The Complications of Definition

The day after Half-Blood Blues won the Giller Prize, the copy I had requested from the library finally came in. (I put it on hold when it was short-listed for the Booker.) Good timing there. I was pretty surprised Edugyan won the Giller, since I figured Ondaatje had a lock on it, just by existing. A lovely surprise though, and good on the jury for going with—what was to me—something unexpected. Among the Twittering class, it seemed The Antagonist was the favourite for the Giller. It took me while to get into The Anatagonist, but I felt it really came together well in the last 30 or so pages, and totally justified anything I'd tripped up on before. Anyway, this post isn't about the Giller or Lynn Coady (who has a really great Twitter presence, by the way).

It's can be tough to write about music.^* How do you describe it? How can you make a reader understand what the music sounds like, why it sounds that way? Edugyan is such a good writer, that she’s able to describe the technical details of playing jazz in a lyrical (see what I did thar?) way:

Kid wasn't even hardly listening, it seemed. Handling his horn with an unexpected looseness, with a almost slack hand, he coaxed a strange little groan from his brass. Like there was this trapped panic, this barely held-in chaos, and Heiro hisself was the lid.
I pulled back some as he come in, fearing we was going to overpower him in that narrow closet. But he just soften it down with me, blurr it up. Then he blast out one pure, brilliant note, and I thought, my god.

Edugyan not only describes the playing, and the piece, but the emotions embedded in it. Half-Blood Blues is the story of a piece of music, how that piece came to be, and who the people were that created it: Sid, the narrator of the novel and bass-player; Chip, his oldest friend and extremely talented percussionist; and Heiro, a prodigious horn player.

It wasn't true blues, sure, ain't got the right chord structure, but the kid ain't cared none. "Blues," he said, coughing roughly, "blue wasn't never bout the chords."

It has that same feeling of heat and sadness. I'm not going to pretend to be a jazz (or blues!) scholar or aficionado, I just know the way certain pieces, and artists, make me feel. Edugyan’s characters talk about jazz in that way, in the feeling. They risk their lives, they risk each other's lives, to capture that feeling perfectly onto a record. Edugyen captures the feeling perfectly on paper.

I might have been crying. It was the sounds of something growing a crust, some watery thing finally gelling. The very sound age, of growing older, of adolescent rage being tempered by a man's heart.

Edugyan does an amazing job of telling the story of Black jazz musicians in Europe at the outbreak of war, and it’s important that they’re not all American, so as to give lie to the notion of one monolithic “Black experience.” Half-Blood Blues is a thoughtful piece on how “race” is a very complicated concept. The “half-blood” refers to many of the characters in the novel. Almost no one is simply Black (and that’s essentially true of any population in Europe or North America)—if you take that as a concept of skin rather than a cultural one. Though, of course, it's cultural too. The complexities of a Black identity are in direct juxtaposition to the pure-blood Aryan movement happening in Germany during the novel^†. Wrapped up in how Blackness is experienced, there are differing levels of privilege, illustrated here within the microcosm of the band: Sid’s oldest and closest friend, Chip, does extremely well for himself later in life; Louis Armstrong is – by way of his fame – able to escape the worst of the war, and one of the characters bitterly remarks that everything is okay “as long as he gets out.” Edugyan educates the reader, through the character of Hieronymous Falk, about the Mischling: German children born of white mothers and African soldier fathers.

He was a Mischling, a half-breed, but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander. Hell, his skin glistened like pure oil. But he was German-born, sure. And if his face wasn't of the Fatherland, just bout everything else bout him rooted him there right good. And add to this fact that he didn't have no identity papers right now--well, let's just say wasn't no cakewalk for him

In a documentary made fifty years later about Heiro, the band's first manager elucidates:

"Life for black people under the Third Reich," he said through his nose, "was extremely contradictory. This is because there were so many different types of black people, and their treatment depended on what group they belonged to. [...] Hieronymous Falk," he went on, "now, he belonged to a rarer group. He was what back then was called a 'Rhineland Bastard.'

France sent in African soldiers from French colonial countries after WWI to occupy the Rhineland.

So even after the soldiers were sent home, and Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland, these children were seen as part of a significant insult to Germany. A cultural stain.

Heiro has the worst of all worlds. He is German, but is permanent reminder to all that see him of their defeat in WWI (and this is of course more and more dangerous as the years go on, and Nationalism rises). He’s denied citizenship under Hitler, but when he’s in soon-to-be occupied Paris, he’s cautioned against speaking in public. Heiro is German, he’s the enemy, he represents the invaders, even though his country of origin refuses to grant him a national identity. Heiro is completely stateless and lost. It’s heartbreaking. And it gets worse.
While in Hamburg, Heiro takes Sid to a zoo to show him a specific exhibit.

Black folk. Barefoot, dressed in rags and bones. And despite all the mud, despite the filth and the flies, their skin looked weirdly shiny. All silvery black, like the zookeepers kept them buffed up like onyx.
A ache come into my chest. "They keep people here?"
"This is just the African exhibit," Heiro muttered. "They got one for Samoans, for Esquimaux." He was trying to smile, like it ain't so horrifying. Or like it so horrifying, it funny. But the smile ain't reached his eyes.
"A human zoo," I mumbled. "Shit." I was just too damn astonished to say anything else.

