July 18, 2011

On Victoria Glendinning's biography, and my own journeys with Elizabeth Bowen

I’d never heard of Elizabeth Bowen until I read Susan Hill’s Howard’s End is on the Landing when we were in England in 2009. Hill refers to Bowen as “one of the writers who formed me” and writes about how her novels are difficult but not obscure, and so when I had a ten pound note to get rid of at WH Smith at the airport, I sprung for a gorgeous Vintage Classics edition of Bowen’s The House in Paris. I read about 25 pages on the plane journey home (a fantastic achievement, actually–I had a five month old at the time) and it dawned on me that I hadn’t read a decent novel in ages, that I’d forgotten what literary was, what it meant to be challenged (in ways other than those presented by five month olds).

Back in Canada a few weeks later, I picked up Victoria Glendinning’s biography Elizabeth Bowen: A Writer’s Life. There it languished on my shelf until last summer when it was joined by two of her novels which I knicked (for a small fee) from a dying woman’s house. I finally read one of them, The Heat of the Day, during the last few days of 2010 which I was ill and didn’t want to be challenged. By the end of the novel, I was convinced of its worth, but the convincing had been hard-won and the book was so weird in inexplicable ways. And then I mightn’t have ever read Elizabeth Bowen again, except that I’m reading my shelves in alpha order now, and Bowen starts with B. And then The Last September was so extraordinarily good, that I couldn’t wait to get to the Glendinning G, and my anticipation was not for nothing.

I don’t read enough literary biographies, and should really change that, because what a remarkable way to discover a writer who’s still new to me. To get a sense of Bowen’s historical context (Glendinning writes, “She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link which connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark”), and to get also a context for her weirdness, the weird convolutedness of her sentences and the daringness of her subject matter (she was just totally weird. But also amazing). And to understand her wider context too, which I’d begun to learn through reading The Last September–the Anglo-Irish tradition, and what that meant, and how it changed with the 1920s.

Anyway, I’ve come away entrenched as a Bowen devotee (what Susan Hill started two years ago!). I am looking forward to rereading The House in Paris, and Bowen’s The Little Girls, and some of her short stories. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Bowen at the college booksales in the Fall. And for more Victoria Glendinning biographies too, and also Hermione Lee, who I’ve never read before.

Two important things about the Elizabeth Bowen bio: this was first published in the late ’70s, reprinted in the ’90s with an author bio explaining that Glendinning is married to “the Irish writer Terence de Vere White”. Which was kind of weird because White is referenced several times in the book, never in familiar terms (obviously) but so often that it was sort of conspicuous. I consulted Wikipedia later to learn that Glendinning wasn’t married to White at the time she wrote Elizabeth Bowen’s bio, and all’s I can say was that anyone could have seen that they were going to end up together.

Also, that the Igor Gouzenko case features in Elizabeth Bowen’s lifes story! (Bowen was close to the novelist John Buchan, who became the Governor General of Canada, and through him she met her lifelong intimate friend Charles Ritchie, who was a Canadian diplomat.)It would have better had Glendinning and her editors known how to spell Ottawa, but this last is only the one small point that sullied my reading of this wonderful book.

July 14, 2011

Monoceros by Suzette Mayr

Suzette Mayr’s Monoceros takes place in an alternate reality, albeit a reality that very much resembles our own–high school is a nightmare, students are bullied to death for being gay, men and women can lose their jobs for being gay, teen girls are vicious, adults are just as lost as the kids are, and the only difference between the two is that the former have given up searching for meaning. Where the world of Monoceros becomes a fantasy, however, is that the bullied student’s death actually happens for a reason, that his death becomes a catalyst for those he leaves behind to change to their lives. Also, there are unicorns,  fairy godmother drag queen called Crepe Suzette, and a belching prophet called Jesus.

Crepe Suzette wears the costume of Colonel Shakira, heroine of a campy sci-fi show that is important to nearly every character in Mayr’s novel– it’s the favourite show of Max, the closeted school principal; the dead boy had been a fan, and so had been his boyfriend; the unicorn-obsessed high school girl is attracted to its unicorn imagery, and Crepe Suzette is actually her uncle, her Uncle Suzie. In Uncle Suzie’s day job, she’s a waiter, and one day, unknowingly, she serves the dead boy’s mother. She also performed her drag show for the dead boy’s English teacher, who was in the restaurant with her ex-husband, her marriage having ended so recently that they still had tickets for events together. It’s Suzette’s car that Max plows into while driving distracted because his husband has just left him, his husband the school guidance counsellor who (like everybody else after the boy kills himself) is stunned by his own self-absorption and lack of regard that left him so incapable of helping the dead boy.

