February 23, 2016
What is Don Draper thinking?
“
Draper. Who knows anything about that guy? He could be Batman.” —Harry Crane
“What is Don Draper thinking?” —frequent jotting in my notebook during my rewatch of Mad Men Seasons 1-3
The first time I watched Mad Men, it confused me, and the reason I’ve just rewatched the first three seasons for (perhaps?) the fourth time is that it still does, which is precisely the point. I didn’t realize then. That the very thing that compels me to the show is that so much of it and its characters remain a mystery, some of which becomes clearer as I watch it again (and again) but some of it doesn’t.
I don’t get Don Draper, but then nobody does. Inconsistency is his salient feature, that a man whose treatment of women is shameful admonishes others about being respectful to them (and his other respectful bents too, men taking off their hats in the elevator etc.), although he’s really kind of horrible to everybody. One thing I do know about him is that he gives terrible advice, and that’s why I loved the final episode of the series, where he delivers one of his sermons to Stephanie, who doesn’t buy it and thinks it’s bullshit and tells him so—that’s a huge moment, I think. His pitches and his advice are all the same, and their power is his delivery, which might convince you that it almost means something. But I’m starting to think it never does.
I am forever married to the idea of Don and Betty, and I can’t shake it. In the final episode, there is a connection between them, though I don’t think it emerges until they split. (Remember what she says when he sleeps with her while he is married to Megan? That line [paraphrased] about the worst way to get close to Don is to love him? When Betty stops doing so, she starts to really mean something to him as a person in her own right.) My insistence on their substance as a couple mostly stems from about twelve seconds in the episode “The Wheel” in which his pitch for Kodak’s Carousel is so good that he buys it himself, and comes home believing that he loves his family. We see him meet him at the door—he’s coming for Thanksgiving after all. He’s done the right thing. But then it all dissolves and we realize it was a fantasy (or a nightmare), and that his house is empty. He sits down on the step while “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” plays, and here is where I wrote, “What is Don Draper thinking?” I used to think he was regretting mistakes he’d made, that he wasn’t a better husband and father, but now I’m not so sure.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Don tells Rachel Mencken during the first season, and it seems like he’s referencing his feelings toward her with the “it”, but now I’m thinking that he’s talking about his marriage. Later Betty alludes to the fact that their marriage came about suddenly—they got engaged quickly and then she got pregnant, or perhaps it was the other way around, and that was the end of their New York life. The details of everyone’s life pre 1960 are quite hazy on the show, which is strange because it’s so pointed about so many details. But for so many of these characters, you get the sense that they didn’t exist before the cameras started rolling. An example: in their entire friendship, Betty never once tells Francine that she used to model until that one episode where Francine comes over to borrow a dress? There are others like this, scenes between Don and Roger when it is hard what they’ve meant to each other, and the haziness is underlined by the weird flashbacks, dopey early Don who seems so different that the surefooted Don we know in the present (although he isn’t really—he’s just better at playing the part). There is a flashback of Don in California, goo-goo eyed about a girl he met called Betty, and it seems false to me. Similar to one that comes later in the series when we see how he hoodwinks Roger into giving him a job, though this isn’t consistent with the story that Roger tells, and Don just doesn’t seem like Don in any of these scene. But who is Don, anyway? And are his flashbacks as made-up as his pitches?
(“Who ARE you? is a question that characters ask each other throughout the series, in all manner of tones.)
So the revelation to me was that Don and Betty might have never meant anything together at all, that the Don’t Think Twice… moment wasn’t meaningful, and even if it was, that’s just twelve seconds of meaning. Plus remember later when Don tells Megan that he didn’t love his children…until he did (and I think he does, but who knows?) but when did that start? Though I think Betty does love him when the series starts, or at least the idea of him, or at least she wants to have sex with him, but he doesn’t even give her that. (Season One is very much about notions of wanting and desire, in both the consumer and the carnal senses.) “All this,” is the thing they talk about, usually with a hand gesture toward their lurid green headboard or their plaid kitchen walls. What “this” is is never clearly delineated—it seems to very much be the house and its contents (“What do you put in that freezer I bought you?” Don asks her), which is strange because neither of them really likes the house. To Betty, the house is a prison, and to Don it is an anchor of the worst kind. He longs for freedom, a lesson he learned from the hobo who told him, “Home, mortgage, a family—I couldn’t sleep. Went on the road with the clothes on my back, and now I sleep like a stone.” The trouble is that he also wants power and status, and these things come with baggage. And without the wife and house, he doesn’t have the power or the status. He needs Betty, even if he doesn’t want her.
