December 12, 2010
Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris
Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is one of the best books I’ve read this year, blowing my mind with its gorgeous prose, fascinating facts, stunning narrative, and sheer readability– I was absolutely lost inside it. Which is fitting for a book whose author/narrator implores her reader to: “descend until we lose our bearings, until the landscape merges with the base of the bridge, and the sounds of trains, traffic and the river grow almost indistinguishable from one another. We have reached the city at the centre of the map: let us begin.”
Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.
Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.
Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers […who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.
Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.
Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.
UPDATE: See Harris’ piece from The Toronto Star this weekend, Best kids’ books based in the GTA.
December 5, 2010
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
When I started reading Ann Beattie’s The New Yorker Stories last week, I was concerned I was doing it wrong. I’d never read any of Beattie’s stories before, and this collection of more than 40 stories written over 30 years might have been too much of a good thing. Surely, a collection like this meant to be savoured, dipped in and out of, but as I’m a little short on leisure these days, an overdose was my only option. And after the fact, I’m actually grateful, because these stories are small worlds constructed of tiny gestures, but the cumulative effect was to hit me with a wallop.
Beattie’s stories are very much fixed in their time, cars with make and year, characters listening to Sony Walkmans, a reference in a 1979 story to “a stereo as big as a computer”, a lot of pre-electric Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger playing on stereos, no matter the decade. This element of detail, however, gives the early stories the effect of a bad orange cover design. It wasn’t so much that the stories themselves were dated as were their backdrops, which made the collection difficult to settle into. But one or all of the following things happened: the stories got better, the sets got more modern, and I began to get a real sense of what Beattie’s work is all about (and this final effect is the very best thing, albeit an exhausting thing, about reading more than 40 short stories in a row).
Reading 40 stories in a row also revealed connections between them, providing the sense of what Beattie is all about. Revealing also that she only knows about seven men’s names, which are mostly Richard, that every dog is called Sam, and that dogs in general are a preoccupation. As are marriages gone sour (and there is no marriage that hasn’t), multiple husbands (though not all at once), children of divorce, deadbeats, misfits, and all the lonely people (who are sometimes justifiably so). At least three times, a character without use of a limb tries and fails to use that limb anyway, and is surprised by their failure. Betrayal, deception, sinister trespasses, and the kind of people who’ll break your heart over and over again.
There is a range to how these stories are constructed, many focused on the personal and the immediate, but the later stories in particular taking on a wider scope. In “The Cinderella Waltz”, a woman watches as her ex-husband breaks his boyfriend’s heart as he once did hers (and he’s breaking her daughter’s at the same time)’; in “Girl Talk”, a woman about to give birth confronts the reality of her lover’s family (and of her lover, and her whole life); in “In the White Night”, a couple still grieving the long-ago death of their child enact the inexplicable adjustments a complicated life demands of us: “Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before”.
I thought of Grace Paley’s work as I made my way through this collection, the way her preoccupations became definite, the way her characters all eventually became thrice-married alter-egos of their author. The way that Beattie’s stories were the kind that Paley’s Faith’s father wouldn’t have understood, wondering why she didn’t just write beginnings, middles and endings. Beattie similarly ponders connections to aging parents, and plays also with the metafictional element in her story “Find and Replace”, in which her narrator (who is a writer called Ann) confesses that all her fiction comes from reality:
“‘People don’t recognize themselves. And, in case they might, you just program the computer to replace one name with another. So, in the final version, every time the word Mom comes up, it’s replaced with Aunt Begonia or something.'”
One phrase at the end of “Summer People” goes far to sum up what Ann Beattie’s stories are all about, and how a restive reader might encounter them: “For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That way, the uncertainty would end.” But the uncertainly doesn’t in these stories, and novels these stories aren’t nor do they attempt to be. Here is story for the sake of story, for the sake of truth uncertainty provides. Another line from “Find and Replace” is an extension of this idea, and the very essence of the short story, of their perfection:
“You can’t help understanding. First, because it is the truth, and second, because everyone knows the way things change. They always do, even in a very short time.”
November 29, 2010
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
The 2010 Gillers picked a book out of the blue for me, pushed me to pay it closer attention than I might have otherwise, and the payoff was enormous. This is literary awards at their very, very best (and also makes clear that “what sells” is self-fulfilling prophecy, marketing types take note). I was lucky enough to get my mitts on a Gaspereau Press edition of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, which meant that my book was a book of a book, hand stitched, thick paper, a dust jacket for a paperback. Such care; for me this is “what sells” and I bought it.
