December 9, 2012
High Water Mark by Nicole Dixon
After chasing Lisa Moore around last week, it was sweet relief to encounter Nicole Dixon’s High Water Mark, finally something to hold on to. Though while these stories structures were conventional, their subject matter isn’t, Dixon going out of her way to introduce themes and ideas not always present in the standard Can-Lit (though if 49thShelf has taught me anything, it is that there is no such thing as “standard Can-Lit”). Her characters are bolshie, flawed, funny, horny, and determined to forge their own paths. They live in tiny Nova Scotia towns, in downtown Toronto, in Sarnia. Friendships are tangled, love lives are messy. These people are teachers, fisherman, wannabe farmers, and t-shirt folders. Nobody is sure of where they stand.
It’s a solid collection, even though the stories have been written over many years and a few have been published elsewhere– “High Water Mark” appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 19. The stories cover a broad range, but they fit together well, and their diversity makes for an interesting read. “High Water Mark” is the story of a teenage girl in tiny Refugee Cove Nova Scotia whose mother has terminal cancer and who has taken over her sister’s job folding t-shirts in a tourist trap since her sister’s baby died. And yes, it manages to be funny. “Sick Days” is one of the two Mona Berlo stories, beginning, “The grade-five students are making Mona Berlo ill…” and it’s an illuminating view into the classroom from a teacher’s perspective, and into the frustrations of having to guide young lives when one is still trying to get her own sorted out. Alcohol helps.
“Saudade” is the story of two women in a band whose dynamic is rocked by the introduction of a third member. “Mona Says Fire Fire Fire” was my favourite in the collection, Mona now relocated to Refugee Cove teaching French immersion and trying to make a place for herself among the locals while she considers a long-distance love. “Some Just Ski and Shoot” is about one woman’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend, which also represents the culmination of a long, long story. In “Happy Meat”, a couple goes back to the land and discovers that sometimes you need more than self-sufficiency. In “What Zoe Knows”, a teenage girl discovers her father is having an affair, resulting in heartbreaking conclusion and more of a glimpse than she’d like to have seen into the complexities of her parents’ lives, their vulnerabilities. And I loved “Diving For Pearls”, about a woman who goes home to work with her fisherman father and considers what to do about an unexpected pregnancy, the trouble of which is underlined in the context of a life her own mother had had to escape from. “An Unkindness of Ravens” about too-desperate love, the most dysfunctional relationship ever, and a subtly brutal ending. And finally, “You Wouldn’t Recognise Me” from the perspective of Zoe’s alcoholic mother who is struggling for forgiveness and to redeem herself after nearly killing her daughter in a car accident.
Stories like “Diving for Pearls” and “You Wouldn’t Recognize Me” are so incredibly nuanced that they left me longing for more of the same in a few of the others. “‘I know we’re expected to teach art,’ the blonde said quietly, ‘but as if I’m going to. Like it’s important.” This from “Sick Days”, from a character too dim for these stories–Mona’s strong perspective could well have been challenged by someone with more substance than that. There is a similar treatment of other women in book–the friends in “Saudade” are so surprised to meet another woman with whom conversation doesn’t “[default] to talk of shopping or TV or complaints about men.” It made me think that these women have been hanging out in all the wrong places, because brilliant women are everywhere, but they seem to be so apart in Dixon’s stories. And finally, there was a strange recurring theme of women settling into relationships and becoming obese, to the point where it was kind of conspicuous, to the point where there was no worse fate than fat, and being married was somehow synonymous.
But still, I really like what Dixon is doing here, and I hope that in her next book she realizes that she doesn’t have to try so hard to do it. “High Water Mark” is an absorbing, surprising, and affecting read whose characters live large beyond its pages.
December 5, 2012
The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore
To celebrate their 45th anniversary this summer, House of Anansi reissued 10 of their “classic books” as The A List, a gorgeously designed series of eclectic reads, and the first one I turned to was The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore. Because I love Lisa Moore. I was so struck by Alligator when I read it in 2006; found it to be a Woolfian “recording [of] the atoms as they fall”. And then with February in 2009, a book I decided was absolutely perfect. I thought anything could be declared so objectively. As I read the novel, I had no idea of the polarizing reaction readers would have to it, that its reviewers would be alternatively sobbing hysterically or spitting with scorn. Though I’ve reread the novel since, and found it didn’t let me down.
