September 1st, 2010
On having read The Slap
“One of the striking things about so-called literary fiction is that it tends to be not morally simplistic,” says Jonathan Franzen in his recent Globe & Mail interview, which means that Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap might be about as literary as they get. Though I’m not so sure that lack of moral simplicity is that simple. What kind of fiction does a book get to be when everyone in it is totally awful?
But let’s go back to the beginning. I heard Christos Tsiolkas on a rerun of Writers and Company, and liked the sound of The Slap: a story that takes place at a suburban barbeque in Melbourne Australia, where a man slaps somebody else’s misbehaving child. The novel explores the ripples effects of that action, and also deals with the cultural climate of that country: the sons of Greek immigrant communities, their wives whose families come from India, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed “Australians”, the aboriginees (and in this case he’s converted to Islam, and changed his name to Bilal).
I saw The Slap in a bookstore when I was on vacation, so I scooped it up, and arrived home to find that the book had been long-listed for the Booker Prize, and was being called “unbelievably misogynistic”. I read it anyway, because it had appealed to me, but also as a kind of experiment in reading something I wouldn’t normally read.
Tsiolkas defends his book by saying that a book isn’t misogynistic just because its characters are. Which I agree with entirely, but I think the book is misogynistic if the hatred of women it expresses is so unrelenting, so pervasive that when you get to the end of the book and consider an underlying message, that message is probably, “Mothers are the source of all the world’s problems”. Nothing in the book refutes this. Motherhood, so says every narrative strand in this enormous book, makes women “selfish, uninterested, unmoved by the world”. (Women without children do receive a get out of jail free card).
The women in The Slap are all intelligent, interesting people, but each of them is complicit in her own degradation. Each of them is slim and beautiful, married to brutish men who like to have sex with prostitutes. They also treat their wives like prostitutes when they have sex with them, and pretend their wives are the prostitutes. That their wives are also the mothers of their children inspires a bit of tenderness, but it’s usually fleeting. The word “cunt” gets thrown around a lot. These men hate their wives, and they hate their lives, but mostly they hate their wives. Seethingly. Every single one of them.
Also, everybody does drugs. Everybody. It’s kind of boring actually, pill popping as a plot device. Is this really suburban reality? Do I not see that kind of thing in my own life because I live downtown.
So why did I like this book? Because it’s a soap opera. Because Tsiolkas is a master of plotting, and I raced through this 500 page book to see what would happen next. Because, although I didn’t like the answers, the novel posed provocative questions about motherhood and feminism. Because the novel is divided into sections, each from the point of view of a different person who’d been at the barbeque where the slap was slapped, and so we’re taken farther and farther into the future each time from a different perspective. The story becomes so layered, and multi-dimensional. Because each section adds pieces that fill out the past, sometimes to completely horrifying ends. Because where do we put our sympathy– disturbing to consider. Who do we cheer for in a crowd like this? What does it mean that we too want to see the kid get slapped? Want to slap him? Because the ending was totally wonderful. Because each character was so vivid, and how get to know them from within and without. Because the novel was unabashedly of right now. Because it was unabashedly everything.
Though I think it could have been more abashed. Seriously, I’m not an idiot. I know that Huckleberry Finn isn’t racist, is what I mean, because anti-racism is its underlying tenet, but all I took away from The Slap was that women are everything that’s wrong with men, which is everything that’s world with the world. That men hate women, blame them for their ills and justifiably so. And there was nothing in the book that refuted this. What am I supposed to make of that?
In the Guardian piece, Tsiolkas responds to such criticism: “I would call them lazy readers. I think they are confusing the writer with the character. I think there’s a laziness now in how we read. We read for confirmation of who we are, rather than for a challenge of who we are.” Which I get at some level, and he’s managed that challenge very effectively, but I don’t think my reaction is purely personal. Or maybe I just don’t think I really need to be challenged about who I am as a person who is not a worthless piece of shit based upon my gender.
August 30th, 2010
The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb
Camilla Gibb doesn’t reinvent the novel in her latest The Beauty of Humanity Movement, but she challenges the limits of what a book can hold. Her book is packed full with the expansiveness of its story, its vividness of place, of history, its multiple points of view, and voices, and languages, and cultures, and art. Depicting humanity at its ugliest, and most beautiful, all very tidily in under 300 pages of gorgeous prose, The Beauty of Humanity Movement was absolutely a pleasure to read.