I pushed through the story in a way I might not have had the book not been so celebrated. There was a lack of precision in the language, a distance between the reader and the story, and I kept putting the book down and not rushing to pick it up again. But I think this was as the book was intended to be read, a long slow journey without a destination in mind. Because when we arrive at the end of the book, at our destinations, the answers are still not all apparent. By which I mean that if you’re reading to find out what happens next, you’re probably going to find this book disappointing.
An intimacy creeps into the story though, between these people and I, as two fighting sisters drive their ailing father across the country. Sisters are at each others’ throats, banding together only to rally against their father who keeps lighting up cigarettes and forgetting to open the window– the family dynamics are set in motion, and they tell us who these people are and where they’ve come from; we are there. That the sisters have constructed their lives out of pieces, and now they’re older, they’re both discovering that lives are pieces after all. When the narrator discovers her partner with another woman, she goes to be with her father where he’s living with Henry, a family friend. It was at Henry’s where she and her sister spent their childhood summers, on the banks of a lake that had flooded where a town used to be, and being there is to have an awareness of the drowned town, ever-present whether it can be seen or not.
Which serves as a metaphor for the story of her father, who is called Napoleon Haskell, and his relationship to Henry, whose son Owen served with Napoleon in Vietnam. During the summer the narrator spends with her father and Henry, she constructs the story of her father’s past, what happened to Owen, and what had happened to Napoleon to fracture the rest of his life into just pieces of pieces.
Throughout the story, Napoleon is hard at work on crossword puzzles, and these puzzles are an indication as to the novel’s construction. Blanks are filled in from clues, with their correctness not always assured, but the puzzle takes on its own shape anyway. The puzzles pieces include Skibsrud’s prose, sentences with their many, many clauses, as well as allusions to poetry and film, and concludes with a transcript from Napoleon’s testimony of what he witnessed during his time as a soldier. The transcript provides many of the answers the rest of the story had been withholding, and creates an altogether satisfying conclusion to the novel, which doesn’t provide all the answers, but the effect is very much of a whole.
The Sentimentalists is sentimental, unabashedly so, but perhaps if you don’t like sentimental, find a book with another title. Because I liked this book, which portrays the humanness of men at war, particularly during this time when we’re all being brainwashed to believe that “soldier” and “hero” are synonyms. I like what it says about history and story– that the former can never been captured, and the latter has wings of its own. I like the tender gruffness of its men, that love and poetry are what remains, that some things may be irreparable but that doesn’t mean they’re truly broken.
November 25, 2010
Bedtime Story by Robert J. Wiersema
I was afraid to read Robert J. Wiersema’s new novel Bedtime Story because it contains a book within the book, which fascinates me in theory but usually frustrates me when it comes down to actually reading the book(s). Also because the book within that book is a fantasy quest narrative, which is usually a very good sign of a book that’s not for me.
I decided to read the book, however, in spite of my fears, because I have never quite forgotten how much I enjoyed Wiersema’s first novel Before I Wake. Also because it’s a story about a parent/child connection through reading, about the power of literature in childhood, and because Wiersema’s interviews at Kate’s blog and at Steven’s made it seem so interesting.
Christopher Knox is at an impasse– his marriage beyond repair, his eleven year old son at a distance, and he’s been struggling to write his second novel for so long that most people have forgotten he’d ever written a first. When he gives his son a book for his birthday, a used book, and not even Lord of the Rings which the boy had asked him for, it seems a typical misstep– the boy is disappointed, his wife once again has opportunity to reflect that Chris only ever thinks about himself. The book, however, proves surprising, transporting Chris’s son David into its fictional world, which is remarkable for a boy who’s always struggled with reading before.
The problem, of course, comes about when David is literally transported into the fictional realm, leaving his parents and medical experts bewildered by his unresponsiveness. Chris, however, is well-read enough to know that strange things can happen, and suspects that his son’s book is at the the root of what has happened, and so embarks upon a quest to discover the magic spell behind the text that has taken his son, to keep the book from enemy hands (including unscrupulous publishing types), and to find the key to the spell so he can reverse it somehow and return his boy to their metafictional reality.
