May 29, 2023
Books Round-Up
Some books I’ve been reading lately that you deserve to know about!
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You can never have too much of a good thing, especially if the good thing in question is an extension of @alikbryan’s smart and hilarious debut novel ROOST. Its follow-up, COQ, is set a decade later as Claudia’s father has just remarried , now it’s her brother’s turn to have a marriage fall apart, Claudia’s ex husband is displaying peculiar symptoms of wanting to get back together, all of this against the backdrop of an epic family trip to Paris to remember Claudia’s late mother. COQ is a romp, deeply felt, a delight.
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In her new memoir UNEARTHING, Kyo Maclear’s achinging personal experience—after the death of her father and a chance encounter with a DNA test, she discovers that her father was not her biological father after all, and any attempts to understand the true story of her origins are obscured by her complicated mother whose diagnosis of dementia only makes clarity harder to find; or does it?—turns out not only to be a fascinating mystery to unravel, but also a meditation on the possibilities of story and family itself, about what it means to relate to or be related to some people and not others. It’s also a story of seasons, and gardens, what can be found in the fog, and the importance of leaving room in your list for strange and unexpected things to happen. It’s so good.
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I loved this book, a novel that was everything it’s beautiful cover had led me to suppose it might be. A novel that author Margie Taylor wrote with a specific audience in mind, women over sixty who are imagining their lives are set, children are grown, marriage established, when along comes a series of new seismic shifts that change everything. For the eponymous Rose, it all begins with her husband’s abrupt announcement that he’s retired from university teaching, and then her daughter moves home, and then Rose invites a charismatic young man into the family fold who’s nothing like what she thought he was, and suddenly Rose Addams’ comfortable life is turned upside down. A novel about family and friendship and the limits of what a wife and mother can control, ROSE ADDAMS was smart and funny, a delight to encounter, and reminiscent of Carol Shields’ fiction.
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This Bird Has Flown, by Susanna Hoffs
Susanna Hoffs wrote a novel…and I love it? Which shouldn’t be so surprising, because Susanna Hoffs also wrote “Eternal Frame,” which is a work of art that’s moved me more times than most works of art I can think of. But you know what? I’ve been disappointed by fiction by ’80s superstars before, so I went into this novel carefully, cautiously. The story of a one-hit wonder 33 year-old-old singer whose failure to launch is getting her down…when she is seated next to an impossibly attractive Oxford English Professor on a flight to London, and sparks fly (and then some!). If you’ve got a thing (and I sure do!) for fiction with a lot of swearing and nearly as much masturbation, then this book is for you. It was funny, fresh, and surprising, managing to blend rom-com and Gothic tropes (JANE EYRE! REBECCA!) in bizarre and splendid ways. What smart, smart fun.
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At first I wasn’t really sure I NEEDED to read an updated version of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE, by Nancy Mitford, but it turns out that India Knight’s modern day spin is very funny, perfectly delightful. As good as that cover.
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Song of the Sparrow, by Tara MacLean
I remember Tara Maclean’s “If I Fall” playing on the radio when I was 20 and full of angst, and I remember writing the lyric “It looks like a good place here/ so I think I’ll stay for a while” in the margins of my Norton Anthology while thinking about boys who I wished would love me. (And in my mind, that song on the radio would always be followed by “Love Song,” by Sky. Oh, how music is a time machine.)
I first heard about her new memoir, SONG OF THE SPARROW, from my friend @marissastapley who was blown away by MacLean’s story of her unconventional childhood on Prince Edward Island, born to practising Wiccans who’d become Evangelical Christians who filled her world with meaning and magic and music, but who also left her vulnerable to abuse and neglect. A devastating low point of her peripatetic childhood was when MacLean and her siblings were nearly lost in a house fire that made national headlines.
In a story that recalls the essays in Sarah Polley’s acclaimed memoir RUN TOWARD THE DANGER, Tara MacLean bravely faces down the darkest corners of her history and shows how trauma doesn’t have to be the end of a story. With exceptional grace, generosity, wisdom and faith in her own power, MacLean shows the possibilities of going beyond mere survival and creating a rich and vibrant life of one’s own.
