July 2, 2009
February by Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore’s first novel Alligator was a revelation when I first read it. It was a novel composed of sentences, each one as meticulously and surprisingly crafted as the next, and I’d never read anything else like it. As a whole, however, the novel didn’t completely satisfy. This might be asking too much of a book that did so many other things, but still, the project wasn’t completely realized. With February, however, breathtakingly, Moore has built on her promise and in this, her second novel, she has created a brilliant literary achievement.
Now, I realize that by only reading books I’ll probably like, and only writing about books I do like, I may come across as a bit hyperbolic in my literary praise. Indeed, I do love an awful lot of books, but February is something different. A cut above even the very best of the rest, her is my favourite book I’ve read it ages. Casting its spell from the first sentence, crafted as marvelously as I’d expect, I was completely swept up in this novel that reads (as Alligator did) like nothing else I’ve ever read before.
February is the story of Helen, a Newfoundlander whose husband was killed in the Ocean Ranger Disaster in 1982. (Helen is fictional; the disaster is not). The story is focused in late 2008, beginning when Helen’s son telephones her to inform her that a woman he’d spent a week with seven months ago is now pregnant with his child. He is calling to find out if he’ll be made to do the right thing, whatever the right thing may be, and so he will by Helen’s guidance, because she is a distinctly honorable woman. Which is different than being deliberately so. Much of Helen’s life has been an accident, but her goodness is still palpable to the reader. Which is Moore’s first great achievement– that goodness can be interesting, worthy of a story. Moore’s second achievement being her depiction of Helen and her husband’s absolute, pure and total love. A portrait of a good marriage even, which is even more rare in fiction than real life. A marriage so good that there’s really no getting over it, no moving on or forgetting, and Helen’s loss is so heartbreakingly rendered, captured in the details and avoiding any points cliched or saccharine.
February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively “thought-like”– twisting, interrupted, irrational– as Moore’s style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It’s a rare thing– a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I’m taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere.
July 2, 2009
Full Disclosure
Baby is happy right now, because I’m rocking her Fisher Price recliner with my left foot. Hence the typing with two hands here, which is enormously liberating. I pray that Harriet does not get bored of rocking soon, and until she does, let me provide you with full disclosure here. Or at least, a modicum of disclosure, as this is not the sort of blog in which I bare my soul. Rather, this is the kind of blog in which I write about my life usually through a bookish/literary perspective, and I’ve been doing a bit of that regarding motherhood. That Laurie Colwin quote remains the truest thing I’ve ever read. I remain amazed that having read thousands of books, watched TV shows and movies throughout my lifetime, I’ve never once seen the actual experience of having a new baby presented (and I’ll be writing more about this later). Which was how I could have come into this so cluelessly, and why the reality was so overwhelming. Overwhelmingly awful. I will say that the first two weeks were the darkest I’ve ever known, and I feel like I’ve crawled out of the deepest crevice in the universe to get to where I am now. It gets better, I knew it would, but that didn’t mean very much at the time. And even now, when “better” on some days is still its very own kind of hell, and nothing is what I thought it would be, and I am working harder than I’ve ever worked in my whole life, and normalcy seems so irretrievably far away– at least I haven’t cried since yesterday. But before that, it had been over a week, and there are moments when I’m so perfectly all right, and proud of how far we’ve come, and delighting in this strange little girl who has come to live with us. I have learned, however, how much I need people, and that I am so lucky to be surrounded by people on all sides. Friends, family, and oh, husbands (and mine has saved me over and over and over again). I remain a very lucky woman, and the good days are being strung together closer and closer all the time. (Baby is done rocking. Good timing.)
