August 17th, 2011

Of course we don’t judge books by their covers…

But if we did, I’d judge this book to be honest, loyal, fun at parties, a good cook, really sexy…

*Thanks to Dan Wells and Gordon Robertson for making it so awesome.*

Addenda

Addendum to Myths of the Full-Time Writer
Myth #5: If I’m free during the day, I’ll run all my errands during the quietest times in stores, banks, post offices, etc., and save tonnes of time. Nope. As it turns out, the stores and banks aren’t empty at 10am–they aren’t packed, but they are populated with another breed of people–people who are self-aware enough to know they are inefficient, annoying shoppers, and are trying to stay out of the way of the busy 9-to-5ers. These folks include people in wheelchairs and scooters (very hard to navigate in the narrow aisles of urban grocery stores, inevitably snagged on half-a-dozen things before they hit the dairy case); parents with small children (who are hard to navigate, period, and inevitably want to push their own strollers directly into the bread shelves and then stand in front of it, wailing); people who do not speak English but have a complicated transaction they need to request at the bank; shut-ins hoping for an in-depth conversation about current events with the bank teller; and people for whom simple tasks like remembering one’s PIN or selecting a yam are deeply unsettling and hard.

These people try to do us a favour by shopping at 10am, and I found that if I showed up at the grocery store also at 10am, I had to forbid myself from impatiently rolling my eyes at the lone parent completely outnumbered and overwhelmed by her children, who let them throw bananas on the floor because who could stop them. I didn’t cough aggressively at people who had *no idea* their credit cards had chips in them, and I never once glared (I don’t think) at someone who was simply standing in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare, blinking at the sky.

The daytime is for shoppers for whom efficiency is not the first priority, if indeed it’s even on the list of priorities. It’s wrong to bother those people when they try to avoid the crowded times, just like it would be wrong for them to show up at the post office at 5:30 and ask the pros and cons of bubble wrap vs. a padded envelope. You can run errands during the day if you want (I did, just to get out of the house), but it won’t save you much time.

Addendum to The Cohabitational Reading Challenge We both agree that *A Prayer for Owen Meany* falls off a bit in the second half, though I think, for a while at least, I was more dysphoric than Mark about the whole thing. I really love the high-school lit class discussions of *Tess of the D’Urbervilles* and *The Great Gatsby,* because I love a good close reading. But if you don’t, then those passages aren’t very well integrated and are too long–not good novel writing, even if good literary criticism. They exist mainly to unsubtly instruct the reader on how to read Irving’s own novel. Nick Carraway anyone? Ugh. I think Irving is a fine writer and deserving of respect, but no, not deserving of comparison with Fitzgerald. Yucky that he would suggest it, in my opinion.

In vaguely related news, I’ve ripped the cover partways off my copy, ensuring that Mark’s copy will be the one we keep. If you need a paperback of *Owen Meany* and don’t mind a ripped cover, I can get you one in about a week–for keepers!

August 11th, 2011

Update on the Co-habitational Reading Challenge

Well, Mark and I do agree that Irving is starting to rely more heavily on contrivances to make the plot work, but who cares when it is so funny? I was lagging behind in the reading, so when Mark was chortling away at my favourite scene in the book–the Christmas Pageant, of course–I wasn’t there yet and he couldn’t read to me. So when I finally got there, he made me read it to him, though he’d just read it to himself an hour before. So great, at few places I couldn’t speak, I was laughing so hard (mainly to do with the cows and donkeys). The kitten seemed to enjoy the read-aloud too; at least, he fell asleep without biting anyone, which is positive for him.

I’ve also been carrying the book around town and mentioning that we’re reading it, and reactions are always the same–everyone’s read this book, and everyone loves it. How amazing! My reading tastes aren’t avant-garde or anything, but I’m usually reading something most people haven’t heard of, or have *only* heard of but not read. It’s a rare pleasure to be able to have a fairly in-depth conversation about my current read with almost everyone.

