January 18, 2011
The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young (and Betty Draper)
Phyllis Brett Young’s 1960book The Torontonians is not necessarily to be read as a stunning example of the novel form. The satire and irony have been rendered most unsubtle in the years since its first publication, so that The Torontonians reads more like Cyra McFadden’s The Serial than a remarkable work of literature. Remarkable, however, The Torontonians most certainly is when it is read for its feminist content and Toronto setting. It’s a fun read too, and in places very funny.
Published three years before Betty Friedan’s book, The Torontonians is The Feminine Mystique put to fiction, except that Young makes clear what most modern readers of The Feminine Mystique miss: the new woman problem is not so much with the domestic sphere itself, but rather with what consumerism has done to it. Women have never had it so good, except that their labour has been alienated from production via labour saving devices, which don’t actually save labour but just create more jobs to do. And then they’re expected to be fulfilled by the material goods that decorate their houses, and adorn their yards, and when they fail to be, nobody can imagine what could possibly have gone wrong. In its critique of consumer society, Young’s novel anticipates Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
The Torontonians also employs that setting so familiar from Atwood: the city of Toronto. London’s creeping here too, as Karen Whitney’s home on the city’s outskirts overnight becomes the centre of suburban Rowanwood (which was modelled on Leaside). One of the most enduring images of the novel is the Whitney’s buckweed lawn, which they’re forced to spend a summer painstakingly installing because they can’t afford to lay down sod but also realize their neighbours are running out of patience with their uncultivated grass. Rowanwood is the kind of neighbourhood in which a house with just one bathroom is frowned upon for dragging down the market value of the others.
In her novel, Young paints a picture of Toronto in the midst of transition, juxtaposing the suburbs against downtown where Karen had grown up in the Annex neighbourhood. She writes of a Toronto elite (“the Masseys and the masses”) who were all familiar through family connections, and attended the same private schools. But the city, howeer constant in its hum, is always changing. With some of her scenes set against pre-CN Tower aerial views, she shows that no one ever steps into the same city twice.
Young’s novel is a historical document, and deliberately so, as as the book’s introduction makes clear. She thought it was important that 
writers document the way people lived then, and so we get a story in which doctor and patient both smoke during an examination at the Medical Arts Building at Bloor and St. George. We read about a city in which the subway was new, New Canadians were usually Hungarian, downtown high rise apartments were novel (and an exotic dream for the bored housewives of Rowanwood). There is the Peyton Place-ish suburban sex too, and a very funny line about who’d do what in Loblaws, but Young shows restraint here. By the end of the book it is quite clear that her people are not caricatures, and the narrative rises above plot cliches.
(The Torontonians is also very, very Betty Draper, and is the first Mad Men-ish book of a few I will be reading in the next while. The others are The Collected Works of John Cheever, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. Any other suggestions?)
January 12, 2011
Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book ed. Sean Manning
For two days this week, I was swept up in the pleasure of Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, which is edited by Sean Manning. A celebration of the book as object, of general bookishness which is a catch-all term including, “the tactile sensation of turning a page, the sight of my bookmark inching closer to the finish, then finally closing the book, hearing the whomp… the sense of accomplishment that brings” (from Manning’s introduction). I was certainly this book’s idea reader, but I loved it for more reasons than that I was simply predestined to do so.
This anthology was made by its diversity. The effect of this, however, was that it always took a few paragraphs to settle into each essay, each one so distinct from whatever had come before. These jarring entrances aside, it was always a pleasure to discover something new– writers male and female, old and young, an ex-solider and an ex-mobster, and even two essays in translation (yes, yes, yes! In particular because these are from China and Iran, and books as objects in these places have their own kind of stories to tell). Each essayist approaching their subject matter different, where the book itself had come from, how they brought their essay around to its point. Some of these were books lost to time or history, or books still cherished; books that had been read to death or books never read at all. Many essays begin with a portrait of the essayist as a young reader, perusing her parents’ bookshelves, and the books come to delineate family relationships, broken or otherwise. For some writers, the book in question is the only one they’ve ever kept, or else it’s just one in a vast library that fills entire houses (or two, in the case of Francine Prose).
