September 13th, 2011

*The Big Dream* reviewed in *This Magazine*

Have you read the new issue of This Magazine yet? Maybe not, because it just came out and you, unlike me, probably were not awaiting it rabidly because you knew it had a review of your new book in it, but not what the review said.

The review, it turns out, said many positive and insightful thing, including this:

“Rosenblum’s natural dialogue and descriptive prose result in a
collection that successfully depicts the complex balancing act between
home and work that so often define the lives of office workers who
struggle to stay afloat inside and outside of their cubicles.”

For the full review, plus many other interesting articles that don’t have anything to do with me, get thee to a newsstand!

June 26th, 2011

Rose-coloured Reviews Tell Your Sister by Andrew Daley

Let’s get this out of the way up front: I found Tell Your Sister by Andrew Daley to be a dark ride. Part of that is defo the book’s content and style, but part of it may be me and my mood as I read it.  When I looked up the publisher’s link just now to give to you, I was surprised to see that it was described as “mordantly funny” though actually, there’s some quite sharp wit throughout. It’s weird that I forgot about that, but I was pretty devastated by the stuff that happens to the characters–I guess that’s the mordant part.

This is the story of Dean Higham and Aaron Fenn, childhood friends who grow apart when (a) Aaron starts dating Dean’s sister, Susan and (b) their life situations radically diverge. While Dean and Susan are part of a fairly stable middle-class family, with all the cars and cash and university plans that entails, when Aaron’s mother dies when the boys are in grade 12, Aaron is basically left alone. His father remarries almost immediately and takes his two younger kids to live in another town. The father and stepmother offer no financial or emotional support to Aaron; indeed, they steal his baby bonus cheques. If he wants to even see his sisters, he has to hitchhike to visit.

All of this has already occurred before the book gets rolling, so it’s a lot of despair to absorb before you really even know the characters. And you know, the more I think about it, it *is* the humour that leavens things. A lot of it is just drawn from the fact that the book is set in the 1980s–the astute among you will have picked that up from the baby bonus cheques mentioned above. But it’s also gently funny when the characters go about putting on legwarmers to match their sweaters, or experimenting with this strange new band, Depeche Mode, with utter seriousness.

For most of the book, Aaron’s third-person narrative alternates with Dean’s first-person. Dean’s sections take place about 15 years after his last year of high school, which is the time-period where Aaron’s sections are set. Adult Dean is having troubles with his girlfriend, but also a personal meltdown, which is accelerated when he runs into Aaron’s younger sister, Nancy, who clearly hates him.

The two strands of the book work in concert to gradually reveal to us what Nancy has again Dean. It seems it is something bigger than just failure to be a good friend back when Aaron needed one. The twist at the end is that Dean’s crime *is* only to be a good friend, only on a rather large scale.

Dean’s gradual unravelling also has a humourous edge, because so much of it is set in Toronto’s heinous traffic snarls, which Daley expertly play-by-plays. But Dean really is running from something beyond gridlock and his lame-o girlfriend. And the slow reveal, ping-ponging between the two sections, is simple and unmelodramatic.

I also liked how the two sections slowly show us the strange parallels and mirrorings that Dean’s and Aaron’s lives have. This could’ve been really heavy-handed, but I was only half aware of how the author was guiding me along, right up until the end.

The hiccup in this dual-stranded approach is that a few early scenes are from Susan’s perspective. Nothing wrong with that, except that Susan’s POV is immensely well-drawn and engaging, so it’s frustrating when that goes away after about 50 pages, and we never get back inside her head. It’s a loss, and sort of a strange one. By the end of the book when we find out how Susan’s life works out, she feels like a completely unknown character, while in those early scenes I thought we were on our way to intimacy.

Back to the central story, which is of Aaron’s troubles. The best part of that–only from a literary perspective–is the portrayal of the totally realistic creepoid Warner, who offers to help out Aaron when no one else would. His “help” quickly proves itself to be manipulating Aaron into helping him break the law, but Warner is also a deeply imagined character. His shifting version of the truth, intense relationship with his mother and sister, choice of reading material, even his weirdly well-thought out ways of hooking Aaron into his web–all are fascinating.

But, for rose-coloured me, reading about a fascinating person who is also awful, and does a lot of awful things, was hard. As good as it is, I found *Tell Your Sister* bleak and I sensed some cynicism about human nature. None of the characters make good on their best impulses, and most are prey to their worst–people fail each other over and over again.

Though grim, most of these scenarios were pretty realistic (though I thought that the character of Aaron’s dad was over-the-top–clearly The Worst Person in the World). This novel sometimes glances into YA territory, and I do think it would go over well with teens, but it doesn’t truly fit the category because the outlook is so bleak, as are the out*comes* for the most of the characters. I do recommend you read this book, but only when you are feeling strong.

This is my eighth book for the To Be Read challenge–four more to go!

May 29th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* by Dave Eggers

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers is my seventh book in the To Be Read reading challenge. As many of my other picks are, this is a book I feel like everyone in the universe had read except me–until now.

