September 10, 2008
Silent Girl by Tricia Dower
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is intriguing. However faulty, as of course merely having something to say doesn’t necessarily make one adept at the saying. A successful story is the result of various fortunate collisions, but I was thinking of the Fitzgerald quotation when I came across Tricia Dower’s story collection Silent Girl (Inanna). Stories pushed less for being stories than for what Dower has to say with them, how they “deal with a range of contemporary issues: racism, social isolation, sexual slavery, kidnapping, violence, family dynamics and the fluid boundaries of gender.”
I was interested also in the nature of this collection, its eight stories linked by a feminist theme. Each of them inspired by one of Shakespeare’s plays– for example, The Taming of the Shrew for a story of a kidnapped bride in Kyrgyzstan, Hamlet to show “Gertrude’s” side with the story, a widow left with a troubled farm after her husband’s death, and the comfort she finds in his brother. These allusions not necessary to appreciate these stories– my own Shakespeare could certainly use a brush-up– but just another example of the various collisions behind the creation of Silent Girl.
How would such a collection work, I wondered. Stories can often be collected at random, but in this case where they weren’t, would some read deliberately? Would the “something to say” take priority over the saying? Were the feminist links sort of a stretch, or were they actually a part of the book’s construction?
The stories within Silent Girl are various, points of view from women of many ages, from different cultures and places. It is this variousness that makes the stories’ main links (Shakespeare, women’s issues– that “something to say”) particularly interesting, as the connections aren’t really obvious until we come out of the stories’ individual worlds, backing away to look at the book’s overarching theme. Which is to say that many of the stories in this collection are wonderful, stand alone, and it is only when they’re grouped together that their “issues” become relevant. Remaining secondary to the stories themselves, which is how it should be, but still adding a worthwhile dimension. Stories taking full advantage of collectivity to expand on the ideas each raises alone.
The title story is perhaps the strongest in the collection, bookended by the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Matsi the “silent girl” taken from Thailand in the aftermath of the former, living in New Orleans on the cusp of the latter, and working as a child sex slave. Her attempts at self-preservation are heartbreaking and heroic, and the spell never breaks Dower’s depiction of this child’s point of view so absolutely convincing. She must also be commended for a most spectacular narrative arc.
“Deep Deep Waves” manages to be as enveloping as it is troubling, the story of an abused wife whose role as victim is not so passive. Challenging perceived narratives of domestic violence (Dower here offering part of “a new mythology” she thinks necessary to move away from “locked gender roles and a patriarchal value system”), Sona implicates herself in her own story. In “Nobody; I Myself”, the narrator does the same but for different reasons, for love instead of violence.
Though it’s not all dark here either– “Cocktails with Charles” is charming, lively and funny at its heart, and a most delightful story.
Critically, however, and I’ve written of this before (Hello, Vincent Lam!), I’ve got an aversion to fiction requiring a “Glossary of Terms”. I feel any good story should have sufficient stuff to be filled out on its own, and though Dower’s glossary is not extensive, I note that the stories I found weakest are most cited. Perhaps with so much something to say, fact drowned the stories themselves, but this was only really troubling in the case of the collection’s final story. A longish allegorical distopian sci/fi bent, it wasn’t my thing anyway, but even less so considering the appendix. An allegory which puts a layer between the reader and the story, which is a shame after we’ve been so close to all the rest.
To finish reading Tricia Dower’s Silent Girl is to have the fortunate collisions continue, ideas emerging from the stories themselves, from their relationships to one another, and how they depict the status of women throughout the world. Making Shakespeare vital and relevant too, for as Dower writes in her afterword, “some things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time”. Plenty of valuable insight is also offered on Dower’s excellent blog and on her website for the ideas in her stories to continue their expansion.
For– and as Fitzgerald advised– however much the girl is silent, these stories have so much to say.
