September 3, 2021

Householders, by Kate Cayley

I was a big fan of Kate Cayley’s How You Were Born in 2015, and have been looking forward to her latest release, the short fiction collection Householders, which is out this month from Biblioasis, and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest. The first story, “The Crooked Man,” literally took my breath away, a story of overwhelming motherhood, family life in the city, and violence on the margins of everyday experience, and a similar ominousness infuses all the stories throughout the the rest of the collection. That no matter how much we try to hunker down in our houses (whether they be a Toronto semi, a bunker during the zombie apocalypse, or a commune in rural Maine), the world creeps in, and we can’t stop it.

The stories are loosely connected, the narrative about the commune in Maine serving as an anchor. Carol and Nancy arrive there in the late 1960s, and Nancy stays, becomes Naomi, falls under the spell. Naomi’s story and that of her daughter are woven throughout the rest of the book, right up to the present day, amidst stories of a man who offers mercy (or is it?) to a legendary musician past his prime; a woman who pretends to be an nun online; a woman reflecting on a strange and complicated relationship with a troubled woman she’d known during her university years.

Kate Cayley is splendid in her deft arrangement of the sentence, and in her depiction of the quotidian but just askew enough to be new and surprising. These stories are rich, absorbing, and oh so satisfying, and I predict this as one of the big books of the fall literary season.

August 23, 2021

Holiday Reading Part 2

There were no duds in this stack, and even the title I was most intimidated by (hello, novel about the Trojan War!) blew me away. Every single one of these very different books was an absolute stunner, and the connections between them (as always!) were fascinating—see chart below. I was also so happy to reread Turning, which I’d read on vacation three or so years ago, and which I enjoyed but found so SPECIFIC that I wasn’t quite sure it would resonate again, so I gave it away, which I regretted for years. A new copy found its way back into my life this year, however, so I was happy to read it again. By a lake, of course.

I LOVED Malibu Rising—while I liked her previous novel, it didn’t quite live up to the hype for me. This one, however, was amazing. Every Sue Miller book I read is a pleasure. The Laura Lippman book was the most wonderful mindfuck, as was The Other Black Girl, both of which take on writing and publishing. Happy to read my second Marian Keyes—she’s really so good. A Thousand Ships was incredible, and Stuart and Harriet both devoured it after I did. Wild Swims was weird, but neat, and short, which is just the kind of portion I can take my weird in.

And finally Deacon King Kong, which I heard of somewhere, and then found in a Little Free Library shortly thereafter. It was rollicking, kaleidoscopic, huge in its scope, and tragicomic brilliance. Absolutely amazing.

August 13, 2021

Steadily Outward

“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors.” —Julia Baird, Phosphorescence: A Memoir of Finding Joy When Your World Goes Dark

(I loved this book so much!)

August 6, 2021

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

I will confess to having very little interest in all the sad, languishing literary heroines, the kind who embark upon years of rest and relaxation, spending entire chapters imagining what it might be like to have a job, asking such questions as, “How should a person be?” These literary people are just not to my taste, and so I was wary of Emily Austin’s debut novel, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, about Gilda, who is overwhelmed by depression. And also a lesbian atheist who accidentally gets hired as a receptionist at a Catholic Church, and Gilda deals with this complication as head-on as she tackles everything in her life, which is to say: not at all. There’s also the mystery of her predecessor, an elderly woman whose death was suspicious. And the question of how many dirty dishes she can store in her closet before she’s forced to run some water in the sink.

I loved this book, which is very much internal, but where all the sad, languishing literary heroines are impossible company, Gilda is delightful. Her point of view entirely sympathetic, and the reader begins to cheer for the ER staff who receive her with tenderness as she arrives again and again with issues relating to anxiety. The whole narrative gets a little too madcap and threatens to go off the rail in places, but it holds steady, as Gilda doesn’t, and her despair has real resonance, her grappling with meaninglessness so meaningful, and yes, this is a book that ends with hope, which is definitely why I like it so much. But it’s also a really compelling depiction of the experience of mental illness, which was important to Austin, she writes, so that some readers will finally see themselves and that others might finally understand.

