September 25, 2023
Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein
I first found out about the Naomi problem in 2019 when I read No is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, and my best friend was horrified, and I was confused about why she was horrified, and then when she figured it out, she told me to google “Naomi Wolf” and “chemtrails,” so I did, and finally understood, or at least kind of, because what actually explains what happened to Naomi Wolf?
And so that question, “Whatever happened to Naomi Wolf?” is something I have periodically wondered about ever since then, the question becoming more and more relevant as Wolf’s own influence grew and the stakes got higher, as she spouted Covid misinformation through 2021 and onward. A question that seemed also relevant as so many apparently intelligent and curious people disappeared down conspiracy rabbit holes (ie the UK book blogger DoveGreyReader who went full QAnon before disappearing from the internet altogether, or the bestselling Canadian historical fiction writer who, as of Saturday but not thereafter [once someone had flagged it in their Stories], was following something called Gays Against Groomers on Instagram).
Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Naomi Klein’s latest, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which is a consideration of “No Logo” Klein’s own personal branding problem as she has frequently been confused with Wolf over the last decade or so, but also an investigation of how the trajectory of liberal-darling turned far-right poster-child Wolf has a lot to teach us about radicalization, misinformation, political stratification, and the failures of political systems of countries like Canada and the US whose vacuums bad actors like Wolf and her comrade Steve Bannon, and so many others have rushed to fill. [Please note that I called referred to Wolf as “Klein” throughout this whole paragraph, and just had to go back and change it. The struggle is…weird?]
Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Doppelganger because the Mirror World of conspiratorial thinking was front and centre after supposed “parents rights”/anti-LGBT protests across the country on Wednesday that really were Convoy 2.0 with the same PPC signs and Fuck Trudeau flags (and I fear that well meaning people responding to these ding dongs with sincerity and heart are letting conspiracy nutjobs set the rules of engagement, like, it’s only a “culture war” if the other side mobilizes right back, playing right into their hands, which is exactly what they want, especially *play,* it all being just a game to these people anyway, rather than any of their ideas being worth responding to with consideration and logic. It is not irrelevant that, as Klein notes in her book, Steve Bannon dreamed up his ideas for world domination during a period in which he was working for an online gaming company)
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein comes as closer as I’ve ever seen anyone come to explaining just what the heck is going on here, connecting the dots on a vast canvas, making sense of the nonsensical, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Klein’s work before, but also weaving in elements of memoir that are new to her work and which add a real sense of humanity to these stories in which so many of our fellow humans have come to seem almost alien.
Because of this book, I think I know finally (kinda, sorta) understand what was happening at the house I drove by in Norfolk County during the summer of 2022 that was flying a swastika out front, apparently a protest of the federal government. An anti-authoritarian protest that has one running authoritarian propaganda on one’s flag pole, the guy who hates Nazis so much that he’s appropriated their symbols, which is how it happens in the mirror world.
Doppelganger is a study of doubleness, and doubles—Klein and Wolf; left and right; self and avatar; who Wolf was and who she’s become; of how each “side” in this situation is imagining the other is living in a crazy dreamworld; of Israel and Palestine; of foundlings and how some parents of autistic children describe their offspring in similar terms, seemingly “normal” children replaced by another; about how so much far-right rhetoric employs language and ideas from progressive causes and can also thereby render language as meaningless. She writes about buffoonish monsters like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and even Putin, and describes “pipikism”—a term borrowed from a Philip Roth novel—”the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.” She writes, “It doesn’t just farcicalize what they say; it farcecalizes what many of us are willing and able to say afterward.”
