April 10, 2011
On Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks
Once upon a time, so long ago that Harriet was merely a giant protrusion in an unflattering blouse, I went to see Jessica Westhead read at Pivot, fell in love with her short stories, and ever since have been looking forward to her new book And Also Sharks. And because Jessica is my friend, and because I read her stories with joy, with such utter abandon, I can’t possibly post a straightforward review, but I can say this: my friend Jessica Westhead’s new book And Also Sharks is wonderful.
The book met my litmus test for hilarity on page 3, which is that I started laughing hysterically and woke up my husband to read him the line: “I don’t know if I would’ve said before all this that she was nice enough to give you the shirt off her back, but when you stop to think about it, that’s a lot to ask from anyone.” This from the storyWe Are All About Wendy Now, about how a group of office colleagues rallies around one of their own when she becomes ill. Eunice, the narrator, tries to be magnanimous about her colleagues, who are not always that nice to her, and about their intentions towards the sick woman (Wendy), but the story belies her true feelings. Eunice also lives alone with her sick cat and subsists on a diet of ham sandwiches, but she has a solidity to her that the other characters lack, a sense of herself. What she doesn’t have much of is a sense of humour, which makes this absurd story as delivered through her voice so perfectly deadpan, hilarious.
The pathetic are rendered with sensitivity here, and embued a sense of worth and purpose not apparent to the outside world. There is virtue in understatement, in reserve, in being a misfit. And though Westhead’s touch is light, her stories aren’t– the world through these characters eyes is the world as it is, and these strange and wonderful characters take it it on everyday, brave, weird, and ever-unflinching.
April 7, 2011
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner
There are no innocent bystanders in Zsuszi Gartner’s mind-blowing short story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. A car shoots down the street in the title story with a “fifteen year old future ex-con at the wheel”, white trash is skewered along with the middle class in “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, you start to believe the Marmot that the parents of the kidnapped child had it coming in “Investment Results May Vary”, and even the tragedy at the end of “Better Living…” is a kind of quid quo pro. Gartner’s stories in third-person (and in first person plural) take on “types” of people, and no one escapes the bitter scrutiny. Her first-person narrators examine their surroundings on the same level as everybody else, down in the trenches, were the trenches the whole world.
(One moment of grace: the Japanese exchange student appearing riding out of a ravine on the back of an ancient tortoise. Twice. But then I have a thing for literary tortoises.)
The stories document moments on the edge of the apocalypse, a Vancouver I recognize from Douglas Coupland. Apocalypse is fitting for a city on the edge of the world, whose houses perch on the edges of mountains (which keep devouring the houses in one story). The collection begins with “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, about what happens to a suburban cul-de-sac when a piece of prototypical white trash moves in, puts his truck up on blocks, and starts to make the neighbourhood women carnivorous. Narrated as field notes after the fact, by the men whose wives are all now pregnant and straddling motorcycles, the story traces the cul-de-sac’s descent after the throwback appears in such an evolved population.
(“From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. ‘Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stephen quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, ‘maybe’s trying to reinvent the wheel.’)
In “Once, We Were Swedes”, Peter Pan gets literal as a burnt-out foreign correspondent hits early menopause when her husband regresses to adolescence, all against the backdrop of an urban wasteland. In “Floating Like a Goat”, a failed-artist-turned-actuary writes her daughter’s teacher after teacher chastises daughter for failing to have her people’s feet touch the ground in her drawings. “Investment Results May Vary” is narrated by the unhinged and desperate, one being that kidnapping marmot I mentioned earlier.
In “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion”, said daughters disappear leaving footprints in the snow (and here, like the last story, is another parable about wanting what you can’t have). I become semi-hysterical with laughter upon the thought of Susanna, the natural-born little sister (Oops!) who wants “to be a Chinese daughter more than anything else… And in the evenings, while her father diligently quizzed Huan Yue at at the kitchen table about Chinese history… Susanna was banished ot the den with Betty and Veronica Double Digest and a mug of Ovaltine”. And then that image at the end, “little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks”. Oh my.
