November 7, 2011
Dadolescence by Bob Armstrong
Dadolescence is one of a few books I’ve read this year– along with Kate Christensen’s The Astral, Shari LaPena’s Happiness Economics and even the story “Summer of the Flesh Eaters” from Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives— that considers what it is to be a man apart from traditional institutions of masculinity. Is a man still a man when his wife is his family’s main breadwinner, when he’s spent his career chasing after artistic dreams that haven’t come true, when he’s become decidedly middle-aged and no longer attracts admiring glances from women (if he even ever did)? As outliers on the spectrum of masculinity, the men in the novels I’ve mentioned are dumped into a catch-all house-husband/stay-at-home dad catagory, but they fit in here as awkwardly as they do everywhere.
Though Bob Armstrong’s Bill Angus is a stay-at-home-dad, his son is old enough and independent enough that the novel doesn’t fully examine that experience. Rather, Dadolescence considers what happens to every stay-at-home parent when they begin to realize that their role is becoming obsolete. They’ve stayed home for the kids all these years: now what? Though Bill avoids addressing this question throughout the novel, deluding himself into thinking instead that the PhD thesis in anthropology he’s been not writing for years is ever going to be finished.
His stay-at-home dad neighbour/colleagues have similar diversions. Dave has become obsessed with remodeling his house in order to add resale value, digging up floors and knocking down walls (sometimes load-bearing). The tipping point arrives when he decides to built a turret on his 1950s’ bungalow. Meanwhile, Mark tells implausible stories of his work on a cattle-ranch, as a police officer, influencing Bono, and now he’s gunning for an astrophysics contract with NASA. And Bill is taking this all in, imagining himself turning his neighbours’ experiences into an anthropological study of modern masculinity, supposing himself to be removed from what he is observing, though also terrified that he isn’t.
Meanwhile in his preoccupation with his neighbours, Bill finds himself neglecting his household duties, disappointing his twelve-year old son, and (almost) failing to notice that his wife is drifting away from him.
Dadolescence was written from Armstrong’s play Tits on a Bull, which was performed at the 2007 Winnipeg Fringe Festival. Which means that the voice of the hapless Bill comes through with enormous humour, though it overwhelms the novel itself at times and tells much more than it shows. Bill himself is also such a passive character that the plot lags with him at the helm, and in order to be resolved resorts to some screwballish hinjinx. Nothing is subtle here, everything a little bit over the top, but it’s as funny as it’s meant to be, and more than once, I laughed out loud.
In Dadolescence, Armstrong has captured that difficult period in the life of every Gen-Xer, when it becomes time to unload the vinyl evidence of one’s “youthful audio anglophilia” at a garage sale, and finally begin to grow up.
November 2, 2011
The Vicious Circle Reads Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams
I’m coming out of first-person plural here, because I loved Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams without reservation. I’m coming to the tail-end of the busiest month I’ve had in years, and the space I’d carved out to read this book– sitting on the couch during Harriet’s nap times, holding the book open with my feet while I furiously knit up this hat— was like a gift to myself every day last week. The reading was a pleasure, the stories so diverse in their approaches to their subject, so strong, convincing, so funny, and underlined a lot of experiences from my expat days. I don’t think I’d enjoyed any other book as much that we’ve read for our club, unless it was a book written by an English novelist in the 1950s. It’s one of the best books I’ve read lately, and I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.
What being in a book club has taught me, however, is that there’s no telling with taste. And that taste is so much what we’re talking about when we’re talking about books, no matter how much we couch our arguments in aesthetics. I also know that being in a book club has made me a better book reviewer (and it has made being a book reviewer that much harder. I second-guess myself more often now. Which, for a book reviewer, is a good thing.)
Anyway, reactions were mixed across the board as The Vicious Circle assembled in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood of Toronto last Saturday morning. We were also dressed as literary characters for Halloween (and one of us was dressed as a genre)– I was wearing a 99 cent 54DD bra from Honest Eds, stuffed with Harriet’s plush balls as Georgina Hogg from The Comforters, but not the sexy version. There was lots of delicious food, and plenty of gossip, and even a baby, then we got down to the book.
