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.
June 21, 2007
Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland
I’ve written here before about my interest in young protagonists, or perhaps “my uninterest” would be a more applicable term. So many young protagnonists grate on my nerves and I’ve done my best to try to figure out why they do while others don’t, and I think M.J. Hyland’s Man Booker-Shortlisted Carry Me Down may have pointed me toward the answer.
Hyland’s young protagonist is John Egan, an eleven year old Irish boy who has suddenly found himself with a grown man’s body, and who is convinced that his ability as a human lie-detector will one day win him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. John’s parents are loving, but they have troubles of their own, and socially he is isolated at school. Similarly to Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare, this is a novel written from the perspective of a mentally disturbed character. However without Allan’s agenda (which was satire, and provided some sort of guideline for interpreting said perspective), there is no choice but to trust in the character and seek the clues where they turn up.
John Egan’s perspective is so thoroughly convincing that the reader buys into his sense of reality quite easily, examining a disturbing world through his filter. In the instances where that filter becomes apparent, that world is made disturbing all the more. And it is this convincing nature which makes John Egan function so effectively as a young protagonist. That there is no space at all between his character and the narrative voice, and his eyes are all we get, and the spell never breaks.
The novel is written in the present tense, which of course adds to its immediacy. So much is withheld from John, and from his own perspective, that a kind of suspense unfolds over the most ordinary occurrences. In a related way, the extraordinary is interpreted as rather banal from his point of view, particulary at the novel’s climax, and the true extent of John’s troubles become especially clear. The book reads quickly; there is a sense of unfolding, although into what I was never entirely sure. As a whole, the structure of the novel is not perfect, though I don’t see how a novel from John’s point of view ever could be. But it was that point of view, I thought, which made the novel worth it anyway. It works as a character study and as a story that stands up in its own right.
June 13, 2007
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
My favourite thing about Ian McEwan’s characters is how solidly these fictional creations reside in the world. His Edward and Florence in On Chesil Beach only underline this, and how their ties to the world are expressed in this small and subtle novel is a testament to McEwan’s talent.
As in the brilliant novel Saturday, ordinary lives are drawn not on the periphery of history, but firmly entrenched within it, almost powerless against it. Edward and Florence are a young couple on their wedding night in 1962, honeymooning on Dorset’s Chesil Beach in the South of England. “This was still the era… when to be young was a social encumberance.” On the cusp of a new era, with whole languages yet to be invented, particularly pertaining to sexuality, and it is for want of these words that the penultimate moment of the novel spirals so horrifyingly out of control. And in the chapter which follows, McEwan’s communication of miscommunication should be particularly commended.
The reasons I love McEwan’s writing are similar to why I so enjoy Margaret Drabble’s work–characters who live in the world, constructed of details, backstories and even their own paths not taken. Edward and Florence are recent graduates, Edward a historian and Florence a musician. These occupations inform the novel– Edward’s interest in “semi-obscure figures who lived close to the centre of historical events”; the pace of Florence’s music in the background, and the cohesion of her string quartet analogous to the tautness of this narrative. And it is the combination of their respective situations which renders the novel’s climax so inevitable and wholly realized. Such details are what allows, so essential in a novel so sparse, everything to mean something. Which I find truly a rich trip to discover.
June 9, 2007
Town House by Tish Cohen
Three cheers for Tish Cohen’s Town House, which proves that popular fiction does not have to be stupid. The eponymous town house is in Boston, home to Jack Madigan, the agoraphobic son of a dead rockstar. Life presents particular challenges for him, unable to step beyond the front door. These challenges are only underlined when they involve Jack’s teenage son, his somewhat batty real estate agent, and the precocious little girl who crawls in from next door through a hole in the wall. Cohen has created a cast along the lines of a John Irving novel, or The Royal Tenenbaums, and she uses sympathy to negotiate a balance between quirky and real. It was apparent to me that Cohen must have so loved these characters, to invest them with multi-dimensions and have them keep surprising us. When their lives turn out a little too tidily, we’re glad they do, because we have come to love them too.
June 5, 2007
Cease to Blush by Billie Livingston.