It’s a difficult passage, and I wrestle with it. Is it that Germany saw all non-Aryans as animals? That seems too simplistic a reading. I keep feeling as if it’s just another level that Edugyan has placed on the hierarchy. By accident of birth, Heiro is considered more human than those born in Africa. Sid and Chip have US have citizenship, though would be subject to Jim Crow laws in many parts of the country. How high you are on the ladder depends, always, on someone under you. It’s something most of the characters are forced to engage with, and in my mind, it’s what drives Sid’s antagonist feelings towards Heiro. Sid is simply a better-than-most musician, and he resents Heiro’s talent. He wants take Heiro down a rung, not realizing Heiro feels – probably is – closer in situation to the caged Africans than his American bandmates.

I really loved Half-Blood Blues. It doesn't hurt that I just went to Paris a couple months ago, so the city in which most of the action takes place was still fresh in my mind^**. I think I said something earlier in the year (not specifically about Half-Blood) about "Nazi books" and how I'm a little worn out on them. Yet, authors keep coming up with new stories to tell, and new ways of looking at WWII. Half-Blood Blues is really, really sad, and beautiful, and it only became more so as it went on. So sad, that I didn’t want to finish, because the thing with WWII novels is you know that things are not exactly going to go well. Edugyan does relieves tension at the very beginning by telling the reader what happens to Heiro in Paris within the fist 20 pages or so, and in doing so makes the heartbreak of the journey to it ever-present.

^*"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
^**And the thing with Paris, is that it basically stopped building in the late 19^th century, so other than modern cosmetic touches, it looks pretty much the same as it would have to Edugyan’s characters.
^†I'm not sitting here pontificating on Black identity, though. I hope I'm not, anyway. I have zero first-hand knowledge of not being white. I'm acutely aware of this and I'm trying to restrict my analysis to what is in the text only. If I have over-stepped I'm happy to be told so.

The Female of the Species is More Deadlier Than the Male

I know I just said that I'm not hard on fiction. I guess what I mean, is that it takes a lot for me to call something a "bad book" or to say that I've wasted my time reading a novel. I finish almost everything I start, and there have been only two exceptions in the past couple years. However, most of the things I'm about to say about Snowdrops are complaints. It's nominated for the Booker, so I don't have to be rhapsodic about its merits, of which there are many. It's a caper book, that's made clear from the start. There is a sense of fun when speeding through, knowing there's a scam, wondering how it will unfold. Snowdrops has a bit of a pulp thriller feel to it, though written in a more high-minded style, more thoughtful than throwing a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter.

I enjoyed reading Snowdrops while I was reading it, but something nagged at me. About a week after I finished, I finally realised: I am sick of the honey-trap. I'm tired of the nebbishy guy seduced by the "bad" girl. I felt like I'd read Girl Crazy all over again, but set in Russia. Our protagonist, Nick, is a lawyer just moved to Moscow. He's a mediocre sort of fellow, without much in the way of personality, not much success with women, not much of a looker. Nick will be defined by the events around him, pulled along with the flow of cynical Russians, all on the take. Nick does not act, he reacts. Nick wants, but lets others take. Like Russell Smith's protagonist in Girl Crazy, Nick first encounters the conveniently slutty love interest while she's in distress. In this case, he foils a purse snatching. And Masha, after an accelerated courtship, gives him her body (and for extra kink, her “sister” watches). She continues to string Nick along for months, to ensure his help in the caper. (I'm not giving anything away here. Again, this is all foreshadowed in the telling.)

'In Russia,' Steve said, 'there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories.'

Nick falls in love anyway. He thinks of marrying Masha, even though he knows nothing about her, and admits as much to himself in the narrative —constructed as a letter to his now fiancée (like in Girl Crazy there's a dull, dependable girl at the end, to act as foil to the wild girl of yore).

That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.

Caper accomplished, Masha conveniently disappears so that Nick can get onto being whatever it is he's learned to be. He can go back to England having had the Great Adventure, settle down with his predictable boring late-life wife.

One is supposed to separate the work from the writer. I understand that this is crucial in literary critique. But there are seriously unprofessional parts of me that wonder about A.D. Miller (and since I'm not getting paid for this, being unprofessional now and then is probably inevitable). A BBC piece on Miller says: "Miller's own experiences in Russia were 'slightly more uneventful' than those of his fictional creation". It makes me wonder if he wishes that all this had happened to him. If he saw all the strip clubs and easy sex, the women he writes about as desperate to find a non-Russian husband, and wanted so much to have them for himself. Would it have mattered if those women had ripped him off, had hurt him, if he'd gotten to fulfill that Mata Hari dream? In the end, this girl is always a fiction. It feels like Miller is writing a fantasy for himself, a Booker nominated Penthouse Forum letter. “I can’t believe it happened to me. I was working in Russia…” While it is well written, at times clever, Snowdrops winds up existing in sexual cliché territory, and for me that's a bit tired and not the least challenging.

ETA: In the comments, I just proposed the idea that the letter Nick writes to his fiancée is in itself a fiction. That he's the dullest dude ever, and so he makes up this elaborate story to tell his girlfriend, so she'll find him more interesting. And if that's the case, if the book is that self-aware? Then it's fucking brilliant. And I'm willing, totally willing, to believe that's the case, if there's any evidence for it. I'd prefer fiction be good, after all

Whatever You Say I Am

I was saying to a friend, recently, that I'm a lot harder on non-fiction than fiction. Even when I don't wholly enjoy a novel or short-story collection I don't tend to judge it too harshly. I like to talk fiction, move around inside it, make connections. With non-fiction, there's often a thesis in the setup (memoir isn't wholly excluded from this), and that invites critical inquisition of the text, even if the thesis as a whole is solid (see my unhappiness with Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided). That's my theory on how I read, anyway.

