October 25th, 2011
What’s going on
Reviews In case you missed it, there was a very nice review of *The Big Dream* in the National Post on Saturday–you can get the online version here. There’s a less nice but still interesting review of *TBD* in the November issue of Quill and Quire, on the stands now–I’ll post the link when it goes online.
Launches I completely failed to attend the Insomniac Press fall launch last night–or rather, I failed *at* attending, because I did actually go to the launch. I was there mainly in excitement over Jamie Popowich’s Metraville, though in general Insomniac books are pretty stellar and I was looking forward to all the readers. But I was sick, I was tired, and then it finally happened–a Toronto event got started so late that I could not last until it *began*. It was not Insomniac’s fault–everyone else was having a blast, and I wouldn’t have wanted to speed along the festivities. I just have a terrible cold, and am flirting with laryngitis, so in deference to my reading tonight wouldn’t talk to people unless I could get right on top of them and whisper in their ears, which wasn’t making me very popular. And finally, about an hour after the show was supposed to start the room started to spin and I needed to go home. I failed the reading, where my only role was to sit and listen. Lame!
But I did go home and sleep for 10 hours and when I woke up I could speak in a voice heard by people who don’t want to know me intimately, thus I could survive the day and give a tolerably good reading to the very dedicated Ryerson students who made it to class in the rain to hear me!
Laryngitis Why do I seem to lose my voice at least once every year, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you why–because when I was young and stupid I got very sick with strep throat and did not see a doctor. After close to a week of this, I was feverish, mute, and living in a very sad, strange and entirely silent world of my own. When I was finally taken to the doctor and given some antibiotics, it was too late, though I didn’t know it–I apparently have scars on my vocal cords.
I figured this out because, though my everyday speaking voice is normally (rather loud at times, actually), even the slightest cold or cough irritates my vocal cords to Marilyn-like huskiness; if it gets slightly worse or I try to talk a lot, I’m rendered mute for days. I met a woman in her 60s with the same condition who says it only gets worse as you age–for her, the huskiness was apparent in her voice all the time.
What is the moral of the story? Go to the doctor when you are sick!!!
October 13th, 2011
Rose-coloured reviews *Real Life* by Sharon Butala
Real Life by Sharon Butala is the 10th book I’ve read for the Off the Shelf reading challenge. Like many books on this list, I read it because it was starting to get embarrassing that I hadn’t. Not so much the specific book as the author: Butala has a strong reputation as a serious writer, for “writ[ing] with scrupulous honesty and without a lick of pretension.” (so says *Books in Canada*)
She does and, though I had some serious problems with the book, I too am in awe of Butala’s subtle, wry, taut prose. I felt the best story in the collection was “Light.” The story is about Lucia, a fairly average middle-aged woman who leaves her city, her home, and her husband to stay with her developmentally delayed, polio-crippled sister during her–probably final–struggle with cancer. During their time together, she cares for Elaine matter-of-factly, with no obvious tenderness but a great deal of love. Nevertheless, the gap between their lives and their minds is so great that there is little connection, almost no dialogue.
At home, her husband George misses her, but tries to support her in her task. He’s a professor, and lends her books to help pass the long hours of vigilance, but balks when she asks him for books about the Holocaust. He gives in almost immediately, though, and eventually explains to her the difference between the Holocaust narratives she’s reading, and the ones he suggests: “‘Those books will tell you the story…[b]ut none of them are works of art, and they have in common a failure to express the full scope of what happened…The books on this list will help you…’ he hesitated ‘come to terms,’ he added finally, shrugging, as if such a thing were hardly possible.”
And that’s the crux of the story–the inevitably failed struggle to understand true suffering from the outside. Lucia never really understands Elaine’s feelings, and through the story seems to move towards the knowledge that she can’t. “Now Lucia can’t bring herself to try to talk to Elaine about her impending death, and she hates herself for her desire, which she can no longer deny, that Elaine should give up this fight she can’t win.”
Empathy is so hard, is what I think this story is really about, and the more obvious where we should place our sympathies–those who suffered and died at the hands of Nazis, Elaine who was dealt a bad genetic hand thrice over–the more distance we have to cross to do so. That’s how I read the story, anyway, and also gorgeous evocation of love in all it’s horrible imperfection.
Though I enjoyed the rest of the book–the other 9 stories–a good deal, in a way “Light” points up some of the things I found troublesome in the others. Because Elaine is so delayed, illiterate, and often struggling to breathe, the lack of dialogue in that story is appropriate, and serves to emphasize the loneliness of dying. However, almost all the stories in the collection are grounded in the interior monologue of a single character, and this works sometimes better than others. In “Night Class,” Christine spends a great deal of time alone, driving to a far-off university outpost, but even before she takes the job she is so deeply ensconced in her own–admittedly persuasive–viewpoint that she neglects others with almost unforgivable ease. That story makes perfect sense in terms of POV, however excruciating it actually is to read (very, but that’s an achievement, too).
