April 9, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
I never got over Behind The Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson’s first novel which won the Whitbread Award in 1995 (“‘A 44-
I was ecstatic to learn, however, that her new novel would be a return to straightforward literary form. Well, not straightforward exactly, because Atkinson makes a point of taking form and exploding it into a million pieces. There is nothing at all straightforward about Kate Atkinson’s fiction, and what has always delighted me most about her literary novels is how covertly they’re all detective novels as much as Case Histories et. al. That there is ever such mystery at the core of her books–ghosts and dead bodies and things unexplained.
What is explained, however, what most readers will know because they start reading is that Life After Life comes with a gimmick. Think Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World, though not with parallel lives exactly but an array of them instead, strung together like a garland of paper chain dolls. Ursula Todd comes to life, then she dies, and then she’s born again and again, after each death returned to her beginnings, that night in 1910 when she comes into the world during a snowstorm. But then this isn’t even really the point, and here’s what allows Kate Atkinson to defy the bounds of genre: the point of this book isn’t the fantastic, but that it was written by Kate Atkinson and she’s wonderful.
I began this book with a strange sense of deja-vu (which was funny in itself because deja-vu is what it’s all about) because it reminded me so much of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I read four years ago when I was even more ridiculously pregnant than I am right now. The same depiction of the Edwardian middle-class family in a rural idyll (Todefright Hall vs. Fox Corner) with more children that it knows what to do with, some of whom are suspected to not really belong. And the banker father, fairy story references, connections to Germany. Both novels are setting out to do vastly different things, but in Atkinson’s I sensed an echo of the Byatt, and I loved that.
Ursula is born, Ursula dies, and then Ursula is born again, and while Atkinson does not explicitly spell out Ursula’s consciousness of her situation, her actions portray a dawning awareness that there is more to her life than just this one. This awareness manifests as strange sense of dread when she is young, that keeps her firmly on the beach where she’d drowned just a short lifetime ago. Her plight turns comical as she attempts numerous time to prevent her family’s maid from attending WW1 victory celebrations at which she’ll encounter the Spanish influenza and go on to infect Ursula and her beloved younger brother. Ursula eventually resorts to pushing her down a flight of stairs (thus saving the day), and ending up on a psychiastrist’s couch. Her parents are concerned with her oddness, her propensity for deja-vu.
Ursula comes up with clever ways of avoiding her previous mistakes, managing to make it through the 1920s and ’30s and only dying a handful of times. She falls in love, she has affairs, she stays single, she suffers a disastrous marriage, she is disgraced, she triumphs, she falters, and then is born again, determined to make her way. The connections and disconnections between Ursula and her siblings are particularly compelling. World War Two, however, proves to be an enormous impediment to Ursula’s lifeline. Again and again, she finds herself killed in the Blitz, and when she finally manages to skirt her particular explosion, other complications present themselves. Her fate seems determined to find her no matter how she goes out of her way to avoid it.
There is texture to a book like this, and the pleasure of seeing secondary characters from a wide variety of angles–Ursula’s mother in particular whose role in the novel’s conclusion was ingenious. Life After Life is a long book, as befitting a life lived over and over again, and I savoured its slowness, the returns to where I’d been before, places and people I was happy to revisit. I appreciated the specificity of its detail, the brilliance of its writing, its genre-blurring, its daringness in reframing the shape of a narrative, and yes, this is Kate Atkinson, so there is going to be that too.
April 2, 2013
Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz
In a way, it seems fitting to talk about a recipe in reference to Saleema Nawaz’s first novel Bone and Bread, a book that is so very much about food and hunger. It seems fitting to say that this is a novel absolutely packed/plotted with ingredients: family drama, tragedy, humour, intrigue, politics. Truly, there is something here to appeal to every reader (spectacular writing not the least of it), but really this wouldn’t be the right way to talk about the book at all, to reduce it to its parts. Because the thing about Bone and Bread is its very wholeness, the effortlessness nature of its construction. “It’s so good, and it’s not even trying,” was what I said to someone when I heard Saleema Nawaz read at Type Books two weeks back. I’d started reading it the evening before, burning through 100 pages before I turned my light out.
