May 5, 2011
The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
A few years ago, I read Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s exceptional novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and realized that I had to read Chinua Achebe. And so I read Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (the latter at the same time that I was reading its near-contemporary Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Allan Sillitoe, and strange connections between the two were illuminating) and enjoyed the books for both their literary value and the opportunity to read about Africa from the perspective of an African. Or rather, as in the case of Adichie too, more specifically, Nigeria from the perspective of a Nigerian.
My book club read Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah last month, and I thought it would be a good segue into his most recent book, the essay collection The Education of a British-Protected Child which had been sitting on my shelf for a while. And it was a good segue, or more accurately, the essay collection was a wonderful complement to Anthills…, which had been much more challenging than I’d been prepared for.
The Education of a British Child collects essays and addresses by Achebe from over the last 30 years, about his life, his work, and his politics. For Achebe, all three are intertwined, and have their roots in his origins. Nigeria was a British colony until 1960, and so until then, Achebe’s passport had distinguished him, like all Nigerians, as a “British Protected Person”. It was a strange kind of protection though, and Achebe’s feelings towards colonialism and post-colonialism are explored in most of these pieces. What I found most interesting about his perspective is that he writes from “the middle ground”, which he explains is:
.. neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of hte unpredicable, or irony.
So that while Achebe’s feelings about colonialism and its horrendous effects are never measured, neither is any situation so simplified that colonialism is the easy answer to any hard questions about Africa’s present and its past. Achebe writes about the strange position of being an African writing in English, but doesn’t necessarily see the English language as part of the colonial yoke, and notes that English was readily by adopted by Nigerians as a unifying language. Or that he can learn as much from his great-uncle, a traditional leader in his community, as he can from his father, who was a Christian schooled by missionaries, and that both father and uncle “formulated the dialectic which I inherited”. Which is, of course, the capacity to acknowledge the world as a complicated place.
Achebe’s essays are funny, engaging, and where points between them overlap it serves to underline the general effect of the book rather than detract from it. Though it’s much less funny that Achebe has been making the same points for 30 years, that so little has changed– about how Western readers understand African (and Achebe makes a spectacularly impassioned case against Joseph Conrad, over and over), how we have to read Africa through Africa’s eyes, about the legacies of colonialism (and here Anthills of Savannah became so much clear to me– that African didn’t squander a democratic inheritance from its colonizers, Achebe describing the British colonial administration instead as “a fairly naked dictatorship” so what it wrought it unsurprising). He writes about the connection between Africa’s population, and the African-American population, about the history of Africa and Africans, which is so much different from how the colonizers told it in order to justify their actions.
The final essay “Africa is People” begins with Achebe sitting in on a meeting of economists on the state of Africa, during which the prescription for Africa’s problems was generally removing food subsidies and devaluing currency. Suddenly, Achebe takes to the floor with the realization that he was sitting in on a fiction workshop. “Here you are,” he says to the economists, “spinning your fine theories to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories”. Except that Africa was not a laboratory, and Africa was people, and surely they wouldn’t permit these same perilous economic experiments upon the citizens of their own countries?
My copy of this book is now full of underlinings, but I’ll conclude here with what I think is one of the powerful in this marvelous collection, displaying Achebe’s grace, sensitivity, erudition and ease with language:
“Like the unfortunate young man in my novel, the poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne’er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are great than their badge of suffering, because they are human.”
May 1, 2011
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
I found myself paying attention to sentences in Elizabeth Hay’s latest novel Alone in the Classroom. To the ones that, for me, sparkled with resonance, finally articulating thoughts so often muddled in my brain. Complex ideas, like the assurance of “a glimpse of a past as promising as my own future seemed to be”, or “When words avoid you, or continually cross you, you have no escape from yourself.” A description of a schoolteacher, such a perfect image: “She scratched her head with the point of a pencil so frequently that you could see scribbles all over her scalp.”
I paid attention to the way her sentences were either staccato short, or long, long, long, the clauses only near-linked by a comma. And by how the narrative took on the same pattern, not progressive, but rather an assemblage of ideas, of stories. How these stories circle around their centre, though it’s not clear what the centre is for some time.
