January 16, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 2011: Update 1
So the reading has begun, and though the internet has been abuzz with readers planning to read along so I’d be reading a little less independently, I’ve only caught sight of a review or two so far. Last week, I finished Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, which I enjoyed very much, and would recommend to almost anybody as it’s a book to be appreciated on so many levels. I’m now reading Stacey May Fowles’ Be Good, which is a very different book, but not so different that I won’t be able to draw on connections between the two– the connections are there and they open each both books even wider, and one of my favourite parts of the Canada Reads model is comparing these books you might think have nothing to do with one another… We end up having conversations you never would have imagined.
Earlier this month, Sara from the blog Read and Bead read Stacey May Fowles’s Be Good in tandem with Carol Shields’ Unless, and she was surprised to find two strong connections between these books– both, in very different ways, focus on notions of “goodness”. Sara goes on, “The other interesting thing is that they are both similar in size and shape roughly 5×7 inches.” Be Good made her uncomfortable, though not disturbed, but she found it took her to a place she didn’t really wish to go. “It’s not always pretty, and lives are full of things left unsaid, hurt feelings, and longing.” Which, though not a ringing endorsement, is certainly a testament to the book’s impact.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Rosenblum reviewed Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind. Rebecca writes, “[The collection is] very very funny, without being in any way “light.” It’s such a hard balance to walk, especially because a critical perception of “lightness” can sink a book like a lead balloon (abandon metaphor). There is humour in theses characters’ lives because there is humour in everyone’s life. We don’t (usually) laugh at the characters but with them–because we all know that life is funny and cruel and weird.”
She also can’t help sharing numerous excerpts, then becomes frustrated because their brilliance is not readily apparent out of context, and then just implores us to just go and read the book for ourselves. “The problem with Coady’s writing is that any random bit of it looks easy and delightful, and it’s only when you get to the end that realize how much you’ve experienced in the story.”
(Any reviews I missed? Any plans to get reading soon? Email me links to your reviews, or send the reviews themselves if you’re not posting them online, and I will feature them in the next Canada Reads Indies update).
January 13, 2011
Wild Libraries I have known: John W. Graham (Trinity College)
The first day of my final year of undergraduate studies was Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and I remember sitting out on my rooftop patio the evening before, gazing at the city skyline, imagining that I really was smoking those cigarettes, and wishing something interesting would happen. The morning after notwithstanding, even, my wish was granted by the eight months that followed. I lived in a wonderful apartment with two beloved friends, and we had fun parties, elaborate suppers, hilarious adventures and misadventures, and sustained all night study sessions by runs to the 7-11 for Jolt Cola. We stayed up other nights editing school papers, writing newspaper back page columns, essays on Dryden’s All for Love, indulging in melodrama, kissing boys strange and otherwise, strumming guitars, and talking, talking, talking.
It was a wonderful year in which everything I touched turned to gold, and the sun was shining all the time, even when it wasn’t. And even when it wasn’t was sometimes because of my Cold War History seminar, which challenged me like none of my university courses ever had (and the way all of them should have). I loved the course, the discussion was great, the material was fascinating. Our professor was Margaret MacMillan, the year before she published Paris 1919 and won the Samuel Johnson Prize. She was formidable, brilliant, and her standards were high, but I was incapable of meeting them. That I managed to do so eventually made me prouder than almost anything else I’d done.
Our course readings were on reserve at the John W. Graham Library at UofT’s Trinity College, to be read in the library only. Now, it goes against everything I believe in to have any admiration for Trinity College (I went to the much preferable Victoria), but their new library had just opened that year, and it was lovely. Stately chairs in front of roaring fires, everything a beautiful dark wood, perfect lighting, brand new carrels where I’d take my readings too. In that library, I’d meet my other classmates, and we were always waiting for one another to be finished, and it was always late at night. I remember reading, reading about Kruschev’s Secret Speech, the Hungarian Revolution, Yalta, fellow-travellers, glasnost, the Prague Spring. I remember working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, the discussions that we had and the work that I produced making me feel like something of an actual scholar for the first time (and the last). I remember leaving the library as they were closing up, jumping on my bike and riding off to somewhere in crisp, cold night air, and I remember how the stars looked, even though I might just be imagining them now. I remember an awareness that I was living through an extraordinary era in my own life, that things would never be so clear again, or so easy. Life then was delivered to us on a plate, but we knew it was ending come the springtime. It was impossible to imagine what would happen after that.
