December 17, 2008

What Elephant? by Geneviève Côté

I’ve discerned that one key to successful children’s stories is to keep the kernel packed up tight. For example, by all means write a story about the elephant in the room, but really have that story be about poor George who comes home one day to find an elephant watching his TV and eating chocolate chip cookies. When George explains the problem to his friends, none of them believe him. Naturally– elephants don’t watch TV or eat chocolate chip cookies. So George has no choice but to go home again, and there he finds the elephant asleep on his bed, covered in newspapers, because the elephant has blown its nose on every single one of his bedsheets.

Geneviève Côté’s What Elephant? goes on to tell the story of George’s roommate from hell, who eats up all the food, lingers too long in the shower, takes up the entire (now broken) sofa, and steals the morning paper. Worse, George fears he’s going crazy because he knows elephants don’t actually do any of these obnoxious things, and he has nobody he can turn to. If his best friend Pip can see the elephant, he won’t admit, being just as conscious as George is about saving face.

Author/illustrator Côté has created a marvelous story with such wonder in its details– I was particularly struck by George’s prized collection of teapots, and George’s teddy bear clutched in the elephant’s trunk. The story’s resolution is sweet and surprising, complete with a trek off into the sunset, but of course the matter is far from resolved, as we’re left with the question of the talking pink poodle.

December 9, 2008

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

I’m really not sure what posterity will make of Wally Lamb. I’ve forgotten much about his two previous novels in the ten years since I’ve read them, though it should be noted also that I was a less attentive reader then. Of course, I don’t mean to say that Lamb’s books are forgettable, but rather they’re so tied up in zeitgeist, so steeped in here and now, that I’m altogether curious about how they’ll end up traveling through time.

The Hour I First Believed plants the fictional Caelum Quirk in nonfictional terrain. Though he and his wife Maureen both work at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado, it is only Caelum who has the strange fortune of being on the other side of the country on April 20, 1999. While Maureen is at work– she’s a school nurse– and she’s in the school’s library when the two infamous killers burst in. Her strange fortune is to find shelter curled up inside a cabinet where she hides for hours, listening to the massacre, to blaring fire alarms, and being unsure of whether she will live or die.

Maureen survives, but she also doesn’t, as the Maureen emerging from the tragedy is somebody new altogether. She is racked by Post Traumatic Stress, left unable to work for a long time, becomes addicted to her medication, and begins upon a downward spiral that takes her further from any chances of reconstructing her life. As for their life– Maureen’s and Caelum’s– their marriage had been on shaky ground already, Caelum a troubled and sometimes unsympathetic narrator/husband, often acting on his worst instincts and internalizing his feelings. Neither he nor Maureen is able to give the other what they need.

Columbine is a moment in this book then, but it is not the moment, not in a book that reaches up into the present and far back into the past. Following Caelum Quirk against a backdrop that includes September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. And also back into his ancestry, from his alcoholic Korean War-vet father, his great-grandmother the women’s prisons reformer, and his great-great-(great?) grandmother, the formidable abolitionist and civil war nurse. Caelum coming to understand the weight of a single moment in the context of chaos theory, how one event can resonate back and forth through time.

At 700+ pages, this book is huge, though it is stuffed with plot rather than verbosity. Also worth noting that somehow it is not so heavy, and really not a strain on the old wrists. And that though some parts dragged and I skimmed more than I would have liked, reading it was a pleasure. I loved this enormous book, and I was sorry when it was finished, which is certainly saying something for a book that is so fat.

Lamb’s novel uses extra-textual devices to gain access to the past without breaking from his plot– diary excerpts, letters, reports, even parts of a PhD. thesis. Elsewhere the novel uses email and news reports (actual or otherwise) to broaden its scope, and though these can be effective, they do run on long. These were the parts where I found myself skimming, and I’m not sure my skimmage really detracted from the reading experience– cutting some of these bits would have helped the book slim down, and allowed the focus to stay on the characters we really care about (because they are so evocatively portrayed that we really really do).

Wally Lamb does amazing things with fact and fiction here though, inserting his characters into actual situations, and not just Columbine– for example, Caelum’s great-grandmother recounting the day she met Mark Twain. Lamb has the Quirks interacting with actual victims of the Columbine killings, lending verisimilitude to this fictional world. The fictional plot similarly taking on actual issues, including the current events already mentioned, and Lamb draws on his experience as a teacher in a women’s prison to address prisoner’s rights and possibilities of rehabilitation. Showing we’ve come far from the days when a prison warden could hang on her office wall a sign that said, “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity”.

