I hate to say it (you have no idea how much, I assure you), but I was not particularly impressed by this book. "We Miss You," the remarkable piece Mr. Beattie wrote about in August was one of the few bright lights for me in this collection. The kind of work that so impressed me in Samuel Johnson is Indignant, the one or two sentence prose-poems, the meditations and koans, often seemed little more than filler here. The longer works, like "Cape Cod Diary" and "Helen and Vi," length not being one of Davis' strong points to begin with, seemed to collapse under their own weight like dying stars.

Another story I disliked, and this is most likely due almost exclusively to my own prejudices as a reader, since I find that Diane Schoemperlen has one or two stories that I dislike for similar reasons, was "What You Learn About the Baby." It has a reasonably clever structure, being divided into obliquely worded experiential categories, and Davis' prose is as sharp as always, but in essence it's little more than a bog-standard, mostly-sepia-tinted collection of clichés about motherhood. It could be that, as a regular reader of Canadian fiction, I've read more sepia-tinted stories about motherhood than is healthy, but I can't remember the last time one such story struck me as fresh, or told me anything new, emotionally or otherwise. For those new to Davis' work, lovely cover aside, I'd skip this book and go straight to Samuel Johnson is Indignant

Next up is Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace.

Packed deep in the centre of Cockroach is a powerful moral disconnect, a narrator struggling to place himself in a world of shifting rights and wrongs, all wrapped in the framework of the immigrant experience.

Rawi Hage never glamourizes immigrant life in Montréal, but despite the frankness with which he depicts its various confusions, humiliations and consolations, he writes with such verve, with such wit and energy, that Cockroach never feels dreary or oppressive. Instead one is swept along by the narrator's amazingly compelling voice; it makes even the most fantastic elements of the novel feel genuine. I found myself missing that voice long after I finished the book.

Hage's characters are not likeable people; if I met any one of them on the street I'm certain that I wouldn't like a single one. I doubt I would even find them all that interesting. But on the page they crackle with life. I couldn't look away from the horrible things they did to themselves, and to each other. Acts of violence and cruelty committed by or against these characters have followed many of them to Canada, a land that in the novel is both literally and figuratively cold. Here is where we find the moral disconnect at the heart of the novel. As they struggle to find their footing and maintain their dignity in this new place, how much of these past wrongs can they bring with them, and can that past justify new transgressions?

Cockroach is an astonishing and confident novel, rich and nuanced, full of humour and tragedy, with the most wonderfully unreliable and charismatic narrator I've encountered in ages.

I wrote this originally for publication somewhere else and intended to expand it for publication here, but have since decided against that. Cockroach was my thirteenth and final selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis.

I find myself frequently on the lookout for books, Canadian books in particular, that deal explicitly with issues of masculinity. Given all the controversy in the last several years over things like the ratio of male to female prize winners and bylines in magazines (not something I put a huge amount of stock in, but whatever), you'd think books like that would be pretty easy to find. It turns out they aren't. Rust and Bone isn't really about masculinity, of course. It looks like it is, what with the emphasis on various blood sports and failed or failing relationships (no matter how stoic the man, no matter how rough-and-tumble, we can each of us be swiftly and thoroughly demolished by a woman). This book is about anatomy.

The titular story opens with a fascinatingly detailed description of the bones of the hand that leads into an equally detailed and fascinating description of how a boxer's body, his hands in particular, impact the finer points of his career. And Davidson goes from there, taking apart the mistakes and the reasons behind this particular boxer's career. The anatomy of the hand becomes the anatomy of boxing becomes the anatomy of this boxer and his grief. It's sweaty and violent and grim, but it's also a heartbreaking account of a man unforgiven by the world and unable to forgive himself.

"A Mean Utility" was so visceral a dissection of dog fighting that I had difficulty finishing it. I quite literally squirmed in my chair and even felt a little bit ill. The most disturbing thing about this story is how dispassionate Davidson's writing is; his narrator comes down neither for or against the sport or how the protagonists raise their animals. He doesn't have to; the bare facts (a tricky concept in fiction, but we'll pretend for the moment that it isn't) allow the sport to damn itself.

