May 6, 2008
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
(Read my interview with Emily Perkins here.)
It was interesting, the many ways Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife complemented my recent reading of The Girl in Saskatoon. Both books about the impossibility of recreating life out of words, as well as the struggle to define a line between reality and otherwise. Which becomes doubly interesting in Perkins’ case, the recreating as fictional as its result.
Like Sharon Butala, Perkins’ Tom Stone writes in an attempt to put a life back together, his wife Ann’s: “If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse couldn’t help but kick back into life.”
But Tom is also at a disadvantage: “Some facts are known… Other things I can only take a stab at.” His wife had been particularly elusive, an Australian exile in London content to have long ago cast her past away. Part of what had attracted him– Ann’s mystery what he’d fallen for in the first place. That mystery part of the reason why, after Ann becomes pregnant with their first child, her increasingly strange behaviour is not confronted, ultimately leading to her tragic death.
“She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies… Her body was open for viewing. It was the one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.” And Tom has been happy to be distracted. Now that Ann isn’t there to distract him anymore, he writes to address her unknowability, the fact of which is infinitely underlined by her death. Toms lays out the “known facts” and takes stabs through speculation, drafting several versions of the events he still does not understand that led up to what fell apart between them.
Tom and Ann and what happened to them are singularly emblematic of nothing– this is how I know this is a good story. The endpapers now positively covered in my scrawl, as I noted key points, facts, ideas. All emblematic of nothing, I say. Emily Perkins understanding that nothing is so simple to profess to summation, and instead my notes and ideas are expansions– this is the kind of book that takes you there.
About what it was exactly that happened to Ann, because, like Tom, we get pieces of the puzzle but some are missing and certainly out of order. What Tom knows and what he doesn’t, his detachment disturbing at times, and his subtle address rendering him a complex and interesting first-person narrator. The story itself grappling with issues, but not so much as to make a statement. More so to consider: any illusion of safety in a society fraught with danger, such fraughtness intensified during pregnancy during which danger lurks ’round every corner. How once bad things happen in our lives, the limits of possibility are expanded. What is to be a man, to be a “guardian”, in such a place where any horrible thing is possible. How “space is what we crave and fear”, and it is in this context that we turn to one another.
I am being terribly general, and I could write about this book forever, but I will focus on one thread. Tom writes of his staid, middle class parents from whose existence he escaped into his own: they are “so certain of the parametres of their universe, where normality began and ended.” And whether by choice or fate, Ann and Tom do not inhabit such a comfortable place. Much of Novel About My Wife is about negotiating life within these unsure parametres: where family is distant, the streets are dangerous, God is dead, love is ephemeral, one need never grow up and childhoods can hold traumas so dark and unimaginable.
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. Its exploration of love, intimacy, marriage and parenthood. Perkins’ characters demonstrating as much as anybody does: what it is to live in the world today, and how life happens. A fascinating story on a multitude of levels by an exciting and capable writer.
April 13, 2008
The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala
A year ago, a young British woman teaching English in Japan was murdered– to say brutally so just seems redundant. The story was big in the British press, resonating with me in particular as she’d worked for the same company I’d worked for when I lived there. The articles noting places I knew, cultural references that had once been my every day, the woman’s whole life familiar, right up until its ending which was so foreign as to be otherworldly, and this was my fascination.
It was distant enough to stay a story, however. It might as well have been fiction, until a couple of months later when I learned that as big as the world is, a good friend of mine here in Toronto had actually known the deceased girl. In fact she had been there when the girl went missing, a strange coincidence, but of course, not my story to tell. It was jarring though– the otherworldly transgressing into my own universe. Yet, with that universe remaining the same as it ever was. The multitudinous threads connecting me to a story that had nothing to do with me, and what kind of a narrative is that?
I have marked up most of my copy of Sharon Butala’s memoir The Girl in Saskatoon. I’ve underlined passages, written notes in the margins, drawn diagrams on the endpapers to get a better grasp of Butala’s arguments. And, as you can see, I’ve started my review on a tangent, but it ties up, I promise. All of this, I think, an appropriate response to Butala’s book, which is a veritable literary hybrid. Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package. Butala making her process transparent– her very act of containment the result of years of work. It only being natural that the pieces might spring back out again once the package is given to the reader. So do please pardon my tangle.