I’d read one of Lisa Moore’s short story collections as well, but I can’t remember which, which is to say everything about its impression upon me. So I was very eager to read the The Selected Short Fiction, to know better the work of this author who has meant so much to me. And what struck me about the collection, which is made up of Moore’s two short story collections and a few unpublished stories, is that the novels are really not such a departure after all. The same setting, kinds of characters, preoccupations. Lisa Moore is brilliant, and it seems that what she creates can’t possibly come from mere imagination but from vision. The line highlighted by Jane Urquhart in the collection’s introduction: “They made love on the grass watching out for broken beer bottles, an aureole of amber glitter around their bodies.”
“Natural Parents” was my favourite (and I am know I’m not the only one who has ever said this)–the cerebral, all the action. The stories were funny, wrought, exhausting, hard to follow, which makes sense, considering this from Moore, from a CBC interview whose link no longer exists: “If the reader knows where you’re going, there’s no point in reading that sentence; they’ll just skip it. It’s not for the sake of being avant-garde that I want it to be unexpected. It’s because I think a real engagement with a book means that the reader has to chase after the story”. All that chasing in a short story collection though is really hard, one chase after another. I love short stories and I love impossible engaging literature, but it’s hard to fit that kind of read into a life. It’s almost like running around in circles. One short story at a time, perhaps, but then I don’t encounter my books that way. I really would much prefer to have to work that hard on a novel, if I have to work that hard at all.
It occurs to me that what Moore is up to in her novels is not really so different though–that Alligator is just as fragmented and hard to follow (and wonderful!) as the short stories are, and that anyone who sees February as anything otherwise is reading it wrong. There is a bare bones, semi-conventional plot to February that is decidedly not the point of the book. It’s what’s going on beneath the surface that matters, that as with the short stories moments far apart in time occur simultaneously. That February is in fact a long short story that takes on a novel’s dimensions, but look close and you’ll see the underpinnings are the very same. (I’ve written a whole essay on the goodness and value of this book. It’s pretty much all I really ever have to say about anything.)
Anyway, this is the great thing about reaching back in time for a book, about a series like The A List. Because on one hand, each book is a new encounter, but one that has the context of casting everything that came after in a whole new kind of light.
November 25, 2012
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
In her latest novel Flight Behaviour, as ever, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel about ecology. “Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact,” so explains lepidopterologist Ovid Byron. The populations Kingsolver considers in Flight Behaviour are the Turnbrows, a farming family from Appalachia fallen on hard times, and their feisty daughter-in-law Dellarobia who, after ten years, is still an outsider in their midst. When Dellarobia discovers that an enormous population of monarch butterflies have settled in the forest on her family’s mountain, the family encounters other populations previously unimaginable–a team of scientists, environmentalists, frenzied journalists. And finally, on a biological level, Kingsolver is writing about the displaced monarch population and whatever factors in a climate gone awry have led them off their usual migratory route.
Though much more accessible and concerned with the lives of ordinary people (as opposed to Frieda Kahlo and Trotsky), Flight Behaviour is a continuation of the ideas Kingsolver dealt with in The Lacuna, a brilliant book which won the Orange Prize in 2010. She is concerned with an America-divided, a nation stuck on its false binaries, and eroding itself with creeping anti-intellectualism. Flight Behaviour is set in the present day, and its underlying premise is climate change.
Its impact seems obvious–crops are lost to rainy summers, winter never really arrives. And yet to the Turnbrows, “climate change” is an idea, a debate. At least this is what the men on the radio tell them. The crazy weather is another way in which Dellarobia Turnbrow has no control over her life, a life in which there is never enough money, enough work, and she and her husband have never managed to escape from under the thumb of her over-bearing mother-in-law Hester. One day, however, as the book begins, Dellarobia decides to take at least one part of her life into her own hands, and set in motion a series of events to free her from everything. She’s heading up the mountain toward her own escape route, a liaison with a man who is not her husband.
