Melia McClure

My review of Melia McClure's The Delphi Room (CZP, 2013), from Quill & Quire. (See also me reading this thing on YouTube.)

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When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.

After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?

Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.

Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.

A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

Maitland & da Costa

My review recently posted on The Winnipeg Review.

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Being assigned two books to review at once, one cannot help but return to grade eleven English. The command echoes loud and clear: compare and contrast.

Paulo da Costa’s The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand Books, 2013) and Collette Maitland’s Keeping the Peace (Biblioasis, 2013) are both short story collections. Even a cursory contemplation of their titles, however, would lead one to suspect that while they share a form, they are divergent in other significant aspects.

In his 1998 book Ripostes (Porcupine’s Quill), essayist Philip Marchand compares and contrasts the work of Terry Griggs with that of Barbara Gowdy and illuminates insights that are assistive to our consideration of the works under review here.

Griggs, says Marchand, is Catholic; Gowdy, Protestant. He considers their treatment of angels. In Griggs, they foretell miracles; in Gowdy, death. Marchand writes of Gowdy’s characters: “It is as if they have a genetic memory of salvation anxiety – an anxiety in striking contrast to the relatively relaxed approach to salvation characteristic of many Catholics, who know that if Jesus hasn’t entered their hearts, at least they can make a novena on nine first Fridays and feel fairly safe.”

Based on the titles, do you want to guess which of these writers I am about to suggest is the Catholic and which the Protestant: da Costa or Maitland?

Let’s get it over with. Maitland, Protestant; da Costa, Catholic.

Keeping the Peace contains nineteen stories in 238 pages. The stories are short, sharp, intense. They are often shocking. They contain domestic violence, mental illness, teenage sex. The stories often turn on moral failure. More specifically, they turn on the failure of an individual to live up to the standards of “the code,” which is often the unspoken social expectations of contemporary rural Orangetown — I mean, Ontario. You know what I mean. There is no salvation for those who don’t follow “the code,” and for those in danger of straying away from the code there is much anxiety, an emotion that swells to bursting in every story in this collection.

Compare and contrast this with the stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World. The stories in this collection rollick in the foibles of their characters. Aren’t people strange and wonderful? Wow. Did you hear the one about the old widow with the gun who scared the crap out of her live-in caregiver? Did you hear the one about the kid with that disease and he went to the doctor, and he had an operation, and he was freaking cured? Can you believe that? A miracle!

The Green and Purple Skin of the World contains sixteen stories in 206 pages. Many of the stories are intimate family portraits. It would be a stretch to call them dramas. Some haven’t much drama at all, really, or to approach it another way, they haven’t much anxiety. Some of the stories are full of intimate moments, portrayed lovingly, lightly and suffused with fun. To use the word Marchand highlights, salvation is not at risk in these stories. The fate of the family, the fate of an individual is not at risk. These stories don’t sharpen a narrative edge; they expand with love of life and risk being boring.

Let me be clear, not all stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World meet this description. One story about a combat pilot who watches his buddies blow up, for example, has plenty of anxiety and narrative edge. We might conclude, therefore, that da Costa’s stories showcase greater range that Maitland’s, but that would be a superficial conclusion. Maitland’s stories push harder against the edges of reality, focusing on the fraying edges of relationships. The title may be Keeping the Peace, but these stories more often articulate the point at which relationships fragment. There is much anxiety that the peace be kept, that the code be followed, but damnation is inevitable within this mythology. The centre cannot hold.

In the final story, for example, the wife of an elderly man with Alzheimer’s takes him for a walk in the park. It seems a nice day until the man pulls a kitchen knife from his pocket and attacks a concrete lion statue, scraping newly applied paint off the creature’s eyeballs. A mother with a young child passes by and then turns away. The old man’s wife watches the woman pull a cell phone from her pocket. She can only imagine that the woman is calling 911, and she notes as the story ends “she would have done the same.”

