October 15, 2007
False Prophets
Now reading The Golden Notebook, on the back of a bandwagon. My reading is informed by essays on Lessing by Joan Didion and Heather Mallick, each from an opposing point of view. (I wonder what Mallick thinks now of her essay “Lessing is More” having been subtitled “Why Doris Lessing won’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature”, though the subtitle seems to be the only thing she got wrong in the entire piece).
Also now reading Margaret Atwood’s new collection of poetry The Door which is wonderful.
Finally, my first post “Encounters with Books” is now up at the Descant blog. A few bugs still need to be worked out over there, but I hope you’ll check my piece out, and that you enjoy it.
October 15, 2007
Bragging
May I just brag about my friends for just a moment please? That Erica G. successfully hosted her first dinner party last night, I was privileged to attend, and the company was so enjoyable I stayed out until the wee hours of morn? And that the amazingly multi-talented Erin Smith has designed the cover of a book? By which I mean a real book, which wasn’t photocopied and bound in my living room (because she’s done that too).
October 13, 2007
Summer
I don’t very often refer here to the bad days: to the month spent waiting for test results, for example, or to when my husband was so bored at work, he couldn’t be happy while he wasn’t at work. I don’t very often refer here to the bad days, however, mostly because we don’t have them very often. Because my test results came back negative, and Stuart got a promotion. Because we have had an extraordinary summer full of good fortune, and now that the weather outside appears absolutely autumnal, I can look back and be so grateful.
Of course it’s not all just a given: you’ve got to know enough to appreciate the day you’re in. And as a Canadian I know that sunshine is fleeting. From that first gorgeous day in April I knew enough to put on some shorts, to go outside and enjoy it. But the rest, oh the rest. Any season that begins with celebratory High Tea at the Four Seasons is bound to be exquisite. Frisbee in Trinity Bellwoods Park with Curtis, High Park Picnics before we had leaves on the trees, backyard barbeques with so many friends, the garden born, lobster dinners, and city rooftop summer nights.
Our trip to England in June was a magical story, beginning with the car rental mix-up when we got a Saab Convertible instead of an economy car. That countryside: Yorkshire Dales, Lake Windermere, the Pennines in a thunderstorm, and the seaside. Bronwyn’s wedding on the village green. The night we drove four hours from one side of the country to the other, with Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs and Rhianna on the radio, and there was family at the end of the journey. A week in which I ate scones and jam nearly every day.
This summer we were both working for the first time in over two years, and then suddenly my job became permanent and Stuart was appointed to a position that he loves. We had some money again, to get out of town or to enjoy town whilst we were in it. Trips to Toronto Island and the beach at the bottom of Spadina. To Massey Hall for Crowded House in August. Dinners out with friends, just because we wanted to. Our amazing Muskoka weekend back in July, with friends oldest and dearest. To Quebec for Susannah and Loic’s wedding, against the most gorgeous backdrop you could imagine. Trips to Peterborough to see my family, camping on the shores of Rice Lake, infamous Mothers’ Day drunken shenanigans. Montreal in September, and a whole new city to see. The trip on the train.
Summer stretched on this year, from April and into October. That’s seven months of perfect bliss– more than half the year, and we’re lucky just for that. And for the evenings which got colder and darker, and the crunch of leaves beneath our shoes. To wear scarves, and sweaters, and having knitting projects on the go. Oh for October, the best of both worlds. New shoes and warm jackets. To take long lingering walks, still holding hands without our gloves.
October 13, 2007
Run by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s new novel Run creates the effect of a snowglobe. First: the snow. A winter storm has coated Boston in white, and as the city’s former mayor Bernard Doyle and his sons Tip and Teddy emerge from a lecture, their vision is obscured. They can’t see enough to even understand each other, and in the midst of an argument Tip steps into the path of a car.
Next: the globe. Tip has been pushed out of the car’s path by a mysterious woman who is hit instead. Her young daughter Kenya, taking care to collect her mother’s scattered things, clearly possesses a wisdom beyond her eleven years, and through various circumstances she is taken into the Doyles’ care. And it seems that she knows them well, their unique history. In the limited construct of this globe, everything is connected.
Kenya knews that Tip and Teddy are the black adopted sons of Doyle and his late wife Bernadette, who also had an older son, whose own disgrace became his fathers’. As Kenya’s mother lies in her hospital bed, secrets are revealed, connections are established, chance is batted about, and lives change. Class and racial lines are underlined and also revealed as rootless. Patchett explores themes of family, the tragedy of motherlessness, she writes of goodness, and who it is we dream our dreams for.
Stepping away from this book, there are problems. Not the connections, necessarily, or the coincidence or chance– this is the stuff of real life, and rings false only in fiction. But the limitations of a story in a bubble are obvious– the outside world knocks at the glass, but it’s not invited in. Patchett is a wonderful writer whose exposition reads like a tale, but it also left me wanting to see her characters outside their confines. I felt as though this story was just stretching its legs.