What kept me away was all the things that Eggers predicted would keep pretentious types away–the dense and contrarian introductory materials, the cutesy flip-it-upside-down-and-backwards appendix at the back, the “daring” title. And an extra one that’s just me–I don’t like memoir.

Fine, I know this is my failing–I read all book-length prose narratives as if they were novels, and if one is being faithful to the facts, life rarely has the shape and satisfactions of a novel. It has it’s own satisfactions, I know–though rarely an obvious shape–but I don’t care. I want the novelistic ones when I’m reading a book that looks–to me–like a novel.

AHWoSG (as it is referred to in the running heads) is a strangely shaped book, and thus–to me–low on tension. If you’re the one other guy who hasn’t read it, in brief, Dave Eggers parents both died of cancer, within 5 weeks of each other, when he was 22. Eggers had a sister and a brother both a couple years older than him, who helped him and their parents cope. But there was also a much younger brother, Toph, who was only 7 or 8 at the time (I think; I somehow can’t find the earliest reference to Toph’s age). For reasons that (to me) never seem clear, the next-youngest sibling, Dave, is the one to take custody of the boy.

The first chapter, on the end of Heidi Eggers’ life, is incredibly vivid, moving, terrible, and wryly funny. The dialogue is sharp and weird:

“Ah!” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s ice.”
“I know it’s ice.”
“Well, ice is cold.”

It’s kind of quietly devastating, the way the characters are such a comfortable, fully functioning family (under the circumstances), walking around with the knowledge that they aren’t getting to function at all for much longer. Throughout the book (gah–I almost typed “novel”), it’ll be Eggers’ relationship with and mourning for his mom that is rendered most clearly, emotionally, brilliantly.

Oh, and did I mention? The prose is very brilliant–but not in a way you think a lot about. Actually, I glanced at some other reviews of AHWoSG, and some people thought about the prose a great deal, but I found it natural, fluid, hilarious and transparent–the prose seemed to be a clear glass window into the narrator’s mind. I know, it takes work to achieve that illusion, but unlike other first-time authors I could mention, Eggers is happy not to draw too much attention to himself. After the title, he’s either assured we think he’s a genius, or he doesn’t care–he’s a lot of fun to read.

So when he goes off to San Francisco with Toph and gets into the humdrum impossibilities of real life–finding a place to live, cooking food, playing Frisbee (oh, god, he does go on about the Frisbee) it’s fun reading, and fast–light as air, in fact. And interspersed in present-day details are flashes of the past, where we learn about how things were when his parents were alive, when he and Beth and Bill were around Toph’s age and living in the house. Things were complicated. Things were hard and sometimes they were scary and some people behaved really badly, but there were no demons–no saints or angels either. There were just people who lived with each other who were a little fucked up. Eggers mourns the fucked-upped-ness almost as much as he mourns the love.

So, what’s my problem? you might ask. Regular readers know that the above sounds like (one of) my ideal reading experiences. The problem is that aside from quotidian scenes about Frisbee or food, so very much of the book is interior monologues. The dead inhabit those monologues, so we get a decent sense of Mr. and Mrs. Eggers, but the living escape the narrator’s telling, and thus all the non-dead characters are pretty much cardboard cutouts with one or two interesting scenes each, all in service of the narrator illuminating a point about himself.

The other thing I hate about memoirs is what I call “special pleading”–this comes up a lot in “heavily autobiographical fiction,” which is something I like sometimes, but almost exclusively when you can’t tell that’s what it is. My personal feeling is that a writer should not write anything where he or she is too invested in how much a reader likes or dislikes a character. There should be no shielding of characters from a reader’s harsh judgement, no censorship of details relevant to the plot, no slanting the narrative so that some come off better than they should. Even in fiction, you can’t lie.

But it seemed to me that Eggers did protect his characters, and thus unless you’re dead or the narrator, there’s no character development in this book. Dave eventually starts a magazine with his alleged best friends Moodie and Marny, who are in many scenes that take place at the magazine, yet have almost no dialogue. They have no preferences, moods, opinions, or thoughts–they are merely around, because it would be weird if the narrator claimed to have run a magazine by himself.

Eggers has a girlfriend at the beginning of the book, Kirsten, whom he dates on and off for about 2/3s of it–then they break up, she is briefly roommates with his sister, and eventually she marries someone else and he is very happy for her. Again, she has no dialogue and we learn nothing about her–though she attends his mother’s funeral (and has sex with Eggers in the parents’ closet afterwards) we don’t know a thing about what she thinks about it.

That’s true for *everyone* in the book–Beth, his sister, lives nearby and helps raise Toph…sort of. She actually seems to never be around and Eggers is always having to find a sitter if he wants to go out. But how much of that is reportage and how much of that is ellision–Beth’s part isn’t portrayed, out of respect or deference to her wishes or…I don’t know. I just know it pissed me off when the characters are at a wedding and Eggers thinks that that wedding reminds him of Beth’s, six months ago, to “a nice young man.” This is the first and last we hear of that relationship.

