April 8, 2010
So Much For All That by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver breaks all the rules– her best-known novel (and, perhaps, best full-stop) We Need to Talk About Kevin was epistolary, for godsakes. Her last novel The Post-Birthday World is as close to a choose-your-own-adventure for adults as you’re going to get. Her sinfully smart newspaper columns are always out to piss somebody off, and her other novels that I’ve read are uncomfortable, the end-results of fixations. She even dares to be a woman called Lionel.
So it’s no surprise that her latest book, So Much for All That, appears to have a lot wrong with it at first glance. That it’s an “issues” novel, about a topic as timely as the American health care system, and their health insurance system in particular. That, like all Shriver novels, it’s populated by wretched characters who treat one another badly. That one character’s chief occupation is ranting about government control, and taxation, and “mooches and mugs” and these diatribes go on for pages, seemingly only furthering the novel’s political agenda. That nothing much actually happens in the novel, but rather the characters just talk about things that happened, so that expository dialogue is where the action is. That Lionel Shriver characters don’t talk like people– no one is that wry, particularly for multiple dense paragraphs, and nobody actually talks in paragraphs either.
So it will probably surprise you when I report that the book is wonderful. That nobody talks like Lionel Shriver characters, but I wish they did, and eavesdropping onto their conversations for 400 pages still wasn’t enough. That the whole book is conversation rather than action, but that conversation is so vibrant, so pointed and sporting, and brilliant. So Much For That is a satire, the old-fashioned kind. It goes up against the American system and Shriver offers 400 pages of smackdown with more than enough force to sustain itself. It’s a book with a job to do, but the narrative never falters. The plot is gripping, the prose is crafted, the story is sad, but (most essentially) it’s also hilarious.
Shep Knacker has been planning for The Afterlife, but for one here on this earth. For years, he’s been squirreling money away to finance early retirement and the rest of his life in some exotic place where the American dollar goes far. He’d sold his handyman business in the late ’90s and made a tidy sum which has been earning interest ever since, and though it’s a farfetched plan in theory, its achievable in practice. Due to Shep’s conventional streak, his inability to shirk responsibility, however, nobody actually thinks he’s going to follow through.
He’s just about to show them for once and for all, though, the airline tickets bought and he’s made the announcement to his wife (from whom he’s been distant lately) that he’s doing it, he’s taking off for Pemba Island to live out his (still innumerable) days drinking out of coconuts. He’s going, he tells Glynis, with her, or without her. “I do wish you wouldn’t,” she tells him. “…I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”
What follows is a year in the life of the sick, as Glynis begins treatment for an aggressive form of cancer (and Shep’s bank account for The Afterlife begins its steady depletion). Shriver pulls no punches in her portrayal of disease, and the details of Glynis’ ravaged body are absolutely horrifying. Unceasingly horrifying too, and I’ve never read such a portrayal of sickness. Though the portrayal is multiplied by three– Shep’s best friend Jackson’s daughter has been suffering with a rare debilitating disease since infancy, Shep’s father is elderly and beginning to decline, and then Jackson gets himself into a spot of trouble when elective cosmetic surgery on his penis gets botched. (Critics have questioned this final plot line; I actually kind of loved it, and it delivered the appropriate lightness I required to counter all the rest.)
Lionel Shriver’s books are always, however unconventionally, about family and relationships, and in this novel she shows how disease is a family affair. Moreover, how serious disease becomes the only family affair, and everything else is an extension of it. Her portrayal of Shep and Glynis’s marriage and how the cancer changes it (and the ways in which it doesn’t change it) are hearteningly rendered– Shriver writes a sex scene between them that is the most pointful, perfect and uncliched sex I have ever read in any book. Like every character in this book, Glynis is alternately hateful and sympathetic, a nasty piece of work who you’ve no doubt why Shep fell in love with. She pulls no punches either– sick of false sympathy, of friends who don’t bother (or are just scared to), unwilling to offer redemption to those who come seeking it from her. She is real, striking, scary and wonderful.
The book is bleak. I wouldn’t have considered stopping reading, but it’s a lot of misery to get through, but Shriver makes it all worthwhile with the most wonderful ending I could have imagined. Where there is justice, and goodness, and everybody gets what they deserve, and I’ve never known Lionel Shriver to be such an optimist (or a dreamer).
So it’s too bad this ending is the most storied part about the whole tale, but that’s the world’s fault, and not Lionel Shriver’s.
