May 30, 2011
Mini Review: The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
I’ve almost made it through the Bs, and it’s amazing how much I’ve loved these books. Puts me in the right too for having kept these books around even though I wasn’t bothering to read them– there was a reason after all. The Last September is the third book I’ve read by Elizabeth Bowen– the first was The House in Paris and the second was The Heat of the Day which I found awfully strange and difficult. Unsurprisingly, as it was only her second novel, The Last September is more accessible than the others, more straightforward, but this is also a very mature book for a second novel by a writer who was only thirty when she wrote it.
The Last September takes place in rural Ireland in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. The setting is wholly domestic, and minor dramas take place between various characters who are so compelling that all of this would be absolutely enough, but for the war taking place in the background. The war is still distant enough that characters don’t take it seriously, or feel that it has anything to do with them. English soldiers stationed nearby are seen as useful for even numbers dances, and the Irish girls fall in love with men, much to their families’ consternation. There are random-seeming bursts of violence, surprising knowledge that familiar neighbours are involved in the cause of independence, but largely, life goes on with its tennis games, afternoon teas, dances, and walks in the woods steeped in import.
It is not that Bowen plays with the juxtaposition, but rather that the background informs the foreground and vice versa. The connections are subtle (as is so much in this novel of manners) and it’s just that the characters don’t notice them, and the reader unversed in Irish history mightn’t either. Which will only make the story’s ending all the more shocking, and cast the entire novel in a whole new light.
May 22, 2011
Mini Reviews: English Journey and Nightwood
This reading alphabetically thing is working for me, forcing open books that have been languishing on the shelf for far too long. The only problem is that I got three new books on the weekend (plucked out of a box on the sidewalk), which does make me fear that the alphabet will never be got through. The other problem is whatever weirdness will ensue by me following Djuna Barnes with Erma Bombeck, two writers with nothing in common except the letter B. In fact, I think that Djuna Barnes might be the opposite of Erma Bombeck. We shall see…
Anyway, I read Beryl Bainbridge’s An English Journey: Or The Road to Milton Keynes last week, which I acquired for $1 at the UofT Bookstore sidewalk sale back when my life was as such that I’d push a stroller for miles in miles in aimless pursuit of a nap. I’d never read Beryl Bainbridge, but I like England, and I’d just read this review of JB Priestly’s English Journey, a book commemorated by Bainbridge 50 years later in the television program recreating Priestly’s travels out of which her book was born. And I loved it, first because Bainbridge is a fabulous prose writer, with a marvelous dry wit. And because the contrast between her “modern” England of 1983 and today has made this book an historical document onto itself. Because of lines like a girl “with thighs shaped like cellos”, “It seemed there was neither time nor room for pedestrians. We were literally a dying breed”. How she describes her family: “Class conscious, [everyone was] either dead common or a cut above themselves. And “I’ve never worn a hat since my mother bought me on at the Bon Marche and I carried home potatoes in in when my carrier bag bust.” That this is a writer who can write, “I was in Coronation Street more than twenty-five years ago. I played one of Ken Barlow’s girlfriend’s before he married Valerie.” Which I appreciate, and I don’t even know Valerie.
***
I don’t know that there is a book that has sat longer on my shelf than Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which a friend of mine gave to me in 
1997. According to a note on the inside cover, I’d read it in 2001, but I couldn’t remember having done so, and no wonder, really. With apologies to T.S. Eliot, I think I‘m just an ordinary reader. I’m not going to say that this is a bad book, but only that I was almost wholly unable to penetrate its goodness. Almost wholly, because there were certain parts of the book where I felt things had really got going, but then Dr. Matthew O’Connor would open his mouth and start talking again. (In his intro, T.S. thought the Doctor was the best part. This is one of the reasons I suspect T.S. and I are not meant to be kindred souls.)
