May 10, 2024

Peacocks in Public

Raise your hand if you too are unable to resist the compulsion to stop any stranger in public you see reading or even just carrying a book you love in order to let them know—in case they didn’t already—JUST how good that book actually is.

But never before has the experience been quite as rich and rewarding as when I accosted @livingbyn_designs on Saturday night as she walked down Queen West bearing her newly purchased copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that is not only THE best titled title of 2024, but also everything you’d hope a book with such a great title would be, as I found out in February when I read it for a podcast interview with its author, the talented @deerajagopalan (whose BOOKSPO episode goes up next week!).

The best thing about meeting Nila with her copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM Is that she met all of my enthusiasm for this terrific book, and then even exceeded it, positively overflowing with pride and happiness at her friend having produced a book so terrific that strangers will stop you in the street to exalt its praises. I mean, JUST LOOK AT THE EXPRESSION ON HER FACE? Have you ever seen anything as awesome and real?

Our encounter was such a celebration of books and friendship and gorgeous summer nights, and it made me so happy, not least at seeing this book in the world for the very first time. Congratulations on your pub date, @deerajagopalan! I can’t wait to read PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM (again)!

(I posted this to Instagram this week, but wanted to add it to my blog for posterity!)

May 9, 2024

The Game of Giants, by Marion Douglas

I loved Marion Douglas’s novel The Game of Giants, though I’m not sure where to start in telling you about it. The back of the book describes the story as beginning with narrator Rose and her partner Lucy in the early 1980s discovering that their son Roger has developmental delays, his abilities marked the third percentile, which sends Rose back into her own history to explore when things went awry, which was early, because Rose as a character is pretty off-beat herself, and so is the narrative. But I’m not actually sure that this is what the story is “about” at all, and instead have a sense that this is a novel intent its own unique trajectory, intent on the propulsiveness and sharpness that results from Rose’s off-beats, and the terrific momentum created by her narrative voice and the remarkable ways that (in her experience) one thing leads to another, questionable choices culminating in a rich tapestry of experience, insecurities, lessons and longings. This novel is such an achingly hilarious story of tender humanity, with Munro-country vibes and the literary influence of Alberta, and yes, unconventional motherhood is where we finally arrive long after the runaway train has left the station on the wildest of rides, Rose struggling to accept the extraordinary reality of her son because she’s never been able to accept the reality of herself. But the reader does, just as Rose’s long-suffering partner Lucy does, Rose Drury a literary creation to fall in love with, made up of foibles, heartaches and broken parts like nobody else is, just like everybody else is.

May 8, 2024

Gleanings

• I do believe in love and humility and that we all deserve a transcendent life. I believe that we are all trying our best and that we are all artichokes, with our myriad glorious fucking wings.
• Which oceans did the textiles traverse, and how did they get to me?
• It’s distance from that phase of motherhood that allows me such a full and free and visceral connection to it.
• She didn’t find a book she wanted, but typically I found four. Perhaps I will be more restrained in 20 years time, like Margaret? We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d run into each other again, at Saver’s or at Vinnies or somewhere in between.
• What might become possible if we said hello because we are surprised and delighted by one another’s precious beingness, and because by doing so we call attention, our attention, Life’s attention – to your being, to our being, to my being. We acknowledge and are present to the miracle that we get to be alive together on this mysterious planet at the same time? What might become possible if we saw each other? If we slowed down enough to see… and be seen?
• “Trillium are propagated by ANTS. Not bees, the wind, or birds. The seeds are covered by a sweet coating which entices the ants to carry seeds underground into their colonies. After eating the coating, the seed germinates in the perfect subterranean environment.”
• Bonds of colour, bonds of affection: I work towards these. Sometimes the results break my heart.
• Words become buzz words and then after a while some tire of them and begin to sneer and speak of them with ‘air-quotes’.
• I read this book at a fast clip…which more and more I think is the best way for me to read–then I live inside the book, carried along with the characters, and even if I don’t like the book that much I’m inclined to finish it because it has in some way become my life.
• I’ve always had an eye for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy – plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537. 

May 7, 2024

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, by Sidik Fofana

“But what’s sad in this whole thing is Wild One ain’t the criminal here. No, no, no. He jus a dude who did suttin. The criminals is us people around him, the people watching someone shake someone else awake from a dream and not doin nothin to stop it.” —”The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch.”

