February 15, 2011
More on the motherhood narrative
Lately, reading Susan Olding’s book Pathologies (and in particular, her essays about infertility and her daughter’s adoption) and Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (as recommended by Alison Pick), I was struck by how various is the motherhood narrative. And yet the universality of these stories– these women, with their extraordinary experiences of motherhood, managed to articulate so much that I’ve only been gesturing toward since I became pregnant two and a half years ago. Partly because the writing here is so remarkable. This might also be because I’m self-absorbed, and project myself onto everything. But still, how these stories resonated, and also taught me new things about the motherhood experience, added the possibility of additional dimensions to my journey.
I also can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.
February 15, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 4: Still Life With June by Darren Greer
The connections between the four books I’ve read so far for Canada Reads Independently are really quite remarkable: each is a book constructed of fragments, truth is always a construction, the truth-teller functions as a creator, and these are books that test the limits of fiction (even Mavis Gallant’s, who calls the Linnet Muir stories “as close to autobiography as fiction can be”).
None of the others do any of these things, however, with quite as much unbridled nerve as Darren Greer’s novel Still Life With June. Greer’s narrator Cameron Dodds is an unsuccessful writer (“a loser who knows he’s a loser”: do note how such an admission clears a guy of so much responsibility) who publishes under a variety of pen names, including “Darren Greer”. Cameron works nights at a Salvation Army Treatment Centre (where he’s carved out a niche for himself– he’s the gay guy who breaks up brawls by standing in the middle and screeching songs from “Annie”), whose clients he mines for their stories. He attends a writers group at a local bookstore where he never speaks, and certainly the other writers’ stories are of no use to him, but the stories of the writers themselves are gold to him, these poor pathetic people wasting their time.
He’s a story vampire, so desperate for his next fix that he breaks into the file of a client, Darrel Greene, a former addict who recently committed suicide, and discovers that he had a sister, institutionalized with Down’s Syndrome, who Darrel felt guilty about never taking care of. Cameron decides to pretend to be Darrel, connects with the sister, June, and discovers depth to his character in the process. At the same time, he also forms a relationship with a woman from his writing group who has a few aliases of her own, and a troubled relationship with her brother (who is Cameron’s upstairs neighbour).
There are weaknesses in the plot, but Greer has structured his book to escape all scrutiny. For example, Cameron reports that he’s “not really sure why” he decides to go and meet Darrel’s sister June, which is the sort of flimsy construction I can’t stand, but events transpire at end of the story to reveal that there’s more to the story than that. This happens several times in the text actually, when I thought the plot was lost, and then Greer revealed another trick up his sleeve.
June’s character also remains decidedly two-dimensional, though Cameron is upfront about his/Darrel’s inability to imagine the world through her eyes– to show her as anything more than this would be a violation of Cameron’s perspective. She’s two-dimensional for a reason, but yes, that two-dimensionality has a purpose, but sometimes I wonder if we’re letting the book get away with too much.
I was also uncomfortable with the language here, the use of the word “retard”, and it all got a bit Huck Finn on me. And yes, those of us with purely literary intentions can argue context, but I sometimes wonder if those to whom these words are personal have something to teach the rest of us. That there is more to life than literature, perhaps, and that some of us who love words best are blissfully ignorant as to their power, to how they work. So yes, I was uncomfortable, but I also think that I was supposed to be, and that Greer draws parallels between “retard” and “faggot” that made me thing the term wasn’t flung as randomly as Cameron Dodds presented it as being. I think the whole book was an exercise in uncomfortable-making anyway.
Anyway, the whole thing came together marvelously for me in the end, and though much about the book remained ambiguous, I was satisfied– all the right questions were answered, and I was content to let the others go in a way I wasn’t as happy with in Truth and Bright Water. It was a bleak book, but with passages of levity (whose big box bookstore setting also made me think of a very different book, Corey Redekop’s Shelf Monkey, which I also enjoyed). And it was a book that surprised me time and time again, and always just when I thought it couldn’t surprise me anymore.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Still Life With June by Darren Greer
2) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
3) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
4) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
February 14, 2011
Renter's Blues
No, just kidding. There are no blues, as I’m a renter by choice, and we made that choice because buying a house would mean I’d have to get a full-time job while (however conversely) we’d then be broke, and also living somewhere that wasn’t here. But I have renting on my mind today after reading Beautiful Anomaly, Lauren Kirshner’s amazing essay in Taddle Creek about the Sylvan Apartments, which became more and more boarded up every time I walked by them on my way to the grocery store in 2005/6, back when we lived at College and Ossington. I’d always wondered what their story was, and what a spectacular way to discover it.