September 4, 2008
The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
It is typical of the way that argument goes, of why argument is very rarely ever productive, when essayist Stephen Henighan responds to reviewer Nigel Beale’s assertion of “the market as a determinant of literary quality” by pushing the argument towards it most illogical conclusion: “So the great novelists of our time are Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling?” Because no, of course they aren’t, but there is definitely something to Beale’s argument (which I believe was in reference to Ian McEwen.) That sometimes a writer’s popularity can eclipse their literary merit can be demonstrated by Miriam Toews.
Not to suggest that Toews is in need of defending, of any assistance– her first novel Summer of My Amazing Luck was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, A Boy of Good Breeding and the memoir Swing Low: A Life were both McNally Robinson Books of the Year, A Complicated Kindness was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Award in 2005. But all this acclaim may have made Canadian Literature critics forget how fine a writer she really is, how good her writing truly is.
I say this because her work is the epitome of everything I hear critics calling for more of in Canadian literature (including Henighan): much of her fiction is utterly contemporary instead of backward-looking, she makes remarkable the lives of impoverished people who live in cities (and Winnipeg, no less), she has fun with language, colloquialism and the vernacular, pulling it all into pieces and then slapping it back together again. She addresses depression, drug addiction, poverty etc. but not as “issues”, these are stories. She does “gritty” but it sparkles, and though I believe Toews is one of the most exceptional writers we have working Canada today, she rarely gets such critical response, however much she is popular and racks up the awards (which I would argue, as most people would, are not quite the same as “critical response”).
Her latest novel The Flying Troutmans begins, “Yeah, so things have fallen apart.” The narrator Hattie Troutman returning home from a life in Paris that was unraveling anyway, in order to care for her nephew and niece. Her sister Min has been hospitalized with depression once again, and it becomes clear that Min’s problems have taken a toll on her kids– fifteen year-old Logan has been expelled from school for gang ties, and Thebes at eleven has ceased bathing, displays a manic chatter belying deeper problems and fears inside.
So they go on a road trip, driving across America in search of Logan and Thebes’s father. Because Hattie knows the kids need her, but she can’t cope with them on her own, or cope with them at all, she thinks, and there is no one else she can turn to. Min is back home in the hospital, “hooked on blue torpedoes” and last time Hattie had called the hospital, the nurse had told her Min didn’t even remember she had kids.
“But, said Logan, a fifteen-year old could technically live on his own, right?… No, a fifteen-year old cannot live on his own, I said./ Pippi Longstockings wasn’t even fifteen, said Thebes, and she–/ Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said./ And she was Swedish, said Logan./ So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn’t work here.”
And it doesn’t. These kids are all alone and they know it, and they know their mother wants to kill herself too. In fact they’ve exhausted themselves for months trying to keep her from doing so, and there is no safety net, solid or otherwise. How do you even be a kid in a world such as this one? How do you be a figure of stability to kids who know well there is no such thing.
“He asked me if I thought all this stuff was happening for a reason. /No, I said. I don’t think so.”
But yeah, just like Pippi, these people are characters in a book too, and because this is a book by Toews, this terrible reality is underlined always with humour. So that the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that.
One of Toews greatest strengths is voice, perfectly capturing the dry tones of her narrator Hattie, Thebes’s unceasing banter from the backseat, the unexpected breaks in Logan’s teenage reticence. Toew’s dialogue is fast paced, rich and real, and she is a kind of ventriloquist to create these different characters. And a sort of juggler or an acrobat (I’m not sure, someone who can do something awkward but with verve) to put these characters altogether and to make out of it a story so perfectly formed.
The Flying Troutmans represents real development since Summer of My Amazing Luck, which also had a road trip at its very heart and is a fine novel, but Toews has gotten so much better, which is the ideal. Her ending here a perfect balance between happy and real, known and unknown, resolved and otherwise. Here is a novel that is a road trip to somewhere, which is more than enough to ask of a book.
