April 18, 2012

Mini Review: Brief Lives by Anita Brookner

“There is no charm to Anita Brookner”, I wrote last year when I read her novel Look At Me. Like Barbara Pym with just the lonely bits. The book was slow and depressing, and while I appreciated what was good about it, I didn’t like it. I probably would never have picked up an Anita Brookner novel again except that I found this one in a cardboard box on the curb in January. We had a ridiculously mild winter this year, a cardboard box of free books on the curb in January was an even surer sign than lack of snow that something was askew climatologically speaking. But it was the only such box I’d seen in months so I picked through it, took this one home and I read it over the last couple of days.

And that I read it over a couple of days suggests that pace-wise it was better-going than my last Brookner. Though it features the same kind of self-effacing narrator whose unreliability is never affirmed, only subtly suggested (and how does she do that subtlety? The narrator who ever so subtly is not really so subtle). With all tell and very little show, Brookner tells the story of Fay Langdon, a singer who gives up her career when she marries Owen whose business brings her into contact with the magnificent and obnoxious Julia. Fay asserts continually that she and Julia have little in common beyond their husbands’ relationship, that each exists on the other’s periphery, but the careful reader will discern otherwise.Who is the true victim here, and who is the villainess? What are the limits to Fay’s extraordinary self-denial?

Still not much in the way of charm, even better this was really good. A compelling and enjoyable read.

August 17, 2011

I love books too

This evening was very upsetting for Harriet, because her balloon monkey with which she was besotted suddenly popped. We explained that this was part of the balloon’s natural life cycle, then consoled her with a gingerbread man whose arm fell off, and then I ate the arm, and then Harriet went insane, screaming, “I need new arm right now!” We explained that the gingerbread man was a cookie, and that she could eat the rest of him. She was having none of it, and finally her father constructed a prosthetic limb out of a chocolate chip cookie piece. The man’s a genius. Then Harriet forgot about the gingerbread man altogether, went to bed, and now the gingerbread is no more. He was delicious, but his kind will never darken our door again.

This evening Harriet also sat at the table like a superstar, however, and ate her pesto pasta with gusto. “I don’t like beets,” she told us though, and then I banished all talk of “I don’t like—” from our dinner table henceforth, because there is no conversation more boring. The beets were delicious. For afters, we had Barbara Pym with fresh strawberries from the market.

Harriet has become very good at issuing orders. “Stop talking, Mommy!” is a frequent shout, and she clearly doesn’t know me very well, because I’ve never responded well to that kind of guidance. “Stop dancing, Mommy!” was a bit devastating to hear one day last week when I was rocking out to The Kooks, and I fast forwarded to her teenage years and when she finds me totally mortifying. “Clean my diaper!” is another, and my thinking is that if you’re old enough to make a demand like that, you’re probably old enough to use the potty. But alas…

Harriet is currently in love with Curious George, and his curious pipe-smoking ways. If you ask her what her favourite book is, she’ll tell you Knuffle Bunny. We love Mo Willems’ new book Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator. She loves Corduroy too, and Alfie and Annie Rose, and anything else by Shirley Hughes (whose other characters we refer to as “Alfie’s Friends”). She has lately refused to read Sleeping Dragons All Around: “too scary,” she says. She can’t get enough of Murmel Murmel Murmel. And Mabel Murple rains supreme.

If I say, “I love books,” Harriet says, “I love books too.” Which was really exciting for a little while, until I learned (with “spinach”, “tomatoes” and “yak poo”) that Harriet will use that sentence construction to claim a love of anything. But she really does seem to love books, and outside (pronounced “asshat”), and painting, and popsicles, and sandals, and sandcastles, all her friends, dogs and cats, going on the subway, and eating ice cream. She has a hilarious English accent. Her favourite ice cream flavour is cherry, which is weird and we don’t know how she ever discovered that there was such a thing. She has an imaginary friend called Mimi who loves at the museum, and apparently her hair is blue. When we were there last week, Harriet seemed genuinely distraught not to find her there, but we’ll look again. There are dinosaurs in the meantime, and garbage trucks, and fire trucks, and the whole world is amazing.

August 9, 2011

Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Carolyn Black

Until I read The Odious Child, Carolyn Black existed foremost in my mind as being the woman who looks exactly like a girl I worked with at McDonalds when I was seventeen, and then I read the book and discovered she was also brilliant. I’ve met her twice, we have several mutual friends, and I’ve never met anyone as well-talked-about behind her back as Carolyn. For good reason, as I discovered when she was kind enough to conduct the following interview with me over a week last month via email. 

