I wasn't quite able to finish this, my sixty-ninth book, in 2008. New Year's Eve celebrations tripped me up with forty pages to go. Still, I regret nothing, except perhaps that various circumstances prevented me from giving this novel the attention it deserved during most of the month (!) that it took me to read it. (The saddest part of that being that I probably only spent about ten days with the book over that period, being distracted or busy or suffering from the holiday blues or whatever the rest of the time.) Like with most of Nabokov's books, I finished The Gift feeling like I'd just experienced something profound without necessarily being able to identify, let alone understand, what that something was. On the surface the book is pretty straightforward; in the mid-1930s an impoverished Russian émigré poet, the son of an adventerous and quite dead minor noble, moves from one crowded, dingy Berlin apartment to another, falls in love with the landlady's daughter and writes a controversial biography of a middling Russian literary figure from two or three generations before, all the while dreaming of the true, grand work of literature he will one day compose, the work that will mark him forever as a giant of Russian literature. Nothing with Nabokov is ever quite that easy.

To begin with, and a less attentive reader may have missed this entirely, it's not always clear who is narrating the book. The five chapters shift perspective quite heavily (the fourth doesn't really count, as it is the text of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's biography of Chernyshevski), sometimes intimately omnipotent, other times distant and purely superficial, and sometimes even in the first person, although who this first person actually is, Godunov-Cherdyntsev or perhaps even Nabokov himself, is open to debate, depending on when and how it crops up. To a reader not familiar with the history of Russian literature (with a few exceptions, that's me) or Berlin's émigré community between the wars (me again), it's quite easy to get lost amongst the plethora of casual literary references and complicated but eerily similar Russian names. What one ultimately gets is the sense of a community that is rather makeshift, still somewhat in shock, taking themselves far too seriously and unable to reconcile their newfound poverty and dinginess with the glory and dignity of their past. No doubt such circumstances could create a similar degree of cognitive dissonance in the mind of almost anyone. With his spectacularly damning biography of Chernyshevski, Godunov-Cherdynstev (and indeed, Nabokov himself) seems to be suggesting that such a condition existed amongst the Russian intelligentsia for a great many years before the diaspora, to the point where it may have become their natural state. I'm led to wonder: if extreme cognitive dissonance is one's natural state, how can one trust what one sees in a mirror, no matter who holds it up?

Michael Scammell's translation (with Nabokov collaborating, of course) seems a bit murkier than the other translations of his work from this period that I've read, but I'm willing to allow that I may only get that impression because there's so much in The Gift that's specific to a particular time, place, and cultural context that the nuances are simply sailing past me. On a sentence by sentence level, The Gift in translation is every bit as beautiful as Nabokov's English language work.

The Gift was my final book for the Reading 2008 project, although now that the year is actually over, I plan to do a "best of" post (I prefer to save those until the year is actually over, in case my favourite book somehow manages to be which one I read last; after all, the reason most year-end lists happen in early or mid-December is to either give journalists a break from doing real work, or to help publishers sell more books as gifts, neither purpose having any particular relevance to this site). My next book, the first for 2009, will be Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By.

I must admit that despite being a big, big fan of Fleming's Bond series, I was a little disappointed by The Man with the Golden Gun. The opening was very promising: a brainwashed James Bond walks into Secret Service headquarters and attempts to assasinate M (whose name we finally learn, the biggest shock in the whole Bond series). Fleming is always at his best when Bond is on the ropes, a condition more frequent in the novels than the films. Once he meets up with Scaramanga in a Jamaican whorehouse and gets back into himself, the novel falls apart a bit. Mostly it's due to how poorly Fleming handles American dialogue. Though Scaramanga is Catalan (Catalonian?) originally, he spent significant time in the United States and speaks in an American accent, and with Fleming's notion of mid-60's American slang. And Fleming really, really sucks at American vernacular. Scaramanga is a such a talker, and his personality looms so large over the story that the book is nearly ruined by him. He's among the most filmic of the villains in the Bond novels, challenging the outrageous Doctor No for the title. The plot was also working a lot better when it was simply Bond vs. Scaramanga, but once Fleming brought this large SPECTRE-esque group of gangsters into things, much of the charm went out of it.