What I’m telling you is why I found the book annoying. What I’m *not* telling you is why I think the book is bad…I don’t know that I do think that. The narrator rants late in the book about how using characters’ real names, even phone numbers, is meaningless. He says, “You have only what I can afford to give you,” and that is such a true and shocking way of looking at memoir. This book is a very closed-off, shut-down, limited way of exposing personal tragedy. Eggers pontificates at length about how he needed to write the book to heal himself, and in that sense he had to protect whatever he felt needed protecting–but I’m not interested in therapy (well, not in this context). I’m interested in the reading experience and I feel like this one was a highly manipulated, tightly controlled, edging-on-dishonest one–and I’m fascinated by the ways I’ve been manipulated. There are too many to count, especially since this review is already 1200 words.

So what I’m saying is, I didn’t enjoy reading this book. It was frustratingly narrow and (with appendices, etc) close to 500 pages. If you write a narrow book at that length, you end up with endless pages about nothing (no more Frisbee!) and an often-bored Rebecca, but you also end up really immersing the reader in a single point of view, an intense experience.

Eggers achieved something here. I’m not sure what and I’m also not sure that I cared for it all that much, but the book was worth reading. I had hoped that writing this review would show me what I really think of the book, but I still don’t know. So I’m going to continue to think about my ideas about truth in narrative, and the ways it gets manipulated. And no book that makes you think is all bad.

May 15th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone* by J.K. Rowling

Well, it took me 14 years to read the most wildly loved children’s book of my generation. Partly because I just never got around to it, partly because I’m not a big fan of fantasy, partly because the Harry Potter zealots are so obnoxious. “You’ve never read Harry Potter?? But you love books!” one such specimen remarked. Humph.

I finally read it because someone I respect asked me to very gently, and I’m glad she did because J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone is truly charming, very funny, and sweet as pie.

On the front flap of the book, it says that HP&tPS won the 1997 Smarties Gold for 9 to 11 years, and this truly is a dream book for that set. The first 3.5 chapters are a hilarious sendup of awful British bourgeois family values, complete with privet hedges, vicious capitalist dad, smarmy mom and spoiled child. And a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs where they hide even the gentlest, most innocuous weirdness in their lives, orphaned cousin Harry Potter.

The horrible hinjinx of the Dursleys, including vicious assault on innocent loveable Harry, is cringy and funny simultaneously. As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the world the Dursleys inhabit is meant to be our own or not and, if it is, where is child services. But if I were 9, I wouldn’t care; I would only laugh gleefully over passages like this, where awful Dudley Dursley, brat and bully, cannot have his way:

“He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smeltings stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof and still he did not have his room back.”

I think it’s the British-ism of “been sick on purpose” that makes this so funny, but I can’t really be sure–it’s just so hyperbolically *evil*. Someone told me that the American version of HP is rather bastardized to get out those Britishisms–I wonder if that version says “thrown up”? I have the Canadian, Raincoast edition, and it seems to have retain all the Britsy cadences (“to hospital,” “give it here”) as well as more obvious references like the West Ham football team (I don’t quite know what that is, but I can guess). Then again, having not read the original Brit edition, I don’t know what I’m missing.

Sorry for the digression–as I was saying, so Harry is a lonely and miserable orphan at his aunt and uncle’s until one day a letter arrives, admitting him to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. The aunt and uncle try some very amusing stunts to prevent Harry from going, motivations on this being somewhat unclear as they purport to hate having him in their home.

In the end, Harry is spirited away by Hagrid, the loveable gameskeeper from Hogwarts. Hagrid also introduces Harry to his legacy–his parents were powerful and well-respected wizards, killed by an wizard gone back. That bad wizard, named Voldemort, tried to kill Harry too, when he was but a very tiny baby. He couldn’t; baby Harry was powerful enough to defeat this bad dude and save himself when his parents couldn’t. Even better, his triumph sent Volemort packing, and no one’s seen him since.

Harry Potter has become famous as a hero in the magic world, while the non-magic world (the world of “Muggles” in the language of the book) thought he was just a loser who had to sleep with the spiders. Moreover, his parents had wealth and social position, all of which he is now entitled to. Hagrid takes him shopping for all sorts of wonderful magical paraphenalia, and since Harry is finally in possession of his inheritance, he can afford whatever he likes.

The delights continue when he heads off to Hogwarts where his fame, and that of his parents, is well-known, and Harry is the immediate object of interest and admiration. He has never had friends before, but he picks up a few quite easily. He has never played the magic world’s premier sport, Quidditch, before but he is a natural and easily makes the team.

This is, without a doubt, the best possible fantasy for the 9-11 set, and much older besides. I loved all the descriptions of the beautiful old castle Harry moves into, the delicious foods they have the welcome banquet, the sporting equipment and spooky labs (not mentioned in the book: who pays the tuition here?) The dream of finding out that one is not as dull and ordinary as one appears is as old as time, and Rowling does it superbly. And the invention of Quidditch, and making the very complex descriptions perfectly clear in my mind is the act of a superlative creative force.

