April 1, 2007
Chick-Lit/Lit-Fic Showdown
In this post from a couple of weeks back, I took offence at this kind of attempt to blur the chick-lit/lit fic divide. By all means chick lit deserves to thrive, but the divide is important, and essential. All lit is not created alike, said I, and when the plots of two books from different sides of the tracks are so similar, here is a chance to pinpoint what distinguishes a work of chick-lit from one of literary fiction. And I suspected the difference was language primarily, so I read both books to be sure.
The literary book was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, and I’m going to call the other book MVM. You can find the book’s actual title by going back to my previous post, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to identify it and slag it off for being nothing more than what it purports to be– chick-lit. Because the author of MVM makes no attempt to blur the lit divide. She publishes under an exclusively chick-lit imprint after all, and the genre seems to have been good to her.
Upon first glance MVM does bear a resemblance to The Post-Birthday World. In the first book, character G finds herself inhabiting two realities as she is unable to make the choice between marrying her boyfriend in Arizona, and pursuing her career in New York. Somehow she gets both options (through a wish upon a star, I believe), and hilarity ensues. In PBW, at the choice of to kiss another man or not to kiss, Irina’s life splits in two and the reader follows each outcome in alternating chapters. As she is unaware of her dual realities, very little hilarity ensues, and as I wrote in my review post, what we have instead is an examination of intimacy, and the sombre reality that life is generally trying no matter which way you cut it.
I think it is unfair to compare MVM to PBW, but it wasn’t my idea. And yes, my hypothesis that language is the great divide between these two novels is partially true. Partially, because that divide is a veritable grand canyon, but nonetheless. Lionel Shriver’s book is a tad overwritten in places, and I did come away with a list of fourteen words I had to look up in the dictionary afterwards. Some of them were very good: post-prandial. Whereas in MVM the author does not rely so much upon words to emphasize ideas, but rather prefers to repeat phrases, in the manner of “He’s funny. He’s really really funny.” Or preface unbelievable ideas with “Hello?”, as in “The women make brunch while the men watch sports on TV. Hello, stereotype?” Which brings me to the question marks. Character G talks in permanent unspeak. Reading her first person narrative is sort of like eavesdropping upon the soliloquy of a rambling idiot.
There aren’t a lot of metaphors in this book, but here’s one: “I close my eyes, squeezing out the annoyance like that last drop of toothpaste”. G is able to dismiss the challenges of her new life in New York with a simple “Whatever”. She uses a similar ease to deal with the fact she is now inhabiting two alternate universes, consulting wikipedia to learn a bit about “quantum mechanics (whatever the hell that is)”. She learns that there are many theories of alternate universes and therefore her own strange reality might have some precedent. She says, “You can’t rule out something just because it can’t be proven, can you? There are like a million religions and none of them can be proven!”
The PBW is quite unsentimentally full of sex, description and analysis, while MVM tends to gloss over it. I will give you a sex scene verbatim: “Afterward we go to bed and I seduce him immediately. ‘That was fun,’ he says afterward.” Those two “afterwards” and an “immediately” in two sentences give you some sort of an idea of this books pacing, and the consideration allotted to its scenes. We have such devices as “As I sat waiting for my appointment, I thought about my entire life up till now just to get my reader up to speed without having to impart these details subtly”. We learn what G’s future mother-in-law thinks about her because the woman keeps expounding on G’s flaws when G is standing just around the corner. We know the mother-in-law has bad taste because she is partial to orange. We know that characters are surprised when their jaws drop.
For the first two third of this book, I hated it, and I very nearly abandoned it except I thought maybe it got better. It didn’t, really. I did like G’s “psycho roomate” however, who was very funny, but hardly a developed character and her tricks wore thin eventually. I also liked the plot twist as G’s maid-of-honour in one reality starts dating her ex-boyfriend in the other reality, and G’s resentment bubbles into both worlds. However she only deals with this by ignoring her maid-of-honour altogether, which doesn’t exactly make for compelling fiction. Oh, and the end? Hello, spoilers ahead! In the ends G learns that you can have it all and lives happily ever after. And (presumably) loses her best-friend/maid of honour.
This next paragraph would be diatribe on how truly crap is MVM, but I think I’ve made my point. PBW took me four days to read, and inspired me to think about the nature of choices, the possibility of destiny, different kinds of love and fulfillment, and what it means to share a life. I read MVM last evening and it made me depressed that such trite can pass for lit, chick or otherwise. As I said in my previous post, readers should demand better of themselves and their books.
April 1, 2007
Long live Skegness
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is another book I missed the point of as a teenager, and Jeanette Winterson’s celebration inspires me to read it again. Ian McEwan profiled in The Globe, and reviewed (favourably!) in The Guardian. Lionel Shriver is reviewed less favourably, and though I take the reviewer’s points about the troublesome language, I think she misses the nuances of the story. Further, this is a reviewer who disliked Shriver’s last book and seems to be unaware of the six preceding it. I don’t know if that is altogether fair. And though a subscription is required to read this article online, I did enjoy it in my print edition. How Britons don’t appreciate their “crap towns”, and a wee celebration of the British seaside. Long live Skegness.
