#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)

#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)

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)

#10 - Fits Like A Rubber Dress, by Roxane Ward

When I bought this book, it was, as Steven admits to sometimes doing, mostly because of the cover. Really, who can resist a barely-clad woman in black? Not I. It wasn't solely because of that, though. Part of it was the quotation from Timothy Findley on the back, and part of it was because there aren't many Canadian novels (well, far fewer than those of our British and American cousins, anyway) that take the urban experience seriously, and I'm becoming more and more an urban creature since moving to the south. This novel, if nothing else, promised to be intensely urban. I was therefore quite saddened to find that the novel was pretty terrible.

Indigo Blackwell, our protagonist, is a vapid character living a more or less meaningless existence, working a not-very-satisfying job and married to a husband (Sam) who is selfish and mildly manipulative. He's doing research for his novel, in which a gay man is living a double life, pretending to be straight and living in a sham of a marriage. Sam spends much of his time with a young hustler named Graham at gay bars, and it becomes painfully obvious well before Indigo figures it out, that while Sam isn't gay, he's certainly curious, and wants Graham to satisfy that curiosity. Sam is what passes for an intellectual in the book, but mostly he just spouts un-writerly clichés about writing. Indigo's best female friend is a woman named Nicole. She's blond, has large breasts, and works an exciting job in some amorphous on-air capacity for a local television station called COOL-TV. She's fun, exciting, refuses to be in a monogamous relationship, blah blah blah. And then there's Tim, Indigo's best friend from childhood, who fits nearly every gay stereotype there is, except he's straight. I almost get the impression that with Sam, Graham, Jon (whom I'll get to later), and Indigo's own same-sex experiences, an editor asked Ward to eliminate the gay best friend, and she just swapped the pronouns and made him straight. (How many straight men have you met who tell their friends they look "fab" and address women as "darling"? Me either.) So here's the rundown: Indigo spends most of her time having minor skirmishes with Sam and complaining about how unfulfilled she is to Tim and Nicole, who both have problems, but of a much more minor and non-existential nature. She tries to think her way out of the situation, and this is about as deep as it gets:

Maybe she should take up pottery. Or acting. Do stained glass, like her mother. Have a kid or make jewellery; that'd be cool. Something substantial. She could learn to scuba dive, but she'd need a no-shark guarantee. Forge large metal sculptures. Skydive. Do horny things in discreetly public places.

What she does is go back to school to study art and film, and leave her husband when she catches him getting a blow job from Graham in the name of "research". At a party she meets Peter, the playwright, who introduces her to Jon, the dashing young hetero-flexible artist, and she's off on her own experimental affair. It's all very Candace Bushnell.

Until around page 200, when it all takes a swerving left turn (the book is only 300 pages long, so needless to say I was not expecting something that dramatic to happen so late in the book). The book starts to be about drugs and sadomasochism and emotional manipulation. There's at least one scene that could easily be considered rape, although none of the characters (including Indigo, the victim) seem to consider it as such, and there's a lot of cocaine being passed around. Jon seems to be a sadist, and at first looks like he's part of the scene, but more than once he hurts and manipulates and enjoys it because he's breaking the cardinal rule: there must always be choice for both parties. When somebody says stop, it's stops, that's the way it works. That's how it stays play and doesn't become genuine Silence of the Lambs stuff. Jon, and more than one of his friends, violates that rule several times, and Indigo is more than once put in very real danger as a result, and Jon seems to get off on it.

As much as I hate to say it, that swerving left turn was exactly what the novel needed. It was too late to save the book as a whole, but not too late to save Indigo as a character. I was ready to dismiss her as dull and clichéd, smart enough to know she was in crisis, but not smart enough to do the necessary introspection to figure out why and what to do, content to simply be another irritating yuppie consumer. But her ordeal changes her, and though she never becomes the kind of character who is deeply introspective, she does come, finally, to control her own life and have a certain measure of understanding about herself and how she fits in her world. I still won't say I liked the novel, but by the end I liked her.

Fits Like A Rubber Dress was my thirteenth and final selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Alan Furst's Dark Voyage.

Posted by August on 01.31.08 at 1:26 PM | Comments (0)

#9 - Flesh and Gold, by Phyllis Gotlieb

I bought this book because it was the only volume of science fiction in the entire Canadian section of my favourite neighbourhood book store, and I had never before read a Canadian novel that was deliberately labeled as SF. The reviews plastered all over it (from publications as diverse as Analog and Quill & Quire, though strangely no indication of what the book was actually about) were from sources I respected and more than piqued my interest. It turns out Phyllis Gotlieb is fairly well-known in SF circles, but I am an interested outsider at best. Everything I've read about Gotlieb's work, and about this novel in particular, suggests that it is violent and highly sexual, though not necessarily erotic, and I found those statements to be true. It took me a good thirty or forty pages to get the hang of the book, but after that it took me over and I was hooked.