The only proper, reciprocated connection between them, I realized, was in the third season when Don is contemplating moving up the ranks at PPL and being moved to London. He tells Betty about this, and she’s thrilled with the possibility of getting out of the suburbs, and you see that they’re good when making plans like this (and here they’re at their most Revolutionary Road-ish). It’s the ordinary they have more trouble with, the role-playing they’re really poor at, whereas their scene in Rome, when they’re both pretending to be people they aren’t, they’re amazing. The trouble is, however, that Betty knows who she is and when she’s posturing, but for Don Draper, there isn’t any difference.
I thought a lot about Pete Campbell this time, with more sympathy than I had before. I’ve always found him loathsome, and he is, but I see now that he’s not simply a foil to Don, he’s also having parallel experiences. And that he’s much more foregrounded in the show than I ever thought he was—the show begins with his marriage to Trudy and indeed they’re the only couple that stays together throughout (and I always think of Sarah’s comment now: “people who dance that well together, in such a very ambitious way, should never have parted”). Trudy is wonderful, and while Pete is loathsome, their marriage is such a partnership in a way that Don and Betty’s never is, or Don and Megan’s either. (Trudy was not a virgin when she got married—remember? She lost her virginity to the publishing guy who offers to sell Pete’s story in Boy’s Own Magazine. I think this is signifiant.) Trudy knows what she’s doing throughout, and she is the one character who really does get what she wants. Though the idea that this is somehow emasculates Pete and the show’s preoccupation with their power dynamic, and how powerful women are emotionally trying for men is one thing I find really tiresome…
Peggy too is one of the show’s anchors—the pilot is her first day of work and she develops in a way that none of the others do as the series progresses. She is also a version of Don, assembling her persona from what she sees of others just as he does, and I think we understand Don better because of Peggy’s openness with this. She is always watching, watching, while Joan is always being watched, and for each woman, this is her path to power, each one using this, respectively. But here’s another thing I got wrong the first time, another thing that confused me—Joan and Peggy throughout the series, the two paths for women to success. And I was thrown off by the ways in which they were alike and different, and none of it was entirely congruous—where is the symmetry. But no, I realized, as I watched the first three seasons this time. These are not THE two paths for women, but simply two paths, and they aren’t parallel or in opposition, but they’re both different, and each one gets each woman to where she wants to go. This is huge, I think. Peggy and Joan aren’t defined in relation to men or even to each other, but as individual people. It’s a hard thing to get one’s head around.
But a lot of things are: this is deliberate. And it happens because of the bizarre surrealness that permeates so many scenes of the show, the moments that have no footing in reality except to make viewers cringe: Sally Draper driving, Peggy stroking Don’s hand, Glen watching Betty pee, when Lois drives a lawnmower over that guy’s foot. Our reactions are visceral and sometimes the scenes are inexplicable, and all of it keeps us as viewers from getting complacent.
February 22, 2016
There will be cake—eventually
As a blog writer, I tend to think of the future in terms of posts. And this was supposed to be the one in which we celebrated Stuart becoming Canadian. He had new Hudson’s Bay mittens and everything, a citizenship gift from my mom. He passed his citizenship test a few weeks ago, and was called to take his oath this morning. He’d ironed his suit, located a tie (tricky business—most ties he ever had are now located in the children’s dress-up box and are used alternatively as head decorations and leashes for stuffed toys, irrevocably knotted) and we had a car booked to head out to Mississauga this morning for the eight o’clock appointment. We were so excited—I’ve been waiting years for this.
