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#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)

#43 - Homicide, by David Simon

I've wanted to read this book for more than a decade. I doubt there's many people left who don't know David Simon—or at least who don't know his work. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was adapted into the award winning NBC police procedural called Homicide: Life on the Street, and on which Simon worked as a writer and (I believe) eventually as a producer as well. It's also, in my opinion, the finest police procedural ever to air on North American television, and is my favourite television series of all time. This book was also mined quite heavily (by Simon himself) for HBO's The Wire, the second best police procedural in all of North American television. The premise for this book, the first work of non-fiction I've read in something like a year, is simply this: it is the chronicle of a single year, in this case 1988, of the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. I'm generally reluctant to read non-fiction for two reasons. First, I find that I'm not interested in the subject matter of most of the non-fiction that crosses my path (usually just whatever happens to be popular), and I'm not going to drag my ass through six hundred pages on a subject I don't give a damn about. Second, and this is actually more important, because it keeps me away from books on subjects I genuinely am interested in, I find that non-fiction authors tend to pay far less attention to issues of craft than I would like, and as such I tend to find reading non-fiction edifying but not particularly pleasurable. Obviously authors of non-fiction are limited in what facts they can present, but they are less limited in how they choose to present those facts, and what sort of prose style they use. Most of what I've read progresses in the same way. The book opens with a hook, some compelling and unexpected fact or mystery that makes us want to read more. The hook is immediately followed by an extensive backtracking through background data that has no direct bearing on the thing that made us want to read on, but will provide it with much-needed context. Then we get some kind of suspense, in which we are presented with dead-ends or just enough data to bring us to the cusp of understanding the hook, but no closer. And then there is The Big Reveal, in which all is explained, followed by a rather deflating afterword in which the author explains in five pages what you just read a whole book to discover, and thanks a bunch of people who helped him (or her). The prose is usually clear, simple, and written in that matter-of-fact, small-words-only style that tends to mark the features section of most large newspapers. In other words, most of the non-fiction I've read is really fucking dull. It's all research and no craft, no art, no presentation.

David Simon's book is different. For starters, he avoids all the obvious routes for creating dramatic tension, the mysteries inherent in much of the casework. It would be easy to build an exciting book around the cases, but that's really not the heart of what's going in the BPD homicide unit, and Simon is smart enough to see that. He also avoids using blunt, artificial methods to create suspense. In fact there's almost no suspense at all in the book. Simon will at times present us with a killer before we are presented with a victim. The reader also isn't left chasing a hook through the whole book. There is no hook, in that sense. Homicide is arranged chronologically, and with a few exceptions (mostly made, it seems, to keep the book from being bogged down by too much happening at once), events are presented in the order that they occur. The simple fact is that this book isn't about the glory and drama of police work. It's not about the heartbreak or the crime or even the social pressures that create such an enormous and ever-increasing murder rate for such a small city. All of those things are in the book to one degree or another, but ultimately Homicide is about the job, and the people who do it.

This is actually why I prefer NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street to HBO's The Wire. The latter is certainly more real. There's cursing and nudity and the crimes are seen more fully in the context of the city. Even the board, that wonderful administrative tool/bludgeon, looks more like the one the BPD homicide unit actually uses. But it also has more action and suspense, more gunfights and car chases. It's about the city and the various ways that institutions can fail and betray those they were established to serve. It is an epic work of social commentary. NBC's Homicide, despite playing fast and loose with the reality of Baltimore, is still about the job. The detectives begin as thinly-veiled stand-ins for the ones in David Simon's book, but gradually they grow and shift to become not only fine examples of what television can do with strong characters, but also various philosophical lenses through which to examine the nature of the job. The decontextualizing of the murders from the harshest aspects of the city itself serves as a reflection of the distance the detectives themselves have from the particulars of their daily grind. Just as only one or two cases ever truly touch a detective emotionally, only a handful of the cases in the show actually matter in its grand dramatic scheme. There is a difference, after all, between a murder and a killing.

David Simon manages to get the prose right as well. His writing is direct, uncomplicated without being simple-minded, and full of wit. This book, despite all the horror and outrage that it can elicit at times, can also be damned funny it its own slightly bent way. Just like the job. There is a magnificent section midway through the book on the role Miranda plays in interrogation. I won't quote from it, because it must be read in full to be truly appreciated, and it is quite long. I will quote (extensively) from the author's note near the end of the book, in which Simon discusses some of the ethical dilemmas he faced while researching the book.

Finally, a note on one last ethical dilemma. Over a period of time, familiarity and even friendship can sometimes tangle the relationship between a journalist and his subjects. Knowing that, I began my tenure in the homicide unit committed to a policy of complete nonintervention. If the phone in the main office rang and there was no one but me to answer, then it was not meant to be answered. But the detectives themselves helped to corrupt me. It began with phone messages, then grew to spelling corrections and proofreading. ("You're a writer. Take a look at this affidavit.") And I shared with the detectives a year's worth of fast-food runs, bar arguments and station house humor: Even for a trained observer, it was hard to remain aloof.

In retrospect, it's good that the year ended when it did, before one of the detectives provoked me to intervene in some truly harmful way. Once, in December, I found myself crossing that line—"going native," as journalists say. I was in the back seat of an unmarked car cruising Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanying Terry McLarney and Dave Brown in their search for a witness. At one point, the detectives suddenly pulled over to the curb to confront a woman who matched the description. She was walking with two young men. McLarney jumped from the car and grabbed one man, but Brown's trenchcoat belt became caught in the car's shoulder harness and he fell back into the driver's seat. "Go," he yelled at me, still struggling with the harness. "Help Terry."

Armed with my ball-point pen, I followed McLarney, who was struggling to get one man up against a parked car while the second eyed him angrily.

"DO HIM!" McLarney yelled at me, gesturing toward the second man.

And so, in a moment of weakness, a newspaper reporter shoved a citizen of his city against a parked car and performed one of the most pathetic and incompetent body searches on record. When I got down to the guy's ankles, I looked up over my shoulder at McLarney.

He was, of course, laughing hard.

This is typical of Simon's style, although he never has this much presence, or any presence at all, actually, outside of the afterword and the author's note. He's so removed from the narrative, in fact, that until he explains some of his techniques in the author's note, it's difficult to imagine just how a human being can be so completely removed from what he witnesses. This book truly is about the job, and the people who do it.

Homicide is a triumph, one of the finest and most interesting books I have ever read, and certainly the finest and most interesting non-fiction I have ever encountered. I feel close to this world now, in some way in sync with these men. It's an illusion created by Simon's exception skill as a journalist, of course, but all the same I feel sad that it's over.

Next is Wildlife, by Richard Ford.

Posted by August on 06.30.08 at 2:36 AM | Comments (0)

#42 - The Recognitions, by William Gaddis

I apologize for the lack of updates over the last five weeks or so, but I knew this book would require considerable amounts of both time and concentration. I considered taking notes, but I don't review in a professional capacity on this site, and nor do I wish to go into academic levels of detail. And really, whoa, this book has a lot of avenues to explore. It's essentially a satirical exploration of all kinds of fakes and forgeries, from the world of art, currency and religious artifacts to the most fundamental ways in which people live their lives. Ostensibly the main thread of the plot follows Wyatt Gwyon as he goes from being a talented artist working in an antiquated style to a master forger unable to separate himself from his fantasies about a past that never truly existed. I say "ostensibly" because the majority of the book has absolutely nothing to do with Wyatt. Most of the novel is actually concerned with the peripheral characters. In some ways this is good, because like Underworld, the quality of the prose is much higher when Gaddis is writing about those characters and their lives. It's frankly a shame that Gaddis can't (or won't) direct the same attention to Wyatt that he does to Reverend Gwyon or Mr. Pivner, because those are not only the sections of the greatest beauty, but they are funnier, more fun to read, and their satire is more effective. Here is Gaddis describing a sunrise:

The sun rose at seven, and its light caught the weathercock atop the church steeple, epiphanized in there above the town like a cock of fire risen from its own ashes. In the false dawn, the sun had prepared the sky for its appearance: but even now the horned moon hung unsuspecting at the earth's rim, before the blaze which rose behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.

In the daylight's embrace, objects reared to assert their separate identities, as the rising sun rescued villagers from the throbbing harmony of night, and laid the world out where they could get their hands on it to assail it once more on reasonable terms. Shapes recovered proper distance from one another, becoming distinct in color and extension, withdrawn and self-sufficient, each and entity because it was not, and with daylight could not be confused with, or be part of, anything else. Eyes were opened, things looked at, and, in short, propriety was restored. (p. 700)

I know of no way to describe this prose that will do it justice. It is ecstatic, overflowing with both the grace and innovation of a genuine master. If all nine hundred and fifty-six pages had been as beautiful I would have sailed through this book in the kind of state many believe can only be achieved via massive doses of recreational chemicals or sex with super-models, or both at once. Maybe ten percent of the book is like this. The rest of it is inane pseudo-bohemian dialogue overheard at cocktail parties. I'm not exaggerating by very much. At one point Gaddis gives us nearly a hundred and twenty consecutive pages of cocktail parties, and I'm not even certain that's the longest such section. It's almost as though Gaddis knows of no other way to bring more than three people together in a room at one time. The dialogue is fragmentary, shifting from one speaker or location to another without giving any indication of having done so. Sentences are left unfinished, all predicate with no subject. Questions are asked five, six times before they are (unsatisfactorily) answered or given up on, and half the speakers can't decide if they want to use slang or quote from The Golden Bough.

