Tag Archives: fiction

August 24, 2015 · 5:40 pm

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?: My Ongoing Love Affair With Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers doesn’t know it, but I love him. Hard. I just double checked his bibliography and I’ve read most of it (see my reviews of The Circle, A Hologram for the King, and Zeitoun for proof. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and What is the What date from the dark time in the Era Before the Blog). Count me among the devotees of The Believer and McSweeney’s. I’m not ashamed to love him (why would I be? It’s not cool in the McSweeney’s universe to be sincere). I love him for the earnest efforts to share literacy, the belief in his novels in the power of storytelling to make social change, the imagination in the form and voice of his texts.

Did I love this book? No. But happily a reader can not love a book and still love an author. So there. I did like it a lot. Here’s the premise: disgruntled, slightly off-kilter, Thomas, kidnaps a heap of people so that he can interrogate them on a wide range of questions. The novel is told entirely in dialogue (the reviewers love this sort of formal play, and I did find it neat) as Thomas tries to get to the bottom of why an astronaut isn’t on a shuttle, why his friend was killed by the police, why his mother wasn’t a better mother, and, you know, why the crisis among American youth.

It’s this last question that really undergirds the novel. It’s not so much a question as it is the thesis: the promise of hard work is a lie and the lie has led to all sorts of sadness. Those who insist on perpetuating the lie – media, government, state officials, parents – do so at their own peril, as the ‘disaffected youth’ who are confronted by the gap between the promise and their experience are set up for all kinds of volatile response as a result. Cue kidnapping a senator.

Why didn’t I love it? The form felt a bit forced. The argument a bit overwrought (and while I can’t imagine any other way of ‘stating’ the argument in a book that is entirely statements I did think Eggers could have trusted me more to work out the argument (come to think of it I think I had the same complaint in The Circle).

Despite these annoyances, it’s a timely book for the start of another academic year. As students flood my campus I wonder what might happen if I stopped each and every one of them and asked the same kinds of pointed questions Thomas does: why are you here? what are  you hoping to accomplish? what is it you believe the point of this whole thing to be? stop using your credit card (okay, not a question). How would I answer these questions? How do I channel my own frustration at not having the job I was promised – despite ticking the right boxes? The answer of course is I read the book and it demanded I ask myself and reflect. And I don’t need to stop each and every one, I just need to get them to all read Eggers (easy, right?).

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August 18, 2015 · 5:36 pm

Cottage Reads 2015

I’m of the privileged few able to take a week holiday in the Muskokas each summer. This holiday is shared with my family (though my partner has fewer weeks of vacation and was working) and so involves a combination of swimming, hearts tournaments, making ‘suggestions’ about how to eat/sleep/parent/live and reading-in-proximity. It was newly wonderful this year as my nephews are old enough now to turn the pages of their board books, and to make gleeful noises at the appropriate places in The Paperbag Princess. In my family, reading is both a solitary activity and a shared practice. Count me privileged in two ways then: spoiled in the ways of cottage; spoiled in the ways of books.

I probably read more than the rest of my family this past week because I’m a grumpy introvert and I insist both on shared reading time and hours (and hours) of time alone on the dock with a book. But even with this additional solo-time, I read less this year than in the past. I attribute this ‘lost’ time to the bountiful addition of time shared with E. and M. as we screamed up and down hallways, paddled in the shallows and practiced over and over and over saying “Auntie E” (it didn’t work).

So what did I read? And what would I recommend taking on your own cottage vacation (should you be lucky enough to get one)?

The Pope and Mussolini – David Kertzer

My mum has been going on about how good this book is for ages. It’s the non-fiction account of the rise of fascism in Italy and the relationship between the Pope and Mussolini that made this rise possible. I don’t read much non-fiction (as you know) and would never have picked this one up without mum’s insistence. And I didn’t finish it because a) I didn’t care about the story b) that’s the only reason. There were certainly narrative elements that helped this reluctant non-fiction reader to stay interested – neat character descriptions and conflict – but on the whole I just… didn’t care.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie – Ayana Mathis

Despite being more short story collection than novel, I really enjoyed this one. Each chapter follows a different child of Hattie, with Hattie making her own appearances at different points. The first chapter that narrates Hattie’s experience parenting two sick twins is incredibly moving. And sets the stage for a series of provocative, emotional and taught explorations of growing up, class, race, sexuality… it’s got a lot going on. And where you might expect this range of thematic interest to lead to less depth, it doesn’t (I talked about the same with The Bone Clocks – this book isn’t nearly as good at That Great Book, but it is good).