The Psychopath Test danced right through all my argumentative tendencies, and stands as a solidly interesting read. Jon Ronson is an extremely talented writer and pure investigator. The Psychopath Test doesn't come from a single thesis, but rather the coalescing of several incidents and interviews that he'd done, which all seemed to make sense together in hindsight. For example, Ronson had interviewed "Tony" in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital for This American Life. Tony was living among serial killers and sex offenders as a consequence of claiming madness to get out of a jail sentence for aggravated assault. The psychiatrists at the time of his sentencing believed the quotes Tony had pulled from violent movies to be his own thoughts, and declared him insane. The NPR interview seemed pretty open and shut when I'd heard it years ago. Stupid kid does something stupid, and follows with stupid plot to Get Out of Jail Free. When he seems sane, the hospital thinks his treatment is working, and says they need to keep him. If he plays insane, he clearly needs to stay as well. Tony is stuck.

The Psychopath Test however, goes a bit further with Tony's story.
Seems Tony's doctors know very well that he faked his way into Broadmoor.

"Tony[...] did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison." [...]It was now the consensus. Tony's delusions --the ones he'd presented when he had been on remand in jail-- just, in retrospect, didn't ring true. [...]"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That's great!" I had liked Tony when I met him but found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert

However, the action of making up those stories in an attempt to escape prison, as well as many other indications have Tony diagnosed as a psychopath, according to the Hare Checklist.

But then I read Professor Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy."[...]Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

The genesis and applications of the Hare Checklist, named after and created by pioneering psychologist Bob Hare, are ostensibly the main focus of the book. Ronson gives a thorough introduction to the history of the treatment and diagnosis of psychopaths, with pertinent peripheral information about psychiatry/psychology — and its opponents — in general (there's a very interesting chapter on the history of the DSM, which is going into its fifth edition). Ronson then takes the checklist on the road and investigates whether psychopaths are disproportionately represented in the top ranks of corporate executives. The Psychopath Test refuses to have a central thesis, rather Ronson simply and entertainingly reports the facts as he can find them, and the events as they happen. Both Scientologists and psychiatrists are treated with fairness, and neither escape scrutiny. Ronson gives enough of himself, though, to keep the book engaging and avoid being dry recantation of names and dates. This is simply an excellent, well-researched non-partisan look at a specific subset of psychiatric definitions.

When I was in University I took a first-year psychology course as an option. One of the things our professor told us was that we would wind up diagnosing ourselves with all sorts of mental disorders when reading the text book. We were told to ignore this phenomenon (is there a name for it? I never knew), and do our best not to be concerned when we checked off symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder, or food related disorders. We were asked to leave naming of our psychoses and neuroses to the professionals. An interesting subtext of The Psychopath Test is how Jon Ronson begins to do just this, as he becomes more knowledgeable. No, he doesn't think he's a psychopath, but he discovers — he thinks — that he's in whatever the exact opposite category is. He's too anxious, too interested in other people, he feels fear more physically^*. At the same time, he begins diagnosing random people with psychopathy, after taking one class with Bob Hare. That, if anything, is one of the lingering and more important messages in The Psychopath Test: A little learning is a very dangerous thing.

^*It's theorized that psychopaths had a low or non-functioning amygdala. Once Ronson hears about this, he feels his go in to overdrive rather too often.

Looking In

When Pigeon English was released early this year, we didn't know what would happen in London in August...

The narrative revolves around Harrison — Harri — an 11-year old boy, newly arrived to England from Ghana. He lives with his mother and older sister, while his father and baby sister have stayed behind. Harrison's family, like so many immigrant families, lives in a bad neighbourhood (in London), defined by crime and violence. Through the first-person narrative, Harrison retains an innocence and sense of wonder that seems to belong to someone several years younger. This is at times not exactly plausible, as when he seems to have absolutely no knowledge of human sexual activity. I remember being 11. I wasn't participating in anything, but I certainly knew some of the mechanics (and I can't just blame Jean M. Auel for that). Then again, perhaps the avenues which kids in Europe and North America learn about sex just didn't exist in Ghana; I can't claim to know anything about it. In other ways, the exaggerated innocence seems appropriate, as his class-mates are portrayed socially similar. The games and they way they play them sometimes seem, again, something younger kids would be interested in. (I should note, though, that by "innocent" I don't mean "simple.") The comparison has been made, favorably for Pigeon English, to Emma Donoghue's Room, with Harri judged an easier child narrator to read and accept. Readers often found Room's Jack both too precocious and annoying (I don't agree). Harri remains likeable and for the most part, age-appropriate (as above, if anything, he skews slightly young for his age). The Guardian review says

Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.

I think most of this, aside from my issues with innocence, can be chalked up to Harri's difficulty using language in his new context. I think Stephen Kelman's writing is pretty clear on that.

