February 22, 2014
On Rebecca Mead, her Life in Middlemarch, and the Strange Alchemy of the Reread
It almost seems remiss now to admit that I’ve read Middlemarch just once, and not until I was too old for it to become the foundation of my being. Because what a foundation, its purview so large and dense, the force of its moral sweep. Middlemarch is the novel that New Yorker Staff Writer Rebecca Mead has returned to again and again, as she sets out to explain in her new book, My Life in Middlemarch.
Not simply a celebration of George Eliot’s novel, however, Mead’s book is a testament to the strange alchemy of the reread. “A really good book can speak to you at a different stage of your life,” she told me during a recent telephone conversation
“With a book as complex as Middlemarch, literally there are different stories you can appreciate at different times,” she says. And even the same stories and characters are subject to change. While in her early experiences with the novel, Mead identified with Dorothea Brook’s inchoate longing, years later, it would be Casaubon who she’d view with sympathy. “You realize that he was just a very sad, middle-aged man who messed up. You can’t but read him in middle age and see the stripes of that in your experience.”
In Middlemarch, Mead sees stripes of Eliot’s experience as well, My Life in Middlemarch emerging as a curious blend of biography, autobiography and literary analysis. It’s the kind of approach to a novel—particularly a classic one—that university trains out of most of us. (The day after our conversation, Mead tweeted: “recurring question theme from Canadian interviewers: Did you ever think “how dare I write this book?” #thingsAmericansdontask”.)
But it was an approach that came naturally to Mead. “I studied literature at university and became aware that the way that scholars think and talk about books isn’t the way that ordinary readers do.” She wished her book to be an acknowledgement that “a sense of recognition is where a lot of the pleasure of reading begins.”
She continues, “Why do ordinary people read? They read because they feel that the stories they’re learning are enriching their lives somehow or they’re giving them a way to think about their own experience.”
While My Life in Middlemarch is concerned with Mead’s own experiences though (in love, work, parenthood, in relation to her parents, and her native England), her autobiography remains peripheral to the book’s central narrative. “I was happy with balance I struck,” she said. “Some people wanted more and wanted less. The book is very personal, but it’s not confessional. I think I must have been, without consciously thinking about it, channeling this sense of Victorian restraint.”
Ultimately, the richest life story in My Life in Middlemarch turns out to be Eliot’s own, Mead using the novelist’s biography (which was highly unconventional by Victorian standards, and even our own) to draw out the novel’s subtle underpinnings. Few critics have mined Middlemarch for what it has to tell us about motherhood, except perhaps how motherhood can come between two women, as it does for Dorothea and her sister, Celia.
On the basis of her own experience, however, Mead is able to see more deeply into the novel. An uncanny connection (of many) has Mead herself become the stepmother to three boys, just as Eliot was (by her husband, George Henry Lewes). And Mead shows how Eliot’s experiences as a stepmother are echoed within the stories of Middlemarch and its structure, these echoes revealing just how deeply a woman who never had biological children was able to intuit motherhood after all.
“If I could ask George Eliot any question,” remarks Mead, “it would be to ask her about not having children herself, whether she always knew that it was something that she didn’t want. For me, having a child has been most important thing I’ve ever done, for her not to have had that intensity of experience…”
One area in which Eliot did have intensity of experience, however, was in her relationship with Lewes, which Mead depicts as a love story far too perfect to ever work in fiction. “Their relationship was a real inspiration,” she says. “They had their ups and downs, but were intensely compatible. They had this amazing writers’ companionship. Their relationship was especially moving because they met well into middle age. They were both mature and seasoned, had experienced disappointment.”
While Eliot’s biography is indeed central to My Life in Middlemarch, it is the novel itself that structures the book, whose eight chapters are titled for the eight books of Middlemarch. Such a structure came about organically.
“As I was taking notes and figuring it out, it became clear that the titles were so suggestive, perfectly apt for describing aspects of [Eliot’s] life [“Old and Young”, “Waiting for Death”, “Three Love Problems”, etc.], and from that, the book flowed very easily. I haven’t written anything on this scale with such a structural conceit before, and I’m delighted by the aesthetic shape of it, very happy.”
“There were moments,” Mead notes, “writing this book where I was so deep in it everything fitting together, and I felt either I’m really inspired or I’m psychotic; it all meshed.”
