#51 - The Girls Who Saw Everything, by Sean Dixon

I read The Girls Who Saw Everything based almost solely on Mr. Beattie's recommendation, and was well rewarded. Dixon's novel was playful and witty, absurd and serious, emotionally complex and fully engaged with literary culture (though not disconnected from how that culture is viewed from the outside). I was quite shocked then, to learn that Dixon is not primarily a writer of prose fiction, but rather a playwright and actor. Dixon seems quite at home in prose, and the book was a joy to read. Were it not for my inability to look away from the CBC's coverage of the Olympics I would have finished this days ago, perhaps even on the day I began it.

The brilliantly named Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club is a collection of fascinating eccentrics, though their taste in literature is at times questionable (In the Skin of a Lion their favourite novel? For real? Such people are like albinos; you know they're out there but you never expect to actually encounter one). The Lacuna Cabal doesn't just read and discuss books, they go to extraordinary lengths to experience them (including kidnapping Irving Layton). And Emmy Jones! Well, you'd have to read it to believe it. I could not help but be reminded of Corey Redekop's novel, Shelf Monkey, as I was reading this. I enjoyed Shelf Monkey, despite Redekop's considerable stylistic debt to Jim Munroe, but it felt like it was always falling just short of its potential. I won't say that The Girls Who Saw Everything was the book that Shelf Monkey should have been (that's ridiculous), but it is the book that I had hoped it would be. The similarities are plain, I think. The major thrust of the plot in each centres on a cult-like book club that takes its activities one or two steps beyond the rational, with consequences both disastrous and glorious, and both books engage Canadian literary culture with genuinely entertaining results. Dixon's novel seems the more mature effort, however. When I used to play music in front of audiences (a rarity, but it happened), the best piece of advice I was given was to play through the mistakes, and never give any indication that I was anything other than supremely confident in my abilities; that alone was enough to hide all but the grossest of errors. The Girls Who Saw Everything moves with that sort of confidence, and Shelf Monkey, fine novel though it is, did not.

Since the most useful part of this post was most likely my linking to Mr. Beattie's review, I will close by saying that The Girls Who Saw Everything was my sixth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Red Plaid Shirt, by Diane Schoemperlen.

Posted by August on 08.19.08 at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)

Salon des Refusés (The Event)

Last night, as some of you may know, was the joint launch of Salon des Refusés issues from both The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes & Queries as well as my birthday. In celebration of two such momentous events, I took the night off work and made an appearance at the event, a kind of panel discussion about putting together the Salon issues, the Penguin anthology they were a response to, as well as anthologizing and short fiction more generally. I'm not hugely familiar with CNQ and their mandate, but TNQ is exceptionally good at author interviews and has sponsored lively discussions in the past (see their "Wild Writers We Have Known" issue, if you can find it), so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The discussion was good, but I'm not sure how productive it was; there were no real dissenting voices on almost any issue, and Kim Jernigan, though a fine editor and an acquaintance whom I greatly respect, is not entirely in her element as a moderator. But there was a good turnout as well as tremendous enthusiasm, and it was nice to see some familiar faces (in addition to knowing Kim, I went to school with TNQ managing editor Rosalynn Tyo) and it was also good to finally meet Mr. Beattie face to face. I took my camera but failed to remember to take photos. I will certainly remember at any future events I may attend. I will be blogging soon about the issues themselves.

Posted by August on 08.15.08 at 1:06 AM | Comments (0)

