January 28, 2009

Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

Though I am not sure if Laura Lippman is so literary, it must mean something that from her writing I learned the word “postprandial.” Her novel What the Dead Know was absorbing, well written and a treat to read, so deserving of its many accolades. Unusual for a genre writer, Lippman has won significant mainstream critical acclaim, and the position of her books on various bestseller lists is a demonstration of her popular appeal. And perhaps my indecisiveness in regards to Lippman’s literary-ness is more to do with the vague boundaries of that genre than the genre Lippman herself is writing from.

The latter genre is crime fiction, detective fiction. Lippman is perhaps best known for her series of novels featuring Tess Monaghan, Baltimore P.I., though she’s written other strand-alone books too. Her novels are plot-driven, fast-paced, page-turners thick with popular appeal, and so (pardon my bias) I was surprised to find such substance there too when I read her What the Dead Know.

In his essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, Michael Chabon discussed “the modern short story.” Pointing out the form’s roots in genre, in that, “As late as about the 1950s, if you referred to “short fiction”, you might have been talking about… the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, science fiction, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story.” This as opposed to the kind of story dominating the form today, which he terms “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” (Whether or not his assessment is fair is an argument for another day.)

Chabon posits that many great contemporary novelists have “plied their trade in the spaces between genres, in no man’s land.” That some of the more interesting short story writers at work today are toiling away in similar locations. He writes, “Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.” (And if I remember some of the best of the Salon de Refuses correctly, the short story is often there-going already).

And so I was pleased, upon finishing Chabon’s essay, to remember that I had a book of Laura Lippman’s short fiction just waiting to be read. Though Lippman’s own straddling seems mainly just on the border between “genre” and “actually good,” this collection would be different from any other collection of short stories I’ve read lately. And I was interested to see how a collection with such decidedly popular appeal might serve to inform my thoughts on short stories in general.

Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her contains a novella, numerous crime stories, two Tess Monaghan stories, as well a fake news profile on Monaghan whose byline is Lippman’s, and is headlined “The Accidental Detective” in homage to Anne Tyler (who, like Lippman, lovingly renders Baltimore in fiction). The crime stories in particular are riveting, employing sleights of hand near-impossible to see coming. Most remarkable are Lippman’s ordinary narrators whose homicidal tendencies are as surprising to the reader as they must have been for the victims. The ruthlessness of these characters, complicated by the fact that we’re not always called on to sympathize with them, or we simply can’t, or (even worse) we find that we do! Suggesting the many ways in which ordinary people do terrible things in their lives, and that ordinary is just a veneer after all.

The thing about a book like this is that it takes the form right back to its roots, and could make any ordinary reader fall in love with the short story. The ordinary reader who thinks he doesn’t like short stories, doesn’t get them, hates being left hanging, how they’re not quite his money’s worth. (These people exist; we don’t hang out with them much, but I’ve met them. They’re the people not buying your latest story collection). But any reader seeking entertainment, amusement, distraction will find herself caught up in these stories, one after another, and perhaps realize the form is alive, vibrant, and altogether relevant to their reading experiences. Opening up the form, so perhaps the reader might seek some more of it, in admiration of the short story’s so neat and so sprawling containment. Of how every short story is really such a trick all along.

January 26, 2009

Living in the memory of a love that never was

I loved Orlando, unsurprisingly. It was so terrible funny and fresh, and relevant, exuberant. I could read it again and again, and each time discover the book anew. And so now I’m reading Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (the gorgeous McSweeneys hardback, though it’s coming out in paperback in Feb.), and Laura Lippman’s collection of stories Hardly Knew Her (which I look forward to finishing in the bath this evening).

Online and periodically, I’ve been up to my nose in Oliver Jeffers interviewed in The Guardian; on Obama as storyteller and one of the many Midwesterners who’ve explored their identity through story; Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once finds another ideal reader; my doppelganger Gwyneth recommends “amazing, transportive novel[s]” (via Jezebel); LRB underlines why I’ll be renewing my subscription with Hilary Mantel’s memoir on life in Jeddah, and John Lanchester’s “Is It Art?” on video games. Lisa Gabriele is profiled in The Star (and have you seen her touting her book on Dragon’s Den?).

This weekend I grew out of my pants, knit some, helped entertain friends, sang “Long Long Time” whilst strumming my guitar, read a lot, wrote some, slept in, visited family member daily in hospital (who is going to be okay!!), baked a cake, ate a lot of spinach, drove a really large cargo van, danced around the kitchen, and inherited a bumbo seat and a jolly jumper.

