March 14, 2025

All the Days and Nights, by William Maxwell

My first William Maxwell was his novel The Chateau, which I read a couple of years ago in a reading group all about books about houses that Anne Fernald ran online via the Center for Fiction, and that book was the perfect introduction to Maxwell, who published six novels between the 1930s and 1980s, along with many short stories, and also was fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Maxwell is the most Woolf-influenced male author I’ve ever encountered, and The Chateau made that clear, although not as clear as his second novel They Came Like Swallows, whose structure borrows much from To the Lighthouse and which is based on Maxwell’s mother’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic. It’s a biographical thread he picks up again and again his fiction, including in the short stories collected in All The Days and Nights, which makes for a strange and emotional experience for readers familiar with his preoccupations—unlike his characters, we know what’s coming, and yet haplessly hoping for some other outcome all the same. There’s something so vulnerable and real about Maxwell’s characters, their flaws and imperfections. He’s the only mid-twentieth century author I’ve ever read whose male characters struggle with infertility, which was also based on Maxwell’s own experience, and the way he writes about love and marriage is so tender and moving and honest. He writes about people at the mercy of fate, and I really love his work. So very much that I even read the entirety of his collected stories, which is a big deal. Big doorstop collected stories are nice to have, I guess, but not great for reading, and the only one I’ve ever successfully completed is Grace Paley, and she didn’t even write that much. Poor John Cheever’s collection just sat gathering dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally gave up the ghost, and got rid of it. But William Maxwell! I read the whole thing, and it was really great.

March 10, 2025

Women Who Woke Up the Law, by Karin Wells

Karin Wells’ Women Who Woke Up the Law is hardly a feel-good book—it tells the stories of women who had to fight for very little, and often didn’t even get it—but it made me feel good anyway. Not because of good triumphing over evil, because in the end justice prevails, nope, not that at all. But instead because it tells the stories of women (and their lawyers, many of whom were also women) who nevertheless persisted, planting seeds that might take decades to grow, if ever, stories of the incremental pace of progress (along with requisite setbacks). Progress is not inevitable, as we’ve never learned in starker clarity than we’re learning right now as decades of progress are ripped apart and there are even people cheering for it. But progress is still possible, and it takes courage, and grit, and the work of it is hard and often unrewarding. And yet.

Wells, whose previous works instead one of my favourite books about Canadian history, The Abortion Caravan, once again brings the past to life with Women Who Woke Up the Law, each chapter telling the stories of the women behind fundamental changes to Canadian law. These include Eliza Campbell, whose gravestone at Mount Pleasant Cemetery still proclaims “I Did NOT Commit Adultery,” after she was accused by her husband, and fought valiantly for her reputation (and alimony), leading to eventual changes to Canadian divorce law. Also Emily Murphy, the first female magistrate in the British empire, “a complicated and dubious feminist icon,” who was part of a push to give women a share of their husband’s estates. Florence Murdoch, a ranch wife and survivor of brutal spousal abuse (she was beaten so hard to had to have her jaw wired shut) who fought for a portion of the ranch she’d put years of work into, though the Supreme Court of Canada would declare her not eligible, that her “twenty-five years of cutting hay, moving, dehorning, vaccinating and driving cattle… ‘was the work done by any ranch wife.'”

Wells shares stories of women whose courage helped to slowly move the needle on consent laws; of a woman who fought the system for unemployment insurance when she left work to have a baby (judges that argued that women could not be victims of sexual discrimination because in order for there to be discrimination, men and women would have to be equal, which they were not); of Jeannette Corbiere Lavell who fought to keep her Indigenous status after she married a non-Indigenous man (Indigenous men did not suffer such a penalty when they married non-Indigenous women); Chantale Diagle whose abusive partner tried to prevent her from accessing an abortion in the 1980s; Jane Hurshman who killed her sadistic partner after years of abuse and would go on to speak publicly about domestic violence; and Viola Desmond and Rachael Baylis, two Black Canadian women who, decades apart, would help to bring intersectionality in legal parlance. And so many more ordinary extraordinary lives.

