April 15, 2008
A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock
Nathan Whitlock’s first novel A Week of This: a novel in seven days opens on a Wednesday. Such a midweek start suggesting we’ll find the characters in the thick of it, “it” being the titular “this”. A week of ordinary life in an ordinary town, all of this subverting notions of “ordinary”. Subverting notions of narrative trajectory as well, beyond the Wednesday start. Before the novel even begins, its epigram indicates stasis: from Howard’s End, “Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere.”
Whitlock successfully demonstrates that “nowhere” is somewhere after all, or at least a place worth writing stories about. The atmosphere he creates for the small town of Dunbridge analogous to the effect of this novel’s beautiful cover illustration: infinitely bleak and yet striking, the sky an unending grey. If his characters ever had any will, the bleakness surrounding them only crushes it, and yet they live here all the same– by which I mean both that they reside and they exist.
Indeed these people do exist, though you mightn’t know it to read Canadian Literature. I can think of some exceptions– Alice Munro has dealt with places like this, but usually in retrospect, long after her characters have wised up and moved to Toronto and Vancouver. But what about those who are left behind? Those for whom, for various reasons, getting away just hasn’t been an option.
It’s not like Whitlock’s Manda doesn’t want to get out of Dunbridge. She’s not even from there, having arrived in town as a teenager with her father and her brother, to escape their crazy mother. Her outsider status allowing her to view the place more objectively than those around her, but somehow she’s stayed, somehow she’s now she’s lived there half her life. She’s married to Patrick, whose entire mind is occupied by keeping his sports store afloat, except for the part of it desperate to have a baby, and Manda isn’t interested. She also has to contend with her troubled brothers, the fallout from various past traumas, and her wreck of a house. Houses being, I believe, perfect metaphors for their inhabitants’ very selves, how the world surrounds them, and Manda hates hers. It had been her in-laws’, and now there’s a hole in the roof, and the rooms are of full of decades of detritus that weighs her down.
Manda is a great character, altogether realized. She’s mean, which I appreciate– I don’t find nearly enough mean and sarcastic heroines in books who we’re still meant to like. During her week of this, we get a sense of what she has to contend with and her impossible powerlessness against her fate. She is powerless for no reason except that she’s tired, this is the way she’s been going for years now, and that hole in her ceiling will never be fixed. Similarly, we see the people around her– her husband, her brothers– as passive, even willing victims of circumstance. There are no moments of illumination, and even the bad news doesn’t change much.
A Week of This is a good story, an assertive, strong and a readable novel (though at times its structure necessitated too much explaining), which, in spite of its deliberate directionlessnesss, has momentum and characters worth caring about. Where the novel faltered, I found, is when it tried to be more than that. When Whitlock’s attempt at “nowhere” became more of a statement than a story, and it was clear his approach wasn’t necessarily for the sake of story itself.
Manda gets a book from the library that is clearly Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. A book which is definitely not my favourite, I assure you. Manda trying and failing to get into it, finding it boring. Finally, she decides that the book is not only boring: “This book wasn’t simply too smart for her, it was condescending, and for that there was no forgiveness.” A fair assessment maybe, but it was out of place in the novel and not sufficiently pursued for such a strong statement. Moreover it opens A Week of This up to criticisms, comparisons that would have been irrelevant otherwise, even unfair.
All I could think of as I read this was Michael Ondaatje’s treatment of the working class– his romanticizing of these men in their terrible jobs that often killed them, and how he rendered them poetry, but this undermining the reality of their lives. Fair enough. But I’m not sure Nathan Whitlock treats his “working class” any better. Like Ondaatje he uses them to make a statement, about the kinds of people we should be writing about, reading about, the kinds of lives that are worthwhile. I say “uses”, because I don’t believe Whitlock pursues the realities of their lives altogether, their jobs and whole lives at times functioning as props.
