December 30, 2008

The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele

I decided to read The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele, because Katrina Onstad blurbed it, and I trust Katrina Onstad. Onstad’s own novel How Happy to Be was one of the smartest and funniest novels that I read last year, the best of what “women’s fiction” is aspiring to be when it’s not busy pandering to outright stupidity (though I’d also argue that Onstad’s novel has broader appeal). And unsurprisingly– for when is Katrina Onstad ever wrong?– The Almost Archer Sisters didn’t disappoint me.

Told by Georgia “Peachy” Archer Laliberte, a frazzled wife and mother, who seeks solace in imaginary adultery and scouring the internet for information about her son’s epilepsy. She lived in the same house she grew up in, gave up her own professional dreams when she got pregnant at twenty, and in short did everything differently than her glamorous sister Beth did.

Not completely differently, however. Peachy’s husband’s is Beth’s high school boyfriend, and he’d gotten her pregnant too once upon a time. (“Jesus. That man’s sperm could reforest the goddamn tundra… It could be cure baldness. He should be caged and studied.”) But Beth had made a very different choice, unabashedly getting an abortion and continuing in the direction of her dreams, which culminate in a successful career in television and a high-flying life in New York City.

The story turns on a plot that is somewhat melodramatic, Peachy discovering her husband in the pantry with Beth in a most compromising position. It is what Gabriele does with this, however, that gives the book its substance. In her rage and devastation, Peachy leaves her family behind and makes her own way to New York for a few days in her sister’s life. A premise that sounds more cliched than it actually is– this ain’t no Freaky Friday, I mean, but that Peachy follows through with a weekend trip that had already been planned, stays at Beth’s apartment, meets her friends, and discovers there is quite a lot she never knew about her sister and about herself.

Dark in turns, told in a wry tone throughout, Gabriele’s narrative voice inhabits Peachy’s character so completely– in particular, her fierce love for her sons. This most significant considering that Gabriele doesn’t have children of her own, as she states in the reader’s discussion guide at the end of the book. That such authentic and unwavering fierceness could be imagined is a testament to Gabriele’s skills as a writer, which seems too obvious, I realize, but isn’t when you consider how much of women’s fiction is compromised by writers who can’t imagine out of themselves enough. Because it is through imagination, and not necessarily personal experience that stories take flight, and this is surely why this one has wings.

December 30, 2008

Christmas update

I received a Slanket for Christmas, after years and years of longing, and so I will never have to suffer the agony of cold arms again while reading. It really is the most remarkable bookish accessory, the only problem being that whenever it’s on me I very soon find myself falling asleep. But it did keep me snug as I make my way through my Christmas books. Already did the trick with Lush Life, and I’m sure there’ll be more of the same as I read Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth. I also received Inside the Slidy Diner by Laurel Snyder and Jaime Zollars for me and my yet-born babe, and I bought the baby Night Cars, which I think it really liked. Our beloved Smiths gave us each a book by Todd Parr— The Mommy Book and The Daddy Book. (We now wonder if it might be safe to be prepared, knowing where this kid comes from, and buy it an early copy of Parr’s It’s Okay to be Different). Oh, and we also got us a copy of Pulpy and Midge in our house via a present for Stuart, which meant I was startled in bed the other night as we were reading by Stuart exclaiming in woebegone tones, “Oh no! Pulpy just fell on his potluck contribution!!”

December 30, 2008

Two Odd Things

1) It is strange but true that I’ve been craving sweet foods much less since I got pregnant. Which is part of the reason I never really got around to Christmas Baking mania this year. I baked apple pie for Christmas dinner, and gingerbread cookies two weeks ago– but only half a batch. And I kept meaning to bake at least half a batch of sugar cookies too, for though I’ve been craving sweet foods less, usually I can rouse myself enough to eat them. I’d even found the perfect sugar cookie recipe, simple and easy, as the one I’d been using the last couple of years has always caused me trouble. I’m not sure if I found it on the internet or in a magazine, but I do remember the recipe was printed against a blue background, and the recipe below was a chocolate variant of the same.

Except that I actually think I dreamt it, because when I got (nearly) down to getting those cookies baked, I couldn’t find my perfect recipe anywhere. Not in any magazines, or on websites I frequent, and I spent quite a bit of timing just searching, searching, all of it coming up naught. So that was disappointing.

2) Less disappointingly, however, is that I’ve located my grade three teacher. You might recall, as I’ve written about this before, that she wrote me a letter well over a year ago, after reading my story in The Toronto Star. And that she had been that teacher, the one who first encouraged me to write, to want to be a writer. All very good news, except that she’d sent the letter to my dad’s house, where the filing system is a bit dubious, and somehow the envelope had gotten lost, and with it her return address. Efforts to locate her via internet searches came to absolutely nothing, and I wasn’t even sure in what part of the province she lived.

However this summer whilst weekending at our friends’ cottage north of Belleville, the power went out in a gusty storm. Staying out for nearly twenty-fours, which halfway into we decided to alert the Hydro company of. Because perhaps they didn’t know, however unlikely? And then flipping through the phone-book by candlelight (and keep in mind this is a small phone book with a very large font), a name jumps out at me, and I swear it’s my former teacher’s husband’s. An address written beside it, and of course I’m not sure, but I decide to take my chances. The address being not quite right postal-wise, however, and so the note I send takes its time, but it arrives eventually. So my teacher and I are back in touch, I was able to thank her for her lovely note about my story, and all this only because of a terrible storm that knocked out the power last July.