The multiple points of view are dizzying, but well-realized, and serve to propel the plot along. Mayr has her characters linked in all kinds of surprising ways, and they’re all  carrying their own burdens, which only become heavier with the death of a boy none of them really knew. Each one is wholly invested with life, even the dead boy, who, we discover, didn’t take his taunting passively, and had some marvelous come-backs to his tormentor that hit her right where it hurt. Though she doesn’t hurt much, this girl, Petra Mai, who bullies the dead boy when he isn’t dead yet because the boy she loves loves him instead. And with Petra, Mayr has created a character who is hilariously vile, the smart girl, the girl who plays the cello, the girl no one would ever expect had caused so much harm. She barely notices it herself, so intent upon her own story, celebrating her four month anniversary with her boyfriend and daring to think ahead to how they’ll celebrate the fifth. She’s the only one in the novel who never really changes.

As the novel progresses, focus narrows upon Max and Walter, the principal and the guidance counselor who’ve been a secret couple for seventeen years. Mayr’s depiction of Max’s ambivalence about his relationship and sexuality makes for fascinating narrative tension, which is taken in unexpected directions when Walter abruptly refuses to keep going along with their charade. We also witness the English teacher rebuilding herself from the shattered pieces of her marriage, and the dead boy’s mother who is just shattered, but still manages to build something out of the pieces of her son (who she once begged to promise her that he wasn’t really gay, and urged upon him that it was just a phase. This is the kind of thing she has to remember).

The subject matter would suggest otherwise, but Monoceros was a joy to read. The writing was fresh, strange and edgy, the humour sharp, and the teenage characters in particular were startlingly real. The dead boy was its point of origin, but the book becomes much more about life than death, which serves to finally set the others in the direction of actually living their own lives.

July 12, 2011

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

The masses began their appropriation of literary culture during the 1990s with hit films like Emma, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love, with the popular Jane Austen-riff Bridget Jones Diary, and by the time Michael Cunningham’s The Hours became a film in 2002 (an adaptation of a book that was an adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, in which a 1950s suburban housewife achieves emotional oneness with Virginia Woolf), the dynamic shift was complete. Why and how this shift came about is documented in Jim Collins’ fascinating, absorbing book Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture.

“Bring on the books for everybody!” was the call from Oprah as copies of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth were distributed to her studio audience, and was the rallying cry in general as digitization began to make reading more accessible. It’s perplexing though, because this popularization is taking place as the decline of reading is lamented, as the book is declared dead over and over again. Clearly, according to Collins, digital culture has not killed the book, but rather the two co-exist and affect each other in unexpected ways.

What was once “the common reader” is now the “avid” or “passionate” reader, an empowered readership with its own sense of authority, their own understanding of just what reading is for, and their own parameters for book discussion. These are readers who read for self-cultivation, the very middlebrow sensibility that arose with widespread literacy over a hundred years ago and sent the Modernists scrambling for literary obscurity (and the Modernists could afford to do so, as most of them were backed by patrons with inherited wealth). Concurrent to this was the rise of English Literature as an area of academic study, an area that was strangely both elitist and populist– though literature was becoming more difficult to understand, it would be through study at university that readers would received the tools to access to it. And with this professionalization of English came about what Collins describes as an anti-snobbery: “The crucial distinction, which an entire institutionalized practice of reading endlessly reiterated, was between those who knew how to read closely and those who merely read, passionately or otherwise.”

How did the latter become so popularized, and so intrinsically linked to consumer culture? Collins puts forth “superstore bookstores” such as Barnes & Noble and Borders as the first explanation, which in their very architecture created a space that is what the library imagines itself as–instead of an “information hub”, a place where people actually sit down and read. Further, these bookstores delivered literary culture to places that hadn’t had any before, which is an effect as significant if not more so than the negative impact these stores have had on smaller independent ones.The second explanation is Amazon.com, which can now deliver books instantaneously (at least the electronic variety), and went from providing top-down content via an editorial staff in its early days to making its pages personalized for users, thus investing them with their own authority immediately, and underlining that authority by making its users books reviews and curators of reading lists.

