I first read Generation X when I was fifteen (so, 1994), a blue collar kid in a blue collar town. I don't remember much about it except for my reaction. I hated it. "Hate" might even be too mild a word. I don't know that I've ever had as strongly negative a reaction to a book as I had to this one, and I've had some pretty strong negative reactions. My thoughts on it then could be summarized in this statement: yuppies who think they aren't yuppies complain about how hard their lives are. But fifteen years is a long time, and panelist Roland Pemberton (aka Cadence Weapon) has chosen to defend Generation X on Canada Reads. I've revisited other books from my past with positive results, why not with this one?

And the verdict is in! I still hate Generation X. I still hate it a lot, in fact. But unlike fifteen years ago, I now more or less have the vocabulary to vent my spleen. Generation X is about middle class brats slumming it, rolling in the appearance of poverty like dogs roll in shit: to mask their scent. It allows them, Dag and Claire in particular, to be wry, judgemental, hipper-than-thou (but despite being hipsters, they're not trying to be the cool kids, oh God no, not them) without ever having to do the real work of introspection. In one memorable passage, Dag describes the kind of person he believes he used to be:

"I don't think I was a likeable guy. I was actually one of those putzes you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. But at the slightest provocation I'd have been willing to apologize for my working life—how I work from eight till five in front of a sperm-dissolving VDT performing abstract tasks that indirectly enslave the Third World. But then, hey! Come five o'clock, I'd go nuts! I'd streak my hair and drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town."

I got news for you, Dag: you ain't changed. (Pop culture imposition: every time I see "Dag" on the page, I can't help but think of how Brad Pitt pronounces the word "dog" in Guy Ritchie's film, Snatch.) He trades in the trappings of his corporate lifestyle for the nouveau-hippy trappings of a group he calls Basement People, but that's all it is, an exchange of trappings. ("Basement People rent basement suites; the air above is too middle class." Yeah, sure that's why.) He does eventually realize that the superficial changes he made don't work ("But basically, my life-style escape wasn't working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends—no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs."), but he never actually makes a genuine change. I get the sense that we're supposed to imagine that dropping everything and moving to Palm Springs to work a McJob is a genuine change, but it isn't. Dag's coworker Margaret once says to him "the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped," and that's all Dag does, all Andy or Claire does either, for that matter. Stop. Stopping doesn't take you anywhere new, it just leaves you right where you are, except now genuine change doesn't even exist in potentia.

The three of them are all stopped. They ditch their corporate suits for McJobs ("low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future"—but I didn't really need to define that one, did I?), ditch one expression of conspicuous wealth (the accumulation of stuff and homes to put it in, like Dag's old boss) for another expression of conspicuous wealth (services that the genuinely poor largely can't afford, like international travel) and declare themselves on the road to change. Andy calls this shift the "poverty jet set" ("a group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence"), but unlike for the genuinely poor, there's an implicit financial safety net beneath everything these three do. Claire gets regular checkups from the Baxter clan, her father so rich he's moved on to an honest-to-God trophy wife. All three of them, despite their McJobs, rent houses (bungalows in a courtyard, but still) instead of apartments, skip work to travel (Andy somehow found the cash, all on his own, at the age of 15 to fly halfway across the continent to a small regional airport), make impulse purchases, have no student loans despite having college educations, and generally do whatever the hell they please without any apparent anxiety about money. Coupland's characters treat poverty the way Republicans treat homosexuality. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton wrote:

The likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not ... cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

But for Andy, Dag, and Claire, poverty is something to try on while they're figuring out what they want their real lives to look like, it's a lifestyle choice. They are, as I said above, middle class brats, and they've confused ennui with disenfranchisement, with philosophy and morality. When I think of these three, my blood boils, and the lyrics to Pulp's "Common People" spring to mind ("if you called your dad he could stop it all"), followed immediately by The Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia":

Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo
Braggin' that you know how the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul

I worried for a moment that I'm being to harsh on these three, but I don't think I am. In Coupland's clever marginalia, the definition for "McJob" ends with "frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one," and while none of our little Gen-X trio would ever consider them satisfying careers, neither do they have an inkling of the real stress and anxiety inherent in such jobs for people who work them because they have no other choices, no notion of the compromises that have to be made when they are the only way you can get by. But like David Foster Wallace's narrators, they have no problem ratcheting up the irony and making fun of such people's tastes, their choices, their property. They're like the present-day hipsters that make racist jokes (the men in women's jeans so tight that at least they'll never be able to breed and v-neck t-shirts so deep you can see the unwashed hair on their navels) who aren't really racist, they're just being ironic. Puhleaze. Gag me with a spoon already. When Dag tells his boss off, saying,

"[...] do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You make me sick."

I can hear every one of the customers in Larry's bar, or the cashier and the fat man in Dag's nuclear attack story, giving Dag, Claire, and Andy the same speech if they could overhear them telling their stories in the desert, camping out at the site of other people's failures largely because it's kitschy, or because they can gawk ironically at the ruins of middle class privilege, which they largely still enjoy (but pretend they don't).

You might say I found representations of class in Generation X problematic.

The vast majority of these problems are, I grant you, in Part One, but Andy's brother nails it in Part Two when he says that he's afraid of how Andy is living only on the surface of life. Andy believes himself to be seeking depth, a way out of what he finally admits is a middle class existence he feels trapped by (and it's even admitted, finally, that Dag is truly different in his McJob from most, not at all trapped in it, though there's no real significance to the admission; Coupland seems to present it as simply evidence of greater spiritual worth), but all he's really doing is using clever phrases, and worrying about things, even if only to want fewer of them. As for Claire, well, I can understand her a little better after her Christmas in New York (pursuit of a compelling and physically beautiful lover who was with you largely for reasons unknown which eventually turn out to be a kind of metaphysical boost who, upon receiving that boost—or realizing it will never come—makes for the nearest exit? check), but dowsing rod aside I can't picture her as anything more than a chain-smoking fashionista who talks at people instead of to them. Every one of Coupland's characters is repulsive, but it's not until Part Two that they even become characters. I can picture Holden Caulfield reading Part One and tossing the book aside as full of goddamn phonies, though I get the impression that they're actually meant to be little micro-Holdens (not that that would have been any better).

I'm not particularly crazy about the style of Coupland's prose. It seemed to work for me in Microserfs, a novel I loved, so it baffles me (as it did fifteen years ago) why I can't make it work for me in Generation X (or Life After God, for that matter). It seems both flat and unbearably precious at the same time, like DeLillo circa White Noise without the resignation, or Chuck Palahniuk circa Fight Club without the anger (and regardless of his faults, Palahniuk's irony and hipsterism isn't nearly as self-righteous as Coupland's—"Irene smokes") and the sense of humour. Coupland likes to use full, formal names for things that are instantly recognizable to nearly anyone now living by more casual ones ("Hollywood, California" "the Pop artist, Mr. Andy Warhol"—Christ, why not "Andrew"?), and the effect is grating, like he wants to connect to the reader with the cultural touchstones, but is worried that it might they might be unhip so he's telling us that he doesn't really mean it. And the italics. What the fuck is that about? As a literate human being, I don't need the author telling me where to place the stress in a sentence.

