July 3, 2012
Stony River by Tricia Dower
It was funny to be reading Tricia Dower’s Stony River this morning, sprawled on the grass under trees at the park while Harriet played in the wading pool, to be as blissed out as the girl on the cover appears to be. And as that cover might suggest, this is indeed an ideal book for a summer long weekend, to curl up on the grass with, or on the dock, or on a towel on the beach. The book opens up with an irresistible literary map, so you can choose to navigate Stony River or simply get lost in it.
I interviewed Tricia Dower in 2008, after the publication of her first book, the short story collection Silent Girl. Dower’s new book expands upon Silent Girl‘s first story, and is also connected to the book in other more surprising ways. Each of Silent Girl‘s stories took its cue from a Shakespearean play, but with a contemporary, feminist spin, and Dower took great leaps and risks in writing in a wide range of voices. Similarly, Stony River has a theatrical/cinematic feel, a sense of epic, of grandness, and Dower is ambitious in her approach, tackling crime fiction, riffing on True Romance, writing men and women, children and adults, and considering topics including domestic violence, depression, incest, religion, the supernatural, and murder.
Though Stony River seems at first an unlikely backdrop for such a story. A sleepy New Jersey town in the 1950s, most of what happens tends to go on behind closed doors. But one door is busted open on a hot summer day when 12 year-old Linda Wise and her tough-girl pal Tereza witness a young girl and baby boy being removed by the police from the home of “Crazy Haggerty,” a local character who’d been assumed all these years to live alone. When the crazy man dies, however, the existence of the girl–his daughter– and her son come to light, kept prisoner in his house for years, the younger child likely to be a product of incest. Linda and Tereza learn details of the case from the newspaper, and it sets off a chain of events that spins the girls’ lives far apart but also keeps them irrevocably bound.
The unknown girl is Miranda, who is cast into a world she’s only heard about from the books her father urged her to read from his expansive library. She finds refuge with the wife of a local police officer, who stays close to Miranda even after she’s sent to a Catholic orphanage to live with her son. Miranda is urged by everyone to confirm the identity of her son’s father, but she refuses to, insisting that his conception had been by divine intervention. Turns out her father had been a worshipper of various pagan gods and goddesses from his Irish homeland, and Miranda carries with her a special kind of vision. Her religious passion seems easily transferable to her Catholic surroundings, and soon the nuns admit that she possesses a strange connection to God. They’re urging her to become a nun herself, to give up her son and begin life anew, and Miranda refuses to.
Miranda’s sections of the novel are narrated in present tense, providing a sense of immediacy that makes sense as we see her discovering the world around her, whereas Tereza and Linda’s sections are in past tense, the ’50s in sepia tones, rife with cultural references. Tereza is already a girl in trouble and she sees Crazy Haggerty’s now-abandoned house as a perfect place to hide from her abusive stepfather. Whilst hiding, she discover’s Haggerty’s enormous stash of cash, and uses it to skip town for good, running away with a boy she’s met at the White Castle who has a shady past, is a devotee of Charles Atlas, and whose well-intentioned grandmother is happy to put her up for a while.
Meanwhile, Linda stays put in Stony River, wondering what became of her spirited friend, attempting to please her unhappy mother and trying desperately to conform to the 1950s’ expectation of womanhood that Tereza never bothered to understand, Tereza who’d preferred to imagine herself as a Hollywood starlet. One evening Linda gets into a car with an unknown man and is assaulted in the woods, and is left alone to deal with the fear and shame of her experience because she has no one to tell, and because anyone she did tell would protest that she’d been “asking for it.”
But when young girls begin to go missing around Stony River, Linda can longer permit herself to stay silent, putting her reputation on the line to bring her assaulter to trial, unknowingly also bringing herself back into Tereza’s orbit, and Miranda’s too. There turn out to be parallels between Linda’s ordinary life and Tereza and Miranda’s more extraordinary ones, and as ever, it turns out that nothing is quite what it seems.
Dower’s writing is excellent, her period details wonderfully wrought, a sense of place and time absolutely evoked. The novel is bursting with its seams with story and plot, though sometimes the plot fits too tidily into place and the seams themselves are too visible. With so many characters too, it’s not surprising that some are flat, that they all aren’t drawn with the depth of Miranda. And it’s true that after the novel’s mid-point, its pacing begins to fall off a bit, that you’ll wonder where the story is going. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself sprawled on the grass like I was, or on the dock, or on the beach as the novel begins to reach its conclusion. And then you won’t be able to put it down, caught up in the drama, the intrigue, and the feeling– the joy of a perfect summer read.
