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.
June 9, 2023
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy
With the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History, Camille T. Dungy became one of my must-read authors, although I might have read her follow-up Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden anyway on the basis of that gorgeous cover (and oh my goodness, wait until you see the inside covers!!). Soil is a book about metaphors, but also about the thing itself and, to begin with, that this is the garden that Dungy designs and brings to life in the yard of her suburban home in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place where the propagation of native plants and a wild-looking garden is in defiance of home owner association standards about such thing as grass lengths, and Dungy and her family are part of the reason that culture begins to change.
This is a memoir about the labour (and setbacks) in cultivating diversity in our gardens, and beyond them. It’s also a story of receiving a Guggenheim grant to write a book whose progress is stopped up by the Covid-19 Pandemic and a ten-year-old child whose home schooling requires supervision. It’s about being a Black person and a Black mother in America in the wake of the 2016 election, whose fallout in a continuation of centuries of struggle and oppression, and what it feels like to be confronted by deaths of other Black people, those names like beads on a string over the past decade and more—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Like a rosary.
She quotes her father’s response to a (white) reader’s question about how Dungy could consider herself an environmental writer when she spends so much time writing about African-American history. Her father (Dr. Claibourne Dungy) answers, “For us, there is no separation between the environment and social justice.” It’s not one thing or another, but instead everything connection, our environment home to the world we choose to build here, and also to the natural elements over which we have no domain (or at least cannot even imagine we do) and here Dungy writes of wildfires across the state of Colorado during that already miserable plague year, where neither indoor air nor outdoor was safe to breathe in the company of others, and disaster seemed perpetually just shy of the doorstep.
This is a book rich with love, wisdom, and humour, a book about neighbours, about community, about marriage and love, about trying to save truckloads of soil from blowing away in a windstorm. It’s about climate change, and weather, and history, and botany, and place, and travel and belonging, and longing, and grieving, and persisting. It’s about faith.
“Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or it is the hope that what has not yet materialized might, someday, manifest… One of the hallmarks of faith is to believe in a promise and—though the promise has yet to come to pass, and may never in my lifetime be fully fulfilled—to find a way to carry on. To discover and honour what HAS come to fruition.
I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden, But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of the soil as well.”
May 17, 2023
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
I am infinitely grateful to whoever it was who inspired me to put this on hold at the library. OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, by Julia Armfield, was incredible, blending literary elements with horror to create a spellbinding tale of love and loss. The point of view moves between Miri and her wife, Leah, a marine biologist whose routine research trip goes wrong when their submarine sinks and is lost to contact. Six months later, Leah comes home again, but something is very wrong and Miri is unable to reach her, or get answers about what happened in the deep, a story Leah tells piece by piece in her part of the narrative. This is a novel infatuated with the wonders of the world, oceans and love among them. Creepy and compelling at one, a strange inversion of THE SHAPE OF WATER, and definitely one for readers who loved Melissa Barbeau’s THE LUMINOUS SEA, or anyone into JAWS. What a story!
May 15, 2023
Places Like These, by Lauren Carter
“I never though something like that would happen in a place like this,” is the thing people always say in local newscasts in the aftermath of tragedy, as though there were actually places in the world that immune to life itself, to its terrible, tragic unfairness, and inexplicability (and isn’t this part of the same reason people travel, to escape all that?) but, as Lauren Carter shows in her fantastic new collection Places Like This, life happens everywhere, on rural highways, far flung suburbs, northern towns, and abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. In the New York state spiritualist community famous for its mediums, a stuccoed church in Argentina, in the shadows of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood (“Carol did not tell her how she’d envisioned a slab of raw beef, glaring a wet red before purpling like an aged bruise. The expensive cut, one her mother would have rarely purchased at the downtown butcher shop with the creaking wood floor, the dusty cans of corn niblets and cherry pie filling.” ).
