Category Archives: Fiction

November 18, 2013 · 1:31 am

Looking for Alaska: Making Meaning *You Should

On the prompting of my childhood/adolescent/lifelong friend, J., I’m testing out a new way of starting reviews. At dinner last night she told me that she skimmed my reviews as quickly as possible to find out whether the book was worth reading, without spoiling the read itself (it’s true I’m prone to spoilers). She asked whether I might include some kind of rating system in the first paragraph to alert would-be readers to the urgency, necessity or avoidance of a particular read. Less keen on the scale of 1-10 model, she suggested something like “must,” “maybe” and “don’t.” So I’ll try it out and you can let me know what you think. I think 3 choices is a bit limiting, so I’ll go with five: Urgent Priority to Read (5), You Should (4) If You’re So Inclined (3) You Shouldn’t (2), Priority to Avoid (1).

For John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* I’ll offer a “You Should” rating.

And now for the proper review:

My high school Philosophy teacher, Mr. M, approached the existential philosophers with a certain (albeit appropriate) skepticism. He suggested that the existential questions, while worth considering, were most often ignored by “the masses” or easily solved by “making meaning” (given that life has no inherent meaning to an existentialist) in one of two ways: creation or destruction. He fingered all of us in the room and urged us to consider how we might make our own meaning. I (obviously) still remember this lesson and often reflect on whether my desires to have babies or write a novel are borne more out of panicked impulse to make my life count for something than from any intrinsic desire to have a [baby] [novel] [marathon completion]. 

John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* has its own Mr. M in the form of the curmudgeonly Religion teacher who pushes his students to think beyond memorizing names or dates and to think instead about the implications of religious questions in their everyday lives. But more than a teacher figure, the text asks and answers the same question: What can we expect out of life? What makes life meaningful? What responsibility/authority do we have to make our lives worth living? 

These questions are explored against the usual drama of teenagers at boarding school: pranks, lust, foreign exchange students and too much calculus. Think John Knowle’s A Separate Peace rewritten for 2006 and with a massive online cult following. 

It’s a brilliant book not for any particular innovations in plot – that much is pretty staid – but for its novel answer to the question of what makes life meaningful? I won’t do too much spoiling in giving the answer, but the novel took my usual atheist angst about my inevitable death and consumption by worms and brought to it a fresh and even (gasp) hopeful promise about why life (and death) might be meaningful.

And for the intended teenage audience I imagine these questions and the answers presented in *Looking for Alaska* are ever more urgent. That the novel does not gloss or diminish the poignancy and “reality” of these questions for an adolescent audience seems at once both respectful of its readers intellect, but also of its readers complex emotional life. I appreciate that much young adult fiction – including that which I read when I was myself a teen – doesn’t shy away from the difficult, confusing and overwhelming. But this book more than many others I’ve read presents these questions as *actual questions* and sees the problem of answering them as one that all people – not just young people – have to muddle their way about answering. I guess it offers the reader some responsibility, too, to sort out for him/herself what the answer might be. 

And so because this is a book that asks difficult questions and presents compelling – and fresh! – answers, and because it gives funny/smart/round characters a chance to grapple with these questions/answers, and because it’s set at a boarding school and who can resist a good boarding school story (hello Harry Potter fans) I’ll give this book its (4) You Should rating. Go read it. You Should for the book’s sake and because it will help you look/be hip and cool with the teenage crowd (so hot right now). 

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November 7, 2013 · 2:36 pm

The Demonologist: Plot comes first

I’m generally wary of self-described “literary” texts. It feels like a bit of a pre-emptive strike or (to mix analogies) like arrogance masking insecurity to claim “this is a literary thriller.” All the same, this is getting close to a literary thriller (note I said *close*).

There’s certainly the pacing and plot of a thriller: Kidnappings, women in fashionable suits, private jets and fancy hotel rooms, hitmen and demons Not surprising the acknowledgements of the book point out that this book is being turned into a movie. And this is one of my complaints with the plot: it reads like it wants – desperately – to be turned into a movie. Forget spending time examining the thoughts and beliefs of any one character – or how they might change! – we! have! plot! to! consider! It is a gripping plot, though. I made it through the book in two days and wanted, very much, to be reading it. 

I do have other complaints though – are these outweighed by the compelling plot? hard to say. I was okay with the demons and the parallels with the Da Vinci Code (mostly because this was much better written). I was less okay with the various explanations for why our narrator was beset with demons. The novel suggests that demons are all around us, and those suffering from depression may be more likely or more able to “see” these demons. Okay. I’ll accept. But then the novel trots out – almost on a chapterly basis – different hypotheses for why the demons have decided to wreak havoc with David’s life. Not that I’m not interested in the theories, but that each one was presented as “the” reason, so I’d try to absorb that reason and make it fit with the bizzare plot elements only to have “the” reason change a chapter later. It made character motivation and action hard to believe and it made subsequent “reasons” for the demons feel like they were created to suit the particular plot point.

That is to say, the plot was so overpowering that everything else – including reasons for plot points – had to be subsumed to the whim of plot. 

So there’s no real character development – David doesn’t come to understand his father, brother, lover, wife, daughter or self any differently than he did before, now he just accepts demons exist because they showed up and ate his face (not really) – no sense of setting (they drive across the continent and it reads like a movie script describing them in a car rather than the setting having any meaningful relationship to the story). No real thematic or moral question, except perhaps “what would you do for a demon?”

