September 15, 2009
Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner
All right, I wasn’t planning to blog about this book, because I was reading it for strictly fun, but it turned out to be a fantastic novel worth mentioning. The book is Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner (and three cheers to whoever gets the literary reference in that title!). It was a little bit Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher for suburbia satire, a little bit The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer for a take on the politics of mothering, but it was a thousand times better than both these novels put together. A murder mystery that had me guessing until the very end, amused and intrigued throughout, and reading like a madwoman to uncover whodunit. Her take on the “mommy-wars” manages to be well-considered and hilarious.
My impression of Weiner’s work is that it’s somewhat formulaic (though I could be wrong– I’ve only read one other of her novels and seen a movie of the other) and she has made herself somewhat of a spokeswoman for chicklit (on her own very excellent blog and elsewhere). She is incredibly articulate and great at arguing her cause, though the problem with this is that most of the chicklit she speaks for is not remotely as good as the stuff she writes. Nevertheless, I get the impression from reader reviews that Goodnight Nobody was something of a departure for her, no matter what its cover looks like, and as a lover of good books, I must say Weiner pulls it off with aplomb.
September 14, 2009
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
It was only last winter with Alice Munro’s Best that I finally discovered Munro hadn’t spent her career writing Lives of Girls and Women over and over again, and so I was very pleased to pick up her new short story collection Too Much Happiness. And once again, I was impressed by the scope of her work, in two senses. The first, in that there seems to be no template for an “Alice Munro Story”. Set in the past and present, with first and third person narration, with male and female protagonists, about events remarkable and mundane.
But I was also struck by the scope of many of the stories here themselves, how they begin at a fixed point, and then suddenly zoom far out to show the perspective, and hindsight, of an entire lifetime. “Fiction” begins with young Joyce, who’s just lost her carpenter husband Jon to his apprentice and is devasted, and then suddenly we’re whisked off to Joyce second husband’s sixty-fifth birthday. “Deep Holes” starts with the details of a picnic, with devilled eggs and a nursing baby, and ends years in the future as a mother encounters her long-estranged son. And I love that– how this zooming out turns the story inside out, and makes it something so completely different than we figured we were being set up for.
The final story in this collection seemed out of place to me, however– perhaps because I haven’t read Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, with much of its fiction taken from historical fact? As this final story’s title is also lent to the entire collection, however, I decided to read it again quite closely and view the whole book through such a prism. “Too Much Happiness” is the story of nineteenth century Russian exile, mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky. The story is a collection of scenes from near the end of her life, which she’d supposed might actually be a new beginning– she’d become engaged to the man she loved, and having previously not been sure “whether she was going to happiness or sorrow”, she decided it was to be “Happiness after all.”
Happiness, we learn from this story, is a trick after all. Sorrow is inevitable, and the trick of happiness seems to be that too much of it is the direct route to sorrow anyway. That the end of the story will always be the same, and seems to be the case in all of these ones, nothing really changed but just confirmed. But yet as the characters realize this, we as readers have realized that things as we’ve been seeing them are not like we’ve imagined them. Munro twisting her plots masterfully to create suspense, tension, absolute horror– these are stories in which things happen, which in the case of the contemporary short story is not as obvious as it sounds.
These are stories that bring us to the brink of discomfort, and Munro compels us over the edge just to see what’s happening there. The woman going to visit her husband in prison for murdering their children, a strange naked dinner party at which our narrator’s buttocks slap against a dining room chair, a woman telling a story to save her life, the man with the birthmark, the girl who detests being followed by her mentally disabled neighbour which leads to fatal consequences…
“Too Much Happiness” is still the odd story out, it seems. Set outside contemporary times, outside of Canada, about a historical figure, however little known. So much a series of sketches, it’s hard to get a sense of the story as a whole, to find the vividness Munro gives us elsewhere. And yet I do suspect there is trickery here too, and I do get a sense that here lies the key to it all. “Actually, this science,” Kovalevsky wrote of artithmetic, “requires great fantasy”, just as the best kind of fiction is a problem to be solved.
September 14, 2009
Pirates and Penguins, oh my!