June 27, 2012
The Forrests by Emily Perkins
New Zealand author Emily Perkins’ last book was 2008’s Novel About My Wife, a curious and absorbing novel about a woman with a mysterious past who remains unknowable to her husband, and how motherhood seems to bring about her undoing. On the surface, it was an easy book, accessible, full of familiar references; and yet something so strange was going on under the surface, such darkness, an ambiguity that was frustrating and also thoroughly engaging. It was a novel that didn’t wear its literary-ness on its sleeve, but something underlying seemed to suggest that Emily Perkins was no ordinary author.
And with her latest, The Forrests, that fact is established. The novels starts off slow and it’s hard to find one’s footing in the narrative, mostly because there isn’t a narrative yet. We are treated to scenes from a childhood, from an eccentric family. The Forrests are four children, including two sisters Dorothy and Evelyn, so close that they’re practically twins, and their parents whose lapses in responsibility are painfully obvious to their children. The parents break up, then reconcile, and their children mostly make their own way, rudderless. Dorothy marries young, and Evelyn drifts, and both are irrevocably bound to Daniel, a family friend who is part-lover, part-brother to both of them.
The novel finds its plot in adulthood, in much the way life does. Perkins is particularly adept at showing the peculiar connections of marriage and motherhood, and how these impact the sisters who are living parallel lives. Gradually, the novel’s focus becomes Dorothy only, illustrating the unsustainability of family as an institution, or at least of this family. I found it curious to note that The Forrests contains secondary characters called Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, all of them peripheral and never interacting with one another– the modern family and its connections are fragmented, illusory.
We follow Dorothy through the storm of motherhood, into middle age, to old age, to the point at which “time becomes measurable.” Perkins has not fixed her novel in time with many specific cultural references, and so the story has a contemporary feel from the start, a sense of immediacy. And as Dorothy’s awareness begins to diminish as she ages, we see that the seemingly random scenes at the novel’s beginning were actually the pivotal moments of her life in the grander context, the flashes of light that will remain when everything else is confused and dark.
The Forrests is like The Stone Diaries, but edgier, and structured as the interior of its subject’s mind rather than her scrapbooks, and it’s enormously successful. Rachel Cusk, Virginia Woolf. Vividly human characters, gorgeous writing. It’s full of surprises, twists, turns and moments of illumination, quiet but profound in its brilliance, and devastating to have to finally put down.
June 17, 2012
Sue Sorensen's A Large Harmonium
Please, let me tell you about Sue Sorensen’s A Large Harmonium, though it’s distinctly possible that I already did because I spent last week telling everyone about it, urging them to read it, this smart, hilarious book that delighted me so. “I say I will buy the Jiffy Markers myself,” is the novel’s first line, and I was hooked for Woolfish reasons and because I had no idea where a line like that might take me.
The line is delivered by Janet Erlicksen, a university English professor who’s on the cusp of a mild mid-life crisis. The novel begins in April with the school term ending and she must contemplate a summer before her without the scaffold of routine– what then to hang her days on? She considers writing an academic book about bad mothers in children’s literature, or penning a murder mystery in which her mother-in-law is the victim, or starting an online academic journal, but none of these ideas gets far off the ground. She’s also distracted by a sense that her husband Hector is in love with another woman, and she’s ever distracted by their three-year old son Little Max for whom distraction is a main occupation.
In 12 chapters, the novel takes us through Janey’s year month-by-month, incidents in her life, and those of her family and her friends, and it’s Janey’s voice and her humour that drives us, as well as turns in the plot that are never quite what you’d expect. And I love this novel quite simply because it’s doing all my favourite things: it’s funny, it shows a mother for whom motherhood is just part of a complex identity, it shows a rock-solid marriage (in spite of Janey’s suspicions), abortion shows up in the life of secondary characters but as a sad and ordinary thing rather than a plot-point, unabashed feminism shows up too, children’s literature is taken seriously, and it’s an academic satire that really is. (Janey presents a paper on the absence of talking animals in Canadian children’s literature. “It is far more fun to present a research project about something that is not there than something there is. I can get people riled up, outraged. Where are the talking animals? Who has repressed the talking animals? I could make my scholarly reputation.”)
