Magic and Dread

Time for Yourself

2012-01-30T13:24:00.005-05:00

A month into the new year, and I’m doing pretty well with a few of my resolutions. Although it took me a couple of weeks to establish which day of the week I would be posting here, I have managed five for five, one blog post per week. Sometimes I'm finding it difficult to figure out what to post about when I’m not itching to write about a particular book (any suggestions or ideas about what else you’d like to see on the blog?), but nonetheless I’ve made it through the first month. So far weekly blogging has proven an achievable goal.

I’ve wavered a bit more with some of my other resolutions. Of these, the one I’m most concerned about is finding—or rather making—time to work on my fiction. Of course no one expects (or should expect) to be perfect right out of the gate, but this is something I’m really going to work on. I’m re-resolving, here and now, to give myself the time I need to write.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I recently watched In Time, a terrible movie where the premise is that time is money, literally. You pay for coffee, cars, or rent with minutes, days, or years of your life. If your time runs out from paying the bills, you drop dead. The only reason I bring this up—I’m certainly not encouraging anyone to waste two hours of their life watching this movie—is that it underlines what we already know to be true: time is precious. (And also, though not totally relevant to my point, distribution of wealth—and therefore time—is grossly unequal in our society.)

Giving yourself the time to write (or draw, or make music, or whatever your passion may be) is a form of investment. It’s not time anybody else is going to make for you. In fact, they’ll probably try to take it from you. As much as you want to help out, it’s important to realize when you’re giving all your time away and not saving any for yourself.

I volunteer a fair amount, and, in some ways, this is an investment too. It’s something I do to develop my skills and add lines to my résumé. And sometimes it’s a lot of fun. But I’m also trying to get better at saying no, at safeguarding some time for myself. It’s easier to make something a priority when there’s someone else holding you accountable. The trick is to give the same weight—or more—to your own projects as you do to everyone else’s.

It’s something I’ve read and heard again and again, but I’m really trying internalize it: If you want to be a writer, you need to treat writing like a job you have to punch in for. You have to show up, every day, and hold yourself accountable for what you do on the job. Writing circles and things like NaNoWriMo are helpful because they add a level of external motivation (and pressure) to your own self-discipline. I find that even talking—or writing—about writing makes me feel more committed to doing the work, like I have to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

How do you motivate yourself to do work that no one else is counting on you to do? And how do you make the time to do that work?

Digging for As I Lay Dying in Salvage the Bones

2012-01-23T11:13:00.007-05:00

Last week, I wrote briefly about As I Lay Dying—and I’m not quite ready to leave it behind yet. Reading Faulkner’s classic about a month after I finished Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the two novels. The similarities I noted between Faulkner’s Wild Palms and Salvage pales in comparison to the intertextual play I sensed when I picked up As I Lay Dying. Ward seems to be reworking this classic, giving voice to perspectives Faulkner marginalizes.

Ward’s narrator introduces Faulkner, and As I Lay Dying in particular, when she explains how she got an A on her paper about why Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish. This passing detail cues us in to read Esch’s situation—growing up without a mother—in the context of Vardaman’s.

After this signal, it’s hard not to read Skeetah as an incarnation of the brooding and defiant brother, Jewel, in As I Lay Dying. While Jewel seems to care more about his horse than his family members, it’s a pit bull that Skeetah loves with endless devotion. As was the case with Jewel, Skeetah bought China with his own money, and, like Jewel, he must defend his pet (a word that doesn’t quite fit in either case) against his father’s threats to sell it. And yet, even though they each care so deeply for a horse and a pit bull, respectively, they both make the difficult sacrifice when their human family depends on it.

Now, perhaps this is just a function of where I come from, but never having known anyone named Skeet, I suspect that even Esch’s brother’s name, shared with the sleazy drug store clerk in As I Lay Dying, is a hint to think of Faulkner’s novel. Unlike the minor character who coerces Dewey Dell into having sex with him, the Skeetah of Salvage the Bones is, overall, a sympathetic, albeit troubling, character. His capacity for love makes him outshine even the complex and reticent Jewel.

The similarities between these brothers are undeniable, but what makes thinking about Salvage the Bones in comparison to As I Lay Dying truly compelling is Ward's narrator, Esch. Poor, motherless, and pregnant, Esch definitely resembles Dewey Dell, Anse and Addie Bundren’s daughter, but Ward transforms the character into someone tough and beautiful.

The few chapters Dewey Dell narrates in As I Lay Dying are almost incoherent and might remain practically indecipherable were there not male narrators to tell us what happens to her. In contrast, Esch gets to tell her whole story in Salvage the Bones and does so quite eloquently. Whereas Dewey Dell is only ever an object of desire, giving in first to Lafe and then to the drug store clerk, Esch desires. Though her desire is certainly ill-placed, her lust seems somehow empowering. Many of her romps resemble Dewey Dell’s (in the dirt, in a bathroom stall), but she still demands that her lover looks at her and sees her, however painful that ends up being.

Again, if you haven’t read Salvage the Bones, I urge you to pick it up. It’s a book that I’m sure will stay with me for a long time. As always, I welcome your thoughts and any recommendations as to what I should read next. Have a great week!

A Shape to Fill a Lack: Quick Thoughts on As I Lay Dying

2012-01-18T10:11:00.006-05:00

For those who haven’t read it before, or read it too long ago to remember, As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s self-proclaimed tour-de-force about the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s ill-fated quest to bury her in Jefferson.

“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” laments Addie’s husband Anse as the he and his five (well, technically four) children face calamity after calamity. While hauling Addie’s coffin across the county, they attract grief and gossip, injury and incarceration. After one son breaks a bone, another burns down a barn. At the end of it all, her corpse much the worse for wear, Addie gets buried with her parents in Jefferson, and her husband picks up a new wife and set of teeth.

I don’t hesitate to offer this brief summary, because it really gives away nothing. The pleasure in reading As I Lay Dying comes not from what happens but from how it is told. Each chapter is narrated by a different character with his or her own style. Some characters deliver something like a straightforward, realist narration, while others veer more to stream-of-consciousness, and some (particularly Anse’s youngest son, Vardaman, and his daughter, Dewey Dell) are almost incoherent.

The most interesting chapter was the one narrated by Addie Bundren herself. Speaking either from her coffin or from some point in the past, Addie tells the story of her adult life, from Anse’s odd and unromantic proposal to her affair with Reverend Whitfield. But what makes this chapter so interesting is Addie’s understanding of the relationship between language and reality. She sees words like love and pride and fear as “a shape to fill a lack.” While her neighbour, Cora Tull, takes offense at her failure to play her proper social role and speak the conventional morality, it’s actually Addie’s disregard for the way Cora pays lip service that makes her the more admirable character. “People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too,” Addie tells us, dismissing Cora’s empty prayers. Addie’s seven-page chapter, appearing a little more than half-way through the novel, is it’s own self-contained story, deep and thrilling.

I have much more to say about the novel, so I plan to come back to it next week when I consider it alongside Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. That being said, I'd love to hear what others think about this bold little novel—even if you hate it. Leave a comment and let us know!

Ironing out the Kinks: Reflections on my Writing Process

2012-01-10T12:18:00.004-05:00

For a while now, I've been writing a novel, or, rather, rewriting it. While working on my first draft, I approached the ending and froze. Unable to keep pushing forward, I doubled back and have spent the last few months rewriting the first two-thirds of the book.

I've had a lot of help from friends and family who have read isolated chapters and given me invaluable feedback. They have also been their to listen when I needed to talk about my characters or work out specific problems of plot.

Going back, I'm learning a lot. Sometimes I cringe at sentences that I wrote months ago, but I realize that it was important to write them in order to discover my characters and clarify the story that I want to tell. The words I delete are as much a part of the process as the ones I keep.

Some of my edits have been pretty standard: trimming the fat, reorganizing scenes to tighten structure, sharpening dialogue. But I've also been making major changes as to what actually happens in the story.

You see, I tend, unfortunately, to wing it when I write, discovering the plot as I go. I've never been one to use an outline, though I've always believed that my life would be so much easier if I did. The result of my improvisational approach is that I've taken a lot of wrong turns. Growing bored with the scenes I'm writing, I throw a wrench into the works, contriving some twist that only brings me further from the story I want to tell.

Now I'm doing the work of untwisting. As much as I love a complex, knotty plot as a reader, I have to admit that the complications I was throwing into my novel weren't organic to the story and did nothing to make it more compelling. Now that I've spent more time with my characters and have a clearer idea of what they're going through, I am trying to proceed on the faith that their story is interesting enough without imposing complications from outside. I'm actually working on an after-the-fact outline that I hope will help me move forward with a more clear sense of purpose. Maybe now I can write my ending.

Do you use an outline when you write? What other prewriting tools or exercises do you find helpful?

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T11:51:00.003-05:00

I'm feeling excited about 2012. I've got a lengthy list of resolutions—several that I've made before, with a few new ones for good measure—and I think that my efforts to follow through on these will make me a slightly better, perhaps more successful, version of me. Plus, I just sense that good things are coming my way. And perhaps now's a good time for me to knock on wood.

Most of the people I've spoken to over the past couple of days look a bit incredulous when I bring up the New Year's resolution thing. I'm not sure if it's that they scoff at the idea of self-improvement, generally, or whether they're turned off by the particular idea of the New Year's resolution, which they see as a) forced on them by our society and b) doomed at the outset to fail. As someone who makes resolutions on a pretty regular basis—I see most anything as an occasion to turn over a new leaf, be it a move or a haircut—I don't understand the negative reaction I get as soon as I ask whether someone's made a New Year's resolution.

Maybe the problem is that, as one blogger points out, the typical resolutions are about with diet and finance. I'd probably be resentful, too, if I thought I had to make myself work out more (read, at all) or deprive myself. But I don't think that New Year's resolutions have to be like that at all. Lately I've enjoyed reading book bloggers that I follow discussing reading resolutions.

I think my biggest resolution for 2012 will be to blog every week. I really enjoy having this space to write, and I want my blog to grow, so I know that I have to be here on a regular basis.

Now, I don't think I can pull this off if I stick to book reviews, as I have been. I tried it once, and I just can't read and write about a book a week, so this will mean the scope of my blog will change a bit. Any suggestions as to what else you might like to see here?

Thanks, and best of luck with your resolutions!

Poetry with Pit Bulls: On Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2011-12-05T09:18:00.013-05:00

I had already started William Faulkner's Wild Palms, when I picked up a copy of Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award–winning novel, Salvage the Bones. My first thought was that I might do a comparative analysis of the two because I was finding all sorts of interesting connections: Salvage takes place in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina while part of Wild Palms is set during "the great flood of 1927"; both novels feature pregnant women who are compared to animals (in Wild Palms, Charlotte is catlike, whereas Ward's narrator, Esch, sees herself in her brother's pit bull, China). On top of this, Esch tells us she got an A for a paper she wrote on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. "I answered the hardest question right," she says: "Why does the young boy think his mother is a fish?"

And perhaps there is something in these connections, but shortly after I started reading Salvage the Bones, I had to put Wild Palms aside completely. Though I consider myself quite a Faulknerd (a term Nathan came up with a few weeks ago), Ward's exquisite novel swept me away and pulled me deep into its narrative with absolute force. A highly literary novel, making self-conscious allusions Faulkner and Greek myth, Salvage the Bones is also completely raw and gripping, with startlingly visceral scenes and descriptions.

Though narrated by the the fifteen-year-old Esch, who discovers early on that she is pregnant, the novel has as much (or more) to do with her brother Skeetah and his dog China. At the beginning of the novel, China gives birth to a litter of puppies, and it is clear from the start that Esch interprets her own situation—and motherhood in general—with reference to China. The fact that China is a pit bull, capable of terrifying viciousness and power, says a lot about Esch's own experience and understanding. Her mother died in childbirth with her younger brother, Junior, and this loss makes her recognize early on how fragile life is and colours how she thinks about motherhood.

Additionally, Skeetah's relationship with China seems to carry dark echoes of his father's relationship to his mother. That he loves his dog seems unquestionable. He risks life and limb to get medicine when he fears she has parvo; he spends the last of his family's money on dog food; he tends to her wounds before his own. And yet, his demand that she obey him, his need to be her master, evokes the idea of domestic abuse. In many ways, Skeetah seems to be the novel's hero, but Ward makes any identification or sympathy with him deeply complicated and troubling. Beneath anger, violence, and desperation runs a powerful current of love, making the novel far too complex for the question of heroes and villains. (That being said, let me add that I believe dog fighting is deeply wrong and unquestionably cruel. I don't mean to imply that this is in any way a moral grey area.)

Not only does Salvage the Bones tell a very powerful story, but Ward's style is also very rich, and her writing makes her characters' world palpable. One technique I noticed and found very effective was how she ties images together with a type of simile that, rather than quickly evoking an image from outside the text, points back to moments in her characters' pasts, filling in more and more details about their existence. For (a rather gross) example, Esch says China's placenta looks "like the inside of the last pig that Daddy had, that he slaughtered and emptied into a tub before making us clean the intestines for chitterlings: it stank so bad Randall threw up." One image or moment unlocks another, not only enriching the description, but also revealing important information about the characters and the life they lead. Ward does this throughout the novel, showing how every moment relates to and evokes another, how even when "what China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had...Junior," the comparison asserts itself and Esch is suddenly describing how her mother gave birth.

Salvage the Bones is a very brilliant novel, well-deserving of the recognition it has received. Ward renders her characters with the utmost compassion and intelligence, and I think this just might be the best novel I read in 2011.

The Inner World and the Outer: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

2011-11-20T20:12:00.008-05:00

Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was only 23. The novel was in published in 1940 when World War Two was underway in Europe, and in the US a decade of the Great Depression had exhausted the American people. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter McCullers is addressing her specific moment in history, and yet, the book remains powerful and relevant in 2011. Unfortunately, the oppression, inequality, and injustice experienced by McCullers' characters—problems being protested today by the Occupy movement—are still very much with us.

The novel is made up of the separate stories of five characters who cross paths in an unnamed southern town. There is Mick Kelly, a thirteen-year-old girl who loves classical music (presumably a version of McCullers herself); Biff Brannon, the owner of the local diner; Dr. Copeland, a black doctor and community leader; Jake Blount, a drunk and a so-called labour agitator; and Mr. Singer, a deaf mute who moves to town when his best friend is put in an asylum.

The first four all rely on Mr. Singer as a sounding board. He becomes the receptacle for all their passions, fears, aspirations, and aggravations. Because they cannot understand sign language, he is a cipher to them; whatever they want or need him to be, he is. The rich believe he is rich. The poor think he is poor also. The young Jewish boy is certain he is Jewish, while Mick is certain he is not.

Everyone loves and needs Mr. Singer because they have no one else to confess their truest selves to, and Mr. Singer mutely absorbs everything they pour on him. And while this may seem unfair for Mr. Singer, he does exactly what they do. He yearns for his old friend, Antonapoulos, whom he used to talk to incessantly, but it becomes clear that he doesn't miss the real man so much as he misses an idea in his head and having a person who could read his signs. He even begins to write Antonapoulos letters even though he knows he is illiterate. McCullers shows that everyone has this need to speak out what is inside of them, but most listeners are too concerned with their own inner lives be the mute sounding board we crave.

While McCullers is deeply concerned with the inner lives of her characters and the inescapable loneliness of human existence, she is also interested in her historical moment and the material realities her characters must face. Even at thirteen and fourteen, Mick is acutely aware of her family's financial situation, and McCullers shows how material circumstances affect one's ability to even have an inner life. When characters have to concentrate all their energies on day-to-day survival, there is no time to consider art, or even justice and freedom.

Dr. Copeland and Jake Blount are the most politically-minded characters in the novel. As a black doctor in the South in 1939, Dr. Copeland has his work cut out for him hoping to fight racial inequality and better the position of his fellow African Americans. A poor white man, Blount agrees with many of Copeland's arguments about social inequality, but he dismisses the issue of race and sees the problem as purely class-based, devoting his energies to decrying wage-slavery. Though he often undermines himself by being drunk and quick to anger, his arguments are simple and persuasive. "We live in the richest country in the world," he says:

"There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle—the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporation worth billions of dollars—and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat. ....At least one third of all Southerners live and die no better off than the lowest peasant in any European Fascist state."

I found impossible to read Blunt's and Copeland's arguments without thinking about the Occupy movement. Even if the specific forms and degrees of social inequality have changed, McCullers' criticism of the corruption of American (and Canadian) democracy still needs to be made.

It took me awhile to get into The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but it ultimately gripped me, and hard. McCullers' simple style and powerfully-drawn characters, the common but compelling problems they face, made the novel one that will stay with me for a very long time.

Shimmering Notes: Thoughts on Esi Endugyan's Half-Blood Blues

2011-11-09T08:22:00.007-05:00

On Tuesday night Esi Endugyan took home the Giller Prize for her novel, Half Blood Blues. The book was also shortlisted for the Booker, the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Governor General's Award.

I was surprised and delighted to wake up and read about her big win Wednesday morning. I was also kicking myself for not having posted about her novel when I read it. I've procrastinated about writing on it for so long that last night I had decided to forget about it and leave the work in the hands of much better reviewers. Her win a few nights ago, however, makes me eager to put in my two cents.

Jumping between the 1990s to the 1930s, from Paris to Baltimore to Berlin, Half Blood Blues tells the story of a group of jazz musicians, the Hot Time Swingers, trying to cut a record in the months leading up to World War Two and of the fates that befall them. The past meets the present more than half a century later when two of the band's members, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, travel back to Berlin as old men to watch a documentary about their old friend and fellow musician, Hieronymous Falk, who was captured in Paris and put in a concentration camp.

The novel is narrated by Sid Griffiths, the band's bassist. He is a deeply flawed character, consumed by petty jealousies, insecurities, and deep guilt, but his old jazz player's voice allows Endugyan to get away with the abundant similies and images that paint a vivid world but might sound ridiculous coming from a third person narrator.

Endugyan's writing sings when she describes her character's music, capturing Sid's faltering bass line or Hiero's virtousic trumpet. In one scene, Sid is so awed to hear his friend jam with Louis Armstrong that, for once, his jealousy gives way to pure appreciation: “It was the sound of the gods, all that brass. … Hiero thrown out note after shimmering note, like sunshine sliding all over the surface of a lake, Armstrong was the water, all depth and thought, not one wasted note. Hiero, he just reaching out, seeking the shore.” Somehow, these scenes of music dole out more drama and intensity than do a brutal encounter with the Nazis or a tense prewar border crossing.