The book takes place in Hanoi, “the Vietnamese heart”, the city from which was born pho: “a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French”. In the city, Old Man Hung’s pho is famous, its mere aroma bringing men to their knees. He’d had a shop years ago, but lost it when everything was nationalized, and these days couldn’t afford the rents or the bribe money that would be required to even secure a lease.
Pho’s shop had been a gathering place for radicals in the 1950s, when the Vietnamese people were rising up to overthrow their French oppressors. The artists and poets who’d met there had been part of The Beauty of Humanity Movement, which envisioned a glorious kind of socialism, and not one that merely replicated the tyranny that had come before it. Of course, this kind of vision is the sort that gets men in trouble, and eventually the authorities clamped down on their expression. Their leader, the poet Dao, was sent away to an appropriately-ominous-sounding “re-education camp”, and he is never heard from again.
Two generations later, Dao’s grandson is a young man with endless potential, in comparison with his parents who’d toiled for years in a ping-pong ball factory. Tu had become a math teacher, and then realized that loving math and teaching math are not synonymous experiences. He’d left his profession to give tours of Hanoi to Americans, and to pursue happiness in both the material and ideal senses. Though he is not so forward-looking– he reveres Hung, his family patriarch, who took over the role after Dao was lost, and kept the poet’s memory alive for his descendants. And so Tu continues to visit Hung, who lives in a shack and serves his pho from a ramshackle cart, and who belongs to a older Vietnam that is quickly disappearing.
Gibb’s narrative spins all these strands around a character called Maggie, Vietnam-born but American-raised. An art dealer and curator, she has come to Vietnam to find a trace of her father, an artist, who may have been part of Dao’s movement. Everybody she speaks to tells her she should talk to Hung, but when she finally finds him, it seems the old man’s memory is beginning to fail. He and Maggie work together to possibly recover some pieces of the abundance that was lost.
Though The Beauty of Humanity Movement is her fourth novel, in many ways it represents a sophomore effort for Gibb, an attempt to follow the “break-out success” of 2005′s Sweetness in the Belly. Both novels are enriched by Gibb’s background as an anthropologist, and manage to contain the stuff of culture but get bogged down by it– Gibb spins the stuff into story. And though this new book does not quite mesmerize in the way that Sweetness… did, that’s a lot to ask of any book, and so I’ll settle for just being glad that Camilla Gibb has written another wonderful novel.
August 21st, 2010
Alone With You by Marisa Silver
The very best pieces in Marisa Silver’s Alone With You are each expansive enough, containing more story than most novels do, so that the volume isn’t really slim; it only looks that way. Silver’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, she’s a winner of the O. Henry Prize, and has been much acclaimed for her novel The God of War. (It’s worth noting also that the New York Times review of this book is sets a benchmark for reviews we all should aspire to, and also that I don’t very many American short story collections, but now I digress…)
From the story “Night Train to Frankfurt”: “The fact of being was sometimes an unbearable mess and what was hoped for in life was so rarely reached. The shortfall between those two things was so much more fumbling and base than anything Helen had ever imagined.” And that shortfall, with all its fumbling, marks the development of most of these stories. They open up wide in the way that Alice Munro’s do, a decade passing in a paragraph break, and the narrative manages to never miss a beat.
In “Pond”, the mother of a disabled adult child confront her daughter’s pregnancy, her husband hovering in the background of the narrative only to be brought to the foreground at the story’s conclusion, as he’s forced to confront what his relationship with his glorious grandson implies about his feelings for his imperfect daughter. In “Three Girls”, the penultimate moment in a single night telescopes a young girl into the future and a vision of her older sister: “In that moment, Connie had the idea that she wouldn’t know Jean when they were older, that when Jean left the family, she would leave Connie too, because Connie would remind her of things she didn’t want to remember.”
Helen, from “Night Train to Frankfurt” accompanies her mother on a last-ditch attempt to cure her cancer, and their whole relationship, with all its ambivalence and love, is encapsulated in that train compartment. “The Visitor” tells of Candy, a nurse in a Veteran’s Hospital, whose patient has lost his legs and one arm: “It was sad. Of course it was sad. But she didn’t feel sad. Sad was what people said they were in the face of tragedies as serious as suicide bombings or as minor as a lost earring. It as a word that people used to tidy up and put the problem out of sight.”