Winnipeg resident Sorensen has much in common with Carol Shields, who was another, except that her tone is darker and more overtly hilarious. The novel’s pace is brisk and easy, which is not to say “light”, because there is depth here, but the story goes down just as well. Just as Shields did, Sorensen’s got a grasp on joy and how it factors amidst life’s absurdities. This is a wonderful novel with broad appeal. It’s absolutely the funniest and one of the best books I’ve read in ages.
June 14, 2012
I'm thinking about chick-lit circa 1995
I do wonder what it would have been like to publish a novel in 1995 about a flighty woman who works in an office and the tragic details of her romantic life. Especially if this was your second novel, the first having won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Think about it: Candace Bushnell was still a newspaper columnist, and Bridget Jones was just being born as the subject of an anonymous newspaper column. “Chick-lit” was nothing but the title of an edgy anthology of “postfeminist” fiction published by a university press.
Though there is not much about Rachel Cusk’s The Temporary that is chick-lit as we’ve come to know it. The writing, for starters. Chapter 3 begins: “Francine Snaith was lodged in the gloomy oesophagus of the Metropolitan Line, where her enjoyment of the single customary pleasure of underground travel– that of observing her reflection in the dark windows opposite her seat– had been obstructed since Baker Street by the disorderly herd of standing passengers which had been driven by overcrowding down the narrow corridor in front of her.” And that’s just a single sentence.
The book’s beginning is wonderful too, a strange and wonderful scene with Francine Snaith answering a ringing public telephone: “…being possessed of the conviction that destiny had it continually in mind at any moment to summon her, felt it was intended that she should answer.” Eventually, she decides that her destiny is Ralph, a man she meets at an art gallery launch who she imagines to be worldly and successful, though not as much as his friend whom she really fancies. It’s Ralph who calls her, however, this time on her own phone (and how much better is plot set in a pre-mobile phone world, don’t you think?), and from then on, the two are entangled.
Francine is a temp, and Ralph regards her as much of the same, a temporary salve for his loneliness, but once she sinks her paws into him, she’s reluctant to let go. Never mind that Francine doesn’t love him exactly as much as he disregards her, but he fills a vacuum in her life and she makes him do. Cusk illustrates the curious fact of how entire relationships can be enacted out of boredom. The book is told from both their points of view, in alternating chapters. Ralph himself is a bit pathetic but created with some sympathy, while Francine is stupid and a bit evil, and here is another chick-lit diversion, because how can a female protagonist not be lovable? But she isn’t.
There’s a lot of great work detail throughout the novel about the realities of life as a temp, about the uncertain foundation of one’s early twenties during which roommates and apartments are as fluid as identities. And like most of what Cusk writes, the book is also about class, about the enormous gap that exists between Francine and Ralph (or at least seems to. When Ralph’s humble origins are revealed to Francine, we see how baseless are the clues to these things, and yet what important signifiers they continue to be). It’s also a book about the city, about sweeping down streets with the tide, about being stuck in traffic, about being seen and being invisible, about being lost.
The Temporary these days would come complete with a pastel cover. But then so does Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, all of these brilliant writers’ works reduced to their simplest most common denominator.
June 11, 2012
Magnified World by Grace O'Connell
“And as navigate the city at the centre of the map, we realize that we, too, are part of the story, crafting new narratives of Toronto even as the city swirls and eddies around us like a buried river brought back to life.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
Recent Toronto books, including Sean Dixon’s The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, Alissa York’s Fauna, Claudia Dey’s Stunt and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down are remarkable for not just their Toronto settings, but for how their authors engage with the city as myth-makers, building on old myths (and yes, ravines are useful for this) and also for creating new ones. For imagining a Toronto beyond Toronto, an other city that looks like ours but shimmers in a different way, in a way that makes us look at the city twice.
Toronto is engaged with in just this way in Magnified World, the first novel by Grace O’Connell who is Random House Canada’s 2012 New Face of Fiction. It is a story told by Maggie Pierce who enters page one wearing unfamiliar shoes and stumbling home without a clue as to where she’s spent the night. Her home is an apartment above Pierce Gifts & Oddities, her mother’s shop on Queen Street West (with tin ceilings!) across from Trinity Bellwoods Park in the late 1990s, a period in which the neighbourhood was on the cusp of significant change. Maggie’s most significant change, however, has been her mother’s death just weeks before by drowning in the Don River, her pockets full of zircon stones from the shop.
