February 26, 2016
We Oughta Know, by Andrea Warner
The very first real concert I went to (i.e. not with my dad) was to see Sarah McLachlan on tour for Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, a CD I’d recently purchased from Columbia House for a penny. This was in grade nine, I think, 1993 or 1994, with my best friends Britt and Jennie. Britt’s dad drove us there, to the theatre in Lindsay, ON, where we were part of the amazing, intimate performance, and I saw a girl with dreadlocks who kind of looked like a boy, which left me flummoxed. There is a connection, I think, between having seen Sarah McLachlan, powerful and awesome at her piano, on the guitar, and that Britt and I would spend all of high school performing at talent shows and low-rent concerts playing pop covers on our acoustic guitars, singing in harmony. We really took it for granted, all those amazing women who articulated our feelings so well, whose lyrics we scrawled in our scrapbooks. It was the times we were living in. It seemed inevitable that we’d see Sarah McLachlan against six years later at a much larger venue, us sitting high up and far away on the grass, watching her perform with Sheryl Crow, Deborah Cox. I think the Dixie Chicks were there. Biff Naked on a side stage. Women in songs were in the ascendence. “Women in Songs” was the name of a popular CD series here in Canada in the last few years of the decade, and that the collections were feminist or even that these were women at all seemed to use kind of incidental as we drove down the main street in our town singing along with Natalie Imbruglia as she bared her heart with “Torn.”
In her book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music, Andrea Warner articulates that whole scene, and the remarkable fact that four Canadian women were leading the charge of women in song: Celine Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Shania Twain, and Alanis Morissette. These four women too are (along with Diana Krall) are the only Canadians on Canada’s best-selling artists lists, coming in above the Beatles. And even more remarkably, they all made their mark during a five year period in the mid-1990s. What was going on exactly, Warner wonders? How did they do it?
Dion, McLachlan, Twain and Morrisette are not musicians usually linked together, more often viewed in terms of their differences—the good girls and the bad ones, the authentic musicians versus the manufactured ones. Warner makes the interesting point that as a teenager, she regarded these women as she regarded the members of The Babysitters Club, definitive types, not allowing for complexity of character. Making assumptions: how could Dion with her entrepreneurial skills be a Feminist with all her love schlock, and the same with Twain and her bared midriffs? Exhibiting the same narrow-mindedness that led critics to be baffled by Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” (which, incidentally, was the only album my husband and I ended up with two copies of when our CD collections merged):
‘The sweetness of “Head Over Feet,” the sensitive sprawl of “Mary Jane,” and the quirky landscape of “Ironic” were baffling to the easily confused, particularly to those who were committed to painting Morissette as a screaming, seething ball of rage. How can she be angry but so gentle here? Well, how can you have both a right hand and a left hand? It’s simple, provided you’re not someone who hates women. People contain multitudes and women are people; therefore women contain multitudes.’
In her book, Warner takes us track by track through the albums that rocketed these women to stardom, and also examines her own feelings toward them and how coming to admire Dion and Twain for their talent and hard work is a part of her coming to terms with her own notions of feminism. She also takes inspiration from 90s music heroines and blends the personal in with her cultural analysis, discussing how her parents’ separation and own ideas of love and marriage influenced her perspective on Dion’s music, or how McLachlan’s devastating Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff (which I always used to put on when I was at my most angst-full, just to feed the pain) intersects with her grief around her father’s death. She also examines how these four women were regarded by the music industry, by the media, the sexism and stereotypes and the system that is set up so that women are unable to succeed, for example, the rule against playing two songs by women in a row on the radio, which is what galvanized Sarah McLachlan to start The Lilith Fair to show that women aren’t merely to be pitted against each other, but can stand together. Fascinating too to consider the stupid Lilith Fair backlash, that it was reverse sexism. I remember being gibed about “lesbians” by certain morons in my company at the time who knew I was going to the concert, as though most rock festivals are not enormous cockfests (which are distinct from “enormous-cock fests”) and why don’t we ever talk about that?
Warner is a music critic for CBC Music and Exclaim, and a warm, engaging writer who celebrates the power of girls and women and their voices, and critiques the culture that made all this happen. An appendix in We Oughta Know includes a long list of other Canadian female acts who made their mark throughout the 1990s—Alannah Myles, Amanda Marshall, Jann Arden, and others—making clear that the four women spotlighted in her book are not merely some freak phenomena.
