May 11, 2016
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, by Mona Awad
I wasn’t expecting to struggle with Mona Awad’s debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. The day I bought it, I met up with two friends who both happened to be in the middle of the book and they said it was great. It’s been receiving rave reviews. But as I began to read it, I couldn’t help but find it unsettling, and not just in the ways it was intended to unsettle. Part of the problem is entirely my own—I’ve had a hard time reading most of the books I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. Part of the problem too was with the book’s design, the unfinishedness of its stark design and its lack of heft. Was lack of heft the problem? Ironic. I did keep thinking that I’d read a version of this book a long time ago, and it had been called A Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Was I being chick-lit-ist? But then Awad’s Elizabeth is definitely no “chick.” There’s nothing pink about this book. The only shoe you’d put on this cover would be an army boot, but maybe that was the trouble—Elizabeth the teen goth all in black, maudlin and sad. A bit like the actual cover then, rough outlines, scrawled. Maybe that was the problem too.
My problem with 13 Ways of Looking Like a Fat Girl was one that interested me, which is vastly different from most books I have a problem with. The problem I have with most books is that they don’t interest me at all, but this wasn’t the case here. It was totally bizarre. Here I was getting hung about a book because its protagonist was so unlikeable—which says way more about me than that protagonist. What kind of a reader am I? Only the kind of reader who usually considers herself above such critical assessments. Unlikeable, piffle. But I couldn’t shake it here. Elizabeth, I wanted to say to the girl, cheer the fuck up. It can’t all be that bad. Wash off all that unfortunate eye makeup and go out into the sunshine.
Part of my problem with 13 Ways of Looking Like a Fat Girl was personal. In general terms, to be a woman is to be afflicted with a mild case of body dysmorphia, and this inability to grasp one’s own bodily reality for me hasn’t been aided by the three times I’ve lost about 30 pounds in the last 20 years (only once through trying really hard; there was also the time I moved to Japan and the other when I stopped breastfeeding) or the two times I’ve gained 30 pounds in pregnancy, not to mention the other times I’ve gained 30 pounds without any real explanation (except for that one time, which was all down to moving to England, eating a lot of sausage [not a metaphor, you sick dog] and being in love). So you see, I know what it is not to know one’s own body. And so the stories that were fixed in Elizabeth’s perspective unnerved me then. Was she really fat? How fat? And did it even matter? Of course it did. But it doesn’t too. So my unsettlement here is a testament to Awad’s achievement of giving her reader such a feeling of the claustrophobia one can experience living inside a body. Some of it was just all too familiar.
Some of it really was that Elizabeth was also kind of annoying though. Which would be fine, except I think that what I mean by complaining that the character is unlikeable is actually that her lack of evolution is just not very interesting, from a literary point of view. Although it is interesting that so much remains stable for her even as she loses weight—this is quite deliberate on Awad’s part. The novel’s epigraph is from Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (I think?): “There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin.” At any size, really, the song remains the same.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. And while it is also to Awad’s credit that this is not a heartwarming story about a woman’s struggle overcome adversity and finally accept herself (blech), I wanted something more for the character than what was written. As a kind of stand-in for actual evolution, Awad has Elizabeth changing her name as the book progresses, employing the various possibilities inherent in a name like that. But that literary strategy seemed kind of facile, because I didn’t know Elizabeth well enough to understand what it was she was striving for with her new names, what each one meant.
There is a dawning awareness though. The reader sees this in the story “Caribbean Therapy,” in which Elizabeth goes to a really terrible nail technician, incredulous of the woman’s reality—that here is a fat woman who loves and is loved and is happy. And then in the story “Additionelle,” with its stunning, awful, claustrophobic ending. That she’s trying and trying but not getting any closer to the person she is trying to be, to become. And finally in the last story, “Beyond the Sea,” in which she’s coming to realize the futility of her struggle, that we get one life and why should it be such a struggle, unless you’re Karl Ove Knausgård of course. (I think about this a lot, actually. Not about not being Karl Ove Knausgård, I mean, but that I am 36 years old and I refuse to to spend the next forty years of my life fighting, trying to be less, losing, and then losing again. I refuse to be 70 years old and hating myself because I’m fat. For that matter, I refuse to be 36 years old and hating myself for being fat. And am I fat? How fat? No. I refuse to engage. I’d rather eat a croissant. I’d rather take a walk.)
And then the ending of this story, the final line of the book: “As I watch her [a woman peddling on a stationary exercise machine]… I feel dangerously close to a knowledge that is probably ours for the taking, a knowledge that I know could change everything.” And it was here that I wanted to cheer: Yes, yes, take it, Elizabeth. Because that knowledge is right there. Everything I wanted from this book, for this character, summed up in a line. And it’s a credit to Awad too that all possibilities are wide open right here.