The Hour I First Believed is massive and American in its scope, self-consciously an epic quest narrative, and like I said, I am not completely sure how perpetuity will receive it. Which is not to undermine, because I think this book is so important for right now. A gorgeous story that manages to make sense of the times we live in, which is a miraculous achievement, actually. I plan to remember this one for a long while.

November 25, 2008

Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright

The first thing I ever read by Anne Enright was her LRB essay “Disliking the McCanns”, which happened to come out the week she won the Booker for The Gathering. The media hoopla meant her essay received far more interest than it otherwise would have, evidently by many people who did not know how to read.

Or at least by people who did not know how to read beyond the surface, beyond what the words line up literally say. Readers lacking an ear for tone, I suppose, and for nuance. So that they would not see that Anne Enright’s essay was an examination of her feelings rather than a statement or an affirmation of them. Nevertheless, from the essay I determined that Anne Enright is brave, forthright, a complicated writer, and honest to a fault.

I read The Gathering afterwards, enjoying its richness and its language, though I found it all a bit much to take in at once– probably due for a reread. Then I read Enright’s memoir Making Babies once I’d found out that I was pregnant, and I realized that it does take a novelist to write effectively about motherhood– to contain the beauty, the repugnance, the love and the loathing, and the fierceness and the fatigue all into one singular perfect moment. And now having explored Anne Enright in every other literary form, it was certainly time that I paid her short stories a visit.

Yesterday’s Weather contains all the stories published in the UK last year as Taking Pictures, in addition to stories from collections nearer to the beginning of her career. The stories here in reverse chronological order, Enright says, “…partly for comic effect… to see myself getting younger– shedding pounds and wrinkles, gaining in innocence and affectation– as the pages turn.” Which is effect as interesting as it is comic, to see the stories less precise, indeed more affected, and yet still containing some essential grain that makes clear Anne Enright wrote these.

As could be expected (and hoped for), her newest stories are her best, and it is remarkable what she does with minutiae, the domestic in particular. In “Caravan”, a mother forced to wash her family’s clothes by hand lives every moment of this. “She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again to knead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went: tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up in the shape of their clothes.” Enright writes of motherhood as precisely tangledly as she did in Making Babies, the devolution of these domestic themes in her work suggesting the experience of motherhood stamped her. (In her introduction to the collection, she remarks her younger self made the mistake of writing about women who had children and didn’t change.)

Her moments are perfectly composed, affording the reader short bursts of absolute illumination. At the end of “Yesterday’s Weather”, Hazel returning home from a miserable family gathering finds that her tulips have been blown down. Wondering how, so she could prevent it next time: “She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather.”

Enright writes stunningly of teenage girl dynamics in “Natalie” against a backdrop that could break your heart. “Shaft” is so close and devastating– about a heavily pregnant woman in an elevator with a stranger, the story beginning, “As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it.” “Little Sister” about the complexity of sibling loss and holes in families touches on some of the same subject matter as The Gathering. Her stories deal with love and marriage, the straightforwardness of adultery. Her characters spend a lot of time cleaning and cleaning up.

Structurally, these stories are challenging and perfectly formed, and the way Anne Enright writes about women and domesticity is both disturbing and surprising. Setting an example of new and interesting approaches to domestic fiction, challenging it to say remarkable things, and not just things that have long gone unsaid (which may not be remarkable at all), but also to make connections heretofore unmade, think thoughts unthought, and imagine stories wholly unconstructed before. In entirely new ways, to write without a template, which in domestic fiction is decidedly rare. Such innovation is as much of interest and importance to those who like the linoleum stuff, as to those who think they don’t, but who come bearing open minds.

November 18, 2008

Satisfied

Now reading and being absolutely blown away by Anne Enright’s collection Yesterday’s Weather. I just finished reading Justine Picardie’s Daphne, which was a wonderful literary mystery ala Possession except the sources all were real– remarkable, and I loved it. I also just finished The New Quarterly 108, and Kristen Den Hartog‘s “Draw Crying” was so awful, beautiful and perfect that it had me crying, and not just because I’m pregnant.

Also my dinner was really delicious.

Further, there are good things to read everywhere. Fabulously, on Iceland’s economic meltdown, and its ancient sagas, and its literature today. Who’s reading what at TNQ. Globe reviews this week: When Will There Be Good News, and Lucy Maud Montgomery: Gift of Wings. Good heavens: a book by a woman put forth as one of the 50 greatest. On snow books, and what to read in the darkness of winter. Miriam Toews (of the remarkable Flying Troutmans) wins the Writer’s Trust Award for Ficion. Listen to Esta Spalding reading Night Cars by Teddy Jam (who was Matt Cohen— I didn’t know!).