“For the first few weeks, I forgot sometimes that she was dead; not completely, of course, but in little, individual moments, when I would see the yellow zucchini she liked in a store,or smell the rooibus tea she drank. If they were still selling these things, if they existed, then she must be alive, to eat, to drink.”
We begin to see that Maggie was at a remove from the world even before her mother’s death, having spent most of her time working in the shop and caring for mother through her mental health troubles. Her parents’ marital problems have alienated her professor father from the household in all but body, and Maggie’s only other connections are her best friend Wendy and boyfriend Andrew, both of whom are making their own ways and growing away from her. And so when she starts suffering from blackouts and delusions, it’s almost part of a pattern, Maggie moving farther and father away from the world. She doesn’t react in the way we think she might, but it’s a testament to how alone she is, how grief-stricken she is by the loss of her mother. She seeks help from a psychiatrist at the nearby CAMH hospital, but then is taken in by his enigmatic colleague who promises answers and seems to have ulterior motives. All the while, she’s being visited by a familiar stranger named Gil who calls her “darling”, wants to write the story of her life, and may or may not actually exist.
The novel lags in its second third as Maggie’s blackouts and visions begin to seem a convenient way for the novel to evade any real explanation of what’s going on. The farther she gets from reality, the more implausible becomes the behaviour of the people around her, which sort of makes sense, but not entirely, and doesn’t make for spectacular reading either. But then the novel picks up speed again in its final third as Toronto becomes a character, a body: “Below was the Don, flowing like a great vein. If the city were a body, this was where you would draw blood.” The city is most alive in a wonderful scene in which Maggie walks the streets of a downtown which is about to experience its own blackout: “The streetcar went by and then another, and another, like synapses, like the city thinking of itself.”
Sometimes the language got away from itself. I struggled with awkward similes like, “I let myself spread out, mentally checking the city like a tongue running over the empty socket of a tooth,” but these instances were conspicuous in their rarity, against the general strength of O’Connell’s prose. And my reservations about aspects of the story were gone by the novel’s end, as I realized how much Magnified World was a novel about the city, about being alone in the midst of millions of people, but the hope implicit in that it’s not really being alone after all.
June 7, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy Part 2: Myrl Coulter and Helen Potrebenko
Last week, I read Myrl Coulter’s The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, a memoir of Coulter’s experiences growing up in Winnipeg and being forced to give up her son for adoption in 1968 when she finds herself pregnant. Like Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which I enjoyed so much, Coulter shows “what happens when individual lives collide with their particular historical moments.” Unmarried and a teenager, Coulter was sent away from her family and community to live at one of those ubiquitous maternity homes while she waited to have her baby. As an unwed mother, she was treated by disdain at the hospital where her son was born, and expected to move on with her life after the fact as if the story had never happened.
Unsurprisingly, this moving on proves difficult, and the memoir goes on to show how Coulter carried her experience inside her for so many years in silence. Looking back, she questions how her parents could have let it happen, could have sent her away, could have let her give away her son. Eventually, years and lifetimes later, she and her son are reunited, and she’s forthright about the complicated nature of their relationship, and also about her anger at Canada’s closed adoption system that manipulated and wronged so many young woman just like her.
She writes, “…the feminist version of me… was born on a dark night in 1968 when I gave birth to my first child alone in a big crowded hospital. I knew at last that my feminism stems from the invisibility society demanded for unwed mothers back then; I knew that my sense of agency was born in a social order that dictated no one should stop to offer comfort to a frightened eighteen-year-old girl in labour simply because she wasn’t married… I knew.. that being a feminist and being a mother are inevitably connected, like fetus and placenta.” With excellent writing and perfect detail, Coulter paints a rather stark picture of life “back then”, though all of us who have ever been pregnant by mistake are well-aware that the experience carries a devastating stigma to this day.