Concomitantly came about the rise of “bibliophilia”, the idea that loving books brought authority enough to understand how they work, and that reading is for pleasure rather than rigorous study. This fits in well with the ethos of Oprah’s book club, and Collins uses the example of her Anna Karenina episode to explore the culture of Oprah reading. The segment began with her guest Barry Manilow singing the book’s title to the tune of Copa Cabana, her audience wearing their Tolstoy t-shirts, and a discussion with Karen from Will & Grace about how the book creates “a full sense of human nature that is universal.” (And here, Collins cautions us not to poke fun, using Harold Bloom’s point that to read is to “share in that one nature that writes and reads,” so Karen’s not far wrong.)

Collins addresses Oprah’s fine balance as “a literary tastemaker who is both an authority and one of us,” and compares her to Martha Stewart, another figure who has used mass media to enlighten us with taste in finer things. He also unpacks the case of Jonathan Franzen, the self-styled loner who’d given away his TV because of his vision of an apocalyptic world based on images, and had protested being an Oprah’s book club pick. Collins dismisses an opposition between the two with the reaction of his own graduate English students to the Anna Karenina episode and the Franzen debacle– they’d dismissed the book club as light-weight because the book never even factored into the discussion, and yet they didn’t ally themselves with Franzen either, with his old-school elitism (which doesn’t quite concur with his “middlebrow novel”, one of them suggests). Clearly the divide between popular culture and literary culture is more nuanced, less divided than the usual debate might have us understand.

Collins goes on to address long history of film adaptations of books, in particular the British tradition beginning in the 1980s with Merchant and Ivory, whose formula for success would be expanded upon and sealed by Miramax in the 1990s. The former was a niche genre, but became blockbuster formula, and he uses shows how the latter films were marketed in such a way as to appeal to communities of imagined cine-lit lovers. The route to adaptation was not a simple Franzen-esque divide between books good/images bad– Collins cites The Hours as a film that was as good as the book that preceded it, and also actually more complex, and notes that several Woolf scholars appeared in the DVD, that it led Mrs. Dalloway to became a bestseller in America in 2003.

In his discussion of popular literary fiction, Collins notes two trends, the first for the non-literary novel of manners based upon the literary 19th century tradition, and that the underlying use of this kind of fiction is meant to be self-help (not too dissimilar from the self-cultivators of last century). Just what fiction is for remains in question– to be read closely in the professional manner, are we to learn from it (broadening the idea of self-cultivation), or do we read for pleasure? We use the fiction we like to define how we’re seen by the world. And there are countless other points of view, each of them starting from a point no more or less authentic than the other.

The second trend he notes is “the devoutly literary bestseller”, the unabashedly bookish book. Books where characters are members of book clubs, where they write books, where they scorn the idea of fiction as useful until a wildly transporting moment as in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Books concerned with art and beauty, books with Henry James as a character, bookish books like The Emperor’s Children and Special Topics in Calamity Physics (you know, the type of stuff that people like me suck up through a giant straw). But these more literary books with their “neo-aestheticism” come with their own utility linked with consumerism as a way to show us how to live well, and as evidence as we’re reading them that we’re doing so.

The book begins and ends with Collins in his local Barnes & Noble considering a mural of Great Authors sitting at cafe tables (“Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and company”), the curious juxtaposition of these artists against the strange marketplace of the book superstore. But it gets less curious– near the end of the book, he provides an anecdote about a young Henry James longing for bestsellerdom. But it only gets more complicated too. A truly accurate mural, he imagines in his conclusion, would have Helena Bonham Carter, Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sylvia Plath, Harvey Weinstein, Jane Austen, Helen Fielding, Michael Ondaatje, several Amazon reviewers…

Collins ends on an optimistic note: our popular culture is richer for having the literary take its place within it. The 19th and 20th centuries are decidedly over, but we’re standing on the cusp of a new literary age.