As best I can tell, because Gotlieb does very little background exposition, Flesh and Gold takes place in a distant future in which humanity has colonized a number of planets and solar systems, subsequently dividing into a number of unusual species, all still defined as part of "humanity". This distant future looks a lot like ancient Rome, with sanctioned brothels and gladiatorial arenas, though slavery is illegal. And slavery is at the centre of this book. A judge, three gladiators, a doctor, and a former detective all work, mostly oblivious to each other's actions, to expose a large corporation's creation and enslavement of entire species. Violence is a big part of Gotlieb's novel, but it never seems light or unremarkable; it's always weighted and terrifying and there are always consequences. Often times in science fiction and fantasy works (Fionavar Tapestry, I'm looking at you) violence can seem commonplace and harmless, and I think it hurts the narrative to neuter it in that way. Gotlieb never flinches.

I won't tell you how it ends, but I was a little surprised that it ended as cleanly as it did, though not disappointed. Flesh and Gold was alien, exciting, uncompromising, and made me believe that science fiction might truly escape many of the national boundaries that continue to artificially divide readers.

Flesh and Gold was my twelfth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Roxane Ward's Fits Like A Rubber Dress.

Posted by August on 01.28.08 at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)

#8 - Home Movies, by Ray Robertson

I received this book as a gift several years ago, but the subject matter (a country and western singer from Toronto) put me off it, as well as the fact that it's a pretty ugly book with uncomfortably tight binding. Those may be stupid reasons to put off reading a book, I guess, but those are the kinds of things that can go through your mind when you're looking for your next reading experience. It's right up there with "am I in the mood or action, or contemplation?" I also think that I may have insulted the person who gave it to me by not reading it right away, which was not my intention at all. But I guess there's no going back to those moments, right? So a few days ago I finally felt it was time, and here we are.

Robertson's protagonist, James, is in fact a country and western musician who lives and works in Toronto, but was born and raised in a small southwestern Ontario town called Datum. If Datum is meant to have a real-world analog, I don't know what it would be; the geography in this part of the country is too compact to have much meaningful distinction for me. Country and western music has a much larger hold on the northwestern part of this province, which is where I'm from, and I think that's part of the reason why I dislike it as much as I do (with the exception of Johnny Cash, who was brilliant—and only mentioned once, in passing, through the whole novel); had I not been so over-exposed to it, my dislike may simply have been mild rather than great. James finds himself, in the middle 1990s, with an album full of music, but no lyrics, and his record label is pushing him to get something on paper so they can release his long-overdue third album. Pushing him so hard, in fact, that they are threatening to drop him entirely. To refresh and inspire himself, he hops drunkenly onto a late night/early morning bus and heads home to Datum.

What he finds, of course, is that you can't go home again. The community has moved on in his absence, although like all such places, it hasn't moved far. It's a Canadian novel, so there's unfinished family business to be taken care of, childhood grudges to be re-enacted, friendships to be re-examined, and of course the tragic death of a father to understand and come to terms with. It's also a first novel published by a smallish press, so of course there's a certain amount of the Canadian Indie Style going on. There's the beautiful, sexual crazy girl (no unusual name this time, but she does pull a post-coital firearm on our confused protagonist, in an effort to make a point about art), and a tone that's hard to pin down. Actually, to leave the CIS thing alone for a bit, there's something a little odd about Robertson's prose. His diction is pretty standard fare for the 1997 publication date, but there's something jarring about his syntax. Words appear, from time to time, in unusual order with unnecessary or unaccountable hyphens strewn about willy-nilly. It seems that, like our protagonist in search of lyrics, Robertson (and therefore the reader) can never quite manage to settle into a rhythm. My biggest complaint with this book, the thing that I found frustrating me time and time again, was a very, very Canadian thing, and I think is in some ways connected to the Canadian Indie Style. James and the other characters inhabit a real city, the city of Toronto. In that city are landmarks, real places and things, that give the setting its meaning, that allow readers to connect with it as a place. That, as a co-worker of mine pointed out when I brought up my frustration, give the place its own mythology. So what do Canadian authors, including Mr. Robertson, do? They "allude" to real places by giving them almost-the-same fictional names. So instead of Sneaky Dee's, an extremely well known bar (in my neighbourhood, actually) with a life and reputation familiar throughout the city and perhaps beyond, we are given the ridiculous Spooky Doo's. You don't find this in British or American books, so much. When a New Yorker writes about New York, unless fictionalizing a place serves a specific function, they leave the place as it is, because New York is a place with its own mythology that will function better without the interference from the writer. Likewise with London, or Paris, or you name it. But Canadians can't seem to get past this. Erik McCormack has Kitcherloo instead of Kitchener Waterloo, Robertson has Spooky Doo's, etc, etc, etc. It drives me up the wall, and it's no wonder, then, that Toronto and other Canadian cities lack the kind of literary presence that foreign cities have. We neuter them on the page.