In 1962 in Saskatoon, the body of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, a twenty-three year old nurse and beauty queen, was discovered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. She’d been missing for two weeks before her body was discovered, and it was determined she’d been raped and murdered; her killer was never found. Writer Sharon Butala, who’d been a classmate of Alex’s though not exactly a friend, has lived with this story quite central to her consciousness since then, as have many residents of Saskatoon. Butala approaches the story with questions in mind: what is its attraction and hold, what happens to the memory of it over time, how could something like this even happen? Moreover, “To a girl just like me, to someone I knew?”
The book begins with Butala revisiting the murder scene, observing no sign of what had happened. This disturbing in itself, but Butala extends this: if we don’t remember, then such a thing could happen to anybody, and become commonplace and unremarkable. The causality of this seeming backward to me as I read it– surely she means our not remembering makes it commonplace, and being commonplace, of course, it could happen to anyone? But I drew my diagrams, and I thought about it. Realizing that it’s not even the possibility of such an evil act in practical terms that so horrifies Butala, but the commonplaceness. If such a thing is commonplace, regardless of its occurrence, this means that evil is present where we are, altogether pervasive. And it’s coming to terms with this that is central to her narrative, as she struggles to “solve” the murder, to pin down the trouble to something specific. She can’t, such is the world, and this is one of the paramount lessons of her life.
We try to pin down cases like this not just out of curiosity, but to protect ourselves and our sense of security. Butala writes of reactions to Alex’s murder– if there is no killer upon which to place the blame, then surely Alex herself must be culpable. If the victim brought it upon herself, then we who play by the rules are not at risk. “The rules” being the strict and often contrary expectations placed upon women in the 1950s and early ’60s– that they must be sexual, but only so far, their limited choices for the future against the rest of the whole wide world.
There is a line we draw in our own consciousnesses, between what is possible and that which isn’t. Most often this barrier is quite literal– a movie screen– and our sense of order is disrupted when this line is violated. We try to maintain it all the same– “she was asking for it” being such a divide between us and her. Between us and the evil that Butala is trying to understand– forty years later she is horrified at the coldness with which she’d received the news of her classmate’s death, her lack of reaction: “…it would be quite a few years before I would teach myself that I had to tear that barrier down and allow myself to feel, no matter how painful, how horrible or sad– how very difficult it is to know the world as it is.”
And difficult to know in very practical terms also– initially Butala has a vision of gathering the pieces of this story, of putting them together as a writer does, and emerging with something complete, the mystery solved. She quickly realizes the process is much more convoluted: the pieces she gathers are mismatched, broken, contradictory, elusive. At one point she discovers that Alex had kept a diary, that that diary had bizarrely been written in code, that her sister had later burned it– these are the kinds of details she was working with. The official authorities putting up blocks in her investigation, withholding information. Eventually she realizes that “everybody had turf to protect, everybody had kept secrets; they had kept secrets from each other, and from me, and most of us, I was beginning to think, from themselves.”
The mystery is never solved, and even as readers we don’t get the whole picture. Throughout, Butala breezes past details of strange phone calls in the night, her phone being tapped, and “other scary incidents I haven’t put into this book”. This is quite a gap in the narrative, but not altogether out of place, being a narrative full of gaps and probably analogous to Butala’s own experience. She says herself at the end, that her book didn’t turn out to be about what she’d intended at the start: “I saw at last that there is truly no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle,a tidy satisfying end…. The story was, instead, about story”
And what story is about, instead of answers, is connections. However ultimately meaningless or incidental, for those people who create stories, connections are the hinges. Between Butala and Alexanda– their similar rural origins, they were in the drama club, that Butala had a summer job at the hospital where Alex would begin her nursing career. No, the two hadn’t been friends, hardly knew one another– just as I never known the murdered English teacher– but this very fact can make the connections all the more curious, significant.
Butala makes connections even more far-reaching– “that only months after [Alex’s] murder, Watson,Walter and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA”, which might come to be important to the case. That the day after Alex’s disappearance, Marilyn Monroe would sing her infamous “Happy Birthday” to the US President. Butala writes, “By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them.”
These connection
s are solid. The only thing incidental, I think, being that their connectivity is not their very point. And these threads are worked so thoroughly through the very fabric of our lives, so what isn’t significant then?
The story that Butala comes to write is that of two girls who, “although mere acquaintances and never close friends, had been linked by circumstance and history, and by memory.” An elegy for a disappearing world– I began to count the buildings Butala notes have been torn down, including the high school, movie theatre, the legion hall, the places where both she and Alex had lived. She is observing Saskatoon and having much the same reaction she had to the murder scene: how could anything have ever happened if there is no way to tell? This book being her testament.
