September 25, 2009

On Mem Fox's Reading Magic

I starting this book thinking it was preaching to the choir. I already knew that reading aloud to my child would point her in positive directions. I’ve long delighted in picture books, we live in a house full of books, and those of us already literate are reading all the time. We also both love reading to Harriet, because she’s a baby, and there’s not much else to do with her (because “Pattycakes” gets old quick, and there’s only so many times you can play “The Grand Old Duke of York” without being spat up on from up at the top of the hill). As Harriet’s library was ready before she was, she’s always been well placed to reap the benefits of books, but since reading Mem Fox’s Reading Magic, I feel more confident than ever. Which, as a parent, is really quite novel.

Of course, we were on the right track already, but it’s always nice to have that underlined. And then to learn even more about how to foster not just literacy, but also a love of books— Fox teaches the benefits of reading aloud from birth (and not just at bedtime!), how to read aloud effectively, how to make games out of books to enhance the opportunities for learning, why having the child read aloud might stifle a love for reading, and also the three secrets of reading: an engagement with print, with language, and with the world. I also liked her list of twenty books children will love, which is available on her website.

I came away from this book so absolutely inspired, and excited by the opportunity to have a positive effect on my daughter’s life (and on our relationship– Fox mentions the together time of reading, and cuddling together it requires, which is so important to young kids). It also underlined a hunch I’ve had about being a parent for a while– that however much we fret and feel guilty and unsure, the most essential things that children require are those we give them without even trying.

September 18, 2009

The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The thing about Lorrie Moore, I’ve found, is that everybody loves her. Except me, because I didn’t even read her until I read her story “How to be an Other Woman” in the anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. Which made clear why everybody loved her, so I read her novel Anagrams next, which might have been a mistake, because while it was good, it didn’t leave me hungry for more. But then something about the buzz from her novel The Gate at the Stairs hooked me– Lisa Moore’s rave review definitely, and the novel’s dealings with children and motherhood, as this is much/entirely my life these days.

Another thing about my life these days, however, is that I’m tired. I am so unbelievably, unrelentingly tired that it’s quite hilarious, and only because when I am this tired, I’ll laugh at absolutely anything. (Baby no longer sleeps for more than three hours at a time, and therefore neither do I.) And for this reason, I think, as I read this novel, I kept thinking I was reading a book by Francine Prose. I am not sure why– it had a bit of Goldengrove AND Blue Angel about it, and was nothing like Anagrams, or something you’d expect from a short story writer, and I was also (as I said) really, really tired. All of which is beside the point. (Yawn. And at least I didn’t get her confused with Francine Pascal.)

I was fortunate, I think, to come to this novel as I did, having not read much of Moore before. Maud Newton posts her own thoughts on the novel and links to others‘, and the consensus seems to be that Lorrie Moore devotees are a bit disappointed. That the novel is brilliant and absorbing in so many ways, but flawed and unsatisfying at the same time. And it’s true that this novel wasn’t perfect, but I was glad to be reading it as one being awed by the power of Lorrie Moore for the very first time. Critics have been unconvinced by Moore’s narrator, Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year old who seems much more like just a vehicle for Lorrie Moore’s point of view and lingual deftness, but so entranced was I by such a pov and deftness, I wasn’t about to complain.

The novel was so interesting. Which is such a lame way to describe anything, but what I mean by this is that I could think about it forever– about the significance of the title, for example, and the narrative arc which isn’t an arc, and the characters’ stories, and how the narrative was utterly unpredictable, not because it was exciting, but because it was like how life is. How the novel was so accessible, and so challenging at the very same time, and the unending layers you could reveal inside it if you took the time to try.

Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, “That book is amazing. Buy it.” I said, “I’m going to. I’m reading her new book right now.” She said, “That’s just what I’m here to get,” and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. “It’s fantastic,” I said, because flawed or not, it is.

And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore.

