November 4, 2010

Baking as Biography by Diane Tye

One of the best books I’ve read this year is Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes by Diane Tye, which I reviewed for Quill & Quire. The weekend I was reading it, no one wanted to talk to me because I was so frightfully boring, starting all sentences with, “Did you know…?” and “Would you believe…?” and finishing with a fascinating fact from Tye’s book. Of which they were many, as Tye goes through her late mother’s recipe box to reconstruct her life and her times. The book beginning with the most fascinating fact of all– that this woman who baked and cooked for her family for decades once remarked that she didn’t even like baking. It took a few more decades for Tye to understand how interesting this was, and the resulting book explores the history of homemaking, feminism, family and eating, and the complex ways in which we understand all of these things. I loved this book. My review is here.

October 28, 2010

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women has been declared a novel, and certainly it functions with a similar narrative arc, but it’s a novel comprising 15 distinct sections, some of which have been previously published as short stories. The book spans over one hundred years, and four generations of one family, and though there are echoes of her predecessors in each woman’s experience, it is the disconnects between the women that are in some ways more significant. Each woman even disconnected from her own time and place– minds wander back into the past and turn the same pages over and over, all the while the present is overwhelmingly present, but never seems to be the point. The point never the point either– Walbert’s prose is slippery, no sentence or paragraph ever taking you where think that it will go.

If this were a more straightforward book, I’d tell you first that it’s about Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who attended Cambridge University at the turn of the century, but had to get permission to attend lectures with male students (with the promise that she wouldn’t speak), and couldn’t earn a degree, but a worthless certificate instead. She falls in with an Anarchist, but that all falls apart when he quits anarchy to rejoin his class, then fast-forward to fifteen years later when the whole world has fallen in with war. Desperate to give voice to the suffragette cause, which has lost support as the nation turns to the war effort instead, Dorothy goes on a hunger strike, relentlessly, and eventually loses her life.

The heartbreaking postscript to this story being the rest of the story, which is that Dorothy has two children, and they’ve already lost their father. Her son Thomas is sent to live with relatives in America, while her daughter Evelyn makes her own way, surviving WW1 in the wilds of Yorkshire, and then earning a scholarship to study mathematics at Bernard College in New York City. The invisible underscore to the rest of her life being her mother’s sacrifice, which had been her sacrifice as well, but not a willing one. She lives a life that is rich in its own peculiar way, but is also sadly stilted. Her own sacrifice was that she could only ever have one thing or another, and her story ends with a glimpse of a life that could have been more whole than that.

Evelyn never reconnects with her brother or his family, and years later his daughter Dorothy (who grew up estranged from Thomas) is surprised to discover her extraordinary family history. Throughout the book, we see her make conventional choices of marriage and children, and even flirt with second-wave feminism in the most suburban sense, but her awakening doesn’t come until later in life, until after forty years of marriage when she realizes she’s never been who she’s meant to be. Like her grandmother before her, this realization come with its own sacrifices, but there is a freedom with her age, and a world with mechanisms to support her.

Less supportive are her daughters Liz and Caroline, each different from the other but connected by disdain for their mother’s behaviour. Caroline is discovering that her efforts have not culminated in the life she was expecting, Liz is overwhelmed by quotidian demands, and both of their lives are dominated by fear. Both see promise, however, in their daughters– the possibility of hope. But perhaps there is something inevitable, as Caroline writes:

“I find it is the dark of night when you least expect it… regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly. You’ve lost the forest for the trees.”

A Short History of Women is a demanding book, in which the reader has to create her own space, take some time to find her feet. However, once accessed, the story opens wide with avenues to consider, new questions, connections made. The women’s experiences resemble one another, but not in ways predictable or parallel, and a reader who comes away with conclusions (if she manages to at all) will have had to wholeheartedly engage with the story in the process, with questions of how far these characters have actually come, and where there’s left to travel.

October 24, 2010

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan

I am sure I could get to the bottom of whether Marilyn Monroe’s dog (a gift from Frank Sinatra) really had been previously owned by Vanessa Bell, but maybe the joke would be on me then. Or it would just demonstrate that I’d missed the joke altogether, the punchline to a question like, “How do you write a novel about a dog that belongs to Marilyn Monroe, and make it implausibly literary?” If if were to tell you a joke right now, it would probably be something about how I wasn’t quite smart enough for the book about Marilyn’s dog, which is The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan.