For example, Manda works in a call centre, but we never see her actually working–conspicuous in a novel so focused on minutiae. We only find out in one paragraph what her calls entail, but there is no indication of what her work is really like. We see her get up, go to work, have a coffee, time passes, and then it’s the end of the day. Home she goes. Similarly, Patrick’s days in his failing shop are glossed over, the hours themselves. And I realize that work is not always central to one’s identity, and I can definitely empathize with having a job so crap, you leave it behind when you leave the office, but these workaday hours are still the major portion of these characters’ days, the root of a lot of their despair. The fact of these hours could have been pushed harder– perhaps they should have been.
I liked this book– otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about it. But Whitlock is being so provocative, I could not help but respond. In a novel with so much going on, my criticism would have been a minor point had the argument against Ondaatje not been made so strongly, making me consider the various ways it might connect to the rest of the story. I’m not even convinced it really did connect, actually, and I know the argument detracted from a novel that was clearly substantial enough without it. A novel that might say the very same things but in practice instead, which is a much more of a compelling argument.
April 13, 2008
The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala
A year ago, a young British woman teaching English in Japan was murdered– to say brutally so just seems redundant. The story was big in the British press, resonating with me in particular as she’d worked for the same company I’d worked for when I lived there. The articles noting places I knew, cultural references that had once been my every day, the woman’s whole life familiar, right up until its ending which was so foreign as to be otherworldly, and this was my fascination.
It was distant enough to stay a story, however. It might as well have been fiction, until a couple of months later when I learned that as big as the world is, a good friend of mine here in Toronto had actually known the deceased girl. In fact she had been there when the girl went missing, a strange coincidence, but of course, not my story to tell. It was jarring though– the otherworldly transgressing into my own universe. Yet, with that universe remaining the same as it ever was. The multitudinous threads connecting me to a story that had nothing to do with me, and what kind of a narrative is that?
I have marked up most of my copy of Sharon Butala’s memoir The Girl in Saskatoon. I’ve underlined passages, written notes in the margins, drawn diagrams on the endpapers to get a better grasp of Butala’s arguments. And, as you can see, I’ve started my review on a tangent, but it ties up, I promise. All of this, I think, an appropriate response to Butala’s book, which is a veritable literary hybrid. Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package. Butala making her process transparent– her very act of containment the result of years of work. It only being natural that the pieces might spring back out again once the package is given to the reader. So do please pardon my tangle.
In 1962 in Saskatoon, the body of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, a twenty-three year old nurse and beauty queen, was discovered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. She’d been missing for two weeks before her body was discovered, and it was determined she’d been raped and murdered; her killer was never found. Writer Sharon Butala, who’d been a classmate of Alex’s though not exactly a friend, has lived with this story quite central to her consciousness since then, as have many residents of Saskatoon. Butala approaches the story with questions in mind: what is its attraction and hold, what happens to the memory of it over time, how could something like this even happen? Moreover, “To a girl just like me, to someone I knew?”
The book begins with Butala revisiting the murder scene, observing no sign of what had happened. This disturbing in itself, but Butala extends this: if we don’t remember, then such a thing could happen to anybody, and become commonplace and unremarkable. The causality of this seeming backward to me as I read it– surely she means our not remembering makes it commonplace, and being commonplace, of course, it could happen to anyone? But I drew my diagrams, and I thought about it. Realizing that it’s not even the possibility of such an evil act in practical terms that so horrifies Butala, but the commonplaceness. If such a thing is commonplace, regardless of its occurrence, this means that evil is present where we are, altogether pervasive. And it’s coming to terms with this that is central to her narrative, as she struggles to “solve” the murder, to pin down the trouble to something specific. She can’t, such is the world, and this is one of the paramount lessons of her life.
We try to pin down cases like this not just out of curiosity, but to protect ourselves and our sense of security. Butala writes of reactions to Alex’s murder– if there is no killer upon which to place the blame, then surely Alex herself must be culpable. If the victim brought it upon herself, then we who play by the rules are not at risk. “The rules” being the strict and often contrary expectations placed upon women in the 1950s and early ’60s– that they must be sexual, but only so far, their limited choices for the future against the rest of the whole wide world.