The novel also ends quite abruptly, though I won't tell you how (that would ruin what little suspense there is), and it was mostly unsatisfying for all that, although I could see it working better if some of the penultimate scene(s) had been stretched a bit longer. On the whole I think I enjoyed this novel, but I'll need to give another Robertson book a shot before I can determine if it was because of or despite his storytelling style.

Home Movies was my eleventh selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Flesh and Gold, by Phyllis Gotlieb.

Posted by August on 01.25.08 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

#7 - In the Place of Last Things, by Michael Helm

I only just recently tracked this novel down, an old professor of mine having recommended to me two or three years ago. I had been sitting on a comfortable but somewhat worn green recliner in his office, discussing my disappointment with how parochial and predictable and just plain bloodless the CanLit scene had become, when he pulled this book from his shelf and had me read a section near the beginning in which Russ Littlebury, the protagonist, assaults a funeral director. He challenged me: how often do you come across something like this in a Canadian novel? The answer was almost never. Canadian novels, with a few notable exceptions (Robertson Davies and Russell Smith both come to mind) are seldom boisterous and even more seldom dangerous. We seem to excel at expressing quiet dignity, quiet pain, quiet lives. If we tackle large themes at all, or the messiness and violence of the life that most of us (I remind you that we are a sprawling urban nation, and that our last few rural bastions are far less picturesque than the fairy-tale land of cottage country would have us believe) deal with daily, it's only to reduce those elements to subtle gestures in carefully isolated domestic settings, as though all of human drama can be played out effectively in some farm house kitchen. We put no edge in our voice.

Michael Helm has one in his. In the Place of Last Things carries with it many of the tropes that CanLit junkies—sitting, no doubt, in a favourite comfortable chair or on a couch with their legs covered by some not-very-soft decorative blanket and drinking from a cup of herbal tea—would find familiar and comforting. Mike Littlebury, Russ' father, succumbs after a slow battle with cancer. Russ must come to terms with the loose ends of a broken romance as he assumes his filial responsibilities in the rural community that is no longer entirely his home. But there are things in this novel that should shake CanLit junkies from their collective stupor. (Lest you think my judgements too harsh, know that not five minutes before beginning this entry, I too was laid out on a couch with a blanket over my legs and a cup of herbal tea on the table next to me. Note, however, that my blanket was torn from my bed, and my tea was spiked.) Helm's diction, his syntax, his work on a sentence by sentence level, is elegant, highly individualized and more than a little poetic, although I am reluctant to use that word. Often when one thinks of the poetic in Canadian novels one thinks immediately of Ondaatje and his opium-dream novels, and that's a comparison I don't want to make. Unlike Ondaatje, Helm actually seems to understand how prose functions, and doesn't simply use his pretty phrases to mask the weakness of the underlying structure. Helm uses his gift with metaphor to bolster an already solid foundation of strong characters and sophisticated moral and intellectual inquiry. The edge in Helm's voice comes when he uses his unique voice to intertwine the traditional CanLit "issues" with drug deals, the violence of revenge, stolen cars and private detectives. It was an exciting novel to read, as much because of the way Helm confounded and played with what we think of as a Canadian novel as because of the fast-moving plot, which was often full of tremendous tension and suspense.

Ultimately, however, I have to say that this novel is about memory; how we confront and shape it, and how it shapes us. Russ approaches his life through the appeal to authority, constantly referencing what others have thought and said, our collective cultural memory, to map out and make sense of his own life, down even to the smallest of moments. Tara, the only woman with whom Russ is romantically involved during the course of the novel, sees the world through a series of statistics and personal histories, sees the map of social injustice throughout time drawn on the lives and bodies of the poor and uneducated, on those lacking either the gift or desire for introspection. Russ constructs himself from what is itself a construct, the idea of Western cultural continuity, by pulling into himself the thoughts and words of a thousands others and taking them on as his own. Tara finds the shape of her life by transplanting her need to redress injustices she has neither felt nor inflicted on the lives of those who have done both, co-opting their suffering so that she might define herself. Skidder, Russ' best friend, is constantly driven to find a place for himself by connectiong with an almost-famous ancestor; Mike, Russ' father, by disconnecting himself from the memory of his own sordid past, and creating himself anew with the received (and yet hard-won) wisdom of the Lord.

That this novel balances so finely all the elements that it does is testament to Helm's skill as a writer, and I found reading In the Place of Last Things to be revelatory, both in terms of how I thought of what a Canadian novel can be, and how one can approach the writing of fiction in general. I have already purchased his other book, The Projectionist, and have set it aside for some time later this year.

In the Place of Last Things was my tenth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Ray Robertson's Home Movies.

