March 24th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Subways Are for Sleeping* by Edmund G. Wilson

One of the interesting things for me about writing book reviews is that I do further research on the book that I would never have done if it was just a personal read. For example, after finishing Edmund G. Love’s Subways Are for Sleeping, I googled my way to the discovery that it started life as a Harper’s article, *then* became a book, followed by a radio play and finally a musical comedy for which the title is most famous.

It’s a little disconcerting that what purports to be a series of non-fictional essays on homeless people could be transformed into a muscial comedy. I haven’t seen the show, but to my mind it’s a bit of a stretch, but not *that* much of a stretch.

Each of these essays is in fact a detailed character sketch of one person who lives without traditional housing. However, in truth, many are not homeless, which is not exactly a problem with the book–it is certainly interesting to read about a rich man who comes from Boston to New York whenever he feels the need of an alcoholic bender, or about a party girl who arranges for the men in her life to pay for her rent, buy her groceries, and refurbish her kitchen. I did however find it disconcerting how Love gets around talking about anyone who is actually hungry or cold or suffering, except perhaps existentially.

The only two women who populate these essays both exist in semi-comfortable surroundings where they scheme to manipulate men into maintaining their lives. The most pathetic of these, Martha Grant, whose story “The Girl Who Wore No Clothes” is muchly reminiscent of Truman Capote’s novella *Breakfast at Tiffany’s (which was published the year after *Subways*, interestingly…) Martha refuses to leave the hotel, to wear street clothes (she sticks to a bathing suit at the pool, or towels in her room), or to pay for her own upkeep. She claims to be ill, or vulnerable to illness, and the hero (allegedly Love himself in his days as a down-and-outer himself) pities her in her hypochondria. There’s a strangely tender moment at the end of the story when he realizes the heights/lows of dishonesty she has reached in order to avoid working for a living. At that point, you realize that gorgeous seductive Martha really *is* psychologically damaged, and you feel for her as the narrator does.

But the other story about a women living off the sponsorship of men, the aforementioned “Party Girl,” was silly in the extreme and, moreover, I can’t believe anyone would ever be *quite* as systematically dishonest and greedy as that–or at least, if they were they wouldn’t tell a journalist about it.

But it is the systems that Love truly enjoys writing about, and what drew me to the book, too. The copy I have is my father’s, purchased in the 1960s in a pocket paperback edition that disintegrated as I read it (I had to place each page in a stack when I was done reading it, and will throw them out when I complete this review. I am upset about this–I don’t think I’ve every destroyed a book before.) My dad described to me the homeless man who discovered that if he went the New York Public Library, the reading rooms would be full of homeless folks trying to stay warm and not be kicked out, but none of those went to the microfiche viewers, where they could read and sleep unobserved with their heads in the viewers.

How clever, I thought, and it is–that’s Henry Selby, the protagonist of the title story and the original Harper’s piece, and a semi-legitimate homeless man. Henry has dozens of complex systems, from how long he can sleep on which line of the subway to places to get bathed and shaved, to how long he must work to give himself enough money to live a few days. I am fascinated by these subtle contrivances, these ways of making life work.

But hell, maybe that was life 50 years ago, but I was surprised and unconvinced that Henry, and others in this book, were able to get work as waitstaff, office clerks, labourers, for a few days at a time, be paid immediately, and then hive off until they needed money again–and then be given another job just as quick. It seemed to me that men who had been sleeping rough, or semi-rough, for weeks at a time would not be the ones bosses were most eager to hire off the street and pay cash to. Like I say, perhaps the economy was different then, but I was also a bit baffled by the fact the men *could* get decent work and do it well, but mainly preferred to sleep in parks. Not that I don’t think there’s people like that, but if you’re going to examine them as a group, it’s pretty necessary that you look at the why of it. Love never does. In ten stories, the author gives only the barest glance to what about traditional wage-earning, apartment-inhabiting life alienates these souls, and what has come before to lead them to this position.

