August 14, 2011
This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman
Helen Schulman’s This Beautiful Life was a curious read from the start for me, because the life never seemed remotely beautiful. Liz Bergamot is miserable in the new life she’s been delivered to after her family relocates from Ithaca to New York City in order for her husband Richard to continue on a career path to glory. Though the new life is entrancing in turns– as the book begins, she’s chaperoning her daughter to a birthday party in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. But she regrets giving up her career, she laments her teenage son’s distance, her husband’s becoming a stranger, all she seems to do is run errands, and she keeps getting stoned in the bathroom, blowing smoke out the window so nobody knows.
So it’s a house of cards, yes, that comes crashing, but I sort of thought such a house was supposed to have the illusion of stability. Nevertheless, when Liz’s teenage son Jake receives a pornographic video from Daisy, a young schoolmate, forwards it to his friends, and it goes viral, every crack in the foundation becomes startlingly clear. Liz’s social exclusion is exacerbated, Jake is thrown out of school and becomes depressed, Richard’s job is threatened, and six-year-old Coco is lost in the shuffle and begins to act out in disturbing ways.
That the novel is told from the perspective of Liz, Richard and Jake only underlines the distance between each them– we can see that they are scarcely known to one another at all. Jake’s voice is less successfully executed than the others– Schulman has made him precocious, but his preoccupations seemed more the author’s than his own, and I don’t think most teenage boys deliver lines like, “Goddamn it, I’m sorry! But you’re just way too young.” The novel’s other flaw is that far too much is spelled out for us: “Richard does not even genuinely know himself.” Or just in case we don’t get the Daisy/glass house/careless people reference, Jake is reading The Great Gatsby at school.
Of course, Daisy is not Daisy, and here is where the novel gets interesting (and curious). Just who are the careless people here? A family like the Bergamots with the money and clout to make such problems go away? Parents like Daisy’s who deliver their daughter material goods in lieu of love? Kids in general? How has the internet affected the old adage that kids will be kids? That boys will be boys? What does it mean when you have a teenage son watching porn online, and a six year old daughter who is already learning that she is sexual? Schulman touches on the erotic edges of parental love, the hypocrisy of parents condemning young people’s sexuality, and she blurs boundaries in thought-provoking places.
There is no moral to This Beautiful Life, except time marches forward, people move on, and these things go away, or they almost do. Daisy is the blank space at the centre of the story and we don’t enter her consciousness until the very end, when she is grown and nearly moved, but there is an aching sadness at her core that Schulman can’t even begin to address, and that silence is utterly effective. The rest of the novel is cacophonous, a tangled narrative knot at times, but it’s intriguing, provocative, and, like all good fiction, raises more questions than answers.
August 12, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing
This week’s best book from the library was A Flock of Shoes by Sarah Tsaing, illustrated by Qin Leng. It’s the story of a little girl called Abby whose beloved summer sandals fly south in the fall, and send her postcards from tropical islands (“We miss you to the bottom of our soles”). While the shoes are away, she falls in love with a pair of boots that navigate the snow and ice so well, but when spring finally comes, the boots are compelled to jump aboard a northbound train (postcard: “Early nights and gorgeous lights, but we still miss the warm wiggle of your toes.” [Tsaing is also a poet, and it shows].) But the sandals fly back again, fattened up from their time abroad, and they’re big enough to fit Abby’s growing feet.
At first, I wasn’t sure about the book because the story doesn’t completely make sense, and I didn’t understand what the story was a metaphor for, and what the message was. And then I understand that there really wasn’t one, actually, and that this is an old fashioned fairy tale whose message is in its lyricism and magic. It’s immediately appealing to the shoe-mad, which most little girls I know are, and Harriet has asked me to read it to her over and over again.
August 11, 2011
I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue
Anne Perdue’s collection of short stories I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore is the answer to the question, “What should I read after the brilliance of Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting?” Like MacLeod, her stories venture into darkness, their plots take you places, her characters offer a remarkable range of humanity– the alcoholic would-be dry-waller who lives in a rooming house, a teenage dishwasher, a single woman daring to get pregnant on her own, a newlywed couple overwhelmed by the pressures of home ownership. Perdue is funnier though, with a sharp dialogue reminiscent of Jessica Westhead’s, and her stories also had these moments I’ve come to think of as John Cheever moments– the vat of wax! The barbecue! These incidents of horrid absurdity in the midst of the everyday. My husband had to ask me to stop gasping as I read this book, and I really haven’t been able to think about a barbecue properly since.
I love this book, absolutely devoured it, which is fitting for a collection whose stories are larger than bite-sized. These are longer-than-short stories, with twists and turns and plenty of room for depth, and they’re so well-paced, they read up fast. The first story hung me up a little bit with points of view that didn’t seem consistent, but the rest were a smoother ride, the kind of short stories I’d recommend to people who might not know that they like short stories yet.