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – Rachel Joyce

This one reminded me a lot (a lot) of A Man Called Ove. The same sort of whimsical tone, the same exploration of what makes meaning in life, the same absurdist plot premise (in this case our protagonist is walking the length of England to ‘save’ his once friend from cancer), the same easy enjoyment and sense of contentment on conclusion. It’s a book that wants you to feel good about yourself, about life, about connections to others, about the possibility for late-life change, for reconciliation. It’s a feel gooder if I’ve ever read one.

The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

I think I remember this being one of M.’s favourite books and I always meant to read it for that reason. Why did I wait so long? What a delight. A romp through history. The historical fiction ‘true history’ of Ned Kelly presented as autobiography (so cue my favourite things: historical fiction & metafiction). It’s an at time playful, at times painful look at the relationship between state and criminal and our efforts to memorialize ourselves (and to make our lives meaningful). Gosh, and the writing is so good.

That’s it for my summer reads. I’m now gearing up for fall teaching and book clubs. If you have more recommendations or requests, you’d best get them in soon. Oh. That’s not true. I’m waiting for my advanced review copy of the new Jonathan Franzen to arrive. (I can’t wait) (even though I’m waiting). (I’m so excited) (even though I’m usually a Franzen complainer). (end post). (now).

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August 15, 2015 · 5:29 pm

Station Eleven: Why are you having a baby when the world is ending?

I’ve wanted a baby since my lady bits started twitching in my late twenties. I’ve been asked – and had trouble replying – why I want a baby. It’s a good question, and one we (collective humanity we and my partner-and-me-we) should probably be able to answer before we go ahead and have one. Enter me reading Emily St John Mandel’s (excellent) Station Eleven and feeling ever more sure that the world as we know it is ending, and that having a baby is… [enter your adjective]: risky, selfish, hopeful, terrifying, absurd, brave. Sure, when I was born in the 80s my parents must have felt a similar sense of foreboding: the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation probably made it feel pretty scary to have a kid. And without the same frame of reference, I can’t be sure, except the arrival of disasters brought on by global warming makes the ‘threat’ not a possibility, but a reality.

So what does my baby-end-of-the-world-angst have to do with Station Eleven? The book narrates the post-apocolyptic world of a mix-matched cast of characters for whom the mantra “Survival is Insufficient” prompts them to not just survive, but to make and appreciate art, to maintain friendships and romances, and to form complicated relationships with ideas of past and future. It also gave this reader the scope and space to consider the [enter your adjective] of being a parent in any world, the massive responsibility and the abnegation of self called for by culture and circumstance (am I more or less likely to have a baby now? Time will tell).

With characters scattered in time and geography, the novel moves back and forward as readers are invited to piece together the events surrounding the collapse and the journies and connections of different characters (much, I might add, as one of these characters might be positioned to try to make sense of their world). We witness a magnificiently drawn setting of winter Toronto (really, not since the mostly wretched The Night Circus have I enjoyed a setting quite so much) and scenes along the north-east seaboard of North America (less brilliant than that of Toronto). Our characters are a little uneven in how successfully they’re drawn, but for the most part their motivations are well grounded in past events and rich personalities. (I would add that the narration of the lives of these characters ‘before’ the collapse is excellent – our knowledge of the imminanent end to their existence through the juxtaposition of their present adds urgency and poignancy to already great narration).

The past is captured in the creation and curation of the “Museum of Civilization” – an effort on the part of a few characters to preserve the history of the world that was lost, and to teach future generations about the cultures destroyed through their objects. The Museum is contrasted with characters who have ‘lost’ memories of the first years after the collapse. A sense that while remembering and presevation is a critical part of rebuilding culture, so too, an active forgetting (of the violence and isolation, we presume) is required for the same.

The future gestured to at the end of the novel is one of an expansion of connectivity (the lights go on again), the spread of ideas (the creation of a newspaper) and expanded travel (the networks of roads grow). It is a future, though, predicated on the tenacity and hope of its populace. The willingness of each character individually, and the groups collectively, to learn from one another and to trust one another (as in newspaper interviews and expansions of communities).

More than the (truly excellent) video game The Last of Us, the TV series The Walking Dead and the host of other post-apocolyptic futures we’ve encountered in recent years, Station Eleven calls on us to consider not only the everyday marvels and luxuries that surround our priviledged lives, but the threads of civilization that make a human life worth living: art, community, a connection to the past, a sense of hope for the future.

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July 27, 2015 · 9:47 pm

All My Puny Sorrows: What Do We Mean When We Say “A National Conversation” (About Assisted Suicide and Mental Illness)?

You’ve heard it before. The refrain that “it’s time to have a national conversation about _______.” The call from pundits, activists and politicians to engage the nation in a discussion about race, or poverty, or legalizing marijuana, or smoking, or texting-while-driving. Or assisted suicide. What is less often said is what we mean when we say “a national conversation.”