“The ’90s were a remarkable decade for girls like me, and ultimately, the woman we would become. When you come of age in a time when women have voices, take up space, are visible creators and entrepreneurs, it never dawns on you that silence is the rule and these women, your idols, are the exception.”
February 10, 2016
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page
My first proper job after graduating from university was temping as admin staff for a social services agency in the English Midlands, and it was a job that blew my mind in terms of what it taught me about the possibilities of narrative. My job required me type out reams of notes scrawled on yellow notepads and other paper scraps, and render these into a coherent story, and it was fascinating. I worked in Fostering and Adoption and wrote up family trees and histories for families pursuing these avenues, and then moved into Children and Families and supported social workers with overflowing caseloads working to protect vulnerable children and/from their parents (who were often unfathomably idiotic—or fathomably so; indeed, there was an entire basement room with paper files stacked to the ceiling of cases that stretched back generations).
I had this job concurrent to the Victoria Climbié murder inquiry, which delved into the systematic failure to protect a small girl who had been tortured and murdered by her guardians. The details of this failure are shocking, and yet they weren’t altogether: I’d seen how resources were scarce, how social workers were often impossibly tasked, and wondered too how far the social safety net would have to stretch in order to account for every possibility of unthinkable human evil. “The ends and edges of what [people] could have done or could do,” which is a line from Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page.
Frankie Styne is a new edition of Page’s novel, first published in 1993, and it put me in mind of my favourite Hilary Mantel novels, her first two, Every Day is Mothers Day and Vacant Possession, dark comedies about the dark edges of humanity and their successful attempts to outmaneuver meddling social workers. Page’s social worker is Annie Purvis, who we know first from the point of view of her client, Liz Meredith, who’s just been moved into a terrace house with her baby. Liz has spent her time most recently living on a railcar after becoming estranged from her family, but since her baby’s birth (compounded by the fact that he has developmental abnormalities) she’s become tangled up in “the system”. Although she diverts all attempts to get her installed with a phone (living as she does by her grandmother’s advice to “Always avoid ties that bind”), she could do with a television, but in the meantime, she contents herself by listening to conversations between the troubled couple next door and imagining a different kind of reality existing on a planet far away, that life itself is merely the plot of a cheap pulp novel she’s somehow been stuck in.
A novel kind of like those penned by Frank Styne who lives next door to her, though they’ve barely met, and she’s never heard of his novels. Styne is a recluse, done in by a facial deformity and a lifelong struggle with sexual dysfunction, but now his latest book has been nominated for a major award and he’s going to have the press on his doorstep. Which drives him to become embroiled in a revenge plot of his own, sadistic fantasies that outdo any possibilities that have turned up so far in his books.
What impact do Frank Styne’s horror novels have upon the world? Is the impact more or less than the effect of Annie Purvis’s attempts to care for clients such as Liz Meredith and her son? Does Liz really require Annie Purvis’s meddling? And Page does such a terrific job of creating sympathy for each of her characters that we’re gunning for Liz, that we understand why she doesn’t take her son to a clinic after his foot is injured—because it’s true that they’d only take him away from her. And we know too that “they” is a group of people around a table, Annie Purvis and her associates, and they’re making their own gambles about the ends and edges of narrative possibility. That Annie Purvis has struggles of her own, a husband who resents the demands of her job. That all these people in close proximity affect each other in ways that no one can predict and that could never be plotted on a graph. That, contrary to Mrs. Thatcher’s assertion, there is such a thing as society after all, but what it is isn’t always pretty.
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is dark and funny, painful and uplifting, marvellously satirical but never cynical, and thoroughly invested with good faith. Kathy Page is a marvel. This is the very best book that I’ve read in ages, and if I read another half as good in the next few months, that will constitute an extraordinary literary year.
February 7, 2016
Patrin, by Theresa Kishkan
And so #TodaysTeacup continues, the Instagramming of my daily cup of tea, the end of the week marked with #CupAndSaucerFriday. I used to think I had too many sets of cups and saucers, but now it seems as though I don’t have enough. On Friday I took down the last of my cup and saucer sets to use, and was surprised to find that this one set is not from England—not Regency China, or Paragone Fine Bone China, or Coalport. No, this set was from a Czechoslovakian company called Altrohlau. Which was strange because I have Czechoslovakia on the brain, one of the settings for Theresa Kishkan’s beautiful, mysterious novella, Patrin—a novella in which the characters drink Earl Grey.
