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.
February 13, 2013
After Claude by Iris Owens
“‘…Harriet, Harriet,” she moaned, and it passed through my mind that of all the countless treacheries my mother had perpetuated, naming me Harriet was the most infamous.” (p. 62)
“I can’t describe how impossible it is to pronounce the name Harriet to a hidden audience. When you say it, you need to deal on the spot with the listener’s reactions. To call a child Harriet is to condemn her to mediocrity.” (p. 146)
Of all the literary Harriets, I do believe that Iris Owens’ is my favourite. In her novel After Claude, Owens’ has created an unlikeable female character who manages to be irresistible. Which is amazing, but more than that, she isn’t stupid, or scattered, or zany, and not once does Iris Owens’ Harriet fall off a chair. Here is a rare thing: a comic heroine who does not embody silliness. Which isn’t to say that Harriet is mentally stable, exactly, and she’s certainly not as smart as she thinks she is, but then that is setting a high standard for anyone. Further: she suffers precisely NO self-esteem issues. To be fair, she could probably afford to take on one or two, but how refreshing that she never does. That she’s utterly un-neurotic.
How does Owens do it? I can’t figure it out exactly. I’ve thought a lot in my time about unsympathetic female characters, and how little us readers can bear them. That we’re so much harder on the women than the men who fall into the loser-lit genre. Part of it could possibly be that Owens gives us just a few days in the life of her Harriet so we can bear her that long, and moreover that we can discern that underneath of veneer or self-assurance (and really, it’s a voice that wins you over to it) that Harriet is absolutely powerless. She gets as bad as she gives. As was Jim in Lucky Jim, just say, whereas the unlikeable characters in Christine Pountney’s The Best Way You Know How or Kate Christensen’s In the Drink, for example, were characters with enough agency who’d just squandered it by being irresponsible, by making stupid decisions, by having dreams of Bohemian grandeur that don’t add up to much. Perhaps the problem with female loser-lit is that authors are rarely brave enough to situate their character at rock bottom.
“I left Claude, the French rat,” the book begins, and a careful reader will note a wide gulf between Harriet’s perception of matters and what appears to be reality. We figure out quickly from various cues that Harriet is a parasite, lazy and irresponsible, a person who makes up her own history as she goes along. She’s spent the last six months living with her boyfriend Claude, but he’s had enough and wants her out. He’d first encountered her crying on the doorstep of their building after the friend she’d been staying with the on the first floor had tossed all her belongings out the window (after Harriet had snuck a strange man into the friend’s bed to enact a rape fantasy. Clearly with Harriet, no explanation is ever straightforward). She’d spent a period of time in Europe which she attempts to define herself by, though it’s clear that some kind of similar drama to the others is what had sent her back home to America. And now Claude wants to be rid of her, but Harriet’s not budging, even going as far as to get the locks changed, which is far for Harriet who can’t usually summon the initiative to get out of bed.
Oh, she is horrible and scathing, one of those people who calls the world as she sees it. Likes like this like, about her friend, the former roommate, “How often I used to tell her, ‘Rhoda, stop brooding about your size. Having a perfect figure may be a blessing but believe me, it’s not the only thing in life. A saint may come along who is not primarily concerned with with proportions, but when he does, if you drag him in here, be prepared to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.'” There was just something about the voice that won me over, lines like, “Unless he had magically transformed himself into a book of matches stuck to my ass, he was definitely not in the bed.” Humour, as always, is a relative thing, but I found After Claude absolutely hilarious.
Harriet is one of those women Caitlin Moran writes about in How to Be a Woman, a woman who enacts entire relationships in her mind, except that in her mind, Harriet has reinvented the entire world. Her point of view nearly unbudging–that she is is smarter than everybody around her, envied, beautiful, and that she’s going places even when she’s stopped. And it’s true that many of the people around her are so obnoxious that you start to see her point, that she looks good on them, really. Harriet is so sure of herself that the reader can almost believe it.
