November 16, 2013

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

For nearly two weeks, I was reading The Goldfinch, carting it everywhere I went, having to pull out a bigger purse in order to accommodate its heft at 771 pages, my hand cramping as I read it while breastfeeding. I ripped the dust jacket when I tried to tear off a sticker, and then took the dust jacket off altogether when it started getting tatty from the travel. After that, I put the book down on the table on something green, and then the cover started to disintegrate when I wiped the stain off with a damp cloth. I don’t usually treat my books so poorly, but The Goldfinch is so large and solid, a piece of furniture nearly. It has presence, is lived with, is experienced. And it is interesting to think about my wear-and-tear on the book when I consider how much of the book is about what time does to physical objects. The Goldfinch is about its thingness just as much as it is about its text.

Part of this is because The Goldfinch is an event, a new Donna Tartt novel being a once-in-a-decade experience. I bought it the day it came out and for once got to be reading what everyone else was reading, which was fun as we marked our progress on Twitter. The book has been receiving mixed reviews, but those which are positive are ecstatic, and everybody on my Twitter feed seemed to be enjoying it as much as I was.

In some ways, my destruction of The Goldfinch is a tragedy, because the book itself is exquisitely designed, with thin pages and a subtly beautiful cover, though the cover seems to anticipate my treatment of it–food stains aside, the wear seems like part of the design. And on the flyleaf is a rendering of “The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritus, a 17th century Dutch painter. It’s this painting which the book revolves around, this story of Theodore Decker whose own live turns on an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which killed and his mother and many others when he is thirteen years old.

The novel is a curious mix of old and new, strangely so at times. Though perhaps it’s just me who is surprised when a novel so steeped in longing and nostalgia refers back to a time in which email and emojis were a thing. What a thing to consider–how the present becomes the past, and how the past devours the future so that we look back and it’s there. Theo is writing his story from Amsterdam a decade and a half later, where something is desperately wrong and we’re not quite sure what, and then we forget about the present day altogether as Theo takes us back to the museum, and the explosion: “when I lost [my mother] I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me to someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”

Instead, he is traumatized by the incident, and left alone, by default falling into the care of a friend’s wealthy family. Compounding his trauma is fear of consequences to his actions directly following the explosion: listening to the curious instructions of a dying man, Theo removes “The Goldfinch” painting from the disaster scene, takes it with him, keeps it hidden. He tells this secret to no one, but lives in fear of its discovery. He tells us that he couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done for fear of repercussions–his whole life is unstable, he’s terrified of being thrown into foster care, he imagines being imprisoned for theft, and all this seems illogical because he’s so young and because of what happened. Surely her would have been forgiven? But I wonder now if really Theo didn’t tell because he knew that if he did, it would be taken from him.

The unreliability of Theo as a narrator, apparent or otherwise, as one of the book’s most fascinating features. He is a compelling storyteller, his story utterly gripping, and yet I was quite far into the book before I remembered that Theo had been at the museum with his mother only because he’d been suspended from school after some wrong-doing. What had he done, I wondered? I went back to check, and then realized that Theo claimed that he doesn’t even know, that it may have been fuss over a cigarette. He brushes past this. Situating himself as the hero of his story, or at least its victim, but it is remarked that Theo knows what to say and do to impress his friends’ parents, that perhaps Theo is not entirely genuine.

But these thoughts onto turn up here and there. Mostly we’re caught up in the twists and turns of his life, how his estranged father arrives back on the scene and whisks Theo away to live in Las Vegas where he’s making a living as a shady dealer. Here, Theo befriends the inimitable Boris, similarly lost, neglected, and prone to trouble. The two friends get up to trouble of their own, with drugs and petty theft, but Boris provides Theo with the first stable force he’s had in his life since he lost his mother.

The plot turns on coincidence, tragedy, collision and fireworks. There’s nothing subtle about this structure, though this is a book that is very aware of itself–Theo remarks upon the power of misdirection, the force of coincidence and chance. He ends up back in New York living with Hobie, a friend connected with the dying man he’d encountered in the museum. The friend deals in antiques, repair and reconstruction, and Theo begins working for him, making a racket selling forged pieces. He’s still hiding his copy of The Goldfinch, hiding this secret as desperately as he hides the painting itself.