But that’s old-time journalism for you, and it’s only my modern psycho-analytical perspective that makes it unsatisfying for me. But that’s how I read, and I found that though *Subways Are for Sleeping* was very interesting, it left me wanting much much more.

This is the third book in my 2012 To Be Read Challenge.

March 15th, 2012

Entertainments

Life continues busy, but not of all of it is work, so if I can’t be providing substantial updates here, at least I can share the fun stuff I’ve been doing so you can (if you care to) do it too!

Watch Goon. Not-so-secret RR fact: I love Seann William Scott. I think he’s a great comic actor–not infinite range, perhaps, but Goon definitely expands it. It’s a funny, sweet, gory movie–I imagine it could only be better if one actually liked hockey or could look at violence without peeping through one’s fingers. I thought it was really interesting how realistic the violence looked. If you watch a lot of romantic comedies or even action flicks, you start thinking it’s pretty easy to knock a man down with one punch. If you watch *Goon,* you learn/remember that if that man is strong and used to fighting, it’s actually pretty hard to knock him down with seven punches–but you’ll make is face look like rotten meat in the process. Some of the negative reviews say this movie glorifies violence, but I think it really really doesn’t. But don’t let me go heavy on it–the best part is really SWS charming charming portrayl of a loveable goof, especially when he talks about how garbage sometimes blows in his face. Oh, and the city shots of Halifax are great!

Read the latest issue of The New Quarterly Even-less-secret RR fact–I adore TNQ. That said, not every issue is my personal delight–they celebrate a range of writing styles and forms, all interesting but–I just love character-heavy, witty, involving, open-ended short stories the best. There it is–my literary prejudice. And there are some great ones in this issue–by Michelle Berry, Caroline Adderson, Michael Bryson, and others. And intereviews about the short story form with the three listed above, including some interesting discussion about what a short story *is* and what it can and cannot do, alone, and with a book filled with sister stories. The differences between a short story collection, a linked short story collection and a novel in stories are fascinating to me right now–this issue couldn’t have come at a better time.

Read this review of *The Big Dream* in *The Gauntlet*. Thought-provoking, no?

Some other things I’ve done lately that can’t quite fit under the “entertainment” category though I, in my way, found them entertaining:

–I used up a lipstick, was has seriously happened maybe three times in my whole life.

–I rode in an SUV limo, which has happened zero times in my life and probably never will again. Fun, though.

–My cat learned to climb the shower curtain, to open the closet, and that the things flying around outside our window are birds that he could eat if it weren’t for the damn glass. Except sometimes he forgets about the glass.

–I bought a wedding dress.

February 20th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Small Change* by Elizabeth Hay

Another book that I read along with everyone else in Canada a few years back is Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. And just like everyone else, I really enjoyed the novel–the exotic setting of the Canadian North, the real but somehow gentle characters, the fascination and nostalgia of the radio culture.

A few years later, though, I was completely blindsided by Hay’s work in The New Quarterly called The Last Poems. This story had sharply defined characters but a weirdly interior world of rage and psychology and love. I thought it was brilliant writing, far more insightful and memorable than even the novel I so admired.

I think Hay‘s short-story collection, Small Change comes from the same well of stories as The Last Poems–I even recognized some of the characters from the TNQ piece appearing briefly in this book. And these stories have the same brilliant intensity. I was completely immersed in and astounded by the first story in the collection, “The Friend.” In it, a protagonist with a husband and small daughter finds herself taken over by her new friend Maureen, a woman with a small child of her own, a problematic marriage, and a will towards pathos that allows no problems or indeed voices other than her own in the conversation.

*Small Change*’s back-cover bumpf says the collection “illuminates the changing seasons of friendship,” so I was expecting the stories to be linked only by theme–a sort of concept album-style collection, which is not exactly something I’ve seen before. But it turns out that the collection is also linked by protagonist–the same  not-quite-young woman appears in most of  the stories–though a few are in third or even second person, they are all about her. The second piece in the collection is actually still about her relationship with Maureen, sort of, and this former friend proves a touchstone throughout the book, though she is not actually onstage again.