I probably shouldn’t have been so blown away by the novel’s goodness though. That night at Type Books was the first time I met Saleema Nawaz in person, but I’ve known her online for a while, and I’ve known her best through her writing, through the essay she’s contributed to my forthcoming anthology. And from her essay, I knew already that Nawaz is the real thing, a writer as devoted to language as she is to story. The kind of writer who crafts lines like, “The truth was that I liked all [the bagel boys]. I wanted all of them in the way that a dissonant chord wants resolution, setting a vibration out into the world. In the way that a teenager wants to get her life started.”
“My sister and I stopped bleeding at the same time,” an early chapter begins. Told from the perspective of Beena who has always been strangely bound to her sister Sadhana, mainly through the eccentric nature of their upbringing, this line is emblematic of the ways in which the sisters’ experience are linked but ever worlds apart. Because Beena has stopped her period because she is pregnant, just sixteen years old after not even a real romance with one of the boys who works in her uncle’s bagel shop. While Sadhana’s anorexia has begun to overtake her body and mind, a disease whose symptoms would come and go, but would eventually claim her life 18 years later.
Perhaps it’s just because I am pregnant myself, but I don’t know how I could have made it through this book without the wood fire bagel place that has recently opened in close range of my house. Nawaz writes so evocatively about food and hunger, the novel’s most central metaphors, but she renders them literally as well, so much so that it made my stomach growl. Beena and Sadhana are raised in the apartment above the bagel shop in Montreal, the shop that had been their father’s until his sudden death. They’d lived in the apartment with their mother until her death (at the dinner table, yes) during their early teen years, after which their severe and distant uncle became reluctantly enlisted with their care. It’s soon after this that they both stop bleeding, each girl’s life taking on a remarkably separate trajectory even as their experiences remain inextricably linked.
These events are narrated by Beena in the present day who is still in shock from her sister’s death six months before, and who suffers its fall-out as her eighteen year-old son Quinn clearly blames her for what happened to his beloved aunt. But what did happen to Sadhana? Beena is not entirely sure. She suspects her son knows more about it than he’s letting on, and that there is a connection between Sadhana and the probing questions Quinn has started asking about the father he never knew. The web becomes more complicated as Beena uncovers a link between Sadhana’s political work advocating for a refugee and Quinn’s father who has become a right-wing anti-immigrant politican in Quebec and whose name is turning up everywhere. Beena must face her own questions about the cirumstances of her sister’s death and the possibility of her own complicity in its circumstances.
This is a fascinating novel about sisterhood, and what is most compelling about it, in spite what this novel’s gorgeous cover design might suggest, is that there is no symmetry between Beena and Sadhana. They’re not twins, though there is something twin-like in the bond between them, but this is mainly in that, as the text points out at one point, it’s difficult to tell where one sister ends and the other begins. They are complicated, messy personalities who are compatible in some respects, but drive each other apart in others. Their love is as intense as their rivalry and the conflict ever firing between them. Sadhana’s true nature is obscured by Beena’s perspective, as there was so much she never knew about her sister, and so she remains an enigma haunting the novel. But Beena too is just as hard to read, and in many ways she’s as unknown to herself as she is to her reader, and unpuzzling both these women who refuse to be pinned down (or earn our outright sympathy) is one of the book’s most fascinating pleasures.
Bone and Bread is an intense read, 400 pages but a fast read, gorgeously literary and a page-turner. And I’m not really sure what possible recipe could ever come up with such a mix, but as a reader I am overjoyed that Saleema Nawaz worked it out so well.
April 1, 2013
The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Sharon McCartney
Marita Dachsel recommended The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Sharon McCartney right when our family was in the middle of reading On the Banks of Plum Creek, and so it seemed like an irresistible pick. Because we’ve been so fascinated by the gaps and silences in the Little House books, by what goes on between the lines. What is it to be Caroline Ingalls, we’ve been wondering for a while, and are there varying tones to her declarations of, “Oh, Charles.”? What does “Oh, Charles.” really mean?
In her foreward, Sharon McCartney writes of her poems, “I don’t think of them as being an extension of Wilder’s stories. Rather, the voices, the characters, and the details are vehicles, a way to say what I want to say.” But saying what she wants to say via these characters, voices, details renders these poems familiar territory for me, which is important when poetry itself is decidedly not.