But of course any mirror is not just about its reflection, but also about what it tells us about ourselves, and Doppelganger is also a fascinating self-examination, as well as an actually kind and sympathetic study of what might have happened to Wolf and what particular aspects of her character make Klein a bit uncomfortable for what they suggest about Klein herself (and the last chapter, in which Klein describes them meeting in the early 1990s when Klein was a reporter for the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, The Varsity, is generous, weird and extraordinary). She also makes clear that social movements are the way out of this mirror world nightmare we find ourselves in, acknowledging that some conspiracies are indeed quite real (ie disproportionate power in the hands of a few unelected dudes who have too much money, for example) and showing that collective efforts are the only way to meet the pressing challenges of future (ie climate change, fear of which is provoking all this terror in the first place, such refusal to look reality in the face).
“Calm is resistance,” Klein writes in Doppelganger, quoting John Berger’s response to her earlier book, The Shock Doctrine, and I thought about that line too in the context of last week’s hateful demonstrations, how responding to panic and terror with panic and terror is simply a perpetuation of a narrative I don’t want to be a part of.
“The effect of conspiracy culture,” writes Klein in her new book, is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.” In Doppelganger, Klein suggests a deeper, more thoughtful way of acting (and thinking) in response.
September 19, 2023
Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon
Christine Higdon has followed up her award-winning debut with the most extraordinary new novel, Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, a book that somehow manages to be everything all at once: action-packed, artful, playful, timely, timeless, weighty, light, compelling historical fiction that maps so beautifully onto right now. Set in Vancouver in the 1920s, it’s the story of the four working-class McKenzie sisters and their supposedly divergent paths over the course of a year—infertility, pregnancy, an illegal and nearly fatal abortion, and a lesbian relationship–and how these paths are not divergent at all, but instead irrevocably connected to bodily autonomy, choice, and women’s liberation. The 1920s’ backdrop is fun and compelling, but the glitter stark against the darkness of what came before—the sisters watched loved ones return from WW1 with minds and bodies broken, or else not return at all; their brother dies in the flu pandemic; their mother is depressive and addicted to opium. The novel moves between their points of view, including the secrets they keep from each other, with a sweep that’s at once both intimate and cinematic, the narrative held together by an omniscient beagle (of course). A truly brilliant literary (and feminist) achievement, and just a wonderful read, I loved this book so much!
August 10, 2023
Morse Code for Romantics, by Anne Baldo
I was soliciting picks for 49thShelf’s Summer Books lists when Stephanie Small from The Porcupine’s Quill got in touch. “It might not look like one from the cover,” she wrote, “but actually, I think Anne Baldo’s Morse Code for Romantics makes a good summer read,” which is an understatement if I ever heard one. For this is a book that is so steeped in summer, a collection of stories with sand between their toes, set along the shores of Lake Erie, scrappy cottages and rundown motels. With lines like “We don’t know it yet but we will never be bigger, or more real, than we are right here this summer. We will keep fading and shrinking, in small ways, forever always, after this.”
For the most part, these are standalone stories—the exceptions are a handful in which characters reappear—but they’re linked by geography, by recurring imagery, and themes which make this collection such a satisfying book. They’re linked too by being crafted to a standard of real excellence, and I’m thinking of the image on the book’s cover, of the power lines connecting the utility poles, without which I’d probably be employing a metaphor right now along the lines of beads on a string, one gleaming gem right after another.
These are stories of working class people, of people who’ve dropped out of the working class, of Italian-Canadians in the Windsor region. Most are fairly contemporary, the exception being “Marrying Dewitt West,” about the arrogant 19th-century naturalist investigating reports of a sea monster in the depths of Lake Erie who becomes the object of a wily young woman’s affections. And the sea monster image occurs also in “Monsters of Lake Erie,” which begins with an explanation of sonar equipment used in attempts at detecting the Loch Ness Monster: “I thought when you had been lonely for a long time you gained a similar sort of ability with people. To look at them, beaming out a silent pulse, and be able to glimpse the dark, monstrous shapes of their own loneliness lurking underneath the surface.”
There are a lot of lonely people and dark, monstrous lurkings in Morse Code... But peonies too, and shimmering light, a daring to hope, to dream. Magic and mermaids—”But people always forget that mermaids are monsters.” Sparks and fire.