Most remarkable about this book (and how I could start any number of different sentences this way) is not its pop-culture references, or its grip on Mad Men era current events, but its doggishness. Which is unsurprising for a novel written from the perspective of a dog, but then how many novels have been narrated from the perspective of a dog? Well, quite a few, actually, including Virginia Woolf’s Flush, which is referenced on Page 5, and so here is a novel quite aware of itself and its tongue-in-cheek literary tradition.

“A dog’s biggest talent,” so says Maf, “is for absorbing everything of interest– we absorb the best of what is known to our owners and we retain the thoughts of those we meet. We are rentative enough and we have none of that fatal human weakness for making large distinctions between what is real and what is imagined.” A narrator who borders on omniscience then, which makes Maf the Dog… not such a jarring departure as novels go, dog or no dog, but then this is no “no dog” and O’Hagan never falters with his dog’s eye view, of shoes and pantlegs, and whatnot. The dog stays in the picture– a visit to Marilyn’s analyst raises Freud’s dog Jo-Fi, Maf references other literary dogs including Flush, and Steinbeck’s Charley, from Civil Rights we go to Abe Lincoln’s dog Fido who “gave the future president his love of the untethered”,  and so on, and so on. The novel is peppered with footnotes containing such fascinating facts, one of these notes beginning, “A dog is bound to like footnotes. We spend our lives down here…” On page 164, Maf finds part of a journey boring, and so devotes his energy to compiling a list of the Top Ten Dogs of All Time. (Greyfriars Bobby, Lassie, Snoopy, Laika…)

After leaving his home in England with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Maf travelled to Los Angeles and Frank Sinatra via Natalie Wood’s eccentric mother. Kennedy had just won the presidency, and spirits were high– Sinatra presents the dog to Monroe was a gift, she christens him “Mafia Honey”, and they spend the rest of her life together. Monroe had just come off the tail-end of her breakup with Arthur Miller, had become determined to prove herself as an actress and as a person, carried a thick Russian novel around in her bag, and insisted on trying to read it. She’s studying Method Acting with Lee Strasberg (and O’Hagan’s scene of Marilyn reading from “Anna Christie” is incredible, deep and affecting– a seamless weaving of her lines and her conjuring from her own experience to underline them). She has lunch with Carson McCullers, goes to parties with Lionel Trilling (who notes how “[w]hen Henry James was old and tired… he could be seen moving down the High Street in Rye with his dog Maximilian trotting behind him”), meets President Kennedy (and it’s much less sensational than you’d think– “A lot of depressing shoes at the party,” reports Maf. “I mean Mules.”)

Oh, and Mafia Honey is a Trotskyist, and delivers line about how some people think being themselves is a fine alibi for not being something better, and considers Montaigne “my personal friend”, and pees in Frank Sinatra’s backseat. The Marilyn Monroe he presents to us is a complex character, fascinatingly and lovingly rendered, and more interesting than I’ve seen her in any other tribute. The novel is original, surprising, intelligent, full of brilliant insights, and shows that O’Hagan is a novelist with plenty of tricks up his sleeve.

October 18, 2010

The Journey Prize Stories 22

In the Canadian literary circles I tune into, everybody bitches about everything. It’s sort of a standard rule. Which makes it notable, I think, that I’ve never heard anybody complain about the dearth of a thriving literary magazine culture in this country. That I’ve never heard a writer tell me that they’d had it with Canadian lit. mags, and now they’re sending everything to some address in New York City or London. That L.A. is where the bucks are. Though no one ever says that here is where the bucks are either, but the bucks are not the point. Though they should be. Why aren’t they? And probably we could all start bitching about that.

We take these magazines for granted, however. These little outfits all over the country, often driven by volunteers, undersubscribed but over submitted to. Whose funding was cut by the Federal Government a while back, remember? These magazines that have provided stellar platforms from which our best writers have launched their careers. Magazines that readers like me have fallen in love with, and thrill to see in my mail box about four times a year.

Of course, I go on about small magazines all the time. I also spend a lot of time celebrating the short story, and the fantastic work being created in the genre by new Canadians writers. And I realize that this all can be a bit overwhelming– what magazine to read? What writers? What stories? How to get a feel for any of this? So I am very happy to answer all these questions with The Journey Prize Stories 22.

