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.

January 22, 2012

"Loving the mayor is a bit like that": Rosemary Aubert's Firebrand

Rosemary Aubert’s Firebrand is a Harlequin SuperRomance published in 1986, and that I discovered it via a footnote in Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto is to give you an indication that Harris’ book is chock-full of fascinating stuff. As is Firebrand, actually, which I would bet is the only Harlequin ever whose romantic lead has a painting of William Lyon MacKenzie on his office wall. This is a Toronto book through and through, dedicated, “To T.O, I love you,” and it shows.

It’s the story of Jenn McDonald, unassuming librarian (naturally), but she’s an unassuming librarian at the Municipal Affairs Library at Toronto City Hall  (which, under our current city government, has been made to no longer exist). Which gives her a good vantage point from which to observe the city’s mayor Mike Massey (whose not one of those Masseys, the novel tells us), who Jenn remembers from the days when he was a rebellious young alderman and the two of them spent a memorable night together locked up in a police station after a protest.

When they meet again while watching the ice-skaters at Nathan Phillips Square, their original spark is rekindled and Jenn and Mike are drawn to one another. She is baffled by his desire, a man so far out of her league, but it turns out that he’s attracted to her down-to-earth qualities and her spirit, and as they argue about developing Toronto’s portlands and the preservation of the Leslie Street Spit, he can see that she’s a woman who can more than hold her own.

But loving the mayor isn’t all posh cars and white roses. It’s hard to love a man who’s already married to his job, and who is used to commanding all those around him. The path to true love doesn’t quite run smooth, and its bumps include a fierce debate on city council about Toronto police officers being armed with machine guns (Mike Massey is firmly against; his stance is unpopular at a time when officers are being shot with Uzis), Jenn receiving death threats, a custody battle with Mike’s ex-wife, and Jenn’s unresolved feelings with her husband. All this against a fabulous Toronto backdrop: first dates in Chinatown, their homes on either side of the Don Valley (with the footpath between them), Jenn shopping at the Room at Simpsons, galas at the King Edward, a protest near OCAD against arts cuts (including those funding The Friendly Giant, we are subtly told), a stroll together through the Moore Park Ravine, a political rally at the Palais Royal. Michael Ondaatje might own the literary Bloor Street Viaduct, but he’s got nothing on Rosemary Aubert for the rest of town.

It’s really quite a good book. This surprised me, though there are some who will rush to tell me that we all write off Harlequins too quickly, but I’m still pretty sure they’re not my thing. Because this book is a Harlequin, there are passages like, “Whispering, caressing, clutching, they continued, until Mike’s large, warm, immensely masculine body covered Jenn’s completely. Until the soft, shifting eagerness of her beneath him brought him to the brink of ecstasy. He asked. She answered yes. Oh yes.”

And then later in the mayor’s office: “Before her, all six-foot-four of him glowing in the soft window light, stood Mike, fully and gloriously a man. Hungry for her with a hunger that was obvious in every part of his huge body.” Which makes “300 pounds of fun” seem kind of paltry, no?

So there’s that, but aside from huge bodies, Aubert paints the city of Toronto with a vibrant specificity, and anyone who cares about our city’s literature (and municipal politics!) should definitely check out this book. The very best part of Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is its challenge of every prejudice as to what Toronto Literature comprises– the canon is more surprising than you ever imagined. And how fortunate we are that Harris’ book turns up Firebrand, which is out of print, hardly known, and hasn’t a single copy held by the Toronto Public Library. I would urge you to pick up your used copy on Amazon for a penny like I did while there are still copies out there to be had.

January 22, 2012

Pirate hats or antennae

We like to keep all the options open.

January 19, 2012

Mini-Review: How It All Began by Penelope Lively

I read this book for pleasure purely and have no time to review it here, but couldn’t not post anything about it in case you never learned how wonderful this book is and how much you have to read it. How It All Began is the latest by Penelope Lively, who I’ve loved ever since Moon Tiger. This is a story about story, about the chaos theory as applied to history, to life itself, to narrative. When Charlotte Rainsford is mugged in the street, a whole chain of events is set forth that forever changes the lives of people who never suspect the ways in which their worlds are connected. And it’s interesting because these characters spend the entire book reading books, talking about stories, and making clear the ways in which the way stories go in real life and the way they do in books is markedly different– all the while unsuspecting that they’re fictional characters themselves. Oh, that cheeky Penelope Lively who constructs her universes to be so much like the one that we know, and manipulates her people with such deftness that we can nearly forget she’s there, but not completely. I do adore her authorial presence, which is always felt, its charm, and her preoccupations with history and happenstance. There’s a Carol Shields reference in this one, which is not far off the mark. How It All Began is the best book Lively has published in ages (which is saying something, because she’s always pretty good).

