Every year I make a plan, post it here, and every year I fail to follow through. The plan isn't really a plan, it's just a list of books that I've recently acquired or rediscovered on my shelves and hope to read some time before the end of the year. I think I made my very first "plan" post more than six years ago, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that one or more of those books still haven't been read. It'll happen eventually. So without further ado, here, in no particular order, is this year's list (not including Wild Geese, which I'm currently reading, and the remaining Robertson Davies novels that I didn't get a chance to finish writing about):

1. Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles, illustrated by Marlena Zuber
2. The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad
3. What Boys Like, by Amy Jones
4. Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall
5. Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin
6. Where We Have to Go, by Lauren Kirshner
7. Whore, by Nelly Arcan
8. The Pornographer's Poem, by Michael Turner
9. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
10. The Uses of Enchantment, by Heidi Julavits
11. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
12. The Big Why, by Michael Winter
13. The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler
14. The Tamuli (trilogy), by David Eddings
15. Gently Down the Stream, by Ray Robertson

The list is woefully incomplete, of course, and is subject to change without notice, but right now those are the books that I've placed highest on my stack. So stay tuned! These and other great books will be coming up later in the year.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. This strikes me as one of those things that ought to be taken for granted, but Good to a Fault reminded me that it isn't. Morality and ethics have caught my interest in the last couple of years beyond the every day attention I would give those issues just being a person in the world, so when I first heard the premise of Good to a Fault I thought it would be right up my alley. Serious moral inquiry from a Canadian author in a plausible real world situation. That's not exactly what I got.

Clara Purdy is a woman in her forties whose life stalled after her husband left her and then, later, she spent years caring for her mother when she died. Before that, she was at her father's bedside as he passed away from cancer. She does something in insurance that's so irrelevant it's not worth taking the time to go back and look it up, and she's a practicing but not exactly devout high church Anglican (so high church is Endicott's depiction of Anglicanism that this reviewer, raised in the Anglican church and son of a lay-preacher, finds it more than a little Roman, at times uncomfortably so). She's a comfortably middle-class nobody who's had disappointments she couldn't figure out how to come back from, who lives a dull life (though surrounded, it seems, by the most unflappable, giving friends and relatives the world has ever seen), knowing something is missing but not quite sure what. The Gage family are dirt-poor nomads, living out of their car and not really even making the best with what they have. Clayton is shiftless and aggressive, and Lorraine seems to have more or less given up, and though she loves her children fiercely, they've gone a touch wild on her, and Dolly seems more the mother at times. Clayton's mother is with them, and she's such a bitter, selfish old woman she's often more a caricature than a character. Clara and the Gages meet when she collides into their car turning left at an intersection. Nobody is seriously injured, but the car is a write-off and while at the hospital Lorraine is diagnosed with late stage cancer. Clara, looking as much to fill the void in her life as to take responsibility for her actions, lets the family stay with her, picking up all the bills no less.

At this point those of you who are interested in applied morality (not necessarily ethics, sorry—the best way I can think of to put the difference as I see it is actually to steal a line from the character Ducky on NCIS: the ethical man knows it's wrong to cheat on his wife; the moral man actually wouldn't) might be as excited as I was to see some challenging questions posed. That never really happened. Clayton takes off immediately, his mother is no help at all, and Clara Purdy finds herself sole caregiver to three children and a rickety elderly woman. There are some brief conversations with friends and family over whether the Gage family is her responsibility—they aren't, but some of their suffering is her fault, and to that extent I think she's right in that making amends in some way is her responsibility—but no serious argument is ever made against her plan, and she gets a lot of unconditional support. In fact, there's only two other serious questions that are really addressed in Good to a Fault, so far as I can tell, and only one of them is really worth asking, so of course it's the one given short shrift. We should talk about that one first.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. After Clara has been caring for the Gage family for some time a woman comes up to her in church and accuses her of being charitable publicly, to get something for herself. Good or bad, wrong or right, it's not what really matters. What matters is that this woman thinks it means her good works "don't count". Don't count? First, Clara isn't really doing anything publicly, so that's not even worth talking about, but second, what does "counting" mean in moral or ethical terms? Leaving aside questions about what is or is not a good act, are the positive outcomes of such an act negated if the act is performed for selfish reasons? In Clara's case her reasons were neither entirely selfish nor entirely selfless, but I'd say they started out more of the latter than the former. It's possible that the good acts are negated, but I very much doubt it. The children still have a place to live, food in their bellies, a safe place to sleep. So what then does it mean for something to "count"? There has to be, as there is for Clara and most of the other characters in the book—though, significantly, not the Gages—someone or something to weigh and measure, to make an accounting. There must, in short, be a God. Nobody ever explicitly states that there is no inherent virtue in any human activity, but it's telling that the characters who have no faith are also the characters who have no material success, who abandon their responsibilities, who have dirty children and unmade beds. (It pissed me off that, even compensating for Lorraine's cancer and Clara not working, the God-fearing, middle class Clara is far and away a better, more patient mother than Lorraine.)