July 8, 2011

Mini Reviews: Granta 115 and The 27th Kingdom by Alice Thomas Ellis

I bought Granta 115 for the Rachel Cusk essay “Aftermath” on her divorce, but as I read through the issue I quickly learned that one needs no excuse to buy Granta except that it’s Granta at all. What a discovery– yes, it’s a $20 magazine, but the price is more than worth it. being about 10 books in one. The Rachel Cusk essay was as complex, troubling and fascinating as I expected– I will have to read it about five more times to really understand it. Her prose is not readily accessible, the reader has to make her own way, and yet this path-blazing is so utterly engaging, and is why Cusk’s prose stays inside my head for ages after.

There was not one piece in this issue that was not a pleasure to read. I realize that 115 is a bit of a departure, comprising only female contributors, but this commitment to quality probably isn’t a one-off. For me, most notable were Julie Otsuka’s “The Children”, Francine Prose’s “Other Women”, Jeanette Winterson’s “All I Know About Gertrude Stein,” and Caroline Moorehead’s “A Train in Winter.” The last is a story of a group of female members of the French resistance who were taken to Birkenau, an absolutely brutal, stunning tale of devastation, depravity and survival, and this appears alongside Otsuka’s story of second-generation Japanese in America, Francine Prose’s thoughts on ’70s consciousness raising, Rachel Cusk and her divorce, and Janice Galloway’s “We’re Not In This Together” about the difficulty of obtaining contraception in the ’70s. Then stories of Haiti, Africa, India, and A.S. Byatt in the north of England. The contents of the issue are troubling, amusing, contradictory, complementary, as various as feminism itself, but so terribly good. What a fantastic introduction.

**

And then, why has Alice Thomas Ellis’ The 27th Kingdom been sitting on my shelf for years? Perhaps my new favourite book lately, sortof a mash-up of Hilary Mantel’s best social satire (Everyday is Mother’s Day) with her Beyond Black supernatural bent, a bit Graham Green’s Travels with My Aunt thrown in for good measure, also Muriel Spark’s The Comforters. I’d read Alice Thomas Ellis’ Birds of the Air some years ago, but it had not prepared me for the wit of this novel (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983). It’s the story of a chaotic household in 1954 Chelsea, presided over by Aunt Irene, who fawns over her precious nephew Kyril, and who is well-serviced by local thieves to keep her in style. Her sister is a nun in Wales who sends to Aunt Irene a mysterious girl called Valentine whose presence causes strange events throughout the neighbourhood. Ellis had a mind for humanity at its most ridiculous, for the English at their most ridiculenglishness. What an extraordinarily wonderful book . (And do note, I’m reading though Es now– this is very exciting).

July 7, 2011

It Must Be As Tall As A Lighthouse by Tabatha Southey

If you accused me of being a Tabatha Southey fangirl, I could hardly deny it, because I have made a religion out of reading her columns aloud over croissant crumbs on Saturday mornings. And I kind of intended on liking her new book It Must Be As Tall as a Lighthouse (published by few-of-a-kind outlet The Book Bakery) because we’d read her previous picture book The Deep Cold River Story and really enjoyed it.

But no amount of Southey-admiration could have predicted the response I got to …Tall as a Lighthouse when I read it for the first time, out loud, and it left my husband and I both with tears in our eyes (and note that he is English, and only cries once annually). I think this is a book that will appeal more to parents than to children, although Harriet likes to pick out familiar images from the pictures– her favourite parts are the penguin, the fish, and the shovel. She also likes the rhyme scheme, and I do too, as it puts me in mind of one of my favourite picture books, A House is a House for Me.

And perhaps it’s because this is also a book about a house, about a house a mother will build her son, and she indulges all his impossible dreams–surrounded by ocean on all sides, in deepest outer space, near a good tobogganing hill, his window with a revolving view of jungle and desert (and with stairs made of eclairs). I particularly like “the window at which it is raining/when you just want to finish your book”.

But the house keeps changing as the boy keep changing, and he wants different things all the time. And then the end, oh my, the end– “For you’ve taught me that anything Perfect/ is only a moment of time…” That love so solid (red brick) for something so ephemeral is as impossible as the house itself, and yet that love exists, the most straightforward thing ever. Perhaps the loveliest articulation of parental love that I’ve ever encountered, the entire book is something to cherish.