In “The Escapists”, a couple at an all-inclusive Mexican resort display their complete lack of social graces, and receive awkward glimpses into the true nature of the bond between them. “Inheritance” makes clear the weak foundations on which suburban idylls are constructed, as a husband and father drives himself mad trying to live up to his own expectations. “Ca-Na-Da” is a novel in 45 pages, the story of a woman whose son is a stranger to her, and who finally has to face the consequences of a lifetime of not facing the world, or being honest with it (or herself). In “Pooey”, a middle-aged woman whose family takes dysfunction to a new level decides to go against every rational instinct, take a leap of faith, and have a family of her own.
“I Serve” says the button on the book’s cover, which was gorgeously designed by Anne Perdue herself. And her characters do serve, in the jobs that they do, and in the places that they’ve assumed for themselves in society. Yet there are moments, if only in their minds, –and some are impossibly small but still vivid– in which these character break free of the confines of those places, and dare to serve themselves. Here we the readers become the gasping champions of their glorious liberation.
August 9, 2011
Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Carolyn Black
Until I read The Odious Child, Carolyn Black existed foremost in my mind as being the woman who looks exactly like a girl I worked with at McDonalds when I was seventeen, and then I read the book and discovered she was also brilliant. I’ve met her twice, we have several mutual friends, and I’ve never met anyone as well-talked-about behind her back as Carolyn. For good reason, as I discovered when she was kind enough to conduct the following interview with me over a week last month via email.
Carolyn Black’s stories have appeared in literary journals across Canada. “Serial Love” was published in the prestigious Journey Prize anthology, and “At World’s End, Falling Off” won Honourable Mention at the National Magazine Awards. The Odious Child (Nightwood Editions, 2011) is her first collection of short stories.
I: I will begin rereading The Odious Child today, and have been looking forward to it. And I want to begin our interview by asking you the question that has been perplexing me since reading your book for the first time– where did you come from? (As a writer, I mean.) None of the standard equation “Author A meets Author X” lazy reviewer staples quite fits with your style. What writers do you regard as your influences?
CB: Writers I enjoyed reading while writing the collection, who seemed to enter below the ribcage, were Kazuo Ishiguro, AM Homes, and Sheila Heti. I read Muriel Spark throughout high school, and later Nathanael West, Eudora Welty, and Angela Carter. Sexuality, satire, and the surreal are the common elements. I read Miranda July and found her hilarious, but then had a reaction against her, so the first story in The Odious Child is almost a parody of her style, a musing about what would happen if I put a Miranda July character into a story about various degradations … would the childlike language be able to support the story? I am still waiting to have my grand passion, when it comes to influence, to tear out my hair at night because I cannot be a particular writer. I’d really like to have this, an influence whom I wanted to marry and kill, but it hasn’t happened yet although there have been some close calls. I remain optimistic, however, for I am a romantic.
I: See, this is why you’re tricky, Carolyn Black. I’ve never read Miranda July (I had a reaction against her too after seeing her movie, and decided I’d had enough Miranda July for one lifetime) so I missed the joke. I understood what you were up to though—your story is generous enough to contain its own “key” so to speak, as your narrator explains the work she does labelling exhibits at a museum:
“I pile the simple words on top of each other—like beads on a string or pennies in a roll of fetishes hoarded in a cabinet [!]—and connect them with a series of coordinating conjunctions.. The logic must surge forward, as it does when a child tells a story.”
Sometimes it’s not so much that logic surges forward when a child tells a story than the listener indulges the child in listening to a story without surges. There is reward to this of course, as there is with the spare prose of Ishiguro, Sheila Heti, and also you. But do you think that a bit of indulgence is also required on the part of a reader in order to appreciate writing like this? In addition to the usual close reading required of any literary fiction? Or do you think that all literary writers need to be indulged a little bit sometimes?
CB: Are your indulgent readers those readers whose patience is being tried in some way but, still, they persevere? I think this is what you mean. It is curious you would group writers as different as Ishiguro and Heti together, sharing a “spareness” that tried the patience. What would that shared spareness be? Inexplicability? Their works do contain dark matter. Even though Ishiguro writes from inside his characters’ heads, their perceptions of the outer world, to which we do not have direct access, are distorted. The author conceals. And Sheila Heti is not, perhaps, merely concealing, but writing a world where a hidden world does not exist. I remember reading The Middle Stories for the first time, trying to figure out what objects represented. What did the rubber doll mean? What did the flyaway curls mean? Why was a story told about a miserable dumpling that had fallen to the floor? What did it all mean? Why was the author not helping us! The writing was a big fuck you to the reader, which surprised me and made me laugh. I am so used to having everything, every motivation, explained while the plot grinds to a halt. For me, now, writing that explains everything requires a good deal of patience, if only because I’ve read so much of it; writing that resists explication seems beautiful and true. (more…)
August 8, 2011
Every little bit of the story is true
I’m sure I’m not the only person who is watching the riots unfolding in London, and thinking about Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (but not the part about the pigeon). Also about the riots in Vancouver, and how books are the opposite of mob mentality. That these things are just as much about people being idiots (and how) as they are about a profound level of broadbased spiritual poverty and systemic discrimination– every little bit of the story is true. I think that it’s by reading fiction that I’ve learned to process events in the world with reactions that aren’t totally knee-jerk.
