September 22, 2009

Surprising Gillers (with just a bit too much historical fiction. And MARTHA BAILLIE!!)

I was wrong. And come now, this is hardly unprecedented. I tend to be wrong at least five times a day, but I do wish I’d been wrong about something other than Lisa Moore’s chances at this year’s Giller Prize. Because– to the surprise of many– February didn’t make the longlist, and I consider it a fine novel. Also to the surprise of many, ten out of the twelve books nominated this year were written by women, which is surprising because women writers don’t tend to stack up on prize lists, unless it is the Orange Prize, which is why there is an Orange Prize. (Or at least this is the way it looks from my chair. I could be wrong about this too. I probably am, after all, I haven’t slept for more than 2.5 hours in a row in three weeks– have I mentioned this? Have I mentioned that I’m slowly losing my mind, but I digress… as tired people often do.)

The most remarkable thing about this longlist, however, is that it’s interesting. A mix of small and big presses, book names and unknowns (to me), books I know of and will probably never read, and some that seem rather intriguing and I’ve never even heard of. Okay, a bit too much historical fiction for my liking, but then that fiction seems pretty various, and history is anything past five minutes ago. There is a lot of good stuff here.

Including, The Incident Report by Martha Baillie! Honestly, my disappointment at Moore not being included is quelled by Baillie’s spot on the shortlist, because I absolutely adored her book, which was so innovative, surprising, and like nothing else I’ve ever read before. It’s a book that I think more people should know about, not just because they’d probably like it, but because it’s so extraordinarily good. And I never thought about it being a Giller pick, because it’s not that sort of book, but maybe this just isn’t that sort of Gillers? Imagine if Martha Baillie won??

I’m not sure she will. But I sort of think she should. My opinion not meaning so much, of course, as her’s is the only book I’ve read of the list, but I urge you to read it too, and you might just concur.

September 19, 2009

Some things on Saturday

Oh, I wish I could tell you what I’m now reading, but you’ll have to wait for the December issue of Quill & Quire to find out. Alas, but I’m enjoying myself. Birds of America is on its way to me in the post. For the last few days, I’ve been composing a love letter to the Spadina Road branch of the Toronto Public Library (which I’ll put down on paper soon, and copy here). We’ve been listening to Elizabeth Mitchell at our house, and we’re totally obsessed– everyday I have a new favourite, but I like her version of “Three Little Birds” and also The Tremelos’ “Here Comes My Baby”. I’ve been playing guitar myself these days, and Harriet is entranced by the shiny tuning pegs. She also likes strumming the strings. We’re going to England in less than a month, which is exciting, but seemed like a much better idea when the baby was still hypothetical. Now, I am a bit terrified, but pleased that her brilliant sleep patterns are wrecked already so that I don’t have to worry about the time change doing so. (In terms of baby sleep, how about this: ask moxie hypothosizes that sleep is this generation of parents’ “thing” [whereas, it once was potty training] because babies sleep on their backs now, where they do not sleep as well as they did on their fronts. This is also why our parents have little sympathy for the sleeping plight). I continue to be exhausted, much the same way I was when Harriet was born, except I have a life now and do not spend my waking hours sitting in a chair sobbing, and therefore the tiredness feels worse (and yet, I would not, could not, go back there, no). I’ve also quit Facebook, sort of. You see, I was totally addicted, checking it whenever I was feeding the baby and often when I wasn’t, and there are better things I could do with my time. And yet, there are many things I love about Facebook– friends’ photos, event invitations, cool links, finding out about friends’ achievements, that many of my FB friends’ aren’t friends otherwise, and I’d miss them if I went. But there are only so many strangers’ photo albums you can peruse without feeling your life is slipping away, so, I had my husband change my Facebook password, and now I have to be logged in by him. And I really hope this doesn’t happen all that often. So this should free up some time for me to finally read through my stack of London Review of Books that has been accumulating since Harriet was born. And I mean that. I am also going to knit Harriet a sweater from the Debbie Bliss Baby and Toddler Knits book I got from the library today, but I’ll use the 12-24 month sizing, because I’m realistic about how long it takes to get anything done. Today, we had the most wonderful brunch at the Annex Live. And the baby is awake, so I must go lay out the newspaper on the floor so I can read it while I feed her.

September 18, 2009

The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The thing about Lorrie Moore, I’ve found, is that everybody loves her. Except me, because I didn’t even read her until I read her story “How to be an Other Woman” in the anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. Which made clear why everybody loved her, so I read her novel Anagrams next, which might have been a mistake, because while it was good, it didn’t leave me hungry for more. But then something about the buzz from her novel The Gate at the Stairs hooked me– Lisa Moore’s rave review definitely, and the novel’s dealings with children and motherhood, as this is much/entirely my life these days.

Another thing about my life these days, however, is that I’m tired. I am so unbelievably, unrelentingly tired that it’s quite hilarious, and only because when I am this tired, I’ll laugh at absolutely anything. (Baby no longer sleeps for more than three hours at a time, and therefore neither do I.) And for this reason, I think, as I read this novel, I kept thinking I was reading a book by Francine Prose. I am not sure why– it had a bit of Goldengrove AND Blue Angel about it, and was nothing like Anagrams, or something you’d expect from a short story writer, and I was also (as I said) really, really tired. All of which is beside the point. (Yawn. And at least I didn’t get her confused with Francine Pascal.)

I was fortunate, I think, to come to this novel as I did, having not read much of Moore before. Maud Newton posts her own thoughts on the novel and links to others‘, and the consensus seems to be that Lorrie Moore devotees are a bit disappointed. That the novel is brilliant and absorbing in so many ways, but flawed and unsatisfying at the same time. And it’s true that this novel wasn’t perfect, but I was glad to be reading it as one being awed by the power of Lorrie Moore for the very first time. Critics have been unconvinced by Moore’s narrator, Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year old who seems much more like just a vehicle for Lorrie Moore’s point of view and lingual deftness, but so entranced was I by such a pov and deftness, I wasn’t about to complain.

The novel was so interesting. Which is such a lame way to describe anything, but what I mean by this is that I could think about it forever– about the significance of the title, for example, and the narrative arc which isn’t an arc, and the characters’ stories, and how the narrative was utterly unpredictable, not because it was exciting, but because it was like how life is. How the novel was so accessible, and so challenging at the very same time, and the unending layers you could reveal inside it if you took the time to try.

Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, “That book is amazing. Buy it.” I said, “I’m going to. I’m reading her new book right now.” She said, “That’s just what I’m here to get,” and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. “It’s fantastic,” I said, because flawed or not, it is.

And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore.

September 16, 2009

The very best thing

“We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stengal sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.” –from The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

September 16, 2009

Eden Mills Upcoming!

We’re packing up the (autoshare) car this Sunday and heading out of town for the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. I went last year, and it was as wonderful in the pouring rain as it was in the late-afternoon sunshine, so this year we really can’t go wrong either way. Although last year I didn’t have a baby in tow, or I did but she was a blastocyst, but I’m bringing a husband this year for moral support, and such a gorgeous outdoor venue is the perfect way to mute squawky baby cries. I think we’re all going to enjoy it. The schedule is up, and I regret that some of my most desired readers are double-booked. So I’m going to have to run like a madwoman to pack it all in. (Decisions, decisions: we’re giving up a lot to catch Miriam Toews, but we have to, because I heard her read once before and I’ve been wanting more ever since; hope it’s possible to zip from Terry Griggs to Julie Wilson, etc.) Yay, Eden Mills!

*And, oh! Less than two weeks until the Vic Book Sale. And also Word on the Street! The only good thing about about the end of summer is a bookish September.

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.