September 15, 2009

Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner

All right, I wasn’t planning to blog about this book, because I was reading it for strictly fun, but it turned out to be a fantastic novel worth mentioning. The book is Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner (and three cheers to whoever gets the literary reference in that title!). It was a little bit Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher for suburbia satire, a little bit The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer for a take on the politics of mothering, but it was a thousand times better than both these novels put together. A murder mystery that had me guessing until the very end, amused and intrigued throughout, and reading like a madwoman to uncover whodunit. Her take on the “mommy-wars” manages to be well-considered and hilarious.

My impression of Weiner’s work is that it’s somewhat formulaic (though I could be wrong– I’ve only read one other of her novels and seen a movie of the other) and she has made herself somewhat of a spokeswoman for chicklit (on her own very excellent blog and elsewhere). She is incredibly articulate and great at arguing her cause, though the problem with this is that most of the chicklit she speaks for is not remotely as good as the stuff she writes. Nevertheless, I get the impression from reader reviews that Goodnight Nobody was something of a departure for her, no matter what its cover looks like, and as a lover of good books, I must say Weiner pulls it off with aplomb.

September 14, 2009

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

It was only last winter with Alice Munro’s Best that I finally discovered Munro hadn’t spent her career writing Lives of Girls and Women over and over again, and so I was very pleased to pick up her new short story collection Too Much Happiness. And once again, I was impressed by the scope of her work, in two senses. The first, in that there seems to be no template for an “Alice Munro Story”. Set in the past and present, with first and third person narration, with male and female protagonists, about events remarkable and mundane.

But I was also struck by the scope of many of the stories here themselves, how they begin at a fixed point, and then suddenly zoom far out to show the perspective, and hindsight, of an entire lifetime. “Fiction” begins with young Joyce, who’s just lost her carpenter husband Jon to his apprentice and is devasted, and then suddenly we’re whisked off to Joyce second husband’s sixty-fifth birthday. “Deep Holes” starts with the details of a picnic, with devilled eggs and a nursing baby, and ends years in the future as a mother encounters her long-estranged son. And I love that– how this zooming out turns the story inside out, and makes it something so completely different than we figured we were being set up for.

The final story in this collection seemed out of place to me, however– perhaps because I haven’t read Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, with much of its fiction taken from historical fact? As this final story’s title is also lent to the entire collection, however, I decided to read it again quite closely and view the whole book through such a prism. “Too Much Happiness” is the story of nineteenth century Russian exile, mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky. The story is a collection of scenes from near the end of her life, which she’d supposed might actually be a new beginning– she’d become engaged to the man she loved, and having previously not been sure “whether she was going to happiness or sorrow”, she decided it was to be “Happiness after all.”

Happiness, we learn from this story, is a trick after all. Sorrow is inevitable, and the trick of happiness seems to be that too much of it is the direct route to sorrow anyway. That the end of the story will always be the same, and seems to be the case in all of these ones, nothing really changed but just confirmed. But yet as the characters realize this, we as readers have realized that things as we’ve been seeing them are not like we’ve imagined them. Munro twisting her plots masterfully to create suspense, tension, absolute horror– these are stories in which things happen, which in the case of the contemporary short story is not as obvious as it sounds.

These are stories that bring us to the brink of discomfort, and Munro compels us over the edge just to see what’s happening there. The woman going to visit her husband in prison for murdering their children, a strange naked dinner party at which our narrator’s buttocks slap against a dining room chair, a woman telling a story to save her life, the man with the birthmark, the girl who detests being followed by her mentally disabled neighbour which leads to fatal consequences…

“Too Much Happiness” is still the odd story out, it seems. Set outside contemporary times, outside of Canada, about a historical figure, however little known. So much a series of sketches, it’s hard to get a sense of the story as a whole, to find the vividness Munro gives us elsewhere. And yet I do suspect there is trickery here too, and I do get a sense that here lies the key to it all. “Actually, this science,” Kovalevsky wrote of artithmetic, “requires great fantasy”, just as the best kind of fiction is a problem to be solved.