And then at two o’clock this morning, Iris woke up sick, and proceeded to be sick until she fell back asleep after five. It was not long before it was clear that us getting to Mississauga just wasn’t going to happen, and so we turned off the six o’clock alarm and I took Harriet to school this morning as usual (and she wasn’t so gutted about the whole thing—they’re celebrating their 100th day today and she was sorry to be missing that). Stuart has called immigration and has to write a letter requesting a rescheduling of his appointment, and so all should be well in time, but we’re disappointed. This was going to be a big deal. There should have been cake.
Alas. There will be cake—eventually. And in the meantime, Iris is sitting on the couch happily eating popsicles and watching Charlie and Lola, her stomach ailment causing her no trouble except, well, stomach related ones. We are consoling ourselves with the fact that we are leaving (without the children) for a trip to Barbados on Saturday.
February 19, 2016
Dragonfly Kites, by Tomson Highway and Julie Flett
Just a week after bringing you a review of My Heart Fills With Happiness, by Monique Gray Smith and Julie Flett, I’m pleased to bring you another beautiful book illustrated by Flett. This one is Dragonfly Kites, written by Tomson Highway, who’s best known for his plays and works for adults (The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Kiss of the Fur Queen).
Like Flett’s illustrations, Highway’s story is gorgeous and simple. It features Cody and Joe, who appeared in his previous picture book, Caribou Song (and there is another in the works in this planned trilogy). The boys live with their parents in Northern Manitoba where there are so many lakes they’ve never stayed on the same one twice, and there are “islands and forests and beaches and clear water But no people.”
In this landscape, the boys make their own play, collecting sticks and giving them names, making up stories about the characters they become. (As we read this, I asked my city-dwelling children, “Do we know anybody who’d ever play a game like that?” and they both nodded, smiling at me.)
The story gives Flett the opportunity to do what she does best (and what she’s made a reputation for in books like Dolphin SOS, Wild Berries and Little You): beautiful scenes set in nature, highlighted with bright prints and patterns. Her talent shines in particular with her renderings of the dragon flies of the book’s title, with the gorgeous intricacies of their wings.
Joe and Cody name and play with many animals they encounter in the wild, but the dragonflies are their favourite. They catch the dragonflies in nets and tie threads around their middles, holding the strings with the dragonflies flying like kites. Which is the point at which the book really takes flight, and I’ll own up to googling “dragonfly kites” to find out if this is really something people do, and I don’t think it actually is, but that Highway made me wonder is a testament to this book’s magic. The dragonflies’ flight continuing long after the boys are tucked into bed at night, continuing on in their dreams, and now they’re soaring high with the insects, into the sunset, straight on until morning.
“That was a good one,” said Harriet when the story was over, the flight was done.
February 17, 2016
On Carol Shields, Rereading, and The Republic of Love
I’ve gone back off the grid in terms of reading, into backlists and rereads. The occasion of Valentines Day inspired me to pick up Shields’ The Republic of Love, which I read last in 2007, according to the note on the inside cover. (Apparently, I was much more organized in 2007.) I wrote a post about it too, and seemed to be as bowled over by the book’s goodness as I was this time (and also was struck between parallels between it and Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, as I’d later see connections between Small Ceremonies and We Need to Talk About Kevin). I don’t remember how much I loved this book back in 2007, but what I do recall and experienced as a faint echo as I read The Republic of Love this time was how much it made me long to go out and write a book just like it. A sad kind of longing it was because my attempts to be Carol Shields at that point had come up very short and resulted in considerable rejections. (I once wrote a story that was a short story glosa with excerpts from a story in Shields’ Various Miracles, and one rejection I received explained that the inclusion of Carol Shields’ prose on the page with my own only made clear how much my prose was not by Carol Shields. Sigh.) This, this, this, I remember thinking, as I read The Republic of Love in 2007. This is what I want to do. And it was something to be recalling that now from the other side as I now read with a novel of my own.