Marisa Silver, however, does not do tidiness or sentimentality. Her stories are sad, yes, but they contain everything (and unfaithful men in particular), and something is glorious in all their messiness, in the deliberate perfection of their tangle.
August 14th, 2010
Far to Go by Alison Pick
Alison Pick doesn’t just take on history in her latest novel Far to Go, but she takes on what it is to take on history– can the fragments of history be turned into fiction or fact, and how much truth should we expect of either?
Ostensibly, Far to Go is the story of the Bauer family, secular Jews living in the Czech Sudetenland when Hitler annexes the region in 1938. Told from the perspective of their Nanny, Marta, the novel follows the family to Prague where they go to escape Nazi persecution, and recounts the anti-semitism that rises in Czechoslovakia so that the Bauers have nowhere left to flee to. Having been reluctant to leave their home, where Pavel Bauer is an affluent factory owner, a patriotic Czech, and respected throughout their community with his wife Annaliese, it becomes too late for them to receive the exit visas necessary to get out of the country, so they decide their only option is to send their young son to safety through the Kindertransport, which placed children from Nazi-occupied countries with families in Britain in 1938 and 1939.
Marta’s point of view provides an interesting perspective on the family, as she does not take for granted her loyalty to them. Though the Bauers have been good employers, her life is tied up with theirs in uncomfortable ways, and the tide of anti-semitism sweeping the country is difficult to avoid altogether. Her loyalty to their son Pepik, however, is never questioned, and Pick has created a fascinating dynamic between a mother-figure who is closer to the son than his mother is. The story of Pepik’s departure and his subsequent experiences (from his own point of view) are heartbreaking, and the plot hangs on many twists that are artfully constructed.
In places, however, the narrative seems artificial, clunky with exposition in that way that historical fiction can sometimes be, but then Pick frames the story with a present-day narrator who suggests all is not what it seems with the Bauers, creating enormous suspense as the novel progresses. These sections are also written in a tremendously powerful prose that suggests the novel is in the end of a writer who knows exactly what she is doing, that we should put our trust in her and let the pieces come together (and indeed they do– this is a novel I flew through). Pieces which include letters and fragments of letters from characters in the story, filed as historical documents noting the writers’ deaths in Nazi concentration camps.
“I wish this were a happy story,” the novel begins, “A story to make you doubt and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it.” Laying all the cards on the table, such a novel this isn’t, but also (and notably) there is nothing manipulative about how Pick uses her subject matter either. Truly, parts of the book are devastating, but the story leaves its reader with far more than just emotion, evoking intriguing questions about history and truth (and loneliness, and memory, and human kindness). Far to Go serves as a testament to the power of story, to the importance of historical record, and a tribute to the amazing power of art, and what it can render from fragments.
July 28th, 2010
The Lovers by Vendela Vida
I will never forget my experience of reading Vendela Vida’s previous novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I’d brought it away for the weekend, dipping in and out of between various activities, and I wasn’t sure what to think. The prose was so spare, the plot seemed aimless, and the font was just too big for a book so slim. I wasn’t sure if I’d been wasting my time, as I sat down to read the final stretch as our train got close to Toronto. I’d been to a wedding and won the centrepiece, so there was a bucket full of flowers on the seat beside me, and in those last few pages, Vida turned her entire novel inside out and into a story that was so affecting and devastating, I felt like an idiot for ever having doubted.
Her latest novel The Lovers lacks the punch of Let the Northern Lights…, but it has an effect that’s more sustaining. And it’s funny how often I’ll pick up a book of commerical fiction and sing its praises because, wonder of wonders, there be plot there! Forgetting that plot and literary fiction are not mutually exclusive, and thank you Vendela Vida for reminding me.
Because something is particularly ominous from the book’s beginning, Yvonne waiting in the airport for the ride she has arranged along with her vacation rental. It’s been two years since her husband’s death, and she’s venturing out into the world again, on a trip to Turkey to get away from her memories and remember those that she’s forgotten. She has been to Turkey before, on her honeymoon twenty-eight years previously, but the place she finds this time won’t be familiar.