However, if I were the sort of person who put down books unfinished, I might’ve done it after the first and title story, concerning a woman whose ex husband suddenly reappears decades after their divorce. You find, extremely gradually, that there was a complex and heart-rending series of events at the root of their split. But this all comes out slow-fade memories from the much older woman, and I felt like we never get to hear anyone’s real feelings or motivations for what they did. I mean, I didn’t–I couldn’t put together from the tense and grim conversation in a coffee shop decades later where the connection between these people ever existed, much less what truly severed with it.
Lack of connection is what was truly problematic for me in this collection. Many of the stories were really single-character pieces, someone thinking through situations and insights alone in her own head. They might think *about* other people, but never actually engage with them. This worked when there was a true impediment to connection, as in “Light” or “Night Class;” people devastated by their inability to interact with other humans are much more relatable than characters like Jenna in “Saskatchewan,” who doesn’t seem to try. Jenna is a writer from a small town in the title province, “has a real cowboy for a husband,” writes semi-successful books for a publisher in Toronto, but dreams of more praise, a bigger readership, more than somewhat success.
The story concerns Jenna’s time on a literary prize jury–topical now as ever–and reads like autobiography. I say that not because the description of Jenna above almost exactly matches the bio on Sharon Butala’s webpage–that’s too simple. I think it’s autobiography because of how boring it is. There are no other developed characters besides Jenna, no meaningful relationships, no real sense of an adult life at all–just a single interior monologue and a single focus of interest. Despite the fact that the story takes place months after the adjudication (there are many retrospective stories in this book), it is Jenna’s only real focus other than her thwarted ambition. Her husband, her friends, her day-to-day life, whatever it is she actually writes about–all is elided from the story.
Which is exactly like how I feel reading memoir in which the memoirist wants to talk about one specific bit of her life while keeping the rest perfectly private–she constructs a false wall around the experience being focussed on. It ends up being an empty experience, at least for me. I didn’t care about cranky Jenna and her interior monologue, and if the story was some kind of story a clef I couldn’t guess what real event it was based on. Anyone know? The book came out in 2002, so prior to that. I certainly couldn’t understand or imagine the experience of the locked jury–we get no dialogue or sense of the characters of the other jurors, nor of the scorned author. The end of the story seemed to be trying to unlock some of the mystery, but I couldn’t parse it. Maybe it’s me?
What I’m saying is that Butala is extremely good, but her blindspots are substantial, and so are mine, and they are exactly at odds. A lot of the stories in this book were in the “not my thing” category, but the pieces that cracked through were utterly sublime.
Miscellaney
Sorry, I know list posts are lazy, but some days… Anyway, at least there is much on the list to be excited about!
Jouvon M. Evans profiled me and the other women of the short story in her Lance article “Short Fiction, Big Stories”.
Kerry Clare warmly reviewed The Big Dream on Pickle Me This. Yes, Kerry is a good friend of mine, but she also far too serious a reviewer for me not to take this review seriously–and joyfully–too. Really, strangers can hate the book all they want (though I hope they don’t) and I can just write them off as mortal enemies for life; it’s a much bigger problem if my friends hate it. What an awkward dinner party conversation…
Americans can now buy *The Big Dream,* on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and probably also lots of other places.
*TBD* is also available now as an ebook, from B&N in Nook, from Amazon on Kindle, on Kobo, and again, probably others. I’ve actually never read an ebook, much less downloaded one, so if there is a “best” format out there that most people use, or just one that you like, let me know and I’ll look into it.
That’s all for now–more soon!
September 13th, 2011
*The Big Dream* reviewed in *This Magazine*
Have you read the new issue of This Magazine yet? Maybe not, because it just came out and you, unlike me, probably were not awaiting it rabidly because you knew it had a review of your new book in it, but not what the review said.
The review, it turns out, said many positive and insightful thing, including this:
“Rosenblum’s natural dialogue and descriptive prose result in a
collection that successfully depicts the complex balancing act between
home and work that so often define the lives of office workers who
struggle to stay afloat inside and outside of their cubicles.”
For the full review, plus many other interesting articles that don’t have anything to do with me, get thee to a newsstand!
June 26th, 2011
Rose-coloured Reviews Tell Your Sister by Andrew Daley
Let’s get this out of the way up front: I found Tell Your Sister by Andrew Daley to be a dark ride. Part of that is defo the book’s content and style, but part of it may be me and my mood as I read it. When I looked up the publisher’s link just now to give to you, I was surprised to see that it was described as “mordantly funny” though actually, there’s some quite sharp wit throughout. It’s weird that I forgot about that, but I was pretty devastated by the stuff that happens to the characters–I guess that’s the mordant part.
