David Adams Richards

This past weekend, I finished reading David Adams Richards of the Miramichi: A Biographical Introduction by Tony Tremblay (UTP, 2010). The Globe and Mail also reported (Sept 4, 2010):

... some prominent economists and policy makers are now suggesting the real problem [with the economy] isn't lack of consumer spending - it's that the unemployed don't have the right skills to fill the jobs that are open.
   These people are now theorizing that the financial crisis has altered the structure of the U.S. labour market, perhaps permanently (print edition, B1).

The connection between the Richards biography and the Globe's report on the U.S. economy is this: Tremblay's portrait of Richards returns again and again to Richards' fury at how "liberalism" forced change on the lives who lived in New Brunswick, particularly those who lived along the Miramichi River (and particularly in the 1960s and 70s).

The "structure" of the economy changed and established ways of being and living fell away. The two paragraphs from the Globe a similar story - and suggest Richards' charting of the stresses of economic transformation on the working poor could well be an anthem of our time.

Ironically, however, his work has often been marginalized as "regional" in focus. If the U.S. economy is just another "region" now in our multipolar world, then Richards' work deserves the label "universal."

A confession. I haven't read any of Richards' novels. Tremblay's biographical introduction introduced Richards' work to me - but readers familiar with Richards' work will learn much, too. From the historical sweep of the Miramichi region going back to the first European settlers, to the portraint of multiple generations of Richards' family, to the articulation of the literary politics of New Brunswick and Canada during the early years of Richards' career, this book has much to recommend it.

Tremblay ends his biography in 1989, with Richards' first GG win (for Nights Below Station Street), which culminates all of the hard work, struggle and ambition Richards committed to his literary career up to that point. That moment, however, from the point of view of 2010, is about the midway mark of Richards' publishing history, so there is much biography left untold (though Tremblay draws heavily on Richards' nonfiction of recent years to ground his arguments about Richards' literary methods and motivations).

One of those later nonfiction books is God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World (Doubleday, 2009). (G&M review here.) Tremblay, repeatedly,  makes it clear the extent of (conservative) Catholicism's influence on Richards. "Like Dostoevsky," Tremblay writes, "Richards felt that the best alternative to ... bourgeois liberalism was a form of Christian autocracy" (267). A wry smile came to my lips, therefore,  as the book ended recounting Premier Frank McKenna's party for Richards' GG win. McKenna's liberal economic transformation of New Brunswick was grounded by the kind of "intellectual" "theoritical" "philosophizing" Richards "instinctively" despised (quotations mine).

In the early 1980s, Tremblay tells us, "Richards was becoming increasingly reactionary" (283); he believed in "the ethical superiority of spontaneous action over calculated intent, which is always more ideologically laden" (313).

Myself, I don't believe this latter conclusion holds water. Isn't spontaneous action likely to be driven by unspoken, unconscious, unarticulated "ideological intents"? Isn't it better to speak about what's behind the motivation, while also confessing to the imperfect nature and/or understanding of the motivation?

Richards' fiction is strengthened by his generous empathy, particularly for those with lesser than the rest; it also rests on the Catholic conclusion about the unknowability of the human heart. His fury at social workers and other "liberal" "socially progressive" theories and economic/government programs and strategies comes from the same place. You can't help people, he might say, by telling them that they must change who they are. Social work, in this view, is fundamentally un-Christian (or un-Catholic, in some interpretations, at least).

But what about the novels? Are they really about economic philosophy?

No. Tremblay suggests no such limit. In fact, he provides much close reading of Richards' early work, focusing on the characters, their immediate needs and actions. He quotes Richards repeatedly on the author's "love" for his characters and his desire that his readers feel the same. Again, it is hard not to think of Christ the Shepherd, caring for his flock, each unique, each desired, each protected within the fold no matter what.

Tremblay's spirited reading of Richards' early work makes a strong case for its ongoing significance, if not appeal. Perhaps his "introduction" will lead to other reassessments of Richards' output. The economic shocks of the 21st century have arguably only added to the relevance of Richards' vision. Liberalism, it is always worth reminding ourselves, doesn't lead to perfection (nor does any other political philosophy). And critiques of modernism that defend the value of the individual are always valuable.