Butala writes Alex as her parallel self, beautiful while she was plain, dead while she got to live. In their similar origins examining the possibilities of her own narrative, the story she has come to take for granted– but for a few details, the murdered girl could have been her. Butala acknowledges the strength she gains in creating this story, engaging with the world and feeling a part of it in a way she never supposed she could. But she invests Alex with just as much strength– the exchange is fair. Invests her with a voice, her story told however incomplete, and most of all with the fact of memory.
March 30, 2008
At a Loss For Words
Governor General’s Award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen’s latest novel At a Loss for Words is deeply referential. Its tone in the tradition of Lynn Crosbie’s Liar and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (I wonder, is “Spurned Lover Narrative” actually a Can-Lit sub-genre?). And Schoemperlen certainly doesn’t couch these references– using Crosbie’s “There is some truth to this, like all lies” from Liar as her epigraph; later she writes “But I did cry at the train station… I had an epiphany about the fact that there are a goodly number of public places in which crying is acceptable, train stations definitely being one of them…”.
But by far, Schoemperlen’s most intriguing reference in this work is to herself. And though usually I find biography a tiresome approach to fiction, the clues in this direction are marvelously intriguing, (perhaps?) intentionally integral to the work. Actually, this story of a writer with writer’s block (“a writer who cannot write”) references many works, the narrator eager to distract herself from not writing, preferring to quote from other books instead (books on writer’s block among them), and at one point she tells us she is quoting herself: “If I may be so bold… here’s a sentence I like: It is only in retrospect that I understand that obsession has nothing to do with love and everything to do with anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty and fear.” This being a line from Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found, so how positively meta.
And obsession is central to this “post-romantic novel”, the narrator recovering from the end of a long-distance love affair. Thirty years after her first love breaks her heart, she meets him again and dares to imagine things will be different. Decides that “being with him again would erase every rotten thing that had happened to [her] in the meantime”. When this proves not to be the case, she’s left shattered, “at a loss for words.” The last point proven otherwise as she writes this novel instead, recounting her romance with hindsight. The story at times tragic, altogether cringe-worthy when it hits close to home. Structured in the second-person, employing recounted emails, a “he said/she said” volleying back and forth, but then it’s “I said/you said”– objectivity is hardly Schoemperlen’s intention after all.
Marketed as “a bittersweet comedy for anyone who has ever loved and lost”, such a description seems to me to be undermine the “bitter”. Because the tone here strikes me as more venomous than sweet, and though the comedy is present, there is nothing light about this book. So much is going on– the blurring of fact and fiction, an exploration of writer’s block, an illustration of the writing life, a social satire. Most essentially though, At a Loss for Words is an exercise in revenge and herein lies its triumph.
March 27, 2008
Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish
Convention is insufficient with which to discuss Jane F. Kotapish’s first novel Salvage. I could try to think of analogous works– This Novel meets That Novel, say– but an appropriate hybrid refuses to be imagined. I could stick with plot, but really, which one would I choose? Centrally, this is the story of one woman’s tenuous grasp upon reality after experiencing a traumatic event. Or, this is the story of a woman who spent her childhood speaking to her dead sister in a closet. Or, here is the story of one house, and the story of another. An exploration of mother/daughter relationships utterly unreliant upon precedent. About what happens when maybe-actual saints start appearing in one’s back garden. Each thread a bit of the story here, but each one singularly giving readers the wrong impression.
Perhaps I can get to the point by explaining that I read this book over two days, finished it last evening, and only just now realized that the narrator/protagonist goes unnamed. It is significant, I think, that such a detail could be so unremarkable. Also significant, that indeed in this book, the protagonist speaks to her dead sister in a closet– a detail that might have tripped up my reading in the hands of a lesser writer, but the rest of the story carried me right through this. Or that this story of a communication breakdown between mother in daughter, its origins in childhood trauma, could be so invested with pure love. That love can ever be so aching.
I have selected these details to demonstrate Kotapish’s firm control of her narrative, everything exactly as it should be, nothing as you’d think it is. The narrator lacking a name, but I don’t even notice, so sure is her voice, so essential are the details with which we’re provided. Which are that this woman has witnessed something traumatic, something so awful that it’s torn her right out of her life, and she’s returned home again, purchasing a house not far from where her mother lives. Such familiar ground, however, reawakening troubling childhood obsessions, and this woman must navigate the narrow ground between her demons as she edges towards recovery.