And the lists! All those extraneous nouns and adjectives and adverbs. An example:

Edward's dinner became whatever he could microwave from the local Circle K nuke 'n' serve boutique—a beef-and-bean burrito, say, washed down with Polish cherry brandy, the taste for which he acquired during a long, sleepy earnest summer job spent behind the glum, patronless counter of the local Enver Hoxha Communist bookstore.

Something like this works for DeLillo because, as I mentioned before, of the resignation; it becomes an almost penitent litany for him. It works for Palahniuk as an expression of rage or energetic black humour, and it works for somebody like David Foster Wallace because he overwhelms you with it, making it seem like the only way to extract any meaning at all from banality. In Generation X it feels mocking, and I feel like I'm the one being mocked. (I don't imagine Coupland is actually mocking his readers, but I just can't shake that feeling.)

Generation X ends with the sentence, "I can't remember whether I said thank you," but it's not a question worth asking. Of course he didn't. I know that I'm going to be in the minority by not enjoying this book, and that's okay. It wasn't completely without merits, but the problems I saw with it, particularly in terms of class representation, were deal breakers for me.

Generation X was my fourth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and my first book for Canada Reads. Next up is Century, by Ray Smith.

As Kate mentioned here, A Mixture of Frailties is the book where Robertson Davies finally, firmly made the shift from dramatist to novelist. Not to get all "no true Scotsman" on you, but I think, given how his next eight novels play out, a case can be made that A Mixture of Frailties is the first "true" Robertson Davies novel. That's not exactly the case I'm going to be making here, but this will be setting the pattern for most of the remainder of these books. In my comments on Tempest-Tost I discussed the first of the three elements Davies brings together in constructing the identities of his aristocracy of the spirit: self-knowledge. In my discussion of Leaven of Malice I discussed the second element: the conceit. I'm not certain I was clear in how conceits fit in to the framework I'm talking about, as I also spoke about how "we" construct identity, rather than simply how Davies constructs the identities of his characters. I think conceits are analogous to extraordinary circumstances, moments or events that (to return to the jewel metaphor I mangled in my last post on Davies) reveal facets of ourselves that even we may not have known existed. The third element, which takes centre stage in A Mixture of Frailties, is a variation on the bildungsroman. I say "variation", because Davies requires that his characters be, whether they know it or not, apprenticed to various masters throughout the course of their coming of age. (Can we agree, for the purposes of this and later reviews, that "master" is gender neutral? The word "mistress" has connotations I don't want to evoke, and "teacher" or "instructor" aren't quite right for what Davies does.) From what I understand, your standard bildungsroman doesn't actually require this sort of relationship.

A Mixture of Frailties opens with one of Davies' absurd conceits. Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace are now married, and Solly's mother (who, let's face it, was not a very nice person, and was not at all kind to Pearl) has passed away. Her last will and testament is manipulative at best, and punitive at worst. It's simplest to let Davies explain it (I apologize for the length of the quotation):

"Shorn of technicality," said he, "the meaning of the will is this: all of your late mother's estate is left in trust to her executors—you, her son, Solomon Bridgetower—you, Laura Pottinger, spinster—you, Jevon Knapp, as Dean of St. Nicholas' Cathedral. That estate, as outlined here, consists of this house and its contents and considerable holdings and investments. You, Solomon Bridgetower, are to continue to occupy the house, which has always been your home, but it is the property of the trust, and you may not dispose of it. But the income from the estate is to be devoted to the educational project which your late mother has outlined."

"You mean I don't get any money?" said Solly.

"You get a legacy of one hundred dollars," said the lawyer.

"Yes, but I mean—the investments, and the money that brought in my Mother's own income, and all that—I don't quite follow—?"

"That money is all to be devoted to the education, or training, of some young woman resident in this city of Salterton, who is desirous of following a career in the arts. The young woman is to be chosen by you, the trustees. She must not be more than twenty-one at the time she is chosen, and you are to be responsible for her maintenance and training, in the best circumstances you can devise, until she reaches the age of twenty-five. She is to be maintained abroad in order, as your mother says, that she may bring back to Canada some of the intangible treasures of European tradition. The phrase, of course, rules out any possibility of her being trained in the States. And when she is twenty-five, you are to choose another beneficiary of the trust. And so on, unless the conditions under which the trust exists are terminated."

"And I get nothing except a hundred dollars and the right to live in the house?"

"You get nothing, unless the condition is fulfilled which brings the trust to an end. If, and when, that condition is fulfilled and you are still living in this house, you receive a life interest in your mother's estate. Bequests are made to the two servants, Ethel Colman and Doris Black, which will be payable when the condition is fulfilled. Laura Pottinger receives a bequest of the testator's collection of Rockingham china. The Cathedral Church of St. Nicholas will receive all of the testator's holdings in certain telephone and transportation stocks."

"There is a condition attaching to this latter bequest. Until the Cathedral gets the telephone stock, the Dean is to preach, every St. Nicholas' Day, a special sermon on some matter relating to education, and these sermons are to be known as the Louisa Hansen Bridgetower Memorial Sermons. If there is any failure in this respect, the bequest is forfeit."

Solly still looked puzzled. "And all this hangs—?"

It all hangs on your having a son, Mr. Bridgetower. When, and if, you and your wife, Pearl Veronica, née Vambrace, produce male issue, who is duly christened Solomon Hansen Bridgetower, he becomes heir of all his grandmother's estate save for the bequests I have mentioned. But you are to have a life interest in the estate, so that he will not actually come into possession of his inheritance until after your death."

"And if we have a child and it's a girl?"

"The trust will remain."

I may have mentioned, in my review of Leaven of Malice, that Davies' conceits would become less absurd over time. I may have overstated that. Ridiculous? Yes. Punitive? Absolutely. Illegal? Well, who knows, but that's not the sort of thing Davies, at this stage in his career as a novelist, would have even bothered to ask. He just ran with it.

Solly and Pearl wind up facing considerable emotional and financial hardship as a result of this patently ridiculous will, and their struggles in Salterton take up most of the first part of A Mixture of Frailties, far and away the longest novel of the trilogy, but they are essentially just a framing narrative for the psychological and musical development of blue-collar singer Monica Gall. A great fuss (a great fuss) is made over choosing her to be the recipient of the late Mrs. Bridgetower's backhanded charity. Puss Pottinger even rejects one promising young woman because she suspects her of (gasp!) having had relations with a man. There's a lot of good Davies satire in those scenes, and much of it is sharper than in either Tempest-Tost or Leaven of Malice, setting the stage for the quantum leap to come. This is the book where Robertson Davies stops thinking like a playwright, and starts thinking like a novelist.