She never gets there–she sees the butterflies instead, and without her glasses, the red looks like the world on fire. Convinced she’s seen a sign, she returns back to the place where she belongs, unaware that the sign she’s seen is an indicator of something with nothing to do with her and family at all, but which also to do with everything.
Ovid Byron, the butterfly scientist, shows up amidst the journalists, hippie kids and sight-seers with an interest in the phenomenon on the Turnbrow mountain. He sets up camp out behind Dellarobia’s house, and she’s taken on by his team as a assistant. The team, feels Dellarobia, is from another world, with their expensive gear, their years of learning, understanding of the wider world, experiences of travel. Dellarobia has a reputation as “the smart one” but was never able to make much of it after getting pregnant at the end of high school, and shotgunning it into early marriage. And suddenly with her new job (and its income), the world becomes open to her in a way it hasn’t been in years. Unfortunately, this opening is occurring as the world is in peril–what has provoked the butterflies to change their patterns? Will the population make it through the Appalachian winter, so different from the Mexican climate they’re accustomed to. And will they be able to convince Dellarobia’s father-in-law to change his mind about clear-cutting the entire mountain, a decision he’d made to get the family through one payment of a massive debt?
Complicating binaries is what Barbara Kingsolver does, and so this is not just a story about how a group of scientists delivered enlightenment to a simple country girl, and neither is this an inversion in which the humble girl teaches the big city folks a thing or two about the real world. No, Kingsolver has a reverence for learning, and science wins the day, but she shows the way in which so many Americans are cut-off from understanding their stake in the climate change crisis. First, because they have other concerns–overdue bills and foreclosures, dying industries, dying towns, and also because they’ve become accustomed to seeing people just like themselves made a mockery of on television, and they start to believe that televised world is their reality. On a more practical level, whole populations lack access to decent education and resources like libraries. Kingsolver shows the ways in which climate-change denial becomes a kind of foundation myth, a way of defining self and survival, entirely entwined with personal and group identity. And that middle-class do-gooders know nothing about it– Kingsolver has a brilliant scene in which Dellarobia is urged by an environmentalist to take a pledge to reduce her carbon footprint. To bring tupperware for restaurant leftovers, when she’s not eaten in a restaurant for over two years; to carry a Nalgene instead of buying bottled water; to reduce intake of red-meat, when her family can barely afford any; and to fly less. Fly less. This to Dellarobia, who has never flown anywhere.
Most writers couldn’t pull this off, and Kingsolver doesn’t entirely—there are moments when we’re all too conscious that these characters have been born to have words put in their mouths– but the novel succeeds anyway for the greatness of its reach, the richness of its characters, its humour, for the depth of its author’s knowledge and understanding of the world, and her empathy for the people who inhabit it.
November 18, 2012
Here We Are Among the Living by Samantha Bernstein
Non-fiction by women turns up with a predictable lack of frequency on literary prize lists, in particular when the non-fiction is of a personal bent. And so when I saw that Samantha Bernstein’s Here We Are Among the Living was on the longlist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, I absolutely had to check it out. Described as “a memoir in emails”, a chronicle of coming of age in Toronto at the (most recent) turn of the century, written by the youngest child of Irving Layton, this promised to be a book that was something different, a book that I might just happen to be the ideal reader for.
It begins with a prologue, 1999, Samantha writing to her friend Eshe about a road trip to Montreal with her friend Michael to attend a tribute to Irving Layton, the father she barely knows. Much of the journey is Sam negotiating her relationship with her famous father and with his legacy, but also becoming conscious of a developing attraction between her and Michael. When the book begins, we’re two years into the future, Sam and Michael’s relationship over but something lingering between them. It’s a few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and Sam is once again writing to Eshe, who has just started university studies in New York. She writes about her response to the tragedy, about her anger at other standard responses, about her frustrations with her mother who once espoused hippie ideals but turned her back on them with middle age. And so we go, from 2001 to 2005, the story of a girl growing up, finding her place in the world. At the book’s beginning, she’s just dropped out of UofT, is working at Starbucks, is living with her mother and cherishes their closeness just as she’s resentful of it.