Being happy and fat (and what is fat? how fat? etc. etc.) is not a given, but that knowledge that is ours for the taking seems very much of this moment. Just this morning I read Kaye Toal’s article, “I Promise You Don’t Have to Lose Weight to Be Happy” AND Dr. Yoni Friedoff on how liking the life you’re living is the best way to have a heathy weight, AND just yesterday, Lindy West on how to be a happy fat woman. There are very few ways in which I can say that right now is a glorious time to be living as a woman inside a body, but with such zeitgeist this may be one of them. And it feels good.
I hope that Mona Awad’s character gets the memo too.
May 4, 2016
Flannery, by Lisa Moore
There was little doubt in my mind that Lisa Moore could pull off a YA novel. I remember her teen character in Alligator, which was a book that just delighted me when I read it first, and the vividness of her point of view. And as a writer who so skillfully employs word as tools to create meaning, I was sure she had the deftness to tune her work to a different kind of reader. Which, of course, didn’t preclude me from reading it too. If she wrote One Direction fan fiction, I’d probably read that as well. Lisa Moore’s name is a literary hallmark.
So it’s no surprised that I really enjoyed Flannery, her latest book. The title character is a sixteen-year-old girl whose best friend has started ditching her for her cool musician (and slightly dangerous) boyfriend. Meanwhile, Flannery has got to complete an entrepreneurship project with her partner Tyrone, who she’s known since they were babies and is quite possibly in love with, but he’s not showing up to do any work, plus her free-spirited artist mother can’t afford to buy Flannery the new biology textbook she’s required to have, and keeps writing about Flannery on her parenting blog, which other kids at school are actually reading.
Flannery’s voice and point of view represents a stable force in a crazy world, and she’s an amazing mix of confusion, steadfastness and yearning. And naturally, I was very interested in her mother’s character, which Moore renders with just as much nuance. I think a lot about a mother’s right to tell her own story, even when her child is part of that story, because suggesting otherwise is another way of telling a woman to shut up. I do think that when a mother writes about her child with a great deal of thought, she can do this successfully, although Moore shows that Flannery’s mother Miranda is not too thoughtful about her blog (which disappointed me a bit—I would have loved some substance here), or anything, for that matter. Except her love for her children, of course, which is demonstrated in lovely, pointed ways—Miranda swooping in to exalt Flannery’s entrepreneurship project, her intuition regarding the well-being of her son, which her smartass daughter doesn’t give her credit for. Moore shows the the imperfect mother is the only kind of mother, and sometimes that all a child needs.
But of course none of this would be of much concern to the novel’s target readers, for whom Miranda would only be peripheral, I think. Those readers will be just as wrapt as I was by the story though, by Flannery’s incredible outlook on the world, but menacing shadows at its edges. And yes, there is edge here, real significant danger, and Moore so successful melds these points into a true, believable life, rather than using them for more sensational purposes (as bad YA novels might do, and even as a very good one like Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies did quite deliberately). As the world’s is, the emotional spectrum of Flannery is wide. There is a scene in a mall food court where Flannery is betrayed by Tyrone that will break your heart as profoundly as that scene did in Moore’s February when her character waits in a bar for a date who never arrives.
Moore doesn’t push syntax and narrative structure quite as hard in Flannery as she does in her other books, which is the one significant way that the book is a break from her oeuvre. But here and there in her prose sparkles in just the same way her readers have come to expect: “The sun was so low that its reflection was a perfect bright red circle on the water’s surface and as the boat swing around, the circle was smashed into a thousand pieces that skittered away from each other and then floated back together, making the perfect circle again.” Such an extraordinary sentence! And what a gift to any reader, regardless of their age.
April 28, 2016
The Name Therapist, by Duana Taha
Often the most remarkable story about names is the fact that sometimes there isn’t a story at all. For example: I somehow managed to be named after two Irish counties entirely by accident. “What where your parents thinking?” people have asked me, imagining me as the offspring of two Munster enthusiasts, but I don’t think they were thinking of much beyond euphony. Although my maternal grandmother had a difference of opinion about that, and suggested “Lea” as a middle name to soften the sound, which was how I came to be called Kerry Lea by everybody on my mother’s side of the family. But I think my father’s family found the double names a bit pretentious (and really, their tendency was to truncate single names to a syllable, so that’s not shocking), so they called me Kerry, and in my mind it was a bit like having two selves, Kerry and Kerry Lea being people entire distinct from each other. (Further: carrying around an extra name is very cumbersome, and I ditched the “Lea” altogether at the beginning of grade one at a very singular moment in which my teacher asked me what I wished to be called, and I proclaimed myself a Kerry and so have been ever since.)
So what I mean about names, and what Duana Taha means too in her wonderful new book, The Name Therapist, is that even the names without a story turn out to be stories, and for some of us, those stories are inherently interesting. Name nerds, she calls us. In high school, I owned an A-Z of baby names, just because it made for good reading. I used to collect weird and wonderful names I encountered in books—Beezie from A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Zeeney from Louise Fitzhugh’s The Long Secret were two very bizarre ones I fancied once (and while I didn’t end up naming anybody Zeeney, I named my firstborn after another character in the same book). More often than I ever wrote actual stories as a child, I invented fictional class lists, the names telling me everything about the plots inherent, multiple Melissas, and everything. I made up families too, ones with kids a bit older than me, sisters called Robin, Tracey and Karen—don’t you know exactly who these people are? There was a time in which I wanted to a name my child Ariadne, and about a decade ago, my husband and I had a fictional daughter called Sadie Rose who was very well behaved, and then when I gave birth to actual children, I called them Harriet Joy and Iris Malala, who were not named accidentally at all.