From “Ma”: “This morning I addressed the roof beams, /Charles twitching in sleep beside me: /Today I will do whatever I want.” I was amazed by the perspective of a bull-dog in, “Jack, Swept Away When the River Rises Suddenly Mid-Ford” and of the tattered rag-doll in “Charlotte”. Some poems I suppose I read as voyeuristic glimpses deeper inside the book, such as “Nellie Olesen” which imagines Laura’s nemesis years later, sitting mildly at a temperance meeting. “Pa’s Penis” was not as naughty as we’d imagined.
The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder has much in common with Lorna Crozier’s recent collection The Book of Marvels, itself a catalogue of the hidden lives of ordinary things. As interesting as “Pa’s Penis” and the revelation that the Ingalls family had a son who died at nine months of age is the poem from the perspective of the butter churn, the chinook, a rocking chair, the boughten broom. As interesting as the Little House allusions are the poems themselves, and how they turn familiar territory into a vision that’s altogether new.
March 27, 2013
The Stop by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis
Oh, there is nothing quite like the The Stop’s Farmers’ Market. To get there, we have to trudge up the hill above Davenport Road, which is no small feat pushing a stroller, but the journey is worth it. In the winter, to arrive inside the big hall at Wychwood Barns, full to bursting with people touring around the tables heaped with fresh produce, delicious breads and cheeses, and other wonderful things. In the summer, the market spills outside into the grounds surrounding the Barns, and you’ve got to set a budget or else you’ll go mad–cherries, pickles on sticks, cinnamon buns, sushi, honey, cookies. We don’t want to snack too much because we’re planning on having our lunch at the Market Cafe, and then after lunch, the kids play on the splash pad while we wait, hoping the artisanal cheese doesn’t melt in the bottom of the stroller. Such concerns such a luxury and these Saturday mornings a highlight of family life in the city.
That’s not the half of it though, as demonstrated by the stories told in the new book The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis. We thought we knew what The Stop was all about–I bought their cookbook a few years ago, and used it so thoroughly that it no longer has bindings (and I continue to use it still- oh, the fish tacos, the beef stew, that strawberry bread!!). We visit the market a few times a year when we’re hungry and in need of a trek. And this Christmas, we divided our annual food-bank donation in two and gave half the money to The Stop instead. But for all our enthusiasm, it turns out we didn’t know The Stop at all.
It turns out that the hub of The Stop is not the Green Barn, where the farmers’ market takes place each week, where Jamie Oliver paid a visit not too long ago. The real heart of The Stop, instead, lies a few kilometres west down Davenport Road at their main office, which was a small food bank when Nick Saul became executive director in 1998. It didn’t take long for Saul in this role to become disillusioned with the food bank system, which, he tells us, is a relatively recent invention. Food banks came about in the 1980s as a temporary solution to community hunger, but they stayed around as government programs for dealing with these problems were being reduced at the very same time. And now it seems as though we’ve always had them, food banks, systems we support by dumping store-brand Kraft Dinner in grocery store bins every once in a while before heading home to feast on artisanal cheese and organic kale.
The Stop is written by Saul and his wife, award-winning writer Andrea Curtis, but told in Saul’s voice as he outlines his decade and a half with the organization. The problems with the food bank, he realized quickly, were manifold: it was a stop-gap measure; users picked up their hampers and left feeling diminished; the contents of the hampers weren’t anything that anyone would choose to eat, and did nothing to contribute to a healthy diet. There were other things going on at The Stop though that were having a more positive impact, such as their Healthy Beginnings Program, which taught food and nutrition skills to pregnant low-income women. Other initiatives came about–a community garden, cooking classes, drop-in meals. Around all these, a real sense of community began to form. Users came to The Stop and began to find it empowering, to find places where they could contribute to their communities and get involved.
