August 8, 2010
From what I read over the past week
Another literary lost umbrella(!), this time in Barbara Pym’s thoroughly enjoyable A Few Green Leaves: “It was not until she had gone too far along the street to turn back that Emma realised that, possibly in the stress of some obscure emotion, she must have taken Claudia’s umbrella in mistake for her own. And it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be.”**
(**Update: Upon reading Pym’s autobiography, I learned this was based on an actual incident reported in her notebook, which, I think, constitutes *another* literary lost umbrella)
And then I fell into At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, my one complaint about being that its lovely cover got a bit manky when I used it to kill a mosquito. “One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights– which in Emerson’s case expired long ago– a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in my mind as Curious People Thinking because time has passed and the tent has grown larger.”
Then I turned to Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (except that my copy is called Thank You All Very Much, which was the title of a film upon which The Millstone was based). “I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now, so often repeated after the event in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew.”
Next was Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, which was beautiful and difficult, and uncannily channelling Joan Didion in spots. “‘Blackness’, as [Zora Neale Hurston] understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of one’s being than an arm is.”
And finally, Darwin’s Bastards, which I’m not finished yet, but how (in particular), I’ve loved short stories by Jessica Grant, Douglas Coupland, Mark Anthony Jarman, Timothy Taylor, and Elyse Friedman.
Such fun. Honestly, my vacation books could not have been more perfectly chosen.
July 30, 2010
The Proust Questionnaire
For my entire life, I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me The Proust Questionnaire, and so you can imagine my joy when Open Book Toronto came calling. Read my answers here!
July 29, 2010
Imagine a place
Yesterday Harriet crawled around the library lusting after other children’s nannies, and so I sat idly by the picture book shelf to see what I could see. My favourite discovery was Imagine a Place by Sarah L. Thomson, but in particular, the images by Rob Gonsalves. Amazing, mesmerizing pictures that become more magical the longer you look.
July 29, 2010
Books in Motion #6
Everybody was reading novels at around 5:00, as our subway train sped westbound on the Bloor-Danforth Line. I spotted a man reading Oryx and Crake, one reading something by Patrick O’ Brien, and another with his face buried in After Dark by Haruki Murakami (from the Toronto Public Library). Plenty of others reading books I couldn’t see the covers of, and then the woman reading a gorgeous vintage copy of The End of the Affair. (The edition pictured here is not the same, but it’s the closest in hue that I could locate). She looked about forty, perfectly pretty in an ordinary sense, wearing glasses, and shoulder-length curly hair. She was traveling with a man beside her who was stuck in a book too, but I couldn’t see the front of his. Neither was talking to the other. They were laden with two enormous suitcases, and a few other bags. I speculated that perhaps they were en-route to the airport? A trip-out, I assumed, because their luggage had no YYZ tags, but the woman was about two thirds into her novel. And how curious, I thought, to take a half-finished book on holiday with you. I would never, ever do such a thing. Most of it already used up then, and she’ll just have to cart it with her for the rest of her journey…
July 28, 2010
The Lovers by Vendela Vida
I will never forget my experience of reading Vendela Vida’s previous novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I’d brought it away for the weekend, dipping in and out of between various activities, and I wasn’t sure what to think. The prose was so spare, the plot seemed aimless, and the font was just too big for a book so slim. I wasn’t sure if I’d been wasting my time, as I sat down to read the final stretch as our train got close to Toronto. I’d been to a wedding and won the centrepiece, so there was a bucket full of flowers on the seat beside me, and in those last few pages, Vida turned her entire novel inside out and into a story that was so affecting and devastating, I felt like an idiot for ever having doubted.
Her latest novel The Lovers lacks the punch of Let the Northern Lights…, but it has an effect that’s more sustaining. And it’s funny how often I’ll pick up a book of commerical fiction and sing its praises because, wonder of wonders, there be plot there! Forgetting that plot and literary fiction are not mutually exclusive, and thank you Vendela Vida for reminding me.
Because something is particularly ominous from the book’s beginning, Yvonne waiting in the airport for the ride she has arranged along with her vacation rental. It’s been two years since her husband’s death, and she’s venturing out into the world again, on a trip to Turkey to get away from her memories and remember those that she’s forgotten. She has been to Turkey before, on her honeymoon twenty-eight years previously, but the place she finds this time won’t be familiar.