I first read Theresa Kishkan in her essay that won the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and which was included in her essay collection, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees. Unsurprisingly, trees factor prominently in Patrin as well, in patterns of leaves on a quilt inherited by the title character from her grandmother, a Roma from Czechoslovakia who’d immigrated to Canada and become estranged from the rest of her family. When her grandmother dies, Patrin tries to discern the quilt’s pattern, hoping they might provide clues to her family history, which is otherwise lost to her now, the answer to the questions: from where and what did I come?
The novella weaves together several timelines from throughout the 1970s—Patrin embarking to Europe on her own and having her heart broken by a Gypsy musician; spending time with her grandmother in Edmonton after her father’s death, them sleeping together under the quilt; Patrin working in a bookstore in Victoria later in the decade, isolated from the world, trying to decode the mysteries of her own self; and Patrin journeying to Czechoslovakia to do exactly that in 1979, supposing the pattern of trees and leaves on her grandmother’s quilt might be a map of the area in Moravia in which her foremothers had lived and travelled almost a century before.
The world Patrin finds in Czechoslovakia is shadowy and mysterious, the elusiveness of Patrin’s own story underlined by Soviet-era suspicion and paranoia. A friend of a friend takes her on a journey to Moravia to find if her quilt-map line up with actual places after all, and if any history of her family remains. And here the story takes on dimensions of a fairy tale, rich and verdant with a touch of magic, with an ending that in retrospect was inevitable, and is also perfect.
There’s another teacup too—Patrin takes stock of her “batterie de cuisine” as she moves into her own apartment on Oak Bay Avenue in Victoria in 1974, including a mug “from a potter on West Saanich Road” with a ceramic frog at the bottom. We have a mug just like that, a #TodaysTeacup feature from a few weeks back, Patrin wending its own way into my world, surprising patterns emerging, real life as art’s echo.
January 31, 2016
Bearskin Diary, by Carol Daniels
Carol Daniels’ first novel, Bearskin Diary, is driven by a remarkable protagonist, powered by compelling narrative voice and an extraordinary point of view. Sandy Pelly was part of the “Sixties Scoop”, a First Nations child taken from her parents and set adrift in the fostering and adoption system. Her story, unlike so many others, turned out mostly well—she was adopted by white parents who were loving and supportive, who did their best to fight against the racism omnipresent in the society in which they lived, and she was well loved by her grandmother, her Ukrainian “Baba“, who instilled in Sandy a sense of her own self-worth and an instinct for story-telling. But the loss of her heritage and culture is deeply traumatic, a loss whose effects Sandy can’t even articulate properly—she doesn’t know what she’s missing. But she knows she’s missing something, not least of all a place where she belongs. There is a disturbing remembrance of Sandy at five-years-old trying to scrub away the brown from her skin.
Things are going well for Sandy. Against the odds, she’s making it as a TV reporter, a rare position for a First Nations woman in the 1980s (and not so common these days either)—and we’re shown the racism she has to contend with from co-workers. She and her best friend Ellen enjoy regular Girls Nights, and it’s at one of these that she meets Blue for the first time. A Metis police trainee, she is instantly attracted to him, for obvious reasons, but also because she sees a glimpse in him of what she’s missing in herself. Blue is similarly alienated from his culture, however, and their relationship proves complicated—she throws caution to the wind and decides to follow him to Saskatoon, where he lives and works, but after a period of domestic bliss, she realizes he’s still distracted by a previous relationship that might not be as far back in the past as she’d been lead to believe. While this revelation is devastating, however, Sandy has other preoccupations—she’s managed to find a great job in her new city, and has just received a troubling tip about Saskatoon police officers taking First Nations women into isolated areas and raping them, getting away with it over and over again. And as she’s grappling with just how to tell that particular story, Sandy is also connecting with local First Nations Elders and discovering the richness of a culture that’s been denied to her for her entire life.
I read the book in a couple of days, and found it fast-paced and really absorbing. Although I was compelled by the story itself and its main character, more so than the novel’s structure, the container that held it. While Sandy was a rich and textured character, secondary characters were more one-dimensional. There were also strange shifts in point-of-view throughout the text. But it also occurs to me that critiquing the book by English literature standards is also beside the point—Bearskin Diary is part of a different tradition and has a more mythological structure, with expansiveness instead of depth, with depth in the places that I didn’t look for it at first. It’s chronology too is remarkable, the present moment dissolving into the past—each one containing all those that came before. It’s a novel with the feel of the oral tradition—and indeed it’s the voice that draws the reader in.