September 13, 2009

Worst Nursery Rhyme Ever

My friend Kate gave us a gorgeous Mother Goose collection when Harriet was born, and Stuart and I have been happily reacquainting ourselves with the rhymes since then. And Mem Fox does prescribe at least five nursery rhymes per day (“Begin on the day they are born. I am very serious about this: at least three stories and five nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only at bedtime, either”) so we’ve been following her recommended dosages, and then some. We ended up receiving another collection used from our neighbours, and so now we’ve got Mother Goose for upstairs and down. And how wonderful, to discover these rhymes with their words and rhythms, and to realize we’ve known them all along, stored somewhere in the back of our minds but coming back to us just like that.

“Hey Diddle Diddle” is Harriet’s favourite, we’ve decided, because it was the first nursery rhyme she ever heard (on her second day in the world, when we walked part way down the hall in the hospital, and stopped at the “Hey Diddle Diddle” mural, because I could go no further).

But we hate “Bat Bat”. Neither Stuart nor I had heard it before, and when we found it in the first collection, we thought maybe the editor’s son had written it, and they’d included it to be nice. Because it was a load of crap. But it’s in our second book too, so it must be real:

Bat bat come under my hat
and I’ll give you a slice of bacon
and when I bake
I’ll give you cake
if I am not mistaken.

We’re going to start skipping this one, so not to put Harriet off nursery rhymes altogether. They’re all a bit goofy, but “Bat Bat” is idiotic: why would you want a bat under your hat? And would one be enticed by a slice of bacon? Who’d entice a bat? Do bats eat cake? And doesn’t all of this suggest the narrator is indeed mistaken? Nonsense is one thing, but stupid is another.

Worst Nursery Rhyme Ever.

September 6, 2009

Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (eds.)

First, a note to everyone who now lands here after google searches regarding “maternal ambivalence”, particularly those who google “ambivalence about the baby’s birth”– fear not. I am the one who cried on the operating table before my c-section because I’d decided maybe I didn’t want a baby afterall, but it really did work out okay in the end, and it will work out for you too. Ambivalence, I like to think, just means you’re just considering all sides, and really, you’d be stupid not to.

Anyway, those readers land here because of my post from last spring “On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence and my worst tendencies”, a post in which nothing was resolved and I talked around in confusing circles. Since then, I’ve come not closer to conclusions, I’m still troubled about both “mommyblogs” and my feelings toward them, and even having become a mommy myself hasn’t changed my perspective so much at all.

Perhaps resolution is not the point, however. Mommyblogs contain multitudes, and so to think just one thing about them is sort of limiting, which I’m quite sure about now, having read the excellent collection Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog, edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte. A collection of academic essays containing multitudes itself, and reflecting the wide range of responses that mommyblogs prompt. A microcosm, perhaps, of “the mamasphere”, with dissenting voices, personal stories and experiences shared, academic discourse in an accessible way, these various points of view in a heteroglossic rabble.

I come away from this collection entirely comfortable with my lack of conclusions, understanding really that it is thinking about these issues that is the point. I’m still not convinced that most mommyblogging is a radical act, but just considering why or why not is important, and that there are many issues at stake here. Stand-out essays including, Jennifer Gilbert’s “I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood”, Lisa Ferris’ “Kindred Keyboard Connections: How Blogging Helped a Deafblind Mother Find a Living, Breathing Community”, Jen Lawrence’s “Blog For Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations”, and “Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz? Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs” by May Friedman.

I’d never considered mommyblogging marginalization, or the politics of the mamasphere, the implications of corporate marketing, or– for a form so built on self-identification– what it would be read from the perspective of a lesbian mommy in a multiracial family, for example. This is some can of worms.

I see now that whatever my feelings about mommyblogs, to dismiss their importance would be wrong, and that so many bloggers tend to write for themselves and each other, so it doesn’t matter much what I think anyway.