Apparently, Barnes is quite Joycean, which might be part of the problem. Eliot wrote that the novel would “appeal primarily to readers of poetry”, and I get that, in particular because of how much Nightwood reminded me of “The Wasteland”. But even “The Wasteland” rendered as 170 pages of prose would be too much. In Nightwood, if I just let the words fall the way I do whilst reading a poem like “The Wasteland”, I would find myself having drifted entirely away. So then I read more carefully, get to the bottom of every line, which is also unsatisfying because the prose makes no sense at all except in a very general sense, sounds pretty, washes over, but then, oops! There I’ve gone away again. You see? For me, there was no joy in the exercise. And I don’t think it’s every a very good thing when one of the best bits of a novel is its brevity.
May 19, 2011
Mini Review: Pleased to Meet You by Caroline Adderson
Remember Caroline Adderson? She popped up on a list of underrated writers last year, and it occurred to me that I’d never read her. Which was timely, because she had a new novel coming out, The Sky is Falling, which I read and loved, and then Nathalie gave me Pleased to Meet You for Christmas, and I’d been saving it ever since then.
I enjoyed the book entire, though it wasn’t until about half way through that the stories became really vivid to me. Beginning with the story “Knives”, which was the first of my two favourites, about a group of house-sharing university students whose new housemate disrupts their lives, managing to see inside their souls, steal those souls, and multiple knife sets in the process–he gives them weapons to destroy themselves with. Such a smart, funny story whose characters are idiots, but the dynamic between them invests them with multiple dimensions. And then with “Mr. Justice” about a family of miserable people, about losing a father you’ve never had, and about the breaks some of us have to make in order to find happiness. There are no good guys in this story, but we see its characters from every angle, most essentially these glimpses when they’re going on like they don’t even know that we’re there.
May 15, 2011
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
It is impossible not to notice how much Madeleine Thien’s latest novel Dogs at the Perimeter resembles her first novel Certainty, which was one of my favourite novels of 2007. Both novels are tapestries, of fact and story, of art and science, of grudges and absences, of history, the present, and ghosts. If is not that Thien has written the same book twice, but rather that both novels have been fashioned via similar technique, of the same-shaped pieces, that Thien continues to have the same pre-occupations, and now she’s transferred them to another set of characters, to another time and a different place in the world.
Dogs at the Perimeter opens with the disappearance of Hiroji Matsui, a Montreal neurologist, his absence noted by his friend and colleague Janie for whom such vanishings are familiar. In fact, this familiarity has been one of her connections to Hiroji, who has lost people as well–his father at a very young age, soon after their family had immigrated to Canada, and his brother James who’d disappeared in Cambodia while working as a doctor for the Red Cross in the early 1970s.
As a child, Janie had lost her own family in her native Cambodia, her translator father taken from the family soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power. The rest of the family was moved away from Phnom Penh, forced to work in agricultural communes, and eventually Janie becomes separated from all of them. Between this time and her eventual arrival in Canada, she experiences considerable trauma which is forced back to the surface of her consciousness after Hiroji disappears. And then Janie becomes a missing person herself, living apart from her son and husband for reasons that don’t become clear to the reader until close to the end of the book.
Dogs at the Perimeter is a strange blend of dream and reality, one often blending into the other. Characters partake in others’ fantasies, encourage and support one another in delusions, which makes sense in a country being driven into the ground through a revolution sustained via these very same methods. Everything is fluid–to save themselves, characters adopt different names, different identities, slip in and out of the world, giving and taking what they can. So that there are so many identities each person holds within herself, plus the selves of all the people she’s lost, and everything gets lost in the chaos of it all, but also nothing ever really goes away.
Thien’s prose is equally invested with strength and lyricism, and Thien’s characters are sympathetically rendered. With this novel, however, she has taken on an ambitious project, and while she should be commended for containing so much story within a volume that is relatively thin, at times the story itself thins out as well. Though this is a story about trauma, much that is traumatic happens out of the scene, which undermines the brutal realities of the history the novel depicts. Part of this, of course, is due to Janie’s suppression of her experiences, which is where much of the novel comes from, and I’m not sure I would have wanted the novel to be so unflinching, but this is still a remarkable gap in a story that is all about remarkable gaps anyway.