Posted by August on 01.22.08 at 3:21 AM | Comments (0)

#6 - The Darkest Road, by Guy Gavriel Kay

At last the trilogy is over. The more I read of this third book in The Fionavar Tapestry, the more I was reminded of The Lord of the Rings, and certainly not in a good way (I am not a fan). Obviously Kay is a fan; he helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion, after all. But I think what he wound up doing with this trilogy, his first attempt at long-form high fantasy, was take his fan status too far. So much of The Fionavar Tapesty can be paralleled directly with events in The Lord of the Rings. There is the same sense of a world obsessed with the past, there is an ancient and beautiful/powerful race journeying to a land of their own in the West (the lios alfar in Fionavar, but plain old elves in Tolkien's world). Each includes dwarves under the mountains and riders on the plain, a king returning to reclaim his crown and a young man journeying across enemy territory to confront ultimate evil alone, a thing of power in his hands. (Not to mention dead warriors called to aid the good guys, and a trip on a ghostly ship.) And of course, just one or two of the major characters die, and only a handful of the more important secondary characters. In Fionavar, the question was never if the good guys would win, but rather how would they would win. The Darkest Road was simply the wrap up of a long and tiresome example of thinly veiled Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and I'm glad it's done, and glad that Kay moved on to better things with Tigana.

The Darkest Road was my ninth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is In the Place of Last Things, by Michael Helm.

Posted by August on 01.19.08 at 1:41 PM | Comments (0)

#5 - The Wandering Fire, by Guy Gavriel Kay

I was talking last night with someone about the fact that I was reading The Wandering Fire, and not enjoying it very much, and that I was disappointed, particularly since I enjoyed Tigana so much, and Kay came so highly recommended. In him I found a kindred spirit, and he proudly proclaimed that The Fionavar Tapestry, of which this book is the second part, is a pile of wank. Good call, that. I think, if anything, The Wandering Fire was worse than The Summer Tree. The one character that I had held out hope for, a Toronto law student named Kevin Laine, suddenly became another high fantasy puppet. Up until this book he was the only one of the five transplanted Torontonians not to have unlocked secret knowledge, discovered godlike powers, or become a Conan-like action hero in the space of a few days. Up until this book. Midway through, Kevin realizes that he too, for reasons that are inadequately explored, suddenly "knows" one night that his real name is Liadon and that he's supposed to sacrifice himself to the Goddess Dana to end the unnaturally long winter that has plagued Fionavar. I mean, fuck right off.

Until that moment, Kevin was my last hope to find an honest to God character in that mess. In Toronto he had been a strong, capable, charismatic young ladies' man. But in Fionavar, despite still being candy for the ladies, he was essentially in the way, having developed no combat skills, no magic powers, discovered no secret knowledge, received no gifts from strange encounters with rarely-seen deities. He was a human being struggling to find a place in a world that didn't much value the skills he'd spent a lifetime developing. A human being! And then Kay had to go and ruin it all with another bit of ridiculous deus ex machina wank (I say another, because an instance of deus ex machina seems to happen every other page).

And of course characters who have died get brought back to life. Celtic mythology suddenly comes to the fore with the revival of (and I can't believe I'm typing this), King Arthur and Lancelot du Lac. Oh, and did I mention that one of the five Torontonian brats also happens to be the reincarnation of Guinevere? Along with this outrageous plot twist, Lancelot himself revives Matt, a dwarf who is the "source" (one thing I can say positively about this "tapestry", is that Kay handles how mages use magic in a new and potentially interesting way) for the wizard Loren's magic powers. There's also some nonsense about a flying unicorn. One more book, and then I'm swearing off Kay and high fantasy for several months.

The Wandering Fire was my eighth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Guy Gavriel Kay's The Darkest Road.

Posted by August on 01.17.08 at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)

#4 - The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay

You'll notice that the cover on the left doesn't match the title of the book. That's because The Summer Tree is in fact the first book in a trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry, and my copy has all three parts of the trilogy bound together in a single volume. I list them as separate books, however, because even within this single volume they are broken up with separate title pages, acknowledgments, tables of contents, etc. It's three books bound together as one; that's my policy on this stuff and I'm sticking to it.

With that out of the way, I can talk about the book itself. It's the second thing I've read from Canadian fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, the first being a quite good novel inspired by Italian history called Tigana. I didn't realize until I was more than half-way through that The Summer Tree was Kay's first novel. Good thing, too, because it's not really all that great. Certainly not deserving of all the acclaim plastered all over the cover. Well, to be fair, there are some interesting things in it, and I'll start with those. The mythology, which seems to be a blend of Greek and Norse, is complicated, but also consistent and fairly well thought out, and seems to integrate pretty well into how the world functions as a whole. Also, the idea of bringing four university students from Toronto into another dimension is an interesting and unusual way to begin an epic high fantasy trilogy (despite the fact that an American Saturday morning cartoon was already doing it around the time this book was published). But that's about as far as I get with this thing, and those factors (combined with the facts that I've got all three books in one volume, and they aren't very long, and hey, I've already started so why not finish) are pretty much all that will keep me reading.