Yvonne hasn’t been able to find her ride because she’s been waiting 0n the wrong side of the airport, which sets a precedent for everything to follow. All outcomes the opposite of her expectations, everything resembling something from afar that turns out to be different at close range. Returning to Datca, she finds the hotel where she and her husband stayed is now abandoned and crumbling. The holiday house she’d chosen from the internet is not as close to the sea as she’d been promised, and there are sordid books on the shelves, a sex swing on the third floor. She leaves the door open and an owl gets in.
Vida’s writing is angular, full of edges to grip, and– as Yvonne finds Turkey– everything is almost ordinary, but not quite. I’ve read about birds in the house, but never owls, and never about the stench the owl carries with him, and how between the owl and sex swing, Yvonne fears the house will restrict all of itself to her and she’ll have to sleep on the roof. Vida articulates the awkward details of human interaction so perfectly– Yvonne finds another American who pronounces a Turkish name differently than she has, and she wonders which of them is right (if either?). The experience of an American tourist in a poor country, how Yvonne vows to buy goods from a different local merchant every day, and then finds she can’t tell them apart. The local boy who Yvonne befriends on the beach, who she gives cash to for shells he will dive for, and the local people start talking about their relationship.
Are things as ominous as they seem, or is Yvonne simply paranoid? Has the sex swing tainted her experience and now everything seems sordid? She begins to reflect upon her marriage, and find it was not all it appeared either, that the banalities that frocked her with her widowhood did not begin to describe her experience of loss, or how complicated her marriage had been. There remains the matter of the owl in the house though, and then one afternoon when the boy on the beach is diving for shells, he swims out and disappears.
Yvonne plants herself at the centre of this drama, as Western tourists tend to do when they’re at large in the world, but she will soon discover that her role in all of this is actually incidental. Not that her actions don’t have consequences, but the consequences matter far more than she does. That in order to come to terms with her own loss, and what has happened since, she not only has to transport herself as she already has done, but she has to transport herself outside of herself. To get lost if she’s ever going to get found.
A wonderful, gripping, thoughtful book. Vida’s novel is the third in a loosely-linked trilogy about women in moments of crisis, but she has done something different and stronger with each one. A novelist who takes nothing for granted about the form, seemingly rediscovering it each time she revisits it, she makes much out of little and the effect of it lingers long after the last page is read.
July 28, 2010
You've got to court delight
You’ve got to court delight, I think. By which I mean that things don’t just turn up in the post. You’ve got to send small gifts across the country to get a thank-you note in return, and subscribe to literary journals and magazines, and have a friend who lives in Antarctica who sends a postcard from time to time. Or rather, you have to go out of your way to buy a red teapot so that you can be a person who has a red teapot (unless you’re a particular fortunate person for whom red teapots arrive in the post).
Anyway, the point is that I received two letters in the post today upon whose envelopes my name was inscribed by hand. (And it wasn’t even that deceptively handwriting-like font that Bell Canada puts on all their envelopes when they send missives begging for the return of my custom.) Two handwritten envelopes is practically unheard of! I tore them open in a hurry and was not the least bit disappointed by what I found inside.
But let me backtrack. I joined The Barbara Pym Society earlier this year, because it seemed a strange, funny and Pymian thing to do. (I was inspired by this article.) And I also made friends with a brilliant writer/almost birdwatcher, and had her over for tea last week. As a result of these two things, I today received a lovely letter from a fellow Pym Society member who is looking for a Canadian meet-up*, and an absolutely beautiful thank you note from my birder-writer friend (who is truly as master of the form). Both of which made me exquisitely happy.
So you do have to court delight, I think. Though there’s also the point that if you wish to be perpetually delighted, just look for the pleasure of tiny, wonderful things. (Or perhaps I need to get out more…)
*Fascinatingly enough, the Pym Society member had sent me this letter unknowing that we’d corresponded in the past! Three years ago, she published a beautiful essay in The Globe, and sent me a note after I’d mentioned it on my blog. And now we find ourselves two of the very small population of Canadian Barbara Pym Society members! How marvelously tiny the world truly is…
July 27, 2010
Books I am taking away
All right, I have settled on the books I am taking away with me next week on vacation, none of which I’m reading for any reason except for pleasure (hooray!). And yes, I am being too optimistic with the amount of reading I expect to get done (because there will be swimming, and canoeing, and Scrabble, and… no other distractions. Oh, except Harriet). But can you imagine if I happened to get through all the books, and there was nothing next to turn to?
I am taking The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, because I love the Drabble and reread one of hers every summer, and have chosen to reread this one because someone loved its literary baby. And to read for the first time, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym, Darwin’s Bastards by Zsuszi Gartner (ed), and At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman.
