May 4, 2008
The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse
There is a lot going on in The House at Midnight. Too much? Is this a tale of friendship, a ghost story, academic-gothic ala Tartt? With classical allusions and the Bacchae– but really? Requisite clever trendy urbanites, Oxford grads the lot of them, and a healthy dose of zeitgeist. A group of friends and a house cut off from the world, and whatever unfolds. One might ask, Lucie Whitehouse, what are you doing?
And we would ask Whitehouse, the author, because her novel is so obviously constructed. Her hand is always right there, pushing the plot forward, making her people speak. There is nothing organic here, perhaps Whitehouse with her literary agent background knowing too well what it takes for a book to succeed. Leaving absolutely nothing to chance.
All this sounds like criticism, and it sort of is. Because Lucie Whitehouse is not untalented. What she has done here is create an immensely readable book that I devoured in a day. Narrated by Joanna, whose friend Lucas has just inherited a country house from his uncle. A perfect place, he feels, for their friends to gather on weekends, a break from London. They’ve all been friends for nearly a decade now, still close but branching out in separate ways. The house’s isolation serving heighten their bonds and widen their rifts. Joanna sensing something sinister pulsing within the house’s walls, and her fears turn out to not be unfounded.
So if Whitehouse set out to write a piece of decent popular fiction, she has definitely succeeded, “popular” overriding the other elements of the book I’ve already noted. The story light enough, a bit of smut, and though the shocking end is not quite all it wants to be, still a good book for a plane journey. My reservations however, because I get the feeling Whitehouse was striving for more, ticking boxes rather than writing good prose, to straddle “literary” and “marketable” at once– it’s all a bit obvious. The two categories are not mutually exclusive of course, but here they appear to be. Definitely falling on the side of marketability though, so you’ll probably find you like it anyway.
May 1, 2008
Woolf on book blogs?
“But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. 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. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagers for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and yet unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.” –1926, Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”
May 1, 2008
Katie girls
My only shoes worth more than $100 are orthopedic and I haven’t had cable TV in a decade, but I’ve always enjoyed Sex and the City (in syndication, naturally). And not just because of the “Ex in the City/The Way We Were” episode, which brought me such comfort during those dark days when I was deranged and thought no one would ever love me (and these two factors may have been related). Remember, the simple girls and Katie girls? But writer Libby Brooks pins down the rest of it brilliantly as follows:
“…this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women’s experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be cleanup etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?
Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they’d been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were discussed. For my money, the enduring appeal of Sex and the City has nothing to do with guys or footwear. It’s about the uncomfortably accurate presentation of women’s relationships with each other. However the critics receive the new film, they ought to bear in mind that, for all the brunch chatter, this show has never been a story about men. Sex and the City was always, baseline, about us girls; about how women’s friendships can be complicated and bitchy, but also meaningful, supportive and lasting.”
April 30, 2008
A dozen more
Just when I’m down to just one book, I begin to read a dozen more. With great pleasure, I’m finished up The Picnic Virgin, an anthology of new New Zealand writing, edited by Emily Perkins. Also just began Volume 2 of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. And the new issue of Descant— last night I read R. Samuel Bongard’s “The Eye of the Beholder” and it was everything. I’m also rereading Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?”, for I am curious. I am going to be reading Gale Zoe Garnett’s novella Room Tone, rereading Novel About My Wife, and also starting The House at Midnight, which is said to cross Richard Curtis with Donna Tartt, so I am intrigued.
April 30, 2008
On Poetry, and Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time
So thank you to Poetic April, for I believe you had a firm hand in the leaves on the trees. Thank you for the books I’ve read, the books I’ve bought, authors discovered, poems devoured, the little ditties I wrote myself, and for the spirit of it all. Thank you for giving me the confidence to take on poetry, and come away not defeated. For the fun with words you inspired, and for providing a vehicle with which to convey avocado love.
