August 11, 2011

I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue

Anne Perdue’s collection of short stories I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore is the answer to the question, “What should I read after the brilliance of Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting?” Like MacLeod, her stories venture into darkness, their plots take you places, her characters offer a remarkable range of humanity– the alcoholic would-be dry-waller who lives in a rooming house, a teenage dishwasher, a single woman daring to get pregnant on her own, a newlywed couple overwhelmed by the pressures of home ownership. Perdue is funnier though, with a sharp dialogue reminiscent of Jessica Westhead’s, and her stories also had these moments I’ve come to think of as John Cheever moments– the vat of wax! The barbecue! These incidents of horrid absurdity in the midst of the everyday. My husband had to ask me to stop gasping as I read this book, and I really haven’t been able to think about a barbecue properly since.

I love this book, absolutely devoured it, which is fitting for a collection whose stories are larger than bite-sized. These are longer-than-short stories, with twists and turns and plenty of room for depth, and they’re so well-paced, they read up fast. The first story hung me up a little bit with points of view that didn’t seem consistent, but the rest were a smoother ride, the kind of short stories I’d recommend to people who might not know that they like short stories yet.

In “The Escapists”, a couple at an all-inclusive Mexican resort display their complete lack of social graces, and receive awkward glimpses into the true nature of the bond between them. “Inheritance” makes clear the weak foundations on which suburban idylls are constructed, as a husband and father drives himself mad trying to live up to his own expectations. “Ca-Na-Da” is a novel in 45 pages, the story of a woman whose son is a stranger to her, and who finally has to face the consequences of a lifetime of not facing the world, or being honest with it (or herself). In “Pooey”, a middle-aged woman whose family takes dysfunction to a new level decides to go against every rational instinct, take a leap of faith, and have a family of her own.

“I Serve” says the button on the book’s cover, which was gorgeously designed by Anne Perdue herself. And her characters do serve, in the jobs that they do, and in the places that they’ve assumed for themselves in society. Yet there are moments, if only in their minds, –and some are impossibly small but still vivid– in which these character break free of the confines of those places, and dare to serve themselves. Here we the readers become the gasping champions of their glorious liberation.

July 28, 2011

The Astral by Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen’s Trouble was the first novel I reviewed on my blog after Harriet was born, and the novel was disappointing. (Less disappointing was the review I wrote–I can’t quite believe how lucid it reads. Perhaps I secretly paid someone to write it while I was busy lying on the carpet sobbing.) Being a novel by Kate Christensen, however, Trouble was still well worth the read and better than most of the other books out there. So you can imagine how much it thrills me to declare that Christensen’s latest, The Astral, is her best book yet, and the finest book I’ve read in ages.

The Astral is the story of a man at the end of his marriage: Luz, Harry Quirk’s wife of thirty years, has just thrown them out of their home in The Astral, an apartment (which actually exists!) in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighbourhood. She’s come across his latest manuscript of poems, love sonnets, and she’s convinced he’s written them for another woman. Refusing to indulge his insistance that the poems are the product of his imagination only, she destroys the manuscript and banishes Harry from their marital home. Harry finds refuge with his good friend Marion, a recent widow, which only serves to anger Luz further because she’s convinced he’s been sleeping with Marion for years. Though he hasn’t been, not for years or for ever. Harry had had one indiscretion twelve years ago, but other than that, he’s been an pointedly loyal husband.

The Astral follows the months after Harry’s banishment, its effect on his children, and he and Luz’s wider group of friends. As with most of Christensen’s work, the narrative is fixed solidly within the perspective of an unlikeable protagonist, though she invests Harry with a certain charm– I think she tends to go easier on her men than her women. Charm meaning that he’s convincing though, almost, but there are certain moments when it becomes clear that he’s wholely devoid of self-knowledge. A line like, “I’d never had a drivers’ license myself, but I knew bad driving when I see it.” But he brings you around, Harry, and it’s not such a bad place, being in his head. Everything he does is usually justifiable, he knows everybody else’s problems. and then there’s the incredible scene when he storms his wife’s therapist’s office and threatens to maim her, then she proceeds to reduce him to a psychological pulp using his own tricks (but better). Suddenly, it’s not clear what is what anymore.