It was boring, said one of us, and another of us was aghast. One of us had struggled for a while with not liking the characters, which was disturbing because she’s a better reader than that, but then she realized that she just didn’t care about the characters. That they were boring. That they were living in Rome, but weren’t engaged with the setting at all. They could have been anywhere. “But that’s just the point!” said another one of us, pulling out the old “I’ve got personal experience of it” trump-card, which is a stupid trump-card actually, because a book isn’t good just because it reminds me of when I lived in Japan.
The point though, that one of us continued, is that living abroad and being engaged with a place is exhausting, and can unsustainable, and that Williams’ stories reflect the frustration, rage, ennui and struggle of one who is living where she doesn’t belong. Fair enough, says another of us, but the stories were all the same, the same kinds of people, the same kind of stasis, the non-endings. Even though the characters were married, single, gay, parents, variously? But they all sounded the same, was the problem. It was also noted that the gay characters didn’t get to have sex, that Williams shut the door on their encounter, when it was flung wide open for heterosexual couples.
There was no consensus on best stories, though “Pets” probably was closest to it, particularly the strange pet shop owner. It was noted that Williams’ Italian characters were more interesting than her expat characters who seemed more like stereotypes. Though we also liked the story “Saving Rome for Someone Special” about the perils of living abroad with friends-of-friends always showing up to sleep on your sofa, and what happens when a girl arrives who is certifiably insane. There was some debate as to whether Jonathan is pathetic as he’s presented, and why exactly he’s presented as pathetic. It was felt the ending petered out the same way they all did.
We liked the wit though, the dialogue. We liked that a hamster died of being squeezed to death. We liked the end of “Motion”: “But that day, when her eyes finally fell on it, on Frank’s arrow made of dried corn stalks pointing right, she felt a startling surge of gratitude for being linked this way to another human being, and she followed it.” We weren’t nuts about the two stories that weren’t set in Rome. Some of us liked the first story very much, its “acerbic wit” and others found it frustratingly “mommish”. But then no, exclaims another. The point was what was going on below the surface, how she kept laughing at inappropriate moments and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
And so it continued, volleys back and forth over coffee and apple cake, and cupcakes, and guacamole (because there is always guacamole), and always, as always, a splendid time was had.
November 1, 2011
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
“When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children,” writes Joan Didion in her new book Blue Nights. And in fact, when Didion is talking about any one thing in this book, she is usually talking about something else, a point which she spends much of the book considering– her struggles of late as a writer to be direct, to get to the point. In particularly in regards to her daughter Quintana, and when Joan Didion is talking about Quintana, she can’t avoid talking about mortality, about the “death of promise”; Quintana died in 2005 at the age of 39, not long after her father’s sudden death one evening at the dinner table (the year after which Didion chronicled in her previous memoir).
When Didion is talking about Quintana, she’s not only talking about her daughter’s mortality, but about her own. The years since her daughter’s death have brought about a general ill-health, a growing frailty that she has struggled to address with various health professionals with very little success. And then it occurs to her– she is 75 years old. Perhaps this alone is the problem, and there is no “fix”. And this has never occurred to her before, that she would eventually (or quite suddenly) get old. “Time passes… Could it be that I never believed it?”
This from a woman whose writing has always been drenched in nostalgia, who from the time she picked up a pen has been eulogizing the way we don’t live anymore and the “all that” she’d said good-bye to. That Joan Didion has never believed time to pass is impossible to consider, except that maybe she never considered herself passing along with it.
“The common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I,'” wrote Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook,” from her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, except now she’s 75 and that common denominator seems less a sure foundation. In the same essay, she’d also written, “Remember what it was to be me. That was always the point.” And now more than 40 years later, she doesn’t want to remember anymore.
She writes that well-meaning friends try to assure her through her loss: “You have your memories”. She writes that for many years, she fetishized these memories, saving everything– drawers and cupboards stuffed, mementos pinned to the walls– believing that they would help keep people “fully present”. And when she most important people in her life are lost, she’s left with “detritus of this misplaced belief.” She writes that remembering the past only reminds her of how much she failed to appreciate what she had in the first place.
And when she writes about failing to appreciate what she had, she’s writing about Quintana. She’s writing about her own relationship to her daughter (who happened to be adopted), which is similar to any mother’s relationships to her child, adopted or otherwise. Contemplating that newborn bundle: “What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?… what if I fail to love this baby?”