“What Are We Doing Here” is a Toronto story, about an obnoxious woman drunk on her fabulousness who finds herself at a party that isn’t what she promised everyone it would be. “Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika” is the story I had the most trouble with, but upon rereading it, it had a new poignancy, knowing what I knew. (And yes, there is poignancy. It’s not just the girl on the tortoise. Gartner is scathing, but her world is also painful in its loveliness). “Mister Kakami” is a riff on Heart of Darkness. “We Come in Peace” is angels on a mission to earth to discover the experiences of the senses, inhabiting the bodies of five teenagers on another cul-de-sac.
And yes, it is fitting that suburban dead ends recur throughout the collection, and Sponge Bob underpants, and I even found myself positing connections between the Lucy in the first story and the Lucy in the final. These are not connected stories, but they fit together in a way that creates something altogether new as a whole.
I’ve got two conflicts of interest here. The first is that my husband is currently working on a project with Zsuzsi Gartner, so there was one reason I was hoping to like book. Second (and more pressing, to me) reason was that I read the final story “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” last year in The New Quarterly, and it blew me away. I’d never read anything like it before, and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since. And I’ve been wanting it to measure up to my amazing expectations.
And it has. And now let me tell you about “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”, which I reread tonight and finished stunned and stuttering expletives. (No, but first, let me tell you that whatever these stories are about doesn’t half tell you what their impact is. That Gartner’s stories start with premises, but they deliver. She holds nothing back, writes fearlessly, and goes where you can’t quite believe she will.)
“Better Living…” is the story of a recovering terrorist, member of the support group (and it’s absurd, I know, but it’s perfectly executed) who is fighting her urges as she tries to play by the rules, taking on city hall bureaucracy on install traffic calming devices on her street. Because she is thinking of her son, how speeding cars violate that sanctity of the life she’s made: “She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to do for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.”
We see the recovering terrorist in her three guises: suburban mother, host of a militant call-in gardening show (“Gardening is like warfare, and it’s time for you to call in the troops”), and 12-step groupie. And when worlds collide, as they do, there is the inevitable explosion, and it ripped my heart out, both times. And then I immediately wanted to read it again to find out exactly how Gartner had made it happen.
April 3, 2011
Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope
In her very strange book Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow notes that Barbara Pym doesn’t so much write a lot about tea as 
that English novelists fixate on tea in general. Solow also writes that one hoping to learn more about the Pymmian universe could do with reading Joanna Trollope, which is the reason I decided to pick up Trollope’s new novel Daughters-in-Law. In which cups of tea are poured throughout, the ceremony never illustrated as quotably as it is by Pym, but how could it be? But yes, still, the tea at all signals perfect Englishness and is absolutely delightful.
Though Trollope writes of Pymmian class concerns, her work lacks the undercurrents that make Barbara Pym so subtly literary. This, however, also means that to read Daughters-in-Law this week was to escape into a world where plot dominates, and it was entirely easy to becoming altogether lost, which was a treat considering the week that I’d had. A double treat, actually, because I’ve had such a problem with commercial fiction since becoming a more demanding reader– is it too much to ask for accessible but not bad? And as I read through Daughters-in-Law, I kept coming up to intersections where lesser writers would turn off onto cliched avenues, but Joanna Trollope missed them every time.
Cliched characters are avoided too (for the most part) by Trollope presenting her story from multiple points of view, and so we see the impulsive, self-centred mother-in-law Rachel from her own perspective and gain sympathy for her situation. That she has devoted her life to her family, to making her home the centre of her family’s life, a rambling bohemian nest in Suffolk where her husband paints birds in his studio, and she conducts cooking classes in her kitchen. Her position as the family’s centre has never been challenged, even with her two elder sons married, as one has married a woman whose family is abroad, and the other has no family at all. When her youngest marries a girl whose centre is eternally fixed on the self, however, friction is inevitable and explosions ensue.