There are, of course, the usual issues that Fleming has with women and minorities. His writing about the Jamaican locals, with the exception of Rastafarians, is much more reasonable than the apalling racism of Live and Let Die. Mary Goodnight gets the odd slap on the ass, and Tiffy, the girl who works the front desk at the whorehouse, is a little shallow, but otherwise the women in the book are dealt better hands than they have been in some of his earlier books, certainly better than in most of the films. It is in The Man with the Golden Gun where Fleming supposedly makes his infamous pronouncement that homosexuals can't whistle, though readers who are interested in what's actually on the page instead of looking for new ways to crucify Fleming for being a man of his time will note that not only did Fleming not actually write that homosexuals can't whistle, he mocked the idea. Anyway, one more left before I've worked through them all.

Next up is The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov.

I don't norally say things like this, but I think it's an entirely apt assessment, and I couldn't get it out of my head the whole time I was reading this. Entitlement is Dirty Sexy Money meets A Separate Peace. For those not in the know (and judging by that fact that it's being canceled—yet another little pleasure I'll have to let go of—not many of you are), Dirty Sexy Money is about how lawyer Nick George's adult life is turned upside down as he takes responsibility for cleaning up the various messes made by the Darling family, the inconceivably wealthy family he was close to when growing up. A Separate Peace is of course the vaguely homo-erotic novel about coming of age at a private school that everyone who went to public school in Ontario was made to read in high school in the 1990s. Entitlement is more or less about Andy Kronk's relationship with the obscenely wealthy Aspinall family, whom he met after getting a scholarship to Lord Simcoe College, supposedly a stand-in for Upper Canada College. Other reviews have indicated that I'm suppose to make something of that connection, either that it's an indictment or a misrepresentation of a cultural touchstone, or something of that magnitude. I'll let you in on a little secret. It may be because I come from a lower middle class background, or because I grew up in an isolated rural community, but there's only two reasons that I even know Upper Canada College exists. First, Robertson Davies was a student there, and I went through a phase where I learned everything I could about him (I even have a copy of Judith Skelton Grant's Man of Myth around somewhere). Second, a few years ago there was some controversy over whether or not the ailing, underfunded public school system would subsidize the stupidly rich sending their already disproportionately advantaged children to similar private schools, and I read about it in Maclean's. Shinan Govani (who reviewed Entitlement for the National Post, a review so bad I won't link to it here, a review that contained no information that couldn't be gleaned from the first fifty or so pages, I might add, even then getting some of the details wrong, and is yet another in a long procession of Post book reviews by people who know fuck all about books—perhaps it's a good thing they don't have a dedicated books section after all) would have me believe that because I own a television and live within a mile of Sky Bar that I am somehow expected to have this knowledge swimming in my blood with all the plasma and white and red cells. I do not.

Okay, my own class sensitivity aside, Entitlement is a damned fine book. It's easy to go through the motions with the rich, especially if one isn't part of that life. Bennett never allows the Aspinalls to sink into parody or cliché, though not because they never do anything clichéd; rather they are self-aware, understanding that they fit quite comfortably into several of the stereotypes, but are entirely unwilling to apologize for what they are. They are quite alien and graceful, and above all, credible. It's Andry Kronk, who aside from Trudy the biographer is far and away the most recognizably human of the characters (not because Bennett lacks skill in describing the Aspinalls, but rather because they are so isolated from day to day living that they are as functionally different from your or I as is a person with an extreme case of Asperger's) who treads the line most delicately when it comes to stereotypes, with his hockey obsessed, mechanic father, his lust, his drive to be a part of the LSC world only to find that he doesn't quite fit, but Bennett never lets him slide under. It's no surprise that even his gentle brush with the family (one almost wants to capitalize that) nearly destroys him. Though Stuart Aspinall never quite morphed into Donald Sutherland for me, I found it impossible to read about Fiona without seeing Natalie Zea running around in her skivvies pouting about how unfair it was that her fifth wedding was limited to a fifteen million dollar budget. We bring such baggage to these things. That Colin, the inconvenient, rebellious Aspinall, able to overhear himself (as Bloom would have it) to a degree none of the others can ever quite manage, separates himself from that life is not unexpected, though unraveling his ultimate fate is the chief engine of the novel's suspense, which was unexpected.