#50 - Degrees of Nakedness, by Lisa Moore

I read Open several years ago, because I'd been hearing Lisa Moore's name all over the place and wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I don't recall if I was living in Waterloo or Sudbury at the time, but I do remember somebody accusing me of buying the book solely because the cover featured an attractive woman in a bikini. I also remember enjoying the book quite a bit, but not why, nor are the details of any of the stories clear. Degrees of Nakedness will probably elicit a similar reaction from me several years from now. I enjoyed the book, but there's nothing about it that I would really call remarkable or particularly unique. Each of the stories seems told in the same detached, slightly sombre tone, and Moore's prose is so relentlessly clean and straightforward that it's difficult to feel much of anything for most of her characters, and I find it almost impossible to think of her writing in terms of style at all. She seems to rely quite heavily on "the telling detail", but none of her details seem particularly telling. There are some memorable images in her stories, like the taxidermic museum in "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom" (a story that I feel I've encountered somewhere before, though I couldn't say where) and the photograph that opens the story "Haloes." These images seem to be placed in the stories to function as emotional fulcra, balancing the tensions and conflicts of the story, but instead they feel disconnected. Not quite dead on the page, but not pulling the stories together the way they should, either. Even passages of extremely explicit sex (and there's one long one and a few shorter) are flat. They lack erotic verve or a sense of shame or even a genuine, deliberate emptiness. They are simply there, and that's not enough. I'll probably try Alligator at some hypothetical future date, but certainly not with any real enthusiasm.

Degrees of Nakedness was my fifth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Girls Who Saw Everything, by Sean Dixon.

Posted by August on 08.13.08 at 3:19 AM | Comments (0)

A Month of Short Fiction

I've been meaning to mention this for several days now, but I suppose better late than never. Over at That Shakespeherian Rag, Steven Beattie is celebrating short fiction by blogging about a different short story every day for the entire month of August (an excellent month for celebrations, I think). This also coincides nicely with the joint launch of Salon des Refusés issues by Canadian Notes & Queries and The New Quarterly on the thirteenth (my birthday, as it happens, and yes, I took the night off so that I can attend the event), where Mr. Beattie will be a panelist.

So far several of my favourite writers have been represented, including Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and my absolute favourite, Jorge Luis Borges. And I'm pleased to say that though there are several authors whose work I have not yet read (and at least two whose work I don't particularly enjoy), I have so far managed to say that I am at least familiar with the names of all the authors but one (Etgar Keret). Be sure to read Mr. Beattie's excellent introductory post.

Posted by August on 08.12.08 at 2:44 AM | Comments (0)

#49 - The Tracey Fragments, by Maureen Medved

I admit to buying this book for the sole reason that it was made into a film starring Ellen Page. After seeing her performances in Hard Candy and Juno, as well as interviews with her, I simply could not resist. She's far more intelligent and dedicated to her craft than most people her age in any field, and light years beyond your average actor or actress. While I was reading I noticed a full page ad in the back of the book for "reading guides" that Anansi makes available for download. I think they're intended to help book groups with discussion, and I find the idea fascinating. The guide won't really tell you anything about the level of discussion found in your average book group (and The Tracey Fragments doesn't seem like the kind of choice your average book group would make), but rather what Anansi thinks the level of discussion is or should be. So instead of doing a proper review, I'm going to answer the questions found in the two-page reading guide.

1) Does the fragmented style of Tracey's narrative make it a difficult book for the reader?
Yes and no. I'm an experienced reader of a variety of fictional forms, so I'm used to deliberately fragmented narratives. All it really takes to put together a reasonable picture of what's going on is patience and attention to the material. It helps that the book isn't very long. What's most difficult, I think, is how thoroughly Tracey's perceptions have deteriorated, and how unwilling she is to face the truth, not only of what has happened, but of how she's dealing with it. I am disappointed that Medved chose mania as the form for Tracey's mental instability. Mania is a hugely clichéd form for mental illness in literature and drama, and for teenage girls in particular. To put mania together with a fragmented narrative (especially with a female narrator) is almost de rigeur for experimental fiction.

2) How does this narrative form reflect the story itself?
I think I've already addressed that, but just to be clear: Tracey Berkowitz is falling apart after a series of traumatic events, and therefore so is the narrative.

3) Tracey's therapist asks her "Are you happy?" and "Do you think you're creative?" Are these useful questions for getting to the root of Tracey's problem? Do you think the therapist has any idea what the root of Tracey's problem is?
The two questions should be addressed separately. "Do you think you're creative?" is certainly not useful at all, but it comes from Tracey herself. Dr. Heker can only ask questions based on what Tracey tells her, and if Tracey is being honest with us (not a given at all), then it was a logical question to ask given what she was revealing about her parents' attitudes. Certain ways of looking at the world, particularly artistic ones, are unacceptable to Tracey's parents, as she has presented them to Dr. Heker, and so the question is designed to determine if Tracey feels accepted by her parents, or if she's a target for their disapproval.