August 8, 2023
Yellowface, by R.M. Kuang
So, I can’t say I’d necessarily recommend R.M. Kuang’s Yellowface to anyone else who has a new novel coming out in 28 days, because it’s just a little too on the nose, a satire that’s so real about the pressures and cutthroat competition of the publishing industry, the high stakes and low odds which “have made it impossible *for white and nonwhite authors alike* [emphasis mine] to succeed…” (to quote from the novel’s white narrator, who steals a manuscript from her dead friend, an Asian-American bestselling novelist, whose CV is not entirely distinct from that of R.M. Kuang herself—there are so many complicated meta-layers of to this work!). Mostly though, what a white author who sees her own experience in this novel is quite likely to miss is that Yellowface is also a satire of the way in which white women are able to put themselves at the centre of every story, wholly accustomed to being “the expected reader” (to borrow a phrase from Elaine Castillo) of every narrative they encounter, and oh, Kuang plays some tricks with that tendency with both her characters and readers alike. Edgy and brilliant.
August 3, 2023
The Damages, by Genevieve Scott
So just say you wrote a novel about the toxicity of sexual politics in the 1990s with a campus setting, a novel with duel timelines, the contemporary story set against the #MeToo movement as the protagonist grapples with allegations of sexual misconduct against her former partner, the father of her child, and the allegations and their fallout stir up memories of a catastrophic event on campus more than two decades before during which the protagonist’s roommate went missing, creating a fallout that left the protagonist’s reputation in ruins and trauma she’s still just beginning to process…
Wouldn’t it be SO ANNOYING when Rebecca Makkai’s smash hit I Have Some Questions for You comes out just months before your pub date?
A novel whose description so uncannily matches your own (there’s something in the water!) and whose enormous success could possibly overshadow your own?
Thankfully, however, there is this: If you liked I Have Some Questions for You (and a lot of people did!), you should definitely pick up Genevieve Scott’s The Damages. And there is also this: The Damages is not derivative in the slightest and turns out to be its own specific literary creature, a book that held me rapt throughout, and also doesn’t suffer from the overstuffedness that weighed down Makkai’s book at times (though I ultimately felt that the overstuffedness of IHSQFY was deliberate, the point).
The Damages takes place at a fictional version of Queens University in the winter of 1998 during a devastating ice storm that cut off power, caused vast damage and left people stranded throughout the northeast of North America. The novel’s narrator is Ros, who’s trying hard to fit in during her first year at university and who is eager to distance herself from her earnest and wholesome roommate who is the antithesis of cool. But when her roommate goes missing during the chaos and upheaval from the storm, everybody around her declares Ros responsible for what happened, and this shatters the tentative place she’d made for herself in that community, leading her to drop out of school.
22 years later, set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ros and her son are isolating in Ontario’s cottage country as she’s also processing allegations publicly made against her ex-partner, a renowned children’s author. She’s forced to finally reckon with notions of her own culpability, her responsibility, and the possibility that perhaps she’s been a victim too. As with the best books inspired by #MeToo, she doesn’t come to neat conclusions, but instead engages with the mess of it all, teasing out the multitudinous threads, asking questions instead of claiming to have all the answers. A terrific read.
August 2, 2023
Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
The pieces of Wait Softly Brother—a novel about a writer called Kathryn who retreats to her childhood home in Ontario’s Hastings County after fleeing her marriage, she and her aging parents in a relationship of mutual irritation as she pesters them for details of her brother, stillborn before her own birth, desiring some kind of fragment to make the fact of his existence feel tangible, but her mother hands her a letter from a long ago ancestor instead who fought in the Civil War, Kathryn making up HIS story instead as a way to interrogate maleness and brother, and missing pieces of a whole, all the whole torrential rain is falling for weeks and weeks, the family farmhouse an island cut off from the rest of the world—culminate in the richest and most satisfying kind of story, a deep literary mystery. On dwellings, and dwelling, and wells and welling. So so excellent.