And what is what is never quite resolved. Like Lionel Shriver at her best, Christensen writes a veritable keleidoscope of relative perspectives, and the effect is as unsure and perilous as reality. Like Shriver too, Christensen is hilarious, though her caustic is far less caustic and her work is more palatable. The two writers are similar also in that their novels are driven more by ideas than characters (or even plot) so that we can see the seams sometimes, the work of an author trying too hard to make her people go where she wants them to go. We also get some woodenness, some terrible dialogue– Harry answers a question regarding his son’s wellbeing with, “Karina and I were just out there. He’s immersed in this cult, he’s marrying the leader, and they think he’s the Messiah.” But there is a self-awareness there, one gets the sense that Christensen is winking. At one point during a too-earnest conversation, somebody asks, “Who’s writing this dialogue?”

And the answer is Kate Christensen, who clings to metaphor as much her protagonist does. Marriage is poetry: “I believe in rhyme and rhythm. But my adherence to form is loony. I make it much harder for myself than it has to be. I follow arcane rules that went out of business a hundred years ago.” Marriage is also a kind of cult like the one that has sucked in Harry’s son, and though this plotline has the air of the ridiculous, it’s never exploited and works within the bigger picture. Everything in the book is really working for a higher purpose, which makes the pay-off worthwhile because you get this book in the end. A story of the disparate selves within one man and within one marriage, and the reconciliation of the former that comes when the marriage is finally dissolved.

(If you’re thinking you might be interested in this book, read Kate Christensen’s Book Notes at Largehearted Boy, and then there will be no doubt left in your mind.)

July 22, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Hotel World by Ali Smith

It did not bode well f0r a fantastic meeting of The Vicious Circle. It had been hottest July 21 ever, and everyone was either away or unwilling to take on Ali Smith’s Hotel World, so there would be just three of us. But what a three we were! Each of doing our part to eat much cheese and cake and make up for the others’ absences, and there was so much conversation, bookish love and Ali Smith illumination.

I picked this book. I found it in a box on a curb ages ago, and it’s been kicking around ever since. Book club finally gave me a the push to actually read it, and as I did so, there were parts I loved. I was more forgiving with this flawed book than I have been with the other flawed first novels our book club has read recently, first because I’ve read Ali Smith’s second novel The Accidental and it’s wonderful, so it’s easy to forgive any novel that grew into that. And also because she’s Ali Smith– her talent abounds. Even if I hadn’t read The Accidental, it would be clear to me that this is an author whose talent is going to take her somewhere great.

But Hotel World? Not so great. One of us had barely been able to stomach it, and then the entire chapter without punctuation just proved to much. And the other of us began to read it only to realize that she’d already read it about five years ago but had no recollection, which is never a good sign. It’s an experimental novel, and it’s not quite pulled off– its fragments are too fragmented, and in places they come together in artificial ways, and there were so many things we just didn’t get. The book would probably demand a second reading, but none of us had come away with the inclination to go there.

But then we started talking about what we liked about the book, and the talk kept coming. The punctuation-free section that had so frustrated one of us had delighted another– finally, plot! It gave us so many answers to the questions the other sections had posed. We liked the humour, the absurdity. We thought about how Smith is like Nicola Barker, and also Kate Atkinson, though the latter is much more mainstream. Also, Hilary Mantel. We noted the morbid streak, the play with language, that language is not merely employed but is the story, that these writers know their tools. We wondered why all the British writers writing like this happened to be female. We wondered why nobody writes like this in Canada. It occurs to us that in Canada, no big publisher would take a writer like Ali Smith on. If there is a Canadian Ali Smith, she’s being publishing by a small press we’ve never heard of. We want to send out an alert to the big publishers in Canada– Ali Smith is what happens when you push a weird and wonderful writer who challenges her readers. People actually buy her! She becomes mainstream because her work is out there, and is therefore commercially successful. We realize that someone will answer that British publishing has such a wider readership that they can afford to push weightier writers. We will answer them that we don’t care. Ahem.

One of us brings out Ali Smith’s story collection The Whole Story and Other Stories, which two of us swear is her best, and we see that it is dedicated to Kate Atkinson, so the connection is definitely there. We think a bit about Muriel Spark, and remember that Smith wrote the forward to The Comforters, which we read last year. We spend a lot of time talking about the ambiguous parts of the novel that each of us had interpreted differently. None of us are entirely sure what to make of the final section. We all like this book much better than any of us did going in, and we’re so happy we read it, that we made the trek in this heat. We just decide not to discuss how much cake has been eaten between the three of us, but we’re not sorry about the quantity at all.

July 18, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 14, 2011

Monoceros by Suzette Mayr

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

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

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

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

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

July 12, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 8, 2011

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

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

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

**

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

July 7, 2011

It Must Be As Tall As A Lighthouse by Tabatha Southey

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

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

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

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

July 4, 2011

The O'Briens by Peter Behrens

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

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

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

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

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

July 2, 2011

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

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

But then, here is another thing…

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

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

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

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