Book Reviews and Miscellany

Strange and Stranger

2009-03-09T19:43:00.001-07:00

Review of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell. Toronto Star, July 2008.

Even the most casual of comic-book fans know who Stan Lee is. As the main writer at Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Lee helped create countless costumed icons, from Spider-Man to the Fantastic Four to the X-Men. Now less active as a writer, he’s still the public face of Marvel, accepting tribute in the form of ceremonial cameos in the company’s Hollywood blockbusters. (Most recently, he can be spotted in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.)

Less well known – and less well compensated – are the artists who rendered Lee’s fantasias, and sometimes served as unofficial co-writers, too. So there’s a distinct air of redress in a couple of recent large-format art books devoted to other Marvel creators. Kirby: King of Comics, which appeared earlier this year, hailed the late Jack Kirby. Now Toronto writer Blake Bell has published Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko.

Ditko’s legacy mainly rests on his co-creation, in 1962, of Marvel’s single most celebrated character, Spider-Man. Bell argues that Ditko developed not just the hero’s powers and look, but also the series’ focus on Peter Parker’s teenage travails, so crucial to its appeal. There’s more to Ditko than the webslinger, though. Before joining up with Lee and Marvel, he illustrated horror and suspense comics in the 1950s. At Marvel, he helped created at least one other memorable hero, Dr. Strange. And in the 1960s and ’70s, he worked on a host of lesser-known titles for various comic publishers, while also publishing more personal work in fanzines.

All of this work is well represented in Strange and Stranger, which above all is a lavish objet d’art, stuffed with covers, pages, and panels in Ditko’s hand. Psychedelic characters like Shade the Changing Man burst off the page in vivid colour, but the black-and-white stuff is scarcely less striking, marked by Ditko’s clear line and solid draftsmanship. The images are occasionally crude, but they actually benefit from being pulled from their original context. Without having to follow along with the clunky pulp storylines that Ditko’s work accompanied, readers can better appreciate the drawings as a kind of pop art.

Bell’s analysis is a crucial aide to that appreciation. In both the main text and the crucial image captions, Bell charts the evolution of Ditko’s style. He notes the artist’s early influences and shortcomings – such as a tendency toward clutter – and highlights his many innovations. These may have been throwaway tales of mad scientists and hoodlums, but even non-fans will be duly impressed as Bell shows how Ditko varied his page and panel layouts, captured light and shadow, and played with cinematic shifts of perspective.

Ditko is a fascinating figure for other reasons, too. From early in his career, he was enthralled by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy, which touted the ennobling virtues of brazen self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. In Ditko’s work, the Rand influence found expression in a black-and-white sense of morality, an infatuation with vigilante justice, and a disdain for do-gooder liberalism. These themes coloured much of Ditko’s work, but were most apparent in two similar characters, the hard-ass urban crime-fighters The Question and Mr. A, who were only too happy to leave small-time hoods to their deaths. (The Question was later the inspiration for the Rorschach character in Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel Watchmen – another facet of Ditko’s legacy, however tangential.)

Where Strange and Stranger is weak is in capturing any real sense of its subject as a person. Bell runs down Ditko’s childhood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and his early years in New York, but about Ditko’s adult life we learn practically nothing. This can largely be put down to a lack of access – now 80 years old, Ditko has always been reclusive and suspicious of the media. But unavoidably or not, Strange and Stranger is something less than a full portrait of the man.

However, Bell does amply cover the way Ditko’s personal quirks manifested themselves in his career path. After battling Lee for creative control over Spider-Man, Ditko left the series less than 40 issues in. This dynamic would be repeated throughout his career, and a series of standoffs left Ditko struggling for meaningful work by the 1980s. For a devotee of Rand’s principles of self-interest, Ditko was also surprisingly cavalier about money: one witness says he used his old original drawings as cutting boards, and he reportedly turned down a large cash offer from Marvel during the run-up to the Spider-Man film, claiming disinterest, although he did fight to be recognized as the character’s co-creator.

To Bell’s credit, he doesn’t try to claim that Ditko was purely a misunderstood genius. Strange and Stranger is probing and acute about its subject’s limitations. Bell outlines how Ditko’s later characters often served clumsily as mouthpieces for his Randian views, and argues that the artist’s work-for-hire was increasingly tossed-off, as the pencilled pages grew sparse, leaving more work for the inkers to fill in. While Bell is sympathetic to Ditko, his book leads the reader to a melancholy realization: that the artist’s storytelling sensibilities never achieved the same level of sophistication that his visuals did.

2666

2009-03-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

Review of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Toronto Star, November 2008.

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is monumental in more ways than one. A 900-page opus that spans decades and ranges from Europe to Mexico, the novel is the most potent distillation yet of its creator’s themes and techniques. Sadly, the book also serves as a monument to Bolaño himself. The Chilean-born author died of liver failure in Spain five years ago, at the age of 50, while still putting the final touches on 2666.

Not that the book feels unfinished – or, at least, it doesn’t feel any less finished than its predecessors did. Since Bolaño’s death, as his work has marched forth in English translation and garnered rightful acclaim, it’s become clear that he had no interest in neatly groomed little narratives. Whether sprawling like The Savage Detectives or short and concentrated like By Night in Chile, his novels are shaggy by nature. They’re structurally haphazard and unpredictable in tone; they can be demanding and willfully perverse. They also tend to be unforgettable.

2666 is no different. It’s made up of five discrete sections that build on each other thematically but not necessarily narratively. In typical Bolaño style, the novel’s title is never explained or even mentioned in the text itself, though it does come up in the earlier novella Amulet, whose narrator imagines “a cemetery in the year 2666” – a vision of death, neglect, and moral decay.

As the various sections of 2666 echo off of each other, the novel’s shape and meaning gradually gather around two main elements. The first is Benno von Archimboldi, a mysterious and reclusive German novelist who’s nearing the end of a long life. In the book’s first section, a clique of European academics tries in vain to locate the elderly writer. In the last section, we see Archimboldo as a young man, wandering amid the apocalypse of World War Two and forging himself as a writer.

The book’s other major force is Santa Teresa, a lawless and hellish Mexican border city to which all narrative roads seem to lead. Beginning in 1993, Santa Teresa is plagued by unsolved murders – dozens and dozens of them, going on for years. The victims are mostly young women who work in the city’s many maquiladoras, thrown-together factories churning out cheap goods to meet the implacable appetites of NAFTA. (Appallingly and staggeringly, this is not just some grim fantasy of Bolaño’s. Santa Teresa is modeled on Ciudad Juarez, a real border town in which literally hundreds of women have been murdered.)

By placing the German genius and the desert cauldron of modern industry in implicit opposition, Bolaño works his favourite theme: the pursuit of art and the way it collides and overlaps with the messy, ignoble, and sinister aspects of real life. His novels are full of fictional poets, but they’re also haunted by the Pinochet coup in Chile; one of his early books, Nazi Literature in the Americas, is a mock encyclopedia of imaginary fascism-enthralled writers.

The terrifying centrepiece of 2666 is the fourth of its five sections, “The Part About the Crimes.” Nearly 300 pages long, it’s primarily made up of short episodes that relate the discovery of one corpse after another. Wounds are described and clues are sifted in a terse, documentary prose style, making for a kind of police procedural parody. It’s a black and bitter lampoon, though – we see no real law and order at work, just apathy and corruption and outright depravity. Bolaño intercuts this material with several horrific side stories: an American sheriff scours the city in search of a missing woman, and an aloof German immigrant is charged with one of the murders and thrown into a Boschian pit of a prison.

There are other sections and other characters, but to summarize 2666 any further is both difficult and unnecessary. Suffice to say that Bolaño stuffs the novel with anecdotes that open up into other anecdotes – everything from the story of a mad artist who hacks off his own hand to the long church sermon of a former Black Panther. These tangents are usually intriguing, though their relevance sometimes seems subliminal at best. The prose has a similarly freewheeling quality. Sometimes it’s lyrical and striking and sometimes it’s offhand and artless, more testimony than narration. Bolaño is fond, too, of long sentences with clauses that wiggle and multiply – the rhetorical effect is of a steady murmur that you have to work to keep your attention on.

All of which is to admit that reading Bolaño can sometimes be a struggle. But he’s a true original, and the struggle is a rewarding one. 2666 is a fascinating and powerful book, in the end a hallucinogenic portrait of a great evil gathering on the surface of the world. A reader completes most 900-page novels with some measure of relief, and this one is no exception. But it’s also hard to think back on the book without itching to read it again.

Another Side of Hugh Dillon

2008-11-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

Cover profile of the actor and former Headstones frontman, from Driven magazine, September 2008.

There’ve been two Hugh Dillons jostling around in my head lately.

First there’s the spiky-haired rock and roller who fronted the Headstones. In my memory I see them racing through a set at a dive bar in 1993. Dillon snarls and spits, swinging the mic stand, singing about digging up his baby at the cemetery, while the band slams through power chords behind him.

Then there’s the Dillon who’s been on TV all summer, playing a police sniper on Flashpoint. Poker-faced and taciturn, slow to smile. He’s in fit, fighting shape: his head is shaved, his body always tense with checked energy. He crouches on a rooftop and his eyes narrow as he draws a bead on some lunatic waving a gun.

On a café patio on a hot August morning in downtown Toronto, a third Dillon takes shape: a rising actor with a hit TV show, backed by the veritable star machine. Cautious and image-conscious, but still proud of his rough edges, he displays a curious mix of humility and bravado, and he has the star athlete’s habit of dropping ready-made sound bites. (On the intensity of his performances: “Life is intense, except when it isn’t.”)

To be fair, Dillon has earned some bragging rights. After premiering in July, Flashpoint, which centres on a Toronto emergency response team, scored solid ratings both on CTV here in Canada and – more improbably and, Dillon admits, more importantly – on CBS in the States. It isn’t Dillon’s only TV cop gig, either. He also stars in the dark drama Durham County, playing a Toronto homicide detective who moves out to the suburbs to escape big-city violence, only to be caught up in a serial-killer case.

Dillon actually dabbled in acting throughout his Headstones years, most memorably in Bruce McDonald’s 1996 cult classic, Hard Core Logo. He played Joe Dick, a down-and-out punk singer driven by rage and desperation; the role seemed to barely stray from his own stage persona, and initially, he says, “I had no desire to do it at all.” McDonald eventually convinced him, says Dillon: “He is one of those guys, there’s no hidden agenda – they just see something in you that you don’t see in yourself.”

By 2003, Dillon started chasing screen time in earnest. The Headstones had split after five albums, and he’d married his longtime girlfriend, Midori Fujiwara. He’d also kicked a longstanding heroin habit. “You realize that you can no longer put your family through that kind of torment,” says Dillon, who was five years clean and sober this past summer. “You realize that you’re going to die.” He credits Fujiwara and his sisters with convincing him to get help – and admits he didn’t make it easy. “The denial is fucking outrageous,” he says. “Especially being in a rock band, where that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Determined to reinvent himself as an actor, Dillon moved to L.A., land of bit parts and waiters. (Sound bite: “I started over; I like starting over.”) Here’s the twist: after moving to the States, Dillon landed breakout parts in two made-in-Canada productions. Another twist: in both of those roles, the rock and roll animal and former junkie is playing, well, The Man.

Not that Dillon considers it a stretch. “These guys have an incredible job and nobody ever gives them credit,” he says. For him, cops have been humanized since before the Headstones hit, when he worked as an orderly at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and saw police in action on a regular basis. The result, he says, is that he learned to “see them on a different level, as opposed to just authority figures.” To prepare for Flashpoint, Dillon hung out with ATF officials in the U.S., took weapons training and studied the Israeli hand-to-hand combat technique Krav Maga. (Sound bite: “You’ve got to totally invest. If you’re not invested, what can you expect?”) He still keeps in touch with some of the cops by phone.

The emphasis on prep is no accident: Dillon has to work hard at acting. (Sound bite on Flashpoint’s success: “It just makes me work harder.”) Music, on the other hand, always came naturally. The quick release of writing and playing songs still tugs at him. “There’s no thought put into it, and that’s the joy of it,” he says. “It is the art, because it just happens.”

Not that there weren’t compromises along the way with the Headstones, and Dillon admits that “there might have been a record that we weren’t thrilled with.” (DRIVEN elects Nickels for Your Nightmares.) But the group went out strong with its 2002 swan song, The Oracle of Hi-Fi. “We recorded an outstanding rock record,” says Dillon. “We walked away with our heads held high.” Characteristically, he also takes a little punk-rock glee in the fact that the Headstones’ major-label ride coincided with the near collapse of the record biz. “I was leaving as Rome was burning,” he says. “I had a smile on my face. It’s like my spaceship crash-landed in Los Angeles.”

He may have escaped the major-label machine and found his niche on the small screen, but Dillon isn’t ready to give up on rock. “I’ll do music my whole life,” he says. “I’ll always write songs.” That’s no idle boast. His second post-Headstones album, Works Well With Others, is about to come out. And if Dillon feels pressure about his acting (sound bite: “You put that pressure on yourself”), when it comes to music, the pressure is now definitely off. “I’m older, I don’t have as much to prove,” he says. “I’m not writing songs for a paycheque, or a record company, or to fit into a genre, or other people’s perceptions of who they think I might be.”

Dillon’s hoping to get a few live gigs together this fall in support of the new album, but his time is in high demand these days. After finishing out the summer filming Flashpoint’s initial 13-episode run, he’ll spend the fall shooting Durham County’s second season in Montreal, joined by new cast member Michelle Forbes. Her credits include Homicide: Life on the Street – one of the few cop shows Dillon admits to liking – and Dillon says the second season will be “very, very sophisticated, darker than the first one.” (For the record, season one was already quite dark.)

In the new year, he will be back at work on Flashpoint. Beyond that, he’s open to whatever comes his way, including a rumoured four sequels to Hard Core Logo. (Sound bite: “There’s no neutral. You’re either going forward as a performer or just backwards. And for me there’s never been any backwards, either. It’s just forward.”) He and Fujiwara divide their time between L.A.’s hip Silver Lake district and their house in Toronto’s Danforth area. Dillon’s recent success seems to gratify him for her sake as much as his own. “She’s somebody who never gave up on me, even when I gave up on myself,” he says.

“My life is what I want it to be. It’s been a long haul.”

Drive

2008-07-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

Review of Drive: A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile by Toronto journalist Tim Falconer. A slightly condensed version appeared in the Toronto Star in May 2008.

Is a car simply an appliance, a tool that performs a task, or is it a ticket to life-affirming, life-altering experiences? That’s one of the questions at the heart of Drive, Tim Falconer’s consideration of car culture. As for Falconer’s book itself, it’s more appliance than experience – dependable, sure, and stocked with information, but decidedly short on thrills.

Falconer, a Toronto journalist, wants to write about how cars have sprawled our cities, made us lazy, and complicated our lives. And he’s done plenty of research to back it up. But he also wants (quite sensibly) to bring some sense of narrative to that research, and also to understand the deep connection so many people feel with their rides. And so a road trip is born. Falconer sets out from Toronto in his ’91 Nissan Maxima and drives all the way to California, reporting on his progress and interviewing various auto enthusiasts and industry types as he goes.

Drive thus proceeds along two fronts. Falconer doles out background on everything from the history of car design to advertising through the decades to professional car racing, while theoretically using his own experiences and encounters along the way to add colour. It all reads as a bit of a grab bag, but one main theme does emerge: car culture is bad for urban planning, but folks sure do love their cars. For much of the book, these ideas are repeated more than expanded upon.

That’s one problem with Drive. Another is that the colour isn’t very, well, colourful. Falconer writes about highway traffic, about auto-themed tourist attractions (like the Cadillac Ranch, a handful of cars upended and stuck into the Texas desert), and about the ups and downs of the historic Route 66 in the southwest U.S. He also records his impressions of the various cities he passes through, rating them on how inviting they are. But while Falconer’s prose is serviceable enough, he struggles with setting a vivid scene or capturing the spark of a personality. He introduces just about everyone he encounters, for example, with a superficial physical trait or two – descriptions that range from nearly meaningless (“a small, thin, fey man with bleached blond hair”) to laughably absurd (“a small, dark-haired man who wore running shoes and jeans without a belt”).

The author himself strikes a position somewhere between amiable and altogether edgeless. He throws out general disapproval over traffic volume, suburban sprawl, and our car-enabled sedentary lifestyles. But the more specific the subject gets, the more his own opinions seem to retreat. After describing a crass TV ad that plays on parental anxieties, Falconer offers this hard-hitting analysis: “Some people found these spots offensive because they seemed to suggest that people who didn’t pony up for the expensive service didn’t care about the safety of their family.” It’s not the last time we hear from these mysterious “some people” or “more than a few people.”

As an argument, the book is strongest in its final chapter, which makes the case that downtown traffic tolls would both acknowledge the true societal cost of congestion and generate revenue for improved public transit. London, England, has tried this approach with some success. but here in Toronto, Mayor David Miller toyed with the idea and then quickly backtracked. “Miller is just one more politician without the guts to make tough decisions against cars and drivers,” writes Falconer, in a rare but welcome flash of fire.

Drive has other pleasures here and there; they come and go like rest stops on the highway. One charming section recounts a night at a family-friendly drive-in outside Picton, Ontario; another intriguingly describes the way technology is used to track traffic patterns. Overall, though, the book keeps to the middle of the road: it’s informative enough but not fascinating, entertaining enough but not captivating.

Falconer ends Drive with a playlist of rock and roll car songs, including Chuck Berry and the inevitable Springsteen but also the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” It’s a bit of fun that seems out of place, and ironically, it reminds the reader that the book itself could have used some more rock and roll energy.

Black Postcards

2008-07-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Review of indie-rocker Dean Wareham’s memoir Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance. Appeared in the Toronto Star, spring 2008.

Dean Wareham is a rock star – sort of. Like countless indie musicians before and after him, Wareham has spent his career in a no man’s land somewhere between obscurity and mainstream success. His fans are numerous enough that he can earn a living with regular club gigs, but not quite numerous enough to make that living an enviable one.

All of which makes Wareham a refreshing rock memoirist. The genre’s usually given over to tales of fiscal excess and champion debauchery, but Black Postcards, Wareham’s new book, is about as far from Motley Crue’s The Dirt as you can get.

Wareham’s known as the frontman for two cult bands: Galaxie 500 in the late 1980s, and then Luna from 1992 to 2005. Both groups blended dreamy pop and rock-snob taste in influences (Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Modern Lovers) with Wareham’s expressive guitar solos and somewhat less expressive vocals. He may not seem like a likely author – his doggerel lyrics were usually the weakest thing about his records – but the book shows him to be an observant guy with a wry sense of humour.

A New Zealander by birth, Wareham moved to New York City as a teenager with his family, and began his musical career while attending Harvard. As Black Postcards recounts, in Cambridge he learns the guitar and begins playing with an old high school classmate, Damon Krukowski. Eventually the two of them form Galaxie 500, with Krukowski on drums and his girlfriend, Naomi Yang, on bass.

Galaxie 500 made three cult-classic albums, but the personal dynamics were tense; in one of indie rock’s more legendary breakups, Wareham quit the group suddenly in 1991, deeply embittering his former bandmates. In Black Postcards, Krukowski and Yang do not come off well. Wareham paints the couple – convincingly, it must be said – as controlling, petty, and insecure. They constantly outvote him on band decisions, even though he writes most of Galaxie’s songs. And it’s hard not to seethe on Wareham’s behalf when they berate him just for playing a solo charity gig or, even more absurdly, for stepping into a spotlight onstage.

So Wareham splits the scene and forms a new band. Luna’s story is not as ugly as Galaxie 500’s, but in some ways it’s even more dispiriting. The band begins with promise, but by Wareham’s own estimation, they peak with their third album, Penthouse. They go on to record four more, but Wareham seems to find the process increasingly painful, and to take less and less pride in the end result. And a commercial breakthrough eludes the group: they shuffle from one record company to another and tour constantly, usually playing the same clubs again and again.

Wareham’s candor about these frustrations is the greatest strength of Black Postcards. With a light and self-deprecating touch, he thoroughly debunks standard rock mythologies. The touring life? A thankless grind punctuated by band bickering and misadventures, enlivened only by drugs or tawdry one-night stands. Luna’s recorded legacy? Wareham can barely muster any interest in most of his own albums. The adulation of fans? “If you wanted to try and pick up a girl, you had to make an effort,” he explains. “You had to wade out into the audience immediately after the show, pretend to look busy, and then answer a lot of stupid questions from guys who wanted to know what kind of distortion pedals we use.”

Amid all the cheer, the intra-band dynamics are regular points of interest. The various Galaxie 500 psychodramas stand out, of course. But Sean Eden, Luna’s Ontario-born second guitarist, is also a memorable figure. He comes off as mainly benign but hopelessly neurotic, rerecording his own guitar parts for hours on end in the studio while his bandmates twiddle their thumbs.

Lest readers assume the subtitle of Black Postcards must be sarcasm in action, genuine romance does bloom with the arrival of a new Luna bassist, the beautiful Britta Phillips. She and Wareham fall for each other on the tour carousel and eventually become an item. Wareham, however, is already married, with a young son. After much agonizing and some psychotherapy, he leaves his wife for Phillips. Since Luna’s 2005 breakup, Wareham and Phillips have recorded and toured as a duo.

The torn-between-two-lovers stuff is quite affecting, helped by Wareham’s bold honesty. (To his considerable credit, Black Postcards never once reads like he’s trying to court the reader’s sympathy.) But it would all be much more affecting if we had even the barest sense of either woman’s personality. Throughout the book, both Phillips and Wareham’s wife, Claudia, remain near-total ciphers. Perhaps this springs from an admirable impulse to protect their privacy, but the decision does Wareham’s narrative no favours.

In fact, whatever Black Postcards’ merits as an honest document of an intriguing career, it doesn’t exactly mark the arrival of a major new literary talent. Stylistically, Wareham mostly relies on flat, offhand declarations that give the book the feel of an as-told-to. (“I was a father now. It was exciting and scary.”) And for content, he relies too much on his tour diaries; huge patches of the book are devoted to tedious city-by-city summary. Black Postcards is a must-read for any fan of Wareham’s music, and should engage general indie-music fans too, but its appeal outside those boundaries will be slim.

Last Night at the Lobster

2008-03-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

Review of Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, from the Toronto Star in December 2007.

I suspect many people will take a pass on Stewart O’Nan’s new book for the subject matter alone, which is about as prosaic and downbeat as you can get. Last Night at the Lobster is a slim novel that recounts a day in the life of a Connecticut Red Lobster outlet, from the perspective of Manny, the manager. The last day in its life, actually – the branch is about to close in a corporate downsizing move.

Readers who avoid this one will be missing out, though. True, O’Nan’s book is sombre in mood, unleavened by the comic hijinks that we’ve come to expect from workplace tales, and much of the narrative is built on the mundane details of restaurant work. But Last Night is surprisingly affecting and charming: O’Nan takes his milieu seriously and treats his characters with compassion.

On reading O’Nan’s first novel, Snow Angels, many years ago, I was impressed by how well he captured his working-class characters without slipping into the “I sing of the common man” tone sometimes found in, say, Russell Banks. In the early pages of Last Night at the Lobster, I wondered if that balance had tilted. The book is set at the height of the Christmas season, in what seems like an open bid for pathos, and it’s dedicated partly to “everyone who works the shifts nobody wants.” Obviously, O’Nan is keenly aware that while chain restaurants and retailers are unavoidable fixtures of North American public life, they rarely get written about in serious fiction. But a writer on a mission doesn’t always bode well.

I needn’t have worried. O’Nan does openly court our sympathies, and he sounds several earnest notes about corporate indifference: “The whole place may be disposable, and everyone in it,” thinks Manny early on, “but you can always find a use for a rubber band.” (Red Lobster’s parent company, Darden Restaurants, is transferring Manny and four other staffers to a nearby Olive Garden; everyone else at the Lobster is being pink-slipped.) But while the premise has sentimental undertones, O’Nan doesn’t overplay them – instead, he focuses squarely on the responsibilities and worries and minor crises that make up Manny’s last day at the helm of the branch.

That day is complicated on several counts. Several employees don’t bother to show, and some of the ones who do are surly. A blizzard worsens throughout the day. And Manny is distracted personally, too: while he has a pregnant girlfriend who’s waiting for some kind of commitment, he’s still tormented by a recently ended affair with a Red Lobster waitress, Jacquie, who’s not going to Olive Garden and who is working at the Lobster on this last day.

Over the course of the novel, O’Nan sketches several scenarios that will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in a restaurant: the daily regular who’s there when the doors open to order his usual; the huge party that arrives without warning in the middle of the lunch rush; the neglectful parent who blames her child’s bratty behaviour on the staff. Having put in several years at a chain pizzeria myself, I can testify that O’Nan also shows a strong grasp of the casual bickering and camaraderie that employees share. He even throws in another staple of restaurant life, the late-night bull session.

Mostly though, he focuses on the work itself. Last Night is full of patient, deliberate descriptions of Manny and his co-workers carrying out their various duties, from clearing the ice in the parking lot to heating up the deep fryers to cleaning the washrooms. Although one of the book’s regular refrains is “as always, Manny tries to lead by example,” O’Nan manages to stop short of idealizing his protagonist. The messy affair with Jacquie is an obvious humanizing strategy, but it works, helping to create a measured portrait of a decent, confused man.

It’s not lost on the reader, of course, that Manny’s decency is unremarked upon and unrewarded. He’s undoubtedly too loyal to his work: as he admits to himself, “he can’t stand a job left undone,” and it’s downright startling when he idly muses, midway through the novel, about a possible future that doesn’t include Darden Restaurants. Last Night at the Lobster is a small, quiet story with no epiphany or resolution, and Manny’s absorption in his unglamorous everyday tasks could be seen as futility. But the novel dares to suggest that even drudgerous work can still offer us enough purpose to get through another day, and sometimes that’s important enough.

