May 4, 2008
Unmistakably hers
In the Paris Review Interviews, II, from Toni Morrison: “There is no black woman popular singer, jazz singer, blues singer who sounds like any other. Billie Holiday does not sound like Aretha, doesn’t sound like Nina, doesn’t sound like Sarah, doesn’t sound like any of them. They are really powerfully different. And they will tell you that they couldn’t possibly have made it as singers if they sounded like somebody else. If someone comes along sounding like Ella Fitzgerald, they will say, Oh we have one of those… It’s interesting to me how those women have this very distinct, unmistakable image. I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit into African-American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.”
Defining what to me are “the two kinds of books in the world”. How extraordinary it is as a reader to come across those “unmistakable” books. To be turning the pages and think, I’ve not read anything quite like this in my entire life. And how vastly different that is from “Oh we have one of those…” These derivative works have their own place of course, they are made to be read, but more easily forgotten.
There is a certain energy you get whilst reading something entirely new. A frisson of infinite possibility, of personal discovery. I felt that way as I read Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife. Here was something I could not explain away by anything I’d read before. This feeling only intensified as I went back and read her previous novels, and gained an understanding of that voice that was “unmistakably hers.”
It’s happened before– the first time I read Grace Paley or Laurie Colwin are two examples I can think of. Immediately afterwards, entire back catalogues have to be explored. And these explorations become journeys into whole worlds we’ve only glimpsed yet. My own literary universe expanding again.
May 4, 2008
The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse
There is a lot going on in The House at Midnight. Too much? Is this a tale of friendship, a ghost story, academic-gothic ala Tartt? With classical allusions and the Bacchae– but really? Requisite clever trendy urbanites, Oxford grads the lot of them, and a healthy dose of zeitgeist. A group of friends and a house cut off from the world, and whatever unfolds. One might ask, Lucie Whitehouse, what are you doing?
And we would ask Whitehouse, the author, because her novel is so obviously constructed. Her hand is always right there, pushing the plot forward, making her people speak. There is nothing organic here, perhaps Whitehouse with her literary agent background knowing too well what it takes for a book to succeed. Leaving absolutely nothing to chance.
All this sounds like criticism, and it sort of is. Because Lucie Whitehouse is not untalented. What she has done here is create an immensely readable book that I devoured in a day. Narrated by Joanna, whose friend Lucas has just inherited a country house from his uncle. A perfect place, he feels, for their friends to gather on weekends, a break from London. They’ve all been friends for nearly a decade now, still close but branching out in separate ways. The house’s isolation serving heighten their bonds and widen their rifts. Joanna sensing something sinister pulsing within the house’s walls, and her fears turn out to not be unfounded.
So if Whitehouse set out to write a piece of decent popular fiction, she has definitely succeeded, “popular” overriding the other elements of the book I’ve already noted. The story light enough, a bit of smut, and though the shocking end is not quite all it wants to be, still a good book for a plane journey. My reservations however, because I get the feeling Whitehouse was striving for more, ticking boxes rather than writing good prose, to straddle “literary” and “marketable” at once– it’s all a bit obvious. The two categories are not mutually exclusive of course, but here they appear to be. Definitely falling on the side of marketability though, so you’ll probably find you like it anyway.
April 30, 2008
A dozen more
Just when I’m down to just one book, I begin to read a dozen more. With great pleasure, I’m finished up The Picnic Virgin, an anthology of new New Zealand writing, edited by Emily Perkins. Also just began Volume 2 of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. And the new issue of Descant— last night I read R. Samuel Bongard’s “The Eye of the Beholder” and it was everything. I’m also rereading Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?”, for I am curious. I am going to be reading Gale Zoe Garnett’s novella Room Tone, rereading Novel About My Wife, and also starting The House at Midnight, which is said to cross Richard Curtis with Donna Tartt, so I am intrigued.
April 30, 2008
On Poetry, and Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time
So thank you to Poetic April, for I believe you had a firm hand in the leaves on the trees. Thank you for the books I’ve read, the books I’ve bought, authors discovered, poems devoured, the little ditties I wrote myself, and for the spirit of it all. Thank you for giving me the confidence to take on poetry, and come away not defeated. For the fun with words you inspired, and for providing a vehicle with which to convey avocado love.