April 1, 2007
Post-Birthday Republic
What a funny world books are, and what connections are made just by chance of choosing. I’m currently inhabiting a buzzy bliss coming off reading Carol Shields’ The Republic of Love which was just absolutely extraordinary. The buzzy bliss of actually reading it was intoxicating. This was one of the many books I first read as a teenager when I was not altogether thoughtful, and when I encounter them now I’m not quite sure what it was about books I enjoyed then, seeing as I missed the point of everything. Anyway, it was strange to read The Republic of Love on the back of The Post-Birthday World. It never occured to me how compatible they’d be, or how much Carol Shields and Lionel Shriver actually have in common. Think about it: both transplanted Americans, dealing with various labels of “women’s fiction”, and though Shields’ early career did come with some acclaim, both hit gold with their seventh novels. And The Post-Birthday World and The Republic of Love both consider those same quotidian details of intimacy and love. Women’s sexual lives feature prominently; neither author shies away from salty language. (I had forgotten how raunchy Carol Shields could get). Both writers embed their characters in careers and interests which inform the novels with a non-fictional dose of fact. The characters themselves are those “ordinary people” which Barbara Amiel figured in a 1977 review of Shields’ The Box Garden “will be the undoing of contemporary literature” (and thirty years later, I’d say undone looks pretty good). Lionel Shriver is often a difficult writer to know what to do with, but perhaps considering her in this light makes a great deal of sense.
March 30, 2007
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
I get the feeling Lionel Shriver gets off on ruffling feathers. She’s the kind of woman who gives herself a man’s name, runs away to Belfast, writes books that aren’t easy to market, and finds fame with a book about a teenage murderer. In her post-Orange Prize world, she writes controversial editorials about politics, abortion, childlessness, and continues to rankle. To be honest, in 2005 when I first became aware of Shriver, I had mixed feelings about her. But then I read We Need to Talk About Kevin, and my resistance went out the window. Lionel Shriver can really tell a story. She is blunt and doesn’t shy from offense, but I’ll read anything she’s writing, and the odds are that I’ll like it.
We Need to Talk About Kevin was Lionel Shriver’s seventh book. None of its predecessors had been successful; Kevin itself– brutal, disturbing and horrifying– had a hard time finding a publisher. The book was sold partly on sensation, I think, but the story was stunningly told. I remember being interrupted during the final twist, and refusing to put the book down. Stuart read the book right after me, and I could hardly speak to him for fear of spoiling the ending, but I was dying to talk about it. We Need to Talk About Kevin was the most underrated overrated book I’ve ever encountered, and any writer would have a hard time following it up. And it was not as though Shriver was in the habit of writing sensation thriller-esque popular fiction. Though most of her earlier books are out of print, I did get my hands on a copy of her first novel The Female of the Species. A wonderful read, but quite unlike Kevin, and like Shriver herself, it seems, more than a bit odd.
So what was she to do next? I’ve read interviews from a year or two ago with Shriver acknowledging that some readers were bound to be disappointed in her next effort. Topping We Need to Talk About Kevin would be next to impossible, and with her new book The Post-Birthday World one gets the sense that she didn’t even try. Instead Lionel Shriver sat down and wrote another book, a completely different one, but once again a good one.
The Post-Birthday World seems like a startling deviation from Kevin but it’s not so much in comparison with Shriver’s early work. Concerned with women’s lives, emotions, relationships, sexuality. Fixated on sport, but snooker in this case in place of tennis (as in The Female of the Species and Double Fault). And the new book is really not so far from Kevin either– so much of that story was concerned with the dynamic between Kevin’s parents, and The Post-Birthday World examines intimacy in a similar way.
The Post-Birthday World is two books in one. Irina McGovern is an American established in London, a children’s book illustrator, safely ensconced in a relationship with the dependable Lawrence. When she finds herself tempted to kiss their friend Ramsay– a dashing geezer (in the British sense), a snooker champion no less– she’s faced with a choice. And at that instant, Shriver’s narrative breaks into two and we find out what happens if Irina does or if she doesn’t.
The two narratives operate in alternating chapaters, each unaware of the other. And it works; I didn’t find myself rooting for one Irina more than the other, or rushing through one alternate universe to get to the better one. Though the two narratives function separately, they do operate together illustrating the vastly different trajectories a life can take. Certain objects exist in both worlds, certain words are echoed. The two stories demonstrate that there is no such thing as parallel lives, and that life is too complicated for such a concept. Each of Irina’s decisions have different consequences, but not for the reasons you might expect. Life isn’t a chain reaction so much as a mammoth muddle, and Irina has to find her way through the mess, no matter where she’s headed. She illustrates a children’s book with a similar premise, which allows Shriver some explanation of her own intentions. Irina explains, “The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny…whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all others are crap… In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”
My one criticism was Shriver’s overuse of some words that read conspicuously to me. The number of items which were “sumptuous” grew tiresome, as did the many “junctures” at which Irina found herself. I had never heard of “folderol” before, but Irina encountered an awful lot of it.