But. Stepping away from this book, I say, I saw the problems. But I almost couldn’t do that– step away, put it down. Run was intensely readable from start to finish, enjoyable and not in a cheap way. Problems and all. These characters were sketched in such detail, there were moments of sheer beauty, the pace and construction of Patchett’s story was at times mesmerizing– yes, like that snow globe. The scene inside may not be life, but you shake it up and watch it anyway.
October 12, 2007
Expedient
Oh, yes. One factual problem with Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief (and have you seen his youtube channel?). In the novel Bethany gets a passport in a week, and we can assume this took place in 2007, due to DC’s ulta-currency. But we all know that nobody in Canada got a passport in a week during 2007. But then maybe I’m just looking for holes. Maybe this is fiction, after all.
October 12, 2007
Books write the songs
Colin Murray devotes part of his Radio 1 show to songs referencing literature. (Track listing here). I would also add The Arctic Monkeys, sort of, who named their album Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not after a line from the best old book I discovered for myself this year, which was, of course, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (though they claim they were referencing the film, which was good too). And Courage by The Tragically Hip, of course, which took some lyrics from The Watch that Ends the Night. Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Love Over and Over references the Brontes. And I’m sure there’s many many more: what fun!
October 12, 2007
Links and Hijinks
Richard Wright is profiled. They’re going to let Claire Messud be a Canadian (which is v. v. exciting, I think). Doris Lessing’s Nobel win means that now I’ve got occasion to read my new copy of The Golden Notebook. I’m also intrigued by talk of her latest project here. Bookgadget devotee Kimbooktu has started up a new collection of library photos here (and I’m in the archives). Dovegreyreader reads Lucy Maud Montgomery.
October 11, 2007
Descant launch, with two strings of pearls
Quite unfashionably late we were tonight for the launch of Descant 138, we being myself, my dapper husband, and Rebecca Rosenblum in gorgeous splendour. The new issue is beautiful though, and features poetry by Pickle Me This school chum LZ-V. And our lateness was really unavoidable, as there was rain to be walked home in, votes to be cast, socks to be wrung, and butternut squash pasta to be eaten. And then had to get dressed up, as the theme of the eve was the same as the issue– fashion. RR and I wore pearls. We caught readings by Andrew Tibbets and Katherine Ashenberg, heard the strains of “Take on Me” in Spanish. Ian Brown was m.c., and yes he is a bit dreamy. So a lovely night, squash and all.
October 11, 2007
Descant Blog
And in exciting news, I’m thrilled to announce my new incarnation as a Descant Blogger. My first posting goes up this weekend, I believe. I’ll be writing about the remarkable intersections between reading and every day life, and I hope that you will join me in that conversation.
October 10, 2007
The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
A character in Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief remarks of another, “It’s hard to imagine her having much off an inner life.” Coupland’s very point is that everybody does. Even Roger, the forty-something Staples employee, so old he’s become invisible. He’s writing a book– a terrible book. It’s called Glove Pond, about a couple constructed of witty catfights and a barrel of scotch. When Roger’s menacing co-workers hijack the book, it’s pronounced “the worst book even written… [but] I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing.”
Glove Pond is a kaleidoscopic revision of Roger’s own life (as much as a dinner party could possibly be a kaleidoscope, but it has much to say about writing, writers, how they view each other against their own successes and failures). The Gum Thief comprises Glove Pond‘s pages, as well as epistolary exchanges between Roger and his co-worker Bethany the Goth (whose makeup, reflecting her scarlet Staples t-shirt, is far more pink than white). Both Roger and Bethany carry pasts which are minefields of loss and disappointment, and they don’t so much bond over shared experience as through one another assume an essential dyanamic missing from their lives: Roger gets to feel responsible for someone, and Bethany gets taken care of. The plot is fleshed out by letters by Roger’s ex-wife, Bethany’s mother, and the vapid Shawn who had distrusted Bethany’s inner life. Which reads as entirely unbelievable once that we’ve come to know Bethany from the inside.
A novel within a novel, and even a novel inside of that. And the rest of the novel being letters and notes, even memos and FED-EXs, but The Gum Thief still takes on a plot and momentum. Along the way, of course, are typically sweeping and profoundly mundane Couplandisms: “Halloween costumes are another disinhibiting device, like fortune-telling and talking to talks that belong to strangers.” Or, “You know the people I mean– the ones who stay fifty feet away so they don’t look like they’re trying to see your PIN number. Come on. I look at these people and think, Man, you must feel truly guilty about something to make you broadcast your sense of guilt to the world with your freakish lineup philosophy.”
This all culminates into something far more than pop-culture and platitudes. The Gum Thief affirms the inner lives of the invisible, demonstrating the power of the written word to establish connections. Of course the final installment of The Gum Thief letters– one from Roger’s creative writing teacher who has “written several books, one of which was published”– throws the entire text’s veracity into doubt, but the result of this would be a testament to fiction’s trajectory towards empathy. Also serving as a dig at Coupland’s own critics, reciting their lines before they can get to them: “I don’t need or want art that tells me about my daily life. I want art that tells me about somebody– anybody— else but me.”
