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.

February 24, 2008

Falling by Anne Simpson

Unsurprisingly the emphasis of Anne Simpson’s novel Falling arrives in unexpected places. Unsurprising, as one might say that Simpson is a poet first and foremost– she has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, she has been shortlisted for a Pushcart– but perhaps that is too easy. And Falling is Simpson’s second novel after all. However I will still assert she is a poet, for poetry is absolutely Falling‘s greatest strength. The usual bones of noveldom– plot and character– to some extent jettisoned for the sake of poetics instead.

And with these poetics, instead of a novel Simpson has assembled a series of moments. Moments so singularly perfect, absolutely realized right down to every atom, that the novel works: the girl Lisa drowned in a stream, the water moving over her fingertips; Ingrid, her distraught mother at the funeral being comforted by her ex-husband, and the hole in the toe of her panty-hose; her brother Damian, unconvinced that there was nothing he could have done, forgetting his mother’s car and arriving home in the morning, and though his sister is dead, he’s fallen in love with a girl.

This is a world constructed not by verisimilitude, but by language. The characters themselves not so much people as a reason for the words, the images, for the moments. And because the language is so remarkable, this is enough to build a world upon. Ordinary images rendered extraordinary– pictures of a brother and a sister joined by a hinge, the thick heat of summer, the imprint of Lisa’s toe inside a shoe. The falls, and that rushing water, which becomes more the guiding force of the novel than a plot is.

Some sections of the book do demonstrate that Simpson is capable of more plot-driven writing. Following an odd but lovely sequence of chapters, which are otherwise unnumbered throughout the book but here counted down from ten– liftoff instead of falling, as Damian finally confronts the force of his grief– causality is apparent, tension is resonant. One thing leads to another, as novels have taught us to expect, and maybe I would have liked more of this, but then perhaps this isn’t the sort of novel Simpson was writing.

She is writing something quieter than this, something subtler. The rushing river and falls a metaphor for life, but also for the state of life in grief. And so the characters will not be so clearly outlined, merely being swept along. Which is only a bit unsatisfying in the case of Lisa, who is just thought of, and yet the reason for the story. Here is a novel constructed around an absence, but one that remains undefined, which is tricky– I would have liked to know her better. But the metaphor works for the other characters, inside their state of grief and amidst the thickness of their atmosphere. The noise, the rush, unceasing.

So perhaps as readers we too must give in to the current, letting us carry us where it may. Here we will find spots of absolutely illumination, and of beauty. And just as it does for the grieving, maybe even for the dead, surely the current will take us someplace new. Follow that poem, momentum enough– towards the river “opened up, opened wide.”

February 18, 2008

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

I feel fortunate that I read Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park through the prism I did. I’m not sure I would have loved it quite so much had I not first read the cbc.ca article describing the book as, “If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007… what she would be writing.” So I was prepared for something Woolfian then, which in my experience has always required a different kind of reading. One in which you let the prose lead you where it may, but paying utmost attention. It’s a significant cerebral investment, and necessitates a period of adjustment upon returning to the real world once again.

From Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there…”.

Which is evident from the start, the main character of Arlington Park‘s first chapter being rainfall. As readers we must trust and follow it, from cloud to downpour, this “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”. As the rain falls over the sleepy suburb of Arlington Park. “The sound of uproarious applause.”

And then it is morning, “the life of Monday or Tuesday”, except being Friday. Here is an entire book of one single day, which is something easily misunderstood. For though Arlington Park is bleak and rainy, the fact that it is of one day only means that it’s difficult to generalize. “This is what women’s lives are”– decidedly Woolf— perhaps, but for these frustrated, angry, middle-class women of privilege, it could be hard to muster sympathy. But then is this lives in general really? Is it not just a Friday? For it is indeed possible to have it rain all day, particularly in England, and perhaps Saturday will be sunny, but this is not our consideration now.

Just one single day (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”). Though of course one day will always have implications of its own.

Juliet Randall, who wakes up from a bad dream that was also the night before, her husband having been inordinately insulting. Her husband, Benedict: “Murderer, she thought.” And though he isn’t, of course. He is not Mr. Ramsay, or even Charles Tansley, and he’d probably allow for a trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. But still, Benedict has been an asshole, and Juliet feels like her entire life has been severed from its legs.

Which is the general feeling of the characters we encounter in Arlington Park, on this particular Friday. Whether they intended to end up here or not, or if they did and it wasn’t what they’d expected, regardless, on this rainy Friday life feels most uninhabitable. And simultaneously inescapable– motherhood and wifehood each a prison. And though privileged middle-class all of these women might be, are they not still entitled to rainy days? For such days are certainly issued, even if they’re not the rule. And of course there are moments, even in the drizzle, where the pure light of life shines through. The innumerable atoms of a Friday are, naturally, quite various.

