March 14, 2006

Claire's Head by Catherine Bush

(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, March 11, 2006)

Claire's Head is a novel that catches up with the reader. Or perhaps, the reader finally catches up with it. One might be forgiven for wondering, initially, if there would be much here to interest anyone who does not have migraines — in a nutshell, the novel is about Claire, a migraineur who seeks her missing sister and fellow sufferer, Rachel — but that suspicion rapidly fades. The several fruitless journeys, the false starts, coalesce into an archetypal journey towards, not revelation, exactly, nor anything as banal as "growth." Perhaps "towards" is the wrong word, implying as it does some sort of final destination; say, rather, "through." Claire journeys through and out the other side.

There are three sisters in this novel, all coming to terms with the sudden death of their parents in a bizarre accident, all making choices about their lives: where to live, what to work at, whether to have partners or children. Overlaying these common questions Claire and Rachel must also come to terms with their headaches. Bush's portrait of the cautious migraineur who will not leave the house without her stash of pain medication is masterful, as is her evocation of the altered states induced both by those drugs and by migraines themselves. Some readers will no doubt find themselves comparing their own medications and regimes to those of the characters. ("Zomig, eh? I haven't tried that yet. No, acupuncture didn't work for me, either. What she says about tryptophan is worth looking into; must make a note …") These medications, these regimes, for the migraineur are not about a cure, but about preventing and managing — or at least trying to take the edge off — pain.

Pain is practically a character in this novel: the place and function of pain in ones life; the solipsism of pain. The seeking of relief from pain; the ways in which pain can shape other choices. And, most perceptively, the ways in which pain can be integral to our perceptions of the world, and to who we are.

Claire is a cartographer. It is work she enjoys and it reflects the way in which she makes sense of the world and keeps chaos at bay: she is always aware of her location and her orientation; she has an excellent sense of direction; she only needs to study a map for awhile when visiting a new place and can then with confidence put it away in her purse; she counts steps and calculates distances. She maps locations just as she maps the course of her headaches. Bush's narrative reflects this exactitude; a reader, so inclined, could comfortably follow Claire's several journeys by placing coloured pins on a map. This is not abstract knowledge: Bush evokes the sights, and even more importantly to a migraineur, the sounds and smells, of all her locations. A strong sense of place is crucial in a novel with such a kaleidoscope of settings: Toronto, New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Tuscany, Las Vegas, and finally Mexico. It is a credit to Bush's artistry that each and every one of these locations becomes tangible, particularly at the last: ironically Claire, who once lived in the safety of an apartment upstairs from her married sister, by the end of the novel enters a quasi-mythic landscape of which she is less certain, and certainly less in control.

There is not a whiff of humour in this novel: that, and the characters in their rarified world of globe-trotting funded by their parents' insurance money and their single-minded quest for relief, create a very real danger of limitation. But Bush is too good a writer to fall into that trap and her scope imperceptibly expands so that even though we end as we began, in Claire's head, the implications of her journey ripple outwards.

This beautifully written novel will certainly speak to migraineurs. But more broadly, it will resonate with anyone dealing with chronic pain, or indeed pain more generally. And that includes us all.

(Catherine Bush, UNB Writer-in-Residence, will be in Saint John March 13-24. In my office, in fact.)

February 24, 2006

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined ed. by Buchanan and Hudock

"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune"
(Francis Bacon, Essays)

In their introduction to Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined Andrea Buchanan and Amy Hudock make the convincing argument that literature about motherhood has generally been undervalued; that it is a sub-group of women's literature that gets little respect from men or many women. Anthologies such as this one and the Literary Mama website, where these pieces were first published, are attempts to fill a gap and redress a need.

The quote from Bacon, above, may not be entirely pertinent here, as it is addressed to men and seems to admonish them that if they want to achieve "great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief" they had better remain single. Would-be nuclear physicists or bank robbers, take heed. But then again, the tension between mothering and outside work/life/identity is a constant theme in this collection, so perhaps it applies after all. And even if it was not Bacon's intended meaning, I have always found the term "hostages to fortune" to be resonant of the particular anxiety of being a parent.

Even more graphically — though it doesn't roll off the tongue in quite the same way as Bacon's words — and I can't remember where I read or heard it, but — someone wrote that having a child was like having your heart removed from your body and watching it walk around.

