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.

October 13, 2008

My turn for Whats and Whys

Rebecca Rosenblum ponders why she reads the books she reads, the last ten books she has read specifically, concluding that reading is social, however solitary in practice. Her post inspiring Naya V. to consider some of her own bookish choosings. And inspiring me as well, though findings may not be so revelatory as I’ve written here about how I came to some of these already. Nevertheless.

• Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen (now reading), because Rebecca Rosenblum gave it to me for my birthday and now it is time.
• The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, because it was a paperback portable for vacation, and because it came recommended via the impeccable taste of Rona Maynard.
• The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, also because it was a paperback. Because it was longlisted and shortlisted for the Giller. Because it was Rona-recommended, and recommended by Maud Newton and Stephany Aulenback as well. (Oh, and now by me too. This is the best book I’ve read in ages).
• Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine. I picked this up at the Victoria College book sale not just because it was a collection of correspondence but because reading a newspaper feature when the book came out inspired me to embark upon a similar writing project with my friend Bronwyn.
• Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, because I wanted to all the books on the Giller list by women (which was easy as there were only two).
• Flowers for Mrs. Harris by Paul Gallico. Also bought at the book sale, and I was originally attracted by the gorgeous (only slightly damaged) pink dust jacket, and then I remembered that I’d read writer Justine Picardie raving about this novel on her blog.
• What It Feels Like for a Girl by Jennica Harper. Jennica is my favourite poet, and her first book The Octopus kept me up all hours the first time I read it, and so naturally I would read her new book the second I could get my mitts upon it.
• Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. I don’t remember why I read this book at all, perhaps for no real reason, which is probably the reason I was so surprised to love it.
• When Will There by Good News? by Kate Atkinson. Um, because Kate Atkinson wrote it. And everything she touches is gold– except for Emotionally Weird, but I’ve forgiven/forgotten already. Everything else though.
• The Diving Bell and Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. My spectacular Amy Winehouse costume won me this book as a prize at an Oscar Party back in the winter, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. My husband had, however, and was obsessed with it, and insisted that I read it too, and it was as wonderful as he promised. And now we can finally rent the movie.

October 4, 2008

Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden

“We choose New Orleans,” begins the prologue to Amanda Boyden’s second novel Babylon Rolling. “We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide.” The novel’s employment in the prologue of first person plural narration suggesting already that this will be story composed of stories, of voices.

Babylon Rolling tells of a year in the lives of the residents of New Orleans’ Orchid Street, beginning from Hurricane Ivan to just before the devastation of Katrina. Such disparate characters, these neighbours, black and white (and Indian); young and old; long-time residents and newcomers; good people and people who’ve somehow found themselves in more than a spot of trouble.

Though the first-person plural narration ends with the prologue, its spirit continues in the construction of the chapters ensuing. Written in the third person, but very close and in the various singular voices of the characters, within these chapters one voice turns into another in the space of a paragraph break. No other divisions between them, here are the different voices of Orchid Street, one after another as these people go about their separate lives.

The danger of this sort of structure, of such a broad approach to a story (in terms of chronology and character) would be a tendency for glossing over substance. For these characters to be “voices” but little more, and certainly not people, for how do you fit another entire life into a novel that is already so crowded? Which might happen in the hands of a lesser writer, but it struck me soon as I was reading Babylon Rolling that something quite different was at work.

As I read the story of Ariel, the transplanted Minnesotan working overtime managing a New Orleans hotel. She is on the verge of being unfaithful to her husband, and then of course we meet her husband Ed whose own story has nothing to do with that (though of course it will come to, but not entirely). Ed who saves his elderly neighbour Roy after an accident, in which a local drug dealer is to blame and Roy’s wife is seriously injured. The drug dealer’s younger brother Daniel, aged 15, calling himself “Fearius”, and anxiously following in his brother’s footsteps. A hurricane is approaching (but no, not “that” one, not yet). Some will stay, some will go. One of the former being Philomenia whose cooking up something poison in her kitchen and whose grasp on reality is becoming more and more tenuous, though it’s pretty hard to tell.

