May 25, 2009
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Fairy tales can be as tricky as the shadowy creatures inhabiting them, and at a Midsummer Party in 1895, the children of Todefright Hall discover just how much in A.S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book. These children are the Wellwoods, progeny of children’s writer Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey who is a Fabian banker (neither he nor Olive too uncomfortable with contradictions such as that). The children have just impressed by a terrifying performance of Cinderella by sophisticated puppets, and are intrigued by the differences between the story they’re accustomed to and what they’ve just seen (Cinderella’s stepsisters hacking apart their feet to make the slipper fit, and no fairy godmother or magic pumpkin coach). So it turns out there are many different versions of the stories the children know, and this one is by the Brothers Grimm.
The story wasn’t exactly scary, one of the children remarks. Among the grown-ups present in this Bohemian circle is a scholar of fairy tales who agrees, “It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. [But…] these were memories of some other time, long ago, and… they weren’t scary./ ‘They are just like that,’ said Griselda [the child], feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it.” “Like that”, being precisely what they are; not meant to entrance, to sanitize, to edify, to terrify. Folk tales, not children’s tales, which means not geared to any particular audience, and therefore resonating wider.
But these are children who’ve been reared on fairies, whose parents are idealists committed to keeping magic alive in their own lives. Into this circle has also come Philip Warren, a working class boy run away from the potteries, discovered in the basement of the South Kensington Museum (which is to become the Victoria and Albert), and his presence does provide balance and make clear that the Wellwoods’ privilege is rarer than these socially aware children might imagine. But of course Philip is taken with the Wellwoods, and their wild existence, scrambling up trees, riding up and down lanes on bicycles, by the personal stories their mother has written for each of them, by the way that each one of them is his or her own particular sprite.
The difference between the fairy tales the children are accustomed to, the stories their mother writes, and the “like that” stories of the Brothers Grimm is that the latter does not attempt to make itself of another world. Olive Wellwood’s stories are meant to be as “through the looking glass”, but as the story progresses, we see that life itself really is rather “tale-ish”: boys found hidden down hidey-holes, children who appear to be changelings, dubious parentage among the offspring of the Wellwoods and their freewheeling circles, Bluebeardy locked doors with terrible secrets behind them, and vanishings without any explanation.
So that when the children venture out into the world, they find they’ve been sorely deceived. The world is not a firefly-chasing idyll, and the monsters aren’t all fiction– the abuse sustained by Tom Wellwood at public school traumatizes him for the rest of his life, turning him into a Peter Pan type character. The girls grow up to see that for all their scrambling and rambling, society (and their parents) expects something very conventional about the kind of women they’re mean to be. They begin to recognize their parents’ infallibilities, and are taken aback by a world more complex than a good-queen/bad-queen dichotomy. And then comes World War One, into which the boys are led by some kind of Pied Piper, by leaders suffering from “the childish failure to imagine the world as it was” (when “the world as it was” is precisely “like that”).
The Children’s Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt’s best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn’t mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here– a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don’t like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one– there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children’s Book is decidedly vivid and surprising.
It is true that by the end of the book, Byatt’s immersion of her characters into historical events has perhaps become a bit too complete and the pages sweep by lacking the specificity we’ve seen in the earlier part of the novel. But so too did history seem to in the early twentieth century, and maybe we can understand it this way. Perhaps it’s also the way that time goes when children are grown too, a single day holding far less possibility in and of itself, pages turning faster. Towards the end of the 600+ page novel, but this is the sort one is sad to get to the end of. And here Byatt offers us the possibility of some light, of a happy ending at the end of four years’ bloodshed, and so we can dare to hope too that life and the world could also be like that.
May 21, 2009
You must read The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon
I like this picture, because my enormousness gets lost in shadow. You also get the blue sky, sunshine, leaves on the trees, that I’ve picked up a little bit of colour (really– this is an improvement), and that I’ve had my nose in a book all day. Or at least for most of the day, when I wasn’t napping, swimming, being visited by a wee delightful baby and her as delightful mother (who came bearing scones), making more strawberry sorbet and eating the first bbq pizza of the season. Obviously, it has been a really wonderful day.
