imagined herself into a position much like Bush’s, but not the same one– this story is Sittenfeld’s own. The character we get to know intimately as Alice Lindgren Blackwell is a singular creation.

Of course, so was Hillary Rodham Clinton, as depicted in her autobiography Living History. (I loved Living History; I admire Hillary Rodham Clinton). Sittenfeld fictionalizing that style of narrative, that pseudo-intimacy that springs up between autobiographer and her reader. “If I were to tell the story of my life,” narrates Alice Blackwell, “(I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course– one never is)…” But here we are holding the story of her life in our very hands, and our burdened hands, I note– at 55 pages, this book is as voluminous as any autobiography.

The story begins with Alice Blackwell’s question, “Have I made terrible mistakes?” and then sweeps back to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of small-town banker. The sheer normalcy of her life challenged by her unorthodox grandmother Emilie who lives with them, never does a bit of housework and spends her days smoking cigarettes and reading novels. It is from Emilie that Alice acquires her lifelong love of books. It is Emilie also who arranges Alice’s abortion (still illegal then), when she becomes pregnant in her final year of high school.

The novel is broken into four sections, a chronology of key episodes. From Alice’s childhood, we skip ahead to her thirtieth year. She is a school librarian, content to be single, and about to purchase her first home when she meets Charlie Blackwell at a backyard bbq. As crass as she is reserved, a Republican to her Democrat, Charlie is also being pursued by Alice’s best friend, but he is unrelenting. And when she falls in love, the reader can see why– this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even “characters”; they’re people and they’re real.

Ten years later, Alice is a mother, more settled in her country-club lifestyle, but she has had enough of her husband’s drinking and general discontent. It is when she threatens to leave him that he finally cleans up his act, stops drinking and is Born Again. From there the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is clear (and what strange times we must live in, that this is the case). The last quarter of the novel a bit more ruminative than I would have liked, but I still couldn’t stop reading. The choices Alice has made as a woman and as a wife, during her “life in opposition to itself”, have come back to haunt her, and she must act in order to protect her husband and his presidency, of which she is inordinately tired.

That this fictionalized biography reads so true is down to the details, all the details, but the bookish ones in particular. Alice tells us the names of the books her grandmother is reading, every single title in a stack she buys for a young friend of hers, which includes books by Loises Duncan and Lowry, Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. Her daughter Ella reads Bunnicula on the flight to Charlie’s college reunion. Alice has John Updike in her handbag on her first date with Charlie, and she wonders if she’ll ever learn to read so sneakily at political conventions that no one will notice (and she is sad to never manage this). Of her husband’s religion, Alice says, “I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it… Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose– what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?– and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”

American Wife, for all its fiction, sheds a great deal of light on the Bush Presidency and on America. Sittenfeld answering the question, “How could this have happened?” That a man with such limitations could become so powerful, how any awareness of the enormity of his mistakes would make him all the more steadfast about continuing to make them, that the political is really only personal, because politicians are people. Not just in the “we wear sweaters and have children” sense, but in terms of blatant fallibility. How “this”/Bush could have happened is so truthfully imagined here, and isn’t imagined as close to truth as we can get?

Says Alice Blackwell, “What I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity.”

If only the cover
of American Wife did not feature a wedding dress though, and I can’t even think of why it does, since Alice Blackwell didn’t wear one to her modest nuptials. I fear the cover of this book will deter a man from ever picking it up, which is almost tragic, because this book is so rich, entertaining and important. Enacting Hilary Mantel’s assertion that “revolution is a daily task”, that the domestic is the heart of everything.

September 4, 2008

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

It is typical of the way that argument goes, of why argument is very rarely ever productive, when essayist Stephen Henighan responds to reviewer Nigel Beale’s assertion of “the market as a determinant of literary quality” by pushing the argument towards it most illogical conclusion: “So the great novelists of our time are Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling?” Because no, of course they aren’t, but there is definitely something to Beale’s argument (which I believe was in reference to Ian McEwen.) That sometimes a writer’s popularity can eclipse their literary merit can be demonstrated by Miriam Toews.