The point being that none of these characters– like nobody ever in his or her life– is a peripheral character. Every one of them, including those who don’t get to speak so directly, able to claim a part of the prologue’s “we”. And it dawned on me as I read that Babylon Rolling isn’t actually a novel at all, but is a book of short stories all broken into pieces and put back together, a very different kind of puzzle. Which says something about the short story, I suppose, how its surprise appearance here so serves to elevate the novel. That these characters’ stories and lives run so deep, not just into each other but in and of themselves. That their stories stand for their own sakes, complementing as they rub shoulders (and they’re actual shoulders, blood and bone), and that rubbing of these shoulders can create an effect so incredibly rich.

So the structure of this novel is really quite remarkable, but even more so are the voices themselves. That Boyden can bring to life characters so different from herself and from each other as, for example, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (whose presence lends a touch of the Southern Gothic) and Daniel “Fearius” Harris (“But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waiting four months sitting in there.”) Fearius in particular a leap, a risk, that this author could imagine her way into the mind of a black fifteen year old drug dealer, but it is a leap that Boyden makes deftly. I was uneasy with Fearius’s voice at first, not for political reasons as much as grammatical ones, but I became accustomed to it soon, as much as all the others.

Boyden writes in her Acknowledgments that she started the novel in Toronto after having left New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, which had “reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.” The result being a song certainly, even if not so entirely swannish. Because, as her author bio notes, Boyden lives in New Orleans “still”. And the novel’s epilogue returns to that very same “we”, such collectivity a suggestion of hope amidst such destruction.

September 28, 2008

Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

Rebecca Rosenblum is too close a friend for my opinion of her book Once to be considered impartial, and so however much I loved her book (which is very much), you needn’t be concerned with that. In lieu of my own opinion, however, I give you some from a few less biased sorts:

My husband Stuart says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever read short stories before that so stayed on my mind for days afterwards. “Linh Lai”, and “Pho Mi 99″, they’re stories, but they’re also whole worlds and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”

The Globe & Mail’s Jim Bartley writes, “Plot is the least of this intricate story. What matters, tickling the sense memory, is the prickling pleasure of Isobel’s tired feet freed to the air at bedtime; the sugary baklava stuck to its crumpled carton; the florid, chewing face of the tax teacher as he negotiates a wad of honey and nuts. Rosenblum builds and subtly rounds off a story arc, but the sustaining life humming all through this tale comes straight from the sensory input. In Isobel’s word-picture ramble, Rosenblum’s meanings arrive on the reader’s intuitions. Her art remains veiled. The quotidian is rarely so riveting.”

Daniel Baird writes in The Walrus, “Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality… These young characters’ futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent.”

From Christina Decarie in The Quill and Quire, “Each story stands alone, but Rosenblum sometimes weaves the characters in and out of each other’s lives, and when, say, the restaurant in “Route 99″ is revisited, it feels as good for the reader as it does for one of the characters, a single dad with kids in tow: ‘The buggy’s thin wheels wobble over every lump of snow, salt, ice, and Jake whined unintelligibly through his scarf. But it was worth it … I could smell fish sauve and cilantro, hear Koenberg’s rusty mutter’ … Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight.” — Christina Decarie

September 24, 2008

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

“Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street” is the definition of Kate Atkinson’s writing, I think. Her literary roots are deeper than deep, but she’s so fully aware of the actual world. So fully aware, as well, of how frequently these roots surface in life, of how relevant literature and literary-ness still truly are, and in the most unexpected ways and places.

Atkinson’s first Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread award, and is one of the finest novels ever written in the English language. I liked her second novel Human Croquet a little bit better. In 2005 she shifted gears a bit with Case Histories, the first of her crime novels about Jackson Brodie, which I enjoyed as well as its follow-up One Good Turn. And now with the publication of the series’ third novel When Will There Be Good News?, I officially retire from asking, “When’s she heading back into real literature?” One bit of good news: Kate Atkinson’s new novel is as brilliant as anything else she’s done before.