The only story that doesn't seem to conform to the pattern (and I say doesn't seem to, because in some ways it actually does) is the final piece in the book, "The Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic." There's no rough-and-tumble manliness in this piece, and only velvet-draped self-destruction as Davidson delineates a family putting itself back together after having to face two traumatic events, one long in the past and one still fresh and bloody, and it's punctuated by wonderful excerpts from a book that doesn't exist, describing how to accomplish classic conjuring tricks. It's the sort of story for which critics dust off words like "poignant" when they probably mean sentimental. It was nice, for the kind of thing that it was (I like to pretend otherwise, but hey, I'm kind of a sentimental guy), but unfortunately it felt weak and parochial next to the rest of the book.

I suppose one of the easiest things to do would be to compare Davidson to Chuck Palahniuk, but that's not really fair. Chuck's work can be fun, but he's more or less a one trick pony, and even though the trick is a pretty good one, it's only really impressive the first time (that's Fight Club, for those of you keeping score at home). In this first collection (it is his first collection, right?) Davidson displays more range than Palahniuk has over his entire career, not only shocking us as hard—or even harder—but also displaying tremendous sensitivity and control.

Rust and Bone was my twelfth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Cockroach, by Rawi Hage.

I'd been anticipating the release of Rebecca Rosenblum's debut book since I first read her work in The New Quarterly's Salon des Refusés issue (it turns out that I'd been running into her on the blog circuit for quite a few months prior to that, though). I don't often keep my eye on what's being published in any given year. I don't make very much money, and since new books cost more than old books, and I still have a great many classics that I want to read, as a rule I tend to buy and read older books almost exclusively. Once is a worthy exception to this rule. I suppose I might be spoiling the plots of a few of the stories I discuss below, but like with most literary fiction, the plot really isn't the point (nor is it the best part or Rosenblum's fiction, so I don't feel like I'm genuinely spoiling anything).

There is a technique (or a collection of techniques, really), that is sometimes called "magic realism" and is sometimes called by other names. I don't like any of the names, but I do like the technique, the idea of dressing up fantasy as though it were reality is quite appealing, particularly when it's done primarily through small, quiet things. Rebecca Rosenblum balances fantasy and reality in an extremely satisfying way. I don't really like referring to what she does as magic realism—and I'm not sure if she would like it much either—but I can't think of what else to call it. The two obvious examples to discuss would be the lovely "Chilly Girl" and the less successful "The House on Elsbeth," but I'd rather talk about "Route 99." It's a low-key slice of urban life, something that I think most of us who live in cities within a certain kind of budget can identify with. Except that it isn't, or at least it isn't just that. Ella and Carmen, her two protagonists, experiment with a kind of urban thaumaturgy as they wait on the ever unreliable TTC. I don't doubt that each of us attempts, from time to time, to impose our will on the obstinate world through small, symbolic acts of imagination. Ella and Carmen try to mend their TTC woes by ordering the correct dish from the nearby Vietnamese restaurant (the Pho-Mi 99, which appears in several of my favourite stories in Once), trying each time to achieve a total of 99 with their order, either through addition or subtraction, since there is no number 99 on the menu. With each attempt the Route 99 bus behaves a little differently, until finally, in a miraculous moment:

There wasn't any smell, there wasn't any sound. No whoomp of the back seats grinding against their fittings, no roar of the motor, no sign of the bus to the west where she had been looking. It just appeared before them. The driver pulled to a stop even though they were both still sitting. It was Carlson, but when he looked down at them, he didn't look at their legs, or glare at them, or slam shut the doors. He just smiled, blank, polite, a man doing his job, taking girls to theirs. (p. 41)

It's no great miracle, but it's more than many of us ever achieve, and the sense of triumph the reader feels is equal to Ella and Carmen's disbelief and almost completely out of proportion to the size of the moment. But still, it's magic.

Another favourite of mine was "The Words." It takes considerable guts to use multiple viewpoints in any work of short fiction, even more so when it clocks in at a mere dozen pages, but both Joe and Colleen come alive, bundles of nuance, confusion and deception and missed connections. Rosenblum develops the religious imagery smoothly and naturally until it culminates in the only potential moment of communion between father and daughter. I wanted to stay with these characters, and so I was pleased that Colleen showed up again in "Blood Ties," though seeing through her perspective grated a little without Joe as a balancing force.

Once is an exceptionally strong debut; in fact, if I didn't know better I'd have a difficult time believing that it was her first collection of stories. Only "The House on Elsbeth" seems to be a freshman effort, but it's such a difficult concept to work with that I can't imagine anyone more experienced (except perhaps Leon Rooke himself) having much luck with it. It will be fascinating to see what she does in the future. Rebecca Rosenblum also has a blog out there on the world wide internets, where you can find out about her reading schedule or what's on her mind, or whatever. You know, blog stuff.