That being said, Endugyan's exploration of the experience of black and "half-blood" musicians in Nazi Germany and Paris is as fascinating as it is upsetting. She presents a dimension of the Nazi occupation that is quite different from what I've encountered in other Holocaust novels, though still horrifying.

But for all the evil that the Hot Time Swingers face and for all Sid's own deplorable actions, the novel is ultimately a novel of redemption. Despite its serious subject matter, it left me feeling invigorated and thankful to be in a world of so much art.

As usual, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the novel or on Endugyan's? Who must I read of the other nominees?

Unexpected Connections: Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Tom McCarthy's Remainder

2011-10-15T17:43:00.015-04:00

About a month ago, in the fabulous online magazine, The Millions, Jim Santel posted an article about The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. Santel offered a glowing analysis of the book, but what most piqued my interest was his reference to the fact that in 1962, Percy's novel won the National Book Award over Catch 22 and Revolutionary Road, two important books I've read and loved. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to start looking for a copy of The Moviegoer.

Percy's novel appealed to me for several reasons. For one, I've been quite interested in Southern literature since taking a wonderful class on "Southern Fiction and Racial Masquerade" during my master's. Set in New Orleans with a protagonist highly self-aware of the ways his own identity as a white Southern male is constructed, The Moviegoer would offer a lot of fodder to anyone approaching it from a gender studies or critical race theory perspective. In some ways, it reminded me of John Barth's The Floating Opera (1956), albeit with the postmodern playfulness dialed way back. The Moviegoer is certainly a product of its time and place, and the narrator's easy racial generalizations or his landlady's more vicious racism are quite troubling. And yet, they are integral to the story. Moments like when the narrator complains about a black servant who talks politics to him or thinks a young "romantic" on the train is eying him "to make sure [he is] not a homosexual" illuminate a lot about the narrator, his hangups, and the society he so easily navigates.

While raising some of the issues prevalent in Southern fiction, The Moviegoer also brought to mind another, quite different and more recent novel: Remainder (2005), by Tom McCarthy. I read Remainder about a month ago (though I didn't write about it here), and, while the two novels may not seem alike, McCarthy's novel kept coming back to me as I read The Moviegoer.

What links the two novels in my mind is their protagonists' strange searches for authenticity and where these characters locate "real" experience. In fact, the narrators of both books associate movies with some kind of more-real reality. For McCarthy's nameless narrator, it is seeing Robert DeNiro acting in Mean Streets that makes him consider all of his movements unnatural in comparison. Binx Bolling, the narrator of The Moviegoer, finds himself attracted to movie stars because, he says, "an aura of heightened reality" moves with them.

Both narrators also fixate on the past. They both exhibit a sort of repetition compulsion, perhaps linked to a past trauma—for Binx, the Korean War; for McCarthy's protagonist, the accident that resulted in his 8.5 million dollar settlement. McCarthy's narrator puts his millions toward recreating memories: moments and places where his actions felt somehow more natural and real than they do now. Employing hordes of actors, stage managers, and construction crews he repeats the same scene over and over again, getting high on the feeling of what Binx would call "a successful repetition":

What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

Binx's definition of repetition seems to capture exactly what McCarthy's narrator is after with his costly and intricate re-enactments—right down to that word.

Ultimately, both characters seem to grapple with a suffocating despair, unable to find meaning in their lives or connect with other human beings. Well, McCarthy's character may just be a sociopath. He seems truly "posthuman," so concerned with controlling information that he would not hesitate to sacrifice human lives. At least Binx has his cousin, Kate, to share the despair with.

Perhaps it's because I'm a bit stuck in the past myself, but I enjoyed reading The Moviegoer much more than I did Remainder. Despite Binx's despair and the fact that Percy offers no particularly uplifting conclusion to his so-called search, The Moviegoer appealed to me because it was about the human condition. In comparison, Remainder seemed cold, concerned more with information theory than human experience. That being said, it was, of course, brilliant and funny—just ask Zadie Smith. At any rate, I'm glad I happened to read these novels so close together. I think I got a lot more out of them and read them both more deeply than if I had only picked up one or the other.

In the Frozen Ocean: Lisa Moore's February

2011-10-06T12:54:00.007-04:00

I just finished reading a beautifully-written, expertly-crafted book that didn't affect me at all. I can't criticize the writer--she deserves every accolade she gets--and I recognize that the novel itself is a near-perfect piece of art; it just didn't speak to me, and I'm not really sure how to write about a book like that.

The book in question is Lisa Moore's February. It is the story of Helen O'Mara, a woman whose husband died aboard an oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, when it sank in February of 1982. Throughout the novel, Helen, now a grandmother, returns to that February again and again as she grapples with her loneliness and her inability to let go.

While Helen comes to terms with the past and struggles to reach out to find companionship for the future, her son, John, who was eight when his father died and has long resisted becoming a father himself, learns that the woman he had a week-long fling with in Reykjavik is pregnant. Jane is determined to have the baby, and without her family's support, she realizes she will need John's help. Moore deftly weaves their story in with Helen's as each character tries to find a way to move forward.

As I said, there's no doubt that Moore is a master of the craft. She is brilliant at capturing the details of the world her characters move through, how eucalyptus makes John think of Vicks VapoRub and "the plock when the metal lid was unscrewed" or how a homeless man "speaks in a kind of stage whisper, his eyes shooting back and forth." With each image she puts together a palpable world. Her settings are vivid, and her characters are complex, fully-developed, multidimensional. Particularly impressive is how she marries physical and emotional worlds in Helen's imaginings of the sinking oil rig.

Moore's form is flawless. The way the narrative keeps coming back to the sinking oil rig, the novel's traumatic centre, the way chapters move seamlessly between past and present, the external world and the internal, how each chapter section ends on the perfect image or phrase: these elements combine to make a perfectly-structured story.

As a writer, I particularly envy Moore's conclusions. Figuring out how a piece of writing should end is something that I have always struggled with. In February, every chapter section ends with something resonant or poignant, like when John stands looking at the Empire State Building thinking about how foolish his parents were to have four children:

His parents had believed what people said about risk back then. They had believed that there was a new science devoted to the assessment of it. Risk could be calculated and quantified. The risk, they had believed, was worth it.

Or later, when Helen thinks she hears her dead husband in the bathroom and awakes to smoke coming from a pot she left on the stove:

It was weeks later, or months, that she remembered Cal had not been in the bathroom; she had only dreamt him. But she had known, unequivocally, that there was reason to be afraid. She had known he was dead.

Here, especially, I can see all of Moore's skill and the perfectness of her technique, and yet even her most moving passages just didn't move me. I've spoken with several people who love this novel, and I can certainly understand why, even if I don't feel the same way.

I can't put my finger on why February left me cold. It could just be a matter of different strokes for different folks, or it could be that this wasn't the right time for me to read this novel. I'm not sure. Does this ever happen to you? Can you think of a novel that you recognize as being great, but that just didn't do much for you? And if you were to quasi-review such a book, how would you go about it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Growing Pains in The Last Life, by Clair Messud

2011-08-18T11:00:00.006-04:00

Though it didn't pull me in as deeply as The Emperor's Children, Clair Messud's The Last Life is a mesmerizing and beautiful book.

The novel's protagonist and narrator is Sagesse LaBasse, the daughter of a pied-noir father and an American mother. Her grandfather owns a hotel on the French Mediterranean Coast, and for a time Sagesse enjoys a carefree existence, playing at the hotel's pool or hanging out at cafés with her friends.

Everything changes in the summer of her fifteenth year, when her grandfather fires a gun at a group of her friends. After the incident, as everyone prepares for the trial, Sagesse's former friends pull away, and she begins to reconsider her loyalties.

The shooting is one of several events that mark Sagesse's transition from childhood to adolescence and adulthood, from innocence to a kind of understanding. As she struggles through the common teenage issues, from sexual experience to back acne, she also grows in awareness of her cultural and family histories. Messud deftly interweaves Sagesse's story with the stories of her grandfather, father, and mother. Sagesse's grandmother is the primary storyteller, shedding light on a complicated and troubling past, including her husband's decision to build his hotel and her son's departure from Algeria after the War of Independence.

Sorting through these stories and coming to terms with her history, Sagesse resents the workings of time. In a way, she envies her wheelchair-bound brother. Etienne was born severely brain-damaged and physically impaired. Though Sagesse sympathizes and feels a special connection with him, she also believes that he is, in some ways, better off, living in a perpetual present while she tries to make sense of the past, the present, and what might have been.

The Last Life brings the personal and the political together into a moving examination of the past's enduring influence on the present. The history of colonization cannot be easily shaken off. Yet for all its important postcolonial themes, perhaps the novel is most compelling for its portrayal of Sagesse's fraught relationship with her father. This is by no means the focus of the novel, but Messud captures her protagonist's ambivalence perfectly, and I found it beautifully heartbreaking.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of The Last Life?

Poetry, Publishing, and Pettiness: Lynn Coady's Mean Boy

2011-07-31T12:58:00.000-04:00

Despite my own English lit academic background and my literary aspirations, I would not have expected to find a novel about a wannabe poet attending a liberal arts college on the east coast in the 1970s remotely compelling. Lynn Coady's Mean Boy, however, took me by surprise.

One of the things that propelled me through this novel was its structure. Coady divides each chapter between a present scene and flashbacks from the recent and not-so-recent past. She sets up a question (Why is Lawrence feeling so guilty and hungover on his way home to PEI for Christmas?) and teases out the answer in a string of flashbacks
that keep you rushing forward to discover how past meets present. This strategy was very effective at creating suspense but did grow a bit predictable towards the end of the novel.

Mean Boy might be a little light on plot, but its rich, complex characters drive the story forward. The protagonist, Larry Campbell, is an aspiring poet and the first in his family to attend college. He goes to a small mainland university for the chance to learn from the famous Canadian poet, Jim Arsenault. Coady does a beautiful job of portraying a young man trying to play the confident poet. Trying to shed the insecurities he associates with the name "Larry," he introduces himself and signs his poems as Lawrence. He wants to be Jim Arsenault, and yet, he more closely resembles Dermot Schofield, a less confident but kinder man. Schofield comes to the university to give a reading before Christmas break, and Lawrence, charged with picking up the visiting poet, seems frightened by the man's vulnerability. Nonetheless, he loves Schofield's poetry, almost as much as he does Jim's, and he clearly identifies with his insecurities.

Though Lawrence's küntslerroman journey has its own appeal, the novel finds its centre and drama in Jim Arsenault. It is Jim's failure to get tenure that brings Lawrence and the other posturing poets in his seminar together. Rallying the rest of the student body to petition in Jim's favour, Lawrence gets closer to his hero than he could ever have hoped. However, in getting close, he sees the darker side of his cool and charismatic idol. The renowned poet can be stormy and vindictive and cruel--Byron to Schofield's Keats--and Coady's depiction of the bipolar alcoholic feels chilling and real.

At the same time as it depicts the passion and commitment and love of the poets in its pages, Mean Boy makes artistic enterprise feel a bit like high school. Its hard to see the purity of art through all of the pettiness and jealousies that come along with the politics of fame and publishing.

Praise for Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna

2011-07-23T12:02:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer I finally read The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, and it knocked my socks off. Immediately, I put a hold on her latest, The Lacuna (2009), and I was not disappointed.

The Lacuna spans decades, beginning in the late 1920s in Mexico. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is living on Isla Pixtol with his mother, Salomé, a vivacious young woman who has left her American husband to pursue more lucrative lovers. Shepherd grows up reading adventure novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo and writing obsessively in his journal.

Kingsolver's extensive and dedicated research is truly admirable. As she did in The Poisonwood Bible, she includes a bibliography here that not only gives weight and credibility to her fiction but also enables the reader to reach past it to the history it springs from.

Throughout his life, Shepherd moves back and forth between Mexico and the United States, the land of his mother and his father, respectively. He attends boarding school in Washington, D.C., where he witnesses Patton's and McArthur's troops charge an assembly of American veterans who've brought their protest to obtain their $500 veteran's bonus to President Hoover's doorstep. When he returns to Mexico, he gets a job as a cook at the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, then as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile in Mexico. Shepherd moves back to the States as an adult at the beginning of the Second World War. He winds up in Ashville, North Carolina, where he becomes a novelist and endures a few years of fame before being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

As was the case with The Poisonwood Bible, a great part of novel's appeal comes from its structure. The text the reader encounters is ostensibly a collection of Shepherd's journals and letters, reviews of his novels, and newspaper stories assembled and edited into a memoir by his amanuensis, Violet Brown. Shepherd makes a charming narrator, with a keen sense of justice and--for a time, at least--a naive hope that it will prevail.

Shepherd's novels take place in ancient Mexico and resemble the adventure stories he loved as a child. The reader gleans from reviews of his fiction that Shepherd looks back to the Mexican past not for its exoticism, but as a vehicle for critiquing his American present. Among other things, he is deeply troubled by his country's use of the atom bomb.

Kingsolver is clearly drawing on the same tactics as her protagonist. McCarthyism and HUAC's life-destroying investigations have parallels in the War on Terror and the Patriot Act. When Shepherd is denied the right to know what evidence is being brought against him and by whom, I even found myself thinking of Canada's security certificates, which prevent those perceived as a threat to national security from knowing the evidence against them. While some writers paint pictures of a dystopian future to warn us where we might be heading, Kingsolver shows readers that there is ample material in our past to remind us of how governments have used fear to strip citizens of their rights.

The "lacuna" of the title accrues various meanings over the course of the novel. On Isla Pixtol, Shepherd's friend, Leandro, calls the seaside cave near their hacienda a lacuna. Of course, a lacuna is also a gap in a text, like the missing journal from Shepherd's boarding-school days. It is a gap in someone's knowledge. As Shepherd repeats throughout the novel, facing HUAC or rumours spread by the media "howlers," "The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know"--the lacuna. As tempting as it might be to rush and fill in those gaps with speculations and assumptions, Kingsolver implies that the ethical response is to acknowledge these lacunae and let them stand.

Clearly, I loved this novel, almost as much as The Poisonwood Bible, and I'm eager to hear your thoughts. If you've read some of her other novels, I'd love some recommendations, too. Happy Monday!

The Pain in Paintings: Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag

2011-07-06T11:40:00.000-04:00

Louise Erdrich is a phenomenal writer. Her style is impeccable; her images are rich with meaning and emotional resonance. As I wrote in my review of The Painted Drum, she has an incredible ability to render human emotions in all of their complexity. The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is an absolutely stunning novel, interweaving stories of individuals living on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation and in the neighbouring town of Pluto, whose lives are connected by historical acts of violence and injustice. It may just be the best novel I've read in the past couple of years, and I urge you to read it if you haven't already.

Erdrich's most recent novel, Shadow Tag (2010), tells the story of a suffocating and destructive marriage on its way to total annihilation. Despite its dark and depressing subject, I did enjoy it--for the most part. Though not my favourite of her novels, it's well worth a read.

Erdrich reveals the full picture the abusive and domineering husband, Gil, so gradually that I was already halfway through the novel, invested and trapped now, before I realized just how chilling it actually is. In fact, for a moment, Gil, tortured by his suspicion that his wife, Irene, is having an affair, almost seems sympathetic. Of course, none of Gil's suspicions justify him in violating Irene's privacy as he does again and again. Though he waxes on about the injustice of the Patriot Act, Gil has no problem slipping into Irene's office while she's out to read her diary.

The diary provides the novel's structure. When Irene realizes that Gil has read it, she begins writing false entries to manipulate him, and meanwhile she keeps a true diary locked up in a safety deposit box at the bank. She carefully plants misinformation to calm and rile him by turns.

Gil has become fairly successful as an artist, painting an unending series of portraits of Irene. The seemingly romantic aspect of their relationship turns out to be one of the most disturbing ways in which Gil claims possession over Irene, dominates and objectifies her. Mixed up with the sexual politics of a male painter obsessed with his female muse, is a history of "Indians as images." Though Gil, like Irene, has a mixed-blood heritage, he is complicit with white America's production of and fascination with "kitsch" images Native Americana. Even as she sits for her husband's paintings, Irene is writing her dissertation on George Catlin, a painter who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West, and it is clear that she believes Gil's paintings are taking a spiritual toll on her.

Though Gil is clearly the bad guy in the story, Irene is also deeply flawed. As with Gil's abusive behaviour, Irene's alcoholism sneaks up on the reader in small glimpses that accumulate over the course of the novel. Irene herself barely recognizes her problem. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, she asks her youngest son about something she's noticed in the pictures he's drawn of her: "There's this thing on my hand, like another appendage, it's always there. In every picture. What is it, Stoney?" When tells her it's the wineglass, her oldest adds, "He thinks it's part of you."

But regardless of her flaws, I spent the entire novel hoping for her, wishing for her to get the strength to get sober and leave her husband. However, Irene is light, Gil a black hole, and she falls within his schwarzchild radius.

It wasn't until the final section of the book, told from the prospective of Irene and Gil's middle child, their daughter, Riel, that I finally realized I was reading an utterly depressing book. This section explains the structure of the novel and the provenance of the story, and though I sometimes like this--discovering the teller after the tale--I felt it was unnecessary here. For me, it detracted from the "proper" ending and somehow left me more, rather than less, depressed.

Besides being a bit of a downer, there were other things about Shadow Tag that didn't completely satisfy me. For instance, early on Irene discovers she has a half-sister. The two women develop a friendship, but considering Irene's elation at first learning of their connection, I was surprise that Louise didn't factor into the narrative more. Of course, Louise does offer Riel a connection to the tribal traditions she is eager to learn after reading about Indians at school and in her mother's book on Catlin. Still, I wish that the novel had made more of this discovered family.

These complaints aside, Shadow Tag was a very powerful, moving novel. For all it's darkness, it did offer touching moments, instances of hope, and glimpses of redemption.

