October 18, 2012
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: The Green Ship by Quentin Blake
We haven’t had a best book from the library haul in ages, not because the book are no good but because they generally all are, and because life is whirling along at a frenzied pace here so that library books are not what our days hinge about as they once did. But then we picked up Quentin Blake’s The Green Ship from a display at the library about sea and boat books. What a strange, mysterious, magical book about a brother and sister on holiday with an aunt who scramble over a wall to find themselves in a secret garden that is more like a jungle. And in the centre of the garden, they discover a ship except it is not a ship. It’s a strange fixture designed to look like a ship, built from pruned trees, and two tall trees which function as masts. A kind of garden shed is near the front, and inside the brother and sister discover a ship’s wheel, and then they’re discovered themselves.
They discovered by an older woman and the man she calls Bosun (“boatswain”, and actually he resembles a gardener). Stowaways, the boy and girl are made to scrub the deck, which is really to sweep away leaves, and then they all take tea and have madeira cake. The man and woman are all too happy to have the boy and girl join their crew, and so for the rest of the children’s holiday, they all partake in the ship life together.
I love this book for the same reason I love most of my favourite children’s books: because there is another story going on beneath the surface but we’re not privy to its details. In this video, Blake suggests that the old woman had lost her husband at sea, that he’s the “captain” she references, and that the green ship is a memorial to him. The story is viewed through the children’s eyes only who never stop and wonder at the circumstances around this wondrous thing they’ve found, and I actually like that the woman’s story is left untold. I like that it might not occur to children to wonder why grown-ups do any of the inexplicable things they do.
I loved the story’s climax, when the green ship is taken by a storm and it is though the ship is really a ship at sea as the rain pounds and the wind blows, and the old woman steers the ship and remembers what the Captain would have advised her: “Steer into the eye of the storm”. I have no idea if that’s really good advice, but it’s a line I love, and I imagine that it’s applicable somewhere.
October 16, 2012
(Some) Mothers are Writers
On Harriet’s long-form birth certificate, it is written that her mother is a writer. And while I don’t remember much of those blurry days after she was born, when our world was exploded pieces held together with love and hanging on just barely, I remember filling out that form, hunched over my laptop on our coffee table. When we’d got to Mother’s Occupation, we’d paused for a moment. I was three weeks into maternity leave from a job I wouldn’t go back to, from the least meaningful job title in the universe, which was “research administrator.” We couldn’t write that, and besides, I was no longer one. “Why not say, ‘writer’?” my husband suggested, and so we did.
It is often noted as monumental, that moment when a writer learns to call herself as such, when she gathers the confidence, courage and faith necessary to embark upon a creative path. Which I don’t have a whole lot of truck with. I think we sentimentalize these things too much, that we spend too much time with our heads up our asses, and that a woman staring into the mirror practicing calling herself a writer is like Annie Dillard’s writer who “himself only likes the role, the thought of himself in a hat.” I would argue that more important that learning to call oneself a writer is to write and (even better) to write well and to get the work out there so that everyone will know you’re a writer, and what you think doesn’t really matter.*
So this isn’t about how I lied on official documentation and was professionally transformed, never to administrate research ever again. This isn’t about how I learned to call myself a writer, but instead about how everybody’s wrong about motherhood (and by “everybody”, I mean mainly The Atlantic and Newsweek).
Something funny started happening as soon as I got pregnant in 2008. Professionally speaking, research administration aside, it hadn’t been a great time for me. I was a year out of a graduate creative writing program that had failed to take me places, my classmates were publishing books and I was getting rejection after rejection from lit mags. That post-school thing is always brutal, and from creative writing programs in particular. I remember Anne Patchett writing in her memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy how they finished the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had to “write to save their lives” (I paraphrase). It wasn’t working for me. And so when I got pregnant, it seemed like the writing thing was going to be put aside for awhile. At least I would have another focus.
Life, it seemed, would have other plans. Coinciding with my first trimester were some interesting writing opportunities, an invitation to speak on a panel about literary blogging with the Governor General, increased attention to my blog, and some wonderful new writerly connections. By the time Harriet was born, I’d started writing book reviews, had a couple of stories published, and cheques were arriving pretty regularly, even if they were pitifully small. So when I wrote, “Writer” on her birth certificate, I wasn’t entirely delusional. But it wasn’t entirely true yet either.