But all this might give the wrong idea still, for Salvage is terribly funny. Darkly funny, naturally, but ultimately this is an uplifting book, caustic and ironic throughout. Its disparate plot threads and various tones all contained by a brilliant use of language, of imagery, both of which are surprising and edgy. Lines like, “The only reason I can recollect my father’s face at all is because I saw it catch fire in our back yard when I was three.” Lines like every other line as well, and the dialogue, which maps relationships’ whole histories. All recounted in the same even tone, a curious perception, both of which are the effects of damage, of trauma undeniably, but are no less for this, casting the ordinary world in a light entirely new.
It is this same even tone, this perception, which keep the trauma from seizing the narrative. Preventing sensation from taking over, from spiraling out of control. Kotapish’s language keeps her narrative in line– the perfect container. The scene in which the woman recounts the event that drove her towards breakdown manages to be so beautiful and awful, a horror perfectly choreographed– a memory after all.
Salvage is an astounding first novel, challenging the bounds of a novel’s capabilities, demonstrating the startling complexity of emotion. Language employed with the utmost exactitude, bending reality in fascinating ways.
March 21, 2008
The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear
After nearly a week of reading through short zippy novels in a flash, there was something meditative about settling down with Kyo Maclear’s first novel The Letter Opener. It’s a slower read, rumination more than narration, quiet in its power, and subtly sharp.
With such an intriguing premise: Naiko works for Canada Post at their Undeliverable Mail Office. Her job is to direct items stranded in transit, where this is possible. Incorrectly addressed envelopes containing school photos, love letters, birthday money. And “the rubble”, items sprung loose from their packaging: “Lesser goods… Boy Scout badges, vacation photos, Magic Markers, teeth moulds. A medical X-ray. A book of Sufi poetry. A Leonard Cohen audio cassette. Nothing was too small to matter to someone, somewhere.”
This emphasis on things comes to link the story’s various threads: the strange disappearance of Naiko’s colleague Andrei, a Romanian refugee; Andrei’s own history and that of his mother, a Holocaust survivor; the story of Naiko’s fractured family, particularly her mother who is in the early stages of Alzeimers Disease; Naiko’s own problems with intimacy, as she navigates her relationship with boyfriend Paolo; even the end of the Cold War. Such a wide range of subject matter, some of it heavy and loaded, but Maclear uses these ideas effectively, in new and intriguing ways– her deftness with facts perhaps making clear her creative origins in non-fiction.
The narrative sounds crowded, but Maclear’s expansive prose creates the effect of ample space. The novel is also carefully structured to accommodate all these threads, which through Naiko’s own perspective are tied more tightly than they seem. And it is through this perspective that we come to understand a twist on the problem of materialism: not that our society cares too much about “things”, but rather we don’t care enough. How much we lose spiritually from failing to invest our objects with proper meaning, and how much we take for granted.
Though of course conclusions are not so straightforward as this– 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.
March 5, 2008
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner– much acclaimed when published in Quebec in 2005 and now translated into English by Lazer Laderhendler– is a wonderfully rich puzzle of a book. Which must be explained in vague terms, for vague terms are all it presents us with. Three characters, their lives barely intersecting as they all end up in Montreal, loosely linked by blood ties and a strange “three-headed book”. These barely-intersections filled out by fish, pirates, various islands and rising water. Dickner performing strange and wonderful feats with parallels and opposites: wheat fields and oceans, the Aleutians and the West Indies, orphans and their ancestors, of nomads and imagined home.
The book itself is gorgeous, fish throughout its pages. Throughout the story too, which reminded me of The Raw Shark Texts, but only in that this is a bookish story much concerned with fish– quite a strange preoccupation for one writer, let alone two. But then bookish coincidences seem commonplace after reading this story, which is based around one. The “three headed book”, which connects our three main characters– the unnamed narrator who is a clerk in a bookshop, Noah the disinterested archeologist obsessed with garbage dumps, and Joyce the modern-day girl pirate. Oh, I could add more vague details, the maps, the fish shop, Grampa (a trailer) and Granma (a boat), the compass perpetually pointing towards the Alaskan town of Nikolski, a mouldy library in Venezuela, a couple of mysterious girls.
