March 8, 2015 · 11:04 am

We Are Not Ourselves: Why You Shouldn’t Read Book Reviews

The only book assigned to me in high school that I didn’t finish reading was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. I made it far enough to write a term essay and also to know I didn’t need to finish reading it (to be fair, Pamela was published as a serial and Richardson probably wanted to finish the thing eons before he did, but popularity being popularity, the guy couldn’t say ‘no’ to churning out another excruciating letter).

I may not be in school anymore (!), but the guilt I feel in not finishing a book remains a combination of panic that I’ll be found out and a sort of bafflement that this terrible book had been assigned in the first place. Sure no one “assigned” Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves, but they may as well have: the book reviews proclaimed its excellence and compared it with the genius of Franzen.

And this is why you shouldn’t bother with book reviews. As I committed another day’s worth of reading to this interminable and ponderous novel I kept reminding myself how well it was received elsewhere. Kept urging myself to find in the insufferable level of detail something akin to beauty or marvel. Kept assuring myself that this book had been awarded prizes and so had to be of some quality. The fault was mine, I thought, for being an impatient reader. Well, no more. 250 pages into an infinite waste of time, I stopped. I’d figured out where the plot was going (to give it it’s airing: an Irish-American family lives its life: the mother wants a bigger house, the father has early onset Alzheimer’s and the son is an undefined, ill-described mess of wanting to hit someone) and I didn’t care enough to force myself through the purchase of the overly expensive house, the unravelling of the Alzheimer’s mind and the (one can only assume) eventual character development of the son.

It’s very possible I’m wrong. That in my impatience for excruciating detail and an absence of conflict I’ve missed a gem of a novel. That said, I’d in no way encourage you to read this one. But then, this is a book review, and you’ve already stopped reading it.

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February 24, 2015 · 4:55 pm

Adult Onset: What you need to know about being a parent (without having kids)

I’m not a parent. Most of the significant members of my social circles have become parents in the last year or so (friends, colleagues, siblings). It’s been hard at times to be the child-less 30-something among a seemingly ever-expanding network of parents. Sure you say, they don’t stop being siblings or friends, and you’re right, they don’t, but they become something else, too. And in becoming, add to their vocabularies, stories and frames of reference experiences that I can only imagine and witness: baby-led weaning, sleep training, pumps, exhaustion and marital discord. At this point in my life I am interested in parenting in the way I am interested in filing my own taxes: I’m conscious of the merits of taking part, wary of the responsibility and the risk of fucking it up, and secretly suspicious that the claims of it being ‘so hard’ are overstated.

Anne Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset takes up these questions about parenting by following one parent – Mary Rose – over the course of a week as she grapples with the tensions of raising kids in the particular moment of yuppy, 2014, Toronto. Okay, so the particular moment of 2014 Toronto, but also Mary Rose’s own experience as a child and how her relationship to her parents colours her self-conceptualization and realization of her own identity as a parent. That is to say, there’s a bit of past-present blurring and Mary Rose-and-her-mother blurring  throughout.

It would be oversimplified to say her understanding of parenting is ‘fraught,’ but it is. Her parents experienced miscarriages, stillbirths and the death of a child; these experiences contributed to postpartum depression that necessarily impacted the way Mary Rose experienced her own childhood and the way she conceptualized what the acceptable activities and attitudes of parents include. Mary Rose and her partner Hillary raise an adopted child and a biological child (for Hillary, but not for Mary Rose), complicating in the novel how biological connections shape – and don’t – parenting. They’re also lesbian parents in a 2014 Toronto that has legalized gay marriage and (as of yesterday) introduced gay marriage into the curriculum, but still encounter tension in the representation and construction of normalized ideas of ‘family’ and ‘parent’. Add the complications of parenting in an era of anxiety, hyper-vigilance and over-protection (I recently read and enjoyed Hanna Rosin’s “The Overprotected Kid” which is well worth a read if you’re interested in how surveillance culture is impacting parenting norms). Add to that the week depicted is one in which Mary Rose must parent “alone” as Hillary is away.

I’d probably have enjoyed Adult Onset a lot more if I wasn’t currently surrounded by new parents. Don’t get me wrong – I love the babies in my life and the parents raising them. I don’t mind – in fact, I usually enjoy – hearing about teething, naps, day care and the toll it takes on the body.  At the moment I’m invited to watch and to listen the transformation and power of parenting in my real life, and so the opportunity to do the same in a novel is – while beautifully rendered, full of complication and nuance, exceptional writing and strong characters – not immediately exciting. But it was a great read and will – no doubt – lend itself to a rich discussion at the next book club (where, yes, I’m the only non-parent).

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February 14, 2015 · 5:43 pm

The Illuminations: Beautiful doesn’t always mean you like it.

I’ve recently started a book club. It’s given me an occasion to talk to my mum, J., about the book club she’s been a part of for the past 30+ years (how long?). She was giving me advice (solicited, this time) on how her book club operates. They each rate the book, but with the rule (enforced?) that the rating cannot take into account the balance of “well, I found the book beautiful, *but* it just didn’t resonate with me.” That is to say, the rating has to be on your overall impression of the book in ways that don’t allow for separating out the well-crafted sentence from the one that moves you.