Except that Quintana doesn’t just “happen to be adopted”, and Didion has realized that failing to acknowledge this was a significant failing of her own as a mother. That Quintana’s mental health problems (which are referred to obliquely; this is no expose) could have been rooted in her own fears of abandonment. That what the “choice narrative” so favoured towards 1960s adoptees left unsaid was the underside of adoptive parents’ choosing, why a child was up for choosing in the first place. And Didion notes that she could never treat this underside, that she chose to avoid it because to highlight her daughter’s origins would be to expose her own terrible fear– that this miraculous child who’d been placed in her arms would somehow be stolen away from her. To acknowledge Quintana’s fear of abandonment, to acknowledge the fact of Quintana herself, would have been to clarify her own feelings and fears about her daughter, which Didion could never bring herself to do.
Except that she’s lost her now, a worst fear realized, and her daughter’s death has served to bring her own death closer. And without her daughter to survive her, when she dies she will “Pass into nothingness,” a phrase from Keats’ she discovers in one of Quintana’s high school exercise books. A phrase that had resonated with the teenaged depressive Quintana, another side of her that Didion had never allowed herself to understand. A side that she’s coming to understand now as she contemplates the end of her own life, and how much her daughter’s sense of mortality and her actual mortality have illuminated her own.
She finds it hard to be direct now. She offers a passage from her novel The Last Thing He Wanted to show the way her prose used to come so easily, that she wrote it like the rhythm it was. But she can’t do that now. She can’t find the right words, she can’t get to the point, she keeps falling, and forgetting, and getting frailer all the time. The point is slipping farther away. But it’s not that she is afraid to die. She writes that she’s getting so she’s afraid not to die, but it’s not that, and it’s not the writing either.
She writes, “The fear is for what is still to be lost,” and she’s writing about her memories of her daughter. “How could I not still need that child with me?” She writes, “there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”
October 26, 2011
The Submission by Amy Waldman
Amy Waldman’s The Submission begins with a jury making their final deliberations on how site of the September 11th terrorist attacks are to memorialized. Two years on from that fateful day, the nation is still raw, and anxious for healing to begin. No juror feels this more acutely than Claire Burwell, who lost her husband in the attacks, and who has been selected to serve representing the interests of the victim’s families. She rallies support around a design called The Garden, where she can imagine her children playing and which serves to honour the kind of man her husband was, as opposed to the more brutalist designs championed by other jury members. The Garden wins, the identity of its designer revealed, and he turns out to be a man called Mohammed Khan.
That the outrage sparked by this revelation seemed implausible to me mostly means that I don’t live properly in the world. A world in which the idea of a Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero) sends people to the streets spouting hatred and threats of violence, which no doubt inspired some of what transpires in The Submission. The story shifts from Claire Burwell to Mohammed Khan himself, an architect American born-and-raised who is stunned to find himself in the spotlight, discussed on late night TV by right-wing windbags who speculate upon his motivations and foster rumours that this secular Muslim has extremist ties.
The story moves back and forth between these two characters and others, including a reporter who sees the story as an opportunity to further her own career, a Bangladeshi illegal alien who also lost her husband in the towers, the brother of a deceased firefighter who sees his newfound 9/11 status as a chance to finally make something of his life, the jury chair who’s caught between the jury and a state governor with elections on her mind.
Waldman is the former co-chief of the New York Times’ South Asia Bureau, and has the journalistic chops to tackle a story with such breadth, and also understands the spiral effect of story and the role the media plays in this process. It was on the side of fiction, however, where the story fell down for me, and in characterization more specifically. Claire Burwell herself is little more than a type, and she loses substance as the story progresses. Her supposed downfall is an ability to see the issue from all sides, but I failed to see her at all. Waldman tries to complicate her character by suggesting that all was not as well in her marriage as she presents to the outside world, but this significant storyline is never picked up again, and Claire herself ends up virtually disappearing from the novel about two thirds of the way through.
Another character weakly drawn was the firefighter’s brother, who turns out to have stupidity and alcoholism underlining his vitriol. It would have been more interesting to find a bigoted jingoist as intelligent and sure of himself as the characters on the other side. And not for the sake of fairness and balance, but rather because I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we explained away all the idiots as people who know they’re idiots deep down. In reality, there is a fiercer opposition to contend with.