Meanwhile (and this is a novel with a whole lot of meanwhile), he’s long been in love with a red-haired girl who’d been with the dying man and shares his experience of the tragedy, he is very addicted to drugs, he continues the orbit the world of his wealthy childhood friend. That friend’s mother has turned into a Miss Havisham figure after her own tragedy, the red-haired girl is called Pippa, and Hobie is a kind of Joe Gargery. The only explicit Dickens reference here is to Oliver Twist, however, the Artful Dodger in particular, in relation to Boris, though Tartt is subtly trickery here, and I think we’re meant to wonder if Theo himself is just how artfully dodgy in his own right.

I really liked Zsuzsi Gartner’s critical review of this novel from a few weeks back, because engaging with it even if only to disagree made me think deeper about The Goldfinch. She is also terrifically right about that Velveteen Rabbit moment, but I think Tartt is far too capable and tricky a novelist for us to write these off as shortcomings. The substance of the book is as such that its shortcomings seem inherent to its very fabric, and one can read into them to discover the novel’s deeper meaning. I am not sure that Tartt intended to write a realist novel, as Gartner asserts. Tartt, in reference to art, considers paintings which appear realist from afar, but upon closer look are constructed of dots and brush strokes–but then what isn’t? (It’s also worth noting that novels which insist on their novelness are the kind that I love best.)

It occurred to me that this novel so steeped in its thingness and in things was terribly complementary to Pinterest, so I created a pinterest board for The Goldfinch. Definitely a stupid way to waste a previous hour of Baby’ s nap on Thursday afternoon, but it turned out not so much. It was fun to go through the book again in search of things to pin and to include accompanying text, and an excellent way to further engage with the text–it turns out that 771 pages just weren’t enough for me.

November 12, 2013

The Fire Dwellers: Margaret Laurence and Bettys Friedan and Draper

If Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellers were published today, critics would be lauding its uncanny sense of the contemporary moment, how Laurence dares to voice the unspoken truths of motherhood, her pitch-perfect portrayal of the subtleties of maternal ambivalence. Published in 1969, Laurence’s fourth novel belongs with Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians as essential Canadian novels born out of the world of The Feminine Mystique. Which puts the book’s contemporary moment-ness in question, but then the lessons of The Fire Dwellers don’t tend to be the kind we pass on to our daughters, however much to their detriment. Not that they’d listen anyway. Isn’t it funny how the history of feminism is so profoundly uncumulative? How we have to learn it for ourselves over and over, and it’s a revolution/revelation every time?

But then The Fire Dwellers is largely about such disconnectedness, between generations, between spouses, friends, between the personal and the political, and—in the case of protagonist Stacey MacAindra—from one’s self, from one’s own life. Stacey is 39, sixteen years married, mother of 4, and according to the sensationalist copy on my Seal Book paperback, she’s looking for a lover. Which isn’t really true, though it’s probably a good way to sell a paperback. Anyone who has read the book, however, will tell you that she is looking for is herself beyond her oppressive roles of wife and mother. Roles which aren’t strictly oppressive; “They nourish me and they devour me too,” she writes of her children, and it’s in this in-between where she’s stuck, imagining the various ways she is destroying her children (by being overbearing, by too much attention, with her anger, all of these suggestions underlined by “helpful” magazine articles suggesting as much) and/or all the ways they would be destroyed anyway if she somehow managed to get away from them.

Through the novel, Laurence plays headlines from television news programs, broadcasting war, turmoil and unrest around the world. In one sense, the headlines are juxtaposed with the domestic, but we soon come to see that these are parallel, that the home-front is no safe haven after all.

“I can’t forget that piece in the paper. Young mother killed her two-month-old infant by smothering it. I wondered how that sort of thing could ever happen. But maybe it was only that the baby was crying, and she didn’t know what to do, and was maybe frantic about other things entirely, and suddenly she found she had stopped the noise. I cannot think this way. I must not.” 

Children are hit by cars and killed, neighbours attempt suicide, Stacey and her husband worry about money, she fears that Mac is sleeping with his secretary, her youngest still isn’t talking (and what has she done to her to make this go wrong, Stacey wonders), and just as terrifying as the suffocating demands of motherhood is considering who she will be once the demands are rescinded, when the children are older. Who will she possibly be then?

Laurence’s The Diviners is so central to my literary consciousness, and I couldn’t help but see Stacey in the context of the Manawaka she’d fled from as a young woman, and in relation to Morag Gunn whom she’d stood apart from as a child but whom she’d have so much to talk about if they met up again in adulthood. And I was surprised to discover that Morag didn’t even exist when Laurence wrote The Fire Dwellers—The Diviners would be published 5 years later in 1974. But in The Fire Dwellers, you see the roots of The Diviners taking shape, its ideas and experiments with narrative and form.