Happy Canada Day and (however unfitting) some notes on The Names, by Don DeLillo

2011-06-27T12:14:00.000-04:00

As some of you may already know, my blog derives its title from Don DeLillo's postmodern classic, White Noise. It's certainly not my favourite of his novels—Libra takes that place, hands down—but I do so love that Murray Siskind reads TV listings and ads in Ufololgist Today "to immerse [him]self in American magic and dread." It's one of those perfect lines that still speaks volumes about contemporary American culture. And as much as we Canadians try to tell ourselves we're different from our southern neighbours, I'm pretty sure DeLillo's insights apply up here, too.

I recently read The Names, DeLillo's 1982 novel about an American "political risk analyst" and a wandering death cult. One of the things I quite liked about the novel was that Canada actually does register in DeLillo's analysis for once. Of course, as with his critiques of his own United States, his assessment of Canada is far from flattering. While "America is the world's living myth," there "to absorb the impact of [the rest of the world's] grievances," Canada simply capitulates. "Stricken by inevitability," Canada allows the U.S. to "operate with impunity." We give way with "pathetic surrender." Americans have colonized Canada: "They are right next to us, sending their contaminants, their pollutants, their noxious industrial waste into our rivers, lakes and air.... We are in the path of their television programs, their movies and music, the whole enormous rot and glut and blare of their culture." Doubtless, this says more about the States than it does about Canada, and yet it's crucial to recognize just how much their culture shapes ours.

The novel takes place mainly in Athens, Greece, where the narrator, James Axton, meets with a roster of business men and their wives. (Yes, in most cases the wives have no jobs of their own and simply follow their husbands on business trips; at most, one of them takes up teaching English to the locals.) James and his wife, Kathryn (the Canadian), have separated, but at the beginning of the novel she and their son, Tap, are also staying in Athens while she works on an archeological dig. When the dig comes to an end, she moves to Victoria (my home up until last September) where she gets a job at the B.C. Royal Museum.

The novel consists mainly of the narrator in conversation with other traveling businessmen, his wife's filmmaker friends, or the dig leader, Owen Brademas. They're interesting conversations, about language, politics, religion, but I found myself getting a bit sick of all the clever insights. I've been a fan of DeLillo for years, so my reaction to The Names surprised me. Perhaps I'm just a little oversaturated, because it drove me crazy that every character sounded like a shade of DeLillo himself.

As a book of ideas, The Names is brilliant. It's yet another compelling meditation on how human beings make meaning through language and religion, and a look at the dark, dangerous side of religious impulses that strip language of its function to communicate. However, for once instead of lapping up DeLillo's style, I found it almost suffocating.

Other critics love this book. Is it just me? This is the earliest of his works I've read, so maybe his style has evolved into something I enjoy more. Or is this actually a case of oversaturation? Can you ever read too much by a favourite author? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Telling it Slant: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

2011-06-12T19:13:00.003-04:00

For many years, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible has floated in place on my To Be Read list, constantly getting bumped for something newer or more compellingly recommended. Many people whose tastes I generally share have recommended the novel to me, but for some reason "a book about a missionary family in Africa" never really sounded enticing enough to get me to run out and pick up a copy. Nonetheless, I kept it in the back of my mind as a book to get around to.

If one of the people recommending it had even given me a time period—this particular missionary family sets out to the Congo in 1959, shortly before the country became independent of its Belgian colonial rulers—I might have made an effort to get to it sooner. At any rate, it finally made its way through other holds in the Toronto Public Library system and into my hands. All weekend long, I did little other than read.

This book is about much more than a missionary family in Africa. It's about the tragic history of colonialism there and the equally-tragic struggles associated with a supposedly post-colonial Congo. It's about politics, religion, gender, complicity, and language. Kingsolver is a stunning story-teller, and she brings her characters and the country they arrive in to life with her flawless, moving writing.

To start with, she uses form not only to reveal character but also to point to the complexity of perspective and to underscore the many-sidedness of truth. From chapter to chapter, narration shifts to a different first-person perspective, rotating through the four Price girls, the daughters of the single-minded and despotic minister, Nathaniel Price. These chapters are grouped into larger parts, each named after a book in the Bible and prefaced by the words of Orleanna Price, née Wharton, the mother of Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. Thankfully, we never get to hear from the man of the house.

All of these characters offer unique and entertaining perspectives, but I found the few pieces from Orleanna's perspective to be the most complex. More than her daughters, I think, Orleanna struggles to understand her complicity in her husband's arrogant mission, her country's exploitation of Africa, and the tragedy that befalls her own family. To an extent, she wants to accept responsibility and find redemption. After returning to America, she works for a time with Amnesty International, trying to right whatever wrongs she can. And yet, she also refuses others' judgment. She reminds the reader what little agency she had, explaining that by the time her last child was born she had gone six years without one night's uninterrupted sleep. She had no money and no friends and had been beaten into submission by her husband. "And you wonder why I didn't rise up and revolt against Nathan?" she asks, aligning herself with the Congo. "Nathan was in full possession of the country once known as Orleanna Wharton." As with the Congo, Orleanna's independence is never total, and it does not come without blood.

The chapters from her daughters are generally a little lighter, though each one suffers and struggles to come to terms with her experience in Africa. Their distinct, living voices sucked me into this novel more than anything else.

The eldest, Rachel, may not be particularly likeable—in fact, as she grows up she becomes pretty despicable—but she offers needed comic relief with her many malapropisms. As a teenage girl, she worries about becoming a "social piranha." Later, when reflecting on her first husband's philandering ways, she comments, "Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony." As in the last example, her mistakes often reveal some unintended truth. They often expose some flaw or hypocrisy in her Western, and often bigoted, assumptions. But her use of language and the way she pulls "words out of thin air to mean what she please[s]" also reflect her association with the worst of what white people have done and continue to do in Africa. For her, words, like the resources of the Congo, are there for her taking.

In the middle are the twins, Leah and Adah, and each one reveres language in her own way. Leah wants to be exact with her words and name things properly. In Kilanga, the village where her father aims to save so many African souls, she works hard to learn Kikongo, the local language. She has a strong sense of justice and demonstrates this by striving to learn the languages of the people she lives with and to use that language precisely.

Adah’s reverence comes in a different form. She is hemiplegic, one side of her body almost immobile. Doctors predicted that she would never speak a word, and so she doesn’t. However, she reads and writes nonstop and proves herself quite brilliant in math and languages. Whereas Leah aims to speak accurately, Adah loves words for their pliability. She loves playing with them; she delights in poetry and palindromes. She often reaches for the line from her favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, that perfectly encapsulates her approach to language: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Adah’s sense of justice is a bit darker than her twin’s. The way she turns language inside out and reads the world backwards makes room for the many sides of truth.

Finally, there’s Ruth May. At five, the words of her sisters are out of reach. She speaks simply. All the same, Ruth May succeeds where her family fails. With three words, she manages to communicate with the children of the village and engage them in a game of “Mother, May I.”

The sisters are marked differently by their time in the Congo, through the Independence, the election of Patrice Lumumba, his imprisonment, and civil war. They all come to terms with the experience in different ways. Finally, in 1961, Orleanna packs up her children, and they march out of Kilanga with only what they can carry on their back, leaving Nathan, who is still hell-bent on baptizing every last villager, behind.

But the story doesn’t end there. The section entitled “Exodus” lasts almost 150 pages, and if I had a complaint about this book, it would be that it seems to go on for ages after it “ends.” However, this drawn-out exodus is utterly appropriate. Like the Congo, Orleanna can’t just take her supposed independence and live happily ever after. She spends the rest of her life leaving Nathan, even though she never sees him again. The work is nowhere near done.

Kingsolver demands that Western readers recognize our complicity in the atrocities that continue to take place in lands that seem so far away. The Poisonwood Bible is a disturbing novel insofar as it won’t let you just close it and forget. After putting it down, you’re compelled to try to take some form of action or, at least, to keep reading, and Kingsolver includes a bibliography at the back of the book just for this purpose. Now that I've completed The Poisonwood Bible, my To Be Read list has never been longer.

A Reflection on My Reading Habits

2011-06-09T10:05:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a powerful and haunting collection of short stories about the author's experience in the Vietnam War, the nature of truth, and what drives us to tell (or write) stories. It was a wonderfully-written book, and one that prompts all manner of serious reflection about war and death and humour and lonliness.

I don't mean to sound glib.

My appreciation of O'Brien's important work is sincere. It's just that I realized partway through it that I'd picked up yet another book written by a man, taking place in a world of men. Sure, there's a daughter, some girlfriends back home, and the mysterious Mary Anne, who arrives in culottes and disappears smeared in camouflage paint, but the real matter of this narrative is the masculine universe of that war. And this is no failing of O'Brien's: This is a world that needs representation, and the way the author seems to work through the trauma of war and wrestle something meaningful from so much meaninglessness is extremely affecting. The Things They Carried is a book I'm very thankful to have read and that I would recommend to anyone.

I'm a bit frustrated with myself, though, when I look over past posts and see just how many of the books I've read this past year were written by white men. Like so many writers and readers, I was frustrated/shocked/angered when I read VIDA's count of magazine pieces by women writers or saw Esquire's list of 75 must-read books, all but one of which were written by men. (Joyland does a nice corrective list here.) But after finishing The Things They Carried, I looked at my bedside table. And then I looked at my blog.

I'm not going to do pie chart of the ratio, because it would be too embarrassing. At least I'm aware now. There are so many women writers I adore, and I'm going to make an effort to represent them on this blog. Maybe no one's reading it anyway, but it's the principle of the thing.

Faulkner in the Summer

2011-05-23T19:19:00.000-04:00

With Faulkner, you can't let your mind drift. As I mentioned when writing about Absalom! Absalom! last summer, it's so easy to get lost in the layers of narrative and the meandering language, to lose something in the ellipses, that you must be attentive every step of the way. And I find something ultimately satisfying about this kind of reading.

As a professor once advised me and my classmates before we embarked on The Sound and the Fury, it's best, when possible, to read Faulkner's novels all in one go. At the very least, I've found it makes reading easier and more enjoyable when I can sit down for hours at a time and read in large chunks. Already this summer, I've managed to do this with Light in August and The Unvanquished.

At this time of year, as the weather starts to turn hot, I find myself drawn Faulkner. Not that I don't like my lighter beach fair, as well, but there's something about baking on the balcony that seems absolutely fitting for reading about characters who are sweating in the South.

With each novel, reading gets easier simply because I'm learning the history of that imaginary place: Yoknapatawpha County. I suppose I'm pretty familiar with the writing style now, too, but it does help to know that Colonel Sartoris killed the two Burdens or that Thomas Sutpen was the stranger who came to Yoknapatawpha to build a sprawling plantation.

Faulkner's not everybody's bag, of course, but the more I read, the more appreciate his sophisticated style and the complex world he created. Not to mention the fact that he writes about such difficult, compelling issues as race and gender, honour and inheritance. The psychology of his South is endlessly fascinating, though, certainly, profoundly disturbing.

We'll see how long this kick lasts.

Egg Salad: Harbinger of Happiness?

2011-05-19T08:04:00.000-04:00

Milo Burke is in Toosh Dev at Mediocre University. That is, Institutional Development--asking rich philanthropists to make donations--at a third-tier university in New York City. At least, he is until he tells a certain bright young talent, a painting major and donor's daughter named Mackenzie, where to shove it.

Towards the end Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, Milo asks one of his former coworkers if he's too unlikeable: "I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?" In a playful stab at the reader, Vargina responds, "I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."

Of course, if you've gotten this far, you'd hope to disagree with Vargina, and I certainly did. Not only does Lipsyte have a knack for writing hilarious dialogue, but the novel also offers a little something deeper. And for all his failings, for all his masturbatory fantasies and wasted talent, Milo is a remarkably sympathetic character.

Milo's life, at work and at home, is falling apart when an old college friend swoops in to resuscitate him. Purdy Stuart had his father's money back in the eighties when Milo and his friends were studying art and theory, and he has since made it into more money by creating a successful online music outfit. Like some deus ex machina, Purdy tells the folks at Mediocre University that he's willing to make a big donation, but only if they hire back Milo as the development officer for the ask.

Purdy's intentions in playing Milo's saviour aren't quite clear. Dealing with mid-life issues of his own, Purdy has reconnected with several members of the old group, the "faux-bohemians alcoholics" who'd shared a house in university. He enlists Milo to pay off a secret son, the product of an old romance who now threatens to destroy Purdy's marriage unless he gets his hush money.

But Milo can't quite pull it off. At once, he begins to feel sorry for the man extorting his benefactor. Don, a now legless veteran of the Iraq War, is addicted to heroin and bursting with anger. Nonetheless, Milo's heart bleeds for him as he realizes that Purdy's version of events might not be the whole truth.

Throughout the novel, Milo shows a tendency to get far too involved in others' affairs. Meanwhile, his own life is crumbling to pieces. He and his wife are going through a "rough patch"; his mother refuses to come visit his son until the boy--Bernie, the most delightful child I've ever encountered in fiction--becomes less "self-involved"; even the teachers at Bernie's preschool are closing up shop as they duke it out over opposing teaching philosophies.

All his life, Milo has tried to keep a little private piece of his soul to himself. Now, he feels it rotting away. "Squander it," he tells the uncomprehending Bernie. "Give it all away." It may be too late for Milo to really change his life, but he won't let his son make the same mistake.

The novel does offer some form of hope for its protagonist, though not the hope of fabulous gallery show, and maybe not even the hope of a happy marriage. But Milo can look forward to better lunches, and it just might be possible that the switch from reliable turkey wraps to delicious egg salad signifies something a little bigger.

Has anyone else had a chance to read The Ask? Want to share your thoughts?

Consensus View of Reality

2011-05-02T09:05:00.000-04:00

A couple of chapters in to Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, I couldn't stop comparing it to The Crying of Lot 49. First there's the Pynchonesque protagonist, Leo, paranoid, constantly analyzing his own analysis of (what he perceives to be) the situation he's in. Then there's Galchen's engagement scientific theories. As Pynchon takes up the Second Law of Thermodynamics, suggesting an analogy between Oedipa's detective quest and Maxwell's entropy-reversing Demon, Galchen uses the concept of Doppler effect to describe how perspective affects the interpretation of data. Of course, they're very different novels, written fifty years apart by very different authors, but they both offer that sense of intellectual play.

Leo, is a psychiatrist. This makes him an interesting twist on the unreliable narrator, and it makes his descent into paranoia and confusion all the more compelling to read. Things go awry for Leo when his wife, Rema, never a lover of dogs, comes home with one. Well, perhaps it started a little earlier when he and Rema decided to play along with a patients delusions instead of trying to insist on the "consensus view of reality." At any rate, the appearance of the new dog with the "simulacrum" who look almost just like Rema sets Leo on a quest to find the "real" woman he married, following the most unclue-like set of clues and perplexing methods of deduction.

Leo is certainly a quirky fellow. He's difficult to relate to, so fixed in his bizarre interpretation of events, going to extreme lengths to find the "real" Rema when she's right in front of him. OK: He's got serious psychiatric issues. But he's not the flat, cartoon-like characters you find in Pynchon's novels. In some of the things he lets slip, he reveals his humanity, his love, and his sadness. Rema, "the simulacrum," is herself a round and developed character with much more going on than Leo chooses to recognize.

Much is going on beneath the playful surface of Galchen's text. In the final chapters, especially, the level of deep emotion comes as a complete surprise. It's a delightful and moving book.

The Age of Entitlement

2011-04-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

The whole time I was reading The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, I felt a bit unsettled. It's a novel that holds a mirror up to contemporary society, and in its pages I saw reflected back friends, family members, and sometimes myself. Though I thoroughly enjoyed her intricate plot, deftly-drawn characters, and compelling narrative structure and style, Messud's astute social critique left me feeling distinctly un-adult.

The novel focuses on Danielle, Marina, and Julius, now entering their thirties, and, supposedly, the best of friends. They met in college and have remained close for the decade since. However, as the novel begins, in March of 2001, things begin to change.

When the novel opens, none of the three friends are where they imagined they would be at the cusp of thirty. While Danielle struggles to remain self-sufficient, eking out a living making documentary programs in order to afford her tiny Manhattan bachelor pad, Marina has moved back in with her parents, ostensibly to finish writing her book about children's clothes. Julius, a writer who once showed great potential, has gone back to temping to make ends meet.

All three expect more; they feel entitled to it. Marina, in particular, resists getting a regular job because, as she says, "I worry that that will make me ordinary, like everybody else." These words are almost too much for her father, Murray Thwaite, himself a successful writer and public intellectual. On the one hand he adores his beautiful daughter and claims to want her to succeed. On the other, he views her as the "monster" that he, his wife, and "a society of excess" have created.

Of course, Murray himself may not be the honest, admirable figure his friends, family, and fans believe him to be. Shortly after the novel begins, two characters emerge on the scene, poised to reveal him for the hypocrite he is. The first, Ludovic Seely, a Napoleonic editor from Australia, comes to New York to launch The Monitor, a magazine he claims will "foment revolution." Danielle meets him when in Australia, researching a potential program, and introduces him to the Thwaites shortly after he arrives in New York. While the literary world awards Murray for his accomplishments, Seely sneers from the sidelines.

And then there's Marina's cousin, Frederick "Bootie" Tubbs. Like his uncle, Bootie hails from Watertown, New York. He's a quirky character with an unbending moral code. Disgusted by the corruption and lack of intellectual rigour he observes during his first year at college, he drops out and decides to become a sort of independent scholar, making his way, finally, to New York City to study under the great Uncle Murray.

Only, of course, he discovers that Murray Thwaite is not exactly the valiant champion of truth he thought him to be. Unlike his cousin and her friends, who have seen their convictions waiver and fade, he stands fast in his idealism. Granted, he, too, sees himself as being above those menial jobs--at least at first--but he nonetheless exhibits some warped sense of integrity.

Messud's carefully-plotted novel takes these fascinating characters through the months leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center, in 2001, and shows a glimpse of how they deal with the aftermath of that traumatic event. Seely, for one, discovers that there is no place in this world of real revolution for the kind of ironic revolution he had hoped to incite. And while Marina finally seems to act like an adult, Danielle almost swings back in the opposite direction. The age of entitlement has not come to an end.

Book Club Meeting #4

2011-04-11T09:57:00.000-04:00

On Sunday night the book club finally met to discuss Nathan's pick: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. Although I finished reading it over a month ago, the procrastinator in me decided to wait until the group got together to write about it.