I suppose it’s still not wholly true, if we’re speaking in terms of finances, because if I didn’t have a husband who worked full time, we’d be in trouble around here. But I’ll tell you this much, because I’m proud of it, and not because it’s the most important thing, because it isn’t: every month, I make our rent. It’s something. Since I became a mother 3.5 years ago, I’ve managed to put together a hard-scrabbled, deeply fulfilling professional life involving writing, editing, teaching and reviewing. And while motherhood has not been integral to this, as though it unleashed some deep creative fount within me, neither has it been an impediment. In fact, it’s helped hugely with the process in practical terms. It gave me a reason to leave my boring 9-5 job. It’s been the inspiration for some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. I’ve made mother-friends who are inspiring writer-friends in their own right. And motherhood has given me the ability to focus, to sit down and get the words out. Harriet has been in playschool since September and I’ve had mornings for working, and I promise you that I’ve not wasted away a single one.
Now obviously, motherhood is not necessary for career success, for many it really does stand in the way, and plenty of writers have really done quite well without kids. Plenty of mothers are also happy enough to be focusing on motherhood alone. Many jobs don’t mix with motherhood quite so tidily. Quite obviously too, our rent is fairly cheap and I could stand to be way more successful. And furthermore, fortune has been good to me. I am enormously privileged. But–
I am thinking about all this now in connection with Jessa Crispin’s column “The Pram in the Hall“, about how fraught is the question of whether or not to have children for creative professionals in particular. She writes, “The reason why it’s so difficult to think through your decision is because people keep pretending like there is one way this motherhood thing could go, when in reality there are millions.” Which she sees as terrifying as it is rife with potential, but from where I stand now it’s mostly the latter. Like everything with parenthood, when people complain about kids being expensive, demands on parents’ time, how you have to give your kids your all, how you just have to have an exer-saucer just you wait, I throw up my arms and shriek, “It doesn’t have to be this way!” There is not only one way this motherhood thing can go. Because life happens. Also, free will doesn’t get taken out along with the placenta.
For mothers, as with women, and as with people (and I’ve made the connection between mothers and people before), there are reassuringly myriad ways to be. We have to broaden and complicate our understanding of what motherhood is and who mothers are if we ever want the conversation about motherhood to be one from which we actually learn something.
*Obviously, I was a child in the 1980s when our education system was robust, my teachers told me I could anything, and my parents underlined this point over and over. So I can afford to be so flippant.
October 14, 2012
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
Attica Locke’s 2010 novel Black Water Rising was the most unlikely finalist for The Orange Prize. Not because it wasn’t good, but because cinematic crime fiction is hardly Orange-y fare. It was one of my favourite books of the year, however, so steeped in place and time with a plot that wouldn’t let go. It concluded with a suggestion that the book wasn’t quite over yet, that Locke would be taking Houston lawyer Jay Porter into another story, and so it comes as a bit of a surprise to me that in her second novel, she’s shifted gears so much.
A surprise, but not a disappointment. Although Locke starts from scratch in The Cutting Season, the writing is just as tight, the story just as solid. The setting now is rural Louisiana, a sugar plantation turned tourist attraction called Belle Vie. Everything, from the big house to the slave cottages, is preserved exactly as was, which means something different to everyone who comes to see it, whether it be Scarlett O’Hara glamour or the travesty of slavery. For Caren Gray, Belle Vie is home, where her ancestors worked until they were freed, and where they continued to work even after. Her own mother had been the plantation’s cook, and it’s where Caren herself has come back to work as manager after a failed relationship and losing her New Orleans home to Hurricane Katrina. Belle Vie is a return to her roots, but also a fresh start as she aims to give her young daughter the best opportunities in life.