While it's not explicit, one assumes that Harri's family is (in waves) moving to England for a "better life," but his flashbacks to time spent in his home country show that he is now much worse off. (Though this may be some of the troubling white framing of black experience as seen in The Help, or evoking a "noble savage" type.) Comparatively, London is dirty, violent, and crowded. People are selfish, preferring to harm rather than help others. The never-easing class divide in England cuts across colour and and country of origin, keeping a poisonous river between the have-nots and the have-too-much. The origins of the August 2011 London riots, it's been said, erupted from a feeling of absolute hopelessness, from the societal group of which Harri is now a member. Unlike the prevailing "You can be anything" message that American kids grow up with (erroneous or not), England likes to keep its classes separate. Given the historically abysmal record in the way England treats the poor, upward mobility isn't even considered; it's just assumed getting out is not possible. Near the end of the novel, the seniors in Harri's school write goodbye messages on each other's school shirts. Two pages are devoted just to these messages, and they illuminate the matter-of-fact acceptance of the fate of those without means. It doesn't even seem sad or angry, it just is. The messages read like any year-book: some are just names, some are jokes or bawdy quips. They begin^*:

GOOD LUCK KEEP IT REAL     spud
NORTHWELL MANOR TILL I DIE        TYRONE
TAKE IT EASY GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN naomi
DFC [the initials of a local gang]FUCK SCHOOL LEWSEY HILL R. PUSSIES

Then others start, interspersed with the sort above, with a new theme:

JUST ENOUGH EDUCATION TO PERFORM
repeat after me: DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?
DON'T PAY TAX, SELL DRUGS INSTEAD
SEE YOU AT THE JOB CENTRE
Be warned: the future doesn't need you![emphasis mine]

It feels almost prescient that mere months before the London Riots this novel would be published, capturing the soon-to-be-violent malaise of a demographic group so strongly. Harri, while a newcomer, shares a lot with his peers, and neighbours. Like him, most of the people in Pigeon English are essentially, easily good. For example, Terry Takeaway is a thief and a drunk, owner of a pitbull (hallmark of a "bad guy" in many places), but he's also on the lookout for Harri, willing to defend him from older kids for no other reason than it's intrinsically right. (The pitbull, Asbo, is revealed to be a loveable pup, and Harri enjoys playing with him immensely.) There are only a couple essentially bad characters in Pigeon English, and Kelman is careful to make them different as possible, to show that the hard, evil criminals of legend aren't the majority. When things go bad on a large scale, as in the August riots, it's often not because people have substandard ethics or upbringing (fuck you very much, David Cameron), but because they're pulled along, never having been allowed to know another way to be.

There's a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional—getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional—and they go, "That's what we're going to make a film about."<sup>*


*</sup>I've attempted to replicate the changes in type on these pages of the novel, which indicate that there are different people writing each message.
^**Actor Eddie Marsan, interviewed by Jonathan Romney in The Independent, May 2, 2010. As quoted in Jon Ronson's The Pyschopath Test (210).
^***Also, I think I've figured out — for myself anyway — the "talking" pigeon character that seems to have caused so many readers so much trouble. He's supposed to be for Harri, as Harri is for the neighbourhood; an outsider looking in, with a perspective that illuminates the situation. I agree, though, it doesn't really work.

Wild Abandon

My first experience with the work of Joe Dunthorne was watching the movie adaptation of Submarine. The movie is a bit off-kilter, slightly trippy, and seemingly coloured by remembrance. It’s also a bit uneven, and I was left not terrifically impressed. It was, then, with an open mind but a small amount of trepidation I began to read Dunthorne’s new novel, Wild Abandon. What I got was the usual outcome of the book vs movie duel: something much, much better on the page than on the screen.^*

Wild Abandon follows the lives of commune, or their preferred term “community,” members in Wales. Don and Freya are a middle-aged married couple, and half of the creating force behind the community. Janet, their school chum, and Patrick, former landlord and provider of startup capital, round out the founders. The community is in decline, after a decade or so or humming along. New members are hard to find, there aren’t many children.

Don, with his degree in film studies, is ever the actor reciting lines. He’s described as often seeming to have rehearsed things is his head, many times, before speaking. “Don preferred himself in front of the lens. In the same way that a miserable holiday, when viewed through its photographs, becomes a stream of joyful moments.” In a flashback sequence, he is away from the community and gets the call his wife is giving birth to their first child, Kate. He relishes the role of the immediately expectant father, racing back, practicing what he’ll say, dramatically, to the cop that pulls him over for speeding (and is saddened when it doesn’t happen). That he doesn’t make it in time to see Kate born is representative of his character. Freya is responsible in birth, as well as in death; she’s been dubbed the community’s “abattoir,” because she’s the only one who can actually kill and butcher animals. The sexual politics between Freya and Don are interesting: it’s the woman who works hard, and gets down to what has to be done, because there’s little choice; the man lives in the mind, making speeches and directing, while doing very little himself. This relationship isn’t atypical in literature or life; I’m thinking of the Great Male Author trope, with his long-suffering wife behind him, making financial and household arrangements while the artist needs his think-time.

Kate has her sights set on going to University elsewhere in the next year, and 11-year old son Albert is too smart yet not socialized enough. Kate escapes the community to the home of her boyfriend’s parents. Like most teenagers, she wants only what she doesn’t have while living with her parents (and this is echoed by boyfriend Geraint moving to the community later on). She seeks what she thinks will be a more interesting sort of discord.

Considering that Kate had never spent any time in a suburban home before, she had a highly developed understanding of what to expect; during her upbringing, her father had encouraged her to make the most of his film collection, which had a lot to say on that subject, including The Graduate, Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty, and The Ice Storm. One of the community's well-told stories was of Kate, aged ten, setting an alarm for herself to wake at 3 a.m. so that she could come downstairs and watch Poltergiest, the definitive suburban horror film.

In fact, what she finds is that life is pretty much humdrum no matter where you run to.

The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia's dark and seething underbelly, she had found its potbelly of contented boredom.

( In this way, Dunthorne reads a bit like a gentler, less satirically-minded Tom Perrota.)