July 30, 2021

Summerlong

Summer continues! We had a lovely long weekend on Lake Huron recently, and I brought ATTACHMENTS, the first novel by Rainbow Rowell, and loved it so much. I’d had a rough week before we’d headed out of town and so even though I’ve gathered a pile of newly-released thrillers, I knew I wanted something more cheerful. The Rainbow Rowell book was not immediately appealing, however, because I’d found it in a Little Free Library and someone had spilled water on it once upon a time, but it turned out to be perfect, and now I keep recommending it to everyone. Such a great book that manages to be about work and friendship AND a romance all at once. It definitely brought back memories of nascent online culture in the workplace circa 1999/2000. Remember when your emails used to get flagged for using certain language? I worked in an office once where I inadvertently downloaded something that turned my cursor into a fairy wand, and somehow the IT guy knew immediately, and it was very embarrassing, and we didn’t end up dating, but they do in the scene from my next novel that I created out of this situation.

July 19, 2021

Getaway

How I spent my summer vacation! So nice to read such an eclectic selection of fiction.

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is one of the most hyped books of the season, and I really liked it. A fictional oral history of a 1970s’ pop act, it’s also a fascinating treatment of how race and gender can eclipse talent, and a withering indictment of white allyship.

I picked up Picnic at Hanging Rock after it was included on the Topaz Literary Summer Reading Round-Up, and I am so glad I did, because indeed it’s a sultry, languid read, weird and disturbing, the story of the unsolved disappearance of three school girls in turn-of-the-century Australia.

Single Carefree Mellow was everything I was hoping for in a Katherine Heiny book, so sparkling and weird, and definitely a riff on Laurie Colwin who knew better than to assume that love and infidelity were interchangeable, because real life is more messy and complicated. The only problem is that now I’ve read all her books, and so she has to publish another one pronto

I read Burnt Sugar next, by Avni Doshi, so unrelentingly bleak, kind of holding up a magnifying glass to its characters so we could see ever errant hair and enlarged pore, and there was so much ugliness. I didn’t like it, but that’s not to say it wasn’t really good.

And then I read Long Live the Post Horn next, by Vigdis Hjorth, and wasn’t crazy about it initially. I am allergic to the works of Ottessa Mosfegh, and this was kind of similar in the beginning, not far from the bleakness of Burnt Sugar, with characters numb and detached, but then it clicked for me, mostly because it’s about hope and the postal system, which is definitely my jam. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a Norwegian novel before.

After that: Maeve Binchy! I read Circle of Friends years ago when I was a teenager who cut out pictures of Chris O’Donnell from magazines and hung them on my wall, but never read anything else, deciding that Binchy was for biddies, but for the last few months I’ve been listening to the You’re Booked podcast and they talk about her all the time, and so when I found Light a Penny Candle in a Little Free Library, I brought it home, and it was delightful, which I don’t say about most books more than 800 pages long, and it only became COMPLETELY ridiculous in the last few chapters, which is pretty impressive. A really wonderful look at friendship, and also of women who are allowed to be different and now just foils.

And finally, Astra, by Cedar Bowers, which I started on the last night of our trip, a novel in pieces, and I am waiting until I get to the end of give my assessment, but maybe smart people are saying many good things about this book.

July 9, 2021

The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter

I could not love the cover of this book more, at first glance one of those abstract artful prints that have been splashing over literary novels in recent years but, upon rotation, the picture becomes a landscape, a suburban streetscape complete with a picket fence, and the whole novel is a little bit like that, art and realism, something different every way you look depending on your point of view.

Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child is a novel about abortion and motherhood, but to say such a thing is far too reductive, because this is a book far richer than merely what it’s “about.” Instead of about, it’s a world conjured, decades of history, layers upon layers of meaning, and it begins with Jane, a fervent Catholic schoolgirl who becomes pregnant and marries her boyfriend. Going on to have three more children, and a less than satisfying marriage, and when her eldest daughter Lauren comes of age, she takes on a share of the narrative, consumed with high school social dynamics, Jane existing on her periphery, consumed with her local right-to-life group. But then this arrangement is shattered with Jane brings home an orphan from Romania, a disruptive toddler who’s somehow Lauren’s sister now, and the extent of her attachment trouble sends each member of this already fragile family to the end of their tether.