There’s an incredible sense of insight into the worst kinds of human behaviours. “Hand Games” is the story of very little girls and their afterschool friendship that goes awry in a way that most of us will recognize, but I’ve never heard described so well–the power dynamic of refusing to play, of changing the game, of liking and then not liking. It’s persuasive and true and banal and utterly sad–a riveting story.

The problem with the book–or the problem with me that caused me to have a problem with the book–occurred to me about halfway through. In *Small Change,* all the friendships go awry, and they do so in a dramatic sad slide of envy and jealousy, boredom and insecurity, and quite often a desire to “win” encounters not so far removed from the story about the six-year-olds. I found the stories incredibly insightful about certain moments of intense emotions, but not awfully insightful about the rate of incidence of such moments in everyday life–for every friendship I’ve had that ended badly, I have lots that are still going strong, and a few that just kinda quietly drifted off. I don’t know any adults that bring a consistent level of drama to friendships–I really don’t.

When I found the statement, late in the book, “how difficult it is to have companionship without being encroached upon,” I felt like I had found the unifying philosophy of the book, and I didn’t agree with it. I find it easy and lovely to have friends, and I find most of them give more than they take. As a character study–a study of a woman struggling with her inability to keep friends over the long term–the book is perhaps perfectly realistic but deeply sad and finally hard for me to relate to. Each individual story was incredibly vivid, emotionally accessible and relatable, but taken in sum, the stories seem to come to the conclusion that  (I’m paraphrasing from the book itself) all friendships have an expiration date, like milk, and since friendships must end and it’s impossible to end them gently–chaos ensues.

I was so depressed by this book that I thought perhaps I read it too fast–sometimes when I do that, it’s like I’m living inside the text, becoming the characters. But my notes say it took me more than 10 days. Maybe the power of Hay’s writing is that it had me living inside it while reading only a few pages a day. I honestly don’t know what to say about this book–I think the artistic achievement of it is immense, but by the last page I was so miserable I can’t honestly say I liked it.

This is my second book for the 2012 To Be Read challenge.

January 29th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Beatrice & Virgil* by Yann Martel

I was one of the many many people really who liked Yann Martel’s second novel, Life of Pi–I found it fascinating, completely engrossing, realistically weird, and warm-hearted. Though folks have since attempted to explain to me the ins and outs of the book’s symbolism, and though those explanations strike me as plausible, at the time I found it to be the most novelly of novels, completely consumed with its own characters and events, a world unto itself. I liked it very much.

I also liked Martel’s first, and less successful, novel, Self. I mean “less successful” in that fewer people read it than *Pi* (it feels like almost everyone in Canada read *Pi*) but also that it works less well as a book. There, the symbols and politics are much closer to the surface and the world seems a bit too much created for the reader’s benefit, but I was nevertheless interested in the characters and their lives. *Self* seemed an ambitious and adventurous experiment, and I wasn’t overmuch concerned that not every aspect worked out.

I have not read Martel’s first book, a collection of stories, but someone gave me his most recent, Beatrice & Virgil, and I decided to go with it. The novel starts with a frame story in which a novelist much like Martel but named Henry, who had great success with a novel about animals, much like *Life of Pi*, writes a new book that combines essay and novel in a single volume, both treating the Holocaust as their central theme. The Martel-like novelist is then totally shot down by his publisher, gives up writing, and moves to a new and unnamed city with his wife, Sarah.

There, with the financial success of his previous book allowing him to eschew the struggle to make a living, he abandons writing in favour of amateur theatrics, music lessons, work in a cafe, adopting pets, and answering his fan letters. One of these letters comes from a fellow writer also named Henry, who is working on a play but is stuck. He sends an excerpt from his play, a completely charming bit of dialogue where one character attempts to explain to the other what a pear is like. He also sends an exceptionally gory story about the murder of animals, by Flaubert.