Everyone in Wild Abandon is a bit like Kate, moving and shifting, enjoying the new but eventually searching for a new place that might be just a bit better: Kate eventually gets into Cambridge; her parents leaving London squats for the wilds of Wales; Patrick leaves the commune to once again work a full-time job and have an apartment; Freya wanting to leave Don and get Albert into regular school; Geraint joining the community. It’s reminiscent of the constant ebb and flow of city/suburban populations. Albert, not having the possibility of self-determined mobility at his age, turns to an Apocalypse scenario centered on a black hole for comfort. It’s child’s logic; if he never leaves his known world, the only possible change is for the world to end. Kate is the embodiment of that black hole—as her sphere increases (going to school outside the community, then leaving for the Three Crosses suburb, then going to college) the more Albert feels his world is ending.


Dunthorne has just the right descriptive simile or metaphor handy at all times. This isn’t as easy to pull off as you might think; the descriptor has to be contextual, so much so that it gives the reader a perfect idea of the scene at hand, without distraction. Dunthorne has this down to an art, and it’s an integral part of his style. This might be annoying in the hands of a lesser writer, but I only noticed the comparatives so often because of how perfect they were. Early on in the novel, one of the founding members of the community, Patrick, has a paranoid episode after ingesting both marijuana and mushrooms. Fleeing the community on a cold night in just underwear, he tears through the brush, coming out into a suburban street in an empty new development. As he succumbs to hypothermia he falls onto the “road shaped like a thermometer -- a turning circle at one end.” Not only is this an accurate visual, it’s loaded with symbolism. The thermometer, of course, speaks of temperature and Patrick’s loss of body heat. The choice of a cul-de-sac, though, also represents an ending, the bottom of the bag, or in Intervention speak, rock bottom. Patrick quits the community, and gets clean (after a last hurrah of enjoying hospital sponsored morphine drips). Later, Kate takes her university qualifying exams:

There was something enjoyable about the tarot of turning over an exam paper: a whole gymnasium full of people reading their fortunes.

Again, this is perfect on a couple levels. Exam results do tell the future, but on a smaller and more physical level, the turning of the papers is indeed very like turning over tarot cards. It makes the moment slower than I remember when I took my exams, and more lovely. Wild Abandon is like that sometimes, making the reader stop sometimes, over the small moments, looking at the small parts of life in a new way. That’s what good literature does.

Kate’s first memory of cartoons is watching “Steamboat Willie.” She’s struck by the pile of potatoes Willie is tasked to peel, a pile that never seems to end or get any smaller. It gives her nightmares. The petite-bourgeois lives in Wild Abandon are similar in that, not getting ahead, just making lateral movements. (The commune, while at times hardscrabble and always ad-hoc still falls into this category, having been created by a property owner and three holders of liberal arts degrees). Comfortable survival is the same on the commune as in the suburbs. The novel’s title, perhaps, relates to those small moments which stand outside just-living, like the two rave parties depicted (an accidental one in the past, a party for Kate’s birthday that got out of hand, and the one that climaxes the book, which is engineered to generate interest in the community). Perhaps, though, the title is sarcastic, because no matter the location, being middle-class has conformity clauses.

Reviewed from advanced reading copy, courtesy Penguin Books Canada.
^*Yeah, I get that they’re different works. ^**
** And I’m glad I haven’t read Submarine, actually. The Guardian review did that thing that The G&M review did with The O’Briens, talking about how the first book was much better. Sometimes, it’s good to start with the second book?

Making 9/11 All About Me*

In the last ten years I've finished university, been married and divorced, moved cities, traveled across the Pacific twice, got out of retail, got out of publishing, made and lost friends, found a great love, and chose to get sterilised. It's been a big decade.

In 2001 I was 25, living alone and in my last semester of university. My routine was as it had been for years: get up after about five hours sleep, attend one or two classes, race home and change to go to work till 11, study, five hours sleep. I didn't interact with people at school, because I never really had time. Class, work, sleep. So on September 11^th I went to school as usual. I had one class that morning, so I likely woke up around 9 am, without listening to the radio or turning on the TV, just racing to school. The professor didn't mention anything. There were no scenes of people crying and being comforted. There weren't TVs in the hallways or classrooms tuned to CNN. Everything was perfectly normal. People were probably talking to each other about it, but I hadn't talked to anyone that day, other than the people serving coffee. They didn't say anything. Maybe they assumed I already knew. I had no idea.

In writing that, I think I've just come to understand the biggest mystery of my whole 9/11 story. People asked "How could you not know? How could people not have said something about it?" I think the answer is timing. By the time I left my house, and got my first coffee of the day, it was 9:30, mountain time. The towers had collapsed an hour before. It was already done, and maybe at that point it was unlikely you'd say to a stranger, "Have you heard?" Because everyone would have heard. Except, I hadn't heard.

I got home from school a little after 1 pm, 3 pm eastern time. That's when I turned on my TV. I remember this part clear as anything. The first thing I saw was some politician or another saying "America is still the greatest nation in the world." My first thought, as a Canadian used to complaining about the cultural imperialism and hubris of the United States, was Oh, these fucking Americans! And then the scene switched to footage of Tower One collapsing, Tower Two just rubble and smoke behind it. Something was very, very wrong.