July 4, 2011

The O'Briens by Peter Behrens

There exists considerable difference between “a good book” and “a great book”, and lately I’d feared being so fixated on understanding the latter I had become unable to appreciate the former. Which would be a shame, I think, because there is pleasure in a good book, a big fat novel to while away a long weekend with. Losing the ability to enjoy such a thing would be like getting turned off timbits in favour of gourmet cupcakes. But once in a while it becomes clear to me that not everything needs to be placed in a hierarchy, or is another opportunity for a soapbox tirade. That we can simply have a donut and eat it too, in particular on summer weekends when the weather is so sunny, and heat lives on your skin along with a new crop of freckles. Though I will still stamp my foot for just a moment and say that this should have been a better book, but it wasn’t, and I ate it anyway.

It means something, it does, that though parts of Peter Behrens’ novel The O’Briens rang hollow to me, I read it with delight. Absolutely absorbed, and happy, and satisfied with its considerable bulk. The O’Briens is the sequel to Behrens’ award-winning The Law of Dreams (which I haven’t read; it stands alone), the story of Joe O’Brien and his siblings who escape their violent home in the Ottawa Valley at the turn of the century. The sisters are sent to a convent, and quite conveniently die of the Spanish flu years later, so we never hear of them again, but we follow Joe and his brother to California where Joe falls in love with Iseult, and then the rest of the book traces their story back and forth across the continent, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

The problems are this: characters are so unknown to each other that it’s not clear that author even knows who they are; that the action always happens off the page, the characters choosing passivity all the time; that the O’Briens are uncannily linked to all the major events of their time; that the structure of the novel is stilted, and uneven; and that we’re told far more than the writing actually shows until it’s like being beaten over the head with a Leica camera.

But still, the pages kept turning, even as I rolled my eyes. Partly because the novel’s events are so sweeping that I was swept along as well, and because some of Behrens’ depictions of place were so vivid that I could smell the sea air. Because there are real moments of absolute, pin-pointed tension and/or tenderness that show Behren’s would be a remarkable writer if his focus were narrowed. Moments do not make a novel of course, in particular if they’re not very well hinged together, but the moments still stand out here. Also because it’s been ages since I read a saga, and I’ve a thing for families as institutions, and I still think that America is a little bit glamorous (Happy 4th of July!), and Peter Behrens makes it so.

The O’Briens was a very significant part of my glorious weekend, a beach book even though I wasn’t at a beach, but it made me feel like I was missing nothing. And yes, I suppose if The O’Briens wins a big book prize later this year, then we’ll have reason to get on our soapbox about the sorry state of Canadian Literature, but until then, let’s not take a good book as an affront. Let’s just enjoy it, because it’s July after all, and good books are how summer days are very best spent.

July 2, 2011

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble

All right, please forgive me, but I’d like to take the short story off its pedestal for just a moment or two. Not to demean it in any way, but rather to point out the utter banality of proclaiming a writer “a master of the short-story form”. If only because I don’t think there is any such thing as “the short story form”, which is of all forms is probably the most elastic. Think about what Ann Beattie has in common with Alice Munro, I guess. Or closer to home, even Sarah Selecky and Jessica Westhead’s stories are altogether different creatures. There is such diversity in short stories, which is the underlying flaw in any argument against them as a form, but it also means that many of us are sputtering critical banality when we try to talk about them in general.

But then, here is another thing…

Margaret Drabble’s complete short stories A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman were written by a writer who has never been called a master of the short story form, mostly because most people don’t know she ever wrote short stories, because she only wrote a handful of them, and because she had been altogether occupied attempting to become master of the novel instead. (And can I just say that more than most contemporary novelists, she has probably come very close?)

But yet there are stories here which are masterful, because this is Margaret Drabble after all and she is so, so good. So the conclusion I take from this is that the short story form isn’t necessarily one requiring fervent devotion, the way some would like us to think it is– I’m referring to the pedastal. The conclusion is that anyone is capable of writing an excellent short story… as long as anyone happens to be Margaret Drabble.

The stories here, which are organized in chronological order, represent the same kind of trajectory evident in the progression of Drabble’s novels. Early stories are very focussed on the individual, interior and immediate, and were very fashionable in a way that hasn’t aged terribly well (but their quality remains evident). Her middle stories become more political with a strong feminist bent, and then the later ones are concerned with the limits of fiction, with stretching these limits, and also with history, and science and questioning. A reader seeking something conventional from later-Drabble will come away disappointed, but with an understanding of what she is trying (though not always managing) to achieve), the reader can appreciate these works’ greatness.

