February 2, 2012
The chief result of the digital revolution
“The chief result of the digital revolution, then, has been to downgrade all art and personal expression to the level of the ephemeral, quickly-consumed and discarded content. In terms of writing this means genre filler: romance (or its seedier cousin porn), suspense thrillers, and supernatural twaddle. What we’re talking about here is the kind of stuff people purchase by the bale, but that nobody wants to have on their bookshelf at home. Not, I might add, out of shame but simply because they don’t think such books are worth keeping.” — Alex Good, “The Digital Apocalypse”, Canadian Notes & Queries 83
January 31, 2012
Stopping for Strangers: by Daniel Griffin
The stories in Daniel Griffin’s collection Stopping for Strangers are the kind of of stories that will annoy people who think that they don’t like short stories. Those readers who want to know what happens next, who require certain closure, who like a beginning, middle and end. Because Griffin’s stories aren’t so tidily structured, and he’s situated them so that the main action is usually taking place outside of the frame. Inside the frame, what is going on is more subtle, ordinary moments made extraordinary by what we perceive will happen later, but the context is not the point, rather the moments are.
There is a rawness to the book’s design which suits it, these stories of characters operating by impulse, living by (barely) wits, leaping before they look, and not always landing on their feet. Many of these are characters whom life happens to, whether due to lack of initiative or stronger (terrible) forces. Half the stories in the book are about sibling relationships, about the unlikelihood of these connections that also happen to us, and the complicated nature of the obligations inherent in these connections. Though just as little choice is exercised by the characters in romantic relationships, many of whom are forced to confront the challenges of parenthood too soon: “The first time I got pregnant, it was like the baby was stealing our youth… And then when I miscarried, it was like we were robbed again, and so I got pregnant again.” Which is the definition of a vicious spiral.
“The Last Great Work of Alvin Cale” was a finalist for the Journey Prize in 2009, and has the most breadth of all the stories in the collection. In less than 20 pages, Griffin evokes decades of history, the life story of a middling artist who is surpassed in both love and talent by his son, and how he uses his son’s death to selfishly fulfil his own means. “Promise” is narrower in its focus, but with great detail and characterization that illuminates what comes before and after, the latter to devastating effect (and ambiguous effect too, which will frustrate some readers, but others will will find engaging). It’s a violent story of loyalty and futility, and why we do what we do even when we know it doesn’t matter.
“Stopping for Strangers” is a remarkable set-up, a brother and sister who stumble into a stranger’s house via an encounter with a hitchhiker and find themselves in the midst of a nightmare (in Trenton Ontario, no less). It’s the kind of story wherein almost nothing happens, but everything nearly does, and the tension is overwhelming. Atmosphere too permeates “Lucky Streak”, which is not as successful as the other stories in terms of narrative, but creates a fantastic sense of place, time, nostalgia and doom. “Mercedes Buyer Guide” is another story in which a car brings unlikely characters together, a 1981 Mercedes with a trunk full of junk and an envelope full of money.
These stories hinge on connections, the moments that are the point of these stories, the “there and then” as opposed to whatever comes next. Subtle gestures that mean more (or don’t), how these connections illuminate the distance between how characters are perceived as opposed to who they think they are, the unbridgeable gaps, and connections so close they’re causing friction– these are the details that tell us everything. And really, this is what a short story is for. Griffin’s will be beheld with great pleasure by readers who already know that.
January 31, 2012
New Featured Ad: Great Plains Publications
I’m pleased to welcome Great Plains Publications to our sidebar. I’d enjoyed reading Nerys Parry’s Man & Other Natural Disasters last month, and so was happy when they approached me about placing an ad on the site. My posts and reviews at Pickle Me This are never paid for and opinions expressed are ever my own, but it is definitely nice to be featuring an ad for a book whose goodness I can stand behind and can recommend wholeheartedly.
January 31, 2012
Packing snow
Harriet has been lusting after winter for weeks now, but the season really hasn’t delivered. It’s the last day of January, and only now have we received the supply of “packing snow” required for Snow Person construction. But Harriet was ecstatic, and we did have a good time rolling up all the snow in the backyard to make this guy. I explained to Harriet that he would not be long for this world, as our temperatures are tropical today, but I’m not sure that she really understood. “Remember how all the snow melted in Charlie and Lola?” I asked her, but she ignored me, and I really was being a bit of a downer. Though not unnecessarily– I just looked out the window, and our Snow Person is no more. My plan to distract Harriet away from trauma resulting from this situation will involve offering ice cream and chocolate. And it will probably taste better than what I found her eating when I finally dragged her inside (kicking and screaming) for nap time, which was dirty snow out of our garden using a long-abandoned, formerly-buried piece of sidewalk chalk as a spoon.
