August 19, 2007
On commerical fiction
Once again, I won’t be naming names, as I believe no Google search should take a reader to a review by one who was never meant to read that writer in the first place. Howevert I didn’t start off with a bias. I wanted to read the latest novel by JP because if she’s that popular surely the book would be enjoyable in a summery way, and because I’d read this profile in The Guardian and it intrigued me. I am also very interested in what lies within the massive gulf between fictions popular and literary, and as this latest novel addresses much of the same material as Lionel Shriver’s incredible We Need to Talk About Kevin, I thought here we have a fabulous case study.
In the Guardian profile, JP reports, “I tell my publicist not to send me the New York Times, which if they do write about me only do so in order to be snide. But the best revenge is when I end up top of their bestseller list. Which happens all the time.” (Incidentally I found it amusing that she notes that she is more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates.) I don’t want to be snide at all, but the fact was (and this rarely happens to me) I couldn’t read this book. I tried, I failed, I skimmed to the end and found that I’d called it from the first chapter, and that the big twist at the end was laughably ridiculous.
On top of not naming names, I also believe that those who don’t finish books have no business reviewing them (hello amazon), so I won’t. But I will provide some speculation in regards to that gulf between fictions I noted above. It was interesting that my aborted read of JP’s latest was followed by Digging to America by Anne Tyler. Tyler is literary, but unpretentiously so, and so I imagine her work is easily marketed as commercial, which makes for some effective comparison. Craft: that we are told in the first chapter of the JP book that a character is not what she seems, that nobody knows what lies inside her, while Tyler actually shows us this through multiple perspectives. Character development: that JP’s characters are all basically good albeit with tragic flaws, except the absolute baddie who dies anyway so no matter, whereas some of Anne Tyler’s characters are absolutely rotten, and even the good ones are rotten in parts. Finally: that JP’s story is all situation, a “what-if” but the story never goes beyond that. Could this be the crux then, bad popular fiction at its baddest? That life there seems to be lived entirely on the platform of situation, and nobody ever seems to get off it?
August 19, 2007
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s novel Digging to America begins with two American families waiting at the airport for their adopted baby daughters to arrive from Korea. Brad and Bitsy, the Donaldson’s, have come with an entourage of extended family, a shock of camera flashes, balloons, excitement and an inevitable camcorder. The Iranian-American Yasdans, on the other hand, are more subdued: Sami, Ziba, and Sami’s mother Maryam are waiting patiently off to the side. “The girls” arrive, and the two families become acquainted, and entangled throughout the following years due to this unique history they now have in common.
This is how the story begins, but not what this story is about. Which is where the mastery creeps in, I suppose, in good writing. The international adoption is a given, the relationship between two very different families becomes a fact, and the story is about ordinary life with all that in the background. The story is not the situation, but rather how people react and interact accordingly. Tyler explores family friendships, and how different family values seem to so often constitute a threat. How, in a country as new as America and with unconventions such as international adoption and immigration, does a family manage to find or create traditions which suit them? What do blood ties really mean? this explored through scenes of exasperating family gatherings, the families’ fierce love for their daughters, or Bitsy’s father who, before losing his wife to cancer, is momentarily surprised to realize that he could not give her his bone marrow. That they’d shared no blood meant less than nothing to him.
This book was a pleasure for a summer’s day, actually the span within which I read it. Well written, joyfully storied, alternatively happy and sad, though it wasn’t perfect. What are the odds of ever making characters called “Brad and Bitsy” three-dimensional? And yet Tyler goes some lengths towards doing this, with multiple points of view which make clear the distance between a person’s actual self and how they are perceived from the outside. Each of Tyler’s characters come with foibles which render them heartbreakingly real, and thus how they react in their lives reads as true.
August 19, 2007
If you want your local bookstore to prosper…
A word of advice: if you want your local bookstore to prosper, a good tip might be to give me a gift certificate for it. I regard gift certificates as licence to spend twice as much as usual (naturally– one wouldn’t want to look cheap). I was fortunate to receive a gift from Nicholas Hoare recently, and so yesterday we made a journey out of walking there and back. (I like long long walks. I regard them as licence to eat cake en-route.)
When we arrived at the bookstore, Stuart settled down on a couch with a book of interest to wait out my selection process. (Which is to say that Stuart has come a long way since our trip to Paris’s Shakespeare and Company in April 2003 which was the scene of our very first fight.) And I chose very carefully: I am deeply interested in reading Arlington Park and A Celibate Season, but neither was in stock. However I found eight others, and then narrowed the pile to five, and then three.
What won out in the end were Claire Massud’s first novel When the World Was Steady, Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Each of these writers have wowed me with their more recent works, and I am excited to be venturing into their back catalogues for more.
August 16, 2007
The Raw Shark Lady
An interview with Steven Hall up at Baby Got Books. And yes indeed it is funny to be reading Drabble’s The Sea Lady post The Raw Shark Texts. Two books with very little in common except fish and unconventional narrative structure, but how they inform each other just based on their proximity. I am rereading The Sea Lady because I read it too quickly the first time, so excited was I by a Drabble yet unread. I’m paying much more attention this time around, and loving it just as much.