From the return postmark, our Henry sees that the other one lives in the same city. For reasons that didn’t make complete sense to me, the protagonist answers his letter and decides to hand deliver it. He finds himself at an ornate (and ornately described) taxidermy shop, drawn into conversation with his correspondent.

On the one hand, I’m embarrassed that it has taken me so many words to describe this simple setup, but on the other hand, the novel could be seen as little more than what I’ve described above. The rest of the book consists mainly of descriptions of the taxidermy shop (I loved these until I hated them; they go on and on), dialogue with the taxidermist, and scenes from his play. The play, pear scene above notwithstanding, is a grim metafiction about two creatures–a howler monkey named Virgil and a donkey named Beatrice–who have endured horrific events perpetrated against animals in general and themselves in particular–trying to find a way to tell their story. They name the events “The Horrors” and compile a lists of ways to remember them.

Beatrice and Virgil are not exactly real to me, but Martel brings them into my head if not into life in a way that’s affecting. Affecting enough that at the terrifying end of their story, I turned my face from the page in genuine horror.

Michiko Kakutani’s NY Times review of this book makes much of Martel’s “derivative recycling” of Samuel Beckett’s *Waiting for Godot*, a play I think has enough spacious genius within it for many retellings (I’m glad Kakutani hasn’t read this). Martel’s characters have more obvious tenderness for each other (though I do believe Vladimir and Estragon love each other) but maybe the problem is that they aren’t different *enough* for some. I don’t know–because we only read snippets of the play, out of order and incomplete, I find it very hard to criticize these sections. Much as I liked them, it was hard to fully enter Beatrice and Virgil’s experiences, because of all the meta-y double-lensing.

I didn’t do much better understanding the life and experience of our protagonist, Henry. The literary blow from his publishers–and his confidence-bordering-on-cockiness beforehand–sets things up as a kind of satire. The book never goes farther with the satire than those opening chapters, but the depth–shallowness–of characterization would’ve worked with satire. We know little more of Henry than his hobbies–certainly not where his interests in animals and the Holocaust come from. His wife, Sarah has no character at all and indeed almost never seen. The only truly affecting scene in the Henry sections is the death of his pets–I found that devastating, though nothing in his human relationships touched me. I sense that that was, to some degree, the point.

I am not entirely certain what “a novel of ideas” is, but i think that this sort of demi-character–half reliant on what we already know of the author, half only a carrier of plot and opinion–might be a signifier of one. And in that, I do find *Beatrice and Virgil* lacking. I wished I’d cared as much about the human characters as about the animals or, failing that, that the human characters hadn’t been so a large percentage of the book.

I didn’t read the reviews when this book came out but I went back and read a few online in preparation for writing this one. One thing that surprised me is that no one mentioned another very strange, very meta-y novel about another novelist struggling in the shadow of an early bestseller, who also connects crimes against animals to the Holocaust. JM Coetzee’s *Elizabeth Costello* is, like Martel’s book, concerned with representation, though perhaps more with *what* than *how*. That book asks a lot of different questions, though, and comes at them from many angles, whereas I felt *B&V* was pretty much stuck on one. More importantly to an emotional reader like me, Elizabeth lived in my mind as a real person struggling with a hard matter, whereas Henry always seemed a construct to me.

I don’t think *Beatrice and Virgil* a failed book, just an incompletely successful one, like *Self.* The writing is deft and absorbing, the bits of the play sometimes truly lovely, and lots of white space on the pages ensured I finished the book well before I was tired. I liked this book, though the ending was horrific without making enough sense to me to think of it further in any meaningful way. I really don’t know what the final section, “Games for Gustav” was *for*, you know? And I do feel that loss, for I think this novel is above all for thinking about.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know the inscription in my copy–“To Rebecca, May you never have to play Game #13, Yann Martel”–is not entirely friendly. I have never met Mr. Martel–the giver of the gift got this signature for me–so it’s not personal, but it does seem to be a kind of challenge, words offered by an author concerned with something very different than being liked. That, if nothing else, is courageous.