Going back to World War Two and the beginning of the comic book industry, the novel tells the story of cousins Samuel Clayman and Joseph Kavalier, creators of The Escapist. Joe makes his escape from the German-occupied Prague and arrives, at last, in New York, where he stays with his aunt and cousin, and where Sam introduces him to the world of comic books. With Sam's knack for narrative and knowledge of comic book conventions and Joe's life experience and artistic skill, the two create their own highly-successful superhero. Like so many young artists of their day, they sign away the rights to their creation for a pitiful sum.

The novel follows Sam and Joe from boyhood into adulthood and middle age. Over the course of the novel both men, admirable, if flawed, learn the meaning of sacrifice. They struggle for their own freedom and for the freedom of their families, whether waging vicarious war on the Nazis through their comic books or saving up money to help bring persecuted Jews over to America. One after the other puts his life and ambitions on hold to support what family he has in the world. The story is at once tragic and heartening, and Chabon pays sincere and moving tribute to that artifact of mass culture, that popular art form, the comic book.

Describing the early day of the comic book industry, Chabon's narrator often assumes a historian's voice. Footnotes pop up throughout the pages, making the book feel at times like biography rather than fiction. Real-life figures like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman), Orson Welles, and Salvador Dali make cameo appearances, blurring the line between reality and fiction.

But there's also a glittering streak of the fantastic to this novel, not only in the comics that Joe and Sam create, but also in figure of the golem, the mythic being in whose coffin Joe escapes Poland. And then there's simple prestidigitation: the tricks and sleight of hand Joe learns back in Europe and then performs at birthday parties in New York.

Whatever these fantastic elements might mean for the novel's plot, they provide a source of poignant imagery for Chabon to draw upon as he describes the creative process, the pain of loss, or the struggle for freedom. The cousins, walking the streets of New York all night long, smoking and inventing their superhero's backstory, for instance, are "teasing their golem into life." The literal golem, protected by Jews of Prague, fades into memory as the figurative golem, "formed of black lines and the four-colour dots of the lithographer," steps in to provide Kavalier and Clay with the hope of escape. "Every golem in history," the narrator tells us, "was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat--was, literally, talked into life." The golem offers an utterly compelling figure through which to represent the magical power of literary creation.

Magic tricks and superheroes, the things that fascinated Joe and Sam as boys, come back again and again in Chabon's imagery to deliver wallop after wallop, emotional blows that would put the Escapist's best Hitler-punch to shame. In one particularly powerful passage, after Joe realizes that he has lost the last letter his mother sent him from Prague--a letter he never read--Chabon expounds on "the nature of magic":

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

This beautifully sad passage is just one example of Chabon's ability to convey such a depth of feeling in a few simple images.

While we all complained that Joe's girlfriend, Rosa, just wasn't as developed and compelling as the men she lived and worked with, praise for the novel at book club was pretty much unanimous. It's long, and took me awhile to get through, but I'm glad that book club finally provided me with the push to read it.

Now, that's more like it.

2011-04-09T12:19:00.000-04:00

Since writing my post on Richard Condon's novel, The Manchurian Candidate, I watched the most recent film adaptation, starring Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, and Liev Schreiber.

Though the screenplay takes serious liberties with the novel's plot, this is one of those instances—and I can't think of another off the top of my head—where that's actually a very good thing. Many of the changes follow from the fact that the movie is set nowadays-ish (in the years after the Gulf War), whereas the novel took place during and after the Korean War. Among other things, the more contemporary setting yields juicier roles for the women in the story.

First, there's Raymond Shaw's mother, Eleanor. In the novel, she is Eleanor Iselin, wife of Senator John Iselin, working behind the scenes to promote her husband's political career as a sort of Lady Macbeth figure. In the film, portrayed by the always-brilliant Meryl Streep, she is still Eleanor Shaw, never having remarried after her first husband's death (a death, the movie hints ever so subtly, she may have caused). In this version Eleanor schemes to place her son, rather than her husband, in the White House, but she is also a politician in her own right.

Eugenie Rose, too, while a strong character in the novel, gains a level of autonomy and power in the movie that she could not have had in the book, where she only had access to power through her lovers. For fear of spoiling the suspense, I won't give away how exactly the movie transforms her character. Suffice it to say, the change results not only in a more empowered female character but also added layers of intrigue at the level of plot.

Jocelyne Jordan remains as undeveloped and uninteresting in the movie as she is in the novel.

On the whole, though, the significant plot changes improved the story. I didn't feel cheated by ridiculous coincidence as I did reading the book, the pacing kept me engaged, and the conclusion left me fully satisfied. Even the simplest changes—instead of getting him to play out a hand of solitaire before issuing commands, Raymond's handler needs only to recite his full name—made the whole concept seem much more believable.

The conspiracy and paranoia I was looking for when I picked up the book become far more compelling in the movie. While uncovering Manchurian Global's sinister plot, Denzel Washington's character, Ben Marco, teeters at the very edge of sanity as he tries to expose the truth. The movie gets at how impossible this task is, especially when the protagonist can't even trust his own mind.

A Disappointing Candidate

2011-03-20T17:14:00.000-04:00

So, first, my apologies: It’s been almost a month since my last post. I lack any good excuses, so I suppose I’ll leave it at that… Well, maybe I’ll add a quick pledge to do better in the future.

It’s not just the writing I’ve been slacking on. For awhile there it seemed like I’d never finish reading another book. I’m about halfway through a couple of hefty ones, and even The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a great book, took me far longer to finish than I think it normally would.

Richard Condon’s Cold War classic, The Manchurian Candidate, seemed like it would be a refreshing, quick read. Every now and then, some good ol’ plot-driven genre fiction really hits the spot.

Not this time, however.

First, a quick explanation as to why this novel has been on my To Read list: Aside from the fact that it showcases the tropes of paranoid and conspiracy that have long fascinated me as a reader, The Manchurian Candidate also interests me as a writer. In magazines and books on writing, I often see this novel cited as a prime source for examples of unique, vividly-drawn characters.

Certainly, each character in the novel has a unique way of speaking and, at least in the case of Raymond Shaw, a set of idiosyncratic mannerisms. And none of them are the least bit boring or ordinary, with the exception of Jocie Jordan. Condon tells the reader that she is the only person, aside from Ben Marco, whom Raymond lets into his heart. But, at least to me, it’s not clear why. She seems nice enough, but not particularly interesting. Especially when compared with Eugenie Rose Chaney, Marco’s fiery love interest, Jocie seems little more than a plot device. But who knows? Maybe she’s just really hot.

At any rate, most of Condon’s characters are pretty fascinating, each one starkly differentiated from the others. Without being told a name, a reader could easily pick any of these characters out of a passage. However, Condon always, always gives us the name; he hardly ever seems to use pronouns. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but it really bugged me: Raymond Shaw this, Raymond Shaw that. Of course, this alone wouldn’t be enough to turn me off of a book, but the novel had many other shortcomings.

I haven’t seen either of the film adaptations, so I’m not sure how closely they stick to the original plot. In the novel, in any case, Raymond Shaw and his outfit are captured during the Korean War. A group of Russian and Chinese conspirators brainwash all of the prisoners, programming Shaw to be their unknowing assassin.

Shaw comes home from the war a hero (his outfit now believes he saved their lives) and is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour. This not only serves the purposes of the communist conspirators but also helps advance his mother’s political plans for her senator husband, a Joseph McCarthy figure. A few years go by and all seems to be working well when Shaw’s friend Marco, a fellow brainwashed soldier, starts having terrifying nightmares and begins to remember what happened in Korea.

This setup has some great thriller potential. With a few of surprising twists along the way, it’s not surprising that it’s been adapted for film—twice. However, it’s not all that well-executed on paper.

For the first half of the book, the pacing and ordering of events felt all wrong. The narrative starts when Shaw receives his Medal of Honour, then jumps back to the P.O.W. camp and the brainwashing operation, then back further to lay down some backstory on Raymond’s relationship with his mother and her relationship with her father and so on, sometimes all within a single chapter. Chapter three gives the reader a four-page history of the Medal of Honour (useful research for a story I’m working on, but potentially quite boring for some other readers). Now, I would certainly never argue that a story needs to be told in a straightforward linear way, but there’s a way to jump around in time without losing the pull story’s pull, and Condon hasn’t found it here. The story didn’t hold my interest until Marco’s character moves into focus when he starts to dream about being brainwashed.

However, after the story picked up, I was further annoyed by moments that felt completely contrived. Again, I think of myself as someone who is quite willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a story, but a few times over the course of the novel, Condon pushes it too far, asking his reader to accept coincidences that are far from plausible. For me, the dramatic payoff was not worth the unbelievable twists of plot it took to get there.

Condon’s writing is, at the very least, lively. His sentences are short and active, and he shells out some surprising, punchy images. Occasionally, he shows his hand, and you can see him trying to be clever. When this happens, as when he goes on and on describing a so-called giant juke box at a pub called Hungarian Charlie’s, the scene he is creating falls flat. At other times, though, I’d run across a sentence that would practically floor me, like a poetic punch that came out of nowhere, as when he describes Broadway: “the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and colour in suggestively leutic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, on million hands threw dirt upon the streets again.”

Just typing out that description, actually, I feel my other grievances lighten a little bit. It’s a flash of brilliance, and this novel, for all its faults, does have a few of them.

Marks in the Margins

2011-02-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

Back in June I wrote about my tendency to defile the pages of any book that comes into my possession. Like this book blogger, I try to respect borrowed books, though maybe I don't do so quite enough. I'm getting better at keeping library books clean, but when I was in school, I did more than my share of underlining and starring. Nathan's certainly learning to keep me away from his collection.

In fact, he actually picked up an extra copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay, the next pick for our book club. He already owned the book, but now we have his and hers copies. It does make practical sense: There was no way we'd both be able to get through all 636 pages in time if we had to share. This way, we can read the same book at the same time. Also, this way I can put a pencil to the page, crack the novel's lovely spine, and toss it in my purse without feeling any guilt. Win, win.

Maybe someday I'll give in, like I did getting a cell phone or joining facebook, but right now I don't believe that I'll ever read e-books. And my need to scribble in the margins is one of the reasons the e-book format wouldn't cut it for me. It's not even just about writing notes that I can refer back to later. Often, I underline and mark up text in order to better process the words I'm reading. I also like the idea in this New York Times article, that marginalia becomes an exchange between reader and writer: "reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation," says the oral historian Studs Terkel.

There may well be a way to leave digital notes in an e-book. I have to admit my ignorance of the technology. I'd still choose pencil and paper.

I don't mean to imply that people who don't write in their books don't engage as thoroughly with their books as I do. Even one of my old Honours English amigos--a fellow who's gone on to travel halfway around the world to study the literature he loves--refuses to write in his books. For him, as for Nathan, books can be treated as physical art objects.

For the same reason that Nathan can't bring himself to dog-ear a page or scribble in the margins of a book, I don't suspect he could ever switch to e-books. In "The Phenomenology of Reading," George Poulet discusses how the book is a very different kind of art object than, say, a sculpture. Well, yes, there is this intersubjective encounter between the author and the reader. When you're absorbed in the story, in another subjectivity, the physical object starts to slip away. But when you close that book and put it up on your shelf, the well-designed book becomes an object of physical beauty. I don't imagine a Kobo exerts the same aesthetic draw.

Sometimes--often--a cover is what sells a book, or at least draws the passerby in to flip through its pages. I may physically abuse my books, but I'm still a sucker for a good-looking book.

To Be Brief

2011-02-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

I've got a couple of books on the go right now, both enormous and neither one, it seems, possible to read and review in a week. So, I'm postponing my post yet again.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some book-related news for whoever might be interested. First of all, Canada Reads just kicked off, and the graphic novel, Essex County, by Jeff Lemire, got axed. I've never gotten into the Canada Reads thing, but I read about it constantly. From what some book bloggers are saying, I don't think I'm missing much.

Then, from Quill & Quire, it turns out that fifteen new works of fiction by Dashiell Hammett have been uncovered in Texas. Now, I haven't read many good old-fashioned hardboiled detective stories, but since writing a paper on film noirs last spring, I have been getting into the movies they spawned. Most recently, Nathan and I watched The Maltese Falcon, based, of course, upon Hammett's novel of the same name. Expect to see me writing about some of these hardboiled novels in the next few months.

And finally, in another piece that caught my eye about unpublished works by famous writers, The Millions blogger Kristopher Jansma shares the story of his search for the two lost J.D. Salinger stories about Holden Caulfield’s family. It's a short but delightful essay that captures the way Salinger's stories seem to have the power to affect readers in such a deeply personal way.

Until next time.

"Everything is connected."

2011-01-31T21:40:00.000-05:00

This famous line from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow echoes again and again in Tom McCarthy’s brilliant new novel, C. With signals bouncing perpetually around the world and shop fronts communicating secret messages to passers by, the world of C is a puzzle, too vast to pin down. Connections consume Serge Carrefax and his sister Sophie.

C combines a sophisticated, postmodern consideration of information theory and the play of signs with an absorbing narrative and tight, elegant prose. While McCarthy’s style differs greatly from Pynchon’s (more lucid, less ludic), he takes up many of the same themes, though perhaps arriving at different conclusions. Whereas Pynchon seems to find numinous (if dubious) possibility in the proliferation of connections, McCarthy’s novel suggests there may be nothing—certainly nothing benevolent—beyond the signals themselves.

One scene in particular gave me this impression. Late in the novel, the protagonist, Serge Carrefax, attends a séance. Now, I may be getting a bit paranoid myself, but I couldn’t help connecting this to a similar scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the difference is clear. In Pynchon’s world, spirits really do communicate from the other side. In McCarthy’s, the medium turns out to be a fraud. The messages she relates to her audience come not from spirit energies but from an electrical switch operated by one of her (living) underlings.

C follows Serge from his birth, near the turn of the 20th century, through childhood, adolescence, war, and drug addiction, until he finally dies on a ship home from Egypt. Unless he died earlier. In addition to its connections to Gravity’s Rainbow, C also reminded me of “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a short story by Ambrose Bierce that was made into a short film in 1962 and later aired as an episode of The Twilight Zone. I first watched this film when reading theory about the death-drive of narrative, and McCarthy plays with this idea even more than he does communication and meaning-making. What makes this novel such a continually gripping read is that, from the moment he is born—perhaps before—Serge repeatedly faces his end. From nearly drowning in the brook as a toddler, to standing before a firing squad, to crashing his car while high on cocaine, Serge should have died at least six times over the course of the novel. When he finally does slip away, hallucinating from a venomous bite, it becomes unclear whether what went before even happened at all.

Unfortunately, I’ve let too much time elapse since I read the book to say much more about it now, not to mention the fact that I’ve returned the copy I was borrowing. It’s a novel I’m sure to read again, so perhaps there will be some future post with more profound insight and analysis. Perhaps not. As for Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (last week’s book club read), I’ve decided to postpone writing about it until after I see Theatre Passe Muraille’s production later this month.

Blogging Break

2011-01-25T20:57:00.000-05:00

So, two weeks have elapsed. I've read two novels--Tom McCarthy's C. and Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero, both excellent--and I've written about neither. I have no real excuse, only general busyness to hide behind. Nevertheless, I hope to get back on track soon. I'll get back on track and have a new post up by the end of next weekend.

Looking Evil in the Eye

2011-01-11T21:20:00.000-05:00

The title of Brent LaPorte’s first novel, Hope Burned, resonates in a variety of different ways. At its most positive, it refers to the way that hope will burn on against the most overwhelming and brutal adversity. On the level of story, it describes a hope forged in fire, the promise of escape that accompanies a literal burning of the flesh. But on a darker level, it suggests that hope can get burned up when that promise proves false.

Dark, certainly, the novel nonetheless offered more warmth than the first ten pages of filth and physical punishment led me to expect. With this book, the reader must brave a gruesome introduction, filled with the horrors inflicted by a sadistic patriarchy, to arrive at something redeeming and heartening, albeit temporary.

Laporte’s descriptions of torture and abuse struck me at first as excessive, the author’s own sadism inflicted upon his readers. After some reflection, I don’t think this is the case. As the narrator notes at intervals throughout the novel, the abuse he suffers represents but a fraction of all the pain and cruelty suffered and perpetuated throughout the world. In fact, the narrator’s plight, as a “slave” of his fathers, clearly resembles that of the slaves in the anti-bellum United States. During this period, when white slaveholders viewed their African American “property” as sub-human, abuses like the ones described in this novel were commonplace. Even the circumstances that make the narrator’s captivity seem most abominable and unnatural—the fact that the people who beat and humiliate him are his own flesh and blood: his father and grandfather—repeated themselves again and again within the institution of slavery, where the master’s “shadow family,” the progeny of the female slave he raped, faced the same abuse and grew up in the same derogated position as the slaves that did not share their master’s DNA.

As in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, the narrator, christened “Tom” once he escapes over a decade of namelessness, servitude, and abuse, tells his story in the first person. In this case, the story takes the form of a letter to his son. The fact that Tom lives to write this letter offers some consolation to the reader who bears witness to his suffering. The characters he meets after his escape, some movingly and fully portrayed, others mere sketches, starkly contrast his brutal captors.

Tom’s letter shows a depth of feeling and a capacity for love and trust that is quite incredible given what he’s has gone through. Along with his emotive relation of his life story, the narrative offers occasional observations and opinions about the world outside the old mill. At times, as when Tom goes off on a brief tangent about people who depend on television, rather than other human beings, for companionship, these observations felt out of place, as if they belonged more to Tom’s creator than to Tom. Aside from these interruptions that took me out of the story, Tom’s letter was a compelling piece of narrative that whisked me through the first three-quarters or more of the novel.

And then came the ending. Without spoiling things for other readers, it’s hard to say much about why it bothered me. Perhaps, I will suggest this novel on for a book club reading just so that I can discuss this ending with others. It’s not that the conclusion comes completely out of the blue; LaPorte drops subtle hints along the way as to what awaits the reader. Still, the final shift struck me as cheap and highly problematic.

Hope Burned ranges from the depths of depravity to the peak of human kindness. Perfectly paced and emotionally rich, this book's real strength is the abundance of questions it raises. Delving into issues genetic determinism, subtly considering the politics of looking, this is a book that can start a hundred conversations.

Who Wants Heathcliff?