Though I might argue that ten million ecstatic reviews could be wrong, I would also add that they must be indicative of something. Billie Livingston’s second novel Cease to Blush was enthusiastically received by critics and readers, and though I had some problems with the book, I do see why one would be keen on it. Vivian, our heroine, is the daughter of famous feminist academic who has just died of cancer. Vivian is a walking backlash to her mother’s principles, wayward, sexual, a bit actress who plays dead prostitutes in cop shows, drinks vodka from the mo she rolls out of bed, and her boyfriend is an absolute sleazebag. So what happens when Vivian delves into her mother’s (literal) trunk of secrets, and discovers that before this sister was doing it for herself, she was a famous stripper, singer, gangster moll, and one-time paramour of RFK? Naturally, Vivian jumps into a red convertible for a roadtrip to put together the pieces of her mother’s secret life. With the help of true-crime books, biographies, google searches, and a lot of luck, Vivian creates her mother’s story for herself, though all the while her own story is woven throughout this fiction. In learning about her mother’s past, Vivian is able to make sense of her present.
I was attracted by the initial premise of this book, as Vivian attends her mother’s funeral in a bright red suit, somewhat conspicuous amidst her mother’s crunchy friends. Her relationship with her mother’s partner Sally is also compelling, as these two women try to fit into one another’s contexts. Though I must admit that Vivian’s story fell off the rails for me not too far in, by mid-way through the book I was quite caught up in the adventures of Vivian’s mother, even if the adventures were not necessarily the truth and just a product of Vivian’s mind. It was a good story all the same in parts, suspense and intrigue all around, and the glamour of the Rat Pack and glitzy side of the sixties. I think that this story was probably what other readers loved best- the sense of fun, rollicking party all night long. Many times I did wish that this had been the entire book.
Because the rest of it, I struggled with. It bothered me that the dichotomy between “feminist” and “slut” is never reconciled. What was I supposed to take from this? That within every womyn lies a former burlesque dancer? I believe that women are more complicated than this book suggests. In terms of plot, I also thought there were real problems– the penlight on Vivian’s keychain for one. Now Vivian was an absolute screw-up, and not the type to carry a penlight, and perhaps the penlight was meant to symbolize that Vivian was more than her stereotype, but I got the sense that it functioned more as a plot device. The penlight was so out-of-character for Vivian, I didn’t buy it. Another such unlikely occurence: that when Vivian goes to an address she finds written on a 40 year-old piece of paper, of course the present occupier isn’t who she’s looking for, but occupier does have a forwarding address for her. I don’t anyone keeps records that good. Results of Google searches, and items Vivian comes across in books similarly serve to propel her journey along without her having to do any propelling herself. The story falls into her lap, and the plot felt so flimsy to me. Vivian never seems bothered by the fact that her mother lied for her entire life, and seems quite unfazed by the revelations. Minutes after finding out her mother’s stage name, she’s referring to her by it– there is never any confusion. Vivian never feels betrayed or confused, but rather “Cool, Mom was a stripper. Let us hit the road.” I also didn’t buy how smart Vivian was supposed to be, which we are to infer because she corrects her friends when they use words wrong. But if Vivian is so smart, why did it take her over 400 pages to come to her epiphany, which was only that she should no longer let her scuzzy boyfriend sell their homemade p*rn on the internet? I was really pleased when Vivian figured this out, but I could have told her ages ago. And I really wished I could have, because reading about her journey to this point was very tedious.
As a reader, I felt like this book thought I was stupid. As stupid as Vivian even, which was a bit insulting. But I am not going to out and out dismiss it, because flaws aside, it might have a place. Cease to Blush is suited for a beach, I suppose, or the tub, or any day you’re not feeling altogether demanding of your fiction.
May 29, 2007
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
I am new to Haruki Murakami, as I’ve noted. which becomes my approach to his latest novel After Dark. While reading I am conscious of treading in unfamiliar territory, that the bounds of the novel are stretched in a way that feels strange to me, that this fictional world blurs the line between fantasy and reality, and all this is quite disquieting. Which is appropriate really, for After Dark is the story of the city at night, the known in the darkness, the familiar gone strange.
Mari, sitting in a Denny’s drinking coffee, meets Takahashi who remembers her from years before. Their interaction is not terribly significant, but begins a chain of random events which reveal unsavory elements of the city at night. Seemingly random connections are explored, as characters meet one another, or pass by unknowingly. The night is presented as a kind of monster, each individual enveloped by the very same darkness. And throughout all of this Mari’s sister Eri is sleeping in a mysterious room, but we don’t know why.