Carolyn Black’s stories have appeared in literary journals across Canada. “Serial Love” was published in the prestigious Journey Prize anthology, and “At World’s End, Falling Off” won Honourable Mention at the National Magazine Awards. The Odious Child (Nightwood Editions, 2011) is her first collection of short stories.

I: I will begin rereading The Odious Child today, and have been looking forward to it. And I want to begin our interview by asking you the question that has been perplexing me since reading your book for the first time– where did you come from? (As a writer, I mean.) None of the standard equation “Author A meets Author X” lazy reviewer staples quite fits with your style. What writers do you regard as your influences?

CB: Writers I enjoyed reading while writing the collection, who seemed to enter below the ribcage, were Kazuo Ishiguro, AM Homes, and Sheila Heti. I read Muriel Spark throughout high school, and later Nathanael West, Eudora Welty, and Angela Carter. Sexuality, satire, and the surreal are the common elements. I read Miranda July and found her hilarious, but then had a reaction against her, so the first story in The Odious Child is almost a parody of her style, a musing about what would happen if I put a Miranda July character into a story about various degradations … would the childlike language be able to support the story? I am still waiting to have my grand passion, when it comes to influence, to tear out my hair at night because I cannot be a particular writer. I’d really like to have this, an influence whom I wanted to marry and kill, but it hasn’t happened yet although there have been some close calls. I remain optimistic, however, for I am a romantic.

I: See, this is why you’re tricky, Carolyn Black. I’ve never read Miranda July (I had a reaction against her too after seeing her movie, and decided I’d had enough Miranda July for one lifetime) so I missed the joke. I understood what you were up to though—your story is generous enough to contain its own “key” so to speak, as your narrator explains the work she does labelling exhibits at a museum:

“I pile the simple words on top of each other—like beads on a string or pennies in a roll of fetishes hoarded in a cabinet [!]—and connect them with a series of coordinating conjunctions.. The logic must surge forward, as it does when a child tells a story.”

Sometimes it’s not so much that logic surges forward when a child tells a story than the listener indulges the child in listening to a story without surges. There is reward to this of course, as there is with the spare prose of Ishiguro, Sheila Heti, and also you. But do you think that a bit of indulgence is also required on the part of a reader in order to appreciate writing like this? In addition to the usual close reading required of any literary fiction? Or do you think that all literary writers need to be indulged a little bit sometimes?

CB: Are your indulgent readers those readers whose patience is being tried in some way but, still, they persevere? I think this is what you mean. It is curious you would group writers as different as Ishiguro and Heti together, sharing a “spareness” that tried the patience. What would that shared spareness be? Inexplicability? Their works do contain dark matter. Even though Ishiguro writes from inside his characters’ heads, their perceptions of the outer world, to which we do not have direct access, are distorted. The author conceals. And Sheila Heti is not, perhaps, merely concealing, but writing a world where a hidden world does not exist. I remember reading The Middle Stories for the first time, trying to figure out what objects represented. What did the rubber doll mean? What did the flyaway curls mean? Why was a story told about a miserable dumpling that had fallen to the floor? What did it all mean? Why was the author not helping us! The writing was a big fuck you to the reader, which surprised me and made me laugh. I am so used to having everything, every motivation, explained while the plot grinds to a halt. For me, now, writing that explains everything requires a good deal of patience, if only because I’ve read so much of it; writing that resists explication seems beautiful and true. (more…)

July 27, 2011

On library romance

In the past two days, it has occurred to me that it’s not uncommon for women to imagine library jobs as gateways to romance. Julia did, and so did I, though neither of us got exactly what we were looking for. Particularly since what I’d been looking for exactly was Love Story‘s Oliver Barrett IV (who, incidentally, didn’t look like Ryan O’Neal, since I’d read the book before seeing the movie. He also didn’t look like Al Gore). I wanted the son of a millionaire, the Harvard jock with a sports car who’d see past my glasses and my Italian working class origins, even though I didn’t have either.

Needless to say, I didn’t meet him, though I did eventually get glasses, which I hoped would help, but they didn’t. Which was not to say that my career was not romantic– plenty of nights perched at the circulation desk, I’d await the arrival through the library’s revolving door of whoever it was I was happened to be in love with at the time. I remember many flirtatatious chats to the steady rhythm of the date-stamp. There really were two incidents during which I was kissing boys in the stacks when I should have been shelving, which is the nerdy girl’s erotic fantasy. And if none of this sounds particularly romantic to you, I assure you that it was, or at least it was romantic as my life ever got around the turn of the century.