But The Submission turns out to be a better book than it seems, and it turns out that what Waldman is writing about is not opposition at all. Khan digs in his heels and refuses to submit to the demands being put upon him from all sides– does he deny his background, assert himself as an American? But what of his understanding that being American means one has no need to deny his background? But who is he serving here? His country? His some-time faith? Himself? Claire Burwell is asking herself similar questions in her role as juror, and doubt is cast in her mind as to Khan’s intentions. Doubt he refuses to assuage because he’s never given her reason to mistrust him, so he holds back on principle, her mistrust doubly undermined. They’re turning in circles, and so is the whole world around them, violence and intensity escalating with each revolution, which culminates in a life that is tragically lost.
Waldman’s language doesn’t call attention to itself, though hers is a working prose that is doing things, so you’ll notice when you take your mind off the plot enough to pay attention. And similarly with the literary-ness of the novel, which creeps in and eventually outshines the plot. In the end, The Submission is a story both more universal and more specific than what the plot suggests, challenging, provocative and rich.
October 19, 2011
Once You Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson
On Monday, I compared D.W. Wilson to Alice Munro in a Twitter post, and got called out by a few people for being off the mark. Upon rereading my post, I could see how it my point was misconstrued– I forgot that Alice Munro comparisons must necessarily denote Greatness, and I didn’t mean to do that. D.W. Wilson’s short story collection Once You Break a Knuckle reads very much like a first book, lacking in precision and assurance, but there is promise here, evidence of a good writer whose best work is still before him. Which really, in a first book, sometimes, is all that a reader can ask for.
But I stand by my Munro comparison, though I know I should be comparing Wilson to Raymond Carver and commenting on the raw, violent masculinity afoot. What I couldn’t stop thinking of, however, as I read the stories about Will Crease sparring with police constable father John was Flo & Rose, and the Royal Beatings,that violent dynamic of family life with love at its root. About class and how both families are of and apart from their communities, and about the communities themselves, Wilson’ s real-life town of Invermere evoked similarly to Munro’s Hanratty (or Jubilee). And how Wilson seems preoccupied with certain ideas, characters and story lines, returning to them again and again to examine them from various angles, as Munro has also done throughout her story collections and throughout her entire career.
I agree with Steven Beattie’s comment that the Will Crease stories in this book have the feel of ” chapters in a novel searching for a through-line”. My favourite story in the collection was a Will Crease story, but the one that seemed most discrete from the rest, “Don’t Touch The Ground,” about a young person’s act of vengeance with tragic consequences. The collection’s longest story “Valley Echo” was also strong, and its structure reminded me of Munro’s ability to telescope time.
There is a class division throughout the collection between “the hicks” so feared by Will and his friends, and the down-and-outs themselves– I found myself longing for a connection as in a story like Alexander MacLeod’s “Light Lifting”, which would have shed considerable light on both sides. Though there were other kinds of links, most particularly the Oldsmobile 1955 Rocket 88, which turns up with a few different drivers at its wheel, recurring characters, and repeated expressions about broken knuckles and picking fights, and kicking cows as well.
I got hung up on some of the metaphors– no matter how many times I read the line, “I’ve got fibrous red hair and a jaw tapered like a rugby ball,” I still can’t see what he’s saying. Then there was the line about “wineglass-sized breasts”, and I just don’t really think people should compare breasts to anything. But I underlined good parts too– my favourite passage was, “And she was attracted to him– if he didn’t, for instance, need someone to pull his head from the clouds– then Ray knew why: broken people are drawn to broken people. That’s the love life he had to look forward to with Kelly: a three-legged race.”
There is a bleakness to these stories, a sense of inevitability that Wilson goes to such pains to make clear that he takes us decades into the future, and the future is a lot like now is. In a town like Invermere, nothing ever changes, but Wilson that shows story happens all the same.
October 16, 2011
Not Being on a Boat by Esme Claire Keith
There was so much right about Esme Claire Keith’s novel Not Being on a Boat that I was planning to review it here anyway, even though there was one thing quite wrong. The one thing being its length, of course, and that being trapped in the mind of her Mr. Rutledge for 350 pages was just too much, but that it was so thoroughly too much was because her Mr. Rutledge was so spotlessly executed. A divorced retiree jacked up on the force of his own consumer power, he has bid farewell to the world and boarded the good ship Mariola to sail off into the sunset. Equipped with two tuxedos and a taste for the finer things in life, he’s expecting good value for his money and some fine conversation with the other passengers in the Captain’s Mess.