The idyll is broken when a dead body is discovered on the plantation grounds, the body of a migrant worker who’d toiled in nearby farming fields in a way not so different from Caren’s own ancestors a century before. The Cutting Season draws its own parallels between slavery and America’s illegal migrant agricultural workforce, and also becomes about real estate, slavery’s legacy, the modern South and its relationship to its complicated past. Though she never finished law school, Caren has background enough to know that a young Black man who works for her is being set up for a crime that he didn’t commit, and that a cover-up is going on. Her first priority, however, is to protect her daughter who appears to know more about the murder than what she lets on. To that end, her ex arrives to suss out the situation, and to provide his own expertise–he’s a lawyer proper now working in DC at Obama’s White House. He’s just weeks away from his wedding but the past between he and Caren, as the past always does in the American South, just refuses to rest.
There were a few clunky moments, the kind that cause you to shout, “Don’t go down in the basement!” at the horror movie heroine, but these were overridden by the book’s general goodness, its complexity, depth and the brilliance of Attica Locke’s prose. The Cutting Season was the first novel selected for a new imprint by crime writer Dennis Lehane, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a gripping, unforgettable book about the connections between history and now.
October 14, 2012
On Barbara Gowdy, cut-out cookies, and other decapitations
Over the weekend, I read Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love, which readers and writers I admire have been talking about for years. In a collection full of devastating stories, I was most devastated by “Lizards”, in which a woman’s very tall lover decapitates her baby daughter by carrying her on his shoulders and walking too close to a ceiling fan. For some reason, I thought this was an essential plot point to share with my family, including those among us who are 3.
Harriet, whom I’ve accidentally given a fascination for all things macabre, couldn’t get enough of this story. “What happened next?” she asked. “Well,” I said. “The baby died. Her head fell off.” And no, it couldn’t have been put back on. Harriet eventually suggested that they should probably get a cutting board and cut off its arms and legs for good measure. And then we decided it would be an excellent idea to bake some gingerbread men.
Well, not gingerbread, exactly. We made “chewy oatmeal” cut-out cookies, but we call them gingerbread men anyway. Even the women. Their chewiness was part of their appeal, but it also meant that the men were partial to losing limbs and that the day’s focus on decapitation continued. Stuart and I surreptitiously gobbled up the casualties, which meant that by the time the cookies were all decorated and Harriet was permitted to have her “just one”, we were about ready to be sick.
Incidentally, this version of The Gingerbread Man story is our favourite. As with Gowdy, its author doesn’t shy away from darkness, but points out that a cookie getting eaten is far from the worst way a story could end.
October 9, 2012
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
It’s difficult upon first encounter to discern exactly the depth of Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home, which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book is slim, just 168 pages, with passages that would almost wash over you were it not for the strange lines of prose that trip you up, and the peculiar repetition of words, lines and symbols whose effect is dizzy, disorienting. I wasn’t done even once I’d come to the end, and so I had to read it again, that time backwards, mostly. And it’s not even until my third reading that I feel I’ve got a handle on the thing, which means it’s fortunate that the book is slim. It’s the kind of book you really have to dive into over and over.
Upon first encounter, Swimming Home is a story we’ve all read before. Miscoupled marrieds arrive at a rented villa in France, and have to contend with a misfit in their midst. The misfit is Kitty Finch, a botonist, an apparent poet, an enchantress and, according to the neighbouring Englishwoman whose balcony overlooks the villa’s swimming pool, also deranged. For reasons unfathomable to everyone, Kitty is invited to stay by the woman of the house, Isabel, a war correspondent who has never been at home while she’s at home. She’s invited Kitty to stay–Kitty who is first discovered swimming naked in the pool– even though she’s clearly got eyes for Isabel’s husband, the celebrated poet Josef whose betrayals stack as tall as his literary successes.
It comes as not surprise to Joe to discover that Kitty has a poem she wants to show him. “Young women who followed him about and wanted him to read their poetry, and he was now convinced that she was one of them, always started by telling him they’d written a poem about something extraordinary.” She has all his books, and tells his wife that, “Joe’s poetry is more like a conversation with me than anything else… We are in nerve contact.”