I think that part of the problem for me, as far as enjoying the book, was that most of the thematic heavy lifting is done at these cocktail parties. It's through all of these overheard and half-understood remarks that we realize how little in the book is authentic, how selfish and ignorant and vicious are even the best of these characters. And some of them (quite a few of them, actually) are demonstrably insane. In a recent interview, Charles Foran said this of Michel Hollouebecq: "I just sensed a smart and, yes, prescient, provocateur who has expelled his bile by page fifty or so—with another 300 pages left." I feel much the same way about Gaddis and this book, except that there were more like six hundred pages left by the time Gaddis made the switch from razor-sharp satire to the undignified thumping of a long-deceased horse. Not even his spectacular thrashing of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (at one point referred to as How to Procure for Friends and the Vanquishing of Everybody by a Spanish friar possessing only a passing familiarity with English) could save me from frustration at the endless unnecessary repetition.

I almost wish I could say that I hated the book, but I didn't. While it truly had many of the same problems as DeLillo's Underworld (too much focus on secondary and tertiary characters, inconsistent quality of the prose, and far longer than it needed to be), it was ultimately not the messy failure that book was. There were so many hidden pleasures and serendipities and moments of genuine revelation and genius scattered throughout the book that I doubt I could call it anything less than a masterpiece—but with the caveat that it is a deeply flawed masterpiece, and not to be engaged with lightly or by the faint of heart.

Next is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon.

Posted by August on 06.22.08 at 8:38 PM | Comments (0)

Happy Bloomsday!

The title of this post says it all, really. So, happy Bloomsday! Get out there and forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race!

Posted by August on 06.16.08 at 1:24 PM | Comments (0)

Fiery First Fiction and the Second Canadian Book Challenge

Last month I entered a contest at Open Book Toronto; they were giving away, as part of the Literary Press Group's Fiery First Fiction campaign, seven books a week (from a pool of fourteen) . I entered and won the first week's draw, and today my seven books arrived. Hooray! I received the following books:

A Week of This, by Nathan Whitlock

Shape of Things to Come, by Richard Lemm

Stunt, by Claudia Dey

Cricket in a Fist, by Naomi K. Lewis

Fly on the Wall, by Jason Brink with illustrations by Jim Westergard

Squishy, by Arjun Basu

The Jealousy Bone, by Julia Paul

Nathan Whitlock's novel was the only book I'd heard of before the contest (I follow his blog), and I've been looking forward to reading it for some time, but now that I've had a chance to look over the others I can say that I definitely now have more than just A Week of This to look forward to.

And speaking of things to look forward to! Now that we are in the final month of The Canadian Book Challenge, John Mutford has announced a second challenge. I haven't won any of the prizes from this challenge (there's still the big prize coming up, but prizes aren't really the point; the challenge got me scouring the local book stores for authors and titles I hadn't heard of), but I'm looking forward to this second one all the same. The books I plan on reading will be as scattershot as before, but in addition to those I received today, I will be drawing from the following for my selections:

Our Lady of the Lost and Found, by Diane Schoemperlen

Exotic Dancers, by Gerald Lynch

Naked, by Lisa Moore

The Tracey Fragments, by Maureen Medved

Red Plaid Skirt, by Diane Shoemperlen

Losing It, by Alan Cumyn

In a Glass House, by Nino Ricci

On Equilibrium, by John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin, by John Ralston Saul

Here's hoping I have as much fun with this challenge as I did with the last one!

Posted by August on 06.07.08 at 3:13 AM | Comments (1)

First Person Narrative and the Problem of Memory

Often many of the most important choices a writer can make about a work of fiction are unconscious ones; the decision to use first or third person narration can seem more like intuition than anything else. There are times when I agonize over it, particularly when I'm heavily invested in the raw material (if I'm writing in the semi-autobiographical mode, for example). It's not enough that it "feel right"; the choices I make also have to work with whatever point I'm trying to make, with whatever themes I've (consciously) chosen to include. For A Temporary Life, my novel-in-progress, one of the themes—or maybe it's more accurate to say "problems"—I'm working with is that of memory.

Using the first person form of narration came most naturally, but I'm not satisfied with how most writers present dialogue in first person narratives. Let me give you an example from a book I actually quite like, Michael Helm's The Projectionist:

She stands and collects our plates, though I haven't finished yet, takes them to the kitchen counter and returns.

"What's the biggest secret you've kept?" she asks.

"This won't be easy, will it?"

"You've never asked me why I didn't come back home all those years."

"Some people don't. It's not that unusual."

Do you see anything wrong with that passage? Probably not, but I do. Not in terms of Helm's novel, of course, but in terms of my own. How can I create a narrator with an untrustworthy memory and allow him to quote dialogue with such precision? The answer, of course, is that I can't. How many people do you know who can remember conversations with that kind of accuracy? I can do it for moments of extreme emotional intensity, but otherwise I can't recount a conversation that I had an hour ago, never mind years or months or weeks ago. I make exceptions for this "problem" in works of what I think of as "Dear Reader" or "Gentle Reader" fiction, so named for the somewhat antiquated convention of the narrator (not necessarily the author) directly addressing the reader and thereby explicitly indicating an awareness of the novel as a specifically written construction, rather than a representation of memory or an oral retelling of events.

It would be easy to say that I'm frustrated with or dislike or am in some way in conflict with the conventions of realist fiction. Nothing could be further from the truth; all form of fiction have their conventions and great art can be made working both within and against those conventions. I quite enjoyed the Michael Helm novel that I quoted from above, and though it sticks rather rigorously to the conventions of the realist novel, it's also elegant, inventive, and challenging. It's a very strong work of fiction.

In the instance of A Temporary Life I've come to the conclusion that using the standard realist presentation of dialogue isn't the right choice; instead one of the things I've done is stripped nearly all the dialogue from the piece, and I'm even contemplating removing all the quotation marks and using long dashes like William Gaddis or James Joyce or any number of authors you could name. When (note the optimism) my novel finds a publisher I have no doubt that it will be called experimental (should it even receive any attention), though that's not at all my intention. As an artist I don't feel like I'm obliged to reinvent the wheel (or the novel, as it were), nor even to work outside of the conventions of whatever genre I'm working in (I would love to write some urban fantasy or science fiction some day). What I feel it's most important for me to do is make the choices that are most appropriate for what I'm trying to say with (or in) any particular work of fiction. If it means abandoning traditional forms of dialogue in one piece, or being relentlessly true to convention in another, then so be it; the only yard-stick I use is whether or not it's appropriate to the spirit of the work.

Posted by August on 05.26.08 at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)

From Somebody Else's List

Jason Kottke recently posted a link to a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, foreword by Peter Ackroyd and Edited by Peter Boxall. (I've used Jason's referral code, as I'm not a member of Amazon's program, and somebody should get the bump, should you decide to buy the book from that link.) Posting about a book like this is worthless, really, unless you've managed to take a look at the list, and so here it is (or so I've been given to understand). The list is composed entirely of fiction, and by that they mean prose fiction so nobody has to worry about struggling through Shakespeare or Milton (why Shakespeare should be much of a struggle is beyond me, but plenty of folks seem intimidated). It's also pretty heavily biased in favour of books published after 1900, and we could debate forever why some books were chosen and some were not. Why choose Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, an excellent book, certainly, but not the follow-up Still Life, the only work of literature other than Othello to reduce me to tears? Why so much Faulkner, but no Light in August? The list seems compiled rather than considered, but I suppose that's the way of lists. And even though this list is presented with less behind it than, say, Harold Bloom's The Western Cannon, here's what I've read from it (note that I've included The Recognitions, because I'm reading it now, and that I have excluded those works that I have not read in full):

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
The Double, by José Saramago
Fury, by Salman Rushdie
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields
Regeneration, by Pat Barker
Possession, by A.S. Byatt
Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, by Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams
The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson
Watchmen, by Alan Moore & David Gibbons
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
The Public Burning, by Robert Coover
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
V., by Thomas Pynchon
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Collector, by John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
The Bell, by Iris Murdoch
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse
Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
Ulysses, by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll
Silas Marner, by George Eliot
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Émile; or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe
Love in Excess, by Eliza Haywood
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Okay, I'll be honest, I just like posting lists every so often, and I feel like I'm due. And 107 books, from a list like this one, really isn't so bad, especially considering I was twenty years old before I started reading much beyond spy novels and bad fantasy.