Stacey MacAindra is Betty Draper, is calling out for Betty Friedan, though fat load of good a book is going to do her. (I always find it interesting when people critique Betty Draper’s character for her obviousness to Friedan, as though one day every woman in America read The Feminine Mystique, and society flicked a switch). Stacey MacAindra is also so many of us, as we remarked at my book club the other night. “Maybe we all turn into Stacey MacAindra sometime…” as I tweeted last week. Women for whom the day is never long enough to encompass all the things we want to do, all the people we want to or need to be. Women for whom motherhood and selfhood become a battle, with wifehood thrown in for good measure. You’d throw it all away, if you weren’t tied to it inextricably.

Stacey’s green slacks are dated, and so is her slang, but absolutely nothing else is in this novel which 45 years later is a challenge to and a reflection of the world at once.

November 10, 2013

The Other Side of Youth by Kelli Deeth

I think that most of us in our 30s will see ourselves somewhere in Kelli Deeth’s short story collection The Other Side of Youth. For me, it was this passage from “Something Happy”:

“I have your grandmother’s china for you,” her mother said. “She took good care of it.”

“I don’t really have room for it,” Carmen said. She suddenly saw her grandmother’s hands–solid and covered in age spots.

“But you will,” her mother said. Carmen heard a strain in her mother’s voice, but when Carmen looked, her mother was not exactly smiling, but looking up and off at something pleasant only she could see.

It reminds me of a conversation my mother and I have had a million times, and all the grandmothers’ china I don’t have room for in my apartment, never mind that I’ve never had china of my own. And that I’ll probably never own a house ever, which would come with a basement I could put the china in until it came time to pass it on to my own daughter to keep in a box and never use.

This passage also reminds me of the woman in Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down, the woman who told Didion that someday she’d be able to afford a house that code $1000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.”

And Kelli Deeth’s book is about all the ways that it doesn’t, how those inevitable things like basements, china and having babies can go amiss. The final point in particular, which I thought was this book’s most remarkable feature. Just as we’re lately doing a terrific job exploring the many facets and varying experiences of motherhood, so too does Deeth show that not having children is a land of many stories and different experiences. Her characters are childless by choice or otherwise, ambivalent or despairing, looking toward adopting, desperately trying to hold onto high-risk pregnancies, trying to process the emotional pain and trauma of miscarriage, trying to maintain relationships under such circumstances.

A few of these stories are about young women, gritty stories about innocence lost too soon (and isn’t it always too soon)? In those stories of women in their 30s, on “the other side of youth,” Deeth shows that loss of innocence can be just as devastating, illusions only now being shed about what life gives and takes away.

These are dark stories, and yet there glimmers spots of hope and moments of illumination. Lives in pieces may seem like shards, but there is fascinating texture to so many edges.

November 3, 2013

The Love Monster by Missy Marston

Her name is Margaret Atwood. Margaret H. Atwood, no relation. She’s the protagonist of Missy Marston’s novel The Love Monster, which recently won the Ottawa Book Award. And her name is Margaret Atwood entirely by accident–her own mother, Rose, had never heard of the literary icon when Margaret H. was christened. There is no meaning to the connection, which is barely even a connection. In this, I suppose, Marston is casting light upon the shadow in which Canadian authors pen their books, putting the name out there because readers are thinking it anyway, or a name that’s something like it. Here is an iconoclast then, this Margaret Atwood, who’s just been left by a cheating husband, has psoriasis, and works in a dreadful office she calls The Button Factory.

And there are aliens. Oh, if anything could be more off-putting, I  don’t know. If I’d known there were aliens, I don’t know if I could have picked this novel up, but I am so glad I did pick it up because it delighted me. The aliens (who, like the protagonist’s name) are also not the point, but they are there to add a little magic to a story which otherwise might be altogether too near to reality, too bleak to bear.

“This realization–that every single part of her, no matter what course of action she takes, will get uglier over time, that the process is inevitable and unstoppable–has been crushing.” I didn’t underline this part, because I was too embarrassed to and because I didn’t have to, because I am thirty-four years old and have just had a second baby, and therefore that line is seared on my soul. It sounds vain, I know, but it’s a culmination of things, things that have weighed on poor Margaret H. Atwood who is so memorably bitchy, grumpy, uninterested in making you like her, or anyone. It’s not just about looks, but about how her her life gets lost, and she is adrift in a sea of nothingness (and this part was not seared on my soul, but oh, I can relate about pants too tight). Here we have a story in a setting along the lines of The Office, cringe-worthy encounters, meaningless production, an absence of colour.