This is the story of Dean Higham and Aaron Fenn, childhood friends who grow apart when (a) Aaron starts dating Dean’s sister, Susan and (b) their life situations radically diverge. While Dean and Susan are part of a fairly stable middle-class family, with all the cars and cash and university plans that entails, when Aaron’s mother dies when the boys are in grade 12, Aaron is basically left alone. His father remarries almost immediately and takes his two younger kids to live in another town. The father and stepmother offer no financial or emotional support to Aaron; indeed, they steal his baby bonus cheques. If he wants to even see his sisters, he has to hitchhike to visit.
All of this has already occurred before the book gets rolling, so it’s a lot of despair to absorb before you really even know the characters. And you know, the more I think about it, it *is* the humour that leavens things. A lot of it is just drawn from the fact that the book is set in the 1980s–the astute among you will have picked that up from the baby bonus cheques mentioned above. But it’s also gently funny when the characters go about putting on legwarmers to match their sweaters, or experimenting with this strange new band, Depeche Mode, with utter seriousness.
For most of the book, Aaron’s third-person narrative alternates with Dean’s first-person. Dean’s sections take place about 15 years after his last year of high school, which is the time-period where Aaron’s sections are set. Adult Dean is having troubles with his girlfriend, but also a personal meltdown, which is accelerated when he runs into Aaron’s younger sister, Nancy, who clearly hates him.
The two strands of the book work in concert to gradually reveal to us what Nancy has again Dean. It seems it is something bigger than just failure to be a good friend back when Aaron needed one. The twist at the end is that Dean’s crime *is* only to be a good friend, only on a rather large scale.
Dean’s gradual unravelling also has a humourous edge, because so much of it is set in Toronto’s heinous traffic snarls, which Daley expertly play-by-plays. But Dean really is running from something beyond gridlock and his lame-o girlfriend. And the slow reveal, ping-ponging between the two sections, is simple and unmelodramatic.
I also liked how the two sections slowly show us the strange parallels and mirrorings that Dean’s and Aaron’s lives have. This could’ve been really heavy-handed, but I was only half aware of how the author was guiding me along, right up until the end.
The hiccup in this dual-stranded approach is that a few early scenes are from Susan’s perspective. Nothing wrong with that, except that Susan’s POV is immensely well-drawn and engaging, so it’s frustrating when that goes away after about 50 pages, and we never get back inside her head. It’s a loss, and sort of a strange one. By the end of the book when we find out how Susan’s life works out, she feels like a completely unknown character, while in those early scenes I thought we were on our way to intimacy.
Back to the central story, which is of Aaron’s troubles. The best part of that–only from a literary perspective–is the portrayal of the totally realistic creepoid Warner, who offers to help out Aaron when no one else would. His “help” quickly proves itself to be manipulating Aaron into helping him break the law, but Warner is also a deeply imagined character. His shifting version of the truth, intense relationship with his mother and sister, choice of reading material, even his weirdly well-thought out ways of hooking Aaron into his web–all are fascinating.
But, for rose-coloured me, reading about a fascinating person who is also awful, and does a lot of awful things, was hard. As good as it is, I found *Tell Your Sister* bleak and I sensed some cynicism about human nature. None of the characters make good on their best impulses, and most are prey to their worst–people fail each other over and over again.
Though grim, most of these scenarios were pretty realistic (though I thought that the character of Aaron’s dad was over-the-top–clearly The Worst Person in the World). This novel sometimes glances into YA territory, and I do think it would go over well with teens, but it doesn’t truly fit the category because the outlook is so bleak, as are the out*comes* for the most of the characters. I do recommend you read this book, but only when you are feeling strong.
This is my eighth book for the To Be Read challenge–four more to go!
May 29th, 2011
Rose-coloured reviews *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* by Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers is my seventh book in the To Be Read reading challenge. As many of my other picks are, this is a book I feel like everyone in the universe had read except me–until now.
What kept me away was all the things that Eggers predicted would keep pretentious types away–the dense and contrarian introductory materials, the cutesy flip-it-upside-down-and-backwards appendix at the back, the “daring” title. And an extra one that’s just me–I don’t like memoir.
Fine, I know this is my failing–I read all book-length prose narratives as if they were novels, and if one is being faithful to the facts, life rarely has the shape and satisfactions of a novel. It has it’s own satisfactions, I know–though rarely an obvious shape–but I don’t care. I want the novelistic ones when I’m reading a book that looks–to me–like a novel.
AHWoSG (as it is referred to in the running heads) is a strangely shaped book, and thus–to me–low on tension. If you’re the one other guy who hasn’t read it, in brief, Dave Eggers parents both died of cancer, within 5 weeks of each other, when he was 22. Eggers had a sister and a brother both a couple years older than him, who helped him and their parents cope. But there was also a much younger brother, Toph, who was only 7 or 8 at the time (I think; I somehow can’t find the earliest reference to Toph’s age). For reasons that (to me) never seem clear, the next-youngest sibling, Dave, is the one to take custody of the boy.
The first chapter, on the end of Heidi Eggers’ life, is incredibly vivid, moving, terrible, and wryly funny. The dialogue is sharp and weird:
“Ah!” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s ice.”