The characters are flat. What can I say? It seems like, since, or maybe because of, Tolkien and the later weird writings of Michael Moorcock, writers of high fantasy don't seem to feel the need to have their characters behave like human beings, or speak in realistic dialogue. I can understand if your character is a dwarf from a fantasy world, that okay, you're going to take some liberties. I can live with that, no problem. But say your characters are five university students from Toronto. It just doesn't seem proper to strip them of their critical faculties. Kay's characters are so intensely credulous that I can't imagine how they functioned well enough in the world to survive long enough to get to university. These idiots believe everything they are told, and take everything seriously. And! With a few exceptions, they speak like Wally and the friggin' Beav. In 1984!

Alright, so high fantasy isn't so character driven as literary fiction. I get that, it's been drilled into me by friends and even professors that I have to let go of that when I read a work of high fantasy. It's tough, but I can do it. So then we have a few other issues to deal with. First of all, how can all these idiots from Toronto fight as well as warriors who have trained their entire lives, ride horses as well as tribesmen from the plains, and so on. Well, they can't, except that it's a trope in high fantasy that everybody is in some way great or special, and so they have innate abilities that allow them to operate as though they are Bruce Willis in a Die Hard sequel.

Right. And the history. I understand that the events of this trilogy in many ways focus on the re-emergence of characters and situations from a thousand years previous (seriously, how many civilizations do you know that can stay that coherent and organized for a thousand years? But I digress...), and yet before those things come back on the scene, all anybody talks about is what happened a thousand years ago. It's as though nothing of any real importance happened between then and the "now" of the book. A tribesman of the plains kills a herd animal in a dramatic way, and it's the first time it's been done in a thousand years. A prince crosses a river in a dramatic way, and it's the first time it's been done in a thousand years. Nobody eats unless it's a feast, everybody cries like a baby at every little thing, great distances are traversed in a matter of a couple days, and the only two emotions anyone ever feels are "loss" and "longing." I mean, give me a fucking break.

I'm going to have to hurry up and finish these books before they make my head explode with frustration. I was actually looking forward to this, because Tigana was so good, but now I'm far less excited.

The Summer Tree was my seventh selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Wandering Fire, also by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Posted by August on 01.14.08 at 1:08 PM | Comments (0)

#3 - The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro

I don't have the dust jacket for this book at present, but I read a summary of it online, and the conclusions that others have drawn about these stories, the certainties about things left unsaid, made me feel like I did when I was a child, when in the movies an actor and actress would embrace and the screen would go dark. I know now, as an adult, that it meant they were having sex in whatever magical land existed off-camera, but as a child I had no idea, and so missed several rather important plot points. Reading those other peoples' impressions I felt like I had misunderstood when things faded to black.

Reflection makes me think that perhaps I didn't misunderstand. Quite a bit occurs in the unstated moments of Munro's short fiction. What she leaves out is as important as what she describes, but I don't get the sense that she intends there to be no mystery in her work, no unanswered questions. Her work feels so much like life, or rather I recognize in it a true picture of the messiness and vitality and complications of genuine lives, genuinely lived, that I feel such unwavering certainty would be anathema to her work. I like that I have questions, that some of the edges of these characters' lives are left fuzzy, that I have to fill in answers and potentialities (sometimes several) for myself. I feel like my reading experience was richer for it.

As with Who Do You Think You Are?, this book was a complete joy to read. One of the talents of a great short story writer is to create characters who are as alive and intense in the space of fifty pages—or even ten—as those of their brother and sister novelists, who take hundreds. Alice Munro never fails in this regard. In fact I think most of the time she outdoes her novelist counterparts, and it is for that reason (and you could say many other reasons as well) that she is a master of the form (I know the correct honorific here would be mistress, but what male of my generation can use that word comfortably in reference to anyone who is not taking part in either adultery or bondage? I know of none).

The Love of a Good Woman was my sixth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Posted by August on 01.13.08 at 2:39 AM | Comments (0)

#2 - Dead Man's Float, by Nicholas Maes

I've never been particularly touched by Holocaust narratives, and though strictly speaking this isn't a Holocaust narrative, I was finally able to emotionally connect with the event. Nathan Gelder is a half-Jewish Dutchman (his mother is Dutch, and I thought that Jewish ancestry was matrilineal, but I could be wrong) who loses his family in the Nazi invasion of Holland, while he is sent to live with his rich uncle in Canada. My mother's family comes from Holland as well, and we lost a great deal of family as a result of the Nazi regime, although we're gypsies and not Jews. I'm too young—far too young—to have felt the impact on a personal level, but still I think there's a movement, not in an organized sense or anything, but more like a general feeling, among people of my generation to want to feel involved and connected somehow to events of the war. To feel in a way like we too were changed by the atrocities, even though for many of us they are pretty abstract. We don't want for it to be so abstract, so we reach for connections. Dead Man's Float made me feel like my connection was valid. It made me feel as opposed to just think about the effects of the war, and I think that it's Nathan's survivor's guilt that finally made the connection for me.