The devil is in the details, however, all of which Rutledge notices, astute businessman (and borderline autistic) that he is, forever on the lookout for number one. But such details and this perspective doesn’t make for great reading, not 350 pages of it, as we learn about the ship’s laundry procedures, and what’s available on the menu, and the historical facts even Rutledge fast tires of as delivered by guides giving tours at the ship’s ports of call. The flawlessness of Keith’s narrative makes reading really hard-going, though things outside Rutledge’s head are certainly interesting: we receive glimpses of the distopian civilization that Rutledge has left behind him, and the problems come aboard the Mariola when one day a group of passengers and some crew fail to return from a port of call. Suddenly, the ship’s standards begin slipping, supplies are getting low, communications are shut down from the outside world, and the problems of the outside world are creeping in through the portholes.
The novel concludes with an end-of-days scenario that had me furious: 350 pages for this? But as the fury wore off, I decided to write about the book anyway because Keith’s control of her project was so impeccable, and also because I’m not sure there was any other way she could have ended it. Not Being on a Boat is a marvelous satire of consumer culture and luxury tourism, so smart and funny, deadpan and sharp. (It is also beautifully designed by kisscut book design, including the map of the boat I discovered under the back flap). And sometimes a flawed book really can still portend the debut of a really great writer, so though “less is more” would really go a long way here, I’d say Keith is one to keep an eye on, and I’d check out what she comes up with next.
October 12, 2011
The Big Dream by Rebecca Rosenblum
Though I am far too close to Rebeccca Rosenblum to be able to give an unbiased assessment of her new short story collection The Big Dream, I’m going to let my bias fly and tell you that this is a wonderful book. A collection of linked stories about employees at the struggling publishing company Dream Inc., The Big Dream begins with tech support staff scurrying underfoot like rodents and then moves up the corporate food chain– call centre staff anticipating lay-offs, a cafeteria worker who can’t get it together, a new-hire who casts the jadedness of the design staff in terrible perspective, the retired CEO who can’t accept that it’s over, a lusty encounter between the CFO and Senior Marketing Manager, tension between the top execs, and the final story, “This Weather I’m Under” about a VP charged with firing an entire department as her mother lays dying in the hospital.
The entire collection reminded me of a line from Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything: “It’s funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy.” Though there’s not a lot of enjoyment going on in The Big Dream, but certainly, Rosenblum shows that our lives are what we bring to work every day. It’s the personal calls we take at our desks, the way decorate our cubes, what’s in our lunch bags, and hidden in our drawers, and in our coats, and tights, shoes that pinch, and our dental emergencies too. It’s in the camaraderie between office-mates, the shared language, inside jokes, and institutions.
Me interviewing Rebecca at her book launch last month.
My favourite story is “Research”, a story of libreation about a woman who shows up to work one day to discover her entire department has been laid-off and is suddenly left to her own devices. She devotes her research to discovering her office building– its incredibly topography (which is always changing– cubes go up, cubes come down), and the floors above and below her own that she’s never seen before– the modern office has never been seen through such eyes before, and with such reverence. I love the sex scenes in “Loneliness”, which are so perfect. I’m uncomfortable with the Russian boy who masturbates into a sock in “Complimentary Yoga”, but only because I’m a prude, and I’m amazed by how thoroughly he’s been created. “How to Keep Your Day Job” is a wonderful story in second person, the exhausting tale of a fall down a flight of stairs. I love the ending of “After the Meeting”, in which a group of co-workers assemble after their entire department has been dismissed, and they have to consider what they really have in common anymore. I know the predicament of the tech support guy with an abscessed tooth who dreams of dental coverage and is even entitled to it, except that he’s not been given his three-month review and the company really has no intention of making him permanent staff.
The backdrop is bleak, but the conversation is funny. In this fascinating look at the cogs that really run the corporate machine, Rebecca has written a book that’s even better than her much-praised first collection Once. A must to check out for any cubicle dweller, and also for any reader who likes to marvel at the amazing things the short story can do.
October 5, 2011
Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt
Tessa McWatt writes the strangest novels. I’d read Step Closer in 2009, and found it utterly puzzling; not perfect, but so unlike anything else I was reading at the time that it struck a chord and stayed with me, the way she experimented with narrative and form to challenge the limits of fiction and story. Her latest novel Vital Signs is just as odd, and just as much a puzzle. It begins with a husband whose wife is wearing an electrode cap, having her brain scanned, and it dawns on him that he is not worthy of her. And we are to take from this that the idea has never occurred to him before the novel’s first sentence, that in all the years underlying this novel’s relatively brief time span, that he’d never considered this dynamic. But it’s hard to take him at his word, because he’s a narrator who doesn’t even know his own story, let alone his own self.