And so for me, reading The Name Therapist was a bit like going to church. Over the years, Duana Taha has established some serious name cred through her column on the blog Lainey Gossip, writing about names, helping expectant parents sort through Ellas and Bellas, and marvelling at phenomena like Jayden, Cayden and Brayden. She continues to explore these ideas in her book, as well as sharing her own experiences growing up with an unusual name, and how her Irish and Egyptian parents’ experiences with their names informed the selection of her name. (Her mother, Mary Veronica, who was only ever, inexplicably, called Maureen.)
The book is a delicious mix of memoir and social science, even better reading than the Baby Name A-Z (which was very good, actually, because it was from there that I first discovered that Zoe meant life, and that Elaine was a variant of Helen). Taha writes about naming trends, sibling matches, “Utah names,” Starbucks names, same-sex couples with the same name, and just what it feels like to be a Jennifer. Taha’s thesis is that a difficult name builds great character, and that learning to be a Myfanwy will make Myfanwy an awesome girl. She’s got a thing against Gords, but don’t take it personally if you are one. She delves into stripper names, African-American names, and why the Baby Name A-Z’s are so ridiculously Anglo-centric. Names and class. Also, what it felt like to be the parent of a child called Atticus during the summer of 2015.
Name therapy is not an exact science, and Taha’s thesis (name as character builder) was disproved more than once throughout her research, but I think that this was never meant to be a controlled experiment. Instead, it’s a book that will be delighted in by most people who’ve ever thought hard about how they were named and why, and what it means to name somebody else. It’s rich with stories, connections, and fascinations. And that I couldn’t write about it without sharing name stories of my own proves Taha’s overarching premise: that names are something it’s hard to shut up about.
April 20, 2016
On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light, by Cordelia Strube
Ever since 1964, writers whose protagonists are eleven-year-old girls called Harriet have been taking a serious chance on things. How can one actually pull that off that kind of literary homage? But Cordelia Strube, whose many books include the 2010 Giller-nominated novel Lemon (which was one of my favourite books that year) has absolutely pulled it off. Her Harriet, in On the Shores of Darkness There is Light, is a many-splendored, singular creation, and the novel goes and goes and never falters.
Harriet lives in an apartment building called the Shangrila, once a luxury high-rise but now a place housing mostly downtrodden seniors and her family since they lost their home in the 2008 economic downturn. Her mother is trying to keep them afloat through under-the-table bookkeeping, with no help from Gennady, her broke criminal lawyer boyfriend in Crocs, or Harriet’s father Trent, avid cyclist who lives with Uma who he met at the farmer’s market and who is currently in the middle of an IVF cycle. And then there is Irwin, Harriet’s five-year-old brother who has hydrocephalous and whose traumatic entrance to the world brought forth the end of Harriet’s parents’ marriage and all semblances of stability in her life. His health remains perilous, with frequent seizures and hospital visits, ever a source of anxiety and preoccupation for their mother, leaving Harriet with a preponderance of freedom that she exploits for her own devices.
Dumpster-diving for materials for her found art projects, charging her elderly neighbours for runs to the convenience store, and hanging out with her teenage neighbour, Darcy, and losing her scattered grandmother at the Scarborough Town Centre, Harriet has her own agenda, which ultimately involves her dream of escaping it all and getting away to a rural retreat far away in Algonquin Park, living alone by a lake and painting much like Tom Thomson did. A playwright, Strube has an ear for dialogue, and the novel is enlivened by conversation by the people all around Harriet, from confused senior citizens to forthright angry teens, and we see all the information contained within these throwaway lines being filtered through Harriet’s precocious but still eleven-year-old brain and how they come to inform her view of the world. The connections she makes between her father’s obsession with cycling and her stepmother’s IVF cycle, for example, or how a diatribe from the malicious Gennady becomes the title of a sculpture she creates called “The Leopard Who Changed Her Spots.” In a subtle fashion, this is very much a novel that is preoccupied with language, by words, and the puzzles of what things really mean.
As in her previous work, Strube is unafraid to portray adults as a ragtag collection of lost souls and idiots. (This is another feature this novel shares with the collected works of Louise Fitzhugh.) That such folks are responsible for the care of vulnerable people is always a terrifying thing for those people to discover, and On the Shores of Darkness… is about that loss of innocence, the realization that none of us are really ever safe, and that our parents are as vulnerable as we are. “I want you to get better, but I don’t want to be blamed,” admits Harriet’s mother at one point regarding her son’s unhappiness, which is indicative of every adult’s failure in this book to take responsibility for his or her own actions, for their own life. “All of this has been very hard on me,” so say the grown-ups in relation to their children’s hardships, over and over again.
