June 25, 2024
SANDWICH, by Catherine Newman
On Sunday night, the evening before my 45th birthday, which is “halfway to 90,” as my youngest child keeps noting, that very same child’s tooth fell out, an occasion that was once momentous in our household, but has ceased to be. I ended up breaking a ten dollar bill with coins from her piggy bank in order for the tooth fairy duties to be fulfilled, and it occurred me that it won’t be long now before my tooth fairy days are behind me, which felt especially poignant since I was in the middle of Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a novel that is both a beach read about a Cape Cod family holiday and an exploration of the “reproductive mayhem” that is the female experience. Told from the perspective of Rocky, stuck between love and obligation to her elderly parents and her just-grown kids, all of whom have joined her and her husband at the cramped seaside rental as she grapples with hot flashes and menopausal rage, and long-hidden secrets come back to the surface.
“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still, and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course, You have to.”
This is a novel about the enormity of human experience, about ideas that are terrible, heavy and monstrous—the Holocaust, the Patriarchy. It’s about miscarriage, and death, and something called “vaginal atrophy,” and the fragile nature of the human heart, literally and otherwise. It’s about how to love is to lose, eventually, and how far away the overwhelming experiences of early parenthood (experiences that Newman documented in her own popular blog back in the day) eventually becomes, which seems impossible when you’re in it, and about the delights and frustrations of adult children, and the heartache of seeing one’s parents get old. And it’s all so fun, and so breezy, like your best friend is writing you a chatty letter (like a blog), you’ll even laugh, just as you will likely cry, and that balance is a seesaw too, and Newman gets it exactly right.
“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human… But also so terrible and ridiculous.”
May 29, 2024
Vigil, by Susie Taylor
If you think you know Newfoundland writing, then you need to know Susie Taylor, who has followed EVEN WEIRDER THAN BEFORE, her sparkling queer coming-of-age debut, with VIGIL, a book that’s even better, though it doesn’t sparkle so much as tremble, quake, and explode. It’s a collection of interconnected stories (and I’m going to declare it, don’t @ me) each of which really is a stellar example of the form, but the collection also properly satisfies the requirements of a novel, set against the fictional Newfoundland community of Bay Mal Verde, a place on the margins of geography, about people on the margins of society, their lives rattled by poverty and addiction. They’re tragic, but also funny, and familiar, the question of what happened to Stevie Loder at the centre of the plot. The title story opening the collection, about the impromptu memorial at the Ultramar after Stevie goes missing (“Someone had stuck a whole untouched Happy Meal on the growing pile of tributes…and the gulls swarmed the thing.”) Stevie is something of a perpetual loser (I wrote “something of” so I’d seem more compassionate), a scrawny kid who gets knocked around by the world, including his father and his friends, and grows up for more of the same, the story of his disappearance unravelling as the collection unfolds, connected to the respective narratives of characters including Joseph the garbage man, who runs a drug dealing empire, and the people in his employ, including local thug Kev Babcock, who we come to have sympathy for—but is Stevie so expendable? Perhaps. There is Ryan, who was friends with the other boys, but had a route out of town via university, which means that encountering him later in the story is gutting. Carter, whose practical younger sister is also drawn to Kev, but who (thankfully) is smarter than he is, and a meta kind of character called Susie, “that running girl,” who is not from Bay Mal Verde, but arrived in town with her girlfriend, drawing suspicion from that, but she’s alone now, running the trails and narrowly skirting danger, reporting what she sees (except for a pivotal moment when she doesn’t).
The stories in Taylor’s Vigil are a chorus, and they make a song that soars, the bleakness of their concerns offset by the vitality of the voices, and the shimmering moments of redemption woven like miracles throughout the text.
May 28, 2024
The Rasmussen Papers, by Connie Gault
“How strange it is that our lives are not usefully taken apart, not instructive in their compartments, but everything in one life is twisted inextricably with everything else, and it’s impossible to decipher it all.”