September 3, 2008
Being Taken Places
Oh, how books do take us places. After reading Francine Prose’s Goldengrove last week, I absolutely had to watch the movie Vertigo. Which wasn’t a particularly good or convincing film all around, but there was something about it, how it came by its filmishness absolutely brilliantly, and was so thrilling to watch. How the movie and Prose’s novel informed one another; I absolutely loved it.
And then I finished reading Owen Meany, which became far less plodding halfway through. And yes, I understand that some of the plodding was a narrative device, but I think some of it could have been fixed by an editor. Still, I remembered why I’d loved it, which had been the very point.
Then onward to The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy. And I’ll say this– I think Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best writers I’ve ever read, ever. Out of children’s lit. and lit. the world over. I loved The Long Secret when I was young, and I could see why upon rereading– I was just as baffled and fascinated as I would have been the first time around, and not every kids book reread can do that twice. In both of her books I’ve read, Fitzhugh captures the awfulness and inexplicableness that is real life in a way I can only compare to Grace Paley (class differences of their characters aside, of course). In no way watered down at all, Fitzhugh renders that reality palatable for children, which is truly amazing. This is the kind of literature children deserve…
And how strange here to see the number of parallels between The Long Secret and A Prayer for Owen Meany— religious fanaticism, grandmothers, bad parenting, coming of age, summertimes etc. etc.– which would have gone unnoticed had I been reading in any other direction.
August 25, 2008
Goldengrove by Francine Prose
I’m not sure why my review of Francine Prose’s Goldengrove has to begin with a discussion of whether or not it is a Young Adult novel. (It is a novel that “takes its place among the great novels of adolescence,” says its Amazon product description, though I’m not sure this is the very same thing.) I’m not sure why my review has to begin with this discussion, because I know I wouldn’t care so much about a blurring between fiction and non, between poetry and prose, say, or even between a novel of graphics or text. But for some reason the distinction between Young Adult Lit. and Lit. Proper strikes me as altogether essential.
Which is not to say that YA isn’t literature, because it is, moreover it is the very literature that teaches us to love literature. Not simply literature’s adolescent sibling, but still, it is a genre onto itself.
So the question I’m dealing with now is, what makes a book YA? Is it anything more than a youthful protagonist? For often enough the boundaries are blurred, and it’s really quite difficult to tell. For example, the recent story of Margo Rabb, whose book’s YA status was determined by her publisher’s marketing department. And then there’s Francine Prose, a prolific novelist for adults (though she has written a YA novel before). Her new book is Goldengrove, narrated by thirteen year old Nico, taking place over one summer as her family is suffering from the sudden death of her older sister Margaret.
The novel was lovely, gripping and sad, made all the more compelling by moments of absolute clarity. The perfect details of family life, of breakdown and suffering– the contents of Margaret’s work-in-progress bedroom, a younger sister’s unconscious mimicry, the disturbing moment when young people realize that even adults are vulnerable. By Nico’s voice also, which tells the story with confidence, even when her own self is wavering. Her parents growing apart from her, and from each other, and then the process through which the members of this family try to put themselves whole again.
It is Nico’s confident voice, however, that leads me to believe that this book is YA. And I’ve written about this before, about the distinction between literature that is YA or not. The difference being that the latter creates a gap between the narrative voice and the reader, and as a reader goes from childhood to adulthood, they will cross it. Examples, some however inadvertent, are Catcher in the Rye, Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, a lot what Esther Freud writes, and even Harriet the Spy and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself.
Examples are not (however infinitely readable these novels might be) Special Topics in Calamity Physics (which I loved), Prep (which I didn’t), and (I suspect, though I don’t actually know) anything Harry Potter. Forget the third example (v.v. controversial), but with the first two, their young narrators were absolutely in control of their stories. Even when they weren’t in control, they were smart enough and looking back from far away enough that they would be speaking from a wiser place. As opposed to Holden Caulfield, who wasn’t, though many of his readers wouldn’t realize this until later. Or to the narrator of Hideous Kinky who (from The Guardian Book Club today) “merely reports the signs of adult meaning… The reader is left to construct the story.”