Oi vey. Really? The wife identifies with Nurse Ratched? Surely this is the point where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enter the picture, but, no, the book ends. It’s severe, man. Yikes.
The Green and Purple Skin of the World, on the other hand, offers frequent reconciliation. One story collects a family at Christmas for the traditional torture. The mother is desperate for a granddaughter. Is the daughter going to fulfil her mother’s wish? Why should she, since her parents kicked her out of the home many years earlier when she was a teenager and caught in bed with her boyfriend? The daughter went on to live years on the street. The boyfriend was sent off to posh schools. Years later, they married and now all is supposed to be forgiven and forgotten. The daughter swears, however, she will never have a child. Never inflict on another being the damage that was inflicted upon her. But the story doesn’t end on a note of negation; it ends with the mother sharing the daughter’s childhood bathing suit with her. Wouldn’t it look nice on a girl? Yes, the daughter agrees. It sure would.

Cue the strings. Full orchestra. Bleeding heart and tears. Oh, lovely. Yes. It is, though.

As we reach our own conclusion, let us settle on relativity. Different strokes for different folks. An engaged reading, however, demands what Leonard Cohen asked of us in 1956: Let us compare mythologies. Off you go, now. Get reading.

Peter Roman

Peter Roman's The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (CZP, 2013) is the first novel I've read that made me feel like I was playing a video game.

Maybe it was the protagonist, who kept dying and coming back to life, fighting assorted demons (and angels) and progressing to higher levels of complex game play.

But the protagonist isn't Super Mario; he's Jesus Christ. Or at least the soul who inherited Christ's body. Confused? So is he. His name is Cross, as in the Cross, but also angry.

Cross has the biggest case of amnesia in history and a unique problem. He can't die. He wakes up in a cave, rolls away enough of the rock to squeeze out. He has vague memories of being crucified. He remembers his enemy, Judas. No Prince of Peace, he's pissed off.

Over the next two thousand years, he drifts around the world indulging the body's cravings (often simply described as wine and women), fighting in the Roman Coliseum, with King Arthur's Knights, against assorted knaves, rogues and rascals. He has a burning hatred for Judas and a permanent existential crisis. He cannot erase himself (he dies repeatedly, only to dig himself out of various graves). He is propelled forward for a desire to know himself (though he's not much for philosophy) and a desire for revenge (he's convinced Judas is the cause of his fate). Judas, it must be explained, is a lot like Lucifer; he is no mortal; he morphs throughout history, often placing himself at the site of catastrophe and chaos (e.g., Hiroshima et al).

The background of the story is Christ withdrew to Heaven and God withdrew from the world. Judas, essentially, inherits the earth, except he hasn't achieved the complete Doom's Day he expected either. Angels remain, abandoned by God, awaiting his return. A host of other magical creatures also exist, each with different agendas.

Cross is like Moses in the desert, cast out, wandering. How can one not quote Bob Dylan? "Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone." He hunts angels for grace. He kills them and sucks out their power, which restores him. If he died low on grace, he would still be restored, but it would take longer. Being stocked up on grace also allows him to perform magic of various sorts.

While the context-setting is complicated, the plot isn't. The story opens with an angel offering Cross a bargain: find the Mona Lisa (the real Mona Lisa, not the painting) and he will be given Judas. And since his search for Judas is one of the few things that have kept him going for the past two thousand years, of course he says yes. He would do anything for that. And what follows is a series of the odd and improbable. It's also a love story. And everything wraps up tightly, while also setting us up for the sequel.

Part hard-boiled detective novel, part magical realism, part mystic fantasy, part picaresque adventure, this genre bending novel may leave you seeking grace yourself. Though as Cross makes clear, eternal life has its down sides.

Leon Rooke

There's a video on YouTube about manuscript records of Barry Hannah's at the University of Mississippi, and they interview a professor who recounts first reading Hannah, oh so many years ago, and the prof talks about how he had to learn to read Hannah the way Hannah wanted to be read.

He summarizes this as: learning to read for "language," not just for "story."

Rooke is the same way.

Read for the stories, the "acts of kamikaze fiction" in Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow (Exile, 2012) are going to confound.

Read as wild arrays of language, these stories will amaze.

Rooke's fans already know this. Eager readers everywhere, all aboard!

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Here's my other post about the marvelous Mr. Rooke (from May 2010, written earlier), plus bonus interview!