What everyone already knew, I learned six hours after the fact. Was I the last person to hear about 9/11? I sat on the floor in front of the TV and watched the highlight reel, because that's what it was by that point. The second plane strike, the collapse, the people fleeing in terror. I called my then-boyfriend, later husband, who was living in New Jersey. I hadn't been out there yet, so I didn't know if where he lived was that sort of "across the river from Manhattan" New Jersey, I didn't know how widespread the attacks were, how bad the national damage was. He was fine, he told me not to worry, everything was fine. I don't remember being emotional when I called. I was too confused.

After talking to the boyfriend, I was finally able to start putting things together, and I got online. Livejournal was the preferred social network at that time, and there was a lot of material to get through. People had been posting events as they happened, and the fear and confusion of watching it all go down in real time was a live wire in every word. I had friends in Toronto who'd been evacuated from their workplace. I had Calgary friends stranded in Toronto, because all flights had been grounded. At some point I realised a Calgary friend was in New York City that day, and no one had heard from him. I'm sad to say that this is when I started crying; the possibility of my loved one caught up in it all made it real and human, finally. I suppose it may be possible that's when the shock wore off enough to let in some comprehension of the real scale of what I'd been seeing. I called work, because I was so scared for my friend, told them I couldn't leave until someone had heard from him. Work understood. And so I waited. Around 4 pm Calgary time, I learned he'd been in contact with Toronto people. He drove out of NYC that morning, before rush hour to avoid traffic, and had gotten stuck at the border trying to get back into Canada. The borders, of course, were total chaos. He'd been in the WTC the day before. He still has the ticket stub dated September 10, 2001. They'd gone a day earlier than planned.

I went to work, at the 7-11, shell-shocked, two hours late. My loved ones were accounted for, I could go on. It was a weird night. A special edition of the paper came in around 9 o'clock. Customers were infrequent, and quiet. Everyone, by now, knew. Everything was still up in the air, there were no answers yet. We were so far away from what happened, yet we had tilted a little, and it took a while to stop feeling like every day was going to change us again.

In the past couple weeks I've been obsessed with watching 9/11 coverage. I found a site that has archived the live feeds from CNN, CBC, and the BBC from that entire morning. I still have such a hard time understanding that day, because I missed so much of it. I literally slept through the events of 9/11, and it creates this need in me to fill in the missing pieces. I've seen some people talk of a memorial fatigue this week, and I get that. I, however, don't suffer from it. If anything, I require more information, more pictures, more taped phone calls.

If I remember right, it's 10:28 eastern time that Tower One collapses. I watched the five seconds of that on the CBC feed, over and over. They're saying they don't know what happened to Tower Two, because it's in the background, and then Tower One goes. You hear the entire newsroom make a sound... it's a horror movie sound. It's the sound of a heart and a brain breaking into pieces simultaneously. I wasn't there for it, so I needed to feel it, repeatedly. I don't know what that's about.

I was in NYC last month. The PATH train I took in from Jersey City lets out at WTC. On a day I spent alone, just wandering Manhattan, I spent some time at St. Paul's. Hard to imagine how it escaped damage, let alone total destruction, being just feet from Ground Zero. That whole block, even on that sunny day ten years later, full of tourists and citizens going about their day as normal, is a heavy place. I took pictures of Revolutionary era gravestones, while America's involuntary mass burial ground sat behind construction-boards in front of me. Heavy, yet peaceful. In that place, in those moments, all I could feel was hope that peace had come for all those souls, and the ones who loved them.

I'm sure, though, I'm not alone when I say that I still don't understand any of it.


Photo: James Nachtwey, Time.

^*This post isn't about the politics of 9/11, the aftermath, or the reasons why. This is just a personal reflection on that day. It's my answer to "where were you when?"

Easy Reads

This week, the Booker Shortlist and the Giller Longlist were announced. Thus, my library queue got crazy again, and there's going to be a whole lot of Literature up in here pretty soon. It seems appropriate, then, that I just polished off a total snack-book, Emma Forrest's Cherries in the Snow^*.

Having read Forrest's memoir, Your Voice in my Head just recently, I was a bit distracted by knowing which details of Cherries were "write what you know," and unavoidably making conjecture as to which other details were true. Forrest's personality is evident in Cherries, which is smart, funny, and just slightly raunchy. The main character, Sadie, is a young, hip English Jewish girl living in New York (as is Forrest). As the novel begins she's in a relationship with an older man, a journalist. I believe Forrest mentioned a long-time relationship with an older playwright in Your Voice. I began to wonder how much of the stilted sex life in the first part of the book was fiction, and how the older man (men?) in her life felt about that.
The novel is a chick-lit romp through makeup and love, with a feisty eight-year old thrown in. No startling new territory here. Kate Carraway's The Globe & Mail review of Your Voice in My Head says of Forrest's earlier fiction

I and other twentysomething disaffecteds read half-sunk in lukewarm bathwater, searching for instruction and connection with her characters, all of them good bad girls, messy and wanting.

This intrigued me, but I probably would have enjoyed this book a lot more in my teens and 20s. For me, it was possible to believe in those years that a man like the love-interest Marley was on the horizon. Marley is a prince-charming composite, perfect for Emma Forrest, BEST LOVAH EVER (really? at 24 you get this? really?) with a dark distant-past, enough cash to go around, who falls in love with our protagonist almost instantly, but not slavishly. Ten years ago I could easily dream that I too would one day have a glamourous job at a cosmetics company in the big city... oh, shit; I do have a job a cosmetics company in the big city. Anyway, what I mean is, this is all delightful fantasy stuff but at this point in my life Cherries is the sort of thing that entertains only while I'm reading it. To really care about a book like this one probably needs to be able to feel like they could put themselves into the main character and I was wholly unable to do so. I really, really loved Forrest's memoir, and I look forward to any forthcoming work. I suspect it will speak to me more than Cherries in the Snow.

