May 21, 2009
You must read The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon
I like this picture, because my enormousness gets lost in shadow. You also get the blue sky, sunshine, leaves on the trees, that I’ve picked up a little bit of colour (really– this is an improvement), and that I’ve had my nose in a book all day. Or at least for most of the day, when I wasn’t napping, swimming, being visited by a wee delightful baby and her as delightful mother (who came bearing scones), making more strawberry sorbet and eating the first bbq pizza of the season. Obviously, it has been a really wonderful day.
But that book I’ve had my nose buried in has really been one of the very best parts of the day. Said book is The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon, which I’m not going to review because I read it for fun and it’s two years old, but you can read great reviews at That Shakespearian Rag and Baby Got Books. (Outside of Canada, the book is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, which I bet is not as well designed as my Coach House edition, though it just might be.) Also check out Sean Dixon’s blog related to the book, and I know you’ll be intrigued.
The whole thing is brilliant. It’s a book that is accessible and complex, hilarious and poignant, serious and light, important and whimsical, and brimming with bookishness for the love of bookishness, and inside jokes and outside jokes, and all the very best things about literature. A completely original story, startling in its specificity, and yet the implications stretch wide. I adored this novel about “a whole bunch of girls and… an intense little book club.” And moreover, if I may say, I love that it was written by a man. Not enough books about a whole bunch of girls are. Reading about The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club was ever-surprising, ever-satisfying. And perfect for a just-as-perfect Thursday.
UPDATE: Largehearted Boy features The Official Lacuna Cabal Playlist: “In the interest of satire, however, Emmy might choose, for Missy, “Common People” by Pulp, adding with a cocked eyebrow that the character played by Sadie Frost in the video reminds her of Donna Tartt’s slutty sister, so there’s a bookish dimension to the choice.”
May 21, 2009
Visit JessicaWesthead.com
I’m pretty excited about Jessica Westhead’s fabulous new website, not just because it showcases her work, but also because of my amazing husband Stuart Lawler’s part in its making (through his great venture Create Me This). And it’s a gorgeous site. Yay, Jessica! Yay, Stu!
May 20, 2009
Trauma by Patrick McGrath
Charlie Weir’s mother got a lot of things wrong. Favouring Charlie’s brother Walt and disdaining Charlie’s profession, she once remarked, “Oh, anyone can be a psychiatrist… It takes talent to be an artist.” This statement filed away in the lock-box of Charlie’s mind, which he sorts through all too frequently, seething with ancient resentments. His fixation underlining the fact that many people probably shouldn’t be psychiatrists, him in particular. He lies down on his own couch from time-to-time, and self-regards with much the same insight he accords other people in his life, and eventually it becomes clear that Charlie Weir is a danger to himself and others.
Charlie, the protagonist in Patrick McGrath’s latest novel Trauma, is at a remove from those around him. This he regards as an intellectual advantage, allowing him a deeper understanding of character, and making him a better psychiatrist in his own estimation. And it is true that for a time he received professional acclaim, working out of an office with a fashionable address, under an esteemed mentor. In the present day, however, circumstances are altered, though Charlie glosses over this (as he glosses over the fact that he grew up a loner, that he’s a man in his forties who has had only two serious relationships in his life.) He can no longer afford a receptionist, his referrals are way down, and one of his few clients has just attempted suicide.
Charlie works with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, at a time when this is a relatively new field of study. His home in New York City circa 1980 is a fitting backdrop for such an occupation, a sordid, dirty, crime-filled nightmare of a city. His girlfriend Nora, troubled by her own bad dreams, explains them away with the city: “It’s a war-zone, Charlie, you have to be a warrior to live here.” He counsels women who’ve been victims of childhood abuse, of recent sexual assault. He’d previously been working with Vietnam Veterans, but gave this up when he’d started treating his brother-in-law, taken an intervention too far and the brother-in-law had killed himself. Discovering the body, believes Charlie, has been his own trauma, though he’s never had his situation “seen to”. He hasn’t really felt the need to, with his understanding of the pathology of trauma. This understanding, he thinks, is what differentiates him from the men and women he treats who are also unable to control their patterns of compulsive behaviour. It’s what sets him apart.