As with her previous books, Wells is skilled at pulling threads and making connections, weaving these wide-ranging tales into a fascinating tapestry.

March 7, 2025

A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence

Of all the books in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, A Jest of God is the one that made the faintest impression on me, resonating mostly because Rachel, its protagonist, was Stacey Cameron’s elder sister. Stacey from The Fire Dwellers, the Laurence book that meant the most to me, I think, because of its preoccupation with the domestic and the kind of female life I understood. Stacey is a wife, a mother, which gives her a kind of legitimacy Rachel even acknowledges in A Jest of God, in comparison with her own experience—she still lives with her mother in Manawaka, didn’t complete university, teaches Grade 2 in the very classroom she’d attended as a child. Much like Hagar in The Stone Angel (which I reread recently, and failed to love), Rachel lives invisibly, a small and quiet life that is making her crazy. It’s the kind of life that, like that of an elderly woman, I would have scarcely acknowledged as a younger reader. It occurs to me that Laurence writes the gradients of female experience that I was too far away to see at the time, the way I’d thought of Hagar Shipley and Morag Gunn as just two old broads, never mind that there are forty years and a whole lot more between them. The way that I never saw Rachel at all.

Rachel is an easier person to share a stream of consciousness than Hagar was. She has similar pride and fear of being vulnerable, but it not quite so unwavering about it. Her hard shell is not her most defining feature. She’s also 60 years younger and still knows what’s what, a little bit savvy, a little bit willing to strike out and try. During the summer in which the novel takes place, she starts seeing an old classmate whose back in town for the season, and allows herself to fall into a fantasy of a future for them as a couple. He takes her out into the countryside and lays down a blanket so they can have sex without worrying about thistles and brambles, which might be the most care any man has ever shown Rachel ever. Although it’s not doing to end well, the reader realizes. That Nick Kazlik is never going to be driving Rachel Cameron’s getaway car, that she’s going to have to find a way to change her life on her own—and she does. The ending of this book (and there’s a whole lot more going on, particularly the biblical allegory that’s inaccessible to me) is really a triumph. I’m grateful for the chance to return to this one again.

March 4, 2025

One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

“It is very important to do the right thing, eventually,” writes Omar El Akkad near the end of his new book, One Day Everybody Will Always Have Been Against This, a book which, if/when I post an image of its cover on social media, will make some people angry and disappointed with me. “Eventually” the word on which El Akkad’s sentence hinges, tying back to his title, which comes from a tweet he posted on October 25, 2023, three weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Two weeks before that, I’d reposted an Instagram story about an Israeli rocket hitting the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, and then took it down after doubt was cast about the rocket’s origins. It is very important to do the right thing right now, I thought, to be cautious and responsible, verifying facts, not to spread misinformation. I took down the post. (In a January 3, 2025 release from the United Nations, after Israel’s December 27 attach on the last functioning hospital on North Gaza, a medical worker reports that “that wearing scrubs and white coats is like wearing a target on their backs.” At that date, the WHO had verified 654 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza.)

At a certain point, I pretty much stopped reposting stories about Gaza. Which is not silence, or violence. It is very important to do the right thing, so I must tell you that I continued to write about it in my own words, on my blog and in social media posts, but I was wary of the reposts, of just what I was doing with that project. Who was I talking to? Was it the people in my own community who are stranding up for Palestinian freedom, needing them to know that I too was on the right side? Was it those in my circles who put up Israeli flags on their accounts on October 7, wishing I could follow up and ask them how they felt about that? Or those people I love who fly no flags at all but whose relationship to Israel is ambivalent, complicated?

There really are some parts of this story which are allowed to be complicated. And one of these is two sides insisting on their moral clarity. Sharpie debates scrawled on utility poles around my neighbourhood and all over the garbage can at the subway entrance. Dueling sound systems turned up to full blast. Members of my community being drawn into a right-wing media-sphere full of outright lies and fear-mongering. Rifts in the Canadian literary community that have hurt many quiet people deeply, whether I think those feelings justified or not. And yes, the endless focus (locally at least) on people’s feelings while bodies are being blown apart, the trouble of feelings being the focal point we keep returning to. That some lives get to be mourned and others collateral damage. So much noise.