July 27, 2023
The Mythmakers, by Keziah Weir
Okay, hear me out: Lily King’s Writers and Lovers meets Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (which it directly references!), with a healthy and surprising sprinkling of astrophysics and consideration of the possibility of a multiverse. I LOVED this book, The Mythmakers, the fiction debut by Keziah Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair (who has British Columbia ties, so the book gets to be Canadian!). It’s about Sal, a struggling magazine writer whose life has just imploded and who is surprised, no, perhaps enchanted, to find herself within the pages of The Paris Review as a character in a story by an older author she’d met at a book launch years before. But then she reads the story’s introductory text to discover that the author, Martin Scott Keller, had recently died, and also that the story is an excerpt from his final novel, a long-awaited text. Well, naturally, Sal wants to read the rest of the story, and concocts a scheme wherein she connects with his widow under the guise of writing a magazine piece about the experience of discovering herself in fiction, but then the story becomes more tangled than that, too tangled for magazine piece, even long-form.
The Mythmakers is rich and absorbing, a fast gripping-thrill, but also deeply literary, about the nature of story and storytelling, and also the nature of the universe, and of marriage, and love, and the way myths—in particular that of the male genius—are propagated and upheld. It’s a story about art, and art-making, and science, and sexual politics, and gender, and it’s also slightly uncanny, it’s narrative voice hard to pin down, sometimes Sal, sometimes Martin, or Moira, his wife, but is it really?
Who’s telling the story? Who’s pulling the strings?
June 26, 2023
Believe the Hype
Wow, did Ashley Audrain’s The Whispers live up to the hype, and then some. (Most sophomore novel don’t!) It was reminiscent of Lianne Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty, a book I LOVED, but then managed to turn into a literary creature all its own with such complicated, deeply imagined characters whose stories were interwoven in ways that never stopped surprising me. The plot is propulsive and rich with suspense, but also poses some fascinating questions about women’s choices and women’s lives, motherhood and infertility. Such a fantastic read.
June 15, 2023
Some There Are Fearless, by Becca Babcock
I had such a visceral response and connection to Becca Babcock’s Some There Are Fearless, a novel that begins with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and concludes on January 8, 2020, as a Ukrainian plane is shot down in Iran, a day that lives as a portal in my own mind as “this very weird time,” which is fitting (and eerie, and interesting) for a novel that is all about fear, and anxiety, and our notions of controlling and mitigating risk.
Jess grows up in Cold Lake, AB, in the shadow of the Cold War, living just outside a military base. The Chernobyl meltdown absorbs her attention, and this preoccupation, coupled with her academic aptitude and her single mother’s push toward achievement, leads her toward training as an engineer and then a career with Maritime Energy in Nova Scotia retrofitting coal plants, with aspirations to one day work in the nuclear field and prevent disasters like Chernobyl’s from ever happening.
There are other cold wars in Jess’s life—her father has long been estranged from their family, her difficult mother’s fraught relationship with Jess’s brother fills their home with tension, and Jess’s own connection with her mother doesn’t get any easy once her brother leaves to go get a job in the oil fields, putting even more pressure on Jess to be the one who succeeds. She finds solace in the company of Adam, a fellow engineering student, however, and they begin to build a life together, although it’s not always easy for Jess to connect, but they establish compatibility and eventually they have a child, and I love the way that Babcock subverts expectations about how the emotionally distant Jess might be rocked by motherhood (and Jess subverts her own expectations too)—”How could love be spontaneously generated? How could a body feel so much, be so enraptured with another creature who, moments before, had only existed as a kernel and a germ, and who now, just now, breathed in the world, became the most precious thing in that entire world for her two parents? How?”
