March 19, 2008

How to be bad

So let’s begin with the assumption that the purpose of a book is to impart a lesson, though of course this isn’t something of which I am convinced. Children’s books in particular seem to have this expectation foisted upon them, which might be sensible for practical reasons (so much to learn, so little time, so might as well combine some tasks) but this still strikes me as a limited approach to reading (as well as a bit boring).

But what would happen if we approached adult fiction similarly? I believe it would underline the ridiculousness of what we expect kids to be reading, but it’s still interesting to think about. And for the sake of interestingness then, I will consider two books I read this weekend, both of which I enjoyed immensely: Paul Quarrington’s The Ravine, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy.

Such is the best thing about avid reading, I think– how one book after another can illuminate connections you mightn’t have thought of. Because otherwise, would I have noticed the similar tones of these novels? The identical aspirations of their protagonists, and the tendency of these protagonists to alienate those around them, to choose less effective means of communication, to be mean and often downright awful?

The last point being important as I consider one of Harriet’s few negative Amazon reviews: “Harriet is a mean-spirited little girl… We spent many sessions discussing what was wrong with Harriets positions and perspectives as we went through the book. She is compulsive and obsessive and is in serious grief over the loss of her nurse. These issues were completely glossed over.” From there this fair comment does descend into a bit of madness (“After reading this book, it is obvious to me why the 60s and 70s became a child-rearing society that created the greed, personal lack of accountability, and negativism in the young adults of the 80s, 90s, and new century”), but we won’t think about that part of the story right now…

Because it’s true, Harriet is mean. I don’t know that I would so pathologize her outbursts, but indeed even in all her spirit, she behaves in inappropriate ways. As does Quarrington’s Phil, whose name could be substituted for Harriet’s in a disapproving review of The Ravine. Now remember that we’re assuming the purpose of books is to impart lessons, so isn’t there still something we can learn from characters like these?

Because ideally we would like books to teach us and our children how to be good. But failing that (and inevitably so, I think) isn’t it actually as effective and more realistic for stories to teach us how to be bad? Or more specifically, to teach us how to be bad in the best way possible? Because for most people, badness is going to happen at some point.

Now Quarrington’s prescription is less clear than Harriet’s, whose nurse informs her: “1) You have to apologize 2) You have to lie”. Of course this statement is qualified, but it still strikes me as quite useful advice. Awkward to deal with in “sessions” discussing “glossed-over issues ” and “wrong perspectives” (gross), but realistic and helpful in so many ways. A lesson Phil McQuigge might have been well served by.

Still, what Harriet and Phil are doing is more complicated than what our amazon reviewer supposes. We’re to imagine being them, though we aren’t required to act on that. (Is it that children can’t be trusted to make this kind of distinction?) and this exercise is pointless if a character is morally unambiguous. To me reading has no lesson but this very act of imagining, but what a lesson is that, worlds colliding and all.

March 16, 2008

Consolation

I consider myself lucky, that I’ve never been so ill that I couldn’t read, as for me an extended chance to read has always been the one consolation for feeling lousy. It’s also somewhat fortuitous that I jumped on the YA bandwagon last weekend, and put a whole mess of such books on hold at the library. My mind was dumb and tired this weekend, and nothing could have been more fitting than delving into novels for people a third of my age. Namely Mom The Wolfman and Me, which could have been written yesterday (and there is something unfortunate about this in terms of our own progress). Weetzie Bat, which was magic, and has given me the courage to put anything in a book. And oh, Harriet the Spy– must buy my own copy asap. I think I never read her before because I thought she was a girl-detective and I went off precocious sleuths very early on. But no, she is a writer! And her book is actually more practical than many guides to fiction I have read.

I also finished Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be the other day and I was knocked down by its goodness– there are columnists-turned-novelists and then there are writers, and Onstad is the latter. Her book is funny, wise, wonderful with prose to die for. Hers is also perhaps the best fictional Toronto I have ever read. I will buy her next novel the instant it is available.

March 16, 2008

The Ravine by Paul Quarrington

‘”All cultures promote secrets,’ said Atwood. ‘But the secrets are of different kinds. There are all sorts of places, in literature, where you go to be by yourself, places where you go to make strange discoveries of the soul. There’s the frozen north, the desert, the desert island, the sea, the jungle… We’ve got ravines, that’s about it.'” –from Noah Richler’s This is My Country, What’s Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada

Certainly timely was Paul Quarrington’s Canada Reads victory (his King Leary triumphed) with his new novel The Ravine being released so soon after. Though it was not the hoopla that caught my attention, and I hadn’t even read anything by Quarrington before, but it was the title, the subject matter. I’d spent my childhood growing up on the edge of a ravine, and I know what goes on there. “A negative space,” as Richler puts it, the juxtaposition of suburban wilderness. For me the ravine was mythical, a site of dreams and memories and nightmares, and as a recurring theme in Canadian literature I find that ravines are absolutely fascinating.