I could tell you more about these women, about this day, these myriad impressions and innumerable atoms, but they’re trivialized out of their context. Out of context the poignancy of Amanda Clapp’s disappointingly-remodeled kitchen is ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. About how Cusk constructs a whole world in which these women are but cogwheels: “In the children’s playground the women were buttoning coats, brushing down trousers, wiping noses. They strapped their children into their pushchairs, and one after another they let themselves out of the gate: out into the park, out into streets where everything moved, where time set everything whirring and churning and grinding again and you felt the agony of the turning wheels.”

And certainly there are days like this, there are.

February 17, 2008

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters by Richard Greene (ed.)

In the last year I’ve grown fanatically fond of collected letters, though I ended up approaching Graham Greene: A Life in Letters quite differently than the other collections I’d read. A variety of factors could account for this: that though I like Greene’s books, I’ve not read many and knew very little about his life (whereas I am Mitford mad and adore Carol Shields, which just might explain why their letters were devoured so). I wonder if letters really are a good way to get to know a writer/ personality. Of course they’re indispensable to established fans, but for those just finding their feet, I wonder if letters might be overwhelming?

Though this feeling could also be due to the structure of this particular collection. For though it’s editor was clearing instrumental in its shaping (“The material available for this selection is vast– one selection alone fills seventeen linear files, and there are others nearly as large”), his impact is not so apparent in the reading. The book begins with a substantial introduction (biography, historiography), but thereafter editorial content is sparse. Though notes do accompany letters, I didn’t always find illumination quite where I wanted it.

Part of this could also have to do with the broad range of these letters (letters to his mother, wife, children, friends, other literary figures, one-off letters in response from those to fans). Though of course a life is narrative enough, this broadness gives a very liminal and limited impression of Greene. More focus, I suppose, wouldn’t have made “a life” so much, but his development would have been clearer. Of course it was fascinating to realize the consideration with which Greene addressed his letters to such a disparate group of figures, but many letters seemed to lack context. Which might be their point, of course. Perhaps this would be a very good point for me to read more of Greene himself, and seek out an actual biography?

I’ve been dipping in and out of this book for awhile now, which might be reason I’m left with this fragmented impression, but then the book itself was ideal for this kind of reading after all. Every time I picked it up, however, I did read something interesting. And perhaps a fragmented impression is more true-to-“life” than any other– particularly for a figure with Greene’s affiliations. And there was a progression, obviously, from boy to man. He was very much a man of his time, of his world, and particularly interesting are his experiences in “hotspots” which would come to underline his novels– Africa, Indochina, Mexico. A complicated man– letters to his wife and mistresses so full of affection, and his Catholicism, and leanings toward Communism.

My conclusion is that letters serve better as appendices than starting points when assembling a life– however important they are. And that a collection this brief (425 pages) is hardly going to constitute a life, particularly that of one so prolific. But that to Greene’s fans– even those to whom biography is incidental– these letters will shed light on the rest of his work, and bring sympathy to such a complicated character. And even to lesser fans such as myself, a taste of his voice leaves me wanting for more.

February 17, 2008

Abundance

It might be surprising, all the reading I’ve got done this week all the while touring, unless you consider that for me “touring” consists of reading a lot of books in sunny parks whilst sprawled out on green grass. And that there was an abundance sun and grass in our San Francisco.

I’ve got a lot to say about the books just done, which I will do in posts to come. This week I had the pleasure of Arlington Park, Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt, Hobart 8, San Francisco Poems and Anagrams (which was the entire plane journey home). And then home again, I’ve just finished Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, which has been ongoing for ages. It has been my “dipping into” book, to be now replaced by The Paris Review Interviews Vol. II. And I’ve finally started The Poisonwood Bible, which so many people rave about that of course my expectations are high.

February 7, 2008

Bang Crunch by Neil Smith

More than anything, I liked Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch for enacting a scene I’ve been dreaming about for ages: husband and wife get pranked in one of these terrible “comedy” candid camera set-ups they’re always showing on airplanes and/or Canadian television outside of prime time. Turns out the wheelchair rolling down the hill has a dummy inside, in an attempt to catch it wife has fallen down and scraped her knee. Man pops out with a camera, there’s a waiver to be signed, but husband beats the crap out of cameraman instead (tossing camera into a nearby gutter). Why doesn’t this happen more often? Never has violence been less senseless.

This is sort of the way it is with Neil Smith’s collection– it’s full of very cool stuff, good ideas, perfect premises. The final story had me breathing in so sharply I thought I’d swallow myself. The end of the first story did shocking so subtly, I scarcely noticed I’d been hit.

A few stand-out tracks: I loved “Funny Weird or Funny Ha ha?”, starring the woman who fell and scraped her knee. She stores her husband’s ashes in a hollowed out curling rock, which is sort of annoying, but it ceased to be the point of the story for me. Notable too, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, that Smith pitches this woman’s voice so perfectly. “Green Flourescent Protein” was a linked story, and managed the same beautiful sadness, cloaked in a sense of humour. Sympathy sympathy. Smith does it. I also liked “Isolettes”– unconventional drama in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The story made me terribly uncomfortable, but after I realized that there was its power.