Posted by August on 05.13.08 at 1:18 PM | Comments (0)

#40 - The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman

I actually finished reading this on Thursday night (this being Saturday afternoon), but my allergies were so severe that I could barely think, let alone write a coherent blog post. Likewise last night after work. The allergies are with me still, but they have cleared sufficiently that I can now function more or less at my previous level, paltry and insufficient though that may be. The Amber Spyglass was not quite what the first two books were. It didn't have the sense of fun, adventure and wonder of The Golden Compass, nor was there the sense of transition of The Subtle Knife. This was a book almost exclusively of conflict and self-discovery. It's also a book of considerable controversy, probably more so than the other two. One of the big points of contention is the so-called "sex scene" near the end of the book. The two underage children do not actually have sex, though I can see how it would seem that way to folks who see sex in any aggressive, romantically fueled contact between a male and a female. There certainly is such contact, but any reader who paid attention to what happened before and after the contact will realize that neither Will nor Lyra (I hope I haven't spoiled anything for any of you) simply aren't at that point. They are still young, and innocent, and so much full of joy and terror at this new notion of love and physical intimacy that they are barely able to kiss and hold hands. You can forget about them tearing off their clothes to get at the interesting bits underneath. It wouldn't occur to them, and if it did, it would scare the bujeesus out of them. People need to grow up and stop looking for any excuse to vilify folks they don't agree with. Speaking of vilifying folks they don't agree with, the other major point of controversy is Pullman's apparently anti-Christian and more specifically, anti-Roman Catholic point of view. I'm not entirely certain how to present Pullman's point of view, except to say that it's not really the religion that he vilifies. For Pullman, it all comes down to people. The Church has power in Lyra's world, and so it attracts the sort of people who want power for its own sake, and to Pullman's mind (and here I tend to agree with him), those people tend to be pretty bad people. Pullman obviously disagrees with the message, but he doesn't present the institution as malevolent; it's the people who are malevolent (and the Metatron, who was once a man—even God, or the Authority, who makes a brief appearance, is not the villain other characters have presented him as), and the reason to reject the church is not because the institution is evil, but because it forces people to give up human interaction with the world. It invalidates the human experience. And that's really the choice that Dr. Malone tempts Will and Lyra with (just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in Eden). Will they meet the world afraid of themselves, disconnected from their souls because of what they've been told by some nameless, faceless authority, or will they greet the world and each other as human beings, fully aware of their weaknesses but with all of themselves? It's not much of a choice, really, and I can see how even today some people would be afraid of it. I think it's from that fear that many people condemn Pullman's trilogy.

Even though I just finished reading a series of three books, they were all bound together in a single volume, and that made it seem in some ways like a kind of never-ending book (close to a thousand pages, folks!), so now I'm going to read to something quick and light before moving on to the next big thing. So, next is You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming.

Posted by August on 05.10.08 at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)

#39 - The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman

The shortest of the three novels in the His Dark Materials series, The Subtle Knife feels very much like a transitional work. At least one new major character is introduced (Will), and a new magical object (for which the book is named), but otherwise very little seems to have happened as far as Lyra's adventure to find her father is concerned. The book does feel considerably more mature, dealing more frankly with matters of sexual maturity and issues of moral authority (and not coming down entirely against moral authority; Pullman rather sensibly comes down only against arbitrary moral authority). I can't say that I had as much fun reading this one as I did The Golden Compass, but I now have more respect for Pullman's ability to pull together a functioning set set of rules for world-building. Lyra's world seemed rather skimpy in the first volume, but pulls together nicely here.

Next: The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 05.06.08 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

#38 - The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman

I had originally planned to read The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell for book number thirty-eight, a book that had come to me along with a dozen or so others in a package from my father (whose taste in historical fiction is quite good; he steered me towards Patrick O'Brian, after all), and I had even announced that fact on this blog, but I got a hundred pages in only to learn that it was the second book in a series, and that while I had been sent the third book, I had not been sent the first. I am not the sort of person who will read a series out of order, so I switched to The Golden Compass instead, and here we are. For those not in the know (although how could you not be, given that it was recently adapted into a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig—a fact the enormous gold sticker on the cover demands I recognize), this is the first book in a trilogy known as His Dark Materials, a title appropriately lifted from Paradise Lost. The trilogy has a reputation for being anti-religous, or at least anti-Christian, and I can certainly see that in The Golden Compass, where the enemy is the well-meaning but cruel and authoritarian Church.

It's marketed as a children's book, but I prefer to think of it as an adventure story, because while it certainly feels like children are the target audience, there is a tremendous amount of bloody and violent death and a good deal of language—mostly in the form of scientific terminology, although not always—that would probably be over the heads of most junior-high aged kids, and probably would have been over my head when I was that age (I had an unusually high vocabulary at that age, though I seem to have let it plateau). It is rollicking good fun, though, and seems to have an intellectual depth that's not present in either the Harry Potter or Narnia books. I would have loved them at that age, and I'm enjoying them now.

Next is The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 05.03.08 at 2:10 AM | Comments (0)

#37 - A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor

I can't remember anymore if I'd read some of these stories prior to this week, or if I'd simply heard so much about them that it only seems like I had. I was interested in reading this book because O'Connor had a reputation for being controversial, and also for being somewhat forgotten, although I don't pretend to know how true that last is. I only know that finding even this one volume of her work was pretty damned hard, and I had to look for quite some time. (I may not have mentioned this before, but I don't buy books online unless it's absolutely necessary; even when buying used or remaindered, I prefer to give my money to someone in the neighbourhood.)

I have no difficulty seeing how her stories could be seen as controversial back in 1948. They address head on issues of race and religion; they tackle a decaying, morally bankrupt American South in ways that no doubt made her contemporaries very uncomfortable. Reading these stories is an uncomfortable experience for me a half-century later, and not just because, like most people in this day and age, I tend to flinch when I see the word "nigger" in print. O'Connor's stories do display the moments of grace that she is famous for, but they display them only after she has raked each of us (and her characters, of course) over the coals for our ignorance, for not thinking we have ignorance or prejudice in us, for our justifications and our pride. Reading these stories would make even the most egalitarian of us wonder if maybe we aren't as open-minded and fair as we like to think we are. I found myself asking the question, if I had been born, rural soul that I am, in the days of my grandfather's generation, would I be the same man I am today, or would I be like the people in O'Connor's stories? My grandfather was not like them, and that gives me hope, but that's not the same as knowing.

If you're the sort of reader who doesn't think that writers should moralize, or don't believe that literature can or should possess any sort of moral authority, then I won't recommend this book to you. I'm not always sure about what I believe. What is right at one moment doesn't always seem right at the next, and I suppose that's the nature of moral inquiry in the world we live in, but that doesn't stop me from believing that moral inquiry still has a place in art, and that making us question ourselves is not only a kind of moral authority, but a necessary one. I don't think that literature should instruct us in what to believe (and O'Connor had enough skill with irony that she was never quite didactic), but it should force us to do our best to understand why we believe what we believe. A Good Man is Hard to Find will do that for you.

Next: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman.

Posted by August on 04.26.08 at 9:12 PM | Comments (0)

#36 - The Projectionist, by Michael Helm

This is a bittersweet moment for me. Well, not this exact moment. More like three hours ago, when I finished reading the book. That was a bittersweet moment. You see, Michael Helm has only written two novels. On the one hand, I just finished reading a second spectacular novel by Michael Helm; on the other hand, there are no more Michael Helm novels left for me to read. I can guarantee you, that should I compile a list at the end of this year as I did at the end of last year, a list describing those books that I enjoyed reading the most in that year, both of Helm's novels would be on it. In fact, I think it's safe to declare Helm my favourite living Canadian author, supplanting the still wonderful Sheila Heti. Actually, come to think of it, all three of my favourite (living) Canadian writers of prose fiction have only two books to their name (Helm, Heti, and André Alexis*).

Okay, okay, the book itself. The Projectionist was actually Helm's first novel, and while I regret reading them out of order, it was actually In the Place of Last Things that was first recommended to me, so I felt obligated to try that one out first. Helm's prose style is already fully developed, as though somewhere there are a dozen practice novels that were discarded before he arrived at this level of craft. Though his sentences have a slower, more rural pace to them, Helm pays attention to word choice and syntax and all the wonderful mechanics of language in much the same way as J.M. Villaverde (whose work, it now occurs to me, I have already compared to Helm's on this site). Every word and sentence seems to be in the right place at the right time, performing the right tasks. Recently, Steven Beattie commented on what he perceives as a disconnect between technique and subject matter in Canadian fiction:

The problem with all these novels (and the above certainly does not constitute an exhaustive list) is that the form and the content of the works seem extricable, when they should not be. As Mark Schorer writes in his seminal essay, "Technique as Discovery": "The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly its essence."

Readers who are looking for writing that recognizes the essential coherence of subject and technique, of form and content, would be advised to steer clear of the above-mentioned novels [...]