Nikolski is analogous to the three-headed book of which it speaks: “These are fragments, literally. Debris. Flotsam and Jetsam… It’s a piece of craftsmanship, not a mass-printed object.” And the reason for such a thing? “A passion for puzzles, maybe.” But definitely maybe, for here every word and detail means something. As soon as I finished this book, I couldn’t help but begin it again, and the significance of every sentence I’d read was just compounded. Which is not to say that I read solely towards a solution, which might prove only elusive, I think. But rather that Nikolski‘s puzzle itself was compelling enough, and– no matter the way each bit just “clouded the issue rather than clarifying it”– never ever unsatisfying.
“Nothing is perfect,” so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is. Cheers to Knopf Canada for championing literature in translation in general, French CanLit in particular, and a marvelous CanLit twist as their New Face of Fiction. Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness. His characters are pieces of a puzzle, but they be characters all the same, Dickner somehow choosing exactly the right fragments with which to make this so. Indeed, the novel itself an item of craftsmanship– not quite life but something next door to it– and surely worthwhile in the sum of these parts, more than I have yet comprehended. A sum I still don’t have my head around yet, but I look forward to rereading this book until I do.
February 18, 2008
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
I feel fortunate that I read Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park through the prism I did. I’m not sure I would have loved it quite so much had I not first read the cbc.ca article describing the book as, “If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007… what she would be writing.” 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.
From Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there…”.
Which is evident from the start, the main character of Arlington Park‘s first chapter being rainfall. As readers we must trust and follow it, from cloud to downpour, this “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”. As the rain falls over the sleepy suburb of Arlington Park. “The sound of uproarious applause.”
And then it is morning, “the life of Monday or Tuesday”, except being Friday. Here is an entire book of one single day, which is something easily misunderstood. For though Arlington Park is bleak and rainy, the fact that it is of one day only means that it’s difficult to generalize. “This is what women’s lives are”– decidedly Woolf— perhaps, but for these frustrated, angry, middle-class women of privilege, it could be hard to muster sympathy. But then is this lives in general really? Is it not just a Friday? For it is indeed possible to have it rain all day, particularly in England, and perhaps Saturday will be sunny, but this is not our consideration now.
Just one single day (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”). Though of course one day will always have implications of its own.
Juliet Randall, who wakes up from a bad dream that was also the night before, her husband having been inordinately insulting. Her husband, Benedict: “Murderer, she thought.” And though he isn’t, of course. He is not Mr. Ramsay, or even Charles Tansley, and he’d probably allow for a trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. But still, Benedict has been an asshole, and Juliet feels like her entire life has been severed from its legs.
Which is the general feeling of the characters we encounter in Arlington Park, on this particular Friday. Whether they intended to end up here or not, or if they did and it wasn’t what they’d expected, regardless, on this rainy Friday life feels most uninhabitable. And simultaneously inescapable– motherhood and wifehood each a prison. And though privileged middle-class all of these women might be, are they not still entitled to rainy days? For such days are certainly issued, even if they’re not the rule. And of course there are moments, even in the drizzle, where the pure light of life shines through. The innumerable atoms of a Friday are, naturally, quite various.
I could tell you more about these women, about this day, these myriad impressions and innumerable atoms, but they’re trivialized out of their context. Out of context the poignancy of Amanda Clapp’s disappointingly-remodeled kitchen is ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. About how Cusk constructs a whole world in which these women are but cogwheels: “In the children’s playground the women were buttoning coats, brushing down trousers, wiping noses. They strapped their children into their pushchairs, and one after another they let themselves out of the gate: out into the park, out into streets where everything moved, where time set everything whirring and churning and grinding again and you felt the agony of the turning wheels.”
And certainly there are days like this, there are.
December 31, 2007
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Very exciting news– though it’s still 2007, I have already read one of the best books of 2008. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff comes out late January, and it’s absolutely extraordinary. A first novel you won’t believe, with all the qualities so many people liked about Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but not annoying, pretentious or gimmicky. Anything the least bit gimmicky about The Monsters of Templeton, I considered a gift actually. Lauren Groff is a bloody brilliant writer and tangible proof of this is evident in that her book contains the term “Potemkin nipple”. There is nothing more I need to say.
But of course I will continue on, because I haven’t loved a book this hard in ages. American in its scope (by which I mean big) Groff is good enough to handle her material, which begins with her narrator Willie uttering her mighty opening sentence, “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.”
Now normally monsters don’t turn me on, but Groff has done something quite original here. The magic not even questioned amidst such a solid realism, but a realism so bizarre that no magic could be contested. And also magic and realism so original– could there be anything more entrancing than a ghost like this one: “To my mother it had looked like a bird; to me a washed-out inkstain, a violet shadow so vague and shy that it was only perceivable indirectly, like a leftover halo from gazing at a bare bulb too long.”