But not quite, however much we’d like to. The novel’s final third takes place at the Chelsea Hotel where Claude has finally been rid of Harriet, and she falls into strange company across the hall, an odd party populated by members of a cult and she latches onto their leader as she does to every single man she ever encounters, and he gets the better of her, but not without giving her something in return. The novel ends with Harriet back in her room in her single bed: “I had no thoughts, only a dim awareness of myself listening and waiting.” Which is actually the strongest awareness of herself that Harriet has ever shown us that she has.
Iris Owens’ biography contains the detail that she was “the daughter of a professional gambler”. She made her reputation as a pornographer writing under the name “Harriet Daimler” for the Olympia Press in Paris during the 1950s. After Claude, published in 1973, is one of two novels she published under her own name, and the other was based upon her marriage to an Iranian Prince. So that is Owens, who is anything but boring, and I promise you that her novel is even more ever so much so.
February 10, 2013
Flip Turn by Paula Eisenstein
Flip Turn, the debut novel by Paula Eisenstein, is a wonderful companion to Leanne Shapton’s memoir Swimming Studies, using fiction to address many of the questions Shapton posed in her book. What does it it mean to be defined in one’s youth by a competitive sport? How can you be yourself without the sport? Does having natural talent hinder one from trying anything that doesn’t come easy? And where does the discipline of competitive athletics come from? Where does it go when the sport is gone? Eisenstein too delves into the peculiar culture of competitive swimming, the smell of chlorine, greeny blond hair, how you should not in fact stow your wet suit in a plastic bag after morning practice but rather roll it in your towel, otherwise it will still be wet for practice later in the later and therefore impossible to put on.
For Eisenstein’s unnamed narrator, competitive swimming offers welcome escape from a horrifying incident in her family’s past. Her older brother had been convicted of murdering a young girl at the local YMCA in their hometown of London ON, and the family cannot help being defined by that event both among themselves and in the wider community. The protagonist of Flip Turn views her swimming successes as a chance to tell a different story about their family life, to change the narrative. If she is good, then her family is good, she figures, which is a heavy burden for a young girl to carry on her shoulders no matter how muscular those shoulders are.
In the pool is the one place where she belongs, where both her mind and her body know exactly what she needs to do in order to be successful. Whereas, at school and even among her teammates, she’s not comfortable in her skin, always feeling like an outsider, partly due to her brother’s infamy or at least her consciousness of it, and also due to the fact that to be teenaged is always to feel like something of a misfit. Home is no better–she is all too aware of the fractures in her family, tip-toeing around her parents in order to be everything her brother wasn’t. Though she has to be careful not to be too successful in her sport–every time her name appears in the local newspaper, she knows that with her surname she only serves as a reminder of the terrible thing her brother had done years before.
Eisenstein’s narrative is told in fragments, which is disconcerting at first but the reader becomes accustomed to the style. This fragmented approach makes sense as well because this character’s world is one that is very much broken, and also because any young person is only figuring out how to understand a world in pieces anyway. Flip Turn has no obvious narrative arc–the trajectory is less of an arc than lengths back and forth across a pool–except that as the story progresses, the narrator’s voice and focus changes, deepens, demonstrating that this character is indeed maturing and that her awareness of the world around her is broadening.
This broadened awareness, however, fails to lead our character to any tidy resolution and, if anything, actually makes her experiences more complicated. Which is pretty much how life works, but it also means that this novel’s abrupt ending isn’t going to satisfy everyone. Though I imagine that anyone who gets into Flip Turn isn’t going to approach its ending expecting anything vaguely book-shaped anyway. What we get here is a portrayal of consciousness instead, a singular voice infused with such tenacity that the reader is left suspecting (or perhaps just hoping?) that this is a character who someday really is going to be okay.