But that book I’ve had my nose buried in has really been one of the very best parts of the day. Said book is The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon, which I’m not going to review because I read it for fun and it’s two years old, but you can read great reviews at That Shakespearian Rag and Baby Got Books. (Outside of Canada, the book is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, which I bet is not as well designed as my Coach House edition, though it just might be.) Also check out Sean Dixon’s blog related to the book, and I know you’ll be intrigued.
The whole thing is brilliant. It’s a book that is accessible and complex, hilarious and poignant, serious and light, important and whimsical, and brimming with bookishness for the love of bookishness, and inside jokes and outside jokes, and all the very best things about literature. A completely original story, startling in its specificity, and yet the implications stretch wide. I adored this novel about “a whole bunch of girls and… an intense little book club.” And moreover, if I may say, I love that it was written by a man. Not enough books about a whole bunch of girls are. Reading about The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club was ever-surprising, ever-satisfying. And perfect for a just-as-perfect Thursday.
UPDATE: Largehearted Boy features The Official Lacuna Cabal Playlist: “In the interest of satire, however, Emmy might choose, for Missy, “Common People” by Pulp, adding with a cocked eyebrow that the character played by Sadie Frost in the video reminds her of Donna Tartt’s slutty sister, so there’s a bookish dimension to the choice.”
May 20, 2009
Trauma by Patrick McGrath
Charlie Weir’s mother got a lot of things wrong. Favouring Charlie’s brother Walt and disdaining Charlie’s profession, she once remarked, “Oh, anyone can be a psychiatrist… It takes talent to be an artist.” This statement filed away in the lock-box of Charlie’s mind, which he sorts through all too frequently, seething with ancient resentments. His fixation underlining the fact that many people probably shouldn’t be psychiatrists, him in particular. He lies down on his own couch from time-to-time, and self-regards with much the same insight he accords other people in his life, and eventually it becomes clear that Charlie Weir is a danger to himself and others.
Charlie, the protagonist in Patrick McGrath’s latest novel Trauma, is at a remove from those around him. This he regards as an intellectual advantage, allowing him a deeper understanding of character, and making him a better psychiatrist in his own estimation. And it is true that for a time he received professional acclaim, working out of an office with a fashionable address, under an esteemed mentor. In the present day, however, circumstances are altered, though Charlie glosses over this (as he glosses over the fact that he grew up a loner, that he’s a man in his forties who has had only two serious relationships in his life.) He can no longer afford a receptionist, his referrals are way down, and one of his few clients has just attempted suicide.
Charlie works with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, at a time when this is a relatively new field of study. His home in New York City circa 1980 is a fitting backdrop for such an occupation, a sordid, dirty, crime-filled nightmare of a city. His girlfriend Nora, troubled by her own bad dreams, explains them away with the city: “It’s a war-zone, Charlie, you have to be a warrior to live here.” He counsels women who’ve been victims of childhood abuse, of recent sexual assault. He’d previously been working with Vietnam Veterans, but gave this up when he’d started treating his brother-in-law, taken an intervention too far and the brother-in-law had killed himself. Discovering the body, believes Charlie, has been his own trauma, though he’s never had his situation “seen to”. He hasn’t really felt the need to, with his understanding of the pathology of trauma. This understanding, he thinks, is what differentiates him from the men and women he treats who are also unable to control their patterns of compulsive behaviour. It’s what sets him apart.
Of his brother-in-law, Charlie notes that never had he “encountered a man so profoundly alienated from his own humanity that he already felt dead.” Though Charlie himself is so profoundly alienated that he doesn’t even know he’s dead. His absolutely failure of empathy is his failing as a psychiatrist, as a brother, as a husband and a lover. When his brother-in-law dies, Charlie abandons his wife, believing her unable to cope with her husband’s role in her brother’s death. Displaying a complete lack of insight– what she’d be unable to cope with is abandonment in the wake of the loss she’s already been dealt. And now with his new girlfriend, Charlie is unable to regard her character beyond its pathologization, driving her away from him. He’s either being too much of a psychiatrist, or displaying behaviour so dense, it’s hard to believe he’s more than an automaton. He’s accused of being cold, of being clumsy, but fails to take on what these criticisms actually mean.
