Reading and Ranking

[First published in August 2006 in The Danforth Review]

In May 2006, The New York Times published a feature that attempted to answer the question: "What is the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years?" The Times had asked 125 prominent literary figures to pick a single novel published between 1980 and 2005 that they held in the highest regard. The novel with the most votes was Toni Morrison's Beloved. Others short-listed were Underworld by Don DeLillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the four novels of the "Rabbit" series, Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

Most interesting to me was the moderated on-line conversation the newspaper hosted from May 22-26 between two novelists and two critics. The moderator was Gregory Cowles, an editor with the NYT Book Review. The novelists were Michael Cunningham and Jane Smiley. The critics were Stephen Metcalf and Morris Dickstein.

What was interesting about it?

Well, let's begin with the notion of that every list includes not just what's on it, but what's left off. In an essay that introduced the list, A.O. Scott called the results of survey "a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of self-portrait as interesting for its blind spots and distortions as for its details."

Looking at the list, however, one is not aware of the blind spots and distortions unless one is aware of the blind spots and distortions (i.e., to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don't know what you don't know). Which is the first reason why the moderated conversation is invaluable; it illuminates the blind spots and interrogates the idea and process of list-making in the first place.
For example, of the 22 titles on the long-list, only two were written by women. One of those titles was the "winner." The other was Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), which the newspaper wryly notes "was not reviewed" upon publication.

Now no one is suggesting that a "Best of..." list has an obligation to be sociologically representative; however, two out of 22 is without a doubt a "distortion." Can anyone imagine a similar list reviewing Canadian fiction of the past 25 years yielding a similar result? A CanLit list is more likely to be tilted in the opposite direction, featuring Atwood and Munro dominating the field. So what's going on in the USA? The moderated conversation teased out some interesting possible answers.

I found Jane Smiley's contribution particularly instructive (insofar as she said things outside the boundaries of what I would have expected), even as I found her irritating (perhaps because she took me beyond where I felt comfortable venturing). In the end, I felt as one with Stephen Metcalf, who said: "Jane, we disagree so thoroughly, we're practically soul mates." Though I would have added: "Jane, without you, this trip wouldn't have been worth taking."

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Smiley is the author of many, many books, including 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), an examination of the evolution of the novel through history. Having completed her own survey of the form over a broader period of time and wider context, Smiley was well prepared to discuss the ins-and-outs of the Times' narrower review. First, she asked about the gender composition of the judges (50/50). Then she asked about the gender composition of those who bothered to send in a response (69% male, 31% female). Then she said:

I had thought of not responding, not playing the game, as it were, so that statistic intrigued me. It does seem to me to be a male game. Here we have the final four, and here we have the champion. Maybe the women novelists who didn't respond did[n't] feel that one novel could be chosen as "best."

Later, she bemoaned the fact that so many female jurors took themselves out of the competition. She also noted a study that reported men read mostly male authors, while women report reading male and female authors about equally. She cited this study as another reason why male authors were more likely to get more votes; because the women authors aren't being read by men. Male readers have their a subjective definition of "best writing," and it doesn't include the work by the authors Smiley considers her peers: female novelists.

This is the question the group returned to again and again: is it possible to define and defend "best writing" or is the question merely about competing subjectivities? No one was suggesting that sociological reading patterns ought to determine definitions of literary quality; however, the clear distinction between male and female authors on this list, and in apparent studies of reading habits, provided the primary background for the discussion that took place. How to define "best writing"? Is it even possible?

No, is the short answer. At least, there was no answer that garnered consensus. A.O. Scott, in his introductory essay, came up with the most plausible definition of enduring literary greatness:
The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

Interestingly, both Metcalf and Dickstein said they were certain that Beloved would win -- and they voted strategically with hopes of dethroning it. Metcalf even wrote a stinging essay in Slate outlining his objections to the book: "No other American novel of the past 25 years has so elegantly mapped the psychobiography of its ideal reader." However, Metcalf's salvo seemed only to confirm Scott's argument about what makes a great book great. Beloved is the ideal book for the readers of its period. Metcalf can't critique the book without also critiquing the period (quite legitimately, one might add).