I hadn’t heard of most of the 30 contributors to this anthology, and I knew of about as many of the books they’d brought, and yet this did not diminish my reading experience one bit. The essays were that good, and the subject matter so universal that it all resonated with me, familiar or otherwise. Some of the more notable contributors included Ray Bradbury, of course (whose piece, truthfully, was one of the weaker in the bunch), Francine Prose, Joyce Maynard, Elissa Schappell, Karen Green (who is the widow of David Foster Wallace, which I wouldn’t mention, except that it’s what her essay is about), and Karen Joy Fowler (who wrote the Jane Austen Book Club).
I loved Francine Prose’s “Andersen’s Fairy Tales”, which is about tracking down a disappeared book from childhood, about “the real book” as opposed to its impostors (which are available for sale on the internet, of course). Joyce Maynard’s “The Bible” tells her father’s story via a book she never read and doesn’t have now. And oh, I could go on and on about Julia Glass’s “Roar and More”, which is decades long– the first book she ever asked her parents to buy because she saw it read on Captain Kangaroo, and it so stayed with her that she wrote it into her own novel, and her quest for permission to quote the material introduces her to the book’s author, but only for a fleeting moment. Glorious, Anne Fadiman-esque, which is the highest compliment to be bestowed to this sort of thing.
And yes, “The Portable Dorothy Parker” by J. Courtney Sullivan, about all the girls just like her who show up in New York wanting to write like Dorothy Parker but have a different kind of life. And oh my, Rabih Alameddine and “The Carpet Baggers”, which was a novel he had in his childhood home in Lebanon– the book is lost when the house is destroyed by war, but he connects with it a few more times in a brilliant case of book fatedness. Finally, Jonathan Miles’ “Ship of Fools”, which had belonged to the mother he did everything to break away from, and then she was lost to him for good through Alzheimer’s Disease.
Books as objects are never just about the books, of course, and so this anthology encompasses the whole wide world. My only criticism of it would be the essays that plead their cases too hard against e-books and e-readers– such defensiveness is unnecessary, because the essays make the point without even trying. A book is a book, and there’s nothing else quite like it.
January 10, 2011
Canada Reads Indies 1: Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
The basic narrative of Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water was more straightforward than I’d been expecting– Truth and Bright Water are, respectively, an American town and a Canadian Indian reservation, side-by-side at the bottom of Alberta. The story takes place in the summer days leading up to the “Indian Days” celebration in Bright Water (which attracts German and Japanese Indian-enthusiasts in particular), from the perspective of a young boy called Tecumseh. His closest companions are his cousin Lum, and his boxer-dog Soldier, the three of them roaming the area with its peculiar topography as familiar as the blue sky that surges from the mountains– mountain and prairie alike, the coulee, naturally occurring stone pillars rising from the river, the incomplete bridge between the two communities, the old church high on the hill about Truth.
One night out on the coulee, Lum and Tecumseh witness a strange woman throwing something in the river, and she appears to throw herself in after it. Closer investigation by the boys turns up a clean white human skull where they’d seen her jump in, but there is no sign of the woman, or the truck she arrived in either. The scene is troubling to both boys in different ways– a recent tragedy has claimed Lum’s mother, and he begins to conflate what happened to her and the woman they saw. Tecumseh is aware that something is not right with Lum, and disturbed by the skull also, but he is unable to articulate his concerns, and his parents are too consumed by their own affairs to notice that anything is wrong.
His parents’ affairs could possibly have something to do with the return of Monroe Swimmer (Famous Indian Artist) to Bright Water. Monroe, who has purchased the church on the hill but has shown himself to no one, has some kind of connection to Tecumseh’s mother. Tecumseh’s parents are separated, and his father continually embarks upon schemes to win back his wife which are about as sensible as his business ventures. Tecumseh’s looking for business ventures of his own, and ends up with a job with the elusive Monroe, who has begun painting the old church to blend in with the landscape.
Of course, the story is not entirely straightforward– there is a ghost, for example, though Tecumseh is not aware that she’s a ghost. In fact, Tecumseh is not aware of many things, which requires the reader to question on any straightforwardness the novel might suggest. But on a straightforward level, the novel still works, unlike, say, King’s Green Grass Running Water, which really requires a decoder ring to be properly understood. It’s only half the story, of course, but it’s still worth noting that this is a proper tale of a boy and his dog.