In a world with Three Mile Islands, and Fukushima Daiichi, it’s hard to relax—though Jess explains that the nearby Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant managed to avoid the same catastrophe that its sister plant was unable to prevent after the devastating 2011 Earthquake. And the illusion that she is eventually freed from, the trajectory of her story—which artfully braids together different timelines—is her gradual understanding that she’s not actually responsible for keeping the world safe, and that she can’t actually keep ill fortune from arriving at her doorstep, as her relationship with Adam falls apart, and her daughter undergoes testing for an “uncertain shadow” on her MRI. Jess can’t help but wonder if it was caused by the guided tour she’d taken to the Chernobyl zone nine months before her daughter was born, a risk exposure that seemed minimal and worth it at the time, but how do you ever know?
As someone with a Cold War fascination who has spent the last 18 months learning to live well again after experiencing debilitating anxiety, Some There Are Fearless really resonated with my own preoccupations, with my own challenges of making my way, as a person and as a mother, through our own particular age of anxiety. Blending beautiful writing with history and science, Babcock has created a rich and satisfying depiction of what it is to live in a world that is rarely steady.
June 12, 2023
Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change (I wrote about this in my 2017 essay about Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ADULT ONSET, a book that maps on to this one in surprising and interesting ways), but anyone who loves that city or calls it home is going to struggle with that, or maybe that’s even just the baked-in nostalgia that comes from being alive. I’m well accustomed to stories and images of “Old Toronto,” the kinds of photos that get shared in Facebook groups with names like “Long-Gone Toronto,” the kinds of images that Kamal Al-Solaylee writes about in his 2014 essay “What You Don’t See When You Look Back,” about the whiteness of these vintage scenes: “The pictures depict a world where only white people roamed the streets or were allowed into the frame. I can’t help but conclude that the friends who post them would have preferred it if Toronto had stayed that way: small town, white, exclusive and free from people who look like me.”
But in their new book, DENISON AVENUE, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes are doing something different, and in more ways than one. First, the book itself, which is double sided, one side telling the story gorgeously in Wong’s prose and poetry fragments, and the other with panels showing Innes’s drawings of Toronto “now and then,” now being about ten years ago—when Honest Eds was sold and the Kromer Radio property on Bathurst was going to be developed into a WalMart—and then during the years before it with a thriving Chinatown and Kensington Market, before these areas had become ripe for development and working class people could live a decent life downtown.
Within Innes’s contemporary drawings, a figure appears pushing a cart along the sidewalk, picking up cans and bottles along the way, a figure I didn’t even notice the first time I flipped through the book, which is the point of the book, about what remains invisible, and who gets to be seen, and heard.
The woman in the drawings is Wong Cho Sum who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and lived in a house with her husband on Denison Avenue until his death (when car sped past the streetcar doors on Dundas Street). Together they had built a steady and comfortable life with strong community ties, but in the wake of her husband’s death and the city’s changes (which are not bemoaned just because it’s change, but because these are changes that make life more difficult for Toronto’s poor and marginalized people, something Cho Sum has seen before as the city’s previous Chinatown was forced to move west when the area was redeveloped as New City Hall) she finds herself unmoored from the world around her.
To fill her days (or perhaps I mean her evenings and early mornings!) she begins collecting cans and bottles around local neighbourhoods, developing a route up and down streets that are familiar to me.
What I loved about this book was how it told the story of a changing Toronto from the perspective of a person of colour, a person who speaks very little English (in the book, Wong writes her dialogue in the Toisan dialect), which is a perspective I’ve never heard before. And similarly, though elderly women collecting bottles and cans are as ubiquitous in my neighbourhood as they are in Innes’s drawings, I’ve spent very little time considering these women’s perspectives, what brought them here, why they’re doing this—for Cho Sum, it’s to earn a bit of money, and give shape to her days, and for exercise. In so many ways, for me, Denison Avenue was absolutely a revelation.
And it was also just a tremendously moving story of strength and resilience, of love and courage, and friendship and community. (There is a swimming scene!! I just adored it.)
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change, but in Denison Avenue, Wong and Innes manage to capture a unique view of the city as it was for just a moment, all the while making their readers consider what the city might become if we think about what it’s true heart is, which is to say the people who live here.