February 4, 2013
A Question of Identity by Susan Hill
I can’t believe that A Question of Identity is only my third Simon Serrailler mystery. It feels like my connection to these books goes deeper, like these are characters I’ve known for a long long time. Which is a testament to the depth of the books in this series, though I wonder if Susan Hill has finally crossed a line, if the Simon Serrailler novels are now incapable of standing alone. I can imagine that a reader who picks up this one looking for a good whodunnit might be confused by all the attention on Simon Serrailler’s sister, Dr. Cat Deerbon, her work in a hospice, trouble amongst her adolescent children. Would they know what to make of Simon’s stepmother who is hiding some kind of terrible secret about her marriage? And what of Simon’s relationship with Rachel, whose husband is in the final stages of Parkinson’s Disease? Who dun what anyway, that isn’t contained in some rich and wonderful back-story?
For those of us well-versed in the back-story, A Question of Identity is a kind of homecoming. Susan Hill is a wonderful writer whose crime novels are as rich as any literary novel in terms of character, writing, and depth. And what I most appreciate about them are how much they are of this world. In A Question of Identity, a group of readers get together to form a book club to support their local independent bookshop, which is struggling in these tough economic times…
And yes, I admire Hill’s novels’ unabashed bookishness too. Right before a character is killed off, Hill has her compiling a list of books for a lending library she’s thinking of starting at the seniors’ complex she’s just moved to. “She was well into her stride, remembering books she’d loved, wondering if this or that novel was out of print, adding ‘Miss Read’ hastiliy, then ‘Nancy Mitford’ and “Denis Lehane’–one of her own favourites, but possibly a bit too raw for some…. She was enjoying herself, and had just jotted down Daphne du Maurier when she heard a sound…”
So yes, onto the murders. At a (poorly constructed–typical) newly-built seniors’ housing complex in Lafferton, two women have been killed in the dead of night in a bizarre ritual, with no signs of forced entry. Simon Serrailler and his team find a break when they link the crimes to a few committed in Yorkshire years before, except the accused in those cases was shockingly acquitted and fixed with a new identity for his own protection afterwards. Which means that he is now untraceable, and authorities are refusing to disclose any information to police in Lafferton. Simon is faced with having to track down a suspect whose existence has been wiped off the face of the earth.
Somewhat disappointingly, I guessed the murderer quite early on in the book, which says something because I’m normally quite a rubbish sleuth. There just weren’t enough other suspects, and Hill has the suspect finally caught in a sting that felt somewhat artificial. So perhaps as a crime novel this one comes up short, but then I still read it with utter pleasure, and I’m not sure that a good crime plot was ever what I came to these novels looking for anyway.
January 30, 2013
The House on Sugarbush Road by Méira Cook
There is no expressway into the Johannesburg of Méira Cook’s novel The House on Sugarbush Road. Instead, the roads are twisting and clogged with traffic, detritus, pedestrians on the roadside calling out in a language you don’t understand. This is a novel that is disorienting to encounter, hard to get one’s bearings in; the reader travels blindly along these foreign streets, trusting in the story and its teller. And as the story progresses, the trust builds. While The House on Sugarbush Road is Méira Cook’s first novel, she is widely published (and lauded) as a poet, she worked as a journalist in her native South Africa, and her prose gorgeously reflects the former while her novel’s approach shows the latter. The effect is brutal, surprising, and provokes an incredibly visceral reaction.
This novel was not what I was expecting. Perhaps it’s the sweetness of “sugarbush” but I was all set for the Africa of Alexander McCall Smith. And a wildly unpopular opinion, which I continue to hold, is that his Precious Ramotswe books are terrible. This was also set to be another book about the complicated relationship between a Black maid and the family she’s been loyal to for years and years, but my goodness, you don’t know from complicated. Beauty Mapule, like every other character in this book, is as imperfect as she is true. This is Johannesburg in 1994, just post-Apartheid, but this also means the flip-side of revolution–that the whole world has gone to pieces.
This brokenness and devastation is reflected in the house on Sugarbush Road where Beauty has lived and worked for 40 years in the deaths by car accident of Ilse and Meneer du Plessis, her employers, which occur not long before the story begins. Left behind is the elderly grandmother Ouma who is as much as a relic of another time as the house itself is, and Benjamin du Plessis, the son, who has returned from abroad because he doesn’t know what else to do with what his parents have left behind.