Change is hard though, and Saul outlines how difficult it was to shift the centre’s focus away from the traditional food bank’s. First, because The Stop’s volunteers felt good about what they were doing and didn’t appreciate their efforts being criticized. The general consensus was that anyone using a foodbank hamper didn’t have the right to turn their nose up at anything, wilted lettuce, fetid peppers, and all. But Saul was convinced there had be a better way, and slowly, step-by-step, his organization began to blaze that trail. The community garden, he admits, is never going to feed the world, and there are many people who use The Stop whose problems are so complex that those problems are never going to be fully resolved, but many lives have been changed by the place (including those of the babies in their Healthy Beginnings program, all of whom were born at a healthy birth weight last year) and a community has found its spirit.
With The Stop’s Green Barn, Saul writes, “we can have a role tapping into the largely middle-class enthusiasm about food we’re seeing and connecting the dots between the poor and everyone else.” Because the poor, he explains, are largely excluded from the foodie revolution of the last few years. While I’m snacking on my organic kale chips, rising food costs are putting healthy food further and further out of reach of people who could benefit from it as much as I do. Saul checks Michael Pollan’s “vote with your fork” philosophy, and points out that for all the good of the movement, it leaves lower-income people as disenfranchised as they’ve ever been.
Nick Saul left The Stop in July 2012 to become president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, which aims to bring The Stop’s movement and innovations to communities across Canada, and after reading the book, I am confident in this new organization’s success and so excited by the work they’re doing. These aren’t political issues, Saul tells us, but instead these are issues of morality. The Stop is a fantastic story well told, compelling to read, and it will inspire readers to reconsider their relationships with both the food they eat and the people they live amidst.
March 21, 2013
Roost by Ali Bryan
The first thing you need to know about this book whose blurb promises “laugh out loud funny” is that I really did. The first time it happened, I was in the bathtub (where I am often found these days), where the acoustics amplified my hysterics in a fashion most disturbing for the rest of my household. The triggering line was, “I even tried to remind her that you borrowed her pants.”
The second thing is that once I’d finished reading this book, I wasn’t done with it yet. It’s a light and funny read, not necessarily what you’d imagine might resonate, but then I found I kept bringing it up in conversation. “That happened in Roost!” I’d exclaim. My kid would do something funny and I’d shake my head: “Just like Roost!” I’d say.
And the third thing was that when my husband finished reading Fahrenheit 451 the other day and didn’t know what to read next, I put Roost into his hands, that book I kept talking about. He started laughing out loud way earlier on than I did, and I’m enjoying that he’s enjoying it so much.
It’s a hard (and rare) balance to strike, a book that is as funny as it is smart, and I find this can be particularly the case with books by and about women, partly because critics tend to judge the concerns of womanhood as insubstantial anyway and also because writers do have a tendency to bring forth humour at the expense of their female protagonist’s strength and intelligence–see “And the trouble(?) with comic heroines”.
But Ali Byran gets it right in Roost, her first novel, the story of of Claudia who would have failed as a domestic goddess, if she’d ever thought about being a contender. She works full time, is the single mom of two kids whose irrepressible spirits are exhausting to behold, and has the example of her brother’s perfect family to compare her own to whenever she’s required to feel inadequate, which is often.
The dynamics shift though when Claudia’s mother suddenly dies, and the hapless Claudia is left to pick up the pieces of her extended family by sole virtue of being the daughter. Her father as a widow is faring disastrously, her brother is consumed by his wife’s own problems (post-partum depression, for which he has zero understanding or sensitivity), and things around her own home are as chaotic as ever. Moreover, her ex-partner is beginning to resist being at Claudia’s beck and call, and she sees that her reliance upon him for support is going to have to change.
Roost is funny for its frank portrayal of domestic life, in the tradition of Erma Bombeck or Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections. Claudia’s kids are wonderfully realized and irritatingly present in true toddler fashion, nonsensical, so weird, sticky and lovable. But this novel is more than that: Claudia herself is fantastically real as well, and fittingly, “mother” is only one dimension of her identity. Bryan is in command of her material, sometimes unbelievably–I loved when Claudia on a business trip ends up with someone else’s suitcase, ends up wearing the clothes inside out of desperation, except they’re maternity clothes. This all could been gone terribly wrong, been much more silly than meaningful, but Bryan makes it work, and the scene where Claudia and the suitcase owner finally connect, the ever-awesome Claudia stepping up with emergency lactation consulting, was incredibly moving (and funny, of course).