2011-01-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

In Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven, unseen forces pull together a Brontë scholar, a hot air balloonist, the ghost of Emily Brontë, and all the gales of Wuthering Heights. A tempest brews between the novel’s covers, as Urquhart’s prose whips across landscapes—from Yorkshire moors to the frozen Arctic—and bursts into bedrooms from Toronto to Venice. The majority of Urquhart’s characters are obsessed, fixated on the wind, the sky, angels, or even drapery; they embrace the storm and choose violent passion over happy tranquility.

The novel’s protagonist, Ann, the Brontë scholar, sees her entire life through the lens of Wuthering Heights and seeks her own Heathcliff. Unfortunately, she finds him. Or, rather, she projects that character onto the person of Arthur Woodruff, another academic, this one obsessed with the life and work of the Italian Renaissance painter, Tintoretto. He is married, and their affair is the brutal, prolonged storm that they must weather.

Parallel Ann’s story unfolds the story of Arianna Ether, née Polly Smith, a hot air balloonist who lives and dies in Yorkshire nearly a hundred years before Ann finds herself on the same windswept moors. Like Ann, she ties herself to a cruel man who cannot love her back. Unlike her, she spends the majority of the novel as a ghost, hanging out with Emily Brontë and slowing uncovering the truth about her death.

Structurally, the novel works quite well, the two stories gradually moving closer together until they meet and Urquhart gracefully ties together the various components into a poignant and satisfying conclusion. There were, however, aspects of this novel that did not work so well. Granted, capturing a historical figure must be a daunting task, but Urquhart’s portrayal of Emily Brontë just didn’t work for me. The interactions between the ghosts seemed almost campy, at odds with the rest of the book, which took itself quite seriously.

And this is more of a personal objection, but I was frustrated by the fact that both Arianna and Ann fell for such cruel and temperamental men. I marvel at anyone who could read Wuthering Heights and see anything attractive in Heathcliff. Not that either of these women were particularly likeable themselves. Ann is selfish and cannot see her lover through the image she has of him, and Arianna seems perfectly content to become her own lover’s creation.

What made the novel, for me, was Urquhart’s language. Wind imagery provides an incessant motif that charges the entire novel with passion. On top of this, the way Urquhart engages with Wuthering Heights would make Changing Heaven a pleasure to read for anyone who’s been enchanted by that book.

And I am definitely one of those people. As a brief survey of the books I've read lately would show, I have pretty eclectic tastes. On the one hand, I go for playful, postmodern fiction, and, on the other, I fall for Brontë's Victorian Gothic. Urquhart's novel combines a bit of both, embracing intertextuality and offering a lovely tribute to the weather that rocks Wuthering Heights.

Book Club Meeting #2

2010-12-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

For my last entry of 2010, I’m taking up Robert J. Sawyer’s sci-fi novel, Flashforward, a book I never would have picked up if it weren’t for book club. As I mentioned before, our group has some pretty eclectic tastes.

It’s not that I don’t like science fiction. After all, since finishing Pattern Recognition last week, I’ve been browsing Nathan’s bookshelves for another Gibson pick, and I know that most of his novels will lead me into some version of the future. Plus, back in high school I used to devour Kurt Vonnegut’s far out fiction. Sci-fi classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 will always stay with me. However, a vast territory falls under the label “science fiction,” and there’s a great distance between Vonnegut’s universe, populated by Tralfamadorians, and Sawyer’s—essentially ours—bound by laws of physics that the writer explains, in my opinion, in too much detail.

In Flashforward, when a physics experiment with a Large Hadron Collider coincides with the arrival of a pulse of neutrinos from the remnant of a supernova—don’t ask me what any of this means: I studied literature, not physics—the Earth’s entire population gets a glimpse of their lives some twenty-odd years in the future. From this premise, the novel goes on to explore how that glimpse both changes and creates the future it revealed.

The idea is, of course, rich with literary potential, raising complex questions about free will and determination. Sawyer invokes an array of stories, from Oedipus Rex to A Christmas Carol, that take up the nature of prophecy. But he also spends a lot of time considering the physics of time travel and the space-time continuum, and this did not particularly interest me.

As I saw it, Flashforward was solely an idea novel. None of the main characters (all physicists involved in the experiment that set off the flashforward) appealed to me in any way. Although Sawyer created conflicts, as when one scientist foresees himself married to a woman other than his fiance and struggles with whether or not to go on with the wedding, he never made me care about their outcome. All of the characters felt rather flat to me.

Newspaper headlines start off many of the chapters, giving a sense of how the flashforward is affecting the world. I found these more interesting than what was going on with individual characters.

Clearly, Sawyer knows his physics. He knows how scientists conduct their research, and he believes that scientific inquiry and discovery are profoundly important. He may not have written compelling characters here, but we got a good book club discussion out of it. As it was a pretty fast read, I can be happy with that.

Coolness Found: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

2010-12-18T11:32:00.001-05:00

Back in October, my partner and I attended an event at the International Festival of Authors in which William Gibson and David Mitchell gave readings—Gibson from Zero History and Mitchell from an in-progress short story: very cool—and talked together afterward about everything from the writing process to blue jeans to Google. Having read only Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, myself, I went mainly because Nathan devours everything by both writers. (Over the years, he has attended several of Gibson’s readings in Victoria and has five or six signed novels to show for it.) The IFOA event confirmed what I already new both from living with a Gibson fan and from studying postmodern and contemporary literature: I needed to read something by this author.

When Pattern Recognition (2003) made the top ten list for Canada Reads, I decided it would be a good way into Gibson’s work, and, though it didn’t make the final cut, it did hook me. Gibson’s style is remarkably cool, and his story presents some fascinating ideas about how we make meaning in our post-industrial, late-capitalist (whatever you want to call it) world.

The novel centers on Cayce Pollard, a “cool-hunter” highly sensitive to branding. Along with millions of others, she has become obsessed with clips of footage being released online anonymously. She debates with other viewers in online forums about whether the clips come from a completed work or something in progress, about who the maker might be, and about the meaning of the clips themselves.

Cayce’s personal passion and her professional life start to overlap when the CEO of a marketing firm called Blue Ant hires her to find the maker of the footage. With the Blue Ant credit card in hand, Cayce can and does fly halfway around the world in search of the maker. She spends the entire novel jet-lagged, or, as she refers to it, in a state of “soul-delay” (souls not traveling as fast as we can catapult our material bodies).

What made Pattern Recognition utterly compelling for me was this “post-secular” aspect. Not only does Cayce constantly wonder about souls, but her relationship to the footage feels almost religious. Wanting to meet “the maker,” hoping to witness “the creation,” Cayce becomes some version of postmodern pilgrim. In a world inundated with marketing ploys and corporate greed, Gibson’s protagonist finds something profoundly meaningful and significant. In this way she reminded me of some of Don DeLillo’s characters, particularly Brita Nillson from Mao II.

Although I’ve written that I don’t often like present-tense narration, I hardly noticed it here, or, if I did, it worked, and I liked it. Gibson’s language is truly unique; his descriptions made me think of things as I never had before. Now, do I just read Neuromancer and get it over with, or does anyone have any suggestions for which of his novels I should read next?

Book Club Meeting #1

2010-12-01T23:10:00.000-05:00

Our book club convened for the first time on Saturday to discuss Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). I’m still not really sure whether or not I actually liked the book, but it was a great way to kick off the book club.

For one thing, it was short. Now, it’s not like I avoid longer works—some of my favourite books go on for eight or nine hundred pages—but when I’m gearing up to embark on something by a writer who’s completely new to me, a slim novel seems much more inviting.

Aside from its size, Oranges provides some juicy material for intelligent, worthwhile discussion: religion, sexuality, gender roles, home and the difficulty of leaving it. It even got us talking about power and corruption and how we can keep faith in an institution, be it a church, a government, or even a yoga school, when the people in power abuse their roles. Though the book didn’t strike me as particularly important while I read it, the conversation it engendered has stayed with me...at least into this week.

When I say the book didn’t strike me as particularly important, I’m saying this from my own historical perspective. I have no doubt that this novel seemed far more revolutionary in the 1980s than it does today, now that so many more writers have taken up female homosexuality in frank, honest, and compelling ways. In comparison to more recent novels, Oranges seems almost quaint. The few sex scenes that do make their way onto the page are so vague and brief that it’s hard to tell when anything actually happens.

The novel takes place in Lancashire at some unspecified time after World War Two. The protagonist, who shares a first name and much personal history with her author, is adopted by an evangelical Pentecostal woman who intends to raise her to become a missionary. As she grows up, Jeanette’s expressions of her faith make her an outcast at school and an inspiration at church—for awhile. Everything changes when Jeanette falls in love with Melanie and gets demoted and finally outcast for her “unnatural passion.”

What I found most compelling about the novel was how Jeanette reacts to what happens to her. Even though members of her church, even her own mother, treat her terribly, essentially starving her to perform an exorcism, Jeanette doubts neither her religion nor her love for Melanie. She knows that the love she feels is pure, and she even recognizes that those who try to control her sexuality are more concerned about their own power than with her so-called sins.

Interspersed into her narration of her life, Jeanette weaves fairy tale-like episodes, which serve as allegories for her own situation. These story-snippets come and go, sometimes cutting off unexpectedly, but they add layers to the novel and flesh out various symbols that reappear in the story proper. These sections, offering such clear examples of literary symbolism, made me think that this would be a great book to teach in an introductory literature course.

I’m certainly interested in reading more by this author. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was Winterson’s first novel, and I’d like to get my hands on something more recent. Lighthousekeeping (2004), I’m told, is quite good.

Anyhow, the book club is off to a promising start. We’re heading into some Canadian sci-fi in December, so I'm looking forward to something a little different. It feels like eons since I've read some good, old-fashioned sci-fi.

Too Much Information

2010-11-26T11:47:00.000-05:00

Martin Amis’s The Information was . . . a bit of a slough, actually. Granted, it wasn’t the migraine-inducing, plane-upsetting, practically unpublishable novel that Amis’s protagonist unleashes on the world, but it didn’t make me thirsty for more, either.

I think the problem arose from the fact that I sought this book out having read somewhere that it was a brilliant example of comedic writing. In the mood for something light, I tracked down The Information at my local bookstore and dove in. But instead of something easy and hilarious, I found something dense and only darkly humorous. Amis writes smartly, with acerbic wit, but this month that was not what I was looking for.

Richard Tull, the novel’s protagonist, is thoroughly detestable. A writer, given to creating impenetrable texts that most people deem “unreadable,” Richard starts going pretty much mad when his best friend/most-hated enemy, Gwyn Barry, hits the bestseller list with his schmaltzy utopian novel, Amelior. Richard, while struggling to get anyone to read past the ninth page of his own work, plots several ways to destroy his so-called friend. And he doesn’t stop at trying to sabotage the man’s career. He goes so far as to hire Steve Cousins (a gangster so thoroughly tough that he actually seems to enjoy Richard’s novels) to bring Gwyn bodily harm.

Gwyn is pretty hateable himself. Though he certainly puts up with a lot from Richard, who never refrains from voicing his opinion about Amelior, Gwyn makes sure to get his own back. He is very self-satisfied, and he uses women, either as objects of pleasure or as instruments of revenge.

The Information takes place in a man’s world. The homosocial (nearly homicidal) relationship between Richard and Gwyn drives the novel. Their wives, Gina and Demi, are pushed to the margins, important only insofar as they can hurt one or the other of the duelling writers. When his quasi-mistress commits suicide, Richard expresses absolutely no remorse and is, in fact, relieved. At one point, the narrator informs us that Richard feels no special connection to his wife, a woman he married because she was his “sexual obsession.” He does, however, feel the importance of his relationship to his sons, and I found something redeeming in his interactions with the twins, Marius and Marco.

Of course, just because I didn’t like The Information doesn’t mean it wasn’t masterfully-crafted. Undoubtedly, Amis is brilliant. This novel just wasn’t for me, and it seemed much longer than it should have been.

I went out looking for a comedy, and, while parts of it were funny, The Information didn’t feel like an outright comedy. In one of several self-reflexive moments in the novel, the narrator discusses what Northrop Frye identifies as the four mythoi: comedy, tragedy, romance, and irony. I would call The Information an irony. It doesn’t end with a marriage (à la classical comedy) or anything particularly heartening; its characters don’t seem to really grow or evolve or learn anything; I suppose order is restored, but no one could call Richard’s plight a tragedy. For those with an ironic, sarcastic sense of humour, The Information might be worth a shot. Though, even then...a bit long.

So: Any recommendations for a comic novel that might be more up my alley?

Pynchon and the Pothead Detective

2010-11-13T22:44:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned when I wrote about Vineland, I really enjoy Thomas Pynchon's writing. And, perhaps it’s just that I’ve been on a bit of a detective kick lately, watching old noir classics like Out of the Past and reading Paul Auster’s postmodern take on the genre in The New York Trilogy, but Inherent Vice stood out to me as Pynchon’s most enjoyable work yet. Some people may see this as sacrilege, but I had a blast working my way through this novel.

A large part of the appeal of Inherent Vice was its coherent plot (at least coherent when compared to something like Gravity’s Rainbow or V.). Don’t get me wrong, I love these novels, and I’m all for disrupting conventions of form, or rebelling against the entropic death drive of linear plotlines, but I can understand how Pynchon’s sprawling, encyclopaedic tomes could overwhelm some readers. They overwhelm me, too, but I happen to like it.

Inherent Vice is somewhat less overwhelming, probably the author’s most manageable novel since The Crying of Lot 49. The novel follows pothead P.I., Doc Sportello, as he investigates a number of cases for various clients, all of whom seem involved somehow in a vast, interconnected, and nefarious conspiracy. The narrative viewpoint sticks pretty consistently with Doc, a typical Pynchonian paranoid protagonist, and I think this accounts for its readability. Of course, there are innumerable tangents and narrative wanderings, but they all lead back to the main storyline relatively quickly, allowing the reader to follow the thread of the plot. I don’t think this makes Inherent Vice better or worse than any other of Pynchon’s novels; it just makes it easier. Nonetheless, reading Pynchon is always a trip.

Inherent Vice takes place in L.A. during the winter of 1969 and summer of 1970, the arrest and trial of the Manson family forming the backdrop for the novel’s action. The novel conveys a doubled sense of nostalgia for the sixties with its sense of oppositional possibilities. As the seventies begin, Doc already perceives The System’s ascent to total control, and, from the vantage point of the 21st century, the reader has a pretty good sense of how things are going to turn out. Things work out alright for Doc and his clients, but no one can fight the future.

Pynchon populates his world with an assortment of hilarious characters, from the powerful to the paranoid: There's the well-connected real-estate mogul, and the lecherous dentist; the couch potatoes, zombified by television, and the many Californians in love with their cars. The fact that Pynchon keeps returning to his familiar themes and character-types indicates that he is just as concerned as ever about the problems he saw with American (particularly Californian) culture when he began writing in 1960s.

Even more so than his rollicking plotlines and kooky characters, Pynchon's linguistic playfulness kept me turning the pages. I find the way he manipulates simple words particularly fun: a character does something for the “uncountableth” time while someone else moves “untimeably quick”; at one point, trying to distract his pursuers with an impromptu lounge singing act, Doc tilts his hat at a “Sinatroid angle.” For some reason, these small gestures made reading Inherent Vice all the more delightful.

I wish I had a more time for Inherent Vice, because it requires rereading, as do all of Pynchon’s novels. However, for now I’ll have to wait. Book club will be meeting soon enough, and I’ve got a lot of writing to do in the meantime. Still, I’m looking forward to picking it up again soon in the not-too-distant future.

Word Count Update: 7227

2010-11-05T16:22:00.000-04:00

So, what with my increased writing efforts for NaNoWriMo this month, I may have to cut my book reviewing in half. I just wasn't able to finish reading Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice in time to share my thoughts on it this week. Instead, I'll share a bit about my writing progress.

The novel I'm going to attempt to draft this month is something I started working on this summer. Although I'd been doing a lot of research, brainstorming, and planning, I hadn't done that much in terms of actually writing the thing, which is why I thought I'd take advantage of the pressure provided by NaNoWriMo.

I tend to spend far too much time on sentence-level editing and word-tweaking, even while I'm in the earliest stages of a project. (This was a problem for me even when I was writing papers in school.) There are a few problems with this approach: Not only does it take me forever to get anywhere, but also, as I get further in my project, I might discover that I have to axe that sentence I just spent an hour pulling out hair over. Since the object of NaNoWriMo is just to get the words on the page, no matter how crappy, I think this exercise might help me find a more efficient writing technique, or at least silence the inner copy editor for a month.

So far all is going pretty well. I'm about 400 words behind, which I'm alright with me, and I do have plenty of time tonight to make up that lag. Although I'm striving to keep up with the proscribed word count, my main goal is just to stick with it.

NaNoWriMo

2010-11-01T17:45:00.000-04:00

I'm officially committing myself to writing a novel this month, with a little help from NaNoWriMo. The goal here is pure output, unimpeded by constant editing and revision. (That part will come later.) For now my goal is to let the sloppy, somewhat embarrassing prose pile up until I have a rough draft of my novel. I'm both excited and nervous about this process, but I think that joining up with other determined writers will make me accountable for my progress (or lack thereof), and, hopefully, less likely to procrastinate or give up.

My output today was a little slim, what with frustration creating my profile on a continually crashing website and a midday emotional breakdown (no worries: I'm making it sound more dramatic than it was), but tomorrow I'll be up and at my desk bright and early. Wish me luck!

In the Mood for a Downer

2010-10-30T15:54:00.000-04:00

Before I jump into my thoughts about The Retreat, by David Bergen, I’m excited to announce that last night some friends and I decided to form a book club. I’m pretty delighted; after all, the sheer joy I take in having conversations about great books kept me in school for quite awhile. We’ll be meeting once a month, rotating through our respective book choices, so expect some diversions through my usual fare here. Also, any suggestions for a book that I should pose to these folks? This group has pretty diverse tastes, reading everything from historical fiction, set in the golden days of the Roman Empire, to cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic fiction, to literary classics and contemporary Canadian literature. I’m not sure what to expect from the others, nor do I know what to suggest myself. It’ll be a hoot!