We come along with Margaret on her trip to rock-bottom, though the omniscient narrator also embraces Margaret’s mother, her co-workers, even the evil ex, the alien, and invests them with a powerful sympathy, an investigation of the kernel of sadness which lives within us all. The lines, the straight-talk, the music that Margaret plugs into her ears, the disasters–this Canadian book is hilarious, and will never, ever win the Leacock Prize (which is some kind of endorsement). It’s funny, and quirky, but not cute, and it’s terribly profound. Really amazing writing.

Lines like, “Motherhood, the motherfucker above all others: the feeling of always being the lifeguard on duty, of never having a moment’s peace. Counting and counting and counting the precious, vexing little chicks to make sure all are accounted for. Rose believes that, except for that single unspoiled year, sandwiched between her father’s house and her daughter’s birth, that one year lone with her lovely husband, she cannot remember ever feeling at ease. She is always on stand-by. She wants to turn it off, but she can’t. Duty calls. She can feel the motherfucking cape behind her as she rises from the table. Stand tall, mother. Fly!”

And

“But Lou Reed knows everything. If you just listen, it is all there. / He knows that the world can be terrible and that humans struggle to find their way. That’s why they need kicks./ He knows that some kicks can kill you (like heroine[sic*] and brute violence) and others (like love and rock and roll) can save your life. / He knows that sometimes only the tuba can adequately express rock and roll feelings. And he knows how important it is to–how exactly does he out it? Shake your buns.”

*I think “heroine” is a typo, but I’m not sure, and this novel is clever enough, and meta enough that I’d give it the benefit of the doubt. Like the protagonist’s name and the aliens, I can read a whole lot into this. The Love Monster is a novel as heavy on substance as it is on humour, which is rare. I seriously could write a half-decent undergraduate essay on that typo. And I loved reading about Lou Reed, just the day after his death, just another way this novel was like a message from the universe (which all books have kind of read like ever since I finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby).

I liked this novel well enough, thought it was cute, funny, but then eventually, this novel suffused with bleakness begins to bubble over with light and joy and it all comes to mean so much more. SPOILERS!, I guess, but I’m not sure I could convince you to read it otherwise, what with the aliens and the psoriasis. The Love Monster celebrates life and the love, the ties that bind us to the earth and to each other. It is surprising and devourable, challenging tenets of CanLit but affirming the goodness of the world, and I love that. What a revelation–that a wonderful novel can also make you laugh, even make you happy.

October 29, 2013

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

The Pure Gold Baby is Margaret Drabble’s first novel since 2006’s The Sea Lady, and her first book since the memoir The Pattern in the Carpet in 2009. Her first novel since she claimed to have quit writing fiction, with a new publisher after she claimed that Penguin was “dumbing her down”. It’s a novel that it’s impossible to regard outside of the wider context of Drabble’s oeuvre, which even the book itself makes implicit. Page 19 makes reference to “the radiant way” and “a millstone”, which suggest the titles of two earlier Drabble novels. Late in the book, a passage: “A wider view, an aerial view, an uplifting view, a view of the river, a view of time, a view of the shores of the infinite.” Which reminded me of a passage I underlined in The Middle Ground a long time ago: “…London, how could one ever be tired of it?… When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation, all its shabby grime lost in perspective, imperceptible from this dizzy height, its connections clear, its pathways revealed. The city, the kingdom. The aerial view.”

One has to take an aerial view of Drabble’s career in order to make sense of The Pure Gold Baby. Because it’s a curious book, and all her books have been curious lately. But let’s start at the beginning, with her first books during the 1960s, usually about young educated women living and working in London. She was a very fashionable writer, the kind Barbara Pym judged herself against unfavourably during her own wilderness years. The fashionableness means these books are dated now, but they have literary merit. Drabble has always been prescient too about social trends–she wrote about single motherhood early in The Millstone, she anticipates the modern media-scape in A Natural Curiosity.

Her perspective broadened during the 1970s and 1980s, much concerned with both the domestic and with wider social trends. Her Radiant Way trilogy is the story of England, the story of everything, a time of great social turmoil and changes, documented in the lives of the characters she made so real.

Since the late 1990s, her books have become very unconventional, stretching the shape of the novel with remarkable elasticity to encompass such largeness: questions of time, genetics, globalization, history. With every book, one gets the sense that she is asking herself again just what the novel is capable of doing. I don’t think Drabble has the credit she deserves as an experimental novelist. She is far from content to write the same book over and over, and seems rather determined to reinvent the book every time, though her preoccupations remain constant.