November 12, 2008

Giller Hopes

Various circumstances conspired against my reading the entire Giller shortlist, one of which was the fact I had no desire to, but one book I did read was Mary Swan’s The Boys in the Trees. I’m in no place to say it deserves to win of the lot, but I do know that this is a book deserving of celebration. So of course I would be most pleased if it took home the prize tonight.

UPDATE: Alas, was not to be. But do read The Boys in the Trees anyway. Congratulations to Joseph Boyden, and perhaps read his book too?

November 10, 2008

Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio

For some reason, I thought I knew LM Montgomery. The spiritedness of her characters probably gave me that impression– their voices spoke so true, it seemed some part of them had to be their creator. And then there were the myriad ways their stories paralleled her own– the lonely childhoods, the dead mothers and lost fathers, a love of books and a desire to write. I’d visited the Green Gables House in Cavendish PEI (and I’m not sure now if I didn’t know then that Montgomery had never lived there). I once even came across the home in Leaskdale Ontario where she’d lived for many years as the Rev. Mrs. Ewan MacDonald– the house was identified by a historical plaque, and an older man who was walking by told us that he knew her. And all I remember of that conversation now is that he mentioned her bad son, Chester.

It never occurred to me that there would be more, as her books always seemed quite enough. I never thought though, in particular, to consider Montgomery within the literary context of her time. Or the social context either– that she was a woman with no parental support who didn’t marry until her late thirties. That she launched her own career with sheer gusto, knowing early that she would devote her life to writing. Managing to make a name for herself publishing short stories to North American journals before she finally sold her first novel– Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908.

The Gift of Wings shows Montgomery is a complicated woman with a complicated story, made all the more mysterious by the nature of her sources. Her biographer Mary Henley Rubio had been co-editor of the five volumes of her selected journals (published from 1985-2004) which become central to this text. Henley Rubio explaining that these journals were as much a literary creation as any of Montgomery’s novels– she kept notes, and often didn’t write entries until months after the fact; later in her life she would completely rewrite all of them with eventual publication in mind, and so they’re often censored, granted the insight of retrospect, and slanted to tell the story she wants the public to know.

Montgomery’s true nature was as various as her journals, this reflected in her dual lives as world-famous novelist and respectable minister’s wife. Her journals revealing a deeper darkness to her personality that was not detectable in either of these lives– Henley Rubio suggests that today Montgomery would have been diagnosed with a mood disorder.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Prince Edward Island to two families proud of their Scottish heritage. After her mother died when she was very young, Maud would be raised by her maternal grandparents. Henley Rubio positing that her upbringing was particularly spun for its hardship when Maud revised her journals, but that she came of age in a wonderfully close community she’d hold dear for the rest of her life, and she was surrounded by a wide extended family.

She did well at school, displaying her writing talent early. She did not have the financial support to pursue her education, however, and was only able to complete teacher training. After which she was unable to venture very far to work, because her grandfather would not allow her to drive to interviews. It was only after his death that her writing career began in full force, as she moved back home to live with her grandmother and was able to write full time.

She married Ewan MacDonald after her grandmother’s death, and then they moved to Ewan’s appointment in Leaskville. Montgomery had long wanted to be married and she was anxious to be a mother. Henley Rubio quotes interviewees noting the MacDonalds as a well-suited couple who were fond of one another, though dissatisfaction in her marriage is evident in Maud’s journals from early on. Part of this was due to Ewan’s bouts of “melancholia”, culminating in full-fledged breakdowns a number of times. Though it is noted that this was not so apparent to outsiders, and so either the family either took great pains to hide these problems, or Maud exaggerated them in her journals, or both.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this biography was the insight it provided into the creation of Montgomery’s fiction. How her romance with Ewan provided the spark and energy of Anne of Green Gables, for example, or how much her work was influenced by cultural changes– Rainbow Valley penned in the midst of WW1, Emily portraying the struggle of a woman to be taken seriously as a writer, aspects of Magic for Marigold written pointedly to challenge gender roles, and the furor over taboo subjects in The Blue Castle.

Also fascinating is Montgomery’s publishing history– how she was taken advantage of by her original publisher and deprived of substantial income, which ended up in lawsuits that lasted well into the 1920s. And her place in Canadian letters– how her success served to promote Canadian literature, and she devoted considerable amounts of her own time for the cause. It was fascinating also to see the range of readers touched by her work, with famous writers and statesmen the world over contacting her and wishing to meet her. However in spite of this, her credibility diminished throughout her life and she was frustrated to find herself increasingly marketed as a children’s author, or a writer of merely sentimental novels.