And Beauty Mapule, she hates him. She makes a point of of serving him the most paltry or gristly food portions, steals his pocket change, does whatever she can to make his existence as uncomfortable as possible. She glories in her power here, though she cannot articulate exactly her motivations. She thinks Benjamin is oblivious, but he isn’t. He just doesn’t know what to do about it, this woman who had loved him as a child alongside her own child, and who now makes clear her distaste and scorn.
It is easy to assume that the loss of Beauty’s own child, however, has everything to do with her behaviour. Her daughter Givvie, christened Given, who was taken in an episode of violence that was shockingly common at the time. Her son Lucky certainly fared better in his life, but the life that he has made for himself has little room for a mother who is a domestic servant. He wants nothing to do with his eldest son either, the product of an earlier relationship, and so Beauty has been left responsible for her grandson as well, who has turned out to be a complete disappointment.
Beauty’s stepdaughter, who has found being five months pregnant does nothing to deter the advances of the men who continually become besotted with her at first sight, finds work with Ouma’s daughter, Magda, whose previous maid had disappeared along with most of Magda’s worldly goods not long before. The father of her child is a shady but charming businessman with shades of the devil himself who becomes embroiled in the lives of every character in the novel eventually, the one element that connects in a place where so much has fallen apart.
The House on Sugarbush Road is scattered with phrases in a cacophony of languages, and there is not a glossary to be found. And I love that, that we’re expected to find our own way through this wild book, that Cook doesn’t provide us a guided tour, an opportunity for gawking, for spectacle. We have no choice but to be utterly absorbed in the novel, an experience which becomes devastating toward the novel’s conclusion, which is brutal, inexplicable, the opposite of everything we’re trained to expect from a story.
Except the very best stories, of course, which defy expectations. And so it goes with this one.
January 23, 2013
Mini Reviews: Crusoe's Daughter & Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With
Jane Gardam always catches me off-guard, one of those authors who operates without real precedent and so whenever I pick up one of her books, it’s never what I’m expecting. I read Old Filth about two years ago, and found it incredibly bizarre–so traditional its Englishness and its subject matter, but its treatment was a bit like a fun-house mirror. I’ve made more sense of what Gardam is up to since reading this wonderful essay on Crusoe’s Daughter, which posits that Gardam “has, more successfully than most novelists, navigated the narrow stream between the stingy shores of modernism and the grand cliffs of the nineteenth century novel.”
I bought Crusoe’s Daughter (though was disappointed not to receive this edition, whose cover I adore) after Martin Levin noted it as one of his top reads of 2012. I wish to better understand Gardam and her work because it intrigues me so, and also because her admirers tend to be really brilliant readers. It’s the story of Polly Flint, the daughter of a sailor who is sent to live in a yellow house by the sea with two eccentric aunts. The first passage in the book I underlined was a description of a view of trees from a train carriage: “The light showing through them made them look like loops of knitting pulled off the needles.” Oh, can Jane Gardam ever write. And then the line appears again, inconspicuously, closer to the end of the book. There is real method in the construction of this book, which reads as old-fashioned from a distance. Crusoe’s Daughter is actually a novel about novels, or one in particular. In her isolation in that strange house beside the sea, Polly finds escape and company in Robinson Crusoe, whose character’s own isolation she identifies with: “He didn’t go mad. He was brave. He was wonderful. He was like women have to be almost always, on an island. Stuck. Imprisoned. The only way to survive is to say it’s God’s will.”
There was so much going on in this book that I didn’t wholly understand or appreciate, and I’ve never read Robinson Crusoe which probably means I missed even more than I’m aware of. But I was still captivated by the oddness of Gardam’s narrative, by the oddness of Polly herself (who does go mad but only for a little while. She eventually finds salvation teaching Robinson Crusoe and English Literature at a boy’s school). I’m not wholly converted to Jane Gardam yet, but this novel was as such that I’m not going to stop reading her until she finally takes.