I mean that for this second group of examples, if you encounter these books when you are fourteen, you’d find the books much unchanged years later.
To say that Goldengrove is such a book is not to demean it. It is not to say that the book lacks an edge either, because Nico’s dealings with her dead sister’s boyfriend take quite a sinister turn by the end of the novel. And further, it does not mean that this book isn’t worthwhile for an adult to read, but I was conscious all along that I was not quite its intended audience. Even though it was a sophisticated book, and it was– very cool film and music references, its adult characters interesting and well-developed, beautiful writing and pointed insights. But the story was so firmly inside Nico’s head, processed in spite of her confusion, and though the story’s feel is altogether immediate as it goes, I wasn’t surprised at the end to find out that it’s being told from years onward.
I wasn’t surprised either to find that a work by Francine Prose would forgo that gap between narrator and reader. The only other novel I’ve ever read by her is Blue Angel, whose altogether creepy narrator coaxed a tricky sympathy that was most disturbing. If we could learn to get in the head of Ted Swenson, Champion Scumbag, then identifying with Nico is no great feat. It’s what we’re suppose to do as we read Goldengrove, but such a lack of distance keeps this from being a deeper novel. (Which is definitely not the case with Blue Angel, but of course these are two very different kinds of stories).
So why is this distinction important? Because if this was an adult novel, I’d judge it a weak one. Lacking a certain complexity, featuring a predictable storyline etc. etc. But as a YA novel, Goldengrove is brilliant. Which isn’t lesser, no, because I think a story for fifteen year olds has to be different than a story for their mothers. And to pretend otherwise– for the sake of the
book, out of courtesy for its authors, its readers– is to miss something pretty essential.
I enjoyed this book, but if I were fifteen again, it would have spun me a spell. And certainly it is no slight on Prose to say that fifteen year-olds are lucky to have her writing just for them.
August 20, 2008
The Best Antidote: Salon Des Refuses
Since Friday, I’ve been reading the “Salon des Refuses”, as avidly as one reads any literary anthology. But, actually, no– because I’m not sure anyone reads literary anthologies avidly: such books were made for shelving. The Salon, on the other hand, is not a book at all, but rather two periodicals. The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries collaborating on a response to The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, comprising stories by a number of writers whose exclusion from the Penguin Anthology has been regarded as baffling at best.
CNQ Editor Daniel Wells offers the Salon “as evidence of the short story in Canada, both inside and (in particular) outside of Penguin’s anthology.” TNQ Editor Kim Jernigan explaining the project, “What if we “tweaked the beak” of the Penguin by putting together a Salon des Refuses (an exhibition of the rejected) after the famous exhibition of artists not included in the Paris Salon of 1863, many of whom… went on to greater fame than those included?”
The quality of work in these two collections, though typical of the journals themselves, speaks for itself. That I’ve been positively absorbed in these stories these last few days, and oh the joys– my very favourite thing about anthologies– of discovering magnificent writers for the very first time. Which was also the case when I read My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead this winter– Lorrie Moore! Deborah Eisenberg! How could I ever have lived without them? And of course I’m contradicting myself re. the point above, I have avidly read an anthology before. But there is a difference, you see, between readable anthologies and most other anthologies, which are more statements than books, and are 700 pages long, for example. Anthologies made for reading, I believe, are actually where the future of the printed short story lies.
My favourite line from the entire “Salon Des Refuses” belongs to Caroline Adderson in her introduction to one of the stories, “Of course, the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read.” So wise, so true, in all manner of contexts. The Salon itself an example of this, ample consolation, I hope, to those rankled by Penguin that they’ve managed to create something so wonderful beside it.