There is a solidity to When Will There Be Good News? that was missing from the previous two Jackson Brodie novels. They were about coincidence, connections, the most unexpected links, and were both infinitely readable (devourable) but lacking the containment and control distinct to literary fiction. The shape of this novel is different, tighter, which is not to say standard or unsurprising. Mystery has always been at the heart of whatever Atkinson writes, and she is so deft at bending time and place to create just the right amount of space, to give clues but never answers.

The solidity comes from the novel’s more singular focus, on the disappearance of a doctor and her baby. The twist in this being that the doctor has not even been reported missing, but sixteen year-old Reggie Chase, the mother’s helper, is determined that something is not right. Which is usually the case for Reggie, whose mother is dead, whose scumbag brother has set scary thugs on her tail, who finds herself giving Jackson Brodie CPR after a train wreck. The wrong place at the wrong time, always, though this time the right one. Having saved Jackson’s life, Reggie refuses to absent herself from it, hoping to take advantage of his skills as a private detective to help find Dr. Hunter.

Reggie has ample reason to worry about her employer, though she doesn’t know most of it yet. That as a child Dr. Hunter had been the sole survivor of an attack that killed her family, and the killer has just been released from jail after thirty years. That Dr. Hunter’s husband is involved in shady dealings, burning down his businesses to collect insurance, and there’s every chance he’d pull a similar stunt with his wife. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe knows all this well, however, though she is surprised to find the case reconnecting her with Jackson, the two rather gruff police types having flirted with attraction in the previous book.

Reggie, the hard-luck A-level studying orphan is a marvelous creation, Homer on her lap and Corrie on the telly; she is indomitable, fearless and smart, and so funny we forget how perilous her situation is. That such a character, with that mouth and that attitude, is book-smart too makes for a perfect marriage between two equally brilliant but quite different things. In Kate Atkinson’s work, we can ask for that much, though Atkinson knows also there can be too much, so the world goes. “Just become something happens once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again,” and people like Reggie Chase, Louise Monroe, Joanna Hunter and Jackson Brodie know this. That the world doles it out unfairly willy-nilly, cruelty and brutality altogether ubiquitous, and to think otherwise is just naivete (and luck).

Jackson spends much of the novel unconscious or out of the picture, Louise Monroe serving as the crime solver, day saver. As strong a character as Reggie, she is funny and dry, wary of the world she sees through her work. Of her marriage as well, to a man she’s not particularly in love with, however he is good and safe. And she’s finding herself obsessed with women who’ve been victims of men quite otherwise, women like Joanna Hunter who’ve found themselves as prey.

What Kate Atkinson does with language, with allusion, I’ve yet to see another author do– it’s a kind of mastery. Her turns at genre writing demonstrating her ability to plot a plot, and she does that here better than I’ve ever seen her do before. The first of her crime novels in which “genre” is quite irrelevant, really. If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.

September 22, 2008

Yellowknife by Steve Zipp

“Atoms or embryos, was there any difference?/ His former self had viewed the world as an orderly place. The unknown was merely the unmapped. His new self had a different view. Scientists might catch the world in a net of invisible lines, but they could never be sure they were harvesting reality and not themselves. A lipogram was as meaningful as a seismogram, the paradox of the ravens as relevant to ornithology as to logic. Math was a human myth, physics a point of view. Justice, truth, and beauty were trees that fell unheard by other ears. Every being was a chimera. At heart the universe was a mystery.” –Steve Zipp, Yellowknife

Who is Steve Zipp? Which is hardly the mystery at the heart of his novel Yellowknife, but still the question is worth posing. How intriguing, this pseudonymical person whose book is as enigmatic as its author. The Yellowknife of the tale is the capital city of the North-West Territories whose law and order is maintained by the North-West Mounted Police– details revealing the reality we’re dealing with here is not straightforward. Though they do have license plates shaped like polar bears in Yellowknife, but that’s not the sort of thing quite plausible enough for fiction, is it?

