February 3, 2013 · 9:45 pm

Room: Disturbingly Enjoyable

               I didn’t want to like Emma Donoghue’s *Room*. I resisted reading it until now – despite the swells of book-club interest, the claims of brilliance from fellow readers – because there seemed something exploitative and disturbing about the idea of a child protagonist narrating his experiences first held captive in a 12×12 room and then emerging to be reintegrated into “normal” life. 

And there was something disturbing out of the pleasure I took in reading it – the rapturous irresistibility of the narrative. I had trouble putting it down – first wanting to know what depraved and horrifying passage might come next, and later wanting to observe the herculean task of reorienting these “victims” into the Outside. Like watching one of the many crime procedurals the fascination must be one of pleasure: do we want to experience something similar (as perpetrators? as voyeurs? as victims?) or do we attend to these stories of the depraved in humanity because it reminds us of what we are capable of and congratulates us for the smart choices we’ve made in *not* succumbing to these base impulses.

I’m not sure what the cause of the pleasure, but I found myself very much enjoying the story and from that enjoyment very much disturbed by my pleasure. And disturbed, too, for the thousands (millions?) of fellow readers who felt similarly drawn to this story (hopefully with as much reflexive concern for their own pleasure, but I suspect more likely aghast by the “horror” and “darkness” and “how-could-he” – which is not the same as me thinking that I’m somehow more insightful than all the other readers, rather I think I’m willing in this space to be honest and because it’s scary and vulnerable to say you took pleasure in the abuse of others). 

I should read something about reader-viewer pleasure in watching disturbing violence. I’m sure there’s something good out there – suggestions? – that could nuance my reading of *Room*, but as it stands I’ll just have to say – with a decided lack of theoretic depth – I *enjoyed* the book and I wish I hadn’t.

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February 3, 2013 · 6:17 pm

Atmospheric Disturbances: Gimmicky

So all of the usual suspects – The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, the Booker People – thought this book was The Shit. And so I feel a bit like an inept, ignorant reader to say this, but I thought it was just okay. And maybe not even that. 

The premise (and yes, this is a book that has a premise) is man is sitting on his couch, a woman walks in his door that looks identical to his wife but is NOT his wife. So begins the journey through the book to find his “real” wife with all the attendant thematic questions that I’m sure you’ve already thought of: do we change as people over time? what is our real self? how do we ever know (ourselves) one another? can we ever pin point identity? The thematic complication is the overlay of weather patterns and weather predictions as the parallel to the search for self – just as we cannot predict the weather, we cannot predict the behaviour of selves. And the plot complication is that our protagonist is simultaneously searching for a lost psychiatric patient who believes he occupies two times and works for the weather agency. Right-o – this doppleganer foil of our protagonist shows us the insanity of trying to fix identity or relationships. 

When I write this I realize that it does not seem (at all) obvious or matter the fact. Rather, it reads as terribly creative and exciting. And it is! For the first fifty pages. But there’s only so much surface wit and self-congratulatory whimsy that one reader can take. I would have been delighted with this as a novella or short story, or as a novel if it had a serious edit to include something deeper or more complicated than the gimmicky plot. But as it is, I feel a bit like maybe I missed something and didn’t get something that the Serious Reviewers did. If only I was a better reader? No, scratch that. This book just isn’t as good as I might want it to be. And it isn’t as good as the Serious Reviewers want it to be. And that’s a shame, but the truth.

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January 24, 2013 · 8:49 pm

The Birth House: Caricatures

     A note of caution if you’re looking for images to accompany a blog post on Ami McKay’s “The Birth House”: do not type “home birth” into google images and eat your lunch at the same time. Particularly if you are, as I am, a 28 year old woman who spends altogether too much time thinking about babies already. I’m suddenly much less keen to be pregnant. Does it have something to do with the looks of agony of labouring face? Yes. Yes it does.

You might have thought the novel would be the thing to turn me off – mothers and children dying in childbirth – but in this particular account of maternity the women who choose (or are able to choose) to have home births appear to have remarkably comfortable times delivering their babies. This remarkable ease contributes to my dissatisfaction with this novel. The midwife – Dora Rare – is characterized in the most uncomplicated of ways as the healing, caring, gentle, kind, understanding and empathetic midwife. The doctor – the strawman for the evils of modern medicine – finds himself (unfairly, I think) characterized as cruel, insensitive, cold, indifferent to the needs and desires of women.