What a fascinating, sly, and tricky novel is Connie Gault’s THE RASMUSSEN PAPERS, Alissa York’s blurb conjuring the image of a fox with a quicksilver tip to its tail, and that’s it exactly. An urban fox, of course, out of place, slipping along the sidewalk and disappearing down into a ravine leaving no trace, as though it had ever been there. Like Gault’s unnamed narrator, an essayist hoping to write a biography of the iconic but enigmatic Canadian poet, Marianne Rasmussen, who concocts a plan to rent a room in the home of Aubrey Ash, on the cusp of his one hundredth birthday and Rasmussen’s former lover. Once ensconced, the narrator hopes, she will find her way to Ash’s papers and finally undercover the mysteries and crack the code of Rasmussen’s most famous work—but all this turns out to be more complicated than she’d supposed.
Who IS the fox, after all? Is it our unnamed narrator, or Aubrey Ash himself? Ash’s attractive much-younger brother, whom the narrator is drawn to? Is it the cocky young literary critic whose many affectations include a cravat, who—inadvertently or otherwise—sets the narrator’s plan in motion? Is it the patriarchy, the oldest of old boy’s clubs? Or the city of Toronto and its seedy downtown east side, desperate people parked in doorways or screaming expletives on public transit, something scrambled in their brains, perhaps, or maybe they just see everything more clearly than the rest of us.
I loved this novel, which reminded me of Carol Shields in the very best way—imagine the preoccupations of her novels Swann and Unless. About the problems of biography, literary mythology, women writing, bystanding, and the impossible challenges of giving form to the world and to life itself.
May 24, 2024
Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan
Are Irish writers having a moment, beyond Sally Rooney and Tana French, even? (And Claire Keegan, and Louise Kennedy, and Caroline O’Donoghue.) Here’s another, Megan Nolan, whose second book is Ordinary Human Failings, a novel that’s agonizing exquisite, beginning with the death of a toddler on a London housing estate in 1990, all local gossip pointing toward a semi-feral 10-year-old as the killer, the second child belonging to an Irish family that’s never really seemed right, particularly since the death of the mother, Rose, leaving behind her husband, John, disabled by a workplace accident; eldest son Richie, a drunk; daughter Carmel, beautiful and hardened; and Carmel’s daughter, Lucy, neglected and wild. All the pieces fitting into place, or at least that’s how it seems from the perspective of newspaper reporter Tom Hargreaves, young and striving, hoping to land that big scoop that’s going to take him somewhere far from here. He ends up with the family and uses whatever tools he has on hand to get them to hand him their misery, share the pitiful story of how they all ended up like this, but he’s not as savvy as he seems, which is to say that he just doesn’t get it (in both senses) and Nolan shows each family member’s most vulnerable and private selves, the tender bits that nobody else has ever witnessed before, and that nobody like Tom will be able to exploit. Nolan renders these people as tragically, achingly human, their stories only ordinary ones, so the title goes, but this novel itself is quietly magnificent.
May 15, 2024
Death By a Thousand Cuts, by Shashi Bhat
The first time I read Shashi Bhat was her Journey Prize-winning story “Mute” in 2018, and I remember just feeling captivated by the narrative voice, being struck by the singularity of her character’s experience, and yet noting how much I could identify due to the specificity of her perspective and the choice of such essential details. A scenario that really gets under the skin, that’s really “cringe,” as the kids say. A little “Cat Person,” a little Sally Rooney, altogether timely in the age of #MeToo, but also I just read it and wanted more of literature that can affect me like that, and thankfully Bhat delivered with The Most Precious Substance on Earth, her excellent 2021 novel-in-stories, and now with her latest, Death By a Thousand Cuts, which is just devastatingly devourable and I read in a single day.
Naturally, every time I think of this book, the Taylor Swift song of the same name starts playing in my head, which I’m not sorry about. And I don’t know if Shashi Bhat is a Swiftie, but her literary preoccupations are not different from those in Taylor’s tortured poetry—her stories are about seeking and not finding, about the tedium of dating, about longing and wanting and disappointment, but there’s also a brutality to them too, a sting. (Let the wasp on the cover of the book be a warning.) As I was reading this book upstairs, I kept having visceral reactions to the stories, gasping in dread and horror, and members of my household were concerned for my well being, which says a lot for a book, that they can affect one in this way.