Middlesex

2008-03-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Review of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, from the Toronto Star in September 2002.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book isn’t the only long-awaited second novel coming out this season – Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man will be along in October – but it’s the one with the most to live up to. After all, Eugenides’ nine-years-ago debut, The Virgin Suicides, was a more promising book than, say, Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History. Both of them balanced literary ambition with crowd-pleasing camp, but ultimately Eugenides’ sad, creepy tale carried greater resonance.

While The Virgin Suicides was slim and compressed, Eugenides works on a new scale with Middlesex. It’s a 500-pager, a long family saga spanning most of the 20th century and stuffed with Big Themes: personal turmoil and political cataclysm, incestuous love and familial guilt, labour unrest and immigrant unease, crime and capitalism. Small wonder that it’s been gathering pre-publication buzz.

Like its predecessor, Middlesex also concerns sexual confusion amid the leafy streets of Grosse Pointe, Mich. As the very first sentence informs us, the novel’s hero is a hermaphrodite: Callie Stephanides is born a girl in 1960, but reborn at the age of 14 as a boy. The adult Cal, a male diplomat living in Berlin, relates the story of his/her own early life, culminating in that traumatic rebirth. He also looks back in time, recounting the adventures of his parents and paternal grandparents.

Those grandparents are Desdemona and Lefty, who flee the Asia Minor village of Bithynios after the Turks invade in 1922. Narrowly escaping a mass slaughter at the city of Smyrna, the two board a boat bound for the U.S. and marry en route. They settle with relatives in Detroit, and while Desdemona struggles to adapt her silk-growing skills to the new world, Lefty puts in a brief stint at a Ford factory before opening a bar. Their son, Milton, becomes a restaurateur himself, marrying and raising two children of his own. His younger child is our narrator, Callie/Cal.

It’s best not to dwell on the fact that in these early sections, the narrative voice relates events in more detail than a not-yet-born Cal could possibly possess. Cal playfully alludes to this disconnect at times, but that doesn’t make for anything approaching an unreliable narrator subtext. In fact, the technique seems like nothing more than a device to allow Eugenides his epic scope while also making room for a chummy, conversational tone. Cal is a patient and indulgent storyteller, constantly saying such things as “shall I get right to it?” and “so, to recap” and “surely you’ve guessed by now.”

Such asides are symptoms of the novel’s major problem: There’s something a little undignified about its relentless attempts to ingratiate itself. Eugenides tends to formally announce his themes and motifs, as if to spare us the effort of looking for them. (Cal on the subject of Berlin: “This once-divided city reminds me of myself.”) He splashes ellipses liberally to lubricate the suspense. He shows a weakness for cute visual metaphors: the movie reel, the snapshot, the diorama. And the book has more than its share of Lovely Images that seem calculated to provoke sighs of delight. (“It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.”)

The hyperactive plotting also suggests a pathological fear of flagging readerly interest. The sacking of Smyrna and the 1968 Detroit riots provide natural crisis points, and make for two of the book’s most charged and gripping sections. But calamity is never really far: The dominant mode here is melodrama, the dominant strategy plot contrivance. On the night Callie is born, a stroke hits her grandfather, but it’s not fatal – he has more strokes in store, conveniently timed for key moments in Callie’s life. Unlikely coincidences and flamboyant demises abound. We can’t even get through the performance of a school play without somebody dropping dead.

I’m all for (fictional) people dropping dead, and Lord knows The Virgin Suicides had a high body count. But with a story as long and busy as this one, a surplus of crises makes for diminishing returns. Middlesex is always readable and entertaining – for all his apparent insecurities, Eugenides is a natural storyteller – but most of its characters and events seem too arbitrary to really haunt the reader’s consciousness.

The pace does slow down a bit as Callie approaches puberty. Ensconced in a futuristic Grosse Pointe mansion on Middlesex Boulevard and enrolled in a private girls’ school, Callie frets about her body’s increasingly obvious strangeness and moons over a redheaded classmate, dubbed only The Obscure Object. A close attention to the minutiae of teenage life – a page-long description of a school bathroom, say – helps ground the action, and the affair with the Object is particularly well rendered, surreal yet plausible. There’s also a tart section in which Callie’s worried parents fall under the sway of Dr. Peter Luce, a hipster sexologist.

Callie’s resistance to Luce and her own dramatic gender switch form the core of the novel. She flees to San Francisco and takes a brief tour of the underground sex industry, but her adventures feel strangely truncated after her family’s long and winding story. In fact, Eugenides never really reconciles the whimsy and excess of the novel’s first half with the psychological realism he aims for in the second. It doesn’t help that after a tremendous build-up to Callie’s “coming out,” he skimps on describing its aftermath. A predictable subplot involving the adult Cal’s halting romance with an American photographer is sketched as thinly as possible.

Still, it would be a mistake to underestimate Eugenides’ talent. His writing can be sharp and funny. There are nice riffs in Middlesex on German compound words and on the horrific qualities of public men’s rooms. He can move a complicated story along economically. And his obvious affection for his characters (even as he refuses to indulge them) is charming. Middlesex may be underwhelming in the end, but as a diversionary yarn it’s more beguiling than most. At the very least it should inspire curiosity about what Eugenides will do next. I hope we won’t have to wait nearly 10 years to find out.

The Year of Living Biblically

2008-03-29T08:58:00.001-07:00

Review of A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Toronto Star, fall 2007.

It’s a long and ongoing tradition: journalists artificially insert themselves into some milieu and then recount their experiences. Every so often some reporter will, for a brief time, live as a homeless person, or work at a menial job, or undergo some fad diet or exercise regime. Nearly 50 years ago, white writer John Howard Griffin posed as a black man travelling in the Deep South for his book Black Like Me. More recently, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock lived on nothing but a McDonald’s diet for a month for his film Super Size Me. There’s an air of the stunt about these endeavours, but they can also serve as a springboard to thought-provoking larger discussions; Spurlock, for example, managed to look at the unhealthy influence of fast-food culture on modern life from several angles.

A.J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire in New York, has put himself at the centre of a story twice now – first with 2004’s The Know-It-All and now with The Year of Living Biblically. In the new book, Jacobs tells us that his agent refers to his chosen genre as “immersion journalism.” Unfortunately, Jacobs is the kind of writer who gives immersion journalism a bad name. Superficial, intellectually lazy, and unfunny, he uses his own experiences not so much to explore big ideas as simply to kitschify them.

For The Know-It-All, Jacobs spent a year reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in its entirety, after somehow convincing a book editor that this would be an interesting and meaningful task. For The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs sets out to follow the numerous and varied dictates of the Bible, “as literally as possible,” for one year. Especially the oddball ones. Especially the oddball ones that are merely wacky and in no way genuinely threatening or distasteful to modern liberal humanist sensibilities.

Both the book and the project are organized chronologically. Jacobs decides to tackle the Old Testament in his first eight months and then the New Testament in the final four months, and he records his progress in brief diary-style entries, spanning a few days at a time. The breezy, episodic feel is exacerbated when Jacobs realizes that there are rather a lot of rules in the Bible – hundreds and hundreds – so he’s going to have to do some picking and choosing. “I will still attempt to follow all the rules simultaneously,” he writes early on. “But on a given day, I’ll hone in on a particular rule, and devote much of my energy to that rule, while keeping the others in my peripheral vision.”

Look, let’s face it: this is book-deal bait, pure and simple. Jacobs, though, argues (unconvincingly) that his project springs from a genuine interest in spirituality. Nominally Jewish, he lives a mainly secular lifestyle, but remains fascinated by his Uncle Gil, a black-sheep relative who’s tried several religions and has even been a sometime cult leader himself. The irreligious Jacobs also claims to be looking for some sort of ethical framework he can pass on to his young son, and figures living Biblically can help him articulate it.

In that latter respect, it may be that the project actually served a purpose. Part of Jacobs’ Bible year involves trying to rein in his some of his baser human instincts, like lying, gossip, and envy – things we could all stand to work on. But Jacobs’ ethical exercise program seems to bear pretty modest results. At the end of the first month, he notes with some surprise that his new self now holds open elevator doors, gives small change to homeless people, and “refrains from gawking at odd-looking passerby.” That it took 38 years and a Bible-themed book deal to bring basic, everyday human decency onto Jacobs’ radar is downright alarming, but better late than never, I suppose.

Anyway, Jacobs is most interested in visible manifestations of his spiritual carnival ride. He lets his beard grow unchecked, wears white robes in public, and starts blowing a horn (shofar) to mark each new month. His tone while describing these escapades is one of disingenuous mugging: “I sip a glass of water, part my lips, jut out my jaw, and blow the shofar again. It sounds like a dying fax machine.” You can practically hear the whimsical string music that will no doubt figure heavily on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation. The same is true of the various one-off projects that Jacobs engages in, such as building a rudimentary hut in the living room of his condo or writing scripture on the frame of his front door.

The Year of Living Biblically could have made some intriguing points about what it means to observe Biblical teachings in the modern world. But while Jacobs does make some dutiful field trips – he visits, among others, an Amish man, a group building a creationist museum, and his fanatical Uncle Gil, now living in Israel – he returns from these excursions with shockingly little insight. What do you know, the Amish man has a dry sense of humour, and the creationists are more engaged and intelligent than you’d think.

If there’s an overall theme to the book, it’s that much of the Bible probably isn’t meant to be taken literally, especially the unpleasant bits. But Jacobs himself shows no inclination to actually probe deeply at any questions that arise. When faced with the problem of reconciling spiritual interests with fantastical beliefs (creationism, miracles) or unpleasant ones (the Bible’s anti-homosexuality passages), his MO is simple: shrug and move on. The book’s most common rhetorical flourish is the gormless little section-closing scratch of the head, such as: “Could I ever get into the skull of an ancient Israelite who believed in several gods? Do I want to?”

Failing to achieve any relevance, The Year of Living Biblically could at least have been entertaining. But Jacobs has the comedic sensibilities of a matinee standup at a B-grade Vegas lounge. “Humans have come up with some astoundingly bizarre stuff ourselves – biathlons, turducken, and my son’s Chicken Dance Elmo, to name a few,” he writes at one point. And at another: “You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple vodka tonics.”

Like religious belief, humour is a personal and subjective thing, and I guess some readers may consider Jacobs’ comedy stylings to be heavenly. But for this one, they were purgatorial.

The Fabulist

2008-03-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

Review of Stephen Glass’s contemptible debut novel The Fabulist, from the Toronto Star in spring 2003.

A young man is rising quickly in his chosen career when his unethical actions catch up to him. He’s fired and disgraced; his sense of himself and his place in the world is shaken. But a new and transcendent love affair helps him to accept his past mistakes and move on with his life.

It’s a perfectly workable story arc for a middleweight commercial novel. And the hero of Stephen Glass’s The Fabulist is no more flawed than many other fictional characters who command our respect, or at least our attention. Yet the publication of Glass’s first book has provoked almost universal revulsion from commentators and critics.

Of course, media types tend to take a dim view of Glass, who’s become a bogeyman in the field. In 1998, the 25-year-old journalist had worked his way up to associate editor at The New Republic when it came out that he’d spent most of his young career brazenly making things up in print. And The Fabulist, though billed as a novel, recounts the fate of, ah, “Stephen Glass,” a young reporter whose life falls apart when it comes out that he’s been brazenly making things up in print.

Most observers have made a great show of their moral outrage over Glass’s new career, stopping just short of invoking legislation that deviants not be allowed to profit from their crimes. Reading the coverage, it’s easy to forget that Glass is not, in fact, a murderer, and that he’s at least managed to land in a business where his approach to accuracy can be an asset rather than a liability. After all, novelists often smugly describe themselves as “wonderful liars,” while in the next breath asserting that fiction allows them access to some sort of “greater truth.”

Still, the unsettling scent of a cash-in clings to The Fabulist. A coy author’s note addresses Glass’s backstory even as it works in the usual all-that-follows-is-fiction disclaimer. And after ducking media for five years following his firing from The New Republic, Glass gave in and told all to 60 Minutes – on the eve of his book’s publication. (His publicity team has also had a bit of uncanny luck: the breaking story of fallen New York Times reporter Jayson Blair has made journalism ethics a hot topic.)

Readerly unease won’t be limited to the book’s packaging and promotion. The meatiest part of the story is a lightly reworked account of Glass’s now-famous confrontation with his boss at The New Republic after his lies were exposed. (Here the boss is called “Robert Underwood” and the magazine “The Washington Weekly” – Glass changes all names but his own.) Glass’s subsequent soul-searching drives the rest of the narrative. Which means that one obvious question looms: why is this a novel at all? Surely The Fabulist: A Memoir would have had Simon & Schuster reaching for its chequebook just as quickly.

Perhaps we’re to believe that Glass’s motive was some postmodern freeplay of genres. But the text itself – straightforward in structure and tone, with a readable but lacklustre prose style – offers no support for that theory. The more likely explanation is that the first-time author simply sought to dodge the rigours of reporting events as they happened, of getting the details right. Why sweat that stuff, when instead you can rely on the kind of invented flourishes that made you a hotshot reporter in the first place?

There is nothing inherently wrong with that decision. But it means that the reader of The Fabulist ends up feeling like a New Republic fact-checker going back to one of Glass’s phony stories, constantly separating the verifiable bits from the implausible details. An unfair way to read a novel? Maybe so, but given the book’s marketing strategy, I don’t think Glass or his publisher can get away with that complaint.

In any case, the larger problem is that in The Fabulist, Glass consistently puts the freedom of fiction to misguided and self-serving uses. Take his frequent reliance on outlandish set pieces: in one, he slaps on his girlfriend’s makeup to get “in character” while inventing a fake source; in another, he pretends to be deaf to avoid an awkward moment and is forced to maintain the deception throughout an airline ride. These episodes strain desperately for comic effect and usually fall flat.

More troubling are the portrayals of Glass’s fellow journalists. After Glass is fired, he and his family and friends are stalked mercilessly by scoop-seekers. Even as our hero professes remorse for his own sins (to us, anyway – never to those he’s actually sinned against), his tormentors are invariably shown to be mean-spirited, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. Robert Underwood, for example, parlays the Glass scandal into a book deal for himself; I’m not aware that his real-life counterpart did any such thing. In the climax of The Fabulist, one former friend is so desperate for a quote from Glass that he invades a veterinarian’s office and threatens a sick dog.

Like much of the book, this would ring false – contrived and cheesy – even to a reader who knew nothing of the author’s past. But it’s also worth noting that had Glass written a non-fiction book, it’s doubtful that he could have pointed to any real incident that would have made his foes look so pathetic. And he certainly wouldn’t have been able to give himself this climactic pseudo-insightful speech in a moment of crisis: “[A]ccuracy’s not all that you’re looking for. Journalists always say it is, but it’s almost never true. You’re looking for a good story; accuracy’s only half of it.”

And what of Stephen Glass? The obvious appeal of a book like this is the chance for an inside glimpse of the mental processes that led to his elaborate deceptions. But after five years of reflection, Glass’s epiphany is strictly banal: he just wanted to be loved. The Fabulist fails as a novel, to be sure, but if it really does represent everything its author has learned about himself, then it seems to have had little therapeutic value either.

Checkpoint

2008-01-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

Review of Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint; Toronto Star, spring 2004.

Of all the writers who’ve lately run afoul of the do-as-we-say types on the American right – writers like Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal – Nicholson Baker may be the least likely culprit.

Sure, he earned some notoriety back in 1998, when it came out that his phone-sex novel, Vox, was on President Clinton’s reading list, courtesy of a certain intern. But in general Baker is known for cheerful fiction that, in the Seinfeldian phrase, is about nothing. Such early novels as The Mezzanine offer lengthy riffs on shoelaces, milk cartons and escalators – not exactly power-to-the-people stuff. Even when Baker did turn to public activism, in the mid-1990s, his cause of choice – preserving library card catalogues – was hopelessly nebbishy.

All that has changed with Baker’s new book, Checkpoint. Set in real time in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, the novel recounts a conversation between two men. One of them is planning to assassinate the U.S. president; the other is desperately trying to talk him out of it.

That the novel has drawn fire even before its publication is no surprise. After all, Don DeLillo took political flack for fictionalizing the JFK assassination 25 years after the fact in Libra – George Will accused him of “bad citizenship.”

Checkpoint is bolder. It discusses the logistics of killing a sitting president, repeatedly identified as George W. Bush, and its publication comes in the middle of the most divisive election year in decades.

This is a slim book – at 115 pages, it may be the thinnest of all Baker novels, which is saying something – and there’s an inescapable air of the stunt about it. At the very least, it’s intrinsically tied to its time, and while we can fervently hope that “its time” passes after the U.S. election in November, Checkpoint may well stay au courant for another four years. Beyond that, though, its shelf life is unclear.

The novel’s only characters are Jay and Ben, two middle-aged friends who have fallen out of touch in recent years. Jay has summoned Ben to D.C. with a vague plea to talk him through some life crisis. Upon Ben’s arrival, Jay gets a tape recorder going, and Checkpoint takes the form of a straight transcript of their hotel-room dialogue.

Almost immediately, Jay confesses his plans to take out George W. Bush later that very day. Ben is properly horrified, and thus ensues a conversational dance in which the two share their political outrage over recent current events while arguing about how to express that outrage, Ben ever trying to lure Jay away from his murderous intentions.

Their talk touches on their personal history (Jay has drifted from job to job and woman to woman, while Ben is a comfortable academic, married with two children) but mostly dwells on the abysmal state of the union, ranging from conspiracy theories to past CIA transgressions to the use of napalm in Iraq to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Many of Baker’s novels are defined by a strange friction. They take a restless approach to storytelling conventions (footnotes that intrude upon the main text, a disdain for drama or incident) even as their content celebrates musings that can only arise from complacency. After all, fussing about the problem of floating drink straws and other intricacies of industrial design is a privilege of the comfortable, no less so just because most of the Western world shares that comfort.

Yet at its best, Baker’s work has a mesmerizing quality that’s absent from the new book. In Checkpoint, the usual tension has been reversed: the subject is deadly earnest and the narrative approach familiar rather than fresh. So for all the weightiness of theme, the book feels like an inessential addition to the Baker canon.

In form Checkpoint closely resembles Vox, Baker’s other all-dialogue novel, though here the dialogue is more clipped, less leisurely. Baker aims for psychological suspense: When Jay talks of killing Bush with radio-controlled flying circular saws and guided rolling boulders, the reader wonders just how deranged the would-be assassin is, and just how serious. And there are clever and subtle touches: At the outset of the novel, Jay notes that Ben’s glasses were made in China, setting up a much-later riff on the exodus of manufacturing from the U.S.

Mostly, though, Baker’s novelistic aims are overshadowed by the urgency of his subject. Many, in fact, will doubtless read Checkpoint as a Fahrenheit 9/11-style political treatise, but Baker’s intent lies elsewhere. Most of the anti-Bush arguments that Jay and Ben trade off are about as cogent as Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” and if Baker wanted simply to denounce the administration, he’s a thoughtful enough writer that he could have done a better job.

No, his real interest is in making a point about the helplessness of the American people in shaping the political life of their country. An important theme, to be sure, but Checkpoint expresses it a little too baldly, and is a little too light on other rewards, to be a lasting novel.

The Headmaster Ritual

2008-01-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

Review of Taylor Antrim’s debut novel, The Headmaster Ritual. Was in the Toronto Star last summer.

Even more than a regular high school, the boarding school must present an alluring setting for novelists: the usual teenage bellows and whimpers echo all the louder through close quarters, the air of oppression is all the thicker, the yearning for escape even more intense. So it goes in those old standbys A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye, and – more recently and more Canadianly – in David Gilmour’s 1999 novel Lost Between Houses. In the typical boarding school tale, teachers and other adults are distinctly secondary players, there to encourage or to oppose; the implication is that the kids are the really interesting ones, since their personalities and ethics are still in the process of solidifying.

The Headmaster Ritual, the debut novel from American journalist Taylor Antrim, is a typical boarding school tale in many ways. It takes place at a tony Massachusetts institute, and one of its major characters is James Wolfe, a shy, sensitive senior who’s bullied by his yahoo jock classmates and yearns for an unreachable popular girl – and who also happens to be the headmaster’s son, however chilly and distant his relationship with dad may be.

The other major character, though, is a teacher, Dyer Martin. When we meet Dyer in a prologue, he’s not long out of university, he’s living in Los Angeles, and he’s working for his girlfriend’s father’s real estate firm as an apprentice dealmaker. But he’s just been conned into committing half a million dollars of his company’s money for a worthless patch of land, and he fears he’s about to be fired. So Dyer runs: he leaves the job and the girlfriend and flees across the country to an entry-level post as a history instructor at the Britton School.

As that suggests, Britton’s rookie teacher is pretty callow himself, still finding his way in the world. He also has hs own daddy issues, having been raised by his mother after his father abandoned the two of them. So The Headmaster Ritual is a coming-of-age story, but a dual one: over the course of a year at Britton, both Dyer and James endure ordeals and embarrassments that eventually make them stronger. Some of the book’s most affecting scenes are near-stock scenarios of swaggering students bullying sensitive ones in the classroom or on the soccer field – but they’re presented from Dyer’s point of view, capturing his bewilderment and helplessness.

Antrim also plays with conventional notions of the boarding school as some cloistered environment that magnifies petty personal dramas while holding off the wider world. The novel’s action takes place amid news headlines about nuclear posturing from North Korea and vague threats of repercussions from the U.S. Antrim walks a couple of careful lines here: the political stuff gives the book a timely frisson without unduly tethering it to the headlines, and the geopolitics aren’t there just for texture, but are integrated into the main action. That’s because Edward Wolfe, Britton’s headmaster (and James’ aforementioned aloof father) is an aging lefty radical – and an open and fervent North Korea sympathizer.

Wolfe is an enigmatic and imperious presence, with an agenda that pulls in both Dyer and James and drives the novel’s main engine of suspense. The headmaster takes a special interest in Dyer’s senior world history class and press-gangs the young teacher into recruiting several students – including James – to form a delegation for a mock United Nations conference in New York City. Wolfe then ensures that the Britton group will represent North Korea at the event, and as it draws nearer he appears to be having secret meetings with a mysterious Korean man.

All this political intrigue is well paced and well played. I’ll avoid spilling further details, but suffice to say that the conspiracy of course comes to a boil at that mock UN meeting. And while the climactic events are a little outlandish, they don’t overpower the characters’ stories, but rather complement and bolster them. James’s flickering allegiances and resentments in particular are well handled throughout the novel: he’s tormented by an unfulfilled crush and by a tough-guy friend who acts alternately as bully and protector. These relationships play out in intriguing ways, and Antrim resists the temptation to simplify things for the sake of resolution.

He has a little more trouble with his older protagonist, though. Dyer’s relationship with his mother and abortive romance with a fellow teacher seem stiff, perfunctory. And in spots like that, the novel especially suffers from Antrim’s workaday prose, which lacks a certain unpredictable spark. Overall, though, The Headmaster Ritual is an unusually satisfying first novel.

Ghost Town, Robert Coover, Prop.

2008-01-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

A Robert Coover interview/profile, done way back in 1998 on the occasion of (a) a new novel, Ghost Town, and (b) an appearance at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. (For some stupid reason or other, I ended up missing Coover’s IFOA appearance.) This is the long version, which ran in my friend Dave’s fanzine Filler; a shorter one ran in eye weekly.

Grand success stories like David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest may have sparked a minor resurgence in form-stretching fiction, but that hasn’t much changed life for old-school postmodernist Robert Coover. Ghost Town, Coover’s most recent novel, was published last September to little of the fanfare that accompanied, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, and Coover’s first visit to Toronto — he read at the annual International Festival of Authors in October — was likely unremarked by many of the same readers who had lined up for, say, Don DeLillo the year before.

With or without a sizable audience, though, Coover has been pushing fictional boundaries for over thirty years. His first novel, 1966’s The Origin of the Brunists (about a weird religious cult in a small mining town), won the William Faulkner Award, and since then he’s produced a savagely satiric body of work — sometimes dense and confrontational, sometimes compulsively readable. Coover is probably best known for the oft-anthologized short “The Babysitter,” with its dizzying twists in chronology, and the lit-course mainstay The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which lends new creepiness to the term “fantasy league.” Those who delve further into his career, though, will find everything from eroticized odes to power politics (Spanking the Maid) to fresh takes on old fairy tales (Pinocchio in Venice, Briar Rose) to mammoth political epics that marry historical fact and ludicrous fantasy (The Public Burning).

An Iowa native, Coover attended university at Southern Illinois and Indiana before heading to Chicago for graduate work. He reports that although he’d been interested in writing all his life, he didn’t consider it a vocation until the summer after he got out of the Navy, when he “holed up in a cabin, out on an island near the border of Canada and the U.S.” Here he hit on what would be a career-long interest in “all the stories we get from early childhood on: fairy tales, religious stories, patriotic stories, family stories.” Asserting that “stories and language and how we tell a story are all significant,” Coover confesses to a fondness for “disturbing the waters” of various narrative archetypes — “whichever one catches my fancy from time to time.”

This willingness to “stir things up” has occasionally produced brief flashes of controversy. Spanking the Maid, the cyclical, dreamy tale of a man who begins each day by, well, spanking his maid, sparked feminist protests in New York upon its 1982 publication. And the release of The Public Burning (1977) — a cartoonish reimagination of the 1953 execution of alleged Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, complete with “narration” from then vice-president Richard Nixon — was delayed, in circumstances that are still obscure; it is believed that publishers feared legal action from the Nixon camp. (The experience was clearly nightmarish for Coover, though he notes happily that a similar book written in 1999 would likely not encounter such problems. “I wrote The Public Burning before Saturday Night Live,” he says, “and there’s been so much opening up of political satire since then.”)