The closest Good to a Fault ever comes to a genuine moral crisis is when Lorraine (and here I'm going to drop what the genre crown call "spoilers") recovers and is able to take back her children, Clara doesn't want to let them go. She goes as far as calling Community Services to make the case that the children would be better of with her. Whether or not that's true, and that really depends on your idea of what "better off" means, she comes to her senses at the last minute, and the two families have a colossal falling out. The heartbreak Clara feels is genuine, because she does eventually come to love the children, and that's the point when it becomes more about her than about the kids, or about doing something good, or taking responsibility for her actions, or any of it. And then there's a fucking interminable picnic, and the book is over, with few questions asked and none even half-assed answered.

Speaking of interminable, this book was way too fucking long. I know I said that about Fall on Your Knees, but I really should have saved that up for Good to a Fault. Pretty much all the thematic points were made in the first hundred pages, and all the rest of them in the last fifty or so. Endicott seems to be packing as much detail as possible into the scenes of Clara bonding with the children, so losing them will have a greater emotional impact. In that sense it's successful, because that moment and Clara falling apart afterward packs one hell of a punch. It just comes far too late to save the book from being a total slog, and it put off the issues at the core of the plot for far, far too long. Another whack or two from an editorial machete would have helped immeasurably. I really, really wanted to like this book, and I suppose I did, but I didn't like it as much as I had hoped.

Good to a Fault was my fifth and final selection for Canada Reads, and my twelfth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso.

So it's hair, but it's shaped like a hat. I saw Carrie Snyder read at The Starlite in Waterloo a few years back, at the only UW alumni event I've ever attended. She shared the stage with George Elliott Clarke, Erik McCormack and a few other distinguished bookish folks from UW's past (perhaps even Evan Munday, though I honestly don't remember). She read "Tumbleweed," and I'm pretty sure part of one other story, and I have to be honest and say that I didn't think much of it. As I've written here before, I'm not very good at following fiction when it's read aloud. And really, the hair hat seemed kind of gimmicky. Every time I saw her book in the store (and I've actually seen it quite a bit; for a not-very-well-known first-time author, Penguin sure as hell got that book into stores) I walked past it thinking, maybe next time. I mean, it has French flaps and deckle edges both; it's practically begging for me to hate it.

I don't hate it. It was a pain in the ass to turn only one page at a time, and the weight of the flaps kept smacking it shut if I didn't hold the book just so, but I didn't hate it. I think I read all but the last two stories on the train back from Waterloo last night. For some reason, I tore through Hair Hat. It wasn't that I was so enthralled that I couldn't put it down, it was more a kind of puzzled curiosity. Carrie Snyder writes like she knows. Every sentence is confident, hardened, tempered, fully-formed and whole. There is no hesitation in these stories, and the weaknesses, where they exist, are all in the conception, the plan rather than the execution. Except of course for the hair hat itself, which was fucking ridiculous. If you've been reading my reviews of Robertson Davies' books over the last few months you'll know that I'm perfectly willing to accept outlandish literary conceits, but with Davies the whole world of the novel is in step with the conceit, with the satire, the bombast of it. I get the impression that Snyder's man with the hair hat is meant to be vaguely magical, like the blue mittens socks or the Vietnamese takeout in Rebecca Rosenblum's Once, but it was all wrong. Far too light for the tone of the stories, far too arbitrary seeming. Like Nikolski, it was interesting to see the connections, how the pieces fit together without the characters themselves being able to see it, but for quite a few of the stories ("Tumbleweed" and "Harassment," and "Third Dog" especially) the man and his hair felt tacked on. I can imagine Snyder thinking that she didn't have enough stories that included him to make Hair Hat a true story cycle, but that she also thought it would be too uneven if it wasn't a cycle. I personally think this book would have gotten a lot more attention if she had toned down her conceit a bit and let those other stories stand on their own. They could have been brilliant, and now they are merely good.