What I love best about this novel is that nobody ever changes. There is no great revelations. Claudia’s brother is still the jerk he was when the novel began, there is no fix for her father’s heartache, and even Claudia begins to see that her ex is moving away into a life of his own. But all the same, it’s okay, or it’s going to be. This is not a How the Failed Housewife Learned to Get Along With the Vacuum kind of tale, but instead it’s about how Claudia learns to draw on her reserves, that herself exactly as she is has the capacity to roll with the punches better than anyone else. When life is messy, bumpy and hard, it’s because that’s what life is, and not because you’re doing it wrong.
March 10, 2013
Sweet Jesus by Christine Pountney
The first time I read the plot summary for Sweet Jesus by Christine Pountney, I was terrified. 
Two adult sisters and their adoptive brother long-estranged, each with a dizzyingly elaborate back-story, all decide to jump in a truck in the run-up to the 2012 US Presidential Election and go look for America. I was sure it was a novel that couldn’t possibly work, but then great reviews started coming in, and there were readers who couldn’t stop talking about it. I was further intrigued by the Miriam Toews’ blurb, because Toews knows something about literary road trips. I’d also read Pountney’s previous novel, and I’d been interested in her unlikeable protagonist, and I wondered what kind of a novel this one would be whose approach was so much broader.
The novel begins with strength, in Chicago with Zeus Ortega, a professional clown whose lover is dying. As a young boy, Zeus had been adopted by the Crowe family, whose oldest daughter Connie had retained her Christian faith but she finds it tested when her husband reveals that he has gambled away all their money. Connie is in Victoria, and on the opposite coast, her younger sister Hannah (who will be familiar to readers from both Pountney’s previous novels) is visiting Newfoundland with her partner Norm, learning to hold a gun and shoot and moose, delighting in the ease of her feelings for Norm, except that she’s longing to have a baby and he doesn’t want to.
The novel’s three sections read like completely separate books, and while each section stands on its own, with deeply realized characters whose depth and complexity are compelling, I was doubtful that the stories could come together to form a seamless whole. And in a way, I was right, because while the stories do come together, there is a certain artificiality to the plotting, and depth and complexity goes by the wayside–I wanted to see these people immersed in their own worlds rather than uprooted from them. Pountney has a lot to say about sibling relationships, but the connections between Connie, Zeus and Hannah are so much more superficial than the characters’ connections to others in their lives.
By the time the siblings all meet up, however, the plot is running on the momentum of rolling wheels and open roads, and the reader will want to follow where they’re going. The destination is a mega-church in Wichita, Kansas, where Connie hopes to have her faith confirmed, where Hannah hopes to reconcile her lack of faith with her history (and perhaps make sense of her feelings for Norm), and where Zeus is hoping they won’t have to pause to long as he is en-route to New Mexico to be reunited with his birth parents. Nothing there unfolds as anyone imagined, and not one of the characters will be moving on from Kansas in quite the direction they’d planned.
Sweet Jesus is enormously ambitious in its reach, mostly successful, and packed with solid writing and more questions than answers–about faith, family, and the ties that bind us. Though the novel wobbles in parts, there is steadiness at its heart, and most importantly it leaves me enormously intrigued about what Pountney is going to get up to next.
March 7, 2013
Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong
“I hope readers will see that the situation is changing everywhere
. It’s time for all of us to say, “No more” and to go to the barricades—and to claim our space.”–Sally Armstrong in my Q&A with her at 49thShelf.
For those of us who aren’t Sally Armstrong, those of us who haven’t spent the last 25 years bringing home stories of violence against women, subjugation of women and the trampling upon and disregard for women’s rights all over the world, the immediate impression of Ascent of Women isn’t that this is a book about hope and change. Instead, it’s overwhelming to consider that the plight of women in so many places is so terribly dire: scores of Aboriginal women missing and murdered in Canada while police did nothing; the idea of rape as a weapon of war, and that female populations of entire villages in the Congo have had to live through this violence; a fire at a girls’ school in Saudi Arabia during which students died because they weren’t permitted to escape the blaze with their heads uncovered; the endangered lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban; “honour” killings; young girls forced into early marriage; genital mutilation practices, and on and on.
