September 14, 2010
Live and Learn
Though Chatelaine and I are still on the outs (really, Chatelaine? an excerpt from Mini-Shopaholic? Do you know me at all?), from the feature “Live and Learn” in the October 2010 issue, I got a inkling of what the magazine might be like were it actually good. Jan Wong on losing her job, depression and having her world turned upside down in her 50s, and what that experience taught her; Catherine Gildiner on her 60s (“I realized life should not have to be proved, but lived”); wise words from Lauren Kirshner from her 20s (“be a messy work-in-progress”), and then Lisa Moore’s piece, oh my. I am going to cut it out and hang it on the refrigerator that will become the rest of my life. A tidbit, though you really have to go read the whole thing: “Trust everyone. Everyone behaves better when they feel trusted. Nobody wins a fight; the trick is to behave decently no matter what. The trick is to make love a lot. And think of it as making love.”
September 12, 2010
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
I suspect that if I’d ever read the Russians, I’d have a good understanding as to why Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom had to end up being so bloated. It would make sense of why a novel one might describe as bloated has received glowing reviews across the board, which had raised my expectations so much that the bloat came as a bit of a disappointment. But for me, the Russian illiterate, the bloat was just bloat, but alas, there was still a lot to love about this novel.
Freedom is the story of the Berglund family, who are introduced in the novel’s first section through a cacophony of hearsay and neighbourhood gossip. We see the family from without– Patty, pushing her stroller up and down the street before the neighbourhood was even fashionable, her well-meaning husband Walter, their growing family of son Joey and daughter Jessica. Patty is unflappable, never says a bad word about anyone, won’t tolerate gossip about her neighbour Carol, single-mother of daughter Connie, until Connie starts sleeping with Joey, and Patty just snaps. They could never prove it, of course, but somebody slashed the tires on Carol’s boyfriend’s car, and that somebody was probably Patty, and then Joey ends up moving in with Carol and Connie, too many bottles start showing up in the Berglund’s recycling bin, and eventually the Berglunds move away to Washington, Joey becomes a Republican, and somehow the conservationist Walter ends up embroiled in a scandal involving his relationship to coal companies.
The rest of the novel gets close to the Berglunds, and shows us how they got from there to here. The various sections are told from the point of view of Patty (who has written her autobiography in third person), Walter, Joey, and Walter’s best friend, musician Richard Katz, who has always complicated the relationship between Walter and Patty. Like Franzen’s previous novel The Corrections, Freedom is an unflinching depiction of contemporary family life, of its peculiar dynamics, and– like Lionel Shriver’s recent So Much For All That, which I thought was a finer specimen of a novel– the book also is a statement about American society in general. This point gets hammered home through various treatments of the concept of freedom– to define ourselves apart from our families, freedom to defend our country after September 11, 2001, how the term is hijacked by the left and right, freedom as an export, freedom to be you and me, and then these diatribes about environmentalism and overpopulation, and soon I really wasn’t sure of the point being hammered home as much as I was just sure of the hammer.
The characters didn’t convince me. The Patty Berglund we saw from the outside was an intriguing character in all her quirky ordinariness, but her autobiographical section didn’t feel authentic. Moreover her character didn’t either– others described her amazing laugh, which was nothing more than “Ha ha ha” on the page; she was a woman who’d made little of herself, but I was never sure why everyone was so sure of how smart she actually was, down deep; I didn’t get the dynamics of the marriage either. It was all very confusing and eventually I just didn’t really care who did what or why, because no one needs to make life that hard. Life is hard enough all on its lonesome. And I guess I felt that way about everyone populating this book, this family.
Patty only became vivid to me again in the novel’s final section, which is the mirror image of the opening, once again, the Berglunds from the outside. Part of the relief was that the characters had finally quit doing idiotic things, but they all somehow just seemed much less like nonentities from the outside. I cared about them from the outside, they clicked with the world from the outside, they all just made a bit more sense than from that scrambled place inside their heads. Part of this was also that Franzen was allowing the story to tell itself, rather than painstakingly laying it out for us, piece by piece, and piece by piece by piece.
It’s a smart trick though, framing a novel with bits that are so wonderful, that when you finish the book, you put it down and say, “What a brilliant book. What a perfect ending”, even though about two hundred pages before, you’d wanted to leave the whole thing on the bus. Such framing makes the slog seem worthwhile, especially since the slog itself was rife with good writing, intriguing set-ups, humour, and good questions about our assumptions of every day life. So I’m glad I read Freedom, I definitely am, but I also am terribly relieved that I’m not reading it anymore.
September 9, 2010
Style, substance, and that something: on the Mad Men conundrum
When I began watching Mad Men earlier this year, my assessment was similar to Karen Von Hahn’s of the show being “all style, no substance”. This was partly because I’d been biased already by the review of Mad Men Season 1 in the London Review of Books, in which the show’s chief attraction was summed up as our own superiority at watching pregnant women smoke while their children played with dry cleaner bags. Mad Men is good, because at least we get to feel like we’ve come along why, which undermines the fact that we most certainly haven’t.