This is the first book of my 2012 Off  the Shelf Challenge.

January 27th, 2012

Mail Haul

Today my copies of Best Canadian Stories 2011 arrived, filled with exciting stories, including my own “Dream Big.” As if this weren’t enough, my contributor’s copies (and cheque) were part of an exceptionally nice mail haul, which also included a handwritten thank you note for Rosemary Sullivan’s lovely kids’ book Molito, a copy of The Fiddlehead, a set of wedding-invitation samples (terrifying), and a letter to someone who doesn’t live with us. There are a number of such individuals that regularly get mail (and phone calls) chez moi, but Cyril is my favourite, because every time I see his name I am afforded a happy memory of Cyril Sneer one of the best Canadian cartoon villains (not a tight race, perhaps) of all time.

And then when I got online, by google alert informed me of this review of *The Big Dream*on The Toronto Review of Books blog.

A day well-begun, I’d say!!

December 17th, 2011

Rose-coloured Reviews *Songs for the Missing* by Stewart O’Nan

I have been working in publishing for way too long not to read all the extra book bits no one cares about. Card page, acknowledgements, note about the type, copyright page–I’m on it. And that page of quotations from reviews some poor intern who hasn’t read the book cobbled together (that was me, once)–that too, though since this only happens once I’ve purchased it, there’s no point.

In fact, it can be problematic to sit down with a brand new reading project and start with 7 or 8 contextless statements on it’s extreme brilliance. Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan was an extremely well-reviewed book and had 26 such statements, and I daresay I would’ve like it better had I not had my expectations overwrought by promises such as “As we read, we, too, are changed, and in ways we cannot even understand.” (San Francisco Chronicle) or “O’Nan is on a kind of mission to restore a simple, true sense of humantiy to the novel” (The New York Times Book Review)

After getting about halfway through the book, I actually followed up and read the whole of some of those reviews, and found that the excerpts were largely faithful to the wholes; this book is pretty universally adored. So at this point I just feel stupid for not really liking it all that much.

I’m not immune to the achievement of this novel. It’s about a family and a community suffering, waiting, and mourning when 17-year-old Kim Larsen goes missing. I understood that the author loved his characters and wished for a happier story than he could write for them–always a stunner to see that kind of restraint in writing. And the book felt very true: O’Nan never stooped to melodrama, never exaggerated or sugar-coated.

However: I never felt I knew the characters; even when I was terribly sad for them, it was more the many left-behind of the missing that they *represented* that I was sad for. Kim’s parents, Ed and Fran, never seemed to come alive for me, and her friends and boyfriend were little more than teenaged *types*.

I think the problem might have been one of ambition–there are six points of view in this novel, and it covers more than three years, so I never really felt that anything had been portrayed with the sort of depth I wanted.

But let’s back up and work through the book as a whole. The chapters are narrated in third-person-limited. That first one is from Kim’s perspective. It’s only after you read the whole of the book and come back that you realize how gorgeous this opening is, how perfect and elegaic it is, the only part I thought that was consciously poetic, without ever seeming to be. Kim’s viewpoint seemed honest, irreverent and flip as a person who doesn’t know she’s about to disappear. I completely got her character, though I didn’t necessarily like her.

And then she does disappear, from the narrative and from the world. I only picked up halfway through the book that the characters only got a narrative viewpoint when they were in the small town of Kingsville where it was set, or planning to go there imminently. It’s not giving too much away to say that, after the first chapter, Kim isn’t in Kingsville anymore, so we don’t get her POV.

The other points of view that take over after are Kim’s mom, dad, sister, best friend, and boyfriend. I thought it was telling that a number of reviews mentions that the point of view of *two* of Kim’s friends were used, but they weren’t: Nina gets a POV, Elise doesn’t, but the characters appear interchangeable until quite late in the story so it is very hard to keep it straight.