In other words, while both Metcalf and Dickstein didn't want Beloved to win, they also assumed it would. Why? Because it has, as Smiley noted, "the historical scope that a 'best' or 'most important' novel would have." And this fact is so broadly recognized that jurors opposed to it surmised it would win even before the list was drawn up. As Scott noted:

Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, Beloved has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic.

Smiley was Beloved's defender in the conversation, and as its advocate she was articulate and forceful. The list, however, had another subtext, one that required her to make a confession and do some homework.

While Beloved was the survey's clear winner, Philip Roth placed many more books on the long list than any one else. Seven of the 22 were by Roth; DeLillo was second with four titles on the list. Roth may not have written the "best novel" of the period, but as Scott noted, he was clearly the "best writer" as judged by his peers. Smiley, however, confessed she hadn't read a Roth novel since 1969; so she quickly picked up American Pastoral and offered her on-the-go comments (not complimentary).

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Which brings us back to this perplexing relationship between book and reader. Why do some readers admire certain creations and not others? Metcalf said it clearly, but all involved in the conversation appeared to agree: "The selections say as much about the selectors as they do about the winners and losers."

The list that gets made depends on who's making the list, though the participants also seemed to agree that if there was no way to objectively rank titles, there was at least still room for reasoned judgment. Cunningham, for example, told the story of how eight professors at Brooklyn College made a list of their ten favourite books, and "five of the eight of us selected Alice Munro's Open Secrets and four Denis Johnston's Jesus' Son."

Much more interesting was Smiley's argument about why certain readers respond to certain books:

My first premise about what we like or don't like (or respond to or don't respond to) is that our affinities aren't necessarily reasonable or based in any sort of objective standard of aesthetic quality. They are more on the order of crushes or friendships -- there is something about a novel that is perceived emotionally and that draws us into willingly suspending disbelief or not. Arguing about which novel is best, or even about the virtues and faults of a particular novel is like arguing whether your sister should be dating that guy -- basically, the arguments don't matter while the sister still feels drawn to him.

When I first read this, I thought -- yes, but sometimes (objectively speaking) the sister shouldn't be dating that guy (abuser, molester, all around prick). The second time I read it, I thought, Okay. Add some qualifications and this is a reasonable working premise, though Smiley moves on from it to explain why she "just can't enjoy" The Great Gatsby:

None of the characters or themes or incidents seem to me to be developed -- rather, Fitzgerald seems to me to be talking about them at length, but more as a way of exercising his eloquence than as a way of exploring or revealing the situation -- but really, my reason is a made-up justification of an already formed lack of affinity [emphasis added].

And this was what irritated me about Smiley. She provided a reasonable, objective argument to explain her reaction to Gatsby, and then she undermined her own argument and insisted that her rationality was just covering up the subjectivity of her gut reaction, which must obviously dominate, just as she assumed every other reader must primarily be guided by their gut, no matter what other reason-based explanation they might provide.

The critics of this crew, of course, were having none of this. Metcalf:

I'm fascinated by how a discussion featuring two prominent novelists hasn't yet talked about aesthetics!! Isn't this what makes our concerns so parochial in time?? In fifty or a hundred years, who will believe we talked race, class, gender, geography, and even autism, before mentioning good writing?

I shared Metcalf's frustration, though was pleasantly surprised at how well these four outlined the issues that abound in contemporary literary culture -- and how respectfully they discussed them.

What I couldn't wrap my head around was Smiley's privileging of subjectivity when she was so clearly more than capable of close reading. Yes, she had a negative gut reaction to reading Roth, for example, but she also provided an in-depth analysis of the weaknesses of American Pastoral. So cogent was her analysis, that Dickstein, who'd voted for Roth's Sabbath's Theatre as the best book of the past quarter-century, was quick to affirm her argument against the Roth novel that landed on the short list. It turned out, he didn't like it much either. (A matter of the gut? Not for him.)

Dickstein, in fact, provided the deepest (best?) analysis of the group. For example:

The most striking feature of the five books on the short list is what they are not: first, as we've already said, they are not small, perfect books like Marilynn Robinson's two novels. But, except for the Updike tetralogy, they're also not large, circumstantial works in the tradition of Balzac, Trollope, Tolstoy, or Dreiser, books that build up a world, brick by brick, and allow us to inhabit it as we're reading. Instead, they're highly metaphorical works, historical parables that are sharply focused and almost meditations drenched in violence and written in white-hot anger.

