July 26, 2007

Like life itself

In literary happenings, Booklust passes on word of the newDouglas Coupland Exhibit of Penguin Collages– I won’t miss it. And summer is truly here, because out comes The Atlantic Fiction Issue. Now just-finishing April in Paris— review up tomorrow. Also stay tuned for an Animal Vegetable Miracle update. And indeed, Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over cured everything what ailed me. “It was magical… that unexpected, magnificent, beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life itself.”

July 23, 2007

Things fall apart

Joan Didion is not best read, I find, when one’s recent grasp of good sense has been tenuous. Or perhaps she is best read in such a state, but then the reader is not so great to be around after. As I should know, having spent the last day with me. Neuroticism is contagious, but then Didion’s writing is so absolutely fine-picked and lovely, it seems a shame to let it go to waste. And so I’ve been rereading Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and have been immersed in that world of thirty years ago where “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” It seems it’s same as it ever was, and I don’t know if such a constant should be reassuring or otherwise. And I am thinking differently about “On Keeping a Notebook” than I did, and “remembering the me that used to be” seems less important that it used to. And all the California bits, which seem more pressing having read Where I was From.

(“You see I still have the scenes, but I could no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.”)

Next up I will reread A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which, hopefully, will put me back in my mind.

July 19, 2007

Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve got no qualms about saying that Animal Vegetable Miracle is one of the best books I’ve ever read about science and nature. I’ve only ever read two other books as good, and they were Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and so a triumverate now, of these books which have shown me how little I know about the world. But they’ve also invested that blank space of my ignorance with such wonder, and the very beginning of knowledge.

Animal Vegetable Miracle is not so much a lifestyle guide. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver (who has a graduate degree in biology, for the record) recognizes that most families do not have the means to do what hers did: to spend a year of self-sufficiency, growing all their food on their farm. No, she is not saying to do as they did, rather her message is “Here is what we did, and all that we learned.” And so the reader learns in turn– about the vegetannual (seen here). I never knew how early greens like lettuce come up in the growing season, or why. I didn’t know why green peppers come into season before the red ones. With the same ignorance Kingsolver notes at the beginning of her book, I never realized that potatoes grow with stems and leaves. I was aware that tomatoes in the winter weren’t the best thing, but I’d never thought too much about it.

I gleaned practical tips from this book– to prevent rotting in the soil, stick a paperplate underneath my watermelons (and indeed we’ve got another one coming in in the garden!). The book contains seasonal recipes, instructions about canning and preserving, a helpful bibliography and list of resources. Alongside Kingsolver’s beautiful prose, her husband and daughter have contributed articles on areas of their own expertise. And such is the story of a year in a family, though it spans more than a year, certainly. It takes three years before an asparagus plant is ready to eat after all. Planting must be carefully planned well in advance to allow for enough harvest to see them through the winter. For people with all the means that they have, Kingsolver’s family still finds that sustenance to be a full time job, out of reach for most of us. But then, writes her husband Steven L. Hopp: “If every US citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we could reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels every week.” That’s small steps, and for most people very possible.

However infinitely educational, didacticism is not at the forefront of Animal Vegetable Miracle. The story (and it is a story) is by turns touching, hilarious, spiritual and rabble-rousing. How lucky when brilliant writers have the best stories to tell. It was a pleasure to read, and I’d urge it upon you as something so terribly important.

July 12, 2007

Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong

There are some truly lovely elements at work here in Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong’s first novel. Her prose is strong without trying, and the premise is compelling. Place features largely in this narrative, Armstrong creating a powerful sense of atmosphere in her depiction of the Australian rain forest, with the rain, the heat, the endless cycle I quoted in the entry previous. When 14 year-old Allie’s mother Mae apparently drowns in Sydney Harbour, Allie is taken to live with her Aunt Julia, an eccentric tree planter who claims to be giving her land back to the forest. Vines come into the house through her windows, and the rain falls, the floods come. I got the sense of nature as adversary like I’d only read before in Canadian literature. Or rather that nature is not so much adversarial as gigantic so that human drama is minute in comparison. And Armstrong’s story does suffer when she tries to correct this imbalance, stretching her story as broadly as her backdrop. Reaching back decades, spanning geographies, and several personal histories. In such a short novel with multiple points of view alternating between chapters in a subjective third-person narration, we don’t get the chance to delve into one character adequately, let alone to explore the innumerable stories which branch out from each of their separate experiences. So much must be glossed over, details imparted for the sake of themselves, and the story skims its surfaces. There are suggestions that more is going on in the depths, but we’re too busy to be taken there. Insufficiently invested then, the big twist feels facile. Which is disappointing, really, because Armstrong’s writing left me with such a powerful sense of this book, I wished the story itself was better explored.

July 11, 2007

Wholly visible and reliable

What is it when pathetic fallacy functions in reading? Because at the moment I feel like I’m reading Salt Rain in just the right climate: “the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds, the same water falling again and again for decades.” 80% humidity is probably as close to the Australian rain forest as Toronto ever gets. It’s a funny thing.