The Pure Gold Baby reads like a culmination of sorts, the Drabble universe encapsulated. We have a single mother in 1960s’s London, but she takes these characters right up to present day, employing that aerial view, that stunning omniscience she started playing with in the middle of her career. And then the narrative strangeness t00–it’s puzzling. This is the story from the perspective of a woman who pieces together her friend’s history over decades, through stories she has heard, rumours, long and drawn out conversations. Why is she telling this story? We never really know–even she doesn’t know. What do we learn about her, this character who is only named once or twice. Why does she matter?

The centre of this story is Jessica Speight, an anthropologist who a gives birth to a daughter she raises on her own, the pure gold baby of the title. It eventually becomes clear that all is not as it should be with Anna, that she has some kind of unnamable developmental problem–she’s a bit clumsy, a bit simple. Her existence and her affliction come to shape the trajectory of her mother’s life, and here Drabble is pondering motherhood, its questions and problems. Though as ever, her interest is genetic. From where did Anna come from? Jess is not forthcoming with this information, and it causes our narrator to wonder, questions about errant genes.

Or is the origin something else, and here is where the story begins–with a group of children with malformed hands by the side of a lake in Africa where Jess had encountered them years before Anna was born. We’re returned to this point again and again, and Jess makes the voyage back to Africa near the end of the book. It’s kind of an inverse Heart of Darkness, as though Africa were the heart of light, the light that emanates from people like Anna, humanity at its most basic, simple. Which is a bit racist and also reductive in terms of regarding disability, but then whether this is a hypothesis or conclusion is never clear. This is the kind of novel in which characters are allowed to be wrong.

It’s such a strange novel: we are taken through the decades of a group of mothers in London and learn which marriages ended, which children succeeded, which others went wayward (and how there was no telling of who would be who). This is a novel about friendship, and how we tell each other stories, about how we become characters in the stories of one another’s lives. It’s about mental health, public health, institutions. It’s a novel full of facts, pages of passages that read like non-fiction. It’s about progress, and the illusion of progress.

Pure Gold Drabble, is what it is. And so naturally, I loved it.

October 28, 2013

Red Girl Rat Boy Stories by Cynthia Flood

As much as I am pleased that we all love to celebrate the short story, the idea of “the short story” amuses me, as though it were only just one thing. To anyone who might imagine this to be so, I’d like to toss a copy of Cynthia Flood’s new short story collection Red Girl Rat Boy, which is likely to be world apart from the last short story collection you encountered, and is even worlds apart from the last short story collection by Cynthia Flood that I encountered (which is 2009’s The English Stories).

“This isn’t one of those stories puffed out with data about parrots or antique clocks or saffron… What happened, the doings that took me every-and nowhere-in this story, that’s all I intend.” –“One Two Three Two One”

These are stories without signposts, no smooth path laid out for the reader to find her way. Instead, we’re thrown blind into the mix, and we’re guided by voices, the illogic processes of the human mind. Some of these stories hang on specific hooks: the archaic technology of the answering machine in “Such Language”, in which a woman uncovers a terrible secret about her marriage, almost inadvertently, and then finally she has a story tell her friends at book club, who’ve felt that the security of her situation has implied that she thinks she’s above their problems. Real estate in “Addresses”, about a marriage that fails to progress (and is a great piece of circa 1970s’ high rise lit). Family photographs in “To Be Queen”, which reminded me of David Sedaris’ recent essay in The New Yorker. The dark and hilarious story “Care” is about the residents of a nursing home and their underpaid, under-respected aids–how those in both roles are exploited and abused, and how each undermines the system for their own devices. “Care” might as well be speculative fiction for how it takes the reader into a whole other universe.

I could cloak my criticism of this book in theory, perhaps, but with “the short story” in particular, I think it usually comes down to taste. The stories I liked in this book (including all those mentioned above) I liked a great deal, and those that didn’t work were those where the work required of me as a reader didn’t seem to come with a payoff. Flood’s two stories about members of a far-left political group I just couldn’t get into; no matter how many times I reread them, the context was elusive. So too the story of man managing a grow-op while failing to contain his exotic cat–their weren’t enough people misunderstanding one another in this story for my tastes.

I mention the cat and the grow-op to make clear that Flood’s narratives knows no bounds. Like the cat itself, her stories break through barriers, surprise at turns, and Flood herself is the hunter shooting right between the eyes.