It’s also very much a novel made of pieces (and fragments of pieces), which requires the reader to have faith in the eventual construction of a coherent whole, but this is faith that comes with a pay-off. Madeline Thien knows what she’s doing. And perhaps the Madeleine Thien Novel is a form onto itself, and anyway, I’m just happy for the chance to read another one.
May 11, 2011
Mini Review: All the Little Living Things by Wallace Stegner
I was so conscious of the fiction’s construction in Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, but only because I was so amazed that Stegner had constructed something so realized. How had he done it? And it’s not often a reader can ask these kinds of questions and not be pulled out of the story, but the spell was never broken here. Stegner pulls of other impossibilities: a story about the land and environment as a symbol, but the literal facts of the land (and those who inhabit it) are never minimized for this; a sad, sad story so invested with hope, and love; a masculine book full of senses and emotion; a book firmly set in its time but which does not feel remotely dated fifty years later.
All the Little Live Things is the story of the Allstons, a couple who, after the death of their son, escapes the world by building their own little Eden, a paradise in the California wilderness, though the world creeps in– poison oak, gophers, snakes and rotten neighbours. A young man begins camping out on their property, embodying the spirit of 1960s’ youth rebellion (and having a passing resemblance to the couple’s late son). The Allstons befriend a neighbouring woman who they discover is both pregnant and dying of cancer, the competing forces within her body a microcosm for forces at play in the community, and society at large.
It’s a heavy book, but a brilliant, absorbing read, with wonderful moments of humour and insight. Wonderfully plot-driven as well– Stegner certainly does a fantastic ominous. He’s was a masterful writer who doesn’t receive a lot of credit these days, and I’m so grateful to have discovered him.
May 5, 2011
The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
A few years ago, I read Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s exceptional novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and realized that I had to read Chinua Achebe. And so I read Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (the latter at the same time that I was reading its near-contemporary Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Allan Sillitoe, and strange connections between the two were illuminating) and enjoyed the books for both their literary value and the opportunity to read about Africa from the perspective of an African. Or rather, as in the case of Adichie too, more specifically, Nigeria from the perspective of a Nigerian.
My book club read Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah last month, and I thought it would be a good segue into his most recent book, the essay collection The Education of a British-Protected Child which had been sitting on my shelf for a while. And it was a good segue, or more accurately, the essay collection was a wonderful complement to Anthills…, which had been much more challenging than I’d been prepared for.
The Education of a British Child collects essays and addresses by Achebe from over the last 30 years, about his life, his work, and his politics. For Achebe, all three are intertwined, and have their roots in his origins. Nigeria was a British colony until 1960, and so until then, Achebe’s passport had distinguished him, like all Nigerians, as a “British Protected Person”. It was a strange kind of protection though, and Achebe’s feelings towards colonialism and post-colonialism are explored in most of these pieces. What I found most interesting about his perspective is that he writes from “the middle ground”, which he explains is:
.. neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of hte unpredicable, or irony.
So that while Achebe’s feelings about colonialism and its horrendous effects are never measured, neither is any situation so simplified that colonialism is the easy answer to any hard questions about Africa’s present and its past. Achebe writes about the strange position of being an African writing in English, but doesn’t necessarily see the English language as part of the colonial yoke, and notes that English was readily by adopted by Nigerians as a unifying language. Or that he can learn as much from his great-uncle, a traditional leader in his community, as he can from his father, who was a Christian schooled by missionaries, and that both father and uncle “formulated the dialectic which I inherited”. Which is, of course, the capacity to acknowledge the world as a complicated place.
Achebe’s essays are funny, engaging, and where points between them overlap it serves to underline the general effect of the book rather than detract from it. Though it’s much less funny that Achebe has been making the same points for 30 years, that so little has changed– about how Western readers understand African (and Achebe makes a spectacularly impassioned case against Joseph Conrad, over and over), how we have to read Africa through Africa’s eyes, about the legacies of colonialism (and here Anthills of Savannah became so much clear to me– that African didn’t squander a democratic inheritance from its colonizers, Achebe describing the British colonial administration instead as “a fairly naked dictatorship” so what it wrought it unsurprising). He writes about the connection between Africa’s population, and the African-American population, about the history of Africa and Africans, which is so much different from how the colonizers told it in order to justify their actions.