I disgree on some of his examples (Douglas Coupland doing much of anything to worthwhile effect is news to me, and I felt no disengagement at all between the form and content of Shields' The Stone Diaries—quite the opposite, actually—and I'll grant him Leon Rooke with no argument) but the point itself is well made. Too often Canadian writers focus on either honing their prose or their plot, as though an excess of attention to one will compensate for lack of it in the other. I also admit that I can be kept interested in a bad plot if the sentences are good enough, but poorly written prose will often leave me cold to an otherwise excellent plot. I suppose the point I'm trying to get at is that Helm doesn't suffer from this problem. Style and substance are here married as equals, and it was no shotgun wedding. Helm does for the Canadian northwest what Faulkner and others have done for the American south. He's given rural life a language and dignity of its own, in a way that not even Margaret Laurence did, although she came damned close (I like to think of her as the Grand Old Dame of Canadian letters, being much more deserving than Iron Maggie). My only real complaint is that I didn't get to do it first.

The preoccupation with memory that I noted about In the Place of Last Things is present in this novel, although in a less developed form. The narrator of this novel, a man of questionable reputation in his home town, is also a kind of rough-draft for Russ Littlebury, though I somehow doubt either character would see themselves as particularly similar. If there is any problem with this book, it only emerges when looking at it side by side with his other novel, and even then, it's not a problem with this book so much as it is with the other (which was actually better). That problem, which I have hinted at, is that the characters are too similar, and certain themes and plot elements repeat themselves perhaps too vigorously. It's a small thing, when placed against how just flat-out good both books were. I'm gushing, seriously.

Next: A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor.

*It came to my attention immediately after posting this review that André Alexis published a second novel (his third book of fiction) yesterday. Hooray!

Posted by August on 04.24.08 at 2:41 AM | Comments (0)

#35 - Courage My Love, by Sarah Dearing

What is it with French flaps these days? I hate the goddamn things. Sure, I suppose they look pretty and expensive, but books saddled with them almost always have tighter bindings, and that makes them more difficult to hold open, and all that extra weight near the outside edge of the book means that they can flop closed on you at exactly the wrong time. They are just a pain in the ass. I know, I know, Ed had told us that we shouldn't talk about the cover when we review a book, that treating the thing like an artifact is out of bounds. Ed is wrong (or full of shit, depending on how much he's irritated you on any given day). In an ideal world—and in the academic world as well, which is far from ideal—we talk about "texts" rather than "works" or "books". Texts are these mystical abstract things that enter our minds directly, free from encumbrances like paper or ink or the tightness of the binding or that nagging pain we get from sitting too long. The problem is, that when one is assessing the quality of a thing rather than, say, trying to explain why it conforms to neo-Marxist ideology, the way we interact with that thing matters. The conditions matter, if only because we need to understand if something other than the thing (the book!) is affecting our judgement. I don't care how good it is, if a book is printed in such a way that it's always flopping closed or the type runs into the binding or whatever, I'm going to get pissed off at the book and that's going to affect what I say about it. Ed tends to miss details like that (but then, any long-time listener to The Bat Segundo Show will know that there's lots that Ed misses, like when an author is trying to explain—if only through an increasingly aggressive tone of voice—how asking the same questions six different ways won't change their answer, whether Ed agrees or not, and would he please change the fucking subject already). Anyway, I'm sick of French flaps.

I bought this book because it takes place in Kensington Market, a neighbourhood that's about a ten minute walk from my apartment. A woman named Phillipa Maria Donahue, after leaving her home of Cincinnati for her asshole husband, having an abortion and becoming a housewife, decides that the comforts of Yorkville are too constricting (oh that we could all have such problems), and figures that just disappearing into the sloppy mess of the Market is an ideal escape, a way to experience a genuine life, genuinely lived. Or something. She changes her name to Nova Philip, rents a cheap room, gets some new clothes, and befriends a charming but mostly harmless local troublemaker (who is just as big an asshole as her husband, but who is a different kind of asshole, so she likes him) named Tommy Gunn. What's up with all the ridiculous character names I've been coming across lately? It's like a group of middle-aged Wisconsin housewives made a list of potential gangsta-rap pseudonyms and started handing it out to writers. It's embarrassing.

Dearing is said to live in, or at least around, the Market, so I find it curious that the scenes set in Yorkville ring more true. Kensington is painted as a dangerous, almost feral place at times, particularly at night, and that just hasn't been my experience of it. Granted it's not the safest place in the city after dark, but it's not the crazed wilderness of junkies and muggers that it's made out to be. Perhaps in the intervening years (the novel is set in 1999) gentrification has set in, but I doubt it has done so to that degree. I was pleased that I recognized the shops and divisions that "Nova" eventually wanders into and describes, including Courage My Love, the store for which the novel is named (although given where Dearing's protagonist rents her room and her reasons for being in the Market to begin with I think Asylum might have been a more appropriate title, though certainly a less appealing one). I even use similar names for the streets (Fish Street, Clothes Avenue, Vegetable Avenue).

I'm afraid to say that, though I enjoyed the book, I didn't really like any of the characters. Phillipa/Nova remains a tourist at the end of the novel, despite her assertion otherwise, and her sense of entitlement doesn't seem to have been stolen from her, despite an act of violence in the closing pages. Her husband is an asshole, and quite inconsistent at times. He doesn't have a personality so much as he's just repeatedly positioned in such a way that he irritates or offends Phillipa/Nova. We aren't meant to like him, but he winds up being a generic roadblock instead of a real human being. Tommy Gunn is all about the tough love, as much a caricature as the husband (Brendan? Dan? was that his name?), just more useful to the protagonist. I almost wish I didn't enjoy the book, because then I could feel my irritation with its shortcomings is more justified. Maybe ambivalence is a good thing for a book to create in the mind of the reader, I don't know.

Next: The Projectionist, by Michael Helm.

Posted by August on 04.21.08 at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Most of the writers I know who are either barely published (like myself) or as yet entirely unpublished live in mortal terror of two possibilities. First, that no-one out there will like their work and their masterpiece will never find the home it deserves, and second, that their work isn't any good at all and their work will never find a home at all. I alternate between one fear and the other with occasional confident bursts that border on arrogance. As I see things at the moment, there are two options open. We can persevere, if only slowly like myself, and continue to send our typescripts* to journals and agents and publishers. The other option is to self-publish. I respect this option, but rarely will I support it with my dollars. It's not that I believe there is no such thing as a good self-published book, or that there are no decent writers self-publishing. I'm sure there are many. What I do know is I will only be able to read so many books in my life, and I choose those with care according to a set of standards that, while perhaps not unique, are still my own. One is that the book must have first passed through the gauntlet of a professional editor's red pen. Publishing is a business, and editors are human beings, so obviously their opinions are fallible and their motives for selecting a book not always purely artistic or aesthetic. Commerce enters in. But still, somebody else out there, someone with experience and judgement, someone other than the the author him or herself, has declared that not only is the book worth their time, but they feel it is worth mine as well, and are willing lay down the cost of printing to back up that opinion. It is imperfect at best, but still it is something.

Despite how badly and (it seems recently) how often the system can fail, it pains me to see some self-published authors consumed by their anger. It's hard work to self-publish. Writers must not only be writers, they must be businessmen and designers and promoters and salesmen.** It's also hard, and I know this from experience, to have your work rejected. The rejections are not personal, but writers often have difficulty separating themselves from their work. Having a story or a poem or a novel rejected, especially if it happens repeatedly, can feel very much like the editors are rejecting you personally. It can be disheartening. Trust me, I understand.

To cope, I think writers must consider two things. First, that agents and editors are human beings doing a job. Unless you've done something incredibly rude or stupid to piss them off, they aren't out to get you, and most likely have no opinion of you personally at all. In fact, even if you did do something rude or stupid, they probably still aren't out to get you. You just won't be able to have any useful dealings with them. After all, while there are certainly assholes out there, most people won't act liked jerks until you give them a reason to. Not everyone's tastes are the same, and not everyone will enjoy your work. Get over it, and look for an agent or an editor who does, and be sure to do it politely. Second, and this is the moment we all live in fear of, a writer must consider that maybe his work just isn't good enough. I know that it's fashionable to behave as though we are all in this together, as though taste is all that varies and all writers are created equal. It simply isn't so. There is some horrible writing out there, and you might be one of the folks shopping it around. I might be one of them too. I can't tell you how many times, with panic in my heart, I've looked at my own work—including work that's already been published—and asked myself, "what was I thinking? Who would read this crap?" We can't all be William Faulkner or Vladimir Nabokov or Virginia Woolf or Carol Shields or whomever it is we admire. When confronting this possibility, I do not suggest giving up. Let me say that again: do not give up. Instead, get better. Read more, write more, do another draft. Be merciless in your rewriting and your editing. Also remember that getting better doesn't happen overnight. It could take a year, or two years, or ten years. It could take even longer. I won't pretend that it isn't demoralizing, but it's not useful to either your work or your emotional well-being to take it as a personal affront.