A few people have made comments on how neatly Irving straddles the literary/commercial fiction line. One friend put it most succinctly when she said it wasn’t stressful to read, but she didn’t feel dumber afterwards. Actually, when I stop to analyze, I find the book pretty complex, especially th222222222 (kitten interference) the time structure. But as I read happily along, I’d don’t usually think about structure–I think about Owen, Johnny, Tabby and Dan, Grandmother Wheelwright, Lydia and Ethel and Germaine, and all the rest of them.

August 7th, 2011

The Co-habitational Reading Challenge

My partner, Mark, and I are both writers and voracious readers; we say, “What did you read today?” with the same frequency as weather commentary or requests for popsicles (near constant at my house). It’s obviously a much livelier conversation if the other person has read the book you’re commenting on; there’s only so much I can contribute to rantings or ravings if said comments are my only information on the book.

We’ve read a lot of the same material, but not hardly a majority. One book we both loved long ago was A Prayer for Owen Meany, but sadly now we forget a lot about it. The moving-in process has given us two copies of the novel, so we’ve decided to both reread simultaneously–hopefully the book is as a good as we remember, but either way we’ll get some good book chats out of it.

We’ll try to post the recaps of said chats, and invite any who likes to play along at home, either by (re)reading Owen and sharing your own thoughts on the novel, or by reading any book at all in tandem with your house-mate, and seeing how the conversations go.

Happy book-talking!

August 4th, 2011

Songs for The Big Dream

The Big Dream has music in it, but no lyrics. Music is ubiquitous in our culture–with the advent of iPods, less and less of our lives is unsoundtracked, and if you’re going to write real life, you need at least some ambient music popping up sometime. When I wrote Once, there were occasional snatches of whatever the characters were listening to. When I was finished, someone told me that you can’t use song lyrics, even just a few, even if they’re diegetic, even for atmosphere, without paying the artist who wrote them, and the licensing company and whatever-expensive-nightmare.

So I went through the whole book and took out all the direct quotations. I left some vague references and titles in–surely they can’t sue for that, and I guess most readers would be at least slightly familiar with the sorts of music I was writing about, so they’d be able to tune in inside their brains. And it’s not as if music is a huge aspect of my work–it’s just there, a part of things, a thread in the fabric… It was just frustrating, is all, to have to leave things out, even little things.

But since I found out the rules, I’ve been writing with them in mind. In Road Trips, when I wanted to show a character flipping through the radio stations and hearing a little snatch of rap, I wrote the lyrics myself (the joke was how bad it was, so it was ok that I that; I’m not planning an alternative career as a rap lyricist). And in *The Big Dream* I found other ways of describing music besides direct quotations. Sometimes it works better than others, but I think I was largely successful in creating the impression of certain music without using the lyrics. Again, this is a really small part of the book, but I worked hard on it.

Except…somehow I didn’t think all these rules applied to epigraphs. I have no idea why I believed this–probably just because I wanted to, as none of the fair use exceptions of study, review, criticism, etc. applied. I just found this really really perfect epigraph for TBD, and I wanted it and I couldn’t write my way around it–an epigraph is a direct quotation and only that.

So I’ve come to my senses, looked into the matter further, and finally deleted the epigraph. I am sad, because the song and the quotation I picked said the perfect thing, I felt, to introduce the book. So I’ll write this post, I figure, reviewing and critiquing all the music that meant a lot to me and the process of writing TBD, and then I’ll have an excuse to include the quotation here–not in the book, where I feel it belongs, but at least somewhere where people can read it and make the connection. And there’s actually a lot of other music to give credit to, here. I think a lot of writers have music they keep in mind as they write or think about their work, whether or not it’s on in the room where we’re actually tapping at the keys–see Dani Couture’s playlists series or Large Heart Boy’s Book Notes. So it’s a proud tradition of us song-listing authors that I join now–onwards.