Her stories in 1990s’ music success are also really wonderful to read, filled with familiar names, and perhaps the best kind of namedropping, because each one includes an anecdote or detail about what that person taught MacLean and just how generous or exceptional they are. (Special shout out to Tom Cochrane and his wife Kathy who invited MacLean to give birth in their house!).
A beautiful memoir about what it means to stay steady on ever-shifting ground and even rise above it to fly.
May 25, 2023
Snow Road Station, by Elizabeth Hay
An essential part of my writing process is getting to the point where I know my characters well enough that that every bit of dialogue becomes essential to my story, no single line that’s incidental or something that anybody else would say to any other person on the planet. This is especially true with fictional people who’ve known each other for decades: there is no small talk, every sentence loaded with meaning, with freight. In Elizabeth Hay’s new novel SNOW ROAD STATION this can be disorienting for a reader, like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation, but this is also what fiction should be, I think.
I really liked this book, though its effect was more subtle than powerful, which is fine because it’s a slim read and I have time to pay attention.
I really liked this book, a story of late middle age and long friendship (“Theirs was a childhood friendship that had lasted, enduring long spells when it existed out of sight, but then there it was again, like strawberries in season.”) but it was not until its final paragraph, which hits with such a force, nothing subtle about it, that I began to really understand the project, what a complicated fascinating book this quiet story really is.
May 17, 2023
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
I am infinitely grateful to whoever it was who inspired me to put this on hold at the library. OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, by Julia Armfield, was incredible, blending literary elements with horror to create a spellbinding tale of love and loss. The point of view moves between Miri and her wife, Leah, a marine biologist whose routine research trip goes wrong when their submarine sinks and is lost to contact. Six months later, Leah comes home again, but something is very wrong and Miri is unable to reach her, or get answers about what happened in the deep, a story Leah tells piece by piece in her part of the narrative. This is a novel infatuated with the wonders of the world, oceans and love among them. Creepy and compelling at one, a strange inversion of THE SHAPE OF WATER, and definitely one for readers who loved Melissa Barbeau’s THE LUMINOUS SEA, or anyone into JAWS. What a story!
May 15, 2023
Places Like These, by Lauren Carter
“I never though something like that would happen in a place like this,” is the thing people always say in local newscasts in the aftermath of tragedy, as though there were actually places in the world that immune to life itself, to its terrible, tragic unfairness, and inexplicability (and isn’t this part of the same reason people travel, to escape all that?) but, as Lauren Carter shows in her fantastic new collection Places Like This, life happens everywhere, on rural highways, far flung suburbs, northern towns, and abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. In the New York state spiritualist community famous for its mediums, a stuccoed church in Argentina, in the shadows of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood (“Carol did not tell her how she’d envisioned a slab of raw beef, glaring a wet red before purpling like an aged bruise. The expensive cut, one her mother would have rarely purchased at the downtown butcher shop with the creaking wood floor, the dusty cans of corn niblets and cherry pie filling.” ).
These are stories of sadness and longing, of wanting but not getting, but this—of course—is also life itself, and the collection is less bleak than it sounds, because these are stories of characters building a home and a finding a world within its realities, of finding love, spots of light, connection and meaning. Even in “places like these,” rich stories are possible, such as that of the couple whose dog is saved as the narrator’s struggling stepbrother begins to slip away; a widow keeps seeing her late husband; a woman glimpses the depths of her partner’s sadness when she goes home to meet his family; the couple together but emotionally worlds apart as they grieve a pregnancy loss, which is also the loss of so much love and so many dreams. I especially loved the three final stories in the collection, linked narratives about a group of women who’ve been friends since high school whose own ties are fraught, complicated, and irrevocable.
These are tough stories, rugged and hard, but there are also gorgeous moments of connection, of illumination—I keep thinking of a description of a drink in a character’s hand, “a bowl of light.” There are stories that shine.
May 2, 2023
The Light of Eternal Spring, by Angel Di Zhang
“My mother died of a broken heart, or so the letter said.”
And this is the spectacular opening line of Angel Di Zhang’s dazzlingly dreamy debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, a story of love and loss, a story of finding and belonging, about seeing and knowing, all the gaps between what we remember and what really happened, and the curious nature of space and time. How did we get from there to here?—a question that preoccupies Di Zhang’s protagonist, Aimee (pronounced Eye-Me), particularly after her mother dies and she travels with her American husband back to her hometown in China, the rural village of Eternal Spring, where she hasn’t been for so many years. It’s also the question the narrative sets out to answer.