Which makes reading Bearskin Diary really a pleasure. In a time in which it’s never been more important that First Nations’ women voices are heard (and read), Daniels’ novel is definitely one not to miss.
January 24, 2016
Busker, by Nisha Coleman
I picked up Nisha Coleman’s Busker on the recommendation of Isabel Huggan, so it wasn’t surprising that I loved it. It begins with Coleman, fresh out of university, following a man to Paris with romantic Parisian intentions, but the romance turns out to be more of an awkward misunderstanding. Leaving Coleman stuck in France without a visa, or money, or even a home, but what she does have is a violin. So she begins busking on the streets of Paris, and finds her way into the city through a kind of back door, and also finds a way into her truest self and the kind of life she wants to lead—a coming of age, of sorts. And from her perspective on the fringes—she’s in France illegally, busking itself is illegal in Paris although tolerated, and street performing is inherently fringey, sidewalks begin marginal as they are—she is able to tell a Paris story that’s very different from those we might have read before, those that are all Shakespeare and Company and Mavis Gallant. Busker is something different entire, a rich and generous portrayal of misfits and weirdos and the rhythms of urban life.
I kept laughing out loud, which is a mark of literary achievement. Though I also cringed—as one who has never mastered air-kisses, I recoiled at Coleman’s recounting of her first bisous and how she actually made cheek contact. She writes about being asked to play her violin in a hair salon, but how her own unruly do caused a great upset when she arrived. Or the man she met who wanted to perform songs he’d written, which turned out to be “sex songs” with lyrics like, “The horny bull wants a bouncy ride.” And she meets a lot of men, Coleman, and in the beginning, being lonely, takes them up on their invitations, until she realizes that she’s setting herself up for a lot of awkward interactions. She longs for the company of women friends as well, but these kind of relationships are harder to find. Not to mention that at the beginning of her time in Paris, Coleman hardly speaks French.
It is interesting to read a book about a character as solitary as Coleman is throughout much of the time she writes about. The stories she tells are of people she encounters, other characters who come and go, so there is little interpersonal development throughout the narrative. What sustains the narrative and brings all these stories together then is the development Coleman shows in her own character and understanding of it. She’d previously studied violin in university, but after suffering from performance anxiety she quit to do a major in psychology instead. Busking in Paris, however, Coleman finds her way back to the violin, and writes fascinatingly about how busking is not a performance, but about being part of a bigger scene. She writes compellingly too about the politics of street performance, scoping out prize spots, getting shut down by the police, engaging with other musicians and performers. About balance too—that her lifestyle is a kind of freedom and she’s brave to pursue it, but it’s also a method of avoidance: “I can’t fail at this because busking is an ongoing condition, not a means to an end.” And perhaps she gets a bit too comfortable in her Paris life, something that needs to be checked. “After all, Buscar is a Spanish word that means to search.”
What makes Busker so compelling is that Coleman is usually searching, is open to experience, and curious and wondering. She’s also funny, her prose is impeccable, and not she’s not afraid to make herself vulnerable in the narrative. Though it’s impossible could she ever hope to avoid seeming vulnerable in a book that begins with her in such a precarious situation, but the her faith in a city, its people, the world, pays off. In a time when we’re constantly being urged to harden ourselves against a cruel world, Coleman’s book reminds us of the miracles that can happen when we instead open up wide.
- Purchase Busker from McNally Robinson Booksellers
- Check out Coleman’s very cool companion to her book, Busker: The Interactive Experience
January 17, 2016
One Hit Wonders, by Patrick Warner
I added Patrick Warner’s novel, One Hit Wonders, to 49thShelf’s The Next Gone Girl list, a list of suspenseful novels about wives with secret lives. Because it belongs there for a few reasons—this is a novel with twists and turns, about a husband who discovers after his wife’s death that perhaps he didn’t know her at all, and it has the whodunnit element—who is responsible for the body lying on the floor? Suspects include her husband, Freddy, an antisocial novelist trying and failing to follow up his runaway hit first book whose proceeds he now easily lives off of; the has-been golf pro with whom Lila was having an affair and who had got her hooked on cocaine; and two small-time crooks who’d been caught up in a plan to rob Freddy of his millions. What makes this book different from the others though is Freddy’s unabashed complicity in its construction; it’s his second novel all along. But not a memoir—this is fiction. He’s creating conversations he never heard, imagining places he never went, and interactions he was never a part of in order to have the whole story make sense. Which makes us wonder if he’s complicit in other ways. Is there a truth to be uncovered at the bottom of all of this? And isn’t that we ask such a thing of fiction kind of an amazing thing?