It was pointed out to Mead in a recent interview that the connections might go even deeper, that her own book manages to recapitulate the moral story of Middlemarch, the journey from self-centredness into wider empathy. My Life in Middlemarch starts off with Mead’s own story and her connection to the novel, to conclude with a deeper understanding of her parents’ lives and relationship, through the story of Fred and Mary. Mead was thrilled to see this. “What a joyful experience it was to write it,” she says.
The book is a joyful experience to read as well, as attested to by the terrific buzz it has generated. That buzz is all the more remarkable for how much this isn’t the sort of book that any of us these days are meant to be interested in anyway, a celebration of reading a book that’s more that 140-years old, not to mention so much longer than 140 characters.
The response to her book, says Mead, “maybe speaks to a yearning people have to slow down. People are responding to my taking the time to slow down with Middlemarch, to go through it and to read so carefully.”
And not just read it, but reread it. Mead agrees here with my suggestion that there is particular relationship between rereading and the Victorian novel. “That attempt at a whole panorama… There is destiny, ambition, scale and pace that allows one to go back and revisit.”
But what a challenge is rereading with so little time for reading at all.
And here, Mead shares an anecdote about a character she encountered during her Middlemarch research. One of the eight original Middlemarch novellas had come up for auction, and she went to the sale. The book sold for $35,000. Mead told the buyer, “I wish I had that kind of money to spend on a book.”
She says, “And he told me, ‘You do. You just need to rearrange your priorities.’ With rereading, it’s the same.”
- Check out Middlemarch for Book Clubs
February 2, 2014
Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk
While I loved Keavy Martin’s review of the Inuit novel Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (transliterated and translated from Inuktitut to French by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, and translated from French to English by Peter Frost in this new edition by University of Manitoba Press), a review which placed the novel in its context but also took it beyond the context—this is not “merely” a novel written by somebody who’d never read one, but a work of literature onto itself, something to be understood or even just experienced rather than contextualized—, I do think she overstated the challenge this book poses for the inexperienced reader. All set for a challenge was I, but instead I found myself enjoying myself, not so lost in an unfamiliar environment. The novel comes with a glossary of terms, but I could deduce most words by how they were used. The novel’s foreword by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure set the story up well for me, and in terms of the novel’s episodic nature? Well, obviously this was just an Inuit version of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (I am only being half facetious here), so I knew what I was getting into.
Sanaaq is a young widow with a little daughter living as part of a semi-nomadic community in Northern Quebec. The novel’s 48 episodes show the rhythms of their daily life and its seasons, with all the usual drama implied–marriage, love, familial strife, hardship and loss, tragedy, and happiness. Oh, and tea. These characters are as preoccupied with tea, its having and its making, as characters in any English noel I’ve ever read, so I actually felt quite at home. For the reader unfamiliar with Inuit culture and traditions, the stories contained in this novel are rife with interesting details–about the hunting and storage of food, for example, or how the women in the book are always sewing and repairing their boots, and the logistics of Igloo-building. It’s not a portrayal of an Arctic idyll—life can be difficult and dangerous; I found it interesting to see how the dogs were regarded as pests, forever getting into food supplies and causing trouble, having items thrown at them. At one point in the story, Sanaaq is a victim of spousal violence, injured so badly by her husband that she must be flown to the south for medical treatment, and this is treated in the text with unflinching detail of the emotional complexity of the matter. But there is humour here too, and genuine human connections.
As we move through the novel’s 48 episodes, changes in Inuit life become apparent through contact with the qallunaat (non-Inuit people), which begins first with the sound of an airplane overhead, and then becomes more regular and embedded in ordinary experiences—Sanaaq’s husband is taken away to the south for work, her daughter becomes a Catholic convert, old people begin receiving social security payments.
The narrative skirts omniscience in a way that seems curious to the reader who is accustomed to the English novel. There is a matter-of-factness to the telling, perhaps related to its origins—it was written in a shorthand that can be written as quickly as it is spoken, and so this written novel has an oral nature. There is also a simplicity to its delivery that only comes across as such because a whole layer of the narrative is inaccessible to me as a reader (and I think that this is the challenge for this reader that Martin was writing about in her review). Saladin d’Anglure’s foreword makes clear that the apparent simplicity of Nappaaluk’s novel is undermined by the Inuit symbols and stories referenced, as well as details of Nappaaluk’s own life and members of her community. In short, this is only a straightforward story because I’m not smart enough to know it isn’t otherwise.