Which is all to say, don't read this book in a public place or you may end up sobbing in a cubicle in the washroom at your local diner but quickly stifling it when someone else comes in, someone who thinks they are alone and so shuts off the lights when they leave, which would leave you sitting in the dark but not enough in control of your voice to call out, "Hey lady, I'm in here!" and so you would have to find your own way to the light switch in pitch black, and you might bang your head. Which would improve neither your state of mind nor your appearance.

To be fair, this might not happen to every reader. And please don't be alarmed at the sobbing part. I certainly don't mean to give the impression that all, or even most, of the pieces collected here are tragic. A couple are; a couple may break your heart. But almost all of them share, in one way or another, in the sense of how the world becomes a much more threatening place once we have birthed a child. In the sense of how happiness is revealed as so much more fragile than we had thought, back when our hearts were safely inside our bodies and not tottering around on two very small legs.

There are some tragic stories here. There is, in fact, a whole section about illness and loss which contains some wrenching writing (Megeen Mulholland's "Miscarriage of an English Teacher," Phyllis Capello's "Hospital Quartet," and Heidi Raykeil's "Johnny" are particularly powerful). But I wasn't even there yet when I embarrassed myself at the diner; I was reading something more quotidian, something about the small, incremental losses that inevitably happen as a child grows up and away: Linda Lee Crosfield's "Packing the Car," maybe, or garrie keyman's "Son of a Bitch."

There are other clusters of texts that caught me up, as well. Short of revealing too much on a blog that some of my students read, let's just say that some of the pieces in "Sex, Fertility, and the Body" resonated, and leave it at that.

The texts in the section "Mothers, Fathers, Parents" were mainly about being a child rather than having one. Two of the pieces, Sybil Lockhart's "Grey" and Liz Abrams-Morley's "Mitzraim," describe caring for parents with Alzheimer's or dementia. That is my own situation, and I found both pieces oddly comforting.

I don't want to imply that these writings are only interesting in a therapeutic way; they are, after all, published in an anthology called Literary Mama. The editors are claiming a place for narratives of motherhood within, rather than separate from, literary writing. And I think that is precisely the point here: I and many other parents have read all sorts of resource books. I, and many other parents, are educated parents who try to approach our roles thoughtfully. And yet no amount of such reading can come close to producing the frisson after frisson of recognition provided by this anthology.

Sarah Pinto's "Third Month" opens the collection. Since I began in alarm, I will end on a note of hope and anticipation by quoting from it:

This is what if feels like
from the heart of a barrage of everything.

And what should smell of time
and the sweeter side of impermanence
is a vertigo of stopped seconds.
My amazement stands ready for use
like a regiment tired of weekend drills.

Hope and anticipation. But carefully armed, for all that.

September 17, 2005

Review of Carolan’s Farewell by Charles Foran

(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, Sept. 17, 2005)

I will shortly make a few measured and analytical remarks about this novel, but first, forgive some burbling: this is a beautiful, beautiful book. A book to live in for awhile. We hear much of it, as the first of the two main parts of the narrative lies with Terence Carolan, a blind composer and harper who lived between 1670 and 1738. We hear what he hears, and cannot see what he cannot. The language used to describe the input from his remaining senses is by turns exultant and earthy. Very earthy: Carolan's aging and failing body, and its baser functions, take up much of his attention as he pushes himself to finish a punishing religious pilgrimage and then the final leg of what turns out to be his last of many journeys through Ireland.

Carolan is a complex and faulty character. Neglectful of the wife and children he loves, travelling the country to sing for his supper, drinking too much and not practising his music enough, and ludicrous in his unwieldy, disobedient body, he is also intuitive, kind, a fascinating case study of the artistic process, and very, very droll. It is only Foran's skill that reconciles us to his absence through much of the book.

The second half focuses on Owen Connor, Carolan's fictitious manservant and guide, at a time when he is largely separated from his master, who lies ill. The two part structure echoes events in the plot; the first section recounts the last part of Carolan's journey, and in the second, after a long period of frustrated inactivity, Connor repeats some of that journey alone. Our attention is deflected from Carolan, who comes to various realizations of his own, to Owen, who must now answer a different set of questions. In some senses his character is the more tragic of the two, in that Carolan seems to achieve a sort of peace, while Owen never seems to be comfortable except with the master he is loosing.

