September 30, 2007
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
So often, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves employing metaphors of artistry when it comes to a well-crafted book. Writers “weave” narratives, “paint” images, and, yes “craft” at all. Similarly, I recently wrote about a book’s machinery. And all this is high praise, really, to liken a writer to an artisan. But then Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air manages to surmount such praise– “seamless” is the best crafting metaphor I can think of. This book feels too whole to have been created, too perfect. Late Nights on Air is an entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.
The story is set among a group of people working at a small Yellowknife radio station in 1975. Indeed this is the True North, but not like we might imagine: “It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow.” Sound, not sight, becomes the salient sense, which is natural with the radio, and Hay creates this effect beautifully. Admirably too, for it is hard to write sound. And not just those voices in the night, but also snow crunching underfoot, paddles in the water, crackling fires and birdsong. Truly, this is the most audible novel I have ever read.
The story, quite simply, tells what happens when a various group of people come together in this strange and isolated place. The enigmatic Dido, whose voice causes some people to fall in love with her, and whose presence does others. Harry Boyd, a washed-up has-been, managing the station as part of his demotion. Gwen, who is too young and arrives in town with a bruise on her throat. Eleanor Dew, the station receptionist, the steadying force. Relationships are entered in and out of, loyalties shift in surprising ways. Each of these characters come with their own unwavering backstories, and point-of-view shifts between them with such fluidity. Similarly the story moves back and forth in time in a way that feels only natural, demonstrating Hay’s remarkable skill without actually making us aware of her at all.
The final third of the book tells of a modified version of our original group heading out on a six week canoe trip through the barrens. Though the travellers are light-hearted in their preprarations, a sense of foreboding pervades and clearly something bad is going to happen. And though what does happen is as devastating as one might expect, I found myself quite impressed with how deftly this event had been established, with a lack of emotional manipulation or gratuitous sensation. Also with how rivetted I remained to the story as the group made way along their journey– I tend to like stories that happen in places, usually urban places, but so attached I was to these characters that my attention never faltered as they portaged and canoed for days, sometimes seeing no other living creature but a single ptarmigan or a caribou.
Such is the story then, though what’s it about? It’s about people, and all that their presence entails. It’s about love and longing, otherness and belonging, bookishness and radio, seasons and change. It’s about Canada, and universality, and goodness, and less-than goodness. It is also an absolutely beautifully designed book, and I’d encouraged you to pick it up in hardback if you could. A nice compact shape and gorgeous cover art. And what’s inside is stupendous. Such a fitting title as the narrative felt weightless, but yet simultaneously substantial. Reading was an absolute pleasure.
September 28, 2007
Packed
This weekend: I plan on checking a number of things off a list I should have done ages ago. In terms of fun, workshop reunion at RR’s. Nuit Blanche. The Victoria College Book Sale starts tonight (though I’m saving myself until Monday morning). You should check out the booksale– it’s right in the neighbourhood of Word on the Street, which I’m going to Sunday. Exciting! I went last year, but spent the day in a booth. This year I’ll get to browse. Will you be there too? Let me know, and I’ll come say hello to you.
September 28, 2007
Thinking back and forth
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air, which is to say I’m positively bewitched. 100 pages from the end, and expect a review sometime tomorrow. I am positively enveloped; I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. To have a story so gripping and writing so good is rare, really. And the book has been doing strange things to me. “After a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time of my life.”
That passage set me thinking about the most vivid time of my life, and last night around 10:30 I was digging through boxes to find my journal from September 16th 2001-May 31 2002. The exact dates were incidental, but that time was on fire. Anyone who was there would know that, and it seems I remember it very poorly upon rereading my journal. Stories and anecdotes I have no recollection of, which is strange. Though the writing is good– this surprised me. When I read my fiction from that period, I want to bury myself in my backyard, but the journal was really lovely in places. The stories it told were often sad too. Funny with vividness– I think it comes from the whole spectrum of emotions, confined to a small space. “My time there was the most crazy time of my life.” Vivid, yes, but I wasn’t happy. I remember those days epically, but they were tough to be in the thick of.