Aimee, a photographer, is known as Amy in her new life in New York City, where she is now so established that she thinks in English, and her photos appear in ads on the subway, and she thinks her thoughts first in English instead of her native Mandarin. Though it’s Manchu that’s Aimee’s mother tongue—literally, her mother’s first language—and she’s forgotten it to the point when her sister’s letter arrives with news of her mother’s death, she has to have it translated by a woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown running a vegetable stall.
It’s 1999 and communication is not as instantaneous as it is today. When Aimee and her husband David set out for Eternal Spring in the hope of making it back in time for her mother’s funeral, she has no idea what to expect, and her family don’t even know to expect her. What she’ll find is a place and people who are radically different than they were when she last saw then, by virtue of the nature of memory, but also because the previous decade has been a time to radical change in the village, which has become busy and bustling, not a village at all. Because nothing ever stays fixed, both in life, and in our memories, and such understanding is a challenge for Aimee, whose photos aim to capture time, to hold it still.
How to grapple with the mutability of reality? And even more important, how to resolve her relationship with her mother now that her mother is gone? The last time mother and daughter were together led to a spectacular flame-out and they haven’t spoken since. Will there be any chance for Aimee to to reconcile with her mother’s memory? And what about reconciling the space between Aimee and Amy, between the place where she comes from and where she lives now, and possibility of belonging to both places, a kind of double exposure, not a photographic error but instead an accurate image of her psychic reality?
I loved this book, its freshness and sense of play, its curious placement outside of time, just beyond the limits of realism, about the all the possibilities of impossible things.
April 17, 2023
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
True confession time: I’ve never read Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, and I likely never will. Reportedly, it’s very lengthy, set a long time ago, and all about a man staking his claim in a gold rush (yawn), and no doubt it’s extraordinary and brilliant, but each of these makes for three counts on my NOPE NOPE NOPE list, and there are so many other books in the world.
My interest in Catton’s latest Birnam Wood, however, was piqued by critic Lauren Leblanc’s enthusiasm for the project, which was also the reason I went to see Catton at the Toronto Public Library’s Bluma Salon event in early March, which was really fantastic, and I bought the book there. She kept talking about plot, and about how “character is action; we are what we do,” and I was intrigued, though I’ve got to say that even though this novel clocks in at only just over 400 pages, I picked it up thinking of a doorstop, and what have I gotten myself into? There was not a lot of white space. Will I be reading this novel for the next 900 years?
But reader, I sped through it in two days. This book! This book! Speaking of plot… Though it didn’t take off immediately. I was interested in the story and surprised to find that it was so much more intimate and immediate than I was expecting, deeply embedded in the experiences of characters ranging from the leader of the gardening collective, her loyal sidekick, a renegade citizen journalist, a pest-control mogul who has recently received a knighthood, his wife, and a reclusive American billionaire seeking refuge in middle of nowhere New Zealand for reasons that aren’t bound to be honourable. I thought this would be a more sprawling book, individual people at a distance, more a book in general than this one, which is so exactly, specific. Even though the paragraph-long sentences were hard to parse at first, so many clauses, and semi-colons. Like making one’s way through the weeds and the bramble, and then suddenly there I was at the heart of things and the novel was unputdownable.
“She was still looking for a villain. She was still trying, desperately—and uselessly—to find somebody more monstrous and despicable than her.”
Who is the villain of this story? Who is the hero? Such murky distinctions (if any are to be made) are what make Birnam Wood such a fascinating puzzle of a story. I loved it.
April 12, 2023
The Burgess Boys
Running away on my own personal reading projects is perhaps my favourite fascination, the time I spent rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series in 2019 a case in point. (I talk about it all the time, like some people’s version of where they were when JFK was shot. Where were you when I was reading A Ring of Endless Light? Omg, remember when I was reading A Severed Wasp in New York City? Somebody ought to put up a monument!) And the best thing about these sprees, like most things I do, is that they’re never planned, they just have to happen, and when they do the moment is so absolutely perfect, serendipitous, infusing my life with light and meaning, spiritual, an epiphany. I am not being facetious or hyperbolic in the slightest.