Very little is straightforward in either Yellowknife-the-city, or Yellowknife-the-book. “Borders exist for a reason,” the novel warns us, and one reason is that when upon crossing this one, all bets are off. Dogs hijack snowmobiles, characters disappear beneath the ice, a Perfesser philosophizes at the dump, and tunnels down in the earth keep turning up in the strangest places. The legendarily mystical North a perfect setting for this kind of magic (which the book turns up and satirizes), juxtaposed in a perfectly readable balance with a (literal) grittiness one would expect from a place where the elements and mining factor so centrally.

The story takes place in 1998, a bureaucratic nightmare of a time as the territorial government is currently in the midst of splitting into two. Though not overly long, Yellowknife has something of a sprawl about it and sprawling indeed is the Cast of Characters, not one of them incidental. The novel’s shape is not particularly taut and some parts reach out into tangents left unresolved, but I still found my reading most satisfactory. The many characters actually populating this strange place, from the drifter whose car is destroyed by a buffalo, the gravid biologist employed by the government and specialized in voles, her fiance who presents her with a ring whose stone is coal. The shady dealer with an understandable fear of dogs and his numerous failed business ventures, one of many rushing for gold but coming up way short.

Yellowknife is one of those novels fat with allusion, giving readers the impression that nothing means nothing, even if it’s not altogether clear what means what. At its most accessible, the novel is a hilarious satire, silly and absurd, but signs are scattered throughout the text indicating something deep down and more profound– sort of like the universe itself.

-More on Yellowknife (with a link to download)
– Steve Zipp’s blog

September 18, 2008

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder

Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children’s writer. She’s written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, “I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was.”

In terms of Snyder’s writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, “Happily Ever After”: “She’s every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like.” I recognized Snyder’s poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains’ second chapter: “Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow.”

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.

Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy’s journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that’s not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.

Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there’s trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home…

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.

September 14, 2008

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld, in her fiction, has a strange relationship with truth. First, her debut novel Prep, which I failed to love, that was famously marketed autobiographically, with photos from Sittenfeld’s high school yearbook. And now with her third novel American Wife, “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” Mrs. Laura Bush in particular, which has generated controversy as well as positive reviews. The latter entirely justified– this novel is exceptional.

Sittenfeld’s First Lady Alice Blackwell notes that “the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people… the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true– it’s staggering.” Though similarly staggering in my opinion is the faith these same people have in truth itself, that truth is even possible, all the while fiction is much-maligned and negated, treated as less-than real when it can be so much more so.

Though American Wife could have been a really cheap trick, a satire at best, Sittenfeld’s novel is neither. She’s not exaggerating the “looseness” of her inspiration, so that when I read about Charlie and Alice Blackwell, I didn’t have to think about George W. and Laura Bush. Charlie and Alice were characters enough on their own, and the circumstances of their lives different enough from the genuine articles that I didn’t find myself reading and connecting the dots. They both come from Wisconsin, which Sittenfeld evokes with a vividness I’ve never seen applied to the American Midwest, and Charlie’s family made their fortune in the meat industry. They have just one daughter, as opposed to the Bushes’ twins. Charlie’s father is not a former president, but had made a failed run at the position years and years before. The country invaded by American in 2003 goes unnamed. Etc.

I take from all this that Sittenfeld was not trying for an expose, a Primary Colours, or any kind of exploitation of Laura Bush’s life. But rather that she has been intrigued by Laura Bush, by her unique position and her elusiveness, the evidence that she is a far more complicated person than the public gets to see. And so Sittenfeld imagined herself into a position much like Bush’s, but not the same one– this story is Sittenfeld’s own. The character we get to know intimately as Alice Lindgren Blackwell is a singular creation.