This is a novel about story-making, about empathy and where it can take us. Our own empathy—why is it that we long to get inside the heads of twisted people and be immersed in troubled lives—and also Freddy’s as he imagines himself into the minds of the men who orchestrated his wife’s downfall. He tells us, “I feel dirty after all that. And yet my task is to empathize with these characters, walk a mile in their shoes. The trouble is I have trouble with empathy. It seems to sit on the delusional end of the sympathy spectrum, perhaps at the point where sympathy runs out and something darker begins. Empathy is only a confidence trick, a species of legalese, a way of making the afflicted believe you are walking in their shoes. Empathy is the tool that gets you through the door. But who is to say what you will do once inside?”
And isn’t that passage wonderful? Warner is a wonderful prose writer, a critically acclaimed poet, and author of one previous novel, double talk, which was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. And while One Hit Wonders might frustrate readers more interested in gritty realism than a look into fiction-building whose reality can fizzle out into nothing just when you think you can almost touch it, others will be most impressed at the genre-blurring metafictional achievement Warner pulls off here. I’m still not completely sold on the ending, but endings tend to be a bit like that, as Lila’s Freddy would attest.
January 13, 2016
Hotels of America, by Rick Moody
Reviewed by Kerry, Toronto Canada. Rated 3 out of 5 stars I bought a copy of Hotels of North America, by Rick Moody, because I was intrigued by the idea of a novel comprising online hotel reviews. I am not being facetious when I write that online hotel reviews are actually one of my favourite kinds of literature, and I have passed many an hour reading aloud ones written by English people, who tend to be very cranky and have strong feelings about the temperature of toast. And part of the reason I love these reviews so much is because of the narrative one senses beneath those few hundred words, the rage and fury that bubbles to the surface, the idea one gets of what the writer left behind as he embarked on his disappointing getaway. And the narrative, rather than the hotel amenities, is what Moody’s Morse—a prolific and popular reviewer—focuses on, the reviews themselves posted in alphabetical order but referring to hotel visits spread over decades of Morse’s curious and mysterious life (which has lately been particularly peripatetic). Usually the hotel itself merely serves as a platform for Morse launching into an episode from his past, involving his broken marriage, a troubling love affair, his itinerant work as a motivational speaker, the various schemes he’s embarked upon with his current partner, K. Some of these episodes are funny, and more than once I laughed out loud. A few are poignant, and each piece is a thoroughly worthwhile vignette. Cumulatively though, the novel lacked momentum—strange for a novel about travel, although the problem is that Morse never gets anywhere. So that I’d put the book down and not be compelled to pick it up again, though I was happy enough once I had done so. And while I am not sorry I read this book, and I’d recommend it to interested readers on the basis of Moody’s writing, I will probably not read it again. Was this review helpful?
January 10, 2016
Birdie, by Tracey Lindberg
Last week writers Lee Maracle, Drew Hayden Taylor and Tracey Lindberg spoke on CBC’s The Current about the idea of First Nations book club month (responding to Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Carolyn Bennett’s recent proposal) and what the experience is like being an Indigenous writer in Canada. The program was excellent, and the show was stolen by Maracle, who was indomitable, admirably cantankerous, and an excellent articulator of her situation and that of other First Nations women writers.
Maracle explained, “The balance in reading is not there for Indigenous women. 70% of book buyers are women, but 80% of books sold are men’s—it doesn’t matter what colour you are., So I think that’s a problem in Canada. If you just say Indigenous books, I think Tom King, Drew Taylor, Richard van Camp will get on the list [of suggested titles for a book club], and myself and Tracey will be at the bottom or at the middle.” The numbers back up her experience; in 13 years, for example, Canada Reads has never featured a book by a First Nations women writer—though I suspect this is a wrong that will begin to be righted upon the announcement of this year’s shortlist, which may very well include Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie. In fact, I hope it does.