January 21, 2009

Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads: The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

It was monumental to finish reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes on the same day the United States’ received its 44th President. Though I understand how President Obama’s own ancestral history varies greatly from Aminata Diallo’s, to have read this book is to understand the significance of what he represents. To trace the path of Aminata’s life is to understand the early history of blacks in America– how this history is fraught with complexity, its terrible legacies, how this history refuses to sit down in the history books where it belongs, and all the reasons why it never should.

Lawrence Hill has created a story in the “sweeping epic” genre, crossing over years, languages, continents, and oceans. The story of Aminata Diallo, who is telling this story herself close to the end of her life, in England where she is campaigning for the abolishment of the slave trade. She begins at the beginning, her childhood spent in the village of Bayo with the security of two loving parents. Their family life is idyllic, but danger lurks beyond its bounds. One day whilst out assisting her midwife mother, twelve year-old Aminata is kidnapped, her village is burned, her parents are killed. She spends the next three months walking with other prisoners towards the Atlantic Ocean, deprived of food and comfort. Her precocious nature, however, in addition to the midwifery skills she has garnered from her mother, serve to make her useful to her captors. This becomes even more pronounced on the journey she takes from Africa to America by slave ship, where she survives by her formidable wits.

Aminata continues to distinguish herself as a slave on an indigo plantation, then as a “servant” in Charleston (where she is taught to read and write). She escapes from her owner on a trip to New York City, realizing the freedom she’d never stopped yearning for. Her reputation grows, and she is asked to help the British compile The Book of Negroes— a record of Black British loyalists promised freedom and passage to British North America. The reality of life in Nova Scotia once she arrives, however, proves much different than the promise, and soon Aminata has nothing to lose by an arduous voyage back to Africa as part of a Black settlement in Sierra Lione.

“Honey,” says Aminata Dialla, “my life is a ghost story.” A ghost story she prefaces with the following “caveat”: “Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led towards water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.”

The scope of this novel is stunning, its details so pointed and perfect that readers will have trouble distinguishing from non-fiction, which is the impact Hill is trying to achieve. To re-imagine what really happened, to let Aminata’s life stand for the experience stand for the experience of all of those who had no such voice. To fill in gaps in our own sense of history– on the (brutal) details of the slave trade, the (brutal) history of Blacks in Canada, all of which is widely known in a vague context, but without specificity and almost taken for granted. Slavery evokes countless symbols and ideas, but the humanity gets lost, and the concrete fact of it forgotten. There is so much learning to be had within these pages, and a fascinating life story that moves with a furious momentum.

The story is the point of this book, its facts and details, and realities. What gets lost, however, is the life itself. Though secondary characters are drawn with some complexity, they never entirely function as real people. And this is particularly the case with Aminata herself, though I know many would disagree with me. But to me, she read as a vehicle for the story she had to tell, rather than an actualized character. That she never changes through the years demonstrated that for me– she makes references to aging, to her looks changing, but her behaviour and convictions never seem to alter over sixty years. Though of course we’re hearing the story through the prism of her own perspective, but it was telling to me that I never got a sense of what she looked like (though we’re told many times details of her appearance).

The story is the point of this book, told in Aminata’s steady voice, but such steadiness comes at the expense of exquisite prose. There are moments, of course– the chapter titles highlight these– but in general, the prose was quite unremarkable. The story was riveting, but as a novel, the book failed to take flight. Scope is part of the problem, when years pass in the space between paragraphs. There is nothing artful about a line beginning with, “The days came and went…”, for example.

The Book of Negroes is an important book, an essential book even, but not wholly satisfactory as a novel. Still, it is a triumph in all number of ways, as I hope I’ve illustrated, and I am glad that I finally read it.

Canada Reads Rankings (so far):
1) The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

January 16, 2009

Alice Munro's Best

I thought I knew Alice Munro. It’s a critical error, I think, so common amongst those of us who’ve been to school. Because we’ve read Lives of Girls and Women, and we’ve read The Stone Angel, and The Handmaid’s Tale, so this CanLit thing is old hat, right? But I had no idea. I’d read The Progress of Love ages ago, though I don’t even remember it, but it still lives on my shelf. I read Lives of Girls… at least twice in my literary schooling, and evaluated numerous undergraduate papers on Who Do You Think You Are? (which, in spite of that, remained a book I love).