Of his brother-in-law, Charlie notes that never had he “encountered a man so profoundly alienated from his own humanity that he already felt dead.” Though Charlie himself is so profoundly alienated that he doesn’t even know he’s dead. His absolutely failure of empathy is his failing as a psychiatrist, as a brother, as a husband and a lover. When his brother-in-law dies, Charlie abandons his wife, believing her unable to cope with her husband’s role in her brother’s death. Displaying a complete lack of insight– what she’d be unable to cope with is abandonment in the wake of the loss she’s already been dealt. And now with his new girlfriend, Charlie is unable to regard her character beyond its pathologization, driving her away from him. He’s either being too much of a psychiatrist, or displaying behaviour so dense, it’s hard to believe he’s more than an automaton. He’s accused of being cold, of being clumsy, but fails to take on what these criticisms actually mean.
Charlie Weir is not an absorbing narrator. It’s true that he is cold and clumsy, and it’s a credit to McGrath that his voice doesn’t convince us otherwise– Charlie Weir convinces nobody except himself. (I do wonder about implications of psychiatrist/narrators– their seemingly absolute command of their characters, the characters’ resistance to falling under command. Is psychiatry itself a kind of failed novel?) What Charlie’s voice does mean, however, is that the narrative is not as enthralling as a “psychological thriller” probably should be. There is no “grip” about it, but tension does rise as Charlie becomes increasingly isolated. As we’re left with just his own voice, and the confines of his mind, which is a most terrifying place. His awareness of his breakdown cannot save him in the end, and we’re only forced to bear witness as he ever so clearly and evenly narrates his inevitable descent into an abyss.
May 19, 2009
Voracious
Now reading Trauma by Patrick McGrath, because Emily Perkins mentioned him in her interview last year. I reread Perkins’ Novel About My Wife yesterday, because Tessa McWatt’s puzzler put me in the mood to go back to it, plus Perkins writes about first pregnancy as a really bewildering, terrifying and tender time in a marriage, and I wanted to revisit that. Having the time and space to read voraciously is something I’ve not experienced in a while, and I’m really enjoying it.
And on the internet too– Jessica Westhead has a story up at Joyland.ca, “Todd and Belinda Rivers of 780 Strathcona“. Katia Grubisic in praise of difficult writing at the Descant blog. Seen Reading goes from sea to shining sea (or from Vancouver to Wolfville at least). The wondrous Meli-Mello responds to my post about Mommy blogging. And Marnie Woodrow guest-posting on Sesame Street turning 40 (plus she writes about loving Rita Celli, and who doesn’t love Rita Celli?). From The Walrus, “Water Everywhere, 1982”, which is an excerpt from Lisa Moore’s new novel February (out in June).
And we’re just back from our final midwife’s appointment, which is so strange to consider. And moreover, that in just a week, our Baby will be here. This little person we’ve known so long and haven’t even met yet– I am very excited for that moment to come. (Besides, the reusable baby wipes– I actually sewed them! We’re all ready now.) 
May 18, 2009
Long Weekend
Long weekend= Sweet Fantasies Ice Cream, long rainy Saturday with plenty of time for napping, dinner out (with cake and two forks), The Movies (which was Star Trek, because I definitely owed Stuart for a variety of dullish [to him] cultural events he’s accompanied me to), grilled asparagus for lunch, long long walk to Trinity Bellwoods Park and home again (with plenty of bench resting along the way), brunch out, trip to the ROM and the Schadd Biodiversity Gallery, Dufflet treats in the ROM cafe, Greg’s Ice Cream, an afternoon together in the company of our books, three books for me in three days (and another one tomorrow?), squirms from the little one who will be born in just eight days, and yes, this is far too many sweets, I know, but as one is only ever 39 weeks pregnant a few times in a life, we shall shove your dietitian where the sun don’t shine. (Which isn’t here, thankfully. Happy May.)
May 18, 2009
A country where you don't know the language
“The first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon– and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you’ve had the right shots.”– Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife
May 18, 2009
Step Closer by Tessa McWatt
Tessa McWatt’s Step Closer is a puzzle of a novel, which I was just in the right place for considering what I’d read before it. The novel’s various pieces as follows: the 2004 Tsunami, witnessed from afar by Emily who is a Canadian living in Spain with her virologist boyfriend, Sam. Virology, which Emily is trying to learn more about so she can assist Sam with Spanish translations. And that Emily is a writer, the tsunami unleashing a need within her to put together a story about what happened between her, her friend Marcus and a man called Gavin along a pilgrim’s trail five years previous. Gavin and Marcus’s encounter relating to an incident at a Scottish borstal twenty-five years before that, during which one boy had destroyed the other’s life. There is also the matter of Sam’s current preoccupation with a colleague, and with his brother who’d disappeared years before.
