November 15, 2013

Picture Book Inspiration: Get Excited and Make Things

(This one is cross-posted to Bunch Family!)

My favourite picture books are the ones whose stories escape their pages, books that live on in the imagination long after they’ve been returned to the shelf, books which inspire their readers to get excited and make things. And such books are perfect for these days when it’s a little too cold outside, and you’re looking for a fun diversion or two.

How To by Julie Morstad: It’s been nominated for a 2013 Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature Illustration, and no wonder. Morstad’s How To is a guide to life, albeit life lived whimsically, with a great deal of imagination and style. It doesn’t inspire a specific craft project, but instead is the launching pad for several (including chalk-drawings, stilts, butterfly wings) and also to a whole new way of looking at the world.

The Imaginary Garden by Andrew Larsen and Irene Luxbacher: This is a really wonderful story about the connection between a young girl and her grandfather who has had to leave his garden behind to move into an apartment. Together, Theo and her grandfather create an imaginary garden to fill the void, a painted picture on a large piece of canvas. I love this book because there’s something going on beneath the surface–just what is the grandfather’s story, I wonder?–but I also love that  just about every child who reads it is compelled to pick up some crayons and paper and make an imaginary garden of her own.

Jillian Jiggs by Phoebe Gilman: I memorized this book when I was seven years old, and now my daughter knows it too. And she has been inspired to play pirates by it, as well as to fashion a robot head out of tinfoil and a cardboard box. (“I’m mad about boxes! Boxes are fun! No one will guess who we are when it’s done.”) Jillian Jiggs’ imagination is quite contagious, and I also remember that its follow-up, The Wonderful Pigs of Jillian Jiggs, came with instructions for making little stuffed pigs of one’s own, with button noses and everything.

The Stone Hatchlings by Sarah Tsiang and Qin Leng: This book is the follow-up to the acclaimed A Flock of Shoes, the story of a little girl who finds some eggs and decides she is going to hatch them into birds. Never mind that Abby’s mother tells her that the eggs are just stones–with the aid of some paint and a brush, Abby transforms those eggs into beautiful birds who are alive in her imagination. We’ve had three egg-shaped stones nesting in a pile of silk scarves ever since this book came into our lives, and I don’t doubt that they’ll hatch one day.

Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen: My love for this book knows no bounds–it’s funny, features yarn-bombing, a brave heroin who defies an evil archduke, and it’s illustrated by Jon Klassen (who did I Want My Hat Back). Extra Yarn is the story of Annabel, who finds a box of yarn and starts knitting, and discovers that the length of yarn is infinite. So she knits sweaters for people, sweaters for pets, sweaters for trees and pickup trucks. Her creations fill her dreary little town with brilliant colour, and might just inspire a young reader to pick up a pair of needles.

Chicken Pig and Cow by Ruth Ohi: Ruth Ohi’s series takes place amongst the residents of a popsicle-stick barn, the residents themselves being plasticize creations, all of whom have been built by Girl. The friends have adventures, misunderstandings, reconciliations and brave rescues. These books were the inspiration for the popsicle stick barn we’ve got at our house.

The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb: I love this book by Julia Donaldson, who wrote The Gruffalo. In delightful rhyming verse, she tells the story of a string of paper dolls who went on to have many adventures, and even when their life was over, they lived on in the memory of the little girl who made them. When we made our own string of paper dolls, naturally, we too called them, “Ticky, and Tacky, and Jackie the Backy, and Jim with Two Noses and Jo with the Bow.”

You can get a Paper Dolls template here!

**

It occurs to me that each of these book features girls who are getting excited and making things, though the Morstad and Gilman do show boys in the mix. But what else am I missing? Are creative boys being left out of picture books? Or is my reading just a little too girl-centric? Please give me your recommendations in the comments.