Trollope writes with assurance of modern life– Pymmian and “old fashioned” aren’t necessarily synonyms, and I don’t think a curate turns up once. The youngest son Luke is forced to kick his cocaine habit before Charlotte will go out with him, however. And though Rachel and her husband Anthony live without a care on their inherited wealth, their children are all slightly constrained by housing prices. Trollope also writes matter-of-factly of one character’s experience with post-partum depression, which is incidental to the plot, life having gone on since the occurrence (as life often tends to do).
She also doesn’t have to rely on adultery for this novel about marriage and family relationships to progress, which is not to say that adultery itself is a cliche, but it usually is as portrayed in fiction. To write an an entire novel so compelling about people who (for the most part) behave quite decently is no small feat. And also, for that matter, Pymmish. It abounds!
April 1, 2011
Finding the Words , edited by Jared Bland
I once changed my entire life on account of an essay from the PEN Canada Anthology Writing Away, and I simply adored the most recent, Writing Life. So you can say that I’ve got a strong attachment to these anthologies, and so accordingly have been wondering what one would be were it not edited by the late Constance Rooke. In the latest, Finding the Words, I have my answer: it’s a different kind of creature, but still packed with inspiring, provocative writing, and proceeds of the books sales go to the same great cause.
My favourite essay was “How to Swim in a Sea of Shit” by Karen Connelly, about how the novel still matters. She writes with humour, and a light touch, and then her piece shifts effortlessly to the lessons she has learned from “writers in countries where writing words is an essential act of courage”. I loved Emma Donoghue’s “Finding Jack’s Voice”, with reflections on the processes through which children find their way to language; Lee Henderson’s “On Tuition Row” about corporate English, and how instead he tries “to ride the old roads of English”; Stephanie Nolen about the women in the Congo who gave her their words about their experiences as rape survivors in that war-wracked country; Michael Winter on the veil that falls and renders fiction as fact, or vice versa. Elizabeth Hay, Annabel Lyon and Lisa Moore write about finding their way into new novels. David Chariandy writes about not being at home at home, a theme of exile also touched upon by Rawi Hage. In “Affricates”, Richard Poplak asks, assuming land has a mother tongue, what language does the northern part of South Africa speak?
The book’s theme was too vague for the anthology to be cohesive. It’s the separate riffs on a concrete idea that I’ve always liked about the best anthologies, the PEN ones in particular, but this riffing on an idea that really didn’t mean anything in the first place kept the essays from banging together and illuminating one another, creating those fascinating intersections I love so much. So Finding the Words is a book that’s not necessarily more than the sum of its parts, but the sum still manages to be outstanding.
March 26, 2011
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
I’ve lately aimed to avoid the “this meets that” construction in my book reviews, but this one I really want to share: Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English is Emma Donoghue’s Room meets Lord of the Flies. Told from the perspective of Harrison Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanian immigrant living in the wilds of London, Kelmen’s first novel is the story of six months in a community wracked by gang violence, knife crime, drug abuse, poverty and other urban blights. Through the eyes of Harrison, however, we also see its spots of beauty– the delight of riding the tube, how the wind gusts at the base of the tower blocks, the doggy personalities of local unsavoury characters’ canine companions, the peculiar quirks of local language (and now I’ve just realized that the book’s cover features dual imagery, and now it’s making me cross-eyed). In particular, Harrison is attracted to the pigeon he feeds covertly from his balcony, and seems to serve as the kind of protecting force that he is otherwise quite lacking.
This is a braver book than Room, which sanitized the experience of its young protagonist. Kelman doesn’t soften blows, though Harrison’s is a refreshing perspective upon stories which are so familiar from the news. He is wide-eyed, taking in his new home without context, though even he recognizes that there is nothing ordinary about the blood on the pavement from the dead boy who was stabbed. (“The dead boy’s mamma was guarding the blood. She wanted it to stay, you could tell. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away, but she wouldn’t let it.” Um, and this is on the first page. Regardless of the upliftingness of Harrison’s perspective, the story doesn’t get easier than this. Consider yourself forewarned, but don’t necessarily be deterred.)
