April 12th, 2011

What’s this book about?

Bookstore employees, librarians, students and teachers answer this question with aplomb–accurately, succintly, and without hestitation–but I think anyone who has actually written and published a book knows how baffling it is. Something 200 pages, or even less, full of people and places and thoughts and ideas, is not easy to sum up. Even if there is in fact a spy, a grim police investigator, a hooker with a heart of gold, and a car chase through the Andes, the guy who spent a year or two of his life writing it is not going to say, “Classic spy novel,” and leave it at that. Once you’ve spent hours and days and weeks poring over the minutiae of the characters’ lives, you’ll never be able to boil them down to quick descriptors–they are far too human and complex and difficult and weird and…oh, if you really want to know, why not read the book?

Basically, when someone asks me what my book is about (either one), I am extremely tempted to say, “Everything.” Because though the characters and situations in the stories are deeply specific, unique, and definite, the book itself represents my way of seeing the world: what I think is important, worth noticing, worth dismissing, funny, strange, exciting, stupid, boring, and/or cool. A book is a world view because a book is by its nature a microcosm: what get left in versus ignored constitutes what the writer sees as important.

I can’t say for sure, having not gotten very far down the road yet, but I think this might be more pronounced in writers early in their careers. You have so many years (nearly 30, in my case) to work up to your first book and then–well, most people’s first books aren’t satires of European governance. First books are usually very personal, which is not at all to say autobiographical (though many are, of course): you can tell who people are through what they care about, just as easily as through what they’ve done.

And all this is to say: I’m having trouble coming up with a decent summary of The Big Dream. I had this problem with *Once* too–it took me months *after* the book came out to work up a competent summary of what one might expect in reading it. This necessity shouldn’t have taken me by surprise–I wouldn’t read anything that had offered no clue what it was about. But it’s only being on the inside that has shown me how hard it is to offer that clue.

So, here’s what I’ve come up with so far–what do you think? Sure, I’d like people to want to read the book after reading this paragraph, but even more important is that they have some sense of what they would experience if they did. After all, there are people in the world who would just *hate* this book, based on who they are and what they want when they read–they might as well be able to flag an inappropriate choice from the outset and not get involved. So, do you think this gives you a clue?

The Big Dream is a collection of short stories about life at the Canadian offices of Dream Inc., an American lifestyle-magazine publisher. In a tough market, the staff is struggling to do their jobs well–or even to keep them. But they’re also trying to have friends, to be good parents and good children, to eat lunch and answer the phone and be happy. The Big Dream is a book about how life doesn’t stop on company time. It’s about how the “dream job” and dream life that is supposed to accompany it do not necessarily happen, but the joys and sorrows and sandwiches of waking life are more than enough to occupy our minds and hearts. The Big Dream is a book not about jobs, but about the people who have them.

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.

March 8th, 2011

I’m excited about…

Going to The New Quarterly‘s Toronto reading at Tranzac (which I just learned right now stands for Toronto Australia New Zealand Club!) in the Annex, doors 7, musical entertainment 7:30, readings 8. Should be wonderful, and that venue (multicultural club) is outstanding. See you there?

This lovely review of Once, by Sheila Lamb at the Santa Fe Writers’ Project.

This fantastic grade 11 chemistry textbook. I know, this blog is not usually about stuff I do in my editorial world–that would really require a whole other blog, and who has *that* kind of time? But I just worked so hard on this book that I gradually got obsessed and now I think that as grade 11 chemistry textbooks, this is the best one in the universe. Seriously, everyone who worked on it was amazing and brilliant and not just because they were nice to me when I was very tired and stressed. My role in the project was actually quite minor compared to some, but that does not in any way diminish my love for it.

February 18th, 2011

Reminder about Public Lending Right

In case you haven’t heard, the Public Lending Right is Canadian authors’ hard-won right to be compensated for our books in the public libraries, and registration for published in 2010 (or prior) opened on February 15, so if you’ve published a book in Canada, you should sign up.

February 11th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *Inventory* by Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand’s Inventory is a long poem in seven sections and many subsections. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a 100-page poem outside of school before, and that might be one reason this book stayed on my shelf so long, though I’ve always enjoyed Brand’s work in the past.

And what I’ve enjoyed is still there–the rhythmic voice and global vocabulary, sadness without cynicism and, very occasionally, plainspoken joy. The subject is the grim catologing of the world’s dead and other damages, wrought mainly through war but natural disasters and local violence make appearances, too. The sadness was challenging to deal with, no question, especially because of the ever-shifting narrator’s bafflement and slow-burning rage. But though I read very slowly, I felt no urge to stop to read something more cheery.

The poem is described on the jacket as “incantatory,” a word I always thought meant “in the manner of singing” but actually turns out to be “in the manner of chanting a magic spell.” *Inventory* actually seemed like both, like a song of sorrows and a magic spell to help the reader bear them. Although it is incredibly sad–it is after all an inventory of death–I felt the character’s love for the world in her sadness, and her warm and constant attention to the real details of real life. “Half the mind is atrophied in this / just as inanimate doors and pickup trucks / the unremitting malls of all desire.” What I think this means is that pain makes us objects, inanimate, unable to feel, but not entirely–we’ll never stop desiring. Am I close? Who knows! I like the lines, though, and when I don’t understand I feel secure nonetheless with these concrete nouns recognizable and benign.