The novel is straightforward, however, the same way that Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt is straightforward. Woven into its fabric are hooks, feathers and other unusual objects. The shapes of the quilt tell its stories, but the stories aren’t quite what they seem. Tecumseh struggles to decipher the quilt as he does the whole world around him– none of his questions are ever answered; his parents keep disappearing; the bruises on Lum’s body are clearly inflicted by his father, but nobody does anything about them; and what about the woman having her hair cut in his mother’s salon who is convinced that Marilyn Monroe was an Indian?
The whole book could be explained away by allegory, and when I read it in graduate school, that is probably what I did. The symbiotic relationship of Truth and Bright Water showing that recent political borders are arbitrary, and that even Indian/non-Indian comes with a similar lack of distinctions– the Indians play up their stereotypical culture for the tourists, but their “Indianness” is far from King’s sole preoccupation with these characters. Or does glossing over such distinctions make matters worse? Famous Indian Artist Monroe Swimmer is painting out the church from the prairie landscape, obliterating the past (after years of working in museums and painting Indians back into the picture in the landscapes he “restored”): “Seeing that it has gone is one thing. Finding it now that it has disappeared is something else.” After all, that history can be so swept away is really just an illusion. Really, nothing is straightforward at all, and such subtle complexity is the novel’s great strength.
Truth and Bright Water is not without its weaknesses, however. Tecumseh’s limited point of view leaves too many gaps to make the novel as satisfying as I would have liked it to be, or perhaps the trouble is too many plots to be brought together effectively. Though the gaps have their purpose, and the too many plots is analogous to crazy shape of Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt, and that’s how life is. The subtlety of the novel also works against it– one could finish it and think they’d read a middling story about a boy and his dog. Though I enjoyed the story and found the ending particularly sad, its overall effect upon me was a bit underwhelming.
I’m glad I read it though, sort of a cheat of a reread, as I barely remember reading it in the first place. Truth and Bright Water requires attention and close reading that I didn’t apply to it before, so I’m grateful for the opportunity this time around. A very good book that gives the rest of the line-up quite a lot to live up to.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
January 5, 2011
Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Confession: I’m not especially crazy about Jackson Brodie, the sometime-PI of Kate Atkinson‘s exceptional crime novels. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the guy either, but that I’ll automatically read any book he appears in has far less to do with the man than his creator. Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language, I only turned to crime (fiction) when she started writing it, and her crime fiction is as good as anything she ever wrote, including my favourite of her novels, the award-winning Behind the Scene at the Museum. The latest in her Jackson Brodie series, Started Early, Took My Dog, definitely doesn’t disappoint.
The novels in the Brodie series definitely stand alone, though first-time readers will find themselves wading through some treacherous back story. Jackson Brodie is the link between the books, not so much as the solver of the crimes in question, but as a magnet for incident, and co-incident. Stories have always happened around him, beginning with the murder of sister in childhood, which becomes his most formative experience.
In Started Early, Took My Dog, Jackson is living even further than usual on the fringes of the law, still recovering from the fraudster wife who stole his money, still pining for Louise Monroe up in Scotland, still connected to Julia who knows him better than anyone, and striving to be a good father to his children in spite of everything else that has happened.
But of course, his story remains on this novel’s periphery. At its centre is Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police officer who, in a moment of weakness, ends up with a child that isn’t her own, and then suddenly finds herself pursued by a variety of unsavoury characters. One of these characters is Jackson Brodie, who’s trying to track down the origins of Hope McMaster, a woman who’d been adopted thirty-five years before whose story is vaguely connected to Tracy’s through a social worker’s file. As in all of Atkinson’s novels, the past and the present are impossibly intertwined. Who was Hope McMaster? Who is the child in Tracy’s care? What are the Leeds police force still trying to hide after all these years? And who is the strange man who appears to be on Jackson’s trail?