December 30, 2008

Lush Life by Richard Price

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard notes, “The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not… [So w]hy would anyone read a book instead of watching people moving on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing– a poor thing, but our own.”

So then how would Dillard contend with the recent fashionable claim that movies or television can be literature too? Is their “thing” just as subtle? What would she make of Richard Price, whose novels have been made into movies, who has written screenplays of his own, and is a noted writer of the television show The Wire?

But as Deborah Friedell remarks in her LRB review of Price’s latest novel Lush Life, “writing for the screen also seems to have given [Price] the enthusiasm of an outsider: his novels delight in being novels.” Which is Dillard’s “subtle thing”; that it is language and not spectacle used to tell the story here. However cinematic and paced Price’s writing might be, this effect is created through careful attention and deftness with words and not by a trick of a camera.

So why would anyone read a book, particularly one so decidedly steeped in a world we know from film, instead of watching people move on a screen? For the love of language first, of course, but also for the experience of ten or twelve hours entrenched in the story. And the experience of re-imagining the scene from words on a page, so that the act of reading becomes one of creation. Particularly the creation of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where I’ve never been before, but from Price’s narrative I can decipher the points on its map. The part of New York City as much a character in the story as anybody else, Price plumbing its depths sometimes quite literally, whether historically and topographically.

Though I was completely lost during the first fifty pages of the novel– in unfamiliar geography, references, a language in which I’m decidedly unschooled. I persevered because the novel’s premise continued to intrigue me so– three young somebodies (if even in their own minds) robbed by two characters they identify solely by their race. One victim too drunk to stand and falls apart, the second handing over in wallet in sheer terror, but the third, Ike Marcus, who “walks around starring in the movie of his own life,” steps to his assailant saying, “Not tonight, my man.” And then he’s shot dead.

But as the novel progressed, I found my way into it eased. Going back to reread the beginning (by which I am imploring you to follow it through), I made more sense of it all. As suspicion is cast upon Marcus’s companion that night, Eric Cash, the thirty-something restaurant manager who “had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill…” In a world where everybody is trying to become something else, Cash is old enough to realize he might never succeed, and bitter enough to find Ike Marcus’s confidence more than irritating.

What follows is more than just a police procedural as detectives investigate Marcus’s murder. The narrative shifting point of view from Cash himself, the police involved, to Tristan, a young black teenager who lives in one of the neighbourhood’s surrounding housing projects and writes hip hop poetry in his notebook. The juxtaposition of Cash and Marcus’s lifestyle with Tristan’s in such close proximity is as jarring as its meant to be, though for its commonalities as much as the differences.

Lush Life could be a movie but it isn’t, and as a movie it would still be something very different. In the meantime then taking full advantage of its literary-ness– the effects of language, depth of character, such a scope. Demonstrating that their very own way, books are as capable as movies of extraordinary things.

December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas

Christmas Eve was always such a funny day, so wondrous and yet so ordinary. You’d have to keep reminding yourself, “It’s Christmas Eve!”, all the while incongruously eating your cheerios, brushing your teeth, going through the motions. This all to push yourself forward, because the magic is never apparent until after the sun goes down, so you have to conjure it in the meantime. And enjoy this lazy lovely day, should you be so fortunate to be spending it as a holiday. It is to be hoped that those who aren’t so blessed are granted an early dismissal.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays from Pickle Me This. If you don’t have any books on your tree, I’ll cross my fingers you find some good ones under it.

December 23, 2008

A sound economic prospect

Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written about why book buying for Christmas is a sound economic prospect.

December 23, 2008

Phoebe Gilman

Somehow it took me until yesterday to learn that Phoebe Gilman died in 2002. She was a really marvelous author and illustrator who had such an impact on me as a reader. I still remember her visit to my elementary school, and how exciting it was meet someone who’d created such a wondrous thing as a book. I can still recite most of Jillian Jiggs by heart. I also remember how Phoebe Gilman told us that she thought Jillian’s little sister was called Rebecca, although the character went unnamed in the story, and so I am excited to see Rebecca’s name was made official in subsequent Jillian tales. I am excited also to note that Gilman left such an extensive literary legacy that will bring her work to avid readers for generations to come.

December 23, 2008

A Passion for Reading

The text of my presentation for the December 9 Art Matters Forum “A Passion for Reading” has been posted online. I addressed the ways in which literary blogs promote a passion for reading, and how, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.”

My co-panelists’ presentations can be found here and are well worth reading.

December 23, 2008

Crumbs

On “slummy mummy” writing: “[these] writers know these idiosyncrasies aren’t really faults but bargaining chips… The domestic preoccupation seems so much worse because the women are complaining about domesticity without moving beyond it.” Via Maud Newton, Laura Miller on rereading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe: “Narnia is a mongrel thing, and so is Christmas. As is often the case, this mongrelizing is the source of its strength.” Could Curtis Sittenfeld’s fictional reassessment of Laura Bush have been all too misleading? Macleans covers Rebecca Rosenblum’s marriage to Robert Downey Jr. The Edible Woman is Seen Reading (aside: last time I read this book, I thought it was dated and politically irrelevant, however brilliant. An essential literary artifact. And then it was sometime last year when I was restless, and everybody told me I should have a baby, and I started feeling a bit like a cake. And now I am having a baby, and of course I’m thrilled about it, but I’ve realized I was wrong about The Edible Woman).

December 23, 2008

Today's things to do list

• check the post
• go swimming
• pick up a book at the library
• pick up a parcel at the post office
• bake three apple pies
• write, read and knit
• be cooked my favourite dinner
• look into becoming a lady of leisure