I say “character,” but the book is tricksy on this aspect. The first section starts with “We believed in nothing” and continues in the first person plural throughout–not a defined group, I felt, but more a we-the-people, we-the-world’s-citizens. At the beginning of the last stanza of the first section, the lines ” now we must wait on their exhaustion, now / we have to pray for their demise with spiked hands” I was pretty sure she meant “everybody.” The second and third sections specify down onto a single person, “she,” a watcher of boys eating burgers and slick cities, a watcher of news on TV and, resulting from that, a weeper. “She” seems distinct from the narrator, who seems to identify with her closely and yet sometimes to pull back to a greater distance. Towards the end of the third section we get “we, / there is no “we” / let us separate ourselves now, / though perhaps we can’t.” Does this mean separation between the narrator and “she”? I think rather it means the impossibility of the “we-the-world” global consciousness in the first section–we can’t identify with each other really, yet we are stuck with each other, humanity’s collective fate impinging on all of our personal fates. Or something like that.

And “she” is observing fates both collective and personal. Where I got excited was in the fourth section, which is divided into subsections. The first of these returns to the “we,” but it is much more specific and intimate than before–now “we” are on a trip, touring Al Rifai Mosque, listening to the guard sing and wondering at the beauty. And then in the second subsection we finally get a “me”–“a voice called to me, “Welcome back, Cousin.” I can’t tell you why I was so happy about this, but I felt sort of like it was a homecoming, the narrator reunited with “she” to become a more cogent, personal whole.

Again, no idea if I’m close–this review (a good one, both in the sense of being positive and of being well-written) mentions there being several “characters” in the book, which seems plausible, but I’m happy with the idea of one woman in many guises, from many angles. In the fourth section, she’s being mistaken for someone else, or might be–this man’s cousin–though she’s willing to admit the possibility.

The next section is an elegy for someone who left and was mourned for, and is dedicated to Marlene Green. If Green is a public figure, I don’t know of her (Google fails me); perhaps that’s not the case. I read the section as broken-hearted sorrow for lost love, because I felt the book getting more intimate and because I felt that the “she/I” mourned a personal loss beyond what she saw on tv.

The 5th and 6th sections move back and fourth with “I” and “she”, with a fair amount of “you” thrown in, but I already felt implicated. They are also beautiful, beautiful, but what I read this morning on the bus is the thing that burst my head open, and that’s the 7th section, which begins “On reading this someone will say / God, is there no happines then, of course, tennis matches and soccer games, / and river song and bird song and / wine naturally and some Sundays.” And so it goes, the last dozen pages of the book, a genuine, faltering, beautiful attempt to offer comfort, succour, joy or something like it in the face of tragedy. This section would not have been half so stunning were it not in the context of all that came before, were it not in some small sense *earned* by the reader. I don’t doubt that I’ll sometimes take the book down and read only the 7th section, to revel in it, but it’ll never feel quite the same way without the rest.

What a stunning book. One thing I thought upon closing it is that it must’ve been so hard to write. However, in the reading of it, the strain of emotion is apparent, but never the strain of poetry–maybe poetry is the real succour?

This is the 4th book in my To Be Read challenge. The first poetry collection, and also the first Canadian book. Interesting, whatever that says about what languishes on my shelves.

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!

January 18th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *Jenny and the Jaws of Life* by Jincy Willet

This book was loaned to me–rather forcefully–by my friend M, and the introduction by David Sedaris is about how the book is so hilarious that he also proselytizes for it and pushes others to read it, or simply reads bits aloud to them.

Strong praise indeed, for I consider Sedaris one the best and funniest…actually, I’ve never been able to pin down what he does. It is essayist? Memoirist? Well, he’s pretty much the funniest *writer*, of anything, I know of. For him to write an intro and blurb for a book–let alone a bout that came out in the 80s and was being re-released in England in 2006 (??) seemed like a pretty big deal. And really, my friend M is pretty sharp, too–she spotted this perfect-condition hardcover on the sidewalk in a box!

I did not find this book all that funny, but I liked it anyway. Isn’t that weird? Usually, if I find the marketing inaccurate, it’s because the book isn’t good and I just hate the whole thing, but this is a great weird disturbing book. I found it flawed at certain points, but really riveting, inventive, striking…and yes, some bits made me laugh.

My favourite story in the collection was probably the first, “Julie in the Funhouse.” It’s about a man whose sister is murdered by her teenage son and daughter. Hahaha, right? It is true that both the man and his sister are of an ironic turn of mind, and flashbacks of them together and some scenes of him by himself are mordantly funny, but just funny in the fabric of the story, which is very much like the fabric of life. I culled through looking for a “hilarious” passage in this story, but the laughs when they come are pretty modest, in keeping with the tragic subject of the story.