The premise of the novel is straightforward and original: Nathan Gelder, an aging translator, has a stroke after (maybe?) killing a rock star called Leonard Barvis, and the entire action of the novel takes place inside his head, alternating between his memories from childhood until the time of the stroke, and his perception of what's going on around him in his hospital room. Nathan's story is different from others I've read of survivors, partly because he's caught between two worlds, having a gentile father, but most notably because once he leaves Holland, he doesn't really have to struggle with most of the woes that typically confront refugees. His rich uncle supports him, and though the rest of his family swings between hostile and indifferent, Nathan's biggest concern is finding a way to cope with his guilt, his crisis of identity (is he a Jew? is he a gentile? is he neither?) and becoming adjusted to his life in a new and different world.

Nathan's biggest issues seems to be finding an outlet for his rage, which stems, as I've mentioned more than once, from his survivor's guilt (although I'm not entirely certain Nathan would phrase it like that). As he gets older he seems to be more at peace with his uncertain identity, but determines that he must in some way act out his anger in order to avenge his parents and cleanse himself of what he feels as his guilt and his betrayal of his parents. He sees contemporary mass culture as being a force for consuming individual identities similar to the Nazi movement had been. He targets Leonard Barvis as being an individual who fully embodies the evils of mass culture in the same way that the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg embodied their particular brand of evil.

I only have three complaints with Maes' choice of Barvis as an outlet for Nathan's rage, and coincidentally they are the only complaints that I have with the book. First, though Barvis has a presence throughout the book because of what Nathan can glean about what's going on in his hospital room, he's not introduced early enough in the novel as a cultural force for me to take him seriously as a nemesis for Nathan. In fact, were it not for his fans' riotous reaction to his death, he would be a joke his persona is so over the top and ridiculous. While he is certainly a strong character, the last hundred pages of a 438 page novel is too late to introduce someone so pivotal to the narrative. Second, given how realistic the novel and its narrator are, I was surprised to find that Leonard Barvis was such a parodic character that he'd be at home in a Robert Coover novel. In fact, he strikes me specifically as a parody of Marylin Manson, the bizarre late '90s rock star loved by the superficially disaffected. He didn't fit so well into the entirely convincing world Maes had created. Looking at an approximate timeline for the novel, Barvis' major fan base should be folks about my age (or rather, I was the right age for when those scenes in the novel take place), but I can't imagine a person of my age finding Barvis' ridiculous nonsense appealing, by which I mean his off-stage persona, not his music or lyrics. One of the appealing things about Marilyn Manson was that in interviews and public appearances he came across as educated and intelligent, as well as polite and well-spoken. Barvis just speaks in nonsense phrases and cuss words. I can, however, imagine a person my parents' age (and Maes is of approximately that age, from what I can tell) seeing Barvis as a dead ringer for my generation's superstars, particularly if their focus has been literary or academic rather than on the pulse of youth culture (not that I think such a thing is a deficiency, it's just the sort of thing I've noticed from literary types of a certain age). Which leads me to my third and final complaint: the age of pop stars like Elvis Presley and the Beatles is long over, and had already been through its final throws by the time Barvis is said to be active. Popular music began to fracture in the 1970s, by the '90s becoming a collection of micro-genres with only a handful large acts still commanding major public attention. Even artists breaking sales records is misleading, because the market for popular music expanded exponentially, with sales expanding only mathematically. There will never be another Elvis, and never another Cosby Show. My generation has very few shared cultural touchstones, especially where music in concerned, and it's virtually inconceivable for me to imagine an artist commanding a following as large and loyal as Barvis in the 1990s.

I don't mean to exaggerate my complaints, however. I found this book very difficult to put down, and I am quite disappointed that it was not noticed by any of our many award committees. The book is bold, emotionally sophisticated and finely crafted, exactly the sort of thing Canadian letters needs more of, and exactly the sort of thing that publishers and media outlets need to recognize.

Dead Man's Float was my fifth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro.

Posted by August on 01.08.08 at 9:49 PM | Comments (0)

#1 - Yellowknife, by Steve Zipp

If you've been reading this site for the last month, you'll know that I've joined The Canadian Book Challenge, a contest wherein participants are asked to read thirteen books by Canadian authors between October 4th 2007 and the first of July 2008. Author Steve Zipp was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent novel Yellowknife to use as one of my thirteen selections. I tell you this only in the interest of full disclosure, although regular readers will know that I would never let such a thing colour my opinion of a book one way or another.

The book itself, the physical artifact, is quite handsome and feels good in the hands. The paper is of exceptional quality, and the matte cover rather refreshing. It's published by Res Telluris, a house with which I was previously unfamiliar, but as Yellowknife is such a fine specimen, it seems to me they know what they are doing.