I thought I knew Alice Munro, but that was like thinking I knew somebody I hadn’t called up in twenty years. And then I picked up Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Short Stories.

It wasn’t clear from the start that I was wrong, for the first two stories “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid” were from Who Do You Think Are?, and so this was quite familiar ground. The next few stories followed similar patterns, the retrospective voice recalling a rural childhood and noting complicating factors the child’s perspective had missed. There are hints of sexual transgression, domestic dissatisfaction, marriages go wrong, and whole ways of life now obliterated. All very much what I had expected.

The first real hint of something came with “Miles City Montana”, which wasn’t so much a departure from what had come before, but whose plot twist was so harrowing I had to skip right to the end before reading through. Keeping in mind, the is a short story. And the stories from then on in contained these singular horrifying moments where I could hardly bear to read. When one friend takes another’s lover, a lonely librarian duped by the promise of love, characters that do terrible things to one another for reasons that are never straightforward or explainable. That taxidermist, and what he did behind Bea’s back. The woman who’s heading west, tricked into thinking she’s promised love. The woman alone in her house in the country and the knock on her door in the middle of the night, or the woman driving with her grandchildren in the backseat when a filthy girl strung out on drugs forces her way into the car.

From “Friend of My Youth”, the stories branch out into history, or least further back into history than Munro has been considering all along. Here, no more first person narration, but rather we get pieces from all manner of perspectives. The author herself revoking her own authority– from the end of “Menesetung: “I thought there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious…./ And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

These stories take on a strange, uncertain and fascinating shape. I was most struck by “Carried Away”, which told the story of a small town librarian who receives unexpected letters from a soldier at war. Rather than a flowing narrative, the story is made up of blocks like a quilt, or more like sides of a cube because the result is most three-dimensional. I kept noticing points in these stories where the edges of these blocks would nearly connect, but not exactly– slightly altered phrasing, or memory from a different angle. How lives are made, these stories are, with shady corners and lots of questions.

But then these really aren’t stories at all, in a way, but rather novels. There is no narrow scope here, anything left out suggests reams of detail we can fill in for ourselves, and these are the stories of whole lives, entire places, which is not usually within the short story’s grasp. They are not novels only because they’re too short to be novels, which is not be undermine Alice Munro’s status as the short story master, because I’ve never been so mesmerized by 500 pages of stories in my life. She is a master, I think, because in observing these stories written over the course of her career, it is evident that she’s pushed the very limits of the form, changed the shape into something altogether different from what she started with, enabling the story to be stuffed to its capacity, and even further. An Alice Munro story: I didn’t know the half of it. I’m still blown away.

This collection is enhanced by its introductory essay by Margaret Atwood, placing these stories within their literary and geographical context. I would have appreciated dates attached to each story, however, and their places of publication, to give an indication of the book’s overall range. Also some kind of afterward by Munro herself, a retrospective? But then I fear I may be asking too much. With this superb collection, she has already given generously.

January 13, 2009

On those unsympathethic females

Last week I read Christine Pountney’s novel The Best Way You Know How, which– apart from some ghastly clanking similes– was a pretty good read. Though on a personal level, I’d probably relate to any book about a Canadian girl who runs away to England to find a husband (and thank goodness I had better luck with my pick than Pountney’s poor old Hannah Crowe). But I was surprised to have enjoyed the book as much as I did, considering the mixed reviews. For as engaging and witty as Pountney’s writing is, I found Hannah Crowe to be as obnoxious as promised, but it occurred to me to wonder: do we have to like a heroine to like a book?

I wouldn’t have even though of Alice Munro, except by chance I picked up her selected short stories following Pountney’s book, and as I read the first two pieces (from Who Do You Think You Are?), I realized how much Munro’s Rose is like Hannah. Self-destructive, all her evil cards on the table, manipulative, immature, lacking self-confidence and self-esteem, and fascinated by the power she holds over her boyfriend/husband. Desiring to be dominated, but insisting on remaining indomitable.

I suppose it is Munro’s retrospective approach that casts Rose in a more sympathetic light, though if I remember from my most recent read, even in the later stories in the book, she never becomes wholly agreeable. Whereas the immediacy of Pountney’s narrative makes Hannah quite unbearable, and the third person narrative makes us witnesses to her blunders without the benefit of her perspective to cast the incident differently. Though the point is that Hannah doesn’t have this perspective, lacking as she is in self-awareness.