Spanking the Maid and The Public Burning represent two extremes in fictional scope: the former is short and compressed (more of a novella, really), the latter long and epic. Since Coover’s books have varied greatly in length throughout his career, one wonders at the writing process: Are the shorter books products of extensive cutting? Does Coover know, when he sets out, whether he’ll be running a sprint or a marathon? No to both, as it turns out. “I think my preferred length,” says Coover, “the one that I’m happiest with, is that of Spanking the Maid or Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears — that sort of novella-length work.”

However, once he starts writing, Coover often finds that he has little control over the matter. “I often think I’m writing a one-pager, or something very short, and it’s only when I sort of open up the story, and see what’s inside it, that I see what it’s trying to tell me.” His works in progress, Coover claims, inevitably follow surprising directions. “I may do a lot of structuring — I write out outlines, how it’s going to move, what all’s going to be in it — but those things get overwritten quickly enough as the text begins to take off on its own. And sometimes I think I’m going to have a big piece and it just suddenly finds a way to come to a natural end much sooner than I thought — that’s rare, but it’s fun. The more natural tendency is to keep going, becoming massive and challenging.”

Whether or not Coover is being disingenuous when he describes his projects taking on wills of their own, this, er, organic view of the composition process would seem to resist extensive editorial collaboration — a suspicion Coover confirms. His best editors, in Coover’s view, have been the ones “who’ve known how to just do the best for the book once they’ve decided they want to do it.” Changes made during the publishing process have been limited to “very minor copyediting alterations,” with more structural or substantive revisions unheard of. “I spend a lot of time going over and over these texts,” Coover says, “and I haven’t found anybody in the industry sharp enough, or literarily-minded enough, to make judgments like that.”

Not surprisingly, Coover’s penchant for demanding prose has occasionally run him into trouble with the accounting departments of publishing houses. “My work has never been best-seller stuff,” he says, which makes for a career of small advances and limited financial recompense. (Coover reports that even the income from The Universal Baseball Association, arguably his most popular book, has been minimal.) Not that he’s complaining. “I count on a continuity of readers, rather than a broad base of readership at any given time. A best-seller is a book that gets to a lot of people who just aren’t readers. That’s certainly the case with Cold Mountain [Charles Frazier’s wildly successful 1997 novel] — although I think it will have a lasting life, I know it’s being read by a lot of people who haven’t read a book in years. That’s a remunerative readership, but it’s not a very rewarding one.” With his current publisher Henry Holt, Coover has at least found some measure of stability: Ghost Town is the first of a contracted three books.

Perhaps Coover’s future royalty statements will benefit from the recent renewal of interest in experimental fiction. Big, attention-grabbing books like Wallace’s, Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s seem to have reawakened the reading public’s appetite for fictional worlds unlike the quotidian ones of, say, Raymond Carver or Richard Ford. “I never really saw it go away,” Coover says of the apparent revival of the postmodern impulse, “but then I was close to young writers, and I could see a continuous interest in disruption of form. Minimalism and dirty realism got big press because they were easy to read, easy to review, and easy to sell, but I could see that all along that there were people like Wallace.” Still, Coover’s own recent work, like that of his contemporary John Barth, remains largely ignored by the mainstream media.

However, financial pressures must be eased by Coover’s full-time gig: for 20 years he has taught creative writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Coover specializes in hypertext, the study of computer-driven reading and writing, in which narrative flow is nonlinear and interactive — indeed, often controlled by the reader, not the author. “It’s an essential creative difference in form,” says Coover. “You can move any book into the computer, but you can’t move just any text out.” Coover’s interest in new technologies and their application to storytelling dates back to the ’60s, when he made a short documentary film “just to understand the process.” He also embraced word processing very early, one of the first in the Brown community to do so: “I used to sit and work in a room next to the mainframe itself.” (Interestingly, though, Coover says computer composition did nothing to actually influence the way he wrote, conceding only that “it made a lot of things I wanted to do easier” in terms of cutting and pasting text.)

As for the technology that has wrought hypertext, Coover felt early on that those who ignored it would end up “disenfranchised, illiterate, disempowered.” Still, he does acknowledge the validity of some concerns, both practical and aesthetic. (Chief among these, at least to my mind, is the lack of evidence that most readers actually want to usurp the author.) And the rise of the Internet seems to have even Coover fearing for fiction’s future; he sounds almost nostalgic recalling the days when hypertext meant “dealing with diskettes and CD-ROMs,” and admits that “text’s future is not as clear as it was to me three or four years ago — what looked very promising looks less so now.” Still, says Coover, “you do worry about the loss of the reading experience, but I think it’s wrong to put your head in the sand.” Accordingly, he is helping to organize a conference at Brown — slated, he says, for sometime in the spring of 1999 — with the objective of arriving at “some sense of how words of how words are going to survive.” Besides international poets and writers, Coover hopes to also attract attendees from the technological industry — say, represntatives of Intel or Microsoft.

For now, Coover still publishes in the old-fashioned way, and Ghost Town, his third novel in two years (following John’s Wife and Briar Rose, both in 1996), is a compact, compressed sendup of the conventions of the western genre. Beginning with a lone drifter atop a horse, the novel charts a haphazard narrative course through a hallucinatory, anarchic world of cattle rustlers and lynch-happy posses, rowdy barrooms and deserted banks, stern schoolmarms and scheming whores. Distinguished by non-sequitur plot turns and Coover’s demanding virtuoso prose, Ghost Town is not for the faint of heart. Indeed, the stock settings, the splashy cartoon violence (including surprise resurrections), and the protagonist’s ever-shifting goals often produce a disconcerting literary-video-game effect. “That’s the metaphor of the ghost town,” says Coover. “Things are never as they appear.”

Coover’s work within the western format dates back to his 1972 play The Kid (which he cites as Ghost Town’s direct antecedent). Driven since then to produce “a massive epic” containing “all the various characters in the west,” Coover began only after conceiving the book’s central image: the ghost town gliding past the lone rider on the desert plain, overtaking him from behind. “As I followed the impulses of this visual image,” he says, “everything got crushed into this quite short narrative.” He was still driven, though, “to make sure every element of the western was tucked in there somewhere, even if only a mention.”

Coover’s perennial interest in genre will also inform his future work. He describes his next book as “a collection of short fiction dealing with children’s themes,” and he’s also working on a long novel premised on yet another cultural institution: the porn film. Centering on a character dubbed Lucky Pierre (Coover won’t divulge the working title, but he does give me that much), the book will comprise nine novella-length sections, “representing nine reels, and nine filmmakers.”

While we’re on the subject of titillation, I have to ask the author of The Public Burning — in which Richard Nixon trysts on the death-house floor with condemned spy Ethel Rosenberg, before being sodomized by the ghostly national mascot Uncle Sam — what he makes of Washington’s annus horribilis. Not surprisingly, Coover considers the situation more ludicrous than anything in his own fiction. “It’s pathetic, a case of Congress dropping its pants in front of the public, in front of the world. It’s silly, it’s funny.” Coover doesn’t rule out the possibility that the events in question may one day engage his own imaginative impulse, but not in the foreseeable future. “I think you have to let these things settle into the context of the time before you can manage them.”

Mark Haddon Q&A

2008-01-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

In summer 2006, I did an e-mail interview with Mark Haddon, whose second novel, A Spot of Bother (the follow-up to the massive hit A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), was coming out that fall. My questions were strictly straightforward, but he was generous with his responses. Since this was for a Chatelaine front-of-book piece, said responses were then broken into tiny shards, two or three of which were picked up for publication. But here it all is in full.

After the huge success of Curious Incident, did you feel any pressure – from publishers or from yourself – when writing your second novel?

Obviously I felt some pressure after Curious Incident spread round the globe like a benign plague. Thankfully, however, it all came from me (my agent and publishers were blissfully unpushy). And that pressure was less a pressure to write an equally successful book, but to understand precisely why Curious had been so successful in the first place. It was a very peculiar novel. Consequently, unlike most novelists, I couldn’t simply write another book in the same genre, or the same voice, or with the same setting. But I did want to carry over something from one novel to the next. And I knew that once I had solved this puzzle half the job would be done.

In the end I decided that what made Curious work so well was a quality of empathy, a kindness, an interest in other human beings, not in spite of their failings, but because of them. And it is this, I think, which connects Curious Incident and A Spot of Bother. As Dan Franklin, my editor in London, said after reading the new novel, it’s like being in a different car going to a different destination, but you know that the same driver is at the wheel.

Because Curious Incident was such an unusual, one-of-a-kind novel, do you feel there’s more pressure with the second novel to establish “what kind of novelist” you are or anything like that?

It took me a long time to admit that Curious Incident was a good novel (it’s fantastic having written a bestseller but it’s hard to silence that nagging, doubtful voice which keeps asking whether you’ve written something that’s simply entertaining and easy to read). There’s a world of difference, however, between writing a good novel and being a good novelist. I’d love people to read A Spot of Bother and think I’ve managed to cross that divide.

You’ve said Curious Incident began with the image of the dead dog. What was the starting point for A Spot of Bother?

Actually, it’s not strictly true that Curious Incident began with the image of the dead dog. It began with many things coming together, as all half-decent novels do. The image of the dead dog was simply one of those things. It also happened to be the pithiest and funniest answer to a question I was asked several hundred times. And the one people remember most clearly.

As for A Spot of Bother, well, I wanted to write about nervous breakdown, I wanted to write about older people having sex, I was bored of reading novels in which gay men have perfect dress sense and thrillingly promiscuous lives, I liked the idea of writing in a way that was quite complex but seemed utterly artless....

From there, how quickly did you realize you wanted to write about various members of a family?

It was Donna Tartt, I think, who talked about novelists writing for a single voice, then writing for a group of voices and moving towards writing for the whole orchestra. Curious Incident was a piece for a solo instrument. A Spot of Bother is a quartet. Maybe the next novel will be a concerto.

Which character did you feel closest to as you were writing? Which did you feel least close to? (Or did you not think in those terms?)

I began with George’s story and initially I felt closest to him. But as the novel progressed I realised that I had to give equal weight to all four members of the family. And that it would only work once I had fallen in love with all of them.

George’s bout of mental illness is one of the major engines of the novel.What attracts you to that as a subject?

Show me the novelist who is not interested in the failings of the human mind.... We all spend a great deal of time in our own company, lying on the sofa thinking about what is going through our heads, and what might be going through other people’s heads. I’d go so far as to say that you can’t write a literary novel with being slightly obsessed with the way the mind works. And like all complicated machines, it’s only when it breaks down that you really begin to understand how it operates.

You’ve written children’s books, and Curious Incident was marketed to both adult and young-adult readers. Was there anything particularly liberating – or particularly challenging – about writing your first novel aimed solely at adults?

No, is the short answer, for the simple reason that when I wrote Curious Incident I thought I was writing for adults. The (rather brilliant) marketing strategy was something dreamed up afterwards by my agent and publisher. On the other hand, I am secretly looking forward to the fact that some fans of Curious will be, let’s say, “challenged” by some of the material in A Spot of Bother. I think all good art is slightly disturbing as well as entertaining.

Both your novels mix comic set pieces with dramatic, serious moments, to great success. Is that the kind of approach you most enjoy as a reader, too?

To be honest, I usually steer well clear of novels described as “comic.” “Experimental,” “dark,” “difficult,” those are the words that I find tempting on a flyleaf. I’ve just started reading The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, and I’ve recently finished reading Villette by Charlotte Bronte (a novel which doesn’t really get going till, ooh, about page 250).

Though I guess you could describe my favourite novels (Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Bleak House...) as comic in the broader sense of the word. None of them are going to make anyone laugh out loud, but they are imbued with a profound generosity and good humour. All of them are aware of the cruelty and harshness of the world but they never allow themselves to be poisoned by those qualities.

Home Land

2007-12-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

Review of Sam Lipsyte’s novel Home Land; this was in early 2005 in the Toronto Star.

Novelists have always found rich material in characters who are at odds with the world. But in North America in the years since World War II, an entire sprawling genre of alienated-young-man fiction has taken shape. Everywhere there are confessions of grownup Holden Caulfields adrift in a world of affluence. They disdain business and society and fetishize their own failures, yet somehow they rarely seem to suffer any real physical privation – their pain is the existential itch of the privileged.

Sam Lipsyte’s second novel belongs to that category, but to its credit, it’s firmly in the black-comedy subgenre. And it’s organized around a conceit so fitting and simple that I can’t quite believe it’s not been done before (though I confess no examples leap to mind). Home Land is narrated by a thirtysomething layabout, and it’s made up of letters to his high school’s alumni newsletter.

Eastern Valley High School of New Jersey has produced gods of the guitar and the baseball diamond, as well as rising stars in politics, business, and science. It’s also produced the underemployed Lewis Miner (class of ’89), who, as he declares at the outset, “did not pan out.” Over several weeks and a couple hundred pages, Lewis entertains his former classmates with painfully honest accounts of his masturbatory misadventures and drug-dazzled ambles about town, Or rather, he tries to entertain them: none of Lewis’s updates make it into the pages of “Catamount Notes,” to his growing frustration.

Lewis’s shoulders are stacked with chips that more earnest writers would build whole novels around: his mother’s dead, his father’s brutish and estranged, and his girlfriend’s ditched him to be closer to her own movie-star brother. Lewis keeps himself in drug money by writing “FakeFacts” for the in-house newsletter of a cola corporation, but mostly he hangs out with his best friend, Gary, a fellow class-of-’89 wastrel who has issues of his own. Gary (who first appeared in Lipsyte’s short-story collection Venus Drive) disgraced his parents with accusations of ritual sexual abuse, then sued his psychiatrist after deciding that his recovered memories were (probably) false. Lewis semi-affectionately refers to him as “the Retractor.”

With its offhand accounts of days and nights wasted away, the novel nicely captures the kind of relationship in which close friends encourage each other’s worst habits – what the shrinks call codependency. It’s also rich in secondary characters, such as Fontana, the former principal of Eastern Valley High, who suggests a couple-decades-older version of Lewis. There are also threatening drug dealers, preppie princesses, and blusteringly self-involved parents – a steady parade of bit players enlivens the action, and one never has the sense that they’re mere foils to Lewis.

They might be foils to Sam Lipsyte, though. Home Land isn’t really a character study and it isn’t really a state-of-our-culture satire (unlike its predecessor, The Subject Steve, which combined a light comedic touch with DeLillo-isms that strained to be epoch-defining). Mainly the novel’s a venue for its author’s twitchy wordplay. Literary types typically show their skills with lyrical swooning, or with painterly descriptions of everything that passes before their characters’ eyes. Lipsyte, though, prefers stylized, funny dialogue and off-kilter aphorisms. And he draws laughs from the kind of exposition that would be mere narrative pollyfiller to most writers: “Home from the garland, I found the latest issue of Catamount Notes in my mail slot, got myself nooked up on the sofa for a visit with my cougar kin. Some alums had acquired new coordinates of toil on the corporate slave grid. Others were celebrating the advent of poop-smeared approximations of themselves.”

As that passage indicates, Lipsyte’s style does run the risk of being overly glib. Home Land’s wry tone of emotional vacancy is certainly preferable to woe-is-me victimhood, but it does tend to keep the stakes small as the story moves to its climax (which is, inevitably, an Eastern Valley High class reunion). When Gary’s horrific relationship with his parents is rendered at the same insouciant pitch as, say, Lewis’s idle lust for a barista, it’s hard to genuinely care about either – or, indeed, anything. The novel’s resolution, which sees Lewis’s smirking and mugging burned away by raw and painful feeling, is a powerful moment, but a small victory.

Specimen Days

2007-12-16T17:05:00.000-08:00

Review of Michael Cunningham’s novel Specimen Days; Toronto Star, 2005.

It’s still early in the critical jousting over Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham’s new novel, and already several reviewers have accused him of recycling his last one. That would be The Hours, the 1999 blockbuster hit made up of three interwoven stories about people in varying stages of emotional distress – one of those people being Virginia Woolf, whose style, themes, and situations are reworked in the book.

Cunningham’s new novel is also made up of three connected stories to which a dead literary figure – poet Walt Whitman in this case – serves as a kind of godparent. Still, the cries of “retread” are unfair. In Specimen Days, Cunningham genre-hops from historical fiction to suspense thriller to science fiction, and whatever the book’s flaws, it’s clear that in style and subject he’s pushed himself onto new ground (at least, new to him).

In fact, the book that Specimen Days really calls to mind is David Mitchell’s hit novel Cloud Atlas. Both of them dabble in various genres and hopscotch across various time periods, and both tease the reader with clues and echoes that link the various stories. I don’t mean to suggest that the similarity is anything but coincidental (Mitchell’s book was published only last year, after all), but Specimen Days does suffer in comparison: it lacks Cloud Atlas’s giddy, propulsive plotting, and Cunningham’s connective webs feel less clever and energizing than Mitchell’s.

One of the disappointments of Specimen Days is the way Cunningham handles his discrete narratives. In The Hours they were intertwined, with the reader pulled back and forth among three time periods in a manner that, while it may have been contrived, at least seemed organic during the reading. The stories were also nicely brought together at the end, in a way that managed to seem satisfyingly inevitable rather than manipulative. In Specimen Days, in contrast, each story ends before the next begins, and most of the connections between them are slight – such as the recurring character names, or variants of them, and the Whitman motif, which feels like an add-on more than an integral part of the proceedings. The overall effect suggests a collection of novellas more than a novel.

Still, for the most part Specimen Days is engaging enough that it’s tempting to overlook the structural jerry-rigging. And one common link to the novel’s three parts is the Manhattan setting – a lovingly rendered backdrop that goes a long way toward providing narrative continuity and momentum.

“In the Machine,” the first piece, is set in the 1800s, among New York’s desperately poor. Lucas, a sickly 13-year-old, takes over his brother’s job at a metalworks plant after the brother is crushed in the workings of a machine. Lucas divides his energy between trying to provide for his frail, ghostlike parents and mooning over Catherine, his dead brother’s fiancée; his only solace lies in reading from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at night. (He also quotes from the book in conversation, compulsively and convulsively – his spasms provide a comic touch that doesn’t quite feel intentional.) The boy’s situation gets more desperate when he hears the keening voice of Simon, his dead brother, emanating from the machines around him – the gears at work, his mother’s music box – and becomes convinced that malevolent ghosts are reaching out to ensnare the living.

The portentous gloom of “In the Machine” makes it the most ponderous of the three pieces here. But it also makes for a nice parable about the anxieties of the industrial age – and the theme of paranoia runs deeper as the novel progresses. In the second story, “The Children’s Crusade,” the time is now, with New York City enshrouded in dread by the still-fresh World Trade Center attack. The protagonist is Cat, a forensic psychologist who works with the FBI, logging and interpreting terrorist threats. A group of child suicide bombers are striking at random throughout the city, and they share an obsession with the poetry of Whitman – and with Cat, who’s drawn into their eerie campaign.

The final section, “Like Beauty,” is set about 120 years from now, in a distinctly dystopian New York. A sinister private-sector plutocracy calls the shots, and the city has become a kind of theme park. Simon, a sentient android, makes his living as local colour for the tourist trade, simulating muggings on demand (shades here of the stories of George Saunders). But it turns out that Simon’s creator imprinted him with a hidden homing impulse, and when it kicks in, Simon flees New York for Colorado in search of his maker – in the company of Catareen, a female lizardlike creature from another planet.

The vision of the future here is a familiar one, from its jargon (“hoverpods” float by overhead) to its facile satire (children are named “Tomcruise” and “Katemoss”). But if Cunningham doesn’t exactly reinvent his genres in Specimen Days, he does show a certain fluency in them. “The Children’s Crusade” subtly escalates the suspense, as Cat’s own safety is compromised, while “Like Beauty” deftly avoids overexposition, parsing out just enough detail about the state of the world circa 2120 to keep the story coherent.

Ultimately, though, the novel shows little cumulative power, mainly because of the handling of the Whitman motif. The Leaves of Grass quotations that various characters spout are lovely in and of themselves, but the poet’s influence never really seems encoded in the novel’s DNA. And Whitman’s relation to the overall theme – the search for beauty and transcendence in an age of everyday dehumanization – remains superficial.

Again, in fact, the advantage goes to Cloud Atlas. Mitchell focused on the battle between altruism and avarice within human nature, and while his message wasn’t necessarily any more profound than Cunningham’s, it seemed more vivid and deeply felt, rooted in character rather than abstract ideas. Specimen Days, which essentially presents good people battling the vague and faceless spirit of the age, is not nearly as haunting.

The Sleeping Father

2007-12-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

Review of Matthew Sharpe’s novel The Sleeping Father; Toronto Star, sometime in 2004. One good thing about putting all this old stuff here is that it’s made me realize I give in far too often to a certain rhetorical tic: a series of consecutive sentence fragments, set off by “Or” or “And,” to list characters or elements of a book. Must stop that.

The reception of Matthew Sharpe’s newest book must gladden indie publishers across the land. The New York author has previously published a short-story collection and a novel with imprints of the Random House empire. But his biggest success has come with the tiny New York house Soft Skull Press, which released The Sleeping Father early this year. That novel has become a sleeper hit, propelled by strong reviews and word-of-mouth and an appearance on the Today Show’s TV book club.

The buzz is understandable. In his tale of a Connecticut family in crisis, Sharpe creates awkward, stress-jangled characters, sets them in an up-to-the-minute social context, and watches them collide, maintaining throughout a strict dedication to the reader’s enjoyment.

The crisis-beset family is the Schwartzes, as singular in their misery as anything Tolstoy could have imagined when he set out his famous aphorism about each unhappy family being unique. Mother Lila has fled to California after multiple infidelities; depression-addled father Bernard spends much of the novel in a coma after a prescription mixup; teenage son Chris is a high-school misfit with the gift of irritating everyone around him; and teenage daughter Cathy has renounced her family’s Judaism in a quest to Catholicize herself.

That the above paragraph is absurdly reductive is a compliment to the book. Too many novels rely on one easily summarized defining dilemma per character, but the foibles of the Schwartz family intersect and multiply in unpredictable ways, and their wobbly orbits pull in intriguing secondary characters. Like Lisa Danmeyer, an ambitious neurologist with some daddy issues who indulges Chris in a weird battle of wills. Or Frank Dial, Chris’s sole friend from high school; their relationship is complicated by race (“Frank was one of five blacks matriculated at the Bellwether High School for Upper Middle Class Caucasians”), vague homoerotic yearnings, and, eventually, Frank’s feelings for Cathy.

The Sleeping Father is primarily a black comedy, and the book is an unfailingly fun read. Sharpe’s narrative voice is snappy but not quite smarmy, and at its best and most confrontational, the dialogue hums electric. In structure, too, the book is eager to please: while the scenes and situations are mostly domestic in nature, Sharpe builds suspense thriller-style, with quick scene changes and 59 short chapters.

On the downside, the author apparently believes that he must drop a bravura apercu into every paragraph to keep readers impressed. A line like “Each of them gave [their grandfather] a kiss, which meant penetrating with their faces the almost tactile bolus of smoke that encased his head” is wonderful, but nearly every scene is rendered at the same pitch – which means that the tone becomes monochromatic and those glittering one-liners lose a bit of their patina. Also, Sharpe’s guiding hand can sometimes be too easily discerned behind the speech of the characters. Chris, Frank, and Cathy occasionally veer toward the kind of hyper-articulate teenspeak that invites mockery when we see it on TV shows.

Still, Sharpe’s willingness to pursue surface effects accounts for much of The Sleeping Father’s appeal. The book’s third-person narration jumps among various points of view but also encompasses an omniscient voice. That voice pokes fun at the characters: “Cathy made a gesture at her brother that was definitely not a sign of the cross.” It renders lyrical their raw feelings: “Walking so lightly in the world was a source of intense frustration for Chris.” It brazenly withholds information for dramatic effect: “Lisa Danmeyer … was speaking with someone she considered to be an ally at the hospital, a sympathetic ear.” In short, it does anything necessary to entertain for the moment.

That’s an untrendy approach, thought by many to be a relic of pre-modernism. But it can resonate with readers, as shown in the popularity of John Irving’s novels, or of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. And unlike many others, Sharpe somehow pulls it off without sacrificing the novel’s emotional punch. I chuckled at the many contrivances in the telling of The Sleeping Father’s story, but I found that its characters and their problems long outlived the turning of the last page.

Elsewhere, Part 2 / Elyse Friedman

2007-12-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

On Steven Beattie’s site last month, he and I did a joint “dialogue review” of Elyse Friedman’s short-story collection Long Story Short. Here it is. And here’s a profile of Friedman (well, one of those weird and slightly awkward review-profile combos) done for eye weekly back in 1999.

In person, Elyse Friedman offers little hint of the brash energy on view in Then Again, her debut novel. Sitting meekly in a Random House boardroom, the 36-year-old author seems quietly amused at the novelty of being an interview subject, and her responses are refreshingly free of stock sound bites. That unpretentious quality also informs Friedman’s fiction – but at a much higher pitch. Then Again is a spirited romp, full of outsized emotions and marked by a manic narrative voice.

The novel centres on a bizarre family reunion. Joel Schafer, a stinking-rich Hollywood crap merchant (think Joe Eszterhas with a Canadian birth certificate), summons his two sisters, Michelle and Marla, to their childhood home in the suburbs of Toronto. He’s restored the house to its exact 1970s state, and has even hired actors to stand in for the long-dead Schafer parents. In narrating the action, the lonely shut-in Michelle alternates the increasingly flaky present with the emotional detritus of her past, highlighted by a doomed teenage love affair that still haunts her, 20 years later.

