May 14, 2008
Unless
This past weekend has ruined me, and I remain in a coma. Or perhaps I just can’t stop reading Rebecca long enough to focus on anything else. And I have a stack of books-to-be-read up to my elbows, so thankfully this weekend is a long one and I can fill it well.
Last evening I attended the Fiery First Fiction event, and it did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed hearing Nathan Whitlock read from A Week of This (which I read last month), Shari Lapeña read from her book (which I’ve got upcoming), and then there was Claudia Dey who must have sold her book a thousand times. Personally I’m not sure how I’d live long without it– her reading was unbelievable. Coach House is publishing wonderful books these days; remember Pulpy and Midge? And I also want to read Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig.
Read Claudia Dey profiled in The Toronto Star. Watch “the list of books that make the best use of their type” at Baby Got Books. Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories reviewed. Margaret Drabble is characteristically excellent in “The beginning of life should not be a subject for a crude polemic”.
Today whilst reading The Danforth Review on A Week of This, I was surprised to see my own review referenced. Bryson’s points are interesting, and I found quite illuminating his assertion that novels “are fictional inventions of imagined worlds. They are performances of language, and the references they make to each other– explicitly or implicitly– are of greater interest than a novel’s photo realism.” True enough, perhaps, but then isn’t the novel quite a multitudinous thing? And don’t we all approach it differently?
And like Heather Mallick, I’ve noticed this month’s issue of The Walrus is decidedly short on women writers. “Apparently you can’t have a good magazine unless women are writing it,” writes one of Mallick’s avid readers. But you sort of can’t, actually, in this day and age. Not if you’re writing a general interest/current events magazine, and women are writing practically none of it– is this really surprising? The only pieces written by women are two of four “field notes”, one of four book reviews, a poem by P.K. Page, and one of nine letters to the editor. (Perhaps the whole issue is the answer to Austin Clarke’s story title, “Where Are the Men?”) What all this signifies exactly, I cannot venture to say. But then to me the facts appear as such, I don’t actually need to say anything.
In related news, I’m looking forward to reading Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers. Check out coverage at The Savvy Reader.
May 13, 2008
Same jeans
Things are mad here. We would suggest that when you’re organizing your mother’s surprise 60th birthday party, you actually bring the bag filled with those party things you’ve spent weeks preparing to the party. This way you don’t leave them in your backyard, discover this after driving two hours to the party venue, and then have to drive all the way back to Toronto (and then back to the venue again) which means you’d drive about 600 km in one Saturday afternoon. This would probably also ensure that you’re not insane at said party, spearheading its descent into rampant debauchery. Who would ever have thought a 60th birthday party could get so out of control? It really truly did, my mother perfectly surprised, particularly to see my sister who lives on the other side of the country. A house full of bright lights, loud music and garish prints, and full of friends, and full of family, and we’re truly fortunate these last two are one and the same. (I would post pictures, but they’re unsightly).
May 10, 2008
Fiery First Fiction
Oooooh– Fiery First Fiction! A fantastic promotion by the Literary Press Group. Events are being held across the country, and I’m looking forward to attending Monday night’s in Toronto at Supermarket. FFF is promoting 14 first novels published by Canadian small presses. Buy one at participating independent bookstores and get a free durable book bag– I just got mine, and durable IS the word. I love it. Though I could only get one book today (I am trying to curb book buying habits to no more than one daily) so I selected Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña. And yes, I chose it by its cover, but I think I’m on to something good.
I was at the bookshop with my friend Bronwyn, which has always been one of my favourite experiences. She’d also brought her spare copy of Rebecca to pass along to me, so it’s been an evening of fine new acquisitions.
May 8, 2008
What I have been waiting for
Last night I got to attend the Kama Reading Series again, with superstar readers Lawrence Hill, Anand Mahadevan, Kelley Armstrong and Miriam Toews. It was such an impressive assemblage, though I must say the ladies stole the show. I hadn’t heard of Armstrong before, but she really took that whole “I write vampire fiction” thing and ran with it– she was fabulous. Truly, I don’t get enough vampire fiction. And then Miriam Toews– I’ve only ever read her incredible memoir Swing Low: A Life, which is one of very few books that have ever left me sobbing. So I knew she was a good writer, but I hadn’t yet been exposed to how funny this woman is. She was hysterical, deadpan, right-on, and I could have listened to her read for ages. I would like to pay her to sit in my house and entertain me. And now I absolutely have to read her fiction– what have I been waiting for?