But…does it make me sound snobby to say this really is a book for children, and very young children at that? The first half of the book is entirely devoted to Harry’s life with the Dursley’s, his passage to and arrival at Hogswart’s. The second half is a series of adventures that lead Harry and his friends to discover a mystery at the school, and then to solving it.

The whole second half is one self-contained adventure after another, although in retrospect, HP and co usually discover a clue to the ongoing mystery in their seemingly unrelated scrapes and mistakes. They are thwarted by a very bad bully named Draco Malfoy, and annoyed then befriended by a know-it-all girl named Hermione Granger (all the names in this book are wonderful). There is no character development to speak of–good people are very very good, bad people are very very bad (often for no reason) and there’s no good saying anyone might reform because they won’t.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for you to say that everything works out awesome in the end, Harry becomes more of a hero than ever, and the reader is very glad that this is so. Rowling crafts a simple, elegant tale. Even though there’s no real suspense (there’s six more books; I know no one dies now) I was very eager to keep reading and to find out what exactly happened.

And now that I know, I’m quite satisfied, but feel no particularly burning urge for book 2.

March 15th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *The Anxiety of Everyday Objects* by Aurelie Sheehan

I read Aurelie Sheehan’s novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects in just over a day, very rare for me. I had (and still have) a miserable cold, and wasn’t capable of concentrating on complicated material for very long, so this little book suited me just fine, and I read it compulsively as a distraction from my snot-drenched woe.

Even in this weakened state, I still didn’t think it was very good. But it was a little good. I really enjoyed the warm, gentle treatment of the day-to-day life of an office, and especially the workdays of the protagonist (let’s face it, heroine), Winona. She’s a secretary in a law firm, taking dictation and typing letters, organizing folders and answering the phone when the receptionist’s away. She doesn’t love it, but she finds it comforting and Zen-like to do the job well. At one point she describes it as like picking bits of grass out of a bucket of bolts, which I didn’t quite get, but the rest of Winona’s observations and emotions about her work are spot-on–I know exactly what she means, and in certain ways, I have never heard it expressed so well. Moreover, Sheehan sets most of the novel in this office, and lingers on the setting not as something to parody or scorn, but as lived experience. There is a lovely moment where Winona, carrying two cups of coffee to her boss’s office, finds the door closed and has to set both on the floor, knock, wait to be beckoned in, open the door, then pick up the cups and bring them inside to be served. Not a huge deal, but perfectly done, and quietly funny.

Unfortunately, though Winona is good at her job and wise in her assessment of it, in many other ways she is…a moron. Actually, she’s only a moron to serve the machinations of the plot–most of the truly stupid things Winona does seem out-of-character, but she does so many of them that it becomes difficult to keep track of what her character *is* exactly. Sheehan manufactures strange explanations for bits of a normal woman’s life that she can’t be bothered to write. Friends? Winona doesn’t have any, she announces with equanimity at one point. Family? She doesn’t speak to her parents because they live in Florida and are boring. She has a sister, who begs her to dogsit at several points in the novel, and is pretty funny–but basically a one-note joke. Education? Apparently Winona has an MFA in film from some unnamed NYC institution, but she never references anything she learned or did there. Her plans for putting her education to use involve imagining neat-o scenes in her head, and wandering around the city with a video camera.

Romantic history? This is the worst one. At one point, the 3rd person narrator actually proposes to explain Winona’s romantic history, but then begs off with “She had loved.” This seems unlikely; more likely, though Winona denies that she was “born yesterday” at one point, is exactly that. She seems to have no idea what happens in relationships, and to not even desire one so much as be curious about the concept. When an attractive guy at work takes her to dinner, she opens the meal with “Is it because you want to have sex?” And then, bafflingly, he doesn’t answer and thing proceed as if it hadn’t been said. As to whether she is actually *attracted* to this attractive guy, or anyone–who cares? Winona goes where she’s pushed by contrivances of plot. When a manically sexual ex comes into town (that they ever actually dated never seems probable, but whatever), he proposes they have a little no-strings-attached bondage and domination session. Winona, having never done that before and no further plans that evening, says sure. That goes about as well as you might expect.

Actually, it goes a little better than you might expect–he does indeed have nefarious intentions, but they are decidedly PG…because we’ve got to get back to the main plotline, I guess. The main plotline is about…well, it’s not even revealed what is really going on until the final quarter of the book, so for most of the time it is about a strange girl-crush Winona develops on a new lawyer at the firm, Sandy. Sandy is blond, well-dressed, stunning and blind, and seemingly auditioning for a role on Ally McBeal. She’s so gorgeous, so great at her job despite her lack of sight, and she even finds time to encourage Winona to be the best that she can be. She notes a few times that Winona is good at her job, then promotes her to office manager, demoting the woman currently in that position. The after-effects of that shuffle on office relations does feel realistic, but Winona’s cheerful acceptance of Sandy and everything she offers her–a day at the spa, a diamond watch, unorthodox and secretive work instructions feels just this side of absurd. Winona’s almost 30, but she doesn’t think there’s anything odd about photocopying she can’t tell her boss about?