Part of my attraction to this book is that Bernstein is documenting my time– she’s two years younger than I am but just a bit more worldly enough that our lives had their parallels. There was something peculiar about being 22 when the Twin Towers fell, on the threshold of a world that appeared to be crumbling. And for me, the Irving Layton part of Bernstein’s story functioned as a metaphor– how are we as a generation to find our place in the world in the enormous shadow of our parents’? So many of our values were their values once upon a time, but they outgrew them. Their culture remains our culture. What does it mean that we’re taking on their cast-offs? Will their cast-offs just destine us to make all the same mistakes?
Here We Are Among the Living is also a stunning record of an important time in the history of Toronto, of the burgeoning civic awareness that developed as the city turned into the new century. Bernstein writes of one Sunday when a shopkeeper bought a row of parking spaces in Kensington Market, and gave the road over to pedestrians, which turned into pedestrian Sundays. For years, her friends’ hang-out was a loft in old factory building down on Cherry Street, that would be turned over to demolition crews with the development of the West Don Lands. Her memoir includes Toronto under SARs, and the great blackout of 2003 (which is also depicted in Grace O’Connell’s novel The Magnetic World, and it makes me wonder where else it will turn up in literature yet-to-be-born).
And it’s not just recent history, but also geography. I was living in Toronto in 2001 as well, but my experience of the city was confined mainly to the university campus. Beyond Bathurst was the Wild West, and I never went north of Bloor except to see a movie at the Cumberland. Whereas Bernstein navigates the city like someone who has lived here her whole life, like somebody with a car. She writes about the peculiar circumstances of her upbringing, on the fringes of Forest Hill, on the fringes on the middle class (her mother drove a Saab, but it was 17 years old). She spent her childhood growing up on Thelma Avenue in a house her mother owned, and talks about its bizarreness, “a lower-middle-class street in a rich area” and I’ve checked out Google streetview–it’s still just as odd. She spent her teenage years in high-rises on Walmer Road, and at Yonge and St. Clair. She cris-crosses neighbourhoods, takes in the College Street scene, her boyfriend’s comfortable home in Riverdale, her eccentric friend who lives in a storefront converted from a dental office. She comes to understand, reluctantly, the futility of trying to make the best parts of the city forever stay the same.
Here We Are Among the Living is a documentation of intersections between the personal and political, like some of my favourite non-fiction books— Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik and Subject to Change by Renee Rodin. It’s the story of the profound ways in which an ordinary woman understands her place within the wider world. I think the book also deserves attention in light of the success of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, as Bernstein is engaging with the very same question. She writes, “All kinds of confused, difficult people have still done some good in the world; we aren’t the first ones tripped up by our own natures, who don’t know what to do or how to act. But in our uncertainty, trying at least to flesh out ideals we have stick with, create lives that won’t betray us too much.” And her book resonated with me where Heti’s didn’t, for a few reasons. That she called it true, for one, and that she asked the questions earnestly. And also that her characters are in their early ’20s rather than their late ’30s, and that in the trajectory of the book they grow up, that they actually come closer to understanding the kind of people they want to be. A lot of people do.
Which is not to say that all the enthusiasms of one’s early ’20s are to be thrown away with age. Samantha Bernstein grows up, but I found it interesting to read her older brother’s supposedly wise lectures on the value of capitalism and the goodness it has brought to countries like Greece and Spain. In light of the recent economic turmoil of these two countries, her youthful idealism does not seem so misplaced. She begins the book by dropping out of school, but finds herself by going back to academia, another school and another program and a bit more experience under her belt. I also find the structure of this memoir quite remarkable, a testament that electronic communication has value, that it’s capable of being literature, that young people have something to say and their own way to say it.
I don’t think this book is for everybody. It’s a bit too long, not always as profound as it imagines itself to be, is an exercise in self-indulgence, and yet I connected with it on so many levels. It’s a book I emailed my friends about, my friends who were sitting around a booth with me at a College Street diner on the night of September 11 2001, and I told them, “This is our story.” It’s a book that’s important for anyone who cares about women’s non-fiction (and if that’s not you, what’s wrong with you?). I loved it, and it’s truly one of the most remarkable books I’ve read this year. I’m so glad that the folks at the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction think so too.