Sanaaq can and should be discussed beyond the story of how it was written, but the story is still pretty fascinating—Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk was asked by a missionary to write down phrases of the Inuktitut language so that he could develop his vocabulary, and what she delivered him instead was his long work of fiction, which she completed over many years. As Martin writes, “Mitiarjuk’s work has long been celebrated in Inuit communities, and… she received major honours before her death in 2007—she was awarded an honorary doctorate from McGill and was named a Member of the Order of Canada.” And now finally her work has been made available to be read by English readers, for pleasure just as much as enlightenment.
January 26, 2014
Dear Leaves, I Miss You All by Sara Heinonen
Weather-wise, it’s been a long, hard winter. The kind of season in which you think it must surely be March by now, but then it’s not even February, and there is no single month which is longer than February. The other night, we were reading Barbara Reid’s book Picture a Tree, and upon gazing on the “A tree can be a tunnel” page, I suddenly exclaimed, “I miss green leaves so much,” and then my aha moment–so that was what the title of Sara Heinonen’s book meant. It was so clear that it was strange that it hadn’t been always.
I found my way into the stories in Dear Leaves, I Miss You All in a similar way. With the first few, I had trouble finding my footing, didn’t understand Heinonen’s project. Was there even a project at all? Her places (which are mostly Toronto, and sometimes Hong Kong) are a strange borderland between here and there, apocalyptic realism. The world we know, but the sky’s a funny colour. At first, I wondered if there wasn’t much to these stories, save for some starkly defined edges nfused with clarity of vision or humour. I read “Notes from the Fallen” and it made me think of Cynthia Flood’s “Care”, but “Care” was so much more (action-packed, experimental, difficult, daring). Heinonen’s first story, “The Edge of the World,” about teenagers trying to imagine a future once the economic engine of the world had sputtered out and their parents had settled into various forms of regressive malaise (the mother who is addicted to watching owls on a web-cam. I loved this). People kept disappear into holes, sniffing poultry, falling and not getting up again. I didn’t know what to think. I was disoriented in these stories’ universe.
And then. Reading “Walking Along Steeles After Midnight”, more of the same, I thought. Set at the north edge the city (borderlands), a banquet-hall, a woman going nowhere in her marriage and her life. She leaves the party, she’s offered a ride. It’s insisted that she takes it, but no. “I want to feel my boots sink into the thick new snow on a deserted suburban sidewalk… It’s just a matter of how to refuse the ride.” And aha, finally I get it. Figuring out how to refuse the ride, how not to be taken for one, to blaze one’s own trail, small and significant acts of courage in the dark. From this point on, I decided that I loved this book.
Also: trees. As Heinonen’s biography notes, she’s a landscape architect by trade, which might be related to these stories’ fascination with all things concerning arbour. Dear Leaves, I Miss You All—indeed, the splendour of trees, their solidity and munificence, wonderfully evoked.
The Barb and Benny stories throughout the book—were they bordering on caricature, I wondered in the beginning? But I came to understand them as funny and lovely instead, a subtly subversive and surprising riff on domestic themes set in the east end of Toronto. Barb is a neurotic environmentalist, intent on sewing polar-fleece onesies for her husband and son so they can keep the thermostat down. And now her neighbour is set on pruning (*butchering*) the horse chestnut tree whose nuts keep dropping in his swimming pool (which is now open until the end of October, thanks to global warming). The paragraph in this story that I read aloud to my husband while laughing included the line about Barb’s son, Carson: “He’d recently purchased a chinchilla without our permission and named it Gandhi.” The story ends with a party, a storm, Gandhi in a tree, diehards in a castle, bouncing and missing what’s coming.
In “The Chairs in Bjorn’s Room,” a newcomer to Toronto attempts to woo a pretentious furniture designer. In “The Bloom”, a woman contemplates a former colleague who is afflicted with a cherry tree bough protruding from her abdomen. In “The Blue Dress”, a woman who’d moved to Hong Kong on the coattails of her lover’s career makes a decision about her future, perhaps the first one of her life. I loved “Night of the Polar Fleece”, in which Barb is trying to channel her anxiety into fiction, and stumbles upon a writers’ group in a bar on the Danforth in a blackout during a snowstorm. While wearing her fleece suit, which makes it awkward to take her coat off. She is beginning to learn, through her earnest son, that sometimes you have to take a break from being the change you wish to see in the world.