October 27, 2013

Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau

Motherhood gets written about so often, I think, because we’re all trying to articulate the inexplicable. Edging closer and closer to the point, but never quite getting there, putting the most abstract, complex emotions and feelings into words. But poetry gets close to capturing the subtleties, in its smallness and delicateness, hovering just inches about how it is. I am thinking of Susan Holbrook’s poem “Nursery” from Joy Is So Exhausting, the workings of a mind through nursing marathons, as the baby moves from left to right and back again: “Left: Now that you’ve started solids, applesauce in your eyebrows, I’ve become a course. Right: Spider on the plastic space mobile, walking the perimeter of the yellow crescent moon. Left: Dollop. Right: Now it’s on Saturn’s rights; if it fell off, it would drop right into my mouth.” I am thinking about Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang.

And now The Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau, which is a collection of poems about making art and making babies, about birth and loss, and about the very strange community that is the online forum. The collection begins with a poem called “my children are not my poetry”: “a mother’s job is to know/ what matters and keep it alive/ a poet’s job is to feel/for a pulse…”

The first section is a series of poems about a miscarriage,a frank and raw exploration of the physical and emotional experiences of it. Of how death amd birth go hand in hand. The second section is about pregnancy, though it seems to be that it’s here that saying these poems are “about” anything becomes a little too simplistic. These poems are curious, puzzling, their imagery not literal and challenging our expectations, surprising us. These poems are pregnancy and motherhood are written with the first section of the book in mind, with an awareness that motherhood has its own dark side of the moon, that it’s love with an outline of pain. This poet knows what the stakes are by now. “the womb is… a nightmare nine months/ of falling no idea what it is/ to land.”

The third section is about birth and babies, though the poem “reclining buddha” contrasts the story of my life (“when you come to my bed with your/ whimpers and needs/ bird mouth searching for my breast/ i know i will hold you the rest of the night/ cup your bald head/ in my hands soft…”) with the story of a Cambodian mother whose grown soldier son returns home to spend a night in bed with her as he had as a child. “another birth story” sets the experience of a woman finding and losing herself through the birth of her child against the language of feminism, women’s studies and academia.

And then “happiness threads”, poems inspired by communication on an internet baby-wearing forum, with all the inane abbreviations that occur in such places. These poems include a glossary, which is telling, I think, how motherhood necessitates a whole new language near unintelligible to the rest of the world. Here, Dennis Unrau captures the shattered nature of a new mother’s existence, these conversational threads written in the dead of night, presumably as baby nurses. And the reader charts the evolution of this mothers experience, as she finds her feet, finds new challenges, redefines herself as a mother over and over again and the world never really does become steady. I love the idea of threads, especially in light of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, and thinking about these women on the internet in the middle of the night and all their literary antecedents thread-wise.

And then section five is “love poems”, whatever is left for the margins, conversation once the dishes are cleared and the kids are in bed. “don’t touch me i growl/ end of a day of cluster feeding/ your need does not move me.” Poems about the people we’ve come from. And then “Holiday”, which is so lovely, celebrating one’s partner in the chaos of it all:

your lullabies and page-turns are white

noise

    i sink

into a book notice later the music

stopped    you asleep together

map in one hand

a flashlight beam on a slack

cheek a moving eyelid

XX

Read an interview with Melanie Dennis Unrau at the Jane Day Reader. 

October 23, 2013

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

I am glad that I don’t have to write a proper review of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby, that instead of taking the book apart to understand how it works that I got to simply let its impressions wash over me, to inhabit the narrative instead of examining its joists. The book itself, I found kind of by magic. I’d heard about it but it sounded too esoteric for my tastes, but then I kept hearing about it everywhere and seeing it references on social media, and one morning I turned on The Sunday Edition to hear Solnit saying, “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds…” and I just kind of knew I had to buy this book.

And so I did, taking in its peculiar construction in the the process. Chapters 1-6, Chapter 7 is “Knot” and then Chapters 8-13 are titled as the first six but in reverse order. We finish where we started, with “Apricots.” And throughout the entire book runs a single line of text, an essay onto itself. I love this because it meant that as soon as I finished reading the body of the book, I had to open it again, go back to page one, and I respect any book that begs to be read twice.