Friedman’s work has already earned admiration from the Toronto author Paul Quarrington, who set her on the path to publication. After enrolling in a correspondence course at the Humber Writer’s Workshop, Friedman was paired with Quarrington (Whale Music, The Spirit Cabinet), who praised the short stories she turned in. Emboldened, she turned to the long form and sent her erstwhile mentor a draft of Then Again. “After the course was long over, he was kind enough to read the manuscript,” says Friedman. “And then, doubly kind, he gave it to his agent.” But the matchup was fortuitous for creative reasons as well as career ones: “I think we have a similar sensibility. I love the fact that he can write something very funny but also very poignant.”

Friedman walks that line pretty well herself in Then Again, which veers from cartoonish satire (Joel’s absurd pranks, Michelle’s dating misadventures) to grim drama (a mother lost to cancer, a father to suicide). The novel isn’t wholly free of first-fiction missteps – the prose sometimes lacks finesse, and the denouement seems contrived – but it’s readable and affecting throughout. And Joel’s mad wish to reclaim the lost suburbia of his youth gives Friedman plenty of thematic play. “One thing that interests me is selective memory,” she says. “I’ve talked to a lot of siblings who’ve grown up in the same house, and some remember it as being an utterly hellish experience, while others remember it warmly and fondly.”

The streets of Friedman’s own childhood – she was raised in North York – don’t fare well in her memories. “I didn’t enjoy the suburbs particularly. I felt like our family was just too weird to survive there. And when we moved downtown, and I saw the weirdos thriving on the street, I felt like we had come home.” Not surprisingly, in Then Again Friedman renders the downtown core much more affectionately – and compellingly – than she does the ’burbs. The novel may be a raspberry to suburbia, but it’s also an ode to Toronto life, right down to the fictional stand-ins for Book City and the By the Way Café.

While Friedman’s already started a second novel, she’s keeping her artistic options open. A graduate of a Canadian Film Centre screenwriting program, she’s written five feature-length scripts, mostly comedies. None have been produced, but Friedman’s currently negotiating to option one. She’s also sold a proposal for a TV sitcom, although no broadcaster is yet attached. “I think writing is writing,” she says. “I write poetry as well. I want to be able to move from format to format, and not get categorized or stuck into one role.” Different mediums offer their own advantages; Friedman cites film’s visual nature and narrative compression, but notes that fiction allows for time-shifting and more ambitious structure. While writing Then Again, she never slipped into screenwriter mode. “It’s all about the rhythm of the words when I’m writing fiction. I hear it, I don’t see it.”

She might have to start thinking in pictures now, though – she’s mulling over an offer to pen a screen adaptation of her own novel. “Adapting from a novel is a whole other matter,” says Friedman, swallowing with trepidation. “Obviously, I’d have to go back and revisit the story and relive it again, and try and divorce myself from the structure and the format that it’s in now and play with it. You really do have to radically alter fiction to put it on the screen.”

King of Infinite Space

2007-11-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

Review of King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts; review was in the Toronto Star in fall 2006.

King of Infinite Space is a book about geometry, so it’s fitting that it’s a little oddly shaped itself. Nominally a biography of a famous Toronto mathematician, the book is equally concerned with geometry’s larger role in math, science, and art. Ostensibly aimed at a general readership, it’s back-loaded with 150 pages of appendices and endnotes. And ultimately it’s structured as not a life story but a series of interlocking subjects and episodes – evoking nothing so much as one of the complex theoretical figures that come up so often in the book’s pages.

Siobhan Roberts, the author, is a freelance journalist, and the book grew from a profile she wrote for Toronto Life in 2003. The subject was Donald Coxeter, a well-known University of Toronto geometry professor who died that year at the age of 96. Coxeter was born in the U.K. and studied geometry at Cambridge University; in 1936 he immigrated to Toronto to accept a teaching post at U of T, and he remained there ever after, publishing books and papers, travelling to conferences, inspiring acolytes, and becoming a legend in the field.

The Coxeter that we glimpse in Roberts’ book is a mildly eccentric and intriguing figure, but his was not an especially dramatic life and this is far from an in-depth character study. Coxeter’s politics and social values are touched on a little, his relationships with his wife and two children somewhat less. Whatever personal problems or crises he may have had are all but ignored. (One comic high point is a throwaway list of the Coxeters’ grievances with successive maids in the 1930s and ’40s.) Despite its subtitle, King of Infinite Space is too academic, cautious, and respectful in tone to really function as a biography.

Which is fine, because it’s clear that Roberts would rather talk about Coxeter’s work anyway. She writes with enthusiasm about his intellectual and aesthetic interest in symmetry and shapes and in diagrams and models, in a time when much of the mathematical establishment was hostile to visual aids. And she discusses at length a couple of his major legacies: Coxeter diagrams, which are a kind of shorthand for describing complex shapes using points, lines, and numbers, and Coxeter groups, which are groups of symmetrical shapes generated by reflection.

At least, I think I have those descriptions right. Enthusiasm or no, Roberts’ book is rather heavy going for those without much geometry background (i.e. me, admittedly, but presumably many other general readers too). Her passion for the subject is obvious, but at times I wished she had a little more of, say, Malcolm Gladwell’s gift for breaking down complicated insider concepts into graspable and enlightening outsider lingo. Roberts herself seems to tacitly address this shortcoming by liberally stacking the book with rather mushy testimonials from Coxeter’s colleagues and admirers. “Coxeter’s perspective and ideas are in the air we breathe,” says one younger geometer, Ravi Vakil. “It’s not that his ideas are used to solve problems, it’s that the fundamental problems grow out of his ideas. He’s the soil, part of the substrate, part of the building in which we work, in which we live.” This and similar passages seem designed to reassure readers that Coxeter is a towering giant even if we can’t get our heads around exactly why.

Still, Roberts pursues some tangents that will intrigue even the uninitiated. In the 1950s, Coxeter formed a friendship with the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who was no math expert (“[Coxeter’s] hocus-pocus text is no use to me at all,” Escher complained) but managed to apply complex geometric principles to his drawings through sheer work and will. And although Coxeter was a pure mathematician, mainly concerned with investigation for its own sake, some of the most interesting parts of the book cover the way geometry intersects with other fields. The familiar problem of how best to stack spheroids, for example, came in handy for early efforts at electronic information transmittal. And the shapes of different proteins are relevant in designing drugs to combat disease.

Some important larger themes emerge, too: the declining position of geometry within the mathematical cosmos, and the declining interest in the visual within geometry. Bourbaki, a group of French mathematicians, was openly hostile to classical Euclidean geometry – the group was associated with the battle cry “death to triangles” – and mistrustful of Coxeter’s beloved visual teaching and learning, considering it inferior to pure logical reasoning. And Roberts notes that geometry’s struggle to hold the interest of the academy could have long-term consequences, as future scholars are forced to rediscover lost knowledge that their forebears already had. King of Infinite Space rarely hits heights of urgency and approachability, but at times it’s quietly invigorating as it looks at the joys and rewards of the pursuit of knowledge.

Elsewhere, Part 1: Q&Q Reviews

2007-11-24T13:24:00.001-08:00

Links to some book reviews that were written for Quill & Quire.

Liam Durcan’s short-story collection A Short Journey by Car (November 2004 issue)

Diane Schoemperlen’s Names of the Dead: An Elegy for the Victims of September 11 (August 2004)

Brian Busby’s Character Parts: Who’s Really Who in Canlit (October 2003)

John Armstrong’s punk rock memoir Guilty of Everything (January 2002)

Have Not Been the Same: The Canrock Renaissance 1985-1995 by Michael Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider (September 2001)

Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour (July 2001)

The Lion, the Fox & the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia by Carol Off (January 2001)

Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America by James Laxer (August 2000)

The Next Canada: In Search of Our Future Nation by Myrna Kostash (June 2000)

No One Belongs Here More Than You

2007-11-09T21:16:00.000-08:00

Miranda July’s debut short-story collection; review was in the Toronto Star in spring 2007. Might have been a bit soft on this one, as it hasn’t really stuck in my mind much since I read it.

The short-story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You is Miranda July’s first book, but it’s hardly her first step onto a public stage. July, who lives in Los Angeles, has already had a varied career as a performance artist, sometime musician, and most notably filmmaker and actress, having directed and starred in the indie hipster fave Me and You and Everyone We Know two years ago.

Happily, though, July’s writerly debut doesn’t read like the work of a dilettante. The book is uneven – what first collection of 16 stories wouldn’t be? – but often enough it shows both care and talent, and its best it will leave readers both laughing and brooding.

Though the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You range widely in situation, some generalities can be made, and they won’t surprise anyone who saw Me and You and Everyone We Know. Nearly all of the stories are told in the first person, and nearly all of those narrators are female. A typical July protagonist is a lonely, wide-eyed misfit, aching to connect with someone but unable to. She may have vague artistic ambitions and she may be intelligent, but she’s strangely diffident and seems to be off in some way, as if some essential circuit has shorted, hampering her ability to interpret and navigate the world.

The very first story sets the tone. Here a woman ponders her neighbours, a young couple named Vincent and Helena: “What if I borrowed her clothes and she said, That looks better on you, you should keep it. What if she called me in tears, and I had to come over and soothe her in the kitchen, and Vincent tried to come into the kitchen and we said, Stay out, this is girl talk! I saw something like that happen on TV; these two women were talking about some stolen underwear and a man came in and they said, Stay out, this is girl talk! One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.”

There are laughs in there both broad (the easier-on-the-neck non sequitur) and subtle (I find the colon in the last sentence inexplicably funny), but it still manages to sound like a weirdo talking, not like an an abstract comic exercise. Throughout the book, July tests that line with more oddball characters. Some are merely goofy, like the woman in “The Swim Team,” who gives old people “swimming lessons” on her kitchen floor, using bowls of warm water; others may actually be deranged, like the woman in “Making Love in 2003,” who believes she was violated as a teenager by a disembodied “black shape” and spends her adulthood trying to find its human configuration.

As that suggests, there’s a fair bit of bad sex in July’s stories, too. Not bad as in laughably described – on the contrary, even a few lines of throwaway dialogue in one story, “I Kiss a Door,” are startling in their economy and immediacy – but bad as in unsatisfying, messy, odd. A grown man nurses at his wife’s breasts like a child; a young woman masturbates to her sister’s tales of debauchery, recounted over the phone. These quirks are presented nonjudgmentally, but there’s no celebratory, diff’rent-strokes-for-diff’rent-folks air, either. Rather, the characters’ sex lives seem like another expression of their pathologies and miseries.

The downside to No One Belongs Here More Than You is that its tonal palette occasionally seems limited, tedious. Several of the stories are miniatures, only a few pages long, and the weaker ones seem more like sketches, telling us things we’ve already been told in a flat, compulsive monotone.

It’s probably no coincidence that two of the most affecting stories are also two of the longest in the book. In “Something That Needs Nothing,” two teenage girls move to the big city (Portland, Orgeon) and try to make a life together, but fall out; the narrator ends up working in a peepshow booth in back of a porn video store. “How to Tell Stories to Children” is about a bizarre family relationship – a couple is too absorbed in their own battles and affairs to care about their young daughter, so the narrator, a friend of the husband’s, becomes the girl’s de facto mother. Both of these stories take their time, allowing us to settle in with the characters. And they’re both also refreshing because their narrators are relatively clear-eyed; the stories get their effect less from the loopiness of the narrators own perceptions than from the complications of their situations.

Thieves Like Us

2007-11-09T21:13:00.000-08:00

Interview with Janice Kulyk Keefer in Saturday Night, early 2004. Her novel Thieves, about Katherine Mansfield, had just come out.

The act of writing fiction, mostly made up of pondering and chin-stroking, can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a dramatic one. So it’s no surprise that popular culture has fixated on other fields, like police forensics. Still, the writing life continues to hold an endless fascination for – well, writers.

Authors have always made up an unduly high proportion of fictional characters. But the current trend goes one further by drawing on real-life scribes. Michael Cunningham’s homage to Virginia Woolf, The Hours, was a blockbuster hit; this spring Irish novelist Colm Toibin will release The Master, a novel about Henry James. And Toronto writer Janice Kulyk Keefer has just given us Thieves (HarperFlamingo Canada), which centres on the life of New Zealand-born short-story writer Katherine Mansfield.

One knock against books like these is that they tend to over-rely for their effect on the reader’s own knowledge of, and feelings for, the writer in question. Against this charge, though, Keefer is fairly secure: it’s unlikely that most of her readers will be familiar with her subject. In her lifetime, Mansfield was a literary rival to Woolf, known for pointed domestic dramas and frank treatment of subjects like childbirth. Today, though, she’s a cult figure, lacking the iconic status of many of her contemporaries. Still, her life story is rich in material: she moved from crisis to crisis with various lovers and fought a long, losing battle with tuberculosis. (Mansfield died in 1923, at the age of 34.) “She was a classic bad girl in some ways,” says Keefer. “The thing that fascinated me was her incredible zest for life.”

That fascination began at a short-story conference in France in 1988 (the centenary of Mansfield’s birth), where Keefer saw a short film about the author’s life. From there, she devoured journals, letters, and biographies, gradually zeroing in on one minor figure: Garnett Trowell, a former lover of Mansfield’s who settled in Windsor, Ontario. Trowell, it turned out, had kept a cache of letters from the author, which were donated to the University of Windsor’s library after his death. Those letters inspired Keefer: Thieves alternates an account of Mansfield’s life with a contemporary storyline involving a failed academic’s search for lost letters.

While Thieves was gestating, though, Keefer was busy with other books. A professor at the University of Guelph, she’s published poetry, short fiction, novels, and literary criticism. Her most recent subject has been eastern European immigration to Canada, explored both in her Governor General’s Award-nominated novel The Green Library (1996) and in a biography of her family, Honey and Ashes (1998).

On the subject of Mansfield, Keefer is voluble and excitable, though also clear-eyed about her subject’s personal and literary flaws. “I tried to restore the full humanity of this person,” she says. And if comparisons to Cunningham’s The Hours are perhaps inevitable – Mansfield’s own publisher is only too happy to get them started – that has Keefer a little uneasy. “I think I’m doing something very, very different,” she says, adding that Cunningham’s attempts to capture Woolf’s prose style left her irritated. “Who can write Virginia Woolf except Virginia Woolf?”

The World Without Us

2007-11-09T21:07:00.000-08:00

Toronto Star, summer 2007. I saw this book in a catalogue or something in advance of pub and thought it looked intriguing. I knew the topic was “hot,” but I was caught by surprise when the book came out and was covered, like, everywhere.

Visions of planetwide disaster dance through our culture these days. Thanks to scientists, journalists, and Al Gore, we know more than ever about the ecological, economic, and political stresses we’re placing on the world. And novelists are fond of foretelling a complete breakdown of social order, whether through spectacular catastrophe or slow attrition, that leaves the remnants of humankind scrabbling viciously for whatever paltry resources are left.

Even in the most horrific of apocalypse scenarios, though – such as Cormac McCarthy’s Oprah-touted blockbuster The Road – the concern is what life’s like for the survivors. True speciesists, we apparently consider the prospect of the Earth enduring after complete human extinction to be either inconceivable or irrelevant.

Not Alan Weisman. With The World Without Us, the American science journalist has written an entire book about what a post-human Earth might look like. It’s an intriguing, attention-grabbing premise – albeit a strictly hypothetical one in this case. Weisman imagines the human race disappearing more or less overnight, leaving the rest of the global ecosystem in the very same shape it’s in now, unravaged by, say, the fallout of a nuclear war. Barring some supernatural rapture, that’s unlikely to ever happen: if we all go at once, it probably won’t be quietly or unobtrusively. And even a deadly new specieswide disease, for example, would still leave some survivors to carry on, as Weisman notes late in the book.

Still, the abstract premise makes an excellent springboard for an often fascinating look at our planet’s biology and ecology. And on its most basic level, The World Without Us appeals to sheer human curiosity about what kind of record we’ll leave of ourselves, and how long it’ll last. Individual homes will go quickly, as untended roofs collapse within decades and moisture attacks from within, and even skyscrapers and bridges will fall after a few centuries, returning cities to their original forest or jungle states. (We can forget all about those sci-fi imaginings of perfectly preserved underwater downtowns, a la Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence.)

Posterity will be better served by underground dwellings, like the cavernous multi-level cities discovered at Cappadocia, Turkey, which date back 10,000 years. Mount Rushmore should last for 72,000 years or so – likely long after anyone’s around who will be able to recognize its faces – and copper-based sculptures like the Statue of Liberty could hang on practically indefinitely, albeit toppled and lying underwater.

Weisman’s MO is to zero in on specifics. He looks closely at the fate of Manhattan, for example, but says very little in general about which metropoli might outlast others. And he offers no cohesive single-chapter overview of the world’s fate. Which means that readers should not come to The World Without Us expecting much of a synthesis or unifying narrative – the book feels like it’s all tangents and little centre. Weisman’s prose is often dry and he’s not exactly a master storyteller; the strengths of this book, rather, are the breadth of his research and his gift for presenting a huge array of information clearly and quickly.

Which, despite the above caveats, is enough. Those tangents are usually fascinating, whether they cover the engineering and design of the Panama Canal or speculations about the fall of the Mayan empire or descriptions of the long-gone giant animals that roamed the prehistoric Americas. And there’s something exhilarating about skipping from a Turkish resort town left eerily abandoned after a war to the gigantic industrial oil complex of the Houston area to Korea’s Demilitarized Zone.

And to be fair, there is one notable recurring motif in the book: our ugly chemical and nuclear legacy. Besides the 400-plus active reactors ready to spew radioactivity into the environment without maintenance, there are underground caches of nuclear waste that could make nasty surprises for unsuspecting future visitors. (At one such site near Denver, officials plan to leave warnings engraved in seven languages on 25-foot granite blocks.) And tiny airborne particles of plastic have already entered the food chain at many levels, which could affect the future evolution of other species in hard-to-predict ways. “What will survive of us is love,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin, but what will really survive of us, it turns out, are polymers.

It should be noted, though, that The World Without Us doesn’t read like a primarily environmentalist text. Weisman’s tone throughout is cool and dispassionate, that of a scientific observer rather than an activist, and when he does argue that we should take care of our planet, it’s in basic terms that are nigh impossible to dispute. Nor does he celebrate or advocate the end of our existence – though he does give some space to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which argues that the best thing for the Earth and for us would be human-wide sterility. Founder Les Knight gets a little dreamy as he suggests that our final generation would live in an idyllic paradise marked by less competition for resources. (Apparently he never saw Children of Men.)

The flipside to Weisman’s dispassion is that The World Without Us is a book of facts more than ideas; it’s rarely illumined by the philosophy or poetry that its premise would seem to invite. The closest it comes is a chapter that covers some of our poignant efforts to send a sort of cultural time capsule into outer space. The Voyager space probes contain gold-plated disks bearing images and sounds that represent human life, including musical selections ranging from Mozart to tribal rhythms to Louis Armstrong. Long after the very Earth has been swallowed by the sun, Voyager and its cargo – “the last remaining fragments of human aesthetic expression,” in Weisman’s words – should still be travelling the spaceways. And the broadcast waves we’ve been sending into space for the past hundred years or so will also keep on marching indefinitely; it’s not inconceivable, says Weisman, that some extraterrestrial intelligence will one day encounter the I Love Lucy TV show. “They may not understand Lucy, but they will hear us laugh.”

Coureurs de Bois

2007-11-09T20:59:00.000-08:00

Debut novel by Canadian author Bruce MacDonald. No relation to the Canadian filmmaker of the almost-same name, Bruce McDonald, though I don’t think I ever clarified that in the piece. (The Toronto Star wisely added a line to that effect when this appeared in spring 2007.)

A familiar Parkdale landmark figures prominently in Torontonian Bruce MacDonald’s debut novel. But the Gladstone Hotel in the pages of Coureurs de Bois isn’t the trendy, scrubbed-up nightspot that’s been hosting book launches and cocktail parties for the past two or three years. Rather, it’s the rough flophouse of an only slightly less recent past, home to barflys and hookers. MacDonald is telling a Parkdale story, but it’s Parkdale before the first tendrils of gentrification began spreading, or at least before anybody noticed them.

That’s reflected in the title, which reinforces the sense of a wilderness that hasn’t yet been tamed (but will be). The two pivots of Coureurs de Bois – modern-day equivalents of the French fur traders of yore who went renegade and allied themselves with the natives – are Cobb, a hulking native fresh out of prison (tax evasion), and Will, an academic prodigy fresh out of the University of Ottawa (economics). The two settle separately in Parkdale, they meet, and they fall into a business partnership, selling black-market cigarettes. Cobb provides the inventory and the street sense, while Will provides the business acumen, and soon enough the two have set up a proper corporation, dumping bucketfuls of cash into its coffers.

(A tiny digression here. However thematically apt it may be, the title probably does the book no favours. Its history-class associations are unlikely to compel the attention of young readers who by all rights should be the natural audience for a contemporary urban novel like this one.)

As the setting and central plot premise suggest, the novel has its share of grim, seriocomic realism – but only a share. MacDonald isn’t afraid to throw in broader touches, like the chance meetings that propel the various secondary characters’ destinies, and even a little straightfaced wackiness, as in Will and Cobb’s scheme to use their cash to buy land in Costa Rica, convinced that oxygen-generating greenery is the great cash crop of the future. At the same time, Coureurs de Bois also traffics in vague spiritual themes. Both Cobb and Will are propelled by visions involving a crow – Cobb’s came in a dream, Will’s during a cleansing fast – that they view as signposts to their purposes in life, even if the directions aren’t always clear. This sets up many ruminations about “the dream economy” and the symbolism of contracts and transactions.

Those ruminations are grounded in a gritty portrait of Parkdale – its variety stores, diners, bars – and an engaging cast of secondary characters. Persey, a suicidal medical student who works at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Centre, falls into a friendship with Will and has a consequential one-night stand with Cobb. Paddy Pape, Cobb’s gay parole officer, struggles with both cancer and his unrequited infatuation for Will. There are others, too: a mentally disturbed woman, a prostitute, a cop, a homeless man. All of them orbit each other, their paths occasionally – and increasingly – intersecting.

MacDonald shows skill in balancing his various characters, motifs, and tones. The novel moves at a quick, punchy pace, the story told in short chapters and scenes that alternate among storylines. At the same time, I sometimes wished MacDonald would go deeper into his themes and his characters. It’s debatable how much the vision-quest stuff really gels; often it seems more like a kind of garnish on the main action. And at certain crisis points, we could use more access to characters’ motivations: their actions seem staged, the emotions behind them ignored or taken for granted.

This is even true of Cobb, to a certain extent, though in general the native ex-con is still MacDonald’s most memorable creation. He’s manipulative and criminal-minded, but he also has a sense of responsibility, a respect for his role in the economy of life. In one delightfully hammy scene, he bumps into a businessman on the street, knocking him over, and then literally picks up the terrified man and brushes him off, apologizing profusely. “Accidents were omens to Cobb; and he behaved accordingly, seeking the goodwill of the victim, hoping to cure quickly any hard feelings that might come to a curse.” If the novel never quite coheres, there’s at least plenty of entertainment along the way.

A [ampersand] R

2007-11-09T20:54:00.000-08:00

From the Toronto Star, way back in September 2000. Review of Bill Flanagan’s novel about the rock & roll business, A&R.

“A&R,” explains the protagonist of Bill Flanagan’s new book, is a recording-industry term referring to “artists and repertoire,” a holdover from the days when companies matched songs and performers in an effort to churn out hits. These days most pop stars write their own stuff and aspire to artistic integrity, but the A&R tag has stuck – perhaps because the industry continues to view its talent as pawns to be moved willy-nilly on the march to the Top Ten. Flanagan, a longtime rock journalist and current VH1 exec, offers a breezy satire of that perennial campaign in his first novel.

His hero is Jim Cantone, a naive talent scout who’s just made vice-president at WorldWide Records, run by the aging maverick “Wild Bill” DeGaul. While Cantone struggles to remain aloof from the shadowy power struggles that define WorldWide’s corporate culture, the label’s recent signings prepare for their shots at the charts. The punk-pop outfit Jerusalem is Cantone’s pet project; Black Beauty, a seven-woman “cultural collective” of black lesbian folkies, seems destined for the delete bin; and Cokie Shea, a confident young country singer, is discovered after she slips her demo tape into an exec’s pocket at a bar.

Readers will doubtless look for signs of roman à clef, and there are some. (DeGaul’s backstory – he built his “Tropic Records” label into a success, then sold it to a mega-corporation – is a clear nod to Chris Blackwell and Island Records. And the circumstances of Shea’s discovery echo Mariah Carey’s.) But most of A&R’s characters seem modelled less on specific real-life rockers than broad, recognizable types: the temperamental soul diva, the has-been heavy metal star. Unfortunately, the non-musician characters are similarly stereotypical and sketchy. Cantone never seems to develop beyond bland affability, and secondary players, like his wife, barely register at all.

With its hidden agendas, shifting loyalties, and commerce-of-art backdrop, A&R calls to mind Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen’s fictional funhouse ride through high tech, high finance, and high-concept showbiz. But the book can’t match Andersen’s restless wit or exhilarating pace. In fact, Flanagan – who’s produced some insightful rock journalism – turns out to be a disappointingly artless novelist. His prose rarely rises above the level of serviceable, and his dialogue, uniformly stilted, groans under the burden of exposition. The plotting is haphazard, too. One of the few unpredictable characters, the bitter WorldWide staffer Zoey Pavlov, disappears from the narrative altogether just as her story arc’s getting interesting. And few readers will fail to foresee the book’s “surprise” plot twists.