Michael is the kind of husband who’s always loved his wife best at a kind of distance. (I’d mentioned that McWatt’s previous book reminded me of Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife. It ain’t got nothing on how this one does.) He’s attracted by the darkness of her skin when he first meets her, and waits for weeks to discover where she actually comes from, because he prefers the allure of mystery. An allure that is all but extinguished when his exotic wife is transferred to a domestic setting, and sets to work keeping his house and rearing his children. Michael’s disappointment is only added to when his design career doesn’t take off as he expected, and though he does well enough, so many dreams remain unrealized. His desperation for more finds an outlet in a cliched affair with a young colleague, which ends after too many years of her wanting more than he can give.
When Michael’s wife Anna is diagnosed with an aneurysm, the history of his marriage becomes stirred up in the present. He knows there is a chance his wife could die, and he is anxious to confess his sins to her. But this is complicated by Anna’s medical problems, which have left her with a mangled, near-indecipherable way of communicating. The words themselves are clear, but put together, they are nonsense, or else they are stories of things she believes are true that have actually never happened.
And yet, Michael feels there is secret meaning to what she says, that she knows more than she lets on. He begins to find himself communicating with her better than he has in years, and he uses his own skills in designing pictograms to tell her things he’s never been able to put into words. The reader finds, however, that he’s really just slipping into the same old patterns, lusting after his wife when she is away from him, exoticizing her character. He imagines the dressings that will be wrapped around her head after brain surgery: “[the nurse] will wrap it once, twice, more times around Anna’s head, and my wife will resemble an Egyptian nomad.”
Puzzles aside (and there are plenty. McWatt is attempting to answer the question, “What is a mind?” after all. The novel contains actual representations of Michael’s pictograms, and I confess to poring over the novel’s ending and still not really understanding what happened. Though perhaps this is the point– that Anna gets it, and this is all that matters), this is a novel about marriage and family. A decidedly bleak novel about marriage and family, and Michael’s ambivalence toward his wife and children pointedly demonstrates the desperate underside of love.
October 2, 2011
Outside the Box by Maria Meindl
My friend Maria Meindl has written one of the best books I’ve read this year in Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, The Grandmother I Thought I Knew, and it’s a book that proves fascinating on all different kinds of levels. First, Meindl’s book is a history of magazines and radio broadcasting in Canada during the mid-2oth century, demonstrated by the experiences of Mona Gould who made her entire career as a freelancer in poetry, copy-writing, feature-writing, radio broadcasting, and column-writing between the 1930s and the 1960s. She wrote for publications including Saturday Night and Chatelaine, worked as a publicist for the Red Cross during WWII, was affected by the split between commercial and literary writing that took place during the 1950s, published two books of poetry, and her most famous poem “That Was My Brother” in included in anthologies and textbooks to this day. In her radio broadcasts, she’d have to find subtle ways to work word of her program’s sponsor into her scripts. At times, Gould was published in the same periodicals as poets as notable as PK Page and Margaret Avison, but never achieved the same prominence herself, and from this failure to remarkably ascend, her story has a great deal more to tell about the wider world of publishing and broadcasting in her time than those of those whose experiences were so singular.
Which is not to say that Mona Gould was not remarkable or singular. At her best and worst, there was no one else quite like her, and Meindl has done a tremendous job of portraying such a complicated woman and the ambivalence involved in family relationships. Though she certainly had the resources at her disposal– Outside the Box is not just Mona’s story, but is also the story of Maria’s years-long efforts to catalogue Mona’s archives for the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. Boxes upon boxes she’d inherited after her grandmother’s death, and she writes about how the boxes were conspicuous in the archives– everything slung into boxes willy-nilly, the boxes themselves tatted and from anywhere, and the papers within covered with dust and cat-hair, and she’d discover open tubs of vaseline, and on the back of one pile of of papers was stuck a colostomy bag. The boxes were a mess, and cataloguing them often appeared an impossible task. More burden than gift, as her grandmother had so often seemed to be to Maria. And yet there was richness to be found, and a Mona Gould to be discovered who was distinct from the alcoholic, mean-spirited woman she remembered as having come between her parents in their marriage. Letters written to lifelong friends, papers that demonstrated that Mona had worked hard for her success and it had not simply appeared to her, as she sometimes spun it. That this woman who put herself above feminism and craved approval from men had battled discrimination throughout her career. Maria had been aware that her grandmother had been something of a liar, but the truth behind these stories is often more fascinating than she’d ever imagined.