Which brings me to Cliff Burns. I first heard of him three days ago, when Dave posted about him. Mr. Burns has a talent for rage and vitriol that is truly astonishing, and he directs it all at editors and publishers, seems to take every rejection personally. You can read some of his complaints here. When folks suggest that his responses are extreme, he has replied the following (you can find it in the comments at that last link): "My posts are not the aggrieved rantings of a petulant author, they are based on experiences I've outlined, in depth, in an essay called "Solace of Fortitude" (Google it, you'll find it)." I did search for the essay, and found it here. The story he tells is not so extraordinary, not so different from hundreds I've heard and read about, some of those stories being about the early years of now successful authors. Mr. Burns would have us think the rejections are unwarranted, however, particularly because of experiences like the one outlined here. That is indeed a ridiculous thing to have happen, but as I said before, editors are human and sometimes the currents of commerce prevail. He challenges us to download his novel, read the first ten pages or so, and see for ourselves if he should have a home with a major publisher. I did just that (you can find the novel, So Dark the Night—a good title by the way—here). I read the first twelve pages, in fact. Were I an editor, I would have rejected this novel as well. I may not have even finished the first ten pages. The prose is juvenile, with a cliché—either a phrase or an image—not only on every page, but in nearly every paragraph. His characters have names that would seem ridiculous in a parody of a genre novel, never mind in the real thing. I would not only refuse to recommend So Dark the Night to others, I will not even finish reading it. Mr. Burns' novel is simply not very good.

But Mr. Burns ought not give up. His blog is exactly as Dave described it, "entertaining and smart". He is not without talent; it simply does not show in So Dark the Night. Mr. Burns does not need to quit, he needs to get better. Unfortunately it may be too late. He has taken his rejection notices as assaults on his worth as a human being, and has responded by insulting editors and publishers directly, liberally employing words like "fuck" and "cunt". I mentioned above that doing something rude or stupid is a good way to ruin your already slim chances at publication for reasons that have nothing to do with the merit of your work. Mr. Burns has done something that is both rude and stupid at the same time. I'm sure that Mr. Burns is a fine human being; I have no doubt that were we to sit down over a cup of coffee that we would get along. The fact that I don't think very highly of his novel does not mean that I don't think very highly of him. I don't know him, and so I have no real opinion about him as a human being to speak of. I understand that twenty-five years is a long time to struggle. I understand the sense of helplessness, and the sense of hopelessness. I have had more than my share of those two feelings (though I have not written about them here), and I am not without sympathy for Mr. Burns. If he thinks he can find an audience in self-publishing, then I wish him all the best, but it doesn't stop me from thinking that his anger is misplaced. We all live with the same fears about how our work my be accepted, we all have the same trouble separating ourselves from the work we have put so much of our sweat and emotional energy into. The publishing industry is no doubt flawed, but name-calling and such is unproductive, unprofessional, and downright childish.

*I hate to be the one to break the news, but manuscripts are so-called because they are written by hand. When you send a publisher or whomever a type-written document, it is a typescript. You may not share or be interested in my linguistic pet-peeves, but I reserve the right to kvetch on my own blog, and will happily allow you to do the same on yours.

**I know that I use masculine forms most of the time, but I find consistency preferable to alternating between genders, and I despise the vague and grotesque grammatical constructions necessary to make all things gender-neutral.

Posted by August on 04.20.08 at 5:27 PM | Comments (0)

On Writing

I'm a writer. People know this about me, though I haven't published very much, and nothing outside of this blog for a while now. It's not entirely for lack of trying, although that is certainly part of it. The reason I'm not trying to get published right now is because I have, for the time being, given up on short fiction and am trying my hand at a novel. After two years of work, I'm on chapter three. From that statement you can learn that I've successfully passed the major "first chapter" hurdle, and that my biggest problem is maintaining momentum. Thank God I've only planned on a total of ten chapters. Even when my momentum is at its best I work quite slowly.

I don't bring this up because I want congratulations or criticism. I bring this up because I want to start posting about the process, about the act of writing, the preparation and the decision making. I bring my novel up because writing about the process may appear suspect when one has published very little, and I thought it would be a good idea to let you folks know where I'm coming from in my observations and ruminations. Who knows? It may help me with my own work, with the momentum, to make my thinking so public. It certainly couldn't hurt. I won't be keeping a running word count or anything like that, as I write all my first drafts in long-hand, nor will I discuss the specifics of plot or character. I'm not interested in opening a discussion about my novel-in-progress. I want to talk about writing. Think of it like this: just as I'd rather ask an author a question like "why did you choose the stream of consciousness form instead of a standard 'realist' form?" than "where do you get your ideas from?", I'd also rather talk about why I chose to use an elaborate syntax than where I got the idea to make my protagonist's second cousin a circus clown (that's not actually in my book, it's just an example). I will post when I have passed major(ish) milestones, like completing a chapter or a complete draft or something, but otherwise I will write about more abstract concerns. And hopefully with more clarity and organization than displayed in this post. Oh, I will tell you that the working title for my novel is A Temporary Life, although that is subject to change once the project is finished.

Posted by August on 04.20.08 at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)

#34 - Blue Ridge, by T.R. Pearson

I purchased this book some while back because Pearson was described on the back cover as being neo-Faulknerian. This is a term I'd never heard before, but Faulkner is among my favourite authors, is probably my favourite American author. Neo-Faulknerian? How could you go wrong? As it turns out, you can't, at least not if buying and reading a copy of Blue Ridge was the course of action you were contemplating. Going wrong, I suppose, would involve not doing those things. Pearson's prose does not possess the same biblical slowness as Faulkner's, but his South is very obviously the same South Faulkner wrote about. They also share the same dry, considered wit, often showing itself to great effect when the plot would seem to suggest other directions.

Blue Ridge is actually possessed of two plots that meet only briefly and somewhat superficially in the final pages. Two cousins, Ray and Paul Tatum, deputy sheriff and actuary respectively, both attempt to navigate murders and their consequences, Ray in Hogarth, Virginia, and Paul in New York City. Ray's tale is simple and detective-like with the sort of suppressed fallout that can only really exist in the American South (a place so mythical that it deserves its own set of capital letters). I liked Ray and the unexpectedly erratic Kit Carson (no relation), and even the colourful collection of yokels and suitably provincial law enforcement personnel. Paul's story likewise had its own set of colourful city-dwellers, but we had Paul himself as the narrator and so only his unattached, slightly superior fish-out-of-water observations to go on. Virtually no-one in his story was likable, not even Paul himself and especially not the two police detectives (who seemed to be doing their best Keystone Cops impressions), except of course for the polite but genuinely terrifying gangster Giles, who was incredibly charismatic.

There's two other T.R. Pearson books floating around my apartment someplace, and expect to see them later in the year, as I doubt that I can keep my hands off of them for very long. Next is Courage My Love, by Sarah Dearing.

Posted by August on 04.20.08 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

#33 - The Line Painter, by Claire Cameron

My first thought upon finishing this book, and I hate that it came to me in these words, was "what a good little book." Right away I regretted the phrase; it appears, even to me, as a patronizing remark of the damning-with-faint-praise variety, and that's not at all what I intend to do. After all, as I said to a friend over coffee this afternoon, I would most certainly read another book by Claire Cameron, based solely on the experience I had reading The Line Painter. It was, after all, a good book. It had interesting characters that I could imagine walking the streets out there somewhere, it had an excellent plot that was, as advertised, a genuinely fresh take on a premise that has been worked over by authors and film makers literally for generations. It was decently paced and hit all the right emotional notes. It was suspenseful, heartbreaking, funny and touching at all the right moments. There was something just not quite right about it, something that seemed off, if only by a semitone (that analogy may not make any sense; I don't really know much about music). It took me a while to identify what that thing was: the tone.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I am extra-sensitive when it comes to books set in the north, particularly when they are set so close to where I'm actually from (the novel takes place mostly on the highway between Hearst and Kapuskasing; I'm from a few hundred kilometers northwest of there, and have been through both communities more times than I can recall), and particularly when they are written by southerners. My noticing this at all may have simply been a case of my being too much on the lookout for misrepresentations. Northern Ontario (or more accurately, Northwestern Ontario) has the potential to be rendered in much the same way as some of the more superficial representations of the rural American south, but is equally complex in its own unique way. Cameron did a pretty good job with Hearst. It certainly fits my experience of the town, such that it is. I have zero complaints with her rendering of northern people or attitudes. It's plain that she did her research; there are a few moments when her Torontonian narrator makes erroneous assumptions or presents false information, but one of the Hearst locals always corrects her eventually. That actually brought a smile to my face.