Not to suggest that Toews is in need of defending, of any assistance– her first novel Summer of My Amazing Luck was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, A Boy of Good Breeding and the memoir Swing Low: A Life were both McNally Robinson Books of the Year, A Complicated Kindness was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Award in 2005. But all this acclaim may have made Canadian Literature critics forget how fine a writer she really is, how good her writing truly is.

I say this because her work is the epitome of everything I hear critics calling for more of in Canadian literature (including Henighan): much of her fiction is utterly contemporary instead of backward-looking, she makes remarkable the lives of impoverished people who live in cities (and Winnipeg, no less), she has fun with language, colloquialism and the vernacular, pulling it all into pieces and then slapping it back together again. She addresses depression, drug addiction, poverty etc. but not as “issues”, these are stories. She does “gritty” but it sparkles, and though I believe Toews is one of the most exceptional writers we have working Canada today, she rarely gets such critical response, however much she is popular and racks up the awards (which I would argue, as most people would, are not quite the same as “critical response”).

Her latest novel The Flying Troutmans begins, “Yeah, so things have fallen apart.” The narrator Hattie Troutman returning home from a life in Paris that was unraveling anyway, in order to care for her nephew and niece. Her sister Min has been hospitalized with depression once again, and it becomes clear that Min’s problems have taken a toll on her kids– fifteen year-old Logan has been expelled from school for gang ties, and Thebes at eleven has ceased bathing, displays a manic chatter belying deeper problems and fears inside.

So they go on a road trip, driving across America in search of Logan and Thebes’s father. Because Hattie knows the kids need her, but she can’t cope with them on her own, or cope with them at all, she thinks, and there is no one else she can turn to. Min is back home in the hospital, “hooked on blue torpedoes” and last time Hattie had called the hospital, the nurse had told her Min didn’t even remember she had kids.

“But, said Logan, a fifteen-year old could technically live on his own, right?… No, a fifteen-year old cannot live on his own, I said./ Pippi Longstockings wasn’t even fifteen, said Thebes, and she–/ Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said./ And she was Swedish, said Logan./ So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn’t work here.”

And it doesn’t. These kids are all alone and they know it, and they know their mother wants to kill herself too. In fact they’ve exhausted themselves for months trying to keep her from doing so, and there is no safety net, solid or otherwise. How do you even be a kid in a world such as this one? How do you be a figure of stability to kids who know well there is no such thing.

“He asked me if I thought all this stuff was happening for a reason. /No, I said. I don’t think so.”

But yeah, just like Pippi, these people are characters in a book too, and because this is a book by Toews, this terrible reality is underlined always with humour. So that the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that.

One of Toews greatest strengths is voice, perfectly capturing the dry tones of her narrator Hattie, Thebes’s unceasing banter from the backseat, the unexpected breaks in Logan’s teenage reticence. Toew’s dialogue is fast paced, rich and real, and she is a kind of ventriloquist to create these different characters. And a sort of juggler or an acrobat (I’m not sure, someone who can do something awkward but with verve) to put these characters altogether and to make out of it a story so perfectly formed.

The Flying Troutmans represents real development since Summer of My Amazing Luck, which also had a road trip at its very heart and is a fine novel, but Toews has gotten so much better, which is the ideal. Her ending here a perfect balance between happy and real, known and unknown, resolved and otherwise. Here is a novel that is a road trip to somewhere, which is more than enough to ask of a book.

July 31, 2008

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

Writes Juliet Ashton in a letter to Dawsy Adams, “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.” But it might be, homing instinct or no homing instinct. That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a novel comprising a selection of correspondence, primarily to and from Juliet Ashton. Ashton, living in 1946 London with its war wounds still so fresh, is a writer seeking the subject of her next book– she’s previously published a commercially unsuccessful biography of Anne Bronte, and a very popular collection of humorous columns she’d written during the war. Her interest is sparked by a letter she receives from Dawsy Adams, a pig farmer from Guernsey in Britain’s Channel Islands, who has somehow acquired a book that was once hers, Juliet’s name and address inscribed on the inside cover.