Entitlement has been compared to The Great Gatsby, and I suppose that it's a fair comparison, though unlike Fitzgerald, Bennett seems to understand that prose can be made to do more than evoke a mood and snipe at one's friends.

Entitlement was published by ECW Press. If you're interested, Bookninja has a great interview with Jonathan Bennett available. Next up is The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming.

I had expected this book to take me only a day or so to read; after all it's not only quite short, it's written by one of my favourite authors. It took me more than two weeks to read. Usually taking so long with a book means either that it is extremely long, or it has trouble holding my interest. Neither was the case with At A Loss For Words. Instead I found that I was so emotionally invested in the material that I found it virtually impossible to stay with the book for any length of time. If you shortened the time frame and switched the pronouns around, the plot—a writer, suffering from writer's block, is reunited with a lost love for an intense long-distance romance, only to be callously abandoned by him a second time, with traumatic consequences—would be a pretty accurate description of the last twelve months of my life. I don't normally like to discuss personal things on this blog, particularly in the middle of a review, but I can't help but wonder if those recent events in my life are causing me to think more than I should of a weak book.

The narrator's dry, intelligent voice cleary marks At A Loss For Words as a Diane Schoemperlen book, but a lot of the careful, clever diction and playful sentence structure that are among the chief delights of her best work are missing or subdued. It would be easy to dismiss the lack of playfulness as owing to the heavy subject matter, but Schoemperlen has dealt with sombre themes before and not been any less lively or inventive. I've come to the conclusion that there's two possible explanations for this, one quite interesting, the other rather less so. The less interesting explanation is that it's a weak book and my emotional involvement with the content is making me think it's stronger than it is (not an idea I relish, on any level). The other explanation has substantial artistic merit, and strikes me as the sort of thing Schoemperlen would do, though (if it is what's going on) it's not as effective as it may sound. At A Loss For Words, despite being about a specific failed relationship, is far more general and abstract than literary fiction—and Schoemperlen's in particular—tends to be. The bulk of the novel "happens" in the form of first-person recounts of dialogue in the absence of virtually all context. Much of that dialogue, if we can rely on the narrator, is inane and clichéd and completely recognizable to anyone who's ever been furiously in love and then been hurt by that love. What I think Schoemperlen might be doing with this is examining the curious blend of sameness and hyper-specificity that comes with love and heartbreak. No love has ever been as fierce as our love, no hurt as big as our hurt, but somehow even our greatest wordsmiths can't discuss it without falling into to the same cadences as the least of us. Our experience of love and heartbreak and our reactions to them are so predictable they might be akin to genetic memory. It doesn't quite come off, but I like that idea better than being unable to trust my own judgement because of emotional turmoil.

Next up is Entitlement, by Jonathan Bennett.

There's a lot of energy in this book. The opening story, "A Sound Like Dolphins," is possibly the weakest in the book, but it also sets up nearly every story in the book with its blend of frank violence and sexuality and the every day mess that is domestic life. When we think of tales of domestic life, particularly in this country, we tend to think of rural—or at least not explicitly urban—families living lives of no real import but nonetheless dealing with nuanced emotional and moral consequences. We also tend to think of these works as focusing primarily on the lives of women. Being, as we are, nearly a decade into the 21^st Century, one would hope that we could put aside in both our national literature and our national subconscious such simple, ridiculous notions such as women having more or more interesting/important things to say about domesticity through fiction. We of course have not.