November 12, 2013

The Fire Dwellers: Margaret Laurence and Bettys Friedan and Draper

If Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellers were published today, critics would be lauding its uncanny sense of the contemporary moment, how Laurence dares to voice the unspoken truths of motherhood, her pitch-perfect portrayal of the subtleties of maternal ambivalence. Published in 1969, Laurence’s fourth novel belongs with Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians as essential Canadian novels born out of the world of The Feminine Mystique. Which puts the book’s contemporary moment-ness in question, but then the lessons of The Fire Dwellers don’t tend to be the kind we pass on to our daughters, however much to their detriment. Not that they’d listen anyway. Isn’t it funny how the history of feminism is so profoundly uncumulative? How we have to learn it for ourselves over and over, and it’s a revolution/revelation every time?

But then The Fire Dwellers is largely about such disconnectedness, between generations, between spouses, friends, between the personal and the political, and—in the case of protagonist Stacey MacAindra—from one’s self, from one’s own life. Stacey is 39, sixteen years married, mother of 4, and according to the sensationalist copy on my Seal Book paperback, she’s looking for a lover. Which isn’t really true, though it’s probably a good way to sell a paperback. Anyone who has read the book, however, will tell you that she is looking for is herself beyond her oppressive roles of wife and mother. Roles which aren’t strictly oppressive; “They nourish me and they devour me too,” she writes of her children, and it’s in this in-between where she’s stuck, imagining the various ways she is destroying her children (by being overbearing, by too much attention, with her anger, all of these suggestions underlined by “helpful” magazine articles suggesting as much) and/or all the ways they would be destroyed anyway if she somehow managed to get away from them.

Through the novel, Laurence plays headlines from television news programs, broadcasting war, turmoil and unrest around the world. In one sense, the headlines are juxtaposed with the domestic, but we soon come to see that these are parallel, that the home-front is no safe haven after all.

“I can’t forget that piece in the paper. Young mother killed her two-month-old infant by smothering it. I wondered how that sort of thing could ever happen. But maybe it was only that the baby was crying, and she didn’t know what to do, and was maybe frantic about other things entirely, and suddenly she found she had stopped the noise. I cannot think this way. I must not.” 

Children are hit by cars and killed, neighbours attempt suicide, Stacey and her husband worry about money, she fears that Mac is sleeping with his secretary, her youngest still isn’t talking (and what has she done to her to make this go wrong, Stacey wonders), and just as terrifying as the suffocating demands of motherhood is considering who she will be once the demands are rescinded, when the children are older. Who will she possibly be then?

Laurence’s The Diviners is so central to my literary consciousness, and I couldn’t help but see Stacey in the context of the Manawaka she’d fled from as a young woman, and in relation to Morag Gunn whom she’d stood apart from as a child but whom she’d have so much to talk about if they met up again in adulthood. And I was surprised to discover that Morag didn’t even exist when Laurence wrote The Fire Dwellers—The Diviners would be published 5 years later in 1974. But in The Fire Dwellers, you see the roots of The Diviners taking shape, its ideas and experiments with narrative and form.

Stacey MacAindra is Betty Draper, is calling out for Betty Friedan, though fat load of good a book is going to do her. (I always find it interesting when people critique Betty Draper’s character for her obviousness to Friedan, as though one day every woman in America read The Feminine Mystique, and society flicked a switch). Stacey MacAindra is also so many of us, as we remarked at my book club the other night. “Maybe we all turn into Stacey MacAindra sometime…” as I tweeted last week. Women for whom the day is never long enough to encompass all the things we want to do, all the people we want to or need to be. Women for whom motherhood and selfhood become a battle, with wifehood thrown in for good measure. You’d throw it all away, if you weren’t tied to it inextricably.

Stacey’s green slacks are dated, and so is her slang, but absolutely nothing else is in this novel which 45 years later is a challenge to and a reflection of the world at once.

November 10, 2013

The Other Side of Youth by Kelli Deeth

I think that most of us in our 30s will see ourselves somewhere in Kelli Deeth’s short story collection The Other Side of Youth. For me, it was this passage from “Something Happy”:

“I have your grandmother’s china for you,” her mother said. “She took good care of it.”