Henley Rubio has done formidable work with materials on which she is expert, though I might criticize the biography’s over-reliance on Montgomery’s journals. Not that I’ve a more suitable source in mind, of course, but some parts of the book do read much like a retelling of the journals themselves. Moreover the journals are so patchy at times and the holes are often left unfilled– we read of Friday January 29, 1937 from her journals, “On that day happiness departed from my life forever…” Imagine my frustration then as Henley Rubio goes on to recount, “We don’t know what she learned [that day], but it seems to have been about Chester.”

Which was a fair guess, as Montgomery’s son Chester was a nasty piece of work. His misbehaviour would be a blight on her existence from the time he was young until her death– he lied and stole, took advantage of his parents, had two children with a woman he’d barely support, spent years and years failing law school on his mother’s dime. For a woman much concerned with images (she was the minister’s wife, of course), Maud’s oldest son caused considerable heartache.

The later years of Montgomery’s life were a sad decline, in health, happiness, and literary reputation. For many years she was much involved in the Canadian Authors’ Association, but was eventually sidelined from this organization. She remained busy with speaking engagements and responding to her fan mail, but her diminishing reputation was a blow. Her journals portray her husband as sinking deep into his mental ailments, though Henley Rubio speculates much of that might have been caused by over-medication, and Montgomery herself probably experienced something quite similar.

And so her books had always been quite enough, but Henley Rubio has illuminated them and their author even further. Providing Montgomery with a context she sorely lacks in all her singular fame– so s
he had contemporaries, a place in literary society, a family. Underlining the importance of her work within this larger context, which goes far to explain how she has come to occupy the singular place she does.

October 29, 2008

Upcoming

Well, though I was a little bit concerned, I’ve enjoyed John Updike’s Too Far to Go, though it served to underline my prejudice towards 1970s marriage as Ice Stormy as you like– how boring the suburbs really must have been, that so many unattractive people kept having sx with one another. Did that end with the ‘eighties? As I assume everyone settled down a bit with the advent of interlocking brick driveways and The Twenty Minute Workout. Plus the widespread use of microwaves.

So I’ll soon start reading Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio. I can’t remember the last biography I read (and so it is fortunate that I keep track of all the books I read– note, I’ve not read a strict biography in the three years I’ve been keeping track, though I’ve read plenty of non-fiction, memoirs, biographical memoirs, but…) and so this will be a change of pace. Not so much thematically, however, as this has been a very Montgomery filled year– Anne Shirley turned 100 this year with all kinds of fanfare, and this very summer I reread both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. But I continue to know very little about Montgomery’s life, particular her later life (except what I picked up from As Ever, Booky). So there is a lot to get to know.

October 26, 2008

Pickle Me This reads about werewolves

I would never have read Living With the Dead had I not heard Kelley Armstrong read as part of the Kama Reading Series last year. “New York Times Bestselling Author” though she is, Armstrong did stick out in this group of literary writers. The first story she read that night had been published in an anthology about Vampire birthdays– “Really,” she had to say, because no one in the audience would have believed in such a thing (in vampires or anthologies about vampire birthdays). We weren’t exactly her kind of crowd, but Kelly Armstrong wooed us. Self-deprecating, hysterically funny, and a wonderfully engaging reader, she was a star of the show that night, which was something for a woman who’d had a problem with her GPS and ended up in Mississauga instead of at the ROM. I was very glad she made it to the right place eventually.

So I wanted to read her latest book, from her “Women of the Otherworld” series, because Armstrong herself seemed terrific. But also because I never would have read it otherwise, and I am eternally curious about my own tastes and prejudices. I have an appreciation for popular fiction, but I avoid “genre” like the plague, which isn’t entirely fair, because I’ve never even been exposed to it.

It’s not strictly bookish, though, my aversion to genre and fantasy. I don’t even like The Princess Bride, which frustrates some people to no end. I think it all stems from when they made us watch The Neverending Story one rainy day in grade one, and after being traumatized by the horse sinking into the quicksand, I wanted nothing imaginary ever again. Which is strange considering how much I love fiction. The truest literary form I know, but I like fiction to recreate the world I live in and not make itself another one.

I never got into watching Buffy or Angel, until we moved to Japan. There was only one English channel on TV, so you could take it or leave it, but even when I left it, my husband didn’t and as our apartment was only one room, I couldn’t help overhearing. I couldn’t stop paying attention either, because Buffy and Angel were really good shows. Well, except for the vampire/fantasy stuff, which I tuned out to. Without those elements, these would have been perfect shows for me.