November 12, 2012
Sleeping Funny by Miranda Hill
It’s so tough to review a short story collection with any authority. Whenever I go declaring the “strongest story in the collection,” the book reviewer next door will go and call it the weakest, or not even mention the story at all in his review. And that one story that just didn’t do it for me will be the one that someone else celebrates.
In truth, it’s tough to review any book with real authority, but most short story collections definitely further complicate the task. So much really is just a matter of taste, so that of course I’d be the least enamoured with Miranda Hill’s “Rise: A Requiem” because historical fiction just doesn’t do it for me, while “The Variance” absolutely held me enraptured, but then I’ve got a thing for stories about middle-class wives and mothers and leafy streets, don’t I?
When I review short stories, I like to talk about the book as a whole rather than necessarily break it down into parts, but Sleeping Funny makes this nearly impossible. I could say, I guess, that this is not a seamless, well-curated, devourable collection. This is not a book that seems to be more than the sum of its parts, and yet… its parts are extraordinary at times and altogether worthwhile.
What I will say is that I am so very glad this book exists. Because it’s really a beautiful object, comprising stories by a writer who won our nation’s top story prize in 2011, because the stories themselves are rich and deep, and because not every publisher these days is going to take a chance on a collection whose stories are so disparate. Because this is a book less about its bookishness than about the stories themselves. A celebration of stories, nine of them, which demonstrate the remarkable range of what a short story can be.
“The Variance” really was my favourite, the latest addition the Canon of Can-Lit Lice. Written from a dizzily shifting array of perspectives, it’s the story of neighbours on a well-to-do street and how their lives are disrupted when a new family moves in and casts the reality of their lives in an unflattering light (and plus, they’re petitioning to cut down the old maple). A bit Meg Wolitzer, a bit Tom Perrotta, this story also shows the influence of Zsuzsi Gartner, under whom Hill has studied. I also enjoyed “Sleeping Funny”, the story that ends the collection. It’s about a woman who has failed to live up to her early potential and now must come home to pack away the pieces of her (hoarder) father’s life after his death, and is struggling to keep a pet fish alive in order for her young daughter to have something to believe in.
I’ve got a thing for realism too, which is probably why these two stories worked best for me. The others read more as experiments, though they’re grounded by the same detail that made “The Variance” and “Sleeping Funny” so successful. In “Apple”, a high school sex-ed class is traumatized by visions of the circumstances of each of their own conceptions (except for Amanda Axley, “a brainiac in a family of rednecks” who is thrilled to learn she was the product of an illicit affair with a handsome doctor, conceived in the back of a supply closet). “Petitions to St. Chronic” is winner of the 2011 Journey Prize, the story of an abused wife who finds salvation in infatuation with a comatose man who has just attempted a very public suicide. In “6:19”, a man’s attempts to alter the rigid structure of his life takes him on a journey more strange than he’d ever anticipated.
“Because of Geraldine” is the story of a marriage in a shadow, the narrator looking back on her family’s infatuation with her father’s first love, who become a country and western singer. In “Precious”, a family and their whole community become enthralled by a beautiful, golden-haired infant whose older brother’s own singularity goes unnoticed. And then two stories about digging and death– “Digging for Thomas” about a young widow in WW2 whose attempts at a Victory Garden confuse her young son, and “Rise: A Requiem”, about an Anglican Minister in Kingston in the 1800s who discovers that the bodies he buries are being disturbed.
While the range is sometimes disorienting, I preferred Sleeping Funny to the kind of short story collection that perfects one trick, and then just performs it over and over. Miranda Hill’s is certainly a remarkable debut, and a promise of exciting books ahead.