I enjoyed the first few episodes of season 1, though not as much as I’d anticipated– I wondered if my expectations had been made too high. Soon I’d decided that I’d finish watching the first season, but probably not pursue it beyond that. And I’m not sure what the turning point was, but somewhere along the line not pursuing the rest of Mad Men was not remotely a possibility.
I’m now just about at the end of Season Three. I’m in no hurry to get to Season Four. Though of course I am, but you understand how tragic it would be to one day have no more Mad Men before me. Because I love Mad Men, I do. I love its style, I love when it shocks me (the lawnmower, Betty and the shotgun), I love how I am desperate to find sympathy for these characters who do nothing to deserve it, that I have so much invested in the disaster that is Don and Betty, but mostly I just really love Don Draper. In a way I have never loved anybody, except for Dylan McKay and my high school math teacher. Impossible, lustful, agonizing loves, where you’re fortunate to run into them once in a while in early morning dreams.
It’s not just that he’s good looking– Jon Hamm on 30 Rock really didn’t do it for me, which was sort of the point of that endeavour, but I don’t think we can write it all down to Hamm being such a great actor. It could very well be the suits and the haircut. Or what I’m after might be the elusive Don Draper something that makes him such a magnet on the show. How he’s unpindownable. And when he’s good, he’s not even that good, but I cling to straws– “at least he’s a better parent than Betty”, which isn’t even technically true and wouldn’t be an achievement even if it were. But when he defended Bobby, and when he cooked for Sally in the middle of the night, and when he bought Betty the necklace, and when he demanded that guy remove his hat in the elevator. That he kept Sal’s secret. Fundamentally, he’s a man of integrity.
And when he goes and does something abhorrent, which is usually, somehow I’m convinced that he’s just not himself. That perhaps what he’s really lacking, what he’s calling out for in the dark, is someone to love him properly and that someone would be me. I sometimes wonder what Don Draper could do to have me finally not forgive him. More than he’s cultivated his own self, have I merely cultivated a self for him? Is that what everybody around him has done as well? Is he the projection of our fantasies (and mine happens to be a good dad, and a kind husband)? Is the point of Don Draper that we want to believe in beautiful people? That we fling our sympathy upon them? Does his charisma come from him being fundamentally empty, and therefore a vessel for anything? Is he all style and no substance, and the entire show is this self-aware?
It’s curious though, the inconsistencies of his character. Of everybody’s character on that show, and it was one of my problems with it when I first started watching. The characters were different people in each episode, not just in a mildly interesting way, but in a way that made me wonder if the show had too many writers. I get the whole “Don Draper is an enigma” thing, but it has crossed my mind from time to time that that hole who is he might just be a clever way of badly constructing a character. And that the other characters who weren’t hatched out of nothing have no such excuse for being wildly fluctuating from one thing to another. Except Pete Campbell. I have determined he’s a psychopath.
I experience Mad Men the way I experience novels, by which I mean that there are often whole passages I don’t understand. And I love this about the show, that there’s more going on than I’m ever supposing, but sometimes I wonder if the problem is not so much that I’ve missed something as much as that that something just doesn’t make any sense. Mad Men is either brilliant or terrible, and I’m really not sure which, but it’s brilliant certainly in that I don’t care regardless.
September 8, 2010
Books in Motion #7
I refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, mostly because I ride public transport with riders who live to refute such an assessment of the state of literary things. And now I doubly refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, because riders are reading poetry, even. So nothing is so bad. Said rider was a strange-faced, gorgeous woman of about twenty three, whose fashion savvy stirred my envy. That high waisted, ruffly look whose origins I’ve never been able to trace– people just woke up one morning and started dressing like that, but how did they know?? High heels with short shorts, if you know what I mean. Her hair gathered messily into into the kind of scarf I would have once thought hideous, but now sort of love. She was travelling east on the Bloor-Danforth line, and reading Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski, and maybe the whole thing was a set-up. Desperate to impress, she wanted everyone to think that she was awesome, but whether or not her intentions were pure, she had certainly succeeded.
September 8, 2010
I Still Don't Even Know You by Michelle Berry
From my Quill & Quire review of Michelle Berry’s new short story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You:
“Though the best stories in Michelle Berry’s collection I Still Don’t Even Know You begin with predictable set-ups, they go well past the point of familiarity and push the boundaries of a reader’s comfort. Readers become privy to moments of improbable connection and agonizing intimacy. These captivating stories hinge on scenes that are painful to read, yet impossible to look away from.”
You can read the rest here.
September 7, 2010
Songs blasting by outside my window #5
Amazingly, “Tangled Up in Blue” by Bob Dylan, which is up there with “Heaven is a Place on Earth” as one of my all-time favourite songs, ever. Full stop. And I think this is some kind of a good omen.