The woman eventually chosen to be schooled in Europe is twenty-one year old Monica Gall, part of The Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, an amateur vocal group used by Pastor Beamis to raise money on the radio for his parish, a group commonly know as the Thirteeners (who seem to be a none-too-subtle parody of Seventh Day Adventists). Beamis, the Galls, and most of the Thirteener congregation are uneducated, working-class folks, with all the virtues and vices that entails. But Humphrey Cobbler sees the potential for something better in Monica and her voice, and he convinces the Bridgewater trustees to see it too. Most of the rest of the novel concerns her training in England, with occasional visits paid to the Bridgetowers. Robertson Davies wrote eleven novels in his career, and this is the first of my four favourites (in case you're wondering, the others are The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Cunning Man), in large part because for the training of Monica Gall he finally turns satire, theatricality, conceits, and all the other trappings of his first two novels into means rather than ends. A Mixture of Frailties is coherent, human, and holds up remarkably well to repeated readings, without the heavy theoretical scaffolding that characterizes his more celebrated Deptford Trilogy.

In what will become signature Davies fashion, Monica is placed in the care of famous conductor Sir Frederic Domdaniel, who introduces her to three other teachers, each of which will refine her talents and expand (or complicate) her character.

The first of those teachers is Murtagh Molloy, a nasty little Irishman with wandering hands and a coarse manner—but he's also got an unsurpassed sensitivity to the nuances of music and emotion. Sir Benedict sends Monica to him because, though she displays considerable potential, her style is sickly sweet, melodramatic, and obvious (God, it reminds me of pretty much all of my early work). That's okay for The Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, but not for a world-class opera singer. She needs to learn how to evoke "the proper muhd". Molloy makes her sing Paolo Tosti's "Good-Bye!" (listen to Nellie Melba's performance, the touchstone Molloy uses in the novel), and then performs it himself so that she can hear and understand the difference.

He sang the song himself. It was like any singing Monica had ever heard, for although his voice was unremarkable in tone, and he sang without a hint of exaggeration or histrionics, it became as he sang the most compelling and revealing of sounds. The song invaded and possessed her as it had never done in all the time she had known it. Her own rendition, moulded by Aunt Ellen, was carefully phrased and built up emotionally until, she flattered herself, the final repetitions of "Good-Bye" provided a fine and satisfying climax. But as Molloy sang the song there seemed to be no calculation of this kind, and the phrasing was hardly apparent. Yet the whole song was sung with a poignancy of regret which was the most powerful emotion that Monica had ever heard expressed in music. "It's unbearably sad when you really understand it," Aunt Ellen had said, thinking of her dead lover, and Monica had striven to recreate that sadness herself; sometimes she had succeeded, until the sob mounting in her throat brought on a prickling of the eyes, and then a fullness in the nose which ruined the singing. But that was real feeling, wasn't it? And that was what made great music, surely? Yet here was Murtagh Molloy, apparently as cool as a cucumber, giving rise to a sadness in her which swept far beyond anything she could associate with Aunt Ellen and the dead schoolteacher. This was the sadness of all the world's parting lovers, of all the autumns since the beginning of time, of death and the sweetness of death. Monica was moved, not to tears, but to a deep and solemn joy.

"You were dipping your bucket into a shallow well and I was dipping mine into a deep one," he tells her. Finding a deeper well for her bucket is what Sir Benedict wants Molloy to teach her, and by bullying, angering, and embarrassing her, that's exactly what she does. But he doesn't do it alone. What becomes clear is that, while one doesn't have to be an emotional prodigy to call up the proper muhd, it does require more experience and a greater depth of character than Monica possesses at the ripe old age of twenty-one. Molloy would provide that experience and depth with a little bit of guilty, teary-eyed dirty-old-man-style grab-ass behind his wife's back, but with the exception of one sad, drunken misstep, he knows better (and Monica has a better head on her shoulders than anybody really gives her credit for—I think she's one of Davies' best female characters, actually—and would not have been up for any dirty-old-man shenanigans anyway).

To learn more about music theory and to get some dirt under her nails (and for other reasons that aren't really significant to Monica's education), Sir Benedict sends her to work under the young, avante-garde composer Giles Revelstoke. It's through her exposure to him, whether intentional or not, that she finds that deeper well to dip her bucket. Giles is everything you'd expect from a character with a name like Revelstoke. He's brilliant, arrogant, cruel, short-sighted, selfish, and more than a bit of a libertine. Of course Monica fall hopelessly in love with him, and of course he treats her like a drudge. In fact, he gives every indication that he hates her and resents her presence in his life, until one snowy Christmas Eve in Wales he walks in on her brushing her teeth, lifts up her skirts, gives her her first taste of life, and then wanders off to bed without a word being said. When they return to London they are lovers, and she is almost completely his creature. Monica's experiences with Giles are probably the most important and intense in the novel, and though it's an old, old story (really, who among us hasn't fallen in love with someone who treated us like shit to satisfy their own desires?), Davies deserves credit for integrating it successfully into an extremely satisfying transformation from community enforced ignorance to fully independent personhood. Revelstoke teaches her about physical pleasure and desire, about betrayal, about ego and the petty truth of artistic communities, and finally, with his implosion in Italy and his suspect death later in London, about self-preservation. (I actually tried to find a passage to quote to illustrate all of this, but Davies, despite his love of aphorisms, maxims, and proverbs, actually resists that kind of pat summation for important things like a character's maturation.)

Monica's third teacher doesn't cut a prominent figure in A Mixture of Frailties, appearing only twice as far as I can recall, and described in not great detail, but she teaches an often-overlooked lesson that flies in the face of the popular wisdom surrounding the creative class (which a great many of creators believe). Her name is Amy Nielsen, and she is an American living in Paris who runs a kind of finishing school, teaching young women history, literature, which fork to use and so on. She also shows them the sights and lets them soak up a little bit of culture. What she does for Monica is a little more specific. Monica wants to be a singer, and a great one. Amy teaches her how to act the part. There's a truism that creating is so much about the person that the tools largely don't matter. This is, of course, utter bullshit, and Davies never buys into it. Of course tools matter. They won't make a bad artist into a great one, but they will allow someone with talent to maximize that talent. I can tell you from my own experiences as a drummer (oh yeah, I play the drums) that two things, other than practice of course, were responsible for dramatic improvements in my playing. The first was playing with musicians who were more skilled and experienced than I was, and the second was upgrading from a crappy no-name drum kit with pie-plate cymbals and busted tree branches for sticks, to a high-end Sonor kit with top of the line Sabian studio cymbals and laser-balanced signature series Vic Firth sticks. Having better tools allowed me greater freedom, and frankly improved my playing considerably. Amy Nielsen knows that Monica wants to be a singer of operatic quality, and that means mingling with high society. Thirteener surfaces just won't cut it. It all happens off stage, but Amy teachers her to be a great singer rather than just a hick with a decent voice. It amounts to taking her shopping and to a few parties, but the impact it has belies its source, and it will show up in her choices as the novel progresses.