You can forgive me for being deluded though. I understand the world through literature, and books tend to present libraries as most romantic places. In Love Story, it’s the Radcliffe Library where Jenny Cavilleri first encounters her unlikely future-husband Oliver Barrett IV (“I’m not talking legality, Preppie, I’m talking ethics. You guys have five million books. We have a few lousy thousand.”) and he invites her out for coffee, purportedly to get his book. In Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report, Miriam meets Janko Prijatelj in the park on her lunch break from the Allan Gardens Library, but it is through the language and structure of library bureaucracy that we become privy to the details of their romance.

And then there’s the erotic novel Overdue For Pleasure, about a simple librarian who discovers her wild side . What about Rose in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? who is molested in the stacks during her library job, and saved by the man who will become her husband? (Though admittedly, this plot line is less than romantic.) AS Byatt’s Possession unfolds in a library, the English kind, which are the very best. And then there’s every Barbara Pym book ever written (except the ones that are tales of village life) in which dusty love is encountered across hushed study tables between individuals the rest of the world has forgotten.

Update: Amy Lavender Harris’ excellent blog post informs me about “Rosemary Aubert’s Harlequin romance Firebrand (1985) in which a City Hall librarian has a torrid affair with the City’s charismatic, handsome, left-leaning mayor. It need not be said, of course, that Aubert’s Mayor does not close any branches.”

June 27, 2011

Wild Libraries I Have Known: Brewster Ladies Library

Hamilton writer (and fellow member of the Barbara Pym Society!) Judy Pollard Smith writes about the Brewster Ladies Library in Brewster, Massachusetts:

I have a Golden Rule about Libraries. They have to carry Barbara Pym, May Sarton and Edith Wharton. If they carry all three I know they’ll have everything else that good libraries should have. And last week at the Brewster Ladies Libary, I counted several of each writer’s novels, neatly shelved and waiting for patrons to tuck them into their wicker baskets.

In 1852, when Brewster was a flourishing Cape village, Misses Sarah Augusta Mayo and Mary Louise Cobb, along with friends, raised enough money to place a shelf of lending books in the home of Captain Mayo on Main Street. Over the years the library has added a garden dripping with rich vegetation, and a fabulous addition. The original house still serves as a hushed reading room with stained glass windows and the original fireplace. If you listen you can hear the rustle of the Misses skirts as they pass by.

There is a cheerful children’s room with aquarium, story times, toys and books. There are author chats, book discussions, holiday family programs (works out well if it rains on your vacation!) and local artist’s displays.

There are 200 Senior Volunteers, four of whom were sitting gluing the pages back into books when I was there. There are cosy wing chairs, free internet and a general feeling of amicability. Denise at the Reference Desk redefines the words “pleasant, helpful, lovely.” And summer visitors can get a card for no charge.

I say, “Up with those two Misses who started their lending shelf in 1852!” They had no idea what shining threads they were weaving into the posterity of this tiny village.

June 9, 2011

The Odious Child by Carolyn Black

I’m very happy that Carolyn Black has agreed to be next up at Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This. First, because it’s been awhile, this mostly because it’s been awhile since I’ve read a book that’s made me curious enough to go search the author out for some illumination. Second, because her book The Odious Child has left me so curious, most of all to discover who Carolyn Black’s influences are. I can’t figure them out. (Although she is thoroughly umPymmish, however, her characters do work in Pym-like occupations I find infinitely fascinating– indexers, librarians, museum cataloguers. Yum). She writes like no one else I’ve ever read, like a writer who’s standing on the shoulders of nobody, her stories’ own foundations are so very solid. There is a fantastical element to the stories, but nothing whimsical. You might call some of the stories’ structures “experimental”, but it’s not the right word because it suggests the author didn’t know her outcomes beforehand and Carolyn Black’s “experiments” are so incredibly, impeccably controlled.

The story that kept me up in the night thinking about it, and wouldn’t get out of my head the following day, was “Baby Mouth”, which is the very best illustration of maternal ambivalence I have ever read. Lionel Shriver also did it well, but she forgot to put the love there, and Carolyn Black doesn’t, with a story that so much echoed my own experience that the similarities made me shiver with every page I turned. About a mother who’s not perfectly suited to the new baby in her care, and how those dark early days come back to her almost a year old when her baby still hasn’t smiled. Wondering, but unable to confess, if a violent moment of abandon could have led to her baby’s problem… (Here is my obligatory clarification: we had no violent abandon at our house, except for the time I punched the wall [but not through it! There is restraint, albeit the wall’s, and not mine, but alas…])