Are the novels themselves any good? I'm now motivated to find out for myself.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Darwin's Bastards

Last spring, I went to the schoolyard to pick up my six-year-old step-daughter from senior kindergarten, this book in hand: Darwin's Barstards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, selected and edited by Zsuzsi Gartner (Douglas & McIntryre, 2010).

The kids thought the cover was fantastic. "What is that?!"

The book was the centre of a throng, and witnessing the chatter of the SKs on this subject was a pleasure to behold.

Mutants clearly invigorate the six-year-old mind. Equally, many of the 23 stories collected in this anthology invigorated mine.

Divided into four sections (survivors, lovers, outliers, warriors), this book throws down the gauntlet of what a short fiction anthology in Canada can be.

For one, while all of the authors are Canadian, this isn't a book any high school student could claim in boring. For two, Gartner has achieved that elusive balance, one that has stymied her peers for decades - an anthology that effortlessly blends the literary and the popular, genre fireworks and pointy-headed big ideas.

My personal favorites:

• "There is no time in Waterloo" by Sheila Heti
• "Survivor" by Douglas Coupland
• "Notes from the womb" by Anosh Irani
• "This is not the end my friend" by Adam Lewis Schroeder
• The introduction by Zsuzsi Gartner

Other stories in the collection provide fierce competition for the above. Authors include: Lee Henderson, Stephen Marche, Yann Martel, Timothy Taylor, Mark Anthony Jarman, Jessica Grant, Elyse Friedman, Annabel Lyon, William Gibson, Heather O'Neill, Pasha Malla, and Neil Smith. And others.

"There is no time in Waterloo" by Sheila Heti imagines a world in which everyone consults their mother before taking any action. "Mother," however, is metaphor; it's a hand-held device, really. The device predicts the probability of various outcomes. Waterloo, Ontario, is the site of the action. Also the home of RIM and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Princess Avenue, where I spent layabout time in the 1980s and early 1990s, features in a prominent role.

"Survivor" by Douglas Coupland is set in the middle of the Pacific on a tiny island, where the n-th season of the CBS hit reality show "Survivor" is being filmed. Meanwhile, nuclear war ends life elsewhere. The "survivors" are survivors. Outwit, outlast, out play.

"Notes from the womb" by Anosh Irani is narrated by a foetus. The story ends at birth.

"This is not the end my friend" by Adam Lewis Schroeder is set roughly 50 years in the future. The USA has melted down into zombieland. Obsessed with celebrity trivia, it has suffered social collapse. To prevent a similar crisis, the Canadian government has outlawed celebrities and built a barrier between the Great White North and its southern neighbour. The story follows the trip of a musicologist, who is researching "rock stars." Travelling with his neice and nephew, he visits Feist, who is living in a remote location in a trailor.

The introduction by Zsuzsi Gartner is charming, funny and intelligent.

Darwin's Bastards is an anthology for every bookshelf.

Some reviews:

• Globe and Mail (March 26, 2010)
• National Post (March 26, 2010)
• Toro (April 8, 2010)
• Straight.com (April 22, 2010)
• Los Angeles Times (May 23, 2010)
• Montreal Gazette (June 11, 2010)
• The Tyee (June 18, 2010)
• Broken Pencil (Aug 5, 2010)
• Geist (Aug 11, 2010)

Even a dissenting one:

• Quill & Quire (April 2010)

Other links:

• The Movie

Kenneth Sherman

Andre Alexis provoked what amounts to a shit storm in Canadian letters today when he published an essay in the July 2010 issue of the Walrus titled, The Long Decline. What was in decline? The art of literary criticism.

First, I agree that the contemporary art of literary criticism is one or two notches above pathetic.

But, second, I think this is a perpetual state. Good criticism is rare, rare, rare. The quality of criticism doesn't go up and down with the cultural tide. Good critics transcend their contexts.