So yeah. “Literary”  if you take literary in the sense that the writing wasn’t terrible – there were some okay descriptions and useful figurative language. And for all those complaints, still undeniably readable. LIke gobble it up readable. I might even read Pyper’s other – more famous – “Lost Girls” if only to see if the idea of “literary thriller” exists or if my bias against the genre outweighs any strength in the writing,

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October 29, 2013 · 1:25 pm

Stoner: Overlooked Gem

Published in 1965 John William’s *Stoner* reads like something written forty years earlier. I’m not sure how I’d never heard of the book before, though a quick search of the internet suggests no one else has either (thanks mum for point it out to me). It was reissued in 2006 by New York Review of Books with an accompanying set of quotes from famous people (Tom Hanks endorses it!) pointing out its relative obscurity. So! If you’re looking for that hipster book that will set you apart as a reader who knows what’s what… No really, this book well deserves much more attention (something beyond a Wikipedia *stub* for instance).

Except it’s sort of a thematically appropriate obsolescence and obscurity. The novel takes a realist and measured approach to the question of what makes our lives meaningful – recognition? reputation? family? career? – and ultimately concludes that most of us – including our titular character and protagonist – will die unremarkable and unremembered (just like the book!). Against the idea that this obscurity is to be bemoaned or fought, the novel suggest that by embracing the small, idiosyncratic “purposes” that enliven our individual lives we can find, if not notoriety, then contentment. This message is one well worth considering in an era of ubiquitous fame and instant-celebrity. Instead of imagining that life fulfilment will come from celebrity, or even posthumous remembrance, the novel suggests that it is the quotidian and the insignificant that afford life its purpose and satisfaction.

In a similar vein the novel poses that the disasters that befall us (our protagonist is an English professor at a small American college who cannot communicate his desires, married to an unhappy and angry woman, father to an unhappy and angry daughter) as smaller – even to ourselves – than we might imagine. Disasters of workplace tension are nothing compared to the personal horror of making the wrong choice in a partner or abandoning our parents’ dreams for us to pursue our own. 

A humble book about a humble man that is, in this humility, simply extraordinary.    

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October 1, 2013 · 1:24 pm

The Orenda: Ambivalent

The Orenda* is well plotted historical fiction with reasonably complex characters, but its thematic questions are muddy. The plot, narrated from the three, alternating first person perspectives of Bird (the warrior), Snow Falls (the damsel) and Christophe (the Jesuit) has a classic development. In a three act structure the plot introduces our three characters and their relationships, sets the conflicts and sees the climax and resolution. The structure appropriately mirrors what Boyden has setup as a climactic moment in indigenous-settler relationships – that is, the historical period narrated is imagined as a “tipping point,” to borrow from another Canadian writer. The “resolution” bleeds into the reader present with a concluding paragraph from the chorus of the novel who reminds the reader that while these events took place in the historical past, the relationships/resonances continue.

The chorus also makes the argument that what appears from the present as obvious mistakes on the part of Wendat, were not at all obvious at the time. I suppose this is where my ambivalence emerges. If the narrative wants to ask questions about historic responsibility for the death of indigenous peoples and cultures – and indeed the book offers this up as a sort of genocide – and if it wants to ask these questions in a complicated way, it aims to do so through narrative point of view. By showing three different perspectives on events the text weaves form and content to emphasize not only multiple perspectives in historiography, but multiple perspectives in “present” events: that even while, or maybe especially while, an event unfolds the outcome – (the reader’s present) is not at all known or certain. That individuals act in the immediate moment in ways that best align with their personal and cultural values and beliefs, and that to hold any one person accountable for not foreseeing the future is unfair.

As unfair, perhaps, as not assigning *some* accountability within the text for what can only be read as unjust values and beliefs. If the text holds that personal values and beliefs dictate behaviour, the text also introduces as sort of moral relativism that excuses behaviours and beliefs that cause harm and stem from arrogance. In particular I’m referencing the text’s position on the Jesuit priest Christophe. While we can see that his behaviour is guided by his beliefs, the text passes no judgement – to a fault, I think – on these behaviours/beliefs, instead suggesting that Christophe acts in the only way he possibly could based on his belief structure. Historical blame gets diffused into this sort of relativism and happenstance. Except that the Wendat people Christophe lives with change *their* behaviours and beliefs – so change is possible! – in response to living with him for years. Why then, can we we not see some change in Christophe? 

The unwillingness to adopt or present a *position* on the history can be seen again in the descriptions of torture. The Haudenosaunee and Wendat routinely torture one another; in a few lines the Jesuits compare this torture to torture occurring as part of the Spanish Inquisition, as a way, I suspect, of suggesting that neither is more “savage” than ther other, just practicing their particular beliefs in ways appropriate to their respective (cultures). This point is one Boyden raises in interviews, too, I suspect as a way of diffusing criticism that the narrative presents the indigenous as “savage torturers.” Except by equating one form of torture with another the narrative repeats this kind of moral equivalency and so, moral ambivalence. I’m dissatisfied with this equivalence/ambivalence because it seems to me from the perspective of the present – and from the present reading into this past – the events that led us to today are not (at all) open to relativism and ambivalence. Responsibility ought to be assigned in the past, and responsibility ought to be acknowledged/taken in the present.

That said, I’m excited and curious to hear how the book gets taken up by the reading public. With all the “buzz” the book is getting I’m confident it will be on many reading and prize lists and it will most certainly stimulate lively conversation – an outcome the book well deserves. I look forward to hearing what you think and to talking about the book and the history-present it describes.

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