If I have any criticism of Charles Foran's lovely text — one critic calls it note-perfect and that seems right — it is of the way in which his characters betray evidence of sensibilities more modern than would have been likely. Carolan "comes to terms with grief" — or at least, he would have if he existed in a contemporary setting. Owen exhibits a sense of egalitarianism that would have been unusual in 1737. But Foran, who has a steady sense of historical detail, would surely not misstep here. And in fact, instead of giving us the contemporary characters in fancy dress of lesser historical novels, he does something more subtle: he translates, transcribes, eighteenth-century sensibilities so that they exist seamlessly, apparently without effort, in an unabashedly contemporary novel. The deftness with which he accomplishes this blending is remarkable. And even if it were not, the novel rushes over any quibbles with the sheer strength of its language. The dialogue between Carolan and Owen, all the dialogue, in fact, is so clearly realized, so telling and at times so funny, it would be worth a recommendation alone. I look forward to hearing Foran read; much of this novel should be spoken aloud.

And much of it should be pondered over. Carolan is a fully realized character, but he is also emblematic of an Ireland now long passed away. Connor is equally well-drawn, and equally representative: of the struggle of the lower and working classes for a sense of self-worth in the face of the inexorable barriers of class, and in particular of the displaced Irish during the upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries. Foran's Ireland is a depopulated, shivering place that has fallen away, even while it is still beautiful. Ultimately this novel is about loss — personal, communal, national — and how individuals as well as whole peoples confront those losses. But putting it so bluntly does a disservice to the fineness of Foran's ear for language, the sure hand with which he has crafted his tale. I sit here writing this while listening to one of Carolan's airs on the internet. It is a light, balanced piece, with delicacy and humour, despite solemn undertones and an overlaying sadness. Much like this novel, in fact.

A number of Terrence Carolan's tunes are available online here and elsewhere. Charles Foran will be reading at UNBSJ on Sept. 22, and in Fredericton on Sept. 23.

August 28, 2005

Review: Brooklyn Noir 2: Manly, yes, but I like it too.

What the viewer cannot see here is the small tattoo of the Brooklyn Bridge on the young woman's hip. Which makes it all alright. Yes, I just finished reading Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics edited by Tim McLoughlin from Akashic Books, indie publishers whose motto is, "reverse-gentrification of the literary world." Akashic would appear to be on a roll: there is, as the title of this collection implies, an original Brooklyn Noir, as well as Chicago Noir and San Francisco Noir. D.C. Noir and Dublin Noir are forthcoming, with others planned. Why mess with success? And indeed, this is a readable, well chosen collection of previously published stories set around Brooklyn, a companion to the original collection of purpose-written pieces.

Editor McLoughlin has divided the stories into "Old School Brooklyn," "New School Brooklyn," "Cops & Robbers," and "Wartime Brooklyn." H.P. Lovecraft opens the collection with "The Horror at Red Hook" (1927) . Now, you either like Lovecraft or you don't. I don't, really, and rapidly tired of his pantheon-of-everything-evil-ever meets Gangs of New York. Lovecraft doesn't write noir: he writes deepest midnight with shots of vertiginous vermilion, obscured by sulphurous, nauseous smoke the colour of the back rooms of hell, shot through with the bilious green of the vomit of venomous toads. That being said, a few stories in, I appreciated the story for the way it sets the tone and provides some historical context. Thomas Wolfe's "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" (1935) is next, an oddly unfinished paean to the borough marred by an irritatingly obtrusive transcription of dialect. Irving Shaw rounds off the first section with "Borough of Cemeteries" (1938), an effective story, in an interestingly staccato narrative voice, of working people during the depression remembering times of plenty gone by, and their spectacularly feckless rebellion.

It is in the second section, "New Brooklyn," that the collection really takes off. Jonathan Lethem's "Tugboat Syndrome," about an orphan with Tourette's syndrome drawn into the orbit of a two-bit goodfella, is brilliant. Here is the young narrator:

My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They're an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they're smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. (67)

Colson Whitehead's "The All-Night Bodega of Souls" (2001) is also excellent; he writes in waves, like a wall of overlapping graffiti. Next up are the only two women represented in the collection. Carolyn Wheat's "The Only Good Judge" (2001) demonstrates hard-boiled sensibility, from the distaff side, in this story of a judge, "cut down in what would be considered the prime of her life if she were a man and her tits didn't sag" (116). Maggie Estep's "Luck Be a Lady" (membership required; 2004) has hints of urban fantasy and a likable B&E artist, Harry Sparrow, as the protagonist.