These are stories that will be appreciated by readers who aren’t even sure that they like reading short stories. And while I know short story lovers bemoan the form’s lack of wider and/or commercial acceptance, I get it too—as a reader I want something immersive, something deep and lush to sink into and get lost inside, the way I can inside a novel, but in these stories, I really can, so much richness, so much texture. As satisfying as the dripping fruit of the cover, but even better, because I can read them over and over again.
May 14, 2024
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes, by Adrienne Gruber
As I noted in the introduction to my Bookspo conversation with Adrienne Gruber, I’m not as preoccupied with notions of motherhood these days, or with essays about of motherhood, certainly not as much as I was back in the day when I was publishing my own anthology of essays about motherhood, when I was positively obsessed, and felt like I was working out pressing and essential existential questions with this obsession. The most surprising and disappointing revelation of that experience (along with many others that weren’t disappointing at all) being that motherhood is niche, never mind that everybody everywhere was born to a mother once upon time. But considerations about motherhood themselves are not as fascinated and universal as I’d supposed they’d be back when I was young, starry-eyed, naive and about to publish my first book. (Goodreads reviews for my most recent novel include comments from readers who were disappointed that motherhood factored so strongly into my book, and therefore they found themselves unable to relate to the story.) I think too about what older writers must have thought when I was in the heart of “discovering motherhood” era. And I’m not helping the cause by having now considered motherhood discovered and conquered, because soon it will be a decade since I last changed a diaper. But now Gruber’s essay collection Monsters, Martyrs & Marionettes has gone and got me right back into the thick of it. It’s tapped a nerve. “Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul.”
There is an essay in this book, “A Route That Does Not Include Your Child,” that is the nonfiction version of the “Hot Cars” chapter of my novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND. Gruber and I both, I suppose, too attuned to tension, to risk, to possibility (though it’s our job as writers), reading Gene Weingarten’s 2009 article “Fatal Distraction” in the Washington Post with meticulous attention. From the first page of my novel, “Parenthood, Jess observed from her perspective smack dab in the eye of the hurricane, was—if you were lucky— like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”
And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. She’s writing about legacy, about her own struggles with mental illness, and those of her scientist mother, and her grandmother’s cognitive decline. About how essays of motherhood turn out the essays about everything, about the most elemental parts of life itself, milk and sweat, and then a reviewer will turn around and write something like, “This dark comedy is not for the squeamish,” and question who would want to read a book like this.
Anne Enright has called motherhood “the place before stories start”, describing her surprise at finding it was not the sort of journey that one could send dispatches home from. I read Enright’s memoir MAKING BABIES when I was pregnant with my first child, and a decade and a half later I understand what she means. I’d never envisioned how those early days would come to seem like a journey I now cannot imagine having ever taken. “Did we really go through that?” Otherworldly. But this only makes writing down how it was all the more important, because otherwise it would be impossible to remember any of it in that unbroken sleepless blur.
May 9, 2024
The Game of Giants, by Marion Douglas
I loved Marion Douglas’s novel The Game of Giants, though I’m not sure where to start in telling you about it. The back of the book describes the story as beginning with narrator Rose and her partner Lucy in the early 1980s discovering that their son Roger has developmental delays, his abilities marked the third percentile, which sends Rose back into her own history to explore when things went awry, which was early, because Rose as a character is pretty off-beat herself, and so is the narrative. But I’m not actually sure that this is what the story is “about” at all, and instead have a sense that this is a novel intent its own unique trajectory, intent on the propulsiveness and sharpness that results from Rose’s off-beats, and the terrific momentum created by her narrative voice and the remarkable ways that (in her experience) one thing leads to another, questionable choices culminating in a rich tapestry of experience, insecurities, lessons and longings. This novel is such an achingly hilarious story of tender humanity, with Munro-country vibes and the literary influence of Alberta, and yes, unconventional motherhood is where we finally arrive long after the runaway train has left the station on the wildest of rides, Rose struggling to accept the extraordinary reality of her son because she’s never been able to accept the reality of herself. But the reader does, just as Rose’s long-suffering partner Lucy does, Rose Drury a literary creation to fall in love with, made up of foibles, heartaches and broken parts like nobody else is, just like everybody else is.