The most ordinary facts of childhood take place in extraordinary places, just as Donoghue made quite clear in her novel. Harrison and his friends play games, run fast, he holds hands with his girlfriend, and get into innocent mischief. He fights with his older sister, wants to please his mother, and longs for his father and baby sister who are still back in Ghana. However the CSI-styled games he plays with his friend get him into trouble over his head– his clumsy efforts to solve the murder of the dead boy attract the wrong kind of attention, and soon childhood games and real-life thuggery are entangled in irrevocable ways. (Kelman also shifts perspective a little bit at the end of the novel, similar to what happens at the end of Lord of the Flies*, to show that real-life thuggery itself is an extension of childhood games).
Problems with the book are worth mentioning: yes, there are paragraphs narrated by the pigeon, which is kind of unfathomable (“don’t let the pigeon drive the bus!”), but it’s only about 1% of the whole book, so don’t let it throw you off. I was also slightly unnerved about Ghanian slang delivered via a white writer, no matter how much he knows about working class communities, but part of this my problem and that issues of cultural appropriation are constantly under negotiation. In my mind, Kelman’s perspective was altogether convincing and issues of authenticity should be debated by somebody who isn’t me.
Pigeon English is a book a lot like its cover. Not that it will necessarily make you cross-eyed, but that it turns into something different the longer you look at it. That perception is always a matter of perspective, and in Harrison Opoku, Stephen Kelman has delivered an especially “lovely” one.
(*I know a lot about Lord of the Flies, because I wrote an essay on it in 1996. )
March 13, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 5: Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady
There were two stories in Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind that ended so unsatisfyingly that I was able to perfectly understand the sentiment of those people who say they don’t like reading short stories. I like stories that are a kernel of a bigger idea, stories which (however ambiguously) contain all the answers to any questions about what happened before or what’s going to happen next, but one of these ended with a boy about to descend down a slope whose precariousness may or may not kill him. I mean, it’s a testament to the story that I cared so much either way, but still, I thought, come on now
But it is a testament to this book’s all-round wonderfulness that it was these two stories that were linked to stories that came later in the collection, stories that answered my questions about precarious slopes, and invested their characters with whole other dimensions. And then the other stories, the ones that stood on their own– they stood so well, so perfectly contained and yet entirely expansive.
It is also a testament to this book’s all-round wonderfulness and alleged funniness that it met my personal funniness benchmark, which is that I was compelled to read two pages of it to my husband beside me in bed while I laughed so hard that tears ran down my cheeks. This was from “In Disguise as the Sky”, a story that otherwise was not particularly funny, but no matter. It was the part about “day-cake”, and what “muffin” means, and “the sudden appearence of a tall woman with large breasts screaming ‘muffin'”.
A woman who has just met her fiance’s brawling, sprawling family and is now travelling with them through Cape Breton on a road-trip gets out of the car at one point and looks out at the ocean: “She didn’t know if this was beautiful or not”. Which is the kind of response a reader will have to these stories, with their moments of tenderness amidst ugliness, humour and desparation, their ribald gentility. A character like Cookie Sloane, a cross-eyed, drunken, lumbering thug, and how he managed to make the line, “I’m a known snatch-sniffer” kind of charming. When he smiles with his dirty teeth, and said, “God love ya, dear!” and I kind of wanted to jump his cross-eyed bones. I’m really not sure if Cookie is beautiful, but Coady makes me understand why Bess thinks that he is.