Yvonne hasn’t been able to find her ride because she’s been waiting 0n the wrong side of the airport, which sets a precedent for everything to follow. All outcomes the opposite of her expectations, everything resembling something from afar that turns out to be different at close range. Returning to Datca, she finds the hotel where she and her husband stayed is now abandoned and crumbling. The holiday house she’d chosen from the internet is not as close to the sea as she’d been promised, and there are sordid books on the shelves, a sex swing on the third floor. She leaves the door open and an owl gets in.
Vida’s writing is angular, full of edges to grip, and– as Yvonne finds Turkey– everything is almost ordinary, but not quite. I’ve read about birds in the house, but never owls, and never about the stench the owl carries with him, and how between the owl and sex swing, Yvonne fears the house will restrict all of itself to her and she’ll have to sleep on the roof. Vida articulates the awkward details of human interaction so perfectly– Yvonne finds another American who pronounces a Turkish name differently than she has, and she wonders which of them is right (if either?). The experience of an American tourist in a poor country, how Yvonne vows to buy goods from a different local merchant every day, and then finds she can’t tell them apart. The local boy who Yvonne befriends on the beach, who she gives cash to for shells he will dive for, and the local people start talking about their relationship.
Are things as ominous as they seem, or is Yvonne simply paranoid? Has the sex swing tainted her experience and now everything seems sordid? She begins to reflect upon her marriage, and find it was not all it appeared either, that the banalities that frocked her with her widowhood did not begin to describe her experience of loss, or how complicated her marriage had been. There remains the matter of the owl in the house though, and then one afternoon when the boy on the beach is diving for shells, he swims out and disappears.
Yvonne plants herself at the centre of this drama, as Western tourists tend to do when they’re at large in the world, but she will soon discover that her role in all of this is actually incidental. Not that her actions don’t have consequences, but the consequences matter far more than she does. That in order to come to terms with her own loss, and what has happened since, she not only has to transport herself as she already has done, but she has to transport herself outside of herself. To get lost if she’s ever going to get found.
A wonderful, gripping, thoughtful book. Vida’s novel is the third in a loosely-linked trilogy about women in moments of crisis, but she has done something different and stronger with each one. A novelist who takes nothing for granted about the form, seemingly rediscovering it each time she revisits it, she makes much out of little and the effect of it lingers long after the last page is read.
July 26th, 2010
Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner
Jennifer Weiner’s latest novel Fly Away Home is no guilty pleasure. Of course, it’s a pleasure, and maybe for that we’re meant to feel a bit guilty, but I didn’t really. I was too happy reading a fat book that was devourable, a funny and smart book that was so well written that it never broke the spell.
Weiner is a more versatile writer than she gets credit for. Though she’s well known for writing books with shoes in the cover, I really enjoyed her murder mystery Goodnight Nobody, and her latest is also something completely different. Less Sophie Kinsella, Fly Away Home made me think of two recent novels I loved, The Believers by Zoe Heller and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. But set apart from these with the dry wit and breezy tone that have become Weiner’s signature.
So much of women’s fiction begins with a question of empathy, of an author wondering their way into a particular character’s mind (as opposed to wondering their way into a fast-paced plot, just say). In Fly Away Home, that character is a familiar figure, the wronged wife standing up beside her prominent husband as he tells the nation that he’s sorry for his transgressions. She’s standing there stone-faced as he admits to hurting his wife, his family, and as he vows to come to terms with his weaknesses, to make amends. As he asks for a bit of privacy, so he can calculate his eventual comeback.
That woman is Sylvie Serfer Woodruff in Weiner’s book, wife of Senator Richard Woodruff who has just been caught using his connections to fix a job for his mistress. Sylvie hadn’t suspected a thing, so busy was she fulfilling speaking engagements to support him, arranging his schedule, fetching his breakfast, and running the lint brush over his shoulders. Not to mention trying to stay twenty pounds lighter than she’d been in law school, getting her hair done, having regular botox sessions, and occasional plastic surgeries. In her spare time, she tried to contain their daughter Lizzie, who struggled with addiction and a host of other personal problems.