At nearly 400 pages, the novel is long, but swiftly paced and never dull. The bleakness of its considerations are broken up with incredible humour, from the cacophony of the voices in its background to the sheer audacity of Harriet herself, her nerve, all the things she is willing to do and say. There is a humour too in the contrast between the child’s point of view and the world around her, and—in the case of Harriet’s friend, Darcy, in particular—the person she is trying to to be. The sheer naïveté of these would-be old souls. Darcy likes to go on about, “that Caitlin whore,” a friend from her old neighbourhood, and we learn about what Caitlin did to her at Guides: “I was a Sprite and she was a Pixie. That ho bag made like all the cool girls were Pixies….Then the skank fucked up my puppetry badge.”
There is a twist two thirds of the way into the novel that is absolutely devastating and potentially crazy-making, but Strube manages to make the final section work with the introduction of a new character, a young girl who underlines the novel’s Fitzhugh ties by her determination to be a detective, carrying a magnifying glass and clues jotted in a notebook even. And while the novel veers dangerously toward sentimentality as it heads to its conclusion, Strube shows just enough restraint, and manages an impeccable ending, one that brings its pieces together, steady as the beat of a heart.
April 13, 2016
The Road to Atlantis, by Leo Brent Robillard
Leo Brent Robillard’s novel The Road to Atlantis has been sitting on my shelf for about six months, and while I’ve wanted to read it—it’s a novel about family, and I love that cover—I’ve been terrified to pick it up. Because it’s a novel that begins with the death of a child, and I just don’t want to go there, not even in fiction, and also because a novel about the death of a child is so easy to do badly, all emotional manipulation and cliche. But last week I’d finally steeled myself, and I am so glad I did. The Road to Atlantis works on every level.
Here’s why. The tragedy occurs in the first chapter, and we know it’s coming. Anne and David are at the seashore with their two children on a summer vacation, and while the plot is taking the reader toward the inevitable moment (because the back of the novel has told us as much) the narrative itself is concerned with all the details and frictions of ordinary life, which is to say that there aren’t any ominous clouds, or if they are, we only notice them in retrospect. And when it finally happens—their daughter disappears while swimming, and the entire beach goes on alert as they search for her, because perhaps she’d only wandered off —David thinks, “So this is how my life was meant to be…This is what tragedy feels like.” But we don’t hang there for long inside that moment. Within a paragraph (“This is it, he thought.”) this chapter is over.
We’re given a blank page for the purpose of recovering our senses (for certainly, the end of the first chapter hit me like a gut-punch) and when the second chapter begins, we find the family a year ahead in time, their lives seemingly resumed, the rest of the world no longer so conscious of the tragedy that had befallen the Henry family. Which makes it almost easier to carry on the charade that life goes on, these characters still stunned, numb and vacant as it does. And it’s here where the novel launches, taking us through the next two decades of their lives, the moments where Anne and David hang together and where they fall apart, each of them navigating grief in their own way. And it is in their own way, ways that are so connected to the people they were before their daughter died (the people we met in the first chapter) that these trajectories seem inevitable. “This was how my life was meant to be.” This entire novel is about that resignation.
Which sounds depressing, but there’s too much substance to be simply that. At one point in the novel, David takes his high school history students on a field trip to the Diefenbunker near Ottawa, a Cold War era bunker deep under ground, and while the narrative too plumbs similar depths, it’s not the plunge itself that matters but the scenery down there. We see David and Anne trying to carry on with ordinary family life, performing their respective jobs well and less well, parenting their son as he grows older, confronting their own family histories, and yes, all the while their daughter is present, memories of her stirred continually. They’re pursuing their own passions and fascinations, some of them inexplicable. Turns out “This was how my life was meant to be,” is not as straightforward as one might assume, because while the tragedy of a child dying touches everything, there comes a point at which it no longer defines it.
I loved this book, it’s depiction of real people who are so thoroughly tied to the world, although there are certainly moments at which they might not want to be. The Road to Atlantis is an engrossing read, the reader swept along by its pace, and as amazed at what time can do as its characters are.
April 6, 2016
Escape Plans, by Teri Vlassopoulos
Back in November, I went to the launch for Teri Vlassopoulos’s novel, Escape Plans and bought the book with great anticipation, but then I got pneumonia not long after and the book got lost inside a month of illness, a month during which Escape Plans received a short review in The Globe and Mail, which is always a good thing. So I should have known then that when I finally picked up on the book on Friday that I was in for something excellent, a weekend of really wonderful reading. I finished the book on Sunday night in the bathtub, which was kind of fitting in a small-scale way. And I enjoyed it so completely.
We learn in the prologue that one of our three narrators, Niko, drowned in the Aegean Sea, this information disclosed by his daughter Zoe who is recalling how she learned of her father’s death, returning home from swim practice, the smell of chlorine, her wet bathing suit in a heap on the floor. And then the novel proper begins, Niko’s first sentence, “I’ve always been good at leaving,” and telling the story about how he left his family in Toronto and returned to his native Greece to work for an ailing shipping company that had once belonged to his uncle and grandparents. Zoe’s storyline begins years after the prologue, as she moves to Montreal for university and embarks on her first real love affair. And finally, we meet Zoe’s mother Anna, Niko’s wife, who is travelling to Paris with her partner, this storyline contemporaneous with Zoe’s, and Anna is unsure about the terms of her relationship, the future, and also worried about her daughter back home.