I feel like I’ve grown up with Carol Shields. I received The Stone Diaries as a gift in high school from my mom, a lovely little compact hardcover, before all the awards, I think, because it has no stickers, and her biography was still celebrating The Republic of Love having been shortlisted for The Guardian Short Fiction Prize in 1992. And I loved it—it was easy to love. This was makes Shields work so easy to dismiss—as “light,” not serious. It was her world-building that did it for me, the inclusion of actual photos and a family tree, the poetry written by fictional characters. How the photos were (many of them) of Shields’ own family, and this amazing blurring between fact and fiction was fascinating to me. The novel would stand on its own without these additions, but they pushed its edges, its limits, in ways that were wonderful to somebody who is only just discovering what fiction can do.
Unless remains my favourite of all her books—I went into great detail to explain why in this post from 2011. It’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, and it’s been rich with surprises every time. Eventually, I’d read all her books, her short story collections. I bought Various Miracles in a used bookshop in Kobe in 2003, and remember reading with rapture. Larry’s Party, Happenstance. I reread Small Ceremonies a few years ago, and really loved it—even with her first novel, it was clear that this was a writer with tremendous vision. I loved her collection of letters with Blanche Howard—I’ve read that book twice and intend to return to it throughout my life. There’s so much wisdom from two remarkable women, about living and writing, marriage and motherhood, and it was they who inspired me to pick up Penelope Fitzgerald’s Home, and I’m so pleased that I did. I think that’s also the book in which Shields notes that she’s no longer jealous of others’ literary success (though perhaps that was in Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life), which seemed like an impossible goal for me once upon a time, but I’ve found my way toward it. I was stirred too by the notes about her “talent for friendship”; Shields has been such an inspiration for me as a writer, a mother, a feminist, a friend.
I had no idea what to expect when I picked up The Republic of Love last weekend; I didn’t remember much about it. I wasn’t even sure I really wanted to read it because there are so many books waiting for me to read them for the first time, let alone reading this one for the third or fourth. But here were my impressions as I read it. First, I was hooked immediately. My husband was reading a book he was loving, and said to me a while into it, “I’m hooked now.” “I was hooked on this one in the first paragraph,” I replied. Or the first sentence? “As a baby, Tom Avery had twenty seven mothers.” I’d forgotten about that and though it was Larry from Larry’s Party with the 27 mothers, but but I remember now that he had just one mother and she went and committed botulism. Carol Shields is certainly one for memorable prologues. Also remarkable: Tom is the name of Reta’s husband in Unless. I guess Shields had run out of good men’s names, the stolid types, Toms, and Joes. I think a lot about authors who reuse names—Barbara Pym does this. And then I went and read somewhere that there was no meaning behind it: “With me it’s sometimes just laziness,” she wrote to Philip Larkin. “If I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book.”
Another thing that was important was that I’d visited Winnipeg since my last reread of The Republic of Love, which made the book’s sense of place all the more vivid to me. We’d even made a pilgrimage to the Project Bookmark marker on the corner of River Avenue and Osborne Street, speaking of blurring lines between truth and fiction. I’d essentially stood right there inside the passage of the book, and now there were the words on the page after I’d seen them right there in their world, and the effect was amazing.
Shields loved naming characters (gratuitous Toms notwithstanding), creating the webs, the family trees we see in The Stone Diaries. It seems unfathomable that the world of The Republic of Love is created, made-up, rich as it is with friendships and histories, and couples who knew each other since meeting at someone else’s wedding through somebody’s aunt a thousand years ago. We get entire paragraphs of people who turn up at a party whom we never see again in the book, but they add texture to the world of Shields’ love story here, that it’s never just about two people anyway. Because the lovers have parents, and ex-spouses, and ex-boyfriends who have moved back in with their ex-wife whose husband used to be married to the first wife of one’s fiance. A merry-go-round, Shields refers to it.