August 15, 2007
In the underwater realm
“…though in the underwater realm nothing seems impossible, and some of the strangest things are true.” –Margaret Drabble in her acknowledgements to The Sea Lady
August 15, 2007
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
I don’t claim to have a sure grasp on Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts. If I did claim such a thing, you’d probably know I was lying, or just stupid, and even the Raw Shark Texts discussion forums make clear that straight answers are not close at hand.
Steven Hall’s first novel exists as a conundrum, a puzzle and a maze. Eric Sanderson wakes up prone on a living room floor, devoid of memory, and the only clue offered out of this predicament is a letter he wrote before, signed “The First Eric Sanderson”. This latest Eric Sanderson therefore must follow subsequent clues and put pieces together to recover his identity. Such a neat little premise is complicated, however, by the fact that Eric’s conciousness has been attacked by a “conceptual shark” and that Eric remains under threat.
A conceptual shark? Constructed of the words and ideas it feeds upon, this shark is the concept of a shark quite similar to the shark you now see in your mind as a consequence of the words and ideas I’ve just given you. And so not entirely farfetched after all. Hall’s novel stands as metaphor for what language and ideas can do, the power of books. Notes Eric Sanderson, “it was possible to create a maze from stacked, written-on paper. Bizarre, unlikely, stupidly time-consuming and dangerous, but, yet, possible.” Which, with his novel, Hall has demonstrated.
Of course in addition to the metaphor, this book’s literal function is essential. The Raw Shark Texts is an adventure. When Eric Sanderson makes the preceding remark, he is in fact crawling through an underworld maze actually constructed of stacked telephone directories. Under threat from his conceptual shark and with the clues from the First Eric Sanderson, Eric has descended into this world of “unspace”, in which he can be relatively safe from his predator. He teams up with a girl called Scout who has her own motives for involvement, and together they’re looking for a way to defeat the shark and save themselves.
There is something, albeit undeniably clever, of the “look ma, no hands!” variety about this book. Steven Hall seems intent on demonstrating the innumerable powers a book is capable of, employing typefaces, codes, images, and even a flipbook. In lesser hands this postmodern extravaganza might have been rendered quite hollow, narratively speaking. But no, Hall is not so cheap. The best trick of all is his story: Eric Sanderson’s entire plight is the result of errors made in a fury of loss after the death of his girlfriend Clio. And that Hall’s conceptual people, his conceptual love, that this stack of written-on paper so managed to break my heart and have me longing for appropriate resolution is a testament to Steven Hall’s skill as a writer. It serves to underline his entire thesis: that a book really is a most powerful thing.
August 14, 2007
Counting the steps to the door of your heart
There was an instant during “Distant Sun” where the whole world was perfect, and we were swaying, singing. The lullaby that is “Don’t Dream It’s Over”. Their new songs sounded just as good as the ones I know best, and I had to shut my eyes a few times. Crowded House was amazing, and I don’t think I ever appreciated what a live show could truly be. What an absolutely beautiful night.
Coming up is my review of The Raw Shark Texts, and it’s fortunate that I’ve had some time to attempt to get my head around it. Also a review of The Big Book of The Berenstain Bears. Find out what it is to be continuing the aquatic theme with a reread of Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady.
Short stories here in The Guardian. As one who gave up on The Bible at the part where Noah’s son finds him drunk and naked, the arguments for and against its readability hold interest for me. “Firstly, there’s the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you’d think that He would be able to make it more interesting”. Jeffrey Eugenides on Middlesex in its second life.
“Do you climb into space?”
August 13, 2007
All the melons I have taken for granted
The garden education continues, and this afternoon my world view shifted. We had harvested our first cantaloupe, minutes off the vine we were each eating half at the table, and it dawned on me how much work this little melon had done to come to life. Not to mention the work we’d done to further that life, and I considered the abundance of energy involved, and here we were about to devour it in mere minutes. I thought of all of the melons before that I’ve taken for granted, and how strange it is that we rarely think hard about what we eat. And the melon even tasted different after that. I think I’ll think harder now. And the fruit was lovely, delicious, and absolutely precious.
August 13, 2007
Piedust Memories
I’ve been too busy having fun lately to take pictures, and so I bring you one of my favourite shots from our trip to England in June.
This weekend has stretched long with the fun. Someone gave Stuart tickets to We Will Rock You for Thursday eve, and fun was had. Friday evening we met up with Natalie Bay for an authentic Japanese meal at Ematei, followed by authentic ice cream from Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe. Saturday evening was a housewarming at the gorgeous new abode of a certain Ms. Kim Dean (special guest appearence by E. Smith). And then today, a whole day with the future-Smiths. We went out for Chinese food, and then came back to ours for a game of Scrabble on the porch while the rain poured down. And I won! Word I longed to be a word was “piedust”. Best actual word of the game was “zygote”, and Carolyn and Steve didn’t get too angry when Stuart and I cheated (I handed him a tile in the bowl of popcorn). They stayed over until the sun came out, and then dinner was tea and freshly baked scones and jam, which would have been perfect had I not added too much salt. Everyone was very understanding though, and copious dollops of jam rendered them absolutely edible.
Now reading The Raw Shark Texts. I think I will be up quite late tonight reading to get to the very end.
Tomorrow night we’re going to see Crowded House!
August 9, 2007
Art arrived today
Today I received a print of my favourite painting ever: Fisher Price Mother Russia by Kirsten Johnson. Nothing has ever been more brilliant. And I am looking very forward to it hanging it up, having it adorn my walls forevermore.