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Here's the Barry Hannah video:



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Here's Leon reading poetry:

Donald Barthelme

We're due for a Donald Barthelme revival. Or at least I was, because of passages like this (from an interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Serman, 1975):

BARTHELME: [On teaching creative writing] About the only thing I give them [the students] in the way of general pronouncements is that I forbid them absolutely to use weather in any form. ... Weather, weather. Thunderstorms, rain. 

I say, "This is an entirely artificial prohibition and as soon as you leave my class you can use all of the weather you want. But for this space of time, weather is verboten." 

That immediately gets rid of a lot of really bad writing.

RUAS: Why, because --

BARTHELME: -- Because it's so easy to use weather as the equivalent of an emotion, and you know --

RUAS: -- And Shakespeare's already done it better than anyone else can.

BARTHELME: Yes, and one very good student, at the start of this semester, said, "What, no weather? What would Lear be without weather?"

And I said, "The exception to this rule is if you write Lear."

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My favorite quotations from Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews:

• “There’s nothing more rewarding than than a fresh set of problems.”
• “There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem.”
• “Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.”
• “To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’”
• “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

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Most people probably encounter Barthelme in a classroom, which is unfortunate, especially if he is taught as part of the post-modern crowd, which of course he is (part of it, and taught that way). His fiction may be of the 1960s & 1970s, but his influence (and potential influences) span backwards and forwards in time.

Not-Knowing begins with two substantial essays, "After Joyce" and "Not-Knowing," which establish Bartheleme's bona fides as a Modernist and a Texan. His father was an architect and high on the intellectual curve for his time. Barthelme's interviews and essays show his deep immersion in aesthetic debates from visual art, to buildings, to books. While he may have picked up some avant garde tendencies from his father, his pater didn't appreciate Donald's sense of humour, or the advent of the "post-" prefix.

What one senses in all of this is the primal conflict, perhaps best illustrated by noting the title of what of Barthelme's novels, The Dead Father.

"Not enough emotion" and "too many jokes" were what Barthelme considered the weaknesses of his fiction. We might identify here instead an anxiety to simply be himself. But what was that?

Barthelme situates his work, like Joyce (and his other oft cited influence, Gertrude Stein) in the perpetual state of becoming. Or as he calls it, Not-Knowing: "The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives."

There is also the ongoing argument with those who don't "get it," those content to be hip to be square.

Barthelme quotes Kenneth Burke (from "The Calling of the Tune"):

For the greater the dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist in an otherworldly art that leaves the things to Ceaser to take care of themselves, the greater becomes the artist's dependence upon some ruler who will accept the responsibility for doing the world's "dirty work."

Puzzle that one out for a moment, before reading Barthelme's response:

This description of the artist turning his back on the community to pursue his "otherworldly" projects (whereupon the community promptly falls apart) is a familiar one, accepted even by some artists. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the other writers of the transition school (Burke mentions them specifically) are seen as deserters, creating their own worlds, which are thought to have nothing to do with the larger world. The picture is, I think, entirely incorrect. ...

Burke's strictures raise the sticky question of what art is "about" and the mysterious shift that takes place as son as one says that art is not about something but is something. In saying that the writer creates "dissociation and discontinuity" rather than merely describing a previously existing dissociation and discontinuity (the key word is "developed"), Burke notices that with Joyce and Stein the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or a commentary upon the world -- a crucial change in status which was also taking place in painting. With Joyce, and to a lesser degree with Gertrude Stein, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated.

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Barthelme wrote that in 1964, just when the Sixties were becoming the Sixties. He then went on to become one of the leading literary innovators of his generation. His short stories and novels kept up the beat. The times were a-changing. At least, so it seemed for a while. They don't really change. They just modulate within a frequency. (What frequency, Kenneth?)

Check on the podcast by The New Yorker: Chris Adrian reads “The Indian Uprising,” by Donald Barthelme, and discusses it with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

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As much as Barthelme was on his period, part of what we mean by literary influence is that the artist was ahead of her time. I think this is true of Barthelme. There is much (too much) "knowingness" in  the 21st century, despite all of the quakes, wars, economic and environmental meltdowns. And I don't just mean Dubya's "you're with us or agin us." So-called progressives can be just as closed-minded as the ultra-dumb, I mean, -right.

"Dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist"? In the interviews Barthelme repeatedly asserts that he's a "realist." Amen to that. He's also a language-magician and an idea-jerking philosopher (joker, midnight toker).

BARTHELME: I say it's realism, bearing in mind Harold Rosenberg's wicked remark that realism is one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration.

We're talking about art, people.

Repeat after me. Donald Barthelme revival. Donald Barthelme revival.

Sam Lipsyte

A quick look through the GoodReads reviews of this book suggested many of Lipsyte's fans were disappointed with the new collection, The Fun Parts.

For the life of me, I'm not sure why.

I started Lipsyte's Venus Drive a few years ago and couldn't get into it. The timing wasn't right for me, or something.

After finishing The Fun Parts, however, I'm ready to try again.

The new collection has 13 stories. They are darkly humorous. There is foul language, sexual themes, drug use, gun play and death. Some readers might be tempted to locate cynicism within. I didn't.

This is a completely subjective comment, but Lipsyte is the same age as me, and the collection had a nice "ah" feeling. The stories are uncomfortable, the characters struggling, contemporary reality is presented as a distressed array of random happenings. Yup, I recognize all of that as day-to-day.

So, yes, the stories have a male predisposition, but it's a post-modern, post-feminist predisposition. That is, a la Leonard Cohen, "the war is over/ the good guys lost." The characters are caught in the minor dramas of their lives, disconnected from any saving grace of any mega-narrative.

The disconnected isolation of the individual is a recurring strategy, in fact.

"Nate's Pain Is Now," for example, is narrated by an Augusten Burroughs-type memoirist, whose found himself on the outs. His redemptive self-story is no longer in demand. He just another former drunk/junkie with a father who's disappointed in him.

"Deniers" tells the story of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who won't talk about his past, or show much emotion about anything. Her friend wants to write a poetry cycle about her, and then she hooks up with a guy with a skinhead past.

As a frame, the story risks cliche, but it avoids that fate and explodes with many small moments that enlighten and entertain, to risk cliche myself.

Here's one passage:

"Anyway," said Tovah, "I've been working on a poem cycle about you."
"A what?"
"A bunch of poems."
"About me?"
"Yeah."
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know a lot, Mandy."
"Not really. Maybe about me and Craig."
"Researching facts isn't the point," said Tovah. "It's about my construction of you. My projection."
"So," said Many, "I don't get it. Are you asking permission?"
"A real artist never asks permission."
"Oh."
"But I don't want any static between us."
"Am I Mandy?" said Mandy.
"Pardon?"
"In your poem, am I Mandy? Do you name me? Do you say Mandy Gottlieb?"
"No. It's addressed to a nameless person."
"Then why should I care?"
Tovah seemed stunned.
"Well...because it's so obviously you."
"But you said it's about your structure of me."
"My construction of...yes, that's right."
"So who cares?"
"I don't really understand your question."
"It's okay, Tovah. Write what your heart tells you to write."

This short passage contains a number of nice reversals, seems to bring these two friends closer together, but ultimately illustrates the gulf between them, while still keeping them connected.

The fun parts?

Lipsyte takes readers to the edge of oblivion. He saves us, however, from going over into the void.

Spencer Gordon

Winner of the CBC's 2013 Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book, Spencer Gordon's Cosmo (Coach House, 2012) is spritely, clever, funny, thoughtful, and restrained.

That last adjective may seem odd. It seems odd to me, given the wide ranging playfulness of this short story collection, but it's a thought that recurred as I made my way through the book.

Restrained, how? In emotion, surely. In perspective, perhaps. In aesthetic approach, maybe. In interests, not sure I would go that far.

Two of the stories begin with quotations from giants of American post-moderism: David Foster Wallace and Donald Barthelme. And the anxiety of influence is clear throughout. These stories seek to bend form, play games of the mind, articulate multiple layers of surface, foreground the artifice of the story itself, make the reader hyper aware of frames, and celebrate the swirl of language, carefully.