Pardon Our Monsters examines a variety of mostly domestic situations (divorce and single fatherhood, siblings dying, the onset of puberty, fucking up your life and having to move home), mostly, though of course not exclusively, from male perspectives or with male protagonists. Hood's characters are not grand people living grand lives, are not explicitly urban, and the stories definitely involve issues of emotional and moral nuance and consequence. They also refuse to strip out the violence and puss and blood and shit and decay that regularly inhabit the periphery and sometimes even the cores of plain old domestic lives. And I'm not just speaking metaphorically. There's a wonderfully true to life scene in "Giving Up the Ghost" wherein a thirteen year old boy sneaks off to a hospital washroom to masturbate to completion for the very first time while his sister lays dying of a brain tumour on the next floor. It's quite remarkable stuff, in its way. Not quite as good as the blurb by Trevor Ferguson (I'm not sure who that is, but he apparently he gives great blurb) would suggest, but he's certainly somebody to watch. Particular favourites are the titular piece, a fine exemplar of the criteria stated above, and "That Ghost We Had," which is simultaneously the sweetest and saddest thing ever.

Next: At A Loss For Words, by Diane Schoemperlen.

Those who know me, if I am known at all, know me as a bit of a nitpicker (okay, more than a bit). Little details can often get under my skin. I was therefore disappointed to find problems on the very first page of Be Good, indeed with the epigraph itself. There are three quotations that open the book, the third being lyrics from "God's Gonna Cut You Down," attributed to Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash did indeed record the song in 2003, and it was released in 2006, nearly three years after his death. Cash's five "American Recordings" albums were all excellent, but he only wrote fifteen of the sixty-eight songs on those albums. All the rest were covers. "God's Gonna Cut You Down" is a traditional roots song of the kind that used to be known as a "negro spiritual" and then later just a "spiritual", and is better known as "Run On" or "Run On for a Long Time." In his 1999 song "Run" Moby sampled a version by Bill Landford and the Landfordaires recorded in 1943, more than a decade before Cash first set foot in a recording studio (my own copy of the song, from a boxed set released by Columbia Records in 1992, was recorded by Landford and his band in 1949). It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Alan Lomax or his father John (or possibly even Harry Oster) had recorded other versions of the song as part of their studies of American folk songs that started in the 1930s. As good as Johnny Cash's version is (it's my personal favourite), his only real contribution to the history of the song was to introduce a unique rhythmic arrangement; he had no hand in the lyrics beyond inserting his name into a verse. This is symptomatic, I think, of the growing culture of downloading music, either legally or otherwise, rather than purchasing physical copies (of which culture I consider myself a part; I only know so much about this particular song because early American blues is my favourite music, and I have a massive collection of blues and roots albums—probably 200 or more—most of them recorded before 1960). When listeners acquire an album online, legally or no, they often no longer have access to the writing or recording credits for that music; what's more, they just as often don't care. I once heard, on the radio no less, the Cowboy Junkies' cover of The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" attributed to Portishead. Given the pseudo-nihilism of Morgan, one of Be Good's protagonists, the wrongly-attributed epigraph may be quite appropriate: what do the details matter, so long as you are getting what you think you want?

It's difficult to know where to begin with Be Good, once beyond the epigraph of course. One hopes that by now critics have managed to learn that characters and narrators are not merely avatars for authors, because I could imagine Stacey May Fowles being quit chagrined if someone declared Estella or Hannah or God forbid Morgan or Finn her fictional analog (and if they haven't learned it by now, fingers crossed that they do so by the time I finish my manuscript and find it a home, because I certainly don't want to be confused with the bastard who narrates my book). They are liars and hypocrites and manipulators, they are spoiled and selfish and some of them are straight-up assholes. In other words, people. The action of the novel, such as it is, unfolds as a variety of narrators (including the cities of Montréal, Vancouver, and Toronto themselves!) compete for the reader's sympathy or trust or even just attention, interrupting each other or providing commentary or contradiction when events are described from a perspective not their own. The result is a gloriously ambivalent mess of human emotion and complexity, though by the end I had lost sympathy for everyone except Mr. Templeton (whom I did not like at all, when I first saw him through Hannah and Morgan's eyes). He is the only character with a voice in the novel not described by one or all of the others as beautiful (he's also the only one out of his twenties), and apparently also the only one who has learned that I want is not sufficient justification (nor is I'm bored, the other great excuse for the young and beautiful to behave like assholes with impunity) for much of anything that has negative consequences for others. He seems, in fact, to be the only character to acknowledge that he holds any responsibility at all for the consequences his actions have for other people, and his fear of and for Morgan and their tenuous future. I don't know that I like him much, but I can relate.