Point of view is the most significant aspect of this narrative. Detached, limited, but exact, Murakami’s narrator is not much more than a recorder, albeit self-aware. The narrator explains, “It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss.” And so he does, recording all the way, but never more than this. The connections must become clear on their own, and the narrative becomes a careful negotiation of questions and revelations, betraying only what is essential and never giving too much away.
I find reading books in translation a frustrating but fascinating experience. The Japanese novel is constructed differently than those I’ve come to know, founded in a system of thought which is foreign to me. Translation means that the words came after the concepts, and I can read that strangeness in awkward expressions, but then it me think about words and expressions differently, outside their contexts. I have to twist my head around what is being said to make it fit, but having to work like that allows for an engagement many other books can’t offer. Analogous to the city at night, I think, in its strangeness, offering an altered perspective of the world come morning.
May 21, 2007
Bang
I really should have known. The Girls came recommended by Patricia Storms, Richard and Judy, and everybody else in the whole wide world. If, like me, however, you were put off by all the hype, and by the prospect of a story about craniopagus twins, you really have been cheating yourself. Lori Lansens’ The Girls casts a perfect spell, expresses every lovely notion I’ve ever had about the world, and says so much about perspective, writing, and love. (Those of us who love Kate Atkinson will definitely find something to love here.)
I was under that perfect spell from the very start, probably due to Lansens’ dramatic beginning. A lot gets said about great opening lines, but what about great opening scenes? It’s actually the second chapter of The Girls: “A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born”. And Lansens’ describes the tornado with such energy, intricacy, and action, I could almost feel the wind. I was hooked from then on. It was the best story opening I’ve read since Arthur Seaton fell down a flight of stairs in the pub and puked all over a woman in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Since the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Sometimes it pays to start with a bang.
Bookwise, what’s ahead? Cease to Blush and then The Children of Men (upon the recommendation of my husband!).
May 21, 2007
28 by Stephanie Nolen
The one thing of which I am certain is the power of story, and Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa is a testament to this power. I’ve been reading this book for a few weeks now as it was too much to take in all at once. Not that it depressing, or overly bleak, but rather there is just so much here. Unsurprisingly, as each of Nolen’s 28 stories is to represent one million people in Africa with HIV/AIDS, a structure which does something toward making 28 million a comprehendable number– no small task. The subjects of these stories come from a variety of backgrounds, and their situations are different: the young Ethiopian girl whose parents have died of AIDS who supports her younger brother; the Congolese doctor who braves civil war violence to keep her clinic operating so patients can continue to receive their antiretroviral drugs; the South African activist who refused ARV drugs, coming close to death, until they were made widely available for those in his country who needed them; the twelve-year-old who began taking ARV drugs and became healthy for the first time in his life; the Ugandan doctor working toward an HIV vaccine; the HIV-immune prostitute who must work to support her family; she who wears the crown of Botswana’s Miss HIV Stigma-Free.
Stephanie Nolen is a phenomenal writer, as anyone would know who has read her work in The Globe and Mail. She allows her subjects dignity and writes with sympathy, making extraordinary stories out of ordinary lives. Nolen has been reporting on AIDS in Africa since the late 1990s, and is equipped with both knowledge and the skills to impart it. I found her introduction to this book fascinating, as I learned of the origins of AIDS in Africa, and how it spread. Nolen’s insight that, “The problem with HIV is that its transmission, in blood and sexual fluids and breast milk, preys on our most intimate moments,” seemed to me a wonderfully straightforward expression of so many complicated issues, and informed the way that I would read her book. And as much as 28 taught me about AIDS, it also showed me Africa: AIDS is the story, but in the background is political upheaval and Civil War in various countries; ordinary lives amidst all this, and in more peaceful places too; the societal constructs and family units. Nolen gives us many of the notorious stock-characters of the AIDS epidemic: the truckers, prostitutes, cheating husbands, betrayed wives. And these characters are never true to type, perhaps the very point. Their situations are far more complicated (and in some cases sensible, in their own contexts) than they are usually portrayed. And as readers, we come away with an understanding– the proof of stories’ power, and Nolen’s stories in particular.
