Maggie Helwig

Girls Fall Down
by Maggie Helwig
Coach House, 2008

It's the beginning years of the new millennium as the book opens:

The city is a winter city, at its heart. Though the ozone layer is thinning above it, and the summers grow long and fierce, still the city always anticipates winter. Anticipates hardship. In the winter, when it is raw and grey and dim, it is itself most truly.

People come here from summer countries and learn to be winter people. But there are worse fates. That is exactly why many of them come here, because there are far worse fates than winter.

...

It is hard to imagine this city being damaged by something from the sky. The dangers to this city enter the bloodstream, move through interior channels.

Girls fall down on subways, remembering the smell of roses before they collapse. Was it poison? They don't die, but they are the seeds of a growing fear. The War on Terror isn't named, and historical context is generally ignored. The Toronto of this book is a Toronto with ravines, subways, and streets like the "real" Toronto, but the geopolitical details of the early-21st century are ignored. There is no Bush, for example. No 9/11. Still, the atmosphere and mood undergirding all of the events of the novel is one of ever-expanding fear.

The atmosphere of the novel is a major feature, and a major accomplishment. The plot is simple. It features a triangle between a young man, a young woman, and her brother. All are thirty-ish.

The man, Alex, is a photographer with a degenerative eye disease. He's slowing going blind. The woman is Susie-Paul, who knew Alex when they were undergraduates, but then she "disappeared" for a decade, and they are reunited just as the girls start mysteriously falling.

Susie-Paul's brother is Derek, who is schizophrenic, and missing. Susie-Paul is desperate to find him. Alex assists. Along the way, they hook up and rekindle the complexities of their connection a decade earlier.

Helwig's prose is confident, direct, searing, and multi-voiced. It's excellent, in other words.

As the opening paragraphs quoted above show, parts of the novel are written by a narrator with a broad view and deep insight. These sections offset the third-person narration of the plot-driving portions; the sections about Alex, Susie-Paul, and Derek. Then there are sections that point the camera in random locations around the city, often focused on the behaviours of teenage girls. These bits are simply hilarious:

The first girl who fell, on the day it began.

She had come out of school with her friends, in her kilt and tie and red wool jacket, her thigh still feeling intangibly damp where the geography teacher had put his hand on it after class.

'Sid the Squid,' snorted Lauren as they walked down the steps. 'God, he's so gross. He's just made of gross. And his wife is a hog and a half, seriously, I mean, she weighs like a thousand pounds.'

'She totally could sink the Titanic with her ass. I'm not kidding,' said Tasha.

The strangeness of adults, their clenched little needs.

'Yeah, can you imagine them in bed?' said Lauren. 'Oh, oh, darling, argh, I can't breathe!'

...

'I just feel so cheated,' Tasha was saying. 'Because every year after sports day they have pizza, like every year, and then our year we just have chips and Coke. Literally like a single chip each. And you expect you're going to have pizza, you know?'

'I know, it's so cheap,' said the girl. 'It's like, hey, we're saving five cents, we're so awesome.'

'To me it's like a betrayal,' said Lauren.

In 2008, NOW named Helwig TO's best author. As perhaps you can infer from the maladies of the characters (degenerative eye disease, schizophrenia) and the image of the title, falling girls, this is a novel about social and personal disintegration. There are passages that question the solidity of identity. Isn't who we think we are just chemicals sloshing around in our brains? How can we say we "know" something when everything is always falling apart? Yes, the book has touches of DeLillo, but it's a tres contemporary Toronto book (not a US-lit knock-off), and it invites and deserves engaged Canlit contemplation.

Not all Canlit is focused decades backwards.This is a book concerned with what it means to live right here right now.

Alex has a project to take photographs of the city before he loses his sight, a kind of catalogue and capturing of reality. But it's a reality turned into images, a removed reality that their creator won't be able to access (see) once he's blind.

What of the rest of us? Are we watching? Paying attention? More than a little lost?

The city, says the God-like narrator (to be trusted? or feared?), "is a winter city, at its heart." Cold. Lifeless. Waiting, one hopes, for an eventual spring.