My immediate impression of this book is testament to another point that Armstrong makes: that for the last 25 years as she’s been reporting these stories, the world hasn’t done a terrific job of listening. She gives a shocking story of an editor who “forgot” to follow up on a story she’d brought him of 20,000 Muslim women being gang-raped in Bosnia in 1992. I know that Armstrong was reporting on the Taliban when no one else was, long before September 2001 when the world finally turned its attention toward Afghanistan and feigned to care for what happened to the women of that country.
But things are changing, which is Armstrong’s thesis in Ascent of Women. She connects this tide of change to the awareness that dawned on Western Women in the 1960s and ’70s that the status-quo was no longer acceptable. She cites examples of women all over the world who are effecting change in their communities by standing up to patriarchy and tyranny. In Kenya, 160 girls are in the process of suing their government for failing to protect them from rape; women in Afghanistan have dared to question interpretations of the Koran; the idea that violence is cultural is starting to be undermined by women speaking out against this bogus “culture”; unique programs are being put in place to empower people to change their own minds about approaches to women’s health; economists are demonstrating that women’s financial empowerment is the key to progress in developing nations; grandmothers supporting AIDs orphans are coming together to support one another in South Africa; women who fought for change in Egypt during the Arab Spring are refusing to take a place on the sidelines of the revolution they brought about.
Armstrong’s book is powerful, profound and inspiring. Its organization is a bit haphazard, but then this haphazardness underlines Armstrong’s point: that something is happening here, and not even systematically, but in an organic, surprising, awe-inspiring fashion whose force is, amazingly, impossible to contain.
Check out my Q&A with Armstrong, along with an excerpt from her book.
February 26, 2013
DisPossession by Marlene Goldman
“…the act of rereading–of doubling back and engaging with the spectre–is integral to the process of coming at the self, community, and nation-state creatively. Indeed, the power and attraction of the ghost lie in its transitional status–the fact that it hovers elusively between life and death, past and present, self and other. Ultimately, our encounters with ghosts–whether as terrifying shadows or as benevolent ancestral spirits–signal to us that we have entered the complex territory of home.”
Marlene Goldman’s course “The Politics and Poetics of Haunting in Canadian Literature” was one of my favourite parts of graduate school, and so when I discovered that the course had turned into a book, DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction, I was excited to read it. Canada is a land without ghosts, so has been declared by writers Catherine Parr Traill and Earle Birney, but Goldman shows that contemporary Canadian fiction is in fact rife with spectres. She politicizes and historicizes the trope of haunting by focussing on a few key texts: The Double Hook by Sheila Watson, The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Jane Urquhart’s Away, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, various works by Dionne Brand, and Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water.
Goldman shows that in Canadian Gothic fiction (fiction in which the present is thought to have something more sinister and complicated lurking behind it than just the past), ghosts come about due to acts of possession, namely colonial atrocities against Indigenous peoples and land taken from them. (She links this idea with Freud’s definition of the uncanny, of something being both home and also not home.) This is demonstrated also in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, but Goldman takes the further step of noting that laws of primogeniture, which delivered Cartwright and others like him to the “New World”, were also an act of possession, rendering English sons homeless spectres in their own country, and dispossessed. She complicates the reading of Away by showing how its magic-realism sanitizes and romanticizes actual history. In both Away, Alias Grace, and works of Brand, Goldman portrays the female body as a site of possession and that possession as the effect of various trauma–possibly also as an assertion of control in a society in which women were powerless over their bodies and their destinies. And then with Truth and Bright Water, she demonstrates that ghosts exist not only to stir up histories that should not be forgotten, but also to help make sense of the present and offer hope for the future.
DisPossession is unabashedly academic, which represents a challenge for those of us who are common readers, and I would have also appreciated a broader, less specific approach to the nature of ghosts in Canadian literature beyond these texts. But this is only because I am greedy, and because my appreciation and understanding of the books in questions here have so been deepened by Goldman’s treatment. She shows that Canadian literature is more complex and relevant to the world beyond the page than many would have us believe.