The question "Are you happy?" is certainly an excellent first step in determining whether or not Tracey even needs to be in therapy. It's clear by the end of the novel that Tracey does belong in therapy, but whether or not that was true before she experienced the three traumatic events (or two events, depending on how much you trust Tracey) is up for debate. Tracey's mother clearly believes that she should be happy, but she's also out of touch with her daughter and the impact her own behaviour has on the happiness and mental health of her household.

4) "Dinnertime ... People stuck inside with their families, killing each other." Do people always hurt the ones they love? Does Tracey really love anyone but Sonny?
I'm not going to bother with the first question (of course they do). I'm not sure that Tracey really understands what love is; she loves her brother, of course, but she also thinks she loves Billy Speed when it's far more likely that she's confusing physical intimacy and romantic longing for love. Tracey can be incredibly crass, talking almost exclusively about "fucking" when she means "sex", but that could be a way of hiding from her own naiveté and its consequences. Her first real sexual encounter isn't rape (she gets into the car knowing what's going to happen, and she never actually says no or tells him to stop) but it's not very far off, and it's understandable that she would want to distance herself from the emotional impact of the experience. Feigning greater experience and a more cavalier attitude to sex seems like an obvious but effective way of hiding her pain, from herself if not from the reader.

5) What are the attractions for Sonny of being a dog instead of being a boy?
If Tracey's account of her home life is genuine, and I'm not at all convinced that it is, then Sonny would be attracted to any way of being that would take him out of that situation. Dogs have no real awareness of their situations and therefore no responsibility to act or react to them; if Sonny is a dog, then he is not only insulated from the reality of his home life, but excused from the responsibility of eventually confronting the situation (at ten years old it isn't required of him quite yet). It's worth noting that Tracey is the one who convinces him to adopt the dog persona; the structure of the family makes her Sonny's de facto caretaker, and she may be trying to lift a responsibility that she simply can't cope with.

6) Tracey mentions that her problems began in her DNA. How much of our personality and character is formed by nature and how much by nurture?
For real? Well, Tracey mentions that her problem is DNA because her parents' disapproval of her grandmother allows her to create an elaborate back story of sexual promiscuity (and sexual assault) for the woman that will let her explain away her own confusion over having sex with Billy Speed in the back of his car. Tracey presents her grandmother as both a rape victim and a prostitute, with many of her sexual encounters being willing and unwilling at the same time. Rape becomes consensual, and consensual sex becomes rape to the point where Tracey has difficulty imagining a distinction. If Tracey can explain not only her confusion about sex but also her behaviour away as the result of genetic predetermination then it not only absolves her of responsibility for what happened, it also keeps Billy Speed, whom she believes she loves even though he spurns her, from having to be the cruel bastard that he really is. He can become instead an instrument of fate.

7) Tracey describes herself, her mother, and her grandmother as "Three generations caught inside each other like Russian dolls." What is the role of the grandmother in the story? What influence did she have on Tracey? What parallels are there between Baba's and Tracey's lives?
I should really start reading ahead; I think I answered this question already. Tracey's mother retreats into a stilted suburban lifestyle in an effort to escape the life her grandmother lives (or lived in Tracey's mind; I don't believe a word of her account), but Tracey believes that she is trapped by both her mother's fear and her grandmother's genes, the combination of which forces her into repeating her grandmother's (alleged) promiscuity in the form of a single ill-conceived encounter in the back of a car.

8) Tracey says, "I go on these little vacations in my head." Baba and Tracey both dream of escape. What sorts of escapes does life offer?
Tracey dreams of escape, certainly, but as I've said above, I don't believe for a minute that she's telling the truth about Baba's life, so I don't think it's a legitimate comparison in the way this questions implies. As for what sort of escapes life offers, I think the answer lies in Tracey's fragments: life offers no escapes at all. Her every effort at getting outside her life has disastrous consequences for both her and Sonny, from running away to the park with Sonny and having sex with Billy Speed, to running away from the consequences of losing Sonny into the blizzard, which she then tries to escape by going with Lance and then riding on city buses. Tracey falls apart because there is no escape. Dr. Hekel may have offered some brief respite, or at least an ally, but Tracey never takes therapy seriously enough for it help her (or when she does take it seriously, she takes it as an assault).