Birdie is an example of what riches Canadian readers are missing when they’re overlooking First Nations women writers—a novel about women’s lives and experiences, the connections between them, and what happens when those connections are broken. (Think about more than 1000 missing or murdered women across this country—what must those absences be doing to families whose ties are already strained by centuries of colonial atrocities?) Though Birdie is most importantly about a particular woman, Bernice Meetoos, nicknamed Birdie, who has turned up in Gibsons, BC, after years of drifting, a pilgrimage to the place where The Beachcombers was filmed. In her bag, she carries decades-old clippings of Pat John, an actor from the show—”a healthy, working Indian man.” She’s preoccupied by thoughts of John, as well as taking guidance from The Frugal Gourmet, whose PBS cooking show is broadcast on the CBC. Things have not been quite right with Birdie, even more so than usual (and she spent four years living on the streets of Edmonton after all). She’s secured a job at a bakery and even has a place to live, a local woman to watch out for her—but then something breaks. She goes to bed, doesn’t eat, scarcely breathes, won’t be roused. And as ever when help and comfort are needed, it is the women who come.
First, Bernice’s cousin, Skinny Freda, the two of them raised like sisters, although the circumstances of Freda’s parentage are scarcely delineated. And then she sends for their Aunt Val, who’s had her own ups and downs, but is a motheraunt to both women as Birdie and Freda are sistercousins to each other (and such compound words abound throughout Birdie, suggesting that English proper is not up to the task of telling this story, just as the novel as we know it is inadequate to contain it, and therefore chronology is disrupted, notions of realism challenged, the whole book infused with elements of First Nations storytelling and mythology—Lindberg should be celebrated for her pushing the limits of what “the novel” can be). From her bed, in a kind of dream state, Bernice relives the traumas she’s endured, chief among them childhood sexual abuse by her uncles, which culminated in a terrible act of violence (justice?) that leaves her estranged from her family, alone. Until the women come.
Also present, if not physically, is Bernice’s mother Maggie, invoked in the novel’s prologue and epilogue, whose own problems make her not wholly responsible to what happened to her daughter. Bernice’s landlady too, while not Native, becomes part of this collective of women watching over Birdie, suggesting the possibility of womanhood as a connection that goes beyond culture; what happened to Birdie is particular to her situation, but there is a universality to women’s experience. There are so many things that every woman understands—and we see from being close to each character in this collective that each woman has her own tragedies that she carries within her,
Surprisingly, Birdie is not a heavy book, even with all the violence and tragedy. It’s as funny as it is sad, and more than that, it’s vibrant—powered by the voice of a woman who seemingly lies unconscious, which is kind of ironic, but there’s a lot going on inside Birdie’s mind, even as she’s got one half-opened eye on The Frugal Gourmet. As a character she’s rich and realized, and Lindberg never makes her a victim of her circumstances, her agency retained even in her lowest moments. Her very act of retreating into her mind, while passive from the outside, is a powerful gesture, and necessary for healing, for the possibility of a future.
January 4, 2016
Holiday Reading Joy
One day back into our routine, and I find I’m happy to be here. It’s been so long, with the sick-filled holidays and my three-plus weeks of pneumonia, and while I was nervous about this return to the real world, I find it much more pleasant and even more relaxing than where we’ve been lately. Although, granted, this is after just one day. Get back to me, perhaps, at the end of the week. But the one thing I do miss about the holiday was the reading—it was wonderful.
I was reading not-new and not-notable books in the weeks before Christmas, and enjoying the experience entirely. But then I picked up Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken, and found myself reading notably in spite of myself. It was so terrific. I’d adored McCracken’s short story collection, Thunderstruck, and I spent last Christmas Day sobbing while reading her exquisite memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. I read her The Giant’s House last summer, and liked it well enough, but it lacked the immediacy of her other books. And I had been reluctant to finally pick up Niagara Falls… because it was about men, a comedy team who find fame on the vaudeville circuit and in the golden days of Hollywood—nothing about that grabbed me. But the book did. Oh, its pacing, and energy, and to be so sad and so funny, and so completely realized. Truly, one of the best not-new books I read in 2015, and I’m so pleased that I finally did.