And oh yes, it’s about love: “It’s possible to speak ironically about romance, but no adult with any sense talks about love’s richness and transcendence, that it actually happens, that it’s happening right now, in the last years of our long, hard, lean, bitter and promiscuous century. Even here it’s happening, in this flat, midcontinental city with its half million people and its traffic and weather and asphalt parking lots and languishing flower borders and yellow-leafed trees—right here, the miracle of it.” (Which was precisely what I was getting at here.)
I am older than Fay McLeod, heroine of this story—this is weird to me. Though when you are 36 you start being unfathomably older than so many people and it’s totally bizarre. I have been married a decade and have two kids, but still think it’s strange that Fay McLeod is older than me, but that’s mostly because she’s never been older than me before in the entire time I’ve been reading her story, and it’s hard to get my head around that shift. Will I ever read this book and think that Fay McLeod seems young? When I am 53 and she is 35, I wonder? Though I still think that girls in the high school yearbook who were 18 when I was 14 seem more grown up than I’ll ever be, so maybe there is no cure for this affliction.
What else…. I love the late night radio in this story, perhaps (sadly) the one bit of the novel that is dated because all the local stations would syndicate something cheap for the hours between 12 and 4 am these days. I love those voices late in the night, the call-ins, and everybody with an opinion, something to say. I love the way that time sweeps here, through nearly a year, I think. How so much happens off-page, in the margins. The voices—how Shields lets them have their space without explaining that they’re there for. I love the way an aerogram letter is essential to the plot. The different points of view, misunderstandings, what is understood but doesn’t have to be said. How there is no plot, except that love is the plot. That one can make a plot with good, decent people who aren’t terrible to each other. This, this, this, was what I meant when I said that this was the kind of book I wanted to write.
There is a lovely line by Elizabeth Hay in her essay from the PEN anthology, The Writing Life, that I underlined when I read it first in 2006: “What I’m doing is catching a ride on the coattails on literature.” YES. It occurred to me too how foundational all of Shields’ work has been for me, finding its way into my literary DNA and while I’m still no Carol Shields, her stories and ideas and preoccupations are echoing away in every paragraph I write. If not for her and all her work, I might be whiling away my time in a literary no-womansland.
PS I am excited about Startle and Illuminate, a new book of Shields’ advice on writing, which is forthcoming this April.
February 15, 2016
Good things come
Sometimes the internet is portrayed as the opposite of the world proper, as the opposite of civility, and scapegoat for the end of all things ranging from bookshops to mail delivery, but my internet isn’t really like that. If it weren’t for the internet, I don’t know that I’d get much mail at all, and oh, I do get mail. Today, this most absolutely perfect object: a teacup! A gift from Jocelyn in Calgary whose manatea infusers delight me daily with her #TodaysTeacup photos. I am touched and delighted and overwhelmed, and so thrilled that this perfect object now has a home in my cupboard. happy! is exactly right.
(For me, Instagram is very much about happiness: I found a paragraph that articulated it exactly in The Republic of Love this weekend, even though Carol Shields wrote that book in the early 1990s, but then Carol Shields knew everything: “All morning there have been rain showers, but now a fan of sunlight cuts across the table and she stops to admire the effect. How fortunate a woman she is to possess this kind of skewed double vision. To be happy. And to see herself being happy.)
I do wonder if there is a direct correlation between happiness and being a person who gets a lot of mail. For me, the key is magazine subscriptions and ordering a lot of secondhand books, and being someone who regularly writes thank you notes and Christmas cards, thereby ensuring that I get a few of these in return. Yes, and also being publicly ebullient about the post in general, so that kind friends and strangers out there in online-land are inspired to reach out via the mailbox. After I wrote about Miss Rumphius last year, Theresa Kishkan mailed me a packet of lupine seeds. A few months ago, the write Jennifer Manuel sent me a beautiful card and a book by her late mother, Lynn Manuel, called The Lickity Split Princess, which I enjoyed reading with my family. I haven’t been in touch with my good friend Bronwyn for quite some time, although she sent me a lovely book called Ten Poems About Tea in the fall—and I sent the same book to my friend Melanie a while after that. I had a dream-come-true in December when my in-laws sent me a get-well cookie from The Biscuiteers (all the way across the ocean and everything!). I remember three years ago when I was very pregnant and also going through scary things like neck biopsies, the poet Gillian Wigmore mailed me a drawing of a unicorn her daughter had made. Recently we received an excellent package from our beloved Zsuzsi Gartner who’d heard about Harriet’s recent skating prowess and mailed her a copy of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates that had been lingering in a Free Little Library in her neighbourhood, and we look forward to reading it soon.