There is a line we draw in our own consciousnesses, between what is possible and that which isn’t. Most often this barrier is quite literal– a movie screen– and our sense of order is disrupted when this line is violated. We try to maintain it all the same– “she was asking for it” being such a divide between us and her. Between us and the evil that Butala is trying to understand– forty years later she is horrified at the coldness with which she’d received the news of her classmate’s death, her lack of reaction: “…it would be quite a few years before I would teach myself that I had to tear that barrier down and allow myself to feel, no matter how painful, how horrible or sad– how very difficult it is to know the world as it is.”
And difficult to know in very practical terms also– initially Butala has a vision of gathering the pieces of this story, of putting them together as a writer does, and emerging with something complete, the mystery solved. She quickly realizes the process is much more convoluted: the pieces she gathers are mismatched, broken, contradictory, elusive. At one point she discovers that Alex had kept a diary, that that diary had bizarrely been written in code, that her sister had later burned it– these are the kinds of details she was working with. The official authorities putting up blocks in her investigation, withholding information. Eventually she realizes that “everybody had turf to protect, everybody had kept secrets; they had kept secrets from each other, and from me, and most of us, I was beginning to think, from themselves.”
The mystery is never solved, and even as readers we don’t get the whole picture. Throughout, Butala breezes past details of strange phone calls in the night, her phone being tapped, and “other scary incidents I haven’t put into this book”. This is quite a gap in the narrative, but not altogether out of place, being a narrative full of gaps and probably analogous to Butala’s own experience. She says herself at the end, that her book didn’t turn out to be about what she’d intended at the start: “I saw at last that there is truly no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle,a tidy satisfying end…. The story was, instead, about story”
And what story is about, instead of answers, is connections. However ultimately meaningless or incidental, for those people who create stories, connections are the hinges. Between Butala and Alexanda– their similar rural origins, they were in the drama club, that Butala had a summer job at the hospital where Alex would begin her nursing career. No, the two hadn’t been friends, hardly knew one another– just as I never known the murdered English teacher– but this very fact can make the connections all the more curious, significant.
Butala makes connections even more far-reaching– “that only months after [Alex’s] murder, Watson,Walter and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA”, which might come to be important to the case. That the day after Alex’s disappearance, Marilyn Monroe would sing her infamous “Happy Birthday” to the US President. Butala writes, “By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them.”
These connection
s are solid. The only thing incidental, I think, being that their connectivity is not their very point. And these threads are worked so thoroughly through the very fabric of our lives, so what isn’t significant then?
The story that Butala comes to write is that of two girls who, “although mere acquaintances and never close friends, had been linked by circumstance and history, and by memory.” An elegy for a disappearing world– I began to count the buildings Butala notes have been torn down, including the high school, movie theatre, the legion hall, the places where both she and Alex had lived. She is observing Saskatoon and having much the same reaction she had to the murder scene: how could anything have ever happened if there is no way to tell? This book being her testament.
Butala writes Alex as her parallel self, beautiful while she was plain, dead while she got to live. In their similar origins examining the possibilities of her own narrative, the story she has come to take for granted– but for a few details, the murdered girl could have been her. Butala acknowledges the strength she gains in creating this story, engaging with the world and feeling a part of it in a way she never supposed she could. But she invests Alex with just as much strength– the exchange is fair. Invests her with a voice, her story told however incomplete, and most of all with the fact of memory.
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
April 8, 2008
On poetry, and Sitcom by David McGimpsey
Yesterday I read my husband “Summerland” and “Invitation” from David McGimpsey’s Sitcom, published in 2007 by Coach House Books. From the latter poem I was particularly fond of a reference to “the summer I said I would ‘concentrate/ on my portfolio’ and ended up/ taking extra shifts at a frozen-yogurt stand”. Or the last line of “Summerland”, “The future will be full of shiny new books/ and I promise to skim at least one of them.”
I read these poems aloud, and realized that such a reading made McGimpsey’s poetry come to life. That my voice could not help but take on new inflections, hang on certain tones, take up a rhythm that’s not altogether apparent on the page.