At the same time, David is undergoing an analogous quest, crossing canyons and mountain ranges in search of the elusive “sunstone”. These passages were short enough that my interest rarely lagged, and made interesting by David’s awareness of his place in the fiction, and how he has to keep others from realizing that he is an imposter. Even more interesting, he is accompanied on his journey by the spirit of a boy who’d read the book before him and similarly fallen under its spell. Unlike the other boy, however, David’s journey continues because all the while his body sits empty at home, his father keeps reading the book, convinced (correctly) that continuing the story is essential to David’s survival.
Lots of interesting things are going on in the text. We are treated to no physical description of Christopher Knox, and his narration is first person while the others characters’ are third, the effect of all this being space for the reader to be enveloped by the story, similar to how David becomes the fictional Daffyd. The novel is also a bit too long, a twist too far, but is conscious of this– in the fictional realm, David remarks upon his fear that the story will keep going forever, questing for the sake of quest, and we can certainly empathize. Wiersema also takes advantage of fiction to make alternative realities possible– Chris’s wife’s Jacqui’s refusal to believe her husband’s theory of what has happened to their son begins to seem preposterous. The book’s magic is so solidly rooted in physical reality that all lines between realism and fantasy are blurred, and genre becomes any extraneous idea.
Bedtime Story is a novel to be enjoyed on multiple levels– a fast-paced thriller, ode to childhood reading, a testament to the power of literature and written word (which is always a kind of magic spell, however benign), a magical escape narrative, a heartening story of father/son relations, and there is murder, mafioso, and a mysterious library as well. It was truly a pleasure to get lost in this one for a while.
November 21, 2010
Lemon by Cordelia Strube
A long time ago, I decided that I’d had enough of youthful protagonists, who are always the smartest character in the room, whose ability to control their own narrative is unlikely for a teenager, whose cool detachment from matters at hand never quite belies a author’s conscious attempt to be writing something more than a young-adult novel, who keep being written into novels that have absolutely no subtext and therefore really don’t qualify as full grown-up novels. (I’m looking at you, Blue van Meer, Lee Fiora, etc. etc..) These characters for whom c0mparisons to Holden Caulfield are always invoked blurbishly, because it’s easy, but so inaccurate and positively blasphemous.
But then there is Lemon, narrator and protagonist of Cordelia Strube’s novel of the same name. A misfit in a broken world where all structures of authority have broken down– at one point, she pains at her friend’s mother’s innocence about what her daughter really gets up to. Lemon scoops ice cream in the food court. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption, her adoptive parents fell apart, and the sanctuary she found with a capable ex-stepmother starts crumbling after the stepmother suffers a breakdown.
Lately, the odd time I stumble onto a high school girl’s twitter feed, I can’t help despairing about what kind of world my daughter is going to have to come of age in. Lemon does nothing to assuage my fears, but her articulation of the problem is heartening– what are we going with a spectrum that moves from “princess” to “porn-star”? With her steel-toe boots and baggy clothing, Lemon is written off as a “dyke” by her classmates, exempting her from the mad scramble for acceptance enacted by her best friend Rossi who has sex with anyone who asks her (and those who don’t bother to), who pretends she likes it to make them feel good about themselves. Who feels utterly awful about herself, and then masturbates on a webcam because a Queen Bee asks her to, and when this gets broadcast all over the internet, discovers she’s been set up for a fall.
Lemon remembers her friend, who “used to be an artist before she was a boytoy”. Whose body was used for handsprings and gymnastics, before it became disposible. She remembers when her classmates didn’t pull weapons on each other, and girls didn’t compete to give blow-jobs, and parents were capable of being a reassuring force.
Lemon is a bleak book, its home and school awfulness augmented by Lemon’s volunteer position in a pediatric cancer ward. Worst of all is that Lemon is simply an onlooker in an age of onlookers, powerless to do anything but just keep walking by, no matter how much what she faces disturbs her. Part of this is also her own survival mechanism– she has numbed herself to loss and pain, determined that by not reacting to anything, she cannot be hurt.