Each year, Canadian literary magazines submit their best short fiction for The Journey Prize, which was founded in 1988 when writer James Michener donated the Canadian royalties of his novel Journey.  This year’s judges were Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas and Alissa York, and they culled the list down to 12 stories which appear here. The collection was a pleasure to read, an exciting sampling of the diverse forces at work in Canadian short fiction, and an example of the amazing talent being spotted and fostered by our smaller magazines.

The three stories selected for the shortlist were all deserving– Krista Foss’ “The Longitude of Okay” is a gripping story of a school shooting incident and its aftermath, fiercely plotted, and sparsely drawn with perfect detail. Devon Code’s “Uncle Oscar” is told from the perspective of a young boy who is privy to disorder all around him, and orders that disorder in his own way. That young boy’s perspective never falters. And finally, Lynne Katsukake’s “Mating” takes place in Japan, where a husband is reluctantly supporting his wife in a an effort to find a wife for their son, and the narrative is a subtle meditation on family, love and parenthood.

For me, other standouts in the bunch were Laura Boudreau’s “The Dead Dad Game”, which is also a young person’s perspective on a broken world, and that world is realized with such humour, poignancy and quirky charm. Ben Lof’s “When In the Field With Her at His Back” is a disorienting story with all of itself encapsulated within its very first sentence, and yet it manages to be surprising. I loved Andrew McDonald’s “Eat Fist”, in which a young Ukrainian-Canadian math prodigy’s language lessons from a female weight lifter blossoms into her very first love affair. Eliza Robertson’s “Ship’s Log” is the story of a young boy who’s digging a hole to China, perhaps to escape from a home where everything has gone awry, and the gaps in this playful narrative are particularly devastating to great effect. Mike Spry’s “Five Pounds Short With Apologies to Nelsen Algren” begins, “No one ever tells you not to fuck the monkey…” and goes from there, and never falls over its feet with its furious pace.

As I read this collection, I tried to think of a way to link the stories, to find a way to talk about them all together in a review, but they each read so differently, and I never figured out how. But now I see that the small magazine thing was the underlining factor all along anyway– incredible stuff is happening here. And if you want to add your support to a really thriving culture, The Journey Prize Stories is a good place to start.

October 11, 2010

Room by Emma Donoghue

I am one of the legion of readers who initially found the premise of Emma Donoghue’s Room off-putting. Not because it was horrifying, a woman kidnapped and kept in an impenetrable cell ala Fritzl, who bears a son and has to protect and care for him within such a perilous universe. No, I thought it would be boring, two people, four walls, and the perspective of a five year-old to boot. Until other readers started reading it, and I’d never heard anyone short of raving about it, and I was promised I wouldn’t be sorry. I wasn’t. Room was gripping, fascinating and lovely, and I am awfully glad I changed my mind.

Like We Need to Talk About Kevin, however, it is a book that’s rarely separated from the issues it confronts. Yes, Room posits fascinating questions about motherhood and childhood, but I think extensive focus on these ideas undermines Room‘s literary merit. Because Emma Donoghue has created, with Jack, a point of view that never falters, that remains true. A point of view whose truth is unexpected and surprising, uncomfortable and horrifying. Through Jack’s eyes, the world is truly seen anew, and not just for Jack, but for the reader too. His unquestioning understanding that Room is the entire universe, inhabited also by Bed, Floor, and Eggsnake, and then his mother reveals that there is a world Outside, and now Jack’s faith in the order of things is shattered.

Jack and Ma’s escape from Room is terrifying, and I had to keep from skipping ahead to see that everything would turn out fine (and even when I knew that it would, I had to skip ahead again. To double check). This is plot, this is the stuff, purely unputdownable. Though the whole book has that effect– perhaps it’s the deceptive simplicity of the prose that makes one think there would be no harm in reading just a little bit more, and then they realize they’ve been reading for hours.

It’s true that the plot-drive relents in the book’s final half, but I was so fascinated by Jack’s perspective of the world Outside that I continued to be as gripped as ever. To Jack, Room was a kind of sanctuary, and now freedom in the world outside is full of threats– dogs, and rain, and UV rays, and social constraints that make no sense. It’s a strange dichotomy, amplified by Donoghue’s decision to make Jack’s extended family in the outside world well-meaning and essentially good. And yet even so, relations are impossible to navigate.