November 7, 2012
Desperately Seeking Susans
When I heard about Desperately Seeking Susans, an anthology of Canadian poets called Susan, I was instantly delighted and knew this would be a book I’d have to get, and not least of all because it would probably include a poem by Susan Holbrook. So you can imagine my excitement when it all came together and I learned keeping Holbrook company would be Susans Briscoe, (Suzette) Mayr, Telfer, Olding, and Sorensen (oh yes, she of the A Large Harmonium fame!). The anthology (so reads its jacket copy) “brings together Canada’s most eminent Susans… paired with Canada’s emerging Susans”. It’s also edited by Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, who wrote the wonderful Sweet Devilry (which won the Gerald Lampert Prize in 2012) and is author of a few of our favourite picture books.
Now I have very good intentions when it comes to poetry; unlike many people, I even buy the stuff. But I find sitting down to read it altogether challenging sometimes, because I’m a book devourer, and poetry doesn’t always lend itself to being digested in such a manner. And so it says something about Desperately Seeking Susans that I read it over the weekend, and that reading was such a pleasure. Not that many of these poems could be read in one go– I had to read most of them twice or three times but the nice thing about the anthology was the range of poems, that each one would require a different kind of mental muscle, and so I never got exhausted. Every time I turned the page, I would discover something different and new.
Discovery is the key here. Not being the most avid poetry reader, here is where I’ve discovered some of those “eminent” poetic Susans for the very first time– Goyette, Elmslie, Ioannou. I loved the range of subject matter, from “The Coroner at the Taverna” by Susan Musgrave and “9 Liner” by Suzanne M. Steele about the war in Afghanistan, to poems about children, about elderly mothers and fathers. I love that the book’s epigraph is a poem called “Susan” by Lorna Crozier, and that the book has been blurbed by Susan Swan. I loved the first poem, “First Apology to My Daughter” by Susan Elmslie, which ends with the tremendous last line, “I taught you the ferocity of hunger,” Sue Goyette’s heartbreaking, beautiful poems about grief, Susan Holbrook’s “Good Egg Bad Seed”, which I had to read in its entirety to my husband before we went to bed on Saturday night (“You subscribe to Gourmet magazine or you don’t want fruit in your soup./ You get Gloria Steinem and Gertrude Stein mixed up or you get the Bangles and the Go-Go’s mixed up.”).
I loved Susan Glickman’s “On Finding a Copy of [Karen Solie’s] Pigeon in the Hospital Bookstore”, imagine a poem like Suzannah Showler’s with the fantastic title, “A Short and Useful Guide to Living in the World”. I was always going to love Susan Olding’s poems, which are “What We Thought About the Chinese Mothers” and “What the Chinese Mothers Seemed to Think of Us”. I could go on and on; there is everything here.
I love this is a book founded on such a fun premise, and how the richness and quality of the work did not have to suffer for that fun. It is an essential addition to the library of any Susan, or to anybody who loves poetry, or anyone who doesn’t know yet how much she really does.
November 1, 2012
The Elizabeth Stories by Isabel Huggan
Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories is the book I’ve been talking about for a week now, desperate to shove it into someone’s hands so they can know, or else to encounter someone who already knows just how wonderful it is (and this has happened a lot). In terms of Canadian short stories masters, we don’t have to pick sides, but I liked this book better than any I’ve ever read by Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. Less a novel in stories or a short story collection than a book— but then I can also reflect back on the individual stories. I think that “Sorrows of the Flesh” might be the best short story that I have ever, ever read.
As a bildungsroman, The Elizabeth Stories visits familiar terrain–young girl growing up in small town Ontario, constrained by convention, a misfit, confused by how the conservative society she lives in has no regard for her burgeoning sexuality. The stories were familiar to me as scenes from my own life– anger at a school-yard victim and the horrible people they drive us to be; the epic nature of childhood humiliations; the pain of not fitting in; of being misunderstood; of that impossible love for a high school teacher.