February 20, 2013
The Rosedale Hoax by Rachel Wyatt
“We started out, if you want to begin at the beginning…, an army of professional people, branching out to change things, in this lousy city, to make it great. All of our cells were full of energy. Each of us was a mass of creativity and talent. We were going to do great things as young men and women dream of… Maybe the tall buildings were too much for us because now we walk along long streets, carrying our briefcases with our heads bowed, to talk to each other across polished tables… The gold and silver skyscrapers are very new and quite beautiful but they distort the images of everything around them. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that our daily feet, give us this day our daily feet, beating the same tracks would have worn the sidewalk to a groove….” –Rachel Wyatt, The Rosedale Hoax (Published by House of Anansi in 1977).
More than two years after I read it for the first time, Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto continues to play a huge role in my reading life, and has led to so many amazing literary discoveries. It was because of Harris’ book that I noticed The Rosedale Hoax by Rachel Wyatt in the pile at a used book sale a year or so back. And it was probably also the reason too why I became intrigued by Wyatt’s 2012 novel Suspicion, which I enjoyed very much last summer (and decided was the Canadian version of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl). In my review, I wrote, “Suspicion is a literary trick masquerading as a great suspense novel, a story with meta-elements in which characters must reconcile the fact that they’ve become characters.” More than 30 years before, The Rosedale Hoax had taken a similar approach, but satirizing upper-crust Toronto instead of small-town life, and with characters who are all too ready to cast themselves in the story of their lives.
I had some difficulty settling into The Rosedale Hoax, mostly because Wyatt casts her reader straight into the deep end, does not go to great lengths to delineate context, and takes great joy in language and its tricks. The first sentence of the novel is, “On the wall opposite was a picture of Elsa as Miss Niagara Wholesome Fruit 1967.” Elsa is the mistress of Bob Ferrand, nuclear engineer whose career is being held-up by government bureaucracy (turns out the Ontario government has been less than determined about power plants for awhile now), and whose marriage to the wonderful Martha has grown stale. Bob is the son of a peach farmer who has married well, and is raising his family in the same Rosedale home his wife grew up in. Ever conscious of his status as outsider, Bob seeks solace (and stems boredom) in sex with the former Miss Niagara Wholesome Fruit who lives in an apartment around the corner. He comes home in early morning light before his wife returns from her night shift as doctor at the hospital emergency room. Unbeknownst to Bob, though, his odd comings and goings are being spied by his peculiar poetess neighbour who has decided to take him as her lover. And there are other, even stranger forces at work–blackmail letters are turning up in the milk box and Bob becomes convinced that the mailman is the culprit, or the milkman, or the paperboy.
Anyway, about midway through, I was enjoying the ride, and found The Rosedale Hoax to be completely hilarious. I love that the 82 year-old Wyatt could release two novels decades apart that are both so very much of their time (and yet the older one not even remotely dated). There is a dark humour and deep sense of whimsy running through both books. A fantastic use of different voices too–it is not surprising that Wyatt has spent most of her career writing for radio. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her other novels, and you should defintely look out for this one.
February 17, 2013
Capital by John Lanchester
I wanted to read John Lanchester’s novel Capital partly because I enjoy his writing in the London Review of Books, but mostly because Matt Kavanagh’s review of the book in The Globe & Mail made me crazy. This paragraph in particular:
[Capital] gets off to an ingenious start, prompted by the realization that “houses had become so valuable to people who already lived in them, and so expensive for people who had recently moved into them, that they had become central actors in their own right.” For a culture where mortgages are equivalent to a secularized notion of fate (whether you believe in a kindly God or a cruel one depends entirely on the movement of interest rates), Lanchester’s insight is the basis for a revitalized social novel that reveals how the abstract realm of economic relations structure everyday experience.
Have neither Kavanagh nor Lanchester himself ever read an English novel? Particularly those with such central characters as Pemberley, Thornfield Hall, Wuthering Heights, or Brideshead? Even Darlington Hall, or Hundreds Hall more recently. How about Howards End? And speaking of a “social novel that reveals how the abstract realm of economic relations structure everyday experience”, how about Howards End again? Or Pride and Prejudice? Not an English novel, but the best contemporary novel I’ve read yet to deal with the 2008 financial meltdown is Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, a novel which is profoundly about real estate, but then what novel isn’t? (I love this line from Enright’s book: “You think it’s about sex, then you remember the money…”) And not a novel at all, but what about Three Guineas? A Room of One’s Own? Abstract realm indeed.