A&R’s best moments come when Flanagan concentrates on the venalities of the business. As when a talentless arena-rocking oaf blithely steals a promising song from one of his sidemen. Or when Pavlov surveys her gathered underlings with perfectly pitched scorn: “This crew of nitcombs, fanboys, and wanna-bes included ambitious student directors of college radio stations, a couple of badly ironed music editors of alternative weeklies, and two or three self-improving secretaries from WorldWide field offices in secondary markets.” And although references to the Internet threat are few, they do lend the novel an elegaic feel. “A hundred years of keeping ninety-five percent of the money and all the rights! Who’d have believed it? How can we complain?” asks one character, waxing philosophical about the forthcoming death of the industry. A&R makes a convincing case that few should mourn its passing.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

2007-09-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

Review of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders (who, after In Persuasion Nation, I have now given up on for good). Toronto Star, 2006.

To say that it would be easy to parody George Saunders is no insult. It means only that he’s managed to developed a distinctive and recognizable writing style. After all, the American writers who’ve been lampooned the most over the years – with annual contests devoted to the stuff in each case – are Faulkner and Hemingway, which is good company indeed.

The danger, though, is that writers with idiosyncratic voices may start to sound like they’re parodying themselves. Flourishes become habits, and the fresh becomes familiar. Eventually, a highly distilled style that remains more or less unchanged over several books comes to have the same effect as no style at all, so acclimatized do readers become to the author’s tics.

George Saunders is approaching that point. He’s known for his two short-story collections, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, and slightly less known for his excellent children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. His new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, will seem familiar indeed to readers of his past work.

Partly this is because of the subject matter. Like all of Saunders’ work, Reign of Phil is a black comedy about regular folks struggling to get by in a world that’s vaguely surreal but is still burdened with all the punishing monotony and soul-deadening bureaucracy that marks our own. The main difference is that in the new book, the surreal qualities are more obvious and dramatic.

Reign of Phil is about two countries, Inner Horner and Outer Horner, the former being “so small only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six Inner Hornerites had to wait their turns to live in their country while standing very timidly in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.” While in Outer Horner, the Inner Hornerites are confined to a Short-Term Residency Zone that’s apparently only a few square feet in size.

Trouble starts when some kind of minor earthquake shrinks the borders of Inner Horner to the point where no one can stand within them, and the seven Inner Hornerites are forced to encroach on Outer Horner land. In response, the local Outer Hornerites “tax” them – stripping them of what little money they have, and after that their clothes – and threaten worse, eventually embarking on a mini-genocide. All of this under the direction of “Phil,” an Outer Hornerite of no particular accomplishment who takes the changed borders as a chance to warmonger his way to leadership.

This is all related in the typical Saunders style, which is marked by some very specific comic devices. There’s the abundance of official terms and labels that the characters have to deal with – like “Short-Term Residency Zone” – and which no one ever seems to shorten, even in casual conversation. There’s the repetition of deliberately clunky phrases like “octagonal shovel-like receptacle.” There are the folksy qualifiers, the use of “That is” to begin explanatory sentences and “sort of” in the descriptions of people or actions.

All of this can be funny for a while, of course. But at this point, I for one hope to someday read a George Saunders story without any capitalized corporate/political jargon, and one that isn’t set to exactly the same narrative pitch as all the others.

Still, as a political satire set in a fantastical otherworld, Reign of Phil does manage some broad but effective humour. All of the characters are imagined as sort of semi-humanoids, each with their own bizarre, sketchily described physiognomy. For example, Phil’s brain is precariously mounted on a rack, and whenever it falls off the rack and onto the ground, as it often does, he begins bellowing violently jingoistic platitudes “in a suddenly stentorian voice.” And the media, which shamelessly promotes Phil’s power-grab and sadism, is represented by “three handsome well-groomed squat little men with detachable megaphones growing out of their clavicles.”

Little details like that are funny in a superficial way. But on the downside, they also push the story, which as an allegory is already once removed from reality, further into the level of abstraction. It’s hard to completely visualize any of the characters – we can picture only discrete details of their bodies – or even to imagine what the land they live in is supposed to look like. Our bewilderment in this regard may be fun, but it’s a minor, second-rate kind of fun, one that distracts us from the deeper pleasure of considering how the events in Outer Horner mirror those in our own world.

Not that there are any clear answers to that last question (and nor should there be). Saunders’ overall point is clear enough – best summed up as “be nice to other people and don’t listen to warlords,” I guess – but readers will have their own interpretations of specific elements in his story. Such as the Greater Kellerites, a race of affable, giant coffee-drinkers who reluctantly save the day. Or the even more deus ex machina coda, which is best left for readers to discover on their own.

The book has its strong points, and Saunders isn’t completely relying on familiar tricks. Near the end, he very cleverly and funnily renders the garbled thoughts of Phil, who’s been without his brain for too long. Unfortunately, the good stuff here can’t dispel the feeling that this was an exercise more than a fully realized novella. Anyone who hasn’t read Saunders should – but they should start with any one of his three other books. Reign of Phil will likely be remembered as a footnote to his catalogue.

Heyday

2007-09-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

Review of Kurt Andersen’s novel Heyday; Toronto Star, spring 2007.

Kurt Andersen’s first novel, Turn of the Century, was all about zeitgeist. Set in Manhattan at the height of the first Internet boom, it had its characters juggling complicated lifestyles and eating in trendy restaurants while embroiled in schemes and ventures in the tech and entertainment fields. Andersen, a co-founder of Spy and former editor-in-chief of New York, was well poised to recreate that milieu for fictional purposes, and the book was a lot of fun, enlivened by an inside feel and a breezy pace.

Andersen’s second novel, Heyday, is all about research.

For Heyday is a prime specimen of the Historical Yarn. It’s set in 1848, when a young Englishman named Benjamin Knowles renounces his family business and sets off to find his fortune in the rough, protean new society of America. (Some recent misadventures in Paris have stirred Ben’s taste for adventure; although he doesn’t know it, he’s left a dead gendarme in his wake and there’s another one on his trail, looking for revenge.) In New York City, Ben falls in with a motley group of friends: part-time prostitute and aspiring actress Polly Lucking; her brother Duff, a traumatized vet of the Mexican War with a secret compulsion for arson; and Timothy Skaggs, a dissolute but kindhearted journalist who’s the old man of the group at 35.

Ben and Polly fall in love, they quarrel, and she leaves New York in search of a rural Utopian community where she might make a new home. Soon afterward, Ben and Duff and Timothy set out to catch up with Polly, tracking her west. Eventually all of them make their way to California, looking to get in on the Gold Rush action. And all the while, that murderous Frenchman is still chasing Ben.

In telling this tale, Andersen bows to several of the historical yarn’s obligatory conventions:

1. Scenery, scenery, scenery. From cobble-stoned Paris streets in the middle of a riot to New York’s endless parties to San Francisco rising up from the mad scrabble of the Gold Rush, Heyday is stuffed with description and information. This extends well beyond judicious scene-setting or well-chosen colourful details, to the point that the narrative becomes one long exhausting, droning guided tour – a big reason for this book’s inflated page count.

2. Famous people everywhere. Just as believers in reincarnation tend to insist that they lived their own past lives in precincts of power and celebrity and intrigue, characters in historical yarns must inevitably encounter some of the most storied figures of the age. And so the exploits of Andersen’s happy wanderers feature a carousel of cameos: Charles Darwin and Friederich Engels and de Tocqueville and Walt Whitman and songwriter Stephen Foster and detective Allan Pinkerton. For scale purposes, imagine how absurd it would look if every second contemporary novel had its characters bumping into Al Gore and Britney Spears.

3. Protagonists who are more enlightened than their times. The U.S. in 1848 is a land of ruthless Manifest Destiny, and even the northern states are unduly accommodating toward their slaveholding southern neighbours. But don’t worry. Under the enveloping wisdom of Skaggs (Ben is “pleased to have an American friend to enlighten him about America’s flaws and impurities”), our heroes understand the same things that we readers do: that war and imperialism are bad and that people are the same under the skin and that human rights are inviolable.

4. Showy but superficial nods toward contemporary relevance. About the States’ recent military history, Skaggs reflects that “patriotic hoopla annoyed him, as did the spurious argument that Polk was obliged to attack Mexico before Mexico turned its weapons against the United States.”

To complain about all these things feels like a sour-hearted attempt to spoil the fun; this is simply a yarn, after all. But there’s surprisingly little fun to be had in Heyday. Mostly the novel just feels bloated and clunky. Andersen’s prose moves with a mere serviceable reliability rather than reverberating with the warp and wobble of fiction. And throughout the narrative he’s a hovering, intrusive presence – reminding us of our history (even when the characters don’t understand what’s going on themselves), pointing out connections we can make on our own, explaining motives that are obvious. If a character teases, he must be described as “teasing.” If he nods emphatically, he must “nod emphatically in agreement.”

Nor is there much to catch hold of in the characters. The villain – that vengeful gendarme – is a real moustache-twirler, while Ben and his American friends quickly fall into a bland fellowship that might as well be something out of the Bobbsey Twins for all its nuance and believability. To be fair, Andersen does pretend to complicate these relationships with little episodes of unhappiness or minor disagreements, but these are the quick skips of a tiny, smooth stone along a placid surface.

The only potentially interesting character, in fact, is Duff, who secretly deserted the American army and took up arms alongside the Mexicans, and who’s now wracked by pyromania, self-righteous murderous impulses, and deepening religious fervour. But because his torment is described in the same flat tones and breezy pacing as the rest of the story, it lacks much power or depth and only comes off as out of place and jarring. Heyday isn’t a novel to be taken seriously – few historical yarns are – but nor is it as entertaining as it should be.

The Namesake

2007-09-10T18:44:00.001-07:00

Review of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. Toronto Star, fall 2003.

Jhumpa Lahiri made her name four years ago with her first book, the superb short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Impressive for its crisp prose and close attention to physical and emotional detail, Lahiri’s work also showed a strong grasp of the narrative economy of the short-story form. But these days it’s assumed that young writers will “graduate” to novel-writing as quickly as possible, and she’s done so with her second book, The Namesake.

While the novel shares no characters or plotlines with the nine stories in Lahiri’s debut, it flows so naturally from its predecessor that it still has the feel of a sequel. Interpreter of Maladies is full of Indian immigrants and their Westernized children, settled in the northeastern U.S. and struggling with cultural confusion as well as faltering relationships. The closing story, “The Third and Final Continent,” has a tone of resolution: the narrator’s acclimation to America, and the wary first days of his arranged marriage, give way to a warm but believable declaration of love for both his adopted country and his wife. Still, The Namesake shows that Lahiri isn’t done with the dilemmas explored in the collection.

The novel centres on Gogol Ganguli, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968 to recently arrived Indian immigrants. His father, Ashoke, is a young university professor; his mother, Ashima, dotes on memories of Calcutta while regarding her new home with suspicion. Gogol grows up surrounded both by American white-bread culture and by his parents’ ever-expanding network of Bengali-American friends. His unusual name springs from family history – Ashoke, a devotee of Russian literature, credits his absorption in Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” with saving his life during a train wreck – but to Gogol it only represents one more obstacle in his quest for self-assimilation.

The story follows the first 30-odd years of Gogol’s more-or-less-ordinary life. He discovers the Beatles, graduates from high school, changes his name to the less conspicuous Nikhil, becomes an architect, falls in and out of love, and copes with a death in the family. Each chapter tends to skip a few years ahead of the last, but that doesn’t mean the story moves from one dramatic pivot to another. In fact, not much actually happens; for a book about identity crisis, the conflict here is pretty low-key. Gogol’s parents aren’t particularly oppressive, the travails of his struggle to fit in not especially stinging. After all, the central drama of the first 100 pages is a teenager not liking his name – hardly stop-the-presses stuff.

Yet The Namesake is surprisingly readable, propelled by Lahiri’s expert description. As in her short stories, she snares the reader with a patient layering of detail – from the dirty lining in a kitchen cupboard to the layout of an apartment complex – that never slips into mere information. At her best, she combines that detail with sharp observation of character, making for bold insights, subtly presented. Probably the book’s strongest section recounts Gogol’s affair with a pampered Manhattanite WASP who lives with her rich parents – fully Americanized at last, he’s dating a lifestyle as much as a person. An episode near the end of the book also convincingly captures the pain and confusion of a collapsing marriage. And although these bits stand out, the entire novel is extremely well-written.

Perhaps, in fact, a little too well-written. Throughout the book Lahiri relies on an excessively formal tone, evident in small word choices that start to add up: “contain” rather than hold, “obtain” rather than get, “converse” rather than talk. (When the conversing is especially good, one character even “expresses interest.”) That the novel includes a textbook-ready phrase like “a practice of Bengali nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names” is telling; that the wording hardly seems out of place is even more so.

It’s not that Lahiri’s writing is either clunky or showy. On the contrary, her prose carries undeniable grace, and she’s confident enough to avoid the kind of capital-W Writing with which so many young authors overinflate their work. But the ever-careful language tends to hold us at a reserve, limiting our emotional investment. As the critic James Wood has complained of John Updike, we are not immersed in the characters’ experiences and feelings – rather, we get an author’s very elegant essay about those experiences and feelings. (The book’s summary-style structure, in which many pages pass with little to no dialogue, doesn’t help in this regard either.) At its worst, the disconnect is comical: “He is shocked and discomfited by the news.” Not shocked and discomfited!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a dry, detached style. But it’s unsuited to a novel that’s meant to showcase a central character’s inner journey. Finishing The Namesake, no reader could fail to admire Lahiri’s skill in exploring her themes, in balancing various motifs, in closing the story with a tidy nod to Gogol’s past and his family history. But all that admiration won’t erase the nagging wish that we’d gotten to know Gogol a little better, come to care for him a little more.

The Fortress of Solitude

2007-09-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

Review of Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude. Was in the Toronto Star, fall 2003. The generalization in the first para makes me wince on rereading, but what are you gonna do?

The author Louis Begley, who took to fiction late in life, has said he waited so long because as a young man he felt he had no milieu to document. As far as excuses for creative inactivity go, that’s a pretty good one. Surely the most compelling novelists are the ones who draw on a strong sense of their corner of the world, whether Faulkner’s secession-haunted south or Richler’s hardscrabble Montreal. A writer without that sense is, at the very least, starting from a disadvantage.

Jonathan Lethem has lived in Berkeley and in Toronto, but his real corner of the world is Brooklyn, New York. You’d never know it, though, from his first several novels, which include Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape. Those were gene-spliced genre pieces that mixed science fiction with the tropes of the western, the detective yarn, the campus comedy. Fun stuff, and often intriguing, but when Lethem turned his fiction to his home streets for the first time, with Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, it felt like a breakthrough.

Like Lethem’s other novels, Motherless Brooklyn leaned toward the high-concept: it was narrated by a Tourettic would-be detective looking to avenge the murder of his thug boss. Funny and readable, the book was distinguished by an affectionate but unsentimental portrait of the titular borough and, not coincidentally, by fuller and warmer characterization than that of its predecessors. Lethem builds on that with The Fortress of Solitude. His love of quirk, his devotion to premise, are still in place: this may be the world’s first rock-and-roll superhero urban-jungle coming-of-age prison drama. But it’s also the author’s most expansive and emotionally ambitious novel yet.

It’s the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid who grows up in a black-and-Hispanic area of Brooklyn in the 1970s. Ignored or patronized by his emotionally removed parents, Dylan settles into an uneasy relationship with his ’hood; at best the other kids tolerate him, and at worst they bully and rob him. Eventually an ally arrives in Mingus Rude, the black son of a burned-out soul singer who moves onto the block. Mingus navigates his new world effortlessly, and becomes Dylan’s confidante and sometime protector. But as they grow older, their friendship is strained by Dylan’s growing alienation from his surroundings, his gradual awareness of the opportunities his skin colour affords him.

The first half of this long novel covers Dylan’s childhood and adolescence, and the jittery third-person narration manages the nice trick of relating a child’s discoveries in an adult’s voice and vocabulary. Lethem’s descriptions tend to be showy and self-conscious – an abandoned house “wore cinderblock bandages over the windows and doorway like a mummy with blanked eyes and stilled howling mouth” – but usually end up seeming more apt than contrived. And while the perspective is mainly Dylan’s, it occasionally shifts to others, deepening our sense of the community. Like Isabel Vendle, a rich white woman bent on gentrifying the neighbourhood. Or Barrett Rude Jr., Mingus’s father – a sort of amalgam of soul greats, modelled most obviously on Marvin Gaye but with a personality of his own.

In its second half, the book fast-forwards to Dylan’s thirties and takes on a first-person narration. The tone becomes more conversational and accessible, but the switch also deliberately tests our sympathies. The adult Dylan – living in California, scraping by as a music journalist but dreaming of selling a movie pitch – turns out to be selfish and standoffish, less than likable. It’s a risky but laudable move: for those readers who need reminding that we need not admire someone to appreciate their internal struggles, Lethem offers it here.

All of this makes The Fortress of Solitude sound like a 500-page character study, but it has other charms, too. One is the tension between the naturalistic setting and an overlay of supernatural whimsy. At one point, Dylan discovers a mysterious ring that grants its wearer the power of flight, and he and Mingus, their fantasies fed by comic books, become a sort of superhero team, breaking up the odd mugging and small-time drug deal. But the device doesn’t overwhelm the book: superpowers turn out to be not all that life-changing, and the ring drops in and out of the story.

More important to the novel is Lethem’s love of lore, social and cultural. The narrative is crammed with information: on Marvel comic books, kids’ street games, science fiction book-jacket illustration, graffiti technique, avant-garde art, and above all pop music. (The two main characters are, of course, named for musical icons, one white and one black.) But while the Brit James Wood has led a critical campaign against this kind of thing – having coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe it – Lethem convincingly shows that such accoutrements can delineate character, not just obscure it.

This is most apparent in the hinge of the book, the bridge between the first and second sections. It’s an essay composed by Dylan for inclusion with the liner notes to a Barrett Rude Jr. compilation CD, and the piece perfectly nails the smug, pseudo-intellectual condescension of rock criticism at its worst, made creepy by Dylan’s (unacknowledged) relationship to his subject. “It’s odd to consider that Marvin Gaye, Philippe Wynne and Barrett Rude Jr. were all, by choice or upbringing, weird black jews,” goes one typical flourish of rhetorical excess. Without ever addressing Dylan’s life directly, the liner note makes its points – about his complicated views on race, his relationship to art and his childhood and Mingus – so well that the second half of the book seems to merely amplify them.

Still, the narrative holds attention throughout, and Dylan’s climactic reunion with Mingus, set against an attempted prison break, is adequate payoff. Here and throughout the novel, Lethem’s treatment of racial dynamics is earnest but nuanced. And while Lethem has already drawn not-quite-fair charges of political correctness from some reviewers, The Fortress of Solitude still shows him to be bolder than many young novelists.

Men and Cartoons

2007-09-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

Review of Jonathan Lethem’s short-story collection Men and Cartoons. Was in the Toronto Star.

There’s an old Kids in the Hall sketch called “Premise Beach.” While two of the Kids shimmy away to surf music on a beach, they take turns coming up with some outlandish conceit: a politician with a slab of meat for a hand, say, or people with gift-wrapped packages for heads. Each what-if leads into its own skit, but that skit turns out to be only seconds long – the actual execution is clearly beside the point.

The short stories of Jonathan Lethem take place on Premise Beach.

Lethem is better known as a novelist; in recent years he’s produced his most giddily entertaining book (Motherless Brooklyn) and his most emotionally ambitious and affecting one (The Fortress of Solitude). Men and Cartoons, his new story collection, furthers some of his recent motifs, particularly comic-book superheros and damaged childhood friendships. But mostly it seems a throwback to his previous collection, 1996’s The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. In his short fiction both then and now, Lethem tries out lots of quirky ideas, many of them fantastical in nature. But he tends to develop those ideas so economically that the resulting narratives feel starved and slight.

There are exceptions. In Lethem’s best pieces, he manages to play with his high-concept starting points in intriguing ways and invest them with emotional heft. A highlight of the earlier book was “Vanilla Dunk,” about a futuristic basketball league in which the players wear high-tech suits that allow them to download the skills of past greats. Lethem has lots of fun working out the logistical details of that premise, but he also crafts a gripping story about an obnoxious young white star and his brooding black teammate, encompassing themes of loyalty, integrity, and race.

In Men and Cartoons, the class of the collection is “Super Goat Man.” The narrator, Everett, is a striving Brooklyn-raised intellectual (not unlike the hero of The Fortress of Solitude, or Lethem himself) who repeatedly encounters the title character, a retired superhero. In the 1970s, Super Goat Man moves into Everett’s neighbourhood and befriends his parents; years later, he ends up teaching at the same New Hampshire liberal arts college that Everett attends. It’s to Lethem’s credit that the story’s central novelty, the idea of a humanoid goat moving through an otherwise-realistic milieu, is quickly superseded by Everett’s complicated feelings toward his semi-mentor. Those feelings are a little overexplicated in the end, but “Super Goat Man” remains a memorable portrait.

Most stories in Men and Cartoons, though, are draped on thin conceits and add little to them. In one, a magical police spray is used to identify missing items after a burglary; when the police leave the spray behind, it turns out to also reveal ghostly images of a couple’s past lovers. Another piece summarizes a man’s years-long semi-obsession with a woman he meets at a house party, culminating in an awkward dinner.

Lethem’s prose throughout is capable but perfunctory. In any given scene, there’s little in the way of sensory detail or startling character notes – just the cold outlines of the tracks of the plot leading forward. The people in these stories tend to be limned only by the vaguest of dissatisfactions; they’re clearly afterthoughts to the situations into which Lethem thrusts them.

Still, much of Men and Cartoons is at least superficially entertaining – but when even Lethem’s inventiveness fails him, the result is sheer tedium. “The Glasses” reads like a comedy sketch that wouldn’t survive the first table read. And the dystopia “Access Fantasy” relies on such already-exhausted sci-fi tropes as advertising run amuck.

If Lethem’s made a recent breakthrough in his novels, he’s still struggling to bring a new resonance to his work in the short-story form. One strangely promising development may be “The National Anthem,” the closing piece in Men and Cartoons. Written as a letter from one old friend to another, it’s unwieldy and exposition-heavy. But it’s one of the few pieces here that feels like it was born from some churning emotional impulse, not just from idle speculation.

After the Fall

2007-07-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

One of the fruits of my very brief (like, two-issue) stint as the books columnist for Chatelaine. This was from September 2006. The folks there were nice and the coin was good, but I wasn’t too sad to see the gig go – I found it logistically stressful, and the short word counts (usually much shorter than this particular piece) were a little bit cramping.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the horrors of that day and its aftermath are turning up in popular culture with more frequency, and with fewer hand-wringing cries of “too soon.” Hollywood turned to the subject only recently, but fiction has been leading the way – there’ve been earnest novels about terrorism (Neil Bissoondath’s The Unyielding Clamour of the Night), about citizen anxiety (Ian McEwan’s Saturday), and even about the families of 9/11 victims (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).

The key word, though, is “earnest.” And that raises a question: Is the world ready for a novel that uses the 9/11 attacks as a backdrop for black comedy?

Ken Kalfus decided to find out. The American cult writer is known best for a couple of books set in Russia, but for his new novel he’s found inspiration closer to home. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins) is the story of Joyce and Marshall Harriman, a thirtysomething New York City couple in the middle of a bitter divorce fight. While the lawyers haggle over the terms, Joyce and Marshall keep sharing their apartment, divvying up the care of their two small children while shooting each other silent, seething bolts of hatred.

That would be grim enough – or funny enough – but there’s more. The novel opens on September 11, 2001, with both Joyce and Marshall narrowly escaping death: he flees the burning World Trade Center, while she misses a business-trip flight on what turns out to be one of the hijacked planes. For each of them, the day’s horror is mingled with a brief flash of ecstasy over the other’s presumed demise.

That pretty much sets the tone. As Joyce and Marshall inch closer to finalizing their divorce and parting ways, their vanities and jabs of petty malice are played out in a world of anthrax scares and plans for war. The couple’s antics are funny if excruciating, from Joyce’s hapless attempts to flirt with an FBI agent to Marshall’s vindictive schemes to disrupt his sister-in-law’s wedding. All of it is lively enough – and Kalfus gets us into the characters’ heads enough – that the proceedings never seem pointlessly mean-spirited, which they easily could.

You can’t get too comfortable with this book, though. You might think Kalfus is simply playing the twin stresses of a marriage and a country off of each other, using each as a metaphor for the other. But then you start to notice that the metaphors are getting more intrusive and jarring, the events more surreal, the geopolitical backdrop more and more divergent from reality as we know it. What starts off as a straightforward if tart black comedy slowly turns into something disturbing and dreamlike, and like so much good fiction, Kalfus’s novel is a delightful but unnerving experience.

Related reading

Ken Kalfus isn’t the only fiction writer to pair domestic stress with international security issues lately. For example, the title story of Deborah Eisenberg’s most recent collection, Twilight of the Superheroes (Farrar Straus & Giroux), is a raw whimper of post-9/11 despair and fear, focusing on a group of jittery Manhattan twentysomethings trying to go on with their lives.

Sharper and more acerbic is Carolyn See’s novel There Will Never Be Another You (Random House), set in near-future L.A. A subplot about impending biological attack provides the book’s suspense and timely frisson, but it’s the everyday desperation of the two main characters – a hapless doctor and his bitter, widowed mother – that will stay with you. Especially recommended for Joan Didion fans.

John Updike gets points for audacity with his latest novel, Terrorist (Knopf), whose main character, Ahmad, is an 18-year-old Muslim living in northern New Jersey. Ignoring those who reach out to him, including his high-school guidance counsellor, Ahmad slowly becomes entangled in a bombing plot. Updike’s descriptive powers are as effortless as ever here, but he strains for social relevance, and the dialogue is heavy with political and philosophical speechifying. Not his best work.

