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.
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.