This week I’ve been reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, and getting ready to tack a huge stack of periodicals that have arrived in the post. Also enjoyed rob mclennan’s essay “Rereading Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart at the Garneau Pub, Edmonton”.
May 8, 2008
Authors' Day
Today I had the great pleasure of being a part of the Toronto District School Board’s “Authors’ Day” held at historic Spadina House. The event began with a delicious lunch, which turned out to just be the beginning of good things. Participants were high school students shortlisted in a board-wide short story contest, and there were about forty of them in total. After lunch they broke into groups and attended writing workshops led by me, Gale Zoe Garnett and the lovely Jessica Westhead. My group was fantastic, and for two hours they shared their stories, criticism and ideas. It was a privilege to be there, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. At the end of the afternoon we reassembled, and the top prizes were given. These winning stories have been published in a booklet, I was given a copy, and now I’m excited to read them.
May 8, 2008
Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Emily Perkins
Emily Perkins is slight, with very pretty features and a warm smile. We met on the sunny morning of Wednesday May 7th 2008 in a conference room at her publisher’s office in downtown Toronto.
I: I read a quote you gave, that your new novel Novel About My Wife started with a “kernel of something that made you uncomfortable”, but you couldn’t talk about it then because the book wasn’t finished. Can you tell us now?
EP: I certainly can tell you now. It was a couple things. I sort of had this idea of the character of Ann, but she was very misty at that point. I didn’t quite know the type of woman she was going to be but I wanted a sense, what I was writing around, was a character with contrasting elements.
And then I got into a conversation with somebody at a dinner party in London, and I’d been living in London for about eleven years at this point and he made a remark that I found really disturbing about New Zealanders and Australians, and by sort of by implication any former colony… choosing to live in England because, he suggested, we were white people on some kind of white flight from racial issues and cultural anxiety at home.
And I was really infuriated by it because I thought it was such a narrow and arrogant and, from his point of view, a parochial suggestion to make, and I went away sort of steaming after this encounter. And I thought, If it’s making me so angry maybe there’s something in that. Maybe there’s something I can turn around and look at from different angles. I was looking for a novel— I’d had a couple of false starts since my last one, which was called The New Girl— and I was really looking for a story that would have legs, that I thought I could spend a lot of time with because I have small children and by now, I had a much better idea of the work of a novel, the long work of it, and I just had to find the right thing, and in this kernel I thought maybe I’ve got enough passion about it to build and get a novel working.
I: I never would have thought that— because I was trying to think of what that kernel might be and there were so many possibilities.
EP: Well then, of course, after you start something going and it starts to bubble away, then so many other things find their way into it. You know, the novel begins to act like a magnet pulling other elements and there’s no out-and-out autobiography but there are elements I’ve drawn from my own experience, or extrapolated from my own experience.
I: How did the book change from your initial approach to it. Did it change in any ways that surprised you?
EP: The thing I had to do next was work out who was going to tell the story, and I spent a lot of time doing that, and I’ve got all these— hopefully I’ve binned them— but I had third person subjective views of Ann, and was I writing in that close third person way? Or was I going to try and write a more detached omniscient third person who could know the whole story and bounce around different characters? And it just wasn’t lifting off…
It was a great moment was when I realized that Tom, the husband, had to tell the story— for a lot of reasons, not least because he’s trying to piece together all of this stuff about his wife and in a way he’s doing it alongside the reader…
I: A fundamental part of this book is its gaps. Do you feel confident that you know the answers? Or are you, like Tom, taking stabs at it?
EP: No, I do have it. And I had written versions where the gaps were more filled in, but in the end I just thought the thing about Tom is that he is trying to investigate or work out the truth of his wife, but the point of the book for me is that he’s left it too late. He had his chance to look her in the eye and be with her in a real way and he was so busy, caught up in himself, romanticizing her and being in love with the mystery and not wanting to know. I didn’t want to let him off the hook for that….
I: What was it like writing a first person narrator?
EP: It’s the first time I’ve written something this length in the first person, so for me it was a huge learning experience… I don’t believe that the characters do what they want and I’m just following… there’s got to be someone pressing the keys on the keyboard and that wasn’t Tom, it was me, but at the same time he was quite a formed character right form the start. His voice was pretty much there and his limitations as well.