9) "My mother won't talk to me. She's too busy. She smokes three packs a day and getting her away from the TV is a surgical procedure." How have Tracey's parents become so dysfunctional? What force holds Tracey's parents together? What force repels their children?
It's never quite clear why Tracey's parents are dysfunctional. Tracey blames it on her grandmother's death and her parents' fear, but those are just as likely to be fictions as her romantic descriptions of Billy Speed and her grandmother's life as a prostitute. It's most likely that Tracey's parents have disappointments in their own lives and suffer from the same suburban malaise that affects so many others, and they are moved solely by their inertia, having long ago been broken, or have broken each other. It's no surprise that this repels their children; Tracey's parents seem to have little or no concern for their well-being, using them instead as outlets for their paranoia and frustrations. As I've said, though, Tracey is a very unreliable narrator, and how much of this is real and how much of this is Tracey making excuses in order to avoid taking responsibility for how she lives her life is unclear.

10) Why does Tracey refer to herself as "It"?
Tracey has very low self-esteem and often has difficulty seeing herself as human, a situation that is not helped by how her parents, her peers, and even the romanticized Billy Speed behave towards her. Despite how close she is (or was) to Sonny, she is lonely and feels quite alienated. Describing herself as "It" is also a way for her to distance herself from the pain of her situation. The painful parts of her life can happen to "It", a thing, leaving "I", a person, safe from genuine harm.

11) Why does Tracey identify so strongly with the crow?
The crow is an outsider, immobilized by curiosity and by the warmth of Lance inviting it in, just as Tracey is an outsider immobilized by Billy Speed, but the crow found Lance's invitation to be a trap that ultimately killed it, just as the back of Billy Speed's car wasn't the magical thing Tracey hoped it would be, and her willingness to be with Billy instead of look after her brother had disastrous consequences for her family.

12) The sexual impulse is one of the strongest human drives. What factors push it out of control, as it was in Tracey's case?
Tracey's disconnection from her peers, combined with no real affection from her parents or clear models for healthy relationships and the raging hormones of adolescence most likely make sex and other forms of physical affection feel like the only "real" positive feelings available to her. As a result she is more than willing to sacrifice her well-being, such as it is, to experience it. That it is revealed as an illusion isn't really a surprise to her, but it is enough to push her beyond her limits.

13) Are people's life stories made up of fragments or does a narrative thread run through them? How do lives unravel and tangle up like a yo-yo string?
They don't ask for much, these questions. Of course people's lives are made up of fragments. No person stands alone; each of us intersects in ways we don't understand with other people and the events of their lives, playing roles in their lives that we cannot entirely see, just as they play roles in our lives that they don't always see. Life is repetitive and messy, with people coming and going, themes entering and leaving unresolved, events having dramatic and undramatic impacts. At no point does anyone have all the facts, nor can we always fully trust those facts we do have; the narrative of The Tracey Fragments works in much the same way.

14) "When things happen to people they radiate a light." What does Tracey mean by this? How is this true?
I supposed it could mean that people carry with them obvious signs of the course their lives have taken, like scars almost, though that implies injury and "light" doesn't necessarily indicate that. To be honest when I read the passage in question it seemed like an easy metaphor, a pretty image that wouldn't stand up to close inspection.

5) Tracey circles around and around her "problem" but the narrative eventually spirals down to a nugget of truth. Does the truth set Tracey free?
No, not at all. Tracey has only taken the first step towards healing the obviously significant emotional damage inflicted on her (and by her), and that she has exacerbated by her actions. Admitting the truth to herself, or even just a part of it, is not the same as accepting it or her role in it, even though it's clear that guilt was a big factor in her hiding it to begin with. Most of what Tracey will have to do in order to "be free" are the sort of messy things that happen after novels end. She will have to return to her parents, re-enter therapy, and learn to live on a daily basis with the absence of her brother and the heightened disapproval of her peers. Not an easy thing by any means, and no single act, no matter how revelatory, can act as a "magic bullet".