“That’s good,” said my husband when I was finished, and then he said, “but those sound like stories.” We thought about it for a moment. “What makes a poem anyway?” he asked. We were both quiet, and then I flipped through the book a bit. “Line breaks, I suppose,” I said in a small voice, but it was clear that I wasn’t sure.
What does make a poem anyway? The best I can get is that I’d know one if I saw it. And I certainly know that David McGimpsey’s work is poetry, but it’s why I’m not sure of. It must be something more than line breaks, though they were the most obvious clue. It was also something my voice took on when I read it, the rhythm. But his poems aren’t poetry as I’ve always known it– he’s short on rhyming couplets, his poems stretch on for pages and pages. And while his allusion are classical as one might expect, they’re coupled with just as many allusions to Mary Tyler Moore, Elvis, Hawaii Five-O, and Gilligan’s Island. Also to Suddenly Susan and Judging Amy, just so you don’t think he’s stuck in a ’70s rut.
I bought this book last fall after hearing about it on the radio, intrigued about whether or not pop culture was worth making art about. That was also about the same time I learned that Kimmy Gibbler had become an academic, and so I’d decided that anything was possible. Though now I realize that it’s only possible because David McGimpsey knows all the rules he is breaking– this made clear by his broad allusions, by his control of language. And while his collection is fun, is funny, it’s in no way frothy. Instead, underlined by a caustic bitterness and certain sadness which makes the humour all the more remarkable, actually. And that 60% of the jokes went over my head didn’t mean I wasn’t enjoying myself.
I would wonder about any culture one couldn’t make art of, but I wonder still if McGimpsey ever thinks he might have availed himself of tools lacking in richness. Is their lack of richness the point, or is McGimpsey to show that this stuff is rich after all? I could make an argument for either side. And what then of the nature of poetry anyway? Heady questions, all of these, which– even short of answers– must mean that Sitcom is doing something right.
April 8, 2008
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
When I learned to write short stories by reading other short stories when I was younger, the general sense I got from my reading was that stories had to be strange. For how else but through quirks could you fit whole narratives into pages? Construction otherwise seemed impossible, which was why the earliest characters would always wake up and it was just a dream, or later there would be corpses in bed, characters who were soulless automatons, graveyard shifts, girls in attics, and/or sex with strangers in impossible places. Real life didn’t seem to happen here.
I figured that form dictated content, and I don’t have to tell you that my imitative efforts were terrible. I didn’t understand how stories could be organic instead, growing to determine their appropriate container. That there could be stories like those from Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection Unaccustomed Earth, which fit so comfortable in their containers they didn’t even need to proclaim themselves. Lahiri’s are stories for people who don’t even realize that they like short stories yet. Not that they don’t take full advantage of the form, but rather she writes with such choice details, clear focuses, sensible narratives and cadences that the reader comes away ultimately satisfied. Like reading a novel, but then it’s not a novel, and perhaps you might like stories after all.
Which is to say that as stories, these aren’t especially challenging, seemingly without blocks and wobbles, straightforwardly put. But of course they’re not simple either, their richness so incredibly subtle, and subtlety is definitely Lahiri’s forte. As well as her endings, which might be the ultimate reason her stories are so satisfying (and I wish I could take credit for that revelation, but actually I read it in this review, where Lahiri is called “a master of endings”). Which also is not to say that Lahiri’s stories are easy, because they’re not– the ending of her final story “Going Ashore” packs such a wallop, you’ll be closing the book a bit stunned; the climax of “Only Goodness” is so devastating, you’ve got to read it twice to make sure you’ve got it right; dynamics between certain characters (a young man and his new stepsisters, the awkward student infatuated with his roommate, a tired husband and wife) absolutely horrifying in their details.
The Unaccustomed Earth is an extension of Lahiri’s previous work in a way that is logical, if not quite predictable. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter of Maladies and her novel The Namesake considered Bengali immigrants and their early experiences in America. The characters’ focus was always their children, and here lies the extension as Lahiri makes these children the focus of her newest collection. Children whose parents had moved across the world and therefore have always been accustomed to rootlessness, coming into adulthood knowing no other way. Belonging everywhere, but also nowhere, disconnected by culture and geography from all that went before them.