Something I never, ever stop loving is a big old multi-generational epic. Peter Behrens' The O'Briens is a good choice if you're in the mood for such. The reviews I've seen mention his first (and, they say, better) novel The Law of Dreams, which won the Governor General's award. Since I haven't read that one I haven't any comparative complaints. The O'Briens begins before WWI and ends in the 1960s, following the fortunes of Joe O'Brien and his extended family. Again, from The Globe and Mail:

We see no consequence more dire than his wife being angry with him, but even then we’re not sure whether she wants to leave him because of his drinking binges or because she has fallen in love with J. Krishnamurti.

That's valid, but I didn't really mind the lack of big drama. Some bad things happen, but everyone's pretty much okay in the end, and I don't have a particular issue with that treatment. The O'Briens is a story, not an opera.
I read a lot of Judith Krantz and Barbara Taylor Bradford novels years ago, and the way The O'Briens deals mostly with the lives of the privileged felt similar. Some might take that comparison as an insult, I don't know, but it's certainly not meant that way. Those books, as with The O'Briens, were easy and engaging, over 500 pages and 50-plus fictional years.
As for quibbles, I do have a couple. The O'Briens is most interesting in its early going, usually when focusing on the matriarch, Iseult, and it does suffer sometimes from possible behavioral anachronisms (for example, I'm not sure how easy it would be for a woman to leave her husband and flee the country with her children in 1931, or if many women would even think of the possibility). As well, there was a stand-out magical sperm phallacy (I coined it that day, yes the "ph" is intentional) early on that had quite a few of my Twitter pals giggling^**. Otherwise, it's a fine read, and sometimes just "fine" is exactly what I want.

Okay, awardies and fall lists. Let's do this. *rolls up sleeves*

^*That review is a random Google find, and a lovely little review it is!
^**My tweet: "Her firm white belly loaded with mystery." Oh bugger off, it's JIZZ not the Arc of the Covenant.

Teenage Dirtbag

Mansfield Press imprint, A Stuart Ross Book, kindly sent me a review copy of Mongrel after my post about author Marko Sijan's piece in CNQ. As I said in the comments to that post, I was honestly curious to see what the author of "The Gutter Years" would do with a longer, fictional format (which, of course, was the point of "The Gutter Years": get attention for the long-delayed novel). So thanks, Stuart.

Mongrel follows the lives of five teenagers, and their circles, who attend the same high-school in Windsor, Ontario. Each part of the novel is narrated by one of the five, and traces their interactions with each other. The Windsor of Mongrel is a dark, dirty, and depressing place. I've never been to Windsor, so I can't say for sure if this is accurate or not, though Alexander McLeod's Light Lifting seems a more realistic record of the place. Still, if you're stuck in a place of unhappiness as a teenager, things do tend to seem more apocalyptic than they actually are. The teens in Mongrel are very, very messed up. Several come from abusive or neglectful homes. School is ultra-violent, with no intervention from faculty.

I couldn't help but think of (the truly wonderful) Lemon while reading Mongrel and comparing their versions of desperately downtrodden teendom. In Lemon, though, you had someone to root for. Lemon faced a world much like the one in Mongrel, under constant threat of violence, amidst poverty and suspect parenting, but she was also a character you wanted to succeed. Lemon is a novel with real heart, and compassion. Mongrel feels more like pushing buttons and acting out, less from rebellion than implacable aggression.

Sijan is very adept at writing first person teenage narrative. The language through most of Mongrel is very juvenile, and veers often into needless "gross out" territory. But, that's fine. Actually, it works very well, for what Sijan is—I think —trying to do here. Teenage boys really are pretty gross, and they are very convincingly rendered here. There are also a couple chapters dedicated to female characters. The first, Sera, is pretty far up her own ass, which I totally buy. There are always plenty of those people in high-school who think they've got it all figured out already^*. It's the hubris of youth. The other, Sophie, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, self-hating and anorexic. This, too, is convincing. The female teens in the book, by the way, are portrayed no better or worse than the males. Everyone is equally fucked up in high-school. Of course, they're all equally unlikeable too, and the reader is left without anyone to care about (again, unlike Lemon). That's not really a problem in itself; I'm sure plenty of successful novels are filled with jackasses. For this reader, however, an anchor for empathy is helpful. Least well-treated is Sophie's mother, who is depicted as taking home random men, and teen-aged boys (Sophie's classmates), for the purposes of anal-only sex. It's suggested this is a result of the trauma of her husband being not-secretly in love with her not-gay father. There's something really off about this characterization, though most of the parents in Mongrel are better written, and in some cases are the only locus of compassion and decency.

There's supposed to be some subtext in Mongrel about culture and class clash, and fitting in, but it gets drowned out by passages like

[...]she always had ten to fifteen zits on her forehead and chin, ripe whiteheads filled with pus, which I'd rub my face against when we were humping. When they'd pop, I'd lick them up.

or

She's all possessed with her left eye twitching and she wraps her hand around mine, and starts jerking me off. She pulls her eyebrows in like bat's wings and speeds up and it feels wicked so I tilt my head back against the wall and close my eyes and keep playing with her Zulu tits[.]