From Kirshner’s piece: “In the end, the Sylvan is less a ghost story than a relic from an era when renting didn’t have to be a compromise [emphasis is mine]. The building gave working people amenities usually associated with home ownership. It was a place where people lived well even if they weren’t well off—an idyll that likely will never again be possible for the average renter in downtown Toronto.”
Which is something to think about. And it got me thinking also about what was perhaps my favourite part of Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians: “In Toronto, the word home was still spelled h-o-u-s-e, and anyone who lived in an apartment by choice, and more particularly an apartment downtown, was considered eccentric if not unstable. On Park Avenue in New York, you were told, it was all right to live in an apartment. But in Toronto it was different. In Toronto, if you were stable, you lived in a house. Your Dun and Bradstreet rating was helped considerably if you owned a house, even if, as was usually the case, the mortgage company could put forward a much better claim to stability in this context that you could.”
February 13, 2011
Doubleness and Happiness
Oh, the things I could tell you about my daughter. Like how she strums her guitar and sings the song she wrote, which is the word “Bunny” over and over; how she learned to say “CN Tower” last week; how when I say, “Slow snow falling”, she says “Deep”, and when I say, “Cars dogs babies”, she says, “Sleep”. How she says “sleep” like “seep” and does a fair amount of it herself. How she’s totally into colouring these days, and she has learned to say her name, except she says, “Ohra” instead of Harriet. Her favourite colour is purple (thanks to Mable Murple), she has to have a sticker on her hand at all times (and best if it’s purple), she loves The Wheels on the Bus (in particular “Swish swish swish”) and Skinnamarink. She loves any book by Marisabina Russo, and Alfie and his sister Annie Rose. How much fun she has with her best friend Margaret, especially when they’re being silly together (and seriously, is it ever fun to wear playdough on your ears.
We love love love her (except when she is having a tantrum at the ROM, and arching her back as I try to put her into her stroller so that the stroller rolls across the atrium at top-speed and everybody is staring at me as she’s screaming, and then we go through the same routine later that afternoon in front of a packed waiting room at the doctor’s). Just as I loved loved loved Sarah Hampson’s wonderful piece in The Globe last week about parenthood and happiness. Which I read with Carol Shields on my mind, and it underlined the line I’d already actually underlined from the novel: “doubleness clarifie[s] the world.” Yes, that’s precisely what it is.
Having a child is very much like everything about being a person who is alive: it’s wonderful and it’s terrible. It’s also very much like being alive in the sense that I’d rather do it than not do it, even though sometimes it isn’t very fun.
I loved this, from Hampson: “I realized that while it was hard not to compare my efforts to those of other mothers, I should see my approach to parenthood as an investment in penny stocks no could predict the outcome of.”
These days, as things have come together in a way that makes sense to me, I spend much less time thinking about “parenting” than I did a year ago. I was obsessed with books then, trying to discover some kind of methodology, but lately we’ve been doing just fine at “making it up as we go along”. Though I have put a book called Toddler Taming on reserve at the library. I have a feeling now is just the calm before the storm.
February 10, 2011
My postal phantom receives a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office
Kyo Maclear’s 2007 novel The Letter Opener is about a woman who works at Canada Post’s Undeliverable Mail Office in Scarborough, and as I am a postal enthusiast, I devoured the book with delight. I also really enjoyed Maclear’s essay in the back of the book about “Postal Phantoms”– those people who inhabited your home before you and whose mail you continue to receive for years and years. How you come to understand these people’s characters through the return addresses, and they become so familiar that it would almost be disappointing if you one day encountered your postal phantom in the flesh. (I wrote about my own postal phantoms in this post, back in 2008.)
So worlds collided today when my current postal phantom received a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office! (This phantom is not mentioned in my other post, because I’ve moved since that post was written and left Amanda Lee Hickman behind. In fact, no doubt Amanda Lee and I are now postal phantom-ing it together back at my former address.) I wanted to call up Kyo Maclear and tell her all about it, because it’s really quite remarkable– this means that my postal phantom is out there in the postal phantom netherworld sending mail to undeliverable addresses. What a menace this guy is!
The root of most of his problems, I think, is that his old/my address is still on his cheques, which was how the Undeliverable Mail Office tracked him down (misleadingly) to my house. The whole thing makes me feel quite sorry for that postal employee (and in my head it was Maclear’s Naiko) who took care to open his envelope, redirect his letter, and even include a standard notice about why she had to open his mail that ends with a happy face and the message, “We care”. She must have felt so satisfied, tracing this piece of mail (with no return address, mind you. My postal phantom is so careless!) back to its owner, and I hope she never realizes that she’s only sent it further amiss.