Snyder's greatest strength is in revealing family dynamics obliquely, usually through completely unrelated speech. Children argue about hot dogs, an aunt refuses to serve a snack between meals, and beneath it all we learn about abuse, fear, loneliness, self-hate, almost without seeing it happen. And then there's the goddamn hair hat, intruding, breaking apart the delicate emotional structures Snyder builds with her smooth, confident prose. The hair hat man even has his own story, which could have been quite poignant were it not completely undermined by the conceit Snyder has—quite literally—attached to him. Even the explanation makes no real sense. That one telling detail that could have been, should have been, magical takes all of Snyder's excellent craftsmanship and makes it farcical. Reading this book was like looking at a lovely Renaissance painting with a large gash running down the side of the canvas. It's still beautiful, but all your attention is taken up by the thing that spoils it.

Hair Hat was my fourth selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my eleventh selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott.

Please excuse me for some vagueness, and if I make some minor factual errors. Immediately after finishing The Jade Peony, I loaned it to my mother to read, and since she lives in Waterloo and I'm now back at home in Toronto, I'm unable to have it in front of me while I write this (and I don't take notes while I read). So: I once wrote on this blog that I'm not interested in literature as social work, and I'm certainly not interested in an author behaving like my case worker, and that's what a lot of The Jade Peony felt like to me. I wasn't just supposed to be reading a decent novel about Chinese people, I was supposed to be absorbing a culture, learning about history, becoming a better person. Like broccoli, it wasn't actually bad, but knowing it was supposed to be good for me made me not want to finish it.

But finish it I did.

It's difficult to write in the voice of a child. Children are not simply minature adults, and they certainly aren't stupid. There's an extremely delicate balance that has to be maintained; children don't see the same things we do, the way we do, and writing them as though they do is unconvincing at best. What details will they pick out as important? How will they interpret those details? Choy has an especially difficult task, because he chooses not one just child's voice, but three. Additionally, a great many of his readers may not be Chinese, and the novel takes place in a time that those readers most likely don't have any direct experience of. He has to include sufficient cultural and historical detail to situate the reader in a particular time and place, but he also has to balance it against what a child would pay attention to, how much they would understand, how they would understand it, and so on and so on. I find that there are moments when Choy is convincing, particularly with Jung-Sum and Jook-Liang, but most of the time he swerves around all over the place. Jook-Liang seems to miss far too much even though she's quite young, and Jung-Sum sees far too much for his age. The scene in which Jung-Sum runs to the cinema with his friend, leaving behind his beloved turtle, is told with far too much telling detail and sadness for what a child his age could have mustered, and I don't get the feeling that Choy is trying to present us with an unreliable adult narrator looking back at his past.

It wasn't a bad novel, and I enjoyed the clash between Poh-Poh's ideas of Old China and the new Canadian ways, but for the most part I found it unnecessarily sombre, and a little dull. I think it would have worked better as a collection of linked short stories. The chapters were almost episodic, and there didn't seem to be any definite narrative arc, except perhaps in the second half of Sek-Lung's section, which was so charged with meaning that it was as subtle as a freight train. To be honest I think this is the worst of the four Canada Reads books I've read so far. As much as I hated Generation X, at least it moved me in some way, made me react, even though that reaction was very strongly negative. It's frankly taken all my will to gather enough interest to write even this little bit about The Jade Peony. My final reaction is that I just simple don't care. It probably doesn't help that my edition (earlier than the one pictured here, with a much different cover) was riddled with typos, huge gaps between words, and other production oddities that made it feel more like I was reading an un-corrected proof.

I'm sorry to be so brief, but I just can't find anything I want to say about this novel. Typical CanLit, perhaps? The Jade Peony was my fourth selection for Canada Reads, and my tenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Hair Hat, by Carrie Snyder.

I didn't like the music in this book. This may sound like a piddling thing, but it's not, really. Ray Robertson writes ecstatically about music, with a gift that's difficult to match outside of Rolling Stone's better moments, and like all such writing, it can make you hear the music in new ways. Or if you're particularly musically literate (as I am—I couldn't tell you how much music I have all totaled, but there's about 54 days of continuous, no-repeat listening on my hard drive, and that doesn't even begin to touch my CD collection, which hit 500 albums before I finished high school) it can make you want to shake the writer out of his blind stupidity. Or it can do both.

