July 6, 2008
Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
Having lived away from Toronto from 2002 to 2005, I found a very foreign city depicted within Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down. This city under siege, by paranoia underlined by strange happenings. The falling girls, the first one collapsing on a streetcar, and others follow, but no answers can be found. Authorities rule out poison– well, as much as they possibly can, which is not entirely. There are no significant abnormalities: “‘What does that mean…? What is an insignificant abnormality?'”
The first girl is the template, the precedent, for escalation. People whispering about bioterrorism becomes brown-skinned people beaten in the streets.
I do remember Toronto the morning of September 11th 2001. As Helwig writes, “Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.” The week I left the city, about nine months later, a garbage strike was just beginning. The SARS epidemic outbreak during the year that followed, and that massive blackout the year after that– I missed it all, the brink of chaos. My city has always functioned in an orderly fashion, as much as possible with so many people in one place. This is the land of reason, logical explanation, and everything has always happened elsewhere.
And so I would suspect Helwig’s Toronto would be more familiar to those who were here then. Here is a fiction steeped in reality, Helwig’s Toronto so actualized that it fooled me, made me disoriented, but the problem was mine. All the part of the city I’ve not paid attention to– references to The Cloud Gardens, for instance, which couldn’t possibly exist, but it’s just that I’ve never been there. To Bloor Supersave, which I thought might be standing in for Dominion, or the ManuLife Valu Mart, but of course it’s its own place, right at the top of my road.
Against the city backdrop, is Alex, to whom a chance meeting has brought the past back in the midst of this chaos. Reconnecting with Susie-Paul, who broke his heart more than a decade ago, and she’s got him all wound up (the way she always could do) in a quest to find her missing schizophrenic brother. She accompanies him on his nighttime rambles through the city, photographing the city’s dark side (this theme, albeit in a very different style, reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark).
The particulars of the story at this novel’s heart weren’t its strongest aspect. Connection and significance somewhat tenuous at times, but all this is strengthened in the context of the novel as a whole. The atmosphere that Helwig creates, and the greater connections between the people that live in this place. Moreover Helwig’s fascinating exploration of girls, “the things that girls do.” Their secret lives, never entirely uncovered, and their power, however unconscious, the novel’s true heart. With such far-reaching ripples, the implications immense.
July 3, 2008
Isn't it splendid…
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me glad to be alive– it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can stop when I make up my mind to do it, although it’s difficult.” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
July 1, 2008
Celebrating the Short Story
I’m writing this now, lying on the carpet in front of my bookshelves. I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time, what exactly I wanted to write about, and I decided it would be best written with inspiration in sight, within reach. Where I’m lying now, I’ve got my books by authors J-L before me– I’m looking at Jhumpa Lahiri’s two books of short stories. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Up above are collections by Jack Hodgins, Sheila Heti. Books by authors S-Sh are to my right– J.D. Salinger, Carol Shields. The Ps above that– Grace Paley, Emily Perkins. Flannery O’Conner is tucked over in the corner beside a Norton Anthology that contains “The Dead”. I really couldn’t think of a better vantage point for such a celebration than this (except if I were standing up, Twilight of the Superheroes would be within my grasp).
I’ve been wanting to celebrate the short story since I attended a reading of Luminato’s Festival of the Short Story last month, since I read Rebecca Rosenblum’s blog post after the fact, since I found out about Joyland, a new online home for short fiction established by writer Emily Schultz. One of the first stories posted there being “Clear Skies” by Lynn Coady, who’d moderated the Luminato writing I was at, and whose comments regarding the form were properly celebratory– the risks short fiction allows writers and readers, how it expands the possibilities of what fiction can explore, how the short stories are not miniature novels or long poems, but something onto themselves. Worthy of a festival indeed.