It’s a fascinating structure, in particular that one of the narrators is (seemingly) a dead man, these passages narrated by a ghost. Vlassopoulos does a wonderful job creating suspense as his story progresses, and we want to find out what happens to him, and it seems impossible that he could actually die, so alive are his words on the page. Just as effective are the ways that Vlassopoulos have the members of this broken family, disparate figures, each of them, curiously echoing one another, and connected in ways that only the reader is privy to. The inspiration for this structure is the mythological Graeae, three sisters who shared a single eye (which in this case is the novel’s first-person narrative, a single I). The Graeae enter into the story via poetry written by Niko’s mother, who also wrote about a historical figure who shares a name with a turtle belonging to Niko’s next-door neighbours in Athens….by which I mean that this is a novel loaded with freight (also fitting). There’s nothing incidental, even if Zoe’s haphazard road trip to New York City and then Niagara Falls kind of seems that way, even in her own mind. And each character is laden with their own history—Zoe with the tragedy of her father’s death, Niko’s legacy from his literary parents, and Anna’s own childhood growing up with her geologist father in Northern Ontario. Vlassopoulos’s characters are (sometimes unknowingly) such products of the people they’ve come from, and the places they’ve been, and she shows how experience and inheritance comes with its own DNA, and so much of it is inescapable. (There is also a Bonnie and Clyde reference near the end that’s exquisite, that their doomed outcome was never the point.)
While there’s nothing showy about Escape Plans, and getting used to the structure takes a few chapters, eventually the deftness of the novel’s construction becomes overwhelming, and I finished the book asking myself, “How did she do that?” It’s the kind of book that I want to return to again, to discover connections (odds and omens) that I wasn’t savvy enough to pick up on the first time.
March 28, 2016
Ice Diaries, by Jean McNeil
To me a paradox is a comforting thing, with its suggestion of the unknowability of universe and therefore possibilities well beyond our narrow expectations of experience, ideas surpassing our rigid understanding of black and white, hot and cold, fire and ice. To me it’s comforting too that a single thing can be two things at once, that all the easy answers are the wrong ones, because any of us who bother to think already know that this is the case. And if you’re the kind of person who also has these proclivities, than you too will probably be fascinated to spend a while lost inside Ice Diaries, the Antarctic memoir by the Governor General’s Award-nominated author Jean McNeil.
It’s a memoir freely acknowledged by its author to be a creation, about a continent without terra firma, a huge expanse of space in which there is nowhere to go, where everything is white but so much of the year is darkness. The Antarctic is a place where few people ever go, but those who do are compelled to return. A place of toughness and fragility. Inhabited by scientists, except that McNeil is a writer send along on their expedition. A Canadian, who has lived in Britain for more than twenty years. In this 400+ page book, the paradoxes abound.
For me this was a slow read, structured similarly to McNeil’s journey to the Antarctic by sea, an experience she says she was grateful for, because the Antarctic is not to be simply arrived at, but instead acclimatized to, otherwise the effect is much too jarring. We also find ourselves in the opening chapter in the Falkland Islands, a stepping-off point to the Antarctic, and this is two years after her Antarctic journey. Because while it’s the fashion to begin a story in the beginning, most of us don’t realize we’re there until the middle—time is not so tidy. Which is also the reason that a narrative strand of Ice Diaries is concerned with McNeil’s violent childhood in the Maritimes, as well as a summer during her teen years during which women were being stalked and murdered in her small town and McNeil met her father for the first time, experiences that become conflated. And while these passages seem a bit extraneous to the Antarctic chapters, it is interesting to consider the ways in which they’re linked. And so too how McNeil’s early life may contribute to the claustrophobia and dread she feels at the end of her Arctic sojourn when the sun begins to disappear and McNeil fears she may never get away from there.
McNeil is a tremendous writer who brings the Antarctic landscape to life (! another paradox for a place with so little life) with the deftness of her prose, and her memoir is rich with fascinating details—such as that one must remember to apply sunscreen under one’s chin as the reflection of sun off the snow can cause third degree burns. This journey through the topography of the continent at the bottom of the world is one through the topography of her consciousness, and both emerge from the story known and still unknown at once.
March 20, 2016
Becoming Lin, by Tricia Dower
Although coming-of-age books tend to feature adolescent protagonists, Tricia Dower’s novel Becoming Lin not only demonstrates that such “becomings” can occur elsewhere (and even more than once) in a lifetime, but also represents an arrival for the author herself. For this book, Dower’s third—after the acclaimed 2008 story collection Silent Girl, which put feminist spins on Shakespearean narratives; and the 2012 novel Stony River with its sinfully delicious Peyton Place bent—is absolutely her finest yet. Becoming Lin is the kind of book that you’re sorry when it’s finished, bereft to leave behind a world that has held you so fast.