Things get way bad before they even hint at getting better, the narrative confirming all our worst fears about “the world out there”. And yet. Her one critical voice is a kind of beacon of hope, and it’s hilarious, smart and authentic. The world is crumbling around her, but Lemon calls it as she sees it, her point of view deadpan and refreshing. Her point of view is underlined by the books she reads, a gamut from Samuel Richardson to Catherine Cookson. Her mind is stuffed with trivia, which she uses to try to make sense of and provide context for the world around her, and the context is always just a little bit skewed– she’s only sixteen after all, so this youthful protagonist isn’t too good to be true, though a young reader would be less conscious of that then I am (and this is just one of many reasons why this is determinedly an adult novel).
With eight books behind her, Strube is perhaps far enough along in her life and her career to not have her young protagonist be her proxy. Perhaps it takes an experienced author to write young people really well? Though no doubt, there are exceptions to this, and I could encounter them forever, but Lemon is indeed a wonder. It’s deep entrenched in my mind, which is disturbing but fascinating, and I’ll not be forgetting this character any time soon.
Truly, one of the finest books I’ve encountered this year, and ever.
November 16, 2010
Penny Dreadful by Laurel Snyder
On the rare occasions I read YA, it will be a book I used to love, or a book that refers to books I used to love (such as A Wrinkle In Time, which was why I read Rebecca Stead’s beautiful When You Reach Me). Of course, as Laurel Snyder’s latest novel Penny Dreadful is brand new, I read it for the latter reason. On her blog she’s posted a list of books loved by her protagonist, books referred to in the text– Emily of New Moon, Little Women, Betsy-Tacy etc. etc. And this gratuituous bookishness convinced me that this was a book I had to read.
I wasn’t sold short– we learn on page 5 that Penelope has just finished an Anne of Green Gables book and is having trouble deciding what to read next. Later she wonders if a situation is like a disturbing book with an innocuous cover, “like Bridge to Terabithia“. Penelope Gray’s biggest problem is that her life is nothing like the characters in the books she devours, and she makes a wish that things could get more interesting…
And then they do, but not quite in the way she’d imagined. Through a series of events, her family ends up moving to a small town and encountering a cast of wacky characters, and what with all the wacky characters, a winding river, and the wishing well that started it all, Penny becomes assured of her place in the narrative that is her life. That she will find the hidden treasure after all, and save the day etc. Except that she’s not a character in a book (except that she is a character in the book. Fun!), and has to learn that even if things don’t work out to a perfect conclusion, life can still be okay.
Penny Dreadful is a timeless, lovely middle-grade novel with much bookish appeal. Made very rich by and a fitting tribute to the marvelous works it alludes to.
November 14, 2010
Talking About Detective Fiction by PD James
I am a detective fiction neophyte– I only read my second Dorothy L. Sayers last week. The book was Strong Poison, featuring Harriet Vane who’d been introduced to me in the marvelous Gaudy Night. And I thought it was fitting that I follow up Stong Poison with P.D. James’ nonfiction book, Talking About Detective Fiction.
It’s possible that I am exactly P.D. James’ intended audience here. Long prejudiced against genre fiction of any kind, though with a penchant from very young for smutty true crime books, but there you go. I found my way into detective fiction via Kate Atkinson, and her Jackson Brodie. I became addicted to television’s Midsomer Murders (which is based on the books by Caroline Graham). I also like Susan Hill, and recently enjoyed The Dead Politician’s Society by Robin Spano. I particularly adored Sayers’ Gaudy Night which, as James asserts, demonstrates that “it is possible to construct a credible and enthralling mystery and marry it successfully to a theme of psychological subtlety.”
But there is a lot I have to learn, such as that “crime fiction” is an umbrella under which detective fiction falls. The sacred rules of detective fiction, which all the best writers find ways to creatively skirt, including that the criminal must not be a character whose thoughts the reader follows, the detective should never know more than the reader does, no more than one secret room or passage, no intrusion by supernatural elements, no twin brothers or doubles unless the reader has been prepared. That there was no such thing as detective fiction before 1842, because there had been no detectives (or at least not in England– it was the year the Metropolitan Police came into being). The eternal allure of Sherlock Holmes (and one of the funniest parts of the texts is when James questions, at length, the reasons why H0lmes and Watson had continued to share a small flat from which Watson would have to retire to the bedroom when guests came around). James deals primarily with English detective fiction in the book, but devotes a chapter to the very different direction taken by the genre in America, with “hard-boiled” detective stories about Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. I also particularly liked her chapter “Four Formidable Women”, which included Agatha Christie and Sayers.