These are stories of sadness and longing, of wanting but not getting, but this—of course—is also life itself, and the collection is less bleak than it sounds, because these are stories of characters building a home and a finding a world within its realities, of finding love, spots of light, connection and meaning. Even in “places like these,” rich stories are possible, such as that of the couple whose dog is saved as the narrator’s struggling stepbrother begins to slip away; a widow keeps seeing her late husband; a woman glimpses the depths of her partner’s sadness when she goes home to meet his family; the couple together but emotionally worlds apart as they grieve a pregnancy loss, which is also the loss of so much love and so many dreams. I especially loved the three final stories in the collection, linked narratives about a group of women who’ve been friends since high school whose own ties are fraught, complicated, and irrevocable.
These are tough stories, rugged and hard, but there are also gorgeous moments of connection, of illumination—I keep thinking of a description of a drink in a character’s hand, “a bowl of light.” There are stories that shine.
May 2, 2023
The Light of Eternal Spring, by Angel Di Zhang
“My mother died of a broken heart, or so the letter said.”
And this is the spectacular opening line of Angel Di Zhang’s dazzlingly dreamy debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, a story of love and loss, a story of finding and belonging, about seeing and knowing, all the gaps between what we remember and what really happened, and the curious nature of space and time. How did we get from there to here?—a question that preoccupies Di Zhang’s protagonist, Aimee (pronounced Eye-Me), particularly after her mother dies and she travels with her American husband back to her hometown in China, the rural village of Eternal Spring, where she hasn’t been for so many years. It’s also the question the narrative sets out to answer.
Aimee, a photographer, is known as Amy in her new life in New York City, where she is now so established that she thinks in English, and her photos appear in ads on the subway, and she thinks her thoughts first in English instead of her native Mandarin. Though it’s Manchu that’s Aimee’s mother tongue—literally, her mother’s first language—and she’s forgotten it to the point when her sister’s letter arrives with news of her mother’s death, she has to have it translated by a woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown running a vegetable stall.
It’s 1999 and communication is not as instantaneous as it is today. When Aimee and her husband David set out for Eternal Spring in the hope of making it back in time for her mother’s funeral, she has no idea what to expect, and her family don’t even know to expect her. What she’ll find is a place and people who are radically different than they were when she last saw then, by virtue of the nature of memory, but also because the previous decade has been a time to radical change in the village, which has become busy and bustling, not a village at all. Because nothing ever stays fixed, both in life, and in our memories, and such understanding is a challenge for Aimee, whose photos aim to capture time, to hold it still.
How to grapple with the mutability of reality? And even more important, how to resolve her relationship with her mother now that her mother is gone? The last time mother and daughter were together led to a spectacular flame-out and they haven’t spoken since. Will there be any chance for Aimee to to reconcile with her mother’s memory? And what about reconciling the space between Aimee and Amy, between the place where she comes from and where she lives now, and possibility of belonging to both places, a kind of double exposure, not a photographic error but instead an accurate image of her psychic reality?
I loved this book, its freshness and sense of play, its curious placement outside of time, just beyond the limits of realism, about the all the possibilities of impossible things.
April 17, 2023
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
True confession time: I’ve never read Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, and I likely never will. Reportedly, it’s very lengthy, set a long time ago, and all about a man staking his claim in a gold rush (yawn), and no doubt it’s extraordinary and brilliant, but each of these makes for three counts on my NOPE NOPE NOPE list, and there are so many other books in the world.
My interest in Catton’s latest Birnam Wood, however, was piqued by critic Lauren Leblanc’s enthusiasm for the project, which was also the reason I went to see Catton at the Toronto Public Library’s Bluma Salon event in early March, which was really fantastic, and I bought the book there. She kept talking about plot, and about how “character is action; we are what we do,” and I was intrigued, though I’ve got to say that even though this novel clocks in at only just over 400 pages, I picked it up thinking of a doorstop, and what have I gotten myself into? There was not a lot of white space. Will I be reading this novel for the next 900 years?
But reader, I sped through it in two days. This book! This book! Speaking of plot… Though it didn’t take off immediately. I was interested in the story and surprised to find that it was so much more intimate and immediate than I was expecting, deeply embedded in the experiences of characters ranging from the leader of the gardening collective, her loyal sidekick, a renegade citizen journalist, a pest-control mogul who has recently received a knighthood, his wife, and a reclusive American billionaire seeking refuge in middle of nowhere New Zealand for reasons that aren’t bound to be honourable. I thought this would be a more sprawling book, individual people at a distance, more a book in general than this one, which is so exactly, specific. Even though the paragraph-long sentences were hard to parse at first, so many clauses, and semi-colons. Like making one’s way through the weeds and the bramble, and then suddenly there I was at the heart of things and the novel was unputdownable.