The carefully part is the restrained part. There is much intelligence here and much authorial control. The narratives are strong and assured. The paragraphs, short or long, are well manufactured.

Strangely (?), the book I read immediately before this one was Not Knowing, essays and interviews with Donald Barthelme. In one of the interviews Barthelme is asked to identify the biggest weakness in his writing. Or perhaps his biggest regret. Emotion, he ways. He wished he'd included more emotion. And fewer jokes. He also asserts repeatedly that he is a "realist" because art articulates the tropics of the mind.

Having read these two books so closely back-to-back, it's impossible for me not to draw comparisons. I feel that Cosmo could have used more emotion, though also more jokes, and less restraint. Perhaps an "s" could have been added to the title. Cosmos. I realize these are purely subjective tastes, and suggestions, so I will try now to say something more objective.

As others have noted, "authenticity" is a recurrent concern in this collection. The first sentence of the first story: "This is authentic, Crystle thought." These five words are just lovely. The italics. The concise "thought." The begged question: what is? The inauthentic "Crystle," who turns out to be Miss U.S.A. aboard an American military vessel in South Asia on a medical-humanitarian mission to aid cleft-lipped children.

This is a fantastic set-up. The beauty queen, the U.S. military, the child victims of random cruel circumstance. It is real because it is real; such things happen; but it is also highly "made;" it is an organized event, a deliberate placing of idealized pageant contestants with the randomly displaced. In other words, exactly the kind of "media event" that takes place every day and which can only be called authentic after it's been filtered through tough-fibered layers of skepticism.

Gordon gives us this skepticism, but he also keeps the reader buoyed well above cynicism. There's that restraint again. Crystle is moved by the suffering children, even as she has panic attacks about her biggest fear: falling down on the runway mid-pageant. This is authentic? We should care?

Even as I admired the writing, I wasn't sure.

But it got me to thinking along the lines of what did Andy Warhol have to say about the Holocaust? I popped the two terms in Google and came up with this....: "Sculptor George Segal created this work entitled The Holocaust. The memorial is at the location of the Legion of Honor and overlooking the Bay at Lands End. Segal is considered an important figure in the Pop Art movement which includes Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol."

Barthelme repeatedly insists that he's not ignoring social realities, and that his work references, among other things, the Vietnam War, racial strife, poverty and other social conditions. It just doesn't foreground those things; it foregrounds the activities of the mind (while also acknowledging the place-in-time context).

Here's a couple of the quotations I liked from Barthelme:

• “To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’” (1981)
• “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.” (1987)

Cosmo lives up to both of these, and I salute it. It is difficult and a riddle; it is art.

Bravo.

Best Canadian Stories 2012

I’m not sure if these were the best short stories in Canada from 2012, but some of them are very, very good.

The anthology includes 10 stories, and I would like to celebrate what I consider the best of them.

Caroline Adderson’s “Poppycock” opens the book. Holy cow. This story will have me quivering for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be out of place alongside the stories of Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. Paragraph by paragraph, it terrified me. The protagonist is a woman, a divorced mother of two, whose has been alienated from her family (father and sister, mother deceased) for over two decades. Her daughters are young adults and moved out. One day, her father shows up. She hasn’t seen him in 20+ years. He’s extremely unwell. Is this a chance for redemption? A corrective? A chance for explanation?

The whole thing tore my heart out. Unbelievable.

Or as Justin would say, Unbeliebable.

Lynn Coady’s “Dogs in Clothes” is another boot shaker. Ostensibly the story is about a young female publicist who shepherds a famous male (deep thinker) publicist around a metropolitan city (which seems a lot like Toronto during the G20 summit, when there were fences all over downtown and paranoid security apparatus[es] all over). Meanwhile, the publicist is texting a (female) friend and (married-to-someone-else) boyfriend and her brother (who is at the hospital where her father is under the knife for heart surgery). Grace under pressure? Is this Hemingway all over again? Are Coady and Adderson taking the same drugs?

Once again, a story about full catastrophe living. And not a Buddhist in sight.