I will say that I did not love Unaccustomed Earth as much as I did Interpreter of Maladies, but that is perhaps too high an expectation to put on any book. But I don’t mean that this is an inferior collection. Rather that it was an inherent optimism, the hope underlining the first collection that made me fall in love with its stories. Arrival in America, with all its hardships, was still its own happy ending, resolution. Whereas Unaccustomed Earth shows that few stories ever tie up so easily– loss is the rule here, whether it be through death, trouble, or relationships that never were for the gaps that lie between us. Many families in these stories move back to India eventually, for various reasons, the rootlessness only exacerbated then.
But though my heart was not warmed, it was certainly moved, this collection as stunning as one might expect. Lahiri is only getting better, still making stories out of the realist stuff of life, and a life so true that her forms are ultimately secondary.
April 4, 2008
On poetry, and Six Mats and One Year by Alison Smith
Kate Sutherland has put out the challenge— why don’t we talk about poetry this month? And since I’m celebrating with my own Poetic April, I thought I’d take part. First by answering, why don’t we talk about poetry? I know I don’t because I don’t have the confidence. I could talk about it casually as I do fiction, but I’d feel altogether vulnerable. Even accessible poetry– I lack the formal approach to it. But I will forget about that, if you promise to be patient and tolerate my pedestrian meanderings. If you promise to also tolerate my own little poems too, which I’m only writing for my very own self.
All of these provisos, basically because I suspect I’m quite poor at all of this, and it’s my nature to deprecate myself before you do. Though I have another reason for avoiding talk of poetry– a formal approach I say I lack, but I am not sure there is even one. I understand “novel” and I understand “story”, but “poem” seems as broad as days are long, as are ways to read one. I understand that this is true of stories and novels too, but it seems truest of poems most of all. When everything is so contained, absolutely nothing extraneous– including the reading experience– it seems impossible to find a poem the same way twice, rendering generalizations impossible. This becoming all the more evident as I begin to reread collections of poetry I own.
I reread Canadian poet Alison Smith’s book Six Mats and One Year today. Published in 2003 by Gaspereau Press, I must get away from the poetry for a moment to comment on this book’s design. The cover laid out like a Japanese tatami room, six mats of course, grooves in between them. The book is gorgeous. When I read it the first time, the poems were so tied to my own experience as I was living in Japan at the time. It was remarkable then to see the most quotidian details of my own life expressed with poetry– the ticking clock in an English conversation school, purikura shots, “counter girls heralding the public in a caffeinated chorus”, Hello Kitty, the yearning for home (“I left as we do our childhoods: rushing to escape, without souvenirs”) which I knew would soon be my own experience.
To find this book again four years later was quite different. No longer did it resonate so personally, and perhaps it was the schooling I’ve had since then or what a better reader I’ve become, but I read the poems more for themselves than for what of me I found it them– Smith was attempting more than just a scrapbook of my memories after all. I found an odd nostalgia, of course, but now I was able to achieve distance. Also to understand some structures and images that had seemed abstruse before.
Here is the problem– I can’t articulate much about the language. Perhaps with some practice I’ll get better and will revisit this book later in the month? Now I can just say that Smith uses accessible language, though some of it wrapping up strange and curious images. Other bits laid out in ultimate simplicity: “Me too, I realise, I do/ want to be happy.”
The poems are structured cyclically, the “one year” of its title with four sections. The first concerns teaching in an English conversation school, the second written about time spent living at a Buddhist monastery. Home creeps into the third section, as the novelty and exotic wears away. The final section is home again: “where you can finally read/the signs on the wall”.
In each poem and the collection as a whole, Smith blends the material and spiritual in an airy fashion. Accepting Japan’s incongruities, its seamless gaps (the priest’s second son in his Ghostbusters t-shirt), all contained within a perfect package. The literary embodiment of a gaijin‘s Japan.