I find reading Kate Atkinson to be a most intoxicating experience– her immersion in her characters’ thoughts, and how she does twists and turns like nobody’s business, and just when I think I’ve got it figured out, she twists it around again. She works coincidence in this way that makes me marvel at the world– not relying on it as a plot device as bad writers do, but instead coincidence is her entire preoccupation, her books are an examination of it. Her books are funny, smart, never saccharine. And they are dark, unflinching in their assertion that the world is a dangerous place to be a woman, the stories violent, gruesome at times, highlighting injustice, but then Atkinson’s narratives culminate in their own kind of justice– goodness triumphs.
So Jackson Brodie lives to fight yet another day, but even more importantly, Kate Atkinson lives to write another book, and how fortunate are we for that.
December 22, 2010
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
I read Barbara Comyns’ book Our Spoons Came From Woolworths strictly for fun, with no intention of blogging about it, but then once it was finished I desperately required somebody to talk about it with. And you will do! I first saw reference to the book at the DoveGreyReader blog, where she didn’t mention the book at all, but it was included in a stack of books about eccentric middlebrow families. The title was memorable. And then Stephany Aulenback at Crooked House included some excerpts as part of her (Having) Babies in Literature Series. I also really liked the pink in the cover, then picked up a copy at the Vic Book Sale in September whose spine had never even been cracked. (For those of you who share my aversion to dogs in books, do note that the cover photo is slightly misleading. There is a dog, but he is actually a fox, and only comes in at the end.)
The book’s copyright page states, “The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty”. Chapter 9 begins, “This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could just fill pages like this: “I am sure it is true,” said Phyllida./ “I cannot agree with you,” answered Norman”… That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people’s books.” Chapter 38 is entitled “The Last Chapter”, and begins, “This is the end of my book, but not the end of my story, which will go on until I die…”
All of which is to say that this novel is a delightful blend of fiction and memoir, made up in a whimsical form whose lightness very nearly belies the rawness of its subject matter. Sophia marries Charles at the age of 21 in 1930s’ London, and they set up house together. (This was when poor people lived on Primrose Hill). Charles is devoted to his painting (and his mother thinks he is a genius) and therefore has an aversion to earning a living, so Sophia supports them both with commercial art work and posing for painters. When she eventually becomes pregnant, Charles (along with his family) blames her for ensnaring him into the mess of domesticity, but Sophia is determined to make their situation work. The chapter of her birth (which is the aforementioned Chapter 10, btw) is brutally awful, but delivered in the matter-of-fact chirpiness that runs through the entire story, whether Sophia is dealing with her botched abortion, her infidelity, her husband’s inattention, their poverty, and the eventual death of her daughter. Oddly enough, this isn’t a depressing story at all, because Sophia never fails to be optimistic, to take notice of the rare happy times, because the entire story is delivered in retrospect, so the self-pity and sadness is glossed over.
What we get then is an unconventionally-structured narrative about unconventionally-structured lives, a fast-paced read from the perspective of a unique and captivating narrator. Hooray for Virago Modern Classics, which brings women’s stories back into print (though from examining their catalogue, I see that ought to go about bringing this one back into print again). Definitely, everything the cover would have you expecting (except the dogs).
December 12, 2010
Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris
Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is one of the best books I’ve read this year, blowing my mind with its gorgeous prose, fascinating facts, stunning narrative, and sheer readability– I was absolutely lost inside it. Which is fitting for a book whose author/narrator implores her reader to: “descend until we lose our bearings, until the landscape merges with the base of the bridge, and the sounds of trains, traffic and the river grow almost indistinguishable from one another. We have reached the city at the centre of the map: let us begin.”
Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.
Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.
Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers […who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.
Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.
Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.
UPDATE: See Harris’ piece from The Toronto Star this weekend, Best kids’ books based in the GTA.
December 5, 2010
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
When I started reading Ann Beattie’s The New Yorker Stories last week, I was concerned I was doing it wrong. I’d never read any of Beattie’s stories before, and this collection of more than 40 stories written over 30 years might have been too much of a good thing. Surely, a collection like this meant to be savoured, dipped in and out of, but as I’m a little short on leisure these days, an overdose was my only option. And after the fact, I’m actually grateful, because these stories are small worlds constructed of tiny gestures, but the cumulative effect was to hit me with a wallop.