All of which is to say that I am very lucky, and perhaps kind of spoiled, but more importantly that people can be wonderful, and sometimes it’s true that good things come. The last line from Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona: “But like at the Novelty Machine, I just felt filled with love, knowing that good things take place.” (I read that line back when I was in the midst of neck biopsy panic, and I remember the simple perfection of that sentiment, how it shifted my perspective. Plus, there were drawings of unicorns, which helped too.)
Today is the strangest day of all the others, the one holiday (Family Day here in Ontario, though it’s not celebrated across the country) upon which we also receive mail delivery. Mail delivery and a holiday: “the universe conspiring to delight me” I wrote today, and it’s true.
February 13, 2016
Happy Valentines Day
Everything’s been a special occasion around here lately, what with Pancake Tuesday and the fact that we had afternoon tea for dinner the day after that. And now it’s a long weekend, four days of it if you count Harriet’s PA Day, and we’re stretching out our Valentines Day celebrating and marking it with cheese. (Long weekend adventures have been extensively instagrammed.) It’s freezing cold outside but everything around here is wonderful and cozy, which feels nice after our terrible boring Christmas vacation rife with sickness. I just finished reading my second novel by Tana French (you MUST read Tana French) and now for sentimental reasons, am about to embark upon a reread of The Republic of Love.
February 12, 2016
My Heart Fills With Happiness, by Monique Gray Smith and Julie Flett
As the world’s biggest fan of Little You, the board book by Richard Van Camp and Julie Flett, I’m particularly excited about Flett’s latest work, My Heart Fills With Happiness, a board book written by Monique Gray Smith (whose novel, Tilly, was winner of the 2014 Burt Prize for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature). “This book is dedicated to the former Indian Residential School students and their families—may you find what you seek,” reads Smith’s dedication, and her text is a celebration of First Nations culture as well as those perfect moments of exuberant joy that might be noted as ordinary if they weren’t so extraordinary (and perhaps the key to happiness lies in knowing that distinction): when you see the face of someone you love, smell bannock baking in the oven (with a teapot in the illustration; and oh, do I ever want to bake bannock now), when you’re dancing, singing, or holding the hand of someone you love. “What fills YOUR heart with happiness?” the book asks as it ends.
I received an advanced copy of My Heart Fills With Happiness back in December when I’d been ill in bed for weeks, and I recall reading it with Iris one afternoon while we were home alone together. It was late afternoon and the west-facing window in my room was poured through with sunlight, as yellow as this book’s beautiful cover. We were lying in my bed, face to face, and prompted by the book’s final question, we started talking about the things that fill our hearts: cake, and sunlight, and hugs, and books. The first proper conversation we’d ever had, it occurred to me, as her brain had undergone some transformation rather suddenly (she’d just turned two and a half) and now was (kind of) a creature capable of communicating complex ideas: she looked at me and said, “The sun makes my window so open.” And I knew exactly what she meant.
UPDATE: Bannock happened! We baked it this morning and the smell is indeed one that would fill your heart with happiness. Delicious. We happen to have leftover Devonshire cream in the fridge as well as strawberry jam, so my heart is basically exploding (and not just with cholesterol). I got the recipe from here.
February 10, 2016
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page
My first proper job after graduating from university was temping as admin staff for a social services agency in the English Midlands, and it was a job that blew my mind in terms of what it taught me about the possibilities of narrative. My job required me type out reams of notes scrawled on yellow notepads and other paper scraps, and render these into a coherent story, and it was fascinating. I worked in Fostering and Adoption and wrote up family trees and histories for families pursuing these avenues, and then moved into Children and Families and supported social workers with overflowing caseloads working to protect vulnerable children and/from their parents (who were often unfathomably idiotic—or fathomably so; indeed, there was an entire basement room with paper files stacked to the ceiling of cases that stretched back generations).