What I remember most is the smell of the John W. Graham Library, more palpably than I remember anything else about it. A new building redolence, of fresh paint and new wood that only looked ancient. It smelled like a hot stack of photocopies and not remotely like a book. I came to associate that smell with everything about that year, when were standing on the threshold of the rest of our lives, and if I could smell it now, I think I’d cry. I really would, because of how lovely it was and how young we all were, so ridiculously and unknowingly earnest.
But new smell only lasts so long. When I returned to Toronto in 2005, I went back to the library so see if I could find it again, and was disappointed to find it smelled like anywhere. And of course, I was standing in the very same place, but it wasn’t the same at all.
January 12, 2011
Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book ed. Sean Manning
For two days this week, I was swept up in the pleasure of Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, which is edited by Sean Manning. A celebration of the book as object, of general bookishness which is a catch-all term including, “the tactile sensation of turning a page, the sight of my bookmark inching closer to the finish, then finally closing the book, hearing the whomp… the sense of accomplishment that brings” (from Manning’s introduction). I was certainly this book’s idea reader, but I loved it for more reasons than that I was simply predestined to do so.
This anthology was made by its diversity. The effect of this, however, was that it always took a few paragraphs to settle into each essay, each one so distinct from whatever had come before. These jarring entrances aside, it was always a pleasure to discover something new– writers male and female, old and young, an ex-solider and an ex-mobster, and even two essays in translation (yes, yes, yes! In particular because these are from China and Iran, and books as objects in these places have their own kind of stories to tell). Each essayist approaching their subject matter different, where the book itself had come from, how they brought their essay around to its point. Some of these were books lost to time or history, or books still cherished; books that had been read to death or books never read at all. Many essays begin with a portrait of the essayist as a young reader, perusing her parents’ bookshelves, and the books come to delineate family relationships, broken or otherwise. For some writers, the book in question is the only one they’ve ever kept, or else it’s just one in a vast library that fills entire houses (or two, in the case of Francine Prose).
I hadn’t heard of most of the 30 contributors to this anthology, and I knew of about as many of the books they’d brought, and yet this did not diminish my reading experience one bit. The essays were that good, and the subject matter so universal that it all resonated with me, familiar or otherwise. Some of the more notable contributors included Ray Bradbury, of course (whose piece, truthfully, was one of the weaker in the bunch), Francine Prose, Joyce Maynard, Elissa Schappell, Karen Green (who is the widow of David Foster Wallace, which I wouldn’t mention, except that it’s what her essay is about), and Karen Joy Fowler (who wrote the Jane Austen Book Club).
I loved Francine Prose’s “Andersen’s Fairy Tales”, which is about tracking down a disappeared book from childhood, about “the real book” as opposed to its impostors (which are available for sale on the internet, of course). Joyce Maynard’s “The Bible” tells her father’s story via a book she never read and doesn’t have now. And oh, I could go on and on about Julia Glass’s “Roar and More”, which is decades long– the first book she ever asked her parents to buy because she saw it read on Captain Kangaroo, and it so stayed with her that she wrote it into her own novel, and her quest for permission to quote the material introduces her to the book’s author, but only for a fleeting moment. Glorious, Anne Fadiman-esque, which is the highest compliment to be bestowed to this sort of thing.
And yes, “The Portable Dorothy Parker” by J. Courtney Sullivan, about all the girls just like her who show up in New York wanting to write like Dorothy Parker but have a different kind of life. And oh my, Rabih Alameddine and “The Carpet Baggers”, which was a novel he had in his childhood home in Lebanon– the book is lost when the house is destroyed by war, but he connects with it a few more times in a brilliant case of book fatedness. Finally, Jonathan Miles’ “Ship of Fools”, which had belonged to the mother he did everything to break away from, and then she was lost to him for good through Alzheimer’s Disease.
Books as objects are never just about the books, of course, and so this anthology encompasses the whole wide world. My only criticism of it would be the essays that plead their cases too hard against e-books and e-readers– such defensiveness is unnecessary, because the essays make the point without even trying. A book is a book, and there’s nothing else quite like it.
January 11, 2011
The most odious of book reviewing acts
Last week, I committed the most odious of book reviewing acts: I wrote the line “Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language” without any qualification. Rendering the line meaningless, though I meant every bit of it, but I was still too drunk on the sheer joy of having read Kate Atkinson to actually go to the effort of explaining myself. And even though I’m very tired right now because there is a small person in my house who has been coughing all night, all week, I want to rectify my misstep. I want to tell you why Kate Atkinson is one of the best contemporary novelists in the English language.