Hannah and Morgan and Estella are people I know or have known, and they burn as bright and as hot and as lethal on the page as they do out here in the world, thanks solely to Fowles' sharp prose and unsentimental gaze. I feel I can know them and love them (and do, as I see their various bits and pieces in the women I know or have known), but I doubt I could bring myself to forgive them, nor I think would they want me to, and that's as it should be. Be Good is the sort of book I want to mail to ex-girlfriends with passages underlined, not to say "see how you were?" but rather "I would have understood more than you think, it need not have been so scary for either of us." Mr. Beattie's suggestion that the three young women may in fact be the same woman drifted in and out of my consciousness as I read this book, the idea being more or less plausible at various points in the narrative; at the very least Fowles forces the reader to question their identities in relation to one another, thankfully without ever robbing their stories of their emotional heft.

The only character I have a problem with is Finn. He seemed real enough when seen through the eyes of the three young women, but when finally given his own voice, the wires were cut and my disbelief was no longer suspended. It was things like this:

There was a part of me that really did want to give her the opportunity to grow up, to be with me and become a better person. A part of me that knew that she had so much potential to become a calmer, more tolerable, version of herself. That was the part of me that finally let her come with me to the west coast. My influence on her meant she would dress better, speak better, act better. I knew that I was the only person who could do that for her and, despite my aversion to the pressure, I knew that she looked to me to be saved. (p. 78)

I read that, and immediately thought of what I had written about Dan from Courage My Love (as much as I hate to quote myself): "He doesn't have a personality so much as he's just repeatedly positioned in such a way that he irritates or offends Phillipa/Nova. We aren't meant to like him, but he winds up being a generic roadblock instead of a real human being." I have seen men like Finn in movies, read about them in books, but despite living the bulk of my life in an isolated, conservative rural community (where one would imagine such attitudes to be more likely found), I have yet to come across in flesh and blood a man of my generation who thinks that way, or at least would admit to having such thoughts, even to another man. But I have (and this is where I insert the caveat that anecdotal evidence counts only because it colours my reading of the book, and that I am in no way denying that such creatures as Finn might actually exist) met and even dated women who think that way and say those kinds of things about the men in their lives, even directly to the faces of those men. Finn's character is sufficiently supported by the other narrators to keep him planted squarely in his role and the novel stays on course. I had very little interest in gender as an academic, and have even less as a reader and a writer, but I find myself paying greater attention to depictions of masculinity when reading work by writers who are known for or explicitly market themselves as being concerned with gender issues, feminism in particular (feminism and gender issues not necessarily being synonymous). Had I not been aware of Fowles as the publisher of Shameless, I probably would not have even noticed. For the record, I do consider this "added awareness" as a critical blind spot. My ideal is to read the book as it comes to me and demands to be read; I consider going in with an agenda in place intellectually dishonest. Like all of us (and like Fowles' characters) I'm only human, and can be a hypocrite myself at times.

The book itself was quite beautiful, and the cover photo (by Spencer Saunders—I think that's the same Saunders) looks suspiciously like the alley behind my apartment building. So much so, in fact, that I'm going to go out there tomorrow in the daylight, book in hand, and come to a definitive conclusion on the matter. I don't have the spare cash to buy it right now, but Fowles has another book out at the moment, Fear of Fighting (with Marlena Zuber), that you can expect me to read and review sometime early next year. In the meantime, I'll leave you with two interviews and link to Stacey May Fowles' blog.

Next: Pardon Our Monsters, by Andrew Hood.