As for what I read this week: David Bergen’s The Retreat (2008) eloquently relates a painful story of love and family, separation and loss. The novel takes place in Kenora, Ontario, in 1974, the year of the Ojibway occupation of Anichinabe Park. This historical setting provides a political backdrop for the personal dramas that take centre stage: the Byrd family’s attempt to find fulfillment the Retreat, a commune run by the sleazy Doctor Amos; Lizzy Byrd’s love affair with Raymond Seymour, a young Ojibway man living with his brother on the reserve near the Retreat; and the Seymour brothers’ struggles with social injustice and the childhood trauma of separation.

Lizzy’s summer romance with Raymond and his dangerous encounters with the local law enforcement form the main thread of the plot, but a lot goes on at the Retreat, and Bergen gives most of his characters some time in the spotlight, exploring the complexities of human relationships and the difficulties of love and family. Lizzy and her three brothers watch their father try to hang onto their mother, but the Retreat seems only to splinter them farther apart. Meanwhile, the meaningful relationships that Lizzy and Everett Byrd forge with Nelson and Raymond Seymour are shattered by violence. Even peripheral characters, other members of the commune, betray each other and are hurt or abandoned.

Bergen’s writing is thick with rich, sensory detail, making the Retreat palpable and real. This detail, I think, contributes to the overall beautiful sadness of the book. Every single scent the author records seems like a memory of something lost. Long before the heartbreaking conclusion, these aching details assured me not to expect a happy ending.

I don't generally think of myself as someone who likes particularly "depressing" books, but lately the books that are drawing me in might all deserve this label, to some extent. Of course, The Retreat isn't just depressing; it's also beautifully-written and evocative. Nonetheless, I'm wondering what's with my choices these days. I think part of it might be time of year: Fall seems to require thoughtful books, and sometimes those are also depressing. For every season, there is a book, I suppose. Does anyone else get into reading phases like this? What makes the best fall read, and does that differ from a winter read?

Judging a Book by its Cover

2010-10-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

With its attractive cover design and fabulous title, Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau jumped out at me from the House of Anansi Press’s table at The Word On The Street earlier this fall. Ignoring that old adage (which I don’t suppose we’re really meant to apply to books anyway), I sized it up at once on as something I would love and purchased it solely because it looked fun.

Ultimately, I did enjoy this book, but it took me some time to get into. The narrator, Hazel, tells her story—less an overarching plot than a collection of vignettes—in the present tense, a style that doesn’t always work for me. In this case, it grew on me, and I can appreciate it as an appropriate choice for the story and not just a gimmicky departure from a more “traditional” narrative style. After all, one thing that sets Hazel apart from her mother, and even her father, is her poor memory. The adult Hazel would be hard pressed to recall her childhood voyage on the Lakemba in the same level of detail that she can conjure up when she still is that child. All the same, the present-tense narration took some getting used to and kept me from really sinking into the novel.

Help Me, Jacques Cousteau spans from Hazel’s childhood into her early adult years and feels more like a character study than a story. Hazel’s family is full of eccentrics, from her gadget-building father to her story-telling uncle, and Adamson portrays them beautifully. Even though the novel floats from moment to moment, offering only glimpses of these people, they feel full and real, as if they go on living their lives between their appearances on the page.

The narrator herself is complicated and elusive, hard to pin down or relate to. Like the narrative, Hazel seems to float, always at sea and still riding the boat that carried her from Australia to Canada in childhood. She not only forgets the past but also dreads the future, which she can recognize as it approaches. She fears, too, that she was switched at birth, that she does not really belong to her family.

While Adamson’s characters were interesting, her writing made this book. Savouring her beautiful, lyric prose felt like reading poetry. Every description rendered Hazel’s world fresh and vivid, and for those less plot-focused than I, Adamson’s writing might be reason enough to pick up this slim book. In my case, though, I think I’ll be more likely to use Help Me, Jacques Cousteau to prettify my bookshelf than to reread it.

Revolutionary Road, Resonating Read

2010-10-16T14:54:00.001-04:00

First of all, I just want to explain that I haven’t watched the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road, so I can’t make any judgments as to how the movie compares to Richard Yates's stirring novel. I read it on the recommendation of a great friend whose taste in books and movies tends to match up pretty nicely with mine. And indeed, I haven’t fallen so deeply into a book in awhile. I found Revolutionary Road intelligent and brilliantly written, albeit somewhat depressing.

For those who, like me, have not seen the movie or don’t know much about the book, Revolutionary Road takes place in the mid 1950s and tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler. This bright young married couple once believed they were bound for greatness, but, two children and a move to the country later, they are living an ordinary life and resenting each other for it. They make plans to change this by doing what they always said they would: move to Europe, where they believe self-discovery and a meaningful life await. Let’s just say, things don’t work out as they planned.

Yates’s very real, very flawed characters make the narrative utterly compelling. Even minor characters, like Frank’s coworker Jack Ordway, or the real estate agent, Helen Givings, seem to live and breathe and possess real, complicated motivations. The narrative moves among several characters’ points of view, giving the reader a rich and complex perspective on the story. This being said, the majority of the novel is focalized through Frank. The narrative frequently drifts back into his memories, giving glimpses of his childhood, his relationship with his father, his post-War bachelor lifestyle, and the first time he set eyes on April. She, in contrast, remains fairly opaque. Only nearing the end of the novel does Yates share one of her childhood memories: a brief visit from her perpetually absent father.

As much as the novel spoke to me here in the twenty-first century, it is definitely of its time. In particular, Frank’s psychoanalysis of his wife—he speculates that her unwillingness to have children reflects penis envy—seems disturbingly dated. Published in 1961, Revolutionary Road reminded me in some ways of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Like the characters in these books, the Wheelers crumble when faced with what they see as the “hopeless emptiness” of post-World War Two American culture. They yearn for something more than the cookie-cutter suburban life that society is selling them.

Yates also looks at how his society treated non-conformity as mental illness. Earlier this week, still deep in Revolutionary Road, I made a jaunt down to the beautiful new TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre, where I saw Howl, a film about Allen Ginsberg’s life and his famous poem. Ginsberg wrote Howl in 1955, the year in which Revolutionary Road is set, and the film, which goes briefly into Ginsberg’s time in a mental institution, made me think a lot about John Givings, Helen Givings’s institutionalized son. The Wheelers feel an uneasy connection to John. They waffle between seeing him as a man unfairly submitted to shock therapy because he refuses to play by arbitrary social rules and seeing him as someone who is, indeed, ill.

This novel kept my mind churning long after I put it down. Sure, it was a bit depressing, but it was thought-provoking and captivating. After such a fully-absorbing read, I’m finding it difficult to settle into anything else. If anyone has any recommendations, I’d welcome some help in choosing what to pick up next.

A Funny Take on Fate

2010-10-09T12:11:00.000-04:00

In The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark, Christopher Meades’s debut novel from ECW Press, a simple twist of fate (or folly) brings a quirky cast of characters together when a runaway plum causes a kerfuffle at the market and Henrik gets mistakenly marked for an assassin’s target. From the first page, Meades’s story-teller voice cues the reader to suspend disbelief as a world unfolds where coincidences run rampant and characters seem like they might have sprung from the pages of a comic book.

Through all the twists and turns of the plot—and Meades doesn’t let the action stop for a minute—the novel is really about Henrik’s quest to distinguish himself, to become unique if it kills him. As he tries different methods of sticking out from the crowd, from looking for a new job to smoking pot to speed dating, his fate intertwines with those of Roland, a young business analyst, and Bonnie, a would-be murderer trapped in a loveless marriage to a man named Clyde.

The plot progresses rapidly, with Henrik trying out of slew of lifestyle changes as fate, all the while, rushes him towards a crazy climax. At times, the brisk pace of these madcap events did leave me wanting a little more. Meades gives the reader a taste of so many funny ideas that he doesn’t get a chance to develop them all. In particular, I expected to hear a little more about the Truth Company, one character’s idea for a business that sends out field operatives to say those things too awkward to broach in person.

While none of the characters are particularly likeable, they are all quite entertaining. Even Henrik, who sees himself as “the weed sprouting out of the wallflower,” constantly surprised me with his bizarre ideas for becoming unique and his fundamental misunderstanding of the world he doesn’t quite fit into. Meades grants the reader full access to Henrik’s thoughts, and what goes on inside this protagonist’s head is as funny as it is a bit sad.

For me, however, the funniest (though the most far-fetched) characters were the three elderly assassins, one blind, one mute, one deaf, who won’t let being in a senior’s home stop them from taking lives and making money. Meades skillfully puts slapstick on the page, and much of the novel’s comedy derives from misfired arrows and grenade attacks gone awry. These villains strike me as an older and eviler version of the Three Stooges. (Bonnie and Clyde, of course, contribute to some of the more violent hijinx, as well.)

Meades’s style is easy and absorbing, and he has a flare for combining comedy and action. The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark was a fast and funny read, perfect for some lunch break escapism or a lazy day in.

Catching Up On Classics

2010-10-03T16:44:00.000-04:00

Saul Bellow’s award winning-novel, Herzog (1964), spans five days in the life of Moses Herzog, a man consumed by his own suffering. Moses undergoes a midlife crisis after his second wife, Madeline, kicks him out of their Chicago home to shack up with his former friend, Valentine Gerbasch. Formerly a professor of philosophy, Herzog sees his work collapse along with his marriage. Throughout the course of the novel, he struggles to make sense of his contemporary society and find meaning in his own endeavours, questioning the importance of philosophical theories to lived existence.

At the level of plot, Bellow’s novel is quite simple: After an abbreviated trip to Martha’s Vineyard, Moses returns to New York and has dinner with Ramona, a woman he finds very attractive but to whom he resists making a commitment. He then sets out to Chicago to try to sue for custody of his daughter, June, having heard that Madeline and Vincent locked her in a car during an argument. In Chicago, Moses is seized by a murderous impulse and gets his father’s gun, planning to kill his ex-wife and her lover. From outside his former home, he watches Valentine bathe June and realizes that she is not in danger. The next day, Moses gets in a car accident and gets arrested for illegal possession of the gun. When his brother bails him out, Moses feels energized rather than defeated. He goes out to his old country home, begins to fix it up, and then invites Ramona over for dinner when she comes to town.

Though not much actually happens in the novel, the narrative is complex and rich. Throughout the novel Herzog continually writes letters that he never sends. He writes “to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” The whole novel hangs around these letters, brilliant devices that Bellow uses to shed light on Herzog’s past, to reveal his state of mind, and to tease out the novel’s larger questions about human suffering and responsibility.

I think fall was the perfect time to read Herzog. At this time of year, while I’m undergoing school withdrawal—it’s the first time in five years I haven’t been taking some sort of literature class—I really appreciated the serious intellectual engagement this book offered, even if it did make me feel a little out of my depths at times. In checking this one canonical text off my list, I realized that I'll probably never be as well read as this fictional character.

Life Without Internet

2010-10-02T10:52:00.000-04:00

The only downside to finally moving into our new home is that we will be without an internet connection for a whole nine days. I foresee myself spending a lot of time in coffee shops, which will actually be pretty great. I thoroughly enjoy taking my laptop on little outings. And I'm sure I get a lot more done when I'm out of the house.

I'm a little belated with my review of Saul Bellow's famed novel, Herzog, but I'll be making a little field trip to some wifi location or another to post it in the next couple of days. For now, I'll have far fewer distractions from getting my reading and writing done now that I'm cut off from my precious internet.

Middle-class Murder

2010-09-25T10:41:00.000-04:00

When I started reading Trevor Cole’s Practical Jean, the first thing that came to my mind was the John Waters film, Serial Mom. Like Waters, Cole casts a small town housewife as a serial killer: a premise that paves the way for some delightful black humour.

Whereas Waters’s suburban slayer is simply a psychopath, brutally murdering someone for the slightest offense, like taking her parking space, Cole’s protagonist seems somehow sympathetic. And, of course, practical.

After spending three months tending to her dying mother, Jean Vale Horemarsh decides that she must save her friends from the pain of getting old. She murders not out of rage or hate, but out of love; death is not a gift that Jean bestows on just anyone. One by one she gives each of her closest friends one Last Poem, a chance to do whatever makes them happiest before she gives them their fitting end.

Cole does a brilliant job answering the question Jean always got from her mother growing up: “What was going through your mind?” What appears psychotic and brutal from the outside seems absolutely practical and kind from Jean’s point of view.

Cole also shows how even the most “normal” (or, rather, white, middle-class) childhood leaves its psychic scars. Jean’s murderous reaction to her mother’s death springs from a lifetime in the stiflingly repressed town of Kotemee, a place that Cole brings to life in careful detail. I pictured Kotemee being a lot like the Pleasantville of another movie that came to mind while I read this novel. It is a town that leaves Jean completely unequipped to deal with the real suffering she faces when caring for her mother.

Practical Jean is a satire of the middle class and a contemplation of middle age. Out of the blood and violence arises a thoughtful--and funny--exploration of female friendship. Cole is willing to look at the dark and gruesome, but the novel left me laughing.

Dismembering Cliches and Catapulting Disbelief

2010-09-17T15:24:00.000-04:00

This week I read Kira Henehan’s Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, a novel as madcap as Vineland (my read from last week), but altogether different. Whereas Pynchon’s departure from reality savours of comic books and cartoons, Henehan’s feels more surreal and dreamlike, though just as funny.

Henehan creates an intriguing and absurd universe where pockets can hold a generous supply of deviled eggs and life-sized puppets can bowl a perfect game. From out of this universe a bizarre and mysterious detective story emerges, the careful reporting of Henehan’s narrator, Finley.

Finley, Murphy, and The Lamb work for a man named Binelli and reside at Tiki Ty’s Tiki Barn, a “bookstore-slash-vintage surfing memorabilia museum.” Finley has no memory of her life before she first met Binelli and acquired her pet snake, Lavender. While the novel begins as a record of her assignment with Uppal Puppets, her path to self-discovery soon becomes the real matter of the book.

Though Orion has all of the elements one would expect from a mystery novel, the story is not so much plot-driven as it is fueled by language. It is Henehan’s wordplay that makes the novel such pure reading pleasure. Finley tends to misunderstand those around her just as she strives to be understood perfectly, herself. Her resistance to and examination of any and every cliché renders her language constantly fresh and surprising, so while she is quite inept as an investigator, Finley makes an irresistible narrator.

Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles is as delightful as it is weird. And it’s very weird. It's quite a dense little book, and it deserves a rereading, but it's also a book that I can enjoy without completely "getting." For anyone looking to venture outside of the bounds of literary realism, I think
Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles makes quite a nice little foray.

Pynchon: From Politics to Potty-Humour

2010-09-12T21:39:00.000-04:00

Apartment-hunting has consumed my life for the last week and a half, so my apologies for the belated post. Happily, we’ve now found a place to call home in October, and I finally found some downtime to finish Vineland and to write a few words about it.

First off, I’ve been a Pynchon fan for a little while now, writing my undergraduate thesis on Gravity’s Rainbow and pushing The Crying of Lot 49 on anyone I meet who has not yet had the pleasure. I thoroughly enjoy Pynchon’s madcap, cartoony style, but I know it isn’t for everyone. Like his other novels, Vineland ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, raunchy sex talk rubbing up against contemplations of the universe.

With an unruly cast of characters who flit in and out of the narrative and a tendency to wander off on tangents that last for pages at a time, the novel does make following the plot a bit of a challenge. It offers the reader more to hold onto than do some of the author’s tomes, but I wouldn’t want to try reading it over too long a stretch of time.

The novel takes place mainly in 1984, the year of Reagan’s re-election, flashing back to events in the sixties. Through the story of a teenage girl (Prairie Wheeler) who learns why her mother (Frenesi Gates) left her as a baby, Pynchon explores America’s cultural transformation between the rebellious, rock-and-roll sixties and the television-saturated eighties. Frenesi’s story is replete with betrayal and heartbreak, sex and addiction, power and oppression. In the end, mother and daughter finally meet at a family reunion. Brock Vond, the man who kept them apart, is eliminated, in a way. Still, Pynchon, as usual, resists the typical happy ending. The joining of Frenesi’s new family and the one she abandoned is tentative. Prairie’s father may find peace with the expropriation of his house, but the Reagan years are far from over.

One storyline does get a happy ending, though. DL, a friend of Frenesi’s from her revolutionary filmmaker days, falls in love with the man she once almost killed. DL is a ninjette in a plotline that works off of typical martial arts film motifs, much like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Hired to assassinate Brock Vond, DL accidentally performs the Vibrating Palm (a slower-acting version of Tarantino’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique) on Vond’s lookalike, a man named Takeshi. After working off her bad karma with him for years, the two finally get together, and the sex is fantastic.

All in all, Vineland was a lot of fun and surprisingly poignant at times. Despite the relentless potty-humour, the novel takes its politics pretty seriously. Pynchon makes me feel both serious and juvenile, intelligent and immature. There’s a lot to be said for that.

In Toronto

2010-09-02T17:28:00.000-04:00

After six days of driving and a lovely visit with my mom, Nathan and I have arrived in Toronto. Needless to say, in the process of this huge move, I haven't done much reading or writing. Nonetheless, I hope to get right back on schedule next week, so please return for my thoughts on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland.

Beginning the Trip with The End of the Road

2010-08-28T02:25:00.000-04:00

Well, it’s been another crazy week, our frantic packing and cleaning interrupted by days of wedding things for Nathan’s sister—very fun and lovely wedding things. We’re now officially on the road, and Nathan’s started a blog about our big move which you can check out here if you’re interested.

In our brief spots of down-time this past week, I read John Barth’s second novel, The End of the Road. Although the novel engages critically with some lofty philosophical ideas, from existentialism to structuralism, it’s also a quick and occasionally amusing read.

Barth has quite an entertaining style, very similar to that of many other (white, male) mid-twentieth century American writers, like Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. His narrator, Jacob Horner, may not be a particularly admirable fellow, (he lacks any sense of moral grounding or ethical responsibility), but he does look at the world and his situation in it in a comical, if perverse, way.

Jake Horner, in fact, bears a great resemblance to Todd Andrews, the narrator of Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera. The two novels share much in terms of theme and content: They both feature triangulated sexual relationships; they both prod the tenets of existentialism; and they both deal, peripherally, with the fact of racial segregation in the South.