There was no reason why I picked up Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to read next, except that both books had come in at the library at the very same time. But, as in my first Never Mind the Patriarchy experience in March, random books brought forth remarkable connections. Once again, I was reading a book that Anakana Schofield had recommended, this time TAXI!, which Schofield calls her “favourite Vancouver novel” (and you can believe it). It’s the story of Shannon, a female taxi driver in Vancouver during 1971 and 1972. The episodic novel follows Shannon as she philosophizes and longs for revolution, driving the streets of Vancouver with various down-and-outs and scumbags throwing up in her backseat.
Says Shannon, “There are so so few choices for women. They’ve got you in a cage. If you’re bad they tighten the bars around you so you’ve got no space at all. They they give you back the original cage and call that freedom.”
It’s a funny book, but timeless in a way that is tragic. Protesters erect tent cities in local parks, unions are striking, there is social unrest, not enough jobs for young people, and there’s a war going on. “The first time Shannon drove cab drunk out of her mind was the Christmas after the War Measures Act.” TAXI! could have been written yesterday, which is a mark for Helen Potrebenko, but bad luck for the rest of us. Shannon herself would probably not be so surprised, having never suffered any illusions about progress.
June 4, 2012
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-Enchantment” was an essay by Patricia Robertson in Canadian Notes & Queries 84, in which Robertson decried contemporary writers in general for their failure to imagine the world beyond the individual, and the failure of contemporary writing to be anything but tedious. Hers was an inspiring argument, even stirring, and yet… I’m not yet tired of the kind of novel she’s maligning. Domesticated fiction remains what I most want to read, and I’m not nearly finished with it yet. And I don’t even have a good argument as to why this should be the case, except that I think that with the reader taking an imaginative leap, domesticated fiction can do as well as the fantastic, or any other kind of literature, to “incorporate some of the wildness, the strangeness, the mystery of the world around us.” To show that we are indeed “participants in a vast web of being.”
And all this is preamble to the fact that tonight is the night Jeffrey Eugenides has been freaking out about for ages, the night I give my two cents on his latest novel The Marriage Plot (which my husband gave me for Christmas, I’ll have you know. How domesticated is that?). My Jeffrey Eugenides backgrounder is this: I think I tried to read The Virgin Suicides once, but couldn’t; I thought the movie was really weird; I liked Middlesex a lot, except for the part where Cal joined the circus, because in those parts, the novel wasn’t domesticated anymore. All of which suggests that I come to The Marriage Plot with a lot less Eugenides-related baggage than the average avid reader. But I come to it hesitantly all the same because I’d heard reports of reader dissatisfaction, because I’m allergic to hype, and because the novel sports all these allusions to literary theory and David Foster Wallace, and I know as much about one as the other, which is nothing.
But then I started to read it, the first line: “To start with, look at all the books.” And then Eugenides describes the contents of Madeleine Hanna’s bookshelves, and then it was clear that he’d written this novel just for me. It begins the morning of Madeleine’s graduation as she’s still dealing with fallout from the breakup of her relationship with Leonard and runs into an old friend Mitchell who’s sweet on her and who only makes her angry. The plot swoops back and forth from past to present, and it’s true that here is one of these books where everything that happens has happened already, but how I admire Eugenides’ command of chronology and all the details. Though the details themselves are not the point, instead the plot is. On one level (and there are several) the novel is an exercise as to whether 19th century romance/marriage plots can work in a 20th century story, and I come away from the book assured that they always have.
The Marriage Plot is social satire, academic satire, a bookish orgy, and the most beautiful celebration of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline that I’ve ever come across in a 400 page novel written by a man. Yes, there were times when I skimmed, allusions that went over my head, and did read the book a little wide-eyed, a bit too eager to attribute significance at every turn. That the 1982 “Cosby-sweater” reference could not be an anachronism surely, and that Eugenides, with some kind of ironic gesture, had planted it there for a reason. And even if he hadn’t, it was planted all the same, and the text was a different place for it.
Eugenides shows that there is no torture quite like life in one’s early-twenties, regardless of the century. Here is the story of the most world’s most scalene love triangle, and the angles mean more than the love does. Manic-depressive Leonard with the tortured background who captivates the romantic Madeleine in a semiotics class, and Mitchell who is convinced that Madeleine is meant to be his wife but she’s having none of it (except for drunken gropings here and there). The first two become inextricably tangled and love doesn’t have so much to do with it. Meanwhile Mitchell is off on his grand tour, culminating in an experience volunteering at Mother Theresa’s mission in Calcutta, and he’s thinking maybe he’s a religious mystic but suspecting that this isn’t the case. He’s become obsessed with The Jesus Prayer and insists that Franny Glass has got nothing to do with it. All the time that Leonard and Madeleine are cracking up and up, and then she and Mitchell meet up again at a party a year after their graduation…
And that ending, so perfect. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but Reader, she says, “Yes.”