So far Salt Rain is a pretty good story, but then you’ve got to feel sorry for any book that has to follow Henry James. Such an unfair pitting, but the narrative voice feels so slight in comparison. Which came to mind last night when I was reading James Wood’s review of Edward P. Jones’ Aunt Hagar’s Children in The London Review of Books. Writes Wood:

These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wholly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practices in A House for Mr. Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr. Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?

And now, post-James, I am craving omniscience. And have set myself a little challenge: the next story I begin will have a narrator who is not a sweet ghost at all.

(Update: Oh, yes, I looked it up. “eschatology [esk‐ă‐tol‐ŏji], the theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world.”)

July 9, 2007

Completely a fool

Reading a classic every month takes up so much reading time and reading effort, but oh the payoff. I adored The Portrait of a Lady, which I hardly remembered from my first reading seven years ago. Oh, the mastery. And that Henrietta Stackpole was redeemed in the end; it pleased me that my younger self was not completely a fool. It was interesting, by the way, to see how self-reflexively I used to read my books– the lines underlined. It was as though I used to read seeking myself (“Yes yes yes! That’s meeee!” my notes appear to shriek. “That’s just how it is!!”). Any line that summed up my experience, my struggles, my pain. I once read a book where a character had the same name as a boy I loved, and I underlined every single instance of that name. How ridiculous. And so we’ve come full circle, I suppose. It seems that my younger self was indeed completely a fool.

Now reading a new novel–Salt Rain (from Australia!) by Sarah Armstrong. And so the alternating rereading begins, and next I will get to We Need to Talk About Kevin.

July 2, 2007

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

One paragraph near the end of Annie Dillard’s new novel The Maytrees seems to embody Dillardness, in my opinion. “Lou wondered where his information would go when he died. Would filaments of learning plant patterns on earth? Would his brain train the sinking plankton to know their way around the seafloor from here to Stellwagen Bank? Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all she had learned topside. Which was not much, she considered, nor anywhere near worked out. Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific babies.”

There’s nothing missing, I tell you: vocabulary I’ve got to learn first (deliquesce means “to melt away or to disappear as if by melting”); syntax I have to twist my head to get around; an organic link between learned information (from books of course) and the natural world; grotesque images of fecundity; the very fact of wondering. Annie Dillard so plants her books in the world, and The Maytrees is no exception. Though this is the first novel I’ve read by her (and this is her second novel), it is impossible to disconnect it from her oeuvre.

In her book The Writing Life Annie Dillard writes the wisest thing I’ve ever read– that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. And so lives are spent in The Maytrees, by days. Toby and Lou Maytree live in Provincetown near the beach, prone to the elements, the sea, the storms, the dunes. Idyllic is their life: she paints, he writes, they have a son. “Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees.” And so goes their love story, except that Annie Dillard is not sentimental. As she saw the darkness of creation in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so too does she acknowledge the pain of love. After fourteen years of marriage, the Maytrees live apart for twenty years, to be reunited by tragic and complicated circumstances. So much of love is about forgiveness.

Like Martin Levin in this Saturday’s paper, my full disclosure necessitates acknowledging that I am a big fan of Annie Dillard. I am not sure that the average reader unaware of her work could pick up The Maytrees and understand it outside of the context of from whence it came. The erudition, bibliophilia, that her characters are people just as much as the dunes are. This is a difficult book, full of so innumerable references I didn’t understand, words I’ve yet to learn, sentences I had to read again and again to get their images in my head. Oh, but once I had. And that which is out of my grasp has me reaching, which I appreciate. There is so much beauty here.

Dillard is a challenging and exciting writer, and I am so pleased to see that The Maytrees is as good as that which came before.

June 30, 2007

A Memoir of Friendship by Howard and Shields

The thing about a book of letters is that it’s usually going to end with someone dying. And perhaps there is no better metaphor for the death of a writer than the blank page which follows the end of her text. That that writer’s voice has been inside your head for 400+ pages at her most natural and free will only have that page’s silence resound. This week reading A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, I had the same problem I had with Decca. Both were big books I was intending to read in in bits and morsals but somehow the chronology, the voices, the spirit proved too sweeping and I was entranced. Reading became a race to an ending I knew very well would be a sad one, but the story was too good to take slowly. And that one blank page could be so devastating is certainly a testament to what came before it.

For nearly thirty years Blanche Howard and Carol Shields exchanged letters, beginning in 1975 when Shields wrote seeking advice on a book contract from the more experienced novelist Howard. Of course both women had a particular flair for the written word, and their relationship grew around such commonalities, including their love of books, their interest in CanLit in particular, feminism, politics, marriage and family. As the letters progress, the women become grandmothers, never stop being mothers, discuss aging, seek “the meaning of life”, exchange book reccomendations. Typewriting, to PCs, to email. Shields comes to achieve enormous success as she takes home one literary prize after another, while Howard’s own career progresses more slowly, and she often struggles to get her work into print. Her husband begins a long decline with Parkinson’s Disease, and later Shields is diagnosed with the cancer she died of in 2003. And amidst all this life, overwhelmingly, there is such joy. Inevitable, I suppose, from two women doing what they loved best (writing) and sharing their ideas all the while with an old, loved, cherished friend.