Lizzie’s sister Diana had always been the polar opposite, struggling with nothing, racking up one achievement after another to become an emergency room doctor. The news of their father’s affair comes at a curious time for Diana however, with her being in the throes of an extra-marital affair herself, with an intern from the hospital who’s everything her husband isn’t. (The husband is one of the funniest parts of the novel, Weiner pulling no punches in depicting his unattractiveness. Gary likes to announce, “Gotta go drain the dragon” before he uses the restroom; he comments on Youtube videos with the username Ithurtswhenipee. Their sex life is awful, usually culminating in Gary masturbating “with the burdened expression of a man who’d been forced to shovel the driveway just when the game was getting good”.)
Richard Woodruff is moved to the margins as the rest of his family attempt to put their shattered worlds back together again. Sylvie returns to her childhood home to reconnect with a self she hasn’t paid attention to in years, Lizzie finds her life assuming an unexpected direction, and Diana decides that her own direction should shift 180 degrees. In the end, things tie up neat and tidily in true commercial fiction style, but it’s a wonderful ride to get there, and no one would ever fault these characters for their packaged resolutions.
“‘What?’ Selma asked. ‘Divorce isn’t such a tragedy…. Nobody ever died of divorce.’/ ‘Sunny von Bulow?’ Ceil piped up./ ‘They never got divorced,’ Selma said. Sylvie glared at her mother, and Selma lowered her voice incrementally. ‘Claus just tried to kill her. See, if they’d gotten divorced, it could have worked out better for both of them.’”
Flay Away Home is a funny book, and such a smart book, with no holds barred. A trip inside the mind of that stone-faced lady, and the reader comes away with a broadened perspective of what her experience must be. And a broadened perspective also of questions of love, and marriage, and family, and what it means to truly get lost inside a book.
July 14th, 2010
The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
Catherine O’Flynn’s two books have been imperfect novels packed solid with goodness. The News Where You Are, like her first novel What Was Lost, chronicles contemporary life in the English Midlands, its bleak dose of “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” nicely countered with humour, pop culture references, and an underlying faith in the human spirit. Her characters are vividly realized, their dialogue sharp, and the settings evoked with perfect detail. The plots and subplots are absorbing, both novels a pleasure to read, and so in the end all is forgiven even when they don’t quite work as wholes.
At the centre of The News Where You Are is Frank Allcroft, who serves less as a character than as an anchor for the various strands O’Flynn is weaving here– anchor fittingly, because Frank is a local news anchor, O’Flynn depicting the details and minutiae of his job in fascinating detail, and also showing him reflecting on the changing media scene, questioning the place for folksy local in a fast-paced globalized world; Phil Smethway, his old friend and mentor has died six months previously in a mysterious hit and run; Frank is finally beginning to admit to himself how much his mother’s unhappiness has always affected him, and he is also trying to reconcile his feelings regarding his architect father, whose buildings have one-by-one been demolished since his death; Frank makes a point of attending funerals of those whose lonely deaths he reports, and then one of these people turns out to be connected to Phil…
(Frank’s frosty co-anchor, responding to one of his famous corny jokes, asks him, “What the hell am I supposed to do? If I laugh, I look as if I’m mentally ill. If I don’t laugh, I look as if I hate you.” I can’t find another place to fit this in, but I want to repeat it because it’s funny, because it’s a dynamic I’ve never considered, and though a lesser author would make the co-presenter simply hateful and hating, O’Flynn opts more for the more interesting angle. Her characters are always surprising).
It sounds like a hodgepodge, but it isn’t, and in the end the whole thing comes together more effectively than What Was Lost. Too much is going on for this to be a masterful novel, but its strands are all compelling and they comprise the stuff of this world in a way that’s both familiar and surprising. Also a bit shamelessly heartwarming–though its premise(s) are sad, O’Flynn injects enough humour, enough pointed observation about the absurdity of everyday life, and provides Frank with a wonderful family whose solidity is never questioned. Without overdoing it then, O’Flynn gets the bleakness of contemporary England, the centuries of histories underneath the feet, which makes the recent past almost seem disposable, and how “the future” is now something looked back upon with nostalgia. What was lost and what remains.
July 4th, 2010
I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere was the first of my hot summer books, and the perfect book for a sunny long weekend. It’s mainly told from the point of view of Eliza Benedict, an unassuming wife and mother currently preoccupied with adjusting to life in Maryland after six years living in London, and also with her daughter’s initial forays into teenaged awfullness.