Beattie’s stories are very much fixed in their time, cars with make and year, characters listening to Sony Walkmans, a reference in a 1979 story to “a stereo as big as a computer”, a lot of pre-electric Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger playing on stereos, no matter the decade. This element of detail, however, gives the early stories the effect of a bad orange cover design. It wasn’t so much that the stories themselves were dated as were their backdrops, which made the collection difficult to settle into. But one or all of the following things happened: the stories got better, the sets got more modern, and I began to get a real sense of what Beattie’s work is all about (and this final effect is the very best thing, albeit an exhausting thing, about reading more than 40 short stories in a row).
Reading 40 stories in a row also revealed connections between them, providing the sense of what Beattie is all about. Revealing also that she only knows about seven men’s names, which are mostly Richard, that every dog is called Sam, and that dogs in general are a preoccupation. As are marriages gone sour (and there is no marriage that hasn’t), multiple husbands (though not all at once), children of divorce, deadbeats, misfits, and all the lonely people (who are sometimes justifiably so). At least three times, a character without use of a limb tries and fails to use that limb anyway, and is surprised by their failure. Betrayal, deception, sinister trespasses, and the kind of people who’ll break your heart over and over again.
There is a range to how these stories are constructed, many focused on the personal and the immediate, but the later stories in particular taking on a wider scope. In “The Cinderella Waltz”, a woman watches as her ex-husband breaks his boyfriend’s heart as he once did hers (and he’s breaking her daughter’s at the same time)’; in “Girl Talk”, a woman about to give birth confronts the reality of her lover’s family (and of her lover, and her whole life); in “In the White Night”, a couple still grieving the long-ago death of their child enact the inexplicable adjustments a complicated life demands of us: “Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before”.
I thought of Grace Paley’s work as I made my way through this collection, the way her preoccupations became definite, the way her characters all eventually became thrice-married alter-egos of their author. The way that Beattie’s stories were the kind that Paley’s Faith’s father wouldn’t have understood, wondering why she didn’t just write beginnings, middles and endings. Beattie similarly ponders connections to aging parents, and plays also with the metafictional element in her story “Find and Replace”, in which her narrator (who is a writer called Ann) confesses that all her fiction comes from reality:
“‘People don’t recognize themselves. And, in case they might, you just program the computer to replace one name with another. So, in the final version, every time the word Mom comes up, it’s replaced with Aunt Begonia or something.'”
One phrase at the end of “Summer People” goes far to sum up what Ann Beattie’s stories are all about, and how a restive reader might encounter them: “For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That way, the uncertainty would end.” But the uncertainly doesn’t in these stories, and novels these stories aren’t nor do they attempt to be. Here is story for the sake of story, for the sake of truth uncertainty provides. Another line from “Find and Replace” is an extension of this idea, and the very essence of the short story, of their perfection:
“You can’t help understanding. First, because it is the truth, and second, because everyone knows the way things change. They always do, even in a very short time.”
November 29, 2010
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
The 2010 Gillers picked a book out of the blue for me, pushed me to pay it closer attention than I might have otherwise, and the payoff was enormous. This is literary awards at their very, very best (and also makes clear that “what sells” is self-fulfilling prophecy, marketing types take note). I was lucky enough to get my mitts on a Gaspereau Press edition of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, which meant that my book was a book of a book, hand stitched, thick paper, a dust jacket for a paperback. Such care; for me this is “what sells” and I bought it.
I pushed through the story in a way I might not have had the book not been so celebrated. There was a lack of precision in the language, a distance between the reader and the story, and I kept putting the book down and not rushing to pick it up again. But I think this was as the book was intended to be read, a long slow journey without a destination in mind. Because when we arrive at the end of the book, at our destinations, the answers are still not all apparent. By which I mean that if you’re reading to find out what happens next, you’re probably going to find this book disappointing.
An intimacy creeps into the story though, between these people and I, as two fighting sisters drive their ailing father across the country. Sisters are at each others’ throats, banding together only to rally against their father who keeps lighting up cigarettes and forgetting to open the window– the family dynamics are set in motion, and they tell us who these people are and where they’ve come from; we are there. That the sisters have constructed their lives out of pieces, and now they’re older, they’re both discovering that lives are pieces after all. When the narrator discovers her partner with another woman, she goes to be with her father where he’s living with Henry, a family friend. It was at Henry’s where she and her sister spent their childhood summers, on the banks of a lake that had flooded where a town used to be, and being there is to have an awareness of the drowned town, ever-present whether it can be seen or not.
