October 22, 2007
The Door by Margaret Atwood
I do not possess the authority necessary to fairly review any book of poems, let alone Margaret Atwood’s The Door. First, I picked up the collection and read the poems straight through, the way you aren’t supposed to. I need to read them again, I need to read the book backwards, or upside-down, or something. However that one such as I, not possessing poetic authority, can pick up this collection and enjoy it– “accessible” has become such a bad word, but what about “appreciatable” with its various connotations?
Many people will read these poems for their poet, which might seem troublesome, but then I find nothing troublesome about people reading poems. Atwood has been prolific of late, with her story collections Moral Disorder and the more unconventional The Tent, her retelling of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad, and Writing With Intent, a collection of nonfiction, all published within the past two years. But Atwood was a poet first, so her poems should not be overlooked, and this collection seems very in keeping with the general sense of her other recent work. In “Another visit to The Oracle”, she writes: “There’s so much I could tell you/ if I felt like it. Which I do less and less./ I used to verbalize a mile a minute,/ but I’ve given it up. It’s/ too hard to turn the calories into words,/ as you’ll find find out too if you live/ long enough.”
Indeed physically Atwood’s once-sprawling texts have grown very slim. The poem goes on, “So I’ve had to edit. I’ve taken up/ aphorism. Cryptic, they say./ Soon I’ll get everything down to one word./ All crammed in there, very/ condensed you understand, like an/ extremely small black star. Like a black/ hole.” Lately Atwood seems to have banished superfluity, and in its place has appeared such a broad canvas of considerations that conciseness is only necessary. Her latest poems range from the personal (“My mother dwindles…”) to the political (“A poor woman learns to write”). She writes of environmental disaster, war and destruction, of art, aging, life and literary celebrity. She writes, “The dog has died./ This has happened before./ You got another;/ not this time though.”
Throughout this volume we receive glimpses of that titular door as it swings open and shut. “The door swings open,/ you look in./ It’s dark in there…” Death, it seems, is what lies behind, and it seems also that her own glimpses are driving Atwood forward. No time for epics, with so much to say. And so perhaps a poem is the perfect package for a message, the whole world rendered tiny and wrapped up in words. To be unwrapped and unwrapped, again and again, in a thousand different ways.
October 21, 2007
A book's right time
“There is only one way to read which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag– and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement… Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” Doris Lessing, 1971. Preface to The Golden Notebook.
Which is a wonderful thought and entirely true. However, like all truths, I can poke holes in this.
On “dropping books which bore you”– a contentious point in reading circles. I rarely do it myself, can think of two or three books in the past year, and why don’t I drop books which bore me? The Golden Notebook is a case in point: last Tuesday afternoon I was pulling my shopping trolley through the Roxton Road parkette, dispairing that The Golden Notebook had ever been written. “I hate it,” I was wailing, as the trolley bumped along. “I’m 192 pages in, and I don’t think I can take 400 more.” Why not drop it, it was suggested to me? “But what a waste of those 192 pages,” I cried. (These are the problems, clearly, of the more fortunate people in the world). “What am I ever going to do?”
Indeed, the book was a slog. Structurally the problem is obvious: essentially broken up into four sections, the first one takes up half the book. The currency of the book was also a problem, as it was not so current nearly fifty years later. Its politics were obsolete, its structure made me wonder if I was being made fun of, I was bored bored bored, there on page 192.
But then I turned to page 193 when I got home, and the whole book changed. Suddenly it made sense to me, and from then on I was enjoying myself. Nothing dramatic had shifted, but the pieces now fit. I understood what Doris Lessing was trying to do with her fragmented, enormous novel. I understood what she was saying about men and women, idealism, writing, the point of art at all. But not completely– so much of this went over my head. I truly believe that Anna and Molly might have had a better time had they spent time with men who weren’t horrible. Indeed a lot of the book was still a bit tedious, but what The Golden Notebook is attempting to capture is life. Or life at a a time, and it does, I think. Not since Woolf have I ever read a text more Woolfian. “I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images”.
I try to read the books I “should” or “ought”, whose authors have just awarded Nobel prizes, because I am not as effective a self-educator as Doris Lessing. I need a bit of help every so often, to fill in my gaps, to fill out the world. And I tend not to drop the books which are boring me either, because so often page 193 is waiting just around the corner.