The last thing on Eliza’s mind is Walter Bowman, from what she’s come to refer to (though she rarely refers to it) as “the summer I was fifteen”. That summer, after she stumbled upon him burying a body, Bowman kidnapped Eliza, and kept her prisoner for thirty-nine days, and then he let her go, to be the only one of his victims w ho’d live to tell.
Years later, Eliza appears unscathed on the surface, having managed a fulfilling life for herself, married to a man she loves, and as a devoted mother to her children. (Eliza’s academic background is in children’s literature; she claims, “Everything I know about parenting, I learned from Ramona Quimby”). Though she never feels completely secure, insisting that the windows stay locked even in the heat of summer, but there are indeed long periods of time during which she doesn’t think of Walter Bowman and that summer. So she is really rather rattled to hear from him again.
Bowman had been sentenced to death for the murder of another girl he’d picked up when he was with Eliza, but due to technicalities has been waiting on Death Row ever since. When he contacts Eliza, he is hoping to manipulate her into assisting him with one more appeal, the same way he’d managed to manipulate her into complying with his wishes during that summer long ago. Of course, Eliza initially resists his advances, but he has promised to reveal information about his other victims, and she also hopes that by meeting him, she might finally understand why he let her go.
In addition to Eliza’s point of view, the novel comes from the perspective of Walter, and from that of Trudy Tackett, mother of one of his victims. Trudy’s reason for living is to finally witness Walter’s executive, and her sections of the novel are the most compelling of the trio– Lippman nails the might of her fury and the hole that is her grief. Walter himself is less believable, though perhaps being inside his head is just discomforting. Eliza also is hard to pin down– she’s meant to be somewhat unknowable, even to herself, and far more impressionable than impressing, but sometimes she reads as though Lippman wasn’t altogether sure who she was either.
I’d Know You Anywhere is not as successful as Lippman’s previous stand-alone novels (Life Sentences and What the Dead Know), its structure as fragmented as Eliza’s character. By its second half, however, the book picks up steam, becomes more cohesive, and by the time Eliza’s facing Walter down in his cell, the whole thing is worth the ride. Lippman’s writing is so smart, the prose bursting with the stuff of the world, with facts and ideas, and her characters usually jump off the page– Eliza’s overbearing sister Vonnie, her eccentric but loving parents, her daughter and her son.
The book is devourable, suspense mounting as the plot whips along, and really, summer days were really made for books like this.
June 20th, 2010
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake begins with Rose Edelstein, aged eight, helping herself to a bite of cake and becoming overwhemed by an awareness of her mother’s profound sadness. This awareness is devastating, and has enormous implications: that her mother is human, that life is complicated, that Rose is powerless to control the world around her. Childhood naivete ends at this point, when Rose realizes that she can taste people’s feelings in the food they create– her mother’s sadness makes family dinners unbearable, she eats a friend’s sandwhich and is “envious… that this lightness was where she came from”, and so the vending machines at school supply her with sustenence, the relief of their bland and innocuous factory flavour.
Aimee Bender is known for her short stories, and this seems like the perfect premise for one of these. The novel reading like an extended short story itself– the perfection of the details, the minute observation, the sense of play and whimsy, the genre-bending, the fantastic. And yet this is decidedly a novel too, with great expansiveness, development, and enormous weight. Cake-like, airy and solid.
There is so much that Bender gets absolutely right. Her narrative voice is a stellar achievement, Rose reminiscent of Ramona Quimby as the book begins, and yet undercut by a darker tone that takes over as the book proceeds. Bender manages a perfect balance of wide-eyed child and wry observer (see “[Dad] always seemed like a guest to me. ‘Welcome home,’ I said.” vs. “he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves”.) The story is perfectly timeless, flying on its own steam, freed from the cumbrousness of period. It has the tone and appeal of a YA novel– elements of A Wrinkle in Time in addition to Ramona. And yet, YA this is not– the sadness is heavy, the emotions complicated and awful, and too much for even Rose to understand.