“I know it’s ice.”
“Well, ice is cold.”
It’s kind of quietly devastating, the way the characters are such a comfortable, fully functioning family (under the circumstances), walking around with the knowledge that they aren’t getting to function at all for much longer. Throughout the book (gah–I almost typed “novel”), it’ll be Eggers’ relationship with and mourning for his mom that is rendered most clearly, emotionally, brilliantly.
Oh, and did I mention? The prose is very brilliant–but not in a way you think a lot about. Actually, I glanced at some other reviews of AHWoSG, and some people thought about the prose a great deal, but I found it natural, fluid, hilarious and transparent–the prose seemed to be a clear glass window into the narrator’s mind. I know, it takes work to achieve that illusion, but unlike other first-time authors I could mention, Eggers is happy not to draw too much attention to himself. After the title, he’s either assured we think he’s a genius, or he doesn’t care–he’s a lot of fun to read.
So when he goes off to San Francisco with Toph and gets into the humdrum impossibilities of real life–finding a place to live, cooking food, playing Frisbee (oh, god, he does go on about the Frisbee) it’s fun reading, and fast–light as air, in fact. And interspersed in present-day details are flashes of the past, where we learn about how things were when his parents were alive, when he and Beth and Bill were around Toph’s age and living in the house. Things were complicated. Things were hard and sometimes they were scary and some people behaved really badly, but there were no demons–no saints or angels either. There were just people who lived with each other who were a little fucked up. Eggers mourns the fucked-upped-ness almost as much as he mourns the love.
So, what’s my problem? you might ask. Regular readers know that the above sounds like (one of) my ideal reading experiences. The problem is that aside from quotidian scenes about Frisbee or food, so very much of the book is interior monologues. The dead inhabit those monologues, so we get a decent sense of Mr. and Mrs. Eggers, but the living escape the narrator’s telling, and thus all the non-dead characters are pretty much cardboard cutouts with one or two interesting scenes each, all in service of the narrator illuminating a point about himself.
The other thing I hate about memoirs is what I call “special pleading”–this comes up a lot in “heavily autobiographical fiction,” which is something I like sometimes, but almost exclusively when you can’t tell that’s what it is. My personal feeling is that a writer should not write anything where he or she is too invested in how much a reader likes or dislikes a character. There should be no shielding of characters from a reader’s harsh judgement, no censorship of details relevant to the plot, no slanting the narrative so that some come off better than they should. Even in fiction, you can’t lie.
But it seemed to me that Eggers did protect his characters, and thus unless you’re dead or the narrator, there’s no character development in this book. Dave eventually starts a magazine with his alleged best friends Moodie and Marny, who are in many scenes that take place at the magazine, yet have almost no dialogue. They have no preferences, moods, opinions, or thoughts–they are merely around, because it would be weird if the narrator claimed to have run a magazine by himself.
Eggers has a girlfriend at the beginning of the book, Kirsten, whom he dates on and off for about 2/3s of it–then they break up, she is briefly roommates with his sister, and eventually she marries someone else and he is very happy for her. Again, she has no dialogue and we learn nothing about her–though she attends his mother’s funeral (and has sex with Eggers in the parents’ closet afterwards) we don’t know a thing about what she thinks about it.
That’s true for *everyone* in the book–Beth, his sister, lives nearby and helps raise Toph…sort of. She actually seems to never be around and Eggers is always having to find a sitter if he wants to go out. But how much of that is reportage and how much of that is ellision–Beth’s part isn’t portrayed, out of respect or deference to her wishes or…I don’t know. I just know it pissed me off when the characters are at a wedding and Eggers thinks that that wedding reminds him of Beth’s, six months ago, to “a nice young man.” This is the first and last we hear of that relationship.
What I’m telling you is why I found the book annoying. What I’m *not* telling you is why I think the book is bad…I don’t know that I do think that. The narrator rants late in the book about how using characters’ real names, even phone numbers, is meaningless. He says, “You have only what I can afford to give you,” and that is such a true and shocking way of looking at memoir. This book is a very closed-off, shut-down, limited way of exposing personal tragedy. Eggers pontificates at length about how he needed to write the book to heal himself, and in that sense he had to protect whatever he felt needed protecting–but I’m not interested in therapy (well, not in this context). I’m interested in the reading experience and I feel like this one was a highly manipulated, tightly controlled, edging-on-dishonest one–and I’m fascinated by the ways I’ve been manipulated. There are too many to count, especially since this review is already 1200 words.
So what I’m saying is, I didn’t enjoy reading this book. It was frustratingly narrow and (with appendices, etc) close to 500 pages. If you write a narrow book at that length, you end up with endless pages about nothing (no more Frisbee!) and an often-bored Rebecca, but you also end up really immersing the reader in a single point of view, an intense experience.