To summarize or "blurb" the book would be quite difficult, and even the publisher gave up, opting instead to populate the back cover with a description of the setting, a short quotation, and a string of nouns that can all be found within. I quite like it when books resist such easy pigeon-holing. Zipp's novel is a web of narratives that all connect obliquely with one another, some of them winding up neatly, others trailing off, some still beginning at the end of the book. The result is not so much a traditional A to Z story (although it reads like one, most of the time), but instead more an elaborately textured rendering of a place. What Yellowknife presents is how truly different the North is from the rest of Canada (I'm a Northerner myself, although not from quite that far up, and I see echoes of Yellowknife in my own home town). It's a place of mysticism and wildness, quirky locals and international politics. It is big and small at the same time. The world changes there, and consequences are amplified.

If I were forced to say "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" about this book, it would be an unequivocal "thumbs up". The opening few chapters are stiff, at times, but Zipp quickly hits his stride and sucks his reader in, adding threads to his tale that seem more believable the wilder they become. I'm not sure how widely available this novel is, but if your local book store doesn't carry it, you should convince them to. I'm sure you can also order it directly from Res Telluris, but if worse comes to worst, I'm sure Steve would be able to help you out and find a copy for you to buy. Which you should do. I'm quite pleased that I was able to start my year in reading with such a fine volume. I'll be on the lookout for his next effort.

Yellowknife was my fourth book as part of The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Nicholas Maes' Dead Man's Float.

Posted by August on 01.05.08 at 1:06 AM | Comments (1)

#53 - Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe

I read The Temptations of Big Bear several years ago as part of a course on contemporary Canadian literature. I was struck by Wiebe's formal experimentation and his deft, original approach at dealing with aspects of Canada's history that can be uncomfortable for many contemporary Canadians to acknowledge. It was a delicate, graceful book, and I'd squeeze the word "accomplished" in there somewhere if I could figure out how. So I was definitely looking forward to his 1974 follow-up book of short stories, Where is the Voice Coming From?. Turns out it was pretty terrible. Wiebe does not excel at the short story form at all. There are a few piece like "Scrapbook" and "Tudor King" that read like they were intended to be poignant coming of age tales about children dealing with the harsh realities of mortality in the prairies, but instead they are empty, amateurish scraps of narrative that confuse being sombre with being serious. "Millstone for the Sun's Day" looks like it could be a utopian/dysptopian science fiction thing, like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", but it just flat out doesn't make sense. Wiebe uses so many fictional titles and euphemism that the result is just kind of a vague sense of some kid doing something on a boat and some old man being displeased about it. "Did Jesus Ever Laugh?" falls into nearly every serial killer or insanity stereotype in all of literature (with the exception of the killer not being gay), and was boring to boot. In fact, of all thirteen of these stories, only and handful were worth reading at all, and only the title story actually stands out as memorable. And that's mostly just because it's a short version of the kind of thing he did in Big Bear.

Where is the Voice Coming From? was my third book for The Canadian Book Challenge, and my final book of 2007. I will begin my Reading 2008 project with Steve Zipp's novel, Yellowknife.

Posted by August on 12.30.07 at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)

#52 - Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke

I met Leon Rooke briefly in 2001 at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, the same day I met Sheila Heti and George Elliott Clarke. I heard him read some stories, at least one of which hadn't been published yet. He didn't need a microphone; his voice wasn't just loud, it was big. You could hear it through the entire festival grounds. You could feel it. I told him that I had never read any of his books, but that after that performance I would go and buy the next one I found. And I did, in fact I bought two (Shakespeare's Dog, and Painting the Dog). Fat Woman is my third, and I didn't realize until I was nearly finished it that it was his first novel.

My edition isn't the one you see pictured here. Mine is a tacky blue mass-market paperback from a company called General Publishing, part of their New Press Canadian Classics line. On the cover is a not-very-good oil painting by a woman named Jane Martin. It's the sort of painting that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s, but has not held up, and now looks only like the sort of thing that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s.

I can't quite place the time in which the novel is supposed to be set, nor the location. The dialogue has an American south ring to it, but with the exception of some of the navy references, most of the cultural landmarks mentioned seem to be Canadian. The novel was first published in 1980, and though I've met people like those described in this novel, I still can't fathom that such deep, such profound ignorance could still exist at such a time in a nation such as this. And yet still I believe it. Fat Woman is a good book, not just because of Rooke's contagious prose style, hitting you like an old-school revivalist preacher, sucking you in and not ever letting go, but because there is a tremendous tension between an honest and sometimes harsh portrait of an uneducated rural woman and an overblown caricature of the same. There were times, reading this book, when my heart went out to Ella Mae Hopkins, for all that she had suffered growing up and at the hands of those around her who, despite their love (and here I'm thinking mostly of her dead mother and her husband) can't help but be cruel. Ella Mae suffers from wild mood swings, anxiety, and an over-eating disorder of epic proportions. It's easy to laugh at her, and sometimes I did. But I also pitied her, and despite her ignorance and her own portion of hate and bigotry, I felt myself sympathizing with her, and hoping that things would work out alright in the end. Rooke never really tells us for sure; it all comes down to whether or not we trust Edward Hopkins.