The Tracey Fragments was my fourth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Degrees of Nakedness, by Lisa Moore.

Posted by August on 08.11.08 at 1:46 PM | Comments (0)

#48 - Exotic Dancers, by Gerald Lynch

I did not realize it when I purchased this book, but it is a sort-of sequel to his 1996 novel Troutstream, which also happens to the be the name of the fictional Ottawa suburb in which both books take place. Perhaps it would have been useful to have read that book first, I don't know. I bought Exotic Dancers mostly, I'll admit, because of the interesting cover and the fact that it's told in several different voices, including passages in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the reader and discusses events in his life unrelated to the story. Besides, the title suggested that there might be a little bit of sex and adventure in this story, and I am still on a deliberate search for something less parochial in Canadian letters.

The first fifty pages could not have done more to turn me off. The introductory sequence was vague and ultimately irrelevant, and the various voices (Maggie, Jonathan, Holly and Joe) were flat and their expressions somewhat clichéd. Lynch has no ear at all for slang, and doesn't really have any sense of youth culture, despite having to depict the internal monologue of two teenagers (sitting down to watch Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with your kids in 2000/2001? I think you're a decade late, Mr. Lynch). Exotic Dancers is named after an incident early in the novel that has almost no connection with the main narrative but is not significant enough to be considered a legitimate sub-plot. I know that it's satire, and probably intended to be funny, but it just isn't. It seems rather sad, actually. This Ottawa suburb seems smaller and more provincial than the rural northern community where I grew up. Bingo games bringing players from all over the Ottawa area, and then the community behaving like there's no strippers anywhere in Ottawa? I find both those things difficult to believe. I don't frequent strip clubs, but I have been more than once, and Lynch's description of Bernadette's routine is so far from the truth that it simply can't qualify as satire. The characters are very conservative about sex and relationships, with the exception of Holly, who is mentally ill. Lynch really has no choice but to burn down the bar where the strippers work; there's no way he could continue with that storyline and keep his readers' respect.

The entire first half of the novel is a mess, in fact. Lynch can't seem to decide what his book is going to be about. Is it a patchwork satire of a fictional suburb? Is it the heartbreaking story of a young female athlete going slowly insane? Is it the story of a difficult romance between two unemployed single parents? Around the halfway point Lynch decides that it is the latter, and everything snaps into focus. The subplots become subplots and cease to fight for top billing. The characters' voices gain some depth from having specific narrative roles, and the satirical set-pieces (a long and wonderful bit skewering an overbearing teacher is almost worth the purchase price on its own) are suddenly funny, effective, and have a sense of connection to the plot.

Exotic Dancers is certainly not the best novel I've read this year, but it ended strongly, and Lynch eventually brought me to care about his characters. Perhaps another pass could have brought more cohesion to the book, but Exotic Dancers left a strong enough final impression that I may go back and find Troutstream.

Exotic Dancers was my third selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Tracey Fragments, by Maureen Medved.

Posted by August on 08.10.08 at 1:23 PM | Comments (0)

#47 - Stunt, by Claudia Dey

I enjoyed this novel, but I'm having some difficulty trying to explain why. It reads, for one thing, like the lyrics to a Dresden Dolls song. It is so crammed with contradictory metaphors that, while the prose is quite lovely, it often betrays its own internal logic, tenuous as it is. Imagine that Jeannette Winterson has read about two-thirds fewer books than she actually has, and has also lost her interest politics and you'll have a good idea of how Claudia Dey's prose functions. Not my sort of thing at all, really. And yet I could not put it down.

The plot and characters were very fairy-tale-like, with names like "Eugenia", "Immaculata", and "I.I. Finbar Me the Three". Eugenia, the narrator, is on a quest to find her father, a man who seems, based on his behaviour, to be either a mad artist or a mad hobo, or potentially even both. I'm honestly at a loss; I have no idea what else to say, and the more I think about the book, the more I want to pick apart its flaws. Perhaps someone else could read the book and then explain to me why I enjoyed it so much.