Sigh. Then, obsessed with Sandy’s cryptic messages alternated with warm intimacy, Winona starts following her around town and filming her. Deranged behaviour for most of us, but Winona’s a filmmaker, so it’s ok. Now we see why Sheehan made Winona a filmmaker, instead of a poet or painter, despite a complete lack of film-references or vocabulary in the novel: the setup of for the big denouement requires a random moment caught on film! So, Winona is neither auteur nor psycho stalker; she’s just a plot element.

So then the big shakedown occurs (as on Scooby-Doo, the main villain turns out to be a character the reader doesn’t know, so we never had any hope of understanding what was going on–at least, I didn’t–until the author tells us). There are elements about the ending that are quiet and kind of interesting: the bad guys don’t get punished, and the good guys all wind up unemployed. They were at least able to quit their jobs valourously, but still, the book ends with a kiss and the implied promise that Winona will now make her movie. In a really good book, I feel like I turn the last page and the characters keep going; here, I felt sure that Winona neither made a movie nor did anything else. She just went back to sleep in the imagination of her author.

This is my fifth book on the To Be Read challenge. So far a literary novel, a collection of literary short stories, a YA novel, a long poem, and now (let’s face it) chick-lit. At least I get around!

March 11th, 2011

Canada Reads Independently: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

I really admire Kerry Clare‘s Canada Reads Independently program, and this year I’ve read two out of the five books, which is actually pretty good for me. All the books on the list look fascinating, and I’ll probably try to track’em down eventually, but for now, I did the story collections. The other collection in the running, Lynn Coady’s *Play the Monster Blind* was fast and furious, while Gallant’s collection was huge and a bit slower moving, but I adored it too.

As Kerry mentions in her review the stories aren’t ideally presented in book form here. I agreed, the book was too long and overcrowded, but the way I got round that to read really slowly (according to my diary, it took nearly 2 weeks), in and around other things, so the stories stood in my head a bit more as *stories* and not bits of a book.

It’s funny how much I like this book considering how antithetical Gallant’s style is to the things I usually admire–there’s very little dialogue, even very little scene. In the Linnet Muir stories, the final section of the book and some ways its crowning glories, there are massive paragraphs, mainly written in the past imperfect–the general sense of the things were happening, could and would happen, during a certain period or in certain circumstances. She slides from the habitual to the individual in such stealthy increments you barely know she’s doing it. Sometimes it feels like a story is just a random collection of notes and memories, but you get to the end and the weight on your brain is, in fact, story-like. How does she do that?

The bit about the notes and memories applies only to the Linnet Muir materials–the other stories feel highly organized, though always organically so. My favourites are the long, fleshy ones about Canada folks meandering through Europe, trying to…what? They are lost souls, mainly, drowning in provincialism and the false confidence that their new-world births divorce them from history. Well, doesn’t that sound lofty! In truth, sometimes the Canadian/European dicotomy is laid on a bit thickly, but for the most part it’s shockingly subtle–the characters are so much themselves, you don’t wind up thinking that they are also part of a larger category…until the characters themselves think of that!

Mavis Gallant’s fabled parallel to Alice Munro is often described in differences–urban versus rural, Canadian versus global, etc. I think the big difference for me is that Gallant writes with a bit more distance from her characters. This is not to say that Munro is kinder, or doesn’t subtly judge her characters, but she stands inside their brains, it seems, and follows the machinations of even their worst impulses. Gallant leaves a certain privacy to the folks in her stories, the room for a grim or silly failure that adults are allowed.

Her best stories are, I think, third person narratives about these grim and silly folks and their failures where we know the general schema of their hears, but perhaps not their inner workings. An old favourite of mine, which I once wrote a grad-school paper on and have read now half a dozen times, is “The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street.” Here is a quotation to show a little of how it works. This is a long passage, but Gallant’s genius is a slow-burning kind:

At the wedding reception Peter lay down on the floor and said he was dead. He held a white azalea in a brass pot on his chest, and sang, “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” Sheilah bent over him and said, “Pete, darling, get up. Pete, listen, every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you’ll get up.”

“I do love you,” he said, ready to engage in a serious conversation. “She’s so beautiful,” he told a second face. “She’s nearly as tall as I am. She was a model in London. I met her over in London in the war. I met her there in the war.” He lay on his back with the azalea on his chest, explaining their history. A waiter took the brass pot away, and after Peter had been hauled to his feed he knocked the waiter down. Trudeau’s bride, who was freshly out of an Ursuline convent, became hysterical…

We don’t find out exactly why Peter wanted to lie on the floor and say he was dead; we can surmise he was drunk and wanting attention, but that is our surmise and not Gallant’s. She probably does in fact *know* though; Peter might not. We also never find out what Peter did in London during the war, other than fall in love.