Shaena Lambert’s “The War Between Men and Women” seems, at first, more straightforward. We’ve all lived through Phase I, II, III, IV, V, VI Feminism(s), so we all get this, right? Well, this is more like Faulkner’s “the human heart in conflict with itself” Nobel Speech (1949). [And isn't that great? Isn't the internet useful for something, once and a while?] “Endure and prevail.” Words post-Boston. Post-catastrophe. Eternal.

Lambert’s story starts: “It was 1968, and there was a war between the men and the women.” Holy crow. The story is told from the point of view of the child of two parents at war. As readers, we are once again in the middle of it all. In the middle of a war of all against all. Is it total destruction? Is there a chance for safety? Is peace an option?

What does all of this have to do with Canada, circa 2012?

“The story is constantly changing,” says the back cover, “and readers have to change as well.”

Well, okay, but why does it all seem so 1918?

Douglas Glover’s “The Sun King and the Royal Child” offers historical context as respite. In perhaps the “deepest” story in the collection, Glover offers (again, like the others) a narrator under pressure. Here is a young man who has had an long-running affair with another man’s wife. The other man is an archaeologist who has become famous as a researcher of pre-European contact Iroquois history/cosmology in southwestern Ontario. The “Sun King” and “Royal Child” of the title are Iroquois “artifacts,” except maybe they’re not, as the story eventually explains. Like much of the Glover-opus, the “present” of the story is both now and “then.” Or, to quote Faulkner again, “the past is never past.” (Though the quote is often paraphrased, as I have done here, according to Wikipedia: the real quote is from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”)

Oh, Hemingway. Faulkner. Canada. 2012. What gives?

I don’t know. But it makes for a startling collection of short fiction.

Check, that.

Could use something by Tony Burgess, though. A little zombie ice fishing.

Just sayin.

Julian Barnes

Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
Random House, 2013

Early in life, Barnes writes, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still — at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) — it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

He also writes, “There is the question of loneliness.” Then a few sentences later, “Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.”

Together, these quotations seem to beg the question, Is loss of a spouse like a return to adolescent confusion?

Yet, he is unambiguous. Adolescent loneliness is the worst.

Before I address this question, I should say something about the book as a whole. It is slim, a mere 118 pages. A quick read, it is divided into three sections. Ostensibly, it is about grief; specifically, it is about Barnes’ grief for his wife of 30 years who died in 2008, after a 37 day illness. Cancer in the brain.

But to say the book is a memoir would be mistaken. It is part memoir, part essay, part fiction. The three sections are titled: The Sin of Height, On the Level, and The Loss of Depth. Levels of life, as the title says.

The balloon on the cover is another hint. There is a survey of 19th century balloonists, and also 19th century photographers. This is all interesting, well told, precise in description, alert in metaphor, and … all preamble to Barnes’ use of the first person to describe his experiences following the death of his life-partner.

There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process; yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical — and vertiginous — while mourning is horizontal.

Me, I like this distinction. Grief has nausea; mourning, sadness.

Let’s get back to the question of adolescence, which Barnes doesn’t develop, but which I would like to push deeper. In my own case, as my wife approached death (and I mean her final months, so there was a period of extended awareness of doom many times longer than Barnes had), I had feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. When you are living with the awareness of doom, yet trying not to be consumed by doom, you focus on the day-by-day. Watch the flowers grow. Take pleasure in the laundry. The future goes blank. You cannot plan. You cannot take for granted that you will be together six months from now. Maybe not even two months from now. “I’ve been here before,” I told Kate. “I know this feeling. I feel twenty-two again.”

History did not record what she said in response. I don't remember. I don't think she said anything. "Do whatever you need to do, honey," or something along those lines.

The future, then, was blank. Full of possibility, yes, but blank. Lonely, too. One quests for love, to relieve the loneliness. Having found love, one can always lose it. It is part of the marriage contract. One must go first. The marriage contract becomes a caregiver’s contract. I will look after you. I will not abandon you.