She has an ear for the peculiarities of speech, of regional dialects and expressions. She can write whole conversations between characters who never use words with more than one syllable, and the words they use is usually “fuck”, and it’s clear that she delights in the trick of it, she hears the poetry. She creates voices, and it’s from these voices that her characters emerge whole. Her narratives inhabits these characters’ brains, and no two voices sound the same– in her latest Started Early, Took My Dog, we find our favourite hardened Private Detective, a female middle-aged former police-superintendent, an aging actress in the throes of senility, plus all the people who surround these people, perspectives shifting to show everybody from every angle. So a panorama, but with a soundtrack, which is a regular cacophony, but music more than noise.
Her narratives are whimsical, delightful– Behind the Scenes at the Museum begins upon the instant of Ruby Lennox’s conception, her exclaiming, “I exist!” And also contains the line “Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards”, which is my definition of pure light. In Started Early, Took My Dog, we celebrate afternoon teas, and there are plenty of scones, but then let’s examine Britain’s underside: corrupt police officers, neglected children, murdered woman (with blood and gore), inequality, poverty, heartbreak and abject loneliness. This book contains an epigraph by the Yorkshire Ripper. Kate Atkinson never flinches, in fact, at times she borders on sensational, but her characters are so real, and their language so unbelievably rich that we give it to her.
She fixates on the past, every single one of her books jumping back in time as though it’s just as simple as looking over one’s shoulder. The past is always there, its mysteries leaking into the present day, its unsolved crimes contaminating the soil. And yet at the same time, she’s so much a writer of the present, a chronicler, her books remarkably current, their pop-culture references inconspicuously embedded within the stunning prose. The stories she tells are of the way we live now, but within these stories she loves the best bits, and what’s sepia-toned is never sentimental– Atkinson’s past is never an idyll. Sanctuary is only to be found in the stories we tell, the connections we find, in the sense we make of the chaos after the fact.
January 11, 2011
Making Light of Tragedy gets made over
Seriously, there is nothing the Vicious Circle can’t do. We decide we don’t like the cover of Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy? Fine. Our Patricia makes another one. And we love it.
January 10, 2011
Canada Reads Indies 1: Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
The basic narrative of Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water was more straightforward than I’d been expecting– Truth and Bright Water are, respectively, an American town and a Canadian Indian reservation, side-by-side at the bottom of Alberta. The story takes place in the summer days leading up to the “Indian Days” celebration in Bright Water (which attracts German and Japanese Indian-enthusiasts in particular), from the perspective of a young boy called Tecumseh. His closest companions are his cousin Lum, and his boxer-dog Soldier, the three of them roaming the area with its peculiar topography as familiar as the blue sky that surges from the mountains– mountain and prairie alike, the coulee, naturally occurring stone pillars rising from the river, the incomplete bridge between the two communities, the old church high on the hill about Truth.
One night out on the coulee, Lum and Tecumseh witness a strange woman throwing something in the river, and she appears to throw herself in after it. Closer investigation by the boys turns up a clean white human skull where they’d seen her jump in, but there is no sign of the woman, or the truck she arrived in either. The scene is troubling to both boys in different ways– a recent tragedy has claimed Lum’s mother, and he begins to conflate what happened to her and the woman they saw. Tecumseh is aware that something is not right with Lum, and disturbed by the skull also, but he is unable to articulate his concerns, and his parents are too consumed by their own affairs to notice that anything is wrong.
His parents’ affairs could possibly have something to do with the return of Monroe Swimmer (Famous Indian Artist) to Bright Water. Monroe, who has purchased the church on the hill but has shown himself to no one, has some kind of connection to Tecumseh’s mother. Tecumseh’s parents are separated, and his father continually embarks upon schemes to win back his wife which are about as sensible as his business ventures. Tecumseh’s looking for business ventures of his own, and ends up with a job with the elusive Monroe, who has begun painting the old church to blend in with the landscape.
Of course, the story is not entirely straightforward– there is a ghost, for example, though Tecumseh is not aware that she’s a ghost. In fact, Tecumseh is not aware of many things, which requires the reader to question on any straightforwardness the novel might suggest. But on a straightforward level, the novel still works, unlike, say, King’s Green Grass Running Water, which really requires a decoder ring to be properly understood. It’s only half the story, of course, but it’s still worth noting that this is a proper tale of a boy and his dog.
The novel is straightforward, however, the same way that Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt is straightforward. Woven into its fabric are hooks, feathers and other unusual objects. The shapes of the quilt tell its stories, but the stories aren’t quite what they seem. Tecumseh struggles to decipher the quilt as he does the whole world around him– none of his questions are ever answered; his parents keep disappearing; the bruises on Lum’s body are clearly inflicted by his father, but nobody does anything about them; and what about the woman having her hair cut in his mother’s salon who is convinced that Marilyn Monroe was an Indian?