Black Hole

2007-07-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

Review of Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole, from the Toronto Star, fall 2005. Burns was at the IFOA here in Toronto that year, and my book club did Black Hole that month. I liked the book, but boy oh boy, did they hate it; it broke down a bit along gender lines, as I recall.

The North American teenager has been a boon to horror writers, right up there with Jack the Ripper and the atom bomb.

Above all else, the teen years are years of anxiety – about identity, about status in the weird demi-monde that is high school, and about future roles in the larger community (“the real world,” as the constant reminder goes). Teenagers also tend to obsess over their emotional states and to magnify the importance of their personal relationships – which represent, after all, one of the only real staging grounds in which they can assert themselves.

Oh, and in many cases their own bodies are still mutating on them.

Small wonder, then, that Stephen King’s very first novel, Carrie, was set in high school. Or that one of the most acclaimed TV shows of the past decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, brilliantly presented deformed monsters and otherworldly demons as metaphors for more prosaic teenage terrors.

Even as Buffy was spellbinding TV critics, Charles Burns was producing Black Hole, a long graphic novel that also mixes horror tropes with teen romance ones. Over the past 10 years, the Philadelphia-based writer-artist has serialized Black Hole in a 12-issue series of comic books; now, the Random House imprint Pantheon has collected the complete story in a beautifully packaged hardcover book.

It’s hard to imagine taking in Black Hole as its original readers did, at a rate of only a chapter or two per year. Although the story’s made up of brief vignettes, their power is cumulative rather than discrete. And the book’s greatest strength – its eerie, nightmarish mood – is best appreciated with sustained reading over a sitting or two.

Black Hole is set in the 1970s in a Pacific Northwest town, where a sexually transmitted disease referred to only as “the bug” is spreading among the local teen population. The bug causes physical deformities, but afflicts each victim in a different way, from the subtle (one girl grows a tail) to the dramatic (one boy’s face is transformed into an inhuman mass of tentacles). Some are able to mask their mutations and pass for normal at high school classes and bush parties. Those who can’t are ostracized, reduced to living in a makeshift campground in the woods outside of town.

The metaphorical power of this premise is obvious – plague terrors, body terrors – but as the story wears on, the nature and meaning of the bug remains undeveloped. Adults are almost entirely absent in Black Hole, and we learn nothing about the larger community’s reaction to the disease. There is no sense of anyone questioning or fighting it, only a matter-of-fact resignation. This flat treatment both encourages and discourages thematic resonance: on the one hand, readers are left free to superimpose just about any of their own fears or preoccupations onto the proceedings, but on the other, the deformities caused by the bug are so singular – rendered almost lovingly in Burns’s black-and-white inks – that they resist any comforting abstractions, insisting on their own reality.

That’s not the only tension that vibrates through the narrative: there’s also a sense of some kind of creepy collective unconscious bubbling and boiling beneath the everyday teen angst of the characters’ waking lives. The story comes together around a sort of love triangle: an amiable doofus named Keith adores an aloof girl named Chris, who in turn adores an amiable doofus named Rob. As Black Hole opens, Rob is already infected; he’s grown a second mouth in the middle of his neck, one that has a habit of moaning his secrets as he sleeps. Early in the story, he infects Chris, whose entire skin begins moulting and shedding. She retreats to the woods, while Keith finds his own way to the community of outcasts there. Soon secondary characters are drawn into the orbit of the main trio, and various alliances and desires gradually push the plot toward bursts of horrific violence.

But just as important to the narrative are the many dream sequences, filled with images of decay and degradation. Dream descriptions often seem superfluous in films and novels, but in Black Hole they feel integral – mainly because of Burns’s expertise as a graphic storyteller. A skilled draftsman, he works in black-and-white with no shading or tones, employing a sharp, clean line and liberal use of solid black. The resulting images are surefooted and readable (or whatever the graphic-novel equivalent of “readable” might be), but can also shift into dense, hallucinatory dreamscapes smoothly and without warning.

Most impressive is the way Burns manipulates the reader’s perceptions and emotions at an almost subsonscious level, moving us back and forth in time and offering grim foreshadowings – all with the use of visual cues (a gun, a mutilated doll) that orient and disorient us in the same way language does in all-text books. The dialogue and narration in Black Hole is straightforward, even mundane; it’s the imagery and the pacing that creates a powerful mood of dread and melancholy.

Street Life

2007-07-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

Mini-profile of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall; was in Saturday Night in, I think, the April 2004 ish.

It’s a common journalistic exercise: a reporter tries out life on the street for a few days, then returns to middle-class comfort to pronounce on What It’s Like to Be Homeless. But don’t put Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall in that category, even though his first book chronicles his own stint in a notorious urban shantytown.

For one thing, Bishop-Stall stayed put in Toronto’s Tent City for nearly a year, relying only on whatever resources he could scrounge. And for another, Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown (Random House Canada) is refreshingly free of political or sociological theorizing. “I wanted to write an adventure story,” says Bishop-Stall, and so the book’s focus is squarely on his daily struggles – and those of his volatile new neighbours.

Located on a patch of unused lakeside land, Tent City was home to dozens of Toronto’s homeless, who slept under canvas, slapped together homemade shacks, or lived in donated “prefabs.” Bishop-Stall joined them in late 2001 and remained until the following September, when police evicted all squatters and closed Tent City for good. For Bishop-Stall, surviving those 10 months meant building a livable shack on his own, earning food-and-booze money, and mastering the obscure social codes of his new world. (“Goof,” he learned, was the worst insult imaginable.)

The 29-year-old journalist cultivated his sense of adventure early on. Raised in Vancouver, he left home at the age of 17 to hitchhike to Costa Rica, and since then has lived at various times in Mexico, Italy and Spain, using Montreal as his on-again, off-again home base. In the fall of 2001, crisis hit as a book project and a relationship both collapsed, so Bishop-Stall decided to live in Tent City for a year and produce a book about it. “Things had kind of blown up for me in general,” he says. “I’d lost my place and my girl and my dog – living in a tent didn’t sound so bad.”

Not so bad if you don’t mind being at the mercy of rats, rainstorms and cold, not to mention everyday aggression stoked by widespread alcohol and drug abuse. “There was a particular complexity to the violence,” says Bishop-Stall. “You win a fight and you’re gonna get stabbed that night. There’s no real way to win until you have friends.” Those friends and their stories give the book much of its power. Jackie, an early ally, regularly disappears into crack binges and prostitution; another, Eddie, dreams of going straight and raising his newborn son, but instead ends up in thrall to Tent City’s dealers.

To gain the trust of those around him, Bishop-Stall was careful not to fall back on outside resources. “It’s impossible to get the story of people on the street unless you spend enough time there that you become part of it,” he maintains. He arrived in Toronto with only a small amount of money, which he quickly spent on supplies, and when he signed a book deal midway through his Tent City year, he had the advance deposited in a trust that he couldn’t access until his stay was over. He did take some precautions, though: once a month, he would meet up with his agent to turn over the notebooks he’d been filling.

Those notes form the basis of Down to This, which is presented in diary format. The day-by-day reportage does make for a long and repetitive book: at times the narrative seems an endless parade of incoherent arguments and senseless fistfights. But the form also creates a cumulative portrait of the punishing lifestyle, and captures a sense of growing dread as Tent City’s crack trade grows in power.

Post-eviction, Bishop-Stall lives in Toronto, working as a freelance journalist and working up other book ideas. He’s checked in with his old neighbours at two reunions, one six months after Tent City closed and another on the first anniversary. But he’s also suffering, he admits, from both survivor guilt and culture shock: “The hardest thing to do is relax, not be on the edge.”

Then We Came to the End

2007-07-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

Review of a debut novel by Joshua Ferris; Toronto Star, early 2007.

Joshua Ferris’s debut is billed as a comic novel about office life, and it is, sort of.

But don’t get the wrong idea. The Brooklyn-based writer’s book doesn’t make reaching jabs at the absurdity of corporate America. It isn’t cluttered with satirical acronyms and company jargon à la George Saunders or David Foster Wallace. It doesn’t try to impress upon us how numbing and dehumanizing the capitalist superstructure is. (If anything, its characters are all too human.)

In fact, what Then We Came to the End has to say about office life is so straightforward and modest that it hardly needs to be said: Work is a force that gives us meaning, except when it doesn’t.

Which is just fine. Because the real insight that drives this novel is of a different, more behind-the-scenes nature: Since a workplace brings together many people who wouldn’t necessarily choose to associate with one another, it’s a prime window onto human nature under minor stress, and is full of possibility for drama and comedy. That this actually seems like a fresh idea says more about the failings of contemporary fiction than it does about the wisdom of Ferris; for example, the makers of the American sitcom The Office – surely one of the best things on TV right now – have already figured out the same thing. But it’s a welcome starting point nonetheless.

The workers in Then We Came to the End work at a large Chicago ad agency in the year 2001. They have fond memories of the recent boom – a smorgasbord of comradely late-night work sessions and fat bonuses – but now business has dried up and management has begun to lay people off. So the employees who are left pretend to look busy: they surf the Internet; they write bad screenplays; they photocopy entire novels and read them at their desks.

And they gossip. Mostly they gossip. About Tom Mota, who’s been issuing threatening mass-email proclamations ever since being laid off. About Carl Garbedian’s nervous breakdown. About Chris Yop, who after his own layoff still skulks around the office, trying to pitch ideas. About Amber Ludwig, who’s pregnant with Larry Novotny’s baby and hasn’t decided whether to have an abortion (Larry is married). About Janine Gorjanc, whose daughter has been murdered. And especially about the boss, Lynn Mason, who may or may not have breast cancer and who may or may not have backed out of a mastectomy at the last minute.

All that gossip is relayed in first-person plural narration, evoking a kind of group consciousness. (Jeffrey Eugenides used the same technique to strong effect in The Virgin Suicides.) The novel’s opening lines set the tone: “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. This happened all too infrequently.”

It’s tempting to read that stylistic choice as a comment on the submerging of identity in a corporate setting, but Ferris seems to be going for something fresher than that. What’s most striking is the way the mass viewpoint fails to transcend the individual characters’ neuroses and blind spots. If anything, the group narrator’s understanding of the various crises that beset employees seems even more faulty, gap-riddled, and confused than any singular narrator’s would be. The herd’s wisdom adds up to something less than the sum of the parts.

Which is no doubt the point: Then We Came to the End emerges as a book about the frustrations of partial information, frustrations that are only exacerbated in a large and complicated social milieu. At its best, the novel raises this theme to an almost existential pitch. A simple line like “We hated not knowing something” refers to petty office squabbles and personal catastrophes, but also evokes a continuum of not knowing that points all the way to big meaning-of-life questions – which the characters pointedly ignore. Not knowing is the human condition.

Happily, though, the narrative is also grounded in specific detail and texture, and built on overlapping, small-scale anecdotes. That includes some entertaining descriptions of the business at hand; Ferris worked at an ad firm himself, and the campaigns he describes bear the mottled hues of verisimilitude. Some of the office hijinks are low comedy (a sushi roll left to rot behind a bookshelf), and some of them creak a bit (there’s a long episode about the battle to scavenge the more-comfortable desk chairs of laid-off colleagues), and some of them are brazenly whimsical (a nebbishy art director inherits a giant totem pole from a dead co-worker), but somehow together they all work within the novel’s insular world.

Despite the book’s episodic nature, a growing urgency does gather around two things: Tom Mota’s mental state – will he show up armed and angry one day? – and Lynn Mason’s cancer. At the same time, the pacing is leisurely enough that we live with the characters awhile, which is one of the book’s greatest charms. At first, those characters seem to be built on sitcom shorthand – the brassy one, the fearful one, the eager one – but many of them transcend those origins, becoming rounder and more nuanced as time passes. Or rather, as time circles: another of the book’s charms is the way its incidents and anecdotes range back and forth but return again and again to the brief span of a couple weeks in the spring of 2001.

If there’s a disappointment in Then We Came to the End, it’s that Ferris doesn’t quite have the will to stay within the world he creates. A chapter in the middle of the book is related solely from Lynn Mason’s point of view on the eve of her mastectomy, and while it’s a careful and sympathetic portrait of her mental state, it would have worked better as a short story – here it only subtracts from the novel’s cumulative power. Similarly, an epilogue set in 2006 provides a cozy sense of summing up, complete with the revelation that one of the minor characters has legitimized the group’s experiences by writing a novel about them. The only novel we readers need, though, is the one we’re reading; in a book about uncertainty and and missed connections and elusive meaning, these steps seem too much like a retreat.

The Diviners

2007-05-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

Review of Rick Moody’s novel The Diviners; Toronto Star, fall 2005.

Like Philip Roth before him, the American writer Rick Moody has shown that you can go a long way on sheer energy. His prose style has its lapses – it’s often pretentious and careless – but usually his writing transports the reader with sheer propulsive force. Unlike Roth, though, Moody tends to polarize critics: some delight in his cleverness, while others find his work contrived and showoffy.

Count me among those who’ve enjoyed his stuff. Moody’s best previous books, the novels The Ice Storm and Purple America, were family dramas that played out over the course of a few days, chronicling the spiritual malaise of the well-off, and for all their stylistic tics they carried an emotional density and charge. His new book, though, has a broader canvas and is more overtly comical in its ambitions.

Ostensibly, The Diviners is Moody’s most ambitious book yet, with all the trappings of a Major Statement. It has 500 pages of heft. It has nearly two-dozen characters, ostensibly representing a cross-section of American society. Its ostensibly complex plot features mysterious complications and byzantine connections. It ostensibly satirizes major social institutions, and ostensibly intertwines the struggles and wishes of its characters with those of the larger world in which they live.

The problem, as you might have guessed, is that in fact The Diviners only appears to do these things. The novel is like nothing so much as a model home in a swank subdivision: the fixtures are gorgeous and the countertops gleam, but the house is unlived-in and unloved, and even basic functionality is in question (do those faucets really work?). All of this is ironic indeed for a novel that purports to satirize the emptiness and superficiality of modern American life.

***

The Diviners takes place in the last months of the year 2000, the time of the post-election recounts. At its centre is Means of Production, a low-tier film production house in Manhattan that’s run by a bullying striver named Vanessa Meandro. In search of a project that will get her noticed, Vanessa fixates on “The Diviners,” the screenplay for a sweeping TV miniseries that will follow migrating tribes over many generations and countries, ending up in latter-day Las Vegas. (The title, of course, refers to the semi-mystical art of locating underground water, and the fact that Moody’s publisher considered it fair game is a measure of how little lasting impact Margaret Laurence has had beyond Canadian borders.)

The problem with “The Diviners,” the screenplay, is that it doesn’t actually exist. The idea was thrown together as a lark by one of Vanessa’s employees, Annabel Duffy, and another associate, action-movie star Thaddeus Griffin. Yet the project quickly takes on a life of its own, with agents, network executives, investors, and even romance novelists all wanting a piece.

That conceit provides the connecting tissue for the story, which is episodic in the extreme. For much of the novel, each chapter brings a new or previously incidental character to centre stage. Some are drawn realistically, like a reverend haunted by a past indiscretion who seems to have stepped from the pages of an Updike novel. Others are more cartoonish, like an Indian cabdriver who talks himself into a job at Means of Production with over-intellectualized babble about television (“This is where the myths and stories for the future must be sewn”).

Each new character or backstory carries a light sheen of social reportage – two frequent motifs are the election recount and the Krispy Kreme donut chain – and plot tangents sprout everywhere. Probably the most dramatic one involves Annabel’s brother Tyrone, a mentally ill bike courier who’s suspected to have attacked a woman on the street with a brick: as the victim lies comatose, Tyrone flees the police and falls in with a cultlike group of revolutionary students planning a firebombing campaign.

The problem with all this is that the tangents rarely intersect in meaningful or interesting ways, and no narrative momentum builds. For example, at first much is made of the absence of a genuine “Diviners” script, but as the project proceeds apace, that lack never seems to cause any problems, or even to come up at all. And no sooner do we learn that a romance writer named Melody Howell Forvath has written a long-ago novel also called “The Diviners” than she (and her presumed claim of authorship of the nonexistent miniseries) promptly disappear from the story completely. She seems to have been in there in the first place only to allow Moody to write an account of a Hollywood Botox-injection party.

It’s clear that with the interconnections among the book’s many characters, Moody would like to convey an impression of intrigue. But again and again, that impression turns out to be false, because he can’t be bothered with the heavy lifting of actual plotting. This makes The Diviners essentially a 500-page collection of riffs.

***

That Botox party is emblematic of the novel as a whole. Such an event, after all, is a pretty easy target, and most of the satire here is on a similarly facile level. I mean, how could anyone in the year 2005 think that having corporate media executives babble about “synergistic marketing” is still incisive? And for a novel about the entertainment industry, The Diviners rarely feels informed by any real insight into, or knowledge of, the world it purports to skewer. Moody’s tin ear is especially evident in a climactic set piece in which he describes a special Thanksgiving episode of “The Werewolves of Fairfield County,” a hit primetime soap with sci-fi/supernatural overtones. Weirdly, the lengthy summary of the episode is neither close enough to typical television to ring true nor exaggerated enough to be striking or funny.

Adding to the overall sense of cheap laughs is Moody’s apparent contempt for his characters. The most extreme case is Randall Tork, a pompous and narcissistic wine critic who considers himself “the greatest wine writer in history” and who assaults hapless vintners with deep-purple prose. The Diviners is Moody’s first book since literary critic Dale Peck notoriously called him “the worst writer of his generation,” and for anyone who wondered whether Moody would retaliate in his fiction, Randall Tork is the answer.

Tork is hardly an anomaly, though. At times Moody seems to debase his characters with outright glee. Early in the novel, we’re shown Vanessa’s mother sitting on the toilet and guzzling malt liquor to the point of insensibility even as her bowels, afflicted by some colitis-type disease, explode in blood and gore. Vanessa herself, described for the record as “plus-sized,” has a cabdriver take her all over Manhattan, from one Krispy Kreme to another, so that she can obsessively stockpile donuts.

A novelist need not treat his characters like hothouse orchids, and certainly the people in The Ice Storm and Purple America made fools out of themselves often enough. But because we lived and breathed with those people for 200 pages or more, they also earned our indulgence and sympathy. The hapless folk in The Diviners are given no time to do so, since there’s always another character waiting to catch our attention.

Which means that when Moody does strain for some kind of emotional payoff near the close of the novel, by manufacturing a test of human empathy for Vanessa, it only feels forced and false, unearned. Similarly, a bizarre coda featuring an unnamed but thinly disguised Antonin Scalia – the Supreme Court justice who’s about to help hand the presidency to George W. Bush – seems mainly like a lazy attempt to puff up the import of all the hurlyburly that’s gone before. “How do you end a story about god and country,” Scalia asks a friend as the novel finishes. But whatever The Diviners is about, it’s a good deal sillier and more trivial than god and country.

***

In Moody’s defence, it should be noted that while The Diviners has many faults, tedium is not one of them. This is a maddening book, but it’s entertaining on a superficial level. Yes, Moody can be pretentious: the book opens with 10 superfluous pages describing sunlight moving across the entire planet. And careless, too: in one chapter a goldfish that’s fallen from its bowl is described as wriggling “like a comma trying to slip between two clauses” – and this supposedly from the point of view of a developmentally challenged child!

But Moody also has an ease with phrases and sentences that keep tugging the reader along, and he can write some funny dialogue, and the sheer number of characters and scenarios in The Diviners does help to energize the proceedings. Hopefully next time out Moody will marry his skills to a fuller and more realized vision. But for now, he’ll have to content himself with having written what may be the most readable bad book of the season.

Rip It Up and Start Again

2007-05-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

Review of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds. Was in the Toronto Star, 2006.

It used to be that the Velvet Underground was the universally acknowledged grandfather of alternative-minded rock. Today, though, trendy young bands like Interpol and Franz Ferdinand and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are more likely to find inspiration in Joy Division’s ghostly vocals and brittle guitars, or Gang of Four’s jagged groove, or the Talking Heads’ jittery polyrhythms. All of those bands had their heyday in the late 1970s and early ’80s, that fertile few years that followed the punk rock explosion. Other groups from the same period are finding new audiences, too; some, like Wire and Mission of Burma, are even touring and recording again after long hiatuses.

Which means that Rip It Up and Start Again is well-timed. The book throws a spotlight onto the “postpunk” scene – or scenes, rather – by touching on dozens of groups from the U.K. (most of them) and the U.S. (a smattering), including the five named above. In doing so, author Simon Reynolds, a music writer originally from Britain but now living in New York City, is looking to correct a rock-history imbalance: the brief punk movement has been much mythologized, but its musical aftermath, less iconic but more interesting, has been under-considered.

Unlike punk, though, postpunk is fragmented and diverse – a stew of sometimes contradictory ideologies, aesthetic impulses, and musical styles. So Reynolds must look for some common ground from which to start. To that end, he reminds readers that the punk of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols was essentially regressive, backing away from the bombast and pretensions of modern rock in favour of primal three-chord riffery. Postpunk, he argues, is not just the music that followed punk, but the music that followed punk and was also progressively “futurist,” or self-consciously innovative rather than imitative.

And where better to begin than with John Lydon, first known to the world as Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten? After the Pistols broke up, Lydon formed a new band, Public Image Ltd. (PiL), that purveyed rousing rock noise influenced by Jamaican dub, German art rock, and disco. He also billed his new project as a “corporation,” showing that he’d learned something about public-relations theatre from notorious Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.

From PiL, Reynolds moves on to other first-wave postpunk acts that sprang up all over England in the late 1970s, like Joy Division, the Fall, Throbbing Gristle, and many others. Though dissimilar in style, these acts shared a keen hunger for new sounds (often incorporating electronic and funk grooves), a disdain for rock and roll conventions, and in many cases a passionate left-wing political stance.

The downside to all this is that since bands like the Pop Group and Gang of Four tended toward the shrill and had a fondness for lecturing, a dour and dutiful feel sometimes creeps into the first half of Rip It Up. So it’s a welcome development when, in the book’s second half, Reynolds broadens the focus into “new pop” – acts that worked unabashedly retro influences into their sonic mix and/or cultivated a poppier, radio-friendly sound. His consideration of the ska-revivalist Specials, the synth-pop giants the Human League and ABC, and the fame-craving Orange Juice (whose classic soul-flavoured single gives Rip It Up its title) varies and warms up the tone considerably.

Reynolds has done a great deal of research here, and Rip It Up is a valuable reference. But since it’s essentially a series of miniature band histories, it has limitations. The emphasis is on reportage, not analysis; a few more startling or thought-provoking insights here and there would have given us strength for the long march from group to group (more than 50 groups in all). Similarly, Reynolds’ workmanlike prose struggles to capture or spread a sense of real excitement. He lauds many bands I haven’t listened to in years and others I’ve hardly heard at all, but he rarely inspired me to go back to the records, and I’m usually a soft touch for that kind of thing.

The book’s conceptual rigging sometimes feels a bit shaky, too. Most of the American chapters especially seem like arbitrary detours (even when the bands are undeniably important, like Pere Ubu) and might better have been dropped. And as we get further into the 1980s, decisions about who gets covered, and how much, start to seem like a nightclub bouncer’s velvet-rope whims. Many omissions are perfectly understandable; no one needs to read another few hundred words about how the Clash grew from straightforward punkers into an uncommonly ambitious and adventurous band. Still, for such a wide-ranging book, Rip It Up ends up having a strangely cloistered feel, offering little acknowledgement that this allegedly world-changing collection of groups existed within a wider milieu of rock – even of postpunk British rock – at the time.

All of that said, there’s no other book out there quite like this one, and Reynolds has done some important work in putting together this vast collection of information. (He did more than 100 original interviews for the book, and they go a long way toward enlivening the text.) And he tells plenty of good stories along the way. Like that of Scritti Politti, who began as scruffy agit-prop deconstructionists and later morphed into the smooth MOR-pop stylists that they’re mainly remembered as here in North America. Or the creepy case of Bow Wow Wow, in which Malcolm McLaren took a malleable young pop band, appointed a 14-year-old girl as the lead singer, and marketed their records with a relentless and vaguely sinister campaign of titillation. For students of rock history, an abundance of anecdotes like this should be reason enough to read the book.

Heavier Than Heaven

2007-05-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

I wrote about Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles R. Cross, for my friend Jep’s website. This was back in early 2002, I think. In retrospect I’ll have to concede that my “nobody cares about or listens to Nirvana any more” lede was probably a case of wishful thinking on my part, though I do still think they were wildly overrated.

Nirvana’s Nevermind album, which propelled Kurt Cobain and his bandmates to multinational superstardom, was released 10 years ago last fall. The rock press duly tried to make an event out of the anniversary – there were retrospective features in Rolling Stone and Spin – but without much success. Over the past few months, we’ve heard more about Courtney Love’s business dealings than Kurt Cobain’s importance in rock history.

Which may be fitting, since the critical adoration of Nirvana probably has more to do with lucky timing than with the music’s quality or lasting relevance.

After all, Nevermind was released in a climate of “death of rock” hand-wringing, in the year of Vanilla Ice and “Rico Suave.” So rock writers who feared that the electric guitar would soon become a historical relic wept with relief at Nirvana’s popularity: here was a chart-topping hard-rock band free of embarrassing heavy-metal associations. Never mind that Nirvana were only one pop-punk act among many, hardly the most innovative or even the most tuneful. Never mind that much of the “grunge” that followed the band to the charts was no more creative or ambitious than a typical New Kids on the Block single. Nevermind saved rock and roll!

But for rock and roll saviours, Nirvana made some pretty unremarkable records. Most of their celebrated songs seem half-written, with modest riffs mercilessly overworked and all surprises gone by the third listen. Even “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the band’s signature song, now sounds like a mediocre tune greatly flattered by its arrangement. (Who could dispute that the most thrilling moment is that little drum flourish that heralds the roaring guitars?)