A narrator struggling with her narrative is a difficult creature, particularly when the struggle is (however fictionally) such a literal one, to put pen to paper. McWatt avoids the chance of tediousness, however, by having Emily embed herself within her characters’ points of view. In her shifts away from first-person, she presents herself as a secondary character, and uses whatever pieces she can find to construct Marcus and Gavin’s stories. She also vividly portrays expatriate life with its listlessness and danger, dares and temptations, fleeting selves and cleanish slates, against the running of the bulls.
The text is further enhanced by McWatt’s marvelous prose, which is difficult, surprising and illuminating. Shying away from nothing– the sordid, the disturbing and the strange, but none of it cheapened, for sensation. As a reader I saw before me many scenes I didn’t like, but I was confident the author was showing it to me for a reason. That she knew very well what she was doing.
Like Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife, this is a story whose narrator never asked the right questions, never noticed the right things, and so there are gaps in the story that can’t be helped, and are actually especially illuminating. Though McWatt’s Emily’s telling is more satisfying, perhaps not providing all the answers, but we do see in the end that her telling has been a journey of self-discovery. She realizes that she has so often made herself a character in other people’s stories that she’s forgotten her own– which is a strange and twisted kind of egotism. Her focus on the past also keeping her from dwelling on the problems of her present, which are more numerous than she might allow. McWatt has written the most galvanizing, satisfying and beautiful conclusion, however, which doesn’t so much give an end away as allow us to see Emily on the way to decidedly somewhere.
Even permitting gaps, however, not all the pieces here match up as they should. The virology metaphor perhaps stretches too far, and is not ultimately convincing. The questions Emily leaves unasked are sometimes too opportune plot-wise, and don’t wholly make sense. But with such a puzzle of a novel, I do suspect that another read would make things clearer, and that I could even do well with another after that. The novel’s conclusion making clear that Tessa McWatt is in control, and that ultimately such disparate plots link together. Which has been Emily’s point from the very beginning– “There is an order here, awkward and quiet, even now, if you look carefully.” The reader is convinced.
May 15, 2009
Bad Gardener
Bad mother, bad schmother– what I am is a bad gardener. I didn’t used to think this. I used to even imagine that I had a green thumb, but turns out I just lived in a house whose backyard had very fertile soil (as a result of probably 40+ years of being a Portuguese man’s backyard before it became ours). When we moved last year, we set up a pot garden on our deck, and it was a disaster. I think we got three cherry tomatoes and a bean from the whole lot, in addition to a crop of thyme we never managed to harvest. I will try again with a pot vegetable garden another time, but not this year, when I’ll be too consumed with another little seedling. But seeing as our deck might be as far out into the world as I venture some (most?) days, I wanted something to be growing there. We went to the garden centre last weekend and bought a bunch of annuals that should take off without a great deal of work on our part. Though not if the squirrels have anything to do with it, bruddy squirrels, those vandals. It would be one thing if they ate the plants, or if their nuts were actually buried there– but there are no nuts, they have no interest in the flowers but to unearth them. The squirrels just dig until the pot is sufficiently ransacked, then go about their merry way. Or as merry as a way can be for vermin. If I were a different type of person, I’d be gedding out my shotgun…
May 15, 2009
On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence, and my worst tendencies
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and motherhood lately, as I put one on the back burner and prepare for the other. I reread Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work yesterday, which is such a complicated, dark and beautiful book. And two ideas glared at me from her introduction– first, the inevitable backlash to any mother who dares to put her experiences down on paper (or blog). Cusk found herself taken aback, but reasoned the response with that “in writing about motherhood, I inevitably attracted a readership too diverse to be satisfied from a single source. The world has many more mothers than an author generally has readers.” So many people read her book because they were interested in motherhood, because of “the desire to see it reflected, to have it explained, all that love and terror and strangeness, even if it is immediately repressed by the far stronger desire for authority and consensus, for ‘normality’ to be restored: to me, the childcare manual is the emblem of the new mother’s psychic loneliness.” But more on this in a minute.