I was fairly sure I was going to love this book, which surely benefited from being championed by the exuberant Sheree Fitch whose exuberance was entirely justified– it was a pleasure to read this book from start to finish. Many of these stories are concerned with inhabitants of rural communities who have disgraced themselves and find shame within and without (or sometimes not at all with the former, as in the case of “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” who begins to walk through the town barefoot and convinced that she’s the second-coming). Sometimes these communities are seen from the outside as in the title story, the girl who can’t decide what is beautiful, and ends up with a split lip and a broken tooth after an elbow in the mouth from her future sister-in-law. In another, a woman returns after years away and numerous accomplishments racked up, and finds the past is either inescapable, or getting away from her so quickly she hasn’t even noticed it’s gone. In “Look, And Pass On” , a man “from away” becomes involved with a woman whose “wholesome sexiness” belies a darker past (and a terrible pair of underpants)– everything under these simple surfaces is always more complicated than it seems.
These are sad stories, but most funny stories are sad underneath (and this is the case with every other book I’ve encountered this year for Canada Reads Independently, except the Mavis Gallant, but only because she wasn’t funny). And underneath the funny, and underneath the sad, there is ballast here, stories rooted in place, in character, and emotion. They were so realized that their form was entirely secondary, and I could devour these one after the other. There wasn’t sameness, but this collection was a readable book, and I haven’t devoured any other of the Canada Reads Independently picks quite like it. And so this is my top pick, a book like this the whole point of the exercise, because it’s out of print even. When else was I going to read it? But now I am just so terribly glad that I did.
As I reflect upon all five books, Coady’s is the least fragmented of the bunch. Though a collections of stories like Gallant’s, it doesn’t play the games the three novels played with fact and fiction, truth and lies. And though I love these kind of games, I do wonder if they’re redundant sometimes when we’re reading fiction after all. If in accepting that I’m reading a story, I’ve already leapt through those hoops of what is real, and what is art, what is artifice, and the problem of fictional realities. The questions these stories ask are clever, but it is the rootedness of Coady’s stories that will stay with me, I think– the ballast. Her characters walk on ground that seems as solid as earth, and something quite like life plays out upon it.
1) Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady
2) Still Life With June by Darren Greer
3) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
4) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
5) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
March 10, 2011
I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
20 years late, as usual, I fancied David Cassidy in 1992 when The Partridge Family reruns were played on Much Music, and I am always happy to have “I Think I Love You” in my head. So that is one reason I wanted to read Allison Pearson’s latest novel, and also Michiko Kukatani liked it, and so did Maureen Corrigan. I’d never read Pearson’s first novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, but the premise of this one really appealed to me.
That premise is Petra, a thirteen year-old girl growing up with South Wales in the early ’70s, mad about David Cassidy with a passion only teenage girls are capable of. She and her friends collect his posters from The Essential David Cassidy Magazine (which come broken into pieces– there is a particularly disquieting scene involving Cassidy’s beheaded torso and unbuttoned jeans), kiss the posters with vasalined lips, practice writing their Mrs. David Cassidy signatures, and love their idol in an absolutely, utterly true way that Allison Pearson is insistent about taking seriously.
Meanwhile, we get alternating chapters from the point of view of Bill, fresh out of university and working as a rock journalist, or so he tells his girlfriend, when really he’s working for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Composing the monthly letters from David that Petra and her friends pore over hoping to find personal messages of undying love embedded between its lines.
Bill and Petra’s paths collide at a David Cassidy concert in London at which Petra’s friend Sharon nearly gets trampled. Twenty-five years later, they meet again, when Petra wins a chance to meet the former teen idol in Las Vegas in a concert sponsored by a magazine Bill runs. Petra is now a professional cellist, years away from the screaming girl in the crowd, but she’s just lost her mother and her marriage, and her daughter is on the cusp of teenagehood, which Petra finds completely terrifying. She can’t help but be immersed in a little nostalgia.