Still, Kurt Cobain’s story is a poignant one: a lonely, alienated youth achieves his lifelong dream of rock stardom, only to succumb to heroin addiction and kill himself at the age of 27. In a recent biography, Heavier Than Heaven, Seattle journalist Charles R. Cross methodically documents Cobain’s short and unhappy life. Cross’s extensive research – well integrated into the narrative – is augmented by a close look at Cobain’s private journals, courtesy of widow Courtney Love. With affection and respect, the biographer captures the human tragedy at the core of the story.

But Cross also remains admirably clear-eyed about his subject’s foibles, and the resulting portrait should debunk any illusion that this was a rock and roll visionary. Throughout Heavier Than Heaven, Cobain comes off as a grasping poseur obsessed with pleasing the cool kids. And in his later days, he was little more than a stupefied junkie.

At least Cobain’s early childhood was relatively idyllic, marked by artistic leanings and a love of music. But his parents divorced when he was nine, and his adolescence was troubled: he tested boundaries and wound up shuttling between parents, relatives, and friends. But he did not, Cross points out, live under a bridge in his hometown of Aberdeen – both Cobain’s sister and his Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic discredit that enduring legend.

In fact, Cobain’s talent for mythmaking becomes one of the book’s major themes. The phrase “despite what Kurt would later tell reporters” recurs often, and “Cobain, Kurt Donald, exaggerations by” is one of the heftier index entries. Some of these revisions are minor and even charming: Cobain claimed that the first band he saw in concert had been West Coast punk godfathers Black Flag, while Cross shows that in fact Cobain’s first live rock experience involved the somewhat less cool Sammy Hagar.

More troubling is the larger hypocrisy on which Nirvana’s career was built. After Nevermind broke, Cobain dutifully played the rock-star game – the press, the MTV appearances, the arena tours – while complaining at every juncture that the rock-star game was beneath him. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone, Cobain wore a homemade T-shirt reading “Corporate magazines still suck.” But as Cross shows, Cobain was only too willing to let the corporate rock establishment manage his career. After recording In Utero, a harsher followup to Nevermind, Cobain bowed to label pressure and allowed producer Scott Litt to create more radio-friendly remixes of a couple tracks. As Cross writes, “Once again, when challenged by a problem that might affect the success of his record, Kurt acquiesced to the path of least resistance and greatest sales.”

Ironically, one such acquiescence proved to be a seminal moment in the band’s artistic development – though it came too late to be built upon. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance in November 1993, only five months before Cobain’s suicide, is discussed at length in Heavier Than Heaven, and rightly so: the show served as the basis for the band’s most affecting record. Cobain’s misery found expression in the sombre stage design and downbeat song selection, and the acoustic format forced the band to open up its sound – drummer Dave Grohl played with brushes instead of sticks. Nirvana’s quieter songs (“Polly,” “All Apologies”) were always among their strongest anyway, and here they were spliced with well-chosen covers, including Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” and the Vaselines’ “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.” In a nicely weird move, the band also did three Meats Puppets songs in a row (all from Meat Puppets II) – for which the Puppets joined them onstage.

Cross himself doesn’t look too closely at Nirvana’s music in Heavier Than Heaven. Most rock bios feature long and windy exegeses of each record, but Cross mostly restricts himself to trolling Cobain’s morbid lyrics for clues to his state of mind. (He points out that five of the six MTV Unplugged cover selections mention death, for instance.) But he is capable of striking insight. In relating a funny story about Cobain’s late discovery of the Knack’s wretched Get the Knack, Cross notes that Krist Novoselic “had a better grasp of the larger rock oeuvre…. Krist knew what was kitsch, while Kurt sometimes erred in this category.” Occasionally one wishes Cross would offer more such musical perspective.

The book’s only major failing, though, is its kid-glove treatment of the monstrous Courtney Love. No one who has followed Cobain’s career (or Love’s) could fail to see her as manipulative and opportunistic, but Heavier Than Heaven is heavy on oh-please lines like “He was a mystery to her, and Courtney was attracted by the unexplained.” There’s some evidence here of Love’s materialism – she pushed Cobain to buy a Lexus, and to headline Lollapalooza “to shore up their financial future” – but Cross consistently downplays such episodes, and readers have to pay close attention to catch them. It’s hard not to assume that Love’s co-operation with the biography – and her forking over of Cobain’s journals – explain the author’s uncharacteristically soft touch on this subject. (Speaking of those journals, in February 2002 Love negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal to publish them separately – despite the fact that, as Cross’s book shows, they’re often mortifying to Cobain’s memory. Reportedly she has never read them in entirety herself.)

Still, Cross charts Cobain’s life with a strong instinct for narrative and detail, and crafts a perceptive portrait of a conflicted and often fascinating man. (Though Cobain craved stardom and excess, he remained shy and awkward throughout his life – he’s doubtless the only rock giant whose sexual conquests failed to number in double digits.) And the closing chapters, detailing Cobain’s spiral toward suicide, effectively combine suspense, dread, and sadness. Cobain’s importance to rock and roll may be overstated, but his story of suffering is still powerful.

Black Swan Green

2007-05-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

Review of David Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green; Toronto Star, spring 2006.

Does anyone think back to their early teens without wincing? Even for the most self-confident and socially successful of kids, those are bewildering and exhausting years. There are the ever-shifting codes and conventions of peers to keep up with, the demands of the adult world to adjust to, and of course the search for one’s own sense of self to get on with.

Jason Taylor, the 13-year-old narrator of David Mitchell’s new novel, is not at all self-confident or socially successful.

In Black Swan Green, Jason recounts a year in his life – 1982 – as he grows up in a sleepy British village. “Sleepy” being relative, of course. Certainly life is dramatic enough for Jason, who’s buffeted by the usual schoolboy sturm und drang: his parents feuding with each other, bullies stalking him for sport, the girl of his daydreams ignoring him. Throw in some anxiety about the Falkland Islands war (it’s 1982, remember) and a nasty stammer (which Jason anthropomorphizes as “Hangman,” as in, “Words beginning with N have always been one of Hangman’s favorites”), and the boy’s having a rough year indeed.

Things aren’t all bad, though. We also see Jason recognizing and developing his own budding literary talent, first as a poet and eventually as a writer of narrative prose. Mitchell does a nice job here of illustrating Jason’s flair for language with striking but plausible flourishes; he wonderfully describes a Roxy Music song as “kazookery,” for instance. And as the year passes, Jason grows in other ways, too, coming to discern the contours of his own principles and to see where they bang up against the dilemmas of the larger world.

All of which is to say that Black Swan Green is a coming-of-age novel. And this seems to be the place to mention that like Jason, David Mitchell grew up in smalltown England, turned 13 in 1982, struggled with a stammer in his youth, and, obviously, found his vocation in writing. But I’ll make no more of all that, except to note that, unsurprisingly, Mitchell’s rendering of time and place in this new book has a warm and lived-in feel.

In any case, the novel is a sharp departure for Mitchell. His three previous ones have been nothing if not audacious and fanciful, culminating in Cloud Atlas two years ago, an epic that hopped giddily from genre to genre and storyline to storyline, from the 19th century to the far future. Smart and exhilarating, the novel won Mitchell a raft of new readers (including me). Black Swan Green is neither audacious nor fanciful, but what Mitchell has set out to do here – to capture the flux of youth, and to dazzle the reader with everyday, awkward human interaction rather than clever narrative conceits – is risky and rewarding in its own way.

Not that Mitchell has lost all interest in form. In fact, Black Swan Green seems to deliberately set the natural interiority of Jason’s first-person narration against more transparently dramatic storytelling strategies. The novel is structured as a series of semi-discrete episodes, with larger story arcs progressing incrementally in each – much like a TV series. Many of the set pieces are heavy on dialogue, and the dialogue sometimes does exposition duty, catching the reader up on recent developments. Some sequences even seem like celluloid-ready montages, such as this quick-cut description of a school hallway thronged with students: “School was all skiddy floors this morning, damp steaming anoraks, teachers telling kids off for screaming and first years playing illegal tag in the corridors and third year girls trawling the corridors with linked arms singing a Bananarama song.”

Occasionally, Black Swan Green is a little too transparently dramatic. Early in the novel, the narrative ducks are so blatantly set in a row – Jason’s parents have an uneasy marriage; the father’s facing changes at work; a town boy has enlisted in the Royal Navy – that waiting for them to fall is downright distracting. Also, Mitchell winks at his readers probably more than this particular story calls for when he improbably deposits a character from Cloud Atlas into the village for one chapter. (He also can’t resist at least one cheap historical-hindsight gag – “Betamax, of course! VHS’s going extinct” – although to be fair, he does show much more self-discipline in this regard than many others would.)

Often enough, though, Mitchell’s obvious efforts to please the reader work wonderfully, and the novel’s never less than tremendously engaging. He creates a fully realized village community that’s populated with a vivid and large cast of supporting characters. (And how refreshing that is, after so many literary novels in which the protagonist seems to know three people in the world.) Jason’s various predicaments entertain us without straining believability, and at its best the dialogue snaps without seeming too stylized. One comic highlight is a chapter called “Relatives,” in which an aunt and her family visit for the day. The dinner-table conversation is dominated by competitive, posturing back-and-forth between Jason’s father and uncle, and at every turn our perceptions of Jason, his family, and his extended family fluctuate, even as Jason’s do not.

On the more introspective side, the descriptions of Jason’s struggles with “Hangman” are insightful and fascinating, as he explains how his stammer favours certain letters, situations, and even times of year. “Most people think stammering and stuttering are the same but they’re as different as diarrhea and constipation,” he says. In their matter-of-fact tone, these passages pull off the nice trick of stirring our sympathy without appearing to try to do so.

In the end, though, Jason is a little too sympathetic. He may be socially timid and inept, but he’s also talented, kindhearted, and morally and ethically precocious – “not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right,” he says at one point. Though tested by the aforementioned various predicaments, he always does the right thing, and still feels guilty if he doesn’t do it quickly enough. These are false notes in a novel in which so many small details ring true.

Eventually, the idealized air spreads from protagonist to plot. As Jason’s year passes and he either accepts or outwits many of his torments and tormentors, one gets the unavoidable sense that Mitchell is asking the reader to collude in a kind of joint wish-fulfillment exercise. It’s impossible not to like Jason. But by the end of this very likable novel, it’s not quite possible to believe in him.

Trance

2007-05-14T21:04:00.000-07:00

Review of Christopher Sorrentino’s novel Trance; appeared in the Toronto Star in summer 2005.

It’s been more than three decades since a group of California far-left radicals calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and then threatened, bullied, and abused her until she joined their cause. But the story continues to haunt us – perhaps because the SLA was in the news again a couple of years ago, when several of its members finally went to prison for a 1975 murder, or perhaps because the subject of urban terrorism in America has acquired a fresh urgency lately.

Whatever the reason, Hearst and her erstwhile comrades keep turning up in the culture. Two years ago Susan Choi published American Woman, an excellent novel based on the summer that Hearst and three other fugitives spent hiding out in a rural cottage. Early this year PBS aired a fresh documentary film about the case called Guerilla. Even comedian Margaret Cho has borrowed from Hearst lore for the title and cover of her upcoming book, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight.

And now here is Christopher Sorrentino’s second novel, Trance, based on Hearst’s fugitive days. It’s an ungainly but gripping piece of work – a postmodern experiment that reads like a thriller.

Sorrentino has stuck closely to real-life characters and events, and you can hardly blame him: the true story is so outlandish, crowded, and eventful that the novelist’s task is not to embellish but to simplify. The SLA came together in Berkeley, made up of white upper-middle-class college students or grads and led by an escaped black convict, Donald DeFreeze. Though they numbered less than a dozen, they believed they were about to incite a revolution and overthrow the American government, restoring power to “the People.” What they lacked in political sophistication or strategic sense they made up for in stockpiles of weaponry and in long-winded communiques to the press; their official slogan was the punchy “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

After murdering a popular Oakland school superintendant to no apparent political purpose, the SLA made national news by kidnapping 19-year-old Hearst in 1974. Two months later, she announced to the world that she’d joined her captors and rechristened herself Tania, and shortly afterward was caught on film robbing a bank with her comrades. The SLA then relocated to Los Angeles, where the police soon found and cornered the cadre; six members, including DeFreeze, died in the resulting shootout.

Circumstance had separated Hearst from the group the day before, along with two other members, Bill and Emily Harris, and now the three of them fled back to Berkeley. Sympathetic acquaintances – including a sportswriter who dreamed of an SLA-related book deal – spirited them to the Pennsylvania countryside, where they hid out for several months along with another wanted radical. Eventually, they returned to the Bay area to start a “second team” SLA; bombings and bank robberies followed before Hearst and the Harrises were found and arrested, more than a year and a half after the kidnapping.

Like any novel dealing with familiar real-life scenarios, Trance must navigate an uneasy relationship between invention and fact. Sorrentino renames the Hearst character “Alice Galton,” for example, but still uses her Tania alias. The Harrises are likewise given pseudonyms, but are mostly identified by their real-life noms de guerre, Teko and Yolanda. Some characters, like the dead SLA members, bear their real names, while others don’t, even when their models are obvious. These are small decisions, but they reflect Sorrentino’s overall strategy of highlighting the novel’s relationship to the historical record – both the conflicts and the confluences.

Trance picks up the story in L.A., at the point when Tania, Teko, and Yolanda are separated from the rest of the SLA while on a supply run. Teko is spotted shoplifting at a sporting goods store, and Tania shoots out the storefront windows to scatter the security guards. The three revolutionaries then embark on a series of carjackings, bickering about what to do next and how to hook up with their comrades. Meanwhile, DeFreeze leads the rest of the cadre to a new safehouse, where the L.A. police close in around them.

Sorrentino’s work in this section sets the pace for the rest of the novel with suspenseful storytelling, a strong ear for dialogue, and wry situational humour. American Woman was sombre, but Trance finds the comedy in the material – much of it at the vainglorious Teko’s expense – without trivializing the impact of the SLA’s idiocies and crimes.

If there’s one disappointment, it’s that Sorrentino allows the public record to set the narrative agenda so rigidly. Nearly all of the events in Trance, even many tiny details, are drawn from existing accounts. The underreported aspects of the SLA case, such as the formation and earliest days of the cadre, would seem to be ripe for fictionalizing, but they’re ignored here. Even the last hours of the Los Angeles safehouse siege are related not from the point of view of the doomed SLA soldiers, but from that of Tania, watching events unfold on a motel room TV.

Not that the book is unimaginative. Rather, the fictionalizing comes in textures, in tangled skeins of motivation as we leave and return to various characters’ minds. Like Hank Galton, Tania’s father, befuddled by helpless love and concern; Guy Mock, the fugitives’ sportswriter friend, balancing sympathy, skepticism, and self-interest; and Joan Shimada, a Japanese-American radical who falls into the SLA ambit but is openly scornful of their pretensions.

All of them orbit the central figure of Tania. To Sorrentino’s credit, he doesn’t pander to the question that launched a criminal trial and a thousand op-ed pieces in the 1970s: that of whether Tania was a coerced victim or a willing accomplice. In fact, that angle is barely acknowledged in the novel, which presents a Tania who more or less believes she’s acting freely (but still might not be, anyway). More interesting are the dynamics between Tania and the other revolutionaries, and her growing friendship with Joan Shimada.

There’s a huge cast of background characters to deal with, too, and Sorrentino gives spark to them all with judicious use of anecdotes and minor details, as when one SLA soldier recalls an argument at her sister’s “bourgeois” wedding. Most impressively, even the briefest cameos don’t just solidify our conception of the character for the sake of expediency – rather, they suggest a rich and real life lived off the page.

Indeed, for such a long and sprawling book, the major tension that emerges is between what’s included and what’s not. Although Tania’s fugitive exploits provide a narrative throughline – Trance essentially ends with her arrest – that narrative is full of tangents, tone shifts, multiple perspectives, and stylistic experiments. At one point, Sorrentino even uses concrete poetry to represent a shooting victim’s last, jumbled thoughts. In the absence of a classically seamless structure and consistent point-of-view, the overall form of the story comes to seem arbitrary: we may wonder, for example, why we turn to Lydia Galton, Tania’s mother, so late in the action. It’s fitting that in a novel so entwined with the historical record, the reader is invited to speculate on what’s been left out, and on how further additions and subtractions would change our understanding of the play and its players. A risky move, but it’s one that Sorrentino can afford to take – after all, what’s been left in Trance is plenty satisfying.

A Changed Man

2007-05-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

Review of Francine Prose’s A Changed Man. Was in the Toronto Star in early 2005.

A few years back, the novelist and critic Francine Prose provoked some literary debate with a Harper’s essay on fiction and gender roles. There’s an unspoken critical assumption, she wrote, that male writers are more likely to show ambition and innovation, while female ones are content to be unassuming and sentimental. To debunk that preconception, Prose highlighted contrasting passages from various well-known writers’ work – Flannery O’Connor versus Frederick Exley, say – and she had little difficulty illustrating that male and female “voices,” if indeed they’re distinct at all, overlap a great deal in both style and subject matter. (Some accused her of stacking the deck, but she certainly didn’t have to go far for her examples: all the writers she quoted were well known, and some, like Hemingway, were downright canonical.)

The essay may have raised more questions than it resolved, but it’s no surprise that the subject so exercised Prose: her own fiction is itself an eloquent rebuke to facile literary dichotomies. A typical Prose novel covers big ideas about ethics, art, and social structures, but presents them with minutely observed single-point-of-view narratives that emphasize a character’s day-to-day (and often minute-to-minute) thoughts and feelings. The first half of that equation tends to be more highly valued by prize juries and reviewers, but the second is arguably more crucial to aesthetic success in literary fiction. In any case, Prose at her best is both more readable and more memorable than alleged deep thinkers like Don DeLillo.

Prose’s new book, A Changed Man, fits the pattern above – except that it’s unusually nuanced in its negotiation between theme and character, and it may be her most successful novel yet.

At the story’s outset, a neo-Nazi skinhead named Vincent Nolan arrives at the Manhattan office of Brotherhood Watch, a human rights NGO, and offers his services with a rehearsed line: “I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me.” Meyer Maslow, Brotherhood Watch’s founder and a famous author and Holocaust survivor, quickly senses the potential for outreach and publicity, and talks his chief fundraiser, Bonnie Kalen, into boarding Vincent while they figure out what to do with him. So the newly reformed neo-Nazi becomes houseguest to a suburban, Jewish single mother and her two sons, the older one sullen and the younger fearful and baffled.

The character of Vincent is tricky to pull off, since we’re meant to find him essentially sympathetic. So we quickly learn that his association with the Aryan Resistance Movement was only half-hearted; it’s put down to bad luck (he was adrift after losing a job and splitting from his wife) and the wrong crowd (he landed on the couch of his cousin, a more enthusiastic neo-Nazi). We also learn that Vincent’s conversion to racial tolerance began with a dose of Ecstasy at a rave, though he shows his public relations skills by inventing more suitable epiphanies at various points throughout the novel.

Some may accuse Prose of sweetening the medicine by minimizing Vincent’s history of hate, but I think she’s achieved a necessary balance in making both his dalliance with racism and his abandonment of it emotionally plausible. And late in the book, a section focusing on Vincent’s cousin does allow us into the paranoid, petulant thoughts of an unreconstructed neo-Nazi, who’s depicted as odious but not quite cartoonish.

Unlike many of Prose’s novels, A Changed Man is an ensemble piece, with point-of-view shifting back and forth between Vincent, Bonnie, Meyer, Danny (Bonnie’s older son), and other supporting players. All are deftly sketched, particularly the bewildered Bonnie, still recovering from a split with her swinish husband and now coping with her own feelings for the ex-skinhead in her spare room. Meyer Maslow, too, is a memorable creation, vacillating between frustrated idealism and wounded ego as he broods about the meaning of his work and his own declining celebrity.

In rendering these people Prose is not a striking, er, prose stylist – she does not do new things with language or serve up quotable bravura metaphors – but her writing is taut and confident nonetheless. Her strength is in character, in capturing the tortuous flow of inner vanities and insecurities, the tug between self-recrimination and –justification.

Prose records these mental meanderings so deeply and sympathetically, in fact, that readers may barely notice that she’s also lightly working in some heavy ethical questions. Books like Blue Angel and Hunters and Gatherers targeted specific hypocrisies (academic political correctness and new age feminism, respectively), and what they lost in subtlety, they gained in sting. A Changed Man is more shaded, less pointed, as characters ponder the nature of heroism, courage, and self-improvement, as well as the difference between genuine integrity and the theatre of surface charisma. On the latter point, it’s no accident that the story’s crisis moments all involve public-speaking events: a fundraising dinner, a TV talk show appearance, a high-school graduation ceremony.

That graduation concludes the novel with only a partial sense of emotional resolution. Closure is often missing from Prose’s work; many of her stories seem to end arbitrarily rather than organically. That’s somewhat true here, too, though not egregiously so. A Changed Man does leave a few loose ends, but if its finish is less than wholly satisfactory, it’s mainly because Prose’s characters have become so real that readers may wish to follow their lives a little more.

Twilight of the Superheroes

2007-05-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

Review of Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheoes. Was in the Toronto Star in early 2006.

It’s been fashionable for years to complain about the “workshop effect” on the contemporary North American short story. The argument goes that the recent rise of creative writing programs has honed young writers’ technical proficiency while discouraging ambition and idiosyncrasy. So we get solidly and stolidly constructed stories from which anything that might raise the reader’s eyebrow or muddy the author’s intent has been removed. The characters and their dilemmas are outlined in bold, the appropriate backstory is expertly filled in, and the epiphany pulls sleekly into the station at the appointed hour.

The workshop effect (or at least its recent hegemony) has probably been overstated, but it’s still fair to say that when it comes to fiction about the way we live now, we could use a little more narrative weirdness mixed in with our real-world anxieties. And for that, the work of New York City writer Deborah Eisenberg is as good a source as any.

Take the title piece of Twilight of the Superheroes, Eisenberg’s new book. It’s about a group of twentysomethings housesitting in a Manhattan loft before and after the 9/11 attacks, about how young people struggle to make their way in the world and how that’s distorted by paranoia and grief. But it’s also about Lucien, the uncle of one of those twentysomethings, who’s lost in grief for his dead wife and lost also in terror, convinced that 9/11 portends an apocalypse.

What makes the story notable is that there’s no sense that any of these elements is a metaphor for any other one – all of them are simply there, bumping up against each other. By the story’s end, no understanding or resolution is reached, no comfort (warm or cold) offered.

Or take “Like It or Not,” another piece in the new book. It follows Kate, a schoolteacher visiting Italy who falls into a weekend trip to the countryside with an Italian man, a friend of a friend serving as impromptu tour guide. Most of the story tracks Kate’s shifting feelings and preoccupations: she’s exasperated with her guide, broods over her ex-husband’s illness, and picks at her own loneliness. Near the end, though, the point-of-view moves suddenly to the guide, and it’s the switch in perspective, not the actual events (what follows is hardly a surprise) that gives the story a disorienting twist.

Like Alice Munro, Eisenberg has stuck to short stories throughout her career – Twilight of the Superheroes is her fourth collection since her debut 20 years ago – and similar motifs and techniques tend to recur in her work. Her narrators are often befuddled by their own conceits about themselves, and often we catch them trying (without much success) to navigate a strange land – American innocents in Latin America is a favourite Eisenberg starting point. Her stories can slide into a mood of unsettling threat without warning, but they also have a Chekhovian spirit of capturing small details and tangential conversations as they come up, apparently without propelling the narrative forward.

When all of this works, it works beautifully – most notably in the terrifying title story of Eisenberg’s 1992 collection, Under the 82nd Airborne., in which a self-involved former actress visiting Honduras is menaced by a thuggish American mercenary. Or “Mermaids” (from 1997’s All Around Atlantis), in which a family trip to New York leads to overlapping agendas and individual agonies, all of them observed by a young girl who doesn’t fully understand them.

There’s nothing that strong or fully realized in Twilight of the Superheroes. Instead, the new book gives us moments here and there worth savouring: the raging contempt of an aging lawyer for his family in “Some Other, Better Otto,” or a teenage boy’s almost hallucinatory culture shock as he readjusts to urban privilege after years abroad in “The Flaw in the Design.”

Unfortunately, though, when several Eisenberg stories are read together in a collection, her limitations become more apparent, and the overall effect can be stultifying and muddled. Partly this is a question of voice. Twilight of the Superheroes features people young and old, male and female, rich and middle-class and poor, coldly practical and near-lunatic. But this doesn’t lead to the giddy multiplicity of styles that you might expect. Some characters are more given to exclamations, and some hold to a more flat affect, but for the most part the diction and pitch vary little throughout the book.

For example, early in one story, “Window” a 19-year-old woman flees a small town and a dead-end job, and her dissatisfaction is described thusly: “When she was little there had been moments like promises, disclosures – glimpses of radiant things to come that were so clear and sharp they seemed like erupting memories.” That’s some nice writing, sure. But the point is that Eisenberg’s prose always maintains a ruthless elegance, whether it’s actually appropriate to the situation and character or not.

Eisenberg also has little interest in quotidian detail: she’d rather ruminate on someone’s inner angst or secret fears than ground us in their daily life. Factor in the aloof prose as well, and many of her characters seem more like artist’s conceptions than real people. (Similarly, at times her Manhattan resembles some Woody Allen-style fantasyland that’s removed from the grit of the real world.) And while Eisenberg’s stories are spiky and unpredictable in structure, often the character dynamics behind the action can be summarized all too easily, stuck in some limbo that’s neither singular nor universal.