Charlie Weir is not an absorbing narrator. It’s true that he is cold and clumsy, and it’s a credit to McGrath that his voice doesn’t convince us otherwise– Charlie Weir convinces nobody except himself. (I do wonder about implications of psychiatrist/narrators– their seemingly absolute command of their characters, the characters’ resistance to falling under command. Is psychiatry itself a kind of failed novel?) What Charlie’s voice does mean, however, is that the narrative is not as enthralling as a “psychological thriller” probably should be. There is no “grip” about it, but tension does rise as Charlie becomes increasingly isolated. As we’re left with just his own voice, and the confines of his mind, which is a most terrifying place. His awareness of his breakdown cannot save him in the end, and we’re only forced to bear witness as he ever so clearly and evenly narrates his inevitable descent into an abyss.
May 19, 2009
Voracious
Now reading Trauma by Patrick McGrath, because Emily Perkins mentioned him in her interview last year. I reread Perkins’ Novel About My Wife yesterday, because Tessa McWatt’s puzzler put me in the mood to go back to it, plus Perkins writes about first pregnancy as a really bewildering, terrifying and tender time in a marriage, and I wanted to revisit that. Having the time and space to read voraciously is something I’ve not experienced in a while, and I’m really enjoying it.
And on the internet too– Jessica Westhead has a story up at Joyland.ca, “Todd and Belinda Rivers of 780 Strathcona“. Katia Grubisic in praise of difficult writing at the Descant blog. Seen Reading goes from sea to shining sea (or from Vancouver to Wolfville at least). The wondrous Meli-Mello responds to my post about Mommy blogging. And Marnie Woodrow guest-posting on Sesame Street turning 40 (plus she writes about loving Rita Celli, and who doesn’t love Rita Celli?). From The Walrus, “Water Everywhere, 1982”, which is an excerpt from Lisa Moore’s new novel February (out in June).
And we’re just back from our final midwife’s appointment, which is so strange to consider. And moreover, that in just a week, our Baby will be here. This little person we’ve known so long and haven’t even met yet– I am very excited for that moment to come. (Besides, the reusable baby wipes– I actually sewed them! We’re all ready now.) 
May 18, 2009
Step Closer by Tessa McWatt
Tessa McWatt’s Step Closer is a puzzle of a novel, which I was just in the right place for considering what I’d read before it. The novel’s various pieces as follows: the 2004 Tsunami, witnessed from afar by Emily who is a Canadian living in Spain with her virologist boyfriend, Sam. Virology, which Emily is trying to learn more about so she can assist Sam with Spanish translations. And that Emily is a writer, the tsunami unleashing a need within her to put together a story about what happened between her, her friend Marcus and a man called Gavin along a pilgrim’s trail five years previous. Gavin and Marcus’s encounter relating to an incident at a Scottish borstal twenty-five years before that, during which one boy had destroyed the other’s life. There is also the matter of Sam’s current preoccupation with a colleague, and with his brother who’d disappeared years before.
A narrator struggling with her narrative is a difficult creature, particularly when the struggle is (however fictionally) such a literal one, to put pen to paper. McWatt avoids the chance of tediousness, however, by having Emily embed herself within her characters’ points of view. In her shifts away from first-person, she presents herself as a secondary character, and uses whatever pieces she can find to construct Marcus and Gavin’s stories. She also vividly portrays expatriate life with its listlessness and danger, dares and temptations, fleeting selves and cleanish slates, against the running of the bulls.
The text is further enhanced by McWatt’s marvelous prose, which is difficult, surprising and illuminating. Shying away from nothing– the sordid, the disturbing and the strange, but none of it cheapened, for sensation. As a reader I saw before me many scenes I didn’t like, but I was confident the author was showing it to me for a reason. That she knew very well what she was doing.