**
I don’t know that I’ve ever been as stupid than the year I was twenty-one, when I came across Susan Swan’s Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With while shelving books at the university library. I was drawn to the title immediately, of course, as stupid boys were a habit of mine at the time, not just because I was stupid myself (though this was part of the reason) but also because I hadn’t realized I could do any better. Perhaps I thought the title might justify so many of my life choices at the time? But I was so stupid the year I was twenty-one that I didn’t even know how to read a short story collection. I think I was too young to appreciate what Swan was up, and I don’t think I got very far with the book at all.
The best thing about re-encountering a book is that it can be a testament to how far one has come. I would love for this momentum to continue, for my intelligence to be increased by the time I am 45 to the same extent it has improved in the last 12 years. Though that might just a peculiarity of one’s twenties; is there any other learning curve so great? Yes, my taste in men has come a long, long way, but I am also such a better reader now.
Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With is remarkable for being a book published in 1996 with a laptop computer on its back-cover, with a whole section of the book called “Cyber Tales”, written as a conversation on the internet. In 1996, I wasn’t as stupid as I was when I was 21, but I don’t think I’d ever used the internet. How amazingly forward thinking was Stupid Boys…, which walks a very fine line of being very much of its time but not being dated. I was trying to explain the difference between the two, and I think it comes down to Swan having been aware of the use of technology in her work, and intending it to mean something other than just “modern” (which it most definitely wouldn’t be just a few short years along).
Stupid Boys… is a collection of stories about the way women construct their lives and identities of men undeserving of such an honour (and who are often even unaware they’re so being honoured). Using traditionally structured stories (including some narrated by the famous Mary Beatrice Bradford), and more unconventional tales peopled by characters from classical literature and pop-culture, Swan writes about the compromises women make, and the pleasure and pain of such choices. It’s also a surprisingly remarkable complement to Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which is the book I read immediately afterwards.
January 20, 2013
Some Great Idea by Edward Keenan
For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll inform you that I actually appear as a character in Edward Keenan’s new book Some Great Idea: Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto. Keenan, a Senior Editor at The Grid, writes in his book about how the Rob Ford spectacle has galvinized a whole segment of the population to take an interest in city politics, of this effect on his own career: “…before, my regular readership consisted largely of insiders at city hall, and political activists. Since Ford was elected, tens of thousands of readers click through online to soak up anything I write about the mayor.” And that’s me, one of tens of thousands. (I’m the one waving.) I didn’t even vote in the 2006 municipal election, the only election I’ve ever sat out since I came of age, but I remember being busy that day, not seeing the point. That election result seemed inevitable, but since Rob Ford took office in October 2010, nothing is inevitable anymore. It suddenly seems worth paying attention to what’s going on around us.
I think I’d be compelled to pick up any book whose author acknowledges that his thinking about Toronto has been influenced by Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto. Amy has since become a dear friend, but we’d only met in passing when I fell in love with her book back in 2010, marvelling at how markedly she demonstrates that a city is constructed of stories as much as concrete and steel. Keenan takes this as the premise for his book, whose opening line is, “I have this notion that cities are just a collection of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Near to the end of the book, he writes, “The answers, then, are in the process, just as the themes and lessons of any story lie not in its conclusion but in the unfolding of the plot.” So there you have it: plot. This is not some dry polemic. There is movement here; we get somewhere. Which is exactly what you would expect from a book with a subway on its cover.
Some Great Idea is the history of Toronto since amalgamation in 1998, the story of mayors Lastman, Miller and Ford. Though Keenan emphasizes that Toronto has always resisted being defined by its leadership, so the story goes beyond these three figures. Which isn’t to say that the city hasn’t been marked by personalities, and Keenan selects William Lyon Mackenzie, RC Harris (who was apparently very different from the figure Ondaatje portrayed him as), and Jane Jacobs as three individuals who resisted convention, rebelled against the system and helped to shape the city we live in today.