May 31, 2012
Full Frontal T.O. by Patrick Cummins and Shawn Micallef
Now here is a book that our entire family can love, though not immediately, because after I picked it up at the bookstore last Thursday evening, I read it all through dinner and didn’t talk to anybody. Which was kind of annoying, but when I finally shared the book, they understood. Even the three year old, who found the pictures fascinating and absorbing, context not really being the point of their appeal. Full Frontal T.O.: Exploring Toronto’s Architectural Vernacular collects a series of photos by Patrick Cummins who’s been documenting Toronto’s street-scapes since the 1980s. Context is provided by way of Shawn Micallef’s pithy text. The photos show how the same city blocks have changed over time in some ways, and remained the same in others– the gist of the approach is shown on the Full Frontal blog.
The black and white images of single building or blocks changing over time is an urban time machine, showing patterns of decay and gentrification, or stagnation, in other cases. Interspersed throughout the book are full colour spreads of buildings grouped by theme– dead stores, semi-detached houses, gothic cottages, DIY cottages (which is my favourite– these buildings fascinate me), variety stores. And the effect of all of this is make me realize how little I actually see of the city around me. We walk its streets as if we’re sleeping, and then turn to a book like this to find so much that is familiar, so much that is in my neighbourhood, so many buildings that I’ve wondered about (like this one!) but it never occurred me to take curiosity further than that.
Every time I’ve opened this book, I’ve discovered something new– my ex-boyfriend’s old house, places right around the corner, blocks of streets I used to walk down daily, and lines like, “It’s good to stick your head out of a window sometimes because, apart from looking out of, that’s what they’re made for,” a critique of Toronto’s ubiquitous three-panelled windows. And in this way Full Frontal T.O. is a simulacrum of the city itself– you never encounter it the same way twice.
May 28, 2012
All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen
Summer is here, at least in spirit, and the cover of Alice Petersen’s short story collection All the Voices Cry meant that I had to read the book at once. (Book has been reviewed well already, and been long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.) Though these are not stories of lazy, hazy days; the fish ain’t jumping and the cotton’s not high. Petersen’s are most often stories of summer places out of season, or of people out of place in those summer places. And the places themselves– rural Quebec, Petersen’s native New Zealand, even Tahiti– frame characters’ expectations in terms of idyll, pastoral, and usually (as is the way) experience comes up short.
Alice Petersen knows her way around a good sentence: “We knew he drank at night on the boathouse steps; the more beer he drank, the more bottles there were to get a refund on.” This from the first story, whose title “After Summer” is a good way to frame the whole book. A young man is looking back at summer memories and the darker shadows behind them, contemplating his single father’s loneliness, and how the notion of family got away from them. In “Among the Trees”, a widow contemplates the life she’d built around her artist husband which manifested in the artists colony they built together on her family’s property. This colony is a centre the collection revolves around, many of its stories loosely linked to its characters and geography. We see the widow and her husband from the outside in “All the Voices Cry”, in which Freya, another widow, a neighbour and a stranger, walks through the surrounding woods in winter and contemplates her “sustaining illusions”.
We meet Freya again in “To Catch a Fish”, avoiding entering her cabin where her new lover is cooking dinner. And fish aren’t jumping indeed, to great consequence, we see, when Freya makes the choice to choose herself and her solitude, the ground she stands on. In “The Frog”, with subtle gestures, a single mother considers what ties her to her life and beyond it, and how people without children move through life like amphibians (which is something to wrap one’s head around, just what exactly Petersen means by this, and the process of engagement steeps the reader further in the story).
The last six stories in the collection are different from the others, removed from the Quebec landscape we’ve been planted in thus far. Also, these stories are more storied, artificial, set-up than the others (which is not a criticism). Though I could get this impression from these stories’ settings’ unreality in my own mind. They take place in New Zealand gardens, on the International Date Line, on Tahitian cliff sides, foggy beaches. A few of them also have a mystical nature, and maybe that’s where the airiness comes from. A man enacts futile attempts to defy a psychic’s predictions, a woman dares to abandon her vexing husband in the middle of a tropical nowhere, a couple attempts to ignore potentially devastating news by going through the motions of sight-seeing, characters’ own lonely histories bubble up inside them.