Once was my eleventh selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Rust and Bone, by Craig Davidson.

Being a relative newcomer to the Canadian literary scene (I think it's safe to say that I've only been aware of "the scene" for about six or seven years, which makes me a definite newcomer), John Metcalf's books are like UFOs. People talk about Metcalf and his books. Some people even claim to have read them (especially people who have been around since the '70s). Bringing up his name is always controversial. But what happens if you go out looking for his books on your own? You're not likely to find one at all. Bad UFO metaphors aside, here in Toronto, the capital of Canada's publishing industry, I had to go to nine bookstores to find even a single copy (I found two, both used and both nearly two decades old), and the staff at less than half of those stores even knew who I was asking about. Mr. Metcalf's name is one that I've been hearing ever since I became a dedicated reader of Canadian fiction, somewhere around 2001 or 2002, but rarely were any specifics mentioned. I know he's supposed to be hugely influential, but I don't really know how, or on what or whom. I also know that he's supposed to be at the centre of some kind of controversy, but I don't know anything about it, and nobody will tell me (here's a note for all you journalists and commentators and what not who like to allude to the controversy: chances are good I was still seeing spot run when this controversy began, and I'm almost 30 years old; if you aren't willing to come right out and explain what it is you're talking about, please just shut the fuck up about it entirely). His essay in the Salon issue of CNQ was kind of venomous, so maybe it's all just blunt talk and hurt feelings. Metcalf also had a story in the TNQ Salon issue, and it was quite wonderful (therefore my trek to nine bookstores).

Metcalf's Englishness should be apparent to anyone who reads widely. There's something simultaneously straightforward and musical about English prose (English as in the nationality, not the language) that doesn't seem to happen in other dialects, and it's present in Adult Entertainment. I haven't thought enough about it to be able to cite a specific sentence and then take it apart to explain how it works (is it diction, syntax, some culturally specific combination?), but it's a kind of rhythmic smoothness. Metcalf seems to have an excellent eye for detail as well. Paul Denton's sexual frustration comes fully alive in "Polly Ongle" thanks almost entirely to the specifics of clothing, body parts, food and sound that serve to either exacerbate or distract from that frustration. We get the sense of Paul's senses being so acute, so sharp, only because Metcalf's prose is acute, sharp. "Travelling Northward", a story about a respected but broke and horribly selfish novelist called Robert Forde—the subject of the TNQ piece as well—is successful for much the same reason. If Metcalf wasn't able to take us so fully into Forde's remarkably comic sensebility, we wouldn't have much sympathy—or antipathy, come to that—for anyone in the story, be it Forde himself or any of the mostly well-meaning but equally ridiculous secondary characters. Metcalf wrote in TNQ that he will have a new collection out sometime soon, and that it will include some Forde stories. I am looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Adult Entertainment was my tenth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Rebecca Rosenblum's debut collection, Once.

Flight Paths of the Emperor marks my third consecutive book by a Salon des Refusés author. I was much impressed by the short story, "Five Paintings of the New Japan", which was reprinted in the New Quarterly's contribution to the Salon, and when I found a copy of the first printing of this book two weeks ago I jumped on it. (The image on the cover of my edition is the same as the one shown, but the design and layout of the cover as a whole is quite different.)

It's not difficult to explain what holds these stories together; they all seem to be about Canadians experiencing Japanese (or in one story, Chinese) culture, and butting heads with that culture, and with their own assumptions. Many of the characters and settings seem to carry over from one story to the next. That doesn't sound very exciting, I know, but Heighton pulls it off almost flawlessly (the one yakuza story seems a little out of place). Obviously alienation is a major theme of this collection, as characters with loneliness and unfamiliar surroundings. Like language, the specifics of culture are generally thought of as arbitrary. Just as there is nothing particularly tree-like about the word "tree", nothing that suggests a specific treeness as determined by nature, there is nothing particularly necessary or natural about one style of politess or one system of conducting business. Stories of alienation tend to emphasize this arbitrariness; we either wind up seeing through the assumptions we make about our own culture, or we experience the dislocation of trying to make sense of the assumptions made by another. Flight Paths of the Emperor left me with another idea altogether: the inevitability of culture. I was struck, not by some saccharine notion that we are all the same deep down, but rather that no matter how differently we approach the world or our lives, the reason we reach for solutions, the motivating factors in the emergence of culture, are fundamentally the same. Only the manifestations are arbitrary. This seems like an obvious thing to say, and of course it most likely is; what is non-obvious is thinking about it at all.