What I mean is, Gallant is smarter than some of her characters, and she often makes gentle fun of them, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Sociology comes in for a particularly hard go, and though I must protest as one born into the House of Sociology, I also laughed at the jokes. On Sarah’s relationship with her father in “In the Tunnel”: “Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: That would show him who was subjective.” And Lottie, a sociology student on the loose, of a countryman encountered in Paris in “Virus X”: “…he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns.”

Ha! I find Mavis Gallant’s stories very very funny (despite my House of Sociology resentment), and often unspeakably sad. The sadness is that people are often less than they could be, weak or blinkered or selfish or some combination thereof. And there’s little fatalism, I feel–choices are made, often bad ones. And yet the humour is there, though it  can be hard to find if you’re not on her wavelength, and maybe that’s one reason the length of this collection can be an advantage–it gives you time to get into the Gallantian mindset. I certainly enjoyed spending 2 weeks with her.

January 31st, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *An Abundance of Katherines* by John Green

I haven’t read a YA book in years, although I hear there’s been really interesting things going on in that category for fiction. However, whenever I go into that section of the bookstore, I find myself overwhelmed with vampires, pretty little liars, and gossipy girls, and I have to run away. Not that I am against the silly side; when I was myself a Young Adult, I read a lot of teen-geared garbage (for books that required thinking, I usually just read adult ones) and it never did me any harm. I’m just a bit too old for it now, I think.

I did, of course, read some good YA in my youth, too (Paul Danziger, Gordan Korman, a few great ones I can’t recall authors for) but I don’t think I ever came across anything like John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. This fast-moving goofball comedy was a gift from my dear friend AMT (er, in 2008–I don’t know how that happened! I’m so sorry, AMT! The To Be Read challenge is saving me from myself!) So I was happy to be guided back into the YA world after all these years.

*Katherines* is the story of Colin Singleton’s summer after graduation. His girlfriend Katherine dumps him on grad night, so he and his best/only friend Hassan decide to take a road trip to help distract Colin from the pain. On the second day, in rural Tennessee, they see a sign for a roadside attraction that contains the entombed body of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand–the dude whose assination started WWI–and they have to go figure out what that’s all about.

Not very much, as it turns out–just a historic body the town bought to bring in more tourists. But the tourguide and her mother promptly adopt Colin and Hassan, giving them a place to stay and jobs for the summer for no other reason than they seem charming, and the plot demands it.

Most of the large external events in this book make little sense, and the idea that the people of rural Tennessee are dying to house, feed, and heal the souls of tourists from the north isn’t even the worst of it–that’s at least a conceit we’ve seen before, in a 100 000 romance novels. There’s also the idea that Colin–who made his first friend at 14 and stopped at one–has somehow been able to attract 19 girlfriends in the course of his life; moreover, that they were all named Katherine. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows that it’s usually easier to make a friend than get a date, especially if one is socially moronic as Colin is. Most of the 19 Katherines aren’t described in the novel until the bitter end, at which point I though there is no way I believed it. Just silly plot frills.

But, yet…I really liked this book. How did that happen? The setups are so inane, yet the characters themselves are amazingly true-to-life, and affecting. The other thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that Colin is supposed to be a child prodigy, a kid who was supersmart at a young age and has been mainly schooled by private tutors. This bit of the plot, I believed, and I really enjoyed reading about how his mind worked–the wild tangents to history, medicine, physics, etc. This book has 87 footnotes, almost all of them interesting and amusing–I was always happy to turn the page and see a footnote. There’s also a long appendix in the back about math functions, which was concise and readable and (I am a former math nerd) fascinating.

Why the math appendix? Well, another of the way-too-many layers of plot is that Colin is trying to write an equation that summarizes who gets dumped at what point in a relationship. It’s a pretty shallow and silly way to see the world (as he eventually discovers) but some of the stuff he comes up with along the way is really interesting. The new friend he and Hassan make in the country is Lindsay Lee Wells, a paramedic-in-training with a jerky boyfriend, a sarcastic sense of humour, and a heart of gold. Mainly you know where that’s headed, but she also helps him with the formula, which I thought was the best part.

Colin’s a shallow, insecure leech–as he gets dumped by the 19th Katherine, she remarks, “You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.'” and she’s right. The nice thing about teen novels, as opposed to adult ones, is that it’s infinitely more forgivable to be self-obsessed when you are 18 than 28, and Colin truly does grow, mature, and learn to look for more than constant reassurance in his relationships. And it really made me happy as he did.

I feel it’s late in the review to mention this, but this book is, in addition to all of the above, hilarious! In the tradition of YA novels everywhere, the wacky best friend is a) fat and b) non-white, but Green takes Hassan to a couple different levels: Hassan is truly engaged with his Muslim faith, but to what extent is he hiding behind it to mask insecurities about his weight, social skills, etc.? I’ve never seen those questions in a YA novel, and it really works–Hassan isn’t just wacky, he’s a fully realized human character. He’s also wicked funny, and spends the book refering to himself as Daddy in the third person, demanding to watch Judge Judy and relentlessly mocking Colin in the kindest way possible. There’s also tonnes of slapstick (at one point, Colin and Hassan are chased by hornets), which you know I have a soft spot for.