A celebration, absolutely, of some really excellent authors. And I appreciate this approach much more than the attack on the Penguin itself, and its editor. The critical pieces opening CNQ making the argument far less than the stories do– in particular the review by Michael Darling which takes single sentences from stories in the Penguin Anthology and strings them altogether to make a point (but what point? One could do that with anything). The pieces condemning Urquhart for her choices, for her background, her tastes, and giving all matter of justification for this, but in the end it really seemed to come down to “we got left out, and so did other people we like.”
Because it’s all down to sensibility, it really is. And it’s fine that these conversations are taking place because I like that I live in a world where people get angry about short stories, if they have to get angry at all. But still, nothing is definitive. Even in this wonderful collection of tales, there were some I didn’t like, and some (albeit v.v. few) that I didn’t think were very good. Oh, but the others. Really, they’re all you need. Slip them over to someone who’s hauling that Penguin, tell them, “Why not try something else?” They’re bound to be converted, just as I was. Celebration is contagious.
To discover such goodness all at once is overwhelming. Wells writing, “And if after reading the stories… you are not compelled to go searching for more of the same, well, then, I’m afraid that your case is hopeless: there’s nothing else we can do for you.” I cannot argue with the magnificence of Mark Anthony Jarman’s “Cowboys Inc.”, though I’m not sure I liked it, but I’m so glad I read it. How affected I was by Bharati Mukherje’s “The Management of Grief”. Terry Griggs’ “The Discovery of Honey” was an extraordinary tapestry of language and imagery, and I was entranced from start to finish. I liked Patricia Robertson’s “Agnes and Fox”. My favourite story was “Impossible to Die in Your Dreams” by Heather Birrell. I enjoyed “Cogagwee” by Mike Barnes, Steven Heighton’s “Five Paintings of the New Japan”, Sharon English’s “The Road to Delphi” and Russell Smith’s story. But then I always like Russell Smith’s stories, and I knew that already.
The other writers I didn’t know, however, for the most part, and I am so glad to discover. My “Must Borrow”/”Must Buy” lists ever-expanding, and it is so refreshing to be exposed to all these new (to me) voices. Exciting to know what innovations are ongoing and ever-possible, and the marvelous flexibility and potential of the short story form. I finish this collection feeling absolutely inspired– it is a triumph. You don’t even need to knock the Penguin– I haven’t read it and I’m sure I never will (and so won’t so many other people), but this collection has changed the world. No mere hyperbole, it has, if just a little bit. Congratulations to CNQ and TNQ on something wonderful. You’re going up on the shelf, but I’ll visit you again.
**And now for a PICKLE ME THIS GIVEAWAY: As I subscribe to both CNQ and TNQ, I’ve ended up with two copies of the Salon. If you live in Canada and would like a copy of one of the journals, email me your contact info at the address in the sidebar and I’ll post one of them to you. First-come/ first-served** And now CLAIMED. Lucky EG.
August 17, 2008
Exit Lines by Joan Barfoot
The problem of contemporary elderliness is illuminated by Sylvia Lodge, both a character in Joan Barfoot’s new novel Exit Lines and a resident of the Idyll Inn Retirement home. Whilst listening to an off-key choir’s performance, she notes, “And there’s a repertoire issue– do you suppose they realize that ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ thoroughly predates the most ancient among us?”
It is this institutionalization of age that Barfoot is working with in her new book, quite literally first with the Idyll Inn itself, “the latest addition to a small chain… a numbered company run by a management group on behalf of a collective of professionals, mostly dentists and doctors, interested in untroublesome, steady investment in what’s bound to be a growth industry.” The Idyll Inn’s opening beginning the book, everything freshly painted, brightly new, though the roof will be leaking in months and the sod isn’t laid yet. Presided over by Annabel Walker, who has the dubious distinction of being the daughter of the man with which Sylvia Lodge had had a longstanding affair.