I expect the true detective fiction devotee might not find a lot here that’s new, and moreover could even find plenty to quibble with, but all the same, James’ book is clever, funny and engaging, and manages to convey some of the suspense and characterization of her novels. For a reader like me, however, Talking About Detective Fiction is a delight, a fine celebration of a genre I’m looking to know better.
November 10, 2010
The Carnivore by Mark Sinnett
I first learned of The Carnivore when it was on the shortlist for the Toronto Book Award, and its author Mark Sinnett was reading an excerpt on the radio. The excerpt was intriguing, featuring a husband and wife meeting together on the shore of Lake Ontario as swimmer Marilyn Bell completed her crossing of the lake in 1954. The simple dynamic between the couple belied something darker and deeper, and the historical detail was inconspicuously well done. When The Carnivore ended up taking the prize, I knew that I had to read it.
When Ray Townes is in the final stages of emphysema, he and his wife Mary look back on the course of their marriage, and how their lives hinged on Hurricane Hazel, which ravaged Toronto in October 1954. The couple doesn’t look back together, however, the book consisting of alternating chapters from their two solitudes. The effect of this is interesting, as we learn that each of them has their own secrets about how much they know about the other and what they’ve chosen to withhold.
Ray is a police man who spent the hurricane rescuing citizens clinging to rooftops and washed out bridges. What the newspaper articles profiling his heroics fail to reveal, however, is that his courage that night stemmed from a mania that arose from a terrible act he’d committed, and that while he was supposed to be on duty, Ray had been driving around the city with his mistress. Mary is aware of all of this, however, which is why she resents the rehashing of events as the 50th anniversary of the hurricane approaches. She has never been able to forgive her husband for what he did and what he took from her, and now her own traumatic memories of the hurricane have been awakened– she was a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and witnessed horrific injuries that night she’d never been able to forget.
Sinnett’s depiction of the hurricane– the rushing rivers, the broken bodies in the hospital, the force of nature that tore its way through a city– are the most compelling aspect of the novel. They are riveting, illuminating and unflinching in their portrayal of a tragedy that seems to have been whitewashed by years of familiarity– like Hazel was somebody’s elderly aunt who came visiting once. Sinnett deftly uses detail in the story to describe the hurricane and the more general atmosphere of Toronto in 1954, his historical fiction not toned by sepia even though the book is structured as a reflection.
The back-and-forth in the narrative, and that the story is told to the reader rather than immediately experienced makes the plot read a little mechanically at times. Similarly the characters, who we’re permitting such a limited perspective of by their own voices and the partner’s perspective. Though some of the gaps Sinnett leaves in the character are interesting– we don’t get all the answers about why they’ve done the things they have, and that space to ponder is particularly engaging.
The Carnivore is a worthy recipient of The Toronto Book Award, a deserving book that will strike a chord with readers from Toronto and elsewhere. A book that uncovers another layer to a city we think we know.
November 8, 2010
On reading Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris
I realize I’m being startlingly unoriginal in loving Anne Fadiman’s books of essays, not to mention about a decade late, but you see, I spent that decade entirely unaware that Anne Fadiman’s books were in the world, and I now see it as my duty to deliver any other readers from such similar darkness.
I first encountered Fadiman in August when I took her book At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays away with me on vacation. Tragically, its adorable front cover was marred when I used it to kill a mosquito against a log wall, and I was determined that a similar fate would not befall the even more adorable cover of Fadiman’s Ex Libris.
Ex Libris is a book of essays about books and reading, written with Fadiman’s signature exuberance. Though her book’s subtitle is an understatement; she is just about as “common” a reader as Virginia Woolf was. Fadiman’s bookish cred is serious: her parents are both writers, she grew up in an apartment with 7000 books, her husband is a writer and the progress of their relationship can be traced by the dedications on the fly leaves of books they’ve given each other over the years. One of her essays begins, “When I was four, I liked to build castles with my father’s pocket-sized, twenty-two volume set of Trollope.”
Still, however, there is common ground between her and us, which is partly aspirational thinking on our part, but also the result of Fadiman’s generous spirit. And she does have a knack of summing up experience just right: “I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch, I’ll settle for a book of Water Pik instructions”, she writes of her incessant need to always be reading something (which once a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual, twice, in an otherwise literature-barren motel room).