I had this job concurrent to the Victoria Climbié murder inquiry, which delved into the systematic failure to protect a small girl who had been tortured and murdered by her guardians. The details of this failure are shocking, and yet they weren’t altogether: I’d seen how resources were scarce, how social workers were often impossibly tasked, and wondered too how far the social safety net would have to stretch in order to account for every possibility of unthinkable human evil. “The ends and edges of what [people] could have done or could do,” which is a line from Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page.
Frankie Styne is a new edition of Page’s novel, first published in 1993, and it put me in mind of my favourite Hilary Mantel novels, her first two, Every Day is Mothers Day and Vacant Possession, dark comedies about the dark edges of humanity and their successful attempts to outmaneuver meddling social workers. Page’s social worker is Annie Purvis, who we know first from the point of view of her client, Liz Meredith, who’s just been moved into a terrace house with her baby. Liz has spent her time most recently living on a railcar after becoming estranged from her family, but since her baby’s birth (compounded by the fact that he has developmental abnormalities) she’s become tangled up in “the system”. Although she diverts all attempts to get her installed with a phone (living as she does by her grandmother’s advice to “Always avoid ties that bind”), she could do with a television, but in the meantime, she contents herself by listening to conversations between the troubled couple next door and imagining a different kind of reality existing on a planet far away, that life itself is merely the plot of a cheap pulp novel she’s somehow been stuck in.
A novel kind of like those penned by Frank Styne who lives next door to her, though they’ve barely met, and she’s never heard of his novels. Styne is a recluse, done in by a facial deformity and a lifelong struggle with sexual dysfunction, but now his latest book has been nominated for a major award and he’s going to have the press on his doorstep. Which drives him to become embroiled in a revenge plot of his own, sadistic fantasies that outdo any possibilities that have turned up so far in his books.
What impact do Frank Styne’s horror novels have upon the world? Is the impact more or less than the effect of Annie Purvis’s attempts to care for clients such as Liz Meredith and her son? Does Liz really require Annie Purvis’s meddling? And Page does such a terrific job of creating sympathy for each of her characters that we’re gunning for Liz, that we understand why she doesn’t take her son to a clinic after his foot is injured—because it’s true that they’d only take him away from her. And we know too that “they” is a group of people around a table, Annie Purvis and her associates, and they’re making their own gambles about the ends and edges of narrative possibility. That Annie Purvis has struggles of her own, a husband who resents the demands of her job. That all these people in close proximity affect each other in ways that no one can predict and that could never be plotted on a graph. That, contrary to Mrs. Thatcher’s assertion, there is such a thing as society after all, but what it is isn’t always pretty.
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is dark and funny, painful and uplifting, marvellously satirical but never cynical, and thoroughly invested with good faith. Kathy Page is a marvel. This is the very best book that I’ve read in ages, and if I read another half as good in the next few months, that will constitute an extraordinary literary year.
February 8, 2016
The Disappearing Woman Writer
I’ve never read anything by Constance Beresford-Howe. Why not? Because her books were old, their covers not very enticing. That her focus was on older women also would not have meant anything to me for a very long time, would have been a drawback, actually (I’d had been through enough with The Stone Angel; I still don’t really love that book) though I recall that my mom had a copy of The Book of Eve. I never read her because her books were never assigned to me for a class, which the reason that I read many things. I suspect I didn’t read her books for the same reason that women proclaimed our universe “post-feminist” in the late 1990s. But her name was familiar when I encountered it in The Globe obits a couple of weeks ago. (You see, I am now at the point in my life at which older women have become interesting; I pore over the death notices every Saturday.) A name with which I am that familiar should perhaps have the death of its bearer meet with more press than just an obit: “Educator, Author, Lover of Literature.” The Globe’s Marsha Lederman had tweeted about her death, as well as had a few others who’d had her as a teacher at Ryerson. And I was glad when I learned that a longer obituary for Beresford-Howe was in the works. Because, see, I’d recently read the essay, “The Amazing Disappearing Women Writer”, and realized that lack of attention to Constance Beresford-Howe, in later life and in death, was not a literary anomaly.