He’s the kind of first person narrator who’s trying to write away from himself, trying to write this novel about this wife, but he centralizes himself. It’s in his character to do that. So at the same time as I was following that, I was aware that with first person you’ve got to try to give the reader a break from that endless “I I I” stuff and so I tried to make an effort for Tom to be able to lose himself inside scenes, to describe as though they were happening in the moment— scenes with Ann, with friends, to get away from his own internal [voice].
I: Is that why he was a writer?
EP: Definitely. I wanted to give him the skills that there would be some kind of context where it was plausible that he could be sitting down and doing this.
I: I am curious to know how central Ann’s pregnancy is. Do you think this story could have been told without that?
EP: The pregnancy to me is very central because it’s a transformative moment for her and it’s when the past begins to bubble up for her. It’s not her first pregnancy but it’s the first one she’s carried to term and there’s a body mirroring that we all have, we live with, that we can’t ignore or we ignore at our peril. And she’s having this somatic experience in response to her pregnancy. Without the pregnancy, I’m not sure what the trigger would have been for Ann’s other self to come calling.
And also I wanted the pregnancy because I really wanted to write about that stage in a marriage, which is an amazing time when you’re having your first child and maybe you’ve bought a house and you’ve got this terrifying mortgage and life is really changing… it’s a particularly vulnerable, and yet exciting and very tender time and so I wanted to include all of that.
I: The book is packed with a kind of ominousness, there’s danger everywhere and some of it is real and some of it might be imagined. Do you think it makes a difference?
EP: One of the things I wanted to explore was the ways we create our own demons, how we imagine demons that aren’t there. We’re certainly living in a time at the moment where it’s easy to be anxious and paranoid and I think that is as dangerous as pretending there’s nothing going on. So I did want to play with potential dangers; the danger seems to be from outside in the book but it’s coming from inside.
I: I was struck by the passage where Tom describes his parents as “so certain of the parameters of their universe, where normality began and ended.” He wants a different kind of life. Do you think he makes this choice? Does anybody actually fit within fixed parameters?
EP: He is much more like his parents than he thinks he is That’s part of the reason he really locks on to Ann. He’s sees something in her that’s beyond his boundaries It makes him feel spec
ial to be with her and he feels that he’s left his parents’ parochialism far behind, but of course he hasn’t really. He’s limited and that’s his fatal flaw— that he can’t imagine himself into another person’s skin, the way he’d need to in order to save them . And also in describing his parents, I think that’s a solid trait of a lot of people. You know “my way is the right way” and I’m always trying to resist that, I suppose.
I: If you look at all your books together, what do you think they tell us about your interests as a writer? What are your fixations in your writing?
EP: I think that if you looked at them altogether, probably— how do I talk about this without sounding like a wanker?— I’m really interested in how we construct ourselves, the building up of identity and how much we live as a known quantity and how much we’re mysteries to ourselves and how much we invent ourselves and live in other people. So I think that’s the main connection between the books.
I: All of your books also deal with characters and exile— do you think exile is possible?
EP: Is exile possible? I don’t know if self-imposed exile is possible in that way, and certainly in Novel About My Wife, ultimately it’s not possible. (Pauses) I’d like to think it’s possible. I’d like to think we have choices about these things. It’s not like these formative selves are our only selves. It’s interesting, I’ve lived in England for quite a while and gone back to New Zealand and you’ve got to merge the self you were with all of the experience that you’ve had in a different place. I think location does affect us much more than we think and you can experience freedom by going other places but whether or not that’s a permanent freedom, I don’t know.
I: As a writer, what have you learned since your first book?
EP: A lot, but I think this is the book that’s taught me the most. Or maybe I learned the most between the last book and this book. I spent some time working on a screenplay— an adaptation of someone else’s book— and that taught me a lot about structure and plotting and I think I’ve learned to embrace those technical sides of writing that were mysterious to me when I started out. I’ve learned… about everything! That I needed to feel so strongly about something in order to dig as deeply as I needed to to make this book work. But when you start a new book.. you feel like you know nothing all over again…
I: You’ve mentioned that you’re addressing characters coming to know themselves. You also address characters knowing other people, or failing to do so. Is this knowing ever really possible?