Believe it or not, I had never ever heard Dolly Parton’s working-girl classic 9 to 5 until less than a year ago, when my friend K played a dance mix of it in the aerobics class she teaches. True! I don’t generally like the “they let you dream just to watch’em shatter” type of song–too reductive, too whingy. But this song is *very* catch, great for aerobics, and it has two great lines: “there’s a better life and you think about it / dontcha?” and “in the same boat with a lot of your friends / waiting for the day your ship will come in / the tide’s gonna turn and it’s all gonna roll you away.” Have *you* heard a better extended metaphor in a pop-song? A nice bit of solidarity, too! And I like “pour myself a cup of ambition,” too. Someday, I may write a story called, “A Cup of Ambition”–or is that not fair use? Oh, probably not. Sigh. (Query: I’ve still not seen the movie nor the stage show; should I?)

My background in songs about work is, well, work songs. I’m from that sort of family. So I was pleased to find a collection of our old favourites in Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions. A bit more modern than the original Seeger, and also easier to find on CD (oh, sigh, sacrilege), this album is delightful. I certainly realize that a lot of these songs are about work done by slaves, and that it’s grossly offensive to align office work with that history. I don’t do so–I just like songs about work in any form. My favourites are “Jacob’s Ladder,” (that’s actually a really wonderful video there, which I hadn’t seen before now), for the incredible line, “Every new rock just makes us stronger,”  and “John Henry”, about the strongest man in the world. But no kidding, there’s everybody else and then there is Mr. Seeger–a singer for us all.

I’m a literalist, and I always felt that The New Pornographers’ The Crash Year is actually about a market crash–no idea if that’s true or not, although the album being released in 2010 would indicates so, as do lines like “you’re ruined like the rest of us” and “oh my child you’re not safe here.” And there’s a whistle-chorus!

You know you’re a serious Simon and Garfunkel fan when you are into the B sides–the tracks with a horn section, and more ribaldry, less tender reflection. One of my favourite all-time S&G works is Keep the Customer Satisfied. This is essentially a barstool plaint by a travelling salesman, exuberantly sung even when the lyrics are, “And I’m sooo tired / I’m oh-oh-oh so tired/I’m just trying to keep the customer satisfied.” You just don’t hear that line in rock’n’roll very often, and it makes me feel like these guys really know what it’s like to have a not-too-great job–though, as far as I know, they mainly didn’t. I mean, quirky musical icon isn’t a bad gig, right?

Of course, I like lots of music by folks who don’t work at job-jobs or write about them. In fact, I spent most of my time while writing this book listening to music by Vampire Weekend and The National, with a little Neil Diamond and Arcade Fire thrown in. And none of those artists give the impression of having done their time in the salt mine, but that’s ok–I really don’t theme my life by what I’m writing, I just shape it for posts like this.

And there’s Weezer. Silly, irreverent, possibly outdated Weezer, whose music is mainly about flirting and being awkward at parties–not that isn’t awesome, because it totally is. But sometimes, especially this one time, they manage to get right at the heart of things, and write the line that encapsulates not only my book but a chunk of my life’s philosophy. It was in the song Keep Fishin’ (yes, it’s the video with the Muppets–watch it if you haven’t, it’s brilliant). Note that throughout this post I have offered an evaluative judgement on all directly quoted material–it’s criticism, people, and therefore fair use. That *wonderful* line, which really should be my epigraph–fie on the greedy music industry and their selfish need to keep all their good lines for themselves, is:

You’ll never do
The things you want
If you don’t move
And get a job

July 18th, 2011

Days 6 and 7, Oxford and Manchester

Oxford is just so incredibly beautiful, full of history and learning, gorgeous architecture and fields and gardens and places to buy books and pubs. But the thing that blew my mind is that this historical place going back centuries is *still* an accessible (well, to some) institute of higher learning. Just as my parents drove me to Montreal with my purple sheets and London Boy t-shirt when I was 19, some people’s parents drive them to *Oxford* and leave them there to increase their brilliance.

It was the summer term while we were there, so we didn’t see all that many students. A young man biking frantically ahead of our bus with his academic robe streaming behind him gave some idea of what the vibe will be there come fall. And we saw a few groups coming into or out of graduation ceremonies: the girls in pretty dresses, the guys in white tie and tails for some reason.