Which serves as a metaphor for the story of her father, who is called Napoleon Haskell, and his relationship to Henry, whose son Owen served with Napoleon in Vietnam. During the summer the narrator spends with her father and Henry, she constructs the story of her father’s past, what happened to Owen, and what had happened to Napoleon to fracture the rest of his life into just pieces of pieces.
Throughout the story, Napoleon is hard at work on crossword puzzles, and these puzzles are an indication as to the novel’s construction. Blanks are filled in from clues, with their correctness not always assured, but the puzzle takes on its own shape anyway. The puzzles pieces include Skibsrud’s prose, sentences with their many, many clauses, as well as allusions to poetry and film, and concludes with a transcript from Napoleon’s testimony of what he witnessed during his time as a soldier. The transcript provides many of the answers the rest of the story had been withholding, and creates an altogether satisfying conclusion to the novel, which doesn’t provide all the answers, but the effect is very much of a whole.
The Sentimentalists is sentimental, unabashedly so, but perhaps if you don’t like sentimental, find a book with another title. Because I liked this book, which portrays the humanness of men at war, particularly during this time when we’re all being brainwashed to believe that “soldier” and “hero” are synonyms. I like what it says about history and story– that the former can never been captured, and the latter has wings of its own. I like the tender gruffness of its men, that love and poetry are what remains, that some things may be irreparable but that doesn’t mean they’re truly broken.
November 25, 2010
Bedtime Story by Robert J. Wiersema
I was afraid to read Robert J. Wiersema’s new novel Bedtime Story because it contains a book within the book, which fascinates me in theory but usually frustrates me when it comes down to actually reading the book(s). Also because the book within that book is a fantasy quest narrative, which is usually a very good sign of a book that’s not for me.
I decided to read the book, however, in spite of my fears, because I have never quite forgotten how much I enjoyed Wiersema’s first novel Before I Wake. Also because it’s a story about a parent/child connection through reading, about the power of literature in childhood, and because Wiersema’s interviews at Kate’s blog and at Steven’s made it seem so interesting.
Christopher Knox is at an impasse– his marriage beyond repair, his eleven year old son at a distance, and he’s been struggling to write his second novel for so long that most people have forgotten he’d ever written a first. When he gives his son a book for his birthday, a used book, and not even Lord of the Rings which the boy had asked him for, it seems a typical misstep– the boy is disappointed, his wife once again has opportunity to reflect that Chris only ever thinks about himself. The book, however, proves surprising, transporting Chris’s son David into its fictional world, which is remarkable for a boy who’s always struggled with reading before.
The problem, of course, comes about when David is literally transported into the fictional realm, leaving his parents and medical experts bewildered by his unresponsiveness. Chris, however, is well-read enough to know that strange things can happen, and suspects that his son’s book is at the the root of what has happened, and so embarks upon a quest to discover the magic spell behind the text that has taken his son, to keep the book from enemy hands (including unscrupulous publishing types), and to find the key to the spell so he can reverse it somehow and return his boy to their metafictional reality.
At the same time, David is undergoing an analogous quest, crossing canyons and mountain ranges in search of the elusive “sunstone”. These passages were short enough that my interest rarely lagged, and made interesting by David’s awareness of his place in the fiction, and how he has to keep others from realizing that he is an imposter. Even more interesting, he is accompanied on his journey by the spirit of a boy who’d read the book before him and similarly fallen under its spell. Unlike the other boy, however, David’s journey continues because all the while his body sits empty at home, his father keeps reading the book, convinced (correctly) that continuing the story is essential to David’s survival.
Lots of interesting things are going on in the text. We are treated to no physical description of Christopher Knox, and his narration is first person while the others characters’ are third, the effect of all this being space for the reader to be enveloped by the story, similar to how David becomes the fictional Daffyd. The novel is also a bit too long, a twist too far, but is conscious of this– in the fictional realm, David remarks upon his fear that the story will keep going forever, questing for the sake of quest, and we can certainly empathize. Wiersema also takes advantage of fiction to make alternative realities possible– Chris’s wife’s Jacqui’s refusal to believe her husband’s theory of what has happened to their son begins to seem preposterous. The book’s magic is so solidly rooted in physical reality that all lines between realism and fantasy are blurred, and genre becomes any extraneous idea.