She’s projecting, we think, this beautiful, naked, swimming girl who is unhinged, but in the depths of the book, nothing is quite what it seems. Less a projector than a receptor, Kitty Finch becomes the tabula rasa upon which the other characters transmit their own fantasies, dreams and nightmares. Less a misfit than a lightning rod, the spine of this disturbing, strange novel, and we find that her grasp of reality is truer than anyone supposes, that she knows each of the people around her better than anybody else does or even better than they themselves do. Tragedy becomes inevitable, but probably not the way you think it is.
At its murky depths (which become illuminated, as are those of the swimming pool which is the novel’s central image), the trick isn’t to underline just what is significant in the text, but instead to understand that everything is. Nothing here is incidental. Which doesn’t make for an immediately satisfying read, because you’ll never be finished with this one, but it’s a delight to encounter a novel that doesn’t hesitate to challenge either its reader or the limits of what a novel can do.
October 9, 2012
Wild Writers in Waterloo, November 2-3
I’m looking forward to the Wild Writers Literary Festival next month in Waterloo, where I will be running a class called “The Art of Blogging”. Other excellent events are scheduled throughout the festival, featuring readers including Terry Fallis, Merilyn Simonds, Alison Pick, Miranda Hill, Carrie Snyder, Diane Schoemperlen, Helen Humphreys, Alexander Macleod, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Redhill. and Michael Crummey. You can check out the full schedule here. Hope to see you there!
October 7, 2012
On mothering and books
“I don’t really feel I have to analyse my own motives in wanting children… It’s like (to me) asking why you want to write. Who cares? You have to, and that’s that. But the kids, like the writing, belong ultimately to themselves, and not to you. In fact, they’re very like the writing. A gift, given to you by life, undeserved like all grace is undeserved by its very nature, and not to be owned….” -Margaret Laurence in a 1971 letter to Margaret Atwood, from A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers (ed. J.A. Wainwright).
“There was babbling I forgot to do, stimulation they never got, foods I meant to introduce and never got around to introducing. If a black-and-white mobile really increases depth perception and early exposure to classical music increases the likelihood of perfect pitch, I blew it. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.” -Anna Quindlen, “Goodbye, Dr. Spock”
October 4, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads Incendiary by Chris Cleave
We met in the Annex on the last day of September, over scones and triangle sandwiches. Two of us had read the book previously and loved it, one of us so much that she couldn’t bear to read it again and mar the experience. We’d all enjoyed the book, except for one of us who found it ridiculous, but then noted that she’d still got through it easily. It’s that kind of book. One of us read most of it on a plane journey with a toddler. It’s a book you can read with a lot going on in the background.
It wasn’t quite what we’d expected. Primed for a “heartbreaking novel about loss and grief”, we were surprised to be immediately captured by the narrator’s voice, which isn’t the kind of voice that turns up in the Ian McEweny books set in London that we usually read. We were surprised by her biting wit, her fierce intelligence, that although the character is damaged from the outset, she is not a caricature of such things. We appreciated this presentation of a working class character, and how much of the novel is about class after all (and quite up front about this). We disagreed over the upper-class characters, who seemed so unreal that some of us had supposed they weren’t actually meant to be real, in a Fight Club set up, but it seemed that they were. “I don’t know,” said a few of us who knew what she was talking about when it comes to toffs, “they seemed pretty real to me.”
We wondered why the narrator was so detached from the world around her, even before the tragedy that claimed the lives of her husband and son. Though insights into her background provided clues to a sordid world she might be grateful to be detached from. By the end of the novel, she is clearly unhinged (though how unhinged is not altogether apparent– a fair amount of ambiguity is at work here), but we wondered how sane she was when the book started. She displays symptoms of OCD from the beginning, though we note that Chris Cleave doesn’t do this stereotypically.
We love the part where she throws up on Prince William’s shoes. How she is able to look at Prince William with a broken Britain all around him, and think, with sympathy, “You are going to be the king of… this.” She has an understanding of everybody around her, which is what allows her to step into other people’s roles, into men’s hearts and fantasies. We thought that the novel had some weak plot points, but one of us supposed that we were coming to this book with different expectations when we were meant to. That this book was written in a world in which a terrorist attack on London was thought to be a dark fantasy. And, as the story goes that is always attached to Incendiary, the 7/7 attacks were launched the very day this book was published. So now readers approach this book expecting the verisimilitude promised by happenstance, but it was never meant to be a documentary. What happens to London at the end of this novel is more dystopian than anything else, and perhaps we’re not to measure it against the world we know.