I can't say I care much for country music. A long, long time ago, there was no such thing. There was just American folk music, what people like to call "roots" music nowadays, and it was a mealy patois of backwoods English doggerel, vaudeville, and slave lament. Then in 1912 a man named Hart Wand, who oddly enough was white, published a song probably written years earlier, called "Dallas Blues," and from that moment on there was the Blues, the rawest, saddest, sweetest sound mankind has ever produced, and there was everything else. A lot of the very early stuff was jug and fiddle and washboard music, but through some musical mitosis a line was drawn; on the white side was Country, and on the black side was Blues. They drifted apart, bluesmen picking up a sophistication worthy of their first real baby, Jazz, and country folk leaning heavily towards a decidedly unsophisticated twang. The two cells bumped into each other once or twice over the years, the one time Country giving birth to its greatest child, Bluegrass, and later the Blues had its second baby, and they called it Rock and Roll. Blues laid low for a while, but its children went out into the world and conquered. Country music died, only to be brought back from the dead in 1954 for the exclusive use of Mr. Johnny Cash. Everything else that calls itself Country Music is the result of stray electrons coursing through nerves that don't yet know the brain won't be taking any more calls. Some of it is beautiful in that plastic-bag-in-the-wind American Beauty kind of way, but mostly it's sad. But Rock and Roll and Bluegrass and all the various other spawn of that 1912 break are a promiscuous bunch, and they've been fucking like rabbits in the meantime, giving us Funk and Soul and Alt Country and Indie Rock and Neo Folk and Hard House and Deep Funk and even the likes of Autechre and Lady Gaga. If you know how to listen, you can trace it all back to 1912. I sound like a total music snob, but then, I kinda am.

Given all that, it should come as no surprise that I had some issues with Ray Robertson lavishing his substantial gift, his ability to write about music the way A.S. Byatt writes about art, how she can make you see painting and colours as though you'd gone through life with your eyes sewn shut, on 1966 and a fast-and-loose Gram Parsons analog. As a character, a person inhabiting that time and that place, Thomas Graham just works. He's absurd and over the top and paranoid and charismatic in the right way for his time, and though his disciples are few, they are completely his, when even a year earlier or later, they could not have been. But his music! I just can't buy that The Duckhead Secret Society are making something worth all that fuss.

Which is not to say that there isn't any good music in Moody Food. There's lots, and some of it is even Country, and when Ray Robertson taps into that, it's golden. But when Graham hears Sgt. Pepper and accuses Bill of tipping off the Beatles to the Duckhead sound, I stop taking all that gushing seriously. Sgt. Pepper is a great album, it really, really is. It's just not all that deep. As complex, sophisticated, and just plain old good as it is, very little of the Beatles oeuvre actually goes that far beyond the surface. When Robertson writes about Hank Williams or Arthur Crudup, though, he's talking about a simpler music that reaches all the way back, past what our smart monkey brains can understand, to our lizard brain, still ticking over like some ancient diesel engine, powerful, insistent, but dumb. That's the place Graham comes close to touching with the Dream of Pines material. The Interstellar North American Music isn't anything close to that; it's a coked-out fantasy, a fever dream, and while Robertson's ecstasy is more about Bill and Thomas' decline into, well, into something drug-fueled and horrible, it seems almost a shame to waste it on so much delusion.

Waste is maybe the wrong word. Moody Food was damned near impossible for me to put down because there was so much life in it. It takes place more than a decade before I was born, so it's not a period I feel much connection with or any nostalgia for, and I certainly can't tell you if Robertson's depiction was all that accurate. I can tell you that it feels right. I can tell you that I enjoyed the hell out of the book, in large part because I had such a desire to fight with Robertson over the music. The best parts of a book aren't always the things that you find beautiful, but can instead be the things that provoke you, that make you want to argue with the text and the writer. Those are often the things that bring me the most pleasure, and I could see myself spending many an hour, drink in hand, having a spirited back and forth about music with Robertson—or any one of his characters. Moody Food is probably the closest I'm going to come, at least until I get around to Gently Down the Stream.

Moody Food was my third selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my ninth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy.