“I don’t really have room for it,” Carmen said. She suddenly saw her grandmother’s hands–solid and covered in age spots.

“But you will,” her mother said. Carmen heard a strain in her mother’s voice, but when Carmen looked, her mother was not exactly smiling, but looking up and off at something pleasant only she could see.

It reminds me of a conversation my mother and I have had a million times, and all the grandmothers’ china I don’t have room for in my apartment, never mind that I’ve never had china of my own. And that I’ll probably never own a house ever, which would come with a basement I could put the china in until it came time to pass it on to my own daughter to keep in a box and never use.

This passage also reminds me of the woman in Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down, the woman who told Didion that someday she’d be able to afford a house that code $1000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.”

And Kelli Deeth’s book is about all the ways that it doesn’t, how those inevitable things like basements, china and having babies can go amiss. The final point in particular, which I thought was this book’s most remarkable feature. Just as we’re lately doing a terrific job exploring the many facets and varying experiences of motherhood, so too does Deeth show that not having children is a land of many stories and different experiences. Her characters are childless by choice or otherwise, ambivalent or despairing, looking toward adopting, desperately trying to hold onto high-risk pregnancies, trying to process the emotional pain and trauma of miscarriage, trying to maintain relationships under such circumstances.

A few of these stories are about young women, gritty stories about innocence lost too soon (and isn’t it always too soon)? In those stories of women in their 30s, on “the other side of youth,” Deeth shows that loss of innocence can be just as devastating, illusions only now being shed about what life gives and takes away.

These are dark stories, and yet there glimmers spots of hope and moments of illumination. Lives in pieces may seem like shards, but there is fascinating texture to so many edges.

November 10, 2013

Someone is always crying somewhere. Usually here.

Everything has been a bit heightened around here lately, busy and outside of ordinary. Stuart was working at a conference at the beginning of last week, and so was away a lot. There has been a flurry of activity to have my book copy-edited by the end of this week (which is very exciting!). I was preparing for the Wild Writers Festival in Waterloo on Saturday, and then we found out on Friday night that my poor dad was going to need emergency surgery. My mom drove Iris and I to Waterloo on Saturday morning and left without enough time, which meant that we arrived just as my event was beginning, GPS dropping us off a block away from where we should have been. I’d been breastfeeding in the car as we zipped down the highway, leaning over the carseat, presenting a curious sight to passing drivers, I am sure. The car stopped and I jumped out without even saying goodbye, dashing across an intersection and with no time to even worry about how my mom was going to contend with Iris, who did indeed scream for the entire 80 minutes I was presenting. Apparently, everybody was quite concerned, not knowing that Iris’s end-of-the-world scream is pretty standard for her. She has taken to letting it rip whenever anybody who isn’t me is holding her. After 7pm, this population includes her father, which is a little bit annoying, and we’re hoping it’s just a phase. I know it’s just a phase. But still. A bit rage-inducing.

Anyway, my Wild Writers event went really well, but between worrying about my dad and Bad Iris, I wasn’t really there. (Read Carrie Snyder’s blog, because she was!) We didn’t stay too long after lunch, and drove back to the city without incident. We were happy to learn that my dad was out of surgery and stable, and while his recovery will be long and difficult, I am glad he’s going to be okay. We’ll be going to see him next weekend, in the midst of (inevitably) last-minute preparations for our trip to England. Yes, Bad Iris on a transatlantic flight. Gulp. Luckily, there will be Grandparents at our destination to receive her. And probably hand her back when she starts screaming…

So yes, there has pretty much always been someone around here having a tantrum lately. I am pleased that this someone has not always been me. While Iris sleeps on me, or doesn’t sleep on me, rather, I have been reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a big fat American-sized book which I’m 500 pages into and not tired of yet. Not a perfect book–I agree with all of Zsuzsi Gartner’s criticisms in her review. And yet, it’s working for me. I enjoyed Jared Bland’s examination of its language in yesterday’s paper.