The final essay “Africa is People” begins with Achebe sitting in on a meeting of economists on the state of Africa, during which the prescription for Africa’s problems was generally removing food subsidies and devaluing currency. Suddenly, Achebe takes to the floor with the realization that he was sitting in on a fiction workshop. “Here you are,” he says to the economists, “spinning your fine theories to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories”. Except that Africa was not a laboratory, and Africa was people, and surely they wouldn’t permit these same perilous economic experiments upon the citizens of their own countries?
My copy of this book is now full of underlinings, but I’ll conclude here with what I think is one of the powerful in this marvelous collection, displaying Achebe’s grace, sensitivity, erudition and ease with language:
“Like the unfortunate young man in my novel, the poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne’er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are great than their badge of suffering, because they are human.”
May 1, 2011
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
I found myself paying attention to sentences in Elizabeth Hay’s latest novel Alone in the Classroom. To the ones that, for me, sparkled with resonance, finally articulating thoughts so often muddled in my brain. Complex ideas, like the assurance of “a glimpse of a past as promising as my own future seemed to be”, or “When words avoid you, or continually cross you, you have no escape from yourself.” A description of a schoolteacher, such a perfect image: “She scratched her head with the point of a pencil so frequently that you could see scribbles all over her scalp.”
I paid attention to the way her sentences were either staccato short, or long, long, long, the clauses only near-linked by a comma. And by how the narrative took on the same pattern, not progressive, but rather an assemblage of ideas, of stories. How these stories circle around their centre, though it’s not clear what the centre is for some time.
But the circling is not aimless. Just enough is held back that you’d never accuse this book of being plotless, and the plots involve a schoolgirl murdered near Ottawa during the 1940s, another one who had died in a fire in Saskatchewan years before, the creepy teacher linked to them both, the teacher-turned-reporter who brings these stories together, and tells them to her niece who is the novel’s narrator. Connections abound here: former residents in the prairie town re-encounter one another in the Ottawa Valley, on the same train years later, relationships are incestuous, patterns are repeated: “It’s possible that a hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life.”
I adored Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air a few years ago, and was so pleased to find that this follow-up met all of my expectations. It’s a similar book, circular in shape, concerned with the past and with memory, full of moments where characters find that “[w]hat I had known about collided with what I had never been told”, and these collisions can shocking and powerful. Like Late Nights…, I imagine that this won’t be a book to everyone’s taste. Critics will delight in pinpointing what is wrong with it, lacking the understanding and imagination to see what is so right.
It’s an unsettling book, whose story goes where you don’t think it will, and doesn’t answer all its questions. Whose clauses, sentences, ideas and stories are strung together, one after another like random beads on a string, and it’s hard to find the pattern, that hidden symmetry, when you regard each bead individually. The key is to take in the whole, of course, the string of beads itself, its cumulative effect. In nature, there is no such thing as a straight line, and neither is there in a good story.
April 27, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads: Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
We were concerned that Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah might have broken The Vicious Circle Book Club. We speculated at links between the book’s difficulty, our historically low turn-out, and that the majority of us present hadn’t managed to get to the end. “I made the mistake,” said one of us, “of judging the book by its page count.” 216 pages had seemed like a breeze to those of us who read as easily as we walk, until we tried to actually read them. Things Fall Apart this book was not: the text was dense, full of rambling parables, conversations in which speakers were not located, narration that shifted between characters’ points of view and omniscience, the plot (and there really was one) was obfuscated, and those of us who’d finished the book were still confused.
But of course Chinua Achebe is not in the habit of writing bad books, and we reasoned that there was method in his method. How do we approach it? Were we failing to give the novel credit for its roots in an oral tradition? Were we slighting the novel for failing to impose the narrative shape dictated by the Western canon? Also, we reasoned, this was probably just not a great book club book– not to be read once breezily and discussed over wine (and here we discover a book club’s limitation, we imagine). What were we ever do with it?