It’s a novel about the 1960s, about idealism and reality, about the narrow confines of a wife’s identity and that of a mother. Familiar themes, all of these if you’ve read books like Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellers or watched Mad Men, but themes made fresh with the nuances of the novel’s point of view, the carefulness with which these ideas are examined. In Becoming Lin, the prose is mostly inconspicuous, but what grips the reader is the evolution of Lin’s consciousness, and the complexity that arises from the absence of polarities—unusual for a history of a decade so constructed of extremes.
Linda Wise is sheltered, overprotected by her parents in their sleepy New Jersey town, particularly since her sexual assault years before (which occurred in the novel, Stony River). At the age of 23, she sees an opportunity for herself when she meets the charismatic Ron Brunson, a guest pastor at her family’s church one summer. Ron preaches social justice, and shares stories of his experiences on Freedom Rides, for which he spent time in jail. Ron’s values seem to accord with Linda’s own, but with the addition of the possibility of actual action, something she’s found hard-to-come-by in her hometown, studying at a women’s college toward a social work qualification. The two end up sitting side-by-side at a church dinner, and Dower marvellously constructs the dialogue that brings them even closer. Ron mentions to their table that his chances of getting a church of his own are lessened without a wife, who’s expected to take on (unpaid) roles in the congregation—among them counsellor or administrator-typist. Someone mentions he should put a wife-wanted ad in the newspaper, and Linda’s not quite listening to this.
“I type. I can do the bulletins,” she volunteers, with characteristic bad timing, in essence responding to the want-ad, and while the moment is awkward, Ron Brunson is game.
After a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Linda (who is happy to have her new husband truncate her name to the more sophisticated-sounding “Lin”) follows Ron to his congregation far across the country to rural Minnesota, where she soon finds herself playing the careful and conservative role of the minister’s wife—not quite what she’d signed up for. Typing bulletins is not even the half of it. Most troublingly though is her husband’s reticence to voice his opposition to the Vietnam War, a point of view that could put his job at risk. And here is where a lesser novel would have irrevocably split the couple, wife going off to radical pursuits and leaving her dull husband behind, but instead Dower has Lin give Ron the courage to realize that opposing the war is his duty as a minister and as a Christian. Theirs is a true partnership, however much a complicated one.
And it is complicated, this we know from the outset, as chapters for the first half of Becoming Lin alternate between two timelines, one of the newlyweds negotiating their new life together, and the other of Lin half a decade later, now a mother to a young son with whom she is moving to the nearby city of Hopkins to begin a new life for herself. A temporary experiment, this is meant to be, though the reader is not made privy to the details at the outset—we know that she and Ron are still married, it’s his name on her apartment lease, that he takes for granted she’ll return home to a year from then. And the story here is familiar to me as well, because I grew up watching Three’s Company and One Day at the Time on television—sitcom scenes of single moms and apartment complex social dynamics. Though the problems Lin is grappling with here—and so too are the other single mom friends she encounters—are not so easily resolved in neat half hour episodes. It’s a brave new world of women’s lib, access to abortion, and career gals, though the notions of justice that have followed Lin throughout her life continue—she’s working for a company in which promotion is not accessible to women employees; her friends contend with deadbeat dads who don’t support their families, she gets groped on busses and feels somewhat unsafe just walking around in her own life.
In the intervening years, Lin and Ron had been wrapped up in the anti-war movement, stirring up resistance from their neighbours and gaining the unfortunate attention of the FBI. Her faith in God and religion has wavered, her husband’s remaining steadfast, and this has become a great divide between them. Their year apart then is an attempt to bridge that space, Ron wishing her to take the freedom and responsibility she longs for, and again, it’s a strength of the novel that he remains (for the most part) a sympathetic character, their connection a true one, albeit one with weak spots and failings. And that the religious character (he’s such a square, man!) does not become the bad guy, that he too is on the side of social justice, but his position is complicated too, just like life is.
In essence, Lin has two becomings in this story, and it’s important to note that one is not necessarily the undoing of the other. That progress is a process, and so is it for feminism, coming in waves as it does, some change rolling back on other kinds, and there is contradiction and disagreement, which might look like disarray from a distance, but it’s a becoming, indeed.
March 17, 2016
Barbados Book Report
I promise that I am nearly finished writing blog posts about Barbados, but I haven’t talked about the books yet. We brought so many books to Barbados, twelve or so, books for me and books for Stuart, and it made our suitcase quite heavy and wondered if it was really wise to travel with more books than sunscreen, but my intuition than it was indeed turned out to be correct. Because there was so much time to read, and even enough time that there was enough time to read…and also do other things besides reading. (I am also not sorry that we brought twelve physical books with us, a few of them hardcovers, because on the journey home I found a forgotten Kindle in the pocket of the seat in front of me, belonging to someone called Pat who’d lost more than 100 books all that once. If I’d forgotten a book in an airplane [which, by the way, would never ever ever happen] I’d still have eleven more available for my reading pleasure. There is nothing I’d rather carry more than books. And I would rather carry books than nothing any time.)