Also in yesterday’s paper: a story about Harriet’s play school and its role as part of Toronto’s hippie past and the legacy of Rochdale College. And do read “The Wild Thing With People Feet Was My Favourite,” which is an amazing story of the power of picture books and how they shape and reflect our lives. Plus, a Behind the Poem feature from Melanie Dennis Unrau’s Happiness Theads, in which the poet unpacks the strange abbreviations of online mothering forums. And an interview (with recipes for cookies and scones!) by the creators of Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook.

November 7, 2013

On the Unbearable Uselessness of Mother Wisdom

My daughter Harriet is four, and she is a lot like me, except that she’s grown up in the city instead of the suburbs and she goes to the museum once a week. For someone who is four, she has some excellent ideas about where to get the best pastries in our neighbourhood. One day she’ll use chopsticks, but for now, she eats her sushi with a fork.

Which is to say that I am enamoured of her worldliness, and I’d like to think that between the two of us, we have this life thing figured out.

My illusion slips though when I glimpse the parts of her that are just a little too familiar. I observe the awkward ritual of her eating a cupcake. I catch her being unkind to a younger classmate. I see her making all the missteps I’ve spent most of my life learning to avoid.

***

It took me 25 years to learn not to leave dirty dishes piled in the sink. Which sounds like a lesson that’s awfully mundane, but it isn’t. First of all, because it made me the kind of person who doesn’t leave dirty dishes piled in the sink, which is useful. And also because it taught me the pleasures of a chore all done, the loveliness of a small window in my life in which there are no dishes to do. When there’s a job, get it done, is what it took me a quarter of a century to figure out, and this is just one of the things that I know.

I know that cupcakes are most delicious when I don’t lick the cream off first. This is also true of Oreos. I know that making my bed in the morning will improve the experience of going to bed tenfold. I know that I have to be the change I wish to see in the world, and that kindness is a subtle force, but one that’s powerful. That if something’s difficult, it’s all the more reason to try it. That fear is not an exemption from bravery. I even know how to eat an ice cream cone without it dripping down my shirt. Most of the time.

I know that books are the key to the universe. That after every winter comes a spring. That if I try it, I just might like it. That being loud is not the same as being heard. That if I take care of things, they last longer, and if I put them away, I know where to find them. I know that cheap shoes will leave a legacy of ruined feet. And if I’m going to eat a cookie, I better make sure that it’s a good one.

***

Let us imagine a conversation with my daughter. The one where I tell her, “I learned all my lessons so you won’t have to.” And she says, “Thanks, Mom,” my ever-grateful beneficiary. She will always get her homework done before dinner. She takes care of her teeth. She will seek out vulnerable classmates and befriend them. She never ever asks, “Are we there yet?” because she knows that whining doesn’t make a journey go faster, and she was born knowing that boredom is a kind of personality defect.

I am not completely a fool. I know that parents more experienced than I are reading this now and thinking, “Just you wait, lady…” My little daughter is only four and the stakes are cupcakes and whining; this is just the beginning. And it’s what lies ahead that is totally terrifying.

I think of other things I’ve figured out by now. Important things like how not to get hit by busses when crossing the street. How not to get a stupid tattoo. I know how not to get pregnant. I know how not to get so drunk that I’m left unconscious and therefore, in the minds of some, a fair target for rape. I’ve gotten quite good at figuring out how not to get my heart broken. I learned how not to give myself away, how to keep friends, and how to appreciate my own company. I fell in love with a man who knows he is lucky to be loved by me. I can drive a car without crashing. I know how to be secure in myself without having to whittle away at the self-esteem of another. These are lessons, some of them, that have been a long time coming.

**

From exposure to a multitude of terrible cliches, I’ve known all along that part of being a parent is letting our children go, letting them fly, setting them free. It’s a lesson that’s easier to know in theory than in practice, but I still understand it as a necessary component of the mother trade.

And it’s a really romantic idea, at least when you choose not to think about Icarus. Instead, soaring eagles and everything. But what I never understood are the inherent risks of flying, that our children aren’t always going to soar. I didn’t realize that part of being a parent is also giving our children the freedom to plummet back to earth.