“She was still looking for a villain. She was still trying, desperately—and uselessly—to find somebody more monstrous and despicable than her.”
Who is the villain of this story? Who is the hero? Such murky distinctions (if any are to be made) are what make Birnam Wood such a fascinating puzzle of a story. I loved it.
March 17, 2023
I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
There were some moments in which I felt, reading I Have Some Questions for You, that perhaps Rebcca Makkai was trying to squeeze too much into this book. A novel 400+ pages long, a campus novel, murder mystery, #MeToo/cancel culture moral reckoning, Anti-Black racism and how the justice system is far from just for people of colour. Plus a treatise on true crime podcasts, because Mekkai’s narrator Bodie Kane is a podcaster too, in addition to being a film professor, and she casually rattles off old crime cases: “Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. There one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer…” A story that’s specific and unspecific at once, positively amorpheous.
The specific part of the story is about Bodie returning to the scene of the crime in 2018, which is to say high school, which was, in her case, a mid-grade New Hampshire boarding school she’d been sent to in the 1990s by a benefactor after horrific tragedy had befallen her family in Indiana. Those years were, as high school always is, complicated, Bodie conscious of herself as an outsider, and then, in her senior year, her roommate from the year before is murdered. The school’s athletic assistant was found guilty, and he also happened to be one of the few Black people on campus. By 2018 and deeply steeped in true crime podcasts, Bodie is already mildly obsessed the case as she comes back to Granby to teach seminars on podcasting and film history.
At the same time, her husband (they’re separated; he lives next door/ they get along fine) is being cancelled on Twitter by a somewhat insufferable performance artist, and Bodie is slowly being undone by the complexity of these matters: what is the distance between what her ex is alleged to have done and other instances the prompted us all to #BelieveWomen, plus the absolute bullshit she and her peers had to put up with with in high school from male teachers, and even from each other as rumours spread (but then some of these rumours are what protected students from abusers—how do you ever know what/which women to believe?).
It’s been a busy week and I’ve not had as much time to read this book as I would have liked, to give it the focus it really deserved, so that I could get lost in it, but last night I sat down for a couple of hours to finish it and finally everything clicked, the over-stuffedness, the real answer to whodunnit:
“My point is, you were part of the machine… You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it; when the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.”
What a marvelous, absorbing, complicated world of a book this is, a literary mystery, and a mirror.
February 28, 2023
Strange Loops, by Liz Harmer
Exquisite and propulsive are the first two words that spring to mind when I think about Liz Harmer’s latest novel, Strange Loops, which I read this weekend and found virtually unputdownable. It’s the story of Francine, a high school teacher involved in an inappropriate relationship with a former student, who is now 18, the power dynamics at play inversely reminiscent of a relationship Francine had during her own teen years with a charismatic pastor at the church Francine’s twin brother Philip had started attending, a church that Francine had followed him to, though she was never the believer that he was, perhaps the reason he’s been angry at her for decades.
The novel moves between three timelines with Philip and Francine’s respective points of view: high school era, present day when both are married with children in their thirties, and a cataclysmic family vacation five years before that during which a storm blew in and everything the twins had been repressing for decades finally exploded to the surface. Are the “strange loops” the two are caught in destined to repeat forever? Does Philip know about Francine’s relationship with her former student? Will he tell her husband? And how does their mother’s own history factor into all this, a small but essential question whose answer is vital to this novel’s tremendous power?
Last summer a Canadian journalist published a misguided memoir that became more than a bit notorious after the fact, a strange and unthoughtful work of revenge, the kind of memoir one might more often encounter in torrid fiction than real life, a book that was mostly remarkable for the questions it posed instead of any of the conclusions it came to. And if that strange memoir had been an excellent novel, it could have been this one, an unsettling story of doubleness, the messiness and irresolvability of power dynamics, and what it means to be a woman who wants, who desires.