The story is funny, as Black satirizes the absurd industry of modern parenting, but it’s also sad as the mother’s desperation mounts, and the love is tender, and Black’s empathy with her character is remarkable, which is the case through the whole book, even in the stories that are completely out there. And it’s where the solidity comes from, I think, from a writer who is so completely invested in her people and their points of view. Which, you’d think, would go without saying, but I’ve read a lot of books where this is not the case. Particularly not when the author’s people include, for example, a disembodied head…

Anyway, though Carolyn Black’s first book is one of the strongest debuts I’ve ever encountered, I’m not sure this is a book for the short story novice: it demands close attention and several leaps of faith, and these readers might not be ready for it yet. But for those who are already admirers of the form, The Odious Child will prove remarkably rewarding.

June 1, 2011

Mini Review: Look at Me by Anita Brookner

Can you blame me for having kept Anita Brookner’s Look at Me on my shelf for years? Seriously, the cover is hideous. But because it started with B, I got to it finally, and though the start was slow, it grew on me. Which is unsurprising, because the book is so Barbara Pymmish– spinster librarians, their tea rituals and lonely lunches. But only superficially, actually. In her book Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow writes that Brookner “lacks the insularity which makes the English, English” and that her heroines “struggle incessantly, never in balance”. There is no charm to Anita Brookner, but this, of course, is why her books seem more literary. (I am not sure that they actually are, or perhaps what I mean is that Pym’s unliterary-ness is only understood by those unschooled in Pym.)

Look at Me is the story of Frances Hinton, spinster librarian, who feels she’s finally glimpsed what life is, what the world is, when she is befriended by Nick and Alix Fraser (who Jonathan Yardly writes “could just as well be Tom and Daisy [Buchanan]’s British cousins”). The couple, however, plays with her affections, and at the end of the story she’s left with her same lonely life, though I wonder about Frances’ own role in her fate. She has cast herself as an observer, but as a result, we have very little understanding of her character, of how she comes across to others. We must put the pieces together with statements by the malicious Alix Fraser, and it is left to us to decide which character is more unreliable. Frances, who is also beginning a career as a writer, may have more control of her narrative than she appears to.

April 30, 2011

Project Tea Party

The best thing about being married to me is that you get to spend whole mornings up to your elbows in marzipan. Because I was determined that we would make a battenberg cake for our royal wedding tea party. And today we discovered that just how Queen Victoria got so fat– it’s because you have to trim top and sides off the cake before you ice it, and it takes inordinate willpower to not eat the scraps–they were delicious! The marzipan too, even though it was too sticky. I got Stuart to construct the cake once I’d baked it, because I’m terrible at things that require attention and patience. He did a bang-up job, and the cake was delicious (then devoured). We also served these strawberry jam tarts, which were incredible (and easy). And scones shaped like teapots, which is the best thing I have ever imagined. This photo was taken before we took the sausage rolls out of the oven, and they were delicious too, although store-bought. Tea was served in the big, beautiful teapot I received as a wedding gift and that spends most of its time getting dusty on the shelf because I fear breaking it. So it was nice to use it. I also liked an excuse to pull out my teapot table cloth from Honest Ed’s, and I think the Queen probably has one similar.

And then Nathalie Foy took the (battenberg) cake for hostess gifts, bringing me actual perfume scented like a Barbara Pym paperback: “sweet, and a bit musty, a lot like Pym’s world come to think of it.” I read in the papers that the Duchess of Cambridge was wearing an identical scent yesterday.

April 3, 2011

Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope

In her very strange book Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow notes that Barbara Pym doesn’t so much write a lot about tea as that English novelists fixate on tea in general. Solow also writes that one hoping to learn more about the Pymmian universe could do with reading Joanna Trollope, which is the reason I decided to pick up Trollope’s new novel Daughters-in-Law. In which cups of tea are poured throughout, the ceremony never illustrated as quotably as it is by Pym, but how could it be? But yes, still, the tea at all signals perfect Englishness and is absolutely delightful.

Though Trollope writes of Pymmian class concerns, her work lacks the undercurrents that make Barbara Pym so subtly literary. This, however, also means that to read Daughters-in-Law this week was to escape into a world where plot dominates, and it was entirely easy to becoming altogether lost, which was a treat considering the week that I’d had. A double treat, actually, because I’ve had such a problem with commercial fiction since becoming a more demanding reader– is it too much to ask for accessible but not bad? And as I read through Daughters-in-Law, I kept coming up to intersections where lesser writers would turn off onto cliched avenues, but Joanna Trollope missed them every time.