Flight Paths of the Emperor was my ninth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Adult Entertainment, by John Metcalf.

Regular readers (or even readers who have read none of this site except the last post) will know that I'm currently reading Steven Heighton's Flight Paths of the Emperor, and should be done with it in the next day or so. When I am finished with that, I will begin reading Rawi Hage's Cockroach, which arrived in the mail this morning. I was given the book so that I would write a short review to be published elsewhere, and as such I don't want to post a full review here until after the short one has been published in that venue, which will not be until October at the earliest. So: though it will actually be book #55 for the year, my review will have it labeled as #56 or more likely #57. This may not be a particularly important detail to most of you, but it's important to me and my reading project. Consider yourself informed.

I picked this book up because of Mr. Beattie's appreciative essay in the Salon des Refusés issue of Canadian Notes and Queries. I hope that he won't mind my quoting from it. He wrote:

The only thing that can be said definitively about Jarman's stories is that they do not resemble the kind of blandly naturalistic pieces of psychological realism that are normally associated with Canadian short stories.

[...]

Some writers write from the head, others write from the heart. Jarman writes from the gut. Jarman's stories are not places to turn for comfort or succour. He is a ridgidly unsentimental writer, who eschews pat resolutions and reassuring platitudes.

[...]

Instead, he writes subversively about outcasts and roughnecks, men who are desperately trying to eke out an existence on the margins of a society that seems ferociously inimical. The stories are told with a heightened awareness of language and its ability to stretch an contort itself[.]

I must confess that despite these laudatory remarks indicating that Jarman's work is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for in Canadian fiction, the story published in CNQ ("Cowboys, Inc.") did not fill me with confidence. The story is a nonlinear collection of intense, uncomfortable moments in the lives of three people as they pile into a Volvo and try to run from the world, and themselves, through the highways and back roads of the American South. it's not a bad story, by any stretch, but it does have a vague, dreamlike quality to it, and while I'm sure that it probably felt fresh in 1984, it's something that I've seen more than enough of at this point in my career as a reader. Jarman's use of the present tense takes some of the edge off, but not enough to make this story a favourite. I was relieved to see that I'm not alone in that, though; in the afterword, Jarman himself admits that some critics have advised readers to skip the story. I wouldn't go that far, but I'm definitely not in love with the piece.

The subject matter of the stories in Dancing Nightly in the Tavern could become unrelentingly depressing were it not for Jarman's keen eye for surprising and beautiful details. Jarman has seeded each of these stories with lovely imagery, small details that have little or no bearing on the plot or major themes but nonetheless stick in one's mind. My favourite of these images is from "Jesus Made Seattle Under Protest." Ray, an unemployed oil worker, daydreams of a waitress, "her naked ribs floating from the long rope of her backbone" (p. 94).

Dancing Nightly at the Tavern was my eighth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Flight Paths of the Emperor, by Steven Heighton.

Diane Schoemperlen is one of my favourite authors. Her short story collection, Forms of Devotion, is among my favourite volumes of short fiction, Canadian or otherwise. I've had Red Plaid Shirt sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for quite some time now, alongside Our Lady of the Lost and Found. I was saving it for a time when I felt really excited about short fiction, and thanks to the recent Penguin/Salon controversy, that time is now. Imagine my disappointment, then, to learn that many of these stories are from previous collections. It was only outweighed by my joy at learning that Schoemperlen had written more than four books. For some reason, when Forms of Devotion was released, none of her works before In the Language of Love were ever mentioned. I can only imagine that's because they are out of print, but I now at least know there are additional treasures to be found in my local used bookstore's "S" section.