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Stacey May Fowles

Be Good
by Stacey May Fowles
Tightrope Books, 2007

Stephen Cain and Gregory Betts outline conclusions in Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism After Modernism (University of Ottawa Press, 2010) that overwhelm me as overdue.

The volume of essays within which their work appears began as the annual Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa in May 2008. Cain's essay is "Feeling Ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie, and Canadian Postmodernism's Second Wave." The Betts essay is "Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound Poetry and Visual Art."

Here's a quote from Cain:

The postmodern literature that emerged in this country post-1986 is what I call "pessimistic pomo," a type of postmodern that, despite using many of the same textual techniques, resulted in texts whose primary ideological manifestation was nihilism, and that rather than rejoicing in the lack of epistemological centre and seeing this absence as a site for liberation and reconstruction, despaired at the futility of existence and lack of agency toward social and cultural change (105).

Here's a quote from Betts:

While early Canadian visual and sound poetry retained an avant-garde sense of history, a turn away from inherited traditions led rather quickly to a disillusioned sense of history and progress. This transition could be characterized as a shift from revolutionary decadence to postmodern decadence (169).

What is this? and what's overdue about it?

I must begin with the personal. Betts and Cain are speaking my language. They have articulated my experience; my perspective; my opinion. They have given words to a "reality" I absorbed without being able to define; or see; or step outside.

Post-1986, to use Cain's timeframe, is my entire, post-17-year-old adult life.

To be more specific, the short stories I was writing in the 1990s were rooted in the "despair" Cain gives voice to, and they were also motivated by a force Betts calls "a disillusioned sense of history and progress."

That's what "this" is; an acknowledgement of a cultural moment.

What's overdue about it? Maybe I'm over-emphasizing the significance of these essays.

One could argue, for example, that Mordecai Richler was always the existentialist, never the nationalist. So perhaps I'm only glad to find others promoting a tune I recognize. One that isn't new, only too often faint.

It's not that "urban fiction" hasn't had its supporters. Or its anthologies. Some of which I've been in.

It's just that the Canlit ethos is still struggling towards a sophistication that can accommodate internationalist influences without the anxiety of a self-loathing colonialism. A-hem. Apologies. (Did I say something? Can I keep my passport?)

A fair chunck of Re: Reading the Postmodern concerns reactions and responses to Linda Hutcheon's 1988 title, The Canadian Postmodern, which concentrated on the uncertainties innovatively (?) embedded within Canadian historical fictions. The past is not, you know, what it seems. Brilliant; or not so much.

Okay, so, like, eh (my internal hoser provokes me), as Betts points out, what Hutcheon found notable in 1988 was fading fast even as it was being published. A new, darker complexity was imminent, if not already encompassing.

And I include myself among the crowd of writers Cain lists as captured by this influence: Tony Burgess, Matthew Remski, R.M. Vaughan, Derek McCormack, Patricia Seaman, Andre Alexis, Michael Turner, Natalee Caple, Nancy Dembowski, and the two authors of focus in his essay: Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones (105-6). For good measure, I have to include also Matthew Firth, Sal DiFalco, Alexandra Leggat, Peter Darbyshire, Hal Niezviecki, Ken Sparling, and Kenneth J. Harvey.

There are others, of course, quite a field, actually, but I need to move on to what's supposed to be my subject here: Stacey May Fowles' Be Good, a terrific companion to Zoe Whittall's Bottle Rocket Hearts. Both are stories about being young and restless in Montreal at the turn of the century, or thereabouts.

Both represent a turn beyond "nihilism," though both muck around on the dark side. Whittal's protagonist is way too damn bouyant to be nihilistic; Fowles' characters never give up believing (or searching for) the authentic experience. Call it love, if you like. Or call it something other than endless drunken hell, mind-fucks, and so-called friends.

These novels by Fowles and Whittall wouldn't find a home in Hutcheon's 1988 postmodernism, but neither are they aligned with the 1980s/90s Jones/Crosbie. But they are part of a continuity, one that interests me, makes my synapses ping, ping, ping.

Fowles' characters are early-twenties, either in or just out of university in Montreal. Many are would-be bohemians floating on their parents' dime. As a generation, they were playing at being beatniks, because what else was there to do? Betts quotes Steve McCaffery about the 1960s' "utopian potential of decadence" (173), and McCaffery says: "Well, that utopian belief in a language revolution is long gone but at the time it was instrumental." My point is, Fowles' characters never had any belief in revolution. They just move into the future dreading that worst of all outcomes: becoming a suburbanite.