They read more like essences, distillations, than like life itself.

This might be the place to mention that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man topped a similar list in 1965, and the group seemed to agree that no one in the past forty years had written anything that could top it. Race may be a sociological category, in general, but it is also the dominant subject of America, and Invisible Man is its dominant statement.

Comments about Marilynn Robinson also repeated through the dialogue. Her novel Housekeeping made the long list, but I also got the sense from the group that they thought this novel was gaining in gravity as time went along. For example, Cunningham asserted that "if history is any indication, we can assume that every generation is wrong about its enduring works of art. ... I suspect we're seeing a shift away from the monolithic ur-book toward a more motley assortment of books that bite of smaller bits of the world but chew them more exquisitely."
On the other hand, Smiley said "the form of the novel has always seemed to alternate (or fail to decide) between 'perfect' and 'abundant.'" She cited Austen and Henry James as examples of the former and Dickens and Zola as examples of the latter.

It was also pointed out that the writers celebrated on this list -- well, only two of them were born after World War II. They're old! Has the "younger generation" (now into their 50s; and so also old!) not written any "great novels"? In response to this question, Cunningham provided a list of books written since the mid-1970s "that strike me as potentially enduring." And Smiley said the whole exercise had missed the point, or at least had missed what had really going on in recently in American letters:

I do not think that the last twenty-five years in the American novel was the era of Roth, Updike, McCarthy, and DeLillo. In my world, the last twenty-five years is the era Virginnia Woolf predicted in "A Room of One's Own" -- the period when women routinely gained a place to be and an education, and put both of these to use and wrote books. In my world, the last twenty-five years is the era of, in no particular order, Valerie Martin, Gish Jen, Susan Cheever, Anne Tyler, E. Annie Proulx, Francine Prose, Alison Lurie, Diane Johnston, Alice McDermott, Geraldine Brooks, Marilynne Robinson, Sue Miller, Linda Hogan, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, Andrea Barrett, Marianne Wiggins, Joy Williams, Urusla K. LeGuin, Alice Hoffman, Alice Walker, Carol Shields, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Anita Shreve, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Ann Beattie, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Lee Smith, Gail Godwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gaitskill, myself, and plenty of others I didn't think of in the first five minutes. To me, it's the women, young and old, who have been doing new and interesting things, both large and small, and that's who I've been reading. And when I suggested this to David Lodge at lunch, he agreed.

Well, then. I guess that settles it. (What, no Atwood?)

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Stephen Metcalf:

Time purges the past of its irrelevance; so said a wise professor of mine once. In the end, no demographic category matters, on the part of the author or the reader; power relations melt away; what is left is good writing. Nothing rots faster and more conclusively than bad writing. Even a hint of the meretricious will kill it off. If it so happens that a series of bulletins from the over-inflated male ego turn out to best capture the soul of a demented culture, so be it; then Roth will triumph. Or maybe not. Some very smart money is on a book called Housekeeping. Or maybe the heart and patience of posterity will have room for both.

Ha! Well, we'll see....

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com

Short Story Theory

[This essay first appeared in lichen 7.2, Fall/Winter 2005]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the short story is a genre in want of an audience.

Publishers are wary of short story collections because they "don’t sell." Book sellers interweave story collections into banks of novels under the general category of "fiction." There is no National Short Story Month. There is no Griffin Short Story Prize. No one has ever claimed short story writers are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world.

Perhaps that’s because it is a truth universally acknowledged that the short story is difficult to define. The short story is commonly defined with a tautology: a short story is a story that is short. But how short is short?

Hal Niedzviecki’s collection Smell It (Coach House, 1997) includes a one sentence story. Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness" is significantly longer. If the adjective is difficult to pin down, consider the noun. What is a story? It is a prose tale, yes. But is an anecdote enough?

What’s more, it is a truth universally acknowledged that short stories are novels in embryo. Short stories are widely seen as a kind of training ground by aspiring writers, creative writing programs, publishers, agents, journalists, and readers with, and without, literary aspirations.

A training ground for what?