March 30, 2008
At a Loss For Words
Governor General’s Award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen’s latest novel At a Loss for Words is deeply referential. Its tone in the tradition of Lynn Crosbie’s Liar and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (I wonder, is “Spurned Lover Narrative” actually a Can-Lit sub-genre?). And Schoemperlen certainly doesn’t couch these references– using Crosbie’s “There is some truth to this, like all lies” from Liar as her epigraph; later she writes “But I did cry at the train station… I had an epiphany about the fact that there are a goodly number of public places in which crying is acceptable, train stations definitely being one of them…”.
But by far, Schoemperlen’s most intriguing reference in this work is to herself. And though usually I find biography a tiresome approach to fiction, the clues in this direction are marvelously intriguing, (perhaps?) intentionally integral to the work. Actually, this story of a writer with writer’s block (“a writer who cannot write”) references many works, the narrator eager to distract herself from not writing, preferring to quote from other books instead (books on writer’s block among them), and at one point she tells us she is quoting herself: “If I may be so bold… here’s a sentence I like: It is only in retrospect that I understand that obsession has nothing to do with love and everything to do with anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty and fear.” This being a line from Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found, so how positively meta.
And obsession is central to this “post-romantic novel”, the narrator recovering from the end of a long-distance love affair. Thirty years after her first love breaks her heart, she meets him again and dares to imagine things will be different. Decides that “being with him again would erase every rotten thing that had happened to [her] in the meantime”. When this proves not to be the case, she’s left shattered, “at a loss for words.” The last point proven otherwise as she writes this novel instead, recounting her romance with hindsight. The story at times tragic, altogether cringe-worthy when it hits close to home. Structured in the second-person, employing recounted emails, a “he said/she said” volleying back and forth, but then it’s “I said/you said”– objectivity is hardly Schoemperlen’s intention after all.
Marketed as “a bittersweet comedy for anyone who has ever loved and lost”, such a description seems to me to be undermine the “bitter”. Because the tone here strikes me as more venomous than sweet, and though the comedy is present, there is nothing light about this book. So much is going on– the blurring of fact and fiction, an exploration of writer’s block, an illustration of the writing life, a social satire. Most essentially though, At a Loss for Words is an exercise in revenge and herein lies its triumph.
March 28, 2008
On the attack
I read Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work this week, after reading this piece on its reception. How curious the way some people read– I cannot fathom. To have your judgment on a work come down to whether or not your liked its characters, for example. Which is even more ridiculous in the case of fiction, but strikes me as dangerous all the time. To read a memoir is not to stage a character assessment. Maybe I just don’t read enough books that are enraging so I can’t understand why you’d write a letter to an author that read “Frankly, you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children.”
It seems that some people so ready to judge are incapable of grasping any point of some complexity. It isn’t even ambivalent, Cusk’s portrayal of motherhood, but something richer, truer in its depth. And then that she is accused of coldness, of being unloving, all the while love shines through in every word. When she writes, “I realise… that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.”
It is interesting also, “self-obsession” being knocked about when it was the very point of the exercise. I’ve also just read Diane Schoemperlen’s At a Loss for Words, which could probably pick up some of the same criticism. But what you miss, I think, reading on the attack. People’s capacities to miss the point are quite remarkable.
March 27, 2008
Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish
Convention is insufficient with which to discuss Jane F. Kotapish’s first novel Salvage. I could try to think of analogous works– This Novel meets That Novel, say– but an appropriate hybrid refuses to be imagined. I could stick with plot, but really, which one would I choose? Centrally, this is the story of one woman’s tenuous grasp upon reality after experiencing a traumatic event. Or, this is the story of a woman who spent her childhood speaking to her dead sister in a closet. Or, here is the story of one house, and the story of another. An exploration of mother/daughter relationships utterly unreliant upon precedent. About what happens when maybe-actual saints start appearing in one’s back garden. Each thread a bit of the story here, but each one singularly giving readers the wrong impression.