And yet, these stories surprised me at every turn, Elizabeth surprised me at every turn, for her ordinariness, for the plainness of her situation, a plainness so rarely encountered in fiction. In The Elizabeth Stories, there is no justice, no ending is tidy. Elizabeth’s parents are unbearably awful people in very subtle ways, though we’re provided glimpses as to how their characters have been shaped. Elizabeth herself does the most terrible ordinary things, we witness moments that are unbearable to watch, that leave us thinking, “Oh, no she didn’t. But of course she did!” How shocking twists are inevitable just a page later. And how many shocking twists there are in this book that so much reeks of the ordinary, the domestic, the mundane. There is a brutal, horrifying stuff going on here, and I think of this at a time when women writers are crawling out onto crazy limbs in order to be gritty, shocking, to push the limits of what we’re allowed to write about. When Isabel Huggan was doing it all the while, such brutality right here embedded into this neat little package of a book. Maybe some of us don’t have to try as hard as we think we do, or maybe the point is that not everyone is Isabel Huggan, but still.
And oh, the writing. How the ordinary is illuminated (like Lisa Moore and sock-sorting in February— turns out there is more story in a laundry basket than we ever imagined). From “Queen Esther”: “As soon as I was tall enough, my household chore on Mondays was to bring the wash in after school. It was a job I never objected to, even when in the winter my fingers ached as I pulled at the pegs on the frozen shirts and sheets. The clothes, stiff and unwieldy, would be stacked like boards in the basement where overnight they’d go limp and damp, perfect for ironing on Tuesday. The grey-blue shadows on the snow, the sky like clear rosy tea steeping darker, the creak of the lined–the only part missing in winter was the smell. In all other seasons, I buried my face in the laundry and breathed it in, the delicate aroma of virtue.”
October 22, 2012
Heidegger Stairwell by Kayt Burgess
I loved Heidegger Stairwell, a novel by Kayt Burgess, which seems to be an excellent companion to Sophie B. Watson’s Cadillac Couches, another CanLit musical ode which I recently read. Both are about musical fandom and friendship, with cross-Canada road trips thrown in for good measure. Burgess’ novel is structured as a work-in-progress, a tell-all book by music journalist Evan Strocker about his long relationship with the world-famous Canadian band Heidegger Stairwell, though he’s a little too close to his subject, as suggested by editorial notes from the band which are scattered throughout the manuscript (“No one had an STD. We are talking about something different. I told Evan that.–Coco”). Evan takes the band from their humble beginnings in a thinly veiled Elliott Lake ON–charismatic figures and musical prodigies colliding in high school hallways– to regional stardom, eventual breakup, and then reunion after their six-song EP becomes an underground sensation. It soon becomes clear (or at least Evan would like us to think so) that Heidegger Stairwell would not exist without Evan Strocker’s orchestrations, and we begin to understand that the band itself only exists to give Strocker’s universe coherence and his life some meaning.
I’ve never encountered a character like Evan Strocker in fiction before, a transgender man and an abashedly serious shit-disturber. Growing up in small-town Ontario as Evie, he fit in nowhere except with the band. He started off dating their drummer as a young teenager, and then became embroiled in torrid and/or complicated romances with most of the other band members as time went by. He’s not a protagonist who’s crying out to be liked, or perhaps it’s that he really is, but he has no idea how to go about making it happen.
Heidegger Stairwell was the 2011 winner of the 3 Day Novel contest, and while I thought that last year’s winner was a fun, cute read that was pretty good for a winner of the 3 Day Novel contest, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this year’s is just really good full stop. Burgess comes with university degrees with classical music and creative writing, so she knows what she’s doing here. And it doesn’t really matter how long it took her to do it; she’s created a novel that’s outside of ordinary.
October 14, 2012
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
Attica Locke’s 2010 novel Black Water Rising was the most unlikely finalist for The Orange Prize. Not because it wasn’t good, but because cinematic crime fiction is hardly Orange-y fare. It was one of my favourite books of the year, however, so steeped in place and time with a plot that wouldn’t let go. It concluded with a suggestion that the book wasn’t quite over yet, that Locke would be taking Houston lawyer Jay Porter into another story, and so it comes as a bit of a surprise to me that in her second novel, she’s shifted gears so much.