Like Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife, this is a story whose narrator never asked the right questions, never noticed the right things, and so there are gaps in the story that can’t be helped, and are actually especially illuminating. Though McWatt’s Emily’s telling is more satisfying, perhaps not providing all the answers, but we do see in the end that her telling has been a journey of self-discovery. She realizes that she has so often made herself a character in other people’s stories that she’s forgotten her own– which is a strange and twisted kind of egotism. Her focus on the past also keeping her from dwelling on the problems of her present, which are more numerous than she might allow. McWatt has written the most galvanizing, satisfying and beautiful conclusion, however, which doesn’t so much give an end away as allow us to see Emily on the way to decidedly somewhere.
Even permitting gaps, however, not all the pieces here match up as they should. The virology metaphor perhaps stretches too far, and is not ultimately convincing. The questions Emily leaves unasked are sometimes too opportune plot-wise, and don’t wholly make sense. But with such a puzzle of a novel, I do suspect that another read would make things clearer, and that I could even do well with another after that. The novel’s conclusion making clear that Tessa McWatt is in control, and that ultimately such disparate plots link together. Which has been Emily’s point from the very beginning– “There is an order here, awkward and quiet, even now, if you look carefully.” The reader is convinced.
May 15, 2009
On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence, and my worst tendencies
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and motherhood lately, as I put one on the back burner and prepare for the other. I reread Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work yesterday, which is such a complicated, dark and beautiful book. And two ideas glared at me from her introduction– first, the inevitable backlash to any mother who dares to put her experiences down on paper (or blog). Cusk found herself taken aback, but reasoned the response with that “in writing about motherhood, I inevitably attracted a readership too diverse to be satisfied from a single source. The world has many more mothers than an author generally has readers.” So many people read her book because they were interested in motherhood, because of “the desire to see it reflected, to have it explained, all that love and terror and strangeness, even if it is immediately repressed by the far stronger desire for authority and consensus, for ‘normality’ to be restored: to me, the childcare manual is the emblem of the new mother’s psychic loneliness.” But more on this in a minute.
Second, Cusk writes “with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Which I’ve been conscious of also here, as babies have become such a preoccupation of mine lately. As my personal experiences, the books I’ve read, the way I’ve been reading, and everything I’ve been doing have been so framed within the context of our baby’s imminent arrival. Though Pickle Me This has never been a particularly serious literary blog, it’s certainly become even less so lately. I’m not saying my hard-hitting criticisms of picture books aren’t worth noting, but there are some readers, I’m sure, who are less than enthralled. And I really don’t want to alienate any of my five readers.
Here’s the thing: I have read mommy blogs. (Note, I didn’t say “I read (present tense) mommy blogs”. But now I’m getting all Brian Mulroney pedantic.) The term mommy blog is a slur, as is “chick lit”, neither “genre” (let’s say) helping itself by mainly comprising compost. Stephany Aulenback recently remarked on the ubiquity of parents chronicling their children’s lives online: “I think when our children are grown up, they’re going to have different notions of “public” than we do now.”
My derision of women writing about their domestic lives (“compost”) sits uncomfortably with me, because it’s so easy to deride women’s domestic lives– everybody does it. By existing within the domestic sphere, these stories really serve to undermine themselves, which certainly bothers me when it comes to fiction. When with aesthetics as an excuse, fiction about women’s lives is so often deemed less than literary, as craft is less than art, etc.
The problem I have with mommy blogs, however, is that I watch them in the same way I’d watch a train wreck– even the incredibly well-written ones. I don’t necessarily admire these women’s “honesty” and how they “put themselves out there”, but sometimes I really do have to tear my eyes away. Their deliberate provocations are often horrifying, my knee-jerk response is catty, and I’m not the only one. As Cusk says, “The world has many more mothers…”, each one with her own opinions, and then fights break out in the comments section, commenters accusing other bloggers’ “followers” of being sheep, and then baa-ing themselves. Controversial topics include diapers, breastfeeding, reproductive rights, between working moms who work at home or out, and these are controversial topics, but it’s all handled a bit grade five. No one ever shows up to have their minds changed or expanded. My problem with these blogs is less with the blogs themselves, but how they feed on my worst tendencies.