The message I get in the end, is that everyone is horrible, and will continue to be horrible through the generations. Parents fuck you up, no matter how good or bad they are to you, and you will propagate more fucked up kids in turn. As the books ends we learn Gunther, the pus-licker above, has impregnated Sophie. He discovers Sophie's condition after having anal-only sex with her Mom, then stealing into Sophie's room to find her barely alive, reading her suicide note... oh, come on. I'm trying here, but some things are just a bit ridiculous.

It will probably come as no surprise that I didn't like Mongrel. This book isn't for me, I am not its audience. I'm not sure who the audience would be, precisely.

^*Surely, there are people of every age like this, and no one person has everything figured out. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that teenagers aren't too young to start on this game, though there is something about the teenage ego that still finds it hard to see past their own nose. HI, I AM AN OLD LADY. GET OFF MY LAWN.

RIP Jack Layton

I've been trying to write something about Jack Layton for a day now. I could never do him justice, so this is just a small thing inspired by this stunning panorama of the messages of love and respect at Toronto City Hall.

Maybe it's just me, but isn't this how we should feel about the people we elect to lead us? Shouldn't we trust them with more than our tax bill? Isn't it more important that our leaders believe in all of us, rich and poor, than in separating us by income? I realise it's a bit Pollyanna, but I can't wrap my head around why people accept anything less. Yet they do, and they will. In the meantime, others will continue to do Jack Layton's work, and spread his message that we can always do better than we have before, as Canadians. That's the family he was always talking about; I've never felt it more keenly than now.

The mourning, it seems, has not yet passed.


Patrick Corrigan, The Toronto Star

Someone Wrote a Book About Calgary*

A couple months ago, I was reading Shawn Micallef's tweets about his time in Calgary with a critical and cynical eye. I thought he got it right, most of the time, and though I could be nitpicky about some details in the tweets, I won't. I've always said that Calgary can be fun if you're a visitor.

Of course, I know Calgary in a different way. I lived there for the first 26 years of my life and I return every 1-2 years to visit my Dad, my cat, the house I grew up in, and take the drive to Banff to see my ailing Mother. I went back in early June this year, to a place I recognize less and less. Maybe it's from living in Toronto so long, I've forgotten just how incredibly aggressive the whole vibe is in Calgary. For the first time, I felt uneasy in my hometown. Walking down 17^th Ave, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I felt menaced. The quiet at my Dad's house, in an early 70s suburb backed by Nose Hill Park (at right^**), was eerie more than comforting. I looked over my shoulder a lot. Driving, as Micallef put it, is "no fun. No fun." I saw some cyclists attempt to ride on these hostile streets, and my hats off to them. If all of those complaining about the lack of bicycle infrastructure in Toronto could see what these bold Calgarians deal with, they'd be amazed at how good we have it^†.

I did take a bit of issue with the Spacing post that went up later, only in that I felt the reach could have been a bit broader. I lived in one of the neighbourhoods just out of downtown, after moving out of my parents' house. And yes, they can be lovely. In fact, I returned to that neighbourhood several times during my last trip. Micallef mentions Crescent Heights, which was the aspirational housing of kids from the north-western suburbs. Mount Royal was where we wandered, after-bar, Elbow River in the moonlight. But go a little further and things change. Each neighbourhood homogeneously proclaims its decade as you move further away from the core, "mixed" architecture being an anathema. The ability to walk to much of anything is gone. My parents' house is 2km from the nearest grocery store. Try that with a bag-full of canned goods. It's not that the Calgarian suburbs are a nutritional desert; there isn't a convenience store any closer. It's just house, after house, after house. I'd like to see what Micallef would make out of this wasteland. The 'burbs are mandated to look uniform.

It's this sort of environment in which Monoceros takes place. The pressure for uniformity in the Calgary suburbs extends, too, to the people who live there. Calgary is hyper-masculine, and to step out of line is to become extremely vulnerable. There's little support for those who won't fall into place.

What I love about Monoceros, is how Suzette Mayr set a book in Calgary, without using any overt cowboy tropes. Mayr, interestingly, has most of the narrative take place in February. You'd think it would be difficult to write about a prairie winter, or perhaps monotonous to read about one, but Mayr's lucky to have Calgary to work with, with its ever-changing temperature. The Chinooks that roll in and out through Monoceros affect the moods and actions of the characters, like the Santa Ana winds do in a Raymond Chandler story.

If the weather in Calgary is totally unpredictable, the prejudices that run through the populous are easy to call. This is why Max and Walter hide their relationship (which is a marriage in everything but name, right down to the boredom of familiarity) for over a decade, to the point of maintaining separate residences in name only, lest they be fired from their shared Catholic high-school workplace. When Patrick Furey kills himself, it's partially due to the knowledge that navigating this world, when his classmates have begun to clue into his sexuality, will be too difficult. The boy he loves, Ginger, has gone cold, after conducting a secret affair. Ginger, too, knows the risks are too great. Calgary is a city infused with testosterone, and enforces a strict code of conduct. This isn't to say there aren't out people there, but to be out is sometimes a luxury that some can't afford. It's still this way; tall, thin, black-wearing friends of mine still get "fag-rolled" simply for looking like something other.

Monoceros is solidly a book about Calgary, even if it is rarely explicit about it. Mayr understands very well the hetero-normative crush of the suburbs, which take up more than 90-percent of Calgary's area, and at least as much of its collective consciousness.

^*See, also: "No One Writes Books About Calgary."
^**That photo, by the way, was taken at 8:30 pm in early June. When you leave for a while, it becomes wonderful and confusing how late the light stays.
^†What Calgary does have, is a lot of off-road trails, which are more recreational in intent, though I suspect some do get used for commutes out of the suburbs.