Things we discussed: that page 40 really was the gateway to the book’s readability; that Elewa’s miraculous sexual position was implausible (or perhaps Elewa was particularly spry); that we liked the characters a lot; we cleared up what had happened between Beatrice and Sam at the party; that we liked the scene at the public execution; and we really liked Beatrice’s character. We spoiled the ending too. And suspected that the book’s haphazard structure is a statement about the perilous nature of any political structure in a dictatorship. We talked how this book corresponds with current events in North Africa and the Middle East. We compared Sam to Hosni Mubarak. The ideas of dictatorships– one characters statement that if Kangan had at least been a real dictatorship, then things actually might have got done. And the inevitability of what befalls the main characters in the end– that they were tragic heroes. But then the obfuscated plot plays out strangely against that inevitability of fate. In another form, this book could have been a John LaCarre novel.
Then we talked about how the book outwardly suggested that race was no longer an issue in the nation of Kangan, but inwardly was saying otherwise– that the post-colonial government had merely appropriated colonial structures. That the powerful characters were all powerful due to their colonial ties and Western education. That the book is also about class, religion, and sex. About the way that women are left to pick up the pieces in the end, Ikem’s revelation about women being the last resort, but how the last resort is always too late. (And his ideas about an embracing of contradiction being the beginning of true strength). And inevitability again– women are left to pick up the pieces here, but there are signs of change. The new baby who is named not by the patriarch, and who is given a boy’s name even though she is a girl. And then how everybody celebrates by singing the maid’s religious song, which none of us got our heads around, but alas.
So we were relieved to discover that The Vicious Circle wasn’t broken after all, and that there is a lot a book club can do with a book like this. That all of us came away with a deeper understanding of the novel due to insights from other readers, with this puzzle of a book closer to being solved. And then we drank more wine, and ate more lasagna, and some of us today are sorry that we didn’t help ourselves to a second slice of chocolate cake.
April 10, 2011
On Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks
Once upon a time, so long ago that Harriet was merely a giant protrusion in an unflattering blouse, I went to see Jessica Westhead read at Pivot, fell in love with her short stories, and ever since have been looking forward to her new book And Also Sharks. And because Jessica is my friend, and because I read her stories with joy, with such utter abandon, I can’t possibly post a straightforward review, but I can say this: my friend Jessica Westhead’s new book And Also Sharks is wonderful.
The book met my litmus test for hilarity on page 3, which is that I started laughing hysterically and woke up my husband to read him the line: “I don’t know if I would’ve said before all this that she was nice enough to give you the shirt off her back, but when you stop to think about it, that’s a lot to ask from anyone.” This from the storyWe Are All About Wendy Now, about how a group of office colleagues rallies around one of their own when she becomes ill. Eunice, the narrator, tries to be magnanimous about her colleagues, who are not always that nice to her, and about their intentions towards the sick woman (Wendy), but the story belies her true feelings. Eunice also lives alone with her sick cat and subsists on a diet of ham sandwiches, but she has a solidity to her that the other characters lack, a sense of herself. What she doesn’t have much of is a sense of humour, which makes this absurd story as delivered through her voice so perfectly deadpan, hilarious.
The pathetic are rendered with sensitivity here, and embued a sense of worth and purpose not apparent to the outside world. There is virtue in understatement, in reserve, in being a misfit. And though Westhead’s touch is light, her stories aren’t– the world through these characters eyes is the world as it is, and these strange and wonderful characters take it it on everyday, brave, weird, and ever-unflinching.
April 7, 2011
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner
There are no innocent bystanders in Zsuszi Gartner’s mind-blowing short story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. A car shoots down the street in the title story with a “fifteen year old future ex-con at the wheel”, white trash is skewered along with the middle class in “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, you start to believe the Marmot that the parents of the kidnapped child had it coming in “Investment Results May Vary”, and even the tragedy at the end of “Better Living…” is a kind of quid quo pro. Gartner’s stories in third-person (and in first person plural) take on “types” of people, and no one escapes the bitter scrutiny. Her first-person narrators examine their surroundings on the same level as everybody else, down in the trenches, were the trenches the whole world.