A plot summary: Hannah finishes university. She is in love with her roommate, Morgan, but can't tell her. Instead, she follows "boyfriend" Finn to Vancouver, where he won't let him move in with her and their intimacy ends. Meanwhile, we find out that Morgan isn't her real name and that "Morgan" has a profound gift for self-mythologizing. She also seeks out sex with men who hit her and hooks up with a man twenty years her senior, who knows what everyone seems to know about Morgan. One day she will leave.

The story does ultimately lead to a moment of heightened authenticity, but I won't give it away here.

All I wanted to say was, this is a groovy little book that fits snugly into a non-tradition tradition. "Isn't it pretty to think so," Hemingway had his protagonist say in The Sun Also Rises. The year was 1926, and not much has changed. Except that it has.

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Zadie Smith

If it had been published a few years earlier (that is, if it had been published during the Presidency of George W. Bush), there would have been a stronger political context for unpacking the title: Changing My Mind (Occasional Essays).

As it was, Zadie Smith's brilliant and diverse essay collection was published in 2009, and so can be read politically as an affirmation of the dude who followed dubya, the cosmopolitan Mr. Obama, who is sometimes derided as a waffler.

Smith doesn't celebrate waffling, but she does celebrate deep and attentive thinking. "For reasons that are obscure to me," she writes, "those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians" (142).

Quote: "Shakespeare's art, the very medium of it, allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can't seem to: speak simultaneous truths" (143).

Quote: "From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive fools" (144).

Well, not all of us do, and not always, but point taken. Life, reality is mutable. The bards are more honest than the politicians. It is hypocritical, nay, dangerous, to seek purity in our politics or truth through ideology.

Smith quotes John Keats' famous definition of negative capability, then notes: "Through the glass of 2008, 'negative capability' looks like the perfect antidote to 'ideological heroism'" (144).

So, she takes us into the G.W. Bush era, after all. (Which for many, ahem, hasn't ended, and didn't begin with dubya, anyway.)

The book's seventeen essays are classified by five verbs: reading, being, seeing, feeling, and remembering. They are not, despite what might be suggested above, overtly political. The title, however, is well chosen.

Covering topics are diverse as film (seeing), David Foster Wallace (remembering), her father's D-Day involvement (feeling), her early engagement with Zora Neale Hurston (reading), and Mr. Obama and Shakespeare (being), Smith champions life as an engaged process. One with ebbs, flows, regressions, and, above all, change.

Lord, bless her. Early on, I discovered I needed to read this book pen in hand; all the better to put check marks in the columns where I wanted to shout out, "Right on!"

Smith is dedicated to the delicate, sophisticated, and precise. She is a detractor of the, well, fanatic. Here's a couple sentences from her essay on E.M. Forster:

To his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E.M. Forster is proof that when it comes to aesthetics, one really better be fagged: the zeal of the fanatic is what's required. "E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot," thought Katherine Mansfield, a fanatic if ever there was one (15).

In a terrific compare and contrast essay ("Two Directions for the Novel"), Smith shows what literary criticism can be and so often isn't, an opportunity to be open to different perspectives and not build up an argument on one side with the goal of eliminating any opposition.

The two novels contrasted in this essay are Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Do these novels represent the two directions for the novel? The two directions or just two directions? They are two very different novels. They may even be, as Smith suggests, "antipodal." "One," she writes, "is the strong refusal of the other." But are they the only two paths novels can go by? Unlikely.

Smith writes:

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us down this road the true future of the Novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It is perfectly done -- in a sense, that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait (73).

"A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked." Yummy. This sentence describes the state of the Canadian novel, and the above paragraph is stunning criticism calling out for mimics within the Canlit cosmos. Not a criticism of nationalism, but a criticism of form, style and content. One rooted in deep history and respectful of diversity of approach.

Meanwhile, anyway, and in any case (apologies for the diversion), it's a great essay.

