May 18, 2007

Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan

Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare is one strange book. It received rave reviews when it came out in hardback last year, was much-hyped all around, and I’ve been reading all about it for ages, and it still managed to be nothing like what I had expected. Part of that, of course, is that it hasn’t got much precedent. I’ve read of this book compared to works by authors as divergent as Chaucer and Ken Kesey, and though we’ve got the perspective of a mad girl, The Bell Jar this ain’t. No, the one adjective applied over and over to this book is “original” and it’s a very fitting one.

Poppy Shakespeare is a comedic social commentary employing elements of both satire and the fantastic. This is the story of N, a patient at the Dorothy Fish, a day centre in a fictional psychiatric hospital in North London. The thing is, however, that N and co-patients have no desire to be discharged. So isolated from mainstream society (the divide represent by Borderline Road which runs around the hospital like a moat) and so comfortable within their place in a rather absurd system, they scheme to display more symptoms and up their diagnoses. The wrench into this system arrives in the form of Poppy Shakespeare, a rather stroppy but decidedly normal woman who has been admitted to the Dorothy Fish against her will. Her claims of mental soundness are interpreted as a reluctance to confront her problems. When she tries to engage a lawyer to help her out of her predicament, she finds she is only eligible for legal aid if she is diagnosed as mentally ill. The spiral goes downward from there, as told by N who watched it happen, or perhaps was more culpable than she might let on.

The object of Allan’s satire is the “results-oriented” approach which has been employed in Britain during recent years toward state services such as education, social services, and mental health. Patients at the Dorothy Fish begin to be randomly discharged so that the hospital can boast high rates of curing– even if the cure usually leads to the patients’ suicide. And none of this sounds like very funny stuff, but it is. This is partly because of N’s perspective and her language–blunt, colloquial, playful and true to her character. Allan doesn’t shy away from the sordid, but turns it all the way on its head until it becomes a joke. And what is comedy if not blurring the line which is sanity, but then the message is ever-present, just below the humour. This is a novel which is doing many things.

It’s not easy, however. When I finished it I saw its worth, and Allan is clearly a spectacular writer, but the novel wasn’t altogether enjoyable to read. And that’s not just because of the bleak subject matter (actually there is very little bleakness here). Though N’s voice was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this book, it went on long sometimes. Though typical of the character, her narrative takes a long time to get on track. Her perspective is not capable of percieving depth of character, though at times this is just the point– that in such a system, depth gets lost. And I do get the feeling that with any such criticism of this book, I could find a way to explain what Allan is doing. Here is a novel that is more “interesting” than “good”, but I don’t mean that in an altogether bad way. Though I do feel that the novel could have benefitted with a little more editing, some tightening up, on the whole Clare Allan has successfully realized her vision. A vision of a part of society most of us are not usually privy to, and for that alone, I think, it’s worth a look.

May 15, 2007

Wooden leg first

I think it’s quite cool that my rereading of A Good Man is Hard to Find coincided with Flannery O’Connor in the news, as a new letters archive is opened. Maud Newton provides excellent coverage, as well as links to previous O’Connor posts she has written. I especially like her “But it is a wooden leg first”.

“If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is esentially the way a story escapes being short”.

May 9, 2007

The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer

I wanted to know that “beach read” and “literary” weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I wanted a book that spelled summer, but didn’t make my head go numb. And I was so pleased that Janice Kulyk Keefer’s new novel The Ladies’ Lending Library lived up to expectations, satisfied my impossible desires. Here is a summer book through and through, all the while substantial, well-written, and I would recommend that you pack it along this season, no matter where you’re going.

But particularly if you’re off to Cottage Country, which would be fitting. The Ladies’ Lending Library is the story of a group of Ukrainian-Canadian families who spend summers together up on Georgian Bay, and it explores the curious intimacies which emerge in this kind of community. Cottageness is captured vividly– waves pound the beach throughout the novel, whole days spent in the sunshine, fathers at the weekend, rotting wooden steps and slapdash suppers. The story takes place during the summer of 1963 (as does Ian McEwan’s new On Chesil Beach, and I look forward to seeing how these books relate). 1963– before the Beatles, before Kennedy was shot, when everybody called Baby “Baby” and it didn’t occur to her to mind. Such a cusp would be rife with stories, and Kalyna Beach is no exception. Dissatisfied mothers, wandering eyes, immigrant experiences which permeate the present, the perils of puberty, adolescent humiliation, sex, sex, and the contemplation of sex, trashy magazines, breasts, and the foxy sixteen year old in a bikini who is the object of everybody’s fascination.