My first book was Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels series. As I’ve said, it’s a series I’m not mad for, but am intrigued by, and I’ve enjoyed each subsequent book more than the previous (which makes sense—I’m perpetually bored by stories of childhood and adolescence). And this was the one I’ve been most looking forward to, for the characters are mothers now and Lena is a writer, and these storylines compel me. And they did. I read most of this on the 5 hour flight, dipping in and out of Carolyn Smart’s collection of Bonnie and Clyde poems, Careen, for diversion. I enjoyed it so much, and was most struck by the tension between the two friends when Lena becomes pregnant and is determined to do pregnancy and motherhood properly, to prove her friend’s struggles with it had been personal failings rather than circumstance. And there are even a few days where it seems possible, until the whole thing goes to pieces, and she loses herself as so many women do (not knowing too that all this is such a temporary situation—she imagines motherhood as a fixed state). This was the first Ferrante books I seemingly devoured in that way one is meant to. I really really liked it.
Next up was My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, which Ann Patchett and others had proclaimed as Strout’s best book yet. I’d come belatedly to Olive Kitteridge, but really liked it, and had been looking forward to this one, but it kind of disappointed me. I mean not entirely, because it was interesting and also short, a consideration which meant my investment was not overwhelming. But this was also problematic because I bought the book in hardback, paid $30+ for it and felt I’d paid a lot of money for something slight and unfinished. Which was inherent to the project, I supposed, but I was never able to quite figure out how, or what the point was, or why this wasn’t a novel proper. Though it being short, I think I will go back and explore it again, see what I missed. It did actually seem an uncanny read after reading Ferrante, echoes of one with the other. The very premise of Lucy Barton reminded me of the part in The Story of a New Name in which Lena’s mother comes to Pisa to care for her when she is ill, an anomaly in the story of their relationship, as it was for Lucy and her mother, and so too the circumstance of each woman’s positioning against her past and her family, and the insurmountable nature of class.
After that, I read The Sunken Cathedral, by Kate Walbert, whose A Short History of Women I’d enjoyed so much a few years ago, and it came recommended by Nancy Jo at Book City. It also seemed like a strange choice following My Name is Lucy Barton, also set in New York City, delving into ideas of motherhood, art, and friendship. Although I felt I wasn’t quite in the right mindset for it. It’s even more fragmented than Lucy Barton but less annoying so—the pieces are so disparate that it makes the project seem like more instead of less. All the same though, I couldn’t make the pieces (each of them compelling in their own rights) fit together to mean something greater than the parts. Was I reading it wrong, I wondered? Why couldn’t I focus enough to have the whole thing make sense? And then I found this New York Times book review that kind of confirmed by feelings and suggesting the problem wasn’t entirely me, and I liked the book better after that, accepting it on its own terms.
And then I read Diary of a Mad Housewife, which I was absolutely mad for. I’d ordered it after reading Laura Miller’s article on the resurgence of the housewife novel, which interested me because I think Mitzi Bytes fits into the genre. And it was fantastic. How can this book be out of print? It’s funny, sharp, and a marvellous exercise in narrative voice. I’ve never seen the award-winning film, but now I’d like to. As the introduction indicated in my edition, this 1967 anticipated books like Bridget Jones Diary and Candice Bushnall’s Sex and the City columns, and fits well into the genre of Betty Draper books I kind of love, which includes Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellers, The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young, and the obligatory Betty Friedan. I appreciate that it’s a book about marriage and motherhood that does necessarily think marriage or motherhood is the singular problem, but that the problems go deeper than that. Also seemed an extension of The Sunken Cathedral in its considerations of New York and motherhood. These novels were continuing to speak to one another.
Following that, I read The Hundred Year House, by Rebecca Mekkai, which is our book club selection for this month and as I’d read online that it was a bit of a beach read, it seemed fitting to bring with us. It was a strange book that I didn’t entirely understand until I was further into it, and also not until I’d read about her first novel, The Borrower, which was rich with references to classic children’s books including The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin, and the suddenly it all made sense, that this book is similarly a puzzle mystery but for grown-ups. The story moves backwards over the twentieth century to reveal the secrets behind a house, the eccentric family that owned it, and the visitors at an artists’ colony housed there for several decades. On the whole, it was a bit forgettable, but I enjoyed it. Curious echoes between it and Mad Housewife as well—both have characters who are hit in the face by mean men called George.
I had to take the dust jacket off for the next book, because my friend loaned it to me and then I took it to the beach, which puts books in perilous situations. The book is The Faithful Place, by Tana French, whose books I adore. My third Tana French, and perhaps my favourite. (I am reading them in order; each book is narrated by a minor character from the previous one. And I was so thrilled to discover a new one is forthcoming in August!) I don’t recall connections between this one and others I was reading, but I was so entirely absorbed in the novel that I wasn’t thinking about anything else. It’s about a Dublin detective, Frank Mackey, who returns to his estranged family when a suitcase is discovered in an abandoned house on their street. The suitcase belongs to his first love, a girl who jilted him on the night they were meant to run away together. And now maybe it turns out that he wasn’t jilted, and that someone close to both of them actually killed her.