The first half of the novel is a bit awkward in the transitions between Bill and Petra’s stories, and Pearson writes Petra’s story so brilliantly that Bill’s part pales in comparison. Her portrayal of teenage girls is worthy of Judy Blume (and one character even seems lifted straight from Deenie), her respect for their feelings and intelligence makes these characters so compelling, and she nails it– the evil social dynamics, the insecurity, the desperation for everything the whole world seems to just be withholding. The second half with grown up Petra and Bill is basically a fairy tale and runs down a predictable road, but the characters remain so fresh, and Pearson is such a good writer that the whole book is a joy to read. In particular, her insights about mother/daughter relationships, and her ideas of teenage girlhood as expressed by Petra remembering her own adolescence and now contemplating her daughter’s.
I Think I Love You is a novel that manages to balance a little fun with a little subtext, and is well worth a read if you don’t mind the song stuck in your brain.
March 8, 2011
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
That it took a bit of time for me to really get into Elizabeth Jenkins’ novel The Tortoise and Hare might be chalked up to my post-vacation stupor, or my struggle to believe in a manly man who is called Evelyn, but regardless, I overcame it, and surely this is a book entirely worthy of its gorgeous cover. Though on second thought, I do wonder if the trouble wasn’t all mine– this is a strange book that takes time to find its story, digresses away from the main point of view in jarring ways, and is rife with unclear pronouns, all of which, when compounded with jet-lag, hindered me a bit. But I got over it, I did, about a third of the way in, and then I was sucked into the story which took me exactly where I knew that it would go, but managed to surprise and horrify me all the same. As though I didn’t want to find out what would happen next, I couldn’t stop reading either, one thing after another in a display of terrifying inevitability.
What strikes me most about the story is how its main players don’t conform to type. Beautiful, elegant Imogen isn’t troubled when her husband Evelyn (!) strikes up a close friendship with their neighbour, Blanche Silcox. Blanche and Evelyn have much in common, but dumpy Blanche in her hideous hats poses no threat to Imogen, which is not to say that all is well in Imogen’s marriage, of course. Her relationship is founded on her being the object of her husband’s affections (which she is unable to properly return in a physical fashion) and has come to seem groundless now that her husband’s affections have waned, and there is the question of their horrible son, Gavin, who has about as much respect for his mother as his father does (which isn’t any). But surely this is the way that marriage goes, though she does allow herself to hope for resurrection of happiness now past.
So the two have grown apart, and there is the question of how much they were ever together, and as the novel progresses, Blanche begins to creep further and further into the relationship (and altogether deliberately, Imogen notes, though Evelyn doesn’t see this) until she finally comes between them. Through being everything that Imogen isn’t, Blanche somehow managed to make herself the unlikely but perfect companion for Evelyn– sensible, adoring, smart, rugged, and capable.
The true power of the novel, however, is that Imogen isn’t simply the opposite of these things. She is an avid reader (and there is some wonderful bookishness here), she takes an interest in her husband’s affairs, she is absolutely capable in her own way, but her confidence and countenance are flatly undermined by Evelyn’s disdain for her intelligence and sensibilities. Silcox’s opposite, however, is shown in Zenobia, a gorgeous, ostentatious, idiotic woman who, Imogen one day suddenly realizes, is the type of woman she herself becoming by continuing (and failing) to be the kind of woman she imagines men like Evelyn want to be in love with– Imogen’s moment of recognition is the novel’s finest moment.
The subtlety here isn’t Pymian, the kind where a character brews a pot of tea and manages to articulate the entire British class system, but rather the subtlety is in the plot, which unfolds with such unruffled swiftness that it’s barely noticeable, and absolutely unstoppable. Agonizing, and perfect, and I would have preferred to see Blanche Silcox hit by a bus in the end, or impaled on a fence rail (because the woman is pure evil, no bones about it), I have no doubt there will be justice somewhere beyond Jenkins’ final page, and I am convinced that it’s really Imogen who comes out of it all in triumph.
February 15, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 4: Still Life With June by Darren Greer
The connections between the four books I’ve read so far for Canada Reads Independently are really quite remarkable: each is a book constructed of fragments, truth is always a construction, the truth-teller functions as a creator, and these are books that test the limits of fiction (even Mavis Gallant’s, who calls the Linnet Muir stories “as close to autobiography as fiction can be”).