But in his new book, El Akkad, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar and Canada, and was awarded the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel What Strange Paradise, cuts through all of it to create something most essential, to show the hypocrisy at the core of Western Liberalism as the world does nothing while tens of thousands of Gazans are brutalized, murdered. He writes, “There exists no remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital [in Toronto] deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.”

This is not only a failure toward the people of Gaza, it’s a failure to ourselves, to the moral foundation we purport to stand on. El Akkad writes, “Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and someone managed to make it close.”

I don’t think this is a book to be debated, to be countered in the back-and-forth manner of the garbage can sharpie debates (which, I will tell you, have failed to yet add an original element to the conversation or change anybody’s mind). This is a deeply thoughtful and considered book that needs to be understood more than it needs to be agreed with or dismissed altogether. It’s the story of El Akkad’s falling out of the love with Empire, with the Western project that so enticed him as a young person growing up in the Middle East where freedom was curtailed and corruption reigned, a promise of something better, but which has again and again failed to live up to that promise.

He is done with it. He writes, “Everywhere there is a great rage simmering, boiling over, and everything feels like an argument. But there are no arguments to be had anymore.”

February 27, 2025

Moon Honey, by Suzette Mayr

27 years before she won the Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr released her debut novel, Moon Honey, a book that begins with a young white couple, Carmen and Griffin, having sex under a pool table in Griffin’s parents’ basement, the third time they’ve ever done it, and in the midst of things Carmen smacks her head on the table leg, passing out for about a minute, but Griffin doesn’t notice. Griffin doesn’t notice much, barely reacting at all when, not long after the pool table incident, Carmen is transformed into a Black woman, except to find the premise sexually exciting. His mother, Fran, on the other hand, who never liked Carmen in the first place, is almost relieved to have her virulent racism as a hook on which to hang her dislike for her son’s partner, but doesn’t have time to be comfortable there before she has her own transformation, part of a maternal legacy. Such metamorphoses punctuating the book—a bridesmaid who turns into a horse the bride rides out on, another bride who turns into a LITERAL asshole. Anything can happen in Moon Honey, limits to be pressed like luck, and the result is wild and rollicking magic. Out now in a brand new edition from from NeWest Press.

February 26, 2025

I Read My Own Book

Yesterday I read my own book, which is not something I’ve ever done before, with any of my books, cover to cover. It was in anticipation of tomorrow’s meeting of the Beyond a Ballot Book Club, which is reading WAITING FOR A STAR TO FALL, and I thought that I should probably reacquaint myself with the story, which came out almost five years ago. And I’m glad I did, first because there was indeed so much of the story I’d forgotten (her roommate Lauren! I love her!), which would have made me the most useless guest author ever, but also because I really enjoyed the book. Like, ridiculously enjoyed it, which I guess makes sense since I wrote it, and therefore it would indeed so viscerally tap into my emotions, but I wasn’t expecting to feel it so much. While most what my main character experiences in this book is not based on my own life, I’d drawn on my own post-adolescent feelings of longing and sad-hoping to realize her character, and so reading it really did affect me in a really stirring way.

I was also glad to enjoy the book so much because of how it was a novel that wasn’t received the way I’d expected it to be by readers. Part of it was the marketing, I think, which positioned the novel as a straightforward romance, which it’s not, but I’d come away with some regret that perhaps I’d been too ambiguous in my approach to the story. This is very much a #MeToo novel, but I wanted to write about the grey areas surrounding that issue, which is not to say that I’m ambivalent about consent, and rape culture, and unequal power dynamics, and how some men get away with everything while women are torn down so easily, but I found it really interesting to think about a workplace relationship from the point of view of someone who thinks she has more power than she does, about what it means when some women choose the side of the oppressor, about being sure of yourself when you’re too young to really know (and how patronizing is that) and how all these ideas that really do muddy the water.