All the stories in the "Cops & Robbers" section have the proverbial twist, sometimes subtle, sometimes formulaic. Lawrence Block's effective "By the Dawn's Early Light" (1984) features a blacker-than-Marlowe ex-cop-cum-P.I. protagonist who creates his own complication, and the twisty ending of Donald E. Westlake's "The Best-Friend Murder" (1959) is made palatable by the curmudgeonly angst of the investigating detective. NYC legend Pete Hamill's "The Men in Black Raincoats" (1977) manages to make betrayal maudlin. Stanley Ellin's nostalgic "The Day of the Bullet" (1959) is a classic coming of age tale, with the twist that the vulnerable young boy is a future criminal.

The last section, "Wartime Brooklyn," contains some of the most disturbing entries in the collection. Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Tralala" (1957), from his Last Exit to Brooklyn, is brutal, both the protagonist herself, and what happens to her. This story will stay with you, so approach with caution. Salvatore La Puma's "The Boys of Bensonhurst" (1987), from his The Boys of Bensonhurst, is almost sweet, coming as it does after Selby's text. Though it's not that sweet, really. Gilbert Sorrentino's "Steelwork" (excerpt; 1970) rounds out the collection with its concise depiction of spiralling decline and societal abandonment (themes shared by Selby and Whitehead).

I'm not sure I like the sections; they don't always make sense. The first two are chronological by publication date, the last is chronological by date of setting, and "Cops & Robbers" is thematic (and really, in a sense, most of the stories are about cops and robbers in one way or another). Of course, if the collection had been strictly chronological it would have ended with Estep's whimsical story, and that would have provided a very different feel from Sorrentino's bleak piece.

This collection moves between the popular and the literary, with stories originally published in venues ranging from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Weird Tales, to the New Yorker and the Paris Review. It shifts from the spare lingo of the classic detective genre to the lush, overflowing language of Lovecraft, Lethem, and Whitehead. It is at times uneven, though in the aggregate it presents a compelling, at times lurid, portrait of a range of Brooklyn neighbourhoods over the past eighty years, neighbourhoods that are now, ironically, in various stages of gentrification. There is some excellent writing here, and some disturbing and affecting depictions of back alley's and vacant lots. Again, in the aggregate, these stories are bleak, brutal, and oddly beautiful.

I am left with one question, though, and at the risk of sounding foolish, is Brooklyn a masculine borough? Not literally, of course, but in the sense of Brooklyn as a literary landscape. Or is it simply the genre itself, with its femmes fatales and its brooding, antisocial hardboiled dicks? We were just down at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (I will try to post on that separately), and the bookstore there is a treat. But the contemporary section — the table of gritty NYC writers like Hamill and Selby — seemed a pretty masculine space. The stories by the two women offered in this collection are among the lightest and the most humorous of a generally unforgiving bunch. Though there is certainly a tradition of urban women's writing — Pat Califa comes to mind — so maybe there are overlooked texts and writers out there. If popular noir writing is anything like popular sf, there likely have been women writing and publishing from the beginning.

Perhaps that should be the next offering in this series: Noir: Dames' Stories.

And then, he walked in ...

June 8, 2005

New feature: Reviews/The Daughters of Freya

Is she on drugs, you ask? She has been writing reviews, give or take, loosely defined, since this venerable blog began. Very true, discerning reader, but until today — until this very post which you are currently deciding whether to read or not — I have always reviewed books which I begged, borrowed, stole, or (usually) bought myself. However, now that I have become such a bigwig in the literary blog world, the offers of review copies have poured in. Three, at last count. In order to distinguish reviews of such texts from the more disinterested ones — though can any review ever be disinterested? but let's leave that to the philosophers — I now add a new category with the unambiguous name "Review." So without further ado, here is the first:

A review of The Daughters of Freya by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond.
$7.49 US ($9.49 Cdn)/110 emails over 3 weeks

I heard of The Daughters of Freya, a mystery told through emails, last October, but was leery when I read the first email:

Dear Samantha:

Karen and I need your help. Six months ago Lisa dropped out of Berkeley and joined a cult in Marin County north of San Francisco. This isn't like the moonies or hari krishna or any other cult you've ever heard of. I wish it was. Believe it or not, Lisa is running around having sex with strangers out of some crackpot belief that this is going to lead to world peace.