Fat Woman was my second contribution to The Canadian Book Challenge. Next: Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe. This will most likely be my last book of the year, depending on how much free time I find myself over the holiday season, so stay tuned for an end-of-year wrap-up and a preview of what books to expect in the new year. Happy holidays, everyone.

Posted by August on 12.22.07 at 3:46 AM | Comments (0)

Making a List, Etc.

I had completely forgotten until just now that, as part of The Canadian Book Challenge (that is, to read 13 Canadian books between last October 4th and the Canada Day that is fast approaching) I'm to explain how the books were chosen. For some it's a book from each province or territory; for others all winners of a particular prize. For me, it's the availability of Canadian books I haven't yet read. I have a pretty large selection of Canadian books here at home, but only a few that I haven't read, and so I'm going to start by reading those, and should I run out, or simply not feel ready for/interested in a book currently in my library, I'll go to the store and get a few more that I haven't read yet. Simple as that. Here's my tentative list, in no particular order:

  • The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields (just finished)
  • Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke (in progress)
  • Yellowknife, by Steve Zipp
  • The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence
  • The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • The Wandering Fire, by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • The Darkest Road, by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • Home Movies, by Ray Robertson
  • The Tin Flute, by Gabrielle Roy
  • Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe
  • Street of Riches, by Gabrielle Roy
  • A Celibate Season, by Carol Shields & Blanche Howard
  • Dancing Girls, by Margaret Atwood

Posted by August on 12.19.07 at 2:03 PM | Comments (0)

#51 - The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields

My first experience with Canadian literature was with a Carol Shields novel. I was in the seventh or eighth grade, I can't exactly remember which, and I had just gotten into the habit of listening to talk radio on the CBC before going to bed (don't ask; I was a strange child), and the program that aired just as I was nodding off was one in which selections from a Canadian novel were read every night over the course of several days or weeks. That novel was The Stone Diaries. My parents bought me a copy on our next trip to "the city" (Winnipeg), and I was off. To this day it remains tied for the much coveted title of "Favourite Novel" (the other contender is A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale). Despite becoming enamoured with her work at such an early age, The Republic of Love is only the third novel of hers that I have read. Why? Quite simply, because of Larry's Party. That book was a catastrophic failure, so far as I was concerned. Larry was not a man in any sense that I recognized, nor was he a woman in a man's body; I simply could not believe in the character at all, and it was a struggle to finish the book. I consoled myself with short story collections like Various Miracles and Dressing Up for the Carnival, but I was put off her novels for quite a few years. All this has now changed.

I fell in love with this book. The book's two protagonists, Fay McLeod and Tom Avery are damaged but real, well-drawn people with full lives, lives that feel like they could be biography rather than fiction. The main action of the book, and the main pleasure, is to watch these two characters move in a spiral around one another, sharing friends and places, existing on the periphery of each other's lives but never quite meeting, and never quite knowing why they fail to connect with the various lovers or almost-lovers that come and go. Destiny seems to have a hand in their eventual (inevitable) romance, but there is so much else going on, such a richness of detail to how their lives are presented, that it never rings false, never feels cheap or out-dated. The Republic of Love is an exquisite, satisfying book about real people finding real love, and living, more or less, happily ever after, and Shields somehow manages it without being sentimental or saccharine.

That's not to say that the book is perfect, of course. There are little things about it, not really relevant to the plot, where it's plain that Shields had no real experience. Things like fast food. Tom Avery eats on a pretty regular basis at his local A&W (a pretty appropriate choice, given the Winnipeg setting), but it's obvious that Shields hadn't set foot in one in more than a decade, if she ever had. The menu items he orders, which would have been popular when she was young had been discontinued for decades at the time the novel is set, she populates the restaurant with waitresses as well as cashiers and cooks, and the patrons tip regularly. None of this is accurate for any fast food franchise, never mind A&W specifically. It's a small mistake, but one that could have been avoided by eating a single meal for research, though I think I only found it jarring because I worked there for several years as a teenager. There were a few other similar things, mostly characters using slang terms and customs that belong to the generation before them, but they are of small consequence.

The Republic of Love was my first book as part of The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up: Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke.

Posted by August on 12.19.07 at 1:27 PM | Comments (0)

The Canadian Book Challenge

I recently learned about The Canadian Book Challenge, which is essentially book-blogger John Mutford challenging his readers to get through thirteen Canadian books between now (well, starting October 4th) and Canada Day 2008 (that's July 1st). All those who meet the challenge will have their name thrown into a draw for a very Canadian prize package. I don't imagine I'll have much trouble getting to thirteen, especially with nearly seven months between now and the deadline. Each entry will be labeled as part of the challenge.

Posted by August on 12.09.07 at 10:39 PM | Comments (1)