January 5, 2009

On Context: Dream Babies and Great Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 30, 2008

The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele

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

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

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

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

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

December 30, 2008

Lush Life by Richard Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 23, 2008

Holidays

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

December 18, 2008

On Nicola Barker's Darkmans

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

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

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

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

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

December 17, 2008

What Elephant? by Geneviève Côté

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

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

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

December 9, 2008

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 25, 2008

Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 18, 2008

Satisfied

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

Also my dinner was really delicious.

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

November 12, 2008

Giller Hopes

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

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