Category Archives: Fiction

May 10, 2010 · 2:15 pm

Olive Kitteridge: Too sad, too neat

              The Pulitzer Prize winning, Olive Kitterdige, has a beautiful opening chapter. We meet Henry, his wife Olive, their son Christopher. The themes of the novel are introduced in subtle, yet poignant ways: what does it mean to lead a good life? what kinds of compromises are made to sustain a relationship? what makes life and relationships worth having?

These questions are taken up in the first chapter in the relationship between Henry and his shop-worker, but recur throughout the novel in the various short-stories that make up each chapter (indeed the “novel” is perhaps better thought about as a short story collection that gains coherence through the reappearance of the titular character, Olive, and the thematic concern with the value of life and relationships). Had these questions been peppered with other concerns the reader might be more inclined to dwell in the weightiness that each provokes, but as it is, the constant return to the heaviest of questions – why live? – caused me to disengage from the stories, too sad to continually – and in different contexts – contemplate.

Likewise the ending of each chapter fell into the “too neat” category by tidily reaching some kind of epiphany in a homily-like sentence or two that left this reader concerned that the complexity of “how to live a good life” had been resolved with the trite and too neat answer “live honestly,” or alternately, “lie to protect those you love.”

That said, the stories are richly detailed and the characters (especially Olive) are fully imagined. And as a short story collection (you know my loathing for short stories) it holds the reader as the reappearance of Olive lends it some narrative (beyond thematic) consistency. The realist mode lives! and if you dig realism and the weightier questions (asked and answered in each story), then you’ll certainly appreciate Olive.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, National Book Award, Prize Winner, Short Stories

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April 28, 2010 · 11:51 pm

Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years: Did not disappoint

      This man is not Adrian Mole. Like the trip to the recreated Anne of Green Gables house when my father asked if the house was “really” where Anne lived, fiction does not live. And what a shame that it doesn’t. There’s nothing I’d like more than to ring round Adrian’s house (well, the piggeries) and find him fastidiously drinking his afternoon tea and waxing poetic about his prostate.

But really, finding out that another Adrian Mole book had come out was happy news, and once again, Sue Townsend has delivered a remarkably witty and insightful novel featuring one of my all time favourite male protagonists. What isn’t to love about Adrian? Nothing makes a reader feel more love for a character than feeling smarter and more sophisticated than the (altogether hapless) first person (diarist!) protagonist. But if Adrian were entirely daft I might not love him as I do; instead, it is precisely Adrian’s flaws and vulnerabilities that make him so loveable. The reader at once feels superior to Adrian and identifies with him.

For a reader who values character consistency and complexity, Adrian certainly satisfies. And for a reader who values the endurance (and here I mean both in the literal sense of a character who just. keeps. going. and in the sense of a character whose sensitivity and earnestness far surpasses his particular political moment and geographic location) Adrian does not disappoint. And funny. So funny.

Note: Adrian Mole, From Minor to Major, (the collection of the first four – or five? – Adrian novels) is the first and only book I’ve ever stolen, and I did it by accident (I swear). I started to read it while in the library, and walked out still reading it (well before the days of electronic door monitors) and forgot to sign it out. Shame.

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April 28, 2010 · 12:09 am

Albion’s Story: Better than it should be

                        Novels that rely heavily on Freudian and Lacanian references and images have no business being even remotely enjoyable (see: Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers). Likewise a first person narration of a violent, predatory, sadistic and narcissistic protagonist are, at best, an exercise for the reader in empathizing with the darker aspects of humanity (see: Nabokov’s Lolita), and done poorly, rewarding for the reader in the sense of self-satisfaction of never being like the narrator (or even believing that such a narrator could ever find a real, living equivalent) (see: the latter half of The Kindly Ones). 

So it is that Kate Grenville’s Albion’s Story is better than it should be, but still a long way off from good. The Freudian and Lacanian emphasis is repetitive and exhausting, but before becoming so (that is, in the first 50 pages) the narrator’s anxiety about his (sexual) maturation, virility and coherent identity are, somewhat, intriguing. What, he asks, does it mean to be a “whole” individual? what is required of man of reason and what is required of a man of nature? Unfortunately these questions continue to be asked throughout the novel, never gaining complexity, proposing a few answers.

The narrator is despicable. He rapes, degrades, and emotionally abuses every woman he encounters in the text, including his wife and daughter. His narrative voice repeatedly proclaims that the women “want” this kind of abuse; or, justifies abusive actions based on an innate feminine weakness of will/intelligence that requires his intervention. Such misogyny is taxing for any reader – even when these thoughts are made absurd by the sheer repetitiveness of their utterance. I was, therefore, surprised to find myself sympathizing, however briefly and reluctantly, with the narrator in the last ten pages of the narrative. I can only account for this sympathy by supposing that Grenville succeeds in temporarily separating Albion’s sadism from his desperate loneliness, traits that the narrative otherwise represents as begetting one another.

Reading Albion’s Story one cannot help but wonder whether the novel might have made an entirely successful short story. A compressed version would allow the reader to sustain a degree of openness to Albion’s character that the repetitive misogynist thoughts and actions negate. Likewise the heavy-handed layering of Freudian and Lacanian thinking might be parsed and focused. As it is, the gem of the last ten pages is not equal to the slog of the first three hundred.   

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April 26, 2010 · 1:53 pm

The Trade: Dressing up colonialism

                           Fred Stenson’s 2000 novel The Trade was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which I think is pretty neat considering the novel focuses on the fur trade, and as you might well imagine, the fur trade is not usually a sexy or glamorous topic. I say “usually” because Stenson does include some sexy-glam, but not nearly enough to titillate a Giller jury (though maybe I’m projecting here, as the Giller has recognized a fair number of novelists writing historical fiction: Margaret Atwood, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Anne Michaels, Wayne Johnston, Jane Urquhart, John Bemrose, Elizabeth Hay, and most recently, Joseph Boyden). So maybe my point is less that historical fiction is unpopular and unrecognized, and more that it is a triumph of the Canadian h.f. novelist. In this case Stenson takes what grade seven history turned into a mind-numbingly-dull exercise in remembering that the NorthWest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company merged in 1822, and turns it into a fascinating and engaging narrative of deceit, violence, betrayal and madness. 

My favourite part? When a cat adopts orphaned bunnies only to watch while the bunnies get eaten. A microcosm for the rest of the narrative that sees (somewhat unconvincingly innocent) good-hearted and sincere men turned violent, or become objects of extreme and disproportionate violence. Stenson ultimately lays the blame for the violence of the fur trade at the hands of “colonialism,” but does so by personifying the ruthless economy of colonialism in the HBCo governor. This sleight, whereby colonialism is not blamed for the devastation of the land, the buffalo and indigenous people, but rather the governor is, remains a problem for me.

That said, Stenson does well to draw attention to the complexity and pervasiveness of colonial violence by including a missionary and an artist-in-the-field-reporter (I should say that the epistolary narratives of the missionary and artist are distracting and awkward inclusions at the end of a narrative that has otherwise been third-person omniscient) as a way of gesturing to the ways colonialism, Christianity and archival “truth” (in the form of paintings and written histories) sustain one another.

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