Yesterday, our wee family attended the launch of Patricia Storms‘ book The Pirate and the Penguin at the magnificent Yorkville Public Library. It was not actually Harriet’s first literary event, as she’d attended Coach House Press’s Wayzgoose Party the week before, but it was her first launch, and the first time she’d sat down for a public reading. She was spoiled by Patricia, I think, who had an actual pirate on hand for the occasion, and was kind enough to pose for a picture with us. Her reading was excellent, and held even Harriet’s three and a half month-old attention span. Afterwards, Stuart and I had shared a slice of cake, which Harriet inadvertantly stuck her hand in.
We loved the book, from each one of its delightful map-illustrated inside covers to the other. Now, I’ve never really *got* pirates myself, except Somali ones– I don’t understand why International Talk Like a Pirate Day is funny, for example. But I’ve been a big fan of penguins going back yonks, and I like alliteration at the best of times. The story was funny, and sweet, and I especially liked its references to knitting and yoga. Patricia has been illustrating really wonderful books for a long time, and we’re so excited that she’s finally written her own!
September 13, 2009
Worst Nursery Rhyme Ever
My friend Kate gave us a gorgeous Mother Goose collection when Harriet was born, and Stuart and I have been happily reacquainting ourselves with the rhymes since then. And Mem Fox does prescribe at least five nursery rhymes per day (“Begin on the day they are born. I am very serious about this: at least three stories and five nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only at bedtime, either”) so we’ve been following her recommended dosages, and then some. We ended up receiving another collection used from our neighbours, and so now we’ve got Mother Goose for upstairs and down. And how wonderful, to discover these rhymes with their words and rhythms, and to realize we’ve known them all along, stored somewhere in the back of our minds but coming back to us just like that.
“Hey Diddle Diddle” is Harriet’s favourite, we’ve decided, because it was the first nursery rhyme she ever heard (on her second day in the world, when we walked part way down the hall in the hospital, and stopped at the “Hey Diddle Diddle” mural, because I could go no further).
But we hate “Bat Bat”. Neither Stuart nor I had heard it before, and when we found it in the first collection, we thought maybe the editor’s son had written it, and they’d included it to be nice. Because it was a load of crap. But it’s in our second book too, so it must be real:
Bat bat come under my hat
and I’ll give you a slice of bacon
and when I bake
I’ll give you cake
if I am not mistaken.
We’re going to start skipping this one, so not to put Harriet off nursery rhymes altogether. They’re all a bit goofy, but “Bat Bat” is idiotic: why would you want a bat under your hat? And would one be enticed by a slice of bacon? Who’d entice a bat? Do bats eat cake? And doesn’t all of this suggest the narrator is indeed mistaken? Nonsense is one thing, but stupid is another.
Worst Nursery Rhyme Ever.
September 11, 2009
Readers' Choice
Oh, exciting! I’m one of five finalists in the University of Toronto Alumni Short Story Contest, whose judges will be choosing a winner in the next few weeks. In addition to the main contest, however, there is a Readers’ Choice Award, voted online. Click here to read the five stories (including mine, but I’ll play by the rules and not tell you which it is) and vote for your favourite.
September 10, 2009
Television saved my life
Though I’ve always been partial to television, its tendency to consume my evenings whole meant that I’ve kept my distance from it these last few years. I also don’t have cable, which definitely helps with this. (Further, I hate commericals, which is why I love Midsomer Murders on TV Ontario, also because MM is the best show ever.)
But this summer, it’s true that television saved my life. First, when a friend lent us her Series 1 and 2 DVDs of 30 Rock in late June, and though we’d have to turn it up loud to be heard over the baby’s screaming, each episode provided us with a little bit of lightness every evening. And though I went into the show with Liz Lemon’s character appealing to me most, I was surprised to find that Tracy Jordan became my favourite. In every episode, he’d utter a line that would completely surprise me, and turn my idea of who he was inside out. His complete lack of conformity (to anything) made him always fresh and interesting, bizarre and hysterical. ThoughI do continue to worship at the alter of Tina Fey. (Naturally. I’m a girl with glasses).
The other show I’ve watched, and the one I appreciated the most, however, is CBC’s Being Erica. Which does appeal by its Toronto location (and Jessica Westhead reference– see Pulpy & Midge behind Erica’s desk. This is one bookish show). I’d almost given up on liking Canadian television, as every show I tried to watch was usually terrible, but I had heard good things about this one, and the series was being rerun for the summer. (I also liked that I could watch it online whenever I wanted.) It’s a show with a gimmick (girl goes back in time to learn lessons from her past), but the gimmick was never the point for me.