So far, being a mother has been one long continuing education, and the greatest revelation has been this: it is unfair to expect my daughter to immediately impart a lesson that I took 25 years to learn. From my daughter’s perspective, all my hard-won mother wisdom is utterly useless. No matter how many times I tell her all the things that I know, she’s still going to have to figure them out for herself.

***

I am watching Harriet in the playground, besotted with the big girls who have no time for her, following them around and seeming not to notice when they don’t respond to her bossy instructions for playing. The girls are playing with Barbies, and now she wants one too, never mind my lectures about their distorted bodies and deformed high-heel feet. Another group of kids is playing soccer, but Harriet doesn’t want to play with them, no matter my feminist imperative that girls can do anything. “I’m not good at running,” she says, which is actually true, because when has an apple ever fallen far from its tree? If Harriet had a sink, her dirty dishes might be piled to the ceiling.

But she is four. This is what I have to remember. What I keep telling myself. It would be a tragedy if she had it all figured out, and it would also make me quite redundant in the role of her mother.

As it is, however, she needs me. Not to have all the answers, but to stay close-by as she makes her own way. It’s my job to give her space, to let her fall, and to help pick up the pieces, if need be.

It’s my job to love her as she is, a work-in-progress just like the rest of us.

This essay was written in August. Mercifully, Harriet has not since mentioned wanting a Barbie.

November 6, 2013

Wild Writers this Saturday

Just a reminder about the Wild Writers Literary Festival this Saturday in Kitchener-Waterloo. Last year, my presentation was about blogging in general, and this year I’m going to get deeper into it with a talk about literary blogs in particular. My new presentation is called “Making the Most of Your Blog: A Guide for Readers and Writers”, and I hope to inspire participants to partake in the art of blogging, to hone the craft and use it to not only become better readers and writers, but also to better “the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work,” to quote Virginia Woolf.

I’m really looking forward to it, and hope to see some of you there. And then after my workshop, there are incredibly events going on all day long featuring some fantastic writers. It is going to be a wonderful day.

More info here!

November 5, 2013

Margaret Drabble at IFOA

The seed of Margaret Drabble’s 18th novel The Pure Gold Baby was planted years ago during a trip to Zambia, Drabble explained to interviewer Eleanor Wachtel during her appearance at the International Festival of Authors on Saturday afternoon. Zambia, she described as “a beautiful golden country”, and countered that Africa was in fact “the heart of sunlight”. It was impression that stayed with her through decades, though was so apart from the rest of her life that she wasn’t sure how she’d ever use it in her fiction. Even still, the Zambian landscape “became part of the hinterland of my thinking.”

Drabble would return to Zambia years later, “in search of an ending,” she says, for The Pure Gold Baby. Or not an ending exactly, she clarified, but a sense of resolution. The novel isn’t spoiled for knowledge of this Zambian return, which mirrors its introduction, in which anthropologist Jessica Speight observes a group of children playing by the side of a lake, the fingers on their hands fused together in a deformity that resembles lobster claws. The Pure Gold Baby, Drabble says, is not a novel of revelations.

She had seen these same children herself, and was struck by them, by their indifference to their disability, “imperfect children having a perfect time.” Eventually, as her narrator does, and not until years later, she was able to trace her fascination with these children to a childhood friend whose hands had been disfigured after an accident. This connection said something to her about “the mysterious workings of the memory.”

This is vintage Drabble, the broad treatment of history, fascinating with anthropology, autobiographical elements, this story of a young single mother in 1960s’ London. Though underlying the story is that of David Livingston, the famous British missionary to Africa who only ever managed one convert. He was just as successful in his quest to find the true source of the Nile, dying nowhere near where he wanted to be because he was going the wrong way. Drabble was intrigued by his misplaced journeys, this story of life’s alternate directions, of where you end up when you’re going the wrong way, and she wanted his journeys to underlie Jess’s story, though motherhood had put an end to her own actual travels.

