January 14, 2013 · 2:08 am

Canada: Plodding

I expect Richard Ford thought he was writing some substantial when he penned *Canada,* and if the weight of the book is to be the sole judge of success, it is indeed of weighty matter. Alas, we readers take more into account than the weight of the book (and perhaps this will be of increasing truth as the ebook encroaches on our habitual Sunday effort of hoisting books above our heads while sprawled out on the couch with the concomitant cognitive dissonance where we think the book incredible if only to justify the sheer physical effort of reading it) and find this book curiously short on the vital elements we might expect from a Pulitzer prize winner such as a compelling plot, developed characters or something approaching a complex or compelling thematic question. 

Instead we’re left with 300 odd trying pages about the parent’s bank robbery (no spoiler, it’s all revealed on the first page). In fact, I’d rather it was a spoiler because then it might feel like the 300 pages were leading up to something, rather than, as they are, a painful effort to cloak plodding plot in weighty short sentences that herald the end of another short chapter: “I felt it was so.” “I never saw him again.” “I wanted it that way.” etc. etc. that all culminate in what we knew was coming the whole time and had only hoped would be done already.

The second part – the murder early alluded to (also on the first page) – might be expected to be more interesting were it not for the improbability of the events, the lack of interest I had for the protagonist and the total inconsequence of what transpires: it appears that even Dell doesn’t care what takes place, so much so that the novel – in another demonstration of heavy-handed abrupt chapter ending – moves off to the “epilogue” third chapter that (I suppose) is meant to deal the blow of “we all have ordinary lives” or perhaps “there are stand-out moments in our lives, but they happen early on and are often not of our doing.” So that, in the end, the moments that make our lives consequential – at least for Dell (that’s another problem! the book doesn’t in any way speak to a “human” condition or create a character believable enough for me to think it could happen, more a well physically described, but poorly realized character)  – are not our own, but happen *to* us. 

This book happened to me. And I’m hopeful that nothing of consequence will come from it. 

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January 14, 2013 · 2:07 am

The Impostor Bride: Well-Intentioned

I think Nancy Richler wanted to write a *good* book. *The Impostor Bride* dances around being good, but lacks rhythm and grace and so slouches awkwardly around the dance-floor, making it awkward for everyone reading, but the effort at goodness is altogether too sincere to turn away.  

The plot offers originality – a war-bride shows up in Canada, is scorned by her betrothed because he sees “something” amiss in her, she marries his brother, gives birth, abandons the child and runs away. We learn over the course of the novel the practical reasons for her abandonment (the titular “impostor”), and are meant, I think, to also contemplate the psychic and affective reasons she might also leave. The book makes a sincere attempt to point the finger at the (oft suggested “unspeakable”) atrocities of the Holocaust as being “too much” for the young bride, but without entering these events – or even shadows of them – into the plot *and* without offering Lily’s narrative point of view (even a third person limited would have gone a long way) these “unspeakable” reasons are left to the reader’s speculation and are not, as Richler might have hoped, compelling enough to justify the abandonment of a child. Indeed, our first person protagonist – the abandoned daughter – rightly points out that many of her peers have parents of this generation of “unspeakable” events who did not leave (even if they do exhibit erratic behaviour), so why did *her* mother leave?

For this reason the plot events that supposedly explain the abandonment do not hold water. Nor does the eventual explanation of how members of her family knew, and didn’t tell her. Nor, too, the hastily and inexpertly constructed reunion scene (not a spoiler, I think, because the progression of the plot is such that it can *only* resolve in a reunion). A note on the reunion (as it particularly irked me as it’s the climax and the apparent justification for so much weaving in and out of time – we’re meant to get *here*): not only were the scenes rushed, especially when contrasted with the earlier scenes that explore in great length everything from depressed smoking to school yard bickering, but the explanation offered by Lily which is in effect the explanation of “I have no explanation,” would be fine, indeed, it would be complicated and profound, if we had Ruth *do* something with the explanation, think something about it, reflect on it, reject it, respond, react. Instead we witness the reunion, hear the paltry account of why she left, find no explanation of the mysterious rocks, hear nothing of Ruth’s reaction or thoughts. 