This all made me remember Kate Christensen’s comments about her novel In the Drink, which became marketed as “chick lit,” Christensen supposing all the while that she’d been, “consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre”. She explains, “I trace Claudia’s lineage through an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan…”

As the chick lit it wasn’t, Christensen’s novel didn’t succeed, and reader responses reminded me of the criticisms of Pountney’s book. Claudia, like Hannah, fails to win our sympathy, and to many readers, that was all she wrote. But now I’m wondering if “loser lit” is an exclusively male domain; is co-opting impossible? Is sympathy required of female characters in a way it isn’t necessarily of males, or does it have to be won differently? Is sympathy a demand female readers make that male readers might not? Are these female characters unsympathetic in a different way than the males, rendering them fundamentally disagreeable as literary characters at all?

No answers of course, as it’s late and I’m tired. But I’m going to be thinking about unsympathetic heroes and heroines this next while, and looking into the different ways they’re constructed. Any of your comments would be most helpful, so do leave some.

January 5, 2009

On Context: Dream Babies and Great Expectations

The kinds of stories in Great Expectations: Twenty-Four Stories about Childbirth (eds. Dede Crane and Lisa Moore) are the kinds that any woman could tell. About labour gone long, rings of fire, gruff obstetricians, and idyllic birthing pools left unattended as women are rushed to the hospital in a cab. Certainly, after reading Ina-May’s Guide to Childbirth in a state of dumb bliss, I was in need of this sort of reality check: Stephanie Nolen’s contribution begins, “For about forty perfect minutes, I had the birth I wanted…”

Anyone can write about childbirth, and the experience of becoming and being a parent, but what I remain most grateful for is that good writers actually do. I felt this profoundly after reading Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Anne Enright’s Making Babies: that thank goodness novelists write about this sort of thing, for who else would be so capable of doing so? Of capturing the various sides of this most multi-sided and and ordinary event, and then casting them in a light that is entirely new. For anyone can write about this stuff, but not everyone will do it well.

So I had confidence in Great Expectations, which comprises contributions from Canadian novelists I love including Lynn Coady, Christy Ann Conlin, Karen Connelly, and Lisa Moore, as well as journalists (including Nolen), poets, editors, and other writers I should have already read. Caroline Adderson’s essay made me scream on the book’s first page, with its mother with the burst blood vessel in her eyes. “She paid at both ends, poor thing.” Esta Spalding’s essay on twinship followed, which broke my heart and made me fall in love: “Joy and sorrow. Twins.”

And onwards. I read this book in a single day, twenty-four births (at least) and the moment never ceased to be a miracle. I appreciated the points of view of the few male contributers (including Curtis Gillespie’s advice to those who follow him: “take off your wedding ring to avoid crushed fingers”). As a pregnant lady, I’ll note that Great Expectations is not an easy book to read, and certainly doesn’t serve to ease any fears (for I just learned new fears I didn’t even know I could have), but it was the context I found most reassuring. That this sort of thing happens all the time, and very often things go wrong, but then they’re okay, and in the end there’s a baby. How at the the end of her piece, Sandra Martin says of her children, “without them my journey would have been soulless.”

So 2008’s reading finished with Great Expectations, and I began 2009 with Christine Hardyment’s Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, in which context is the object, providing the most fascinating illuminations. That we have always had “childcare experts” among us, from Rousseau (“Emile [was] the most famous childrearing manual of the age”) whose own history shows desertion by his father, and abandonment of his own children to foundling hospitals. “His dream children were born free, natural and innocent, but became instantly oppressed.”

Hardyment’s book is a 2007 update to her 1983 original, and surveys childcare advice and practice from the 17th century to the present day. She shows that advice and practice were not always the same thing, but that both were influenced by fashion, politics, and sociological changes– how one thing has always lead to another. During the 20th century, with “behaviourists” between the wars creating model citizens, post-war Soviet backlash leading to Benjamin Spock’s acknowledgment of babies as individuals, child-centred babies raising their own children, to how childcare manuals have become the “parent-centred” volumes we see today. And throughout all these changes, parents have been grappling (differently) with the same problems: how to deal with feeding (breast best or not, depending on the era), sleep patterns, intellectual development, and toilet training. The evils of mouth-breathing, however, thankfully have ceased to be considered.

In noting how successive editions of 20th century childcare bibles were constantly adapting with the times, Hardyment makes clear how our ideas of baby raising are always in flux. Which is often a good thing, some advice of yore completely ridiculous so it seems from where I stand– hanging apartment dwelling babies out of windows in cages for daily airings was one, as were midwinter dunks in cold rivers, and mothers who were amateur apothecaries.