The whole book could be explained away by allegory, and when I read it in graduate school, that is probably what I did. The symbiotic relationship of Truth and Bright Water showing that recent political borders are arbitrary, and that even Indian/non-Indian comes with a similar lack of distinctions– the Indians play up their stereotypical culture for the tourists, but their “Indianness” is far from King’s sole preoccupation with these characters. Or does glossing over such distinctions make matters worse? Famous Indian Artist Monroe Swimmer is painting out the church from the prairie landscape, obliterating the past (after years of working in museums and painting Indians back into the picture in the landscapes he “restored”): “Seeing that it has gone is one thing. Finding it now that it has disappeared is something else.” After all, that history can be so swept away is really just an illusion. Really, nothing is straightforward at all, and such subtle complexity is the novel’s great strength.
Truth and Bright Water is not without its weaknesses, however. Tecumseh’s limited point of view leaves too many gaps to make the novel as satisfying as I would have liked it to be, or perhaps the trouble is too many plots to be brought together effectively. Though the gaps have their purpose, and the too many plots is analogous to crazy shape of Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt, and that’s how life is. The subtlety of the novel also works against it– one could finish it and think they’d read a middling story about a boy and his dog. Though I enjoyed the story and found the ending particularly sad, its overall effect upon me was a bit underwhelming.
I’m glad I read it though, sort of a cheat of a reread, as I barely remember reading it in the first place. Truth and Bright Water requires attention and close reading that I didn’t apply to it before, so I’m grateful for the opportunity this time around. A very good book that gives the rest of the line-up quite a lot to live up to.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
January 10, 2011
The Bob Dylan of children's authors
“This may sound disingenuous, but here’s the thing: When you are a small child besotted with books, the books themselves– especially the ones you love the best–are autonomous things, concrete yet abstract, like the stuffed animals and building blocks that help you travel to places where only you can go. At bedtime, you don’t ask your mom, “Read me some E.B. White.” You ask for Stuart Little, or Charlotte and Wilbur. You ask for a dog story; for Pippi, Babar, or–nowadays–Toot and Puddle. Your favourite characters–you know them. From a mile away, you could spot the Man in the Yellow Hat, Mrs. Mallard, Olivia or Ferdinand the bull; but H.A. Rey, Robert McCloskey, Ian Falconer, and Munro Leaf–who the heck are they? Authorial celebrity is sabotaged yet further when picture books lose their jackets… they shed their authors’ biographies as well. Many prolific children’s authors are also prone to changing dance partners–that is, illustrators– making their books even harder to see as distinctly their own. (Dr. Seuss may be the exception to this rule. Children become aware of him as a uniquely creative individual, perhaps because they hear their parents call the guy “a genius”. He’s the Bob Dylan of children’s authors, too eccentrically, definitively… well, Seussian… to be confused with anyone else.) “– Julia Glass, “Roar and More” from Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Books.
January 9, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads Making Light of Tragedy by Jessica Grant
Though not essential to our discussion of Jessica Grant’s novel Making Light of Tragedy, you should probably know that it was my turn to host a meeting of the Vicious Circle, and that we had to make it a brunch affair because my apartment is too small to accommodate both such a noisy group of women and the sleeping baby that an evening would require . So the baby was banished to the museum for the morning, along with her father, even though there was an actual blizzard and he had to push the stroller through snow that came up to his knees. And even though there was an actual blizzard, the entire cast of the Vicious Circle made it through, even two mothers of newborn babies, and one of the said newborns too. My kitchen was drowning in a sea of snowy boots.
I’d chosen the short story collection Making Light of Tragedy, because I’d read Grant’s novel Come Thou Tortoise, and I’d heard her first book was even better. And because, while I’d liked Come Thou Tortoise, I’d suspected there was an even better writer struggling to get out there, and perhaps the story collection could shed some light upon her. That Grant’s talent might have been pushed further than the novel itself had permitted her to go.
We all agreed that the collection was an excellent book club book, which was a fine point to start from, but then it all fell apart from there. Incredible, the range of reactions, from a group of people who seemed to like the book all around. But one of us could scarcely get past the first story, for it was so wowing (her Journey Prize award winning “My Husband’s Jump”). And then a few others said if they hadn’t been reading this for book club, they would have abandoned it altogether after the first few stories, which would have been regretful for they so liked the stories that came later. All of us pronounced the book uneven, a bit too long. Unanimously, we decided that the book could well have shed “George the Third Wasn’t Mad Forever”. Some of us loved “My Husband’s Jump” for its rather incongruous grounding, but others determined it far too twee. One of us found “Della Renfrew” particularly tedious, but another defended it with line after, admittedly, hilarious line.