Finally there is Sir Benedict Domdaniel himself. To bring us all the way back to Tempest-Tost, what he teaches her is professionalism, and brings out her professional ambition. When she's weighing her options in a professional capacity it usually winds up being between the extremes of the anti-social Revelstoke and the people's champion Molloy, and that's when she hears, like her own conscience, the voice of Sir Benedict counseling a reasonable middle ground. And truly he is the most professional, the most accomplished, and the most self-aware among Monica's three musical masters. He exposes her to other ways of being an artist, and she learns valuable things from those ways, but by taking on his centrism, she chooses her own middle way, and is ultimately not consumed by the passion of extremes. (Davies also lets it slip that she will be successful, so though the novel ends with a mystery, it's a different mystery entirely.) You can see that voice taking root in her head in this lengthy scene:

"Now listen [Sir Benedict says]: I haven't been bullying you like this just for fun: I've been trying to find out what you're up to. All I know at present is that you have a pretty fair little voice—good enough among several hundred just as good. What training will do still remains to be seen. But unless you have some honest appraisal of your self you haven't much chance. And all that appears now is that you think you have some talent, and are bashful about saying so: you want to sing, with some vague notion of benefitting mankind in general, and raising people a little above the mire of total depravity in which God has placed them. What do you want out of it for yourself?"

"I haven't thought much about that."

"Little liar! Now, answer me honestly: haven't you had daydreams in which you see yourself as a great singer, sought after and courted, popular and rich—probably with handsome men breaking their necks to get into your bed?"

Monica blushed deeply, and was silent. None of her daydreams had ever included bed.

"You see! I was right. In your heart of hearts you think of singing as a form of power: and you've got more common sense in your heart of hearts than you have on that smarmy little tongue of yours. You're right; singing is a form of power—power of different kinds. Singing as a form of sexual allurement—there's nothing wrong with that. Very natural, indeed: every real man responds to the woman with the golden, squalling, cat-like note, and every real woman longs to hurl herself at the cock-a-doodling tenor or the bellowing bass. Part of Nature's Great Plan. But sex-shouting's a trap, too. At fifty, your golden squall becomes a bad joke. What then? Teaching? If you're not born to it—and few of the sex-shouters are—it's a dog's life; pupils are fatheads, most of 'em. Are you trying for—well, when you're trained—a possible twenty-five years of that kind of glory? Because it is glory, you know—real glory."

"I hadn't thought of it that way."

"Not refined enough? Well, there's another kind of singing. The technique is the same, but the end is different. It depends on what you have in your head and your imagination; it means being a kind of bard, who reveals the life that lies in great music and poetry. You use your voice to give delight. That's what music used to be for, you know—to capture the beauty and delight that people found in life. But then the Romantics came along and turned it all upside down; they made music a way of churning up emotions in people that they hadn't felt before. Music ceased to be a distilment of life and became, for a lot of people, a substitute for life—a substitute for a sea-voyage, or the ecstasies of sainthood, or being raped by a cannibal king, or even for an hour with a psychoanalyst or a good movement of the bowels. And a whole class of people arose who thought themselves music-lovers, but who were really sensation-lovers. Not that I'm a hundred per cent against the Romantics—just against the people who think that Romanticism is all there is of music. Well, there are two kinds of singing. The sexual singer is, in pretty nearly all respects, the greater of the two, just as a mountain torrent is necessarily a greater force than the most beautiful of fountains: when she sings, she's a potent enchantress, and the music is merely the broomstick on which she flies. With the bardic singer, the music comes first, and self quite a long way second. Now: which sort of singing appeals to you?"

"Oh, the second, of course. The—bardic kind."

"If you really mean that, I think the less of you for it. Far better to set out aiming as high as you can, and killing yourself to be one of the big, adored, sexy squallers. It argues more real vitality and gumption in you. Still, I don't trust you to know what you want. You're too full of a desire to please—not to please me, but to please your family, or your schoolteachers, or those people—the What's It's Name Trust—who are paying the shot for you. Those people never want you to have great ambitions or strong, consuming passions. They want you to be refined—which means predictable, stable, controlled, always choosing the smallest cake on the plate, never breaking wind audibly, being a good loser—in a word, dead. I admit that the world couldn't function properly without its legions of nice, refined, passionless living dead, but there is no room for them in the arts. So we'll see what you are after you've had a few months of work. At the moment you're just a nice girl with pots of money to spend on training. So let's get to work."

This could be Davies himself speaking to the reader about music, about literature, about love and human relationships, even, and it's a technique he uses frequently—the conversation which is also a lecture which is also a manifesto—but in most cases, as here, it serves to plant a powerful idea into the mind of the protagonist that will shape her choices and her views for the rest of her life.

In A Mixture of Frailties we finally have all the elements of Davies' "personal myth" method/theory of how his aristocracy of the spirit construct their identities. By the end of the novel, Monica Gall finally achieves the level of professionalism and self-knowledge that marked out Valentine Rich in Tempest-Tost, we have a fairly absurd conceit setting the plot in motion as in Leaven of Malice, and finally A Mixture of Frailties brings a kind of bildungsroman into play by putting Monica Gall through a series of literal and spiritual apprenticeships. For the first time we've seen Davies at something like full strength. I haven't even scratched the surface of what this novel has to offer, and I think it's a much-overlooked Canadian classic.

A Mixture of Frailties was my third selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Generation X, by Douglas Coupland.

I've never participated in Canada Reads before. I'd like to say that sometimes my reading schedule doesn't allow for it, or that I'm not interested in the books, but the truth is that, while I really believe in the value of my job and the project I work on (which I'd rather not discuss the specifics of), I don't make very much money, and buying all those books at once is far and away beyond my means. Not unless I can find them used or remaindered, of course, and good luck with that. Toronto's used bookstores are picked clean the day after the titles are announced. Usually. This year things are different.