When I was doing my bachelor's degree, one of my summer jobs was working Confined Space Safety Watch (known colloquially as Hole Watch) for the Weyerhaeuser pulp and paper mill in Dryden. The job was pretty simple. The mill would shut down for ten days of the annual top-to-bottom maintenance period, a lot of workers, both contract and union, would have to crawl into some very cramped spaces to work, and often those spaces were dangerous. My job was to put on a tonne of heavy gear, grab a first aid/emergency rescue pack and a walkie talkie, and sit outside a confined space for twelve hours a day making sure nobody died. I worked in the bleach plant, the recovery boiler, the chemical plant, flak dryers, precipitators, black and green liquor tanks, and a few places I can't remember the names for. I did it two years in a row (earning, in each ten day period, about twice my current monthly income), and there were never any accidents or emergencies on my shifts. I got a lot of reading done. On one particularly scorching afternoon I was working in the precipitators—a relatively easy post, because there was a place to sit, it was easy to keep track of the workers, and there were normally at least three other watchers there with you—and I happened to be seated next to a woman whose name I can't recall. The precipitators were an ugly, almost frightening place. To us it was a long, narrow iron corridor with iron doors on either side, like the watertight doors of a battleship. There'd be welders and other tradesmen (always men) on the other side of the doors, balanced on thin, tightly grouped iron rails, a great, black, breathing emptiness far above and below. Even in the heat of the afternoon it was a grim, dark place, like something David Lynch would have built for the Baron Harkonnen. We didn't want to think about our surroundings, and it was too filthy a place to bring a book, so we'd talk. The woman I sat next to on that afternoon told me what she did to pass the time. She would pick a person at random, me, say, or one of the welders, and imagine an entire history for them. Would they have a family? What did they do for fun? Where did they live? If she liked the way her story turned out, she would find a way, small and innocent, to put herself in it, to make it, just briefly, her own story as well. She never wrote any of it down. It all just happened in her head, and when she was done, she'd let it drift away like smoke.

Nikolski is about serendipity, three characters whose lives barely brush up against each other, never quite connecting. Noah, the itinerant archaeologist, Joyce the dumpster diving pirate, and the unnamed bookseller with the ocean in his basement. They are united by the Book with No Face, by trash, and by a shared bond of blood that they don't even know exists. Set in Fournier, Lazer Lederhendler's translation is lovely to read as the three protagonists fumble in the dark, unknowing but, strangely, far from lost. That, I think, is the conventional reading, and it's certainly the best one.

I'm going to offer an alternative.

One of Dickner's protagonists, the only one without a name, and not coincidentlaly, the only one who is allowed to narrate his own story, works in the S.W. Gam Bookshop in Montréal, the only place visited by all three characters. Nikolski begins in 1989 with him cleaning out his dead mother's house, taking with him the Nikolski compass—a cheap plastic compass that points to the island of Nikolski, where our narrator's father lived and eventually died. It's the only thing he has left of his family. The novel also opens with garbage, bags and bags of it, full of history, of treasure, of the stuff that Noah and Joyce will build their lives with.

I wonder if there may not somewhere be a Britannica of our desires, a comprehensive repertory of the slightest dream, the least aspiration, where nothing would be lost or created, but where ceaseless transformation of all things would operate in both directions, like an elevator connecting the various storeys of our existence.

Our bookshop is, in sum, a universe entirely made up of and governed by books—and it seemed quite natural for me to dissolve myself in it completely, to devote my life to the thousands of lives duly stacked on hundreds of shelves.

This could be Nikolski, the book our narrator writes himself, the chapter in the Britannica that contains his slightest dream, the one where he has family, connections. I can imagine him sitting behind the counter, looking at the customers, seeing which books they buy (or steal), finding common ground, making up stories like the woman who sat next to me in the industrial hell of the precipitators. This woman buys books about marine life and shoplifts books about computer programming. That man comes in with a child and browses the dinosaur books. Before that, there was a woman, loud and frantic, with a book that was decades old and falling apart. How do these things connect? I see our unnamed protagonist as the narrator of the entire novel, taking his mother's collection of travel guides as a jumping off point and reaching back, creating a mythology of wanderlust and a family tree to support it, putting up the scaffolding that will let him build the courage to leave a life that holds no connective tissue for him anymore.

Of course this is just me grafting my own experiences on top of a narrative that works exceptionally well as it stands, but I think that any book that can open itself up this way, that can be read as a complex, adventurous, but still accessible novel and like a box of puzzles and secrets, like a map to pirate treasure or a midden heap, is a book that should win Canada Reads. I have two books to go, but I think I've found the contender I'm rooting for. And as an aside, if this is the sort of thing that's going on in French Canadian literature, English Canada needs to get working on more translations as good as Lederhendler's.

Nikolski was my third selection for Canada Reads, and my eighth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Moody Food, by Ray Robertson.

I'm not entirely clear on why, but this book reminded me a lot of Fits Like A Rubber Dress, by Roxane Ward, which I read back in 2008. But here's the thing: How Happy to Be only had a handful of superficial things in common with Rubber Dress. The experimentation with sex and drugs that finally kept Ward's book from being a total waste of time is just the jumping off point for Katrina Onstad, and it doesn't take more than a paragraph or two to see that she's drinking from a deeper well. Onstad's characters have tried hedonism themselves, and while it was the solution to some problems, it wasn't without problems of its own, an idea Ward barely dipped her toe in. But I don't mean to make this into a ninth grade compare and contrast.