Whereas. Tonight, in my less vivid life, I arrived home with my husband, who takes the subway to my work every day so we can walk home together. “I need to read,” he said, when we got in the door. He is currently enthralled by Little Children. So we sat down on the couch together, books in hand, the kettle on for tea. A straight hour of nothing but books, tea, and biscuits, and perfect quiet. Elizabeth Hay has created something amazing. And the sweet bliss interrupted only to get up get the pumpkin risotto started.
September 28, 2007
Canoeists carried
“The canoes carried the canoeists and the canoeists carried the damselflies and everything seemed weightless. They were heading towards the first day of August, the street lights were noticeable again, and a few leaves were turning yellow, indicating in their minimal, elegant way an end to this long, warm summer and the beginning of a darker chapter.” –from Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air
September 27, 2007
Particularly telling
From The Guardian Review of When To Walk: “It’s a sign of how good a writer she is that you even forgive Ramble’s perusal of boxes of memorabilia – usually the sign of a book that deserves to be forgotten beneath the bed.”
Exactly.
September 27, 2007
Links for Thursday
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may by Judy Pollard Smith was an absolutely gorgeous essay. “There is a plethora of print for baby boomers to mull over, about how worldly-wise and wealthy we’ve become on some counts, about how many toys we’ve collected, about how we strive to improve upon medical solutions to halt the aging process./ But where, oh where, is the stuff of import? Where is the reading material that tells us that we don’t have to keep on dieting and jogging like maniacs, that it’s okay to let ourselves grow older with élan, with hope, with our friends and families, with happy hearts, with grace? Where is The Wife Of Bath when we need her?” I sent it to my mom.
On books which have opened our eyes to feminism. I love that one is broad-minded enough to include Joan Didion. For me? Three Guineas, The Edible Woman, Just as I Thought by Grace Paley. I’ll think of others, I’m sure. (Yes. Fear of Flying was tremendously important during a rather bizarre period in my life, no matter how cliched and out-of-date that reads). Though of course the books that really formed my conciousness included The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger, and The Real Me by Betty Miles. Much later on came Bust Magazine, which changed my life, I think. Though I’m older/younger than that now.
Some audio links: I listen to online radio at work. Like everyone else, I adore This American Life. And for the last week and a half I’ve been enjoying BBC Radio 1’s Legend Shows, by Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry, Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller etc. Very cool, and you can always listen again.
And if all else fails, you can look up “fruit” on wikipedia.
September 26, 2007
Books in my life
I’ve got all these books in my life, and not necessarily just the ones I’m reading. Books I’m not reading seem to have just as much a presence. Oh, reader’s compunction. I get it rarely, reading as swiftly as I do, but a couple of tomes have been lurking lately, and I know it is absolutely imperative that I get to them, and they’re piled on my bedside, but the dust on their jackets is now this thick. I’m talking nonfiction, usually, when I talk like this. To begin a long nonfiction book is a tremendous commitment, requiring sacrifice as to how it keeps me away from fiction. A Short History of Everything and Guns Germs and Steel are way overdue. I’ll get around to them. This might be absolutely a lie, but I really intend that it not be.
And then books I should be reading. And not should as in “ought to be but won’t” as above, but rather “must” be read, as the whole universe is saying so. Like with Great Expectations quite recently (and yes, I’ll get to that book too). Now it’s Lucky Jim, which Rona Maynard recommends. And in this interview Kate Christensen cites it as an influence on her In The Drink, which I’ve just read. (Do read the Christensen interview [via maud newton] by the way, for a fantastic example of chick lit’s cannibalistic tendencies, which I’ve mentioned before.) So I suppose Kingsley Amis is in the cards for me.
As is Raisins and Almonds, which comes recommended by Becky Rosenblum‘s mother.
Exhausting. But now I actually am reading Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. Or at least I will be before the night is out. This book has had rave reviews all around, and so I am looking very forward to it.
September 24, 2007
When to Walk by Rebecca Gowers
Rebecca Gowers’ first novel When to Walk, which earlier this year was longlisted for The Orange Prize, is a week in the life of Ramble, a character whose narration reminded me of Poppy Shakespeare‘s, but whose story I found much more satisfying.