I once heard it said, and I do not recall by whom or in what context, that the quality of an artist's work can be determined by how far that artist can stray from her influences before her work ceases to be any good. I don't know anything about Diane Schoemperlen's influences, but if the above statement is true, then it pleases me to say that her stories get better the further they get from the work of other writers. She is at her best when she defies comparison. The weakest of the stories collected here ("Hockey Night in Canada," which should very nearly be discarded simply for placing that damned sport so prominently—I hate fiction about hockey nearly as much as I hate the damned game itself— "Losing Ground," "Frogs" and "Clues") are all from early in her career and seem to be from a time before she found her voice. They are not Alice Munro stories, but they are from Munro Country, so to speak, stories that lean rather heavily on the muted realist style that she was instrumental in establishing as the "expected" form of short fiction. Where Munro excels, Schoemperlen does not. Those early stories wander in and out of quiet moments in lonely or troubled lives, examining events or people or issues that are only important in hindsight. They are mostly collections of the narrator's memories and musings, eventually gelling into a moment of clarity or emotional resonance in the final lines. Dull stuff, really. The only exception to the dull sameness of these early stories is "This Town," a satirical look at the texture of small town life presented in a way that bears a striking resemblance to a tourism brochure or a Wikipedia entry (not that you could make the latter comparison back in 1979, when the story was first published). The pace of "This Town" is quick and the sentences are sharp, clipped things, full of tremendous wit and energy. It's the first time, in this collection at least, that the reader is allowed to see the Diane Schoemperlen who wrote Forms of Devotion.

My two favourite pieces in this collection (aside from those taken from Forms of Devotion, of course) are "A Simple Story," from 1987's Hockey Night in Canada, and "The Antonyms of Fiction," originally published in Parallel Voices/Voix Paralleles in 1993. "A Simple Story" seems at first glance a parody of creative writing exercises and books like Lou Willett Stanek's So You Want to Write A Novel? (Which was actually given to me by my high school creative writing teacher, who had a tremendously positive influence on my decision to study literature from both the critical and creative ends, though I never did use the book.) The opening paragraph is a cold, hard nugget of plot, the sort of thing that would make a fine back-cover blurb, if short stories had such things:

One night in a small city a man and a woman went out to a restaurant to celebrate. On the way back, they were nearly run down by a car that went out of control and rammed into the window of an apartment building. They were lucky. They could have been killed.

In that one paragraph you have the whole of the plot, and various subtitles that follow ("Describe the Night," "Describe the Car," "Describe the Farmhouse") demand only the fleshing out of "telling details," the sort of information that nearly always appears profound but only actually is under the most skilled of hands. Schoemperlen undermines these demands by providing an excess of detail in crisp, clever prose, moving out in all directions from that one nugget like some linguistic Mandelbrot set. The piece even comes to a dead stop with yet another demanding subtitle, the story expanding ever outward. The most wonderful and amazing thing is not Schoemperlen's postmodern pyrotechnics, but rather that she sketches a half-dozen delicate and emotionally engaging portraits of intersecting lives alongside those pyrotechnics. All this in the space of just twenty pages.

"The Antonyms of Fiction" uses a similar juxtaposition. Despite the bold subtitle ("FACT," it exclaims), Schoemperlen opens the story in the simple and time-honoured this is me, and here is what happened style. Aside from the subtitles, most of which are genuinely antonyms of the word "fiction," the story proceeds in standard realist ways, with characters and plots and closely observed images, as the narrator tells the story of her relationship with a man named Jonathan Wright. The more the narrator reveals about the relationship, however, the more her meditations on truth and reality and fact creep into story, until they begin to take over entirely. In the final section, labeled "FICTION," the rug is swept entirely out from under the reader, as the narrator comes right out and says that she made the whole thing up. Jonathan Wright does not exist, the relationship never happened; the entire point of the story is the narrator's meditations, the conflation of fact and fiction, the ease with which Schoemperlen could have passed off one for the other. And she pulls this rug from beneath us at exactly the moment when the reader is most emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It is classic Schoemperlen, and she handles the transition so expertly that it doesn't feel jarring. The pleasure one gets from being emotionally invested in the characters is transferred seamlessly to the pleasure one gets from taking the story apart and seeing how it works, from being in on the joke. Why Canadian readers have somehow managed to avoid lavishing Schoemperlen's work with the sort of praise that writing both sophisticated and accessible deserves is beyond me. I honestly believe her short fiction is as far ahead of the pack (and the pack includes favourites like Atwood and Carol Shields and Vincent Lam) as is Donald Barthelme's, or nearly any other master that you could name. There are several other pieces, the titular "Red Plaid Shirt" among them, that I would also single out for special praise had I the time, but I will close now by saying that the hunt is on for her out of print collections.

Red Plaid Shirt was my seventh selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, by Mark Anthony Jarman.

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

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

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