June 30, 2009
Update
So, I’m not going to say I’ve mastered nursing, I’ve certainly learned plenty in the past five weeks, and it’s getting better all the time. I will lay claim, however, to having mastered reading while nursing. Which I don’t do all the time for fear of child neglect or that she’ll grow up to think her mother is a hard cover, but I am pleased to say that I’ve got a lot of reading done lately. I read Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost in a hurry, and enjoyed it very much. I’m now absolutely obsessed with Lisa Moore’s February, which I think will win the Giller Prize this year, if anyone’s betting. And this morning I bought The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, who I’ve never read but have heard great things about (including from Jessica Westhead). So the moral is that reading is possible in this new life, as are banana pancakes, park bench afternoons, Midsomer Murders, laughter and ease. I have avoided daytime television thus far, which I’m quite proud of. New pleasures are late evening walks, respect for quiet, baby bathtime, board books and almost-smiles. And that’s starting to make everything else worthwhile.
June 29, 2009
They had the bedside lamps on
“Helen can bring herself to the point of weeping just thinking about Cal’s yellow rain jacket that came to his thighs and the rubber boots he wore back then and the Norwegian sweater with the elbows out of it and how he rolled his own cigarettes for a time, which was unheard of (he had other pretensions: he made his own yogurt and tofu, grew pot, experimented with tie-dye), and how he wanted a house around the bay for summers, and how the children came by accident, every single one of them. Cal was a reader, of course; he read everything he got his hands on. They both read. Helen had a book in her overnight bag and so did Cal, and after they’d had sex and showered and looked through the TV channels and eaten and drunk some more beer, they each got their books, and they had the bedside lamps on. They fell asleep like that. Cal with a book over his chest.”– Lisa Moore, February
June 26, 2009
Trouble by Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen writes like a man, which has caused misunderstandings in the past because she also writes like a woman, this misunderstanding compounded when she writes about women (as in her debut novel In The Drink, which, as I’ve written before, failed as the chick lit it wasn’t). All of by which I mean that Christensen’s writing voice lacks a gender, this bringing forth interesting results in her challenges of feminine and masculine notions.
In her latest novel Trouble, Christensen assigns the familiar bottoming-out-down-in-Mexico role (as in Under the Volcano) to a woman, or in fact to two of them. Strait-lacey psychiatrist Josephine has flown down at the last minute to comfort her friend, aging rock star Raquel Dominguez, whose reputation has endured a massive assault via celebrity gossip blogs. Josephine is not in much of a position to comfort, however, having just decided that her marriage is over and determined to immerse herself in the hedonism Mexico seems to offer. Both women have behaved badly, and are not at all concerned with seeking redemption.
‘”All I can say,” said Raquel, “is that it is not fun to be a woman and to fuck up…”
“Maybe women are expected to behave better than men,” [Josie] said, “because we are better than men. The world without women is Lord of the Flies. The world without men is Little Women.”
In Trouble, Christensen subverts any idea of betterness, Josie’s own perspective being rather limited (as Christensen herself has pointed out). For a psychiatrist, her assessment of everybody is remarkably wrong, and it turns out she knows herself just about as badly. She’s not better than anyone, including her troubled friend and the men in their lives, but she manages to remain immune from any real “trouble” by regarding her Mexican experience as an “experiment”. Raquel, however, is more troubled than Josie suspects, and an act of negligence/indulgence on Josie’s part leads to tragedy.
This is a novel that begins mid-conversation, and follows its characters over a very short period of time. The result of this is distance from the characters and the story, Josephine’s first-person narration in particular making no dramatic gestures to draw us closer. As readers, we are given copious description, mundane dialogue, small-talk and gratuitous sex, and it’s hard to find Christensen’s over-arching thesis. I’d posit this is because there isn’t one, or rather because there are several. Numerous literary allusions underline this, to Under the Volcano, to Joan Didion’s work, and to A Passage to India, which I’ve not yet read, but must now, because the end of Trouble suggests it might be the key what Christensen is up to.
As in her first novel, however, it’s clear that one major intention is to play out familiar literary tropes (the bottoming-out character, “in the drink”, plenty of scenes taken up by descriptions of bullfights) with a female cast in the starring role. Moreover, a somewhat-unlikeable female character, which is rare in fiction, and hard for some critics to stomach or understand. That us liking Josephine was never Christensen’s point, and that identifying with her is something you’d only do if you were frightful (or unbearably honest). These are demands not often made of male lead characters, and Christensen plays with this twist to do novel things with her fiction, to tell a story that’s not often told.