July 27, 2010
Grains of salt
Sometimes, when I really want to die a little bit inside, I sit back and take stock of all the bad advice that I’ve given out in creative writing workshops. Like when someone referred to a “bird of paradise” in a story, and I wrote: “Be more specific. What KIND of bird? How is it paradiscial? SHOW ME!”. When I told the (now published, very successful) poet who knew exactly what it was she did, “You’ve sort of written yourself into a rut. Why not try something different? PROSE???” Every time I thought that me not understanding a term or concept was a reason the writer should think about changing it.
The very first story Rebecca Rosenblum workshopped in our Masters program had a reference to a baby “squalling.” Never having heard this term beyond the snowstorm variety, I wrote, “Wrong word. Do you mean ‘wailing’?” Rebecca is now my dear friend, and we’ve never talked about this, mostly because I’m still absolutely embarrassed.
It’s amazing, the kind of authority I’ve assumed in these sorts of situations. And all the things, and words, I never knew, and never even knew I was missing. There certainly is a reason why a grain of salt or two should go with everything, in particular if that everything is a bit of advice from me.
July 26, 2010
Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner
Jennifer Weiner’s latest novel Fly Away Home is no guilty pleasure. Of course, it’s a pleasure, and maybe for that we’re meant to feel a bit guilty, but I didn’t really. I was too happy reading a fat book that was devourable, a funny and smart book that was so well written that it never broke the spell.
Weiner is a more versatile writer than she gets credit for. Though she’s well known for writing books with shoes in the cover, I really enjoyed her murder mystery Goodnight Nobody, and her latest is also something completely different. Less Sophie Kinsella, Fly Away Home made me think of two recent novels I loved, The Believers by Zoe Heller and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. But set apart from these with the dry wit and breezy tone that have become Weiner’s signature.
So much of women’s fiction begins with a question of empathy, of an author wondering their way into a particular character’s mind (as opposed to wondering their way into a fast-paced plot, just say). In Fly Away Home, that character is a familiar figure, the wronged wife standing up beside her prominent husband as he tells the nation that he’s sorry for his transgressions. She’s standing there stone-faced as he admits to hurting his wife, his family, and as he vows to come to terms with his weaknesses, to make amends. As he asks for a bit of privacy, so he can calculate his eventual comeback.
That woman is Sylvie Serfer Woodruff in Weiner’s book, wife of Senator Richard Woodruff who has just been caught using his connections to fix a job for his mistress. Sylvie hadn’t suspected a thing, so busy was she fulfilling speaking engagements to support him, arranging his schedule, fetching his breakfast, and running the lint brush over his shoulders. Not to mention trying to stay twenty pounds lighter than she’d been in law school, getting her hair done, having regular botox sessions, and occasional plastic surgeries. In her spare time, she tried to contain their daughter Lizzie, who struggled with addiction and a host of other personal problems.
Lizzie’s sister Diana had always been the polar opposite, struggling with nothing, racking up one achievement after another to become an emergency room doctor. The news of their father’s affair comes at a curious time for Diana however, with her being in the throes of an extra-marital affair herself, with an intern from the hospital who’s everything her husband isn’t. (The husband is one of the funniest parts of the novel, Weiner pulling no punches in depicting his unattractiveness. Gary likes to announce, “Gotta go drain the dragon” before he uses the restroom; he comments on Youtube videos with the username Ithurtswhenipee. Their sex life is awful, usually culminating in Gary masturbating “with the burdened expression of a man who’d been forced to shovel the driveway just when the game was getting good”.)
Richard Woodruff is moved to the margins as the rest of his family attempt to put their shattered worlds back together again. Sylvie returns to her childhood home to reconnect with a self she hasn’t paid attention to in years, Lizzie finds her life assuming an unexpected direction, and Diana decides that her own direction should shift 180 degrees. In the end, things tie up neat and tidily in true commercial fiction style, but it’s a wonderful ride to get there, and no one would ever fault these characters for their packaged resolutions.
“‘What?’ Selma asked. ‘Divorce isn’t such a tragedy…. Nobody ever died of divorce.’/ ‘Sunny von Bulow?’ Ceil piped up./ ‘They never got divorced,’ Selma said. Sylvie glared at her mother, and Selma lowered her voice incrementally. ‘Claus just tried to kill her. See, if they’d gotten divorced, it could have worked out better for both of them.'”
Flay Away Home is a funny book, and such a smart book, with no holds barred. A trip inside the mind of that stone-faced lady, and the reader comes away with a broadened perspective of what her experience must be. And a broadened perspective also of questions of love, and marriage, and family, and what it means to truly get lost inside a book.