However there were people who read this book and thought I’d written an anti-feminist screed, and there were even people who congratulated me for my bravery in writing an anti-feminist screed (YIKES!). To which I say, we all bring our own baggage and biases to every book we pick up, but it sure made me think that avoiding ambiguity might actually be advised, and that the reading public might in fact require clear and direct messaging instead of broad spaces to think around in. (I don’t REALLY think that, but I also don’t want people thinking I’ve writing a novel in defence of predatory men!).

But I was pleased to read the book just like a reader, instead of as the writer I’d been when I’d read it so many times pre-publication in draft form, and to discover that I really do think I got it just right, and if not everyone got it, well, so be it. But I was pleased with what a thoughtful, nuanced, and subtle story this is, which is what I think that a novel operating in a grey area has to be.

So weird to be reading this novel about politics in such a different political environment from the one that I wrote it in though, sheesh. The book is absolutely fictional, but was inspired by a politician whose downfall made way for our current Ontario premier, who has been such a disaster and who is predicted to win his third straight majority when we go to the polls tomorrow. (Does this make me think differently about the other smarmy guy who we could have had instead? Not really. And don’t worry, after that scandal that “ruined his life,” he did manage to be elected mayor of a city he hadn’t even lived in. These guys do okay…) I also wrote this novel in 2017/2018, when the new US presidency seemed like a blip, a fluke, and everything is so much more awful now. Even worse, my novel features excerpts from made up news articles/opinion pieces and the one by a female right-wing tabloid columnist that was supposed to be paranoid and crazy—about how #MeToo was going to generate a backlash that made broken men absolutely dangerous, “you ain’t seen toxic masculinity yet”—reads as horrifyingly prescient.

February 25, 2025

February Essay: In the Air Tonight

The week after the US election, I was talking to my therapist about fathers. Not my father, but fathers in general, and about the avuncular manager at the grocery store whom I’d encountered in the bread aisle with an expression of concern on his face because there had been a widespread recall. Another widespread recall, after the one not long before it that had me tossing my fancy $5 ancient grains loaf into the garbage because it might be contaminated with metal fragments, just one more thing that made it feel like the world was going to shit, like nobody normal was in charge.

“Do you know what’s going on with this?” I asked the grocery store manager, who looked up from his clipboard shaking his head, but not despairingly. It’s just a lot, managing a grocery store, even at the best of times, and these are not that. He explained that my preferred loaf was not affected by this recall, and I said I wanted to be sure. Mainly I just wanted to keep talking to him, because of the authority of his clipboard, and how he reminded me of the actor Richard Kind.

“Basically,” I told my therapist, the revelation dawning. “I wanted the grocery store manager to be my dad.”

And with that, I finally realized why, in the wake of an election that was upending the world order, I was yammering on about ancient grains and grocery stores, and I also understood the one thing I might have in common with voters who were celebrating the election result instead of mourning it.

It was all about dads, about clipboards and pressed shirts, about order and authority, and the the promise of a person (a man person) who could tell you, and even mean it, that everything was going to be all right.

(Read the rest at Substack. If you’re a long-time blog reader, I would be happy to send you a complimentary paid subscription. Drop me a line and let me know.)

February 21, 2025

Anastasia Krupnik

My family is reading The Iliad aloud (turns out we’re Homer completists; after reading Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey a few years back, it only seemed natural) but nobody is enjoying it. It’s as boring, bloody, and stagnate as the Trojan War, and then when my kids found out the horse wasn’t even in it, they were furious. I’m not ready to give up on The Iliad yet, however, and so we’re interspersing its books with lighter and more satisfying fare, which most recently was Lois Lowry’s novel Anastasia Krupnik, the first title in her series about the quirky daughter of a poet and a painter growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I bought an Anastasia boxed set for my children a few years ago (tragically, does not currently seem available!), and while we’ve since read Books 2-4 all aloud and absolutely loved them, I hadn’t read them the first book yet—it’s a bit different, set when Anastasia was only 10, before she moved into her tower bedroom in the suburbs and her little brother, Sam, was born. In my mind it was more idiosyncratic than the other titles, and maybe that’s true, but now I’m not sure why I held back at all, because it’s just as great, maybe even more so, and it turns out it might also be my own personal urtext.