None of Petersen’s characters is quite where they’re meant to be, where they want to be, and they see themselves in new lights against the unfamiliar contexts. The book is slim, the stories are subtle and quiet, and though their impact is not always immediate, All the Voices Cry is a collection you might want to meditate on, its pages getting dog-earned and stained with coffee rings as the summer wears on.
UPDATE: Speaking of quiet depth…
May 22, 2012
Night Street by Kristel Thornell
I often wonder about the nature of the fictionalized biography, the kind of which Kristel Thornell has created in her first novel Night Street, which is based on the life of Australian artist Clarice Beckett. Though I realize any biography contains its own fair share of fiction, the blatant fictionalization makes me uneasy, it makes me seize on something that isn’t so and could lead to me going around in public spouting lies quite unaware. And then I wonder about my own wonderings, if they have any basis in a novel whose fiction is inspired by a real-life person I’ve never heard of. Do I put my wonderings away then? Does it even matter what is fact and fiction in a book that wholly creates everything I’ve ever known about this artist called Clarice Beckett? It’s kind of interesting to consider. Even more so when I think that this book was marketed to me as being an Australian literary award-winner, the Vogel Literary Award no less. Which I’ve never heard of either, but I take it as authority, and isn’t it funny how we do that? And I like it actually that I come to this book with no preconceptions at all.
I wanted to read Night Street because I’ve been dying for a novel, and also because we don’t get to read enough Australian writers in Canada (and when we do, I generally appreciate them. At the moment I’m thinking of Helen Garner). Thornell has apparently chosen to fictionalize most elements of Clarice Beckett’s life because Beckett was elusive by nature anyway, not terribly well known, and because Thornell wanted to blur the edges of her work as Beckett did with her own paintings, one of which is displayed on the novel’s front cover.
And when I read this book, I kept thinking of Katherine Mansfield, mostly because I read so little literature from Australia that New Zealand’s Mansfield is all I can come up with, also because Thornell’s treatment of Beckett’s life reminded me of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Thieves, and because both Mansfield and Beckett came to tuberculotic fates, though that and approximate geography are about all they have in common.
Thornell’s Clarice Beckett (and I still have to make the distinction! I just can’t let it go) was not a woman of tumultuous passions, being wholly devoted to her art from a very young age. Painting was it from the very beginning, and so the decision to live at a remove from the rest of the world was never a difficult one to make. Her family’s reservations about her choices don’t bother her, she racks up rejected proposals without compunction, she builds a portable painter’s studio and wheels it out onto the beach and paints and paints as the rain falls down (which, as you might see, leads to the fate which befalls her). She has a couple of love affairs, but even these fail to permeate her focus, and her feelings towards her lovers are more aesthetic than erotic.
So it’s not so much Beckett’s edges that are blurry in this novel, but Beckett herself, whose remove from the world is also a remove from the book. She’s an unknown quantity. There is no friction driving the novel forward, which at times is frustrating, and yet the singularity of Beckett’s vision is the novel’s chief appeal. Everything she sees is in terms of tone, of light and colour. “Tone came in first. Apt and beautiful, the word tone for describing the stages of intensity of light and shade, gradations in luminosity being indeed every bit as subtle and sliding at the moods of a voice. ” Every person she speaks to, she’s peering past them, over their shoulders because landscape is the point always. “A distance off, the child, until then seated, unfolded, elongated and became kinetic: a small figure running away from the beach. Clarice noticed in herself a growing interest in the human form; perhaps physical love did that to you.”
A problem I often have with books about art is that I find myself unable to see what the text is describing, but this was not the case with Night Street. Thornell brings her images to life on the page, and uses language in way that is just as intriguing (“Silence flattered him like a high-class suit, a generously positioned lamp”). And it was refreshing to read a book that doesn’t rely on the same plot-points to turn on– pull between self and society, love or art, home or the world. For Thornell’s Clarice Beckett, it was only about art always, and Thornell has created a convincing portrayal of a woman so absorbed.