August 8, 2011
Going Home Again
“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience or returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.” –Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
I don’t get home very often, hardly ever. I’ve never lived in either of the houses where my parents live now, my grandparents’ houses were sold and gutted long ago, the woods behind the house I lived in until I was nine are now so grown-up that you can’t see the house from the road, and I rarely find myself on that road anyway. Wallace Stegner was right. Like Joan Didion, my parents may have wanted to promise me that I would “grow up with a sense of [my] cousins and of rivers and over my great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to [have pledged me] a picnic on a river with fried chicken and [my] hair uncombed, would like to [have given me] home for [my] birthday, but we live differently now.” Which I don’t think is an inconsolable loss, but it’s a loss still, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been awash is nostalgia this last while. I keep wanting to write essays about how I spent the night of September 11 2001 in Kos at College and Bathurst eating fries with my friends. This comes on because that night was ten years ago, a nice round number, and because I’ve been listening to Dar William’s The Honesty Room, which I bought around the same time. I keep wanting to write essays about riding our bikes in Japan, and our house in England with its dirty lace curtains and the park across the street, and these wouldn’t be essays, really. They would be diary entries, which, according to Sarah Leavitt, are differentiated from memoirs in that in memoirs, the role of the self is to serve the story. In my story, the role of the self would only be to serve the self, pure indulgence. Basically, I’d like to go home again. Which is as impossible as: Basically, I want a time machine.
I try. Sometimes I walk down Dundas Street between Bathurst and Manning, where I lived for a pivotal year at the turn of the century, except that the Chinese herb shop we lived over is now a store where you can buy a $2400 ottoman, and the restaurant at the end of our block burned down last summer. Sometimes I walk through the university campus where I lived when I thought that a push-up bra and blue eyeshadow were key accessories and where the snow fell so high once that the army came and shovelled us out, but it’s too altogether the same and different. We’ve been replaced by new students who sleep in our beds and imagine themselves to be the centre of the universe.
My family has a thing for nostalgia. A favourite pass-time has always been the Driving By Where We Used to Live game, or the Driving by Where We Lived Before You Were Born game. I sometimes still play this, except we don’t have a car, and so we settle for Pushing Your Stroller Past the Old Apartment whenever we’re in Little Italy. My husband thinks this is weird. Partly because he has lived in none of these locations save for one, and so the game to him is a little bit boring. I keep trying to take him home to places he’s never seen in his life which are inhabited by strangers who have painted the garage door and redone the siding. Besides, he grew up in a land so steeped in its history that he was eager to shed the concept entirely with his new life in Canada. He’s had enough of trodding on Roman ruins. He also thinks it’s funny that any Canadian building one hundred years old is worthy of a plaque.
Anyway, the point is that the cottage we’ve stayed at the last two summers is also where the summers of my childhood were spent. Or not the entire summers, but a few weeks of every one, which, interestingly, have gone all metonymic and become the only bits of those summers I remember. So that last week I did get to go home again, to a place so utterly unchanged, but then I am so changed that it’s a new place altogether and I am happy with that, because I certainly don’t want our summer vacation to be one of those drive-by games that makes Stuart exasperated. I want the cottage to be a place for Harriet to discover for herself, just like I did, and she doesn’t need to know that the dock used to be broken and sinking, so slippery that you couldn’t run, where our fort was, and that the beach was wider once upon a time, but the minnows are the same, and so are the leopard frogs. It is easier to walk barefoot on gravel than it used to be, or maybe it’s just that the soles of my feet are just hard.
No one needs to know about the two salient selves I remember from there. The seven year old girl with a side-ponytail performing a choreographed routine to the theme from Jem and the Holograms on top of a picnic table, and the other one even more awkward, if you can believe it. She’s sitting on a swing dreamily, listening to “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” on the yellow Sony Sports Walkman tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her baja jacket. She’s staring at the sunset sparkling on the lake, and she’s thinking of profound things, like boyfriends, and breasts, and one day being so far away that she’ll be able to refer to herself in the third person.