Eggers achieved something here. I’m not sure what and I’m also not sure that I cared for it all that much, but the book was worth reading. I had hoped that writing this review would show me what I really think of the book, but I still don’t know. So I’m going to continue to think about my ideas about truth in narrative, and the ways it gets manipulated. And no book that makes you think is all bad.
May 15th, 2011
Rose-coloured reviews *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone* by J.K. Rowling
Well, it took me 14 years to read the most wildly loved children’s book of my generation. Partly because I just never got around to it, partly because I’m not a big fan of fantasy, partly because the Harry Potter zealots are so obnoxious. “You’ve never read Harry Potter?? But you love books!” one such specimen remarked. Humph.
I finally read it because someone I respect asked me to very gently, and I’m glad she did because J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone is truly charming, very funny, and sweet as pie.
On the front flap of the book, it says that HP&tPS won the 1997 Smarties Gold for 9 to 11 years, and this truly is a dream book for that set. The first 3.5 chapters are a hilarious sendup of awful British bourgeois family values, complete with privet hedges, vicious capitalist dad, smarmy mom and spoiled child. And a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs where they hide even the gentlest, most innocuous weirdness in their lives, orphaned cousin Harry Potter.
The horrible hinjinx of the Dursleys, including vicious assault on innocent loveable Harry, is cringy and funny simultaneously. As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the world the Dursleys inhabit is meant to be our own or not and, if it is, where is child services. But if I were 9, I wouldn’t care; I would only laugh gleefully over passages like this, where awful Dudley Dursley, brat and bully, cannot have his way:
“He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smeltings stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof and still he did not have his room back.”
I think it’s the British-ism of “been sick on purpose” that makes this so funny, but I can’t really be sure–it’s just so hyperbolically *evil*. Someone told me that the American version of HP is rather bastardized to get out those Britishisms–I wonder if that version says “thrown up”? I have the Canadian, Raincoast edition, and it seems to have retain all the Britsy cadences (“to hospital,” “give it here”) as well as more obvious references like the West Ham football team (I don’t quite know what that is, but I can guess). Then again, having not read the original Brit edition, I don’t know what I’m missing.
Sorry for the digression–as I was saying, so Harry is a lonely and miserable orphan at his aunt and uncle’s until one day a letter arrives, admitting him to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. The aunt and uncle try some very amusing stunts to prevent Harry from going, motivations on this being somewhat unclear as they purport to hate having him in their home.
In the end, Harry is spirited away by Hagrid, the loveable gameskeeper from Hogwarts. Hagrid also introduces Harry to his legacy–his parents were powerful and well-respected wizards, killed by an wizard gone back. That bad wizard, named Voldemort, tried to kill Harry too, when he was but a very tiny baby. He couldn’t; baby Harry was powerful enough to defeat this bad dude and save himself when his parents couldn’t. Even better, his triumph sent Volemort packing, and no one’s seen him since.
Harry Potter has become famous as a hero in the magic world, while the non-magic world (the world of “Muggles” in the language of the book) thought he was just a loser who had to sleep with the spiders. Moreover, his parents had wealth and social position, all of which he is now entitled to. Hagrid takes him shopping for all sorts of wonderful magical paraphenalia, and since Harry is finally in possession of his inheritance, he can afford whatever he likes.
The delights continue when he heads off to Hogwarts where his fame, and that of his parents, is well-known, and Harry is the immediate object of interest and admiration. He has never had friends before, but he picks up a few quite easily. He has never played the magic world’s premier sport, Quidditch, before but he is a natural and easily makes the team.
This is, without a doubt, the best possible fantasy for the 9-11 set, and much older besides. I loved all the descriptions of the beautiful old castle Harry moves into, the delicious foods they have the welcome banquet, the sporting equipment and spooky labs (not mentioned in the book: who pays the tuition here?) The dream of finding out that one is not as dull and ordinary as one appears is as old as time, and Rowling does it superbly. And the invention of Quidditch, and making the very complex descriptions perfectly clear in my mind is the act of a superlative creative force.
But…does it make me sound snobby to say this really is a book for children, and very young children at that? The first half of the book is entirely devoted to Harry’s life with the Dursley’s, his passage to and arrival at Hogswart’s. The second half is a series of adventures that lead Harry and his friends to discover a mystery at the school, and then to solving it.
The whole second half is one self-contained adventure after another, although in retrospect, HP and co usually discover a clue to the ongoing mystery in their seemingly unrelated scrapes and mistakes. They are thwarted by a very bad bully named Draco Malfoy, and annoyed then befriended by a know-it-all girl named Hermione Granger (all the names in this book are wonderful). There is no character development to speak of–good people are very very good, bad people are very very bad (often for no reason) and there’s no good saying anyone might reform because they won’t.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for you to say that everything works out awesome in the end, Harry becomes more of a hero than ever, and the reader is very glad that this is so. Rowling crafts a simple, elegant tale. Even though there’s no real suspense (there’s six more books; I know no one dies now) I was very eager to keep reading and to find out what exactly happened.
And now that I know, I’m quite satisfied, but feel no particularly burning urge for book 2.