I suspect that there is something about my gender which makes me particuarly fond of collections of letters. It’s the same thing that makes me an assidious evesdropper, missing my streetcar stop, for example, so as not to miss the end of a stranger’s conversation. I find something so delicious about other people’s lives, but when these people’s lives are extraordinary, and when their expression of their lives via the written word is so particularly vivid, the resulting book can’t help but be gripping. And bookishly speaking, what a thrill I get being privy to the genesis of their own works, to their exchanged thoughts on Margaret Drabble’s “latest” The Radiant Way, Shields’ response to Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook”, to their critical admiration for M. Atwood, and feelings toward other giants in the CanLit scene.

Howard, along with her daughter Allison Howard, has edited these letters wonderfully. Divided into approprate chapters introduced by Howard, and interwoven with other relevant writings to flesh out the context, there is a wholeness to this work. Functioning on so many levels, truly it is a celebration. And not just of Shields and her powerful voice (whose power is undeniable here), and its silence too soon. But a celebration also of engagement with the world, of women, their lives, and, most of all, their friendships.

June 26, 2007

Making It Up

Time has been running away from me lately– a symptom of June. I am now reading Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault and loving it. It’s my take-out book (paperback) whilst I’m reading A Memoir of Friendship, which is too big to carry around with me and really I’d just like to stay home until I finished it.

And last week I had the great pleasure of reading Penelope Lively’s Making It Up. I’ve never read anything else like it, nor was I originally compelled by the premise, but I had to read it anyway because, after all, Penelope Lively is one of my favourites. And fail me she didn’t– she never has.

Billed as “an anti-memoir” in our very age of memoirs, and I loved that idea. Lively takes pivotal points in her life and contemplates could-have-beens. What if her family had escaped Egypt via another route, and gone down in a boat sunk by the Germans? What if she’d gotten pregnant at eighteen? What if she had emigrated to America? But I was concerned as to how this would function in practice; how could this stand up as a book beyond the novelty of it all? And really I just wanted to read a Penelope Lively novel. Why couldn’t she just have written one?

But as I’ve already said, Penelope Lively is not in the business of disappointing. What the anti-memoir tag fails to convey is how truly “anti” these memoirs are; Lively herself is peripheral in most stories, absent from others, long dead in one. In fact this is more a collection of short stories, each with differerent characters, no continuity, and Lively herself as a character doesn’t ever appear. She understands that different versions of herself along other roads would have been someone else altogether. And so she has invented these people, as well as the people surrounding them.

These fictions are build upon the very opposite of fact, and are therefore the ultimate feat of imagination. Conjuring notions of story, of fate, what we are constructed from and where we go, as well as being a solid collection of stories in their own right. And I loved them for that, and for everything. For their authenticity, and for Penelope Lively’s nerve– to tell stories– which are more honest that any truth I’ve ever been told.

June 24, 2007

Before I Wake by Robert J Wiersema

There are numerous conclusions which can be drawn by the fact I read Robert J. Wiersema’s Before I Wake— a 366 page novel– in the space of a moderately busy 24 hour period, but it’s the cliche I must emphasize beyond anything else: I couldn’t put it down.

Wiersema has an article in this weekend’s Globe Books discussing the comatose in literature in which he makes what he notes is an “obvious statement”: that “Characters in comas don’t lend themselves well to dramatic conflict”. Yet, in spite of this hindrance, Wiersema has created in his first novel dramatic conflict aplenty– between husbands and wives, wives and lovers, mothers and daughters, the media and the rest of us, the needy and the blessed, good and evil, God and Satan. Indeed the gamut is run, conflictually speaking, and at the centre of all of this is Sherry, a beautiful three year old who has been struck by a truck and lies comatose. The accident aggravates cracks within her parents’ already fragile relationship, but they are forced to work together when it is discovered that Sherry has been invested with healing powers– she cures her carer’s arthritis, two cases of cancer, and then the word gets out and the rest is a media blitz.

Not everybody is particularly pleased by Sherry’s miracles. “The Stranger”, dressed in black of course, sets out to disprove Sherry’s powers by any means necessary, recruiting others to his cause and placing Sherry and her parents in great danger. The man who’d been driving the truck that hit Sherry finds himself wandering around the city in a kind of limbo, finding some solace with others in his situation at the Public Library, where wisdom is sought in the obvious place (bookish delights). Meanwhile the crowds gathered outside Sherry’s window are getting larger– pilgrims who’ve come looking to be healed and protesters alike. Tensions build, forces collide, culminating in a supernatural showdown.

Though my own tastes tend toward realism, I readily accepted the world Wiersema had offered me. I was won over by its cinematic scope and ordinary emphases. The narrative was constructed just so, and I couldn’t rest without finding out what happened next. In spite of all the magic. And, yes, I do suppose, perhaps, because of it.