But on the whole, Hardyment marks no divide between a “silly then” and “sensible now”; there is no such thing as progress but parents are going in circles instead. This perspective making Dream Babies as useful as it is fascinating and amusing, the past available for the choosing of its best ideas and not just ridicule. Also making clear that the contradictory advice of those most ubiquitous baby user guides is just as chaotic as it seems to be, and so it has ever been. This most interesting corner of history (and history is all corners) providing a context so absolutely necessary, for otherwise, how would we know not to be told what to think? Hardyment writes, “Manuals need to be kept in their place: tools, not tyrants, a helpful indication of the varied options that face us, not holy writ.”

December 30, 2008

The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele

I decided to read The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele, because Katrina Onstad blurbed it, and I trust Katrina Onstad. Onstad’s own novel How Happy to Be was one of the smartest and funniest novels that I read last year, the best of what “women’s fiction” is aspiring to be when it’s not busy pandering to outright stupidity (though I’d also argue that Onstad’s novel has broader appeal). And unsurprisingly– for when is Katrina Onstad ever wrong?– The Almost Archer Sisters didn’t disappoint me.

Told by Georgia “Peachy” Archer Laliberte, a frazzled wife and mother, who seeks solace in imaginary adultery and scouring the internet for information about her son’s epilepsy. She lived in the same house she grew up in, gave up her own professional dreams when she got pregnant at twenty, and in short did everything differently than her glamorous sister Beth did.

Not completely differently, however. Peachy’s husband’s is Beth’s high school boyfriend, and he’d gotten her pregnant too once upon a time. (“Jesus. That man’s sperm could reforest the goddamn tundra… It could be cure baldness. He should be caged and studied.”) But Beth had made a very different choice, unabashedly getting an abortion and continuing in the direction of her dreams, which culminate in a successful career in television and a high-flying life in New York City.

The story turns on a plot that is somewhat melodramatic, Peachy discovering her husband in the pantry with Beth in a most compromising position. It is what Gabriele does with this, however, that gives the book its substance. In her rage and devastation, Peachy leaves her family behind and makes her own way to New York for a few days in her sister’s life. A premise that sounds more cliched than it actually is– this ain’t no Freaky Friday, I mean, but that Peachy follows through with a weekend trip that had already been planned, stays at Beth’s apartment, meets her friends, and discovers there is quite a lot she never knew about her sister and about herself.

Dark in turns, told in a wry tone throughout, Gabriele’s narrative voice inhabits Peachy’s character so completely– in particular, her fierce love for her sons. This most significant considering that Gabriele doesn’t have children of her own, as she states in the reader’s discussion guide at the end of the book. That such authentic and unwavering fierceness could be imagined is a testament to Gabriele’s skills as a writer, which seems too obvious, I realize, but isn’t when you consider how much of women’s fiction is compromised by writers who can’t imagine out of themselves enough. Because it is through imagination, and not necessarily personal experience that stories take flight, and this is surely why this one has wings.

December 30, 2008

Lush Life by Richard Price

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard notes, “The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not… [So w]hy would anyone read a book instead of watching people moving on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing– a poor thing, but our own.”

So then how would Dillard contend with the recent fashionable claim that movies or television can be literature too? Is their “thing” just as subtle? What would she make of Richard Price, whose novels have been made into movies, who has written screenplays of his own, and is a noted writer of the television show The Wire?

But as Deborah Friedell remarks in her LRB review of Price’s latest novel Lush Life, “writing for the screen also seems to have given [Price] the enthusiasm of an outsider: his novels delight in being novels.” Which is Dillard’s “subtle thing”; that it is language and not spectacle used to tell the story here. However cinematic and paced Price’s writing might be, this effect is created through careful attention and deftness with words and not by a trick of a camera.

So why would anyone read a book, particularly one so decidedly steeped in a world we know from film, instead of watching people move on a screen? For the love of language first, of course, but also for the experience of ten or twelve hours entrenched in the story. And the experience of re-imagining the scene from words on a page, so that the act of reading becomes one of creation. Particularly the creation of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where I’ve never been before, but from Price’s narrative I can decipher the points on its map. The part of New York City as much a character in the story as anybody else, Price plumbing its depths sometimes quite literally, whether historically and topographically.

