Category Archives: Fiction

December 7, 2011 · 6:58 pm

Wax Boats: A week ago

                                      So the whole point of this blog was to help me remember the books I read, because I have been known (on occasion) to forget the books that I read. So it is with some regret that I report that I finished reading Sarah Robert’s short story collection Wax Boats about a week ago, and in the time between finishing it and (finally) having the time to write this, I have forgotten a lot of the salient details I had planned to comment on.

What do I remember? What can I comment on?

There are some good animal stories in this collection?

Umm. I liked that several of the stories featured reoccurring characters (I expect Roberts is hard at work on a novel, as many of the stories and the cycle of characters lend themselves well to a longer work), though I might have liked these stories to be properly linked – perhaps under one title? – rather than interspersed among other stories in the collection, which led to some unnecessary thematic jostling.

There’s a really great story about a Boy Scout camping expedition gone wrong “Hammersmith” that is well worth getting the collection to read. I’m not sure I’d extend the same recommendation to the rest of the collection, as my already fading memory suggests the stories were good, but not great. With the exception of ‘Hammersmith,’ which asked what kinds of bravery are possible, and what we owe one another in small – self-sustaining – communities. It would be a really good story to put on a Canadian lit comprehensive exam list, or a course on Canadian literature, if, for some reason, you found yourself in the position to be writing either of those things.

I promise to never let a week go by between finishing and blogging again. For all our sakes.

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December 2, 2011 · 4:10 pm

Everything is Illuminated: Brilliant.

     So Jonathan Safran Foer sounds like a prat on the radio. He sounds like a self-assured genius, who is maybe also judging you for eating meat. And so I put off reading Everything is Illuminated because I thought it might be infused with self-righteousness or self-congratulatory brilliance. But after finishing the novel I no longer care what Safran Foer sounds like on the radio, or whether he is arrogant and self-congratulatory. I don’t care because the book is brilliant. And so I’ve been (again) reminded that books are not their authors, and while Safran Foer probably is a prat, that’s no reason not to read (and love) his book.

What do I love about it? Let me describe the ways:

Character voice: While the characters themselves appeal to me in the way all brilliant characters do – in their unpredictable, yet believable, reactions; in their failings; in their changes over the course of the novel; in their revelation of something about me – the voices of the characters in this novel are staggering. I don’t simply mean Sasha’s (genius) voice as a translator come to English that reverberates (I’m not sure if that’s the technical word for it, but whatever it is when you’re still hearing the voice hours later), I mean the kind of distinct clarity of a singular character: when grandfather is speaking the diction, the meter, the pacing could only belong to him. The characters are each unique and complex, but they are made exponentially more so by the lilt and precision of their voices.

Form: Postmodern play with form can be annoying. There are occasions, I think, when adding blank pages, or runonsentences, or cacophonous ellipses (if ever there was an oxymoron….) are nothing but authors trying to show that they too have read Paul Auster, William Faulkner, and Kafka, and that they too recognize the dismemberment of form can parallel the collapse in certain truths. But here! But here! Oh but here formal play does not distract, does not serve as formal play for the sake of formal play. Here the introduction of unusual and unexpected formal elements provoke, they punch, they do something to meaning that makes the words mean MORE. And that’s it, I think. That instead of the postmodern ennui, here the formal disintegration is meant to emphasize just how acutely we feel, just how poignant love and loss can be and are, just how sincerely feelings are emphatically FELT. The form makes you feel  – perhaps, and individually, disoriented or annoyed or awed – in order to remind you that living is an exercise in feeling.

Plot: Neither too saccharine or too cold, the simplicity and elegance of this story is brilliant. Unfolding over protracted time, but an isolated location, the plot weaves in ways that both surprise and satisfy. A cliched expression on my part, but nevertheless true.