March 15th, 2011
Rose-coloured reviews *The Anxiety of Everyday Objects* by Aurelie Sheehan
I read Aurelie Sheehan’s novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects in just over a day, very rare for me. I had (and still have) a miserable cold, and wasn’t capable of concentrating on complicated material for very long, so this little book suited me just fine, and I read it compulsively as a distraction from my snot-drenched woe.
Even in this weakened state, I still didn’t think it was very good. But it was a little good. I really enjoyed the warm, gentle treatment of the day-to-day life of an office, and especially the workdays of the protagonist (let’s face it, heroine), Winona. She’s a secretary in a law firm, taking dictation and typing letters, organizing folders and answering the phone when the receptionist’s away. She doesn’t love it, but she finds it comforting and Zen-like to do the job well. At one point she describes it as like picking bits of grass out of a bucket of bolts, which I didn’t quite get, but the rest of Winona’s observations and emotions about her work are spot-on–I know exactly what she means, and in certain ways, I have never heard it expressed so well. Moreover, Sheehan sets most of the novel in this office, and lingers on the setting not as something to parody or scorn, but as lived experience. There is a lovely moment where Winona, carrying two cups of coffee to her boss’s office, finds the door closed and has to set both on the floor, knock, wait to be beckoned in, open the door, then pick up the cups and bring them inside to be served. Not a huge deal, but perfectly done, and quietly funny.
Unfortunately, though Winona is good at her job and wise in her assessment of it, in many other ways she is…a moron. Actually, she’s only a moron to serve the machinations of the plot–most of the truly stupid things Winona does seem out-of-character, but she does so many of them that it becomes difficult to keep track of what her character *is* exactly. Sheehan manufactures strange explanations for bits of a normal woman’s life that she can’t be bothered to write. Friends? Winona doesn’t have any, she announces with equanimity at one point. Family? She doesn’t speak to her parents because they live in Florida and are boring. She has a sister, who begs her to dogsit at several points in the novel, and is pretty funny–but basically a one-note joke. Education? Apparently Winona has an MFA in film from some unnamed NYC institution, but she never references anything she learned or did there. Her plans for putting her education to use involve imagining neat-o scenes in her head, and wandering around the city with a video camera.
Romantic history? This is the worst one. At one point, the 3rd person narrator actually proposes to explain Winona’s romantic history, but then begs off with “She had loved.” This seems unlikely; more likely, though Winona denies that she was “born yesterday” at one point, is exactly that. She seems to have no idea what happens in relationships, and to not even desire one so much as be curious about the concept. When an attractive guy at work takes her to dinner, she opens the meal with “Is it because you want to have sex?” And then, bafflingly, he doesn’t answer and thing proceed as if it hadn’t been said. As to whether she is actually *attracted* to this attractive guy, or anyone–who cares? Winona goes where she’s pushed by contrivances of plot. When a manically sexual ex comes into town (that they ever actually dated never seems probable, but whatever), he proposes they have a little no-strings-attached bondage and domination session. Winona, having never done that before and no further plans that evening, says sure. That goes about as well as you might expect.
Actually, it goes a little better than you might expect–he does indeed have nefarious intentions, but they are decidedly PG…because we’ve got to get back to the main plotline, I guess. The main plotline is about…well, it’s not even revealed what is really going on until the final quarter of the book, so for most of the time it is about a strange girl-crush Winona develops on a new lawyer at the firm, Sandy. Sandy is blond, well-dressed, stunning and blind, and seemingly auditioning for a role on Ally McBeal. She’s so gorgeous, so great at her job despite her lack of sight, and she even finds time to encourage Winona to be the best that she can be. She notes a few times that Winona is good at her job, then promotes her to office manager, demoting the woman currently in that position. The after-effects of that shuffle on office relations does feel realistic, but Winona’s cheerful acceptance of Sandy and everything she offers her–a day at the spa, a diamond watch, unorthodox and secretive work instructions feels just this side of absurd. Winona’s almost 30, but she doesn’t think there’s anything odd about photocopying she can’t tell her boss about?
Sigh. Then, obsessed with Sandy’s cryptic messages alternated with warm intimacy, Winona starts following her around town and filming her. Deranged behaviour for most of us, but Winona’s a filmmaker, so it’s ok. Now we see why Sheehan made Winona a filmmaker, instead of a poet or painter, despite a complete lack of film-references or vocabulary in the novel: the setup of for the big denouement requires a random moment caught on film! So, Winona is neither auteur nor psycho stalker; she’s just a plot element.
So then the big shakedown occurs (as on Scooby-Doo, the main villain turns out to be a character the reader doesn’t know, so we never had any hope of understanding what was going on–at least, I didn’t–until the author tells us). There are elements about the ending that are quiet and kind of interesting: the bad guys don’t get punished, and the good guys all wind up unemployed. They were at least able to quit their jobs valourously, but still, the book ends with a kiss and the implied promise that Winona will now make her movie. In a really good book, I feel like I turn the last page and the characters keep going; here, I felt sure that Winona neither made a movie nor did anything else. She just went back to sleep in the imagination of her author.