Trouble is not her very best work. As Josephine’s perspective is limited, so is the entire book’s, and the story’s shape is too fragmented to be wholly satisfying. Perhaps it’s the nature of Josephine’s solipsism, but the secondary characters she describes remain unrealized, and unreal. But by being a Kate Christensen novel, this book is worthwhile, and probably more worth reading than most of its peers on the shelf. For Christensen writes well and fearlessly, with a dirty sense of humour, and any novel by her is an event nevertheless.
June 23, 2009
Baggage Unloaded
Yesterday, after almost five years of reliable service, my trusty computer died. And naturally, I’d not backed up anything on it. So there goes hundreds of itunes songs, tons of word processing files, and most painfully, five years of photos from adventures near and far. Tears were shed, of course, but there are blessings to count. That, for some reason, randomly, all Stuart managed to save in a desperate attempt before my hard drive died was a file of unpublished yet publishable stories that would have been irreplaceable. And we’ve been pretty diligent about having our very best photos developed and put into albums (including a year’s worth we had developed just in April). Sadly, none have been developed since Harriet was born and we’ve lost some pretty precious ones from her early days, but enough were put on Facebook and emailed to grandparents that we have a considerable record. Things could be worse, and we will have plenty of opportunity to take photos of Harriet in the future, I am sure.
Everything else that got lost, I don’t really need. Sure, Stuart and I will miss our “Books Read Since 2006” files (lame, I know, but Art Garfunkel has had his list since 1970) but we will start new lists. We have lost thousands of photos, but we would never have looked at these, and there were times I felt a bit overwhelmed by the size of my photo library– what does one do with such volume? I’ve lost a meticulous record of submissions, all my published work, story starts and some works in progress, but the published works are already out there, and losing the rest might feel like losing ten pounds. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I begin a new year, a new decade, I’ve got a new baby (who is four weeks old today!). Perhaps the lost computer is baggage unloaded, and now I get to get a new one, and has there ever been a better time for a fresh start? Tabula rasa? It’s inspirational. Seems I’ve got some brand new creating to do.
June 22, 2009
CNQ
Canadian Notes & Queries is one of my favourite magazines, and now you can check out their brilliant new website. In particular, may I refer you to my review of Libby Creelman’s novel The Darren Effect which I enjoyed very much.
June 22, 2009
It's hard to be hip over thirty
I’ve been rereading my copy of poetry collection It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst (of Alexander’s No Good Very Bad Day). My edition is a gorgeous Persephone Book (endpaper as above) and I’m rereading because I’m turning thirty on Wednesday, and as I certainly found it difficult enough to be hip under thirty, I need all the help I can get. From the title poem:
All around New York
Perfect girls with hairpieces and fishnet jumpsuits
Sit in their art nouveau apartments
Discussing things like King Kong
With people like Rudolph Nureyev.
Meanwhile the rest of us
Serving Crispy Critters to grouchy three-year-olds
And drinking our Metrecal,
Dream of snapping our fingers to the music
If only we knew when to snap.
But it’s hard to be hip over thirty
When everyone else is nineteenm
When the last dance we learned was the Lindy,
And the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbra Streisand
Were trying to do something about it.
We long to be kicky and camp– but
The maid only comes once a week.
And since we have to show up for the car pool,
Orgiastic pot parties with cool Negroes who say ‘funky’ and ‘man’
Seem rather impractical.
The Love Song of J. Aldred Prufrock,
Which we learned line by line long ago,
Doesn’t swing, we are told, on East Tenth Street,
Where all the perfect girls are switched-on or tuned-in or miscegenated,
But never over thirty
Trying hard
To be hip.
June 21, 2009
A different kind of swim lit
The story is tragic, and I don’t wish to undermine that, but I am so absolutely intrigued by this part: “As her family told The Globe in a lengthy letter responding to an interview request, ‘She even combined her two passions for reading and fitness by figuring out how to read a book while swimming laps.’” I can’t even begin to imagine how this could be accomplished. A book enclosed in plastic wrap? A page skimmed at the end of every lap? An audio book and a waterproof Sony sports walkman? Regardless, I am impressed.