Perhaps I can get to the point by explaining that I read this book over two days, finished it last evening, and only just now realized that the narrator/protagonist goes unnamed. It is significant, I think, that such a detail could be so unremarkable. Also significant, that indeed in this book, the protagonist speaks to her dead sister in a closet– a detail that might have tripped up my reading in the hands of a lesser writer, but the rest of the story carried me right through this. Or that this story of a communication breakdown between mother in daughter, its origins in childhood trauma, could be so invested with pure love. That love can ever be so aching.
I have selected these details to demonstrate Kotapish’s firm control of her narrative, everything exactly as it should be, nothing as you’d think it is. The narrator lacking a name, but I don’t even notice, so sure is her voice, so essential are the details with which we’re provided. Which are that this woman has witnessed something traumatic, something so awful that it’s torn her right out of her life, and she’s returned home again, purchasing a house not far from where her mother lives. Such familiar ground, however, reawakening troubling childhood obsessions, and this woman must navigate the narrow ground between her demons as she edges towards recovery.
But all this might give the wrong idea still, for Salvage is terribly funny. Darkly funny, naturally, but ultimately this is an uplifting book, caustic and ironic throughout. Its disparate plot threads and various tones all contained by a brilliant use of language, of imagery, both of which are surprising and edgy. Lines like, “The only reason I can recollect my father’s face at all is because I saw it catch fire in our back yard when I was three.” Lines like every other line as well, and the dialogue, which maps relationships’ whole histories. All recounted in the same even tone, a curious perception, both of which are the effects of damage, of trauma undeniably, but are no less for this, casting the ordinary world in a light entirely new.
It is this same even tone, this perception, which keep the trauma from seizing the narrative. Preventing sensation from taking over, from spiraling out of control. Kotapish’s language keeps her narrative in line– the perfect container. The scene in which the woman recounts the event that drove her towards breakdown manages to be so beautiful and awful, a horror perfectly choreographed– a memory after all.
Salvage is an astounding first novel, challenging the bounds of a novel’s capabilities, demonstrating the startling complexity of emotion. Language employed with the utmost exactitude, bending reality in fascinating ways.
March 21, 2008
The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear
After nearly a week of reading through short zippy novels in a flash, there was something meditative about settling down with Kyo Maclear’s first novel The Letter Opener. It’s a slower read, rumination more than narration, quiet in its power, and subtly sharp.
With such an intriguing premise: Naiko works for Canada Post at their Undeliverable Mail Office. Her job is to direct items stranded in transit, where this is possible. Incorrectly addressed envelopes containing school photos, love letters, birthday money. And “the rubble”, items sprung loose from their packaging: “Lesser goods… Boy Scout badges, vacation photos, Magic Markers, teeth moulds. A medical X-ray. A book of Sufi poetry. A Leonard Cohen audio cassette. Nothing was too small to matter to someone, somewhere.”
This emphasis on things comes to link the story’s various threads: the strange disappearance of Naiko’s colleague Andrei, a Romanian refugee; Andrei’s own history and that of his mother, a Holocaust survivor; the story of Naiko’s fractured family, particularly her mother who is in the early stages of Alzeimers Disease; Naiko’s own problems with intimacy, as she navigates her relationship with boyfriend Paolo; even the end of the Cold War. Such a wide range of subject matter, some of it heavy and loaded, but Maclear uses these ideas effectively, in new and intriguing ways– her deftness with facts perhaps making clear her creative origins in non-fiction.
The narrative sounds crowded, but Maclear’s expansive prose creates the effect of ample space. The novel is also carefully structured to accommodate all these threads, which through Naiko’s own perspective are tied more tightly than they seem. And it is through this perspective that we come to understand a twist on the problem of materialism: not that our society cares too much about “things”, but rather we don’t care enough. How much we lose spiritually from failing to invest our objects with proper meaning, and how much we take for granted.
Though of course conclusions are not so straightforward as this– this is rumination after all. The Letter Opener is primarily the story of Naiko’s own self-discovery, as she realizes her constructions of others through their objects tells more about her own self than anybody else’s. And this story is fascinatingly beautiful, a satisfying read.