August 6, 2011
When I was a compulsive parenting expert…
Over at my friend Nathalie‘s parenting blog 4 Mothers, I’ve written a guest post about my career as a compulsive parenting expert:
‘I told them, “And be prepared to feel like a cow. Be prepared to cry, and cry. It’s going to be awful, I’m not going to lie to you. But you’re going to get through it, I promise. I sit here feeding my screaming infant and lecturing you as living-proof that one day everything is going to be okay. Oh, and by the way, I’ve gone through your registry and crossed off all the stuff you don’t need, and made a note about everything you’ve missed.”
It was a compulsion, I will admit, the way I insisted on hunting down women in their third trimesters of pregnancy, and horrifying them with stories of how terrible their lives were about to become. But really, I wasn’t responsible for my behaviour in their presence. The very sight of their burgeoning bellies, their innocent bliss, how they kept talking about looking forward to getting the baby out so they could finally get a good night’s sleep again—it would fill me with overwhelming dread, and I’d start displaying symptoms of PTSD.’
You can read the rest here.
August 6, 2011
What else is there to do in Paradise?
“…because what is there to do/ in Paradise but loaf beneath a tree,/and dream of other worlds?” –Bruce Taylor, “Little Animals” (from QuArc).
We had the most delightful vacation, mainly because we spent most of it reading, reading, reading. Also because Harriet got to roam free like a storybook child, the weather was wonderful, we ate pie almost every day, no laundry was done for a week, the lake was warm and gorgeous, the company was fun, Harriet fell back in love with her summer friend from last year, and because the beer was always cold. We’re not unhappy to be home, however, because here we can drink from the tap, there isn’t sand in the bed, we can go walking not along the side of a highway, and we might end up eating something for dinner that isn’t a frozen burger. It was a perfect week, and isn’t doing seven days of nothing exhausting? So we’re going to need another day or two to recover, and will probably have to go out for dinner tonight because no one is yet up to cooking. Not even a frozen burger.
We weren’t as stranded book-wise as last year, because we’d brought lots of books to read. I started with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I polished off in a day and then urged into the hands of my husband who read it as happily. I was grateful for all the hype it had got, because I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and the read was splendid. I’ll be definitely reading her back catalogue. Then I moved onto Gertrude Bell’s biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, which has been sitting on my shelf for ages, and I’ve wanted to read to learn more about Bell and the history of the Middle East. Bell was your standard mountain-climbing, desert-mapping, Sheikh charming Victorian lady. I can’t say that biography itself was exceptional (I think I’ve been spoiled from having read Victoria Glendinning so recently) but Bell was so exceptional, it would be impossible for her story not to be interesting.
And then I read Anne Perdue’s I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, which blew me away and merits its own book review even though I 
read it on vacation. I’ve met Anne a few times (and I loved her guest post at Canadian Bookshelf), but I wasn’t prepared for how amazing this book was. I’d like to describe it as Jessica Westhead meets John Cheever, and also, what to read after Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting. One of the very best books I’ve read this year, and I’m so thrilled to have encountered it, and to be able to recommend it to you.
I also read through my giant stack of periodicals, which had arrived after the mail strike. The stand-out piece of the bunch was Kathleen Jamie’s “In the West Highlands..” (subscription required) about nature writing via the book Ring of Bright Water (which I know from Alissa York’s Fauna). About how stories of a pet seal living in one’s bathtub lost their appeal with what readers learned from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which didn’t necessarily take on the seal-living-in-bathtub phenomenon, but taught us that we are not nature’s masters after all. “To care about animals now, we must do it from afar.”
Which was a nice way to transition to the absolutely superb QuArc Issue, a joint venture by The New Quarterly and Arc Poetry, which celebrates the intersections of literature and science. And has Rachel Carson poems! Margaret Atwood juvenalia. An interview with Alice Munro! I’m halfway through the Arc side, and I’m finding it very difficult to put down. A bit unbelievable to have so much good stuff inside one (gorgeous) package.
Transition also to Wallce Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I bought at Bob Burns’ Books in Fenelon Falls (a visit to which I’ve been 
looking forward to for a year). I’m reading this book now and aren’t in love yet, but I am firmly in love with Stegner and I like that it’s the second Pulitzer Prize-winner I’ve read this week. Also at Bob’s, Harriet got Wacky Wednesday, and Stuart got Terry Prachett and Ian Rankin.
The other bookish thing that’s gone on is that I made a cottage library over the past year. Made out of review copies I didn’t have room to keep, and also books I’ve scavaged from boxes on curbs. Usually I scavenge less, and donate my extra books to the library or a booksale, but I enjoyed putting the cottage library together instead, which includes some great books and also some trashy ones, which any cottage library requires. I took a picture of one of the shelves, which is only a bit overwhelmed by the mounted fish above it.
July 29, 2011
Cottagier climes
Pickle Me This is on vacation for the next week or so. We’re escaping to cottagier climes, and looking forward to hitting the Foodland tomorrow, as well as the beer store. I am taking A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore and the rather hefty biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.