(Though I also hate the smugness. The current trend is to embrace your inner bad-mom, and let her all hang out, but at the root of this is the sense that badness is in fact best. That anyone embracing domesticity has something up her ass, that liberation lies in the anti-domestic after all, but I’m really not so sure. I think a lot of these people might be misled. For all they’re anti-mom, they not beyond-mom, and they certainly define themselves in relation to their [albeit messy] homes. And this is a bit dangerous, can all go very wrong– I read one blog by a defiantly proud bad mom, and then her baby died.)
Which is not to say that maternal ambivalence, the experience of which these women are trying to project, is not real, or a subject deeply worth pursuing. It’s just not very often expressed in a particularly thoughtful way within these forums. Whereas I’ve found the idea explored well elsewhere, in the experiences of women artists in particular. Perhaps because these women have a medium with which to convey their experiences, because they are well-accustomed to expressing themselves. Because it’s a complicated issue requiring a high level of articulateness. We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Divided Heart, Who Does She Think She Is, Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Anne Enright’s Making Babies, and I was recently introduced to Marita Dachsel’s Motherhood and Writing Interviews (by writer Laisha Rosnau, who is the subject of one).
So somehow I find myself saying that inarticulate people have no business writing about their lives. Hmmm. (Or perhaps that they should, but I just shouldn’t read them because I’m not very nice). For your own interest, please do check in in about two weeks times to see how articulate I’ve become with a newborn, and then again six months later when my house is a mess and I’m smashing my head against the wall and the stove is on fire. When I’m just as bad a mom as any of them, reality sunk in. Don’t think I’m not aware of this, but it’s still scary to consider.
But it’s not simply black and white, good mom/bad mom and I appreciate the writing best that reflects this. How Rachel Power (author of The Divided Heart) wrote recently: “maternal ambivalence is not a state of being torn between love and hate for our children (meaning not them so much as what they’ve done to our lives) — but is a state entirely borne out of love. It is precisely this love for my children, being so excruciating, that I can feel has ruined me. This acute tenderness and sense of responsibility is something us mothers are never free of, and almost impossible to imagine until you’re in it.”
May 14, 2009
The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble
Oh, but I do wish A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble would settle that petty spat about the tea set. You see, they’d have so much to talk about. I just finished reading Drabble’s latest book The Pattern in the Carpet, whose reviewer in The Telegraph was quite correct with “What a puzzle: Margaret Drabble’s memoir cum history of the jigsaw cum paean to her rather dull aunt shouldn’t really work. But somehow, in the end, it seduces.” It did. I’d also listened to the Guardian podcast of an excerpt from the beginning of the book, and so the whole of the book I read in her voice.
It was a very strange book, the kind they don’t let you write unless you’ve been publishing for nearly fifty years and they indulge you. Such permissiveness a good thing, because the book is fascinating. (I’m not sure it will come out in Canada. It is a very English book. Estimates of a limited audience here might be correct, but then again they may not be). The book, of course, is a puzzle in itself (though if I were English, I’d call it a “jigsaw”), made up of memoir, family history, and the history of the jigsaw puzzle. Which comes to encompass a history of games, of amusements and pastimes. (And why does pastime not have two s’s, I wonder, but anyway…) Also a history of childhood, and children’s literature too. Told most unsentimentally, and Drabble admits she’s never had much of an interest in childhood, or explored it in her fiction. But she’s looking backwards now, in light of her own age and her husband’s illness, perhaps because, she admits, she dreads of looking forward.
But The Pattern in the Carpet is hardly a personal indulgence. Drabble was indulged instead in being permitted to publish a book that “shouldn’t work”, whose pieces do not fit together neatly, and together form a whole that is quite difficult to explain/contain. Entire chapters as digressions, anecdotes fitted in for no other reason than that they’re interesting, moving from jigsaws to mosaics, to the city as a jigsaw, production and marketing of children’s games, and reconstruction of ruins, and the “Teas with Hovis” cups and saucers from her auntie’s bed and breakfast. Something called a warming pan, and how Drabble’s mother liked electric blankets, but for Drabble herself the novelty wore off and she sticks with hot water bottles now.
