April 4, 2007
Sophisticate
Along the lines of childishness, I continue with my “boys adventure story” Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. I am reading it based upon Hilary Mantel’s recommendation in her top ten favourite books listed in the back of Giving Up the Ghost, and I do like those lists. They’re recommendations from individuals I trust and respect, and I am glad to have my horizons thus broadened.
And so Kidnapped. This wonderful article from November 2005 quotes Mantel on how the book was formative for her as a reader and a writer. She identified with David Balfour as an outsider in a wild country. A great quote: “She dislikes it being said that she “escaped” into books. “When you read a novel or a play, it enlarges your own psychological repertoire. You see more choices that can be made. So it seems to me that by reading when you’re young, you sophisticate yourself.”
April 4, 2007
As it is
3 undergradate essays marked, 72 to go. I expect to spend the next two weeks delirious and snacking. In Pickle Me This update news, I’ve elected to return in May to my summer job from last year, because I decided I would have a better summer working and monied than one spent idle and poor. And I’ll surely have lots of chance to be idle and poor once summer’s over. The only bad thing about this is that I am turning 28 this summer, and getting really old to have a “summer job”. This is, however, the last summer job I’ll ever have. Which is something I’ve said so many times before. Oh adulthood, how you continue to elude me…
April 2, 2007
Now reading
Now reading: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, my April classic. Next up is Certainty by Madeleine Thien. And I’m looking forward to hearing Jacqueline Baker and Lionel Shriver read at Harbourfront on Wednesday.
April 2, 2007
Carry my desk
Thesis=Submitted. Which feels much less exciting than it is. I have this evening for a breath of fresh air before tomorrow when 75 undergraduate papers to-be-marked enter my life, and then after that I have to find a job. But in the meantime, this evening at least.
I am so grateful to my friends Jennie, Britt and Bronwyn, as well as my husb Stuart, each of whom read through the whole thing during the last two weeks and alerted me to copy errors so numerous I am ashamed of myself. They are acknowledged in my acknowledgments, of course. And the book itself is dedicated to Stuart, naturally, reading, “This story is for Stuart, who carried my desk home on his bicycle.” True story.
Once upon a time Stuart and I lived in a one-roomed box. This was not the first place we’d lived together, of course. Previously we’d spent six months sleeping on an inflatable mattress in a ramshackle house with holes in the roof. The box felt like luxury in comparison, and we were very happy there. Sunshine came through that window absolutely beautifully. And one day I set my sights upon a desk. A desk which we had no room for, but I needed a space to sit and write all the same. Such space doesn’t come easy when you live in a box. And so Stuart agreed, and we bought a little desk at Muji. A little desk that weighed a tonne, and we didn’t have a car. We lived about a half hour walk from the city centre, and my clever husband devised a method wherin the desk was balanced on the seat and handlebars of his bike, which worked perfectly unless we weren’t going straight. But it was certainly better than I could have done, and I admired his might all the home, walking my pink bicycle beside his blue one. And the desk just fit, under the ladder up to our sleeping loft. And it was there where I learned how to sit down and write, which is 75% of everything. And it was then when I realized that here was a boy who would do anything to support me, and that I was tremendously lucky.
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.