Kerry Clare is running a concurrent programme, called Canada Reads: Independently, in part as a response to the criticism that this year's lineup for the CBC event only features books that have already received considerable attention here in Canada. I will be participating; I already owned three of the five books her panelists chose, and the other two were not hard to find on my budget. But! Through some miracle of fate, three of the official Canada Reads titles have fallen into my lap, so I will be participating in that as well, hunting the bookshops for the remaining two titles as I go along. (And if some kind publisher or publicist wants to help a poor boy out by supplying copies of Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony or Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault, that poor boy would sure be grateful. *cough*)

Wait, wait, you say. What about the five book reviews you're behind on? Good point. I'm five books behind! What's going to happen is this: sometime over the weekend, I'm going to post my review of A Mixture of Frailties, by Robertson Davies, thereby wrapping up The Salteron Trilogy. Rather than moving directly on to The Deptford Trilogy, which I've already finished reading, I'm going to start in on the Canada Reads and Canada Reads: Independently books, alternating between the two lineups until I've completed them all. (I think the world can wait for yet another assessment of The Deptford Trilogy, don't you?) That way I can participate more or less as it happens, something I've never been able to do before. I'm looking forward to it. I'll be starting with Generation X, by Douglas Coupland, and then Ray Smith's Century.

This is the one post I never wanted to write. People who know me, and regular readers of this site, will already know that I am not a feminist. I am, in fact, quite critical of feminist theory at times. I resist making this a big issue on this site for two reasons: first, emotions can often run high when it comes to identity politics (of which feminism and feminist theory can play a significant part), making it very easy for a poorly-worded sentence to cause a colossal misunderstanding, and second, feminism remains a useful movement, and feminist theory a useful set of tools for a variety of fields; I don't like limiting my tools, and criticizing something too much on the Internet can do that. But this thing, this stupid, stupid, embarrassing disgrace brought to us by the Editorial Board at the National Post has left me no choice but to articulate my position as clearly as I can, because the absolute last thing I want is to be grouped with those ignorant jackasses.

There are legitimate arguments to be made criticizing Women's Studies programmes. Lack of rigor is a complaint I've heard from serious scholars, both male and female, from other disciplines. I've even seen examples of it myself, when a former partner of mine was taking Women's Studies courses and became extremely frustrated by what she felt were academic standards well below what she was used to in her primary field. Most importantly to me, however, is that such programmes, while admirably dealing with an extremely broad set of social and theoretical issues, quite clearly privilege a particular theoretical framework and point of view. This isn't a problem in the hard sciences or certain professional schools, but it's more than a problem in the arts, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. Degrees are for fields of study, not points of view. I think folding Women's Studies into something more inclusive, like Gender Studies, would allow for a more diverse and therefore robust programme, a diversity that feminist theory helped bring to my own field, English Literature.

I think the above paragraph constitutes a reasonable critique of some of the problems (or perceived problems) with Women's Studies programmes as they now exist.

This bullshit from the National Post does not:

The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.

Women's Studies courses have taught that all women — or nearly all — are victims and nearly all men are victimizers.

[...]

Divorcing men find they lose their homes and access to their children, and must pay much of their income to their former spouses (then pay tax on the income they no longer have) largely because Women's Studies activists convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. So now a man entering court against a woman finds the deck stacked against him, thanks mostly to the radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies.

[...]

Over the years, Women's Studies scholars have argued all heterosexual sex is oppression because its "penetrative nature" amounts to "occupation." They have insisted that no male author had any business writing novels from women's perspectives; although, interestingly, they have not often argued the converse — that female writers must avoid telling men's stories.

I'd be curious to see the Post's research into how judgements in family court have changed with respect to husbands and fathers, or how patterns have shifted with regard to awarding custody in various jurisdictions across Canada. It would be equally interesting to see how—or even if—those number correlate with the growth of Women's Studies programmes in those same jurisdictions. The Post has cited no numbers, no Stats Canada documents, no independent surveys, not even any anecdotal evidence. Surely if there is a clear culture of "radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies," then Canada's most obsessive-compulsive bureaucratic wing must have data on it somewhere, and no doubt the Post's crack Editorial Board has ferreted it out. Perhaps they simply forgot to cite it.

It would also be interesting to find out what educators they spoke to about the pedagogy involved in teaching Women's Studies, and what course materials they perused, and from which courses and institutions, that led them to describe the programmes as courses deliniating women as victimized and men as victimizers. Unfortunately, the Editorial Board doesn't see fit to tell its readers. The course material I have first hand experience with, from Laurentian University, is far from being so cut-and-dried, and though I did not always agree with the approaches or conclusions, offered a highly nuanced set of theories about human interactions that presents ethical and intellectual challenges (in many senses of the word) to both men and women. Perhaps the Post felt their readers would not be interested in this information.

I know I've been hard on the Post in the past for having less than stellar Books coverage, but lately they've improved tremendously with The Afterword, matching and often even surpassing coverage at the Globe & Mail. They seem to have no trouble covering Russell Smith with little apparent controversy, an author who has more than once used female protagonists or written from a woman's point of view (including a pornographic novel, under a female pseudonym). But of course the Editorial Board is talking about the academic world. Well, that's something I happen to know a little bit about. You see, before I ran out of money, I was actually an English Literature student, training to become a university professor. You don't see much of it coming out here in this blog, but I like to wade hip-deep in hardcore theory and academic criticism. Academics love gender reversals in protagonists; there is a tremendous amount of work to be done studying not only the standard literary techniques, cultural and theoretical implications, but also issues of gender identification, authenticity of voice or even appropriation of voice, basically a truckload of the fun things that keep academics writing papers and teaching interesting, though-provoking classes. George Elliott Clarke's libretto Beatrice Chancy focuses on the experiences of a young black woman in 19^th Century Nova Scotia, and is a favourite teaching text of feminist and non-feminist professors alike. Not only is it not frowned upon for this acclaimed poet to be writing in the voice of a female protagonist (well, partly, at any rate), the book is among the most lauded on the many curricula that use it.

(And as for the sex as "occupation" bit, let's just say that the women I know, feminists or otherwise, make their own choices based on knowing they have the power and freedom to explore their sexual identities, and have control over their own pleasure, over their own sexual relationships and destinies. The ladies I know are fierce, and I can't help but wonder how the Post's Editorial Board has gotten these notions stuck in their heads. Perhaps they're projecting. The world may never know.)

In short, the Editorial Board of the National Post has apparently done no research into their claims (or none it wishes to share), and frankly doesn't know shit about literature and how it is studied or taught in Canadian classrooms, regardless of the ideological leanings of the professor or the programme. So what are they on about? Here are a few other quotations from the screed—er, editorial—that might shed some light:

Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity—hiring quotas based on one's gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.

Executives, judges and university students must now sit through mandatory diversity training.

[...]

They have pushed for universal daycare and mandatory government-run kindergarten, advocated higher taxes to pay for vast new social entitlements and even put forward the notion that the only differences between males and females are "relatively insignificant, external features."