October 13, 2007
Run by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s new novel Run creates the effect of a snowglobe. First: the snow. A winter storm has coated Boston in white, and as the city’s former mayor Bernard Doyle and his sons Tip and Teddy emerge from a lecture, their vision is obscured. They can’t see enough to even understand each other, and in the midst of an argument Tip steps into the path of a car.
Next: the globe. Tip has been pushed out of the car’s path by a mysterious woman who is hit instead. Her young daughter Kenya, taking care to collect her mother’s scattered things, clearly possesses a wisdom beyond her eleven years, and through various circumstances she is taken into the Doyles’ care. And it seems that she knows them well, their unique history. In the limited construct of this globe, everything is connected.
Kenya knews that Tip and Teddy are the black adopted sons of Doyle and his late wife Bernadette, who also had an older son, whose own disgrace became his fathers’. As Kenya’s mother lies in her hospital bed, secrets are revealed, connections are established, chance is batted about, and lives change. Class and racial lines are underlined and also revealed as rootless. Patchett explores themes of family, the tragedy of motherlessness, she writes of goodness, and who it is we dream our dreams for.
Stepping away from this book, there are problems. Not the connections, necessarily, or the coincidence or chance– this is the stuff of real life, and rings false only in fiction. But the limitations of a story in a bubble are obvious– the outside world knocks at the glass, but it’s not invited in. Patchett is a wonderful writer whose exposition reads like a tale, but it also left me wanting to see her characters outside their confines. I felt as though this story was just stretching its legs.
But. Stepping away from this book, I say, I saw the problems. But I almost couldn’t do that– step away, put it down. Run was intensely readable from start to finish, enjoyable and not in a cheap way. Problems and all. These characters were sketched in such detail, there were moments of sheer beauty, the pace and construction of Patchett’s story was at times mesmerizing– yes, like that snow globe. The scene inside may not be life, but you shake it up and watch it anyway.
October 10, 2007
The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
A character in Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief remarks of another, “It’s hard to imagine her having much off an inner life.” Coupland’s very point is that everybody does. Even Roger, the forty-something Staples employee, so old he’s become invisible. He’s writing a book– a terrible book. It’s called Glove Pond, about a couple constructed of witty catfights and a barrel of scotch. When Roger’s menacing co-workers hijack the book, it’s pronounced “the worst book even written… [but] I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing.”
Glove Pond is a kaleidoscopic revision of Roger’s own life (as much as a dinner party could possibly be a kaleidoscope, but it has much to say about writing, writers, how they view each other against their own successes and failures). The Gum Thief comprises Glove Pond‘s pages, as well as epistolary exchanges between Roger and his co-worker Bethany the Goth (whose makeup, reflecting her scarlet Staples t-shirt, is far more pink than white). Both Roger and Bethany carry pasts which are minefields of loss and disappointment, and they don’t so much bond over shared experience as through one another assume an essential dyanamic missing from their lives: Roger gets to feel responsible for someone, and Bethany gets taken care of. The plot is fleshed out by letters by Roger’s ex-wife, Bethany’s mother, and the vapid Shawn who had distrusted Bethany’s inner life. Which reads as entirely unbelievable once that we’ve come to know Bethany from the inside.
A novel within a novel, and even a novel inside of that. And the rest of the novel being letters and notes, even memos and FED-EXs, but The Gum Thief still takes on a plot and momentum. Along the way, of course, are typically sweeping and profoundly mundane Couplandisms: “Halloween costumes are another disinhibiting device, like fortune-telling and talking to talks that belong to strangers.” Or, “You know the people I mean– the ones who stay fifty feet away so they don’t look like they’re trying to see your PIN number. Come on. I look at these people and think, Man, you must feel truly guilty about something to make you broadcast your sense of guilt to the world with your freakish lineup philosophy.”
This all culminates into something far more than pop-culture and platitudes. The Gum Thief affirms the inner lives of the invisible, demonstrating the power of the written word to establish connections. Of course the final installment of The Gum Thief letters– one from Roger’s creative writing teacher who has “written several books, one of which was published”– throws the entire text’s veracity into doubt, but the result of this would be a testament to fiction’s trajectory towards empathy. Also serving as a dig at Coupland’s own critics, reciting their lines before they can get to them: “I don’t need or want art that tells me about my daily life. I want art that tells me about somebody– anybody— else but me.”