May 3, 2024
Not How I Pictured It, by Robin Lefler
I read a huge pile of excellent books in February as I was recording interviews for the BOOKSPO podcast, and now that those books are out in the world, I have some catching up to do in terms of posting about them. And one of these is Robin Lefler’s second novel NOT HOW I PICTURED IT, which I just loved with my whole heart. In my conversation with Lefler, she mentions how life itself is stressful enough and therefore, in her fiction, she strives to give readers a holiday from all that and provide fun and pleasure instead, which she definitely accomplishes, but I also want to emphasize that this book is so good. That excellence and being a pleasure to read can go hand-in-hand, as they do in this “shipwreck rom-com” (I didn’t even know that was a thing!) in which the cast of a 20-year-old teen drama en-route to their reunion show end up stranded on a desert island. A great cast of characters with complicated ties to each other (both spoken and otherwise) have to come together to survive, and also figure out who among them is the traitor who instigated this disaster and might still be putting them all in even more danger. Protagonist Ness—who fled show biz years ago and now lives in Toronto unclogging drains in the apartments she owns—is definitely regretting her instincts to avoid being a part of the reunion project in the first place, although the chance of rekindling her connection to her dreamy ex-boyfriend Hayes means: it’s complicated. Funny, sharp, and full of heart, I loved this book.
May 1, 2024
Who By Fire, by Greg Rhyno
In his excellent, riveting, heartful and hilarious second novel, Who By Fire, Greg Rhyno pays tribute to the fact that all the best classic detective novels always include some dame. Although his dame is not just any dame, instead Dame Polara, truly an original, only daughter of legendary PI Dodge Polara, whose brain is now scrambled after a stroke. If elder care wasn’t stressful enough, Dame is recently divorced, her latest IVF round has failed, her dodgy landlord keeps demanding she catch up on rent bills she can’t afford, and her straight job at Toronto City Hall working with heritage preservation is starting to seem pretty futile, particularly as a string of arsons take down one listed building after another. In spite of her best instincts, and out of desperation, Dame finds herself taking on a domestic case on her dad’s behalf, though she’ll be performing the investigation herself, which shouldn’t be so hard, right? After all, she’s the kid whose dad used to lock her out in the cold in order to deliver essential lessons in lockpicking, and she’s tagged along on all his stakeouts. But it turns out the case is connected to something sinister afoot in the city, and the true culprit is closer to home than Dame will ever imagine, putting her in serious danger, and forcing her to rely on her wits when the stakes have never been higher. I loved this book. A pitch-perfect pleasure.
April 30, 2024
Lightning Strikes the Silence, by Iona Whishaw
There’s not much I love better than a return to King’s Cove, the bucolic hamlet near Nelson, BC, where the fictional Lane Winslow makes her home after a tumultuous WW2 during which she’d served as a special agent, utilizing her quick wits and affinity for the Russian language. When Lane arrives in 1946, England left behind her, she’s envisioning a quiet life, a chance to dedicate herself to writing, a retirement of sorts, even though she’s still young herself, but it seems that fate disagrees, as she stumbles across a body and manages to solve the crime, in partnership with the Nelson Police Department, a partnership that’s solidified with Lane’s relationship and eventual marriage to Inspector Frederick Darling a few books into the series. And now we’re on Book 11, Lightning Strikes the Silence, and it seems that Lane’s life hasn’t been quiet for a moment, and is even less quiet than usual when the sound of an explosion is heard high on the mountain above King’s Cove. Meanwhile, in Nelson (on Baker Street!), the local jeweller has been found dead, his office ransacked, and Inspector Darling is a bit pleased about having come upon his own corpse for once, without his dear wife’s involvement, but it won’t be long before Lane is embroiled in the case as well, in addition to caring for a young Japanese-Canadian child found injured by the explosion site. In 1948, with the war long over, Canadians of Japanese ancestry are still forbidden to return to coastal areas, their homes and livelihoods taken from them, and anti-Japanese racism is rampant. Will goodness triumph? Will Lane and Darling crack the case? Will Ames finally do something with that engagement ring he’s got hiding in his pocket? Book 11, and the series gets better and better. Lightning Strikes the Silence does not disappoint.