So this, really, is what's got the Post hot under the collar. Most of this seems like pretty good ideas to me. What it looks like is incremental (and in the case of employment quotas—something I actually believe undermines equality—hopefully temporary) steps toward finally enacting the equality promised on paper in the Charter. The Post is pissed off, it seems, that women are being recognized as people. It's no wonder the National Post Editorial Board doesn't sign their names to these pieces. I too would be ashamed if I'd contributed to this poorly conceived mess. There is a difference between disagreeing with aspects of feminism, and outright misogyny. The Post's editors are clearly incapable of recognizing it.

My challenge to the Editorial Board of the National Post: sign your names to this document and face the public shaming that is your due, or shut the fuck up entirely, you smarmy fucking cowards.

I apologize if this post has been a bit rough, unpolished, or emotional; I'm not a professional journalist. But then, judging by this editorial, neither are the members of the Editorial Board at the Post.

The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopaedia of Crypto-Anthropology, 2^nd Canadian Edition, published in 2005 by The Society of Canadian Crypto-Anthropologists, Ottawa Chapter, compiled and edited by S.F. Jameson and E. Forrester-Pratt. Reprinted with permission.

Jarvis, Mark Samuel. born March 12^th, 1963 — missing December 2^nd, 2003

Mark Jarvis was a Canadian businessman, venture capitalist, and prophet. He was born in the small Northwestern Ontario village of Sioux Lookout to parents Samuel David Jarvis, electrician, and Ethel Marie Jarvis (née Hermann), nurse. Jarvis was born with a teratoma, a kind of tumor, usually benign, characterized by the growth of tissue associated with parts of the body other than where it is found. In males teratomata most often present at birth and tend to manifest as fleshy lumps on or about the coccyx or the neck. The tissues most commonly found in such tumors are from the lungs, brain, and kidneys, though more complex tissues may develop. Teratomata in females tend to present later in life and more regularly in the reproductive system. They are also more likely to develop more complex tissues and organs, and there have been anecdotal reports of the tumors developing as eyes or limbs. As a result, teratomata in women can often be mistaken for malformed fetuses. Jarvis' teratoma was unusual in several respects; first, in that it was located around the anus, second, that it included extremely complex tissues such as teeth and hair, and third, that it could predict the future. His tumor took the form of a row of five teeth circling the outside edge of the anal sphincter, a small flap of skin covering the sphincter itself, and a row of thick hairs near the teeth that resembled eyelashes. His teratoma was diagnosed as benign, but declared inoperable due not only to its proximity to the anal sphincter, but also due to extensive intertwining of the tumor's tissue and the inferior rectal nerves.

I've been reading through the Caustic Cover Critic's archives at work (hey, I have that kind of job), and I just noticed this evening that David Drummond, the book designer I mentioned in a post this weekend, actually has a blog, where he looks at some of the approaches he takes to designing covers. His comments aren't as in-depth as I would like (they tend to be limited to only a sentence or two), but it's still a pretty cool "inside baseball" kind of thing for those of us, like myself, who geek out over both books and graphic design.

I've mentioned this on Twitter, but since I know most of you aren't following me there, I thought I'd mention it here. A.L. Kennedy on Writing is seriously the best writing column on the Web. I know you aren't reading it (I know you aren't, don't give me that look), but you really should be. Kennedy is a goddamn treasure, and we need to encourage more of this sort of thing.

I read this morning on the Quill and Quire blog that a school board in California is banning the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary because it contains a "sexually graphic" definition of "oral sex". The stupidity of this boggles the mind; why someone would want to deprive children of a valuable, bog-standard reference text just because it has a couple dirty words in it is beyond me. But then I find it ridiculous that grownups are afraid of words at all. I wonder if Latin's not on the curriculum so the kids won't learn what irrumatio means.

The 1980s was not exactly my favourite decade, musically speaking. The disturbed geniuses who brought us the spartan soundscapes of post-punk had discovered island rhythms and African beats. Those influences softened their edges, muted their anger at the largely urban disenfranchisement that originally fueled the punk movement. The resulting mess of genres, usually lumped together as New Wave, became little more than a massive John Hughes soundtrack, eventually devolving into cheesy synth-pop before finally dying of auto-erotic asphyxiation, here in Canada at least, with World On Edge's 1991 self-titled debut.

And yet there was a Moment, ever so brief, just as New Wave was about to topple into the realm of AM radio self-parody, when bands like Talking Heads, the darker Depeche Mode, and a handful of others made some really great records. To me those albums seem to have a shorter half-life than those produced at other high points in 20th Century popular music, in no small part because of the deluge of sound-alike crap that would follow them almost immediately. There's been a huge '80s revival in the last few years, and while groups like Chromeo, !!! and others have made careers out of an ironic homage to the flashy surfaces of New Wave, Red State Soundsystem reaches back to that one moment of strength and lets us see it now, right at the point of its decay.

I don't mean to say that Ghosts in a Burning City is a retro album; it's very clearly not. But Red State Soundsystem's heavily textured album is so clearly, so directly a reaction to that moment that it makes much more sense to talk about it in those terms than it would to compare it to other modern New Wave inspired acts, like The Strokes or The Killers. For one thing, Joshua Ellis (the man behind RSS) incorporates synthesizers in a way that references Zero 7 as much as Devo. In fact, I had a "eureka" moment when listening to "Scarecrow" and "Secret King of Africa" when I finally saw how much of the "chill-out" downtempo sound I love can be traced just as easily back through the Manchester club scene to Factory Records (and ultimately, New Order/Joy Division) as it can through trip-hop and dancehall.

What stands out most about Ghosts in a Burning City is Ellis' skill as a songwriter and producer. His guitar work is good, though not exceptional, but tracks like "Divine Intervention", "Redwood City Station", and the wonderfully low-key "Not In This World (Or The Next One)" are so tightly structured, so solidly put together, that's it's hard to believe this is his first album. To be fair, he's been making music for quite a while; I have a stripped-down copy of "Berlin Floor Show" that dates back to at least 2002. It's one of the few tracks that I don't think benefits from Ellis' rusty, atmospheric production technique, actually, and I think he would have been better off releasing that older recording, even though it wouldn't have fit as well into the overall dusty-laptops-in-the-desert feel of the album. Maybe it would make a good B-side.

Ghosts in a Burning City sometimes falls down from Ellis' vocals. He's not a bad singer, but he's also not a great one, and while his scratchy baritone works beautifully on "Not In This World" (probably the best song on the album) and "Coda: Requiem For A Diplomat" (a fun little punk-cabaret number that manages to avoid both Amanda Palmer's over the top theatrics and Andrew Bird's tongue in cheek delivery), he seems to stumble at times, particularly on "Scatterlings + Refugees" and "Every Hour Wounds (The Last One Kills)". Those last two songs in particular seem like "Bob Dylan tracks" to me, by which I mean tracks in which the quality of the songwriting outstrips his abilities as a performer.