But not always celebrated, no. I’ve written before about short fiction’s illusionary portability, and I think a lot of readers get tripped up on this. Expecting brevity to mean easy, but it usually doesn’t mean such a thing at all. If anything, short fiction can take as long to penetrate as a novel does, reading it again and again instead of just once straight through. Which is an investment that doesn’t always make sense in purely economic terms (time is money etc.)– so much time and focus on a couple of pages, you might as well read a novel.
Further it’s hard to read a short story collection. I’m not always convinced collections are the best homes for short stories anyway– they work so well in magazines, I think, and online certainly could be close to ideal. But unless the collection was always meant to be a collection, as opposed to a stack of stories stuck together with string, it can make for stilted reading. And the time thing matters– how do you fit a short story collection into a day? One story might be too short for the bus ride, another too long to get through before you turn out the light and go to sleep.
Addressing any of this is a bit ridiculous because “the short story” is about as various as “the novel” or even “art”. Jhumpa Lahiri is barely related to Sheila Heti, for example. A short story is any/everything. The only thing that is certain is that a short story is itself.
I was a very undiscerning reader when I was in high school. I read what was put before me without judgment, because it was a book and books were good. Because I was Canadian, Alice Munro came my way, and I read Margaret Atwood– I remember liking Wilderness Tips. I read short story collections the way I did novels, voraciously, uncritically. But I do remember being vaguely unsatisfied by them. That I’d approach them looking out for what novels do, and when the stories failed to do it too, I didn’t know what else to do with them.
Which is not to say that I passed them over, but I rarely sought them out. I wanted to read whole worlds and not their pieces, failing to understand the key is to unpack the pieces, pick them apart to find the worlds inside. Within every single atom, if you’re lucky, and you will be.
The first short story collection I truly loved was Various Miracles by Carol Shields. Containing the story “Scenes” which is one of my favourites, itself made up of scenes (of course): “There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.” And the stories in this collection set up the same way– not linked, but fitted against, which is different. There is a space between. Engaging the reader to discern the connections herself, but it’s there– that voice, those themes. Here are pieces that equal even more as a whole.
One of the challenges of the short story– the effort required to read one’s way inside it– is conversely one of the best things it offers. The opportunity to read it again and again, engaging, becoming intimate, discovering its detail, the secrets inside. To get this close to a novel takes time, and perhaps was never even its purpose. Whereas the purpose of a story is to be steeped in, perpetually uncorked. To lie down inside so to look at the sky.
Discovering Grace Paley was a revelation to me, making clear more than any other writer ever had, that a short story was a short story was a short story, and that was that. Paley’s stories wore their storyness on their story sleeves, and I’ve never read anything else quite like them. They’re tough too– once through is not sufficient, you’ve got to go it again and again. She puts up blocks, strange twists, you’re not there to get comfortable. On your toes, get there and stay there. Read about a lady in a tree.
I read My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead this winter, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, and decided thematic anthologies are where the story has never been more alive. To be steeped inside one story after another, storyness in general, all of them of superlative quality, and various, multitudinous as you like. There were even some I hated, and I liked the freedom to be able to do so. Any/everything, from all over the world. If you asked me, What is the short story, I’d hand you this book the size of a brick.
Short stories populate my library. As the sun has started to go down, I’ve turned the light on and I can see to the tops of the shelves. Laurie Colwin, Kate Atkinson, Timothy Findley, Kate Sutherland, Virginia Woolf. I received Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen for my birthday last week. I’m looking at The Journey Prize Stories 19 now, and the literary journals that help keep the short story in business. The space where Grace Paley used to be, because I’ve taken her down now. In preparation of celebrating stories in the way I know best– through reading them.
July 1, 2008
Canada Day
Though tomorrow is the big day, Canada’s 141st birthday, today means a bit more to me because it was three years ago that I moved to Canada. Moved back to Canada, I realize, but the return didn’t lessen the significance. That in addition to the luck of being born here, I had the great privilege of choosing it too– not everybody gets to do that. So to be home, doubly so, and this is a fine one, certainly.
