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.

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.