September 24, 2008
A place before stories start
“I suspect, as I search the room for the hunger by the fireplace, or the hunger in her cry, that I have found a place before stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain? This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind. I thought childbirth was a sort of journey that you could send dispatches home from, but of course it is not– it is home. Everywhere else now, is ‘abroad’.” –Anne Enright, “Milk” from Making Babies
September 24, 2008
When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson
“Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street” is the definition of Kate Atkinson’s writing, I think. Her literary roots are deeper than deep, but she’s so fully aware of the actual world. So fully aware, as well, of how frequently these roots surface in life, of how relevant literature and literary-ness still truly are, and in the most unexpected ways and places.
Atkinson’s first Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread award, and is one of the finest novels ever written in the English language. I liked her second novel Human Croquet a little bit better. In 2005 she shifted gears a bit with Case Histories, the first of her crime novels about Jackson Brodie, which I enjoyed as well as its follow-up One Good Turn. And now with the publication of the series’ third novel When Will There Be Good News?, I officially retire from asking, “When’s she heading back into real literature?” One bit of good news: Kate Atkinson’s new novel is as brilliant as anything else she’s done before.
There is a solidity to When Will There Be Good News? that was missing from the previous two Jackson Brodie novels. They were about coincidence, connections, the most unexpected links, and were both infinitely readable (devourable) but lacking the containment and control distinct to literary fiction. The shape of this novel is different, tighter, which is not to say standard or unsurprising. Mystery has always been at the heart of whatever Atkinson writes, and she is so deft at bending time and place to create just the right amount of space, to give clues but never answers.
The solidity comes from the novel’s more singular focus, on the disappearance of a doctor and her baby. The twist in this being that the doctor has not even been reported missing, but sixteen year-old Reggie Chase, the mother’s helper, is determined that something is not right. Which is usually the case for Reggie, whose mother is dead, whose scumbag brother has set scary thugs on her tail, who finds herself giving Jackson Brodie CPR after a train wreck. The wrong place at the wrong time, always, though this time the right one. Having saved Jackson’s life, Reggie refuses to absent herself from it, hoping to take advantage of his skills as a private detective to help find Dr. Hunter.
Reggie has ample reason to worry about her employer, though she doesn’t know most of it yet. That as a child Dr. Hunter had been the sole survivor of an attack that killed her family, and the killer has just been released from jail after thirty years. That Dr. Hunter’s husband is involved in shady dealings, burning down his businesses to collect insurance, and there’s every chance he’d pull a similar stunt with his wife. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe knows all this well, however, though she is surprised to find the case reconnecting her with Jackson, the two rather gruff police types having flirted with attraction in the previous book.
Reggie, the hard-luck A-level studying orphan is a marvelous creation, Homer on her lap and Corrie on the telly; she is indomitable, fearless and smart, and so funny we forget how perilous her situation is. That such a character, with that mouth and that attitude, is book-smart too makes for a perfect marriage between two equally brilliant but quite different things. In Kate Atkinson’s work, we can ask for that much, though Atkinson knows also there can be too much, so the world goes. “Just become something happens once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again,” and people like Reggie Chase, Louise Monroe, Joanna Hunter and Jackson Brodie know this. That the world doles it out unfairly willy-nilly, cruelty and brutality altogether ubiquitous, and to think otherwise is just naivete (and luck).
Jackson spends much of the novel unconscious or out of the picture, Louise Monroe serving as the crime solver, day saver. As strong a character as Reggie, she is funny and dry, wary of the world she sees through her work. Of her marriage as well, to a man she’s not particularly in love with, however he is good and safe. And she’s finding herself obsessed with women who’ve been victims of men quite otherwise, women like Joanna Hunter who’ve found themselves as prey.
What Kate Atkinson does with language, with allusion, I’ve yet to see another author do– it’s a kind of mastery. Her turns at genre writing demonstrating her ability to plot a plot, and she does that here better than I’ve ever seen her do before. The first of her crime novels in which “genre” is quite irrelevant, really. If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.
September 22, 2008
Yellowknife by Steve Zipp
“Atoms or embryos, was there any difference?/ His former self had viewed the world as an orderly place. The unknown was merely the unmapped. His new self had a different view. Scientists might catch the world in a net of invisible lines, but they could never be sure they were harvesting reality and not themselves. A lipogram was as meaningful as a seismogram, the paradox of the ravens as relevant to ornithology as to logic. Math was a human myth, physics a point of view. Justice, truth, and beauty were trees that fell unheard by other ears. Every being was a chimera. At heart the universe was a mystery.” –Steve Zipp, Yellowknife
Who is Steve Zipp? Which is hardly the mystery at the heart of his novel Yellowknife, but still the question is worth posing. How intriguing, this pseudonymical person whose book is as enigmatic as its author. The Yellowknife of the tale is the capital city of the North-West Territories whose law and order is maintained by the North-West Mounted Police– details revealing the reality we’re dealing with here is not straightforward. Though they do have license plates shaped like polar bears in Yellowknife, but that’s not the sort of thing quite plausible enough for fiction, is it?