In the readers’ notes at the back of the book, Cleave refutes allegations that he wrongly predicted the outcome of terror attacks on London. The chaos and horror portrayed in the novel failed to emerge in reality, but Cleave says that the parallels are not so off. They’re just more subtle: civil liberties curtailed, entrenched racism, a war abroad whose cost is bankrupting British society. To which one of us argues that Cleave is wrong, not because the others are right, but because the “changes” he outlines in his argument have always been part of England. That the terror attacks, if anything, had only brought to the surface what was there all along.
Incendiary was an absorbing, undemanding novel, more interesting than it was good. We note that all of Cleave’s books have been ambitious and well tuned into the zeitgeist, but as literature, they’re lacking. That those of us who loved the book and were encountering it again were probably wise to have abstained from a second read.
October 3, 2012
Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen
There is something distinctly un-Canadian about Sussex Drive, the new satire by Linda Svendsen, a funny, impolitic novel written in the tradition of Joe Klein’s Primary Colours and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. Sussex Drive doesn’t quite probe the depths of the latter, with its confined chronology and a relationship to reality more along the lines of the TV show Spitting Image, but it is certainly entertaining. Sussex Drive examines the 2008 proroguement of Canadian parliament through the relationship between the Prime Minister’s dynamic blonde wife and the exotic, unlikely Governor General who lives with her own family just across the street.
But it’s not exactly that PM’s wife, and that Governor General. Svendsen’s novel takes place in an alternate reality, which we know because Queen Elizabeth has not so recently stepped down from the throne and her son Charles is now King. The Prime Minister of Canada is Greg Leggatt, hard-right politician from the Yukon, and his GG (a legacy from the previous government) is Lise Lavoie, an immigrant from the (fictional) African nation of St. Bertrand, the removal of whose first democratically-elected president Canada had been complicit. She was a renowned charity fundraiser, her first husband a First Nations environmental crusader who’d been mysteriously drowned, and her second-husband a Quebecois movie star (whose lead role in the TV movie Jeune Levesque would come back to haunt him).
Becky Leggatt supports her husband, so much so that she walks around 24 Sussex singing, “Ma-jor-itty!” (to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”). She uses her own covert manipulations to play GG Lise Lavoie right into her hand. However, when she discovers that her eldest daughter has become pregnant after a relationship with a member of her husband’s RCMP security team (a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who’d lost part of his leg), she realizes that her household is not running as smoothly as she might have imagined.
Meanwhile, Lise is on to Becky, but Lise is too distracted by multiple demands on her attention to properly fend her off. Lise is wily, but the Leggatt political machine is even more so. Lise tries to balance the roles of wife, mother, international peace ambassador, head of state, but the routine becomes overwhelming and soon standing up for her principles and the honour of her position is no longer possible. Eventually, she is fearing for her own life as it becomes clear that the increasingly terrifying Canadian Prime Minister will let nothing stand between him and the power he lusts for– not even the members of his own family.
Sussex Drive is a silly novel, but also an important one, an effective satire which asks important questions about our political system, all the while it thoroughly entertains.
October 2, 2012
On awards lists, malarky and various apes
The Giller shortlist was announced yesterday, the nominees for the Governor General’s Awards announced today. Writers Trust last week too, and in general, I’m not so grumpy anymore. I love that The Juliet Stories is getting props. I don’t love that Malarky still isn’t, but I’m confident that it’s a book that will hold its own. Its enthusiastic readers will do its propping for it. I look forward to reading some of the other nominees.
Last week I read the Giller longlisted My Life Among the Apes by Cary Fagan, which I enjoyed a lot. Also was pleased to interview Fagan on 49thShelf, and I hope you’ll check it out because I’m really proud of this one. I’ve also been inspired to create a list of books with monkeys on their cover–a most worthwhile endeavour, I think.
Check out also recent #Fest2Fest interviews with writers Andrew Larsen and Sarah Tsiang.