April 6, 2010
Bloom by Michael Lista
“Something that has bothered me enormously as a reader of poetry is the failure of poets—especially the so-called avant-garde—to pick up on the formal complexity of the world as revealed by the various scientific disciplines. Biologists have shown us the double-helix, the root not only of physiology but also of behaviour, cognition; chemistry gives us Bach and personality; and physicists are proving we’re more math than matter. And yet so many poets give us a world that looks profoundly out-dated; disordered, solipsistic, self-made, random, positively 20th century. I think a more honest book is one in which the spontaneity of personality is set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world.” –Michael Lista, from “Not Every Gesture Is a Manifesto: An Interview…” by Jacob McArthur Mooney
Say I’m making it
for making’s sake, as humans must
when put before an erector set
whose pieces spell out
Please for the love of Jesus
do not dare assemble us
–from “Do. But Do.”
how when an atom’s centre smashes and cracks
new light explodes from the matter’s collapse
–from “Lotus Eaters”
Michael Lista’s collection Bloom comes with a guide map as an appendix, which might suggest its a book that takes us into unventured territory. And while I’m not sure that Lista’s book is necessarily more “honest” than those of the “so many poets” he mentioned in his interview, this is a fascinating collection nonetheless, in its premise and its execution.
Los Alamos, New Mexico is the guide map, and Bloom tells the story of Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist working on the Manhattan Project. Exactly nine months after Slotin’s predecessor, Harry Diaghlian, was killed in an accident while “bring[ing] a core of nuclear fissile material as close to criticality as possible”, Slotin himself has an accident, and though he manages to shield the other scientists in the lab from radiation, he dies nine days later. An essential twist in the story is that Slotin died training his replacement, Alvin Graves, who was having an affair with Slotin’s wife.
I don’t know what “close to criticality” means, and neither have I read Ulysses, but even still, I was able to be captivated by Bloom. Each poem in the collection takes another poem as its source material (by poets as various as Ted Hughes, the Pearl Poet, and the Velvet Underground, by poets as cotemporary as Karen Solie, Robyn Sarah and Nick Laird, and plenty of [undoubtedly famous] other poets to whom a reference might bely that I’ve actually heard of them), and Lista refers to his work with the original poems as “English to English translations”. By which he means that his source materials are building blocks, modified to suit Lista’s poetic purposes and the purposes of the story.
Not a thing is original here– just as Slotin’s experience is a copy of Diaghlian’s, and Graves’ was the stand-in in Slotin’s marriage, each poem is a variation on something that has been written before, each of these poems refers to allusions and other texts (as well as a pivotal part of a 1989 movie projected onto John Cusack’s shoulder). And while the product of such an experiment is a little confusing and overwhelming, it’s also navigable and pretty fabulous to contemplate as a whole– the cacophony, so many voices, and such variation is entirely readable.
I am not this book’s intended audience, presuming it was only ever meant to have just one. But I am pleased to now understand how literary remixing could be an art onto itself and not simply plagiarism ala Opal Mehta. The incredibly illuminating Torontoist interview I refer to above (and yes, I was unafraid of cutting and pasting for this review) notes that Bloom is controversial, that readers could resent Lista’s rearrangement of beloved or iconic works (and I wonder too, if his variations might look paltry in comparison?). Interestingly, however, because my knowlege of the source material was so incredibly minimal (indeed, the only poem I’d read was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight back in Major British Writers, and I’m not sure whether to blame the University of Toronto or myself for this) none of these problems existed.
Lista’s poems refer me not to something that’s old, but something that’s entirely new, which was the opposite of his intentions, but it’s a distinctly original result.
April 5, 2010
There were sorcerers for such things
“But when Zach typed an a, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father’s car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world , was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn’t involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of Zach’s life– and these days, machines didn’t sputter on you, develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked, or they stopped dead– the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn’t. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo– charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do what it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.” –from Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That
April 4, 2010
Poetry Primer Number One: by Susan Telfer
Susan Telfer’s poems have been published in literary journals from coast to coast in Canada. She teaches high school and lives in Gibsons, BC with her husband and three children. Susan is the recipient of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council Gillian Lowndes Award, which is for a community artist who has demonstrated long-standing achievement and growth.
I first encountered Susan through her wonderful collection House Beneath (Hagios Press, 2009) and I’m so pleased that she was willing to share some thoughts here about poetry.
How do I need poetry? Let me count the ways.
As a child, I needed poetry without knowing I needed it, because it was provided in abundance through nursery rhymes, A Child’s Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young, Alligator Pie and the Psalms. Starting in late high school and university, I began to understand how the poetry of the English canon sustained me. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” The right poem, I have found, is like the right homeopathic medicine: a tiny ‘like cures like’ tear to heal some deep hurt inside me. Here is a small sampling of my most potent remedies.
When I was in my twenties, with my first baby, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer and the hardest years of my life began, I found a poem in The Atlantic by Marie Howe called “What the Living Do.” I immediately cut it out, glued it in my journal and read it over and over. I didn’t know then that Marie was writing of her brother who had died of AIDS, or that my young mother would soon be dead, but I knew I needed that poem. Perhaps the most healing message from it for me was that in the midst of death you might catch a tender glimpse of yourself: “and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep.” A snatch of the poem with a photo appeared in Oprah last year, and I realized then what powerful medicine that poem contains.
About four years ago I read “Our Lady of the Snows” by Robert Hass, and put a copy on my fridge. It was Christmas, and as usual, the ghost of my drunken father at Christmases past haunted me. That poem on the fridge was like garlic on the door. Again, Robert was writing about himself as a little boy dealing with his drunken mother; I was remembering myself as a helpless girl dealing with my drunken father, but our stories were similar. He had been where I had been: “And the days churned by, /navigable sorrow.” He told it in a way I could not articulate and that was how he provided medicine for me. I get it out every Christmas, and many other times during the year.