Of course in a small city like the one in which the Idyll Inn is placed, such connections abound. Greta Bauer is not wholly surprised to find living down the hall her ex-lover George Hammond (who had been her boss at the shoe store), though George is now mostly immobile and has lost much of his speech since his most recent stroke. Ruth Friedman is sure she’ll come into contact with some from her Social Worker days, though probably not the children, she admits, but a former colleague, or an old board member.
“Companions gained late in life have not been present. They must take each other only on grounds of what is recounted, and then see how they balance and fit.” Sylvia, Greta, George and Ruth coming together rather circumstantially, by virtue of a shared table that first day at the Idyll Inn. Beginning to share their stories, beginning the process of balance and fit, and Barfoot does this rather wonderfully, no small narrative feat for one backward glance after another. With a delicious dark humour and tenderness, the narrative voice moves deftly from one character to another, and each of them wholly present– the perspective of the aphasic George particularly well done, as well as that of Greta, long ago an immigrant beginning to lose the language she’d worked so hard to acquire.
The novel, with all its backward glances, is structured in the present around a request Ruth makes of her new friends at the Idyll Inn once she’s known them for a while. A request which causes them to consider the bounds of their circumstantial friendship, and also reflect upon their own experiences. I found this part of the narrative less compelling than it was meant to be, and less surprising also. Casting the novel’s pace a bit off balance, and perhaps less the novel’s drive than an excuse for the rest of it, but in this way it was still not unsuccessful.
For the characters Barfoot has drawn in George, Sylvia, Greta and Ruth, first and foremost, but also for the consideration of the problem of contemporary elderliness, which I’ve mentioned already. No longer an institution, raised up by a Great Depression and made solid by a world war, feet tapping to very same songs, instead today’s elderly are a more complicated matter. Having come from all kinds of places, and growing old at altogether different rates, with various needs, medical and otherwise, there is no single song that off-key choir could sing.
August 10, 2008
Coventry by Helen Humphreys
Helen Humphreys, as I learned when I read her book The Frozen Thames last year, does the most remarkable things with diminutiveness. Her scenes are microcosmic, and this is the case again with her new novel Coventry. Which is, of course, a small novel, the tale of a single night in a single place, but stretching over half a century as well. The story of Britons braving the infamous air attacks on the city of Coventry during the night of November 14, 1940, but then as Humphreys writes in her acknowledgments, “My descriptions of the city are based on the accounts of the citizens of Coventry, as well as on eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Baghdad.” And so it resonates.
Coventry is the story of Harriet Marsh who, by way of a wet floor and a twisted knee, has come to be working on fire watch at Coventry’s cathedral during that fateful night. The attacks far worse than anyone had predicted, and the fires erupting are no match for those standing watch, armed with their hoses and buckets. As chaos ensues throughout the city, Harriet finds herself staying close to Jeremy, the young man she’d been working with earlier in the evening. Dodging explosions, trying to help the wounded, attempting to find their way home, struck by the strange sights around them– the white horse feeding on grass in a city park.
Humphreys’ prose is the point here, spare but evocative with the most solid details. The blackened houses “burnt to nothing but their frames” but with the cats in the windows: “Cats stay with the building, thinks Harriet. Dogs go with the people.” The difficult in comprehending the sights they would see that night, let alone explaining them: “The bombs feel to Harriet like all these things– an earthquake shaking the ground, lightening striking the earth, the deep sonorous toll of a bell./ When something is unnatural, there is no new language for it. The words to describe it must be borrowed words, from the old language of natural things.”
This novel is a rumination on human connections, on love and happiness. Happiness to be seized onto, gripped, even in these terrible times, for these unfortunate people who’d lived through one war and now found themselves in another. And not a stupid joy, not a stupor, but something more pure, something that could be held in one’s memory as the bombs fell around them, tearing their entire lives apart, thus enabling survival. The novel referencing other works of literature as well, bookishness in general. Beatrix Potter’s Jeremy Fisher, “… the awful moment when he realizes his life is not what he thought. He has been operating in the world as a predator and now he understands that he really is prey.”