The final book of poetry I’ve read this month is Carol Ann Duffy’s Mean Time. I’d read her before, much enjoying her collection Rapture which came out a couple of years back. Mean Time was a bit of a departure from the other books I’d read this month– not being new, being British, Duffy a more established poet. Her poems also tending to be less personal narratives or confessionals. Their purpose to tell whole stories, to fill whole rooms and entire scenes with meaning.
I love “Litany” and “Before You Were Mine”, but the whole book read itself. Such a pleasure. A great place to leave you, I think, Poetic April. I’ll be back in a year, and of course will drop by from time to time before then.
April 27, 2008
The Octopus by Jennica Harper
I used to have this sticker with a picture of a boy and a bear standing on the top of Planet Earth, set against a black starry sky and the bear was pointing up. The words coming out of his mouth said, “Look up there.” The image to me is the definition of “wonder”, and it kept occurring to me as I reread Jennica Harper’s book The Octopus yet again.
Wondrous things dominate this collection: prairie skies, cinema, rocket ships, spacemen, music, snowstorm, beaches, breasts, mothers, and extraterrestrial life. Some of these things ordinary but made new through widened eyes. From “Cinema Paradiso”: “Only a true believer/ sits on the edge of her seat at the movies/ like they do in the movies./ I am such a believer.”
In the long poem “The Octopus”, this wonder is questioned, as two former lovers have the same conversations they’ve always had. “Something we could not let go:/ all the time spent, the conversations/ run and rerun, we didn’t think we would/ have the strength to have them/ with another person.” The other love who sees such wonder as self-indulgent, who “can’t condone the reckless hope/ of finding some other life out there.” He points elsewhere instead: “If Sagan and his crew really wanted an alien,/ you say, they would look to the octopus…” He is “afraid all this probing/ will have been a waste.”
But to our narrator, the wonder has been enough, and so too the wondering: “the girl on the beach… but is it a waste that I got to dream her?” Pointing up, and wondering what is out there in the universe, asking where did we come from and where are we going. Questions that apply just as much to outer space as to our own histories; the secret to our origins might lie in the stars, but we seek the same answers in our mothers, our families, in the world all around us. In this context everything is worth examining; indeed a praying mantis is a “tiny robot”, we are made up of our elements. And then we can dare to “admit we’re not the only subject/ and can sometimes be the searcher, the verb”.
Harper writes, “All of this talk is just talk./ The truth is, we will never know/ our own future, not even/our own past”. The talk, however, and all the wondering, and the poetry– all this stand as evidence, as an arsenal against empty claims of nothingness. Making it certain: “We Are Here.”
April 27, 2008
Snail's pace
Today was a bit ridiculous, in that I woke up, went to brunch, and then came home and had a nap. And after that I prepared a tea-party. The whole weekend similarly low-key, mellow and pleasant with flowers in bloom and brunch on the patio. Last night was just as crazy, as I stayed home to watch Michael Clayton, and what a movie that was. That so much was going on but so little had to be explained was a wonderful for lesson for this apprentice writer.
This weekend my Emily Perkins kick continued, as I read her first novel Leave Before You Go and absolutely loved it. I’m now reading her second book The New Girl, and as I can’t find her 1997 short story collection Not Her Real Name anywhere around here, I’ve ordered it used off the tinternet, because now I’m quite sure that I can’t live without it. I also read Pulpy and Midge by Jessica Westhead, whose receptionist didn’t even have a name but whose disdain at having to cover the desk during cake-occasions was truer than life.
April 20, 2008
The whole world is out of doors
Though the weekend’s weather has been nothing short of summer, I’ve felt no desire to sit out on a restaurant patio. Mostly because I’ve got case of beer in my fridge, and my own deck just outside my door– such luxury! I’ve never known this before, and we can also open up the double doors into our kitchen and the whole world is out of doors. There’s been plenty of barbeque.
This weekend I picked up Lois Lowry’s The Giver for a quarter at a yard sale. We were in the mood for a walk and got to Type Books, where I picked up The Emily Valentine Poems. I finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was amazing. I like well enough every Bronte that I’ve ever met, but the characters here were dead ringers for people I know, 150 years later. This is disturbing for my sake, but quite an astounding literary achievement and certainly qualifies as “timelessness, so far”. I am so pleased to have followed this bookish recommendation.