A training ground for the "real" genre, the genre of substance, the genre that sells (and thus employs), the genre against which history judges: a training ground for the novel.

Truths universally acknowledged, however, are often balderdash. Short stories are no more miniature novels than photographs are miniature movies. Nor are sales figures a relevant category when classifying or evaluating literature.

What, then, of this problem of definition? How long can a story be and still remain "short?" And what counts as a story?

Attempts to answer these questions have been made repeatedly over the past 200 years.

Short story theorists point to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as the one who first claimed the short story was an independent genre – and a genre superior to the long prose tale, or novel, at that. In her introduction to The Tales We Tell – Perspectives On The Short Story (Greenwood Press, 1998), Susan Lohafer says of Poe:

He gave us our primary emphases in discussions of the form: style; brevity; status. He identified what he called the short prose tale, and told us it could be read in one sitting. He placed it once and for all between the lyric poem, with its power to concentrate effort, and prose forms like the novel and the sketch, with their power to represent the world.
If Poe set the original terms of the discussion, he also started a dialogue without end. Problems of definition are intrinsic to the short story form.

In The New Short Story Theories (Ohio University Press, 1994), editor Charles E. May begins by noting that "the first issue about which we need to come to some understanding – if for no other reason than to call a truce on it – is the issue of definition."

May goes on to outline some of the areas under dispute. Such as "length."

Some theories argue, he said, "that length alone is not a sufficient determiner [of the short story] if all characteristics besides length that may be posited for the short story may also be posited for the novel."

On the other hand, May notes others argue the short story is dependent on the longer form because the shorter form "cannot be defined except by comparison."

Length, however, has not be a problem of definition for the novel, May notes: "for some reason, the ‘longness’ of the novel has been seen as an intrinsic characteristic."

What we can see here is the problem of definition spinning in its endless cycle of infinite regress. More substantial categories are needed.

Consider, for example, two possible definitions of the short story by Douglas Glover (The New Quarterly, #87, Summer 2003):

A short story is a narrative involving a conflict between two poles (A vs. B). This conflict needs to develop through a series of actions in which A and B get together again and again and again (three is a good number to start with, but there can be more). Or, another definition I use: By a story I mean a narrative that extends through a set of articulations, events or event sequences, in which the central conflict is embodied once, and again, and again (three is the critical number here – looking back at the structure of folk tales) such that in these successive revisitings we are drawn deeper into the soul or moral structure of the story.
If you are inclined to theorems, Glover provides this mathematical-type paraphrase of his primary definition of a short story:

((GOAL=DESIRE)+CONFLICT+(SERIES OF INSTANCES OF CONFLICT=BACKBONE=PLOT))=(STRUCTURE=FORM).
Glover defines narrative as "the movement of characters through time," which excludes Niedzviecki’s single sentence story from contention. (The story is titled "Between Two Old Ladies," and goes like this: "There is a sudden smell here").

Or does it?

The title provides the characters, the story the plot. The word "sudden" suggests a "before" and an "after." What’s missing is any information about these characters. What are their motivations (desires)? What are the obstacles to attaining their desires?

There is no series of instances, no central conflict, no look back at an archetypal folk tale.

So, what makes a short story?

One must begin with the admission that no single definition will suffice – and no ultimate definition ever found. Writers will continue to expand the boundaries of the possible, in many directions. Niedzviecki’s story is obviously an extreme example of the form.

Equally limiting, if applied severely, is Glover’s emphasis on "structural" elements; if story is more than length, it is also more than plot.

In A Moveable Feast, for example, Hemingway famously noted how visits to the Louvre influenced his prose style. Similarly, Joseph Brodsky has said that "a writer’s biography is in his twists of language."

Literature rests, in part, on making unique marks.

Technique was central to the definition of the short story 100 years ago. As Lohafer notes, writers emphasized "subjective points of view, pervasive imagery, controlled voice, ellipsis."

Today, however, "we have waded free of explications de texte" (i.e., limiting our interpretations based solely on articulating the interrelationships of the words on the page).

For example, Lohafer notes one influential theorist sees in the short story links "to the angst and rebellion of excluded peoples." Others (including Lohafer herself) see in "story . . . the origins of culture, the morphology of folktales, the oral tradition, the circuits of the brain."