October 7, 2007
Damage Done by the Storm by Jack Hodgins
Reading Jack Hodgins’ collection of short stories Damage Done by the Storm was something of a disorienting process. He writes stories about loggers, skewing my rather shoddily-constructed moral perspective through which loggers are regarded as evil-doers (and yet I cherish books as I do. Hmmm). Hodgins writes even of compulsive loggers, amusingly in “The Drover’s Wife” and so touchingly in “Inheritance”. Place is fundamental to most of these stories, usually Vancouver Island which I know so little of. And these stories go about in ordinary directions, until a sharp turn one way or the other, though so subtly written you mightn’t even know you’re off the path, and then you are, and here is a place you’ve never before.
The final three stories of this collection are connected, and together demonstrate the power of the short story form. “Promise”, “Inheritance”, and “Astonishing the Blind” tell the story of a family over forty years, from multiple perspectives. Each of these stories is brilliantly rich (though “Atonishing the Blind” in particular literally took my breath away), but together they manage to tell more about this family than even a triology of epic novels could. Moreover they tell us so much with such peculiar details, and we fill in the blanks ourselves– a brilliantly personal and engaging process which renders a book our own.
Short stories are unostentatious; they do what they do without calling attention. Of course I only saw the power of these three stories in particular because they were stuck right together, but all the stories in this collection have the very same force. What one incident can tell you about a lifetime: the woman who is waiting for a ferry to dock in “The Crossing”, the retired senator braving a snowstorm to get to his grandson in “Damage Done by the Storm”, the Faulkner scholar and her son travelling through Mississippi in “The Galleries”.
Hodgins also writes well about what it is to be getting old– not to be quite old yet, but to have those days just ahead, and he also writes of the strange predicament many people are experiencing now in still having their parents living at this time in their lives. I remember reading in Carol Shields’ and Blanche Howard’s letters that there weren’t enough old people in fiction, enough room for oldness (beyond, you know, “the grandmother” in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or something) and I feel Hodgins’ people in Damage Done by the Storm would satisfy what they were looking for. Which would be something like reality.
Short stories are tough because you can’t pick them up and put them down, but rather you have to make time: they’re not as portable as they seem. But they’re worth it. One story before bed went down very well, this collection perfectly complementing my recent bout of nonfiction, and altogether providing me with a satisfying reading week.
October 5, 2007
The Search for the Secret River by Kate Grenville
Australian writer Kate Grenville was sure The Secret River was going to be nonfiction. The story of her great-great-great Solomon Wiseman, sentenced to death for stealing in 19th century England, but sent to Australia instead. Though was she going to be entirely faithful to the facts, or would memoir creep in? Eventually Grenville would understand that answering such questions wasn’t going to be up to her, and that in order for her story to be invested with life, it would have to become a novel. When names are changed, history is freed, and suddenly the story grows wings, though this winged-creature is very different from what Grenville started with, which, with books, it seems, is often the way.
There was a memoir in all of this after all, though, with Grenville’s new book The Search for the Secret River. Though I haven’t read The Secret River I was attracted to The Search for… by promises of an exploration of the lines between fact and fiction, thoughts on writing by one seasoned in the art (who had written writing guides previously), and by a consideration of the implications of history. Grenville didn’t disappoint, and I do imagine that for fans of the novel, The Search for the Secret River will provide rich insight into its creation, a sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective, which is rare with authors and books.
I approached this book foremost as a writer, and found it valuable in this respective. The deftness with which Grenville slips her wisdom into the narrative, avoiding didacticism and alienation of those to whom such advice might not be applicable. Her “mantras”: Never have a blank page one; Don’t wait for the mood. “Never mind. Fix it up later”. Words which might ring emptily, were it not for their contexts. She deals with practical matters of reimagining dialogue, investing characters with life, how to write “the other”.
Divided into three parts, the first deals with her research into her family background, her understanding of the facts of her ancestors as colonials, the impossibility of uncovering history at all, let alone bringing it back to life. How “history” can take us so far in the wrong direction, and how often the answers are always in places we’d least expect them, and found usually by chance. The second part of the book is a fascinating recounting of how nonfiction turned into a novel after all, and the final third considers the practical matters of this process.