The story begins as Ramble’s husband tells her that he’s leaving her, she inferring that he regards her as an “autistic vampire”. Where it goes from there is anywhere you can’t imagine, as Ramble deals her own feelings in reaction, but also with her senile grandmother, difficult mother, her gay best friend who fancies her, and the woman downstairs who is a common thief. Ramble’s own world is very narrow, due in particular to arthritis which makes walking distances painful. She is also a writer, employed to write travel pieces about places she has never been. And she has been balancing on the verge of a breakdown for sometime, which becomes clear as the story progresses. Her husband’s departure sparks crisis, but also provides Ramble with the impetus she needs to make necessary changes in her life.
Where most books have plots, this book has a voice, a character, and a much intriguing one. Ramble’s husband claims that she is impossible to reach, and even to those of us privy to her stream of consciousness, she is elusive. She hides in the shadows. As the novel progresses, however we come to see her in all her multiple-dimensions. Unknowingly she begins to let down her guard, disclosing the experiences which have led to her present situation.
Gowers’ fashioning of Ramble’s voice is a great achievement. First, it is rare to find a disabled character whose disability is secondary to her story. Gowers also creates a convincing point of view of this woman who spends her days watching pigeons out the window, fascinatingly portraying Ramble’s inner-life. It is unsurprising that Gowers’ previous book was non-fiction, as Ramble spends so much time delivering facts herself. She has her own peculiar fixations: etymology, Edward Lloyd, pigeon ailments. She is preoccupied by her own rather cryptic family history. Some people find a novel so bursting with “stuff” tiresome, but it is usually a mark of the kind of book that I like best. A question of taste, I suppose, but all this was much to mine.
September 24, 2007
Someday could be soon
Burma in the news. Do you want some context? Read Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, which took the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers earlier this year. I read it last winter and found the book so enomously powerful. “Someday the government of Burma will change…,” Connelly writes in her acknowledgements with such faith, and dare we hope that someday could be soon?
Update: read The last public voice of democracy in Myanmar.
September 23, 2007
Where you live with who
This morning I conducted a scientific study. (How exciting!) A study which is made a bit questionable by the limits of my own library, and the fact that my library has many more books by women then men. But still, I looked through my contemporary novels at author biographies and found the following results.
– 50 books did not make reference to the writer’s partner or family, and 24 books did.
– the 50 books with no reference were split evenly along gender lines.
– Of the 24 books that mentioned partners/families, 1/3 were by men, which was more than I had supposed.
– None of the authors who I knew were gay and lesbian made any reference to spouses/partners
– Writers with famous spouses who are less famous than the writers themselves mention their partners by name
– Writers with spouses who are more famous than they are either don’t mention them at all, or don’t name them
I’ve been wondering lately about this sort of information being included in author biographies– why it is important or relevant? I understand why husbands/wives/partners are so gushingly regarded in book dedications and acknowledgements. (Author acknowledgements are my most favourite extra-textual feature). Of course the writer wants to give due credit, but is this necessarily important to the author biography? One might argue that readers want details of authors’ lives, but these details are so vague, there’s little point. They basically say, “Oh, and yes, she is married.” Or is “…she lives with her husband and children” just another way to say that although she’s smart and writes books, she’s not turned her back on femininity altogether? Which would make me uncomfortable.
I’ve had to write three little writer bios this past while, and in none of them have I noted that I live in Toronto with my husband. Though I would have liked them to. If my novel ever sees its way into the world, I would like my biography to end just like that. But I am not sure why– why does it matter to my professional life? (It is also important here to note whether or not authors actually write their own biographies on published books– this I do not know). I suppose for many female writers, it’s a question of marketing– readers might like a writer they can relate to, and domestic details make an author seem more accessible. I think also that many writers would argue that their family is an essential part of their life, whose support makes writing possible, and therefore the family deserves a place in their life story. I would assume that a writer of children’s books would note if they were a mom or a dad.
And so my scientific study was just as inconclusive as “Do Plants Need Air?”– my famous experiment at the grade eight science fair. There are just too many variables, and so still I am curious. Why is where you live with who important? Is it really important at all?