This missionary’s story connects too to what Jess refers to as the unfashionability of Christianity during the 1970s. Jess in the novel and Drabble herself considers what system has replaced it. What system makes us behave better toward one another? A question to which neither Jess nor her author have an answer, except that we must strive for a culture that is less cruel.

“I don’t have opinions,” says Drabble. “I have reflections.”

The map has shifted, Drabble says, from the 1960s, from Jess’s time, in that we realize now how much is inherited. There was a focus on nurture instead of nature in that time, she says, which meant more responsibility and more blame (upon mothers in particular). Even in the most benign circumstances, she notes, we try to explain away our inheritances, the family members who note that such-and-such a trait certainly doesn’t come from our side.

There has been a shift too in how we treat those with disabilities, from institutionalized care to community-based solutions. Both options come with their drawbacks, and Drabble acknowledges that there is no perfect solution. There are advantages though, she explains, for having the disabled living among us, and she fears what would happen if a disability like Down Syndrome managed to be eradicated. Those with Down Syndrome show us, she says, a different way of being in the world, a sense of human nature that is without guile.

Wachtel suggested that Drabble was perhaps romanticizing the reality of disability, but Drabble is adamant that she knows such people, she has seen their example, and wouldn’t write about it if it were otherwise. These stories are common really; both in her book and in the interview, she cites examples of writers whose disabled family members were hidden away from the world–Jane Austen, Arthur Miller. And it was the uniqueness of her narrative structure allowed Drabble this bit of latitude in her book, enough distance for some literary gossip.

“And what about Doris Lessing?” Wachtel asks her, who also comes into the story. And at this, Drabble stops talking.

“Doris is still alive,” she says quietly. And so the conversation moves on.

The Pure Gold Baby was originally going to be told in the 3rd person, but instead a common group voice began to emerge. Drabble’s narrator is a chorus figure, but a participatory one rather than the Greek variety. Is her narrator reliable? Wachtel inquires, and Drabble replies that she is (they are) about Jess’s story, though she is curiously evasive about her own life. And any reader has the right to see it differently.

The narrator is Jess’s friend, part of a group of young mothers supporting one another in 1960s’ London. It was the kind of community that Drabble herself was part of at the time, and she remembers organizing a cooperative nursery school when her own kids were small. The attitude of the young moms, she says, was “Let’s help ourselves, because no one else is going to.” It was the era of Dr. Spock, and they all felt children knew best. “We were very permissive,” she says, “but we did like a bit of the evening for ourselves.”

These days, childcare is so much more expensive, motherhood itself has become professionalized. (“In the UK, we have something called Mumsnet,” she says. “I looked at it once and my computer broke down. Everybody was talking about penises.”)

Drabble has written about the 1970s before, but it is different to write about it now than when she was actually living it. Her approach to the time and its characters has become anthropological, she says. “I’m looking at small people in a faraway landscape. Now, it all seems long ago.”

Wachtel noted the Rodin sculpture that makes an appearance in The Pure Gold Baby, and Drabble admits her fascination with aging flesh. “And now we live forever and ever,” she says. “It’s almost unfortunate.” A discussion about death and downsizing leads to a mention of Drabble’s pronouncement in 2006 that she was retiring from fiction. She was wrong it seems, and it was during her previous visit to the IFOA in Toronto that she got the urge to return to fiction.

She says she is grateful for Toronto and the festival for providing space in her life in which her laptop started looking friendly again.

November 3, 2013

The Love Monster by Missy Marston

Her name is Margaret Atwood. Margaret H. Atwood, no relation. She’s the protagonist of Missy Marston’s novel The Love Monster, which recently won the Ottawa Book Award. And her name is Margaret Atwood entirely by accident–her own mother, Rose, had never heard of the literary icon when Margaret H. was christened. There is no meaning to the connection, which is barely even a connection. In this, I suppose, Marston is casting light upon the shadow in which Canadian authors pen their books, putting the name out there because readers are thinking it anyway, or a name that’s something like it. Here is an iconoclast then, this Margaret Atwood, who’s just been left by a cheating husband, has psoriasis, and works in a dreadful office she calls The Button Factory.