Right, the tone. The story, the details of which I will not divulge (as I mentioned above, suspense is a big part of this book, and I would hate to spoil that pleasure for those who have not yet read it), felt like it needed a slightly muted, almost-but-not-quite gothic tone. More rural gravitas, I guess. Even though some scenes took place in Toronto, it's very much a rural novel, but it had the casual, bustling tone of an urban novel. Now, in some ways it's altogether appropriate that the novel have an urban tone; Carrie, the narrator and protagonist, is from Toronto and seems to have ventured not very far from that city for the bulk of her life. In my experience there is something about people from Toronto when they encounter the genuinely rural parts of the country. They seem to shift from being regular folks to being the sort of folks who look at everything with an attitude that says Toronto is how real people live. Carrie's tone, and therefore the tone of the whole book, had that in spades when nothing suspenseful was going on, and it took me out of the story a bit, made me more aware that I was reading a book. A good book, mind you, but still I prefer to read without that awareness at the front of my consciousness. I say again that I may have only noticed or felt this or even been bothered by it at all simply because I was already on the lookout for things that didn't ring true. I've made more of the issue than I meant to; I really did enjoy the book, and highly recommend that you read it. In fact, I've already loaned my copy out to at least one interested party.

Before I end I should probably also say that I loved the cover, despite the fact that the book had French flaps and a deckle edge, both of which I despise. Also, if you missed the link above, Claire Cameron has a blog. Next up is Blue Ridge, by T.R. Pearson.

Posted by August on 04.19.08 at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

#32 - The Fiend in Human, by John Maclachlan Gray

I first heard about this book when William Gibson posted about Gray on his blog some time back. I must confess that this is the way I discover a lot of new fiction; what better recommendation than one from another writer? Finding a copy of this book was another kettle of fish entirely. Of course it was available online, or locally in mass market paperback, but I refuse to buy mass market books (they are cheap, disgusting little objects) and if at all possible I'd rather not buy a book online when there are old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar book stores about. I think it was five or six months that I looked for a copy, until finally Dave at Words Worth Books in Waterloo, one of my favourite book stores in the country, was able to track down a hard cover copy for me, at a more than reasonable price. (The staff at Words Worth also has a wonderful little blog.) The biggest problem with having searched so long and hard for a book is that, once found, what if it disappoints?

The Fiend in Human did not disappoint. The story was more complex than one often associates with thrillers, though I freely admit that might simply be because of my unfamiliarity with the genre. The story follows several threads as they weave back and forth across Victorian London; that of Mr. Edmund Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, Mr. Henry Owler and the two young ladies (Phoebe and Dorcas) in his care, Walter Sewell and his old Oxford pal Reggie Harewood, as well as William Ryan, the man who has been wrongly convicted as Chokee Bill, The Fiend in Human Form. As an aside, though Gray lives in Vancouver, he definitely has an ear for the simple-yet-awkward phrasing and naming conventions of Victorian England.

There's very little to say about this book without giving away the plot, and journeying through that rat's nest (like the Holy Land, a maze traveling through the slums of London) is most of the fun of the book, although I must also admit a fondness for many of the characters. Rather than spoil the fun for you, I will just say that it was an entertaining book, and I hope to be in a position to review his other two before the end of the year.

Next: The Line Painter, by Claire Cameron.

Posted by August on 04.16.08 at 1:15 PM | Comments (0)

#31 - No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

I will confess that I only thought to read this book after having seen the movie. I kind of hate it when that happens; I feel like a bandwagon jumper or some other brand of hanger-on. A johnny-come-lately or what have you. If we were talking about music and I told you that I only started listening to Sonic Youth because of their Carpenters cover on the Juno soundtrack, you (some amorphous hypothetical you, not any specific you who might be reading this) would definitely ridicule me, and given the hipper-than-thou politics of the music scene, you would have cause. More and more lately I've seen a similar attitude among readers; if a film has been made or Oprah has heard of the book, then God help your street cred if you get caught reading it on the subway. You are branded a mindlessly consuming sheep. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. In my defense, I've had Cormac McCarthy on my to-be-read list for quite some time, and though I had thought to start with The Road, or maybe Suttree, this book was cheap, available, and familiar. At least I managed to get the Chip Kidd cover instead of some horrible movie tie-in, although some idiot did place a big gold "Now A Major Motion Picture" sticker on it. I've been trying to figure out how to remove it without damaging the book.

What can I say about this book that hasn't been said a million times in the last six months, or however long it's been since the Coen brothers released their masterful interpretation? I like McCarthy's prose style; it's clean and slow and has a mystical feel to it, like Faulkner with a smaller vocabulary, and his dialogue has that strange southern dignity, that curious blend of ignorance and sophistication that you don't find anywhere else in the English speaking world, or at least that you don't find written down. In some ways I'm reminded of Ian Fleming's prose, though I know that's a comparison that a lot of people won't understand. Both writers eschew (Bob Harris be damned) extraneous detail or overt emotional exploration, but McCarthy's world feels spartan, while Fleming's seems decadent. It's a conundrum, and I suppose if I sat down with the works of both men I could explain exactly what constructions and turns of phrase created the difference, but that's not really what I do here. Suffice it to say that the book and the movie were more or less equally good, and often for the same reasons, and that I will be enjoying more of McCarthy's work in the future.

Next: The Fiend in Human, by John Maclachlan Gray.

Posted by August on 04.13.08 at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

#30 - Dance of the Suitors, by J.M. Villaverde

In the past I have seen books published by Oberon Press that have seemed under-designed, almost Porcupine's Quill ugly, an impression reinforced by the glossy coating on the covers. Dance of the Suitors has a soft matte cover with a lovely image (somewhere between Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, though perhaps embroidered rather than illustrated) by Phoebe Anna Traquair, and it makes all the difference in the world. This volume of short fiction, with its heavy interior stock and clear, simply arranged type seems dignified rather than cheap. The thing that struck me the most about the work itself was the obvious care Villaverde took with the language, his obvious attention to crafting each sentence, choosing each word. I found myself reminded, actually, of Michael Helm's In the Place of Last Things, which I read earlier this year and has since become one of my favourite Canadian novels. Like in Helm's book, each sentence in Dance of the Suitors not only feels honed to its essential elements, but also seems to be the absolute best sentence, the most right sentence, for whatever story it happens to be in. With many writers, most writers in fact, there are phrases that one could lift out whole and transplant in another work without doing them much harm, or in many cases without doing them any harm at all. Not so with these stories. Villaverde's sentences are not only finely made, they are the exact right sentences for the stories they are in, and could not be transplanted whole into some other work. There is a real sense of each part being absolutely necessary to the whole.

The title story, "Dance of the Suitors" is, I think, actually the weakest in the book, although that's a relative statement if ever there was one; none of the stories are genuinely weak. The narrator describes in muted terms a visit with his twin sister and the various glancing romantic contacts they have during the course of an evening. One gets the sense of a huge unnamed thing in the room with the twins, a love that is not quite incestuous, but that stands between them and real connection with others (or at least between the male narrator and real connection; his sister has the three dancing suitors of the title, and though the narrator implies that he understands his sister's relationship with these men, I do not feel that he is entirely reliable). The weakness in this story comes, I think, from one or two occasions when the fourth wall is broken and the narrator is revealed to be writing the story down, and not simply telling it or giving us some similar access to his mind. It's an old technique, but it seems out of place for some reason, and was jarring. I also allow that it might be jarring because I read the piece not five minutes after having finished Pynchon's V. which was written in a dramatically different prose style.

One of my two favourite pieces was "Suits of Woe", a wonderfully cliché-free portrayal of a screen writer dealing with back-stage emotional politics. I have done a (very) little amateur acting, and slightly less screen writing, but even I have enough experience to recognize the honesty and straightforwardness of the story. It was refreshing and engaging and I felt like I was being allowed to explore the characters as people, rather than having to continually say to myself "I've seen this a dozen time before", as so often happens with stories about either the stage or screen. My other favourite piece was "Voglio vivere una favola", about the young Henry James ("Harry" in the story) encountering Europe for the first time. Villaverde managed to pitch his voice perfectly for the period and subject matter without any dramatic changes to his style, to the tightness of his sentences, which is no mean feat indeed. I felt James' frustrations keenly, the emotions that were left not entirely unstated, and at the same time I could see the seeds of some of his most famous works being planted, without the obviousness of one-to-one analogs, without feeling as though Villaverde was trying to force those works into an autobiographical mode. I was thoroughly enchanted by the story.

The paranoia of the the woman Myriam in "Where a Disparaging Word" reminded me of the husband in Nathan Sellyn's "A Routine to These Things", though I suffered no anxiety attack this time. Myriam's own anxieties seemed completely unfounded and I spent most of the story pitying her, not liking her, even at times feeling sorry for her young husband and her friend Daniel who seemed to be as much caretakers of her mental struggles as they were friends or family. When her fears about her husband's infidelity proved real, I found myself making a sharp about-face; though she did all she could to push those closest to her away, she did not deserve such a betrayal. Two days later I am still trying to decide if her husband had been cheating on her all along, as she suspected, or if her paranoia drove him to a bold and heinous act. We do these things to ourselves, sometimes, even if the instruments of our pain are other than ourselves. I do not—cannot—absolve her husband, but his role as adulterer may have seemed inevitable to him. If one is to be perpetually punished for a crime, having committed one or not, one might as well enjoy the loot, so to speak.