August 23, 2009

Swimming by Nicola Keegan

Swimming begins, “I’m a problematic infant, but everything seems okay to me.” Narrator Philomena, draped in rolls of baby fat, goes on, “I live simply; when something doesn’t seem okay, I scream until it is again… I am nine months old and the longest I’ve slept at one time is one hour and forty three minutes.” Poised on the edge of the pool before her first aqua babies class, she is slipped into the water and finds herself “liberated from my fleshly prison of gravity.” Philomena swims and she swims, kicking and rolling, amazing all those poolside, and when pulled from the water, she spits up, pees on her father, and then falls asleep for fourteen hours.

Her parents keep checking on her after: “It is an unspoken fact that they can finally love me now that I’m out cold. They bask in this love, as waves of breath ebb and flow, causing the dome of my stomach to stink, then swell. The silence of the household has opened a space for hope.”

I elaborate this first chapter in such detail in order to explain that Swimming isn’t what it sounds like. The journey of a girl from a small Kansas town swimming to Olympic stardom, an American-type story. Interestingly, however, Keegan turns out not to be American at all, and it shows in her writing. Her narrative reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, both books dark and hilarious in turns, eccentric family histories beginning with the narrator’s birth, except in the case of Philomena, this birth actually takes place that moment she first gets in the pool.

Only in this first chapter, however, do we get a sense of Philomena in the pool– how it feels to kick, to float, to duck underwater. Though swimming remains her passion throughout her life, “passion” isn’t the right word exactly, because swimming is more a means to an end, which is survival. Sink or swim? She chooses the latter, so that instead of swimming as the main exploration of the narrative, the sport is a metaphor for how Philomena lives her life. Tracing it back it to its very origins, she says, we all start out swimming anyway.

Despite her aptitude for all things aquatic, Philomena receives little encouragement from her parents regarding swimming. Once again, this won’t be the expected tale– of prodigies worked to the bone, of childhood lost. Her preparation for her olympic career isn’t years and years of practice and determination, but rather an eccentric family to start with, compounded by tragedy. In her mid-teens, Philomena starts swimming to save herself from nothingness, to avert her mind from traumatic memories, and her natural ability is still apparent. So that she catches up fast and she begins to win. Winning itself the object, the race, ripping through the water instead of focusing on what’s around her. She becomes the omniscient narrator of her own life, with all the distance that might imply, and her friends and family she renders brutal caricatures, because this is how life is bearable.

Swimming is Keegan’s first novel, which is obvious at times. Not that the book reads like a novice effort, but instead it’s clear that Keegan has poured into Swimming absolutely everything she’s got. The shape of the book is not quite perfect, but its substance is something remarkable. So that I hope that Keegan has not exhausted her store, and I look forward to seeing where her talent takes her.

August 15, 2009

The Incident Report by Martha Baillie

Something happens when you work in libraries for too long, even part-time. I learned this the day a patron came to the circulation desk asking to borrow a stapler, and I had to explain why this was against our policy: “If we gave it out to you, then we’d have to give them out to everyone.” It was a sorry power trip, from up there on my desk-high perch, and I even felt like kind of a hero. Averting mass stapler lending, which really means holding off CHAOS in the library, the foundation of our society. Where would we be without me?

But I was not the worst case. One librarian where I worked had seen fit to apply labels to every object at the circ desk and the place where that object was to rest. “Pencils” said one tin, “erasers” said another. “Paper Cutter” lived in the “Paper Cutter” place. “Coats” on the closet. This was the Dewey Decimal System gone mad!! I wrote “Floor” on a post-it note, and placed it underfoot. My colleagues, being librarians, failed to see the humour.

But I love it. I don’t think I’ve always been like this, but after a cumulative five years of library work, my own books (and CDs) are always in alpha order. Out at the library, I am always made steady by the sureness of call numbers– that everything will be where it is supposed to. I used to relish shelf-reading, and not just because I got to browse the stacks, but whenever I found a volume out of place and put it back where it belonged, I’d performed a task even more worthwhile than keeping would-be stapler lendees tamed. I love libraries. I love cataloguing. May the god of order forever reign.