With amazing acuity, Bender shows Rose’s reaction to her burden of empathy– how she eats an entire slice of the cake in an effort to convince herself that everything is fine, that she made up her feelings, but Rose only feels her mother’s sadness more, and how she tries to console her mother but doesn’t know what she wants or needs, and how Rose tries to explain that she can taste a hollow in her mother’s cake but can’t explain it well enough, and how after so much explaining, she eventually keeps it to herself.
Rose’s ability to taste feelings actually becomes secondary as the novel progresses, fading to the background– this is a novel with most of its two feet in reality. Understatement makes Rose’s affliction almost plausible, and we’re not meant to consider it too much anyway, but the story continues to be about her family’s dynamics, and how Rose deals with knowledge of her mother’s sadness as her older brother begins to retreat into his own world. It’s also about food, taste and eating, and where our food comes from, how little most of us actually consider this. And it’s about childhood, and things better unlearned, and a yearning to return to a simpler place that has been tainted by what is known now.
And so onto the bandwagon I jump, late for the party as always. Go Aimee Bender, whose novel is perfectly unlike anything else, and also perfectly perfect.
June 13th, 2010
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Everything I knew about Henry VIII before Wolf Hall, I learned from Herman’s Hermits. And I’d planned to keep it that way, because I really can’t stomach historical fiction. Even when it’s written by Hilary Mantel, who I’ve read through suburban black comedies, ghost stories, memoirs and literary fiction (my two favourites of hers have been Eight Months of Ghazzah Street, A Change of Climate, and An Experiment in Love).
But then Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize, and it was nominated for the Orange Prize. And something else happened, though I don’t remember what Steph read it at Crooked House and included an excerpt as part of her babies in literature series, but it all led to me purchasing Wolf Hall when we were in England last fall. The book sat on my shelf for months and months, however, until I decided to tackle (most of) the Orange list, and so last Friday, I finally cracked the great tome (650 pages) open.
Once in a while I tried to remember why exactly I so disliked historical fiction, particularly since I never actually read any of it, but reading Wolf Hall did make my feelings quite clear to me. That the genre necessitates 650 page books, for one thing. In non-historical fiction, wouldn’t an editor do something about a book in which all of the major male characters are called Thomas or Henry? And a pace that goes so quickly, too quickly, and then you find yourself having to refer back to earlier passages, but how is one to find these in a 650 page book??
But, Wolf Hall was readable. It was. I was mainly reading it so I could finally say I actually had, but I found myself enjoying it too. It’s not an easy book, with so many characters and such a dense plot, and Mantel’s prose is not always immediately accessible (and yes, the pronouns were a struggle, but there’s a reason for it. “He” is usually always Thomas Cromwell, to show that Cromwell was everywhere.) But the story, about Cromwell’s rise and rise from lowly blacksmiths’ son to chief advisor to the King of England was fascinating, and Mantel has made Cromwell a complex, sympathetic and wonderfully-difficult character.
I didn’t really understand how fascinating this novel was, however, until I reread its review from the London Review of Books (which I’d read when it was published, but got nothing out of having not yet read the book, of course). The review explains that Mantel’s real genius is rendering a three-dimensional character of Cromwell, about whom little is known, and allowing his mystery to remain fundamental to him. And that nothing within her novel is without significance, in fact more often than not, peripheral characters and details would go on to be instrumental in historical events to follow, though this significance is only hinted at in the novel (and then glossed over entirely by readers such as myself for whom Henry VIII had merely been married to the widow next door, and she’d been married seven times before…). Even the novel’s title Wolf Hall refers to a place only barely mentioned in the story, and the suggestion of a visit there comes in the very last paragraph (and here, according to the LRB review, would begin “the undoing of Anne Bolelyn”).
I recently read that Mantel is at work on a sequel to Wolf Hall, and now I’m quite stunned to find that I’ll not be able to help but to read it. Because the whole 650 pages here was merely in anticipation of what comes next, and what comes next is the rise of Jane Seymour, who was a lowly lady-in-waiting in this book, and the downfall of the Bolelyns, and even (though a few years beyond this) Elizabeth I (who here is just an ugly red-headed baby). To discover that Spanish Mary (in Wolf Hall, petulant, teenaged, and put-out by having just been made a retroactive bastard) becomes Queen herself somewhere down the line– seriously, these are the most tantalizing spoilers ever.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