Faulkner is one of those writers who makes me feel woefully underqualified when I attempt to write about his work. Faulkner insisted that Go Down, Moses is a fragmented novel made up of related short-stories, what we here in Canada would most likely call a short-story cycle (indeed, the first edition of the book was published by Random House as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories). No matter Faulkner's own opinion (which anyway I didn't know until after the fact) I read Go Down, Moses as a short-story cycle.

Any discussion of Faulkner's work must necessarily deal with issues of race and family, both of which are central to this book. The various stories relate the history of the McCaslin family from a time not long before the American Civil War until roughly 1940. "Was", which opens the book, can be a difficult story to read given that Faulkner treats it straightforwardly, matter-of-factly, with no obvious judgement of either the characters or the society that allowed them to exist as they treat men and women, slaves, as they would animals or even worse than animals. It's only by reading the later stories that the reader can see where they fit in Faulkner's moral universe; the wealthy white plantation owners are revealed to be more ignorant and less dignified than nearly any other characters in the book, black or white, master or servant, criminal or citizen, and indeed their (posthumous) punishment is Isaac McCaslin's denial of their patrimony, a thing of paramount importance not only within the McCaslin family but within Southern society as a whole. So much of the action and moral consequence of these stories depends on inheritanceses, either their setting aside or losing or their denial. Isaac McCaslin's refusal to accept the family plantation (and there is here some further dispute regarding the relationships between race and family; there are black and white branches of the McCaslin family, with the white branch inheriting the name and property despite their claim being solely matrilineal and therefore contrary to accepted custom, while the black branch inherits nothing perhaps an endurance and authority othwerwise unknown or unacceptable among the black community, despite their claim being patrilineal and therefore of greater worth: the rules of race trump the rules of patrimony) is the finest moment of dignity and acknowledgement of spiritual connection to the land and to men and women as part of that land in the entire book, but it is misunderstood—perhaps cannot be understood—by his family as a denial of the proper order of things. It is instead an honest, if belated and futile, attempt to acknowledge and return to the order of things as it ought to have been.

The true wonder of this book for me, as it is for all of a Faulkner's books, is his slow, beautiful prose. It rolls around in my mouth like a caramel, sweet and gentle and long. I pity the reader who cannot be moved by this:

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document:—of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and the deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter;—the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies—the racked guns and the heads and skins—in the libraries of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting before the burning logs on hearths when there were houses and hearths or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not. There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan's base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fitting that this should have begun with whisky. ("The Bear" p. 183-4)

The seeds of Isaac's repudiation and the reasons for it are present in that paragraph (the second in the story), but so too is the foreknowledge, the reader being decades removed from the action and presumably acquainted with the South as a far different place by then and besides Isaac already having been introduced as a figure of folly in the eyes of his family in "The Fire and the Hearth", that his repudiation will mean nothing and have no effect except to perhaps estrange him from that which he loves best.

Next: Be Good, by Stacey May Fowles.

My home town is in this novel! That's right folks, Dryden, Ontario makes a brief cameo appearance, in all its Boréal glory. Alright, since I've already mentioned Dryden, I should start out by saying there are two things that bothered me about this book (pet peeve sort of things, not hugely important, but they got under my skin), and it's better to get them out of the way before dealing with the more important parts of the novel. The first thing is distance. There's a fictional Ontario town in The Killing Circle called Whitley. Judging from the landmarks (West of Thunder Bay, with Dryden being the next town on the Trans-Canada, etc), it should probably be roughly where the real-life town of Ignace is. Pyper describes this town as about a half a day's drive from cottage country. Double that, and he'd be closer to accuracy. Folk in Southern Ontario ought to glance at a map every so often. Toronto to Dryden, assuming reasonable traffic and actually getting out of the car to eat (but not stopping to sleep) should be between 22 and 25 hours of driving. I know this, because I've made the drive many, many times. And Dryden is only something like an hour up the road from Ignace/Whitley. Northern/Northwestern Ontario may not have a lot of people in it, but it's absolutely vast. You could fit Southern Ontario into it several times over with room left over. Okay, so the second pet peeve thing is about the weather. Toronto's winter weather, and I can say this after having lived here for a couple of years now, is so mild it's a joke. I literally snorted when I read this:

Tuesday brings a cold snap with it. A low of minus eighteen, with a wind-chill making it feel nearly double that. The talk-radio chatter warns everyone against going outside unless absolutely necessary. It makes me think—not for the first time—that I can be counted among the thirty million who voluntarily live in a country with annual plagues. A black death called winter that descends upon us all. (p. 41)

I've lived in Southern Ontario since 1999 (with two of those years spent in Sudbury, which where I'm from is considered the northern-most edge of Southern Ontario), and in all that time the weather hasn't once been severe enough to make me take my winter coat out of mothballs. Back home I wore it for six months of the year, sometimes longer. There's a scene later on, and I won't explain the context because it will spoil things, wherein a radio announcer in Whitley gives the same caution as the "talk-radio chatter" in the above quotation, because apparently a low of minus twenty was expected that night. In the twenty years that I lived up North, I didn't ever once hear that sort of cold weather warning. Schools were not closed, events were not canceled, nobody stayed indoors. I myself pumped gas outdoors in weather that was in the minus forties, the windchill on at least one occasion bringing it down to minus fifty-four. If northern communities stayed indoors every time it got below minus twenty, everything between October and April would be a complete write-off. Okay, enough ranting.

The Killing Circle was great. Pyper's writing is just as good as many of his more capital-L Literary counterparts, and it's a shame that, as Mr. Beattie points out, some people dismiss his work because he writes thrillers. If handled well, and I believe Mr. Pyper has succeeded in this, any subject matter can be the foundation of strong fiction. Margaret Atwood writes (bad) science fiction, Michael Ondaatje writes soppy romances; I see no reason why Mr. Pyper should be penalized because he calls his thrillers by their proper name. And The Killing Circle is quite the thriller indeed. Mr. Beattie has already dealt with The Killing Circle's satirical elements far better than I could, so I will pass over them here. Patrick Rush, failed journalist, plagiarist, widower(ist?) becomes embroiled (did I seriously just write embroiled?) in the activities of The Sandman, a serial killer stalking Toronto's wannabe literary community. Whether it's because of the gruesome stories told by William, a terrifying hulk of man, a disturbing presence in Rush's writing circle, or the dark shapes in the alleys, broken locks and open windows, this book scared the bejeezus out of me. I wanted to put the book down so I could sleep at night, but I also didn't want to put it down so that I could be sure that my favourite characters—and I, by extension—would be safe until morning. Honestly, if that's not enough for you, then you might want to get a proctologist to see about removing that stick before your eyes turn brown. Pyper is also deft enough to both exploit and undermine the conventions of the thriller. There were several plot twists that I was able to guess correctly (many more that I was not), but those subsequent chapters always made me doubt those guesses, so I was more surprised when I was correct than when I wasn't. I can't wait to read another of his books.

Next up is William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses.

The novella, "A Bright Tragic Thing" (Emily Dickinson, right?), at just over a hundred pages, is obviously intended to be the centerpiece of this collection. Unfortunately, it's by no means the strongest story in the book. Ultimately it's a tragic tale, but it is—or at least I think it's supposed to be—more of a comedy for the first fifty or sixty pages. It's actually quite a bit like an episode of The Office or Arrested Development, in the sense that the majority of the humour comes from paying excruciatingly close attention to the socially awkward. And excruciating is the word. The premise is a good one: misfit teenagers entertain themselves by collecting kitschy souvenirs autographed by obscure, washed-up celebrities, with hilarity and tragedy ensuing. It was just too much to stay with for so many pages. It wasn't that I got bored by Dave and Todd manipulating Murray Mortenson for kicks (although I found the pseudo love triangle of Dave, Todd, and Helen far more interesting), it was more that I could see the end coming from a mile away, and I began to feel embarrassed for the characters and just wanted them to get all that suffering over with.