Where Shriver’s writing excels is with dialogue in particular. Irina’s exchanges with Lawrence and Ramsay are brilliant, quick, and demonstrate the differences in logic between characters. I also enjoyed the fullness of her characters’ world (which seems a mark of her fiction). The cultures of snooker and children’s book publishing are given full consideration, and as Lawrence is a terrorism expert for a think tank, discussions of world events are substantial (I noticed that many of Lawrence’s opinions echo those Shriver has voiced in editorials such as this one). The lives in The Post-Birthday World are examined from all angles, so richly and wholly. This is fiction thoroughly engaged with the world in which it takes place.
This is good fiction: words, symbols, stories, lives.
March 29, 2007
It's so easy to be charming
“I felt like a writer for the first time when I was twenty-nine years old and writing a series of poems. I was very strict with myself for some reason, and each time I finished a poem, I put the question to myself: is this what I really mean? It’s so easy to be charming. It’s a lot harder to say what you really mean.” – Carol Shields, “An Epistolary Interview” with Joan Thomas.
March 28, 2007
You write because
Lately on all sides I’ve been hearing variations on an old adage; this article quotes Robertson Davies: “There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.” And in other articles, in conversations, books etc. lately, I’ve encountered this same pressing melodrama, and it troubles me. I understand F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take on it, to some extent. He said, “You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.” Point taken. But my first reaction to Davies’s assertion is a crisis of confidence. Because if I never wrote anything again, I don’t know that I would go mad or die. The world is far too rich for such an ultimatum. I know that a hole would grow up in my days, and that my fingers would itch for release by pen or keyboard. I know that ideas would continue to appear in my mind, and they’d wait there patiently for cultivation, until they’d wilt and die. If I never wrote again, I would miss it as I would miss never reading again, or never kissing again. But to go out and out mad, or die? I don’t think so. And so I wonder, does this mean that I am therefore not allowed to write at all?
Lately I’ve sat down to write for six or seven hours every day, and I’ve done it because I love it. In my life so far, I’ve found no better way to spend my days. I know I will have to rejoin the real world soon, which makes me appreciate the last two years all the more. It has been a pleasure to devote my days to reading, learning, and writing. Writing makes me thoroughly happy, and if I never have such freedom again, at least I had it once. And I think that’s enough really. No Robertson Davies lightning bolt has ever shot down from the sky and compelled me to deliver my manifesto, but world all around me inspires me to write all the time.
Everywhere I go is whispering with stories, and I write them down because to do so fills me with joy.
March 28, 2007
The Republic of Spring
As a symptom of springtime, I’ve been oddly compulsive lately. I’m not sure if that’s the word I mean, but I saw a picture of a horse recently and now I’m determined to ride one this summer. I’ve never ridden (rode?) a horse in my life. A similar obsession has taken me over regarding Carol Shields. Now I’ve always loved Carol Shields’s work and she wrote the one book I could classify as a definitive favourite, and her short story collection Various Miracles is a masterpiece, I think. I could go on and on here. I intend to reread The Republic of Love soon. And I’m currently reading Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life, which is inspiring, interesting and wonderful. The quote below from Anne Giardini came from her essay (she is Shields’s daughter, and her beautiful piece is about sharing a love of reading with her mother). I think that as a woman who writes, and as a woman in general, there is so much to be learned from the life and work of Carol Shields. Like Laurie Colwin, I think, Shields was a writer who could capture joy.
Further signs of springtime, last night I could be found drinking too much wine on my front porch. We had to go in once the sun was gone because it was too cold then, but before that the world beyond the porch had been swarming with joggers, dog walkers, a skanky couple making out against a fence, neighbours, strangers, cats, cyclists, cars with the windows down, hipsters, nerds, babies and the elderly. It seems like everyone else was just as eager to get outside as we were.
My husband is on holidays this week, and we’re going out for a sushi lunch. Sugoi.
March 27, 2007
Signs of Spring
The number of things I do not know stuns me sometimes– particularly the things I do not know but stare at daily. There was an outcry in England a while back because children were unable to identify tree and bird species, and I realized I was that stupid too. And so we got a bird book recently (how positively uncool is that?) so that I could make up for my orinthological deficiencies. Now there isn’t much variety in terms of birds where we live, though there are pigeons living below the kitchen window, and sparrows living just above. Savannah sparrows, to be specific (I think). And I can identify starlings too now. Though we saw a sparrow-like bird with a red head today, and I’m not sure what planet that one’s from. Anyway, the big news is that yesterday I saw a robin. And so spring has officially sprung.
I also didn’t know a few things about snooker, or Stuart for that matter. That Stuart knows anything about snooker at all, or that it’s pronounced “snewker” and not “snuhcker”. I had no idea. In The Post Birthday World (now reading) one character is a famous snooker player. Apparently its a British institution. And so I asked my own resident British institution– is this for real? Are there actually famous snooker players? And after correcting my pronounciation, he proceeded to list off famous snookerees, and tell me all about the game. Revealed is a whole other side to him, one which has lain dormant all these years.