And lately, it’s been the Lucy Barton books, which I’ve been rereading these last few months and wrote about here. These books not blowing my mind quite like the L’Engles did (“every single one of them words rang true and glowed burning coal/ pouring off of every page like it was was written in my soul…”) but rearranging my thinking in a more subtle way, a quieter way. How I’d dismissed them at first, and then going back to see what I’d been (dis)missing, and how exploring Elizabeth Strout’s books is a bit like being handed a key to a literary universe where the reader is omniscient, making connections the characters themselves don’t understand—though it seems like the inverse when one encounters the Lucy Barton books, it’s true, where the connections are elusive, and it’s hard to understand just how she (both Lucy and her author) got from there to here.
But I think that Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys might just be the bridge.
I first encountered Bob Burgess as a secondary character in Lucy By the Sea, and had the same response to him that Lucy did, which was that I loved Bob Burgess. And so, when I realized that Bob Burgess had his own book (albeit one shared eponymously with his asshole brother Jim) I placed a library hold immediately. (The best thing about becoming obsessed with the Elizabeth Strout books in 2023 is that most of the library holds come in pretty quickly…)
And so Bob Burgess came away with me last weekend, and the coals were glowing again. Oh my gosh, I loved this novel.
The most remarkable thing I can say about it is that I knew its big twist, that Bob had revealed his story to Lucy during their time in Maine, and still the story was not spoiled in the slightest. The other thing I particularly loved was that I got to see Bob (Oh, Bobby!) meeting his second wife for the very first time, and neither of them had any idea!
The Burgess Boys is the first conventionally-structured Strout novel I’ve ever read (the Lucy Barton books are a study in interiority, while her Olive Kitteridge books are the same but with…exteriority [is that a thing?]). And The Burgess Boys really is the bridge between the two, all the scenes of the Lucy Barton books just planted in its soil. Parts of the novel are narrated by Bob’s ex-wife Pam (whom we’ve also met in the Lucy Barton books) and her feelings about her first husband are a quiet preview of what Lucy will feel for William. (There is also, indeed, a line from her perspective: “Oh, Bobby!”
And the scenes in which Bob is looking out the window in his New York City apartment, wondering at all those different lives going on, lighted windows offering just the smallest glimpses of other people’s private worlds—a preoccupation of the Olive and the Lucy books alike. The mystery of other people’s experiences and understandings.
The Burgess Boys is also deeply concerned with the fabric of American society, as the Lucy Barton books are against the backdrop of the 45th President, Covid lockdowns, and the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But so unbelievably presciently considering how much I hadn’t seen coming in 2013. The novel is set around 2007, the shadow of the Iraq War and torture in prison camps still very present, and a major part of the plot involves an act of violence on the property of a mosque in small town Maine, where the Burgess boys hail from, where the locals in this dying town are decrying the arrival of Somali immigrants whose culture seems to represent a threat to their way of life. As with the Lucy Barton books, as with, well, everything, the challenge: how do we learn to live with difference? How do we learn to live with each other? Strout refusing to look away from class, either, and how poverty can come to define one’s experience. The ways in which all of our experiences make us either harder or softer. How it’s never not complicated.
March 27, 2023
My Boots Match My Book
I made up a thing called International Match Your Book to Your Boots Day on the occasion of my wellies being broken out for spring at the same time I’m finally reading Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry, which I started reading yesterday evening and am already more than halfway through. It’s so good—it sparkles. This evening I am aiming to put dinner on the table as early as possible so that I can put on my pyjamas as soon as I can and retire to bed to read the rest of it.
March 23, 2023
Bleed, by Tracey L. Lindeman
The first time I heard about this book was last fall while I was drinking tea in Jennifer Knoch’s garden and asked her about amazing books she’d edited that were coming down the pipeline, and she talked about BLEED so passionately and made clear that this was a book that everyone should read, not just people with experience suffering with endometriosis.
And then two more people I deeply admire—@aborshpod’s Rachel Cairns and @yellowmanteau (Julie L. Lalonde)—started posting about it on Instagram, weaving its threads into the stories they tell online about reproductive justice and feminism/violence against women respectively—and showing too that all these stories are connected, for worse (because such tangles makes everything so much more *complicated* and difficult to resolve) and also for better (improving healthcare for people with endometriosis means better outcomes for *everyone*).