Coventry is a small book with a great deal of power, comprising images beautiful and so ugly, joyousness and the depths of sadness, of there and here, and now and then, but none of this is juxtaposition. These forces’ opposition ceasing to matter when each is ever present, and so such is complexity, this piece of the world.
August 6, 2008
The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper
Though at times maligned in literary realms, thrillers are remarkable for exemplifying just what books are capable of doing to us. For demonstrating the book’s incredible power, and how it is strange that we take for granted a stack of paper with printed symbols that is terrifying. Film is entirely different, I think, or at least bad movies are, which take full advantage of their ability to startle us. Whereas literature has to be more subtle. More subtle than even a good film, because writers have less at their disposal– only words. To create a mood, a grip, the twists and terror, and then to do all this, but write well also? For prose to be surprising and inspired, characters well rounded, scenes to be properly evoked, the story fresh and original, and unbearably real and unbearably awful, and all this has been Andrew Pyper’s marvelous feat in his new novel The Killing Circle.
This was a novel that kept me up very late one night, too terrified to turn off my light, and too impatient to wait until morning to see how it ended. The grip beginning with the novel’s prologue, with Patrick Rush, a single father, at a drive-in movie with his son. The son disappearing on his way back from the snack bar and, frantic with worry, Patrick looks for him admidst the maze of parked cars, in the light of the terrifying movie on the screen before him, snippets of sound audible as he rushes from car-to-car. Venturing further out into the farmer’s fields surrounding, with no sign of his son, and however urgent is all of this, Patrick is also somehow resigned: “I know who has done this,” he says. “Who has taken my son. I know its name.”
In the next chapter we’re taken back four years to when Patrick, an aspiring novelist and dissatisfied television critic, joins a creative writing circle. The circle comprising five other rather eccentric souls, and led by Conrad White– the novelist nobody has heard of–, Patrick quickly realizes there isn’t an abundance of talent among them. And yet the story by a member called Angela captures his attention. Angela, whose face “never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.”
Her story is a ghost story, the story of a girl haunted by “a terrible man who does terrible things”, and the story starts to get inside Patrick’s head. Or rather he plants himself inside of the story, if there is any difference between such situations. The story’s impact upon him only intensifying when a local serial killer’s crimes start taking on eerie connections to the narrative. Patrick begins suspecting a member of the circle may be responsible, sensing himself in danger, and setting himself up as a suspect as well.
The creative writing circle is an ingenious device here, in “reality” the work from such groups often blurring lines of fact and fiction (i.e. “Write what you know.”) The writers’ stories suggesting (or betraying?) odd biographical details, misconstruing perceptions, providing for inadvertent and inappropriate therapy sessions (as well as terrible fiction), and a strange misplaced intimacy. Friendship or rivalry? And no one is ever quite as they seem, sometimes you’re even hoping this is the case. An atmosphere that absolutely fosters Patrick’s Rush’s paranoia.
This blurring of fact and fiction continues throughout the book, explored by Pyper in a variety of ways, also highlighting how it is that scary stories come by their power. By being just possible enough that you’ve can’t disbelieve it, that there really might be a monster hiding under your bed. So heightened was the mood of this story, the depths of its realism, I considered the monster– I really did– and Patrick Rush’s own experience was analogous. Could there really be a shadow following him home through the alley, somebody at the window, footsteps on the stairs? He knows it sounds crazy, and yet…
This novel is functioning at levels I’ve not got a full sense of yet, meta-meta, and I am sure that a character is called “Conrad White” must be some kind of joke I just don’t have the punchline for. Also notable is the Toronto of the novel, as vivid and electrified as Maggie Helwig’s in Girls Fall Down, and as well featured as that in Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be. Satirizing literary and media culture, whilst on a deeper level exploring the limits and danger of imagination.