It’s also the story of Keenan’s own engagement with civic life, in the last ten years in particular (and in this way, Some Great Idea is a nice companion to Samantha Bernstein’s memoir Here We Are Among the Living which documents this same period in Toronto). He’s been in a privileged place, telling urban stories at a time when an awareness of urbanism had taken hold of the city like never before: this was the birth of Trampoline Hall, Spacing magazine, Richard Florida, the Dufferin Grove Park pizza oven, and Keenan ties these factors all together as the story of this place. It’s his place, where he lived in an industrial loft with the woman who is now his wife, where his children were born, where he and his wife became homeowners. It’s a story too that is more complicated than the personas of the men in power suggest–there was a great deal of progressiveness in the city under Mel Lastman thanks to figures on council like Jack Layton; David Miller’s legacy was far more positive than most of us remember; Rob Ford’s “leadership” has engaged Torontonians like nothing before.
Keenan shows that Toronto too is a much larger place than the downtown core highlighted in most civic discussions. He gives the example of Woburn, a neighbourhood within this supposed “city of neighbourhoods”. Except that Woburn isn’t a neighbourhood at all, but it’s the name given to the area where Keenan spent his teen years, near Markham and Lawrence in Scarborough. He has it stand for the inner-suburbs in general. It’s an area that grew up entirely differently than the downtown neighbourhoods, with different interests and priorities, whose populations no longer live the lifestyles the area was so rigidly planned for. You have to understand a neighbourhood like this, its strengths and weaknesses, in order to understand how Rob Ford was elected into office, to understand why someone who lives in that part of the city might see themselves as as taxpayer before citizen, if they even define as citizen at all.
The book’s title is taken from a quotation by Benjamin Disraeli: “A great city whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea.” The peculiarity of this diction, the vagueness of “some” great idea unspecified points to the book’s one weakness, a kind of muddled conception of itself and its purpose. I longed for Keenan to grasp his narrative with more confidence, for less journalistic objectivity. It wasn’t always clear where the story was going, but then Keenan himself was the one who wrote that unfolding not conclusion is the very point. And I will take it.
Because I learned so much about Toronto from this book, its history and its present. Keenan posits diversity as the city’s great strength, and goes on to define a city’s “diversity” as being about so much more than the ethnic backgrounds of its people. He closes with his theory of a city as something ever in the process of being born–“Inventing Toronto”, then, in addition to imagining it. The city as a story each of us is telling every time we stroll, cycle or drive down one of its streets.
Other Toronto links:
-My review of Rosemary Aubert’s Firebrand, “Loving the mayor is a bit like that.”
January 6, 2013
Whitetail Shooting Gallery by Annette Lapointe
Imagine Alissa York’s Fauna but in rural Saskatchewan and with all the sentimentality stripped away. Imagine lots of sex, kissing cousins, a gunshot to the face, and a set of teeth that get kicked in over and over again. Imagine a family farmhouse, country roads, the kind of place you might want to move to raise your kids if you don’t look too closely. The hockey player, the pastor’s daughter, how he’s giving blow jobs to his teammates, and she’s having sex with her best friend. All those things that go on down in teenage caves in the basement, the kinds of people who live in holes in the ground, poring over pornography, vampire novels, Flowers in the Attic, scarcely coming up for light.
Oh, and horse books. “It’s those damn fillies again. They’re everywhere. That particular shade of sun-drenched blond hair spontaneously generates short fiction for girls when nobody’s looking.” And in a sense, this is a horse book, but not in the way you think. Jen is big, not at all graceful as she scrambles up on her horse’s back. The book begins with gunfire, buckshot in her horse’s neck, and Jen’s own body is full of holes. The shooter was her cousin Jason, the circumstances behind the incident quite unclear, and clarity never really comes, the plot circling around the mystery over and over, as two decades pass.
“Clarity never really comes.” I think this sentence is important, actually, as Whitetail Shooting Gallery baffled me thoughtout, disturbed and troubled me, but it also intrigued me, continually surprised me, never stopped me wondering what would happen next. It’s an anti-pastoral, a complicated portrayal of rural life. It’s the story of Jen and Jason, two cousins whose relationship was always strangely tangled or predatory, who drift apart in their teenage years. Jason is troubled by his shattered family, and while Jen’s family remains strong, her parents don’t really know her. She struggles to reconcile her feelings, her yearnings, her body, with expectations of womanhood. (Significantly, at the arena where Jen teaches figure-skating and Jason plays hockey, the girls’ change room is labelled “Visitors”). She runs around with a pack of wild girls, girls with fleshy bodies, hair, nails and teeths. They’re all a bit feral, and they long for lairs, the kind boys get:
“If Jenn were a boy, she’d have claimed the family basement for her cave. It would be her birthright, She’d have crawled underground and lined her cement cave with clothes and animal hair, and she’d plot how to capture her chosen other-person, how to drag them down into the dark and chew on them.”