Which was the way I felt about reading Living With the Dead. That it was a fun, plot-driven novel, and I could even overlook the werewolves and half-demons when they weren’t integral to the story. The story of Robyn Peltier, PR rep. for an obnoxious celebutante for whose death she has just been framed. She enlists her friends– said werewolf and demon (though Robyn doesn’t know this about them)– for support as she tries to prove her innocence, and also tries to avoid a strange violent woman who is determined to stay on her trail. The woman wants something from her, but Robyn does not know what. For there is so much she has to discover– including the true identities of her friends, who she can trust, and who she can’t.

That I wasn’t in love with Living With the Dead isn’t the book’s fault, for I don’t suppose I was ever meant to be its ideal reader. For some people, I think, the demons and werewolves would be main attraction, but I still don’t get that. That I read the book all the way through and enjoyed it, however, is a credit to Armstrong’s excellent plot. So it’s not the book, it’s the genre. Could be that such books require significant investment? Living With the Dead— a pretty long novel at 372 pages, containing a folklore and vocabulary all of its own– demands more effort than I would typically allot to my pop-fic. You really have to want to get this stuff, the werewolf nitty-gritty, but unfortunately I just wasn’t that determined in the end.

October 21, 2008

Dad-Lit, it seems

This weekend I read The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, which I was surprised to see acknowledged itself as indebted to Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies. I’ve not read my copy of Dream Babies yet, but will do soon due to the rave reviews I’ve seen by others. Anyway, the McEwan book was really wonderful, and perhaps my favourite of his since I read Saturday. (I really didn’t like Atonement that much; is there a terrible place where they put away people like me?). I don’t know that I’ve read such a thoughtful book by a man about parenting and childhood. And then without even thinking, I picked Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York to read next. It seems I’m really on a Dad-lit kick, but I am loving the perspective. “Whatever the origins– and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all– what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it– less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us… [Children] compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.”

October 17, 2008

Entitlement by Jonathan Bennett

I’ve been trying to think of a more suitable avenue into Jonathan Bennett’s novel Entitlement than the fact while I’ve been sick in bed these last two days, it’s been my dearest companion. But you see, as I’ve been sick in bed for two days, my capacity for thinkage is stunted. Which is unfortunate because as much as “the book’s got plot” (a quote from Bennett, interviewed at Bookninja), Entitlement offers much more to remark on.

Interestingly, however, that the book would be so plot-driven was not so obvious until about two thirds of the way through. What hooked me from the very start was premise– an outsider’s perspective onto absolute wealth and affluence. “The rich are different from you and me.” Which was, of course, a bit Fitzgerald, but also reminded me of one of my favourite paperback guilty pleasures which is A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne. Except, set in Canada– what a twist indeed for Canadian Literature. Do we even have rich people in Canada anyway?

The “outsider” is Andy Kronk, who enters private school through a chance hockey scholarship, and becomes swept up in the drama of the Aspinall family. An awkward triangle forming between Andy with the Aspinall children, Colin and Fiona. When his father dies, Andy becomes a surrogate brother, privy to the intimacies of the Apsinall world. Discovering the heightened power of the wealthy in Canada– a country determinedly blind to class distinctions. This blindness allowing the rich to have control unchecked, without notice or acknowledgment of the extent of their reach.

This reach has been apparent to those who’ve tried to touch the Aspinall’s before. Biographer Trudy Clarke is having trouble getting interviews for the book she is planning, and she is warned to abandon the subject altogether– of the father, Stuart Aspinall, she is told, “He ruins people he doesn’t like.” However, Trudy will not be deterred. When she is granted a connection to Andy Kronk, she sees it as a prime opportunity, leaving her daughter and all other responsibilities behind to travel north to Kronk’s isolated cottage. Andy proving particularly candid, for his own reasons. Bennett’s multiple points of view showing both characters believing themselves fully in control, but we soon discover that neither is at all.

It is from this point on that plot takes hold, complete with twists, audible gasps (mine) and crooked cops. Clues from the beginning I hadn’t even picked up on becoming significant, and this book of so many points of views taking on a cohesive shape. A race to the end, for sure, but then this is a plot-driven book written by a poet, so this isn’t a guilty-pleasure either. The very best of all number of worlds and influences, and so thoroughly enjoyable. Fiction to get lost in, and once you’ve found your way out, there’s much to reflect on about where you’ve been.