Second, Cusk writes “with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Which I’ve been conscious of also here, as babies have become such a preoccupation of mine lately. As my personal experiences, the books I’ve read, the way I’ve been reading, and everything I’ve been doing have been so framed within the context of our baby’s imminent arrival. Though Pickle Me This has never been a particularly serious literary blog, it’s certainly become even less so lately. I’m not saying my hard-hitting criticisms of picture books aren’t worth noting, but there are some readers, I’m sure, who are less than enthralled. And I really don’t want to alienate any of my five readers.
Here’s the thing: I have read mommy blogs. (Note, I didn’t say “I read (present tense) mommy blogs”. But now I’m getting all Brian Mulroney pedantic.) The term mommy blog is a slur, as is “chick lit”, neither “genre” (let’s say) helping itself by mainly comprising compost. Stephany Aulenback recently remarked on the ubiquity of parents chronicling their children’s lives online: “I think when our children are grown up, they’re going to have different notions of “public” than we do now.”
My derision of women writing about their domestic lives (“compost”) sits uncomfortably with me, because it’s so easy to deride women’s domestic lives– everybody does it. By existing within the domestic sphere, these stories really serve to undermine themselves, which certainly bothers me when it comes to fiction. When with aesthetics as an excuse, fiction about women’s lives is so often deemed less than literary, as craft is less than art, etc.
The problem I have with mommy blogs, however, is that I watch them in the same way I’d watch a train wreck– even the incredibly well-written ones. I don’t necessarily admire these women’s “honesty” and how they “put themselves out there”, but sometimes I really do have to tear my eyes away. Their deliberate provocations are often horrifying, my knee-jerk response is catty, and I’m not the only one. As Cusk says, “The world has many more mothers…”, each one with her own opinions, and then fights break out in the comments section, commenters accusing other bloggers’ “followers” of being sheep, and then baa-ing themselves. Controversial topics include diapers, breastfeeding, reproductive rights, between working moms who work at home or out, and these are controversial topics, but it’s all handled a bit grade five. No one ever shows up to have their minds changed or expanded. My problem with these blogs is less with the blogs themselves, but how they feed on my worst tendencies.
(Though I also hate the smugness. The current trend is to embrace your inner bad-mom, and let her all hang out, but at the root of this is the sense that badness is in fact best. That anyone embracing domesticity has something up her ass, that liberation lies in the anti-domestic after all, but I’m really not so sure. I think a lot of these people might be misled. For all they’re anti-mom, they not beyond-mom, and they certainly define themselves in relation to their [albeit messy] homes. And this is a bit dangerous, can all go very wrong– I read one blog by a defiantly proud bad mom, and then her baby died.)
Which is not to say that maternal ambivalence, the experience of which these women are trying to project, is not real, or a subject deeply worth pursuing. It’s just not very often expressed in a particularly thoughtful way within these forums. Whereas I’ve found the idea explored well elsewhere, in the experiences of women artists in particular. Perhaps because these women have a medium with which to convey their experiences, because they are well-accustomed to expressing themselves. Because it’s a complicated issue requiring a high level of articulateness. We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Divided Heart, Who Does She Think She Is, Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Anne Enright’s Making Babies, and I was recently introduced to Marita Dachsel’s Motherhood and Writing Interviews (by writer Laisha Rosnau, who is the subject of one).
So somehow I find myself saying that inarticulate people have no business writing about their lives. Hmmm. (Or perhaps that they should, but I just shouldn’t read them because I’m not very nice). For your own interest, please do check in in about two weeks times to see how articulate I’ve become with a newborn, and then again six months later when my house is a mess and I’m smashing my head against the wall and the stove is on fire. When I’m just as bad a mom as any of them, reality sunk in. Don’t think I’m not aware of this, but it’s still scary to consider.
But it’s not simply black and white, good mom/bad mom and I appreciate the writing best that reflects this. How Rachel Power (author of The Divided Heart) wrote recently: “maternal ambivalence is not a state of being torn between love and hate for our children (meaning not them so much as what they’ve done to our lives) — but is a state entirely borne out of love. It is precisely this love for my children, being so excruciating, that I can feel has ruined me. This acute tenderness and sense of responsibility is something us mothers are never free of, and almost impossible to imagine until you’re in it.”
May 14, 2009
Reliving my own evolution
“I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar; prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a precious civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly, without misunderstanding.” –Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