My one criticism of this book would be its title, which is misleading. The lending library of which it speaks is an official-sounding excuse for the mothers of Kalyna Beach to meet weekly and exchange trashy novels, but is hardly at the forefront of this book. Though the ladies themselves are central to the plot, such a title undermines the Kulyk Keefer’s broad narrative range. The sweeping points of view throughout the novel are one of its most interesting elements, incorporating the daughters’ perspectives alongside their mothers’. Though the men in the story are given their say, female voices are much more present. And I enjoyed the seamlessness as one perspective worked its way into the next, and how the female characters, of such various ages and experiences, were thus linked.

I am grateful that a novel of “women’s concerns”, and with subject matter so beachy, could be so thoughtfully treated and well-written. These are stories which deserve to be told well. Kulyk Keefer writes such beautiful descriptions, sympathetic characters, and realistic situations (however heart-wrenching or amusing). Like any book you want for the beach, this one is a pleasure, but moreover you’re better for having read it. The ending is particularly perfect. “And she wants to shower them with rose petals, to rush down to the dock to wave them off on their reckless, needy journey into possiblity.” So did I.

I closed this book quite satisfied.

(Note that for a last minute Mother’s Day gift, this would be a fine pick! )

May 8, 2007

Hollaring Comrade

The girl walking across Queen’s Park shedding tears over the death of a man in a book? She would be me. And that book (84 Charing Cross Road) was absolutely lovely.

PS- Anyone know what “book post” is? It sounds like the most wonderful system in the whole world.

UPDATE: Someone has made an 84 Charing Cross Road website!

May 2, 2007

Catch

Where I Was From by Joan Didion is the best book by Joan Didion I have ever read. This is no small praise. Yes, The Year of Magical Thinking came with a sentimentality creeping in which humanized Didion and I appreciated that, but reading Where I Was From I realize that she is at her very best when cold and watching. It’s the connections she draws which make her work so powerful, and I love the way she leaves us to do with them what we will. Or at least the way she seems to let us do what we will, for her words are so calculated, her logic so exact, that even when I disagree with what she is saying, I cannot help but see her point of view.

I am now reading The Fifth Child on the advice of Heather Mallick. Intriguing, apparently not typical Lessing, and much akin to We Need To Talk About Kevin, which was my best book of 2005 (and which I’ll be rereading this summer).

Last night I cried upon realizing that my days have suddenly become much shorter, which is the power of an eight hour workday. This was devastating to contemplate, as there I was aiming to finish Where I Was From, write the end to a stubborn short story, post an entry on Divisadero, and bake cupcakes all before bedtime. How I will miss my grad student/housewife days, where all of that was possible, and hours and hours more were open wide, and I was still free to cavort with the postman every morning, and read and write all day long. But then I got to work this morning and remembered that I’ve got a pretty lovely gig for the next few months, my coworkers are wonderful, I can ride my bike to get there, the work is (sometimes) interesting. More good things were underlined as we went outside to play catch at lunch time.

And so all is well, and time enough there will be. I suppose also that eight hours a day of wages will make evenings and weekends a delight.

April 26, 2007

Cake or Death by Heather Mallick

My favourite thing is when irate readers respond to Heather Mallick’s column with accusations of hypocrisy or contradiction as though the world were so straightforward that consistency for the sake of itself was a virtue instead of a limit. Heather Mallick’s new book Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life is absolutely riddled with contradictions and Mallick is well aware of this. In her introduction she answers her titular proposal with cake and death– a somewhat morbid extension of having your cake and eating it too, but morbid is just the way Mallick is feeling these days. Justifiably so really, and why should it mean she remains cake-free? If you’ve got a cake, you might as well eat it. I mean, what kind of a moron wouldn’t?