Maxime isn't shallow, stupid, or fame-obsessed, but like the smart kid in the rural school who doesn't want to be abused by her classmates, she acts the part—though it's not abuse she's escaping. How Happy to Be shows us what happens when she gets sick of acting, and for a while it's a hell of a lot of fun. Onstad's send-up of self-important celebrities and the media apparatus that seems structured soley to support their egos is dead-on (Onstad's Much Music analog is called BFD-TV, which I can only assume stands for "Big Fucking Deal"), and I laughed out loud more than once while Maxime was interviewing Ethan Hawke. It all seems like such a laugh, really, watching Maxime deliberately sabotaging her career, eviscerating her coworkers with her wit, navigating parties and talk shows and fucking Ad Sales out of boredom. And then for a moment it's all ripped away and we can see the insecurity that underlies it all, Maxime's, the celebrities', the media's.

I look at Nicole Kidman and I realize I know more about her life right now than I do about my father's. But I only know the details, the breakups and the box-office figures: names, dates, and injuries. These are the boundaries of my job, and they're closing in. My palms moisten. My shoulders shudder. I look at my right hand; it's in the air. Somehow, I can't help it; the hand doesn't care about professional repercussions. It waves frantically.

I need to know something.

"Lady in black," says the Czar. Most women in the room answer to that description, but he means me. I stand up, my heart racing a little under the collective sweep of eyes. The notebook paper clots in my palm.

"My question is for Nicole Kidman," I say.

"Speak up please," says the Czar.

"My question is for Nicole Kidman," I shout. I clear my throat. "What's it like?"

The Czar gives Ms. Kidman a quick, apologetic glance that she doesn't catch, plucking at her water glass with her bony fingers. "Can you clarify your question, please?" asks the Czar.

"What's it like?" I'm just going for it now, just letting it all out. "I mean, when everyone thinks your husband is gay, and then he leaves you, and you're a billionaire and not untalented but in a business where talent doesn't really matter and, and, you had a miscarriage that we all know about." The strangeness of this strikes me suddenly and I say it again, "Somehow we all know about that. Every single person in this room knows and, you, and you have children, right? You have two children?"

Nicole Kidman looks up, straight at me, unsmiling, her white skin reflecting the lights of the cameras that line the sides of the theatre.

"My question is, What's it like to be you?" It's a bad question. I recognize it as such even without the Sludge Monster's little choking sounds. But it occurs to me that that's my problem; I don't know what it's like to be anyone else. I can't imagine any other life but this one. I'm being stabbed to death by my point of view. Does anyone else ever feel like that? So desperate to break your own borders, so frantic you want to smash through someone else's stomach and crawl in? Maybe Nicole Kidman knows something about this; a person who walks in other people's bodies for a living must, surely?

Did I just say that out loud?

I sit down.

The room is very, very quiet. The Czar whispers something in Nicole Kidman's ear and she shakes her head. The Italian woman moves ever so slightly away from me. Nicole Kidman leans forward, mouth over the microphone. In a girlish Australian voice, she says softly, "It's probably not that different from being you."

I doubt that, but I write it down anyway.

"Next question!"

Perhaps that was a bit long to quote (I'm sorry, I tend to linger where Nicole Kidman is concerned). In that scene Maxime, just for a moment, sees through the cracks in her own life and directly into someone else's. Later on Nicole Kidman will make a complaint about the question through her "people", but in that instant she's a human being speaking to another human being, unmediated, and it's almost too much for everyone. As Leonard Cohen would say, it's "a breaking of the ancient Western code."

Real life being too much seems to be one of the dominant themes in the book, really. Maxime's father migrates to a remote island with a handful of hippie flakes to escape the reality of his wife's death, Maxime gives herself over to movies and pop culture&mdash to escape the island commune—then alcohol, drugs, and meaningless sex to escape a failed relationship and an empty, unsatisfying job—while her friend Sunera turns to pills.

Only Theo McArdle seems comfortable in the real world, and as a result he seems almost beatific by comparison. He's also the only one whose work deals with "the real world" in a sense (in fact, Maxime and Surena call him a "real person," as opposed to whatever it is they think they are). Maxime's father is a dropped-out wanderer, and she and all her friends create a fantasy world for a living, build up a patina of glamour to protect the myth of what today (the novel takes place in 2001 which, improbably-sounding to this reader, was almost ten years ago) we would call the Creative Class. Theo is a physicist, his entire job to understand the nature of reality. He's not perfect, but Maxime is so bent on self-destruction and Onstad keeps the pace moving so steadily that it can be easy to miss his distraction, his occasional social stupidity. It's good for the book that he's more than just piece to move around the board, even if he's mostly just that, and I liked him despite myself.