I loved it. Now I’m pretty partial to Margaret Drabble anyway, and have readily embraced her admittedly strange more recent novels that might have put her long-time readers off. But I suspect these readers will find the new book appealing as well, even if they lack interest in the subject matter (and I really couldn’t have cared less about jigsaw puzzles before this book. Now I’m just a little bit inspired). The book is a veritable curiosity shop, scattered with sharp thinking, wonderful questions, and Drabble’s meticulous prose.
But yes, she needs to talk to her sister. Byatt also has a new book out, The Children’s Book, which I was resisting. I don’t love A.S. with the same lack of reserve with which I love Drabble, plus The Children’s Book is 600+ pages and I’m having a baby in a week and a half. The book might just be heavier than the baby, but then I read this review at Dovegreyreader Scribbles, and more thoughts upon the novel over at Crooked House. And now I simply must have it, baby or not. Particularly because of how it relates to The Pattern in the Carpet, to childhood as an invention and its literature. I’m looking forward to it. And maternity leave pre-baby has brought on the return of my ability to focus, and so this whole “reading” idea is not as idiotic as it might seem in the time being.
May 11, 2009
Thought You Were Dead and Quickening by Terry Griggs
The timing was quite fortuitous in my discovery of Terry Griggs. (My discovery of her for myself, I mean, for Griggs is already well recognized, having published five books, including two novels, two children’s novels, and the Governor General’s Award-nominated short story collection Quickening. She was awarded the Marian Engel Award in 2003). I read her short fiction first in Canadian Notes and Queries 76, which was the infamous Salon Des Refuses issue, and then in The New Quarterly 108. I found that Griggs’ narrative voice had the force of a hurricane, the fortuitousness being that when I wanted more of it, I had not long to wait. Her new novel Thought You Were Dead was released earlier this month with Biblioasis, and her 1990 collection Quickening has been reprinted as part of the Biblioasis Renditions series.
Thought You Were Dead takes the crime novel formula and turns it on its head with such a literary consciousness that book reviewer becomes uncomfortable using such cliches as “turns it on its head.” Literary consciousness is not to mean hoity-toity here, however, or obnoxiously academic, seeing as Detective Chellis Beith only possesses one half of an English degree. Rather that this is a novel very conscious of itself as a book, written by an in author in full possession of her tools at work (which are words). With its tongue in its cheek, sending up the genre– Chellis Beith isn’t even a detective, though he’s frequently accused of being one. Instead, however, he is a literary researcher, formerly a grocery store stock boy, snatched up by a best-selling author one day in the ValuMart “along with the gherkins and the Melba toast.”
We find the body on page 1, and that this body is fictional, the work of Chellis’s employer Athena Havlock makes no difference at all. Griggs makes no firm distinction between fact and fiction, between the literal and metaphoric, and these distinctions become even more incidental when Athena Havlock disappears. Second body turns up on page 145– a live one in the form of a supposed long-lost sister. And then Chellis is forced to start putting the pieces together, to fill out the details in life as he’s so often done in story. He employs his best friend and old frame in a quest to uncover the truth, applying the same level of initiative he applies to everything (which, suffice it to say, is very little.)
Griggs’ fiction is as demanding as it is rewarding, pulling no punches at all. The reader is plunged rather than eased into the story, whose language must be untangled, unraveled in order to work out the plot. Chellis Beith may be a slacker, but Terry Griggs is no such thing, her tangling and raveling deliberate and intricate, sending up crime fiction, small-town culture, and the literary life. And so much more, this becoming clear with every rereading, with every sentence picked apart, with every one closely read. What a richly textured lark is this, how substantial is Terry Grigg’s concept of whimsy.