Kavanagh’s review was as irksome as it was familiar, a critic lauding a male writer for venturing into female territory (because what is a novel about houses than “domestic fiction” after all?) and declaring that territory still yet to be explored. I wanted to read Lanchester’s book in order to understand if anything new was really at work here, and also because it seemed like the kind of novel I would probably enjoy.
“…immensely enjoyable, but important too.” So goes Claire Messud’s blurb on the novel’s back cover, and she’s right on both accounts if we assume “important” to mean, “notable non-fiction writer makes up tales based on current events”. The “enjoyable” part is pretty straightforward, Capital being a novel that is not altogether novel and which relies on traditional narrative shapes and patterns. Its heft is mainly in page count only (500), and the pages fly by in this story of colliding, disparate and parallel lives. They mainly take place on Pepys Road, a street in London whose homes were built in 19th century to cater to lower middle-class families but which had become, in the 21st century, residences for the rich: “The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road. They were rich simply because of that, because all the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds.”
The residents include the Younts, Arabella and her husband Roger who works for a bank in The City and begins the novel urgently calculating the likelihood of his million pound bonus, whose acquisition has become vital in order for the family to sustain their extravagant lifestyle. At the other end of the scale is Petunia Howe, in her 80s and growing frail, her daughter struggling with an awareness that her mother’s death is going to make her a very wealthy woman. In between them live an African footballer, a family of Pakistani immigrants who run and live above the corner shop, and coming and going are the Polish builder (who is hired three times by Arabella Yount to paint the same wall a different shade of white), the Hungarian nanny, and the Zimbabwean traffic warden who is working illegally.
Kavanagh’s analysis of Capital is interesting when he remarks that the book “seems to ignore the lesson of [Lanchester’s earlier non-fiction book] I.O.U.: However individualistic our culture may be, the financial crisis reveals that we’re all in this together. The novel’s characters seem oddly unaffected by one another, particularly in their encounters with others outside their own station.” The characters in Capital only come together briefly for a community meeting after a strange campaign involving somebody leaving postcards on every doorstep with images of each of the houses on Pepys Road, marked with the note, “We Want What You Have”. Someone is photographing the houses, and also filming them, posting the images on the internet, and the residents of Pepys Road are uncomfortable with this attention. (“They love it… It’s that great British middle-class battle cry: “Something must be done!”… They’ll stop at nothing once they get their indignation going… It gives them an excuse to talk about property prices. It’s the only time they’re ever allowed to talk openly about money, so it’s no wonder it gets them excited.” )
Lanchester’s observations about the English and their peculiarities are one of this novel’s great charms, particularly as seen through the eyes of the book’s non-English characters. The trouble, however, is that rather than functioning as actual characters, Lanchester’s people are so forced to stand for England proper that they are types instead of individuals. No one ever takes a ride on a train or in a car without conjecturing about city and nation flying by outside the window. Everything here is functioning on a grander scale.
Capital is a novel that calls to mind the works of Zadie Smith, partly because it revisits ideas of a multicultural England and also of religious extremism that she wrote about in her first novel White Teeth. But also because Capital is similar in approach to Smith’s latest novel NW. While NW was a novel as flawed as it was ambitious, its reach counts for something. Smith understood that to write a novel which recreates a city, the shape of the novel itself would have to be recreated too, pushed further beyond the linear, the grid of well-drawn careful streets. She understood further that for a novel to truly encompass the diversity of characters she was writing about, she would need to employ a similar diversity of narrative styles. The shape of the world of Lanchester’s illegally-employed traffic warden, for example, would have to be vastly different from the well-born City banker. While both walk the same streets, those streets are not the same at all to each character, and moreover, their paces differ, as does their language, the rhythm of their thoughts and ideas.
For Capital to be successful as a piece of literature instead of merely “enjoyable and important”, Lanchester would have had to demonstrate this narrative divide, and he doesn’t even attempt to. Though it is possible that his novel is more enjoyable for the lapse, from the point of view of anyone who loves an absorbing and unchallenging read, but for this reason and others, Capital is certainly less important than we’ve been lead to believe.