A surprise, but not a disappointment. Although Locke starts from scratch in The Cutting Season, the writing is just as tight, the story just as solid. The setting now is rural Louisiana, a sugar plantation turned tourist attraction called Belle Vie. Everything, from the big house to the slave cottages, is preserved exactly as was, which means something different to everyone who comes to see it, whether it be Scarlett O’Hara glamour or the travesty of slavery. For Caren Gray, Belle Vie is home, where her ancestors worked until they were freed, and where they continued to work even after. Her own mother had been the plantation’s cook, and it’s where Caren herself has come back to work as manager after a failed relationship and losing her New Orleans home to Hurricane Katrina. Belle Vie is a return to her roots, but also a fresh start as she aims to give her young daughter the best opportunities in life.
The idyll is broken when a dead body is discovered on the plantation grounds, the body of a migrant worker who’d toiled in nearby farming fields in a way not so different from Caren’s own ancestors a century before. The Cutting Season draws its own parallels between slavery and America’s illegal migrant agricultural workforce, and also becomes about real estate, slavery’s legacy, the modern South and its relationship to its complicated past. Though she never finished law school, Caren has background enough to know that a young Black man who works for her is being set up for a crime that he didn’t commit, and that a cover-up is going on. Her first priority, however, is to protect her daughter who appears to know more about the murder than what she lets on. To that end, her ex arrives to suss out the situation, and to provide his own expertise–he’s a lawyer proper now working in DC at Obama’s White House. He’s just weeks away from his wedding but the past between he and Caren, as the past always does in the American South, just refuses to rest.
There were a few clunky moments, the kind that cause you to shout, “Don’t go down in the basement!” at the horror movie heroine, but these were overridden by the book’s general goodness, its complexity, depth and the brilliance of Attica Locke’s prose. The Cutting Season was the first novel selected for a new imprint by crime writer Dennis Lehane, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a gripping, unforgettable book about the connections between history and now.
October 9, 2012
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
It’s difficult upon first encounter to discern exactly the depth of Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home, which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book is slim, just 168 pages, with passages that would almost wash over you were it not for the strange lines of prose that trip you up, and the peculiar repetition of words, lines and symbols whose effect is dizzy, disorienting. I wasn’t done even once I’d come to the end, and so I had to read it again, that time backwards, mostly. And it’s not even until my third reading that I feel I’ve got a handle on the thing, which means it’s fortunate that the book is slim. It’s the kind of book you really have to dive into over and over.
Upon first encounter, Swimming Home is a story we’ve all read before. Miscoupled marrieds arrive at a rented villa in France, and have to contend with a misfit in their midst. The misfit is Kitty Finch, a botonist, an apparent poet, an enchantress and, according to the neighbouring Englishwoman whose balcony overlooks the villa’s swimming pool, also deranged. For reasons unfathomable to everyone, Kitty is invited to stay by the woman of the house, Isabel, a war correspondent who has never been at home while she’s at home. She’s invited Kitty to stay–Kitty who is first discovered swimming naked in the pool– even though she’s clearly got eyes for Isabel’s husband, the celebrated poet Josef whose betrayals stack as tall as his literary successes.
It comes as not surprise to Joe to discover that Kitty has a poem she wants to show him. “Young women who followed him about and wanted him to read their poetry, and he was now convinced that she was one of them, always started by telling him they’d written a poem about something extraordinary.” She has all his books, and tells his wife that, “Joe’s poetry is more like a conversation with me than anything else… We are in nerve contact.”
She’s projecting, we think, this beautiful, naked, swimming girl who is unhinged, but in the depths of the book, nothing is quite what it seems. Less a projector than a receptor, Kitty Finch becomes the tabula rasa upon which the other characters transmit their own fantasies, dreams and nightmares. Less a misfit than a lightning rod, the spine of this disturbing, strange novel, and we find that her grasp of reality is truer than anyone supposes, that she knows each of the people around her better than anybody else does or even better than they themselves do. Tragedy becomes inevitable, but probably not the way you think it is.
At its murky depths (which become illuminated, as are those of the swimming pool which is the novel’s central image), the trick isn’t to underline just what is significant in the text, but instead to understand that everything is. Nothing here is incidental. Which doesn’t make for an immediately satisfying read, because you’ll never be finished with this one, but it’s a delight to encounter a novel that doesn’t hesitate to challenge either its reader or the limits of what a novel can do.