Smith’s strengths are not always where he thinks they are. I thought he did pinpoint characters beautifully, wacky premises perfectly formed, but sometimes the writing itself was too conspicuous. The similes and metaphors are unconventional, which works sometimes– for example, “Not a blanket or a shroud of loneliness, but something thinner, tighter. A leotard of loneliness.” Which is awkward, and took me awhile to get my head around, but once I did I felt there was a payoff. Whereas, “A vein in his neck looked as swollen as a garden hose” really doesn’t work at all.

So though I enjoyed this work and would recommend it without reservation, I think it’s the work of a writer finding his feet. Which is to be expected of somebody’s very first book, and imperfect first books always make me hopeful, excited when they have that certain something. I’m pleased that publishers take chances on potential. And this book indeed has that “certain something”, with all the “stuff” packed inside it. Though of course “stuff” does not a short story make– I would lay bets on Smith as a novelist, the longer form forcing him to put away his toys and build up something of the substance that shows in glimmers here.

February 6, 2008

Credible space flight

I’m on the tail end of a short story run– I finished Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien (whose Certainty was one of my favourite books of last year). Now reading Bang Crunch by Neil Smith, now out in paperback. And then back to novels come Saturday morning, as I’ll have airport waiting and flights to pass (dance dance dance). But lately I have found the short story quite delicious– perfect. Which is probably very fitting, as lately I’ve been writing quite a few of my own.

Fabulous things read lately include from Hilary Mantel’s review in the LRB, “Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods.” The Judy Blume profile that Kate was talking about. Boys don’t get it, do they? Bookninja thought the profile went on “a tad lengthily”. And I do wonder if it is girlishness that kept the Guardian Books blog’s celebration of Anne Shirley as one of the few pieces ever there whose comments didn’t descend rapidly into a churlish a*shole contest. Which is not to say that boys are as*holes, but the ones commenting over there usually seem to be. Or commenting most places, actually (but of course, dear readers, not here.)

Also, though I don’t agree with all she says here, I have fallen completely in love with Tabatha Southey. My love for columnist Doug Saunders is much older, but his piece this Saturday comparing today’s terrorists with those of the early ’70s was fascinating.

And also this stellar piece on the Munich air crash 50 years ago in which 8 Manchester United football players were killed, along with the crew members, team supporters, reporters and coaches: “On February 6, 1958, however, the news has only just begun to find the means of spreading itself at speed through the global village. An international network exists, although it is a primitive and unreliable mechanism compared with the digital world of the future.”

February 4, 2008

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead by Eugenides

I’ve written before about short stories and their lack of portability. It’s a bit paradoxical then to have found the solution in the form of a big fat anthology. Perhaps it works because the anthology makes no illusion of portability? Anthologies aren’t great books for lugging around, for reading as you go, but the short story works in this context, functions as itself, best to dip into from time to time. Reading the whole book made me hungry for more, and for more short story anthologies (which is why The Penguin Book of Summer Stories is scheduled as an upcoming heart’s desire).

Perhaps the reason I’ve been so struck by My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro is that somehow every story managed “greatness”. Which sounds entirely subjective, I realize, but seemed quite straightforward with each story I finished. Love also the platform from which many “great” stories are launched from anyway, if not necessarily the most romantic ones.

Editor Jeffrey Eugenides writes in the introduction, “Please keep in mind: my subject here isn’t love. My subject is the love story… The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims– these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment… Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.” Which, I suppose, makes for better reading than roses are red, violets are blue…

Eugenides has chosen such a vast array of stories– some translated from Russian, German, Chinese, from such unlikely co-conspirators as Chekhov and Miranda July. From the short story writers I like the very best– Grace Paley and Alice Munro– to those stories so classic, we scarcely give them a second glance– “A Rose For Emily” or “The Dead”. Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta”. To fall in love with Lorrie Moore for the first time (and yes, I’m lucky indeed). I liked almost every story here, and the few I didn’t, I will still acknowledge are good. This anthology was akin to a party, but crowded with stories instead of people, and I felt privileged to have had them so specially collected, to be able to mix among them.

January 30, 2008

Words I encountered

Words I encountered today whilst reading Nabokov: violaceous; canthus; effluvia; elytra; gouache; basilisk.

January 29, 2008

Must

I’ve been reading bits and pieces lately, but some of it has been incredible. Last night was reading aloud from The New Quarterly 105 “Umbrella” and “Knife” by S. Isabel Burgess who, according to the internet, is also a Ph.D. student in nonlinear physics and pattern formation. Which isn’t all that surprising, actually, and her poems are amazing.

In terms of short fiction, from My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead I’ve fallen in love with “Some Other Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg, and now her collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a must must. (Today I told RR that some days it is my to-read list that keeps me from jumping out my office window).

Online: 12 or 20 Questions with Lynn Coady (whose Mean Boy you might remember how I loved.)