And yes, I do open my postal phantom’s mail. We have been in this relationship long enough that I feel like his letters are really for me. Now I may have to track down the actual person behind the phantom, because it would only be responsible. But then I’d also have to explain why I’ve been opening his mail, which might get a little bit awkward.
*I recently read Maclear’s picture book Spork. It’s awesome.
February 10, 2011
She still fits into that damn doll stroller
“There was a little kid, maybe three of four, walking down Main Street by herself with a doll’s stroller strapped to her butt. Every few steps she’d stop and sit down in it for a rest and then get back up and keep walking.
From the back all I could see was the stroller and two little legs. I wondered what she was thinking. I wonder what three-year-olds think. I wonder if somebody had told her she was too big for that stroller. I wonder if she felt the way I did about people who told you something that you knew was just not fuckin’ true and if she felt like screaming at them and hurting them and plunging herself into a chemically induced oblivion.
I admired this kid for keeping her cool. She just strapped herself into that doll stroller and took of walking, probably without a word. All the way down Main Street. She’ll show the whole town that no, in fact, she still fits into that damn doll stroller.”
–from Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which I’m reading for the first time. I quote this because last night it made me laugh until I cried.
February 9, 2011
How about this? One magazine thinks about its gender gap.
From Kim Jernigan’s introduction to The New Quarterly 117: “When making their choices for this issue, the poetry editors were thinking seasonal, in part, but our fiction editors, of which I’m one, were thinking thematic. Worrying, I should say, that our choices might be falling into a predictable pattern, specifically that we were tending too often to mother/daughter stories. Four of our five editors on the fiction side are women, and of those, three are mothers. Were we looking to see our own lives reflected on the page?
…But I think our choices reflect less our demographic than the thematic cast of the submissions as a whole. For whatever reason, the fiction we receive tends not towards work, or war, politics or race relations or environmental catastrophe, but towards the familial and relational.
At least we’ve captured some fathers and sons this round…”
In a week during in which we were once again informed that the gender gap for magazine contributers continues to be gaping, it was refreshing to read of an editor and her editorial board conducting their business with these ideas in mind. It would nice if more editors would do the same, in particular those whose mags are suffering from a dearth of women writers.
And “suffering” is the right word. Come on now, it’s not like magazines are doing really well the way things are. Something needs to change, and correcting this disparity this would be a step in the right direction. I’m not just ranting on principle either– a diverse body of writers makes for better and more interesting content. Everybody wins.
February 9, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads This Cake is for the Party
We headed out to the west end, somebody brought a chicken, and there was a baby (who never cried). There was also a heart-shaped chocolate cake doused in chocolate glaze, and it was for the party, and we would have it and eat it too, etc. etc. And so we sat down to talk about the book, which was Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party.
As usual, we were divided, but in a less dramatic way than we’d been with Jessica Grant’s book. Partly because Selecky’s book is a much more even collection, but too even, we decided. Our main criticism that the book was short on action, not as in car chases and explosions, but characters who showed some agency, stepped outside their inertia– and the stories we liked the very best were the stories where characters actually did such things.
The stories we liked the least were those at the beginning of the book, and we wondered if a story like “Paul Farenbacher’s Yard Sale” (which we loved, every one of us) had started the collection, would this book have been easier to embrace? The characters in the first story “Throwing Cotton to the Wind” didn’t seem fully formed to us, and who’s named Sanderson and Flip? Though this story did have a passionate defender among us, who’d read it five times in a row because she found it so moving. She found it hingeing on the moment when Anne and Flip have sex, and how the looseness of these characters allows the reader to slip into their places, this one powerful moment of connection between two unhappy people. Another of us noted how well Selecky writes about animals, and also the greatness of the line about a sound like falling potatoes.
Another criticism was that after the fact, the stories in the collection had blended together. The best exceptions were “Paul 
Farenbacher…” (and one of us loved the part where she leans back on the ice-cube dispenser, and the fridge starts ringing like a slot machine), and “Where Are You Coming From Sweetheart?” (and of this story, one of us remarked that Selecky had so absolutely nailed what it is to lose a mother, being in that house with the father who has no idea how to take care of you)– we loved the ending to “Where Are You Coming From…” in particular, a powerful image with so much weight to it. Though we wondered about time period– it seemed retro, but references were contemporary. But these stories, like all the good stories This Cake…, have some weight to them, history, characters who act, and are not mere cardboard cutouts of people.