I mostly didn't notice Onstad's prose, which is good, because I don't think it was trying to be noticed. When she did do something clever it was also smooth and occasionally lovely. But there were times, especially near the end, when I wanted more. Onstad gets the media/digital age stuff right, which most writers don't (especially journalists—sorry folks, most of you come off like tourists, weirdly, guys like Hal Niedzviecki in particular), but for once I'd like to see a writer who is smart about those things slow down a bit and also give us a rich, Munro-like prose experience. Books like How Happy to Be are fun—really fun—but I'm sick of rush rush rush. Even when the book has some depth to it, the prose often doesn't have enough, and that's what I was missing here. But I suppose it's unfair to criticize Onstad for not writing the book I wanted.

How Happy to Be was my second selection for Canada Reads: Independently as well as my seventh selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and while it's not about to unseat Century, I'd definitely recommend it. Next up is Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner.

It's not difficult to see why Fall On Your Knees was chosen for Oprah's book club. It's not a bad book, but neither is it a particularly good one (I'm not sorry I've read it, but I wouldn't ever actually say to someone "hey, you should read this book"), and it has all the features that a big, serious, meaty family drama/epic is supposed to have. There's a family without a lot of money in a remote village a long time ago, a great romance with disastrous consequences, a great talent nurtured and then prematurely snuffed, any number of lives lived in quiet desperation, a miraculous child, an abusive husband/father, some heartbreaking death. Very little humour, and some modern characters dressed up in period clothes so they can chafe against their fate of being born in a time before they could be accepted for who they are. It's a very Canadian book.

Despite the laundry list of potential clichés I just went through above, none of that is really what keeps Fall On Your Knees from actually living up to all the attention it's gotten. It's just too damned long. That can be—and often is—a facile criticism, but in this case it's accurate. Ann-Marie MacDonald gives us two or three exceptionally managed moments of extreme emotional tension (Kathleen's death, Frances with Ginger in the cave all the way up to the shooting, and the bits in Kathleen's diary when she discovers both jazz and Rose), but they are separated by an ocean of dreary greyness.

Kathleen's death is probably the best illustration of this. Kathleen was the most fully realized character in the book, even though she appears in less than half of it. Her death scene was tragic, monstrous, bloody, and it struck the book like a hurricane. Killing off a character that strong so early in the book was bold, and exactly the sort of thing that could have made Fall On Your Knees great, but killing her doesn't make her gone. Her memory lingers, of course, and her name becomes a kind of curse on the Piper household, but she reappears several times in flashbacks, letters, photographs, and diary entries. She's so close to what happens in the rest of the book that the shock of her death becomes diffuse, absorbed by the rest of the book. As a result it doesn't have anywhere near the impact on the reader (or this reader, anyway) that it could have, and even Frances' antics can't drag us out of the emotional dead zone that follows, the in-between feeling that I got from most of the book. Even when something was happening I felt like I was waiting for something else to happen.

It's not just specific incidents like Kathleen's death that get lost in what seems like interminable interstitial sections. So much of the first few chapters, James' life before Materia, their courtship and the start of their lives together, falls out of memory, irrelevant and almost entirely unnecessary. All of what the story requires of the Mahmouds and the origins of the Piper family could have been condensed dramatically with no real harm done. Likewise the fighting and squabbling between Mercedes and Frances. I couldn't help but feel that I was reading (and re-reading; Frances and Mercedes' relationship was very repetitive) passages that added nothing. I don't mind a sprawling story if I feel like it's well-executed and tightly under control, but MacDonald didn't always seem in control of the material. The more the lies and confusions and superstitions of the Piper family were compounded, the more it felt like overkill, making the same point again and again, avoiding giving the book a real centre. The end result—which I admit I saw coming—was an almost shaggy dog Big Reveal, but for a minor character rather than the reader. I felt cheated, not because the resolution was too clean (it wasn't), but because it was too obvious.

As I said above, I wouldn't go out of my way to hand this book to anyone, but I wouldn't tell them to put it down, either. Fall On Your Knees was my second Canada Reads selection, and my sixth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is How Happy to Be, by Katrina Onstad.