Very little is straightforward in either Yellowknife-the-city, or Yellowknife-the-book. “Borders exist for a reason,” the novel warns us, and one reason is that when upon crossing this one, all bets are off. Dogs hijack snowmobiles, characters disappear beneath the ice, a Perfesser philosophizes at the dump, and tunnels down in the earth keep turning up in the strangest places. The legendarily mystical North a perfect setting for this kind of magic (which the book turns up and satirizes), juxtaposed in a perfectly readable balance with a (literal) grittiness one would expect from a place where the elements and mining factor so centrally.
The story takes place in 1998, a bureaucratic nightmare of a time as the territorial government is currently in the midst of splitting into two. Though not overly long, Yellowknife has something of a sprawl about it and sprawling indeed is the Cast of Characters, not one of them incidental. The novel’s shape is not particularly taut and some parts reach out into tangents left unresolved, but I still found my reading most satisfactory. The many characters actually populating this strange place, from the drifter whose car is destroyed by a buffalo, the gravid biologist employed by the government and specialized in voles, her fiance who presents her with a ring whose stone is coal. The shady dealer with an understandable fear of dogs and his numerous failed business ventures, one of many rushing for gold but coming up way short.
Yellowknife is one of those novels fat with allusion, giving readers the impression that nothing means nothing, even if it’s not altogether clear what means what. At its most accessible, the novel is a hilarious satire, silly and absurd, but signs are scattered throughout the text indicating something deep down and more profound– sort of like the universe itself.
-More on Yellowknife (with a link to download)
– Steve Zipp’s blog
September 18, 2008
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder
Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children’s writer. She’s written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, “I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was.”
In terms of Snyder’s writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, “Happily Ever After”: “She’s every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like.” I recognized Snyder’s poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains’ second chapter: “Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow.”
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.
Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy’s journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that’s not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.
Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there’s trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home…
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.
September 18, 2008
Indeed walrusy
“I spend a lot of my time thinking about it and a lot of time counting, counting how many men are mentioned, say, on the front page of a newspaper as against how many women, counting men in photographs of some new committee, counting members of Parliament. We all know that the number of women has slipped downward. So I seem to be bean counting all the time. It’s a great burden. It’s an irritation. I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I’m too conscious of it not to think about it.” –Carol Shields interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel in “Ideas of Goodness” from Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields
I quote because there is not one woman contributor listed in The Walrus’ table of contents for October/November. Which has happened before (when Heather Mallick was “struck by the Aspergian social inadequacy of this indeed walrusy magazine.”) As a subscriber, as well as someone who’s recommended this magazine to others, I am becoming disappointed and embarrassed. And bothered, that the best spin I can put on this is just that perhaps they haven’t noticed. The worst being their content criteria is excellence only, and perhaps women writers are excluded from that? But I don’t believe it.
I’ve found the magazine suffering lately from its dearth of women writers, not just in principle but in content. I maintain that women and men write differently, that literature and letters are richer for that, but The Walrus seems to have forgotten. A magazine in which I read every article every month, even what doesn’t interest me, because I suppose that I will learn something, that the piece is there for a reason. But lately I’m not so sure that I should bother. Because if the women aren’t there because no one has noticed, perhaps there’s not so much reason after all. Because if the women aren’t there and nobody cares, this isn’t the magazine for me.
Though I do fear becoming one of those frenzied “Canceling My Subscription” people. Must not do that.
September 18, 2008
Like a treasure
“I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded and spread out before my eyes, in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the post the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence… Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a children crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark… I hoard all these letters like a treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship./ It will keep the vultures at bay.” –Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trans. Jeremy Leggatt).
September 17, 2008
How fortunate
Oooh, Giller Longlist. And I’ve read not a one. How fortunate, however, that only three of them are by women, and I can only ever be bothered to read books by women, so my bedside stack won’t stack too intimidatingly (and topple in the night and kill me in my sleep, etc.). Indeed, I did somehow find myself in a bookshop today, standing at the cash clutching The Boys in the Trees and Good to a Fault. I’ve been meaning to read the first one for ages, as it’s been recommended by esteemed readers Maud Newton, Stephany Aulenback and Rona Maynard. Of the second book, I know nothing, but the blubs were all by authors I liked, and so I thought, Why not?
September 16, 2008
Bibliophibians
Click on the comic for a clearer image. Comes from Wondermark by David Malki. Sent to me via Leah B (so thank you!).