Oberon is a fine press, with an excellent reputation, particularly for publishing superb works of short fiction, but I would feel that Canadian readers would be done a disservice if Mr. Villaverde's future work were not picked up by a publisher that has a larger distribution network and a heftier promotions budget. I was quite impressed by these stories, and attention to language such as they display is one of my chief pleasures as a reader. I certainly hope that Dance of the Suitors and Villaverde's work to come will find a larger audience.

Next: No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.

Posted by August on 04.12.08 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

#29 - V., by Thomas Pynchon

This book took me far longer to read than I expected, for two reasons: first, I was quite ill for two weeks, and did not read a word during that entire period, and second, much of this book was very, very boring. As you might expect, this book has two narrative lines that move towards a common point, sort of (gasp), like the shape of the letter "V". One of these branches follows the comings and goings of Benny Profane and The Whole Sick Crew, a collection of AWOL sailors, thinkers, artists, gang members and various other slackers. It has many of the elements of your standard 1950s jazz (or "beat") novel; the characters have unbelievable names, most of the dialogue is empty with long conversations that go nowhere, many of the characters feel a manic desire for change and an even more manic desire for travel, but both manias are a species of nostalgia, not for the new state they want, but for how they felt about the state they are escaping. The prose is loose and not always well crafted, with energy and rhythm being the driving forces. This narrative branch is not very good, and seldom makes any sense, but it's also seldom boring.

The second narrative branch (I wish I'd found another phrase to use; I'm already sick of this one) is a series of stories pieced together by the younger Stencil about a mysterious figure from his father's past, probably a woman, who is only known by the first intial "V". Much of these chapters (or at least, all of the first) is a rehash of Pynchon's incredibly dull story "Under the Rose," and it has not been improved in the retelling. His impersonation of the late Victorian voice is far from perfect, seems very much a parody, in fact, but he infuses it with the lack of clarity and sense found in the jazz sections. The result is turgid, dull, and mostly meaningless. It improves slightly as the novel progresses, but only slightly. The other major problem with these chapters is the sheer volume of characters; there are simply far too many to keep track of. Most of them are wholly insignificant to the novel as a whole, many insignificant to even the chapter in which they appear, yet Pynchon feels the need to sketch a history for each of them, and provide each with a ridiculous name that is usually in some way similar to the ridiculous name of some other character. I'm not opposed to having to work to understand and enjoy a work of fiction, but only if I feel that I will be rewarded by my labours, and only if that work has some point to it. Pynchon's torrent of similarly named and similarly insignificant characters does nothing but get in the way, and working to sort them out brought me no intellectual reward. It was frustrating and dull.

I wasn't disappointed not to learn who—or indeed what—"V" actually was, and there are many options to choose from, so I'm sure like most readers I have my own theories on the matter. I am disappointed that following Stencil's search and Benny Profane's manic idiocy yielded nothing of consequence. It is with great relief that I am finally able to put this book aside.

Next is J.M. Villaverde's Dance of the Suitors.

Posted by August on 04.10.08 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

#28 - Lost Girls and Love Hotels, by Catherine Hanrahan

I can't entirely decide how I feel about this book. I enjoyed what was there, I suppose, but by the end, even though the plot had run its course, I still felt like things were just getting started. The prose was plain and very much "about the story", in the sense that there was no formal experimentation or any real effort at elegance. It's not that the prose is bad; I just have a hard time picturing Hanrahan slaving away over whether or not a sentence was quite right. The long and the short of it is that it was so easy to read that going slowly and chewing over what was happening was pointless; there's very little here except the story itself, and it simply ran so fast that it exhausted itself early.

I guess that's maybe the problem. The story is alright, I suppose; I'm sure we all know somebody bent on a sex and drug fueled descent into self-destruction, either at home or abroad (and if you don't, I suggest that you consider yourself lucky, as people untouched from that sort of strife are becoming more and more rare), but that very fact, that we all know somebody like that, means that the book needed more than an exotic location and the obligatory best-friends-consider-lesbian-sex scene that you find in the movies they play on CityTV late on Friday nights to distinguish itself. It just wasn't there, and it's a shame because it always seemed that Hanrahan was on the verge of turning the book into something meaningful. I suppose I should have known better when the cover used words like "edgy" and "hip". I've been on this quest to find Canadian literature with a little blood in it, and though I certainly found blood in this book, it came at the expense of heart and mind.

Next is Thomas Pynchon's V. (It bothers me that there's a period in the title of that book; punctuation in titles strikes me as nearly as un-anglophone as not capitalizing anything beyond the first word, and while I have no desire to see the rest of the world conform to anglo rules, I find it comforting when works written in English behave like they were written in English. I find myself becoming more conservative—aesthetically, not socially or politically—with every passing year, and what dismays me the most about that fact is that I'm not particularly dismayed by that fact.)

Posted by August on 03.13.08 at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

#27- Indigenous Beasts, by Nathan Sellyn

I can't get over the appropriateness of the book's title. The men in this book—and the book is mostly about men, a thing that is more rare in my reading than you might think—are often violent, sometimes intensely so. What keeps them from becoming clichés is that their violence and brutality often shocks them more than the reader. It's not a callous, unthinking brutality. It's a brutality laced with guilt and fear and shame, with the knowledge of having failed, without always knowing why or how. There were times when I felt I'd read these stories before. Given how many writers cut their teeth on the form, I know, as a writer, that it's certainly quite difficult to feel like you're creating anything new. With a few of these stories, particularly the ones about childhood, like "The Helmet", I get a palpable sense of Sellyn struggling to overcome the sheer volume of finely-detailed short fiction. He's not always successful, but usually he is.

A number of stories struck me as wholly unique and invigorating (at least, for Canadian short fiction; I don't read so much from the US or the UK), but one in particular, "A Routine to These Things" struck a pretty heavy emotional chord somewhere inside my soul. I was reading this book last night on the Spadina streetcar heading north. The ambient temperature outside wasn't that bad, really, but the wind chill was insane and so despite the lateness of the hour and our distance from the clubs and bars the cabin was crammed full of bundled, half-drunk travelers. I'm not claustrophobic, but I tried to convince myself that the crush of humanity, the closeness and confinement, had an impact on what happened. I had an anxiety attack reading a short story. My chest tightened, my attention wandered, I had trouble keeping my breathing steady and calm. I had to put the story aside, in fact, and finish it when I got home. Where it happened again, the privacy of my living room. The story is about a married couple who are trying to reconcile after a four-month trial separation. It's written from the husband's point of view, but somehow we're able to sense the dichotomy of first causes; the husband knows why things soured, the wife believes she knows, but disagrees. With their sex-life waning (as it often does in long-term relationships, and they have a child so obviously that makes things difficult, if only for logistical reasons), they make the mistake of allowing one of their close friends to talk them into going to a swinger's party. I'm not a swinger, have no interest in swinging at all, but even I know that to bring another person—two other people in this instance—into your marriage is not the way to solve problems. If it's something that interests you, it's something you should do only when the relationship is in a place of strength. Anything else is begging for trouble. And trouble is what happens. The husband never really wants to go through with it, but is cowed by his wife's enthusiasm and their friend's rush to thrust them into the world (at the party he imagines, maybe, that the friend is hostile towards him). The experience is a failure for him, a night of shame and guilt and tears, and he falls asleep near the pool, his entry into the swinging lifestyle unconsummated. We never find out for sure what the wife does with the creepy German man she's paired up with, but the fact that she only emerges from her designated room in the morning speaks volumes. For the wife, the problems that follow, her eventually falling out of love, seem to stem from the husband's jealousy, but it's not a jealousy entirely without cause. He feels guilty and ashamed (there's those two feelings again; they crop up like weeds in this book) for not stopping things before his wife went and slept with another man, and he feels like a fool for relying on her sense of disquiet, on hoping that she would be as nervous as he was and reconsider. He might have been able to put that aside, I think, had he not actually tried to stop it, minutes before partners were assigned, and been ignored. The heartbreak that follows is like a juggernaut, not in the least because he refuses to place all the blame on his wife for what happens, while she seems unwilling to accept any of it. What struck me about this story—almost literally struck me, right there on the streetcar—was not the plot or the subject matter. I've read stories like this before, although normally with the gender roles reversed. It was the prose that did it for me. It's straightforward, simple and plain, but full of depth. Many writers, myself included, would have been hard-pressed to resist the temptation to go overboard, to give a manic edge to the melancholy, but the writing in this story is just as much about the need for restraint as the story itself is. I'm tempted to say that Sellyn's prose is artless, but it isn't; merely guileless, which is a far better thing.

Next: Lost Girls and Love Hotels, by Chatherine Hanrahan.