Imagine it. Imagine the nation (once you’ve sorted out what you mean by that) engaged in a conversation. How would it happen? Where would it happen? Who would be invited to bring their voice and their perspective? How would it shift beyond you presenting your point of view, me presenting mine a little bit louder, you returning with yours, louder still? How, in an era of social media feeds filled with identical opinions to our own, would we ever escape our own existing political and social persuasions? With the decline (disappearance?) of shared, public social spaces that invite the free interaction of people of different social, political and economic backgrounds, how do we have a national conversation beyond the echo chamber of ourselves?

Oh I know you’ve already sorted it out. You’ve realized this is a book blog and I’m an earnest (if irritatingly one-tuned) champion for the power of novels to make our individual and collective lives better. Yep. I think one of the few ways we have a national conversation about a particular subject is to read about it in a shared literature. And then talk about it with friends, at book clubs, in libraries and with strangers.

Picture me: I’ve just finished Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows. It’s a book about sisters, art, love, mental illness and assisted suicide. Our protagonist, Yolandi, summarizes the central problem of the novel:”She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.” In effect her sister, Elf, wants to die, and Yolandi wants to stop her from dying (or to make her want to live) (and these two things are different). Until Yolandi isn’t sure if she wants to stop her, or to make her. Maybe she wants to honour Elf’s deep, desperate, sincere and considered desire to end her life.

So I’ve just finished the book and I’m feeling very much like this is a book I need to talk about. And I’m in a bakery in little town and the woman behind the counter notices I’m carrying a book. She asks me about it, and I tell her “meh, it’s just okay, but I just finished an incredible book, All My Puny Sorrows, about [see the summary above]”. And we spend ten minutes (not that long really, but long enough – try it) talking about the central problem of the novel. She presents her view – one shaped by a Christian faith, her own experience with anxiety and a concern about abuse. I present mine – deep confusion, worry that ‘allowing’ assisted suicide for mental illness entrenches ideas of mental illness as an irrecoverable state, a committed belief in the importance of respecting individual’s choices (and, indeed, contributing to contexts where individuals might make their own choices). We talk and we listen and neither of us leave the conversation any more sure about anything.

I admit this experience is rare. Short of teaching novels (ah! another way we have a national conversation: the classroom!), I don’t often go around talking to other people about the books I’m reading (okay, you’re right, this blog definitely counts as me talking to other people about the books I’m reading). But I can’t put it any other way: All My Puny Sorrows demands discussion.

It is not an easy book. Other reviews have pointed out moments of humour, but I admit I missed these – or perhaps I just didn’t recognize them as moments of levity – caught up as I was in the… impossible (perplexing seems too small a word) experience of Elf, Yolandi and their family. I suppose the closest approximate to its humour would be the viral comedy set by Tig Notaro that layers tragedy upon tragedy until the sheer weight of the suffering can only be hilarious because otherwise would be to succumb.

Of course I’m reducing the book by saying it’s about assisted suicide and mental illness. It’s about a whole lot more. Questions of familial loyalty (what would you be willing to give for your family member?), the relationship between art/genius and suffering (that old trope), the ‘treatment’ (both in the clinical sense and the representational) of mental illness. The affiliative (friends, brothers-in-law and lovers) and filiative (sisters, mothers, father) relationships that not only shape our identity, but gather up the pieces of it in both hands and sort of cluster-squeeze us back together when we crumble apart.

One of the other questions that threads the novel is to what extent we inherit our suffering. The novel does not dispute the inheritance of mental illness, but it asks a different kind of question about inheritance of suffering. Instead of associating suffering in a one-to-one relationship with mental illness, the novel asks whether the psychological and physical pain of mental illness might be one kind of suffering that is passed on through genes, while another sort of suffering – that of loneliness, or alienation, or loss – might be another kind of suffering we – inadvertently – give to our children. The suffering in this novel is, then, both related to mental illness and much larger than mental illness. It is much larger than Elf, and lived by the other characters. It acknowledges and creates space for Yolandi’s suffering, her mother’s, Elf’s husband, and ours as readers.

It becomes a question then of when we – you and me as individuals – find our suffering (whatever its cause) to be so great that we do not want to live with it any longer. The novel asks us to stop and fully consider: What do we owe one another in these moments – these enduring moments that become a lifetime?

Miriam Toews has brought a compelling voice to the national conversation about assisted suicide. As we head into a federal election, we’re presented with another occasion to engage in national conversations. We can use elections as an opportunity to ask ourselves and our neighbours about what we want for and from our national government, and what we are willing to do and give to make this happen. You could do worse than to read All My Puny Sorrows and then talk to someone else about it. We might just end up having a national conversation.

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