It’s just as well that most of the students weren’t around, as the tourists would’ve completely trampled them. I know it’s terribly poor form to complain about tourists when one *is* a tourist, but it’s also practically de rigeur–everyone does it. There were MANY tourists in Oxford, which surprised me–it’s a university, after all. Most were there, I think, for the architecture, which was stunning, and not so much interested in the colleges themselves. There was also an undercurrent about Harry Potter that I did not understand–apparently there are some scenes in the films set there, but I haven’t seen the films. We saw this broom at All Souls’ College, and people seemed pretty excited about it–thoughts?

Other highlights of the day included the Bodleian Library (though I was very sad that we were not allowed to see the actual stacks), Blackwell’s Books, which has 3 miles of shelving in the basement alone, and where I bought my lone book purchase of the trip, The Book of Other People, which I am much looking forward to reading. (NOTE: If I had not grown to loathe both my luggage and my miserable lack of upper-body strength, I would have bought many more. Consumer responsibility is increased when one will have to carry it.) We also had some really good pub food.

We saw our 7th consecutive sunny dawn the next morning, and were really starting to doubt the rumours about English weather. We left our cosy hotel and it was only when we were standing at the bus stop preparing to depart that I realized we’d be staying next to a Cattery the entire time. A cattery! House of cats must be what that means, right? Certainly explains the cat I saw in the parking lot at the hotel (I chased it; it bolted; I never learn).

We took the bus to the train station, and were very early (as usual). Then the train was delayed. Then we got on the train and it was chaos–no assigned seating, no where to put large suitcases, totally zoo with people still staggering through the aisle 15 minutes after the train had departed, looking for a place to collapse. The strange thing is that I was the only one that minded; the English were quite cheerful about having to stand in the aisle for a whole stop, or sit with their legs sprawled around their baggage. In light of their good grace, I refrained from complaining (much) either.

Still, it was a looooonng train ride to Manchester, and the flapjack I had bought as a genuine English treat disintegrated into a million particles all over me (and Mark) and was much too annoying to eat. Plus I never figured out where the bathrooms were. So I was not in great spirits by the time we arrived at Manchester Piccadilly, which I had thought was not actually where we were supposed to be, as our tickets said Manchester Metrolink.

It turns out that the Metrolink is a tram service (basically just like Toronto streetcars, but with tootling little kids-show-style horns), so the ticket saved us 90p in getting to our hotel. Unfortunately, a) some idiot tripped me and walked away as I crashed to the ground, so then my knee hurt, plus I was angry, b) our train had been delayed so much it was rush hour by the time we got on the tram, and c) when we got off at the stop proscribed by the info dude at the train station, it was completely not apparent where we were, and none of the streets were labelled.

So, I didn’t get off to a great start in Manchester. By the time we arrived at the Stay Inn (which is technically in another town entirely, Salford), I was in a bit of despair, and not thrilled to see that there is no entrance to to hotel from the street, and you had to go through an alley and parking lot to get in there. The very helpful and sweet staff working the desk were horrified at my suggestion that it wasn’t safe to be sending pedestrians through a dark alley and lot if they came home late–they assured me both that it was, and that the owners were building a street entrance the next year.

The room was nice, if small–the tv was on top of the wardrobe, which meant you either watched flat on your back, or with your neck at a 45 degree angle. Odd. The kindly hotel staff misunderstood our desire to see the town and sent us toe Piccadilly Gardens, which reminded me of Yonge and Dundas Square, with spray fountains and artfully arranged cement plazas, and nothing much to do but shop. Actually, as Mark pointed out, Manchester is a lot like TO, down to the tram/streetcars.

Instead, we strolled the Chinatown, and had a nice, very authentic meal in a room full of Chinese people–always a good sign. I kept thinking I would learn about the Chinese population in Manchester when I went to the People’s History Museum the next day, but I never did. That’s odd, too.

The next day was much better and I didn’t fall down once.

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!

June 8th, 2011

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I guess the reason I’m not writing longer posts is that I’m busy with all this other stuff!