There were so many things in this book that I thought were MY things. Like when Anastasia (when she’s going through her wanting to be Catholic stage) makes the sign of the cross while thinking to herself “Forehead. Belly button. Left nipple. Right nipple.” And having a beloved wart. (RIP the wart on my finger that fell of when I was 24.) Being a list-maker. And maybe even living in the kind of household where children do precocious things like be read The Iliad (which doesn’t happen in this book, but I feel like it could…)

February 19, 2025

Gleanings

• What caretaking teaches us is that there is no grand or permanent utopia, only tiny, fleeting, and intimate ones
• i am saturated in colour, the rosy or yellow or sky blue buildings, the cup I bring back from the market, filled with pineapple and mango, dusted with chile, the houses tumbling down the hills above Oaxaca, red, pink, emerald green.
• wish i could teach the value of small things to other people. there has to be a crack somewhere so i can get in, so i can show this. just a sliver.
• One of our regular big-order customers comes to pick up six hardbacks, which means the pressure is off for the rest of the day because that sort of sale is more than I might take the whole day. This is less a comment about what a great sale it was, and more a comment on how modest our takings are.
• But words — they’re not hard, not to me. They’re malleable and slippery and musical. They are the material of play — or one of the materials, and one of my most reliable. We dance together. Words dart under the surface and burst through it, carrying an image, a roar, a need.
• So why bring up uncertainty? Because in Victorian Women Writers this week we are finishing up our work on Villette, and more than once in class I have acknowledged my own uncertainty about what exactly is going on in this strange, brooding, gripping novel.
• I’m trying to bring gentleness into my interactions with loved ones and strangers as a kind of resistance to brutality.
• And so, if you find yourself spinning, wondering what more you can do beyond donating to a cause or contacting your government representative, here’s a little primer to get you started…
• What can you say about a famous 1970 novel, that nowadays gets remembered more for its nostalgic fashion than literary merit? That it was brief. That it was stocked with characters from central casting. That it made everyone cry. Including me, many times.

February 18, 2025

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

Twice in the past 24 hours, the first time with a stranger while riding the subway and the second with my doctor while I was having an ultrasound on my neck, have I found myself enthusing about Slow Horses, the mystery series by Mick Herron that’s been turned into an acclaimed series on Apple TV, and about how the character played by Gary Oldman in the show (Jackson Lamb) is always farting. I absolutely love this in our age of fragmented culture, and wonder who I’ll be discussion Lamb’s flatulence with tomorrow.

Possibly I’m failing to impress upon you how good these books are…

Unlike those I was talking to, I haven’t seen the show, but did spend a cozy snowstorm long weekend with the first book in the series, which I loved. (My husband is currently reading Dead Lions, the second book, and he’s enjoying that one too.) It’s a novel about spies whose mistakes and misadventures have sent them to Slough House, the place where misfit MI5 agents go to die (and hence the name for them, the Slow Horses)…until a high profile kidnapping case ends up in their lap. Jackson Lamb is their most uninspiring boss whose faith in them is nil. And yet.

What struck me most about Slow Horses—in addition to it being quite gripping—was its prescience. Published in 2010, and including a narrative thread about a Boris Johnson-esque figure with his eye on Number 10, the idea of far-right racist views being held by mainstream figures might have seemed far fetched at the time, but not so much now. After a massive cock-up, Slow Horse River Cartwright has only managed to stay in MI5 because of his grandfather, a former agent, who, when the two are discussing a journalist exposed for gross racist and nationalist views, explains to him that “[the journalist] wasn’t excommunicated because of his beliefs. It was because there are certain beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you want to dine at the High Table.” Which, in light of the capitulation of so many (powerful) people to the current US administration’s terrifying authoritarian agenda, seems awfully true, and they’re not even hiding anymore.