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.
March 26, 2007
Straight back into the arms of a stranger
“Reading is usually thought of as a solitary act, although a reader in the act of reading is the opposite of self-absorbed. A reader journeys infinitely further from self than can be achieved in travelling across the globe or into space. A reader interrupted can be vague, disoriented; she has been returned abruptly, without benefit of decompression or debriefing, to one specific point in geography and time, from somewhere else altogehter. To admit to having been lost inside a book is not to resort to metaphor but to admit the turth. A reader reads blindly (even books that have been read before hold new directions and dimensions) and so must have confidence in the writer. Reading is like a game of trust in which one person falls straight back into the arms of a stranger whose job it is to catch the faller and hold her fast”. Anne Giardini, “Double Happiness”
March 26, 2007
Gleaned
A wonderful interview with Joan Didion as her book goes on stage. On that difficult first novel. An extract from the new Ian McEwan. Jane Austen gets a makeover— and reaction.