As I said, we start with apricots, an entire tree’s harvest worth. Solnit’s mother is in decline, has entered a care home and the harvest is from the home she’s left. The apricots, Solnit tells us, are her inheritance, perhaps the most generous one she can expect to receive for her relationship with her mother has been fraught, complicated. But this is not just about apricots. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine…”

She writes, “The fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again. They are full of overwhelming piles and heaps that need to be contended with…” She writes, “Trouble seems to be a necessary state on the route to becoming.” I want to quote the whole book, really. ” Of the apricots: “It wasn’t that they were so hard to deal with as fruit, but that they seemed to invoke old legacies and tasks and to be an allegory, but for what?”

Solnit writes of books as places we inhabit, and books inside those books, and on and on, a series of Russian dolls. And it’s true that I felt as though my connection to this book was very personal, curious and magically construed. I think the point of this book is that any reader will feel this, which is magic after all. Mirror lead to glass, which leads to glace which is ice, and then Frankenstein. Here is anything you’ve ever wondered about Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and mothers and daughters (and apricots) and death. Ice as destroyer; ice as preserver. (Solnit’s mind is amazing. It is a dazzling pleasure to feel as though one is inside it.) In the winter, I worked on a freelance project that involved much reading and thinking about the search for the Northwest Passage, which was fascinating, but did mean that I ended up having recurring dreams about travelling through endless night via sled-dog. And it was kind of a pleasure to be brought back there.

“The self is a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.” (These were the points in which I started to think that Solnit was the intellectual’s SARK. Imagine this book rendered in rainbow print. Oh, but I don’t mean it. But I do. And don’t love the book any less.)

“In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children, she also created a work of ark that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

She writes about getting lost in books as a child, about Narnia, and its doorways. She writes about how her own books became doorways, places that other people entered, and drew her into theirs, and how these encounters have changed her life. She writes about the apricots, her mother, deterioration. The coincidences that spark our lives, the coincidences that have shaped hers. And decay as transformation: oh! the places this book goes. She writes about preserving those apricots, canning. Fruit to still-life, and here she is writing all about vanitas, which is a term I’d never heard until I read the essay on Mary Pratt and vanitas. A book inside a book inside a book then.

Oh, what else? The Motorcycle Diaries, leprosy, her own cancer scare. (I am trying to draw you a map through this book. It would probably be easier if you would just read it, please.) “Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger.” On how those with leprosy do not feel pain in affected parts of their bodies, which become damaged as a result, and here she is talking about empathy. “The capacity to feel what you do not literally feel.” A sentence like, “I found leprosy useful for thinking about everything else…” “The self is a patchwork of the felt and unfelt…” I’m only half-way through the book and I’ve written nearly 1000 words.

And so it’s like this, a fantastic journey through a terrain with someone who sees deeper into the world than you’ve ever begun to imagined. Solnit is author of a book with the title A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and she makes digression into an art here, though it always winds back around eventually, the narrative accumulating. Winding, threading, Rapunzel and Penelope, spinning and spinsters. She makes connections between virtual threads and literal threads and fabric, and it all comes down to stories. It always does. “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.” What shape should a book be in a world where that is a fact?

October 15, 2013

Watch How We Walk by Jennifer Lovegrove

Jennifer LoveGrove’s first novel Watch How We Walk recalls Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness in that it’s the story of a young girl from a minority Christian sect whose oppressive religious community begins to bear down as her family falls apart. Emily Morrow is ten years old, a fervent Jehovah’s Witness who believes what she’s taught by her elders, swallows her discomfort as she goes knocking on the doors of her classmates, and leaves her classroom every morning to stand in the hall as her fellow students rise to sing the national anthem. She is eager to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Lenora, who had always been an exemplary student and daughter, baptized early at age 14. But lately Lenora has been changing, spending time with “worldly” friends, listening to disturbing music, and skipping meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Meanwhile, her mother is skipping meetings too, something about Uncle Tyler is making the elders concerned, and her father is refusing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, so focussed is he on making the right impression on the community and having his family do so too in order that he eventually can become an elder himself. There is little room for error by any of these characters whose elders will not hesitate to “disfellowship” or shun anyone who fails to tow the line, and the risk is causing Emily enormous anxiety.

Scenes of Emily’s childhood are interposed with those of Emily ten years later, living a lonely life away from her family and attending university, still trying to process some long-ago trauma involving her sister, and carving letters and numbers into her skin. These present-day scenes are particularly compelling and drive the narrative forward, the reader looking to discover just what has gone so wrong.