Cliched characters are avoided too (for the most part) by Trollope presenting her story from multiple points of view, and so we see the impulsive, self-centred mother-in-law Rachel  from her own perspective and gain sympathy for her situation. That she has devoted her life to her family, to making her home the centre of her family’s life, a rambling bohemian nest in Suffolk where her husband paints birds in his studio, and she conducts cooking classes in her kitchen. Her position as the family’s centre has never been challenged, even with her two elder sons married, as one has married a woman whose family is abroad, and the other has no family at all. When her youngest marries a girl whose centre is eternally fixed on the self, however, friction is inevitable and explosions ensue.

Trollope writes with assurance of modern life– Pymmian and “old fashioned” aren’t necessarily synonyms, and I don’t think a curate turns up once. The youngest son Luke is forced to kick his cocaine habit before Charlotte will go out with him, however. And though Rachel and her husband Anthony live without a care on their inherited wealth, their children are all slightly constrained by housing prices. Trollope also writes matter-of-factly of one character’s experience with post-partum depression, which is incidental to the plot, life having gone on since the occurrence (as life often tends to do).

She also doesn’t have to rely on adultery for this novel about marriage and family relationships to progress, which is not to say that adultery itself is a cliche, but it usually is as portrayed in fiction. To write an an entire novel so compelling about people who (for the most part) behave quite decently is no small feat. And also, for that matter, Pymmish. It abounds!

March 8, 2011

The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

That it took a bit of time for me to really get into Elizabeth Jenkins’ novel The Tortoise and Hare might be chalked up to my post-vacation stupor, or my struggle to believe in a manly man who is called Evelyn, but regardless, I overcame it, and surely this is a book entirely worthy of its gorgeous cover. Though on second thought, I do wonder if the trouble wasn’t all mine– this is a strange book that takes time to find its story, digresses away from the main point of view in jarring ways, and is rife with unclear pronouns, all of which, when compounded with jet-lag, hindered me a bit. But I got over it, I did, about a third of the way in, and then I was sucked into the story which took me exactly where I knew that it would go, but managed to surprise and horrify me all the same. As though I didn’t want to find out what would happen next, I couldn’t stop reading either, one thing after another in a display of terrifying inevitability.

What strikes me most about the story is how its main players don’t conform to type. Beautiful, elegant Imogen isn’t troubled when her husband Evelyn (!) strikes up a close friendship with their neighbour, Blanche Silcox. Blanche and Evelyn have much in common, but dumpy Blanche in her hideous hats poses no threat to Imogen, which is not to say that all is well in Imogen’s marriage, of course. Her relationship is founded on her being the object of her husband’s affections (which she is unable to properly return in a physical fashion) and has come to seem groundless now that her husband’s affections have waned, and there is the question of their horrible son, Gavin, who has about as much respect for his mother as his father does (which isn’t any). But surely this is the way that marriage goes, though she does allow herself to hope for resurrection of happiness now past.

So the two have grown apart, and there is the question of how much they were ever together, and as the novel progresses, Blanche begins to creep further and further into the relationship (and altogether deliberately, Imogen notes, though Evelyn doesn’t see this) until she finally comes between them. Through being everything that Imogen isn’t, Blanche somehow managed to make herself the unlikely but perfect companion for Evelyn– sensible, adoring, smart, rugged, and capable.

The true power of the novel, however, is that Imogen isn’t simply the opposite of these things. She is an avid reader (and there is some wonderful bookishness here), she takes an interest in her husband’s affairs, she is absolutely capable in her own way, but her confidence and countenance are flatly undermined by Evelyn’s disdain for her intelligence and sensibilities. Silcox’s opposite, however, is shown in Zenobia, a gorgeous, ostentatious, idiotic woman who, Imogen one day suddenly realizes, is the type of woman she herself becoming by continuing (and failing) to be the kind of woman she imagines men like Evelyn want to be in love with– Imogen’s moment of recognition is the novel’s finest moment.

The subtlety here isn’t Pymian, the kind where a character brews a pot of tea and manages to articulate the entire British class system, but rather the subtlety is in the plot, which unfolds with such unruffled swiftness that it’s barely noticeable, and absolutely unstoppable. Agonizing, and perfect, and I would have preferred to see Blanche Silcox hit by a bus in the end, or impaled on a fence rail (because the woman is pure evil, no bones about it), I have no doubt there will be justice somewhere beyond Jenkins’ final page, and I am convinced that it’s really Imogen who comes out of it all in triumph.