EP: Certainly in this book Tom is in love with this kind of idea, with his version of Ann. There’s a lot that he (in an unacknowledged way) doesn’t want to know. This book is saying, we’ve got to make the effort to know and without that you’re going to get in trouble. Even though it’s only ever going to take us closer to something. You can’t ever know absolutely and Tom can’t know some kind of nailed-down, absolute truth about Ann and it’s all subjective but I think you really have to try. That’s what I like about the human social project— you have to try.
I: You also write about friendships between girls, and couples being friends being friends with other couples. Why are these relationships important for you to portray?
EP: It seemed logical to me. That Tom and Ann have this very, initially, heated relationship, very intense, but they need this friendship with Tonia and Andy, the other couple, to take some of the pressure off. It’s like a self made family… I think we choose these mini communities to hang out in; for couples there’s a safety in that. Definitely it takes pressure off the one-on-one relationship.
Of course they also act as foils or mirrors or they reflect some other aspect of a person. It would be hard to write a character— I was just thinking about Sabastian Faulk’s new book Engleby which is fantastic, about a very singular man who really just exists in his own world, but he’s always trying to connect with other people— but you need other characters to reflect each other because so much of action is reaction.
I: In The New Girl there’s a line that I’ve been thinking about a lot, when Miranda says, “The world is not a place of safety” and then Mary smiles and says, “It’s safer than you think.” That relates to your new novel as well. What do you make of that passage? Who’s right?
EP: I’m not sure. I think Miranda, partly— she’s not a safe place in herself, and that’s what Mary is responding to. “You’re young, willfully finding danger out there and maybe you think that’s interesting when its less safe”, and you’ve actually got to find interesting in safety, and intimacy that way, and learn about that, which to me is part of growing up, certainly within a relationship. And yet it does relate to Novel About My Wife in the sense that they don’t feel safe in this world, they’re looking to create their own safe haven in their home. They see peril outside but they’re looking in the wrong place.
I: Was safety ever possible for them?
EP: He would have had to change and I don’t know that he could change enough.
I: In the introduction to The Picnic Virgin [an anthology Perkins edited in 1999, of short stories by new New Zealand writers], you said that initially you’d wanted to avoid works that were “boring, parochial or smug”. And you did mention you become less set about what those ideas were exactly. What do you think about them now?
EP: I think it’s good that I wanted to avoid boring work, that I didn’t want to put boring pieces in a collection. I probably was reacting to a version of New Zealand that I was anxious about. I was editing that book from London, a book of new New Zealand, writing, and I discovered that the parochialism I was worried would be there in the writing isn’t there. And what was great about editing that book was that I got to know what was going on in New Zealand fiction at the time.
I: Where did your assumption of parochialism come from?
EP: I think New Zealand fiction has changed a lot in the past 20 years and it has broadened out a lot, but it was preoccupied— and it’s a young literary history— for a long time with defining New Zealandness— who are we? what are we? And always asking that question culturally, to me, runs dangerously close to, Who should we be? What should we be? And that’s when things start getting programmatic, or moralistic. And that’s when the smugness comes in.
New Zealand, at our worst, we can cope with being so far away from the rest of the world by saying, “Well, we’re in the best place in the world, ha ha ha.” And I can’t stand that. We really need to watch that. So I don’t actually think parochialism does exist. I think New Zealanders are more open to New Zealand writing that is not just addressing the question of national identity.
I: How do you name your characters?
EP: Well, Tom and Ann— I wanted nice simple names. With Ann I wanted something that was kind of soft, but was quite plain as well. “Stone” seemed really the right surname for Tom because he’s not very porous [laughs] and then “Wells” of course seemed right for Ann. And I’m not trying to name characters in a Dickensian ways, I don’t want to be artificial about it… And then the others get named in more random ways. But Arlo, the baby— I wanted a name that sounded lovely, was nice to say. “Arlo, Arlo”.
I: You worked as an actor when you were young. When did you begin writing and when did it become a major occupation?
EP: Well I always had wr
itten and I was a big reader as a kid and sooner or later I wanted to express things in the same way I was experiencing them, which was through books a lot of the time. And so I had always written, bad teenage poetry and then when I was acting in my late teens, early 20s I was writing little unfinished stories, dialogue exchanges, vignettes, and then acting really didn’t work out for me or I didn’t work out for acting, and I thought I’m just going to throw in the towel. And I was a bit lost for a while but I was still writing and then there was a writing program at a university in New Zealand and I thought, well it would be great if I could apply to this, and get in, and at least I’d know what I was doing for the next year.