In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), John Updike claimed that the importance of short stories as a "news-bearing medium" had diminished in recent decades.

When pressed to explain himself in an interview on Amazon.com, Updike said, "I do think short stories used to tell people how other people lived, and in a surprising and edifying way. Now many readers turn toward celebrity anecdotes for narrative."

Yes, the days of mass audiences for short stories may be long gone. It’s unlikely, however, that readers of John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor ever had much in common with the readers of The National Enquirer.

In conclusion, if short stories are in our brain circuits, they will remain with us as long as the synapses are firing. They will continue to surprise and awe us.

They will always be at least a little bit mysterious.

Copyright Debate

The following was shared with Access Copyright Affiliates.

You might also want to check out an interesting post on this subject at John Degen's blog.

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By now you must have heard about the federal government’s summer-long consultations on reforms to the Copyright Act.

Like other creator and publisher organizations, Access Copyright will make formal submissions to the government on our priorities as your rights collective. Nevertheless, it’s vital that you also get involved to ensure your voice is heard.

This is because an important aspect of these consultations is being expressed online, and that debate is dominated by individuals who do not agree you should get fair compensation for digital and other reproductions of your works.

It’s a simple fact that users outnumber us. But Canadian users involved in the online debate are so adept at leveraging the Internet and social networks to their advantage, there’s a danger that your voices as Canadian creators and publishers will be drowned out by the chatter. Your interests need to be expressed as forcefully as possible, and it’s up to you to get involved to make that happen.

So what can you do? To begin with, go online and tell people who you are and what you do. Before posting a comment online, you do need to register, but not to worry, registration takes all of one minute. Tell them you need and deserve to get paid for what you do, and tell them why it’s in their interest as Canadians that you do. The more you make your presence felt, the more effective you will be.

What else can you do? Use social networking tools to generate discussion of your perspectives. Shoot a video of yourself, post it on YouTube and then Twitter or Facebook the link. We won’t even try to offer suggestions on being imaginative and provocative as that’s your domain, not ours. But do what you can, as often as you can, as loudly as you can, and encourage colleagues and friends to do the same.

Here’s a sample of the sort of message that needs to get out there:

“My name is Jane Doe and I’m a writer. I’ve published xx novels and xx plays in Canada, and I am read all over the world. This is my livelihood. It pays the rent and puts food on the table. I have a right to benefit from my work and get paid for it. I need to get paid, or I can’t go on. When someone reproduces my work for free, it destroys the market for it, and I suffer the consequences. Don’t let them make that legal. It’s not right, and it’s not fair. Creators need to get paid.”

That’s the bottom line: It’s only right, it’s only fair. Creators need to get paid.

Over to you!

Margaret Christakos

Wordsworth told us poetry was "spontaneous emotion recollected in tranquility." Us post-postmoderns now consider this trite in the extreme. About the only thing people seem to agree on these days about poetry is that they don’t agree on anything.

When I first encountered Wordsworth’s construction as a dim undergraduate, though, it seemed reasonable enough. I hadn’t read any Wordsworth. The only poetry I’m sure I’d read before ENG101 was Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie (such was the state of Ontario’s school system in the 1980s – which is much improved these days, I’m sure).

Still, somehow I’d decided to pursue a degree in English lit, and I was ripe with spontaneous emotion. Recollecting my teenage chaotic inner life in tranquility seemed almost delivered by doctor’s orders.

I even wrote a couple dozen poems following that principle, some of which were published. Others, of course, were horrid, but I kept at it. I caught a Romantic fever and eventually had something that resembled a poetic voice, though my lines kept turning into sentences and my poems into short stories.

Now that I’m past 40 and more tranquil than spontaneous, I can no longer claim to understand what John Keats meant when he claimed to be "certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination." (A quotation I liked a lot back in those lazy, hazy, crazy days.)

Nowadays, poetry often irritates me. It seems too often naïve, baffling or irrelevant. At the same time, I long for some old time religion.

In part, my distaste for poetry is a rebellion against Romanticism, I know, and a rebellion against youth. My own. (How could I have been so stupid?) But it was never poetry’s fault, and it’s me who’s changed; me who had silly, unrealized expectations.

Another way of confessing this is, it took me too long to come into contact with Auden.