This was a most enjoyable memoir, the sort of narrative that only a novelist could write. And I use the term “narrative” quite deliberately, for this what Grenville manages to create, out of her fact, her fiction, and so many moments of her own confusion. She’s written another story, no more or less powerful for the truth at its core, but rather for the strength of its parts and construction alike.
October 2, 2007
Alice I Think by Susan Juby
After much pondering, I’ve finally discovered it. Why will Lee Fiora never be Holden Caulfield? She’s got way too broad a perspective, that’s why. She tells her story in retrospect. She is absolutely aware of herself, which makes her story only ordinary. Holden Caulfield, on the other hand, has no idea (or control over) how he is seen by the outside world. He thinks he does– the guy’s got some kind of charisma, which is why you read Catcher in the Rye when you’re fourteen, and fall in love with him. But he’s really clueless, afterall, which is how he manages to break your heart fifteen years later. That he is so sad, and hurt, and young. Holden’s powerlessness is powerful, narratively speaking.
Susan Juby’s novel Alice I Think manages this very same power, which is the reason why this book was successful in its YA incarnation, and why it deserves the same success now that it’s been repackaged for grown-ups. Teenaged Alice has been traumatized by years of homeschooling, and is now about to be unleashed upon the real world. She has to deal with her embarrassing hippie parents, her complete lack of social skills, her counsellor’s demand that she compile life goals, and the fact of her small town of Smithers B.C. Admittedly, the premise sounds a bit formulaic, but it’s not, because nothing gets solved. Alice MacLeod is unforgiveably atrocious, in that horribly odious way only insecure teenagers are capable of. In the way that poor Holden Caulfield was, with a take-no-prisoners attitude that could be interpreted as “cool” only if you were his peer. Also similar to Holden, with a relationship with a younger sibling firmly establishing sympathy.
Alice, a diarist, is also much like Adrian Mole. I adore Adrian Mole, and wouldn’t make such a comparison lightly, which is not to say that what Juby has done here is not original. 25 years after the fact, in Smithers BC instead of Leicester, she wants to be a cultural critic instead of an intellectual, and Alice is most definitely her own person. But she is indeed a tribute to Mole, who, like Holden, changes as we do. (The diary format, with its immediacy and voice particularly lends itself to this solidification of perspective). All three of these characters are teenagers so horrible that their parents can hardly stand them, and that they are written in a way that they are simultaneously so loveable is really quite amazing.
Alice I Think is hilarious and well in tune with the zeitgeist for a novel depicting someone so far outside of it. Younger readers will identify with this “outsiderness” (a staple of young-adult novels after all), and older readers will view it in a clearer light– she’s so sure of herself, but of course she’s not. All ages will be amused though– I laughed out loud throughout. Juby is an excellent writer and her Alice a marvelous creation whose voice is all her own and never fails.
September 30, 2007
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
So often, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves employing metaphors of artistry when it comes to a well-crafted book. Writers “weave” narratives, “paint” images, and, yes “craft” at all. Similarly, I recently wrote about a book’s machinery. And all this is high praise, really, to liken a writer to an artisan. But then Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air manages to surmount such praise– “seamless” is the best crafting metaphor I can think of. This book feels too whole to have been created, too perfect. Late Nights on Air is an entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.
The story is set among a group of people working at a small Yellowknife radio station in 1975. Indeed this is the True North, but not like we might imagine: “It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow.” Sound, not sight, becomes the salient sense, which is natural with the radio, and Hay creates this effect beautifully. Admirably too, for it is hard to write sound. And not just those voices in the night, but also snow crunching underfoot, paddles in the water, crackling fires and birdsong. Truly, this is the most audible novel I have ever read.
The story, quite simply, tells what happens when a various group of people come together in this strange and isolated place. The enigmatic Dido, whose voice causes some people to fall in love with her, and whose presence does others. Harry Boyd, a washed-up has-been, managing the station as part of his demotion. Gwen, who is too young and arrives in town with a bruise on her throat. Eleanor Dew, the station receptionist, the steadying force. Relationships are entered in and out of, loyalties shift in surprising ways. Each of these characters come with their own unwavering backstories, and point-of-view shifts between them with such fluidity. Similarly the story moves back and forth in time in a way that feels only natural, demonstrating Hay’s remarkable skill without actually making us aware of her at all.