Northrop Frye, Alexis rightly states, was one of them. The decline of newpaper inches devoted to book reviews, Alexis wrongly states, is not indicative of a decline in criticism. It is indicative of the pressures of international capitalism to be "efficient" and capture the "mass audience."

Yes, we are all nostalgic for The Globe and Mail's book section. However, one only need turn to the robust (online) responses to Alexis's essay to know that his lament for the the loss of "conversation" is premature.

I can't say this captures all the links related to this subject, but here is a generous helping:

• The Walrus's list of responding links
• Nigel Beale: The ‘woefully incompetent’ and ‘pugnacious’ André Alexis
• Jeet Heer: John Metcalf is not the enemy
• Ryan Bigge: Snark Vs. Legitimate Criticism: Reprint of National Post Article on Canadian Book Reviewers
• Gordon Phinn: Comment
• Steven W. Beattie: A matter of taste: revivifying CanLit criticism
• Paul Wells: The smoking pile of rubble where André Alexis used to be
• Zach Wells: Reviewing with Andre
• Kim McArthur: Response
• Kate Carraway: Andre Alexis manages to be elegant and brutal and correct

Alexis has responded in at least two places that I found:

• To Nigel Beale
• To Zach Wells (you need to scroll down into the comments section)

Gosh, I don't know what all of this brohaha amounts to, but some of it is interesting.

I'm not going to go to the bother of attempting to articulate that "some" here. You may tempt it out of me after a couple four beers.

BECAUSE the topic of this post is Kenneth Sherman, the author of a book of literary criticism published by Porcupine's Quill  in 2009 that has been woefully ignored.

Is there a decline in literary criticism? There's a decline in interest in decent literary criticism, that's for sure.

Sherman's book is What the Furies Bring (Porcupine's Quill, 2009), and as far as I can tell online it's been reviewed sparsely:

• Toronto Star (Nov 29, 2009)
• National Post (Dec 18, 2009)
• Foreword Reviews (Feb 2010)

See also:

• Excerpt in Geist
• 10 Questions with Kenneth Sherman (Open Book Toronto)

I read this book last fall, and I can only confess now that I cannot do it justice. So I will begin with the trivial: This book contains no essays on Canadian literature. Is that, perhaps, the reason for the resounding critical silence?

On the one hand, I would have liked to have read Sherman's commentary on Margaret Atwood's writings. Sherman has collected  remarkable selection of essays on (post)apocolyptic writing. Elements of Atwood's ouvre certainly fit within this subject. I experienced Sherman's lack of engagemenet with Atwood as a loss.

On the other hand, I deeply appreciated Sherman's engagement with the wide variety of subject matter that he does present. The book is, in part, a response to 9/11, but it is much more. It is proof that one can read deeply in the 21st century. That there can be continuity within contemporary life with deep subject matter. That our literary inheritance offers more than gossip, subjective gotcha reviews, and despair.

For example: Read and weep (and laugh)

Here is a quotation from Michael Greenstein's Toronto Star review:

Allusive yet restrained, Sherman's poetic voice engages well-known writers, such as Primo Levi and Anne Frank, and more obscure figures, such as Nahman of Bratslav and Varlam Shalamov, whose stories of the Soviet Gulag make him the "poet of the frozen Inferno."

The cover image of this book, based on George Raab's etching Lone Pine, tells us much about the style and substance of these essays. Bare horizontal branches of a solitary tree reach out, as if seeking companionship; like a work of sculpture, the pine is defined by the spaces between its branches. Although the landscape of this stark image is set in Ontario, the scenery has universal ramifications.

In similar fashion, Sherman's lyrical essays define and are delineated by bleak landscapes and by other writers who have witnessed and survived the Holocaust or Stalin's death camps. Each essay is a quiet dialogue with the dead, who are resurrected on the page, while the reader listens to the conversation between the essayist and his subjects.

This book shows that however much criticism in general may suck, its supposed decline is not yet fatal. It is a book that ought to tempt every reader with literary aspirations, everywhere.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden

No Place Strange
by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
Key Porter, 2009

I read this book last year and have been recommending it ever since.

It is the story of the birth of a child and the motives and complications, intentional and unintentional, that brought the parents together, pulled them apart, and possibly bring them together again.