But also Lauren is not a satellite, her story the effect of Jane’s cause, because she’s on her own collision course, and that a daughter can be a part of you and also her own separate universe at once is the confounding paradox of parenthood. Which only makes each character’s story richer and more complicated, of course—that our mothers and daughters don’t exist for our own purposes, and here they come along, messing up. And I think it’s the seeming randomness of the novel’s many elements that underlined its artfulness to me, enhancing the texture, the way that all the pieces don’t just lock into place, because they don’t in the world. The years passing by with culture happening in the background—Buffalo makes a curiously compelling setting here, a player called O.J. Simpson playing for the local sports team, and it’s like we can see the 1990s coming. (The Fourth Child reminded me a lot of Ben Lerner’s Topeka, the way it traces so many of our current cultural divisions back to the 1990s, when all the players were stepping into formation.)

I adored the way that The Fourth Child complicated binaries, sat comfortably with paradox, and not only dared to show the many “sides” of the abortion debate, but to suggest it’s not a debate, but life itself, in all its painful, messy splendour.

June 14, 2021

NISHGA, by Jordan Abel

With his first two books, award-winning poet Jordan Abel’s conceptual writing allowed him a fascinating avenue by which to consider notions of Indigenous identity and cultural appropriation, but also—as he writes about in his latest, and painfully personal, book NISHGA—for him to engage with his own lack of connection with the Indigenous culture of his father and grandparents—the land, cultural knowledge and language of the Nishga people. The appropriative works he dismantles with his poetry are significant for being a primary way in which he’s been able to engage with Indigenous culture as someone who was raised apart from his community.

“Where do you come from?” A complicated question for many people, and especially for Abel, raised in Ontario by his white mother, far from British Columbia and his father and grandparents whose lives had come to be defined by violence and abuse originating from their experiences at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School.

Abel’s father was an artist. Ironically, he notes, his father Lawrence Wilson, whom he barely knew, designed the logo for the Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society.

Throughout NISHGA, Abel uses his father’s art, superimposing his images with photography and text, connecting and engaging with, and disassembling. These images are included alongside government records, transcripts of talks Abel has given, and other notes and pieces about his experience as an Indigenous writer in Canada.

NISHGA is a complicated, vulnerable, brave and considered answer to the “Where do you come from?” question. Abel wrote this book, he explains, so that other Indigenous people raised apart from their cultures will understand that they are not alone in their experience.

For the rest of us, NISHGA, artfully, originally, continues to underline the enormity of the legacy of Canada’s Residential School system, and the questions of identity that many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people rarely even consider.

June 10, 2021

Refreshing

Cheri DiNovo, a former Ontario MPP, and retired Canadian Senator Nancy Ruth make the most interesting literary and political companions in recent books The Queer Evangelist (DiNovo’s new autobiography) and The Unconventional Nancy Ruth (an authorized biography written by Ramona Lumpkin). Both daughters of Toronto but raised in classes that were divided by stratospheres, each woman has made her career out of embracing seeming contradictions, putting principles ahead of political loyalties, and both identify as LGBTQ (DiNovo is bisexual; Ruth is a lesbian). DiNovo may be a proud socialist and Ruth a longtime conservative, but both women have also found a place for themselves within the the Ministry of the United Church of Canada…though within that institution each would prove herself ahead of her time.