The narrative follows Jen and Jascon through their teens, twenties and into their thirties, and demonstrates how each is shaped by their early years, by the peculiarities of the land that bore them, what is possible to be overcome and what isn’t. Both continue to have their closest relationships with animals, Jason with the ferrets and lizards he keeps as pets, and Jen ending up working in a zoo. The line between humans and their fellow-creatures remains ever-blurred, which is one of the most interesting parts of the novel, of so many.
Annette Lapointe’s literary reputation was established with Stolen, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. And here in her second book, she’s turning Can-Lit on its head, challenging not only her readers’ sensibilities, but also ideas about what a novel should be. And the latter seems to be a requirement for the kind of book that I like best.
December 13, 2012
Mini Reviews: You Never Know and Earth and High Heaven
There are times when the books on my To Be Read (But Not New-Releases) shelf sit pitifully neglected, gathering dust (though dust-gathering is sort of a given in our house). And then there are times like now when I’m just barrelling through them, when I could stand to never read another new-release again and what I want is tried, tested and good. When I want something I wasn’t expecting at all.
Since falling in love with Isabel Huggan in October (which is remarkable, really. October was a month during which my love was ridiculously hard to provoke. I hated everybody and everything.) I’ve been looking forward to reading her other books. You Never Know is a collection of short stories published in 1993. Some of the stories have a familiar tone to The Elizabeth Stories, narrated in a child’s voice, or in the voice of one looking back upon childhood. But there is lots of range here too in narrative approach, setting, and character. The story that blew me away was “The Violation”, the story of a newly pregnant woman trying to find a place for herself within the rural community that she and her husband had relocated to. The man who plows their lane stops by for lunch, and she proceeds to misunderstand him and he to offend her in the most subtly brutal, unexpected way possible. The gulf between them is enormous, and both of their situations are heartbreaking.
I would describe the shape of Huggan’s stories as inverted-triangular, like a bouquet of flowers. The surface is broad and pretty, but there is enormous depth there, and it goes down down down to levels you might not want to encounter. The themes of most of these stories relate to the collection’s title: how hard it is to know one other, the untraversable gulfs that lie between us. From the conclusion of the book’s final story: “Why we enter each other’s lives and how we’re meant to fit together is more that is given to us to know. And yet that’s what we want, isn’t it? That’s what we want to understand.”
And then I read Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham, which I found more than a year ago in a cardboard box on Heather Birrell’s front porch. I was aware of the title from a list of English Quebec fiction on 49thShelf. It’s the story of a upper-class Anglo Montrealer who falls in love with a Jewish lawyer, and is surprised to learn that the attitudes of friends and family are not so far removed from those in Nazi Germany and in Europe, where Canadian soldiers were fighting WW2. The war was a complicated issue in Quebec, and becomes even more so against the backdrop of Marc and Erica’s romance. It’s a wonderful Montreal novel, very contemporary in its feel, even as it reminded me of Hugh MacLennan all the while–Barometre Rising in particular, with its strong female character. Apparently Two Solitudes came out in this book’s shadow (Graham’s book won the Governor General’s Award, and was a huge bestseller in the US), and MacLennan resented this, considering Graham’s a lesser book for its “not explaining Canada”, for the anywhereness of her setting. Though that wasn’t the impression I got from Earth and High Heaven. It was very Canadian, particularly so in its setting and perhaps an easier book to encounter than MacLennan’s for not being didactic. It’s a conventional novel, but daring for its time and really well written. I enjoyed it completely and I’m so glad it’s in print. More readers need to know it.
