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.
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.”