Also recommended (worth the price of admission all on its own) is the elegy (strangely available on YouTube) to David Foster Wallace, who could not have asked (or dreamed or prayed) for a more sensitive reading of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which (unknown to me until this latest google search) is now a movie ("comedy, drama").

"Elegy" is my word. Within the essay Smith notes that she began writing it while DFW was alive, but the tone overall is elegiac. The tone avoids hagiography, but the sensitivity of the reading Smith presents makes clear her respect for her late-colleague.

Smith quotes the following from DFW (from a 2005 commencement speech (Smith, 264)):

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water. This is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

DFW did, and Smith does. The evidence is on every page of Changing My Mind. I liked the essays about books and literature best. The rest were okay.

Smith writes about Nabokov and Kafka and much else. Here's one of the lighter moments: "It's a cliche to think liking Keats makes you cultured (Larkin and Amis defaced their college copy of The Eve of St. Agnes) ... " [and here she puts in a footnote: "Next to the phrase 'into her dream he melted' was written 'You mean he fucked her, do you?'" (24).]

I looked for a decent video of Smith to end with here, but didn't find one. So here instead is DFW.



http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Amy Lavender Harris

Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2010) is both easy and difficult to describe.

The book contains an analysis of Toronto literature, from the earliest of times to the present.

But what is “Toronto literature”? And what is the critical approach taken in the analysis?

First, Toronto literature is books that set (most of their) action in Toronto.

Second, Lavender Harris teaches at the Geography Department at York University and focuses on “urban identity and the cultural significance of place.” See also the Imagining Toronto website. Her book, she writes:

… is predicated on a belief that rather than comparing Toronto to the world’s other great literary cities and finding it wanting, we should instead realize that Toronto’s literature reflects an entirely new kind of city, a city where identity emerges not from shared tradition or a long history but rather is forged out of a commitment to the virtues of diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding (14).

That is, she presents an urban planner’s view of Toronto as reflected in books written about Toronto. What she compares and contrasts are books about Toronto to other books about Toronto and all of those books to the city itself. The book emphasizes, therefore, the integration of the “real” and the “imagined.” The first sentence quotes Michael Ondaatje from In the Skin of a Lion: “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting” (13).

One caution here. The Ondaatje quotation contains the suggestion that the real can be seen, defined and stabilized. Once it has been routed through the filter of the imagination. But the imagination is nothing if not mutable, and so the real is constantly shifting also. Lavender Harris presents an image of Toronto as filtered through dozens of books published between the recent past and stretching back through the decades to pre-Confederation. She has distilled patterns and provides a remarkably wide-ranging reading list, but I’m uncertain how much this has to do with “the real.”

The greater value in Imagining Toronto is the “kind of charting” the book provides of the imagined Toronto presented across genres in the dozens of books Lavender Harris analyses. This is perhaps the place to say that “literary value” isn’t at the top of the author’s mind, though this doesn’t stop her from calling Gwendolyn MacEwen “undeservedly neglected” (21) or Hugh Garner “internationally regarded” (15), claims George Fetherling challenged in his otherwise praising Quill & Quire review. Lavender Harris, however, does outline a sort of Toronto Canon, but it is a canon shaped around the cultural significance of space rather than a holding to account against a particular school of literary criticism.

The best Toronto books, in other words, are those that assist in defining Imagining Toronto’s thesis and thus they are books that include an exploration of the specific history, geography, and sociology of Toronto. Such books include: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, Claudia Dey’s Stunt, Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown and Death in Don Mills, Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Noman’s Land, Michael Redhill’s Consolation, Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians, Sarah Dearing’s Courage My Love, Austin Clarke’s short stories and Hugh Hood’s The Swing in the Garden. To name but a handful.

I kept a pen handy as I read this book, jotting down titles and authors I’d never heard of or had previously passed over. Lavender Harris provides more than ample proof to contradict the skeptics who think that Toronto hasn’t been deeply engaged as a subject in literature. Here is Lavender Harris outlining that school of thought:

In a 2005 essay called “Making a Toronto of the Imagination,” journalist Bert Archer asserted that Toronto is “a city in no one’s imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world,” adding, “Toronto is a place where people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination.” Similarly, author Andrew Pyper has claimed that “there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place,” a sentiment echoed by literary critic Philip Marchand, who wrote flatly of the “bland and featureless reputation” of Toronto’s literary landscape and insisted that “our city awaits its great novelist” (15-16).