Luckily enough I did get in— and it’s funny, I don’t know how people choose things for these courses and when I think about the work I submitted, it’s just horrifying— but that was a great year You know, it was a lot of fun and we did all these exercises and we had to finish work and I had to finish a story for my portfolio and that story got published in a literary journal there and then a publisher from England read it and was very encouraging and I sent him more work. And that was how my collection of stories happened. And so that was the fundamental thing for me, being in the structure of that course and I mean, now I teach creative writing and I know a lot of people enroll in those courses because they want the discipline, they want to have to finish something, and that was pretty much my reasons too. It was helpful…. Not that I want to flood the world with creative writing students [laughs], but it was a lot of fun. It was great.
I: What were your early influences?
EP: The first book that really affected me was a book by Astrid Lindgren who wrote the Pippi Longstockings stories called The Brothers Lionheart and that was the first time a book made me cry and I had this terribly emotional reaction to it. It’s about these three brothers and one of them died and the others had to follow him into the next world, and it was amazing, about reincarnation really. And then aside from the usual children’s books, CS Lewis and that sort of thing— I was really into Joan Aiken, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula LeGuin, and these amazing children’s version of great myths and legends that didn’t pull any punches…
And then because I was a big reader I found myself reading my mother’s books, and so when I was far too young to know what was going on I was reading Iris Murdoch and Kurt Vonnegut and most of it was going over my head but I loved certain things about it. And of course, there’s a kind of age where you read Anne Frank’s diary and Holocaust literature and books about girls’ experience of the Holocaust and reading those books at same age as protagonists was really profound.
I: What sort of authors do you read now?
EP: Now, I’ve just been really into Patrick McGrath— he’s great— a British writer who lives in New York and he writes a really sort of new gothic kind of psychological stuff, delicious. And I love some Joan Didion novels and I love Wide Sargasso Sea with Jean Rhys, And an English writer called Geoff Dyer, who I always feel strange mentioning because I know him, but he’s a really great writer. And I still just try to read widely as I can and discover new things, and tastes change. But I love those short story writers too— Tobias Wolf and Lorrie Moore.
I: What are you reading at the moment?
EP: I’m reading Tree of Smoke, a Denis Johnson book, a great book, amazing exciting book about the Viet Nam War. And I’m about to start Richard Price’s book Lush Life which I’m looking forward to. But they’re both— I’m travelling now— and they’re both huge, wrist breakers. I don’t know why I brought those ones with me.
(Read my review of Novel About My Wife.)
May 7, 2008
Elizabeth Hay Blog Tour Stop
I am so excited to announce that over the next few weeks, Pickle Me This will be a stop on Elizabeth Hay’s upcoming blogging tour of the Canadian North. Her award-winning Late Nights on Air was one of my favourite books of 2007 (and read my review here). Other stops have included The Book Mine Set, The Library Ladder and Metro Mama. Now over to our guest blogger Elizabeth Hay…
May 8, Dawson City, Yukon: Last night we walked back to the hotel from the bar at Bombay Peggy’s and though it was close to midnight, it could have seven in the evening. The light is uncanny. The sun goes below the horizon, but not far below, turning the depths of the night into radiant dusk.
To get here we drove the Klondike Highway north from Whitehorse. Even in the aftermath of massive forest fires marked with white signs – forest fire of 1998, forest fire of 1953 – the sky and the contours of the land made for unbroken beauty. Night before last I did a reading in the village of Mayo, attracting a handful of interesting folk, and afterwards we walked along the dike next to the half-melted Stewart River. May is a good month to be doing readings from a radio novel since the air is full of sound – break-up, birdsong. They say the best place to see wildlife is on the edges between habitats, and it seems to me that’s the best place to see nervous life of all kinds – on the edges. In the case of Late Nights on Air, that would be the edge between listening and speaking.
We rolled down the hill to the bathroom in our sloping motel room in Mayo. At least one of the rooms in that motel had something I coveted, an ElectroMaid from the 1950s, a self- contained unit of three burners and tiny sink with fridge below. Perfect for anyone with a love of the past and gypsy-like inclinations.