That is the simple, high-level reading of the book.

The phrase "motives and complications" only begins to suggest the complex baggage each parent brings to the relationship. The mother, Lydia, is Canadian, Jewish; the father, Farid, is Lebanese, Muslim. They meet in 1986 in Greece, which functions as a kind of magical middle ground. When they meet, they are each moving "away," but also forward. Toward the new. The other. Each other.

Their courtship begins tentatively, but then it becomes intense. Ultimately, they are separated by a misunderstanding, an error, but not before conceiving a child.

A deeper level of backstory also animates this book. Lydia's father was a journalist who covered the Middle East and travelled deep into dangerous territory to interview members of Palestinian militant groups in the early 1970s. In 1972 he was mysteriously killed, possibly for having a romantic connection with a glamorous revolutionary. The revolutionary, who lived, is friends with Farid's family in Beruit, who are professionals opposed to militarism and the civil war tearing Lebanon apart in the 1980s.

The narrative is, therefore, infused with environmental influences that have only become more amplified in the 21st century: clash of cultures, war and peace, revolution and terrorism. The author handles these influences well, contextualizing the historical, managing and articulating a range of perspectives, while grounding her characters in the specific details of their lives. This isn't a story about politics, in other words; this is a story about people whose lives have been thrown about by politics.

See also reviews in:

• The National Post
• The Globe and Mail
• Quill and Quire
• Canadian Literature
• NOW

The reviews, to my mind, seem stymied by the novel's mixture of love story and politically sensitive historical context. Though the author is praised for her handling of this "incendiary" material, she is not lauded enough methinks.

Initially, I thought I might do a compare/contrast between this novel and Cockroach by Rawi Hage, which also includes a character who experienced the chaos of Lebanon in the 1980s. Hage's narrator now calls Montreal home and lives a noir existence that seems half William S. Burroughs and half Albert Camus. He is also a man with strongly traditional masculine traits.

No Place Strange, on the other hand, is a woman's book. It is a book, at base, about a baby. A magic child. One who embodies hope that the world can move beyond chaos, conflict, misunderstanding and move into a more nurturing, caring, yes, mothering environment.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so.

No Place Strange was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award (which was won by Jessica Grant).

Marion Woodman, Elinor Dickson, Robert Bly

This review first appeared in Id Magazine (Fall 1996).

Robert Bly
The Sibling Society
Addison-Wesley

Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Knopf

New books by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman provide an interesting compare-and-contrast study. Woodman, the Canadian Jungian analyst, feminist, and author from London, Ontario, and Bly have shared the stage of various workshops for the personal development set. Woodman discusses the feminine, and Bly promotes the masculine. Now readers who peruse the latest offerings from two of the 1990s more creative thinkers can attempt to recreate the atmosphere of those workshops for themselves.

Bly, an American poet who first gained prominence for his principled stand against the Vietnam War, is probably best known for influencing men to retreat to the woods with a set of bongos and body paint. Bly's 1992 book, Iron John, became a surprising bestseller and brought the so-called Men's Movement into the media glare.

Iron John, of course, was also attacked for minimizing feminism's significant gains and achievements. In particular, many found Bly's suggestion that men return to a pre-patriarchal form of masculinity ridiculous in the extreme. Bly's new book, The Sibling Society, picks up where Iron John left off. However, this time Bly has been more careful to clarify his position.

"The anger against patriarchal structures," Bly writes, "is a just anger; its structure has damaged both women and men. The women's movement has in general been a vigorous and essential wave of energy, which has brought about deep changes, long overdue, in the relations between men and women. Patriarchal certainty is no longer so firmly implanted in the brain of every man, and patriarchal structures have dissolved in many fields, allowing women to move forward and take a place in the world."

Bly, however, is on guard against feminism's excesses, and it is here that the critics stumble. See for example the recent brutally inaccurate review of The Sibling Society in The Globe and Mail, which all but called Bly a Neanderthal. Bly's critics take him to be saying that we ought to return to the past, where fathers ruled the home and all was right in the land. Bly is not so simple. He strikes, instead, a cautionary note: he celebrates the progressive elements of feminism, while at the same reminding us to respect and honour men and women, their distinctiveness, and the complexity of their differences.