So much is also going on beyond the tension, the whodunit, the fear. Pyper’s novel an exploration of story, the nature of story and our lives as stories. Says Conrad White, “We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.” Patrick unwilling to admit his own story, perhaps still stunned by the death of his wife, and so in place of his story is a void of sorts. A void he fills by appropriating Angela’s story, that of “the terrible man who does terribly things.” The ramifications of this theft are manifold, and awful, becoming the motivation for whatever it was that snatched his son, leading Patrick into the darkest corners of both society and himself.
August 5, 2008
This Weekend for Me
This weekend for me was four days long, and it was filled with ordinary lovely things like reading and writing, a haircut, dinner out and trip to the movies. Plenty of book buying, a lovely brunch with Moms, peach-pie baking and finding out our good friends are having a bebe! A trip to the ROM, bbqs a plenty, and then today to Toronto Island with the Caserights, and we had a splendid picnic under a tree, went paddling, and then Stuart and I rode our bikes from Wards’ to Hanlan’s Point, and home again, and now we’re absolutely knackered.
This weekend, without consciously intending to, I continued my Westness pick with a rereading of The Stone Angel. So glad to reacquaint myself, so appreciative of my recent reading of Lilac Moon for historical context, but I do think that Laurence’s skills as a novelist increased exponentially with the rest of the Manawaka series. Which, I’d think, is the most we could ask of a writer. And then more Westness with Sharon Butala’s collection of short stories Real Life, which is oh-so solid. And then The Killing Circle, which wasn’t West at all, but it kept me from falling asleep last night due to a) terror and b) I couldn’t stop reading. Review to follow… I’m now rereading Late Nights on Air.
July 31, 2008
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
Writes Juliet Ashton in a letter to Dawsy Adams, “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.” But it might be, homing instinct or no homing instinct. That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a novel comprising a selection of correspondence, primarily to and from Juliet Ashton. Ashton, living in 1946 London with its war wounds still so fresh, is a writer seeking the subject of her next book– she’s previously published a commercially unsuccessful biography of Anne Bronte, and a very popular collection of humorous columns she’d written during the war. Her interest is sparked by a letter she receives from Dawsy Adams, a pig farmer from Guernsey in Britain’s Channel Islands, who has somehow acquired a book that was once hers, Juliet’s name and address inscribed on the inside cover.
Dawsy has written seeking other books, which are proving hard to find where he is– Guernsey still a long way from recovering from 5 years of German occupation. Books, Dawsy explains, have become very important to him, and his friends, far more than it was ever figured they would be during that evening they devised their Literary Society as a ruse to hide a pig from the Nazis.
Letters between Juliet and Dawsy, Juliet and her publisher, and also from the other members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, come together to form a marvelously engaging narrative, with characters so real their letters shout off the page. Their stories a testament to the power of literature upon all different kinds of people, as solace during hardship, to bring friends together. Portraying also the horrors of life during occupation, Juliet reflecting that all through the war she hadn’t thought much about the Channel Islands, and I don’t imagine many of us since have thought about it more. A fascinating, if awful, piece of history, and Mary Ann Shaffer’s enthusiasm for this subject is evident in her work. Unnatural exposition the risk of any epistolary novel, and where it happens here (which is rarely) is with these stories, these historical details, but we forgive them because they hold such interest.
The novel’s prose lives up to all the great works it references, which is certainly something. Offering such a fabulous critique: Juliet writes, “P.S. I am reading the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu. Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? ‘My dear little Jane, everybody is born with a vocation and yours is to write charming little notes.’ I hope Jane spit on her.”
One Society member writes of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats who excluded WW1 poems due to his “distaste” for themes of “passive suffering”: “Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! …What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr. Yeats.”
I would urge this novel upon you, with all its wonderfully funny writing, shocking in places, and in other turns sad. Hardly shying away from the brutal realities of this time period, absolutely and bravely unflinching, but also masterful at capturing the nuances of ordinary life. A certain erudition evident, but always underlined by a joy– in books, in reading, in human relationships, and the connections between all three.
(Read DGR’s Review.)