The Ravine is very meta-meta, ostensibly a novel written by Paul Quarrington’s character Phil McQuigge, referencing other fictional works, among them a novel with a character called Paul who is based on Phil. Phil is still having the dust settle from the recent explosion that was his life– his wife having left him upon learning he’d had an affair, his job in television lost when his lead character dies under circumstances for which Phil might be responsible. Phil’s brother isn’t speaking to him, old friends think he’s pathetic, and he’s moved into a basement apartment where he writes his novel and drinks.

As in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the ravine acts as a netherworld for both reality and consciousness– a dumping ground for suppressed memories. The source of all his troubles, Phil decides, has been a terrifying incident from his childhood that took place down in a ravine with his brother Jay and a boy called Norman Kitchen. What happened isn’t exactly clear, and the trajectory of the novel becomes an effort to clarify this hazy memory. Eventually by way of a road trip, and then a car chase, the possibility of Phil’s redemption, and a most enjoyable read.

The Ravine reminded me of Cat’s Eye not just because of the ravines, but rather how Atwood had described her novel as “a literary home for all those vanished things from my own childhood.” The Ravine functions similarly: the big wooden televisions, suburban geography, the matinees– and where else are there people called “Norman Kitchen”? He’s like a character from my parents’ black and white memories, the fat kid in a checkered shirts in their class pictures, but almost certainly there aren’t Norman Kitchens in the present. Quarrington has authentically recreated a past that is almost palpable in its details.

Further, he has created a disgraceful character who keeps our sympathy– no easy feat. Phil McQuigge has done some awful things, but he’s been the victim of circumstance, and the intimate nature of the narrative gets us into his head so we can understand him. Or perhaps he just means his self-portrait to to charm us, but it does. Not least because the book is terribly funny, even in the darkest moments, but also due to Quarrington’s narrative control. Which is necessary to hold together a book so seemingly loose, and here is ever so subtle but steady throughout.

March 16, 2008

What a relief

“Harriet… ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute, looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it. She had had an unreasonable fear that it would be empty, but there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself; for a moment I thought I had dried up. She wrote a lot about what she felt, relishing the joy of her fingers gliding across the page, the sheer relief of communication. After a whole she sat back and began to really think hard. Then she wrote again…” –Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

March 15, 2008

Distastrous Combination

I am sick, driven to bed by a disastrous combination of galloping consumption and the dreaded lurgi. Today I got to work from home (but note: not even in quotations) which meant I was done and supine by 3:00, and having since read The Walrus, The London Review of Books, Weetzie Bat and Mom the Wolfman and Me. Now reading Paul Quarrington’s new novel The Ravine.

March 12, 2008

Dance dance dance

Stuart surprised me with a present today, and a tea accessory at that! A porcelain tea infuser, as seen on this rather fabulous tea blog. I also ate a raspberry white chocolate scone at work. Today the sun is shining, hinting spring, and Marian M. seems outdated again.

I just finished reading The Outcast by Sadie Jones, which presents a tonier 1950s British austerity than I’d ever before glimpsed. “If she had been a drawing, she would be drawn with a few lines, and strong ones”, and all its characters seemed as such. And quietly cinematic.

And speaking of cinema, I watched Once on the weekend, particularly due to my friend KD’s endorsement. It was truly extraordinary, and I don’t think I’ve been so convinced by a film in a long time. Any writer could learn loads by understanding the dynamics in that love story, a story where plot seemed secondary to human nature. If that makes any sense. And it’s been on my mind for days and days since, running through my head and not just its music. I think I had forgotten the possibility of fundamental goodness in a film.

Do note that my favourite song right now is “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You” by The Black Kids. And I like that their chosen tracks include songs by Sloane and Lauryn Hill.

March 11, 2008

It's not just me

My husband is now reading Nikolski, inspired by my exuberant praise for the novel last week. So of course I was a bit apprehensive: I had declared Nikolski “perfect”, what if it failed to measure up?

Last night when I came to bed, I tried to ease him into the story. Saying things like, “The beginning’s a bit strange, I know. It’s hard to tell what’s happening but it will make more sense soon, and you’ll get used to the writing style, and soon the prose will string itself right through your mind, and the fish!!” (For it happens that I am going through a period of being obsessed with fish).

And Stuart said, “I love it already. But be quiet, I’m trying to read now.”

It’s rarely such a pleasure to be shushed.

March 5, 2008

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner– much acclaimed when published in Quebec in 2005 and now translated into English by Lazer Laderhendler– is a wonderfully rich puzzle of a book. Which must be explained in vague terms, for vague terms are all it presents us with. Three characters, their lives barely intersecting as they all end up in Montreal, loosely linked by blood ties and a strange “three-headed book”. These barely-intersections filled out by fish, pirates, various islands and rising water. Dickner performing strange and wonderful feats with parallels and opposites: wheat fields and oceans, the Aleutians and the West Indies, orphans and their ancestors, of nomads and imagined home.