And there are aliens. Oh, if anything could be more off-putting, I  don’t know. If I’d known there were aliens, I don’t know if I could have picked this novel up, but I am so glad I did pick it up because it delighted me. The aliens (who, like the protagonist’s name) are also not the point, but they are there to add a little magic to a story which otherwise might be altogether too near to reality, too bleak to bear.

“This realization–that every single part of her, no matter what course of action she takes, will get uglier over time, that the process is inevitable and unstoppable–has been crushing.” I didn’t underline this part, because I was too embarrassed to and because I didn’t have to, because I am thirty-four years old and have just had a second baby, and therefore that line is seared on my soul. It sounds vain, I know, but it’s a culmination of things, things that have weighed on poor Margaret H. Atwood who is so memorably bitchy, grumpy, uninterested in making you like her, or anyone. It’s not just about looks, but about how her her life gets lost, and she is adrift in a sea of nothingness (and this part was not seared on my soul, but oh, I can relate about pants too tight). Here we have a story in a setting along the lines of The Office, cringe-worthy encounters, meaningless production, an absence of colour.

We come along with Margaret on her trip to rock-bottom, though the omniscient narrator also embraces Margaret’s mother, her co-workers, even the evil ex, the alien, and invests them with a powerful sympathy, an investigation of the kernel of sadness which lives within us all. The lines, the straight-talk, the music that Margaret plugs into her ears, the disasters–this Canadian book is hilarious, and will never, ever win the Leacock Prize (which is some kind of endorsement). It’s funny, and quirky, but not cute, and it’s terribly profound. Really amazing writing.

Lines like, “Motherhood, the motherfucker above all others: the feeling of always being the lifeguard on duty, of never having a moment’s peace. Counting and counting and counting the precious, vexing little chicks to make sure all are accounted for. Rose believes that, except for that single unspoiled year, sandwiched between her father’s house and her daughter’s birth, that one year lone with her lovely husband, she cannot remember ever feeling at ease. She is always on stand-by. She wants to turn it off, but she can’t. Duty calls. She can feel the motherfucking cape behind her as she rises from the table. Stand tall, mother. Fly!”

And

“But Lou Reed knows everything. If you just listen, it is all there. / He knows that the world can be terrible and that humans struggle to find their way. That’s why they need kicks./ He knows that some kicks can kill you (like heroine[sic*] and brute violence) and others (like love and rock and roll) can save your life. / He knows that sometimes only the tuba can adequately express rock and roll feelings. And he knows how important it is to–how exactly does he out it? Shake your buns.”

*I think “heroine” is a typo, but I’m not sure, and this novel is clever enough, and meta enough that I’d give it the benefit of the doubt. Like the protagonist’s name and the aliens, I can read a whole lot into this. The Love Monster is a novel as heavy on substance as it is on humour, which is rare. I seriously could write a half-decent undergraduate essay on that typo. And I loved reading about Lou Reed, just the day after his death, just another way this novel was like a message from the universe (which all books have kind of read like ever since I finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby).

I liked this novel well enough, thought it was cute, funny, but then eventually, this novel suffused with bleakness begins to bubble over with light and joy and it all comes to mean so much more. SPOILERS!, I guess, but I’m not sure I could convince you to read it otherwise, what with the aliens and the psoriasis. The Love Monster celebrates life and the love, the ties that bind us to the earth and to each other. It is surprising and devourable, challenging tenets of CanLit but affirming the goodness of the world, and I love that. What a revelation–that a wonderful novel can also make you laugh, even make you happy.

October 31, 2013

Happy Halloween!