“Ghost Woman” is about a widower, an immigrant from Hong Kong whose daughter has shrunk away from his control and all his dreams for her. In “Closer,” a heartbroken driving instructor projects his own pain onto a student who has a sad story of her own. And then “May Day Mayday”, Benny and Barb and it’s a silent spring. Or maybe it isn’t. “The sky has gone strange again,” says Barb. “I don’t know what to prepare for.” But inside, “the house is fragrant, vibrating with the crescendo of Benny’s heartfelt song, energized by Carson’s tapping on the computer keyboard, hopeful with ceilings I painted sky-blue.”
This is a book that ends in the kitchen, “where something good is possible.” The casserole cooking doesn’t cancel the strange sky, and anything terrible could fall apart at any time whether outside or in. But for the moment, there is dinner on the table.
This is mercy, this is grace.
I look forward to reading what Sara Heinonen writes next.
January 22, 2014
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things
There is a mention of bunting on page 59 of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, which Kathryn has claimed (maybe even in all seriousness) that she included in the book just for me, and from this point you should infer two things which are related: first, that I am situated too close to Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer to offer up a proper review, and second, that I am among those who are fortunate enough to call Kathryn a friend. Kathryn is smart, blunt, hilarious, a bit terrifying in her brilliance, and blessed/burdened with a huge and generous spirit. My admiration of her as a person and as a writer stretches oh, so long, and I am so pleased that her new novel All the Broken Things has garnered rave reviews in The Toronto Star and the National Post.
While I am pleased, however, I am troubled that the reviews have neglected to mention how weird is All the Broken Things. You might be inclined to think it’s just another romp about a boy and his bear, Blueberries for Sal in the Junction, except with a horrible disfigured toddler who is a victim of Agent Orange (and that Sal in the Blueberries book was actually a girl). Laura Eggertson writes in the Star, ” Bo and Bear deserve to become fixtures in the pantheon of Canadian characters who live in our imaginations,” by which I picture the two of them and Anne of Green Gables bounding down The White Way of Delight.
My pictures aside, live on in imaginations these characters do. I finished reading the book the other day and have not quite discovered what I think of it yet. “I think it’s a novel meant to be deeply considered rather than summed up in a sentence or two,” is what I wrote on Sunday in an email to a friend. The novel is a peculiar shape, not quite what I am used to. I found it to be a page-turner, difficult to put down. It’s a novel that moves through time and space almost as quickly as I moved through its chapters, and I have this theory that its plotted more as an epic tale than a novel. (The myth of Orpheus is referred to in the novel, in the form of the Sir Orfeo story, and it’s intriguingly unclear exactly what maps onto what.) While Bo’s journey is certainly inward, it is demonstrated by his outward journey, from plot to plot, place to place, quests, and battles, dragons slain. Characters are not delved into deeply, which is not to say that these characters are not interesting (Bo’s teacher, his mother in particular, Soldier Man in High Park) but that their own journeys remain unclear to us, their mysteries suggested but not brought into light. There is a shallowness to the narrative which is intrinsic to its shape and to what Kuitenbrouwer is attempting (and succeeding at) in her project, which is breadth instead. This book about bear wrestling, Vietnamese boat people, CNE freak shows, and the production and effects of Agent Orange. You know?
Anyway, this is what I love, a book that provokes a more complicated response that either this is good or this is bad. I mean, this is good, of course, but even more importantly, this is interesting. And if I ever get to the bottom of what I think of All the Broken Things, I will be profoundly disappointed to be done.
Check out the book trailer for All the Broken Things by Carol Nguyen. It is also interesting, and absolutely stunning.
January 17, 2014
Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by Alexandra Oliver
Poetry can be perplexing, but it’s got nothing on the poets. Many a time I’ve tried to make sense of who likes who, what and why, going straight to the source and asking poets themselves who’ve confessed they’re just as confused by the whole thing as I am. I’ve tried flowcharts, diagrams, and spreadsheets, and have managed to uncover no pattern except that having me really love your collection is generally an indication that it’s not poetry proper. I have even tried to be more discerning as a result: last year I read Personals by Ian Williams, and while I really liked certain poems, I thought, Nope. This isn’t cutting it. And then the next day it was nominated for the Griffin Prize, so there you go. But then a few weeks ago, hell must have frozen over (along with everything else, I suppose) because critic Michael Lista (whose book I liked, granted) went and picked Alexander Oliver’s Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway as one of his books of the year. A book that I’ve been reading and enjoying considerably!