In BLEED, Lindeman uses a mix of memoir and reporting to show how her brutal and painful experiences with endometriosis since age 11 is representative of the suffering of so many other people, and also how the lack of care endo patients receive highlights sexism, racism, classism, anti-fatness within the medical system. Most doctors aren’t aware of how to diagnose endometriosis, let alone how to treat it—thanks to the influence of pharmaceutical companies, patients are usually given pills before surgery, pills that are ineffectual at best, harmful at worst.
Those who ask for surgery receive push-back from doctors who wish to preserve patients’ fertility, even when patients are adamant that they do not want children. Patients are caught in a catch 22 where they’re able to mask their symptoms and remain high functioning, which comes to undermine their complaints, or else they’re overwhelmed by the physical and mental toll of endometriosis and dismissed as just hysterical.
It was interesting to read BLEED in the context of another book I’ve recently read, Felicia Kornbluh’s A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE about the parallel battles for abortion access (by white middle class feminists) and against forced sterilization (by working class activists of colour). At first glance, these two through-lines seem entire separate, even opposed, from each other, let alone Lindeman’s narrative. In a politics of either/or, black and white, this is certainly the case—but life is not like that. And—as Kornbluh’s book made clear—insisting that it is undermines justice and progress for everybody.
Lindeman’s narrative overlaps with Kornbluh’s when she writes about how birth control drugs were tested on people in Puerto Rico…and then ultimately dispensed in huge amounts to the general public in what purported to be a kind of liberation, but perhaps at a cost that most people don’t like to talk about, mostly because the people who are talking already are religious zealots seeking to control women and also because who wants to be opposed to liberty?
This narrative is messy and demands attention to nuance, and it also challenges me as someone who has mostly been served by the medical establishment so far throughout my life, never meeting with the roadblocks and suffering that becomes standard for Lindeman and others with endometriosis (and PCOS, and a litany of other chronic illnesses, and also [the much feminized and therefore maligned] chronic pain). It’s also a narrative that doesn’t come with neat and tidy ending, for the patients themselves or the system at large. The end of BLEED is just the beginning, after all, of—hopefully—a powerful reset and reimagining of how our medical systems are structured, and what reproductive justice/’my body my choice’ really means.
March 17, 2023
I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
There were some moments in which I felt, reading I Have Some Questions for You, that perhaps Rebcca Makkai was trying to squeeze too much into this book. A novel 400+ pages long, a campus novel, murder mystery, #MeToo/cancel culture moral reckoning, Anti-Black racism and how the justice system is far from just for people of colour. Plus a treatise on true crime podcasts, because Mekkai’s narrator Bodie Kane is a podcaster too, in addition to being a film professor, and she casually rattles off old crime cases: “Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. There one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer…” A story that’s specific and unspecific at once, positively amorpheous.
The specific part of the story is about Bodie returning to the scene of the crime in 2018, which is to say high school, which was, in her case, a mid-grade New Hampshire boarding school she’d been sent to in the 1990s by a benefactor after horrific tragedy had befallen her family in Indiana. Those years were, as high school always is, complicated, Bodie conscious of herself as an outsider, and then, in her senior year, her roommate from the year before is murdered. The school’s athletic assistant was found guilty, and he also happened to be one of the few Black people on campus. By 2018 and deeply steeped in true crime podcasts, Bodie is already mildly obsessed the case as she comes back to Granby to teach seminars on podcasting and film history.
At the same time, her husband (they’re separated; he lives next door/ they get along fine) is being cancelled on Twitter by a somewhat insufferable performance artist, and Bodie is slowly being undone by the complexity of these matters: what is the distance between what her ex is alleged to have done and other instances the prompted us all to #BelieveWomen, plus the absolute bullshit she and her peers had to put up with with in high school from male teachers, and even from each other as rumours spread (but then some of these rumours are what protected students from abusers—how do you ever know what/which women to believe?).
It’s been a busy week and I’ve not had as much time to read this book as I would have liked, to give it the focus it really deserved, so that I could get lost in it, but last night I sat down for a couple of hours to finish it and finally everything clicked, the over-stuffedness, the real answer to whodunnit:
“My point is, you were part of the machine… You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it; when the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.”
What a marvelous, absorbing, complicated world of a book this is, a literary mystery, and a mirror.