Dawsy has written seeking other books, which are proving hard to find where he is– Guernsey still a long way from recovering from 5 years of German occupation. Books, Dawsy explains, have become very important to him, and his friends, far more than it was ever figured they would be during that evening they devised their Literary Society as a ruse to hide a pig from the Nazis.

Letters between Juliet and Dawsy, Juliet and her publisher, and also from the other members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, come together to form a marvelously engaging narrative, with characters so real their letters shout off the page. Their stories a testament to the power of literature upon all different kinds of people, as solace during hardship, to bring friends together. Portraying also the horrors of life during occupation, Juliet reflecting that all through the war she hadn’t thought much about the Channel Islands, and I don’t imagine many of us since have thought about it more. A fascinating, if awful, piece of history, and Mary Ann Shaffer’s enthusiasm for this subject is evident in her work. Unnatural exposition the risk of any epistolary novel, and where it happens here (which is rarely) is with these stories, these historical details, but we forgive them because they hold such interest.

The novel’s prose lives up to all the great works it references, which is certainly something. Offering such a fabulous critique: Juliet writes, “P.S. I am reading the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu. Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? ‘My dear little Jane, everybody is born with a vocation and yours is to write charming little notes.’ I hope Jane spit on her.”

One Society member writes of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats who excluded WW1 poems due to his “distaste” for themes of “passive suffering”: “Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! …What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr. Yeats.”

I would urge this novel upon you, with all its wonderfully funny writing, shocking in places, and in other turns sad. Hardly shying away from the brutal realities of this time period, absolutely and bravely unflinching, but also masterful at capturing the nuances of ordinary life. A certain erudition evident, but always underlined by a joy– in books, in reading, in human relationships, and the connections between all three.

(Read DGR’s Review.)

June 3, 2008

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

The Myths series has a bit of the gimmick about it. These “contemporary take[s] on our most enduring myths”, with their promises to “shed new light”. The books so lovely and slim, they could almost slip inside a pocket, so there is certainly no physical evidence of their substance. Look at the drawing on the cover of Girl Meets Boy, for example, all delicate lines and flowers. Positively precious.

But what would you say if I told you the drawing was called “Self Portrait as a Small Bird” and the self being portraited was Tracey Emin. Wouldn’t you agree then, that this is a book with tricks up its proverbial sleeve? And so it is, being a book by Ali Smith, whose The Accidental was one trick after another. But now the trick is on me, and it may be on you, because there’s nothing of the gimmick about Smith’s latest novel at all.

“Smith’s latest novel” I say, for this is exactly right. It is a powerful novel and it can stand alone. A slim book, yes, and part of a series, but then there is actually very little uniform about The Myths. Featuring a wide range of writers from various backgrounds who select their own myths and approach these stories in any way they choose. In Girl Meets Boy, Smith working with the myth of Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorpheses. As she writes in her afterward, “It is one of the cheeriest metamorpheses in the whole, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change.”

And like any novel, this one has its very own story. Beginning, “Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.” Quickly establishing a world of unfixed parametres, of shape-shifting, as young sisters Anthea and Imogen absorb their grandfather’s stories. TV game show Blind Date playing in the background, with host Cilla Black between the panel of boys and the panel of girls. Anthea wondering, “But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesn’t seem to be either… She can go between the two sides of things like a magician or a joke.”

In the future, however, which is the present day, all the magic has been put aside. The girls’ grandparents have long ago been lost at sea, and life is weighty with its disappointments. Anthea has come back home to Inverness to live with her sister, who has been able to secure her a job as a “Creative” for the multinational conglomerate Pure. And Anthea finds herself easily distracted one day during a “Creative” brainstorm session by one certain vandal in a kilt.

In Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith presents metamorphosis as possibility. Anthea joining forces with the vandal, spreading slogans: “ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, WHERE WOMEN ARE DOING EXACTLY THE SAME WORK AS MEN, THEY’RE BEING PAID BETWEEN THIRTY TO FORTY PERCENT LESS. THAT’S NOT FAIR. THIS MUST CHANGE.” Anthea also falling in love for the first time in her life, with this vandal, who is a woman. Much to her sister’s horror (“My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.”)