Stunt was my second selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Exotic Dancers, by Gerald Lynch.

Posted by August on 08.04.08 at 4:04 AM | Comments (0)

#46 - Night Soldiers, by Alan Furst

Some months ago my father sent me a box of books, mostly historical fiction, and in that box was Alan Furst's Dark Voyage, of which I have already written on this site. I learned some time later that it was part of a series, a later part, bound together more by theme and setting in time than by characters and situations. The series is called "Night Soldiers", named for its first volume. I've made it my business to acquire the other books (all now except two), with the intention of reading them in order. This is the first of them.

I confess that I could never quite get used to the structure of this book. It mostly follows Khristo, a young Bulgarian from along the Danube who, during the rise of European Fascism, gets sucked into the world of espionage, specifically with the NKVD, the Soviet agency that would eventually become the KGB. Agents from other intelligence organizations also figure heavily, most notably Americans. For an espionage novel, it's remarkably lacking in tension. Dark Voyage was quite possibly the most taut novel I've ever read, but Night Soldiers was much more matter-of-fact, and at times Furst's research threatened to overwhelm his story. Still, it was entertaining, and a worthy beginning to the subject. Though the plot and the characters both spilled all over the place, I was sad to let them go.

Next is Stunt, by Claudia Dey.

Posted by August on 08.04.08 at 2:51 AM | Comments (0)

#45 - A Week of This, by Nathan Whitlock

It's always interesting to read novels written by critics, and I must say that I was looking forward to A Week of This with greater than average anticipation, because not only is Nathan Whitlock the reviews editor for Quill & Quire, he's also quite well-known as a blogger in the somewhat limited circles I travel in. (I have linked to his blog above, but not his author-promo site, because it resizes your browser window, and quite frankly, fuck that.) The question one always has to ask with critics-cum-writers, is what will they do about all those pronouncements they've made over the years? Will they swing for the fences and attempt to be the next Gaddis or Pynchon, or will they play it safe, get their man on base and settle for being the next Mike Barnes or Elizabeth Hay? Nathan Whitlock, it seems to me, chose to bunt. What I mean (and I'll drop the baseball metaphor now, I promise) is that Whitlock did not write an overwhelming intellectual labyrinth—and it's clear, thank God, that he didn't try to—but nor did he stick with the plodding, parochial, and more traditionally Canadian kitchen drama. He gave us something much more interesting than either.

A Week of This begins in medias res, the same condition in which it ends, offering little excitement or character development (if by character development you mean a measurable change in a character's personality and behaviour). That was exactly the correct decision. A standard structure of character, conflict, and resolution would have killed nearly everything about this novel that feels surprising and fresh. Though it seems a contradiction to say it, it's the banality of these characters' lives that makes A Week of This surprising and fresh. There's very little in the way of action in this book, no more so than you would find in a week of any normal person's life, but unlike even the most claustrophobic and contained of kitchen-drama novels, there's no Type A personality driving what little action there is, either directly or indirectly (I've come to believe that the "A" in "Type A" stands for "asshole"). The various parents that exist in the periphery of this novel (Manda's obviously damaged mother and her deceased father, and Patrick's dead father) could qualify if their influence wasn't so subtle and sporadic. Patrick's father, who exists for Manda and Patrick as a kind of belligerent ghost in their home could easily have been made into a scapegoat for both the couple's relationship problems and their individual inertia, but Whitlock sidesteps that trap quite nicely and allows any number of factors, named and unnamed, to have their say. Manda, Patrick, Marcus as Ken form a stunted, underachieving quartet, trapped in their lives not only because of circumstances beyond their control, but because of the nature of their personalities. The Popmatters review claims that Dunbridge (the wonderfully named community in which the novel is set) has "broken" Manda, but I would disagree. In order to be broken one must first be whole. There's no evidence that Manda was ever in control of herself or her life; Dunbridge is merely one of many issues that compound the problem, it is not the problem itself. There's hundreds, if not thousands or even millions, of novels and stories that chart the course of the underachiever, the depressed and the stunted and the trapped. What makes A Week of This different is that Whitlock's characters are not exceptions; they aren't misfits living in a world of confident movers and shakers, and their lives are not solely as they are because (I'm looking at you, Michael Winter) they live in a small Newfoundland community, or their mothers have died of cancer, or whatever. A Week of This acknowledges that most of us live lives like this. For every hard charger out there explaining how all success takes is a positive attitude, there's a hundred people out there who made reasonable (or even good) choices, took risks and thought positive, and still failed to get the life they wanted. Most of us belong with those hundred people, but books and films and other storytelling media treat those hundred as the exception (and why shouldn't they? The follow-through required to realize a book or a film almost immediately places you outside the category of the hundred).