The book itself is gorgeous, fish throughout its pages. Throughout the story too, which reminded me of The Raw Shark Texts, but only in that this is a bookish story much concerned with fish– quite a strange preoccupation for one writer, let alone two. But then bookish coincidences seem commonplace after reading this story, which is based around one. The “three headed book”, which connects our three main characters– the unnamed narrator who is a clerk in a bookshop, Noah the disinterested archeologist obsessed with garbage dumps, and Joyce the modern-day girl pirate. Oh, I could add more vague details, the maps, the fish shop, Grampa (a trailer) and Granma (a boat), the compass perpetually pointing towards the Alaskan town of Nikolski, a mouldy library in Venezuela, a couple of mysterious girls.

Nikolski is analogous to the three-headed book of which it speaks: “These are fragments, literally. Debris. Flotsam and Jetsam… It’s a piece of craftsmanship, not a mass-printed object.” And the reason for such a thing? “A passion for puzzles, maybe.” But definitely maybe, for here every word and detail means something. As soon as I finished this book, I couldn’t help but begin it again, and the significance of every sentence I’d read was just compounded. Which is not to say that I read solely towards a solution, which might prove only elusive, I think. But rather that Nikolski‘s puzzle itself was compelling enough, and– no matter the way each bit just “clouded the issue rather than clarifying it”– never ever unsatisfying.

“Nothing is perfect,” so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is. Cheers to Knopf Canada for championing literature in translation in general, French CanLit in particular, and a marvelous CanLit twist as their New Face of Fiction. Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness. His characters are pieces of a puzzle, but they be characters all the same, Dickner somehow choosing exactly the right fragments with which to make this so. Indeed, the novel itself an item of craftsmanship– not quite life but something next door to it– and surely worthwhile in the sum of these parts, more than I have yet comprehended. A sum I still don’t have my head around yet, but I look forward to rereading this book until I do.

March 3, 2008

This weekend I read

This weekend I read Descant 139, and loved in particular “In the Time of the Girls” by Anne Germanacos, the “Synchronicities” section, and poems by Changming Yuan– “delicately hung is this earth/ a bluish cage in the universe.” I also read the February 7 issue of London Review of Books, and “Derek, please, not so fast”— a review of As I Was Going to St. Ives, a biography of Derek Jackson (to whom Pamela Mitford was but a footnote! I had no idea: “To call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats, who seem celibate, faithful, and even tempered by comparison”). The William Faulkner interview in The Paris Review Interviews II was stunningly awful, brilliant and profound. I will soon be starting to read Nikolski, and after that I’ll get to Brighton Rock.

I also began culling my library in preparation for our move. A shedload will be donated to the Victoria College Library Booksale on Thursday, but anyone who wants to can drop by before then is welcome to sort through the stacks. Assuming you know where I live, in which case you’re probably my friend, and I’d be happy to see you anyway.

March 2, 2008

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

It is a curious thing to consider, just what a good book is meant to do. Though anyone who’s ever loved a book, I believe, would know there are a thousand answers. That some books are meant to be enlightening, others amusing, or educational, playful, iconoclastic, challenging, illuminating, inspiring, confirming, terrifying, reassuring, mirrors, windows and the like. For it all depends on the book, of course. And there are some books meant to be curled up in, just like a blanket.

During this past week, Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me was that book for me. This past week, as February sunk its long claws in deeper, I looked for apartments, the sky was grey, I lost a mitten, all my trousers were salt-stained, and the temperature approached -30. So it was a joy to be able to turn away from that, to curl up inside this novel who wears springtime on its cover. To be absorbed by a sunny suburb, the ties of family, friendship, love and all its mini-soap operas. To experience the guilty pleasure of a soap opera, but not to have my mind put on autopilot. You see, that I’m tired and weary does not mean I’m undeserving of a good book– one that is well written, employing interesting language, with well-formed characters, and, while not altogether too much, still has the power to get into my head.

Cornelia Brown has just moved to the suburbs, a surprisingly strange and foreign country. Her instincts are all wrong there, she feels out of place, and she’s mystified by how hard friendships are to come by. A particular source of vexation is her neighbour Piper, Queen Bee of the local of Stepfords. Cornelia is soon befriended by waitress Lake Tremain, however, a single mom with mysterious past.

Cornelia’s voice is the core of this novel, wonderfully intimate, insightful and funny. Her first person narration so clearly defines her character, literary allusions and all, utterly engagingly, for we come to understand why she is loved. Piper’s chapters are told in second person, perhaps fittingly for one who knows herself so little, and de los Santos allows sympathy to build for this often vicious character, heartbreakingly so through the death of her friend. And the third central character is Dev, Lake Tremain’s boy-genius son, deciphering his mother’s secret past to discover the truth of his own origins.

As is the nature of any small community, suburbs in particular, these three characters’ stories come to intersect one another in surprising ways. Sometimes not always as surprising as they’re meant to be, and the plot twist here was just a bit much, but plausibility is never really the point of a book that is a blanket: I just wanted to get away for awhile. By late February I’m wanting comfort, warmth and a mini-holiday, and with all of these requirements, Belong to Me delivered.