On this point, Woodman agrees. "Even now," Woodman writes (with co-author Elinor Dickson), "in the patriarchal excesses of militant feminism, we see yet another swing of the pendulum, the failure to find balance." Woodman's book is called Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, and it is primarily concerned with how Goddess imagery can help save Western culture from its more outrageous bloodbaths. However, Woodman delivers a cautionary note to feminists who find little to like in men, comparing "militant feminism" with the dreaded "patriarchy" it claims to oppose.

Bly and Woodman each retreat from the male and female cultural powermongers and attempt to cultivate the creative middle ground. Woodman, for example, promotes "a new masculine consciousness that can pull the feminine out of the inertia of the mother, bringing a new assertiveness, a new perspective on life." This may sound like a bunch of gobbeldegook, and more than once I got lost in Woodman's book, feeling cast adrift in some netherland of her creation. But it also strikes me as a generous contribution to the stalemate which too often passes for the relationship between the sexes.

"Men have not escaped patriarchy's bludgeonings," Woodman writes at the beginning of a chapter on how a dream relationship to the Goddess can lead men into deeper relationship with themselves, others, and life itself. What is strange is that this needs to be said, and that it has the potential to be so explosive. Bly speculates in The Sibling Society that the reason that Iron John was so consistently misunderstood is because he wrote it for a literary audience, and many of his critics were sociologists.

Maybe that's true. Maybe there is a significant gap between those who can appreciate the wisdom of mythopoetics (the power of myth, metaphor, poetry) and those who prefer their knowledge of the world broken down into statistics, charts, graphs, historical patterns. But if this gap is so wide that we can no longer hear each other, then I think that it's time that we learned to bridge the crevice. There is a ringing need for new answers and new approaches, and Bly and Woodman offer some of the most original.

Bly's point is that patriarchy needed to be broken down, but that the culture that is slowly replacing patriarchy also has its destructive elements. Bly notes, for example, the rise in single-parent homes. Men are neglecting the role of fatherhood. Patriarchy overvalued the role of father, but now we have accommodated the absent father. Western culture has swung from one end of the pendulum to the other. It has created, Bly contends, a society where we parent each other: a sibling society, which has done away with the father figure and is now busy attacking motherhood (see, for example, the significant role attacks on welfare mothers played in electing the Harris government).

Bly makes his point by quoting sociological statistics; however, in the more interesting part of his book, he illustrates his thesis with examples from folklore.

When he talks about fatherless sons, for example, he provides some of the most interesting criticism you're ever likely to read about "Jack and the beanstalk."

For those familiar with Jungian psychology, Woodman's book will prove to be equally rewarding. For beginners, however, many of the passages may prove tough going. Also, I was particularly uncomfortable with her broad generalizations linking Jungian archetypes with quantum physics and chaos theory. It makes for interesting reading and dinner conversation. But is it true?

Eye wuz here

This is a review of an anthology published in 1996 of women writers under 30. Perhaps by now they are all under 44?

*

This review first appeared in Paragraph (Summer 1996).

Eye wuz here: Stories by women writers under 30
Edited by Shannon Cooley
Douglas & McIntyre, 1996

Forty, fifty, sixty years from now, graduate students will read this book and discuss the 1990s feminist consensus the same way that we now read W.H. Auden and the rest of the Angry Young Men and wonder what it was exactly about socialism that so intriged them.

In the meantime, however, readers will be pleased to spend time with the 28 sharp-witted writers brought together in this collection. Eye Wuz Here presents 28 Canadian female writers under the age of 30, all of them working in the short story form. The writing is intelligent, daring, insightful, dangerous, provocative, searing, sad, funny, delightful.

The collection is the project of Shannon Cooley, who began gathering stories for this publication as she was working on a creative writing degree at the University of Victoria. The Canada Council assisted its publication, and now we know what young women have on their minds: mostly sex.