February 23, 2023
This is the House That Luke Built, by Violet Browne
I don’t really know where to start with this book, this brutal, gorgeous, funny, strange and loving story of loss and living, though there is an obvious comparison in terms with subject matter with Lisa Moore’s February, but Violet Browne’s This is the House That Luke Built—fiction born of the author’s own experience—is something altogether its own. Something that, I must confess, I don’t *get* in its entirety, but I’m going to speculate that this is the point, that there are element of Rose’s experience of loss and widowhood that are unfathomable to me, the same way that, I suppose, I once read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work before I’d had children and missed the point altogether.
The novel is told in a series of vignettes moving back and forth through time, showing Rose early in her relationship with Luke as, with her two children and his son, they come together and make a family, baby Emily arriving not long after. We see Emily in 2013: “Every since her father vanished when she was fifty-three days old, Emily’s body has been gripped by a vibration at the molecular level,” an urgency she tries to satiate with tattoos, piercings, as she tries to settle with what was lost to her. 1994, as Luke’s boat goes down in a storm. 1980 with Rose in her father’s boat as a child, in Plancentia, NL.
Mostly though, these vignettes tell the story of Rose trying (and often failing) to pick up the pieces of her family life after Luke’s death, how time marches on, how her parents and her sister keep her going, as do her children, with their own needs and particular wounds that become clearer over time. But she ends up eking out some kind of a deal with the fates, that every year on the anniversary of Luke’s death, Rose gets to walk through the wall of the house he’d built for their family and find him waiting there for her, though it’s a deal she must pay dearly for—in exchange, she’s aging faster, losing years of her life, her teeth decaying, her skin losing its definition. Until eventually she’s asked for too much…
I love this book, just as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, full of gorgeous prose, and gutsy women, and so much love, even in the face of so much loss, maybe especially. Rose’s struggles to raise her kids and make a better life for herself are harrowing and awesome, and the flame that continues to burn for the husband she lost is sustaining, transformative, unforgettable.
February 21, 2023
Blackwater Falls, by Ausma Zehanat Khan
Blackwater Falls launches a new mystery series by Ausma Zehanat Khan, whose Esa Khattak/Rachel Getty books I enjoyed very much, this new series set in Colorado, where British-born Canadian Khan now makes her home, and with Detective Inaya Rahman at the helm. This is a novel very aware of itself as a police procedural post-2020, just as Rahman herself is aware of her complicity as part of a system that neither serves nor protects people of colour.
And it’s not just (B)lack and white, literally, or otherwise. Detective Rahman, a member of the police’s Community Response Team, is brought in after the body of a teenage girl, Razan, a Syrian refugee, is found murdered and bizarrely displayed at the entrance to her mosque in the rural town of Blackwater Falls, CO. A gang of menacing bikers linked to the local Evangelical church lend an aura of menace to the case, plus a local Black activist is furious that this one murdered teen is garnering so much attention, while two other cases of Muslim teens missing from the local Somali community have not even warranted an investigation, have been shrugged off as merely runaways.
Detective Rahman has to gain the trust of local Muslim communities, work toward finding Razan’s killer, tiptoe around the local Sheriff with white supremacist leanings, and also make sense of her superior, Detective Waqa Seif, who keeps obstructing her investigation in curious ways—is he working for the Sheriff, perhaps, or is there some other secret that he’s hiding?
Meanwhile, Detective Rahman is still dealing with PTSD from a violent assault by her police colleagues at her previous job in Chicago, a retaliation for her efforts to hold an officer to account for the killing of a Black man at a traffic stop. And Khan’s depiction of this assault, told through a flashback, was one of the most devastating, affecting bits of fiction I’ve encountered in a book lately—some readers may want to take care.
This novel by Khan—who holds a PhD in international human rights law—is very much a story of our time, from white supremacy, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, border policy, refugee struggles and more, right down to the inhumane working conditions in meatpacking plants that has resulted in so much death due to Covid-19 over the last three years. And yet this isn’t a book that gets bogged down in the issues, perhaps because Khan goes out of her way to have her story show the interconnectedness of all of these ideas and the way they affect people’s lives and communities. The stakes—both in the novel and in reality—are huge.
