July 16, 2007

Workaday Worlds

A frequent complaint about about contemporary fiction, or at least stories which aspire to become contemporary fiction, is that characters don’t work. Whereas in the past, work might have dominated the narrative (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning comes to mind), modern characters’ lives take place after hours. Interesting to note that two exceptions I’ve just thought of are about doctors: Saturday and Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. I don’t know what that means, however these doctors’ idle contemporaries tend to be artists, academics, or documentary filmmakers, and their work is usually peripheral. Or so it’s been said, but when I think back to the last nineteenth century novel I read (The Portrait of a Ladylast week, of course) nobody there did anything either, save for Henrietta Stackpole. And granted Henrietta’s vocation did give her character particular appeal, and I realize James perhaps is a class thing, and these are all just thoughts to think about. Woolf’s working characters were not usually at the forefront of her novels (or if they were, only subtly so ala Lily Briscoe, though of course she was an artist, which brings us back to the beginning). Many characters in books I read, particularly classics, seem to be bankers, but this tends to entail nothing beyond leaving the house in the morning and coming home in the eve.

I have two things to say about all these unformed thoughts, the first being that though none of this is new, what might be new is how positively unremarkable most modern jobs actually are. I cannot imagine what sort of narrative would grow up around the job I’m doing these days, or many I’ve had in the past. Prosaic is not even the word for many jobs around– mind numbing, soul destroying, base and boring. I am fortunate that such is NOT my experience at the moment, but think of how many people must work in call centres. Think of all the stories that will never be written about call centres. I am not terribly convinced this is a bad thing.

The second thing is that Lionel Shriver, like my very favourite Margaret Drabble, always keeps her characters occupied. An anthropologist in The Female of the Species; pro-tennis players in Double Fault; illustrater, think-tankian, snooker player, variously in The Post-Birthday World; travel guide writer and advertising location scout in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Their occupations make Shriver’s characters whole, their worlds rich, and give their stories legs to stand on. Her details are so fascinating, and I can’t think of how much learning it must have taken to acquire them.

July 16, 2007

Time time it was

Time it was. Friday night date, out for dinner and then to the ROM. I had no strong feelings about the new addition, except that I was startled by sunlight once we emerged from the wonderful Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibit “History of History”, as I had forgotten about the world. There is something to that. Saturday we got a new hi-fi, very exciting. We bought our old one in the days of impecuniousness, and it wasn’t very good– the CD player door had become awfully choosy about functioning. And so no more. Saturday night was dinner, theatre, and drinks drinks drinks until well in the morning with friends oldest and dearest, et. al. Somehow hangovers were avoided, and I spent today well in the relaxing way (though freshly baked scones were involved).

Devastating gardening event was that our two watermelons, whose development had been as thrilling to watch as a small baby’s, were ruined by some sort of creature with teeth. A sort of creature that doesn’t appreciate the treasure which is watermelon, as they disconnected them from the vine, gnawed on the green bits leaving gaping holes, and broke my heart a bit. Honestly honestly, I could have cried.

In sort of related news, now reading Animal Vegetable Miracle.

July 14, 2007

Glass Worlds

I was surprised to find that the highlight of my trip to the ROM yesterday was the Glass Worlds Exhibition. Intitially I’d scoffed at the idea of a collection of paperweights, but they turned out to be beautiful and mesmerizing. And bookish too, in their own way, as the exhibit explained to me. As literacy increased, desks became fixtures in many households, as did the paraphernalia which adorned them. And just think of your favourite books: how many of their manuscripts must have been saved from a breeze by the fact of a paperweight? (Though truthfully, actually, I’d suggest not that many. I have a suspicion that functionality was never the ultimate object here).

July 13, 2007

Our lettuce is bolting

Our lettuce is bolting. Since I was very young and new, I don’t think anything has taught me so much so quick about the world as has having a garden.

July 13, 2007

ReReading Kevin

I had a feeling that We Need to Talk About Kevin would be an important book to reread. First read two years ago after a whole lot of Orange Prize and political hoopla, I was doubtful I would like it. It had been cast as variously feminist and anti-feminist depending on who was talking, and employed as a polarizing weapon in the mommy wars. But when I started reading, I realized that easy issues of polarity weren’t what Lionel Shriver was on about, and that she wasn’t spouting rhetoric as much as asking questions. What I remember most about finishing this book the first time was an urgent need to find somebody else with whom to discuss it.