Both characters are naught be caricatures of their professions. It is a novel that pits Midwife against Doctor; Women/Feminism against Medicine/Patriarchy; Women against Men. While the novel does well in exploring the challenges women encounter in deciding and declaring their desires for their bodies, the challenges in controlling their own bodies – both in the early 20th century and now (as good historical fiction always offers parallels to the present) – the strength of the critique of Science, Reason and Patriarchy is blunted by the overly crude representation of the Doctor and of Dora. 

Had either Dora or the Doctor some degree of complexity – something surprising about their reactions, an unanticipated decision or line of dialogue – I might have found the narrative more compelling, but as it was the story unfolded much as I expected and only as it could, ending in a near gag-induced “and they lived happily ever after-esque” conclusion. 

One of the most interesting questions the novel *could* have raised (but didn’t because it was so wedded to a staunch binary between Science and Women’s Traditional Healing Knowledge) is the space for overlap or collaboration or cooperation between science and traditional healing. No doubt the approach of the doctor – to dismiss women as hysterics – suggests that Science can only ever be a bane to women’s control of their bodies. And this representation did little to invite speculation about the opportunities for “medicine” to involve both institutionalized and individualized practices; however, I couldn’t help but place the historical narrative in the contemporary context and wish (oh how I wished) that McKay had done something to suggest the resonances in the present. For a quick search of “birth” will reveal a heated debate – one charged with judgements and dismissals as either “dangerous,” or “hegemonic” – around where and how a woman should give birth. To forget the contemporary resonance and to reduce the complexity of this narrative to one of Right and Wrong, Good Woman and Bad Guy doesn’t do justice to the questions of the reader and the potentials of the topic.

A pity, as I think there’s much room in this plot to offer something complicated and current. Too bad. 

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January 21, 2013 · 9:04 pm

The Lock Artist: It’s a metaphor!

                    I’m not actually sure that *The Lock Artist* is young adult fiction, but the protagonist is a young adult (okay, so clearly not genre defining) and the approach to plot and metaphor – accessible – suggests the genre. 

Digression on genre:

What makes a book young adult fiction? I’m sure there are theoretical responses and I could do some Research (as I’ve been trained to do) or recall what I learned in my Children’s Lit course (ha! a laughable, terribly run disaster of a course), but I’d rather think about the question based on what I’ve read of the genre. And I’ll think about it with some other questions: what makes a novel *not* young adult? A maturity of theme? (and yet we call *The Diary of Anne Frank* young adult NONfiction) The age of the protagonist? (No, says *The Life of Pi*, *The Kite Runner* and *Room* to name some recent examples). So perhaps then it’s the themes? The coming-of-age? Identity formation? And perhaps, too, the pitch of the narration: something not quite as dense and demanding, something shorter on irony and cynicism, something more approachable and welcoming? I welcome responses to this question – and I’ll keep thinking about it.

Back to The Lock Artist:

Given  my tentative claims to the genre specifications of YAF, I’ll say that The Lock Artist fits in there. The protagonist is mute and so there’s a surprising pleasure in reading his first person account because the reader is (explicitly) called into the unique role of listener/audience that our protagonist is otherwise without in his life. We are the *only* people privy to his thoughts because no one else is capable of hearing them. 

The metaphor of “locked up” words plays out in the plot of the novel as our young protagonist learns how to be a “boxman” – the safe cracker in a burglary. The story begins with our narrator in prison for burglary so we *know* how the story is going to end – back in prison – but as his version of events unfolds I found myself willing the ending to be different from what I already knew it to be. That is to say, I found the narrator utterly compelling as a narrative voice and as a person: I genuinely wanted things to work out well for him.

The plot has three foci: how he became a boxman, the relationship with his one true love and how he came to be mute. Of the three the relationship story is by far the most compelling. The boxman stuff is *interesting,* (I tried to pick my gym locker!) but it reads as a procedural crime drama rather than as a story of character change. The trauma/mute thread is slightly more compelling, but suffers from over-hype. For so much of the novel the reader is led to believe that this is The Most Traumatic Thing to Happen to Anyone Ever. And while the event *is* awful – and very well told – it can’t help but to fall short of expectations, if only because it’s been projected as the climax-to-end-all-climaxes. And as it turns out this reader would much rather the climax have been something to do with the relationship with Amelia. And it sort of is. So maybe that’s the problem; a divided climax?

In any case, I’d recommend this one if you’re keen to consider things like genre, if you’d like to learn about the life of a boxman, or if you’re looking for something suspenseful but not all that demanding. Oh and I just really liked – like wanted to befriend – our protagonist. So there’s something there, too, for character lovers.

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