It is difficult to talk about a collection like this, which represents the work of five decades and was never intended to be discussed as a whole. Except to say that it’s a wonderful overview of (and perhaps introduction to?) Margaret Drabble’s work, and a must-read for any of her devotees. That a few of the early stories have a certain unsteadiness, but then the other assume the assurance of writers who, if she has not necessarily mastered the short-story form, has certainly managed to master the story in general.

June 15, 2011

Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe

Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe appealed to me as the perfect intersection between two books I’ve enjoyed in the past: Alayna Munce’s novel When I Was Young and in My Prime (about a young woman contemplating her grandparents’ decline), and Diane Tye’s food studies book Baking as Biography (which I love, love, loved). Though Second Rising wasn’t immediately resonant with me: the poetic language was hard for me to decipher, and though I worked hard to permeate the metaphors to get to the meaning underneath, I couldn’t find it, and this frustrated me. I persisted, however, mostly because of the evocative way that Wiebe writes about food. I had to shake off the urge to go and bake a loaf of bread, to fill my house with the fresh smell Wiebe recreates with her prose, and partake in the ritual of margarine-slathered heels. She writes about squash soup, and pickles, and ham sandwiches, and it was made me hungry, but also perfectly illustrated the connection between her narrator and her grandmother who are particularly close when the former is small (when therefore, according to the grandmother, the two are particularly close in age).

With the second half of the novel, however, the method of the first became clear to me. I began to understand that the language and metaphors of the first half had been so difficult to understand because they were spoken by the grandmother as she suffered from dementia. These wonderful ideas, this language with so much magic at its root, seemingly, is nonsensical, and yet in preserving it, Wiebe makes it otherwise. She writes about decline not as decline, but as a mode of still-living, with connections and singular moments just like in any life. Her grandmother’s’decline actually reawakens the narrator to the closeness she’d experienced with her grandmother when she herself had just been young, except that it is the narrator, now-grown, who is chief cook in the kitchen while her grandmother sits on the stool and watches. The relationship, however, is complicated by the narrator’s own ambivalence about her relationship with her grandmother, about her own absences while her grandmother was in the final throes of her illness.

This is a different kind of book than others about Alzheimers I’ve encountered– Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles or Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue, both about the early-onset of the disease, would refuse to so give dementia its place, but at the end of a long life, there is poetry to the process of shutting down, the loss is not far removed from a natural process. And yet, Wiebe still addresses the practical matters of the disease– the notes the grandmother leaves, and how she preserves these notes and reuses them so that nobody notices her handwriting’s decline. About what it means when a woman who bakes is not permitted to bake any more, and there is a particularly poignant scene in which the granddaughter contemplates how the disease has altered the dynamic of her grandparents’ relationship.

Second Rising is a book about memories,about memories of memories and what distance does to our stories. And it’s about the role food plays in nurturing our family connections, linking generations as it feeds our bellies and souls.

June 14, 2011

Mini Reviews: What I've been reading lately

I put Kyran Pittman’s collection of essays Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life on hold at the library after reading the Globe and Mail review of it. I was interested in the book because I’m also a stay-at-home-mom who does not exactly self-define that way, and who feels a bit unsuited to the stereotype, however perfectly happy I am in this life. I also liked the way the author celebrated blogging in this profile. And as I read the book, during the whole of last Sunday when I was sick in bed, I also loved that this is a blogger-turned-author who can really write. (Though she’s got literary pedigree.) It was a wonderful collection of essays, and I particularly enjoyed her reflections of new parenthood from the vantage point of ten years down the line, her sympathetic examination of the attachment-parenting, organic-fooding, toddler-breastfeeding Mama she used to be, fierce in her judgment of others (and herself)– the perspective was refreshing, and illuminating. But the book is about more than that– though I was wary of her “party-girl turned housewife” persona (mainly because I was never a party-girl, and have a natural distrust for anyone prettier than I am), she kept it mostly understated. I loved her piece on raising boys, on her family’s financial struggles and its effect on her marriage, on raising her kids in the American South and the contradictions inherent in their pride in the place, and her own contradictory experience of being a Canadian in America, on her unwillingness to admit where she belonged. It was a great read.