Young Emily is an empty vessel, taking in the world around her without much of an impression, which makes the childhood scenes come across as not particularly artful, slow in their mundanity. This is exacerbated by the fact that Emily is at such a remove from the world due to her religious upbringing, doubly unable to process what she sees. On the one hand, this makes sense, but still, I yearned for more complexity from this part of the story, particularly as the adult Emily chapters showed just how much depth this character–and this writer–was capable of. I wanted to know more about Emily’s parents, their relationship to each other and to their religion. And yet, there are some fleeting but wonderful scenes where LoveGrove shows us real sympathy for Emily’s parents and their struggles, shows that they are just a powerless against their fates in this system as Emily is herself, whole and flawed people in their own right.

Watch How We Walk is not a perfect novel, but it’s one I couldn’t stop reading, and whose images and metaphors have stayed with me since I finished it. LoveGrove provides fascinating insight into a little-known religious group and their practices, and has crafted a novel with mystery at its core.

October 6, 2013

Accusation by Catherine Bush

“I’m not a circus person,” explains the protagonist of Catherine Bush’s fourth novel Accusation, a line that had me nodding along in agreement. It’s many the author who finds literary inspiration in the circus spectacle, but books about circuses in general tend to bore me, with their freakish humans, chained-up animals and trapeze tragedies. I like my literary characters planted on the ground, preferably one that is concrete. Catherine Bush’s novel, however, is something altogether different from the usual circus story, no big-top for her, but instead a pared-down spectacle, a children’s circus in Ethiopia whose attraction is its performers and the amazing ways they can contort their bodies, how they can catch fire that they throw in the air.

Bush’s novels are always planted much more in concept than narrative and plot, and they are markedly unusual for this. They are also remarkable for their realism, details that plant the stories deep in the ground, on very specific sidewalks and streets, so that a book about a mother orbiting the Earth in Outer Space seems not so far from one’s own experience at all (as in her first novel Minus Time), and so too with this this novel about a journalist driven to explore a(n alleged) crime committed an ocean away amidst a community of street children turned circus acrobats. And this is just one way that this novel turns in on itself as we read it, for it is a story about how we project our own experiences upon those of others (and indeed, as Madeleine Thien read the novel through the lens of race, which never even occurred to me).

That Bush’s novels are planted more in concept than narrative does mean that they tend to be structurally weird, and weak in places. It takes Accusation awhile for its wheels to really start turning, and this is partly because Bush has so many narrative strands to establish. We have Sara, the journalist, who stumbles upon a performance by the children’s circus in Copenhagen. Back home in Toronto, she has a lover whose wife is undergoing cancer treatments. She also has pain her own past involving parents who are emotionally and geographically estranged, and an incident in which she’d been accused of theft and credit card fraud, sullying her reputation and severing important relationships. At a benefit, she connects with Raymond, the leader of the children’s circus she’d seen in Denmark, a black Canadian from Montreal who’d been working abroad for years. Curiously, he requests a drive to Montreal, six hours away. There has been an emergency with the circus troupe, a fall and a terrible injury, and he must return to Addis Ababa as soon as possible. On the long drive along the 401 through the darkness, she feels an affinity with him in his moment of anxiety and tells him the story of her accusation and trial. Just preceding this, there is a stunning scene of him breaking out juggling at a highway rest stop in the middle of the night, people gathering around him. The magic of this man who can summon magic into being with simple dexterity.

A few months after their curious journey, Sara learns that Raymond has been accused of abusing the children in his care, circus performers who’d defected during a tour of Australia. Due to her own past and also because of the odd intimacy of the few hours they’d spent together, Sara finds herself inextricably drawn to this story, journeying to Ethiopia in search of the truth. What she finds there is even more complicated, however, calling her deeper into this story in which she cannot truly be a detached observer, no matter how hard she tries. For better or for worse, and for all manner of reasons, her own thread in this narrative web alters the shape of the story she sees and tells.

Once the novel’s momentum is established, it continues at a heightened pace and nary a clue as to what twists the next page may bring. It was Page 262 where I gasped out loud. Eventually, the story of Sara’s own accusation began to seem extraneous and not sufficiently explored enough to warrant its place near the pinnacle of the novel, though I was so swept up by the more central plot that I ceased to mind that much. Bush explores the ethics of journalism, justice, story-telling, friendship and love, as well as the relativity of truth, or whether truth even matters at all. What is the line between the story as it is and the story we imagine? Does any story even really exist outside of our minds?

Accusation is ambiguous, complex and full of beautiful, multi-claused sentences that are sometimes as difficult to untangle as the novel’s plot is. But in the untangling, the reader becomes deeply engaged in the prose and the plot, part of the story herself.