And so to approach it two years later would be interesting. First, that I’d know the big twist was coming– could this book be about more than its sensation? And also reading it in the context of Shriver’s other work, which I’ve become familiar with. Nearly halfway in, I am pleased to report that the work has been even more resonant the second time around. A certain poignancy is offered, reading in light of what has not yet been revealed. Eva’s character is easier understood, her tragedy more pointed. And I see also that while this is definitely Shriver’s most accomplished work to date, it is in no way a departure from her usual. In all her books, Shriver has a tremendous ability to make unattractive characters realistic, evocative and impossibly sympathetic, even as you want to punch them all the while. This time I also see that, as with Double Fault and The Post-Birthday World, Kevin is ultimately not about motherhood and murder as much as marriage.

July 12, 2007

Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong

There are some truly lovely elements at work here in Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong’s first novel. Her prose is strong without trying, and the premise is compelling. Place features largely in this narrative, Armstrong creating a powerful sense of atmosphere in her depiction of the Australian rain forest, with the rain, the heat, the endless cycle I quoted in the entry previous. When 14 year-old Allie’s mother Mae apparently drowns in Sydney Harbour, Allie is taken to live with her Aunt Julia, an eccentric tree planter who claims to be giving her land back to the forest. Vines come into the house through her windows, and the rain falls, the floods come. I got the sense of nature as adversary like I’d only read before in Canadian literature. Or rather that nature is not so much adversarial as gigantic so that human drama is minute in comparison. And Armstrong’s story does suffer when she tries to correct this imbalance, stretching her story as broadly as her backdrop. Reaching back decades, spanning geographies, and several personal histories. In such a short novel with multiple points of view alternating between chapters in a subjective third-person narration, we don’t get the chance to delve into one character adequately, let alone to explore the innumerable stories which branch out from each of their separate experiences. So much must be glossed over, details imparted for the sake of themselves, and the story skims its surfaces. There are suggestions that more is going on in the depths, but we’re too busy to be taken there. Insufficiently invested then, the big twist feels facile. Which is disappointing, really, because Armstrong’s writing left me with such a powerful sense of this book, I wished the story itself was better explored.

July 11, 2007

Links of late

Links of late: A Midwest Homecoming is the blog I keep reading aloud to who ever is in earshot, scribed by Ms. Leah with whom I shared a bunkbed in Nottingham for three months nearly five years ago. Absolute hilarity, and bookish goodness too, though I suspect she’ll be changing her title, seeing as she’s just decided to move to Korea.

Also, Oprah Schmoprah— book recommendations by some of the bloggers I like best.

Hands down, the best story in the paper all weekend was Elizabeth Renzetti’s “You’d be a numpty to mess about with the weegies”. She writes, “Before you attack a country, it’s probably best to scan their cultural history. Did the two men who drove a blazing Jeep into Glasgow airport last week know nothing about Scotland’s past? Had they never seen Braveheart? Had they never read Rob Roy? Didn’t they know that it is always a bad idea to mess with an angry Scot, especially one from Glasgow? Ye’ll get a wee skelp and nae doot aboot it.” And it only gets better.

An incredible profile of Chinua Achebe here.

Here for summer reading tips. (Stuart was flattered and surprised to see that his recent reading had qualified him as “The Universal Literary Smartarse”).

July 11, 2007

Wholly visible and reliable

What is it when pathetic fallacy functions in reading? Because at the moment I feel like I’m reading Salt Rain in just the right climate: “the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds, the same water falling again and again for decades.” 80% humidity is probably as close to the Australian rain forest as Toronto ever gets. It’s a funny thing.

So far Salt Rain is a pretty good story, but then you’ve got to feel sorry for any book that has to follow Henry James. Such an unfair pitting, but the narrative voice feels so slight in comparison. Which came to mind last night when I was reading James Wood’s review of Edward P. Jones’ Aunt Hagar’s Children in The London Review of Books. Writes Wood:

These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wholly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practices in A House for Mr. Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr. Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?

And now, post-James, I am craving omniscience. And have set myself a little challenge: the next story I begin will have a narrator who is not a sweet ghost at all.