"To live outside the law, you must be honest" (Bob Dylan).

It’s not like I prefer the traditional over the experimental, or the formal over the visual. I like the original over the cliché, the lively over the staid, which isn’t saying much.

I want poetry to be sceptical about its insights and conclusions. But I also want poetry to be something other than another layer of advertising, technical lingo or other form of 21st century linguistic falseness.

Recently, therefore, I was pleased to discover Sooner (Coach House Books, 2005) by Margaret Christakos, which reminded me how wise, funny, irritating, insightful, dull, confusing, sexy, marginal, neurotic, blissful and mind-blowing poetry can be.

The book also stirred up my thoughts about poetry, which led to the above speculations.

The poems by Christakos seemed to be engaged in the same kind of struggle with their aesthetics that I’ve described above. Providing songs for angels while also proving the non-existence of God. Giving reasons to celebrate life regardless of the collapse of truth and the new unreliability of spontaneous emotion, however reflected or refracted.

Or whatever.

The book consists of seven sections. Some consist of a single long poem. Others contain a series of shorter poems. One lovely, Romantic Ode is about the voice of Peter Gzowski.

AN OPEN EROTICS OF GZOWSKI

The voice of XXX the bodiless lover XXX is a trope
for the world’s XXX brooding power to XXX scintillate our aliveness

etc.

I picked up Sooner in a bookstore and bought it because of the two long poems that begin it. I read a few pages and wanted to possess them, wanted more time to read and contemplate them.

Each is a narrative. Characters do things, move through time. The reader sees different perspectives. Characters seek to fulfil desire and are disappointed. Ideals are unfulfilled, held back by reality.

"Between the real and the ideal falls the shadow" – TS Eliot.

This is the essence of wisdom. To keep trying, though failure is certain. Every destination is a new beginning and other cliches of this sort.

This is how the first one starts:

GRASS

If there was a place in her body that could
turn to ice then melt again she might have seen

the point of walking forehead-first into the restaurant whose air
conditioning charged one with the sense of a balloon-shaped planet

whistling oxygen at alarming speed The park attracted her lungs
with a movement of green shadow She laid her body

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on the grass like a wrestler felled by brute force

etc.

I trust this voice. I will go anywhere with it.

But, okay, not every section of the book pleased me equally. The section RETREAT DIARY I found hard to fathom. This I wasn’t keen on:

LECTION

This is my new book.
This is of jouissance and I
half smile. You are some

one I like a lit
tle playing to lose pants fair
ly. Her middle fin

gers smell of the juice
before the curtains tank. …

etc.

But I appreciated the experimental spirit exhibited throughout. I sensed an engagement both with life and with language. This is vague and untechnical, but I mean it as high praise.

I'm happy to say I’d read anything by Christakos at this point, and I surely mean to read her again soon(er - ha - too irresistible). I trust her to read me somewhere interesting – and to provide fun (and sometimes strange and difficult) companions along the way.

She has helped renew poetry for me. An unending process, I imagine.

Thanks, MC.

Some links to check out:

• Margaret Christakos (poets.ca)
• Wikipedia -
• 12 or 20 Questions with MC
• Guest Columnist - Arc
• Poem - The problem of confessionality -
• Essay on MC
• Notes toward essay on MC
• Two poems and notes on MC
• Q&A - National Post
• Poem - There is no we

Alexandra Leggat

Alexandra Leggat's Animal (Anvil Press, 2009) contains 14 stories in its 169 pages. I'm tempted to say it's a slim, distilled masterpiece.

Other early reviews are good, too.

In today's Globe and Mail, Ibi Kaslik compared Leggat to Amy Hempel and Joy Williams:

Consider the marked narrative fragmentation of Amy Hempel's work, in which the only clean message is that love is owed to dogs and art is redemptive. Consider also Joy Williams's languid and rootless female characters, who do not make a move without their canine bodyguards who double as soulmates. It is no coincidence that Hempel and Williams, two of the best and most innovative U.S. writers, both women, write nearly obsessively about animals, specifically dogs.

Writing about dogs is a brave and defiant choice in this era of post-postfeminism, where women are simultaneously mocked and celebrated for their choice of nurturing animals over infants. Leggat's characters, like Hempel's and Williams's females, find solace in dogs, and all three writers seem always to return to canine as symbol, as saviour, as truth.