The book also has much to say to a society so fixated on the cult of personality, celebrity, which Meindl shows is not an altogether modern phenomenon. It is likely that Mona Gould worked as hard on cultivating her “brand” as she did her writing (though, obviously, she would not have put it that way), craving attention and admiration, and in the end, she’d prove a victim of society’s fickleness, and to the changingness of fashion.
Ultimately, however, Outside the Box is a story of inheritance, of coming to terms with where we’ve come from and who we are. In exquisite prose and with a fascinating mastery of chronology, Meindl makes this her own story as much as Mona’s, the story of how becoming settled in her own life and happiness required her to make peace with her family’s past, to unpack the metaphoric baggage that was as heavy as all those boxes and boxes her grandmother had left her.
September 27, 2011
Suitable Precautions by Laura Boudreau
There was a period in which Laura Boudreau and I were both enrolled in the same creative writing program at UofT, though due to me being a hermit, we never met up that often. So I must say that I know the stories of Laura Boudreau considerably better than I know Laura Boudreau herself– I remember reading “Strange Pilgrims” in The New Quarterly, the strange sad story of love with a mailman, and there was her Journey Prize-nominated story “The Dead Dad Game”, which I described as “a young person’s perspective on a broken world, and that world is realized with such humour, poignancy and quirky charm.”
So I thought I knew what to expect with Boudreau’s first book, the story collection Suitable Precautions, but it seems that Laura Boudreau writes to thwart expectations. Which I discovered when I read her book whose stories refused to be pinned down and be any one thing. Yes, we have “The Dead Dad Game”, which is just as good upon rereading, just your standard tale of two half-siblings lying on their father’s grave seeking out good vibrations (as the urging of the siblings’ one surviving parent), after which the creepy neighbour’s pot-bellied pig is maimed in a collision so that the siblings have to create apologetic chalk drawings.
For the first time here, I read her story “The Vosmak Geneology”, about the daughter of the daughter of alleged immigrants, whose mother becomes brain injured by a falling picnic table, loses the capacity for abstract thought or imaginings, then eventually creates a phenomenally popular series of children’s books, factually based upon the life of our narrator who spends her time doing homework in the window of a gypsy’s. “The Meteorite Hunter” about a divorced father who doesn’t quite rue his sorry past, but certainly ruminates upon it as he drives with his stranger daughter to visit a man who’s reported to be able to detect meteorites where they fall (and of course, what father and daughter find that their destination is not what they’d expected).
So what I mean by this is that Laura Boudreau’s stories are not “about” just any one thing, but rather they’re about story, about narrative, about the way a writer starts in one place and ends up in another. I mean, speaking of destinations not expected, that none of these stories will take you where you think you’re on your way to, that these are wild sprawling narratives, and yet Boudreau’s writing is so absolutely controlled. There is a tightness, a deliberateness to the way that she makes the jump from even once sentence to another a determined leap like, “I remember seeing a man in a paper gown masturbating in the hallway. We stayed for lunch.”
In terms of tightness, deliberateness, there is nothing else like Boudreau’s command of the first person voice, however. She does young people so well, in “The Dead Dad Game”, and also in “Poses”, which manages to be a story about a young girl posing for an internet pornographer but also be hilarious. I think my favourite story of the collection is “The D&D Report”, which is another of Boudreau’s stories that start somewhere and end up somewhere else, and manages to have years pass effortlessly as its narrator goes from slacker-lifeguard with a yearning for med. school to a doctor with a husband whose whole life is built on uncertain foundations.
Suitable Precautions is a curious book, the kind of book I had to talk about with somebody else as I read it, because there was so much to say. It’s the kind of collection that might appeal to another short story writer, Carolyn Black, who remarked in her interview with me, “For me, now, writing that explains everything requires a good deal of patience, if only because I’ve read so much of it; writing that resists explication seems beautiful and true.”