That’s quite the pile-on of complaints, I realize. In Eisenberg’s defence, in small doses her fiction is more powerful, and her weaknesses seem less like weaknesses. Twilight of the Superheroes isn’t her best work, but readers may still get caught up in her characters’ mental oscillations, and admire the elegance of her prose – especially if they take the book one story at a time, over time.

Scavenger Hunt

2007-05-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Globe’s Toronto section had this department called “City Diary,” for tiny little slices of life. Nothing like some (self-)righteous rage to get one’s energy up.

I was walking to lunch at the St. Lawrence Market on a bright late-May day when I passed an addled and presumably homeless man holding court on Front Street. He stood in a kind of half-crouch, yelling garbled imprecations at passersby, singling each one out in turn. (To one young woman: “You look good, baby! That’s just what I like!”) People traded wry smiles as they walked in semi-circles around him.

Inside, the place was awash in uniformed schoolchildren – probably in Grade 8 or 9, all wearing white shirts, purple-and-grey kilts, grey slacks. Not an unusual sight at the market, but these children were more purposeful than most. They moved briskly in little groups, wrote on pieces of paper. “That’s three down,” said one. They all seemed to have blue popsicles.

After I bought my food, I stepped out into the sunshine on Esplanade and into another wave of uniformed kids. One small group had just crossed the street and was particularly jubilant; fists were pumping. “We got it,” a boy called to his friends. “We got a hobo’s signature!”

I finally realized that they were on a scavenger hunt. And it occurred to me that in the year 2004, these 14-year-olds probably hadn’t come up with the word “hobo” on their own: a teacher or organizer would have done that for them. On the far corner stood a man I took to be the autographer, holding a cup out, standing stoic and unmoving. The schoolchildren moved into the market, sucking their popsicles, having learned the happy lesson that poor people were put on this Earth to amuse them.

I Thought My Father Was God

2007-05-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

A review of the Paul Auster-edited anthology I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project. This would have been written in 2001, when the book came out, but I’m not sure this was ever actually published anywhere; I have a feeling it was killed for some reason or fell through the cracks or something. Oh well, here it is now.

It may not have halted wars or fostered continent-crossing goodwill, but the storytelling impulse is surely one of humanity’s most universal characteristics. Nearly all of us share a knack for refining the irregular circumstance of life into some sort of coherent narrative. And if we’re born storytellers, we’re also born listeners: it’s a jaded soul indeed who doesn’t perk up a little upon being asked, “Do you want to hear a story?”

So the National Story Project – conceived for National Public Radio by author Paul Auster and his wife, Siri – was a genius move. In 1999, Auster began asking NPR’s listeners to forward brief, true stories drawn from their own experience. In a regular feature for the program All Things Considered, he reads the most striking submissions on the air. He’s now collected 179 of them in I Thought My Father Was God.

Though it draws only from Americans, the collection contains an exhilarating range of author and experience, with contributors of all ages, backgrounds, and regions. The book is apt to skip from Dust Bowl prairie to modern-day suburbia to the Second World War, from beach to courtroom to hospital ward. In the title story, a California youth witnesses an argument between his father and a crotchety neighbour. “Drop dead!” cries the father, and the neighbour, stricken with a sudden heart attack, obliges. Auster has organized the pieces by theme – under such chapters as “Family,” “Slapstick,” and “Strangers” – though there’s considerable overlap among categories.

In his introduction, Auster warns, “Only a small portion of [the book] resembles anything that could be called ‘literature.’ It is something else, something raw and close to the bone….” He’s right, and the book’s appeal is wildly uneven. Much of the writing here is terse in pacing and artless in style; the stories that work rely on conviction and immediacy, not technical skill. In fact, the ones that do betray artistic ambitions – most of them found in the closing “Meditations” section – are among the least engaging, overwritten and lacking narrative drive. (With few pieces more than two pages in length, though, the reader’s investment in the clunkers is a small one.)

Unfortunately, despite the wide range of source material, a samey tone permeates the collection. Auster is a sucker for urban legend-style tales of eerie synchronicity – no surprise, considering his own fiction. “What interested me most,” he writes, “were stories that defied our expectations about the world. Anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and bodies, in our souls.” So more than a third of the pieces here hinge on outrageous coincidences, psychic premonitions, messages from the grave, or long-lost heirlooms miraculously recovered. Readers who don’t share Auster’s sensibility – who suspect that some such tales say more about the storyteller’s need for psychic comfort than “mysterious and unknowable forces” – may grow impatient.

Many pieces here also share an unabashedly maudlin quality, displaying a sentimentality that recalls the most mawkish of Hollywood fantasias. It seems churlish to single out individual contributors, so suffice to say that the Christmas tree and the wedding ring are narrative devices that will have thoroughly wearied all but the most earnest of readers by the last page.

The most powerful stories in I Thought My Father Was God are the ones that confront the world’s random cruelties and shy away from easy resolutions – in short, the ones that most resemble sophisticated, realistic fiction. A young woman who’s moved to L.A. to seek stardom ends up “auditioning” for a porn producer in a grimy motel room. A wartime photographer views his own near-execution on a colleague’s video footage. Teenage siblings devastated by their mother’s murder take solace in lazy summertime binge drinking. A soldier watches a V-J Day celebration mutate into a riot and near-lynching. Startling and unnerving, these stories – and others like them – are the pearls to be pried from I Thought My Father Was God.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

2007-05-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

A review of Ken Kalfus’s novel The Commissariat of Enlightenment; appeared in the Toronto Star in 2003.

Ken Kalfus’s first novel takes revolutionary Russia as its backdrop, and vividly depicts the horrors of the period. At one point, the protagonist of The Commissariat of Enlightenment considers the state of his country, wracked by war and famine: “Recent events had demanded the loss of life on an imponderable scale. Whether the number of Russian dead concluded in five zeros or six was hotly debated in the domestic and foreign press, but the zeros were merely a human invention, a Babylonian bookkeeping trick. The deaths were made tangible only when you stopped counting them.”

A perfectly plausible observation for that character in that situation – but also a clear allusion to Stalin’s famous line about one death being a tragedy, a million a statistic. Blending a sense of immediacy with an authorly wink at the modern reader, the passage is emblematic of the book as a whole.

Kalfus, an American, comes by his subject matter honestly. He lived in Russia for several years, and he’s previously published a short-story collection, Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, set entirely in that country, ranging over various periods in its history. In his first novel, events leading up to and following the Russian Revolution illustrate the sweeping cultural changes of the early 20th century – changes still being felt the world over, long after the demise of the Soviet state.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment begins in 1910, as journalists and other opportunists converge on the isolated village of Astopovo, where Leo Tolstoy lies dying. It’s a proverbial media circus, with reporters, agitators, entrepreneurs, and Tolstoy’s wife, children, and disciples all jostling and competing. A couple of revolutionaries are in Astopovo, too – Lenin and Stalin watch the action from the sidelines with vague notions of using Tolstoy’s death to stir civil unrest. (As Kalfus notes in an afterword, he takes some liberties with the historical record here.)

Also on hand is Gribshin, the book’s central character. A young Russian dazzled by the new medium of film, he’s working as a cinematographer for the French news company Pathé Frères. As he vies for footage, he learns some important lessons about the iconic power of the moving picture, and the ways it can be manipulated. After Tolstoy’s death, the action fast-forwards to the early years of the Communist regime, and Gribshin puts those lessons into action. Now renamed Astopov and serving as an official in the state’s propaganda division (the commissariat of the book’s title), he seeks to sell the people on the glory of the revolution.

The latter half of the book takes the form of a series of set pieces: a standoff with peasants in a rural church, an avant-garde theatre troupe’s rehearsal, a disastrous attempt to recreate the seizure of the Kremlin for a propaganda film. All are exciting, and Kalfus’s prose is sharp and sure-footed throughout, displaying the skill he honed in his short stories. The dawn of the motion picture makes a nice hook for an exploration of iconography, celebrity, and propoganda, and the way each affects the others.

The book’s discrete episodes aren’t really integrated into a larger narrative, though, and often they strain to make thematic points. When Yelena, a subordinate of Astopov’s, shows him a proto-porn film, he has a vision of the MTV age, a future “where unconnected images were ubiquitous and drenched in sex and noise. Here men were buffeted by so many visual representations, so much experience, that they were unable to make sense of their lives.” Like most of the book’s significant musings, this one depends for its effect on the reader’s historical hindsight. The subject is then closed and filed away; Yelena, who had seemed an important character, is never seen again.

In fact, there is little sense of Kalfus’s fictional people struggling with personal dilemmas that illuminate the novel’s political background and themes. He can pull that off – he’s already done so expertly in the novella “Peredelkino,” the highlight of Pu-239. The tale of a complacent Brezhnev-era novelist and writers’ union official, the piece renders a milieu of court intrigue while grappling with questions of literary worth and the free market, artistic envy and community, state support and repression. Resisting easy conclusions, “Peredelkino” is both a novella of ideas and a believable character study.

In Commissariat, in contrast, Gribshin/Astopov remains eternally flat and affectless, and Kalfus shows little interest in the personality or fate of his protagonist. Which is perhaps the point. The novel’s final chapter lingers over Lenin’s embalmed corpse, playfully evoking an image of individual will powerless before the march of history. The narrative as a whole makes a similar point – but makes some sacrifices to do so.

The Name Game: How Books Are Titled

2007-05-04T21:36:00.000-07:00

A piece about book titles that ran in fall 2005 in Saturday Night – the second- or third-last issue ever, I think.

Last year, the Toronto publisher ECW Press released an anthology of autobiographical essays by Italian-Canadian women – reminiscent of the Carol Shields-edited Dropped Threads books, but with a more niche appeal. There were launch parties in multiple cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, but the festivities followed a stormy history. Before the collection was even published, several contributors, including the original editor, had pulled out of the project in a bitter fight with the publisher. The issue wasn’t royalties, or some disagreement over the editing of the text, but rather the name of the book.

ECW had come up with Mamma Mia: Good Italian Girls Talk Back, arguing to contributors that it encapsulated the subject matter and created a sense of conflict and drama. But Gina Valle, the anthology’s editor, wanted no part of that title. “I raised it with them the same day,” she says. Valle objected on several fronts: that “mamma mia” played to ethnic stereotypes, that “girls” was demeaning, and that “talk back” implied disrespect for older generations. Over months of to-ing and fro-ing, more than 30 other possible titles were put forth, and one other serious contender emerged: the milder Bravo Bella: Stories of Growing Up Italian. But the publisher’s sales force insisted that Mamma Mia was getting more enthusiastic reaction from bookstores.

So ECW stuck to that one – and also designed a cover showing a woman gesticulating with her hands, further enflaming the stereotype issue. As a result, Valle split from the project, along with about half of the original 20 contributors. One of those who stayed, Maria Coletta McLean, took over as editor and began soliciting new pieces, and ECW published the book in the spring of 2004. Since then, Mamma Mia has gone on to sell close to 5,000 copies – very respectable for a small Canadian press – while Valle has written letters of protest to various funding agencies and media outlets. Says Joy Gugeler, the ECW editor who dealt with the book: “The title was meant to express exasperation on one level, and that certainly summed up everyone’s feelings at the end of this negotiation.”

Of all the decisions that go into publishing a book, the title is one of the most fraught. It must be short, catchy, and memorable, and it has to capture the spirit of the book while also evoking intrigue or tension. At a large house, editors, publishers, sales, marketing, and publicity types might all weigh in on any given book’s title. Art directors, too, pushing for something they can work with visually. And if the book-buyers at major chains aren’t sold, the agonizing continues. But naming a book is an art, not a science, and the process tends to be driven by intuition and superstition. Ask industry veterans what makes a strong title, and their answers tend to fall along you-know-it-when-you-see-it lines. Focus groups or detailed market research? Forget it, there’s no money for that in publishing.

Small wonder that so many books leave a trail of discarded titles in their wake. In some alternate universe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel is known not as The Great Gatsby but as Trimalchio in West Egg, and Joseph Heller is remembered for Catch-18 rather than Catch-22. Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel was called Pale Flags, not Anil’s Ghost, and Miriam Toews won the Governor General’s Award last year for Swivelhead, not A Complicated Kindness.

Or maybe she didn’t. Back in this reality, after A Complicated Kindness took the prize, Michael Schellenberg, Toews’s editor at Knopf Canada, asked her only semi-jokingly, “Do you think your novel would have won if it had been called Swivelhead?” That early title referred to Toews’ teenage narrator’s watchful gawking, but it lacked, Schellenberg suggests, a certain CanLit gravitas. Several more titles were tossed back and forth, and at one point Toews even suggested Abattoir Life, but she dryly recalls that “everybody at Knopf shot that down pretty fast.”

Still, A Complicated Kindness has been one of the biggest Canadian hits of the past two years, so nobody’s complaining. When a book doesn’t do well, the second-guessing starts. A few years back, Random House Canada published a debut novel by British writer Eleanor Bailey, which Random publisher Anne Collins characterizes as a reader-friendly multigenerational saga. The book was called Idioglossia, a technical term for nonsense babbling, and Collins now believes the title was “completely terrifying” to readers and a crucial factor in the novel’s commercial failure.

In some ways, fiction writers and publishers have it easy when searching for a title: an evocative and not-too-specific phrase will usually do. Scan the season’s big novels – David Bergen’s The Time in Between, say – and you’ll notice that most of their titles sound nice but are essentially meaningless. With non-fiction, there’s more pressure to be clear, there’s the tricky dance between title and subtitle, and there are often more specific marketing niches to consider.

One general principle? As in comedy, incongruity is a plus. “Words that bang up against each other and set off shock waves tend to be good,” suggests John Pearce, a Toronto literary agent and longtime editor, citing John Ibbitson’s fall book about Canadian politics, The Polite Revolution. It’s also a truism that small changes can make a big difference. This fall, authors David Bercuson and Holger Herwig are releasing a book about Winston Churchill’s war conference with Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. Originally it was to be called Christmas in Washington, but that led to some confusion about the book’s identity, says the Canadian publisher, Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company: “Was it jingle jingle, decorating the Christmas tree, or was it Paris 1919?” So the book has now been renamed One Christmas in Washington, in the hope of tilting readers’ perceptions toward the latter.

Paris 1919, in fact, is itself the result of a title makeover. Margaret MacMillan’s book about the Treaty of Versailles was first published in the U.K. as Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War – a monicker the author was quite happy with. For the American publication, though, her New York editor “said anything with ‘Paris’ in it sells really well in the United States,” recalls MacMillan, who grudgingly acquiesced. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World has since become a blockbuster international hit.

Certainly, title talk can incite strong emotions. In Another Life, New York editor Michael Korda relates the story of a terse telegram from Graham Greene: “Easier to change publisher than title.” Since her own split with ECW Press over Mamma Mia, Gina Valle has collected a new anthology of stories covering the Italian immigrant experience across North America, to be published next spring by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

The title has not yet been determined.

30

Outtake #1
When there is disagreement, an editor must turn gut feelings into compelling arguments – or bargain for a solution. Last year, Thomas Allen published the English translation of an Alberto Manguel memoir with the tricky title “Chez Borges.” Manguel wanted to call it “With Borges,” but that sounded clunky to Crean, so the two compromised. “It was a tradeoff between him accepting our design,” says Crean, “and me accepting his title.”

Outtake #2
If “changed the world” has a familiar ring, it’s because you’ve probably seen it in other book subtitles. Recycling of title tropes is endemic, from books that promise “a brief history of” something to those that cover things you must see or eat “before you die.” Numbers, too, are always popular in business and self-help books (a la The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). And just as Paris is apparently a magic word, publishers admit to some other truisms: when Random House published Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown last year, Collins took care to keep “Toronto” out of the title, for fear of alienating readers in the rest of the country.

Swing Batter Swing: Baseball Novels

2007-05-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

A piece about baseball novels for The Globe and Mail’s “Three for Thought” department in the books section; published in March 2004, I think.

With the launch of the new major league baseball season this week, several hundred players will set out on this year’s campaign in a spirit of great hope. For most of them, that hope will be slowly crushed over the next six months.

The bards of baseball tend to sing of the game’s ties to tradition, its contemplative pace, its verdant summertime outfields – it presents itself as the most idyllic of the major sports. But with a long and grinding season and a relatively exclusive playoff format, it’s also the one most spiked with disappointment and frustration.

So it’s no surprise that it holds a special appeal for novelists. There are other reasons, too: the game is rich in lore and legend, and its status as “America’s pastime,” though by now more theoretical than actual, lends a sense of larger import to even the most straightforward ballpark yarn. Some authors exploit that resonance for sentimental fantasy (now batting, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe), while others favour a naturalistic tone (on deck, Mark Harris’s Henry Wiggen series). The most haunting baseball novels, though, are the ones that play off the game’s mythology while acknowledging the dread that hangs over the diamond.

Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952) is the story of Roy Hobbs, a 34-year-old rookie driven by dreams of riches and stardom. Roy first tried to make the big leagues as a young pitcher, only to be shot by a mysterious woman on the eve of his tryout. After a 15-year interregnum of drifting and odd jobs, he’s reinvented himself as a slugger and found a slot with the fictional New York Knights. Despite Roy’s age, his gifts are astounding: in his first big-league at-bat, he literally knocks the cover off the ball.

The Natural was Malamud’s first book, and its slightly surreal air prefigures his later work, as does its preoccupation with frustration. Roy is furious in pursuing all that he feels entitled to – baseball glory, money, and a beautiful but aloof society woman. But though he becomes a phenomenon, leading the Knights to a showdown for the pennant, his appetite is never sated. In one dreamlike scene, his hunger is made literal, as his epic gluttony at a team banquet puts him in the hospital.

At the novel’s climax, the pennant race comes down to a single game, which comes down to a single at-bat featuring our hero – Malamud is unabashed in exploiting the clichés of sports suspense. The crucial difference, though, is that his payoff offers no uplift, only a bellow of despair. In the last sentence of the novel, Roy weeps “many bitter tears.” Here and throughout the book, Malamud pitches with more force than finesse, but his raw prose is a fitting expression of angry ambition and failed promise.

As a prose stylist, Philip Roth is a power pitcher who also boasts pinpoint control. In The Great American Novel (Vintage, 1973), he’s at his funniest and most manic; where Malamud is bitter, Roth is giddy with satiric possibilities. Here he’s invented the Patriot League, which once co-existed alongside the American and the National but was disbanded after the Second World War, its records destroyed and its history suppressed. Much of the action centres on the 1943 season, when the Ruppert Mundys of Port Ruppert, New Jersey, are forced to play all their games on the road after the government leases their home ballpark as a soldiers’ camp. But the setup is really just an excuse for Roth to get busy with tall tales and comic characters. Like Gil Gamesh, a star pitcher (of proud Babylonian background, of course) who’s banished from the league after wounding an umpire with a deadly throw, and who reappears 10 years later as a Soviet spy. Or Frank Mazuma, a carnival barker of a team owner whose stunts include signing a midget as a pinch hitter. (He evokes real-life owner Bill Veeck, who once did the same thing.) Or Isaac Ellis, a teenage genius who’s dying to manage a big league team according to his own convoluted mathematical principles.

The book’s narrator, aged sportswriter Word Smith, claims to be writing a historical expose, but sees himself as competing with The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the like. Hence the “great American novel” conceit, which allows Roth to work in plenty of writerly in-jokes as well as baseball ones – he lampoons everything from Hemingway’s “The Killers” to Melville’s Typee. The literary canon motif, beautifully captured in the idea of a forgotten major league, also pokes fun at baseball’s own high opinion of itself. And while nothing in The Great American Novel is to be taken seriously, Roth finds improbable poignance in the plight of the luckless Ruppert Mundys, a once-mighty team now made up of misfits and losers, wandering a world that rewards only winners.

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (Plume, 1968) is also about an imaginary league. Henry Waugh, a 56-year-old low-level accountant with no family and few friends, is devoted to a virtual baseball game of his own devising, in which the roll of three dice determines every play. Henry plays entire seasons by himself this way – when the novel opens, his UBA is in Year LVI – and to give meaning to the statistics he amasses, he imagines player biographies, team and league histories, even off-the-field political intrigues.

Coover’s premise presages the explosion of fantasy leagues, and more than the other authors considered here, he ponders the fan’s place in the baseball cosmos. In one very funny scene, Henry invites Lou, an oafish co-worker, to play his dice game with him. Lou grasps none of the game’s grace or subtleties; his response is the bored incomprehension of the uninitiate. The density of Henry’s dream world, though, will make even a baseball aficionado feel like an outsider: with its babble of unfamiliar player names, the novel is deliberately disorienting. And while the Roth and Malamud books are both full of allusions to actual players and events, Coover’s novel throws no such winks at the reader.

Instead, we get deeper into Henry’s obsession, into the ever more elaborate – and creepy and distasteful – scenarios he invents. The eerie final chapter appears to represent Henry’s final surrender to psychosis, but also evokes our own complicity, as we’re asked to consider the needs we project onto the players on the diamond. Happy thoughts indeed for Opening Day.

Vernon God Little

2007-04-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

A review of DBC Pierre’s novel Vernon God Little; appeared in the Toronto Star in 2003.

Here’s a fresh case study to please all those no-more-borders types. A debut novel set in smalltown U.S.A., written by an Australian-born, Mexican-raised nomad, captures a cult following in Britain and goes on to win the U.K.’s biggest literary award.

The novel in question is Vernon God Little, which took the Man Booker Prize this week and secured the future of its author, DBC Pierre (the nom de plume of Peter Finlay, a recovered drug addict and sometime con man). It’s a black comedy about the aftermath of a high-school mass murder in a dismal Texas town. Vernon, the titular 15-year-old narrator, is wrongly pegged as a killer and spends most of the novel dodging incompetent cops, a sinister psychiatrist, and a venal con man posing as a reporter.

In theory, the Booker win should be cause for celebration. Here’s a tony literary award going to a contemporary satire that’s giddy with grime. Finally, worthwhile funny stuff beats out phony gravitas. That theory, however, doesn’t survive an actual reading of Vernon God Little, which is ham-fisted as a satire and simply clumsy as a narrative. Either the Booker judges are crazy, or I am.

It may be that the novel’s success says more about the current state of international relations than its own literary merit. It’s hard to suppress the suspicion that this book has resonated with British readers mainly by flattering their laziest prejudices about George W. Bush’s home state. Amid the customer reviews on the Amazon U.K. web site, one admirer writes, “My main concern is that the crystal clear observation will never meet its ultimate target audience. Read this book and imagine it ending up on the shelves in Texas.” John Carey, the chairman of the Booker jury, called the novel “a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with modern America.”

And what does Vernon God Little tell us about Modern America? Well, that people in Texas are overweight and barbecue-gorged. That they’re materialistic and shallow, constantly jostling for status. That they’re easily gulled by the media, and will do just about anything to be on TV.

As a satirist, Pierre is not exactly stalking dangerous game here.

The action takes place in the fictional Texas town of Martirio (which can translate as either “martyrdom” or “torture”). A troubled teen, Jesus Navarro, has just shot and killed 16 of his fellow high-school students, as well as himself. The community’s revenge-hungry gaze quickly falls on Vernon, one of the killer’s only friends, who finds himself under suspicion as an accomplice. Vernon knew nothing of the murders and was nowhere near the crime scene – he suffers from a bowel disorder, and was defecating in a far-away field as the bodies fell. But in that field he’s also stashed a gun that, for reasons of his own, he wants to keep out of the hands of the authorities.

Vernon’s hapless deceptions backfire, of course, and soon enough no one in town believes him innocent, not even his own widowed mother. (Her refrain that “even murderers are loved by their families” is one of the book’s funnier bits.) Things get worse with the arrival of Eulalio Ledesma, a sociopathic drifter-grifter with plans to parlay the Martirio massacre into a TV career. Ledesma casts Vernon as a villain, tightening the noose of public opinion around his neck, and eventually our hero flees to Mexico, dreaming all the while of the panties of his rich-girl crush, Taylor Figueroa.

To his credit, Pierre understands the energizing effect that frustration can have on a reader. A martyr awaiting vindication and a villain in need of comeuppance never fail to liven up a story. But that energy can’t compensate for the paucity of vision here – or for the technical limitations, such as a half-hearted approach to plotting. Vernon’s bowel problem (“that inconvenience,” as his mother calls it) sets up the entire novel, but never once plagues him again throughout all his misadventures. And there’s little pleasure to be had in the story’s various twists: rather than startling or thrilling, the plot machinations seem simply slack and sluggish.

The novel’s satirical sensibilities are equally half-formed. Some promising gags, like the strange profusion of widows in Martirio, are mystifyingly underdeveloped, while more obvious jokes are mercilessly overworked. For readers looking to laugh bitterly at Modern America, the short stories of George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia) offer quirkier, more imaginative situations and wittier delivery – and Saunders also manages to connect with some real emotions.

Pierre tries to do the same in Vernon God Little with a running theme on the complicated bonds of family, but these efforts are hobbled by the failure of the novel’s narrative voice. First-person narration from a guileless and unsophisticated teenager need not sacrifice readability or artistry, but it should carry a sense of immediacy and plausibility. (A superb recent example is Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone.) Vernon’s voice, though, is never a believable one. It’s duly peppered with “ole” and “fucken” for local colour, but it’s also jangled by Pierre’s frequent reminders that there’s actually a Real Writer in charge here. Would a typical 15-year-old ever produce, in conversation, such a laboured construction as “She tugs my elbow. The force of it recommends the floor to my feet”?

Whether these affectations are entertaining in their own right is debatable. Vernon God Little has been praised for its energetic style, but for me, the writing holds little music. Here’s a typical riff: “Picture a wall of cancer clouds sliced clean across the border, cut with the Blade of God, because Mexican Fate won’t tolerate any of that shit down here. Intimate sounds spike the tide of travelers, the new brothers and sisters who spin me south down the highway like a pebble, helpless but brave to the wave.”

If that prose crackles for you, then call me crazy and enjoy the read.