She writes hilariously about she and her husband eventually taking the plunge after some years of marriage, and finally deciding to merge their libraries, about the courtly and carnal approaches to how we mistreat our books, about gender and the evolution of language, compulsive copy-editing, and a wonderful essay about reading aloud with the perfect title: “Sharing the Mayhem.” Some of the book’s best bits feature her hapless husband, and her parents and brother who with her comprise a family like no other. A family that is an institution onto itself, with new word acquisition, literary references and allusions, and compulsive bookishness wholly integrated into everyday life– they are a fascinating window onto a world.
Anyway, I left this book on the kitchen table and something dripped on it, and there’s also now a rip on its upper right edge, but none of this makes Ex Libris less than perfect still, really. And how lucky was I this weekend to be discovering it for the very first time– delight and joy and wonder abound. My life is richer for it.
November 7, 2010
A Fuzzy Realm
The fact was that I struggled with Sheila Heti’s book, How Should a Person Be? About what it meant to call that book a novel, a novel that contains its author as a character, a book whose gratuitous sexuality I found more off-putting than titillating, a book that read like a punchline to a joke I’d missed hearing told. Though I engaged with the book on many levels, at various points jotting, “This is interesting…” in the margins, and throughout as I tried to understand what Heti’s project was.
Part of the problem, I think, was that Heti came from a point of departure that didn’t quite make sense to me. For instance, that the blow-job is the great art-form of our time, as the novel was to the 19th century. Or that “personality is just an invention of new media… characters exists from the outside alone”. I think I’d also have trouble with any protagonist who remarks, “It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men.” There are instances in the book where the protagonists’ all-knowingness is subtly undermined enough, however, that I wondered if the glibness was more wry than I gave it credit for, but I was never really sure.
Throughout the book, however, I kept thinking of Joan Didion, not because she and Heti are at all similar, but because Didion’s entire oeuvre seems to address a lot of the questions that Heti is posing. Didion who says that “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, with Heti eventually answering her own question with Didion’s backwards: “A person lives by telling stories.” Except that the stories Didion tells take her far outside herself, far from home. Whether through actual travel, engaging with different kinds of people, or other works of literature. Didion has this amazing way of telling other people’s stories, but still making herself the centre. A strange, self-effaced blurry centre, but still the point everything else revolves around. And it’s this blur that Heti will engage with.
In trying to answer, “How should a person be?”, I can’t help thinking that Sheila Heti should have just read Didion’s essay, “On self-respect.” The essay referencing a difficult time similar to that endured by Heti’s protagonist, when “[one loses] the conviction that lights would always turn green.” Says Didion, “Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.” And that self-respect stems from “character”, which Heti has determined is a societal construction (but maybe she’s being ironic? I don’t know). Joan Didion, however, has no truck with that: “character– the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life.”
Self-respect, according to Didion, is a kind of investment. It’s not about never failing, never making mistakes, but rather knowing what you’re getting into, meaning what you say and the things that you do. And this kind of thinking, she writes, requires “discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth”– that there is no magic pill for it, then, or book with all the answers, or a drug that makes everything clear. Self-respect stems from knowing ourselves from the inside, keeps us from being “in thrall” to everything on the outside wherein, “At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt [for if we don’t respect ourselves, how do we respect those who associate with us?] we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.” Which is kind of the entire plot of How Should a Person Be?
Part of my problem with Heti’s book is that some of her questions did make me uncomfortable– what it means to think we’re important enough to be doing something important, or that any of us matter that much, and what that the stories we tell ourselves in order to live feature characters we’ve constructed with such tireless precision. Her honesty may have struck a nerve. But she places herself above reproach in a way that’s really a bit dishonest– in making her art so much about her, we can’t engage with it without engaging with her character, and as a reader, I’m not comfortable with the ethics of that. I’m not sure the material is so well served by existing a fuzzy realm somewhere between fact and fiction.
But maybe I’m missing the whole point– perhaps Sheila Heti never did really want to be the ideal of what a person should be. Perhaps in posing such a notion, she was really making a comment on our shallow, celebrity obsessed culture in which the blow-job is the ultimate art-form. And that in proclaiming the blow-job as the ultimate art-form, she is deriding a culture that might proclaim the blow-job to be the ultimate art-form, but I still don’t really understand what she means by that, so you can see why I’m a little bit lost.