April 20, 2008
The Emily Valentine Poems by Zoe Whittall
I realized, from the last book of poetry I read, that I seek out paths allowing access into the poems I’m reading. I suppose this is the way one reads anything, but the paths are usually more straight-forward in fiction. With most cases (and in the case especially of the books I like to read), we’re led through the work with the author holding our hand– even as basically as the points of beginning, middle and end. In poetry, without that guidance, I find myself lost, in particular when form is unfamiliar.
In Zoe Whittall’s The Emily Valentine Poems, pop culture references led my way. I am not sure I would have bought this book at all if not for the title. Other references– musical, literary, and more television– gave me confidence that though I did not know the terrain, I could certainly find my way around all right.
But Whittall’s style represents a quandary for a reader such as I. Her poems are not poems as I was learned them, pentametre iambic or otherwise, and though I sense she is being free with form, stretching its bounds, it all makes me a bit uneasy. By all accounts it should set me free, but see, she is liable to do anything. Who knows what lies on the very next page?
As I go though, I realize it’s worth relaxing for. That the very next page possibly contains a fan letter to Judy Blume, Rayanne Graff, Axl Rose, Corey Haim? So how could I not get along here? A list poem of “Satisfying Soft Victories” (“2) Remembering and using long division”) Much of it like jottings from a notebook, and none of it boring.
I am beginning to see that with a poem you have to read it over and over. By my second and third time through this, I was comfortable enough blazing my own path. The poems more concrete with every read and, however contradictory, ever-changing.
April 16, 2008
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder
When I say that Laurel Snyder’s collection The Myth of the Simple Machines is accessible, I mean that I read the collection and encountered actual pathways down deep into the heart of the message: sometimes literal (as in the line from “Glass”, “Like it or not, this is for you/ so pay attention”) or else constructed from my own experience, my personal connection (“I Covet Everything I Own”). These poems do not put up blocks; the language is ordinary, the images familiar, and I felt comfortable enough to venture inside them. Their simplicity lulling, assuring, but then look– simple is a myth after all. One probably should have known.
That these simple machines would do much more than they appear to. The ordinary language is arranged in extraordinary ways, syntax twisted to catch on, wordplay belying horror, images arranged with every element in its place and things are not what they seem, nor will they stay that way. The seesaw illustration on the cover absolutely fitting, tilting back and forth with every line– hanging on “only”, “despite”, “but”, “and then…” and even when these conjunctions are not present, we sense the same weighing effect.
I got a real sense of narrative as the collection progressed, a coming of age. In the beginning we have “The Girl” and she is small, and she is figuring out how the world works, stumbling and falling. But she’s a clever girl, we’re told– she is both everywhere and elusive, and she is figuring out, using her “simplest solutions”. Enough to have her own voice, her own “I”, examining herself in relation to the rest of the world, conscious of her constructions. Soon pulling away from herself to see the world as it is, in all its complexities and configurations. She has wised up, lessons learned– she keeps her “Triptych(s) of Useful Rules” and she’ll pass them along. But she hasn’t stopped dreaming. The Girl slips like a fish, and I choose to believe that she is happy she is happy she is happy. In sugar or otherwise.
From “Triptych of Useful Rules (Words)”:
Intimacy-
1) You’ll know it when you see it. 2) Anything that lasts longer than it needs to, sentence, look, hand on shoulder. 3) I mean to say, it lingers. I mean both things.
April 16, 2008
Notable things I've encountered
I’ve just finished reading Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb, and am now thrilled to be starting The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Also catching up on periodicals, just finishing LRB and due to read Exile and Walrus.
Notable things I’ve encountered of late as follows: a short story by Hilary Mantel, “Offenses Against the Person”; celebrating postcards (sending and collecting– you might remember that I’m fond of such things); Jhumpa Lahiri in The Star; Justine Picardie on Virago Modern Classics; Orange Prize shortlist; Erica Jong on the sorry state of things, Polly Toynbee’s response (reader commenters: why are you all so angry?) and from the Guardian Blog: “Women don’t secretly hate each other. But they rightfully hate a society that limits them as workers, as writers, as thinkers. Any fight that looks to really change that, count me in.”