So to the issues… The overwhelming sense one gets from Jack’s existence in Room is how well taken care of he is, in spite of. How savvy his mother has been at keeping him safe, making him smart, about exeeding their own circumstantial limitations. She is a hero, is Ma, and Jack is immune to ill because of her love for him. And then when he gets out into the world, there are problems Ma had never considered. “I thought he’d be all right,” Ma says at one point, surprised at how much the force of her love and protection hasn’t compensated for everything– Jack doesn’t know how to climb stairs, how to make small talk, how to play, he is a afraid that the wind might knock him over. He has to wear a face mask for fear of exposure to germs that he’s never encountered in his life.

All of which says fascinating things to me– ultimately that a mother’s love (or a parent’s love) only goes so far, and a child needs more than four walls can give. And yet at the same time, Room gives a fascinating portrayal of how much a parent constructs a child’s universe, the weight of such responsibility.

Room was criticized elsewhere for failing to take on the politics of breastfeeding, of extended breastfeeding in particular. Jack is still breastfed when he and Ma are freed, and Aimee Bender wonders why Donoghue doesn’t use “breast-feeding as an effective symbol for that initial, primal bond between mother and child, a bond that has to evolve over time.” To which I’d answer that Donoghue’s narrator doesn’t think in terms of symbols, moreover that the extended breastfeeding was probably a purely practical matter anyway– a way for Ma to ensure that her son’s meagre diet is well-supplemented. And that their breastfeeding relationship ultimately ends the way most breastfeeding relationships do– quietly, without ceremony. I admire Donoghue’s matter-of-factness in regards to it.

All that notwithstanding, though, I do worry that critical emphasis on the Room‘s portrayal of the mother/child bond will be further off-putting for other readers, the male ones in particular. Because I think Room is a book up anybody’s alley, and Jack’s perspective would be illuminating for anyone. Though beyond the stunning literary achievement of his perspective (which is no small thing, of course), I wonder if ultimately this is not a book of enormous depth; unlike We Need to Talk About Kevin, for example, Room would not be a very different book the second time around. However, let this point not undermine its considerable force as we encounter it the first time through.

October 1, 2010

Two best books I’ve read this year: Mammoth and Light Lifting

Alexander MacLeod’s short story collection Light Lifting never wavers, one solid story after another, and the effect is devastating, gripping, overwhelming. I could hardly believe that the book was this good, and so when I discovered that a friend was reading it at the same time that I was, I got in touch right right away for confirmation. Her take: “This guy is the real thing.”

Short stories whose absolutely evoked universes reminded me of Alice Munro in their expansiveness, whose subtly horrifying endings were a bit Flannery O’Connor. Stories so engaged with the stuff of this world, the living and the doing– laying brick driveways, changing an explosive diaper in a disgusting truck stop bathroom, learning to swim, cycling in the snow, crossing the finish line in a track competition, searching for lice, outrunning a train. So vivid that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction, which is why I had trouble remaining composed at the end of the story “Light Lifting”.

These are stories that hinge on a single moment, when one thing turns into another, and yet these single moments are so emblematic of larger stories that each of these stories is a lifetime, is a novel, and utterly satisfying from beginning to end. MacLeod also manages to bridge the literary gender divide, which I found remarkable– how he writes like a woman, and how he writes like a man, and how such distinctions cease to matter with incredible work like this. I am full of awe, amazement, will be foisting this collection on everyone I know, and not a single one of them will be the least bit sorry. They’ll all feel as lucky as I do to have experienced this incredible collection.

(See Light Lifting on the Giller longlist.)

**

Larissa Andrusyshyn’s debut collection of poetry Mammoth is a study in paradox– how death brings the knowlege of what finally endures; the entire universe made containable by the neat equations of its basest parts; that it is poetry unleashing the magic implicit in algebra, taxonomy, molecular biology, zoology. “Snakes are not made from scratch”, Andrusushyn demonstrates on the basis of its useless hip bone, and so neither are these poems, which have been created from the stuff of life, from the world. The story of the mammoth carcass from which a genome is harvested becomes conflated with another extinction, that of the narrator’s father, and as the scientist diligently searches for what endures, so too does the poet.

Poems such as “Portrait of the Liver at the Open Mic” use humour to break the body down to its parts, show how these parts both function and decay, and to examine the language we use to understand these processes. “Diagram of Flightless Bird” and “Vestigial” connect these parts of ourselves to what came before us, and posit that we carry all history and the universe within ourselves– that we are not made from scratch either. The mammoth and the father return near the end of the book, the poetry asserting that we do not bury our dead after all. That we are a sum of our parts, of now and all that came before us.