January 18, 2012

Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik

Winter has always been difficult. When I was 20 years old, and prone to fits of angst and melodrama, my roommate and I copied out an epigraph from Margaret Atwood’s Survival (we were English majors, in addition to being melodramatic) and mounted the paper on our wall: “To find words for what we suffer,/ To enjoy what we must suffer–/ Not to be dumb beasts…/ We shall survive/And we shall walk/ Somehow into summer…” (DG Jones, “Beating the Bushes: Christmas 1963”).

Last winter, I went about survival all wrong. As the winter solstice arrived in December, I kept telling myself that the darkness only meant that spring had never been so close. This thought was consoling, but it utterly ruined things once June came around, and I couldn’t shake my head of the fact it only meant now that winter had never been so close.

So I decided to do better this year, and Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season was part of that. My plan was so strategic that when the book came out in October, I couldn’t actually read it because it wasn’t winter yet. In fact, it wasn’t really winter until last Friday when the snow fell, and so that was the day I finally started reading. Winter is this year’s Massey Lectures in book form, written and delivered by Gopnik, of the revered New Yorker columns and wonderful books (I loved Through the Children’s Gate). Gopnik, who gets to start sentences with, “My brother-in-law, the Arctic explorer…”, which underlines something I’ve long suspected: that it’s people with the best stories who get to be the best story-tellers.

The book is divided into five essays, but structurally, these essays are curious. They’re not built from the bottom-up as much as vertically, as a flow, words and ideas flying by in a whirl of pages. They’re more consecutive impressions than a cumulation of ideas, which makes sense for lectures, and I also don’t mean to imply a lack of depth. Sure, breadth is what’s on display here, but there is an underlying structure, but it’s easy to get distracted from it by the essays’ sheer volume of stuff.

You’ll know that I was absorbed in Winter because the whole time I was reading it, I started all my sentences with, “Hey, did you know…?” That there was a mini-Ice Age between 1500 and 1850, for instance, which accounts for all that skating on the Thames. I learned about this in the book’s first section, “Romantic Winter”, in which Gopnik asserts that the Romantics constructed winter as a season to be considered rather than simply borne, and developed notions of winter as both beautiful and sublime. And this is what I love about Gopnik’s writing, and this book. Nothing is ever simplified. Gopnik never misses a chance to classify one thing as two things, and usually those two things are directly opposed. But so it goes. “Doubleness clarifies the world,” said Carol Shields, and Gopnik is smart enough to know this.

In “Romantic Winter”, Gopnik references poetry and artwork (whose images are featured), ideas of winter and nationalism, the advent of central heating, icebergs vs. snowflakes. Section two is “Radical Winter”, considering winter as something to be sought rather than survived. He begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is situated at the North Pole (and yes, I’d forgotten this too), and describes the race for the Pole from both ends (and describes what the Poles where imagined to be before we knew they were cold. Seriously. This stuff is wonderful). “Recuperative Winter” is a celebration of the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, and he writes about holidays in general, how Christmas is extraordinary for its doubleness as a festival of renewal and reversal at once.

In “Recreational Winter”, he’s basically talking about hockey and hockey as born out of Montreal in the late 1800s (and it’s the offspring of rugby and lacrosse, not anything so civilized as soccer or field hockey). And did you know that team sport was not even really a thing until the industrial revolution (and the weekend, and the big company to sponsor and pay for the sweaters). And finally, “Remembering Winter”, picking up the strands of loss and nostalgia that have been winding their way through the entire book. Gopnik celebrates Montreal’s underground city that allows winter to be skirted (and did you know that Dallas’s underground city had same designer? And was a failure because Dallas doesn’t need to escape from itself, and also because there was no subway integrated. Dallas is a car town), but also laments how far we are removed from winter now. This loss underlined by how important winter has been to building great cities. He presents winter as “a labile environment where the imagination can not only project but can construct anew from something given.” Why we take our children outside to build snowmen, angels. Global warming with spiritual consequences beyond the cannibalistic polar bears.

Gopnik comes clean at the end of the book: “I realize that these chapters, in the guise of cultural observations and a kind of amateur’s cultural anthropology, are really a composite list of things that I like and things I don’t… I love Christmas carols, A Christmas Carol, Dickens and Trollope, free-skating and fast-passing Russian and Quebec hockey, and courage of the kind that drove people toward the poles, which I wish I had more of.”