Here’s how I came to this book (and be forewarned: I’m going to start talking about Book City again). I went to the Biblioasis launch in October and hear Alexandra Oliver read from her book, which is the best advertisement for this book. She was amazing. Though I didn’t actually buy the book until about a month or so ago when people were talking about it on Twitter, and the nature of my excellent life is that I can be reminded about a book on Twitter and then march straight out to purchase it at the bookstore around the corner (where of course it is on the shelf. They saw me coming a mile away). And I’ve been dipping in and out of the book ever since, intrigued and delighted.
These are poems that are deceptively simple; they rhyme. Sometimes I think that Alexandra Oliver is making fun of me, but I don’t hold this against her. These are poems about familiar situations–encountering other mothers in the park and discussing stroller models, angsty troubled romance. Proud poems about trouble—one called “Curriculum Vitae” contains the lines, “The hive of hell was crowded with my bees/ the sea of ill acquainted with my oar”. Dark, sinister, sardonic and hilarious. A poem about a camera user’s manual, and yes, the title poem, about recounting an old bully years later. “It’s been so long. They say. Amen.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIllNmv1TAs
January 12, 2014
Tenth of December by George Saunders
In 2013, for the first time ever, I’d read almost all of the year’s best fiction, at least as determined by the New York Times. Life After Life, Americanah, The Goldfinch, The Flamethrowers–all of these were huge and satisfying reading projects for me this year. (One would note that these are all books by women. I believe their appearance on this list all together is because 2013 really was a banner year for books by women, but also because it was the year in which Pamela Paul [a woman] became editor of the New York Times Book Review, a most fortuitous confluence of events.) The one book on the list I hadn’t read was Tenth of December, a short story collection by George Saunders, and it had been keeping such excellent company on that list that I decided I had to read it too, for my own reading pleasure as well as for the sake of completeness.
When I started to read, I had no idea what I was getting into. We begin, “Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.” And was there ever a better opening sentence, in terms of rhythm, euphony, use of a moment stopped in time? The smallest pause, and the story begins its movement forward, unrelenting. It is a common complaint of the modern short story that within it nothing happens, and herein the work of George Saunders is resolutely an exception. Although as Alison Pope descends the stairs, where we’re going doesn’t get any clearer. “Say the staircase was marble,” and here we are in the realm of the hypothetical. A strange kind of voice, punctuated by physical gestures, “{eyebrows up}”, catchphrases and short bursts of francais (ballet, it is). And then it is clear–aha! Here were are in the head of a teenage girl, Alison Pope, just three days shy of her fifteenth birthday. She’s home alone and here is her interior monologue, and it is full of affectation and she’s imagining herself as the heroine of our story (oh, but isn’t she though). She is faintly ridiculous, but here is the thing–George Saunders loves her. He believes in Alison Pope, in a benignly teasing way. And it is this kind of faith on which the entire collection is constructed.
In a sense, Alison Pope is a type, and so Kyle Boot, her neighbour (over-helicopter-parented neurotic nerd) but they’re both invested with specificity in their oh-so realized voices, and moreover, Saunders permits both of them (and all of his characters) to go beyond type. As Alison is descending her stairs, she is contemplating big questions in her peculiar sunny way: are people good and is life fun? Alison Pope is voting yes, and then comes a knock at her door, the cruel world fighting to get in. Conspiring to rid the sun from the world of Alison Pope, and the only person positioned to save her from such a fate is a most unlikely hero, Kyle Boot. Here is plot; here is a man with a knife. Because there are men with knives–George Saunders knows that. But he also knows that they don’t always win. That shadow doesn’t negate the light.