In her essay, Jeannine Hall Gailey asks the question: “So, how can the mid-life woman writer attempt not to disappear right before the eyes of prominent male writers, king-makers, editors, judges and juries of prizes and grants? How do we stay seen and heard when perhaps our youthful charms may be diminishing but our art may be improving?”
It was a question I came at as a reader, though I am a writer too with greying hair and a body that is slowly turning into a splendid pudding. But it was as a reader I considered it, how much we are missing. And it affirmed why I do what I do here and elsewhere, championing books from the platform I’ve made, making noise and shouting my darnedest to ensure that women writers don’t just disappear. And that I have to backtrack too, take note of all those books and readers who weren’t bright and shiny enough when I first encountered them, give them another chance.
I was so happy to read Judy Stoffman’s profile of Constance Beresford-Howe in the Globe this weekend, and to have it affirmed that she’s probably a writer I will deeply appreciate, with Barbara Pym comparisons as the cherry on the sundae. I went out on Saturday afternoon and picked up a second-hand copy of The Book of Eve, and look forward to tracking down her other books in time, and to doing a lot of shouting about them.
February 7, 2016
Patrin, by Theresa Kishkan
And so #TodaysTeacup continues, the Instagramming of my daily cup of tea, the end of the week marked with #CupAndSaucerFriday. I used to think I had too many sets of cups and saucers, but now it seems as though I don’t have enough. On Friday I took down the last of my cup and saucer sets to use, and was surprised to find that this one set is not from England—not Regency China, or Paragone Fine Bone China, or Coalport. No, this set was from a Czechoslovakian company called Altrohlau. Which was strange because I have Czechoslovakia on the brain, one of the settings for Theresa Kishkan’s beautiful, mysterious novella, Patrin—a novella in which the characters drink Earl Grey.
I first read Theresa Kishkan in her essay that won the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and which was included in her essay collection, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees. Unsurprisingly, trees factor prominently in Patrin as well, in patterns of leaves on a quilt inherited by the title character from her grandmother, a Roma from Czechoslovakia who’d immigrated to Canada and become estranged from the rest of her family. When her grandmother dies, Patrin tries to discern the quilt’s pattern, hoping they might provide clues to her family history, which is otherwise lost to her now, the answer to the questions: from where and what did I come?
The novella weaves together several timelines from throughout the 1970s—Patrin embarking to Europe on her own and having her heart broken by a Gypsy musician; spending time with her grandmother in Edmonton after her father’s death, them sleeping together under the quilt; Patrin working in a bookstore in Victoria later in the decade, isolated from the world, trying to decode the mysteries of her own self; and Patrin journeying to Czechoslovakia to do exactly that in 1979, supposing the pattern of trees and leaves on her grandmother’s quilt might be a map of the area in Moravia in which her foremothers had lived and travelled almost a century before.
The world Patrin finds in Czechoslovakia is shadowy and mysterious, the elusiveness of Patrin’s own story underlined by Soviet-era suspicion and paranoia. A friend of a friend takes her on a journey to Moravia to find if her quilt-map line up with actual places after all, and if any history of her family remains. And here the story takes on dimensions of a fairy tale, rich and verdant with a touch of magic, with an ending that in retrospect was inevitable, and is also perfect.
There’s another teacup too—Patrin takes stock of her “batterie de cuisine” as she moves into her own apartment on Oak Bay Avenue in Victoria in 1974, including a mug “from a potter on West Saanich Road” with a ceramic frog at the bottom. We have a mug just like that, a #TodaysTeacup feature from a few weeks back, Patrin wending its own way into my world, surprising patterns emerging, real life as art’s echo.