This is my fifth book on the To Be Read challenge. So far a literary novel, a collection of literary short stories, a YA novel, a long poem, and now (let’s face it) chick-lit. At least I get around!
March 11th, 2011
Canada Reads Independently: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
I really admire Kerry Clare‘s Canada Reads Independently program, and this year I’ve read two out of the five books, which is actually pretty good for me. All the books on the list look fascinating, and I’ll probably try to track’em down eventually, but for now, I did the story collections. The other collection in the running, Lynn Coady’s *Play the Monster Blind* was fast and furious, while Gallant’s collection was huge and a bit slower moving, but I adored it too.
As Kerry mentions in her review the stories aren’t ideally presented in book form here. I agreed, the book was too long and overcrowded, but the way I got round that to read really slowly (according to my diary, it took nearly 2 weeks), in and around other things, so the stories stood in my head a bit more as *stories* and not bits of a book.
It’s funny how much I like this book considering how antithetical Gallant’s style is to the things I usually admire–there’s very little dialogue, even very little scene. In the Linnet Muir stories, the final section of the book and some ways its crowning glories, there are massive paragraphs, mainly written in the past imperfect–the general sense of the things were happening, could and would happen, during a certain period or in certain circumstances. She slides from the habitual to the individual in such stealthy increments you barely know she’s doing it. Sometimes it feels like a story is just a random collection of notes and memories, but you get to the end and the weight on your brain is, in fact, story-like. How does she do that?
The bit about the notes and memories applies only to the Linnet Muir materials–the other stories feel highly organized, though always organically so. My favourites are the long, fleshy ones about Canada folks meandering through Europe, trying to…what? They are lost souls, mainly, drowning in provincialism and the false confidence that their new-world births divorce them from history. Well, doesn’t that sound lofty! In truth, sometimes the Canadian/European dicotomy is laid on a bit thickly, but for the most part it’s shockingly subtle–the characters are so much themselves, you don’t wind up thinking that they are also part of a larger category…until the characters themselves think of that!
Mavis Gallant’s fabled parallel to Alice Munro is often described in differences–urban versus rural, Canadian versus global, etc. I think the big difference for me is that Gallant writes with a bit more distance from her characters. This is not to say that Munro is kinder, or doesn’t subtly judge her characters, but she stands inside their brains, it seems, and follows the machinations of even their worst impulses. Gallant leaves a certain privacy to the folks in her stories, the room for a grim or silly failure that adults are allowed.
Her best stories are, I think, third person narratives about these grim and silly folks and their failures where we know the general schema of their hears, but perhaps not their inner workings. An old favourite of mine, which I once wrote a grad-school paper on and have read now half a dozen times, is “The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street.” Here is a quotation to show a little of how it works. This is a long passage, but Gallant’s genius is a slow-burning kind:
At the wedding reception Peter lay down on the floor and said he was dead. He held a white azalea in a brass pot on his chest, and sang, “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” Sheilah bent over him and said, “Pete, darling, get up. Pete, listen, every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you’ll get up.”
“I do love you,” he said, ready to engage in a serious conversation. “She’s so beautiful,” he told a second face. “She’s nearly as tall as I am. She was a model in London. I met her over in London in the war. I met her there in the war.” He lay on his back with the azalea on his chest, explaining their history. A waiter took the brass pot away, and after Peter had been hauled to his feed he knocked the waiter down. Trudeau’s bride, who was freshly out of an Ursuline convent, became hysterical…
We don’t find out exactly why Peter wanted to lie on the floor and say he was dead; we can surmise he was drunk and wanting attention, but that is our surmise and not Gallant’s. She probably does in fact *know* though; Peter might not. We also never find out what Peter did in London during the war, other than fall in love.
What I mean is, Gallant is smarter than some of her characters, and she often makes gentle fun of them, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Sociology comes in for a particularly hard go, and though I must protest as one born into the House of Sociology, I also laughed at the jokes. On Sarah’s relationship with her father in “In the Tunnel”: “Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: That would show him who was subjective.” And Lottie, a sociology student on the loose, of a countryman encountered in Paris in “Virus X”: “…he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns.”
Ha! I find Mavis Gallant’s stories very very funny (despite my House of Sociology resentment), and often unspeakably sad. The sadness is that people are often less than they could be, weak or blinkered or selfish or some combination thereof. And there’s little fatalism, I feel–choices are made, often bad ones. And yet the humour is there, though it can be hard to find if you’re not on her wavelength, and maybe that’s one reason the length of this collection can be an advantage–it gives you time to get into the Gallantian mindset. I certainly enjoyed spending 2 weeks with her.