Lindsay Lee Wells is also a pretty great character, which is interesting, because in my youth, YA novels were often for one gender or another, and the non-target gender was just short-handed as nice, mean, pretty, whatever. Lindsay Lee has some interesting issues, though I did feel her plotline wrapped up rather quickly at the end. I’m sure kids of any gender (and adults too) would enjoy this book.

Ok, I’m almost at 1000 words, and I haven’t covered anything about the extraneous plotlines in the town where Colin and Hassan stay–they are interesting, but go nowhere, and that’s interesting too (more like real life than wrapping everything up on page 299). And the Archduke thing you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I liked this book, is what I’m saying–maybe you would too?

This is my third review for the To Be Read challenge–9 to go!

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 11th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *The Mysteries of Pittsburgh* by Michael Chabon

I was quite impressed by Michael Chabon’s later books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and especially Wonder Boys–such wild and different novels,original, weird and very funny. So when I found a used copy of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and found it completely covered in exclamations of delight from various reviewers, I thought I couldn’t miss enjoying it.

I missed.

Don’t get me wrong–there’s a reason why The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Cosmopolitan and Playboy wrote blurbable raves about this book–“Astonishing,” “remarkable,” “extraordinary” and all the rest, it’s a linguistically gleeful, almost acrobatic novel, and I took real pleasure in the flights of language throughout. On almost any page you’ve find something like, “In the big, posh, and stale lobby of the Duquesne Hotel–in a city where some men, like my father, still wear felt hats–one can still get one’s hair cut, one’s shoes shined, and buy a racing form or a Tootsie Roll.” Or how about, “He stood up, inhaled deeply, and cried, ‘Ah, the sweet piss odor of cedar!'”

There’s a real flare for sentences here that goes much deep than fireworks–the images make sense as long as you care to think about them, and the metaphors are joyous and flamboyant, but true at the core. And oh, what an evocation, a mythologization of Pittsburgh–that’s the main thing I loved about this book. Pittsburgh seemed a magical and beloved place–interesting that the narrator was supposed to have lived there only 4 years, because he seemed to have known and loved it forward. And yet some mysteries never get solved, and I loved that about this urban dream, too–cities are just too big to ever know anything about them.

So what didn’t I love? The plot, I guess, and its various machinations. Art Bechstein is graduating from university, about to start working in a bookstore and have one last magical summer before he buckles down to some unknown serious grownup career. While working on his last academic paper, he meets a guy at the library who tries to flirt with him. Art politely turns him down, and they become friends. The new guy, also named Arthur (this worked just fine, much better than you’d think) draws him into an exciting, glamourous world of new friends and various sexual imbroglios, money and power.

Well, that’s how it’s set up and marketed. In truth, it’s a profoundly episodic novel, with characters making centre-stage appearances for pages on end, only to never be seen again. This happens in the first clangourous party that Arthur takes Art to–it seemed so intense that it all must mean something, but it was just a set-piece; Chabon could write a good party scene, so he did so. Even this girl, glimpsed on the back lawn of the party after a long search for her: “She stood alone in the dim centre of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighbourhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father’s ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long.”

Wow. Doesn’t it break your heart to know that this character, Jane, hangs around until the end of the book without doing anything else interesting ever again? In her one other big scene, she makes a salad.

Virtuosic writing for its own sake annoys me. I can’t be called plot-obsessed, but I’d like what’s on the page to deepen my understanding of character, setting, mood, something. There is a heavy plot running through the final third of the book, to do with the mafia (I’m not spoiling anything) and another with Arthur’s wildly annoying new girlfriend, Phlox (yes, really). I could be in a sensitive mood, but I felt that women didn’t fare too well in this novel–Chabon is well-known for his intimate understanding of men, and perhaps in his early days it was at the expense of understanding women. Phlox felt more like a scrap heap of wild outfits, quotations, beauty tricks and tears. A whole novel reading about her, and when she writes in a letter towards the end, “There’s only one place in the world where you are supposed to put your penis–inside of me,” I couldn’t tell if any spark of humour intended by character, or by author.

I was truly baffled by how the plot wrapped up at the end of the book, and though I don’t know much about the mafia in Pittsburgh, what I could understand struck me as terribly unlikely. Though I realized about midway through the book that the narrator was being constructed as unreliable, I wasn’t able to glean anything from that fact other than that the narrator was unreliable. In the great unreliably voiced books (*A Prayer for Owen Meaney* or *Money,* or even *The Great Gatsby,* which inspired this one) the absence of “truth” in the narration allows the readers to solve their own riddles, or create their own truth. But what can we do with the fact that Art never mentions having one friend–even a friendly acquaintance–that he did not meet after page 1 of this book. Are we to suppose that Art the narrator elides these memories as too painful or difficult? Or that Michael the writer couldn’t be bothered to write characters who existed prior to page 1?