But the thing is that I don’t even like hockey or sports at all, and Gopnik’s hockey chapter had me mesmerized. I am a Canadian who doesn’t know how to skate, but this book made me want to sign up for lessons. The book has had the effect I’d intended, providing my survival with a rich and vivid context, to have me stop a bit and be here now, to throw on another sweater and gaze out the window some more, and maybe even go outside.

January 18, 2012

Porridge Mornings

For the new year, I resolved to start hauling my sorry self out of bed just a wee bit earlier to cook a hot breakfast for our family to eat together. Partly because a hot breakfast is a good enticement to get out of bed at all, because it’s the best way to meet cold, dark winter mornings, and because Stuart would appreciate some early morning company. Three weeks in, we’re quite hooked on the habit, and have been changing up the porridge so it never gets tired. We’ve had steel-cut oats, regular rolled oatmeal and quinoa and barley porridge. My favourite, though, is brown rice porridge, inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook which I had out of the library over Christmas (which was pretty good, actually, even though her porridges are pretty bland. Her sweet potato ravoli was delicious though). Brown rice porridge remarkably simple to prepare when we cook up some rice in the rice cooker the night before. In the morning, toss the cooked brown rice in a saucepan, cover the rice with milk and warm it up, adding 2 tbspns of corn starch for thickening. For all our porridges, we’ve found that a couple of teaspoons of vanilla extract is the key to deliciousness, along with honey, cinnamon and nutmeg, raisins, diced apples or bananas. And whatever is leftover can be reheated the next morning.

Easiest resolution ever.

January 16, 2012

New kids books to start the year right

This Christmas was exceptional for the calibre of picture books that we were given as gifts– so many new discoveries, books exactly in line with the kind of stuff we like, books we’d long been waiting for, though we hadn’t even known it. It was quite a novelty, because as bookish people, we’re used to making our own literary discoveries, used to friends buying us something other than books because they assume we’ve read them all already. But not so! What follows is an absolute trove of delights.

When I Was Small by Sara O’Leary/Julie Morstad: I’ve been buying Sara O’Leary’s Henry books for little people since long before I had a little person of my own. This latest installment is as lovely as the rest, as Henry asks his mother to tell him stories of that long-ago never-never time before he was born, back when she was small. In the pattern of the previous books, she tells him about the small girl she once was, back when she wore the same shoes as her doll, when she had a ladybug for a pet, slept in a mitten, and bathed in a bird bath. And then she shares with Henry a dream she had that connects her past to his present.

There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen by Sheree Fitch/Sidney Smith: We love Sheree Fitch, and Nimbus Press’ re-issue of her books by (with new illustrations by Sidney Smith) is cause for celebration. In this rollicking rhyme, Willa Wellougby discovers that her house has been overtaken by a variety of simian creatures, including go-go apes and square dancing monkeys. The monkeys are agents of chaos, and poor Willa has to contend with them alone, because she’s been calling the police and the RCMP and getting no response. And when the Mounties finally arrive, it might just be too late.

I Want to Go to the Moon by Tom Saunders: A picture book biography of Neil Armstrong, in verse! Tom Saunders’ story began as a song, and it’s recorded on the CD included with the book. The illustrations are vivid and engaging, the bouncing verse outlining Young’s story and underlining a message that impossible dreams can be realized. Only problem is that the verse stays in your head, and in our family we’ve taken to hurling, “You’ll never go to the moon, Neil,” as a cryptic insult.

The High Street by Alice Melvin: The Tate publishes books– who knew? And it’s no surprise that they’re gorgeously designed and illustrated. This was one of two books that Harriet received for Christmas intended to nurture her inner consumer. In this story, a small girl goes shopping with a rhyming list of things to get, and knocks items off one-by-one. But the best part is wall of the shops cut away so that we get to see inside, and also what’s going on in the space above the shop. A must-have for the English fetishists among us.

The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky: Harriet’s grandmother picked this one up on a recent trip to Holland, and we adored it, as we like vintage picture books in general, and the illustrations are reminiscent of Marjorie Flack’s. This story of a cow who (surprise!) falls into a canal is simple and funny, and its illustrations offer marvelous glimpses of Dutch landscapes.

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward/Marjorie Flack: Speaking of Marjorie Flack, here she is, illustrating this ahead-of-its-time feminist tale. Basically, this is Dee Dee Myers’ Why Women Should Rule the World compressed into storybook bunny form. A single mother bunny is chosen to become the new Easter bunny because the skills she has acquired managing her brood and her household are applicable to the competitive world of egg distribution. Apparently, we can do it all!

Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson: Our first Tove Jansson picture book was The Book of Moomin, Mimble and Little My, much beloved. And we like this one even better, the story of lonely Toffle who’s content to haul his suitcase about and remain the fringes of society. Then he discovers a Miffle who’s in need of comfort as much as he is, so he makes it his mission to track the Miffle down and discover the pleasures (and comforts) of friendship with her. The last page is unbelievably lovely, and I only wish I’d known of it during that period about five years ago when everyone kept asking me to do readings at their weddings.

On Market Street by Arnold Lobel and Anita Lobel. Our second shopping book, written by Arnold Lobel (!) and illlustrated by his wife Anita. And it’s an ABC book, and B is for books, so basically this book is perfect, and when T is for toys, we discover a Frog and Toad allusion in the picture. I can’t believe I’d never heard of this one, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1982.

Press Here by Herve Tullet: A book like none I’ve ever seen, but maybe a bit like the iPad. But better. Because it requires imagination to make it go, not to mention fingers for pressing, arms for shaking, breath for blowing the dots away. A truly engaging book with great design, and a lot of fun to “read”.

January 15, 2012

Heron River by Hugh Cook

It might have been the bird in the title, or the character called Madeline, but I think it was the atmosphere of Hugh Cook’s novel Heron River that had me in mind of Ann Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies. Small town Ontario in the sweltering heat of summer, bucolic idyll with something sinister afoot. I could hear the clink of the ice cubes in the lemonade glass, feel the air-conditioner’s relief. The community of Caithness was created for me in remarkable detail, the main-street with Tony’s Barber Shop, the abandoned mill, the river that cuts the town in two. But people are still uneasy after an unsolved murder not long ago, and fears are heightened after a series of break-and-enters.

The book is set in 1995, nearly here-and-now, but its prologue reaches back to two decades before: a small boy falls into an old abandoned well, and in a deftly-plotted flurry of reading, we’re shown the boy’s dramatic rescue by volunteer-firefighters. We’re also shown that trauma never really goes away, and that what happened that morning will forever bear on those involved. In particular on the boy himself, who eventually recovers but with substantial brain damage.

The boy is Adam, and when we meet him in the present, he’s 26 years old and lives in a group home. His parents’ marriage has fallen apart, so his father is long gone now. His mother Madeline lives alone in his grandfather’s house, now that his grandfather has been moved to a long-term care facility. Madeline feels guilty that she’s unable to care for her father, or for her son either, as she is suffering herself from the debilitating symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Though more than anything else, what she really regrets is those moments of inattention years ago during which her son had his accident and their lives were changed forever.

Hugh Cook’s Adam is a remarkable creation, his point of view fascinating to consider in its limitations and scope at once. Rare is it that we see a character with mental disabilities who is evoked in such depth, so devoid of cliche. We see his struggle to comprehend the world around him, to maintain his dignity even while aware of his vulnerability– the way he never says, “I don’t know” in response to a question, but will say, “I can’t remember” instead.

The other characters have been created with similar sympathy, and most are invested with a fundamental goodness. Madeline herself as she struggles to rise above the difficulties that have befallen her, the paperboy who she hires to mow her lawn (and who has taken to prowling in his customers’ houses when he knows they’re out of town), Adam’s carers at the Group Home who treat their charges with respect, the Native man who’s cutting trees down by the river and tells Adam the story of the creation myth. And then there’s Tara, the police officer, who’s exhausted from her night-shifts but loves her job, even though she knows it comes at the expense of time spent with her children. And even though she knows that the sordid world she sees in her work is skewing her impression of humanity.

We get a glimpse into this sordid world from Tara’s point of view, and also through that of a character called Orrin who recounts an upbringing of abuse and neglect, and who matter-of-factly admits to a horrible act of violence. While the other characters in the book are connected in various ways, Orrin exists outside of that web, and it becomes clear that his entrance into the heart of the story is going to have devastating consequences.

Though I enjoyed this book very much, certain elements took me out of the story from time-to-time. The startling depth that renders this literary world so realized gives me the impression that this book was once a much longer one, and that paring it down caused certain gaps to emerge– where were Adam’s brother and father, whose absences were hardly remarked upon? I found it curious too that in a book with so many absent fathers that mothers were forced to bear the brunt of so much responsibility– there were even imaginary mothers who were to blame. I was also concerned as I read this book that I was unwittingly reading a novel whose religious overtones were all too overt, and there was nearly a point where it crossed the line, but in the end, Cook keeps his resolution subtle enough to be interesting.

Cook’s previous 3 books have won awards and acclaim, he’s a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his story-telling chops are very much on display on this beautifully evocative novel. It was a pleasure to be delivered to summer from the cold of mid-January, and to get lost in Heron River‘s pages.