I hope that it's clear that I'm using the word "banal" to mean "commonplace" and "trivial", rather than "trite" or "hackneyed" or similar, sharper definitions. But in the context of A Week of This, I don't think using the word "banal" to describe the lives of these characters to be particularly insulting, because as I've said above, the novel is suprising and fresh. Notions of the banal are as subjective as notions of the sublime, in any event. Some may recall a particularly beautiful passage about a sunrise from The Recognitions that I quoted some weeks ago. I think a sunrise is a perfect example; what could possibly be more banal an image? Millions, potentially billions, of people witness one every day, and have done so for as long as humanity has existed. What could possibly be less fresh and exciting and beautiful? And at he same time, how can one fail to be awed by a human being standing tall as he is struck by the light and heat of a nuclear inferno more than a billion kilometres across? It's just a matter of how one is willing to look at things, really, and looking at things was, for me at least, a big part of my experience reading this book. I don't consider it a requisite that a work of fiction force me to examine my choices or their outcomes (I only require that reading it gives me pleasure, and A Week of This certainly succeeds on that front), but I consider it an additional point in its favour.

I know that there are some who would take issue with my calling any standard realist narrative "surprising and fresh", and would consider my opinion that parts of it are an accurate representation of reality (and that those aspects have particular relevance to my own life) as a weakness not only in my critical approach (it may be; I don't read "as a professional" unless I'm getting paid as such—I read as a pleasure-seeker) but also as a weakness in the work itself, realism being a stale, outdated, middle-class, and inaccurately named mode of writing fiction. My gut reaction is to call bullshit, but without giving reasons that's not much of a statement. The argument that realism is stale and outdated may have some accuracy to it, if one were to speak only in generalities. The mode has been around in almost its present form for well over a hundred years, after all, and the seeds of it were around for at least a hundred years prior to that. But is this the same as stale and outdated? Absolutely not. One has to go from the general to the specific in order to find innovation. When a form has been established, like with graphic design or some other discipline, the challenge becomes, not necessarily to smash or challenge the form, but to create something unique and beautiful within its limits. I can think of dozens of beautiful and unique realist novels, but I can think of only a handful that smash those conventions entirely and remain compelling. Experimental fiction has been scrupulously predictable for most of my lifetime. Without limits (and here I'm thinking of limits an artist imposes on him or herself; I am in no way advocating any externally imposed limitations) most artist, writers or otherwise, tend to produce work that is little more than a shallow, chaotic mess, eliciting neither strong emotional or aesthetic reactions from any but the most dedicated and politically-motivated readers (or so my experience has led me to believe; statements to the contrary are welcome). As for middle-class, I can't comment (although I read much of Ian Watt's book on the subject), being as I am largely uninterested in such matters, but even if it is true, so what? Why must art be "for" the wealthy or the bohemian subsets of our culture? For what reason are they so deserving? (The correct answer is: for no reason.) And as for being inappropriately named, I can only say that I see terms like "verisimilitude" and "psychological realism" tossed around as though they somehow mean "mimesis". Fiction is almost never genuinely mimetic, it's iconographic; it does not enact reality or the truth, it merely points to it. I think the writings of J. Hillis Miller are relevant here (I apologize for the length of the following quotation):

Literature exploits the extraordinary power of words to go on signifying in the absence of any phenomenal referent. [...] A literary work is not, as many people may assume, an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld, a hyper-reality. This new world is an irreplaceable addition to the already existing one.