A plot climax without an attendant climax in character development or theme. And a frustrating plot climax at that because it doesn’t bring a satisfactory explanation (maybe because there isn’t one? not that there isn’t in the world, but because Richler hadn’t imagined what that could be?).

And so I wanted to like *The Impostor Bride* – it had all the elements of Can Lit that I adore: historical fiction, strong female protagonists, World War Two, family drama. And yet, it’s not a book I’d ever take on a second date: far too awkward for the effort.

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December 20, 2012 · 7:34 pm

Too Much Happiness: Perfect Detail

               Alice Munro might be the reason I hate short stories. I mean, she’s the best short story writer ever – perfect detail, brilliant dialogue, the amazing ability to move forward and back in time in seamless slips of paragraphs – but with this incredible talent comes (my) the awful realization that the story is only going to be 30 pages long. And that you want it to be 300. Which doesn’t even make sense because short stories have a certain something-something in the punchiness of the plot, the pace of things, that tells you that it can’t – shouldn’t – be sustained for more than 30 or 40 pages, and yet, such is the brilliance of the characters and the complexity of their motivations that I can’t help but be just a little furious that they’re capped at being *short*.

In any case: it’s a dark collection. Murder, betrayal, knives and cheating and cold train trips. The last and titular story feels a little out of place in the collection in terms of time and setting – it’s historical fiction and set in Sweden/Denmark/Germany – but it maintains thematic resonance with preoccupations of the extent to which women will subsume their own desires and opportunities for the men in their lives, or that women are dependent (to the point of great violence) on men, or the propensity for violence that lives in each of us just waiting for particular – though not necessarily extraordinary – circumstances to come out.

Anyway. I have some ambition to read all of Alice Munro’s collections next year, but then I realize that I have to take several days off from reading after each story because I find them just so intense. So maybe I won’t. Or maybe I’ll read a story a week or something. It’s a hard life for a reader when the challenge is how to space out brilliance so as to not squander it or be overwhelmed by its dazzling beauty.

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December 1, 2012 · 12:39 am

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Something not quite right

           There’s something off in Rebecca Skoot’s *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks*. It might be the wiff of pretension from the author – she’s the only one who over understood how to approach/respect the Lack’s family? – or maybe it’s that secretly this book is very much about Rebecca Skoot becoming the author she wanted to be and this goes more or less unacknowledged in the frenetic attempts to foreground that this story belongs to the Lacks family and that Skoot is “doing a favour” by writing it. As if she’s not benefiting from the story – from Henrietta – too. Oh sure, she tells us that she’s funding the research with credit cards and student loans, but this reader is skeptical. 

So yes – I’m concerned about the authorial tone – both the tone of the author and the author’s tone as one that has authority (wham bam!).

That said, the book presents an *incredibly* interesting and accessible account of the life of Henrietta Lacks and the history of the HeLa cell, cell culturation. It asks provocative questions about who owns biological materials, whether ‘life’ can be subject to patent and ownership in the first place, and who ought to benefit from medical advances that rely on human subject participation. It raises questions about the end of life, the bound between living and non-living material (indeed, one of the more interesting chapters looks at how HeLa has become its *own* organism, but unfortunately doesn’t go into much depth here).

I suppose the aspect I most enjoyed of the book was its ability to weave between the personal narrative of Henrietta and the scientific “biography” of the cell and the medical field (like the Biography of Cancer – this book allows that an unconscious living thing might be just as fit a subject of a biography as any person). The introduction to HeLa as something that is *everywhere* and the supportive player in much medical advance was humbling for this Humanities scholar: I didn’t know; I should have known.

But all the same. There’s something not quite right here. I want to cry “exploitation!” but the book goes to such painful lengths to promise that no one has been exploited, quite the contrary: everyone here are friends. And yet… I’m not convinced.

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