Of course, so was Hillary Rodham Clinton, as depicted in her autobiography Living History. (I loved Living History; I admire Hillary Rodham Clinton). Sittenfeld fictionalizing that style of narrative, that pseudo-intimacy that springs up between autobiographer and her reader. “If I were to tell the story of my life,” narrates Alice Blackwell, “(I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course– one never is)…” But here we are holding the story of her life in our very hands, and our burdened hands, I note– at 55 pages, this book is as voluminous as any autobiography.

The story begins with Alice Blackwell’s question, “Have I made terrible mistakes?” and then sweeps back to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of small-town banker. The sheer normalcy of her life challenged by her unorthodox grandmother Emilie who lives with them, never does a bit of housework and spends her days smoking cigarettes and reading novels. It is from Emilie that Alice acquires her lifelong love of books. It is Emilie also who arranges Alice’s abortion (still illegal then), when she becomes pregnant in her final year of high school.

The novel is broken into four sections, a chronology of key episodes. From Alice’s childhood, we skip ahead to her thirtieth year. She is a school librarian, content to be single, and about to purchase her first home when she meets Charlie Blackwell at a backyard bbq. As crass as she is reserved, a Republican to her Democrat, Charlie is also being pursued by Alice’s best friend, but he is unrelenting. And when she falls in love, the reader can see why– this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld’s work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it’s all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren’t caricatures, or even “characters”; they’re people and they’re real.

Ten years later, Alice is a mother, more settled in her country-club lifestyle, but she has had enough of her husband’s drinking and general discontent. It is when she threatens to leave him that he finally cleans up his act, stops drinking and is Born Again. From there the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is clear (and what strange times we must live in, that this is the case). The last quarter of the novel a bit more ruminative than I would have liked, but I still couldn’t stop reading. The choices Alice has made as a woman and as a wife, during her “life in opposition to itself”, have come back to haunt her, and she must act in order to protect her husband and his presidency, of which she is inordinately tired.

That this fictionalized biography reads so true is down to the details, all the details, but the bookish ones in particular. Alice tells us the names of the books her grandmother is reading, every single title in a stack she buys for a young friend of hers, which includes books by Loises Duncan and Lowry, Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. Her daughter Ella reads Bunnicula on the flight to Charlie’s college reunion. Alice has John Updike in her handbag on her first date with Charlie, and she wonders if she’ll ever learn to read so sneakily at political conventions that no one will notice (and she is sad to never manage this). Of her husband’s religion, Alice says, “I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it… Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose– what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?– and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”

American Wife, for all its fiction, sheds a great deal of light on the Bush Presidency and on America. Sittenfeld answering the question, “How could this have happened?” That a man with such limitations could become so powerful, how any awareness of the enormity of his mistakes would make him all the more steadfast about continuing to make them, that the political is really only personal, because politicians are people. Not just in the “we wear sweaters and have children” sense, but in terms of blatant fallibility. How “this”/Bush could have happened is so truthfully imagined here, and isn’t imagined as close to truth as we can get?

Says Alice Blackwell, “What I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity.”

If only the cover
of American Wife did not feature a wedding dress though, and I can’t even think of why it does, since Alice Blackwell didn’t wear one to her modest nuptials. I fear the cover of this book will deter a man from ever picking it up, which is almost tragic, because this book is so rich, entertaining and important. Enacting Hilary Mantel’s assertion that “revolution is a daily task”, that the domestic is the heart of everything.

September 14, 2008

Unremarkable

Unremarkable weekend, whose highlight was the purchase of trackpants. Which was actually all I wanted from a weekend, we’ve been so busy lately. And also because I was reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I didn’t want to do anything but read it. Now reading I Know You Are but What Am I? by Heather Birrell, and I love it– does Coach House ever fail? A short kidlit kick after that, with Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh, and Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder. And then I have to read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because my husband’s been nagging me to do so for months.