(One moment of grace: the Japanese exchange student appearing riding out of a ravine on the back of an ancient tortoise. Twice. But then I have a thing for literary tortoises.)
The stories document moments on the edge of the apocalypse, a Vancouver I recognize from Douglas Coupland. Apocalypse is fitting for a city on the edge of the world, whose houses perch on the edges of mountains (which keep devouring the houses in one story). The collection begins with “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, about what happens to a suburban cul-de-sac when a piece of prototypical white trash moves in, puts his truck up on blocks, and starts to make the neighbourhood women carnivorous. Narrated as field notes after the fact, by the men whose wives are all now pregnant and straddling motorcycles, the story traces the cul-de-sac’s descent after the throwback appears in such an evolved population.
(“From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. ‘Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stephen quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, ‘maybe’s trying to reinvent the wheel.’)
In “Once, We Were Swedes”, Peter Pan gets literal as a burnt-out foreign correspondent hits early menopause when her husband regresses to adolescence, all against the backdrop of an urban wasteland. In “Floating Like a Goat”, a failed-artist-turned-actuary writes her daughter’s teacher after teacher chastises daughter for failing to have her people’s feet touch the ground in her drawings. “Investment Results May Vary” is narrated by the unhinged and desperate, one being that kidnapping marmot I mentioned earlier.
In “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion”, said daughters disappear leaving footprints in the snow (and here, like the last story, is another parable about wanting what you can’t have). I become semi-hysterical with laughter upon the thought of Susanna, the natural-born little sister (Oops!) who wants “to be a Chinese daughter more than anything else… And in the evenings, while her father diligently quizzed Huan Yue at at the kitchen table about Chinese history… Susanna was banished ot the den with Betty and Veronica Double Digest and a mug of Ovaltine”. And then that image at the end, “little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks”. Oh my.
“What Are We Doing Here” is a Toronto story, about an obnoxious woman drunk on her fabulousness who finds herself at a party that isn’t what she promised everyone it would be. “Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika” is the story I had the most trouble with, but upon rereading it, it had a new poignancy, knowing what I knew. (And yes, there is poignancy. It’s not just the girl on the tortoise. Gartner is scathing, but her world is also painful in its loveliness). “Mister Kakami” is a riff on Heart of Darkness. “We Come in Peace” is angels on a mission to earth to discover the experiences of the senses, inhabiting the bodies of five teenagers on another cul-de-sac.
And yes, it is fitting that suburban dead ends recur throughout the collection, and Sponge Bob underpants, and I even found myself positing connections between the Lucy in the first story and the Lucy in the final. These are not connected stories, but they fit together in a way that creates something altogether new as a whole.
I’ve got two conflicts of interest here. The first is that my husband is currently working on a project with Zsuzsi Gartner, so there was one reason I was hoping to like book. Second (and more pressing, to me) reason was that I read the final story “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” last year in The New Quarterly, and it blew me away. I’d never read anything like it before, and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since. And I’ve been wanting it to measure up to my amazing expectations.
And it has. And now let me tell you about “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”, which I reread tonight and finished stunned and stuttering expletives. (No, but first, let me tell you that whatever these stories are about doesn’t half tell you what their impact is. That Gartner’s stories start with premises, but they deliver. She holds nothing back, writes fearlessly, and goes where you can’t quite believe she will.)
“Better Living…” is the story of a recovering terrorist, member of the support group (and it’s absurd, I know, but it’s perfectly executed) who is fighting her urges as she tries to play by the rules, taking on city hall bureaucracy on install traffic calming devices on her street. Because she is thinking of her son, how speeding cars violate that sanctity of the life she’s made: “She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to do for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.”
We see the recovering terrorist in her three guises: suburban mother, host of a militant call-in gardening show (“Gardening is like warfare, and it’s time for you to call in the troops”), and 12-step groupie. And when worlds collide, as they do, there is the inevitable explosion, and it ripped my heart out, both times. And then I immediately wanted to read it again to find out exactly how Gartner had made it happen.