But enough about baffling marketing–it’s a brilliant, achingly sad story. I think Willet’s real gift is an ability to go towards melodrama asymptotically, closer and closer without ever touching. She’s able to pull of huge scary subjects, like the murder one above, or “Under the Bed,” which is probably the best story about rape I’ve read. And yes, that one has it’s small wry laughs–probably more than most rape stories, but that’s only because it’s more realistic than most rape stories. The humour is only in keeping with the ironies of life. Even “Justine Laughs at Death,” which is a sort of paranormal take on sexual violence winds up being affecting, even exciting, and quite witty. It’s about a guy who is the single concentrated personification of all sexual violence, and what happens when he encounters the single concentrated personification of all women. You couldn’t really find a “bigger” story to write, but she does it (I think; I can see folks disagreeing with me) with minimum porteneousness and maximum inventiveness–it’s a wild story.

And that may bea flaw of Willet’s–she’s incredible with wild situations, and she can make things work that you’d never think possible, but she does best in elevated or extreme moments; sometimes the more ordinary stuff rings false or if not false then too heavily stylized, conceptualized to be real. “The Haunting of the Lingards” is about a “perfect marriage,” in which the couple had one argument early in their relationship, 16 more years of perfection, then the argument resurfaces and destroys them. However, the pages of the story are almost entirely devoted to the first and second fights, and the subsequent fallout from the second. The other 16 years are described in a quick summary of neighbourly envy, which in the face of no other evidence seems untrue–it seems like the narrator has lied to us and the Lingards were *never* happy. But what would be the point of that lie–then the story makes no sense. The concept behind the story–spiritual belief can never be successfully debated or explained, even for love–is far stronger than the story itself. The characters feel like props made for the purpose of explaining an idea.

A few of the more quotidian ones do in fact work quite well, so maybe my thesis isn’t going to fly. “My Father at the Wheel” is a lovely emotional set of postcards from a girl growing into a woman, and all the times her father gave her a life somewhere. A very simple, no-fireworks story that is genuinely moving.

Willett is also an interesting author–she published this book, then mainly stopped writing to raise her son. When Sedaris pushed for the republish 16 years later, the publisher asked her to finish the novel she’d been plugging away at so she could publish that too, which got her back into the game. You can read a nice interview with her here–sharp lady. Apparently she’s got a new book out lately, which I think I’d probably like to check out.

This is the second review for my To Be Read reading challenge–10 more to go!

January 14th, 2011

New in Voyeurism

I’ve joined the literary-voyeurism army on Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading project, and I’ve got some wonderful company. I’m really thrilled that Seen Reading is back after its hiatus, and that I get to be a little part of it. So expect regular reports from me on my Scarborough beat. Also, I rather expect some fails. Even this week, in my first few attempts, I saw what can go wrong. Examples:

1) It is impossible to tell what someone is reading on Kobo unless you are practically on top of them.
2) Some people actually sew little coats for their books that stay on even while the book is open. I assume they are reading porn (why else hide it?) but have no proof.
3) If I am myself reading a very good book, I sometimes forget to look at other people.

More on the situation as it develops!

January 12th, 2011

Winter Books

I don’t always pay attention to the “publishing seasons,” but this year I am, and the winter crop of books is pretty amazing. Winter books that I (and you?) want to read:

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper: I went to the launch party last night, which was super-fun and included among the canapes nutella on bread! I also bought a *hardcover* novel, which pretty much only AP can convince me to do…it’s a ghost story about friendship that sounds a little out of my league but really, I’ve never *not* liked an AP book.

The Divinity Gene by Matthew Trafford launches his first collection at The Gladstone on February 15. I’ve read a few stories around town and also seen Matthew perform some monologues, and am pretty much assured that this collection is going to be the weirdest and most excellent we’ve seen in a while. Also, that the launch is going to be really fun.

And Also Sharks by Jessica Westhead isn’t out until March, but I’m already excited. Stories in the Puritan and The New Quarterly have whet my appetite, as does thinking about her first book, the novel *Pulpy and Midge*. Only two more months to wait!

The Odious Child by Carolyn Black has been on my radar for a while, and this description from the publisher’s website makes me even more interested: “if your child is a furry feral creature, your new love interest a potential serial killer (or worse, a fictitious cliché)…?” Another March book–oh, the waiting!

The Beggar’s Garden by Michael Christie is a surprise treat for me that I just found out about today. Unlike the above authors, Christie isn’t in Toronto and I didn’t know about this book through “buzz.” Rather, a couple years ago I was totally blown away by his story in the Journey 20 anthology, “Goodbye, Porkpie Hat.” At the time, I googled around to see what else he had written and found nothing and was sad. And now today, someone’s facebook post informs me that he has a whole book of stories for me to read, out this month. I’m thrilled, and hope the touring gods bring him to Toronto sometime soon!

What other books are you looking forward to this season?