Crackpot indeed. The photograph of the dreamy young woman on the front page of the site did not help; I was worried that the project might be titillating and exploitative and so didn't risk my hard earned loonies. A short while ago, though, I was offered a review copy, and never one to pass up free titillation, I signed on. And was glad I did. (And I have to say here that those worries were unfounded; the sex was, as they say, tastefully done. Meaning, offstage.)

I think part of my initial hesitation was over being asked to pay almost the price of a mass market paperback for only a fraction of the reading. But compared with a film, the bang for your buck is considerably greater: the experience is spread out over weeks, and takes longer than the average movie to fully read. It's not just the economics, though; I could not imagine that something that seemed so flimsy could offer an experience comparable to reading a novel or watching a film. The publishers, however, are careful not to call it a novel (though at least one reviewer does), and call it instead "a mystery."

My advice would be to enter the experience with an open mind and not to expect the sort of depth or richness that a novel or film can provide. In compensation, however, the truncated email format has its own interest and charm, and draws one in despite of, or possibly because of, its very brevity, and its apparent artlessness. Mixed up here among the more discursive and expository email messages from Samantha Dempsey, the investigative journalist seeking to unmask the sex cult, are perfunctory posts about various meeting and travel arrangements (including e-tickets: a nice touch, that), as well as several side stories: Dempsey's son's relationship with a woman she doesn't like; Dempsey's mother's on-line romance; Dempsey's step-mother's cancer scare. In other words, Dempsey's inbox looks much like those of many of her readers, minus the spam. Though even there we come close, with the inclusion of some hilarious responses from readers of her various published stories with their own axes to grind. (Brownie points for having Dempsey's son refuse to use capital letters or to proof-read his messages). It is this aspect of the project — its representation of an inbox, rather than whatever it is that a novel might seek to represent, that is one of its strongest and most appealing features. If Dempsey wrote too much, if she tried to sandwich Philip Marlowesque observations in her email messages, The Daughters of Freya would only be a failed, and very short, mystery story. But instead we have the staccato rhythms, and the disjunctions, of a ranging email correspondence, interspersed with her journalism (also very well done. In other words, "snappy" and "journalistic," not literary). There are also a number of links to outside "websites" containing articles, as well as various email attachments, including photos of some of the characters. Notable among these latter are thumbnail photos of the various pathetic johns Dempsey has under surveillance (and who are these hapless guys in real life? The authors? Their brothers-in-law, neighbours, and/or dentists? Curious minds would like to know.)

This project creates a narrative with web-based forms on their own terms. That, for me, is the primary fascination. Beside that, the mystery pales: we know the main players and their roles from almost the beginning (except for one red herring that is very ripe). The characterization is practically non-existent. None of the things one looks for in a mystery narrative — atmosphere, suspense, interesting psychology — none of these, with the possible exception of some suspense — and frankly, that is both short-lived and among the least realistic elements of the narrative — exist here. In fact, some of the attempts at traditional "character-building" — I am thinking of Dempsey's ongoing negotiations with her husband about their relationship, as well as the self-congratulatory tone of the ending — are hackneyed and prosaic. But that does not matter, because the format itself is the story. (Full disclosure: I have not read any other on-line narratives, but if anyone is interested in reading more they should check out Jill Walker's list.) But this neophyte reader found the experience of reading The Daughters of Freya quite compelling. As a reviewer I had the option of reading the whole thing all at once, but I decided to experience it over the full three weeks. I'm glad I did. It proved a fascinating contemporary counterpoint to the epistolary novel, even more so than to the hard-boiled mystery.

Oh uh. I sense a syllabus coming on. I had better go and lie down.

Update (9/7/05): URLs fixed; sorry for any confusion! And, according to co-author Michael Betcherman, "The hapless johns, by the way, include David and myself, a brother, a brother-in-law, and various friends. No dentist."