Reading Sidik Fofana’s debut Stories from the Tenants Downstairs was especially meaningful for me because my friend B. recommended it to me when I was staying at her house last week, and she reads my book recommendations all the time but it’s not so often that I get to return to the favour. And what a rewarding favour this was, 8 stories from the perspectives of residents of a Harlem apartment building whose owners are pushing tenants down and out in a project of redevelopment and gentrification, all this the quiet backdrop to the foregrounded experiences of characters ranging from Ms. Dallas, a teaching assistant (who moonlights doing security at the airport); her son Swan whose friend has just come out of prison and who imagines that everything has changed with the new Black president; Mimi, struggling to get enough money to pay her overdue rent; Kandese, who we meet first in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose father dies while they’re living in a shelter; Darius, venturing into sex work and notorious after a run-in with his favourite celebrity goes viral; Najee, another student in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose scheme to make money by dancing on the subway has tragic consequences; Quanneisha, a top gymnast turned drop out who has come to face a world she’d thought she’d left behind; and finally Mr. Murray, the old man who plays chess outside of the restaurant across the street around whom the community rallies when he’s forced from his spot, but he doesn’t respond to their good will in the way that he’s meant to.

And subverting expectations is what this book is all about, in terms of the characters, but also the stories themselves, each of which comes with the most devastating pivot, sometimes on an epic scale, sometimes unbearably subtle (the push of an elevator button at the end of one story that I will never get over). As a reader, I want things to work out for these characters, but Fofana, a public school teacher in New York City (as well as a celebrated short story writer out of the gate—not everybody gets a blurb from Lorrie Morrie), does not give us the satisfaction, the catharsis.

Instead, the reader sits with the discomfort, with the injustice, a situation as intractable as those of these characters who are part of a system that was never built to serve them. Sometimes, often, this is how it is.

May 7, 2024

Bookspo 10

This episode of BOOKSPO is guaranteed to put a song in your head, as Michelle Hébert tells me all about how revisiting Emma Donoghue’s 1997 story collection KISSING THE WITCH helped her discover solutions to problems she was facing in developing the characters in EVERYTHING LITTLE THING SHE DOES IS MAGIC, her debut novel, which is out this week and pretty magic in its own right.

I’m really excited to share it with you, and hope it makes you curious enough to pick up both books (and you definitely should!). Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

May 6, 2024

Light

I have a file in my head I’ve started calling the “Really Important to Understand Even if (ESPECIALLY IF?) You Don’t Agree” file, and the latest addition to it is Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay “Shibboleth.” It joins Naomi Klein’s “We Need an Exodus from Zionism,” a speech she made in New York City last month at a Seder during Passover, and the essay “Resigned,” by Dashka Slater, which I think was the piece that started it all. Someone I admire a lot posted that essay, and the weird thing about that was the people who reacted to it with comments like, “This!” and “So good,” which didn’t seem entirely to be in keeping with the spirit of the piece, but maybe I just think that because of the parts of the piece that I didn’t agree with. And certainly I’ve posted similar responses to other things often in my time, particularly during the years when I was very on Twitter, and I have a visceral recollection of the relief of finally having someone articulate a reasonable point of view when everybody else seems to be infected with some kind of mania or fever dream, all those posts that felt like a lone thing to cling to in a chaotic world. THIS. THIS. But that kind of certainty isn’t what that I’m craving anymore.

Today, a bunch of people I really like on Facebook are sharing a piece called “50 Completely True Things,” a pretty unobjectionable piece (I might even comment, “This!”) but what bothers me about it and really makes me feel for its author, mo husseini (a Palestinian-American, who clearly is caught in a bind here and has issues that I can definitely relate to about people-pleasing and feeling like he’s required to mediate conflicts that he’s in no way I provoked [I’m not saying it’s the same, but I once published a literary anthology in an attempt to mediate The Mommy Wars]) is this requirement for unobjectionableness. (Not unrelated, but also in my file: Roxane Gay’s “The Age of the Open Letter Should End.”) The idea that such a thing is even possible.

It’s been a weird time, during which I’ve been admonished by people I don’t respect very much for both being an enemy of the Jewish people AND aiding and abetting Palestinian genocide with my silence. And funnily enough, people scolding me, yelling at me, or trying to shame me have not done a lot to enhance my point of view, and I’ve given up altogether at trying to persuade other people by doing the same, not just because the tactic is so ineffective, but also because I’ve become vehemently opposed to righteousness and self-righteousness, want nothing to do with either.

I keep thinking of that line from a book I read two weeks ago: “Wisdom is valuable. But the ability to find understanding is a gift that all creation enjoys… In some ways, you can think of wisdom of light. But it is understanding that carries the light. Understanding is what wisdom travels through.” (The author is Michael Hutchison, and it’s a line of dialogue delivered by a Cree Elder.)

Understanding carries the light. I don’t want to to change your point of view, but I seek to understand it, and I want you understand mine too, even if those points of view are different. ESPECIALLY if those points of view are different. There is room enough for complexity, and nuance, and I hope that with the light that comes with understanding, we can all feel braver and more secure, less defensive and afraid, that light not a beacon in the distance, but instead a shine that lights up everyone, everywhere. A kind of common ground.