Ghosts in a Burning City is a strong, if slightly flawed, debut that manages to incorporate a great many powerful influences without ever being overwhelmed by them. There's enough variety here to see that Red State Soundsystem has room to grow as a project, and it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ellis can push past his New Wave-inspired textures into his own Moment.

So ten hours later, I'm only half-way through the process of updating the software. I have successfully updated to from MovableType 3.34 to 4.33, but was unable to make 5.01 work, for reasons that are entirely unknown to me. According to their knowledge base, the errors I was having do not exist. After spending a couple hours bumping my head against that particular brick wall, I decided to give up on 5.01, and revert to the 4.33 upgrade I'd made earlier in the evening. The result was close to three hours of downtime as I tried to figure out why Firefox was giving me 404 errors for files that were clearly on the server. Because I'd been at it for far too long, I was too tired and burnt out to realize the obvious, that the permissions had gotten messed up. A four-second fix turned into a three-hour nightmare. This is the part where I take a bow.

Long story short, no data was lost, vestige.org was down for a few hours, and I have a better system running the back end than I had before, though not quite as good as what I was hoping for. If I can find the time tomorrow, I'm going to do some upgrades to the CSS (don't worry, that I know how to do without screwing it up), and maybe also install some plugins to make commenting less of a pain in the ass. It will also keep legitimate comments from being automatically funneled into the junk folder, which is a problem I've been having for the last six or eight months; this blog has never been one to generate lots of conversation, but I know for a fact that several comments have been lost to that problem.

It's eight in the morning, and I'm finally going to bed.

Tonight (and possibly even tomorrow, depending on how long this takes), I will be attempting to upgrade the blogging software that runs vestige.org. It's been, well, close to three years since a database failure forced me to upgrade, and in the meantime I've missed at least two major updates to the software. According to the instructions provided, I'll have to upgrade from version 3 to version 4 before moving to version 5, which is the latest release. This will be a tremendous pain in the ass, but hopefully it will allow me greater flexibility for dealing with comment spam and various other housekeeping issues.

I've been blogging at vestige.org since February 2000, and I haven't had much luck with upgrades. I've lost bits of the database at least twice, the search function was unworkable for close to four years, and I've had to rebuild the entire file structure three times, screwing up my permalinks in the process. I'm going to do my best to prevent any of that sort of nonsense this time around, but, as the Taoists say, shit happens. So if you come here tomorrow and the site is gone, or you find nothing works anymore, be patient; things will get fixed to the best of my ability.

I wrote in my discussion of Tempest-Tost that I was interested in tracing the development of Davies' system of identity construction through all eleven of his novels, and that Tempest-Tost offered insight into the first of what I believe to be the three major elements of that system: the kind of self-knowledge achieved by his élite, the aristocracy of the spirit (I was perhaps not entirely clear that, while it takes a number of factors for Davies to elevate a character to that aristocracy, it is his or her self-knowledge that is of chief importance). In that first volume, Davies presents us mostly with characters who have already managed the trick of fully constructing their identities, and so we are largely only capable of seeing the end result, not the process or the tools. For Davies identity is like a jewel; it must be cut before it can be said to properly exist, and once cut it does not change. Only a few facets of that jewel can be seen by any one person at any one time, and what can appear to be changes in the personality, in the identity, is merely the rotating of that jewel to reveal more and more facets. In my discussion of Tempest-Tost I wrote about talent, an attitude I called "professionalism" (though it could have other names), and self-knowledge. These are largely the tools Davies uses to cut the jewel. I won't get to the process by which new facets are made until my discussion of A Mixture of Frailties; what concerns us in Leaven of Malice is the chief method of revealing more facets to the reader. And with that I hope I have finished torturing the metaphor of the jewel.

One of the advantages of writing trilogies is that characters can carry over from one novel to the other with much of the heavy lifting already done in terms of introductions and the establishment of certain basic traits. What remains is to be done is simply further development (any writers looking over my shoulder may now give a chuckle at my use of the word "simply"). Davies makes full use of this opportunity, shifting focus in Leaven of Malice to some of the best-drawn secondary characters from Tempest-Tost. More than a decade after my first run through Davies' ouevre I'm still disappointed that Valentine Rich, one of Davies' most real and interesting female characters, never makes an appearance beyond that first novel, though I have no problem understanding why. Gloster Ridley, who makes his only appearance in Leaven of Malice, is another such character, but literary novelists are rarely accommodating to fans of serialized fiction. (Not that I would suggest they should be.) At any rate, characterization isn't what I really want to discuss right now. Davies' technique has improved since Tempest-Tost, but in Leaven of Malice he introduces an element more important to the concept I'm attempting to trace in his work.

According to Wikipedia, the primary definition of a conceit is "an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison." Anyone who's taken a class on 17^th Century literature will remember the concept from John Donne's excellent poem, The Flea, which is the standard scrap of teaching verse. Indeed, Wikipedia also cites it. What I've identified in Davies' work is a definition that's perhaps less explicitly known, but is likely more common in contemporary literature. Also from Wikipedia: "For later literature and film, the term is sometimes used to refer to a device that stretches reality to take advantage of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief."" I would argue that this is an extremely common device in melodrama (and is at the core of situation comedy). I think anyone even casually familiar with Davies' interests will know that he was an absolute fiend for Victorian melodrama, and was clever enough to see its value both as fun, 'trashy' literature and as a source of genuine inspiration. The central conceit of Leaven of Malice could have been ripped straight from such a melodrama, or even an episode of How I Met Your Mother. An elocution teacher (!) who also happens to be a con artist arrives in Salterton and visits a variety of influential local persons, like Professor Vambrace and Gloster Ridley, editor of The Bellman, Salterton's daily paper, intent selling his wares. The instructor in question is Bevill Higgin, an irritating, obnoxious little man, the sort of ingratiating, relentless self-promoter that one despises rather than admires. He is, of course, dismissed by nearly everyone he pushes himself on, except the decrepit, incompetent Bellman reporter Swithin Shillito, and Mrs. Edith Little, Ridley's dull-witted, prudish, easily-manipulated housekeeper (and her family). Higgin wants nothing more than attention, and when he can't get it from the important people in town, he decides to cause trouble. He plants a false wedding announcement for Pearl Vambrace and Solomon Bridgetower in The Bellman (on November 31^st of all days). Seeing that we're talking about Salterton, a slightly cartoonish, satirical version of a small Ontario city (though not so cartoonish as to be completely unbelievable), this isn't just a curiosity to be laughed at and then ignored. Instead it brings down the mother of all shit storms on half the city.