Before that, I’d read Rachel Cusk’s latest novel The Bradshaw Variations. Rachel Cusk is one of my favourite authors, but we have an odd relationship, her and I. First, I’m never entirely sure that I’m enjoying her novels until I’ve finished one. Or perhaps I mean that “enjoying” is not what one does with a Rachel Cusk book, which is also the reason I’ve never been able to write a proper review of one either. Instead of being critically attuned to the text, I have to turn myself off and be completely immersed. It is in this way that she’s like Virginia Woolf– you’ve got to let the text take you where it needs to. Sometimes, the prose is so heightened (also like Woolf) that it gets to be too much, but then you realize that realism was never her intention. The story is beside the point, which is annoying, but then this is Rachel Cusk and the point is so so important, never mind the story. Anyway, I loved it, but perhaps I have to. What I don’t have to, however, is to point out that the second-last chapter of this novel is one of the best short-stories I have ever read. Disturbing, dark and hilarious, and absolutely perfectly executed.

The Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney has been sitting on shelf for years. And no wonder– it is a book about the nature of time. Which is not something I’ve ever been moved to pick up, but nor to get rid of either, though I wondered as the dust-jacket became particularly dusty. But I am a girl who came of age on A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Handful of Time etc. And because I’m reading by to-be-reads from A-Z, I’ve made it to the Ds, and it’s time for Dewdney now: the book was wonderful. I rode the subway home from the NMAs on Friday whilst reading about the invention of hours, minutes, and clock faces. I loved the line that we are to time as owls are to air. I loved the paragraphs that were completely indecipherable to me, and then went to say, “And here’s where things get complicated…” Or, “Here’s where things get weird”. And it was all weird, because it’s about physics, wormholes, De Loreans, photography, the telephone, movies, seasons, Toronto, our expanding universe, the past, future and the present. Which is now. No, now. Absolutely ungraspable. As is so much that I encountered in this book, but didn’t worry too much about the details, and therefore just enjoyed the ride. Dust or not, this is a book I’ll be keeping.

June 9, 2011

The Odious Child by Carolyn Black

I’m very happy that Carolyn Black has agreed to be next up at Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This. First, because it’s been awhile, this mostly because it’s been awhile since I’ve read a book that’s made me curious enough to go search the author out for some illumination. Second, because her book The Odious Child has left me so curious, most of all to discover who Carolyn Black’s influences are. I can’t figure them out. (Although she is thoroughly umPymmish, however, her characters do work in Pym-like occupations I find infinitely fascinating– indexers, librarians, museum cataloguers. Yum). She writes like no one else I’ve ever read, like a writer who’s standing on the shoulders of nobody, her stories’ own foundations are so very solid. There is a fantastical element to the stories, but nothing whimsical. You might call some of the stories’ structures “experimental”, but it’s not the right word because it suggests the author didn’t know her outcomes beforehand and Carolyn Black’s “experiments” are so incredibly, impeccably controlled.

The story that kept me up in the night thinking about it, and wouldn’t get out of my head the following day, was “Baby Mouth”, which is the very best illustration of maternal ambivalence I have ever read. Lionel Shriver also did it well, but she forgot to put the love there, and Carolyn Black doesn’t, with a story that so much echoed my own experience that the similarities made me shiver with every page I turned. About a mother who’s not perfectly suited to the new baby in her care, and how those dark early days come back to her almost a year old when her baby still hasn’t smiled. Wondering, but unable to confess, if a violent moment of abandon could have led to her baby’s problem… (Here is my obligatory clarification: we had no violent abandon at our house, except for the time I punched the wall [but not through it! There is restraint, albeit the wall’s, and not mine, but alas…])

The story is funny, as Black satirizes the absurd industry of modern parenting, but it’s also sad as the mother’s desperation mounts, and the love is tender, and Black’s empathy with her character is remarkable, which is the case through the whole book, even in the stories that are completely out there. And it’s where the solidity comes from, I think, from a writer who is so completely invested in her people and their points of view. Which, you’d think, would go without saying, but I’ve read a lot of books where this is not the case. Particularly not when the author’s people include, for example, a disembodied head…

Anyway, though Carolyn Black’s first book is one of the strongest debuts I’ve ever encountered, I’m not sure this is a book for the short story novice: it demands close attention and several leaps of faith, and these readers might not be ready for it yet. But for those who are already admirers of the form, The Odious Child will prove remarkably rewarding.