[...]

The referentiality of the words a work uses, however, is never lost. It is inalienable. The reader can share in the work's world by way of this referentiality. Trollope's novels carry over into the imaginary place they create (or discover) all sorts of verifiable information about Victorian middle-class society and about human life ... [t]hose historical and "realistic" details however, are [...] transposed, transfigured. They are used as a means to transport the reader, magically, from the familiar, the verisimilar, to another, singular place that even the longest voyage in the "real world" will not reach. Reading is an incarnated as well as a spiritual act. [..] Though literature refers to the real world, however, and though reading is a material act, literature uses such physical embedment to create or reveal alternative realities. (On Literature, p. 16-20)

When one reads a work of realist fiction, it's important to understand that the prose is not attempting (nor indeed is even capable) of mimicking reality. Instead the prose points to something that we will recognize as a reality, and we fill in the blanks ourselves. We get hung up on superficial notions of what representation means; icons are just as much representations are are sculptures and portraits and photographs, they simply operate on a different level. Rather than thinking of a work of realist fiction as a model (a kind of representation) of the world or a specific human consciousness, I think it's more useful to think of such works as being similar to the geometric drawings of men and women pasted to the doors of public restrooms. They don't look much like real men and women (they aren't mimetic), but that's what we recognize them as. How close to "real" men and women they seem depends not just on how close we look at them, but on how willing we are to examine how we look at them. This could also dovetail quite nicely with effects like the uncanny valley, but that's something for some other post. The most important thing to take from this is that the "real" in "realism" comes from the reaction the words create in us, in what they force us to recognize, not in any innate mimetic quality they may possess. And yes, I did just compare A Week of This to the door sign of a public bathroom. Don't worry, it's all good.

To represent the verve and subtle inspiration with which Whitlock writes about this most un-inspiring of subject matter I'm tempted to quote the fuck books passage that's been making its way around various popular book blogs, but I don't think its particularly useful to quote something so promiscuous. Instead I'll leave you with a more considered, but no less damning, scene in which Ondaatje's opium-dream mess, In the Skin of a Lion, is soundly thrashed:

Her library book was the same one she'd been struggling with for almost a week, was there, and she settled in to try again. It was the longest she could remember giving a book. On her shelves the spines of books she'd already read were starting to look tempting, and there was a new one in at the library that sounded at least a little more promising—something about the end of the world. The book's biggest crime, as far as Manda was concerned, was not that it was boring—she'd yawned through enough trash to see that as inevitable, one time out of three—but that it made her feel stupid. It wasn't like the out-and-out, over-her-head stuff she knew instinctively to avoid. Those books seemed to have been created for a whole other species, and she resented their existence about as much as a dog resents birdseed: she didn't get them, she didn't see the point, but it wasn't for her anyway, so why worry about it? This book wasn't simply too smart for her, it was condescending, and for that there was no forgiveness. She would never allow anyone or anything to condescend to her. Ever. (p. 238)

A Week of This was my first selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge (please note that all the books for this year's challenge will be placed in the same category as those from last year's challenge). Next up (not for the challenge), is Alan Furst's Night Soldiers.

Posted by August on 08.03.08 at 9:19 PM | Comments (0)

Sweet Relief

The flood damage is nearly all cleaned up now (my parents gave me a dehumidifier as an early birthday present, and it now ranks as probably the second best birthday gift I've ever received) and several of my lost books have been replaced, so posting should resume regularly in the next day or so. The good news, I guess, is that I'm only two books behind, so it shouldn't be too much work to catch up.

I'm not generally "that sort of reader", but I am kind of disappointed that I will now have a crisp, new copy of Ulysses on my bookshelf instead of the well-used and much loved copy I had before. The old copy was as much a kind of trophy as it was a book that I read an enjoyed. Happily I don't fall into the books-as-trophies category too often (the only other two examples I can think of are Don Quixote and The Recognitions). You can go ahead and think less of me after this revelation, or not, as you see fit.

Posted by August on 07.28.08 at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)