I would say something like "this is where things start to get absurd", but really, an Irish con-man giving elocution lessons who uses a fake wedding announcement as payback for being ignored is pretty absurd all on its own. The point is, once you accept it, everything else in the novel works, and it works well. Professor Vambrace's descent into obsession and paranoia is bizarre on its own, but Davies uses the fake wedding announcement (and, to be fair, a spectacularly fun satire of sociology and sociologists) to create an atmosphere and tone where it makes perfect sense, even when he breaks down to the point of striking his daughter, and things go from amusing to deadly serious. Davies' conceits aren't always so straightforward (though they are sometimes more bizarre), but he seems to still be operating largely with a theatrical mindset.

There's a lot going on in Leaven of Malice, far more than in Tempest-Tost, but not all of it is related to what I wanted to talk about here. The book is a tangle of mostly satirical plot lines that are eventually brought together by the resolution of the wedding announcement incident into a big, frothy, classically comic ending. The wedding announcement strand isn't necessarily the most interesting or important thing going on in the novel, but it is the chief instrument through which Pearl Vambrace achieves self-awareness, and self-actualization. Of course it's also the means Davies uses to throw her and Solly Bridgetower together and get his comic ending, but those two things are closely related, and it all dovetails rather nicely.

Readers of Tempest-Tost will remember that Pearl Vambrace was an insecure young woman, not thought of very highly by most of Salternton, and thoroughly overwhelmed by her domineering father, the Professor. She did have a brief, shining moment as the (alright, a) belle of the June Ball, but by the time Leaven of Malice opens, she's a proverbial shrinking violet, hiding in the listening room at the university library where she works. When the wedding announcement hits, she's bombarded by unwanted attention from her co-workers, accusations from her father, and demands from Solly to "talk." She wants desperately to escape the entire mess, her father's selfishness and Solly's demands in particular. She feels alternately like she's being ignored, pushed around, or insulted. To cope, she winds up doing things—significantly, things like thinking for herself—that she never would have tried before.

First, conscientious girl though she is, Pearl sometimes abandons her place as an assistant librarian and instead hides out in the Music Room of Waverly University Library, where she plays records the Music Appreciation professor refers to as "Horrible Examples" and imagines herself a pianist, a singer, a ballerina of unparalleled grace. Christian Sinding and Frederic Clay aren't exactly the sort of composers I'd imagine a rebellious young girl listening to in 1954; I'd be more inclined to picture her listening to Big Joe Turner (who's much-covered 1939 blues track "Cherry Red" is as proto-rock-and-roll a song as one could ask for) or Ike Turner's pseudonymous band Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, who were already cutting tracks for Sun Records back in 1951, or Les Paul and Mary Ford who sold six million records in 1951 alone, or even Frank Sinatra or the Crew Cuts for God's sake. But then nobody ever would have accused Robertson Davies of being on the cutting edge of music. Details of popular music aside, this little bit of slacking off might seem like no big deal, or even an expression of her generalized anxiety. To a degree it is, but folks who read Tempest-Tost will it's more than that. In that novel Pearl Vambrace was so terrified of her father—of any authority figure, really—that she wouldn't have dared to risk the wrath of someone with as much power over her future as her employer.

An even bolder move is her attending the party of the husband and wife social workers Norm Yarrow and Dutchy Spreewald. These two are... well, let's just say that Davies doesn't seem to have had much respect for the field of social work. "Contempt" might be a more accurate word; about the only good quality he allows them is an earnest desire to help others, but even that is comically twisted into a kind of blind, self-serving, missionary attitude, a cheerful stupidity. The party is a disastrous mess of small-scale social engineering, with a group of young adults being shuffled and herded around playing ridiculous games when it's clear what they're most interested in is chatting amiably with drink in hand. It's a remarkable scene for its razor-sharp satire (Leaven of Malice did win the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, after all), but that's not what interests us here: what makes it important to us is Pearl Vambrace. The old Pearl Vambrace never would have attended at all, and she would have made a colossal cock-up of even getting herself dressed. Her need to escape the embarrassment of her father's rage and selfishness is greater than her fear, and she can't possibly imagine Solly Bridgetower finding her at the party. She puts on her fanciest frock, and off she goes. What Davies does to her at the party is a ploy older than Chaucer but has been in use as recently as last week's episode of How I Met Your Mother; he throws the disagreeable youngsters together in an awkward parody of affection, and lets the reader see a very real sexual tension building between them.

The most significant moment in Pearl's development is also the one most directly caused by Bevill Higgin's mischief (alright, and Professor Vambrace's pride, and some of Humphrey Cobbler's mischief, but it's all set in motion by Higgin). Vambrace gets it into his head that Gloster Ridley is part of some conspiracy to destroy his reputation by linking his daughter with the son of his old rival. This nonsense is mostly a function of his pride, of his being a biggish sort of fish in a smallish sort of pond, of being, essentially, incapable of seeing much beyond the tip of his nose. He takes a cue from trashy detective novels and dresses himself in the gaudy costume he imagines a sleuth might wear, though his notions seem to be a generation or two out of date (it's interesting that Davies inflicts this flaw on Vambrace, the one character he is most consistently critical of in the two novels in which he appears, given that it's a weakness Davies himself always seemed on the edge of succumbing to), and once suitably attired, he proceeds to stalk Gloster Ridley. Well, he tries to, at any rate. All he really succeeds in doing is making a conspicuous ass of himself by skulking around in the bushes and knocking over the landlady's trash cans. He follows Ridley to the home of a friend, where he is easily spotted by the late-arriving Humphrey Cobbler, who later can't resist the temptation to humiliate the professor by shattering his illusions of stealth. The Professor is shocked into a moment of clarity, the closest thing he ever has to true self-knowledge, as Davies writes, "Not only was it bitter to be mocked; it was worse still to feel that he was worthy of mockery." Bitterness turns to rage, however, when he arrives at home just in time to see Solly dropping Pearl off after the party. A row ensues as the Professor completely fails to see reason, and drags Pearl from the car. And then he hits her. It's not a great blow, and she isn't really hurt, but even in 1954 that was not at all the point. Pearl cries until dawn and the Professor loses himself in drink, and nothing will ever again be the same for either of them. Because of his pride, because of his provincial sense of shame, and because deep down the Professor is genuinely a moral man, Pearl will never be under his thumb again. She has all the power in their relationship, and she realizes this as much as he does. Pearl is free to be her own woman, and she grabs hold of that freedom with both hands.

The novel ends with Bevill Higgin revealed as the source of all this mischief, and Pearl's involvement entirely a matter of mistaken identity, but the consequence of his malice (ooooh, there's your title), the ridiculous conceit of a false wedding announcement, is that Pearl and Solly refuse to withdraw it, and by the time A Mixture of Frailties opens, the two are married. These conceits become less absurd as Davies develops as a novelist, but he never lets go of them entirely, and they always play a pivotal role in characters developing their personal myths.

Leaven of Malice has been my second selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is A Mixture of Frailties, the final volume in The Salterton Trilogy.