Andrusyshyn’s book is understated and stunning, slim and expansive, hilarious and sad. Thoroughly engaged with a sense of wonder (“Voyageur”) and a sense of play (“The Mammoth Goes to School”). I had such fun reading (and rereading) this collection, and I know I’ll return to it again and discover something new. It’s a book that manages to not only be transporting, but also to deliver us home.

September 24, 2010

The Dead Politician's Society by Robin Spano

Somewhere along the line these last few years (and I suspect that Kate Atkinson could very well have something to do with it), I discovered, with great surprise, that I have an affinity for murder mysteries.  Crimes novels/detective fiction (and isn’t there a difference between the two? I can never keep it straight, but look forward to PD James’ Talking About Detective Fiction for a little clarification) are the only kind of “genre” that has ever won me over, and I think it’s because these are novels that wear themselves on their sleeves. The same mechanics are present as in any novel, but their workings are much less subtle, and I think that when we revel in detective fiction that we are revelling in the novel in general.

Robin Spano’s first novel Dead Politician Society comes from the less literary end of the spectrum, but kept me up at night in anticipation of discovering who did it, as all good detective fiction should. Her novel’s chief delight is its campus setting, the University of Toronto in particular, and the story is enlivened by the actual streets its characters walk along, familiar views outside their windows, and detailed (but not obtrusive) geography.

Undercover policewoman Clare Vengel is on her first case, sent to infiltrate a secret society of idealistic political science students, and find out who’s killing off local politicians one after another. The story is told from Clare’s point of view, and that of others including students in the society, their charismatic professor, a newspaper obituarist who aspires to better things, and the dead mayor’s ex-wife who wonders if her girlfriend could be behind the crimes.

The  novel comes with its problems, chiefly that while the bulk of the novel races by with deft (and fun!) plotting, it stumbles at its beginning and end. The former is perhaps from difficulty of establishing so many different points of view (which might have worked better had each chapter been more extensive? They were often so brief and chopped up the reading). The latter is particularly troubling, however, as a mystery’s reveal  is its main draw, but this was one was something of an anti-climax– Spano’s set-up had me  geared up for more.

That said, the novel was great fun, refreshingly irreverent, and unputdownable for the most part. Robin Spano has created some memorable characters, Clare Vengel in particular, who– with her wisecracking, motorcycling, chain smoking shamelessness– had an interesting challenge fitting in on campus. Dead Politician’s Society is an amusing social satire, and also perhaps a timely read with municipal politics due to get a lot more heated and ridiculous in the weeks ahead.

September 20, 2010

The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson

Caroline Adderson’s wonderful The Sky is Falling will not be outsmarted. The novel, in which Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist meets the short stories of Chekhov, is narrated by Jane Z., who opens the paper one morning to find a face she hasn’t seen in twenty years. The face belongs to Sonia, once Jane’s roommate, once a friend and possibly something more than that, and also a co-member of a movement campaigning for nuclear disarmament in the early 1980s. Sonia has just been freed from prison, after serving a twenty year sentence for a crime that will be the novel’s climax. The narrative flips back and forth between 1984 and 2004, as Jane explains what happened to her and her friends, and how her past connects with the very different life she lives now.

This is a novel deftly composed of fragments and allusions, whose construction is remarkably assured for this, and yet there are these moments throughout where something slips– a certain detail, an incongruency, we know one thing and then we’re told another–, and these moments take us outside the story for a moment. Poor editing, we can chalk it up to, and avid readers are encountering this kind of thing more and more these days.

And then. And then.

As I said already, Caroline Adderson’s novel will not be outsmarted, there are no slips. How Pascal was said to be a friend of Dieter’s, but Dieter doesn’t even appear to know him, and it’s not Adderson who’s slipped up here, but Jane, and her remarkably limited, unfiltered perspective. Or rather, a perspective that’s filtered solely through a lens of Chekhov stories and the Russian language she’s studying in her second year at UBC, and the stories are more real to her than her life is. She’s more of an agent in these stories, which she manipulates in her essays to suit her own political purposes, than she is in her own life where she is always on the periphery. She reads her life rather than lives it, and her readings are very often wrong.