January 29, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
We assembled on Saturday morning around a table spread with enough brunch to feed several Vicious Circles, and quickly got to talking about the book, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. We were surprised that so many of us got through it, a hefty tome at 650 pages, a hefty tome whose bleak outcome is made clear by its title, and which became so unbearably sad to read around page 450. We speculated that part of the reason we were able to take our time as we read it was that none of us really wanted to get to the end. And one of us was so angry at the end, the lack of pay-off for investing one’s time in such a long book. “Well, that’s the way the world works,” we said. There are no tidy endings, and Murray deserves credit for making his novel reflect that reality. Though surely the world is not as bleak as the novel presents. There is far more beauty in the world than Murray shows, and in particular we remarked upon him driving home the point that the adults whom our messed-up children are in the care of are even more messed-up than the kids are. The parents in his novel are stereotypes, drunken mothers in jungle prints whose silicone implants’ sloshing is audible. There are good parents out there. Some of us even had them.
And speaking of stereotypes, we lamented that Murray did not see fit to instill his female characters with the same depth as the male, to write them with the same sensitivity. At the end of the novel, Lori’s character is given some dimension, but otherwise, the girls were the worst “shit girls say” stereotypes. Which is unfortunate because he writes about the teenage boys and their connections so beautifully, and the novel could have been so much richer if the girls had been half as interesting.
But this is the kind of novel whose approach to its subject matter could be used to explain away several perceived flaws. That we never see the girls in all their dimensions because this is a novel about a boys’ boarding school, and they’re so far removed from the girls’ experience. That the story itself seems dated because the school itself is a relic, as anachronistic as its atmosphere. Though we note that this is very much a novel of the present, and we think the novel is structured along the lines of the video games its characters are so immersed in. We remark that the characters’ trains of thought move seamlessly between the games’ narratives, and the actual world around them. We love so much about the boys at the centre of the story, the richness of their characterization.
A few of us are confused because we heard Paul Murray read at IFOA and were left with the impression that this book was funny, but it was so dark, so bleak. The blurbs and reviews also thought it was hilarious, which makes us think that maybe they didn’t read the book. Also, the novel was sold together in three volumes, and we wondered how we might have understand the book if we’d read it in that format, and that we might have read the first or second, and given up.
We liked the way that this novel spoke about grief, and history, and Ireland, while also subverting and complicating stereotypes on the last point. We thought Howard was ridiculous, sometimes amusingly so, but other times just frustratingly so. We loved the Bethani song lyrics, and when Lori sang into the phone. Some of us thought the glimmer of goodness, of wholeness, that Murray provides at the end of the book was enough. Others thought not so much. Some of us found part two pretty tedious, and the whole druid thing, and the secret room in the girls school, blah blah. Prime time for skimming here, but with the final section of the book, we were hooked again.
Books we talked about when we were talking about this book were The History Boys, This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath (which we think we’re going to putting on our to-be-read list). We were all pleased to have encountered a book we might not have read otherwise, and a book that was so good for discussion, whose flaws made for interesting and illuminating conversation. And then we helped ourselves to another serving of sausage hash browns, and turned our minds to extra-literary things.
January 26, 2012
But every day is Family Literacy Day!
Harriet and I reading, back in the day
As part of Family Literacy Day, my article “How to read so your kids will listen” is online at Today’s Parent, which I’m quite excited about (though I know I’m not telling any of you people anything that you didn’t know already).
Also check out also a list of expert-curated kids book recommendations up at Canadian Bookshelf.
And even if you caught it first time around, it might be worth revisiting the legendary time I dragged out Family Literacy Day for an entire week back in 2010, because there’s really some excellent stuff up there.
January 26, 2012
Our Best Book of the library haul: Sarah Garland's books
Still not sure where Sarah Garland has been all my life… An author/illustrator whose texts are not terribly interesting, but whose illustrations are so rich and jumbled with the stuff of every day life. Those of us who adore Shirley Hughes will find much to love in Garland’s “Coming and Going Series,” simple stories of ordinary adventures like going to the local pool, to playgroup, or having friends over for a cup of tea outside (until the rain comes and washes the party away). The houses are untidy, Mums are unravelled and pear-shaped, someone’s always putting on a cup of tea, and they live in a cottage and have an aga! (Yes, be still my English-fetishizing heart.) There is a certain vagueness to the plots which allows little people to project themselves right into the stories, and indeed, Harriet loves these books as much as I do. We’re besotted.
–Check out an interview Garland did in The Guardian when her books were republished in 2007.
January 26, 2012
Firmly in the moment (and returning to the past)
It was strange how much I enjoyed spending the last five days reading Skippy Dies (well, as much as one can enjoy reading Skippy Dies), all 660 pages of it. Usually books that big make me unpatient, and I’m sure part of it was that Skippy was less demanding than, say, Great Expectations, but I really wasn’t in a hurry to finish (well, as much as one can not be in a hurry to be finished reading Skippy Dies). To be reading that one book for so long felt like time suspended, a chance for me to get caught up on book notes and reviews, and there was nothing so pressing for me to be reading just around the corner, so I could take my time. I had to take my time– the book is huge. And it was so very nice to be firmly in the literary moment and not already be anticipating the next thing.