None of the others do any of these things, however, with quite as much unbridled nerve as Darren Greer’s novel Still Life With June. Greer’s narrator Cameron Dodds is an unsuccessful writer (“a loser who knows he’s a loser”: do note how such an admission clears a guy of so much responsibility) who publishes under a variety of pen names, including “Darren Greer”. Cameron works nights at a Salvation Army Treatment Centre (where he’s carved out a niche for himself– he’s the gay guy who breaks up brawls by standing in the middle and screeching songs from “Annie”), whose clients he mines for their stories. He attends a writers group at a local bookstore where he never speaks, and certainly the other writers’ stories are of no use to him, but the stories of the writers themselves are gold to him, these poor pathetic people wasting their time.
He’s a story vampire, so desperate for his next fix that he breaks into the file of a client, Darrel Greene, a former addict who recently committed suicide, and discovers that he had a sister, institutionalized with Down’s Syndrome, who Darrel felt guilty about never taking care of. Cameron decides to pretend to be Darrel, connects with the sister, June, and discovers depth to his character in the process. At the same time, he also forms a relationship with a woman from his writing group who has a few aliases of her own, and a troubled relationship with her brother (who is Cameron’s upstairs neighbour).
There are weaknesses in the plot, but Greer has structured his book to escape all scrutiny. For example, Cameron reports that he’s “not really sure why” he decides to go and meet Darrel’s sister June, which is the sort of flimsy construction I can’t stand, but events transpire at end of the story to reveal that there’s more to the story than that. This happens several times in the text actually, when I thought the plot was lost, and then Greer revealed another trick up his sleeve.
June’s character also remains decidedly two-dimensional, though Cameron is upfront about his/Darrel’s inability to imagine the world through her eyes– to show her as anything more than this would be a violation of Cameron’s perspective. She’s two-dimensional for a reason, but yes, that two-dimensionality has a purpose, but sometimes I wonder if we’re letting the book get away with too much.
I was also uncomfortable with the language here, the use of the word “retard”, and it all got a bit Huck Finn on me. And yes, those of us with purely literary intentions can argue context, but I sometimes wonder if those to whom these words are personal have something to teach the rest of us. That there is more to life than literature, perhaps, and that some of us who love words best are blissfully ignorant as to their power, to how they work. So yes, I was uncomfortable, but I also think that I was supposed to be, and that Greer draws parallels between “retard” and “faggot” that made me thing the term wasn’t flung as randomly as Cameron Dodds presented it as being. I think the whole book was an exercise in uncomfortable-making anyway.
Anyway, the whole thing came together marvelously for me in the end, and though much about the book remained ambiguous, I was satisfied– all the right questions were answered, and I was content to let the others go in a way I wasn’t as happy with in Truth and Bright Water. It was a bleak book, but with passages of levity (whose big box bookstore setting also made me think of a very different book, Corey Redekop’s Shelf Monkey, which I also enjoyed). And it was a book that surprised me time and time again, and always just when I thought it couldn’t surprise me anymore.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Still Life With June by Darren Greer
2) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
3) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
4) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
February 5, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 3: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
I may be crucified for admitting this, but I didn’t enjoy reading Mavis Gallant’s collection Home Truths, though the stories themselves, they’re a whole other thing. When I finished reading “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”, I had to close the book, catch my breath, and put my head back together. A story that hooked me with its opening lines, “Now that they’re out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, ‘Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.” The story is a scathing treatment of “the international thing” and the people who do it well or otherwise, a pathetic, tragic climax, ill-considered hobo costume, Saskatchewan evoked in the wilds of Geneva. What a trick to render the hollowness of life so very richly.