However, of the two, I prefer The Floating Opera. Todd Andrews may have been a more despicable character than Jacob Horner, but he was also a more interesting one. Whereas The Floating Opera uses Todd’s sociopathic vantage point to critique the absurdity of the law and of class and race relations in Maryland, Jacob Horner’s own complexes did not offer the same critical perspective. I did find Horner’s attempt to arrange a legal abortion in 1950s Maryland a fascinating piece of cultural anthropology, but the novel’s dark ending left me feeling a bit grumpy.

Though not profound or powerful, this offbeat novel did keep me thinking, and I definitely laughed once or twice. It won’t be the last Barth novel I read (I really want to check out The Sot Weed Factor), so I look forward to seeing how it measures up.

A Powerful Project

2010-08-19T17:51:00.000-04:00

While the packing and organizing continues for the big move, I did manage to squeeze in some time over the weekend to finish Aleksander Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, a poignant, if, at times, plodding, novel about a Bosnian writer from Chicago who sets off to Eastern Europe to write the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant shot by Chicago’s chief of police in 1908.

From chapter to chapter, the novel alternates between past and present; while one half of the novel focuses on Olga Averbuch, Lazarus’s sister, as she suffers the loss of her brother and abuse by those in power, the other half follows Vladimir Brik who uses his grant for the Lazarus project to fly to Eastern Europe with his fellow Bosnian, a photographer named Rora. Both stories are emotionally rich, pulling the reader into two strife-filled worlds: early twentieth-century Chicago, where immigrants struggle against poverty and anti-Semitism, and twenty-first-century Eastern Europe—the Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia—where criminals and Mafiosi run rampant and the pain of war stings afresh. Hemon gives more time and development to this second story, which may explain why I found it the more compelling of the two. Olga was a fierce, intriguing, and sympathetic character, but her struggle—unable to give her brother a proper burial, in love with a man wanted by the police—felt somewhat distant and abbreviated.

Brik’s section, infused with much more self-reflection and analysis, allowed me to fall deeper into the story. Though I did not always like the protagonist, he was complex, conflicted, and inquisitive: characteristics that make for a good narrator. His companion, Rora, a storyteller of a different stripe, brings another layer to the narration, alternately tense and amusing. Rora’s stories, an uncertain mixture of fact and fabrication, give murky insight into life in Sarajevo during the war, a time when Brik himself was already in the U. S.

Though Brik and Rora set out to find out about Lazarus’s pre-American life, little plot-based overlap between stories occurs. Rather, the interplay between worlds takes place at the level of language. In subtle ways, Brik reveals himself as the writer of the Lazarus section: Olga worries about brain inflammation, just as contemporary Bosnians do (or so Brik says); the can of sadness (really sardines) from Brik’s hotel room makes its way into Olga’s bleak world. These connecting details enrich both narratives and showcase Hemon’s linguistic cleverness.

At times, as when Brik continually refers to the one particularly smelly cab as the “Ford Feces,” Hemon’s cleverness gets to be a little much, but on the whole, I found his playfulness engaging. I did, however, need to turn to the dictionary more during this read than I have since summer began. Words like “otiose” or “deracination” did not come up so often as to make the read arduous, but they were there.

As do most novels, The Lazarus Project really makes its emotional impact at the end. Both storylines come to climaxes that I found surprisingly affecting, given the very steady emotional tone of the rest of the novel. If ever I found myself bored while reading this work, Hemon definitely made up for it in the end.

No Review This Week

2010-08-13T01:36:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess I'll be missing my self-imposed deadline for the first time this week. Reading and writing have momentarily fallen by the wayside as my partner and I are packing up the car and moving halfway across the country (Victoria to Toronto) at the end of the month. There's a lot of work and still more planning ahead of us, so I decided to take one for the team and not spend half the night trying to finish a book I'm not even halfway through.

I'll be back next week with my review of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project.

Thanks for reading!

Another Foray into Faulkner

2010-08-06T19:49:00.001-04:00

With my second-hand copy of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I had quite a different reading experience than the one I wrote about last week. Whereas then I fretted about not being able to mark up an immaculate copy of Cloud Atlas, this week not only was I free to scribble all over my beat-up book, but also whoever had owned it before me (a student) had left some scribbles of his or her own to guide me through. This was my first time reading Faulkner outside of a classroom, so these marginal notes were incredibly helpful, like little flags marking out an unfrequented trail, where the hiker might otherwise miss its twists and turns. Like The Sound and the Fury, Go Down, Moses, and, well, most work by this renowned American Modernist, Absalom, Absalom! is famously difficult, with layers of storytelling, sentences that span pages, and a parenthetical aside that, in my edition, went on for thirty-two pages. Granted, it’s an odd choice for summer reading, but the thing about reading a novel like this is that it gives you such a feeling of accomplishment; it’s really quite rewarding.

The best way to read Faulkner, I find, is to read for hours at a go, totally uninterrupted. When possible, this makes it much easier to remember what or who each pronoun refers to and to keep track of those protracted, marathon sentences. Almost every time I reopened the book, I found that I had to go back over a lot of the same ground to regain my footing. Once I’m in, however, once I’m immersed in that distinct, lingering style, I get completely transported to Faulkner’s South; I can almost smell the wisteria and feel the thick, sticky heat.

In Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (also a central character and perspective in The Sound and the Fury) reconstructs (perhaps invents) the history of Thomas Sutpen, a man who turns up in Quentin’s hometown in 1833 to live out a perverse version of the so-called American Dream, building himself a sprawling plantation from nothing and leaving his offspring a legacy of misery.

Quentin assembles his story in bits and pieces, from first-, second-, and third-hand narratives, from letters, and from his own first-hand experience. He hears much from Miss Rosa Coldfield, Sutpen’s paranoid and childlike sister-in-law, and more from his father and grandfather. He supplements what facts he has with speculation, first when speaking with his father on the front porch back in Mississippi, and then with Shreve, his (Canadian!) roommate at Harvard.

The narrative circles around and around a few key moments of trauma, which, when finally revealed, feel both horrifyingly unexpected and fatally inevitable. In Faulkner’s haunting depiction of the South, Thomas Sutpen and his heirs are doomed by the social codes that create them—from one-drop racial ideology to gender constructions that divide women into virgins, whores, and slaves—while Quentin Compson and his contemporaries are crippled, traumatized by a history of “defeated grandfathers and freed slaves.”

Even though all of Faulkner’s characters sound the same—after Shreve remarks that Quentin “sounds like [his] old man,” Quentin thinks, “Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve”—he creates such complex psychological depth that his Modernist portrait of two young men discussing incest, slavery, war, and murder rings more true than the most realistic dialogue. It took determination to get through this novel, but the intellectual payoff was worth it.

David Mitchell’s Scrumptious Story Sandwich

2010-07-30T14:12:00.000-04:00

It’s tough for me to read a really good book when I’m not supposed to be writing in it. Recently, my desire—nay, my need—to underline compelling passages and make marginal notes has come up hard against my respect for other people’s belongings. As much as I love using the library or borrowing books from friends (and as much as I need to do so for financial reasons), with certain books I feel it would be worth investing in a copy of my own that I could manhandle and peruse with a pen in hand, marking it up from cover to cover. This was certainly the case this week, as I read my partner’s copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). Though I restrained myself from defiling those pristine pages—at times I nearly had to sit on my hands—I do feel like this is a book I may one day buy for myself, just to have the pleasure of engaging with it in a different, messier way.

Mitchell’s third “novel” is actually a series of six stories, each one sandwiched inside the next. The first half of the book progresses forward in time as narrative after narrative ends on a cliffhanger. Only the middlemost section (the last story, chronologically) doesn’t get cut off. After this section, entitled “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After,” the book retraces its steps back through time, wrapping up each narrative in reverse sequence.

I am of the opposite opinion of A.S. Byatt, who reviewed Cloud Atlas for The Guardian when the novel first came out. Whereas Byatt felt Mitchell’s work peaked with the middle two stories, I found the outermost stories most enjoyable, starting with “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” which recounts an American lawyer’s journey home from the Chatham Islands aboard a ship called the Prophetess, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Ewing’s distinct voice carried me away to this distant place and time, and when the first half of his story cuts off mid-sentence, I felt almost desperate and robbed. Luckily—though I didn’t realize this until I had read more than half of the book—we do get the conclusion to this story, and all the others, in due time.

Mitchell links one story to the next in very interesting ways. In the second section, “Letters from Zedelghem,” set in the 1930s, Robert Frobisher, a destitute English musician fled to Belgium in hopes of gaining the money and tutelage of a reclusive composer named Vyvyan Ayrs, discovers “The Pacific journal of Adam Ewing” on his patron’s bookshelf. Noteably, he recognizes the journal as a work of fiction, not a “real” artifact. Mitchell continually exposes the worlds he creates as fictional constructions, as when the next story, “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” (my favourite), turns out to be the manuscript that the publisher, Timothy Cavendish, reads in his story—which itself turns out to be a movie viewed by Sonmi-451. Sonmi is a “fabricant,” or clone slave, who rebels against the dystopian society that created and exploited her and whose testimony becomes a holographic recording viewed by Zachary, the storyteller in the following section, which imagines a post-apocalyptic, primitive society in Hawaii after the fall of Sonmi’s terrifying civilization. So, yes, this novel is highly layered and self-referential, and leaves the reader no space to distinguish between fiction and a fictional “reality.”

The stories intersect in other ways, too. Most obviously, there is the comet-shaped birthmark shared by characters in each successive story, suggesting the possibility that each protagonist is a reincarnation of the last—though the fictional status of so many of these characters undermines (or at least complicates) this possibility. The image of the cloud atlas, of course, comes up in different guises in each section. Then, Luisa Rey meets Robert Sixsmith, the addressee of Robert Frobisher’s “Letters,” and also sees the Prophetess and listens to Frobisher’s “Cloud Atlas Sextet.” Doubtless, if I’d had a pencil in hand, I’d note even more points of overlap and intersection.

Though I enjoyed the first four stories most, the more sci-fi ones certainly had their merit. Both have their share of suspense, and each has a unique narrative voice, particularly the final one: Zachary speaks in a strange English dialect and says things like, “I’d got diresome hole-spew that day ‘cos I’d ate a gammy dog leg” (239). Sonmi, too, is a likeable and developed character, with her own voice (despite having been bred to be a mere drone). Even though her story rehashes what has often been done sci-fi novels and film—the fabricant’s plight seems a lot like that of Bladerunner’s replicant—Mitchell still manages to make this material fresh and compelling. Actually, what bugged me about this section was just its format: the archivist’s questions, followed by Sonmi’s response. Then again, I don’t really like reading interviews. Probably, for those who like or don’t mind this format, this story might appeal more than, say, Frobisher’s letters.

All in all, I found Cloud Atlas and absorbing and enjoyable read, particularly in the second half, once I realized that I’d get an ending to all those interrupted tales. (I can’t help it: I need an ending.) This layered, imaginative, and playful novel, with its rich variety of narrative style and voices was pure reading pleasure.

My Kind of Mystery

2010-07-23T19:22:00.000-04:00

This week, reading the first installment of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, I almost felt that I might need to go back to grad school. Chock-full of literary allusions, rife with concepts of postmodern theory, and abounding with metafictional layers, City of Glass features all the elements of postmodern fiction that set my scholar-senses tingling. And even though it engages with some difficult ideas—from the relationship of a word to its referent to the various ways in which we make meaning—it’s also just a fun and entertaining read.

The novel’s protagonist, Daniel Quinn (notably, he shares initials with the title character of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, one of Auster’s key intertexts), stumbles into the role of private investigator when he answers a wrong number, someone looking for none other than Paul Auster. Less than ten pages in and the distinction between reality and fiction already begins to crumble away.

Although Auster rigorously maps Quinn’s concrete world, he denies his reader any metaphysical bearings. Fact and fiction, reality and lies, all collapse into each other. A la Cervantes, Auster’s narrator pretends to be no more than an editor, piecing together Daniel Quinn’s “true” story. However, Auster undercuts this premise, not only by making himself a character in the novel, but also by having that character share his reading of Don Quixote. (Quick confession: I’ve never read Cervantes’s novel; I’m sure that those who have will get even more from Auster’s references.)

City of Glass may not be a mystery novel in the ordinary sense—it raises more questions than it solves with answers—but like a good who-done-it, it keeps the reader wanting more. Though Quinn’s a bit of an odd duck, he’s still a compelling and developed character, and I look forward to finishing the trilogy.

Enchanted By Erdrich

2010-07-16T02:33:00.000-04:00

Each of the four sections in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum focuses on the story of a different character who is somehow connected to a traditional Ojibwe dance drum. From Ojibwe living in the traditional way more than a century ago to present-day characters of mixed-blood who live far from the drum’s original home, everyone who comes in contact with the drum feels the pull of its mystical history.

The first narrator is Faye Travers, a woman who lives on Revival Road in New Hampshire with her half-Ojibwe mother. The women operate a business together, appraising estates of the deceased. In one of these homes, formerly owned by one of the Indian agents on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Faye finds the painted drum and, overcome by a mysterious compulsion, she steals it. Though Faye’s theft originally springs from a need to be with the drum, she and her mother ultimately decide to repatriate it.

In the second section of the novel, Bernard Shaawano, grandson to the drum’s maker, tells how his grandfather lost his daughter and heard the calling to build the drum. While the entire novel resonates with spiritual possibility, this section immerses the reader in a world where concrete reality and spiritual realms overlap and interpenetrate.

The third section of the novel shifts into third person narration and shows how the drum’s return has, in some way, revived the reservation and reinvigorated faith in traditional practices. The section opens with the heartrending picture of three children scrounging for food in their frozen house while their mother comes to the brink of prostitution trying to provide for them. In her absence, the house burns down, and her children nearly die. However, the drum exerts its magic force and brings them back from the verge of death.

Finally, the narration returns to Faye, who seems to have been in some way healed by the drum, even though she cannot entirely believe that it possesses mystical powers.

The drum provides the beat that ties Erdrich’s melody together, but all three stories contain so much more tragedy and drama and survival than what I’ve recounted here. While each story is incredibly sad in many ways, the novel is far from depressing. In each section, Erdrich sounds a note of meaning and hope.

And while the stories themselves are beautiful, Erdrich’s language and images are exquisite. From the raven’s laugh to the husky’s hungry blue eye, Erdrich composes a world both meaningful and real. Additionally, she has an enviable ability to describe human emotions in their utter complexity. She somehow manages to convey those thoughts and feelings that seem beyond language, feelings that the characters cannot fully understand, themselves. All in all, Erdrich's careful craftsmanship and poignant philosophy make The Painted Drum an enthralling and thought-provoking read.

Disquieting Dictation

2010-07-08T20:09:00.000-04:00

This week I took even longer settling on something to read than I did last week. Happily, while I wasn’t flipping between various novels, I was reading book blogs and felt my fickleness vindicated when I read Jacob Lambert’s piece, “Not Reading is Fundamental.” Still, even though I enjoyed luxuriating in that in-between-reads phase, where every book on the shelf shimmers with possibility, like the fresh, green breast of Fitzgerald’s new world, I did manage to finish one book to write about this week. (I thrive on deadlines.) Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation, a set of four novellas, or long short stories, was the shortest of the books I had on the go, plus, I need to return it to the library in a few days, so it won out.

The collection starts out with the title story, “Dictation,” a delightful piece in which Ozick imagines that Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s amanuenses meet and conceive of a plan to immortalize themselves. These two “conduits of genius,” as they see themselves, decide to leave their mark by transferring a piece from James’s “The Jolly Corner,” into Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” and vice versa. As Miss Bosanquet predicts, neither writer will notice the foreign matter in his story. Instead, he will only “wonder at what he believes he has wrought—he will congratulate himself!”

Aside from the intriguing premise, Ozick drew me in with her singular descriptions and vivid characterization. For her, James is a man for whom eloquent and elaborate phrases flow effortlessly while Conrad considers writing to be like “dipping his pen in his own blood and pulling out pieces of flesh.” Their amanuenses, too, are opposites. Theodora Bosanquet, is a “new woman,” who smokes, speaks of the most personal things in public, and kisses women, while Lilian Hallowes holds back, keeping her relationships and reputation prim and proper. To bring these characters off the page, Ozick constantly flits through their various thoughts, in a way that evoked for me, at times, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style.

The next story, “Actors,” traces Matt Sorely’s transformation from a naturalist character actor, who gets minor roles in television dramas, into a howling, postmodern Lear in an Off Off Broadway stage production that aims to recapture the style of old Yiddish theater. Something about this story was incredibly eerie. While Matt’s howl consumes him, it’s never clear whether he is going mad, tapping into “a relentless and fiery truth,” or, simply, lying. In the background the real Lear, Eli Miller, father to the woman who wrote this play, haunts him. Though the story started a little slowly, it’s one that I’ve been thinking about for days.

Less gripping, though equally smart and complex, was “At Fumicaro,” the story of a man who, in the years leading up to World War Two, visits Italy to attend a conference on “The Church and How It Is Known” and winds up marrying his young, pregnant chambermaid. What I found most compelling about this story was how the protagonist, Frank Castle, struggles with belief, not only in God, but in everything. One minute he’s ready to elope with Viviana, the next he believes she only used him to get his money. He thinks she’s quite clever, and then he’s ashamed at her simplemindedness. Castle is by no means a likeable character, but his ambivalence and uncertainty make him an absorbing one.

The final story, I was surprised to discover, was one I read years ago in a copy of The Atlantic. I don’t read the magazine very often (though I wish I did), and, at the time, I didn’t know who Cynthia Ozick was, so the author’s name didn’t stick with me. So, this time round, when I got to “What Happened to the Baby” I experienced an odd sense of déjà vu. The scene that brought it all back to me occurs not far into the story, when the narrator, Phyllis, recalls going to one of her Uncle Simon’s meetings. Just as Simon’s wife finishes singing a song in “GNU,” Simon’s universal language, a group of his enemies in the back row gets up and starts shouting “Esperanto” and “Zamenhof.” This was what I remembered from reading the story years ago: competing philologists striving to invent and popularize a truly universal language.

However, the story goes much deeper than this. Simon’s search for a truly universal language is really only a facade, covering over a more personal drama. As Phyllis grows up, she discovers how gullible she has been as she follows Simon’s ex-wife, Essie, down a hall of mirrors. In her own life, Phyllis finds it increasingly easier to lie. As Essie informs her, the true universal language is “lie, illusion, deception.”