For me, the part of the hook was half-decent acting from most of the cast. (Most of the cast– some do act like actors on Canadian TV series, but this is a Canadian TV series after all.) A really wonderful soundtrack that catered to my nostalgic side whenever Erica went back to high school. And pretty fantastic writing that veered towards the unexpected. (I also liked it when Erica enquired whether her going back in time to change the past would disrupt the space-time continuum, as you do, and he informed her that her overall impact on the universe was not quite that extensive.)
I put Erica to the test in a recent episode, where Erica is at the movies with her pregnant friend. Friend has to go to the bathroom, but can’t get out from her seat, and just before the show breaks for commercial, water splooshes all over the floor. “If she’s wet her pants instead of having her water break, therefore defying all television convention,” I said, “then this is the best show ever”. (It was a water splooshing all over the floor moment that had me sure I was never again going to watch Sophie, a previous Canadian show I’d tried to like). And back from commerical, Erica won!
Now, full disclosure, Judith’s water did go sploosh later in the ‘sode, but I’m still giving credit. This show isn’t perfect, but it’s a million times better than most of the other stuff on TV. It’s immensely entertaining, and I look forward to Season Two in a couple of weeks.
September 9, 2009
Far enough on the other side…
Though I’m far from out of the woods, I think I’m far enough on the other side to look back with a little perspective. I went through a phase of claiming that no one had warned me how awful the first few weeks of motherhood would be, but that wasn’t true– I’d read Anne Enright’s Making Babies, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, I’d seen a good friend go through it eight weeks before. It just never registered, there was no context. I have to say now that the best pregnancy/early days book I read of all of them was Diane Flacks’ Bear With Me: What They Don’t Tell You About Pregnancy and New Motherhood. I’m not sure why I focussed so much on the birth part (and read so many other books on the subject, because birth’s going to happen anyway, and you’ll have so little to say in choosing how), but the afterward was so absolutely accurate, that I’d be struck by lightening if I claimed one more time that I wasn’t warned. Particularly when she says that you should just mark three months off on your calendar and take a seat on the sofa. Though I got off mine more than once, remembering that I didn’t have to was tremendously helpful.
Now that baby is here, however, the very best book I’ve found is 365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love. Now that my baby can hold things, hold her head up, roll over (!), smile at me and engage with the world, it means a little less, but when she was smaller, this book gave me some insight into how to interact with her. I really had no idea how to do so– I’d never met a newborn, and imagined she’d be born three months old (if only…). With this book, I began to have some fun with her, gained some confidence in my mothering abilities, and she responded to every activity. The ribbons in particular, long dangling ones hanging from a coat hanger that continue to be one of the most fascinating sights she’s ever seen.
Anyway, I got this from the library and then bought myself a copy and have given two as shower gifts since. I’d definitely recommend it, and we do continue to enjoy the ideas they suggest.
September 8, 2009
An Honour!
We here at Pickle Me This are honoured that Julie Wilson mentions us as one of her favourite book blogs in her profile at the CBC Book Club where she is Featured Reader. Thanks, Julie!
September 8, 2009
On Atwood's new novel
I won’t be reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and I tell you this now in order to promote the book, actually. Because Atwood is a certain kind of author, the kind who might be one of your very favourites (as she is one of mine), and you could decide to give her new one a miss. Her range is absolutely epic, which is why I’m always troubled by readers who claim not to like her work. Which work then, I wonder– The Robber Bride? The Blind Assassin? The Handmaid’s Tale? Because if you’re not partial to any of these, I’m not sure what else of literature is left, really.
I, however, am not really partial to sci-fi/genre fic/spec fic, or whatever you decide to call it. And this, I realize, is just as infuriating/limiting as claiming to dislike all Atwood, but that’s a blog post for another day. Today, however, I’ll just have you know that because I probably won’t be crazy about this one, it’s not taking priority among the to-be-reads. Which does not mean that the book sucks, because I probably will buy it for my husband for his birthday. But rather that ‘something for everyone’ means a boatload of stuff that’s not for me, which is just fine. Margaret Atwood’s flexibility and fictional experimentation have made her one of our country’s most fascinating writers for the past thirty years, and even if not in love with every book, you can’t help but admire that.
(I’ll also probably get to this one eventually, and enjoy it a great deal).