In Dawson City I made something of a faux pas, not taking off my shoes when I entered the library. Dawson’s streets are dirt, in keeping with its true-to-the-past historic self, and everyone protects the library’s indoor carpets. Again, people were receptive, informal, generally relaxed. Yukoners strike me as fiercely proud of the Yukon and eternally glad to find themselves here. Lulu Keating, the filmmaker, has made her home in Dawson. Over drinks in Bombay Peggy’s (former brothel and now an elegant hotel with lurid overtones), she and others at the table seemed altogether pleased with their lives in this isolated, culturally rich, dreamboat of a place. Charlotte Gray, a friend from Ottawa, is the current writer-in- residence at Berton House and she has slipped into life here with graceful ease.
We’ll take the Klondike Highway south to Carmacks for another library reading tonight. Tomorrow, Teslin. Then on Friday I’ll leave the Yukon and fly to my old stomping grounds of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories – setting for Late Nights on Air.
May 6, 2008
But Not Quite
I heard today’s quote on the radio, from an American woman who’s had enough of the Democratic Primary:
It’s almost enough to make me turn off the television.
May 6, 2008
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
(Read my interview with Emily Perkins here.)
It was interesting, the many ways Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife complemented my recent reading of The Girl in Saskatoon. Both books about the impossibility of recreating life out of words, as well as the struggle to define a line between reality and otherwise. Which becomes doubly interesting in Perkins’ case, the recreating as fictional as its result.
Like Sharon Butala, Perkins’ Tom Stone writes in an attempt to put a life back together, his wife Ann’s: “If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse couldn’t help but kick back into life.”
But Tom is also at a disadvantage: “Some facts are known… Other things I can only take a stab at.” His wife had been particularly elusive, an Australian exile in London content to have long ago cast her past away. Part of what had attracted him– Ann’s mystery what he’d fallen for in the first place. That mystery part of the reason why, after Ann becomes pregnant with their first child, her increasingly strange behaviour is not confronted, ultimately leading to her tragic death.
“She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies… Her body was open for viewing. It was the one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.” And Tom has been happy to be distracted. Now that Ann isn’t there to distract him anymore, he writes to address her unknowability, the fact of which is infinitely underlined by her death. Toms lays out the “known facts” and takes stabs through speculation, drafting several versions of the events he still does not understand that led up to what fell apart between them.
Tom and Ann and what happened to them are singularly emblematic of nothing– this is how I know this is a good story. The endpapers now positively covered in my scrawl, as I noted key points, facts, ideas. All emblematic of nothing, I say. Emily Perkins understanding that nothing is so simple to profess to summation, and instead my notes and ideas are expansions– this is the kind of book that takes you there.
About what it was exactly that happened to Ann, because, like Tom, we get pieces of the puzzle but some are missing and certainly out of order. What Tom knows and what he doesn’t, his detachment disturbing at times, and his subtle address rendering him a complex and interesting first-person narrator. The story itself grappling with issues, but not so much as to make a statement. More so to consider: any illusion of safety in a society fraught with danger, such fraughtness intensified during pregnancy during which danger lurks ’round every corner. How once bad things happen in our lives, the limits of possibility are expanded. What is to be a man, to be a “guardian”, in such a place where any horrible thing is possible. How “space is what we crave and fear”, and it is in this context that we turn to one another.
I am being terribly general, and I could write about this book forever, but I will focus on one thread. Tom writes of his staid, middle class parents from whose existence he escaped into his own: they are “so certain of the parametres of their universe, where normality began and ended.” And whether by choice or fate, Ann and Tom do not inhabit such a comfortable place. Much of Novel About My Wife is about negotiating life within these unsure parametres: where family is distant, the streets are dangerous, God is dead, love is ephemeral, one need never grow up and childhoods can hold traumas so dark and unimaginable.
Perkins has created a puzzle of a puzzle. I read this book in anticipation of the ending the first time, and then the second time I pored over the text in search of clues. But both times I was entirely caught up in both this extraordinary story and its more ordinary concerns. Its exploration of love, intimacy, marriage and parenthood. Perkins’ characters demonstrating as much as anybody does: what it is to live in the world today, and how life happens. A fascinating story on a multitude of levels by an exciting and capable writer.
May 6, 2008
Some links
Scroll down for Margaret Drabble’s letter to editor about sorry states of affairs at the British Library. More on Virago Modern Classics– this time from founder Carmen Callil. Listen to an interview with Sharon Butala on Sounds like Canada (from April 29). Writer Rebecca Rosenblum on creation (but not creationism– which is really a strange ism when you think about it). Crooked House passes on some Olivia love, among other children’s lit links.