Defiant of whom or what, I wonder.

Interesting, too, that the back cover blurb compares the "style" of the stories to Raymond Carver, though I found this comparison weak. The blurb continues: "The stories contained in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change." Then: "Life acts for them."

Kaslik's analysis is much more interesting.

This isn't a book about life change; it isn't a book about animals as symbols, either. It is, however, a book heavily infused with a female perspective. It is a book about women, mostly childless, mostly disappointed with men. Animals are a recurring motif. So is alcohol.

I don't find the style reminiscent of Carver. Some of the situations described are mildly Carveresque. Characters seem mildly adrift, confused, uncertain, passive in the face of life's absurdities, but many writers have stuff like that. Not just Carver. And Leggat has much else going on besides.

The comparison to Hempel also surprised me. Hempel is a more abstract writer than Leggat, in my memory at least. She is more stylistically awkward and illogical, leaving wild gaps in stories that readers need to be lively to fill in. Leggat isn't like this either. She is more human, if that's fair to say. More humane, maybe.

A post-feminist writer? I wouldn't say so.

One character notes if you are a woman, you are always being observed. Leggat's characters don't nurture grievances about their femininity, but they do often remark on the fact of being female. One narrator begins her story noting her "long blonde hair," then goes on to tell how she has dreams about playing for the Indianapolis Colts, taking passes from Peyton Manning (probably the only male in the book who posseses no weakness, fault or anxiety).

The recurring scenario in this book is about being female and being let down by men and getting on with life anyway, without children (doesn't make you any less of a woman) and probably without a dog either. I don't think that's a post-feminist thing.

Honesty, in my view, is what makes these stories strong. And, yes, brave and defiant.

Defiant of all the pressures in contemporary life to stifle the truth. Be a team-player. Don't rock the boat. Put others before yourself: your man, your children, your job.

Like Rawi Hage, Leggat harkens back to an earlier generation of existentialists.

Leggat's characters state the honest realities of their lives. They aren't self-pitying. They aren't narcissistic. They don't ask for anything special, except Sunday afternoon's free to watch football and a chance, once and a while, to catch a dream.

Ending with an aside: In his Eye Weekly review, Brian Joseph Davis indicated he generally liked the book, but not the opening story:

“Wide,” Leggat’s first story, has a terse first-person narrative in which the writer delays, perhaps too long, letting the reader know what is really going on. Jess is affected in some way: he can’t talk; he bangs his fists against the ground; he bruises easily; he points; he falls asleep to the sound of static on TV. His wife narrates the five pages, following him out into a cornfield and back. Another man pulls up and, for reasons unknown, trims branches from their fir tree. It’s all a little too vague for an opening salvo.

Myself, I liked the opening story. It is stark, and it is not easy to read, but it alerted me to quickly to how sharp this book would turn out to be. The collection's closer, on the other hand, is much more accessible (and would be the hit single, if this were an album). Maybe it would have been a easier way to begin the book. But easy isn't what Leggat is going for here. Neither did I find the story vague. In fact, I'd made a mental note to write here that it seemed a great way to begin the book. As it is, it's a great way to end this review.

Goodbye Pages

I have no problem calling Pages Toronto's premier book store. Now it's closing.

But it's a new world, isn't it? I saw this news first on Twitter. Someone linked to the Torontoist story.

Looks like the This is Not a Reading Series will continue, which is somewhat consoling. But for those who'd like to save Pages, including me!

Independent book stores have been disappearing for a decade or more now.

There's something going on with the future of books. Who knows what.

Somewhere in all of this, literature will survive.

I have some photographs that I took on Queen West in the 1980s that I will add to this blog post soon. When I think of Pages, I think of 1987.

I think of that ad from NOW of the boy smoking!

Pages, you were great. You are still until August 31st!!

Added link: Toronto Star article, July 10, 2009

Nabokov and Pierre Berton

One of the strangest things on YouTube: Vlad Nabokov discusses Lolita with Pierre Berton.

Plus part 2 of the same discussion.

Olay!

Christopher Plummer plays Vlad Nabokov and discusses Kafka.