I tore through these stories in a hurry, leaping from one to another and having to re-find my feet on each landing. We move from skewed domestic tales (Tom Perrotta meets stylistic innovation?): to a convicted murderer partaking in pharmaceutical experiments which ultimately offer him a chance at redemption; a story in form of a pseudo-motivational email from a middle-manager; the diary of a man in some distant future who is disappointed with his life and decides to make his daughter proud by investing in the latest fad–foreign women displayed as lawn ornaments–and thus begins the downward spiral of his life; the amazing, explosive story “Home” (which it occured to me I’d read in the 2011 New Yorker Summer Fiction issue) about a war veteran returned home broken to his imperfect life; and the title story in which a nerdy boy with an overactive imagination (whose mom is my favourite person in the whole book, and the boy’s perception of her is beautiful and heartbreaking) meets in the woods a terminally ill man who is determined to end his life.
Though very different in tone, Saunders’ collection has the same preoccupations as the Giller-winning Hellgoing by Lynn Coady, moral questions in an amoral world. What is good and what is evil? Are there such things as either? How do we know how to be in a world without God? And is it possible to even get the chance to answer these questions when the speed of life’s locked in at status-quo?
I come to Saunders without context, save for the New York Times list, but in reading the book made another CanLit connection–Jessica Westhead and her short story collection And Also Sharks. This one quite similar in tone and approach, funny and broken characters who show their cracks, created in utmost sympathy. Stories which remain solidly on the side of goodness, even as they acknowledge the realities of life itself.
January 9, 2014
The Silver Button and Wanderlust
I have been besotted with Rebecca Solnit ever since reading The Faraway Nearby last fall, so I was very pleased to receive two more of her books for Christmas. I read Wanderlust: A History of Walking first as it was written before the other, and I loved once again being absorbed in a Solnitian world where the connections between books and place are so strong, and where one thing leads to another, just as one step does. (“One foot in front of the other,” is Harriet’s mantra as we embark on the 1.3 km walk to school every morning. It is a long walk if the walker is 4 years old, particular lately through snow and ice. ) And it is because one thing leads to another that one can’t sum up a Rebecca Solnit book properly, and I therefore must resort to ecstatic sharing. I loved learning about how closely the history of English garden design connects to the history of walking, about how the idea of walking being natural takes for granted civilization (i.e. law and order), and the gender politics of walking and (for women) the sexualization of the street—how different is the term “tramp” depending on to whom it is applied.
The first paragraph of Wanderlust:
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
Which reminds me of the exquisite picture book that I bought Harriet/myself for Christmas this year. The Silver Button is a new book by Bob Graham, one of our favourite authors and the force behind the wonderful Oscar’s Half-Birthday. It’s a story that takes place within a single moment, illuminating the connections, the beauty and the perfections of the world. The perspective moves from a space on the floor in a single room to eventually comprise an entire city and beyond toward the global as Jodie puts the finishing touches on her drawing of a duck and her brother Jonathan rises to his feet to take his very first step. “He swayed, he frowned, he tilted forward, and took his first step. He took that step like he was going somewhere….”
These two books are an unlikely but absolutely perfect pair.
January 5, 2014
Penelope Fitzgerald and the Holiday Read
After we’d gone book-shopping on our recent trip to England, I sat down to read that weekend’s Guardian Books with its books of the year round-up, and found reader after reader citing Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee. Now, my relationship with Penelope Fitzgerald is complicated. She’s an English author called Penelope, which is usually all it takes, but I find her books difficult, inexplicable. There is something there but it’s just beyond my range as a reader. In short, I’m not one of those who “gets” Penelope Fitzgerald. But in my failure to grasp her work, she fascinates me. (If more difficult writers wrote short books, this might be something I experienced more often.) I also love a good biography, and so after reading so many recommendations for the book, I was awfully sorry to find myself stranded on the Fylde Coast with nary a bookshop for miles and miles.
The airport bookshop, I decided, would be my salvation, so I was awfully sorry to discover that the WH Smith in Manchester Airport Terminal 3 barely had books at all, let alone this one. (My expectations were high: it was at the Manchester Airport WH Smith that I bought my first Elizabeth Bowen novel in 2009. I don’t know if this was a different terminal, or if all the airport bookshops have been economic downturned.) We returned home to Canada without the book, and I requested it for Christmas, then was informed that it would be for sale in Canada until after the holidays. So ever it was not to be.
Until just before Christmas, a friend who knew none of this managed to get her hands on a copy and wrapped it up just for me. Penelope Fitzgerald was mine! I started to read it on Christmas Eve, and this fantastic book became the centre of my holiday.