The wonderful Dr. Sarah Tolmie, whom I've mentioned at least once before on this blog, was a professor of mine at the University of Waterloo—my Honours Essay supervisor, in fact (what we at UW referred to as the "Undergraduate Thesis"). In addition to teaching me a great deal about my field, she directed me toward the work of Iris Murdoch, and later, an obscure little novel called Lord Nelson Tavern. She recommended it to me while I was spending a summer alone in Sudbury. My girlfriend was up North working, while I had just moved into a new apartment, and didn't even have a telephone or Internet connection yet. I was, however, making effective use of the Sudbury Public Library. Lord Nelson Tavern, as it turns out, was by Canadian author Ray Smith, and though I promptly forgot both his name and the title of his book, I never forgot the experience of reading it. It was strange, difficult—I'm not sure I understood a single word of it—but it was also amazing. The kind of reading experience I look for over and over again. And then in July, I read this post by Mr. Beattie, and it all came rushing back to me. I'm not sure why I put off reading Century for so long, but Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently has given me the opportunity to correct the error.

Century, though labeled a novel, is six not-quite self-contained fictions that trace the family of Jane Seymour, the subject of the first piece, from 1983 to 1893. The first four are grouped together as "Family," and the last two as "The Continental." Though never explicitly stated, I think that Kenniston Thorson, the American who is the subject of both Continental pieces and Connie (aka Lulu, likely also Constance) from "Red Banner, Black Boots" are Jane's maternal grandparents. Smith arranges the six fictions in more or less reverse chronological order, and as a result there are moments, or aspects of a character's personality, that seem to echo back through time. The second piece opens like so:

Ian knew he was perhaps sentimental, even silly, but he was moved by the landscape and the air in it. I live in the world and this is the world, he thought, as he broke down out of the clouds into the clean air and floated to a stop in the powder snow just below the avalanche platform. This Austrian valley stretching off to the left and right was deep – he could not see the valley floor from here – and steep-walled, the sides dark with rock faces and precarious evergreens picked out by the snow: a dramatic and gloomy scene. But what moved him most was the mist clinging to the mountains across and below, the mist woven through the trees, seeming still.

A hundred pages later and nearly a hundred years earlier Kenniston Thorson is riding in a cab on his way back to his Paris residence when he remembers how,

once, while he was trekking a deep, forested valley in the Vorarlberg, a song had come down to him from the craggy heights, the song of an unseen girl far above had come coiling down through the trees and filled the valley and filled his soul with its clear liquid innocence.

It's not an exact corollary (though "the Vorarlberg" is in Austria), but Century deliberately resists such obvious framing. The novel spans ninety years, not one hundred, and while Gwen has inherited both her parents' sexual appetites (and, particularly, her father's quest for love), it's Jane who most resembles Connie, her nervous energy, her life invaded by the dead of a generation past, dipping her big toe into philosophy but also clearly capable of so much more. Likewise, it's Jane's father who most resembles the sophisticated but restless Thorson, even though they are the only two main characters not related by blood.

Much, perhaps too much, has been made about how difficult Century is to talk about. It's true, but what I wound up inferring from the reviews and blog posts is that it was also a difficult book to read, and it isn't, at least not on the surface. It isn't Ulysses or Sexing the Cherry or Empire of the Senseless, or even Gravity's Rainbow. I found that I had to pay close attention to Smith's prose, but as well as being beautiful, it was also surprisingly charming and straightforward. What makes Century difficult to talk about is its structure, the complex relationships between characters, events, and images. It's one of the saddest, most lovely things I've ever read, but to explain why, I think it would be better, and perhaps even more efficient, to just hand you a copy of the novel rather than to try and say anything about it.

Somewhat surprisingly, I'd come across some of Century before. As soon as I encountered the Venetian masks in "Serenissima" I knew I'd already read that section, and I scoured my bookshelf and magazine rack. The culprit (somewhat unsurprisingly) turned out to be the Salon des Refusés issue of Canadian Notes & Queries (issue #74, well worth reading if you can manage to track down a copy, though bits of it—"Serinissima" included—are available online). I can't overstress this point: Century is one of the finest, most beautiful books I have ever read, regardless of the author's nationality. I don't feel the need to qualify this as a great "Canadian" book. It's just a spectacular fucking book. I will be shocked if I read anything better this year. You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't read this book, and I'm very glad that Biblioasis has included it in their Renditions series. (As an interesting aside, the cover art for this edition is a detail from "Saint-Sauveur Watercolour I" by painter Ken Tolmie, who just happens to be the father of Dr. Sarah Tolmie, who first introduced me to Ray Smith's work.)

Century was my fifth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and my first selection for Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently. Next is Fall On Your Knees, by Anne-Marie MacDonald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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