It would be easy, of course, to complain that the view of the world that emerges from these stories has rather sharp borders. The men, for example, tend to be shallow. They are lovers, losers, boyfriends, abusers, husbands, brothers, uncles, accessories all to the drama of the female narrators. This criticism, I recognize, is cheap, and I wouldn't make it, except that it leads me to where I want to go.

Which is here: In her introduction, Cooley claims a peculiar "goal for all art and literature." Cooley writes: "Through sharing point of view comes empathy, and through empathy, the lessening of loneliness and isolation," which plays an important role "in the process of working towards positive change." A fine sentiment, surely, but as misguided as all attempts to link art and politics.

I would argue, for example, that Cooley's collection feeds a middle-class feminist myopia and assists in the splintering of society, not its healing. Class issues, for example, are dealt with very poorly in this collection, if at all. And it's hard to believe that a generation of writers which grew up during a period which saw two referendums in Quebec, plus the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles, has nothing whatsoever to say about the fate of the nation. To say nothing of the fact that this collection heavily favours West Coast writers over East Coast writers, and includes not one Quebecois or First Nations voice.

But these are political issues, not aesthetic ones, and I have already said that this collection contains some fine writing. I expect publishers to pursue each of the 28 writers in the collection. If they do, Canadians will be offered a rich array of literary work in the years ahead. If I was to offer any advice to the group of 28, I would ask them to move beyond the Jack Kerouac school of journalism as fiction and to let their talents take them into deeper waters.

Jessica Grant

What a delightful book this is, Jessica Grant's Come, Thou Tortoise (Vintage Canada, 2009).

Having just finished, I looked about at what others have said:

• "a mad cap adventure that never fails to feel real" (Globe and Mail review)
• "one of those rare books that manage to entwine humour – in this case, even outright silliness – with poignant insight and a captivating plot" (Quill and Quire review)
• "Author Jessica Grant, bless her big heart, lives by this rule: throw plausibility out the window. In her novel, amputees attend a school where they custom-design their own prosthetics; fruit flies get addicted to toothpaste; cabbies learn safety by driving on an ice rink; and a centenarian tortoise whose skin feels like an old elbow recounts the story of Audrey’s love for a mountain climber named Cliff" (Neil Smith in The National Post)
• "As the story progresses, mysteries deepen, and it's a race to the end to see what is what. And what is what, as you might imagine, is not what is expected, nor perfectly clear, but it's nearly perfect. As is Audrey Flowers herself, and this altogether marvelous and clever book" (Pickle Me This review)
• Jessica Grant wins Amazon.ca First Novel Award (National Post)

See also:

• Jessica Grant on YouTube
• and on YouTube again
• Books in 140 seconds review of the book on YouTube

Lynn Coady once wrote that Mordecai Richler was the only writer in Canada who was allowed to be funny. Sometimes that seemed to be true. Strangely, as we move into the 21st century levity is becoming more ... um, CanLit. (Not Canadian, surely [Shirley]; we've always been comic.)

As the comments above all suggest, the comic prevails in Come, Thou Tortoise, and at the same time, there is a lot going on here. There is a seriousness that the "first readers" sense, but have a hard time articulating. That is a show of deep respect for the writer, I would suggest. Those readers were, like me, in awe of this book.

We can talk plot, but let's first talk word play. I can't name another Canadian book that is so playful with words. The Q&Q reviewer is slightly critical of Grant's penchant for puns, suggesting that this tactic "frequent misspellings and far-fetched word choices come across as gimmicky rather than reinforcing [the narrator's] childlike character." I disagree.

The "truthfulness" of the book is perhaps diminished by the wordplay, but the magnificence of the art is increased. We might call it post-modern playfulness. This isn't a story that depends on verisimilitude. This is a book the revels in all kinds of made-up-ness. First impressions, as the first reviewers suggest, isn't enough to get all of it.

Here's my favorite quote:

• "My dad used to say I was chalant. A lost positive. Nonchalance, he said, is indifference to mystery. Nonchalant is one of the worst things a person can be. You hang on to your chalance."

This is a book full of chalance. I've never read another like it.

What's the plot? Go read it for yourself.