October 29, 2013

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

The Pure Gold Baby is Margaret Drabble’s first novel since 2006’s The Sea Lady, and her first book since the memoir The Pattern in the Carpet in 2009. Her first novel since she claimed to have quit writing fiction, with a new publisher after she claimed that Penguin was “dumbing her down”. It’s a novel that it’s impossible to regard outside of the wider context of Drabble’s oeuvre, which even the book itself makes implicit. Page 19 makes reference to “the radiant way” and “a millstone”, which suggest the titles of two earlier Drabble novels. Late in the book, a passage: “A wider view, an aerial view, an uplifting view, a view of the river, a view of time, a view of the shores of the infinite.” Which reminded me of a passage I underlined in The Middle Ground a long time ago: “…London, how could one ever be tired of it?… When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation, all its shabby grime lost in perspective, imperceptible from this dizzy height, its connections clear, its pathways revealed. The city, the kingdom. The aerial view.”

One has to take an aerial view of Drabble’s career in order to make sense of The Pure Gold Baby. Because it’s a curious book, and all her books have been curious lately. But let’s start at the beginning, with her first books during the 1960s, usually about young educated women living and working in London. She was a very fashionable writer, the kind Barbara Pym judged herself against unfavourably during her own wilderness years. The fashionableness means these books are dated now, but they have literary merit. Drabble has always been prescient too about social trends–she wrote about single motherhood early in The Millstone, she anticipates the modern media-scape in A Natural Curiosity.

Her perspective broadened during the 1970s and 1980s, much concerned with both the domestic and with wider social trends. Her Radiant Way trilogy is the story of England, the story of everything, a time of great social turmoil and changes, documented in the lives of the characters she made so real.

Since the late 1990s, her books have become very unconventional, stretching the shape of the novel with remarkable elasticity to encompass such largeness: questions of time, genetics, globalization, history. With every book, one gets the sense that she is asking herself again just what the novel is capable of doing. I don’t think Drabble has the credit she deserves as an experimental novelist. She is far from content to write the same book over and over, and seems rather determined to reinvent the book every time, though her preoccupations remain constant.

The Pure Gold Baby reads like a culmination of sorts, the Drabble universe encapsulated. We have a single mother in 1960s’s London, but she takes these characters right up to present day, employing that aerial view, that stunning omniscience she started playing with in the middle of her career. And then the narrative strangeness t00–it’s puzzling. This is the story from the perspective of a woman who pieces together her friend’s history over decades, through stories she has heard, rumours, long and drawn out conversations. Why is she telling this story? We never really know–even she doesn’t know. What do we learn about her, this character who is only named once or twice. Why does she matter?

The centre of this story is Jessica Speight, an anthropologist who a gives birth to a daughter she raises on her own, the pure gold baby of the title. It eventually becomes clear that all is not as it should be with Anna, that she has some kind of unnamable developmental problem–she’s a bit clumsy, a bit simple. Her existence and her affliction come to shape the trajectory of her mother’s life, and here Drabble is pondering motherhood, its questions and problems. Though as ever, her interest is genetic. From where did Anna come from? Jess is not forthcoming with this information, and it causes our narrator to wonder, questions about errant genes.

Or is the origin something else, and here is where the story begins–with a group of children with malformed hands by the side of a lake in Africa where Jess had encountered them years before Anna was born. We’re returned to this point again and again, and Jess makes the voyage back to Africa near the end of the book. It’s kind of an inverse Heart of Darkness, as though Africa were the heart of light, the light that emanates from people like Anna, humanity at its most basic, simple. Which is a bit racist and also reductive in terms of regarding disability, but then whether this is a hypothesis or conclusion is never clear. This is the kind of novel in which characters are allowed to be wrong.

It’s such a strange novel: we are taken through the decades of a group of mothers in London and learn which marriages ended, which children succeeded, which others went wayward (and how there was no telling of who would be who). This is a novel about friendship, and how we tell each other stories, about how we become characters in the stories of one another’s lives. It’s about mental health, public health, institutions. It’s a novel full of facts, pages of passages that read like non-fiction. It’s about progress, and the illusion of progress.

Pure Gold Drabble, is what it is. And so naturally, I loved it.