At the Toronto Public Library, as I now know, employees are instructed to log incidents which take place on their shifts. Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Report is made up of such logs, Miriam, her protagonist, seeing fit to order her life to fit the confines of these reports. Perhaps a way to order chaos indeed, as her job sees her engaging in bizarre (and sometimes dangerous) interactions with those on the fringes of society. Her incident reports “resembling a pack of cards” stacked in a desk drawer, containing records of what you might expect (and what you couldn’t possibly imagine but some of which probably comes from truth [Baillie is a librarian in the Toronto Public system]), but also episodes from her personal life (which include a man she meets while sitting on a park bench during her lunch break), and from her history (usually about her father, and a tragedy in her past).

Miriam’s strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie’s exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward).

This is a clever little book, but not too clever, for it is mostly beautiful. Rich with literary allusions that aren’t the point, but still round out the universe. And rich too with story, which goes to show that you can make stories happen anywhere.

August 13, 2009

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Inevitably, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun was going to be a tough act to follow. (We at Pickle Me This adored this book back in 2006). But in a curious way, Half of a Yellow Sun anticipated Adichie’s new excellent collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck in its wide range of voices and points of view. We find similar scope in Adichie’s stories, which take place during different points during this century and the last, are voiced by first, second and third person narrators, whose characters are male and female, and young and old, and are convincingly realized for all this variousness.

The voices are all African, however, which makes The Thing Around Your Neck a difficult work to approach. Adichie actually critiqueing this difficulty within her stories, many of which take place in America, dealing with the ignorance Americans view Africa with (and of course, Americans would not be alone in this). In the story “The Thing Around Your Neck”, a Nigerian woman working in Connecticut begins a relationship with a distinctly Africa-philiac man, and notes that, “white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same– condescending”. In the story “Jumping Monkey Hill”, a Nigerian writer called Ujunwa attends an African Writers Workshop near Cape Town, and the white instructor critques stories for not being “reflective of Africa, really,” or for being “agenda writing… [not] the story of real people.” (Interestingly, however, the retort to that is that the story actually happened to the writer, and I do know that a story having happened in life does not necessarily make it plausible in fiction, but anyway…)

So I’m not sure if it would be condescending to say that I liked these stories very much. I do know, however, that one of the reasons I do so like Adichie’s writing is that reflecting Africa is not necessarily their agenda. First, because she goes to great lengths to show the variousness of “African” experience (it is an enormous continent after all), and because even when her work tells stories from important points in history (as in Half of a Yellow…), it is the story that makes the history come to life, and not the other way around.

My one criticism being that the voices and experiences of African women in America were a bit samey– they arrive with big dreams, are disillusioned by their visa sponsor, work at dead-end jobs, and remark upon Americans’ obesity. Which might mean that this experience is all too ubiquitous, perhaps, but I was not convinced. The stories themselves were strong, however, and in their perspective reminiscent of those in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collections: immigrants navigating the perplexing foreign land that is the USA, and this reframes the familar for a reader like me. And then that the African stories, even at their most dramatic (and there is certainly action here) show the every-day in a land so far away.

The Thing Around Your Neck sounds like a cacophony, voices on top of voices. And this collection certainly makes evident that Adichie is up to the short story form.

July 25, 2009

Where We Have to Go

I’ve just finished reading Where We Have to Go, a novel by my former classmate Lauren Kirshner. It’s the coming-of-age story of Lucy Bloom, a cat lover and an ALF lover with far too many odds against her. Featuring a truly great first line, “The night before my eleventh birthday, I dreamt I was five feet off the ground and flying through the No Frill grocery store on a royal blue Schwinn.”

Zoe Whittall in the Globe & Mail wrote, “Kirshner tempers any potential for melodrama with an expert eye for specific detail and the curt, cruel dialogue of teen girls hell-bent on destroying each other despite their abject loneliness. She is also adept at writing perfect pop-cultural detail: the emotional resonance of Alf, a hamster named Charlie Sheen, lite-brite pegs in Lucy’s pockets, all situating the story in a particular moment in recent Toronto history.”

Check out more praise and information about the book at Lauren’s website. This month she’s also been writer in residence at Open Book Toronto.