I read the bookclub notes at the back (I have a 2001 edition, after Chabon was famous for *Kavalier and Clay*) and as an apology for having had wild ambitions for the breadth and amazingness of this novel, Chabon says, “Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!” But somehow he doesn’t see that as being inherent in the text itself; I think it is. I think this is a wild brilliant first effort from an author that had not really learned to marshal himself, to be true to his characters and his stories, and not just to his own writing. Later on, he did learn those things. So you should probably read this book–it’s got a lot to recommend it–but you should definitely read those later ones.

This is my first book for the Roofbeam Reader challenge
Off the Shelf. 11 to go!

December 27th, 2010

Canada Reads Independently: *Play the Monster Blind*

For those not familiar with the (wonderful) concept, Canada Reads Independently is Kerry Clare’s companion project for the CBC’s Canada Reads. Both programs have 5 books as defended by 5 panelists, and then in some way a winnowing down to one winner. CRI’s panelists are bit more literary than CR’s, and they also have a bit more invested in the project, having chosen books that they love deeply rather than picking from a list.

And the books they’ve brought to the table this year (and last, too–which was the first year of Canada Reads Independently) are just a fascinating collection. I am bad about following reading schedules, I tend to get distracted, but when I saw that Lynn Coady’s *Play the Monster Blind* was panelist Sheree Fitch’s choice, I knew I’d read at least one from the CRI list.

*Play the Monster Blind* is a book my friends have been recommending to me for years as “your kind of book.” It’s Coady’s second book, her first story collection, and an absolute stunner. The stories are rich, taut, and funny, about characters with flaws and and quirks and weird ideas, people you feel like I could know. What can I say, I have smart friends.

The book’s most obvious aspect is its unidealized Maritime settings. The characters in this book live tightly inside their lives and their social relationships; the potential glories of land- and seascapes in the Martimes exist not only outside their towns, but outside their lives. The only time in the book that anyone remarks on natural beauty at all is in the last story, “A Nice Place to Visit,” about an east coast girl visiting Vancouver Island. I did not always find *Play* the best ordered book, but that joke was awfully clever.

If the setting is not a character in the story, it is imbued into each each personality that takes the stage. I’m the last person who can guess the level of accuracy in the accents (if you add up all my trips to different Atlantic provinces, I’ve been there for slightly less than 3 weeks all told). But I know the rhythms *sound* right, like real people talking but no one *I* know, weird slang you have to say aloud to make sense of, and the liberal use of “Jesus” as an adjective (would it be unliterary of me to say that that was one of my favourite things in the book? among many other favourites of course).

If Coady is the kind of writer I imagine she is, she must have notebooks full of this stuff, of which we the readers get the very best. This, from the abovementioned BC traveller, calling home to her young son:

“Me and Pop bought some chickens, and I named one of them Ted. Do you want to talk to him?”
“No, I don’t want to talk to the Jesus chicken.”
“I’m going to go get him.”
“I will kill you if you go and get the chicken.”
“Talk to Nan.” He was gone.
“He’s running outside to get the chicken now,” Bess’s mother tittered on the end of the line.
“For Christ’s sake, Mother, don’t let him bring that thing inside!”
“Oh, he just loves that bird.”
Bess could hear the screen door slamming shut a second time.
“Here’s Ted,” said Dylan. “I’ll hold him up to the phone.”
“Do you know how much this is costing?” No answer. She was screaming at Ted.

And that’s the other thing about *Play*–it’s very very funny, without being in any way “light.” It’s such a hard balance to walk, especially because a critical perception of “lightness” can sink a book like a lead balloon (abandon metaphor). There is humour in theses characters’ lives because there is humour in everyone’s life. We don’t (usually) laugh at the characters but with them–because we all know that life is funny and cruel and weird. This from the story “In Disguise as the Sky” (gorgeous title, eh?), about an ESL teacher and her coping mechanisms. Here, she has overheard one of her students using a made-up word for “muffin”:

“So I come stampeding out from behind the partition where I’m photocopying lists of prepositions, hollering, ‘Muffin! Muffin! Muffin!” Kunakorn gives me a look as if his suspicion that I just make up all the craziness I drill into him day after day has been vindicated. He points with triumph at the new co-worker.
“He say ‘day-cake.'”
“Why are you standing there talking about day-cake?” I say to the new guy.
THe new guy is shorter than me, and about ten pounds lighter. He is absurdly overdressed to be sitting at the front desk. He looks like a boy who’s been polished up for his first communion and I try not to wince.
But I do wince when I realize I’ve scared him. It is awful to scare a short man in a communion suit.

What’s annoying me about the above is that, out of context, you can’t tell how good it really is. I mean, it just reads like well-written chick-lit zaniness (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but that story actually has such fluid and subtle emotion that it really stings when it ends. The problem with Coady’s writing is that any random bit of it looks easy and delightful, and it’s only when you get to the end that realize how much you’ve experienced in the story.

Maybe you should really just read *Play the Monster Blind* for yourself.