Of great interest to me was Lavender Harris’s inclusion of many titles published pre-1967. Just as Carmine Starnino did in his expansive introductory essay to Lover’s Quarrel, where he argued that the pre-dominant view that the nation’s literature had failed to mature prior to the Centennial Generation was false, Lavender Harris re-introduces the sophistication of previous eras to help renew and reframe discussions about Toronto’s literary history.

Lavender Harris, in fact, goes back to the beginnings of geological time, discussing the impact of the Ice Age on the topography of what would become Toronto (i.e., it left the city dragged with ravines, a feature that repeats with unsurprising frequency in many Toronto novels. Paul Quarrington’s The Ravine, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, for example).

Lavender Harris also explores other common features of Toronto: its famous neighbourhoods, its multiculturalism, its suburbs. She also provides a class analysis and surveys the city’s topography of desire. She does all this while also suggesting there is much more that could be said.

Imagining Toronto provides an outline and an overview. It is perhaps overburdened by having to begin by addressing such severe skepticism. It is an introduction to Toronto literature, and it suggests many opportunities where deeper analysis may be richly rewarding. The section called “The Myth of the Multicultural City,” for example, is a mere 25 pages. It deserves a volume unto itself.

Here’s some other online responses:

• Quill and Quire
• This Magazine
• A proud mom!
• Pickle Me This
• Open Book Toronto
• Imagining Toronto's Facebook page
• BlogTO
• Torontoist

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Another Tricky Day

Dany Laferrière

I am a Japanese Writer
by Dany Laferrière
Douglas & MacIntyre, 2010
Translated by David Homel

Not my first post about Laferrière, but this is the first book I've read by this Haitian-born Montrealler in probably a decade.

On the one hand, the conceit is apparent from the cover. The writer is not Japanese; we are going to encounter in these pages play with or about identity.

Imagine for a moment the title: I am a Canadian Writer. Would it carry the same disquiet? Laferrière is, after all, a Canadian writer.

How about, I am a Quebecois Writer?

From the second to last page:

I certainly don't believe in the peasant, who is often racist, nor in popular culture, which is always reactionary (Mishima is the perfect example of the writer falling into the trap of "pure" identity). But Basho -- Basho amuses me.

An exchange from earlier in the book:

"There is no book -- that's what I've been explaining to everyone."

"That doesn't matter. They're completely obsessed with identity, I'm telling you."

"I don't give a shit about identity."

"So you say, but then you write a book with a title like that. What does it mean?"

"It means I did it to get away from the whole business, to show that borders have disappeared. I was tired of cultural nationalism. Who says I can't be a Japanese writer? No one."

The plot, such as it is, is of a writer (first person) who is writing a book called I am a Japanese Writer. He is a Haitan-born Montrealer. He is living in rented digs in the same district where Laferrière set his first book How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired), over two decades ago. There is no book, as the narrator explains above, but there is a book. You are reading it. You have it in your hands.

But let's get back inside its pages. There is no book. There is the narrator trying to explain to everyone that there is no book. The publisher has paid an advance, but there is no book. The Japanese consulate has helped to manufacture a cultural sensation in Tokyo about a black man from Montreal writing a book called I am a Japanese Writer. The narrator likes to read Basho. The only subject he writes about, he says, is himself. But there is no book. Only a writer playing complicated, deceptive games.

Ah, Laferrière. It's nice to be back inside your pages. You are sly and always welcome.

Various reviews of the book on the D&M website.

I like this summation best, from the Telegraph Journal (October 16, 2010):

“[I am a Japanese Writer] is all about place and identity, names and nationality and the paradoxical relationship between rigid lines of nationalism and the fluidity of the individual. Episodic and picaresque, it is a humorous look at identity and nationality, writing and the mind of a writer...This is a deceptively painless read, when really it's a complex, multi-faceted look at race, identity, art and culture.”


http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Scott Pilgrim

Not the usual fare around here, but I just saw this movie on Rogers on Demand and it expresses so much I never thought I'd see expressed. Especially on film.

So well done. So fantastic.

Inshallah, dudes. Rock on.