Posted by August on 03.09.08 at 1:33 PM | Comments (0)

#26 - The Thousandfold Thought, by R. Scott Bakker

I didn't realize when I started reading this series that, though three books had already been published, many more (as many as four more) had been planned. I wound up doing something I hate doing; I started reading a series before all the books were published. And now I'm stuck not knowing how it's all going to turn out, with no recourse but to wait and hope the author doesn't up and die on me or something. It is some small consolation that the books have been good enough that waiting, hoping the author doesn't die, is in fact something that I'm perfectly willing to do. The Thousandfold Thought picks up on most of the issues that I discussed in my last two entries, particularly doubt and betrayal. I found myself liking only a single character in the entire book, a sorcerer called Drusas Achamian, and even then he's a weak, weak man, though he means well. The other characters are often weak, but do not even try to be strong, cannot see beyond the horizons of their own selves, or else they are cruel for no better reason than because they can be, because it confirms, in their own minds at least, their superior position in the world. This book was full of emotional, intellectual, and physical manipulation, of deceit and pain and the worst sort of hero-worship. At times it was difficult reading, not because Bakker's powers as a writer failed him, but rather because they succeeded too well, and the worst these characters had to offer was simply too much to look upon. I'm looking forward to the next volume, due out sometime late next year.

Next: Nathan Sellyn's Indigenous Beasts.

Posted by August on 03.07.08 at 2:29 AM | Comments (0)

#25 - The Warrior-Prophet, by R. Scott Bakker

Doubt remains as powerful a force in this second novel in The Prince of Nothing series as it did in the first. The Inrithi Holy War that had seemed a faraway impossibility and an excuse for political maneuvering suddenly becomes real and terrifying, not only because of how large and powerful it is, but because of the atrocities that follow along with any sufficiently large group of disorganized men, and because of the ease with which Kellhus and other powerful people subvert it until it becomes merely a tool towards the realization of their own personal agendas. Kellhus, who in The Darkness That Comes Before was little more than a kind of ninja-like traveler posing as a prince, manipulates those around him until he becomes the Warrior-Prophet, altering the face of the Inrithi religion until Achamian (a blasphemous sorcerer, and the only even remotely likeable character in the series) is forced to declare that it will become known as a new Year One, a new age of man.

Betrayal is also a significant factor in this book. As the Inrithi try to determine whether Kellhus is a false prophet or a legitimate messenger from the gods (only two major characters see him as false; one because he knows the source of his power, and the other for reasons of vanity), he turns their loyalties inside out. Soldiers and men of rank forswear their kings, religious leaders put aside their scriptures for the cult of personality, and even Achamian's common-law wife Esmenet, a former prostitute, betrays him, the only man who had ever seen her as a person, rather than as a tool (even Kellhus, who takes her as his wife, sees her as that, though no-one believes it). On top of this, factions within the Inrithi begin to war against each other indirectly, making deals with their enemies, kidnapping or killing highly placed people. The end of this book is so emotionally fraught that it becomes difficult to imagine being pleased that any of these characters might succeed with their various plans.

Next: The Thousandfold Thought, by R. Scott Bakker. It's the last book in The Prince of Nothing series, and after that I'll be going back to literary fiction for a little while.

Posted by August on 03.04.08 at 1:20 PM | Comments (0)

#24 - The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker

A co-worker loaned me this book (all three in the series, actually) by Canadian R. Scott Bakker, and the first thing I noticed, aside from the fact that it was so complex that I would definitely need to consult the glossary in the back of the book, was how similar it was to Frank Herbert's Dune. The writing is dense, with the same blend of philosophy, mysticism, dream-like attention to detail, and brief flashes of internal dialogue. This is the first volume in an epic fantasy trilogy called The Prince of Nothing. Bakker's world confounds any attempt to find analogs to our own. There are elements in many of the societies and religions that could come from ancient Rome, Sumeria, or Islam, but seen through alien eyes and combined with entirely fictional elements in such a way that it's impossible to predict how they (the "real world" bits) will behave in the context of the novel. I have been surprised at nearly every turn, and I love it.

The blurbs on the cover of this book compare it to the likes of Steven Erikson and Guy Gavriel Kay. I can't comment on Erikson (I've never read any of his work), but I can tell you that Bakker far outstrips Kay in both depth and complexity. Doubt is the prime mover in this book. Characters doubt their memories, their abilities, their senses and their faith. They doubt the loyalties of those around them, the lessons of history and the very nature of the societies they live in. This mountain of doubt has the potential to overwhelm the reader and deny the concrete physicality of Bakker's world, but it actually does exactly the opposite. All the doubt reinforces the grit; even without any direct referents to real-world societies or events, the intrigue and political machinations, the constant anxiety of the characters only makes this world seem more like our own.

Hey, I'm all caught up! Next: The Warrior-Prophet, by R. Scott Bakker.

Posted by August on 03.01.08 at 1:44 AM | Comments (0)

#23 - The Seeress of Kell, by David Eddings

Alright, I promise this is the last David Eddings book for quite some time (though there are two more series that I'm hoping to read later—much later—in the year), and after this there's only one more post to write before I'm completely caught up. Eleven books behind is a record for me, I think. Anyway, in this final book in The Malloreon, we see the emergence of the true god of Angarak in the altered form of Erriond, a strange but minor character from The Belgariad. The Christian overtones are more than a little obvious, as UL, the father of the gods, implies that the world is beginning to make a transition from polytheism to monotheism through the emergence of a benevolent god who walks the earth gathering disciples to himself. It's not a one-to-one analog, of course. Nothing in Eddings' fiction ever quite is, but it's not entirely subtle, either. Sadly the ending is not entirely satisfying; one gets a kind of "happily ever after" sense that doesn't quite play with how much intrigue seemed to exist that was unrelated to the major movements of the plot. Still, I can't see any other stories being told in this world or about these characters; there's simply nowhere to go.

Next: The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker.

Posted by August on 03.01.08 at 1:21 AM | Comments (0)

#22 - Sorceress of Darshiva, by David Eddings

One of the things that marks this series as different from the first is that many of the male characters who were prominent now have their roles filled by women. The ultimate villain is a woman, the best tactical mind from the western nations has died and has been replaced (and quite ably) by his wife. Poledra, wife of Belgarath and mother of Polgara returns from the dead to take up a pivotal role in the resolution of the ultimate conflict. Belgarion's wife Ce'Nedra, however, who was a remarkable force in The Belgariad virtually falls apart in these books. Her son has been kidnapped, so it stands to reason that she will be full of fear and anxiety, but close to a year later she's still barely functional, even while in hot pursuit of the kidnapper. I find it odd that one of the strongest and most interesting female characters from the first series of books would be brought so low in this one, traumatic events aside.

Next up: The Seeress of Kell, the last of the David Eddings books for quite some time.

Posted by August on 03.01.08 at 1:06 AM | Comments (0)

#21 - Demon Lord of Karanda, by David Eddings

Eddings decided to do different things with the way magic and sorcery work in this world of his. Rather than magic spells or object imbued with magic power (there are such objects, although, consistent with how magic functions for people in these books, those things are alive, possessing both a will and a measure of intellect), magic—or sorcery, I should say, because Eddings makes a distinction between the two, and what most readers would recognize as "magic" is actually what Eddings calls sorcery—is accomplished when a person directs a sufficient amount of will at a task, and then utters a word, like a word of command. Then, poof, miraculous things happen. Only a handful of people can do these things; there seems to be a distinction in both degree and kind between the will of a sorcerer and the will of a regular person. Doing things through sorcery costs the sorcerer significantly in terms of the drain on both his or her body and mind. Eddings has said that this was done to prevent sorcerers from becoming unstoppable or godlike, and it's very effective. It's also an excellent, practical, and entertaining way to integrate "magic" into the story. The reader still has to contend with a certain amount of esoteric learning, but it's grounded in how the mind works more than in obscure languages and strange artifacts. I found it easier to see that kind of power as a thing in the world rather than the strange and ancient ritual weirdness that seems outside of the world that magic seems to be in other works of epic fantasy.

Magic, in the world of Eddings, is not what I have described above (that is sorcery). Magic is instead a kind of shamanic ritualism, a set of prescribed actions, chants, pictograms and so on that combine in specific ways to call up demons and other spirits as slaves to enact the magician's will. The presence of these two forms could be seen as a conflict between the so-called primitive and the so-called civilized, between superstition and intellect, between the visceral and the abstract. Throughout these books, sorcerers are almost universally long-lived and solitary scholars, while magicians are short-lived, ignorant tribesmen.

This, combined with the fact that many of the various nations and races in his books are simply stereotypes based on mostly ancient real-world societies, has brought many to accuse Eddings of racism, but I think that's a false claim. These books are quite short, but they deal with large numbers of characters from an equally large number of backgrounds, and dealing with "types" is perhaps the only way to do this and still keep such a plot-centric story moving forward quickly.

Next up: Sorceress of Darshiva, by David Eddings.