And then, and then! The questions this novel raises around responsibility to others are devastating. It points a finger at all of us for being selfish, for not being capable of truly understanding the other (in such exact Butlerian terms that I’m tempted to see who wrote their work first), for acting out of cowardice, for acting out of grand delusions of self-importance. It accuses each of us of a piracy of spirit and then says, but you are human, this is the only way you could be, and so perhaps, in this predetermination, you are forgiven.

So yeah, I liked this one.

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Filed under 100 Books of 2011, American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Prize Winner

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November 19, 2011 · 4:30 am

The Cement Garden: Imitation or Isolation?

                          Ian McEwen’s first novel, The Cement Garden, shares the suffocating claustrophobia of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and the same preoccupation with the weird intimacy of familial love. Is it unfair to compare and collapse novels in this way? To see such parallels that it becomes difficult to separate plot? (What are the other doppleganger novels?) If the author self-consciously evokes a predecessor is that more excusable than the author who (seemingly) accidentally replicates the themes and questions of an existing work? I’m not demanding the invention of new stories or themes – far from it, I think there is a decidedly short list of topics and questions in literature – rather the mirroring of mood, tone, point of view, theme and abstracted-plot, do provoke questions about the expectation for the ‘new’ when we read, and whether this is a fair or desirable thing.

Proviso! This parallelism may very likely be an exaggeration of my part. I could write a persuasive essay on the similarities, but I suspect that in the conclusion of that essay I’d be pointing too often to “mood” or “atmosphere” rather than plot or character – and replicating a “mood” hardly feels like a justifiable case for inquiring about the boundaries of originality.

No surprise then that I’ll commend The Cement Garden for outstanding development of an oppressive – dare I say “fixed in stone”? – atmosphere. The characters each evolve over the course of the novel, but only within the extreme confines of both their setting and psychology. The narrative only leaves the house on one, brief, occasion, and that journey precipitates the crises that undoes the fragile – and perverse – family dynamic, as if to suggest that any alteration to this (or a?) family ecosystem risks not simply disruption and disorder, but disaster. That we exist as families only in the temporary space of the home and only insofar as we refuse the entry of outside people and outside events. Within these confines, behaviours and morals might be set by the family itself, and it is only with the introduction of these outsiders – whether death or a courting man – that moral codes can be recognized as immoral. Put simply, only in contrast can something be recognized for what it is. So the attempt to seal up and cement over is an act of preservation not just of a body, but of a code and way of life that does not see itself as deviant, but does recognize that the operation of its difference relies on an enforced isolation (and so singularity).

I think DH would like this one. I know I did.

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Filed under 100 Books of 2011, British literature, Fiction, Mystery

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November 8, 2011 · 1:10 pm

Be More Chill: Women with low self-esteem!

                   So here’s the premise: teenage boy is awkward, nerdy, uncool. He hears about a pill, a “squip,” that is a microcomputer that will give him instructions on how to be cool (or “more chill”). He gets a squip, becomes cool, and eventually the squip fails – its technology isn’t perfect yet.

You might have been thinking – wait, wait, as YAF shouldn’t this book have ended with the boy realizing he’s better off as himself, without the aid of a microcomputer telling him exactly what to say? No. No, that’s not the moral: the moral is wait to buy yourself the exact piece of technology that will make imperfect-you more perfect so that you might have money, friends, and sex.

And the sex part? Apparently young women lack self-esteem to such an extraordinary degree that not only do they cut themselves while purging while gossiping about their slutty ex-best-friend, but they are also willing and committed to having sex with any man who might be interested. The only exception to this rule the young woman that our hero is in love with – and it turns out she’s “weird,” and hence “frigid.”

This book shouldn’t be read by anyone, let alone a young adult trying to sort out how they might learn to be okay with their awkward weirdness, because the message? You’re not okay, and it’s not likely you’ll be okay unless you buy something really expensive and/or have sex with an self-loathing young woman. The book, as a result, both deeply disturbing and depressing. Maybe that’s how it is with kids these days? Nah. I think instead Vizzini might try being less chill, and instead he might try to be more responsible.

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