But the circling is not aimless. Just enough is held back that you’d never accuse this book of being plotless, and the plots involve a schoolgirl murdered near Ottawa during the 1940s, another one who had died in a fire in Saskatchewan years before, the creepy teacher linked to them both, the teacher-turned-reporter who brings these stories together, and tells them to her niece who is the novel’s narrator. Connections abound here: former residents in the prairie town re-encounter one another in the Ottawa Valley, on the same train years later, relationships are incestuous, patterns are repeated: “It’s possible that a hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life.”
I adored Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air a few years ago, and was so pleased to find that this follow-up met all of my expectations. It’s a similar book, circular in shape, concerned with the past and with memory, full of moments where characters find that “[w]hat I had known about collided with what I had never been told”, and these collisions can shocking and powerful. Like Late Nights…, I imagine that this won’t be a book to everyone’s taste. Critics will delight in pinpointing what is wrong with it, lacking the understanding and imagination to see what is so right.
It’s an unsettling book, whose story goes where you don’t think it will, and doesn’t answer all its questions. Whose clauses, sentences, ideas and stories are strung together, one after another like random beads on a string, and it’s hard to find the pattern, that hidden symmetry, when you regard each bead individually. The key is to take in the whole, of course, the string of beads itself, its cumulative effect. In nature, there is no such thing as a straight line, and neither is there in a good story.
April 27, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads: Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
We were concerned that Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah might have broken The Vicious Circle Book Club. We speculated at links between the book’s difficulty, our historically low turn-out, and that the majority of us present hadn’t managed to get to the end. “I made the mistake,” said one of us, “of judging the book by its page count.” 216 pages had seemed like a breeze to those of us who read as easily as we walk, until we tried to actually read them. Things Fall Apart this book was not: the text was dense, full of rambling parables, conversations in which speakers were not located, narration that shifted between characters’ points of view and omniscience, the plot (and there really was one) was obfuscated, and those of us who’d finished the book were still confused.
But of course Chinua Achebe is not in the habit of writing bad books, and we reasoned that there was method in his method. How do we approach it? Were we failing to give the novel credit for its roots in an oral tradition? Were we slighting the novel for failing to impose the narrative shape dictated by the Western canon? Also, we reasoned, this was probably just not a great book club book– not to be read once breezily and discussed over wine (and here we discover a book club’s limitation, we imagine). What were we ever do with it?
Things we discussed: that page 40 really was the gateway to the book’s readability; that Elewa’s miraculous sexual position was implausible (or perhaps Elewa was particularly spry); that we liked the characters a lot; we cleared up what had happened between Beatrice and Sam at the party; that we liked the scene at the public execution; and we really liked Beatrice’s character. We spoiled the ending too. And suspected that the book’s haphazard structure is a statement about the perilous nature of any political structure in a dictatorship. We talked how this book corresponds with current events in North Africa and the Middle East. We compared Sam to Hosni Mubarak. The ideas of dictatorships– one characters statement that if Kangan had at least been a real dictatorship, then things actually might have got done. And the inevitability of what befalls the main characters in the end– that they were tragic heroes. But then the obfuscated plot plays out strangely against that inevitability of fate. In another form, this book could have been a John LaCarre novel.
Then we talked about how the book outwardly suggested that race was no longer an issue in the nation of Kangan, but inwardly was saying otherwise– that the post-colonial government had merely appropriated colonial structures. That the powerful characters were all powerful due to their colonial ties and Western education. That the book is also about class, religion, and sex. About the way that women are left to pick up the pieces in the end, Ikem’s revelation about women being the last resort, but how the last resort is always too late. (And his ideas about an embracing of contradiction being the beginning of true strength). And inevitability again– women are left to pick up the pieces here, but there are signs of change. The new baby who is named not by the patriarch, and who is given a boy’s name even though she is a girl. And then how everybody celebrates by singing the maid’s religious song, which none of us got our heads around, but alas.
So we were relieved to discover that The Vicious Circle wasn’t broken after all, and that there is a lot a book club can do with a book like this. That all of us came away with a deeper understanding of the novel due to insights from other readers, with this puzzle of a book closer to being solved. And then we drank more wine, and ate more lasagna, and some of us today are sorry that we didn’t help ourselves to a second slice of chocolate cake.
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.
