Tag Archives: American literature

May 7, 2025 · 9:53 am

Oh William! In a world of too many books to read, read Elizabeth Strout

There’s an argument for God* to be made in the way that sometimes, right when you need it most, a book finds you. It’s how I felt about Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and it’s how I feel about Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William. The book was already extremely overdue at the library, and I had intended to put it in the pile among (too many) others that I ambitiously checked out only to run up against the realities of my limited time. But I’d been looking forward to it, having recently finished Tell Me Everything which I loved, and I figured what is the worst the public library can do? (I know, I know, I owe the library more respect then that. I do know.)

And well Oh William is like all the other Strout books I’ve read in its direct tone, in its simplicity of story, in its beauty of writing. In this one Lucy Barton reflects on her first marriage with William. What brought her to him, why she left, what the staying and leaving cost her, what she needed from him when they were together, what she needed from him after, and how you can love someone through all the many odd and unexpected permutations of a life.

More then a story about their marriage though – or alongside it maybe – is that of William’s mother, Catherine. How she left her one-year old daughter to go start a life with another man, and how the rest of her life was haunted by that decision (and William in discovering this secret must confront the truth that his mother was not who or how he thought she was, but someone more and different, and aren’t we all). Lucy makes the parallels to her own leaving of her daughters when she left William and how this decision hurt her daughters and was necessary. I guess something about what sacrifices mothers are called to make, or make differently from fathers (or presented as such, I guess).

Why did I need this book right now? I suppose there was something to the reminder in it that the stories we have about ourselves and the people we love are just that: stories. That they are written, rewritten and edited in the too many experiences or misunderstandings of our everyday. That we are not and are relationships are not One Thing.

And in a time – still a time – when there is much that is far, far beyond our scope of control (if not influence), there is something so heartening and humbling in the reminder that of this – the story of your life and its decisions – you do have some authority.

*Stipulated I do not believe in God, but you can try to translate as something like love, or interconnection, or mystery.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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February 16, 2025 · 2:38 pm

Pineapple Street: Not good, and hard to put down

What is the name for the genre of book that is not good, but you don’t want to stop reading, and you feel the whole time as if you are already watching the movie adaptation of the thing? Or the kind where the writing is verging on good and interesting, but is mostly just descriptive in the most obvious sorts of ways? Or where the characters change, but that change is at once extremely obvious from the outset and also simultaneously not convincing when it happens (like the crucial event(s) that force the change are just so predictably ridiculous)? Or where the way to hook the reader is through descriptions of how the ultra wealthy live – of their tablescapes (a word I didn’t know existed), their vacations, their clothes and their houses? Where you read the thing quickly and when it’s over feel faintly irritated with yourself for having given over the time to a book that is so clearly not good but is – nevertheless – hard to put down?

Jenny Jackson‘s Pineapple Street embodies this whatever-genre it is. It is – as was the case for me yesterday – an ideal book for a snowstorm where time vanishes in shovelling, sledding and fort building – and further funnels away in reading a book that when it ends you find yourself flummoxed that you didn’t just return it to the library. Perfect for an airplane, a beach, a doctor’s office where you expect to wait forever.

Oh sorry, did you want to know what it’s about? I’ve already given more time to this book then I’d like, so quickly: ultra rich family lives in Brooklyn Heights (which I’ve since gathered is a fancy neighbourhood in New York) and the millennial children lightly struggle with the Torturous Burden of being born extremely wealthy and the Guilt of not deserving such privilege. The end.

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October 22, 2024 · 1:11 am

Wellness: Book Club Gold

In the end I didn’t love Nathan Hill’s Wellness (I’m not even sure I liked it): it was bloated, self-important, unselfconscious about the privilege of its themes (like how Hard it Must Be to not be able to move in to your Forever Home on schedule), aggressive in making sure the reader got the themes (your life and its meaning come from the story(ies) you tell yourself about it!) and over-weighted with symbols to reinforce those themes.

But. But! I keep thinking about some of those pressing themes – to what extent you choose anything, to what degree we are all just making choices in reaction to our past or because someone told us something one time that made us sure of some truth, what shreds of identity remain consistent over time and geography and circumstance – in a way that makes me wonder whether a book you don’t like can also be a good one if it helps you reconsider something or see something anew.

If nothing else there is enough in this book for most middle class white lady book clubs to chew on for at least a few hours. Questions of open marriages, of hating your partner but staying married, of whether you too had an Adbusters subscription in the 90s and now find yourself buying bulk paper towels at Costco with nary a thought to the Corporate Giants, of placebos, of the purpose of art, of messages you’d leave your future self, of whether you can love someone for a lifetime, of how we forgive our parents and how we ask our children to forgive us, of the injustices of generational wealth and on.

But I can’t really imagine most book clubs (certainly not mine that has in its four year history only managed to read one book) wading through this 700 page commitment. And so it’s left to S. who suggested this one, and maybe to you, to tell me if this it the bottom of the U-curve and have we started the rise? I think maybe. I think maybe.

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