With Quickening, which is a very different kind of book, stories that were written a long time ago, it becomes clear that textured larks and substantial whimsy have always been Griggs’ way. These stories of island life are various, but linked by their connections to water (swim lit, however darkly, much to my delight), to vanishings, unlikely points of views (by babies, dogs, and fetuses). These are short stories with limits that are elastic, stretching to accommodate narrative shapes that are “tetrahedral in complexity”. Which isn’t easy. But in her foreword to this reprinting, Griggs notes just what she demands of her readers: “If the gist of any particular effort here seems overly elusive, a reader might need to venture in like a beater and drive out the game.” What a novel challenge to have posed, and we’re better readers for it.
*UPDATE: Terry Griggs has penned today’s Tuesday Essay in The Globe & Mail.
May 1, 2009
So that's what
So that’s what President Obama is reading. (I do so love his formal title. I hate formal titles as a rule, but referring to him by his first name just seems to lack occasion.) The obvious question then is, what about me? I’m now reading Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay, from my stack of novels to get through before Baby is born. It’s only the second book by Hay I’ve read, after Late Nights on Air which I so unsecretly loved. Her fiction is a bit disorienting, characters with such idiosyncratic traits that they’re hard to get one’s head around, the same way people are. The sort of characters you might misuse the word “random” for. I also finished reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons this week, after DGR’s review. And I’m not writing much of anything– I have fourteen submissions ready to send out as soon as I can muster up the energy (Saturday?), and I think I’m done until long post-Baby (which is different from “forever”). All I want to do these days is read, read, read, and thankfully I have plenty of material with which to accommodate that.
April 25, 2009
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Oh, first person narrators, ever so cunning and manipulative. How luring are their points of view, and how they sway us from the very first sentence, because after all, they’re doing the telling. As Helen, the narrator of Helen Garner’s novel The Spare Room begins, “First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn’t that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet’s positive energy flow, or something?” Stepping away, we can see that she’s taking great care to appear to take care, but she also has no idea what she’s doing.
Helen is preparing her spare room for her friend Nicola’s arrival. Nicola has been suffering from terminal cancer for a long time, flitting from one experimental treatment to another with no signs of improvement, and she’s arriving in Melbourne now to stay with Helen for three weeks whilst undergoing another round of treatment at a clinic there.
At first, Helen is happy to host her old friend, and while certainly shocked by her decline and appalled by the side-effects of the treatment she receives, she is willing to go out of her way to be helpful, to release her inner-nurse. She makes soups, changes the sheets, transports Nicola to and from the clinic. Behind Nicola’s back, however, she notes considerable frustrations, primarily with Nicola’s inability to accept her fate. Helen remembers her own sister’s death from cancer: “She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her.”
What Nicola requires of those around her, however, will not be so easy. What she demands of Helen, in addition to the nursing and the hosting that she seems to take for granted, is that Helen believe she will eventually recover, that the treatment will start working and by the middle of next week, she’ll be rid of the cancer. Which Helen is unwilling to do or even just incapable of doing, the futility of Nicola’s struggle staring her straight down in the face.
As the days go by, Helen becomes more and more frustrated by Nicola’s forced insouciance, her smiles, her inability to face the truth. She is also exhausted by the effort of caring for her friend, and by the isolation of the caregiver role. She is soon unable to humour Nicola anymore, to accommodate her need for planetary alignment, and she breaks, forcing her friend to see the reality that this cancer is going to kill her.
It’s a complicated climax, this moment, when we’re relieved that Helen has finally out and said it, and yet it’s discomforting to be feel our sympathy is with Helen, who has just proven herself to be an utter bully, who is behaving in ways most of us wouldn’t like to admit we’re capable of. It’s disquieting to identify with a character acting in a way that is so unsympathetic, but she is the narrative voice, and she’s so blunt and honest. It’s perfectly understandable. You’ll find yourself wanting to wring poor Nicola’s neck.
This is a perfect novel. It’s also quite short, but I’ve written this much, and I could go on and on (but I won’t). Because there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a “long conversation”. As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner’s narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder.