Jane is the daughter of a Polish immigrant, she’s a foreigner in Vancouver where she has come from Edmonton for university. After a year of living three buses away from the campus with her eccentric aunt, she wins a spot in a shared house because she’s viewed as unthreatening enough to not steal somebody’s boyfriend. Here, she meets Sonia and the other housemates, all of whom have their own reasons for political action (and Adderson should be commended for her treatment of this ensemble cast). For Sonia, it’s a genuine desire to save the world (or perhaps to be the saver of the world, more particularly), and Adderson does a fine job of illustrating the heightened state of Cold War politics in 1984, with Star Wars, the Doomsday Clock, a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hanging by its eye-hole from a nail in the wall, and the Korean airliner that had been shot down by the Soviets the autumn before. To the insular group feeding off one another, all these were signs that the end was nigh, and to Jane, even more insulated within that insular group, it seemed her eyes were opening to reality for the very first time.

Twenty years away from all that, Jane is able to understand her own naivete– not necessarily that the end wasn’t nigh, but that she had a chance of changing any of it. She is just as powerless now as mother to a teenage boy who she fears is slipping away from her– it’s not his big leather boots she minds, or the piercings in his face, or his sullen friends, but that he’s becoming a stranger to her. Though Jane’s sympathy for teenagedom is admirable– Adderson has depicted the trappings of adolescence in a realistic way that would make Tabatha Southy proud. When Jane’s son finally seems interested in his mother, it’s only in her own surprising past, and Jane questions the ethics of using the allure of her past mistakes to connect with her son again. To what ends will he end up using her story?

The Sky is Falling is a great, smart and engaging novel that will appeal to Chekhov lovers, and make Chekhov seem appealing to the unconverted. Adderson’s allusions do not burden the story, but they serve to illustrate Jane’s lack of worldliness, and invest the whole novel with rich under-layers of meaning. The past and present strands of the story come together in a marvelously clever ending that both promises a brighter future, and also acknowledges that the thing about the future is that it’s always just escaping one’s grasp.

September 16, 2010

Sandra Beck by John Lavery

I could say that I’ve never before read a book like Sandra Beck by John Lavery, but then I would be lying, if only because I once read the book Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.  These two books are only alike in the strangest ways, both being oddly fragmented novels that aren’t quite novels. Both being about a woman who is never entirely present, who is never ever seen from the same perspective twice. Both novels even end with similarly strange conclusions at customs desks, though Sandra Beck in general, I think, is a less perplexing shade of weird.

It is true, however, that I’ve never read prose quite like John Lavery’s. His sentences are acrobats, flinging from trapezes with no sign of a net. His narrative goes backwards and forwards, overlapping and backing up again on itself. His writing manages to be gritty, ribald, and really beautiful, though it’s also challenging and takes a while to get a sense of the way it flows. The book eventually establishes a momentum, even dipping in and out of time as it does, but then just when you think you know what it’s doing, you realize you know nothing at all. Sandra Beck is the kind of book you could read thirteen times in a row, and it would be a different novel every time.

The book’s first section is from the perspective of Josee, daughter of Sandra Beck, who is everything to her daughter, and also at the same time, never enough. Who manages to be at the periphery of Josee’s life, but also at its centre. Sandra Beck walks with crutches, is perpetually busy as manager of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, is married to Montreal police chief Paul-Francois Basterache, and though Josee refers to her mother as “my happiness”, she also makes her daughter miserable. Josee is in the midst of adolescence, has the voice of a child but is conducting a bizarre affair with a clarinetist’s birth-mark. Witnessing her mother from a distance at the section’s climax, Josee has the revelation that she has never known Sandra Beck at all.

The second section takes some years after the first, as Josee is now grown-up and self-sufficient, allegedy teaching theatre to children in Bogota. Almost 200 pages of a drive from Lennoxville to Montreal, the reader is an invisble passenger in the backseat of Paul-Francois’ LeSabre, and he’s addressing us directly. P-F, so I’ve been told, has appeared before as a character in Lavery’s short stories, and I can see how the writer can’t quite get enough the guy. He’s the police-chief, and a television personality (on the local crime show C’est le loi/It’s the Law, an ardent husband, impatient father, and a wonderful meandering storyteller who does not fear contradiction, the complicated nature of life. He is bilingual, and so duality is his thing. P-F makes the journey fly by, recounting his relationship with the elusive Sandra Beck. The difference in their mother tongues standing in for the differences between any two people, and that inevitable failure to communicate exactly what one means. “When you love someone, you often understand perfectly what they’re going to say before they say it. It’s when they say it that you find yourself struggling to grasp what they’re attempting to tell you.”