May 6, 2024

A Novel for All Seasons—But Maybe Especially This One…

My third novel, Asking for a Friend, is also my first novel that’s set over a long span of time, and ever since it was published, I’ve been reflecting on its seasons. That summery book cover and that it was published on the cusp of fall, and that it opens in December with snow falling outside at the end of an academic term. How sad Jess was during that first February, when she (not unrelated) wouldn’t stop listening to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” on repeat. The changingness of March when Jess and Clara drag their mattresses outside and wake up dusted with snow, signs of spring ranging from crocuses to frat boys on St. George Street dragging their shitty leather couches outside to drink beer out of red plastic cups. And now that we’re long past crocuses and lilacs are coming into bloom here in downtown Toronto, I’m finally thinking about summer, and what a summer book this is, the rituals these friends return to over and over as the years change everything, and bring them together, push them apart, and back again. That first summer after university when they discover that they both have an affinity for swimming after four years spent in a city that’s easy to forget is on a lake. When Clara returns from abroad and both their lives have changed so changed so much, each with so much to prove to the other, as demonstrated by their eventual blow-up on a weekend getaway. And then the final summer scene, two friends floating, finally, easy together after so many years of pushing against the currents and tides in an effort to become themselves, which is what it feels like to me with my friends in our forties. How I love that scene, and this entire book, and I’m excited to think of readers who’ll be reading it on the dock.

May 3, 2024

Not How I Pictured It, by Robin Lefler

I read a huge pile of excellent books in February as I was recording interviews for the BOOKSPO podcast, and now that those books are out in the world, I have some catching up to do in terms of posting about them. And one of these is Robin Lefler’s second novel NOT HOW I PICTURED IT, which I just loved with my whole heart. In my conversation with Lefler, she mentions how life itself is stressful enough and therefore, in her fiction, she strives to give readers a holiday from all that and provide fun and pleasure instead, which she definitely accomplishes, but I also want to emphasize that this book is so good. That excellence and being a pleasure to read can go hand-in-hand, as they do in this “shipwreck rom-com” (I didn’t even know that was a thing!) in which the cast of a 20-year-old teen drama en-route to their reunion show end up stranded on a desert island. A great cast of characters with complicated ties to each other (both spoken and otherwise) have to come together to survive, and also figure out who among them is the traitor who instigated this disaster and might still be putting them all in even more danger. Protagonist Ness—who fled show biz years ago and now lives in Toronto unclogging drains in the apartments she owns—is definitely regretting her instincts to avoid being a part of the reunion project in the first place, although the chance of rekindling her connection to her dreamy ex-boyfriend Hayes means: it’s complicated. Funny, sharp, and full of heart, I loved this book.

May 1, 2024

Who By Fire, by Greg Rhyno

In his excellent, riveting, heartful and hilarious second novel, Who By Fire, Greg Rhyno pays tribute to the fact that all the best classic detective novels always include some dame. Although his dame is not just any dame, instead Dame Polara, truly an original, only daughter of legendary PI Dodge Polara, whose brain is now scrambled after a stroke. If elder care wasn’t stressful enough, Dame is recently divorced, her latest IVF round has failed, her dodgy landlord keeps demanding she catch up on rent bills she can’t afford, and her straight job at Toronto City Hall working with heritage preservation is starting to seem pretty futile, particularly as a string of arsons take down one listed building after another. In spite of her best instincts, and out of desperation, Dame finds herself taking on a domestic case on her dad’s behalf, though she’ll be performing the investigation herself, which shouldn’t be so hard, right? After all, she’s the kid whose dad used to lock her out in the cold in order to deliver essential lessons in lockpicking, and she’s tagged along on all his stakeouts. But it turns out the case is connected to something sinister afoot in the city, and the true culprit is closer to home than Dame will ever imagine, putting her in serious danger, and forcing her to rely on her wits when the stakes have never been higher. I loved this book. A pitch-perfect pleasure.

May 1, 2024

The Road to England, Via Leicester

My first Substack essay for paid subscribers went up yesterday and I’m so proud to have created my fourth of these long-form essays, such a cool and fulfilling creative challenge. This one is about how Adrian Mole’s diaries have been foundational texts and my gateway to English culture. How I’ve never seen how the heather looks, but I learned about the Midlands, about the time I ran away to find an English husband, and how there was actually once a time when I didn’t know what a scone was. Paid subscribers can read it here. Thanks to everyone who has paid to subscribe—your support is so meaningful and helpful to me.

I have two subscriptions left for my dedicated blog readers, just to thank you for all your support of my work here. Drop me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com if you’d like to claim one.