If you like your prose unadorned, this is not the book for you. But there were moments and metaphors that worked, that forced you to look twice but never took you right out of the story. There were experiments that were interesting but never quite worked– “Bellicrostic” (and, tellingly, only one of us bothered to find out if the word was real [and it wasn’t], though each of us meant to), “There I Am”. “The Anxiety Exhibit” also seemed like one of these, until you got to the very end.
The biggest problem with “Plow Man” was that this bereft middle aged man had the exact same voice as all of Grant’s slightly unhinged twenty-something female characters. The similarity in voice a problem throughout the book– the four narrators of “The Loss of Thalia” all sounded identical, for example. Yes, admitted the story’s one defender, but each one added a surprising layer of meaning. The jury was still out on the final and longest story, “Milaken”– a couple of us hadn’t yet finished it, but the story had its defenders too. Some of us had really liked “The Dean of Humanities”, though it was noted that we might not have liked it as much had it not been preceded by the more whimsical tales of the bunch– perhaps we were just relieved to be back in reality? (Some of us still think we would have liked it all the same.) One of us thought she’d got the male voice nailed right in “Taxation”. And “Ugly And” as well, the one story we all mostly liked all around.
We liked the title, though it didn’t bring the collection together (as the Plow Man wasn’t making light of anything, was he?). We thought the cover image was awful and horribly unappealing. That the collection wasn’t brought together by anything at all, and read very much as a collection of pieces that had first been published elsewhere, as opposed to something cohesive. Need a story collection be cohesive (and we thought of Sarah Selecky and Alexander MacLeod’s books)? Not necessarily, but perhaps the problem was that this one was far too long. Out with King George! And a few others we’d never agree on.
We talked about Burning Rock, and how difficult it would be to be in a writing group with Lisa Moore. That everyone’s prose looks crap beside hers. This led to a long, long discussion about the merits of Lisa Moore’s February, which the Vicious Circle appears to be disproportionately fond of. There was much praise for Jessica Grant’s caustic wit, for the two guns moment. But some of these pieces felt overly workshopped. We talked about how a few of us were going to read Come Thou Tortoise now, on the basis of Grant’s collection, having been previously put off on the basis of the talking tortoise (which works better than it sounds). And we talked about how having read this book, at least one of us wished Come Thou Tortoise had been better.
Aren’t people funny?
And isn’t agreeing to disagree always easier to do over sausages, pancakes and french toast?
January 9, 2011
"For never in our lives has anything so extraordinary happened…"
My friend Julia sent me a copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ essay “A Widow’s Story”, because the prose was “stunning”, and she admired Oates’ transition between past and present, and how “though the present is horrid (he’s dying), [Oates] knows, in retrospect, that it’s so much better than the future.”
I am so glad Julia sent it, because it’s a wonderful, devastating essay, but also, though it’s perverse to admit, because I have a thing for examinations of widowhood– also The Year of Magical Thinking, and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice (which was also a New Yorker essay before it was a book). Mostly because these are also fascinating examinations of long and enduring marriages, but, yes, because I can’t help it too– worst nightmares vicariously are the safest kind, a bit like staring at a car wreck, and also because I have this ridiculous notion that if just I read enough books, I could come to the moment prepared.
This final point bringing me to motherhood, which is where a similar plan has already failed me– I read enough books, but I read them all wrong. But, nevertheless, upon reading Oates’ essay, I had an ephiphany about the way that we talk about motherhood, or rather about how often we end up talking about motherhood. That these conversations about motherhood and widowhood are so often similar in approach and in tone. This I realized in particular when I read a line from just after her husband has died, ab0ut her amazement at the impossibility of such a thing occuring: “For never in our lives has anything so extraordinary happened between us…”.
For so many of us who are so fortunate, life doesn’t tend to happen to us. We live in a blissful, lucky, unaware state– what Oates’ describes as “the vanity of believing that somehow we [own] our lives.” Perhaps the most startling upset of new motherhood is the sudden awareness that we don’t, exactly. That another life owns ours and all at once, the world no longer bends to our wishes. That whole cliche about hearts outside our bodies as well, and though none of this has the same permanant rent as widowhood, there are parallels. The adjustment seems impossible.
Similarly, we are otherwise so insulated from the stuff of life, from birth and from death, which usually are enacted in the same place and restricted from public view, that these perfectly ordinary events do become extraordinary. Foreign, unimaginable, except for remnants we’ve gathered from movies and TV and the gulf between these scenes and reality makes the experience all the more difficult to actually process. The disconnect results in the fixation, the never-ending conversation– we’re putting the pieces together over and over again, hoping for something we’ll eventually recognize.