I devoured DiNovo’s memoir in two days after reading an article in the Toronto Star about how she wished to show in her book that change is possible and the fight is worth it. Perhaps unsurprising for someone whose true calling is writing sermons, DiNovo is a wonderful storyteller whose easy, informal sentences make for reading that’s both breezy and inspiring at once. She tells the story of her traumatic childhood, of living on the streets as a teenage drug dealer, of turning her life around after support from a shelter helped her return to education, and then how she went from being a teenage Trotskyist to running her own headhunting firm during the 1980s’ excesses. Her corporate success, however, coupled with its inverse as the 1990s arrived and the economy spilled into recession, led her to spiritual questioning whose answers she eventually began to find in the United Church, where she was ordained as a Minister in 1995. After serving a rural parish, she began to work at an inner-city church in Toronto, helping turn the church’s future around by strengthening its connection to the surrounding community. She performed the first same-sex marriage in Canada in 2001. In 2006, she was elected as MPP for Parkdale-High Park in Toronto, a position she would serve in until 2018.

I reviewed the biography of Ruth for Quill and Quire, and you can read my piece right here. Ruth’s childhood was not the hardscrabble experience of DiNovo, but it was difficult and traumatic in its own way, and she faced her own struggles to find her place in the world, though she always had her family fortunes to fall back on. After inheriting her family money, Ruth devotes herself to philanthropy, supporting causes promoting women’s empowerment. She runs for office twice for the Conservative party, but is both times defeated. In 2005, however, she was appointed to the Canadian Senate, where she used her power from within as she always had—to advocate and agitate for progressive change.

What I find most refreshing about both women is the ways that they managed to get things done by reaching across party lines. In the Ruth bio, it’s noted that she donated to the leadership campaign of Ontario Liberal Lyn McLeod when she herself was a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party, because she wanted to see women in positions of power everywhere. DiNovo was able to work with members of other parties to get significant bills passed in the Ontario legislature even when the NDP was in a third-party position. Both DiNovo and Ruth are far more interested in enacting policy change to improve the lives of vulnerable people than adhering to a party line, or ensuring an election win—and in their doggedness, they really do prove that real change is possible.

June 9, 2021

The Souvenir Museum, by Elizabeth McCracken

There is always something so delightfully skewed by Elizabeth McCracken’s literary world, which is populated by ventriloquists and people who play villainesses on children’s TV programs, with runaways and stowaways, and that voice on late night radio dispensing love advice. Literally uncanny, by which I mean that in her latest story collection,The Souvenir Museum, nobody is at home . A distant son takes his widower father on holiday to Scotland. A heartbroken woman checks into a hotel to drink her feelings, and narrowly avoids drowning in someone else’s bathtub. The TV villainess spends New Years with her brother in Rotterdam. A single mother takes her young son to Denmark to find an old flame to give him a watch her father had left him. A mother, the one character who never goes anywhere, is rendered homeless all the same when she loses her entire family. An older gay man takes his young son on a lazy river while his partner takes a break at the bar, and considers the unlikely course of his life. And speaking of unlikely courses, a mother buys her daughter the doll that she’s always wanted (a Baby Alive!) except that her daughter is grown up, expecting her first child, a recovered addict, and alive, while the child of a long-ago friend whose life had once run parallel to hers…is not. This story is called “A Walk Through the Human Heart,” its title referring to a scene set in a science museum, but the title is also an apt description of what it feels like to be reading this book, the exquisite agony of being alive, of being loved, of being left, and bereft.

Stories of Sadie and Jack weave their way among the others, starting near the beginning of their relationship as American Sadie meets her eccentric English relatives at Jack’s sister wedding in the middle-of-nowhere Ireland, and we see teenage Jack in London, later they spend time with Sadie’s mother, and these stories show the baggage that family brings with it, baggage that’s inextricably bound up with stories, some of them true, some of them otherwise. That to love is always, one day, to lose, but we embark on these journeys of a lifetime anyway, and yes, if we’re lucky, there are souvenirs.

These stories, their sentences—they’re disorientating (which is the nature of travel, of course). But they’re also strikingly evocative, marvellously descriptive—but sometimes too much? How can hair be “brown marcel”? Marcel means curly, I think? These are not images you breeze over. I’m imagining Elizabeth McCracken’s mind as a treasure trove of strange words and rituals and people and ideas, the world as we know it rendered in a funhouse mirror, strange and distorted, which is also to say just as it is.