I’ll admit that it took me a long time to understand where the story was going, and that even once I was swept up in the momentum of P-F’s story, I sometimes still had a hard time trying to grasp what he was telling me. That I found Josee’s section a bit tedious at times. But when I got to the end of the story (and it hit me with a brutal wallop), there was no doubt that I’d just experienced something quite extraordinary. And yes, this is a novel that begs to be encountered for a second time, to bring the pieces all together, but even disassembled, this puzzle is oh so worth the read.

September 12, 2010

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

I suspect that if I’d ever read the Russians, I’d have a good understanding as to why Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom had to end up being so bloated. It would make sense of why a novel one might describe as bloated has received glowing reviews across the board, which had raised my expectations so much that the bloat came as a bit of a disappointment. But for me, the Russian illiterate, the bloat was just bloat, but alas, there was still a lot to love about this novel.

Freedom is the story of the Berglund family, who are introduced in the novel’s first section through a cacophony of hearsay and neighbourhood gossip. We see the family from without– Patty, pushing her stroller up and down the street before the neighbourhood was even fashionable, her well-meaning husband Walter, their growing family of son Joey and daughter Jessica. Patty is unflappable, never says a bad word about anyone, won’t tolerate gossip about her neighbour Carol, single-mother of daughter Connie, until Connie starts sleeping with Joey, and Patty just snaps. They could never prove it, of course, but somebody slashed the tires on Carol’s boyfriend’s car, and that somebody was probably Patty, and then Joey ends up moving in with Carol and Connie, too many bottles start showing up in the Berglund’s recycling bin, and eventually the Berglunds move away to Washington, Joey becomes a Republican, and somehow the conservationist Walter ends up embroiled in a scandal involving his relationship to coal companies.

The rest of the novel gets close to the Berglunds, and shows us how they got from there to here. The various sections are told from the point of view of Patty (who has written her autobiography in third person), Walter, Joey, and Walter’s best friend, musician Richard Katz, who has always complicated the relationship between Walter and Patty. Like Franzen’s previous novel The Corrections, Freedom is an unflinching depiction of contemporary family life, of its peculiar dynamics, and– like Lionel Shriver’s recent So Much For All That, which I thought was a finer specimen of a novel– the book also is a statement about American society in general. This point gets hammered home through various treatments of the concept of freedom– to define ourselves apart from our families, freedom to defend our country after September 11, 2001, how the term is hijacked by the left and right, freedom as an export, freedom to be you and me, and then these diatribes about environmentalism and overpopulation, and soon I really wasn’t sure of the point being hammered home as much as I was just sure of the hammer.

The characters didn’t convince me. The Patty Berglund we saw from the outside was an intriguing character in all her quirky ordinariness, but her autobiographical section didn’t feel authentic. Moreover her character didn’t either– others described her amazing laugh, which was nothing more than “Ha ha ha” on the page; she was a woman who’d made little of herself, but I was never sure why everyone was so sure of how smart she actually was, down deep; I didn’t get the dynamics of the marriage either. It was all very confusing and eventually I just didn’t really care who did what or why, because no one needs to make life that hard. Life is hard enough all on its lonesome. And I guess I felt that way about everyone populating this book, this family.

Patty only became vivid to me again in the novel’s final section, which is the mirror image of the opening, once again, the Berglunds from the outside. Part of the relief was that the characters had finally quit doing idiotic things, but they all somehow just seemed much less like nonentities from the outside. I cared about them from the outside, they clicked with the world from the outside, they all just made a bit more sense than from that scrambled place inside their heads. Part of this was also that Franzen was allowing the story to tell itself, rather than painstakingly laying it out for us, piece by piece, and piece by piece by piece.

It’s a smart trick though, framing a novel with bits that are so wonderful, that when you finish the book, you put it down and say, “What a brilliant book. What a perfect ending”, even though about two hundred pages before, you’d wanted to leave the whole thing on the bus. Such framing makes the slog seem worthwhile, especially since the slog itself was rife with good writing, intriguing set-ups, humour, and good questions about our assumptions of every day life. So I’m glad I read Freedom, I definitely am, but I also am terribly relieved that I’m not reading it anymore.