Filling out the Toronto Service Review (link/idea via Scott). I gotta admit, this is a boring survey, constructed with autofill templates (how else would you explain a question asking if homeless shelters should be funded with user fees?) Still, I feel it’s the least I can do to fill it out–our city government is basically asking what it can get away with cutting, and we have to tell them (well, I have to tell them) that I care about things that I don’t even personally benefit from, and a small tax savings isn’t going to comfort me when I see our services rotting because those who need them most are so poor and pointless. Ahem. I think it’s a good thing to fill it out. Even is you don’t agree with me.

Watching online episodes of My Drunk Kitchen (link/recommendation via Shannon). This is a very funny silly show that is a good five minute way to recuperate from doing something not fun, like filling out the above-mentioned survey.

Taking that V.S. Naipaul quiz (link/idea via Mark) to see if I can identify a male or female author by reading a few sentences of his/her prose. I got 6/10, which is slightly better than I would get if I just guessed at random (I think; I’m not a statistician). So no, no I can’t tell.

Reading Carolyn Black’s book The Odious Child, which is really brilliant and deeply weird, an excellent combination. My favourite story is “Games”–what’s yours?

June 6th, 2011

What I’ve Been Doing Lately

Re-reading Big Two-Hearted River (parts I and II) A lot of things I loved when I was 14 don’t stand up so well these days, but the two stories that make up Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” piece are solid gold and always will be. I love the gentleness of the force behind them–unhurried, unprentensious but so involving, so *intense*. And I have to say, I don’t think a lot of 14-year-old girls read much Hemingway, because if they did there’d be way more of us with giant crushes on Nick Adams. *swoon*

Watching the movie Bridesmaids. I am pretty sure I am the ideal target market for this film. I love comedy of all kinds–situational, standup, sketch, improv, whatever you’ve got. I used to be a huge SNL fan (back when I had a tv that worked) and I’ve been on board the Judd Apatow for a few years now. I am also a feminist who gets depressed when there’s a great comic film with all the ladies sitting quietly on the sidelines. And I’m slated to be a maid of honour this summer, and just last week got engaged myself. I saw the movie with the friend I’m mutual maids-of-honour with and a fistful of candy. No one could have been more primed to see this movie. So you have to take it with a grain of salt when I say I laughed. A lot! I didn’t actually know anything about Kristen Wiig, writer and star, before I saw this, but now I think she’s brilliant. The best part is when she wrestled with the giant cookie. The worst part is the protracted diarrhea joke–but even there, I sorta chuckled when I peeked out from behind my hands.

Playing Wii Sports Resort. Did I mention I got a Wii for my birthday? I am officially the luckiest person in the world! I love it all, but especially the sporty games for some reason. I am unexpectedly good at wakeboarding–if I tried to do that in real life I would be killed immediately–and swordplay. Total goofball fun–ie., exactly my thing.

Making spinach dip. There is no way to subdivide a package of frozen spinach, so you can only make this dip for a large party or gathering, so I spend most of life pining for it. Had a party this weekend and got the chance–hooray! For those who asked for the recipe, here you go:
1 package of frozen spinach
2 cups plain yoghurt or sour cream (I prefer yoghurt)
1/2 cup mayonnaise (I skimp a little because I hate mayonnaise, but it actually blends in just fine)
1 can of water chestnuts, chopped
2 scallions or green onions, chopped
Thaw the spinach completely, then take it in your (clean) fists and wring all the water out of it. This is important and I’ve never been able to think of a better way–let me know if you do. Once it’s wrung out, mix all the ingredients together, seal it in a Tupperware and leave in the fridge overnight…or as long as you can stand without going and eating it with a spoon. You can serve it with vegetables or crackers or sturdy chips–whatever it is will just be a dip-delivery system.

Going to the Clark Blaise/Bharati Mukherjee launch Ok, I technically haven’t done that yet because it’s tonight, but then I *will* be doing it, and who knows when I’ll get around to writing another blog post? It should be a great night, two great writers at a lovely pub. You coming?

Not freaking out over reviewing my proofs for The Big Dream Nosireebob, absolutely not. I’m completely calm about it, as usual.

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.