Along the same lines of stopping to smell the flowers, I am delighted to begin some focussed rereading in the next while. For a long time, I spent every summer rereading, but during the summer of 2010, I was so busy reading books as juror for the QWF First Book Prize, and last summer I made it my mission to finally get my to-be-read shelf pared down. I’ve done a formidable job of the latter task, down to authors whose names begin with Q, and while I’d like to barrel through the rest of the stack, I feel as though I might put off my rereading forever. Further, time has fewer demands on me at the moment than it has for awhile, which also won’t last forever, and so the time is now to revisit books from way back when.
I’m looking forward to rereading the following over the next couple of months, most of which are titles that made an impact on me, but now it’s the impact I remember rather than the books themselves, and so it will be interesting to see if the impact remains. How have what I’ve read or experienced since first reading change my impression? What have I forgotten? Am I a more critical reader now? And does the rereading bring me closer to the person I was when I first encountered these? A few of these are books I can’t remember at all, and the reread might give some indication into how this might have come to be.
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
The Children’s Book by AS Byatt
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
All in Together Girls by Kate Sutherland
Anne’s House of Dreams by LM Montgomery
A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble
The Creation by E.O. Wilson
Various Miracles by Carol Shields
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
Slouching Toward Bethleham by Joan Didion
Headhunter by Timothy Findlay
The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger (for my Canada Reads nonfiction co-challenge)
January 26, 2012
More about stories (and Skippy Dies)
“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories that things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole world…” –Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
January 24, 2012
The sense of a story
Last summer, Los Angeles Times columnist Meaghan Daum wrote about Jaycee Dugard and her story spun as a redemption narrative: “I detect a need on the part of the media to wrap her story up in a bow, to assure the public that she’s OK, to reinforce the central narrative of just about everything we see on TV: Change is possible, maybe even easy; that adversity can be overcome; and that, as Dr. Phil likes to say, there are no victims, only volunteers.” When I read Daum’s piece, I couldn’t help but think of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the expectations that have been foisted upon her since her injuries last January, perhaps perpetuated by the very fact that she’d survived being shot in the face in the first place.
The narrative of her “recovery” though has been so remarkable for its falseness, for its abject denial of the realities of brain injury. Which can’t be wholly blamed on the media, I realize, because Giffords and her publicity team appear to have been much in command of her image over the past year, though I suppose theirs has been a fair response to having to endure what Giffords has in the public eye. If I were Giffords, I would want my audio edited too, my photos carefully posed, my dignity preserved, but this doesn’t change the fact of what many of us can read between the lines: that her story is a tragedy without meaning, without redemption. The miracle is that she’s still here at all, but she’s being pressed to make it more than that.
“Most art is more a matter of finding a few meaningful moments in an utterly plotless flow,” writes Rick Salutin in a recent column “Why the storytelling model doesn’t work.” He notes how inapplicable is story as a model in most kinds of culture, let alone as a metaphor for “Life Itself”. That we usually demand more than mere story from our greatest art, and yet journalists are still required to fit their own work into tidy story-sized packages (and tied with Meaghan Daum’s bow), distorting how the rest of us perceive the world around us.
All of which is true, of course, which doesn’t sit terribly well with me who has lived life so far turned to the novel in place of religion. How to reconcile this? Would the novel telling of Gabrielle Giffords’ story diverge sharply from the shape of a Diane Sawyer interview? Though I keep thinking that maybe story isn’t what Salutin has a problem with per se, but rather that he has a narrow definition of what story is, of its mereness. That perhaps the problem remains, as ever, with the tidy ending, with satisfying that yearning for redemption, both of which are actually a failure to acknowledge the way that story really works, and Life Itself for that matter. (And the simplest solution to this problem is the short story, but you already knew that.)
Penelope Lively’s latest novel How It All Began makes the case for story as Life Itself. Story, her characters remark, is forward-motion, one thing after another, driven by the reader who wants to see what happens next. “Narrative. But a contrivance– a clever contrivance if successful.” Real life, her characters acknowledge, is different from “the unruly world in which we have to live. One’s unreliable progress.” And yet Lively is putting these words in the mouths of her fictional characters to make the point that the novel (and art in general) is actually capable of assuming the shape of reality. That in both life and in art, we must make our way by investing happenstance with meaning after the fact. That story is simultaneously more simple and more complex than how we commonly perceive it, but that it’s only a useful tool when we understand that it’s a tool after all.
Update: I’m reading Skippy Dies, and just came across the passage, “…stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.” But as with the Lively book, here is a novel that creates that sense of messy chaos. I don’t think it’s time to give up on story just yet.
Update to update: It occurs to me that I’m 550 pages into Skippy Dies, and that if there is no redemption by the book’s end, I am going to be very dissatisfied. That 600 pages of messy chaos is a mindfuck, and I really do feel like there has to be some kind of pay-off. So perhaps I shouldn’t situate myself too far away from the Dr. Phil-loving masses.