We noted the book’s strange preoccupations, with organic vegetarian food, and pyramid schemes. We loved the references to the library ball in “How Healthy Are You?”, particularly those of us who’d been to the library ball. We liked that these stories took place in Peterborough, and Sudbury. We thought there were interesting details about these characters’ work (candle making, creating organic household cleansers, etc.), but all these jobs put them at such a distance from the world– we would have loved to see someone driving a bus, or a story that took place in an office.We loved the book’s design, but questioned the blurbs– really Lisa Moore? “Ultra-lush”? And none of us found any of the stories “flat-out funny”.
Sometimes, we think, the hype of a first book raises expectations unfairly. We thought that This Cake is for the Party was a good book, a very good first book. That it’s a promising start to Selecky’s publishing career, a harbinger of greatness to come, and then we decided that was more than enough, and decided to break out the cake.
February 8, 2011
Dear Author, I don't want you to visit my book club
I don’t want an author to visit my book club. Perhaps because my book club is more vicious than most, but I still can’t imagine a book club in which conversation could flow easily in an author’s presence. Because how do you talk about the parts of the books that suck? How can the group vehemently disagree on the book’s quality if naysayers are too polite to speak up? How can you speculate as to the author’s intentions, and where they went wrong? How can the book be viciously attacked, therefore provoking the book’s most passionate defenders to step up? And what if the author ate all the guacamole?
I understand why authors do attend book clubs, and why book clubs want them to do so– the arrangement is mutually beneficial. Authors get book sales and club members get filler, which it seems book clubs are ever after anyway. Though I do wish that book club members would have a little more confidence in their own skills as readers so that meetings did not have to contain merely filler. That they could think up their own discussion questions, for example (and in my club, these are mainly along the lines of, “All right, what’s up with this bit I couldn’t understand?”) Let their own conversation sustain the meeting, and if author visits are desired, have them at a supplementary meeting– certainly these visits would only enhance subsequent discussion. But the discussion will suffer if the author is sitting there for it.
I raise this matter in regard to Canada Reads, and Charlotte Ashley noted the same thing in her summation yesterday. That for the first time, authors have been sitting in on the entire Canada Reads process, and I don’t think it’s done the program any good. I liked the initial plan of having readers champion their favourite books for an “essential books of the decade” list, but things went askew when actual authors got in on the action. And authors got so in on the action, that their personalities became inseparable from the books in question. Relationships through social media developed so that it was impossible for many to read these books without a conflict of interest. The books themselves ceased to be the point at all.
As I wrote in October, “If your book really was one of the essential books of the past decade, couldn’t you rely on your passionate readers to promote it? And if you don’t have those passionate readers, then, um, maybe your book wasn’t one of the essential books of the past decade?” As Charlotte Ashley wrote yesterday, “if there was an elephant in the room [in yesterday’s “debates”, surely it was the CBC’s repeated insistence that this competition was about finding the “most essential” book of the last decade whilst gesturing at a stack of books nobody has ever heard of.”
Unless is the one book here that has any chance of essential-ness. I haven’t read The Best Laid Plans, but Charlotte didn’t have much to say about it, and she’s a pretty smart reader. I read Essex County Book 1, and it was interesting– I’d suggest it had more ambiguity than any of the other Canada Reads books, save for Unless, but still, not quite an essential pick. The Bone Cage was a good first novel, but one with many problems. Like The Birth House, it’s a book whose problems I wouldn’t take great care to deliberate on, except that now someone is going around claiming it’s the essential Canadian book of the decade and it absolutely isn’t. The whole thing is kind of ridiculous.
What’s more ridiculous though is that no one having this conversation. I’ve refrained from saying anything until now, because I don’t like to talk shit about books, but we’re all being far too polite now, and I fear that authors attending our book club is most of the reason why. It’s why book bloggers are celebrating these books without question, not a word of criticism, though there is plenty to criticize, but how can we criticize when the author is our friend on Facebook, and our favourite Twitter pal?
I believe passionately in the role of book bloggers in contributing to literary conversation, that (to paraphrase V. Woolf) ““The standards we raise and the judgements we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.” Of course, I’ve always appreciated connecting with authors through blogging, the writer googling themselves at midnight on a Friday night and sending an email of thanks for my review– I love that. But when the author shows up on my doorstep wrapped up on a ribbon, bearing their book on a silver platter along with a cupcake, well then, it’s not about the book anymore.
I fear that the infusion of authorial presence in the online world is compromising what bloggers have to say, and readers and writers have a lot to lose by that.