June 30, 2008
Seen Reading Within Readings
Seen Reading Within Readings: Spotted on Page 75 of Maggie Hellwig’s Girls Fall Down, on the Yonge subway line south of Davisville, “someone reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, everybody pretending not to notice the man in the mask”.
June 30, 2008
The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill
There is a precedent for me appreciating crime fiction turns by literary writers, and her name is Kate Atkinson and so I was intrigued to read The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill. I’d read Hill’s 1973 novel In the Springtime of the Year quite recently, she has run her own press Long Barn Books since 1997, and is a very prolific blogger.
I also suspect that it’s true that I’d like crime fiction full stop, but I’ve not read enough of it to be sure of this. The rush to the end though, pieces fall together– it’s my favourite part of reading anything.
The Vows of Silence is fourth in a series of Simon Serrailler novels (and a fifth is in the works). Though the book stood alone just fine, back story illuminated whenever necessary, but not so that detail was superfluous. I had all the tools I required to follow the story of Detective Simon Serrailler, on the case when random sniper starts shooting young women in the Cathedral town of Lafferton. The first victim a new bride shot dead just inside her apartment, then a group of girls out at a club for a hen night, and a wedding dress designer who’s been advertising in town– and all this with an upcoming wedding at the cathedral, with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall scheduled to be in attendance.
I’m not sure this is the case with most crime novels, but it is in my limited experience that neither the crimes themselves, nor their solving are what first and foremost propels the narrative. Perhaps in the last fifty pages, yes, who done it will keep you reading late into the night, but there has to be more to drive a whole book. Here it was the characters, the lives of the people of Lafferton, and their interconnectedness, their various connections to the crimes. Hill’s background as a literary writer evident as she populates this community with such vivid characters– people– and the different ways these peoples’ lives are cast in the shadow of the crimes taking place around them.
Hill has stated writing crime fiction appeals to her as an opportunity to address contemporary life and its issues, and this engagement is well reflected here. Also themes relating to love, marriage and togetherness continue– Simon’s sister husband’s diagnosis of a brain tumour, a widow falling in love again, Simon’s father’s new partner becoming part of their family. Simon juxtaposed with all of this, a loner, whose own story is hard to decipher from just this one book out of a series, and what would probably send a curious reader back to the previous three. Who also hasn’t the time much to analyze his personal life, what with just days until the cathedral wedding and the gunman still out on the loose…
I do wonder, what in a literary writer’s background makes the foundation of a good crime writer? Strength in plot-building, definitely, and I could see how short story experience would be beneficial to compressing much into little, and it would take a novelist’s deft hand to bind all these pieces together. Certainly Susan Hill’s apprenticeship must have served her well, for The Vows of Silence is a pleasure.
(By the way, in terms of genre-crossing, an interesting post on Hill being welcome or otherwise in the exclusive world of crime fiction.)
June 30, 2008
Additional Dimensions
This photograph is notable for three reasons, not least of which is that I captured a spectre partway up the staircase. Second, to brag that we have finally painted our hall, and how yellow changes everything. (Goodbye eggplant brown!) But also to talk about the very fact of stairs, how they expand one’s residential experience, the access they allow to additional dimensions. People who’ve grown up in bungalows no doubt feel quite different, but real homes, to me, have always required two stories. And that I have two floors in my own home now has been an arrival of sorts. We’re still a ways away from homeownership, but stairs in the meantime are more than consolation. And not just because we’ve joined the league of multi-story apartment dwellers such as Diff’rent Strokes.
June 27, 2008
Hunger eats civilization
“[It’s] the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war. Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that’s why they can say they’re so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!” –Marjane Satrapi, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
June 26, 2008
Poem in the Post
Kawaii. Today in the post was a “Hello Kitty Everywhere! Haiku Postcard” from my sister. Haiku as follows:
Peeking through the soil,
The flowers shyly emerge.
I am their first friend.