January 31st, 2011
Rose-coloured reviews *An Abundance of Katherines* by John Green
I haven’t read a YA book in years, although I hear there’s been really interesting things going on in that category for fiction. However, whenever I go into that section of the bookstore, I find myself overwhelmed with vampires, pretty little liars, and gossipy girls, and I have to run away. Not that I am against the silly side; when I was myself a Young Adult, I read a lot of teen-geared garbage (for books that required thinking, I usually just read adult ones) and it never did me any harm. I’m just a bit too old for it now, I think.
I did, of course, read some good YA in my youth, too (Paul Danziger, Gordan Korman, a few great ones I can’t recall authors for) but I don’t think I ever came across anything like John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. This fast-moving goofball comedy was a gift from my dear friend AMT (er, in 2008–I don’t know how that happened! I’m so sorry, AMT! The To Be Read challenge is saving me from myself!) So I was happy to be guided back into the YA world after all these years.
*Katherines* is the story of Colin Singleton’s summer after graduation. His girlfriend Katherine dumps him on grad night, so he and his best/only friend Hassan decide to take a road trip to help distract Colin from the pain. On the second day, in rural Tennessee, they see a sign for a roadside attraction that contains the entombed body of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand–the dude whose assination started WWI–and they have to go figure out what that’s all about.
Not very much, as it turns out–just a historic body the town bought to bring in more tourists. But the tourguide and her mother promptly adopt Colin and Hassan, giving them a place to stay and jobs for the summer for no other reason than they seem charming, and the plot demands it.
Most of the large external events in this book make little sense, and the idea that the people of rural Tennessee are dying to house, feed, and heal the souls of tourists from the north isn’t even the worst of it–that’s at least a conceit we’ve seen before, in a 100 000 romance novels. There’s also the idea that Colin–who made his first friend at 14 and stopped at one–has somehow been able to attract 19 girlfriends in the course of his life; moreover, that they were all named Katherine. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows that it’s usually easier to make a friend than get a date, especially if one is socially moronic as Colin is. Most of the 19 Katherines aren’t described in the novel until the bitter end, at which point I though there is no way I believed it. Just silly plot frills.
But, yet…I really liked this book. How did that happen? The setups are so inane, yet the characters themselves are amazingly true-to-life, and affecting. The other thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that Colin is supposed to be a child prodigy, a kid who was supersmart at a young age and has been mainly schooled by private tutors. This bit of the plot, I believed, and I really enjoyed reading about how his mind worked–the wild tangents to history, medicine, physics, etc. This book has 87 footnotes, almost all of them interesting and amusing–I was always happy to turn the page and see a footnote. There’s also a long appendix in the back about math functions, which was concise and readable and (I am a former math nerd) fascinating.
Why the math appendix? Well, another of the way-too-many layers of plot is that Colin is trying to write an equation that summarizes who gets dumped at what point in a relationship. It’s a pretty shallow and silly way to see the world (as he eventually discovers) but some of the stuff he comes up with along the way is really interesting. The new friend he and Hassan make in the country is Lindsay Lee Wells, a paramedic-in-training with a jerky boyfriend, a sarcastic sense of humour, and a heart of gold. Mainly you know where that’s headed, but she also helps him with the formula, which I thought was the best part.
Colin’s a shallow, insecure leech–as he gets dumped by the 19th Katherine, she remarks, “You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.’” and she’s right. The nice thing about teen novels, as opposed to adult ones, is that it’s infinitely more forgivable to be self-obsessed when you are 18 than 28, and Colin truly does grow, mature, and learn to look for more than constant reassurance in his relationships. And it really made me happy as he did.
I feel it’s late in the review to mention this, but this book is, in addition to all of the above, hilarious! In the tradition of YA novels everywhere, the wacky best friend is a) fat and b) non-white, but Green takes Hassan to a couple different levels: Hassan is truly engaged with his Muslim faith, but to what extent is he hiding behind it to mask insecurities about his weight, social skills, etc.? I’ve never seen those questions in a YA novel, and it really works–Hassan isn’t just wacky, he’s a fully realized human character. He’s also wicked funny, and spends the book refering to himself as Daddy in the third person, demanding to watch Judge Judy and relentlessly mocking Colin in the kindest way possible. There’s also tonnes of slapstick (at one point, Colin and Hassan are chased by hornets), which you know I have a soft spot for.
Lindsay Lee Wells is also a pretty great character, which is interesting, because in my youth, YA novels were often for one gender or another, and the non-target gender was just short-handed as nice, mean, pretty, whatever. Lindsay Lee has some interesting issues, though I did feel her plotline wrapped up rather quickly at the end. I’m sure kids of any gender (and adults too) would enjoy this book.
Ok, I’m almost at 1000 words, and I haven’t covered anything about the extraneous plotlines in the town where Colin and Hassan stay–they are interesting, but go nowhere, and that’s interesting too (more like real life than wrapping everything up on page 299). And the Archduke thing you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I liked this book, is what I’m saying–maybe you would too?
This is my third review for the To Be Read challenge–9 to go!