Only recently have I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poems, which strike me with the clarity and depth of one of those 
bell bowls at yoga class. “A Breakfast for Barbarians” and “Dark Pines Under Water” are two poems written in my nursery rhyme years, which, for reasons as yet unknown to me, speak directly to the inner layer of who I am. Some healing is going on in my unconscious. “There is something down there and you want it told.”
George Elliott Clarke, himself a writer of many healing poems, told me, “Writing is not healing for the writer, but for the reader.” Dear Reader, read with your hungry heart until you find the poetic voice speaking the nourishment you need. And especially if you’re from a small town, and even if you aren’t, read Louise Glück’s new book A Village Life.
Marie Howe’s book is What the Living Do, and Robert Hass’ is Sun Under Wood. “A Breakfast for Barbarians” was published in the book by the same title (Ryerson, 1966) and is out of print but old copies are around. “Dark Pines Under Water” was published in The Shadow-Maker (MacMillan, 1969.) They are both in the new edition: The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (Exile Classics, 2007).
April 4, 2010
A Moral Dilemma
This morning whilst out on a quest for hot-cross buns, my husband brought me home a moral dilemma. He’d found Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature by Alison Lurie in a box on the sidewalk, and he thought (quite correctly) that I’d like it. The only trouble was that it’s a Toronto Public Library book and it hasn’t even been discharged.
So, what to do? The book is stolen property, but I feel removed enough from the scene of the crime that I could let myself get away from profiting from it. But what kind of scoundrel allows a theft from the public library to go unrighted? Though would returning it cause undue paperwork for overworked librarians? I’ve looked this book up in the system, and there are eleven other copies– which don’t seem to include this one. Perhaps they’ve accepted that it’s gone for good, and so who am I to challenge that? If I decided to take it back anyway, where exactly would I take it? This book is from the Toronto Library’s “Travelling Branch”, which (I think) means I’d have to go chasing after the bookmobile…
April 1, 2010
Good things come in gorgeous packages
Poetry collections are some of the most beautiful books in my library. They have gorgeous cover designs, seductive embossments, such carefully chosen fonts, wonderfully fibrous paper that sets off the white space, cut with such crisp edges. A lot of this, I think, is because so many of these books come from independent presses and reflect the care that these presses put into each detail of their books.
My all-time favourite cover design is from Alison Smith’s Six Mats and One Year (from Gaspereau Press), whose cover is is divided into rectangles like a six mat tatami room. I’ve got a thing for running my fingers along the octopus legs on Jennica Harper’s first collection The Octopus and Other Poems (from Signature Editions). I love the bird on Kerry Ryan’s The Sleeping Life (The Muses Company), the girl on Laurel Snyder’s The Myth of the Simple Machines (No Tell Books), I love how The Essential PK Page is like a bouquet of pressed flowers (from Porcupine’s Quill), and that tree from Susan Telfer’s House Beneath (Hagios Press), sprawling, gnarled and rooted.
It’s shallow, I know, to love poetry for its packaging, to covet books as objects, but I can’t help it if I do. It’s only the beginning of the story, of course, but it’s an important part, and it’s fortunate that so many poets and publishers think seem to feel the same.
Honestly, e-books will never hold a candle.
April 1, 2010
Poetic April Begins
We’re going to be celebrating April here at Pickle Me This in a most poetic fashion, and brilliant plans are afoot– poets have been generous enough to contibute “Poetry Primers”, to allow some of their work to be posted, and stay tuned also for a poetic interview, for lots of book reviews and discussions. I’m going to be reading collections by Michael Lista, Kyle Buckley, Laisha Rosnau, and others. Laisha will also be one of our featured poets, along with Susan Telfer, Jennica Harper, Kerry Ryan and Rebecca Rosenblum (yes! she contains multitudes).
If any other poets or poetry fans are up for taking part in any way (writing primers, posting poems, and whatnot), do get in touch. Unless you’re the teenage version of me, in which case *nobody* wants to read about that pain that “cuts life a knife”, okay?
Truth be told, I do read poetry year around, but I welcome April and the chance to allow it a little bit of extra attention. Because appreciating poetry demands plenty of attention, and often less than I tend to grant it, modern life being what it is (ie rubbish). Poetry is slow, poetry is precision, poetry demands you to note every syllable, every sound, senses attuned. Poetry is demanding, which is not the same as difficult, and any poem worth its weight in demands will be infinitely rewarding. The way a few words can open worlds wide and wide.
What I want to make clear over the next month is that poetry has popular appeal. If you’re not into poetry, it’s only because you’re not looking in the right places, and note that not being into poetry is sort of like not being into novels (and we all know those people are perfect idiots).
If you do love poetry, then I am glad we’ll be able to celebrate together, and for the rest of you, I hope you’ll be won over by the time May’s flowers are in bloom.