Though only the last story in the collection makes this explicit, the whole quartet seems to be about lies, from Matt Sorely’s take on the nature of acting, to Frank Castle’s distrust of everyone around him. Aside from the first story, which takes joy in historical inaccuracies and fictional play, Ozick’s meditation on lying and the evasiveness of truth is very dark. And yet, because it is a collection of short stories, rather than a novel, I didn’t find Dictation’s darkness overwhelming. I’ll definitely be thinking about these stories over the next little while, but they won’t haunt me.

Happy Canada Day

2010-07-02T01:32:00.000-04:00

—Although, I’m not even writing about a Canadian book this week. I started off reading Nino Ricci’s Origin of Species, but gave up after a few chapters. As Santiago Roncagliolo says in The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook, another book I have on the go right now, in which a slew of contemporary writers respond to questions about the art of fiction, “There are lots of good books to be read. There’s no need to obsess yourself with the bad ones. There are also good books that you read at the wrong time. In those cases, it’s better to wait and try again later.”

I’m not certain which category Origin of Species falls into, but I’m hoping it’s in the latter. It’s been on my To Read list since it won the Governor General's Literary Award, but once I finally started it, I just couldn’t bring myself to keep going. After reading so many good things about it, I was disappointed to feel like the writer was more concerned with displaying his knowledge of Montreal than with telling a story.

Maybe at another time it will speak to me and move my very soul, but, for now, it’s gone back to the library.

After giving up on Origin, I started E.L. Doctorow’s first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. The action-packed beginning, upsetting and brutal though it was, lassoed me in. It felt much like Cormac McCarthy—Blood Meridian, in particular. Of course, like all of Doctorow’s novels, Hard Times has a strong metafictional element. The novel in the reader’s hand is ostensibly the narrator’s ledgers, recording the depressing history of the town called Hard Times.

The first chapter gave me the momentum to keep reading, but by the time I got halfway through, I did consider quitting yet another novel this week. Even though Doctorow’s storytelling ability astounds me and his writing inspires my envy, the novel’s relentless sense of gloom and foreboding made it quite a slog to get through by the end.

Like McCarthy, Doctorow creates a grim and terrifying wild west, where Bad Men, unchecked by cowardly settlers, traverse hostile lands, raping and murdering desperate citizens.

After a visit from one such Bad Man, the citizens of Hard Times try to build again. The narrator, Blue, takes on the role of mayor and ropes every passerby, from a Russian pimp to a Swedish settler, into making a home over the remains of the old town. But despite Blue's hope, the town's destruction is built into it's very provisional foundations.

Of course, Blue recounts the town's history from the perspective of one who has already seen its tragic end. His despair and relentless foreshadowing underscore the inevitability of this outcome, making otherwise upbeat moments dreary.

Despite it's action and adventure beginnings, Hard Times got really slow and heavy and fated really quickly. I did stick it out to the end, but the fact that it was somewhere around two hundred pages shorter than Origin probably helped. And, of course, the fact that it was Doctorow, so the great writing outweighs the depressing factor.

Thanks for a Great Recommendation!

2010-06-24T14:59:00.000-04:00

Particularly after spending a couple of years in an American university, I’m quickly discovering that I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to contemporary Canadian fiction. Luckily, these days I have the time to do some serious reading, and my wonderful friends and family have been giving meet great recommendations. This past week I finally had the pleasure of reading Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness.

Although not a particularly plot-driven novel, A Complicated Kindness kept me turning pages, eager for the next perfect character portrait, the next stroke of heartbreaking humour. Toews’s writes exquisitely, creating incredibly real characters and tapping into the truth of their experiences.

The novel’s narrator, a young Mennonite girl, Nomi Nickel, is seeking an ending to her story. In addition to dealing with the regular trials of adolescence, like struggles with school and the pressure to have sex, Nomi tries to come to terms with the trauma of being left by her mother and sister in East Village. She frequently fantasizes about moving away this town that forces people to choose between their faith and their loved ones. Unfortunately, as she writes in one passage that I found particularly poignant, “[w]hen you’re a Mennonite you can’t even year properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your innermost desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute.”

Together, Nomi and her father develop various systems for getting through the day, like planning meals in alphabetical succession. While her father sells off their furniture piece by piece and sits out at night on a lawn chair, imagining himself as a particle undergoing entropy, Nomi skips classes, smokes pot, and tries to think of things to say to her boyfriend.

Toews’s portrait of their grief strikes deep, but the novel is far from depressing. There’s a lot of humour and a lot of faith—faith in love rather than in strict Mennonite rules—that allow these characters to transcend their pain and to appreciate the complicated kindness that lies behind it.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2010-06-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Feeling the need to read something unpretentious and fun last week, I dove into Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001), a book that my friend described as pure escapism when she lent it to me. After so much expertly-written literary fiction, this wacky adventure novel, set in an alternative 1980s England where the Crimean War has lasted more than a hundred years and people clone dodos for pets, was just the break I needed—brain-candy that still appeals to the lit scholar in me. If I get nothing else from studying literature for six years or so, at least I can experience the pleasure of picking up on the rampant literary allusions and references in this book.

The Eyre Affair requires some major disbelief-suspension: Fforde imagines a world in which the literary market has become a prime target for criminals, and a special crime-fighting unit, the LitraTecs, do their best to halt the traffic of forged manuscripts and so on; the Hindenburg has not exploded, so people regularly fly in “gasbags”; vending machines spout off Shakespeare sonnets for a coin or two. Plus, there’s time travel and all its inescapable paradoxes. (Just wait until you find out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.) Oh, and fictional characters can step into the real world—and vice versa. As the head of the Swindon LitraTecs branch says, “The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think.”

The novel follows a heroine named Thursday Next as she takes on the world’s third most evil villain, Acheron Hades. Hades has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, along with a machine invented by Next’s uncle that allows people to enter into any given work of literature. With this machine, Hades manages to kidnap the young governess, and Next must bring her back, or else Brontë’s readers will forever be looking at a much shorter book.

Next is a pretty kick-ass heroine. She doesn’t think twice before jumping into action, and she brazenly ignores protocol if it means saving a life or stopping a criminal. She’s sassy; while her fellow LitraTecs kowtow to the Goliath corporation, Next gives them the lip they deserve.

The entire cast of characters really comes off the page. Even minor players, who just show up to give Next her phone messages or take her order at a bar, seem to have a voice and character all their own. Furthermore, Fforde does a nice job capturing the voice of two of canonical literature’s most well-known characters, Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax Rochester.

Granted, I judged this novel by a different standard than I applied to some of the other books I’ve read this summer. While I enjoyed the adventure on the whole, there were some things that bugged me.

Fforde writes action really well; romance, not so much. I didn’t particularly care about the relationship between Next and her former boyfriend, and their love story seems tacked on to the more entertaining adventure plot. Also, there are several bouts of phony-sounding dialogue, the worst of which occurs when Next recounts her first meeting with Hades to her superiors. These flaws aside, however, The Eyre Affair gave me just the brain-vacation I was looking for. I’ll definitely keep the series in mind the next time I want to go on one.

E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime

2010-06-10T17:37:00.000-04:00

This week I read E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. As with many of the works I’ve been reading recently, Ragtime creates a world where historical fact mingles freely with fictional narrative. Prominent historical figures like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Emma Goldman share the same fictional space as the narrator’s Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, and self, referred to, simply, as the boy. The novel begins as an overview of events in the lives of seemingly unrelated characters, offering a panorama of early twentieth-century America. As the narrative progresses, the separate stories pull together into a tight web where everyone is somehow connected to everyone else.

Before the stories started coming together and picking up momentum, I found Ragtime a little difficult to get into. But the first couple of chapters, though they don’t offer much in the way of a narrative hook, submerge the reader in the era of ragtime. I particularly admire Doctorow’s technique of using lists to provide a sweeping perspective of the cultural milieu. Even his catalogue of the products available from a mail-order novelty company gives a striking sense of the times: “exploding cigars, rubber roses for the lapel that squirted water, boxes of sneezing powder, telescopes that left black eyes, exploding card decks, sound bladders for placing under chair cushions, glass paperweights with winter scenes on which snow fell when you shook them, exploding matches, punch-boards, little lead liberty bells and statues of liberty, magic rings, exploding fountain pens, books that told you the meaning of dreams, rubber Egyptian belly dancers, exploding watches, exploding eggs.” Phew. In addition to making me chuckle, this exhaustive list also offers connections to various other moments in the novel. For one thing, there are a lot of explosions.

One thing that bugged me about Ragtime was the uncertain status of the narrator. For the most part, Doctorow maintains the voice of an omniscient narrator, using historical tense. However, from time to time, he reminds the reader that one of his characters is writing the story, working from historical documents to reconstruct the past. For example, the narrator explains that he gets some of his details from Younger Brother’s diary, others from Houdini’s private, unpublished papers. As in Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), the narrator himself appears as a character in the story, described in the third person. In this case, he is the boy who practices the art of self-duplication in front of the mirror and plays the burial game with a beautiful girl who once lived in a New York slum with her father. However, whereas The Book of Daniel plays with narration relentlessly, Ragtime is more subtle in its self-reflexivity, and, as a result, I felt that the few times the narrator did intrude didn’t belong. I appreciate that these maneuvers prompt the reader to question the notion of historical objectivity, but I don’t feel that they added much to Doctorow’s historical imaginings.

Maybe it’s just time for me to read something a little more brainless.

On the whole, this was another well-written novel by a brilliant author. The story, once it gets going, is intricate and engaging, and the ideas behind the narrative--the picture of a world transforming into our own, where "the value of the duplicable event [is] everywhere perceived"--is profoundly thought-provoking. Next week, however, I hope I find something that just lets my thoughts be.

Sherman Alexie's War Dances

2010-06-03T15:35:00.000-04:00

I feel the need to begin my posts by briefly explaining why I’m reading what I’m reading at a given time. In this case, Sherman Alexie’s War Dances was a birthday gift from my partner. In fact, he’d planned to give it to me for Christmas, but at that point I decreed that I didn’t want to receive any books until I graduated. No spare time for extracurricular reading. He wanted to get me War Dances—and I actually wanted to get it for him, too—because I had just read a short story from the collection in my contemporary Native American literature class with Nancy Peterson (who recently edited a book of Alexie’s interviews, Conversations with Sherman Alexie), and, apparently, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Like Alexie’s first book, The Business of Fancydancing, War Dances offers an array of hilarious and heartrending short stories and poems, but this collection tends more towards the stories. For me, the poems served as pallet cleansers between short stories, refreshing ideas conveyed with verve and wit, but nothing to sink too deeply into. That being said, I really connected to both “Ode for Pay Phones” and “Ode to Mix Tapes.” Alexie’s nostalgia for the simple experiences we’ve lost in our digital age resonates with my own.

And yet, Alexie is far from old-fashioned. His characters, his stories, his style—even his vocabulary (what other writer uses “epic” as an adjective?)—reach right to the root of what it means to live in the contemporary world. War Dances proves that writing can capture our postmodern condition just as effectively and affectingly as film, television, and music. In fact, several of his stories draw comparisons between writing and these different media. Like the film editor, the contemporary writer can cut from scene to scene and knows just how to splice the pieces together to make something beautiful. Like pop songs, great stories create “an invisible organ, a pituitary gland of the soul.” Drawing out these implicit connections, Alexie reminds the reader just how vital the written word remains, no matter how technology-driven our society may be.

So many of the stories in this collection capture what makes writing such a beautiful and terrifying endeavour. In particular, “Fearful Symmetry” really spoke to me as a writer. The protagonist, Sherwin Polatkin, has had some success as a writer but fears his talent has all dried up, and he needs to find the courage to try again. Like everything in the collection, “Fearful Symmetry” renders an age-old dilemma in a bold, new way.

Alexie does the short story right. He distills an entire life into a few short pages, and brings out the poignancy in the most mundane moments. Drawing on subjects from politics to pop culture, War Dances engages the reader from start to finish in a compelling exploration of contemporary life. I am officially declaring Alexie my favourite writer—at least for this week.

Lawrence Hill's Any Known Blood

2010-05-27T13:49:00.001-04:00

I have not yet read Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), but a friend recently lent me on of his earlier novels, Any Known Blood (1997). Despite its intimidating appearance at five hundred and some pages, the novel was a quick and entertaining read, blending the solemn history of slavery and civil rights in Canada and the U.S. with a personal, touching, complex, and humourous family history.

Spanning five generations, the novel depicts the slow evolution of circumstances for black Americans and Canadians since the mid-nineteenth century. Even though it engages seriously with historical racial injustices and the horrors of racism, the novel is more uplifting than upsetting. In Any Known Blood, friends, family, lovers, and humour provide a healing counterforce to racial prejudice, institutional oppression, and personal tragedy.

After losing his job as a speech writer for leaking a confidential government document about Ontario’s elimination of human rights legislation, Langston Cane the Fifth heads to Baltimore in pursuit of his family history, bent on writing it all down. The novel alternates between the past and present as Langston uncovers letters, diaries, and memoirs, filling in the stories of his ancestors while setting up base in Baltimore and getting to know an estranged aunt. The narrative of the past moves steadily backwards, coming finally to the story of the first Langston Cane, who escaped slavery and fled to Oakville in 1850 only to return back to the Unites States a few years later to participate in John Brown’s historical raid on Harpers Ferry.

At times, the historical documents Langston Cane uncovers when going through his aunt’s papers or a college library really force the reader to suspend his or her disbelief. (How convenient that the Quaker, Nathaniel Shoemaker, recorded whole conversations verbatim in his journal and even jotted down what he can recall of a speech by Fredrick Douglass.) Still, as Hill (or his surrogate, Cane) goes on to fill in historical fact with imaginative detail, the characters emerge fully developed and believable, each with his or her own unique texture and voice.

While Hill’s depiction of Cane’s family history importantly sheds light on a little-known history of black experience in Canada and the United States, I found the narrative of the present equally compelling. Like so many great novels, Any Known Blood is a novel about writing. Not only does Langston Cane the Fifth set out to write a novel that will reconstruct the lives of the Langston Canes that went before him, but his friend, Yoyo, an industrious Cameroonian and the most delightful character in the novel, also takes up a writing career. Unlike his soul-searching friend, Yoyo publishes his pieces in the Toronto Times purely for monetary gain. His humourous opinion pieces provide a lovely counterpoint to Langston Cane’s more personal pursuit.

A fast read and a well-told story, Any Known Blood fit my bill for smart summer reading. Plus, I’m happy to be putting some Canadian content on my mammoth reading list. Now that I’ve had a taste of this highly-readable author, I’m looking forward to picking up The Book of Negroes sometime soon.

T.C. Boyle's The Women

2010-05-19T19:13:00.000-04:00

In The Women T.C. Boyle brings to life the stories of Frank Lloyd Wright’s wives and mistresses with his beautiful use of language and an incredible story-telling ability. This masterfully-written novel gives a moving account of the famed architect’s love life and of the charismatic draw of his genius. It is a marvelous piece of historiographic metafiction, but perhaps not the best choice for my first post-grad-school reading material, and—at least for the first two or three hundred pages—it lacked the page-turning pull that a summer read needs.
I selected this novel on a whim after submitting my final term papers and grades. Wandering the bookstore, experiencing that liberating realization that I no longer had classes or exams to read for, I pulled The Women off the shelf. The cover drew me first: attractive art deco typography and photographs of Wright and the women he loved, bordered in lines of Cherokee red, which, according to Boyle’s narrator, Sato Tadashi, was Wright’s favourite colour.
In addition to this purely superficial draw, I thought I’d love to read something by T.C. Boyle. A few years back I read Water Music, a hilarious and stunning novel based, in part, on the adventures of the explorer, Mungo Park. Since then, I’ve been meaning to read more by this brilliant writer.
But, aside from the undeniable power of the language in both novels, The Women really felt nothing like Water Music. For one thing, there isn’t much in the way of humour in The Women (which certainly isn’t a problem, except that I was in the mood for something a little lighter). There are moments in the introductions to each section (three in total, for the three women who lived with Wright in Taliesin, his Wisconsin home) when Boyle lets his reader laugh, but for the most part, the novel deals quite seriously with four women’s passion and suffering.
The novel is ostensibly written by Tadashi, one of Wright’s apprentices, and then translated by his grandson-in-law, Seamus O’Flaherty. Tadashi’s footnotes appear throughout the novel, commenting on O’Flaherty’s translations, adding tangential memories to the story proper, or drawing connections between various sections of the novel. At first I found these footnotes nothing more than a nuisance—not adding much to the story, postmodern for the sake of being postmodern—but towards the end of the novel I began to appreciate the self-reflexive gesture. At some key points, as when Tadashi, commenting on Wright’s disinterest in playing his role as a father, writes that he would give anything to hear his own son call him papa again, the footnotes add another level of emotional depth to the story. As they accumulate, the footnotes become an essential piece of the narrative, providing a supposedly authoritative take on events in Wright’s life while undercutting the very notion of an authoritative account.
I love the way that Boyle troubles the idea of historic objectivity. Throughout the novel, newspaper writers try to spin one or another account of Wright’s very public love affairs, while the women through whom the chapters are focused see matters in a very different light. As the narrative moves from character to character, Boyle does a skillful job creating four distinct and believable women: Kitty Tobin, the first wife; Miriam Noel, the second wife; Olgivanna Milanoff, the third; and Mamah Cheney, his murdered mistress. Each sees her situation, her actions, and even Wright in her own way. The eccentric architect appears as a completely different man depending on whether he is presented from the point of view of Tadashi, Olgivanna, Kitty, Miriam, or the psychotic cook who murders Mamah.
Finally, Boyle’s language kept me turning the page, even in moments when the story did not. His fitting, surprising, and sometimes brutal images pulled me into the page. In one scene, Wright sets an old tavern ablaze, “the flames climbing the walls to the roof like pent-up things given their heads all in a moment, a swarm of gnawing animals with irradiated teeth” (330). Also, certain phrases kept playing in my head after I read them: “the sun hit her like an axe.” Something about this seemingly simple description set off a pleasurable tingling in my reading senses.
So, though I don’t recommend The Women to those, like me, looking to revel in the pleasure of reading something unassigned and light, I hope that anyone who hasn’t yet read anything by T.C. Boyle will keep him in mind next time you’re at the library or bookstore.