Though I was completely lost during the first fifty pages of the novel– in unfamiliar geography, references, a language in which I’m decidedly unschooled. I persevered because the novel’s premise continued to intrigue me so– three young somebodies (if even in their own minds) robbed by two characters they identify solely by their race. One victim too drunk to stand and falls apart, the second handing over in wallet in sheer terror, but the third, Ike Marcus, who “walks around starring in the movie of his own life,” steps to his assailant saying, “Not tonight, my man.” And then he’s shot dead.

But as the novel progressed, I found my way into it eased. Going back to reread the beginning (by which I am imploring you to follow it through), I made more sense of it all. As suspicion is cast upon Marcus’s companion that night, Eric Cash, the thirty-something restaurant manager who “had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill…” In a world where everybody is trying to become something else, Cash is old enough to realize he might never succeed, and bitter enough to find Ike Marcus’s confidence more than irritating.

What follows is more than just a police procedural as detectives investigate Marcus’s murder. The narrative shifting point of view from Cash himself, the police involved, to Tristan, a young black teenager who lives in one of the neighbourhood’s surrounding housing projects and writes hip hop poetry in his notebook. The juxtaposition of Cash and Marcus’s lifestyle with Tristan’s in such close proximity is as jarring as its meant to be, though for its commonalities as much as the differences.

Lush Life could be a movie but it isn’t, and as a movie it would still be something very different. In the meantime then taking full advantage of its literary-ness– the effects of language, depth of character, such a scope. Demonstrating that their very own way, books are as capable as movies of extraordinary things.

December 23, 2008

Holidays

I’m now on my holidays, so expect to get plenty of reading done over the next two weeks. I just finished reading Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander, Jacaranda about her childhood in Egypt. More than a memoir, actually, it is an investigation into the dawning of consciousness ala Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. I enjoyed it immensely, and not only for its endpapers. Now just beginning Rainforest by Jenny Diski, and The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer. Now enjoying the lights on the zmas tree, one blizzard after another, and the ache of my muscles after this afternoon’s swim.

December 18, 2008

On Nicola Barker's Darkmans

I set out to read Nicola Barker’s Darkmans for fun, not for review, because it came out a year ago after all, generating its own sufficient buzz with a Booker nomination (losing out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering). And while I’m very glad I never intended a review (for a review requires more of a grasp than I can confess to here after 838 pages of much befuddlement), I really can’t leave my response here at nothing, because Darkmans is a book the likes of which I’ve never encountered before.

Dovegreyreader says it is Dickensian, explaining, “Any reader who chances upon Darkmans in a hundred years time will read it much as we may read Dickens, for a fictional snapshot of a section of society living in a particular time and place under particular circumstances.”And indeed Darkmans is massive in that way English novels used to be (in the nineteenth century, as opposed to American novels and how they’re massive now). But its concerns are strictly modern, concerning class, mental illness, drug peddling, dodgy builders, Germans, chiropody and the Chunnel. And also modernity too– grocery stores in ancient forests, and misplaced motorways.

Of course, the novel is haunted by a five hundred year old evil jester. (Have you ever before encountered a haunted novel?) And in any book with a trickster at the helm, what is ever what it seems? Which is nothing. Plot isn’t really quite the right word to describe what’s going on, and I’d even use “romp” if it weren’t so unsinister. The reader thrown into the action without any explanation, and has no place but to follow where the writer leads. (Where the trickster leads?) To encounter birds that might not exist, duplicate cats hung with bells, an incontinent spaniel, a Kurdish asylum seeker with a mortal fear of salad, and Kelly Broad (one of those Broads, with the brother in prison, the other in a glue-sniffing coma, and don’t even start on her sister Linda). She is fabulous, in her mini-skirt and moon boots, and when she finds God, watch out. Though from my experience with Kelly Broads (I spent two years working for Social Services in the Midlands; I know of what I speak), they’re ever so much less frightening to encounter on paper, and we don’t get to do that nearly often enough.

The precocious child who builds an ancient town out of matchsticks, the man whose daughter has been decapitated in Sudan, the tree-collar clipping waitress, bereaved mother, and the enigmatic woman with the birthmark on her nose. Beede and Kane, father and son in their upstairs/downstairs flats, and how they don’t know one another, but they don’t know that at all. And of course everything is actually something quite different.

Which doesn’t take me any closer to explaining the point, or even to me getting the point, but perhaps it has intrigued you. I’m still a-wonder. Here is a book that will leave you feeling like you’ve been hit by the most marvelous train.