The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer, was after that, the fourth book I’ve read by Mortimer, although it reminded me much more of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, by Barbara Comyns, in being a rather devastated telling of the realities behind fancy bohemian lives. These poor women. (Both novels are autobiographical as well.) It’s about a wife who has been as partial to philandering as she is to bearing children, but when her umpteenth husband starts cheating on her, it’s all quite different. It’s a spare novel, much of it dialogue and we don’t even know the main character’s name. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed later novels by Mortimer—I liked My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof and Home, novels written after this one and Daddy’s Gone a Hunting. But I also think it’s far from a beach read and one perhaps not best appreciated under the influence of a daiquiri. And so I’m going to be reading it again.
And finally, my bonus book (for it was from Stuart’s stack). The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith i.e. J.K. Rowling, her foray into detective fiction, the first in a trilogy. And I loved it. For me, I’ve always connected J.K. Rowling (whose work I’ve not read before, apart from a read aloud of the first Harry Potter a couple of years ago) with Kate Atkinson, both of their career successes undertaking similar trajectories, and so it seemed fitting that this book reminded me so much of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels (although Galbraith’s is much lighter in tone, less brutal and violent). Anyway, The Cuckoo’s Calling was great, and I look forward to following its characters through the other books in the series.
Since returning, I’ve been immersed in great Spring 2016 books, and I have a few really good ones I look forward to telling you about.
March 8, 2016
In Time of Need, by Shakirah Bourne
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Or, the alternate blog post title: “Barbados in Words Part I” )
In the future whenever I think about the challenges of fostering a thriving literary culture in a country like Canada (pop. 35 million—as opposed to the US’s 318 million) I’m going to think about the population of Barbados, which is 285,000. Literacy rates are sky-high in Barbados, but there aren’t many bookshops outside the capital city of Bridgetown, which made our vacation last week particularly unique in our experience—this trip was just five minutes away from being the only one we’ve ever taken that did not involve bookshop pilgrimages, and from which we’d come home with fewer books than we’d left with.
Except…that after finally making our way through airport security, five minutes past when our boarding time had started, a bookshop appeared before us at the Grantley Adams International Airport, like a vision. A terrible husband would have suggested that instead we get on the plane, but my husband knew better, and so into the shop we went, me in pursuit of a single thing: a literary book by a Barbadian writer who was a woman. And there is was, In Time of Need, by Shakirah Bourne, a self-published title I knew nothing about, and after all, time was a-wasting, so bought it and rushed for the plane. And I happily read In Time of Need all the way home.
It’s a collection of stories, many of which have already appeared in Caribbean literary journals (including Arts Etc Barbados, which is edited by Bajan-Canadian Robert Edison Sandiford), and which was awarded the Barbados Governor General’s Award for Literary Excellence last year. The opening story, “Getting Marry,” is from the perspective of a young boy confused by his parents’ decision to become married (“because I could have swear that them was married every since”) who decides that getting married is all about kissing and cake, and decides to get in on the action himself with a young friend, only to witness a very adult moment from his hiding spot under the cake-lady’s table. The story is fixed in the boy’s point of view and rich with the slang and colloquialism of his language, but then the voice we encounter in the next story is entirely different (from the pov of a young woman who’s just been sold into sex trade, though she doesn’t realize it), and still the next, “The Last Crustacean,” which is narrated by a crab—all of which is to say that this is a fast-paced eclectic collection, a veritable grab-bag of good stories.
I loved “Sheep Don’t Stand Still,” with its fabulous twist, about a woman who thought she was living How Stella Got Her Groove Back with a Bajan lover she’d met on the beach, but who finds out more than she bargained for when he dies suddenly and she goes back to Barbados for the funeral. “If Dogs Could Talk” is a terrific story, one-sided dialogue by a woman being interrogated by police after her cousin is accused of murder. “Four Angry Men” is about politics and takes place over an afternoon at a rum shop. These are stories about domestic violence, child abuse, and family ties. “I Didn’t Know” has the most wonderful opening paragraph: “I first met Betty when her son stole my car. As I watched her punch him in the face and force my car keys from his pocket, all the while begging God for forgiveness, I decided we should be friends.” Another stellar selection was “The Five Day Death of Mr. Mayers,” a story of happenstance and misunderstanding, one thing leading to another with hilarious results. And I loved “A Tear for Miss Cinty,” about a young girl who doesn’t appreciate her mother’s devotion to an elderly neighbour until her own mother is old herself, and left so much alone.
This was all certainly a side of Barbados I was not privy to from the vantage point of my all-inclusive deck chair, but the colours, the sun, the flowers, the food, the slang and rhythms had become familiar to me and immersion in Bourne’s literary worlds was the perfect way to make my vacation last a little bit longer. So nice to bring a little piece of that place home.