Cake or Death is a wonderful book of essays. Not because I usually admire Mallick’s writing, and not because the book references Margaret Drabble at least twice, but because the reading was just a pleasure. Even with the death, because Mallick’s got the necessary humour (which the irate readers don’t seem to understand). I liked this book so much that I read it all the way home yesterday, and I was walking. I liked this book so much that I read four of the essays last night to my husband. He liked those four essays so much, he wants to read the rest of the book now. Heather Mallick is witty, and she is intelligent, bookish, critical, preposterous, unflinching and brave. If you take her too seriously she can be offensive in that way men are much more likely to get away with. Heather Mallick is a voice in a sometimes awful wilderness, and this book is a terrific accomplishment.

Heather Mallick knows the Woolfian essay. In an unfair review, the essays were criticized for “not having a point”, but if an essay can be summed up in a point, then why write it? Indeed the journey is the point, as Mallick’s digressions, seasoned with cultural references and details from her own life, take her readers where they need to go. And yes, along the journey Heather Mallick often contradicts herself, but I would suggest that your thought processes must be awfully limited if yours don’t. As Woolf does in her essays, Mallick follows the mind, the eye, wherever it goes. And this is interesting. It’s not easy, quick, or classifiable, but neither is life.

What is life are these trips: “Fear Festival”, which illuminates everything in the world which is liable to kill you; “How to Ignore Things” which uses Jackie O’s example as an alternative to therapy; “Born Ugly” which she concludes with “You are not beautiful. Almost no one is. We start with the race already halfway run and then we age to boot, so get used to it. Try to be interesting, and work on the content of your character, not the pallor of your skin”; “The People I Detest” subset “bookhaters”; her essay on Doris Lessing made me decide to take the plunge. I liked every single one of these.

There are so many bad books and here is a good one. And this is about all that I know that is so simple.

April 26, 2007

Rainy Thursday

As I return to the world of work next week, I’ve spent my second-last free weekday properly. I was pleased that it was raining so I could do so. Reworking a short story of mine, and reading two little books. I loved The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, and After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. I loved watching the rain come down, sipping too many cups of tea to count, and being here to receive my first copy of the London Review of Books. I have such a crush on the postman. And am I ever going to miss this lovely life of mine.

Next up (and aren’t I lucky?): Divisadero, the brand new novel by Michael Ondaatje.

April 22, 2007

April can be so uncruel

We stuck close to home this weekend, which is natural as close to our home is a wonderful place to be on a weekend like this. Lots of indulgences: first ice cream of 2007, first outdoor patio supper with the first pitcher of beer. Today we partook in chicken wings as the street went by. I’ve felt mellow enough to be boneless, which is so nice (and rare).

I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto this morn, and I loved it. My problem with Japanese fiction in the past has been its weirdness (I’m a realist to the core) but I rode with it, and I enjoyed it. It’s the first Japanese fiction I’ve read since we lived there, and it was nice to go back for an hour or two. Now reading Happenstance by Carol Shields, who I continue to be obsessed with. And then on to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald who I’ve never read before, but is much championed over at dovegreyreader scribbles. I’m curious.

Tonight we’re watching Notes on a Scandal (a bookish film!) in order that I can get through the evening without fretting to death about my thesis defense (!) tomorrow morning.

April 22, 2007

The Horseman's Graves by Jacqueline Baker

“…or so it was supposed,” writes Jacqueline Baker in her new novel The Horseman’s Graves, “since no one ever did learn for certain and it was all pieced together in the usual way, as history always is, by hearsay and supposition and outright imagination”. Such is the tale Baker tells, and clearly this is a “tale”– old-fashioned and unselfconscious. The story is filtered through various points of view of members of a prairie community close to the Alberta/Saskatchewan border, and it is this union of voices that allows the story to function differently than so many other prairie stories with their isolated first-person narrators.