So here is an old story inside inside this new story, which is a love story, and actually no less than two. For such a slim book, this is something, and that the stories sit comfortably amidst so much stuff of ages– from the ancient Greeks to our poppest of culture, allusions, winks, nods and odes. There are lines and lines and lines between these lines.

But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all. “And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with.” A most refreshing triumph.

May 21, 2008

Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers

I decided I had to read Why Women Should Rule the World after I heard Dee Dee Myers interviewed on CBC’s The Current last month. Her intelligence and experience made a remarkable impression, but it was her optimism that was so inspiring. Coupled with the absolute sensibility of her message: that empowering women is good for everybody. The title is provocative but Myers means it, defining world-ruling as “[taking] advantage of all that each of us has to offer.”

This book’s strength is its fusion of disparate ideas to form a comprehensive whole– so refreshing. Part of it is the politically sensitive nature of Myers’ material– she’s doing a lot of elaborate sidesteps on the way towards her arguments, in order not to be read as in attack mode.

But more than sidestepping, Myers articulates her ideas well beyond polemics. Part of this is her book’s hybrid nature: part memoir, part treatise. She is able to illustrate her own experiences in politics, the ways in which being a woman hindered her own advancement– as White House Press secretary she was given more responsibility than authority, which seems to be a typical story; how she was told, when she protested a subordinate colleague being paid a higher salary, that he had a family to support; the struggle to be likable in authority, which men are rarely faced with. Myers worked as Press Secretary in the Clinton White House for two years, worked in writing and television afterwards, and then got married and had a family.

She writes, “That’s my story, but…” The “but” being key, that hers is not the only choice. “Women want and deserve not only the flexibility to manage work (and family) from day to day, but also the ability to make choices that allow them to pursue their goals across a lifetime.” Her focus remains on power, however, because “[a]ssuming that women– even women with children– don’t want the top jobs means that too many women will never get the chance to make those important decisions for themselves.”

Myers’ reality is complex, and she asserts that women need to accept and support women whose choices are different from their own. She thinks of herself as a feminist, but from watching her son and her daughter she’s certain– “[it] isn’t nature or nurture: It’s both.” She acknowledges aggressive tendencies inherent in men in particular, but realizes these inherited traits aren’t our destiny. Dealing with the example of Margaret Thatcher: that it is too much to expect one woman to change everything, and surely her position altered the world’s opinion of what women were capable of.

That different can be equal: “That doesn’t mean that every man should be expected to behave one way, nor every woman another. Rather it means that women’s ideas and opinions and experiences should be taken as seriously as men’s– regardless of whether they conform to traditional stereotypes.”

Through her own experiences, statistics, and interviews with other women, Myers illustrates the various ways women can be systemically excluded from power. Showing that this is dangerous, not just in principal, but in terms of economics: she shows women as “the engine driving economic growth worldwide,” and not just with their immense consumer power, as she cites studies showing that Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards have significantly higher returns on equity, sales and invested capital.

Myers explains that men and women experience the world differently, and she demonstrates how traits typical to women, such as negotiation skills and collaborative strengths, can be highly effective in business. Moreover that women’s own lives are strong training grounds for management experience– motherhood in particular. She cites examples of women playing key roles in peace processes around the world. That in achieving “critical mass”– wherein women are not token, but a strong enough force to actually make a difference– everybody wins.

Myers is not overtly prescriptive– the general nature of her arguments ensures her book’s relevance is wide. Surely different institutions must find their own way towards solution, by Myers’s book is undeniable impetus for them to do so. I would like to think a man would read this, and find it as fascinating as I did– and not get defensive. That women could cease slinging internecine arrows for a little while, and understand that ganging up on each other is part of a game we don’t have to keep playing. The world can be better.

“This isn’t what I think,” writes Myers. “It’s what I know.”