What a life! Daughter of a prominent family, from a world that is never to return after WW2. Her father edited Punch, her stepmother was Mary Shepherd, who illustrated Mary Poppins, who was the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. Her mother was at Oxford with Dorothy Sayers and Rose Macaulay. Even the incidental intersections: the house her parents were meant to rent when Fitzgerald was 2 was inhabited by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray.
Fitzgerald finishes at Oxford and writes book and theatre reviews for Punch, scripts for the BBC. She marries Desmond Fitzgerald, her “Irish soldier”–one of many men in the book who are also shattered by their experiences of war. The embark on a career as literary bohemians, editing a literary magazine together and having three children who add to the disarray of their household. (In the background: miscarriages, at least one stillbirth. Fitzgerald becomes a larger than life character by her biographer’s hand, but still remains elusive.)
Several rented houses are fled from suddenly. The literary magazine folds. Desmond Fitzgerald gets into trouble. Penelope begins supporting her family by teaching, after a stint working part-time in a Suffolk bookshop. She moves them all back to London, where they really cannot afford to live, so she secures them lodgings on a leaky barge which becomes their home from 2 years. (The Penelope Fitzgerald books I’ve read are Offshore [which won the Booker Prize in 1979], The Bookshop and Human Voices, all of which are illuminated by these insights into her biography.)
The barge sinks… Which is a major challenge to Fitzgerald as a biographical subject, so much of her archive winding up at the bottom of the Thames. There is much hardship as she struggles to secure housing for her family, eventually ending up in a council flat in South London where she is happy enough to be settled. And here begins her literary career, publishing her first book at age 60. She writes a biography of her father and his brothers and poet Charlotte Mew before turning to fiction. And it is from this point on that she’s an overnight success. Etc. etc.
What a book! It makes me want to go back and reread the Fitzgerald novels I’ve encountered, to see if finally I can grasp them with such knowledge of their context. It makes me want to read everything she ever wrote, in particular her penultimate novel The Blue Flower, said by many to be a masterpiece. To understand her as un-English makes it all so much clearer, to think of her work in the context of Beckett’s. Her complexity as a person, as a character–impossible and infinitely loveable. Unabashed and brilliant. When she died, I cried. I have to get my hands on her collected letters, because I just want more more more of her.
December 21, 2013
Love, Nina and Mutton
During our disastrous English vacation, I did manage to get some excellent holiday reading in, mostly because my mother-in-law’s intensive grandmothering meant that I was on mother-holiday. And it was great.
I discovered Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life when India Knight tweeted about it, a collection of letters by Nina Stibbe, a young woman from Leicester who moved to London in the 1980s and got a job working as a nanny for books journalist Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. India Knight is the ex of Andrew O’Hagan, who blurbs this book, which is a fine glimpse into literati inner-circles. In the Guardian Best Books of the Year round-up, film director Stephen Frears cited the book, then said, “But I would say that since it’s about my ex‑wife and our children. Letters from their Leicester nanny. Very funny and sharp.” Another review called it “‘Adrian Mole meets Mary Poppins” so you can see why I had to read it.
Imagine a sitcom in which everybody is writer, and Alan Bennett is the too-familiar neighbour. In fact, imagine any book in which Alan Bennett is a character at all, one who has dinner with the family (Wilmers and her two sons) every evening, and critiques Stibbe for her use of tinned fruits and vegetables in her cooking. There is mischief and hijinx, there is this unique community through the eyes of someone outside it blessed with a nice dose of realism (if a bit sweetly naive at times), character development and incredible dialogue. Mary-Kay Wilmers is a most formidable comic creation. These are Stibbe’s letters home to her sister from during her early years in London, and they’re absolutely delightful.
**
And then I read Mutton by India Knight, her fourth novel about alter-ego Clara Hutt. In this instalment of Clara’s story, an old friend returns from years in America and she’s looking younger and better than ever. What’s her secret? Why yes, it’s extensive plastic surgery (and yoga and she drinks a lot of water). Clara herself isn’t getting any younger and she starts considering drastic measures on her own part. She’d always had these ideas about growing old gracefully, but that was before she started growing old, of course.
The novel is funny, rambling, and I adored every single digression, but then I can’t quite get enough of India Knight and her novels which are basically extensions of her newspaper columns. Instead of plot, we are treated to “what India Knight thinks of everything”, but for some of us that’s absolutely the book we came to read.