This blog sometimes feels to me like this kind of exercise in declaring my overall impression of a book. And in the case of Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations I find it difficult to do so. I didn’t like the book – I’ll come right out with that – but not for any reason I can find to pin down. It’s beautifully written. It addresses complex and nuanced questions about nationalism, identity, memory, gender and maternity. It focuses on provocative settings: the 2001- war in Afghanistan (how do Western soldiers understand their involvement – as a game? a proxy? What counts as “real” violence?), a retirement home (what are the limits of independence and community? what do we owe our parents and what do they owe us?) and the remembered – or misremembered – scenes of an aging woman with dementia (what can she know about her own life? how is her identity reconstituted by those who know her now – and then?).

I wonder if my own over-attachment to character is what gets in the way the novel resonating with me. I say that because the novel shares the focus on the characters (the soldier, the grandmother, the children, the neighbours). And so while complex, human and empathetic, I found myself at a loss to work out who I was best meant to identify and attach to, who I was meant to care about their conflict and change. I suppose a different reader (a better reader?) might be able to see this richness in character as an opportunity – all the more to engage with! – rather than a drawback.

But according to the rules of book club, at least J’s book club, I have to say that I didn’t like the book.

One final note to end on: I love reading the acknowledgement sections of any novel. I like imagining how the novel I’ve just read was built and shared by a community of people. On occasion I recognize names in the sort of recognize a who’s-who. So when I read in the plot of the novel a reference to the university I attended, I imagined while reading who I might know who had come into contact with the characters (or author). Delight then, in reading in the acknowledgements that one of my favourite, certainly most influential, professors M. was in the acknowledgements. I suppose I should be surprised – the feminist elements, focus on photography, interest in the every day should have given me the clues as I was reading. But there you go. So hooray to M. for her involvement in this beautiful book. That I just happened to not like very much.

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February 4, 2015 · 10:15 pm

City of Light: ‘Allegory’ doesn’t mean what you think it does. Or what I think it does.

The thing about an allegory (like a metaphor) is that the comparison is made between two unexpected things (pigs and communist leaders; shadows on the wall and ideas). So when reading Lauren Belfer’s excellent City of Lights I struggled to figure out whether the novel was allegory or something else. A literary term that escapes me, but exists, I’m sure.

So tell me what this literary term is that I’ve missed out on. I’m looking for a term that describes when the fictional plot events/setting/character parallels a contemporary and real plot event/setting/character. Not parallels in an unexpected way, but parallels in a way you recognize the contemporary thing. You’d like an example? Sure.

So a bit to set this example up. The novel is a few things: historical fiction, murder mystery, romance, tragedy of manners. The plot goes something like this – it’s 1901, Buffalo is playing host to the pan-american exposition. Industrialists and engineers are developing hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls with all sorts of complications: union organizing and labour conditions; nature-preservationists and eco-terrorism (that the development of the Falls was protested on environmental grounds was an absolute revelation to me); public versus private ownership of resources. Our protagonist, Louise Barrett is headmistress of an exclusive all-girls school and passionate about the way education can transform individual women and reform society as a whole. She’s also afforded unusual social liberties because of her ‘spinster’ status; a status she’s had to assume for good reason (which I won’t spoil here) to do with gender-based violence and independence for women. A man gets murdered. The hydroelectric project gets complicated. The cast of characters and their secrets and lies thickens.

Right, so in this example Louise is talking to a reporter (masquerading as a photographer – because performativity and identity is also a big thing here), Franklin (who is also a potential love interest). Franklin explains his cynicism as to why he doesn’t think the industrialists care about the ordinary people when the choice is between the people and the extraction of a resource:

I served time in the Philippines, remember? I saw our fine and honorable American soldiers using the too-aptly named ‘water cure’ to exact confessions from prisoners; of course the prisoners weren’t ‘white’ so it didn’t matter. (135) He goes on… Electricity should be a public service, not a commodity sold to the highest bidder. The electricity created at Niagara belongs to the people. Not to the industrialists, not to the nature preservationists […] but to the people” (136). 

It parallels waterboarding, right? Electricity – throughout – parallels oil extraction with immediate gains prioritized over long term environmental damage. But it’s not an allegory because it is – in the fictional past – a recognizable reflection and deepening of our understanding of the present. Am I just describing a term called ‘the beauty and wonder of historical fiction’?

Anyway. I really loved this one. The murder mystery, while a driving plot point, wasn’t the focus of the text so much as Louise’s journey to understand her past and present. The historical details about Niagara and hydro development are genuinely fascinating. The socio-political-economic context that underpins the plot is as rich a character in its own right as any. Including the one moment Louise doubts her self-reliance and thinks how lovely it would be to rely on a man, she is a model of feminist independence. So yeah, please read the book and tell me what the term is that I’m looking for. Or maybe you don’t have to read the book because it’s so obvious. It’s probably alliteration. Kidding. (Am I?)

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