The pace of the novel is gut-wrenchingly slow, because the pace of a missing person’s investigation is, too, or at least feels that way to those waiting. I was bored, but I was pretty sure I was supposed to be bored; it was accurate for the situation being described.

Some of the various blurbage on the book described it as a kind of procedural, and not that I’ve read many of those but I don’t think it is. Big swaths of the investigation are ignored because the family isn’t actually privy to what goes on; the police/family relationship isn’t good. Again, that felt accurate if the book is a kind of procedural of how to be the family of the missing, which includes a lot of grace under condescension and forced ignorance.

There were some weird errors that I caught–Old Navy isn’t an expensive store and the Killers aren’t a British band. That made me worry about the facts I didn’t know enough to catch errors in, like…what the police did and when, and what the Larsens’ legal options were. The errors I mention here are trivial, but they were important in that they made me trust the narrative less, and thus distance myself from it–never a good thing.

As well, particularly at the beginning and the end, there were lots of things going on that the reader is never fully aware of even though the family is, and we certainly don’t know the exact procedures of the officials involved, even when our various narrators are well-involved. The narrative flits through time, and I often would’ve liked more detail about, say, Fran’s community organizing, but the story skips to focus on flirtations between Kim’s old friends.

This review is probably sadly revealing of my own goals as a writer. I like to live with my characters in what feels like real time–the framing of the story is the decision to write about it, and I don’t like the reader to feel her chin being nudged, “Look at this, no, *this,* this is what’s important and the rest doesn’t matter.” O’Nan is not embarrassed to nudge, to elide and emphasize what he sees as important.

So I never understood why the drug connection Kim and her friends had couldn’t be properly explained; the stigma lingers until the last page but I never figured out exactly what they did. For a while this is a secret so people are afraid to discuss openly, but after everyone knows, it’s still kept from the reader. Or it’s possible I’m just obtuse. Ditto the amount of obsessive detail about Ed’s readying of the first house he represents after he returns to work as a realtor following Kim’s disappearance. This section is so detailed that I was expecting him to find Kim’s body in the house’s basement, or something equally important. But there’s no obvious reason for these pages of emphasis–it drifts away and you don’t even find out what the house sells for, or if it sells at all. Very strange.

The ending is an anticlimax for both characters and readers as it would pretty nearly have to be, realistically, given all that has and hasn’t happened previously. O’Nan handles it with quiet aplomb–he doesn’t leave us quite without hope, but to the last, he doesn’t give us anything undeserved either. *Songs for the Missing* wasn’t really the book I wanted it to be, but nor was the reading of it in any way wasted time.

This was the 11th book in my To Be Read Challenge. One more to go before the end of the year!

November 8th, 2011

Stuff going on

So I was in the Deathmatch on Sunday night, and I went down in the first round. But it’s ok, because the winner was Dani Couture, and losing to Dani is a lot like winning, due to her awesomeness. Other awesomeness was provided by Carolyn Black and Grace O’Connell. And a special shout-out to Ricardo at the Gladstone Hotel, who retrieved my lost camera for me and kept it safe until I could come for it. I owe you one, Ricardo!!

Other things that happened in the past few days–a mini-mention in the Toronto Star (not online, sorry) and a wonderful review in the Rover by Mark Paterson. That latter review made my day–I felt like Paterson really “got it.” Not that reviews should have any bearing on how I feel about my book, not that people who understand the book in different ways than I do are wrong–some have much better interpretations than mine–but it is nice to know that I wrote the book in such a way that someone might, at least, feel about it how I do. This is my favourite sentence from the piece: “Communication, understanding, and perception are themes Rosenblum began to explore in Once and takes up again in The Big Dream.” Ok, well, and this one: “Rebecca Rosenblum is one of literary Canada’s funniest food comedians.” If I knew how to put emoticons into my blog posts, I think I’d be driven to use one here.

And now jumping ahead–I’ll be reading at the Lillian H. Smith Library with the fantastic Ann Perdue on December 1. Which is my last event of 2011 (that I know of)–looking forward to it immensely.

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!