The final third of the book tells of a modified version of our original group heading out on a six week canoe trip through the barrens. Though the travellers are light-hearted in their preprarations, a sense of foreboding pervades and clearly something bad is going to happen. And though what does happen is as devastating as one might expect, I found myself quite impressed with how deftly this event had been established, with a lack of emotional manipulation or gratuitous sensation. Also with how rivetted I remained to the story as the group made way along their journey– I tend to like stories that happen in places, usually urban places, but so attached I was to these characters that my attention never faltered as they portaged and canoed for days, sometimes seeing no other living creature but a single ptarmigan or a caribou.
Such is the story then, though what’s it about? It’s about people, and all that their presence entails. It’s about love and longing, otherness and belonging, bookishness and radio, seasons and change. It’s about Canada, and universality, and goodness, and less-than goodness. It is also an absolutely beautifully designed book, and I’d encouraged you to pick it up in hardback if you could. A nice compact shape and gorgeous cover art. And what’s inside is stupendous. Such a fitting title as the narrative felt weightless, but yet simultaneously substantial. Reading was an absolute pleasure.
September 26, 2007
Books in my life
I’ve got all these books in my life, and not necessarily just the ones I’m reading. Books I’m not reading seem to have just as much a presence. Oh, reader’s compunction. I get it rarely, reading as swiftly as I do, but a couple of tomes have been lurking lately, and I know it is absolutely imperative that I get to them, and they’re piled on my bedside, but the dust on their jackets is now this thick. I’m talking nonfiction, usually, when I talk like this. To begin a long nonfiction book is a tremendous commitment, requiring sacrifice as to how it keeps me away from fiction. A Short History of Everything and Guns Germs and Steel are way overdue. I’ll get around to them. This might be absolutely a lie, but I really intend that it not be.
And then books I should be reading. And not should as in “ought to be but won’t” as above, but rather “must” be read, as the whole universe is saying so. Like with Great Expectations quite recently (and yes, I’ll get to that book too). Now it’s Lucky Jim, which Rona Maynard recommends. And in this interview Kate Christensen cites it as an influence on her In The Drink, which I’ve just read. (Do read the Christensen interview [via maud newton] by the way, for a fantastic example of chick lit’s cannibalistic tendencies, which I’ve mentioned before.) So I suppose Kingsley Amis is in the cards for me.
As is Raisins and Almonds, which comes recommended by Becky Rosenblum‘s mother.
Exhausting. But now I actually am reading Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. Or at least I will be before the night is out. This book has had rave reviews all around, and so I am looking very forward to it.
September 24, 2007
When to Walk by Rebecca Gowers
Rebecca Gowers’ first novel When to Walk, which earlier this year was longlisted for The Orange Prize, is a week in the life of Ramble, a character whose narration reminded me of Poppy Shakespeare‘s, but whose story I found much more satisfying.
The story begins as Ramble’s husband tells her that he’s leaving her, she inferring that he regards her as an “autistic vampire”. Where it goes from there is anywhere you can’t imagine, as Ramble deals her own feelings in reaction, but also with her senile grandmother, difficult mother, her gay best friend who fancies her, and the woman downstairs who is a common thief. Ramble’s own world is very narrow, due in particular to arthritis which makes walking distances painful. She is also a writer, employed to write travel pieces about places she has never been. And she has been balancing on the verge of a breakdown for sometime, which becomes clear as the story progresses. Her husband’s departure sparks crisis, but also provides Ramble with the impetus she needs to make necessary changes in her life.
Where most books have plots, this book has a voice, a character, and a much intriguing one. Ramble’s husband claims that she is impossible to reach, and even to those of us privy to her stream of consciousness, she is elusive. She hides in the shadows. As the novel progresses, however we come to see her in all her multiple-dimensions. Unknowingly she begins to let down her guard, disclosing the experiences which have led to her present situation.
Gowers’ fashioning of Ramble’s voice is a great achievement. First, it is rare to find a disabled character whose disability is secondary to her story. Gowers also creates a convincing point of view of this woman who spends her days watching pigeons out the window, fascinatingly portraying Ramble’s inner-life. It is unsurprising that Gowers’ previous book was non-fiction, as Ramble spends so much time delivering facts herself. She has her own peculiar fixations: etymology, Edward Lloyd, pigeon ailments. She is preoccupied by her own rather cryptic family history. Some people find a novel so bursting with “stuff” tiresome, but it is usually a mark of the kind of book that I like best. A question of taste, I suppose, but all this was much to mine.