(Update: Oh, yes, I looked it up. “eschatology [esk‐ă‐tol‐ŏji], the theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world.”)

July 9, 2007

Completely a fool

Reading a classic every month takes up so much reading time and reading effort, but oh the payoff. I adored The Portrait of a Lady, which I hardly remembered from my first reading seven years ago. Oh, the mastery. And that Henrietta Stackpole was redeemed in the end; it pleased me that my younger self was not completely a fool. It was interesting, by the way, to see how self-reflexively I used to read my books– the lines underlined. It was as though I used to read seeking myself (“Yes yes yes! That’s meeee!” my notes appear to shriek. “That’s just how it is!!”). Any line that summed up my experience, my struggles, my pain. I once read a book where a character had the same name as a boy I loved, and I underlined every single instance of that name. How ridiculous. And so we’ve come full circle, I suppose. It seems that my younger self was indeed completely a fool.

Now reading a new novel–Salt Rain (from Australia!) by Sarah Armstrong. And so the alternating rereading begins, and next I will get to We Need to Talk About Kevin.

July 9, 2007

Unsung Love Song

I want to sing a love song: I love the Gardiner Expressway. I decided it was necessary to start singing yesterday whilst browsing through the latest issue of Spacing (which looked quite good by the way). An article, albeit interesting, about the loss of “South Parkdale” to said expressway, and I realized I was so tired of Gardiner-bashing. It takes us nowhere, which, the Gardiner, my friends, decidedly doesn’t.

The facts are these and I know them: that in this day and age, we no longer build expressways right through neighbourhoods. That Jane Jacobs was right. That the expressway network into Toronto is decidedly rubbish, as anyone who’s ever tried to drive out of the city around five o’clock will realize. That the reason the expressway network is so crap is because it was never actually completed (thanks to the efforts of Jacobs et. al), which is a good thing. And yes, also a bad thing, if you happen to drive a car.

So a good thing and a bad thing: such is the story of the Gardiner Expressway. Indeed it’s very bad, and we all know why. It’s crumbly, ugly, creepy underneath in midafternoon let alone the dead of night, cuts the city off from the waterfront, encourages driving when public transport should be an object, it’s noisy, etc. But the flipside is there– the song I want to sing.

As a pedestrian, a cyclist and driver who owns two legs, a bike, but no car, I think I’ve got no bias. And to enter Toronto from driving east on the Gardiner provides one of my favourite views: cityscape against the sky, the CN Tower just off to the south. Whizzing along on an elevated road right out of a retro imagining of the space age. The Gardiner is a relic from a future that was never to be. No highway has ever made me feel more like Judy Jetson. I live in a city and here it is, glimmering in late-afternoon sunshine. A cousin to the CN Tower, built of the same sensibility. When the future didn’t always just mean an apocolypse.

The Gardiner might not have been built with the pedestrian or cyclist in mind, but then I wonder: how fantastic is an expressway that can be crossed this safely? Isn’t the Gardiner an amalgam of pedestrian and driver interests, no matter how skewed? Definitely it stands as a physical barrier between our city and the waterfront, but that barrier is also something of an illusion. The advantages of this sort of road have hardly been taken advantage of. The problem of access to the waterfront is not the Gardiner’s, but rather a confused plan of interests: industrial, port, rail, upscale-residential and parkland, none of which seem to complement each other. In terms of all the problems presenting by the unfortunate lack of planning in this area, the Gardiner seems to me one of our most advantageous.

I guess we could bury it, but wouldn’t years of construction represent a far more formidable barrier to the waterfront? It would also cost too much money, and, oh, never ever happen. And so, I say, the solution is to love the Gardiner instead. Sure we can mourn South Parkdale, and we can miss the history that was lost with the thoughtless planning of yore (through disregard for the past and too much zealotry toward the future), but it’s far more important to learn to live with what we’ve got. For the city to maintain the Gardiner so it continues to serve its optimum purpose. For plans for waterfront development to work with the expressway, rather than ignoring it. And for those with urban interests to stop knocking it; you are boring, and I know all you say already. It would be far more interesting, I think, to look for reasons to love the Gardiner instead. It’s a more sensible strategy, and if you look, the reasons are there.

(Oh yes, and I found that image here).