Willie has returned to Templeton (a fictional version of Groff’s own hometown, Cooperstown, NY) “in disgrace”, her mother taking her mind off her problems with the revelation that Willie’s father is not who she’d thought he was. But who he is exactly, Willie’s mother won’t say, and it is up to Willie to solve the mystery, tracing her complicated family history back to her ancestor, the founder of Templeton. Characters from the past get their own chapters, Willie’s world also filled out by exceptionally brilliant secondary characters– her best friend and her mom, the male joggers who run through town first thing in the morning in particular. Willie herself is an amazing creation– gutsy, smart, funny, weak and strong.
The main character in the novel is Templeton, however, and Groff invests the town with such beauty. 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 30, 2007
Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
A dizzying force of a book, Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I picked it up based on Heather Mallick’s recommendation and was not disappointed. Perhaps the least self-serving memoir ever, Beijing Confidential serves instead to tell the story of China during the last thirty-five years, as an attempt to right wrongs, and as a stunning picture of Beijing today. It didn’t so much make me want to go there, no, but I feel like I was there, which is something.
Throughout her career Wong has discussed her experiences as a third-generation Chinese Canadian studying in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. An ardent Maoist, she was eager to conform to the society she found there, to renounce her bourgeois origins. She describes her young self as “that very dangerous combination: fanatic, ignorant and adolescent.” The extent of her devotion she demonstrated by reporting on a classmate who dared to ask her how she could get to America. In the chaos of the time, such a counterrevolutionary act could have brought forth any range of punishments– even death. And it is this experience which Wong revisits during her trip to Beijing.
Her husband and sons travel with her. She writes, “I am not only planning to chronicle the future of this great city; I also need to come to terms with my own past. For this I need moral support. I need my family to reassure me that I’m not a horrible human being. Or that, if I am, they love me anyway.” Her edges are softened in this context; she displays vulnerability, dares to admit she has made mistakes in her past. This is brave, I think. She has come to Beijing to find her former classmate– a seemingly impossible task in a city of millions– and it is through this quest that we come to discover the city.
Of course for Jan Wong vulnerability only extends so far– she remains gutsy, unsentimental and pulls no punches. Her approach gives us a fascinating perspective on Beijing– what is it to search for your own past in a city so eager to bulldoze its own? For, as Wong finds, Beijing is a bustle of construction. Particularly with the 2008 Olympics ahead, she is aware that this trip maybe her last chance to see that traditional Beijing she remembers from her time there as a student. Already the city is exploding with condo towers, new roads, mammoth shopping malls and uber-development. In this place she once knew so well, she is perpetually disoriented, and so is her reader, though fittingly and not for any lack of control on Wong’s part.
Her story is so deftly woven with past and present, the personal and the political, with the local and the universal. Beijing Confidential is an education as much as a story– fact: Mao banned pets!, for example– but all propelled by her quest for reconciliation. The quest is resolved in storied fashion, involving chance, understanding and some putrid fruit. Such a marvelously constructed narrative, and a memoir with so much worth telling.
November 25, 2007
The Great Man by Kate Christensen
In my limited experience of Kate Christensen, I have found that she doesn’t conform well. Her novels aren’t easily classifiable, and they don’t have ulterior motives. She seems to me a writer who writes for the sake of her books. Who invests her fiction with the same humour and intelligence one might find within a life. Last month I read her first novel In the Drink, and I’ve just finished her latest The Great Man. Christensen started off promising, and now she is very good, and it’s just like Maud Newton says: she deserves to be better known.
The Great Man in question is Oscar Feldman, five years dead. A famous painter of the female nude, lately two biographers have been poking into his life story, stirring up trouble amongst the women Oscar surrounded himself with. His loyal wife Abigail, his mistress Teddy, his cantankerous sister Maxine (also a painter) and his daughters are forced to confront the legacy of this man whose presence had so overwhelmed their lives and continues to even after his death. Oscar’s “greatness” is re-evaluated after a fashion, and the women reconcile (as best they can) their feelings for each other.
Kate Christensen reminds me of Laurie Colwin, which not a lot of writers manage. Both writers redefining what “greatness” is– namely that it can feature that rare combination of humour and intelligence. With complicated and interesting female characters who have bodies, and jobs, and friends. With male characters in their lives who are just as interesting, and a story that does not rely on convention. An eye for the right details, to create a scene in all its vividness. There is joy here, and there’s goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.