The shorter stories that make up the second half the book, "The Soother" and "The Virtual Tour" in particular, are much stronger. The opening sentences of "The Soother" had me thinking, with some dread I don't mind telling you, that I had stumbled upon yet another of the "glories of motherhood" stories that I've read a thousand times before, but was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be about a much put-upon husband/father who also happens to be into paraphilic infantilism. I think this might be the most interesting (in an intellectual rather than erotic sense) and unusual sexual behaviour I've encountered in Canadian fiction, with the possible exception of that thing with the ribbon at the end of The Rebel Angels. The reasons I liked "The Virtual Tour" are too personal to get into here, but it was a good choice to close out the collection, as it left a strong positive impression.

"The Truth" was an interesting story about two people on a first date whose feints and deceptions and even social graces are stripped away, and they speak only in terms of the bitter truth. I feel like I've read it before, or a story very much like it, either in some other collection, or even in a creative writing class (in fact, I once wrote a story with a similar, but not identical, premise for one such class), but I haven't read any of the journals and such where it was previously collected. I wasn't shocked by anything the characters said, and there were few genuine revelations about relationships or the human spirit or contemporary dating, but it was fun to read, and like a lot of conceits, no matter how obvious they may seem, it's important to encounter them in print at least once. Having said that, I think "Wonderful" revolves around the sort of conceit that didn't need to be seen in print at all. It was a completely unremarkable inversion of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (I can't say how it relates to Philip Van Doren Stern's story, "The Greatest Gift," as I've never read it), and I don't think I ever needed to encounter such a thing. Another story like "The Soother" would have done me just fine.

Next up is The Killing Circle, by Andrew Pyper.

I have not always been especially kind to the late David Foster Wallace in these metaphorical pages—I believe respect for the dead (and the living as well) requires both honesty and full disclosure—but those comments were always in regard to his non-fiction, and today we are dealing exclusively with his short fiction, of which I am a long-time fan. I'd read two of the pieces collected here before, the phenomenal "Mister Squishy" and "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," both in McSweeney's.

The obvious place to start a discussion of Oblivion would be with "Mister Squishy," as it is quite clearly a DFW signature piece, and overwhelmingly verbose and precise account of a seemingly innocent and quite banal but actually bizarre series of events. I won't say any more about it, though, as Mr. Beattie has already covered it quite well. The other story in the collection that could be referred to, in an un-ironic way, as a tour de force, is the novella length piece that closes the collection, "The Suffering Channel." So many things are going on at once in this story that it's difficult to decide where to start. There's a tremendous tension between the New York upper crust of "soft news" publishing and the working class state fair/arts and crafts circuit of small town Indiana. DFW satirizes both, but what makes the satire as effective as it is, isn't that he exploits the differences between these two communities, but rather that he exploits their similarities. Both of these societies, who look at each other like aliens, have the nakedly ambitious dragging the insecure behind them, kicking and screaming. DFW also spends tremendous time on body consciousness in both communities (it exists, in the working class world, though it takes a markedly different form). Ultimately, though, as in his non-fiction, DFW's egalitarian-seeming satire comes down on the side of the upper class. The Editorial Intern (not her name, but it's how she's mostly referred to) is as deeply insecure as Brint, the artist who sculpts his own shit while it's still inside his bowels. But in addition, she's beautiful, well-liked, exceptionally well-connected, kind, etc. She's easily the most likeable character not only in the story, but in the entire book. Even some of the cattier editors and interns, despite their clique-ish sniping and superficial posturing are more attractive characters than any of the working class characters, who often come across as merely crass or disgusting. (The point of that overlong sentence being that, in DFW's world, it seems that the rich are shallow but beautiful, while the poor are shallow and nasty; not very remarkable in itself, but he makes it entertaining.) Most of the emotional force of the piece comes from the sense of impending doom that looms over everyone who works for Style, the magazine at the centre of "The Suffering Channel." The reason for the lingering scent of tragedy? The entire piece takes place in July of 2001. It hangs like a fog. Or like something else that hangs amorphous and all spread out. DFW almost kills it when he explicitly states that the beautiful Editorial Intern "had ten weeks to live" (p. 326). Overall, though, it's really quite well put together.

Next up is Long Story Short, by Elyse Friedman.