Bedtime Story is a novel to be enjoyed on multiple levels– a fast-paced thriller, ode to childhood reading, a testament to the power of literature and written word (which is always a kind of magic spell, however benign), a magical escape narrative, a heartening story of father/son relations, and there is murder, mafioso, and a mysterious library as well. It was truly a pleasure to get lost in this one for a while.
November 21, 2010
Lemon by Cordelia Strube
A long time ago, I decided that I’d had enough of youthful protagonists, who are always the smartest character in the room, whose ability to control their own narrative is unlikely for a teenager, whose cool detachment from matters at hand never quite belies a author’s conscious attempt to be writing something more than a young-adult novel, who keep being written into novels that have absolutely no subtext and therefore really don’t qualify as full grown-up novels. (I’m looking at you, Blue van Meer, Lee Fiora, etc. etc..) These characters for whom c0mparisons to Holden Caulfield are always invoked blurbishly, because it’s easy, but so inaccurate and positively blasphemous.
But then there is Lemon, narrator and protagonist of Cordelia Strube’s novel of the same name. A misfit in a broken world where all structures of authority have broken down– at one point, she pains at her friend’s mother’s innocence about what her daughter really gets up to. Lemon scoops ice cream in the food court. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption, her adoptive parents fell apart, and the sanctuary she found with a capable ex-stepmother starts crumbling after the stepmother suffers a breakdown.
Lately, the odd time I stumble onto a high school girl’s twitter feed, I can’t help despairing about what kind of world my daughter is going to have to come of age in. Lemon does nothing to assuage my fears, but her articulation of the problem is heartening– what are we going with a spectrum that moves from “princess” to “porn-star”? With her steel-toe boots and baggy clothing, Lemon is written off as a “dyke” by her classmates, exempting her from the mad scramble for acceptance enacted by her best friend Rossi who has sex with anyone who asks her (and those who don’t bother to), who pretends she likes it to make them feel good about themselves. Who feels utterly awful about herself, and then masturbates on a webcam because a Queen Bee asks her to, and when this gets broadcast all over the internet, discovers she’s been set up for a fall.
Lemon remembers her friend, who “used to be an artist before she was a boytoy”. Whose body was used for handsprings and gymnastics, before it became disposible. She remembers when her classmates didn’t pull weapons on each other, and girls didn’t compete to give blow-jobs, and parents were capable of being a reassuring force.
Lemon is a bleak book, its home and school awfulness augmented by Lemon’s volunteer position in a pediatric cancer ward. Worst of all is that Lemon is simply an onlooker in an age of onlookers, powerless to do anything but just keep walking by, no matter how much what she faces disturbs her. Part of this is also her own survival mechanism– she has numbed herself to loss and pain, determined that by not reacting to anything, she cannot be hurt.
Things get way bad before they even hint at getting better, the narrative confirming all our worst fears about “the world out there”. And yet. Her one critical voice is a kind of beacon of hope, and it’s hilarious, smart and authentic. The world is crumbling around her, but Lemon calls it as she sees it, her point of view deadpan and refreshing. Her point of view is underlined by the books she reads, a gamut from Samuel Richardson to Catherine Cookson. Her mind is stuffed with trivia, which she uses to try to make sense of and provide context for the world around her, and the context is always just a little bit skewed– she’s only sixteen after all, so this youthful protagonist isn’t too good to be true, though a young reader would be less conscious of that then I am (and this is just one of many reasons why this is determinedly an adult novel).
With eight books behind her, Strube is perhaps far enough along in her life and her career to not have her young protagonist be her proxy. Perhaps it takes an experienced author to write young people really well? Though no doubt, there are exceptions to this, and I could encounter them forever, but Lemon is indeed a wonder. It’s deep entrenched in my mind, which is disturbing but fascinating, and I’ll not be forgetting this character any time soon.
Truly, one of the finest books I’ve encountered this year, and ever.