Though of course this community is no neighbourly idyll. I cannot pinpoint one character at the epicentre of this story, but the characters who come together to fulfill this role are each alone in their own way– the Schoff boy who is hideously scarred after an accident; his parents who are so isolated in their grief; Lathias, the Metis hired man who caused the accident and becomes devoted to the boy; the bizarre character of Leo Krauss (whose family had been feuding with the Schoffs since “the old country”); Leo’s first and second wives, whose union to him is unfathomable to the rest of the community; and Elizabeth, the daughter of Leo’s second wife who arrives in town with her mother’s marriage and casts various spells with her bewitching looks and her strange behaviour.

And the tangled web of all of these characters (whose ties are not substantial enough to render any of them not lonely) is conveyed by each of them, and by their neighbours with a wonderfully limited omniscience on the narrator’s part. It’s so effective to come to understand a character through what others see. Baker writes beautiful descriptions of landscape, reveals so much with dialogue and weaves something lovely with humour and darkness together. She develops her tale in such a roundabout way that makes it feel like a yarn, and yet momentum is present all the while. Her pacing yields a fabulous suspense, and she holds back enough to allow her realism a decidedly ghostly edge.

I liked the unfashionableness of this book, and I am not entirely in the habit of being contrary. I like what seemed to be Baker’s utter concentration on a story for the sake of itself, and the manner in which the narrative seemed to be “crafted”. That with a genuine skill with language and story, Baker successfully realizes her vision without having to try to be clever.

With The Horseman’s Graves Jacqueline Baker has written a real-live story with legs, and it runs and it runs and it runs.

April 17, 2007

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

Suite Française is such an intriguing text. I read it in the context of Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (upon which I’ve been marking many an essay during these last two weeks), thinking about Ondaatje’s artful blend of of history and story which foregrounds the latter. Némirovsky’s text goes beyond that, though during her writing she did have a similar blend in mind– as she remarked in her notes: “the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.”

In fact it is only Némirovsky’s own circumstances (she died at Auschvitz in 1942) that have allowed history bear so much upon this work. Suite Française comprises two novellas, as well as two appendices, the first being notes and journal entries by the author during her composition, and the second letters and telegrams which illuminate the perilous situation for her and family between 1936 and 1945. And so what fascinates me continues to be the question of what we should make of this work in its entirety– this blend of story against history, against the history of its author, and the story of the text itself (that the novellas must have been written almost contemporaneously to the events which they describe, and that the work was saved by one of Némirovsky’s daughters in a suitcase whose contents she did not discover until the 1990s). The result is fragmented (as you might expect of the unfinished work of an unfinished life), but there manages to be something of a wholeness all the same. Story upon story compounded upon history, and it all hangs in a balance which tells us of not-so-long-ago.

But we need not examine Suite Française within so broad a context. Here I will echo what every review I’ve read of this book has said: the story stands up. Némirovsky was famed in France before her death; she’d written numerous novels as well as a biography of Chekhov. News of her talent should not be news at all.

“Storm in June” and “Dolce” are the first two of what was to be five novellas telling the story of France at war. “Storm in June” takes place against the chaotic events of June 1940 before the fall of France as residents of Paris fled the city. The range is sweeping which I resisted at first (I am not so fond of being swept) but I soon became comfortable with the many perspectives (one whole chapter from the point of view of a cat!), the contrasts between classes, the furious pace. In the beginning the characters seemed like types more than people, but I soon came to know them and their connections intimately. I also came to understand why Némirovsky might have created types consciously: in her book it is people which are the cogs in the war machine. Says one character, “What we’re going through is down to people and people alone.”

Though of course her main focus is the people who have no control over this machine, which is seen particularly with “Dolce”. The second novella takes place in a German-occupied French village during 1941. Here we see regular people operating under extraordinary circumstances: “It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it.” And indeed the characters are people now– even the German soldiers. Némirovsky creates a marvellous tension throughout the novella, and, as with “Storm in June”, she wraps her tale in the most wonderful prose (brilliantly translated, or so it seemed to me, by Sandra Smith). Evidence of humour, tenderness and love abounds throughout this work, rendering the author’s fate particularly tragic.

But as her daughter stated in a BBC interview: “For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory.”