Barnes writes, “There were 37 days between diagnosis and death.” In my case, there were 21 months. Grief is not competitive, and I don’t mean to be stern; however, the structure of this book is limiting, where it could be broadening. Barnes is careful to say each grief is specific, each experience is unique, yet the book reaches for general conclusions also. Levels of life.

I was not married for three decades, yet I inherited two step-children (and a new partner in her ex-husband), and the future is blank. Full of possibility. It must be. The children demand it so.  As they should.

At one point, near the end of Kate’s life, I was speaking to a psychologist. She asked me how I was doing. I said I was listening someone compulsively to the music I used to listen to when I was 15 years old. I told her that for some reason I felt it important to reconnect with that adolescent. He had the whole world in front of him. He had all of his options open. I needed to live like that, I said. I needed to be ready for anything, and I trusted my 15-year-old self to get me through it. She was disagreeable. “We’ll see how that goes,” she said. I would like to report now, in that regard, things went just fine. I have been horribly, horribly sad, but I survived adolescence, and I’ll survive this. (At least, until I don’t. Time comes for all of us.)

I would have liked to have seen Barnes develop this line of thought (find arguments that contradict his absolutes), yet he is fanciful and metaphoric, an auteur, and, let it be said, brilliant. Earnest to a fault. Besotted with love. A true hero. Bravo.

I saw him once, at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. Late-1980s I would guess. It was the slightest of connections, yet I bleed for him, having read of his heartbreak. I wish him happiness, and healing laughter.

Keep passing the open windows, Julian. You know what I mean.

Primo Levi

Already a well known classic, this book needs no introduction.

Primo Levi trained as a chemist in Fascist Italy, and managed moments of a career despite his Jewish ethnicity before being removed to a Nazi concentration camp. He has written about his time at Auschwitz elsewhere, but this book includes a couple stories from the camp also.

The main narrative, however, recounts his professional career as a chemist, most of which involves paints and varnishes. As the title hints, Levi provides a tour of different elements: carbon, silver, mercury, lead, etc. "Matter," he reminds us, the building blocks of life, which in the ancient stories the gods breathes with "spirit," giving life.

As so it is with Levi, storyteller. He breathes life into the inanimate, rejoices in the human spirit, even as he reminds readers of the horrors humans can inflict on one another and their world.

Levi writes in an after-the-catastrophe tone. He is writing at the end of his career, and also decades after "the camp," and he presents a narrator both weary and alert with curiosity. The narrator takes a teaching tone, recounting the particulars of each element, but not a pedantic tone. He knows what he knows and he also outlines what is unknown. There is a persistent moderation, recalling that other scientist, Artistotle, and "the mean."

It's a tone our tabloid culture finds hard to replicate or embrace, even. What a pity.

Auster & Coetzee

When I was reading this, I found it compelling. I wanted to keep going, find out how it "ended," but it (of course) never really ended. It just ended. It had, a la Julian Barnes, the sense of an ending.

As I was reading it, I liked it. Upon reflection, not so much.

My disappointments outnumber my pleasure points. As such, dear book, I think we should break up. It's probably me, not you, but this is a review of you.

Thus, I had admiration for each of these authors before I read their correspondence, yet my admiration for them is diminished, not amplified, by seeing them all up close and personal.

Why so much discussion of sports? Why so clueless about the 2008 economic collapse? Why so little disagreement or pressing of the other into greater unknowns?

I wish now to read a similar correspondence between Carver and Bartheme, or Didion and Sontag. Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. The genre has possibilities that have been only faintly outlined here.

Coetzee plays the pessimist to Auster's optimist. This gives them a point of conflict but it's also cliche. Auster is the bubbling American, ever hopeful, and Coetzee is old-world rogue, confirmed in his near-cynicism by perpetual disaster.

These tropes play to neither author's advantage. Ultimately I felt that too many opportunities of interest were lost. Coetzee is reflecting on mortality (his own) and "late style". He makes some general observations and Auster offers a series of examples that contradict Coetzee's drift, but the topic is not run to ground.

This book is superficial! That is my conclusion, though it surprises me to say so. Neither of these men is superficial, and their work is full of complexity, but I wanted more from their interaction.

It just is what it is. Play it again, Lenny Bruce.