December 4, 2013
Are You Ready to be Lucky? by Rosemary Nixon
While it’s true that silence greets most literary books entering the world, there is something conspicuous about the polite silence that tends to greet a literary novel about a middle-aged woman. Now part of the problem with such an assertion, of course, is that it’s often one uttered by authors who’ve written unremarkable books about middle-aged women, books whose silence is understandable (and even a victory. If only David Gilmour’s next novel could meet a similar fate). But in the case of Rosemary Nixon’s Are You Ready to be Lucky? (and Shaena Lambert’s Oh My Darling, while we’re at it), the silence is nothing short of an injustice, for the book itself and all the readers whose worlds would be so enriched by it.
So let’s break the silence then, shall we? Rosemary Nixon’s collection of linked short stories is one of the funniest, most original books I’ve read this year. I started reading it on Friday, found it hard to put down, and had devoured it by Sunday afternoon. Are you ready to be lucky, indeed.
The first sentence of this book: “Roslyn high-steps up Bantry Street on an icy Alberta evening buffeted by the late-December gusts, holding high her sixty by forty centimetre tray of pineapple stuffed meatballs, trying not to look like a woman who, at the yearly No Commitment Book Club gift exchange, received a can of gravy and two books called How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself and The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead.”
The last sentence of the book is: “You fucking keep on playing.”
And let me tell you about everything that happens in between.
Roslyn’s just been dumped by her long-time husband, awful Harold. Carrying her pineapple stuffed meatballs, she’s on her way to a party, on the way to meet her fate. The party’s at the home of her friend Stella, a woman for whom being dumped has become a lifestyle. At the party, Roslyn meets Duncan Bloxham, and he chooses her. (Her delight of this fact is indicative of the slim pickings for divorced women in their 40s.) Her whole life having already fallen down around her, Roslyn sees no harm is getting carried away by the moment, and it’s not long before the two are married. Duncan is a pathological liar, a conman, an Imperialist asshole with a cruel streak and a terrible temper, however charming with his British accent. He’s the kind of character of whom the reader will wonder, “What does she possibly see in him?” Except Nixon tells us: the sex is fabulous. By the virtues of his cunnilingus, Roslyn hangs onto Duncan longer than she should, staying by his side on various adventures before finally kicking him out of her life.
We follow the couple to a community of British ex-pats in Spain in “Costa Blanca News”, and while I liked this part, there was a little too much “blimey,” the other characters rife with British stereotypes. In “Left”, Roslyn and Duncan are in England where she meets his family, and the true depth of his idle deceptions are made clear to her. Duncan is the most fascinatingly obnoxious character, so incredibly annoying that you’d like to hit him, and he calls to mind real people. Actual Duncans exist–you probably know this if you’re a middle-aged divorced woman. Nixon just has the chutzpah to put him down on paper.
In “The Sewers of Paris”, poor Stella has been dumped again, and she contemplates the one trip she took with her ex, a vacation from Paris far from the romantic ideal whose highlight was a tour of the city’s sewers. And in “Besides Construction,” we meet Lloyd, handyman hired to fix the crooked house that Roslyn bought after her marriage to Duncan ended. And the two of them dance around the idea of attraction to one another, Floyd a salt-of-the-earth type, not Roslyn’s type at all, but then lately, who is?
“In Which Floyd’s Odometer Passes the Million Kilometre Mark” is a story structured as a pinball machine, which it has in common with the whole book, actually. These are characters who wind up and bounce off one another just to see where things go. There is no traditional narrative structure in the book as a result, no tidy endings, no pat conclusions. The game goes on. “You just keep fucking playing.”
We meet Duncan again, back in Spain with another new wife, and later with even another, this one who he’d bought through the mail and who keeps her shit in the fridge. The story after that one is my favourite, in which Roslyn is en-route to her son’s wedding and drives her car into a deer. Yes, her son, Roslyn’s son Theo, whose wellbeing has been consistently kept in the back of her mind as she bounced from one adventure to another post-divorce. As she hits the deer, thereby ensuring that she’ll show up to the wedding late and rattled, if at all, she is listening to Jann Arden’s Good Mother on the radio, and the irony is not lost.
It is rare that such humour is balanced with incredible prose, cliche-free and striving to be something new with every sentence. This is a book that satisfies, not because it goes down easy, but because it fulfils a need in the reader for something that’s so profoundly good.