After that, I read Cassandra at the Wedding, which I bought at Ben McNally Books right before Christmas. I bought this one on the recommendation of Sarah from Edge of Evening, and was so pleased that I did. As Sarah writes, Dorothy Baker conjures Joan Didion in her setting but is entirely different in tone and approach—more wry than wrought, humour bubbling to the surface even in the darkest moments. It’s a book about twin sisters that seems like a great companion to Libby Crewman’s new novel, Split. About the connection between sisters and what happens when it’s severed, and how one person’s reality can be interpreted by another. Like so many books published by New York Review Books, Baker is doing fascinating things with narrative voice, and I appreciate how hearing from the slightly-deranged Cassandra’s sister Judith turns the whole story on its heel.
Then I read Inside Out, which is an essay by Rebecca Solnit with paintings by Stefan Kurtan. I’d asked for it for Christmas because I love Rebecca Solnit and wish to read everything she’s ever written, and also because it’s an essay on the subject of houses and homes, which I find really interesting. And it was. I loved her thoughts on materials and materialism, and the home as an extension of the female body while the automobile is that of the male (and therefore mobile), which connected to all kinds of things I’ve been thinking about Mad Men as we’re rewatching Season 1. Reading Rebecca Solnit is never not satisfying, and the book is beautiful.
I read Because of the Lockwoods next, by Dorothy Whipple. A Persephone Book, which is never short of extraordinary. I bought it in April when we were in London, because we’d been visiting Lancashire and she’s a Lancashire author and also because she is compared to Barbara Pym, similarly ripe for a revival, says Harriet Evans, but even a better writer. Whipple (whose unfashionable name is perhaps part of the reason she’s so fallen out of favour, writes Evans) is meant to be utterly readable, her novels absorbing. But I was dismayed to discover that they’re also 500 pages long, and you know how I feel about long books. It was one thing to carry such a doorstop across the sea, but then to actually pick it up and read it? Clearly I needed a holiday, a bit of space in which to make the long read happen—but then the book turned out to be everything Evans said. I read the whole thing in 2 days and now want to read everything in print by Dorothy Whipple. The novel was engaging, surprising, rich with complex characters and situations. I really loved it. Was dismayed to read that Virago Books was so thorough anti-Whipple. Thank goodness for Persephone for bring her back in print.
And then finally, I read The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, by Laura Miller, which was a marvellous celebration of reading, of literary criticism, and of the Narnia books and their creator, as well as critiquing the considerable problems with the two latter points. As we’re smack in the middle of reading the Narnia series (all of us for the first time!) in our family, I was glad to learn so much more about them and their context, and there was no shortage of fascinating Narnia and CS Lewis trivia, so that I become as uninteresting as I always do whilst reading excellent non-fiction (avidly sharing details, beginning every sentence with, “Did you know…) We’re reading Prince Caspian now, and I’m loving it all the more for Miller’s book.
November 19, 2015
My review of Split, by Libby Crewman
My first professional book review was of Libby Crewman’s The Darren Effect in Canadian Notes & Queries in 2008. It was a good book, but a messy one, and I suspect my review probably achieved a similar effect, which sadly was not an aesthetic statement, but was just me figuring out my way. But it also meant that I was looking forward to Crewman’s follow-up, Split, which was published by Goose Lane Editions in September. I read the novel twice as summer turned into fall, and it’s a story that has stayed with me since, in its oddness and perplexities, its curious sideways appeal, but also in the vivid moments that Creelman so stunningly evokes.
A remarkable feature of Split, Libby Creelman’s second novel (after 2008’s The Darren Effect; she is also author of the acclaimed 2000 story collection, Walking in Paradise) is that it isn’t split. Whereas Creelman’s previous book was an impressive tangle of multiple storylines suggesting this short story writer was still finding her way into a different literary milieu, Split—for the most part taut, controlled and smartly plotted—signals Creelman’s arrival proper as a novelist. This new book is an ambitious, assured and most accomplished whole.
This wholeness is doubly (ha!) impressive considering the novel’s movement between two moments in time—2008 on the eve of both Barack Obama’s first election victory and widespread economic meltdown, and during the hot summer of 1975, the year after Nixon’s resignation and just months after the last American troops were removed from Vietnam. The former is the novel’s present day, during which Pilgrim Wheeler returns to her hometown in rural Massachusetts to find her childhood world drastically changed, and must finally reconcile with a tragedy that had wrenched her family apart decades before.