Update: Weird. Two hours later, the song drove by again.
September 6, 2010
Among life's momentous acts of self-definition
My (and everyone else who knows her’s) beloved Kate got married yesterday to her just-as beloved Paul, in a ceremony that was probably the most lovely wedding ceremony I’ve ever attended. The bride was Kate, of course, which was part of the splendour, but she was Kate-ier than Kate even, in her flowing dress with the pink flowers, her beautiful golden hair, the perfection of her sun-kissed complexion, and the happiness she radiated. Her absolute faith and confidence in the wonderful man who’d just been made her husband, and I was overwhelmed at how rich their two lives are now that they are two lives together.
The sun came out for the ceremony, which began with the little people, the children of friends of Kate and Paul, who are generous enough to include them in the day. And though Harriet can walk now, I opted to carry her just to make things simpler, but she held her own bouquet, which was her job basically done. Followed by families of the bride and groom, and finally everyone was there together in that beautiful garden, and the children were squawking, a plane flew overhead, and we heard a brief roll of thunder, but no storm came our way.
The readings were “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara, and then the following from “Goodridge Vs. Department of Health” by Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall: “Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations….Without question, civil marriage enhances the “welfare of the community.” It is a “social institution of the highest importance.” … Marriage also bestows enormous private and social 
advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family…. Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”
After Kate and Paul agreed to keep on doing what they’ve been doing, but just to keep on doing it forever, everybody was treated to brunch inside. The food was fantastic, and the company was even better, including best friends and other friends who haven’t been seen in some time. Our friends Erin and Rebecca had brought Harriet a wooden apple pie set (!!) which was so perfect, because nothing short of a brand new amazing toy would have kept Harriet playing happily through the meal and after, all the while she should have been having her nap.
For dessert, there was so much cake, a variety to choose from and we could pick more than one (and pink velvet was my favourite). And ice cream! And then Harriet made out with the ring-bearer, under the table cloth. I guess you pull out the wooden apple pie, and one thing just leads to another). This bodes well for Harriet, because the ring-bearer was two-and-a-half, dashingly handsome, and suggests she might end up better off than her parents, neither of whom anyone made out with until embarrassingly late in teenaged life, but anyway. It was funny.
And it was wonderful too, just to be there. To be called upon to witness this day in our friends’ lives, and to celebrate them with them, and us with us. To celebrate love and to family and friendship, and how the lines begin to blur so these are all the same.
(Thanks go out to Erin for showing up with a camera whose battery wasn’t dead).
September 6, 2010
Authors' Ghosts by Muriel Spark
I think that authors’ ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.
Whole pages are added, re-written, revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.
How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
have passed, the reader
Picks up the book – But was it like that?
I don’t remember this . . . Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.
Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it –
The author’s very touch is here, there and there,
Where it wasn’t before, and
What’s more, something’s missing –
I could have sworn . . .
(Text taken from here. Poem discovered via Ali Smith’s introduction to The Comforters).
September 2, 2010
Rereading A Memoir of Friendship
The first time I read this book, I read it in a hammock, which makes me despair a bit at how much life is changed since then. Because we’ve moved, of course, and (seriously) the tree that hammock was hung from has since been chopped down, plus there is the matter of Harriet who is the very opposite of hammocks.
The book is A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, thirty years of correspondence between two writers (and wives, and mothers, and working women, and intellectuals, avid readers and dear friends). The first time I read it, it was with absolute joy, and I’ve been wanting to reread it for awhile since because I’ve read so many other books since and there will be all kinds of references I didn’t get the first time around. I was interested to see what newness was there.
I don’t know that I’ve ever loved rereading a book so much in my life. Even though I’ve only been reading it in dribs and drabs all summer long (usually while flossing and brushing my teeth, to be precise), because it’s long and I also wanted to savour it. The book makes its reader privy to the workings of two sharp, curious minds, to the trajectory of two different writing careers (and reading careers), to the trajectory of life in general (getting old is terrible, unfair and unrelenting. This book makes no bones about it. I admire the candour.) Privy also to little bits of gossip, literary and political. To the books they loved and the books they loved less, and also the reviewers that made their blood boil. Reading this book, one is privy to wisdom.
I made special note of the books Shields and Howard mutually appreciated, gushed over together, and have decided I want to make an effort to read this in the near future. They are:
The Home by Penelope Mortimer
The Odd Women by George Gissing
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose
Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson
Days and Nights in Calcutta by Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee
Le Divorce by Diane Johnson
Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
And though I’m not much of a crier when it comes to books, once again finishing this book had me weeping. I mean, so much so that it disturbed my daughter and she came over to try to make me laugh and deliver me a hug. To think of Shields dying and leaving a life and a world she so loved, and then to consider all those who loved her and would have to remake their lives without her. Somewhat selfishly, I also think of books unwritten. But I am also uplifted by a life that was so determinedly well-lived.