The final book of poetry I’ve read this month is Carol Ann Duffy’s Mean Time. I’d read her before, much enjoying her collection Rapture which came out a couple of years back. Mean Time was a bit of a departure from the other books I’d read this month– not being new, being British, Duffy a more established poet. Her poems also tending to be less personal narratives or confessionals. Their purpose to tell whole stories, to fill whole rooms and entire scenes with meaning.
I love “Litany” and “Before You Were Mine”, but the whole book read itself. Such a pleasure. A great place to leave you, I think, Poetic April. I’ll be back in a year, and of course will drop by from time to time before then.
April 30, 2008
Anything at all
“‘What are you reading?’
‘A pile of things. Books on stuff, you know how there’s always a new one, on tomatoes or love songs or the secret history of buttonholes.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m waiting for the book on books on stuff to be published. Perhaps I should write it, I’ve read enough of them. Ask me anything you want to know about coriander. Anything at all.'”
–Emily Perkins, The New Girl
April 30, 2008
MacMillan on history
One of the highlights of my whole life has been an undergraduate history seminar with Margaret MacMillan, but I’d think she was amazing anyway. I’m looking forward to reading her new book Uses and Abuses of History, particularly since reading this interview: ‘I don’t think history teaches us clear lessons. I think it’s very dangerous to say that history demands certain things.’
April 29, 2008
Elizabeth Hay Blogging Tour
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 on of my favourite books of 2007 (and read my review here). Other stops will include The Book Mine Set, The Library Ladder and Metro Mama.
April 29, 2008
Paint Chip Poems
1. Cover up the names
for they sway me;
colour blind. To be happy
in a white room called
man on the moon.
Give me monterey white,
balboa mist. I want niveous.
Cream froth, sugar cookie.
Butter milk, summer solstice.
Vichysoisse, straw hat;
elephant tusk,
bare and windswept.
2. Future children’s names:
Audubon Russet
Powell Buff
Livingston Gold
Putnam Ivory
Jackson Tan
Winthrop Peach
3. At eighteen years
I painted my room.
Citrus orange.
April 27, 2008
The Octopus by Jennica Harper
I used to have this sticker with a picture of a boy and a bear standing on the top of Planet Earth, set against a black starry sky and the bear was pointing up. The words coming out of his mouth said, “Look up there.” The image to me is the definition of “wonder”, and it kept occurring to me as I reread Jennica Harper’s book The Octopus yet again.
Wondrous things dominate this collection: prairie skies, cinema, rocket ships, spacemen, music, snowstorm, beaches, breasts, mothers, and extraterrestrial life. Some of these things ordinary but made new through widened eyes. From “Cinema Paradiso”: “Only a true believer/ sits on the edge of her seat at the movies/ like they do in the movies./ I am such a believer.”
In the long poem “The Octopus”, this wonder is questioned, as two former lovers have the same conversations they’ve always had. “Something we could not let go:/ all the time spent, the conversations/ run and rerun, we didn’t think we would/ have the strength to have them/ with another person.” The other love who sees such wonder as self-indulgent, who “can’t condone the reckless hope/ of finding some other life out there.” He points elsewhere instead: “If Sagan and his crew really wanted an alien,/ you say, they would look to the octopus…” He is “afraid all this probing/ will have been a waste.”
But to our narrator, the wonder has been enough, and so too the wondering: “the girl on the beach… but is it a waste that I got to dream her?” Pointing up, and wondering what is out there in the universe, asking where did we come from and where are we going. Questions that apply just as much to outer space as to our own histories; the secret to our origins might lie in the stars, but we seek the same answers in our mothers, our families, in the world all around us. In this context everything is worth examining; indeed a praying mantis is a “tiny robot”, we are made up of our elements. And then we can dare to “admit we’re not the only subject/ and can sometimes be the searcher, the verb”.
Harper writes, “All of this talk is just talk./ The truth is, we will never know/ our own future, not even/our own past”. The talk, however, and all the wondering, and the poetry– all this stand as evidence, as an arsenal against empty claims of nothingness. Making it certain: “We Are Here.”