The collection opens with “Thank You for the Lovely Tea”, a perfect formula. Malicious girls in private school uniforms, and the coldest, most precise and shivery ending: “[Ruth] wondered if she would ever care enough about anyone to make all the mistakes those around her had made during the rainy-day tea with Mrs. Holland. She breathed on the window, idly drew a heart, smiled placidly, let it fade.” The book proceeds with characters caring enough to make all manner of mistakes– a young girl who rejects a playmate for her more sophisticated cousin; young girl abroad whose choice of lover lands her with inevitable heartbreak; Lottie Benz who goes to Europe, seeing the whole world as a pet project, but an acquaintance from home keeps her from making her neat arrangements, and forces her to reconsider the parameters of her life (which is another way of saying that she grows up).
In her pitch, Carrie Snyder referred to the collection as “a smorgasbord for the mind”, but I confess that it was just too much for me 
to digest. The stories were so deep and involving that to move from one to the other was simply disorienting. (This is not a problem I usually have with short story collections. I love the idea of collections offering glimpses into window after window, and I am, after all, a veritable peeping tom.) These stories are exquisite, yes, but many are far from short, and they’re not ideally presented together in book form. Though the edition has given the book overall a definite structure (“At Home”, “Canadians Abroad” and “Linnet Muir”), these stories are not necessarily enhanced by being considered together.
I take full responsibility for this as a reader. For not having the kind of time to consider each of these stories singularly, as they’re intended to be. But perhaps these stories are best considered within the context of whatever issue of The New Yorker each one first appeared in, which places for them, I think, fully at home in the wide literary world. We’re also really talking novels for Canada Reads Independently, and though I might argue that any one of these stories on its own conveys as much depth as a novel, if not more, the effect of all of them together is overwhelming to compare book-for-book.
Now, Carrie Snyder notes that she chose this book primarily for its Linnet Muir stories, however, Muir being the narrator and protagonist of the final third of stories in Home Truths and to consider these, I’d like to shift gears a little bit. Linked short stories have a bad rap these days, a cheap way for publishers to sell a novel that isn’t (for writers to write one). But I would argue that the best collections of linked stories possess a range of perspectives not possible in other forms, and a greater chance of coming close to presenting something like truth.
This is apparent in the Linnet Muir stories, which present the same characters and events in different contexts. And interestingly, because they weren’t necessarily intended to be published together, contain a great deal of repetition in order to establish the facts of Linnet’s life, repetition that would be edited out of a novel’s first draft, but which becomes almost a meditation here. Characters who are secondary in one story are in the spotlight in the next. There is flux, there are many plots, some fizzle out and go nowhere, characters grow up and change their minds, and this is kind of what life is.
“Between Zero and One” was my favourite story in this section, Linnet Muir considering the world of men which she becomes privy to as the sole female working in a Montreal office during World War 2, and how other women could be just as complicit as men in ensuring women’s place as a “third-class immigrant”. In many of the stories, she’s reflecting on her parents, who were too young and too consumed in their own affairs to be present to her as a child, and who are both lost to her now. Linnet is coming of age as she looks back on the vanished world of her childhood, vanished doubly for having disappeared at the beginning of September 1939. Wartime is the backdrop of “Varieties of Exile”, which (like many of these stories) talked around and around itself, avoiding the epicentre to the point where I began to question its architecture, but came to a sad and illuminating conclusion that gave me the strange feeling that this story’s destination and not the journey was necessarily the point (though the latter will be entirely worthwhile upon rereading).
These stories are difficult, and I might suggest that “precise” is an adjective that rarely applies. Not that these stories aren’t deliberately constructed, the imprecision itself deliberate somehow, but there is a muddledness to the prose– lines that could mean any number of things. “I did not forget her, but I forgot about her” says Linnet about the godmother who fails to follow through, and though the line rings familiar, sparkles with insight, what she means exactly is unclear. Which triples the stories’ already-expansiveness.
I’ve also failed to really get to the point, because there are too many points to be considered. Instead of glimpses into one window after another, I kept getting lost in mansions. And so although Gallant should top any list, I can’t put her at the top of this one, but then Home Truths is really a book that belongs in a class of its own.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
2) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
3) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
