The Orphan Master's Son

In local news, our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il was seen offering on-the-spot guidance to the engineers deepening the Taedong River channel. While the Dear Leader lectured to the dredge operators, many doves were seen to spontaneously flock above him, hovering to provide our Reverend General some much needed shade on a hot day.

I've recently become interested in trying to determine what makes a Pulitzer Prize winning work of fiction, and with The Orphan Master's Son (which won for 2013), I remain confused. Officially, "the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life", but with this novel set in North Korea, "American life" is primarily dealt with by contrast, and I suppose to the jury, that's close enough.

The title character is Jun Do (and it's made clear that that is meant to be a play on "John Doe"). He's an orphan who believes (without evidence) that he's the son of the director of the orphanage and a beautiful opera singer, and by virtue of telling himself this story, Jun Do avoids resigning himself to the sad fate of most orphans: being worked to death in dangerous conditions. Repeatedly, it's made clear that in North Korea, reality is a story people tell themselves:

• Jun Do heard the story as if it were being broadcast from some far-off, unknown place. Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack -- if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

• Jun Do told his story, and when the reporter asked his name, Jun Do said it didn't matter, as he was only a humble citizen of the greatest nation of the world.

• And suddenly the story was true, it had been beaten into him.

• You've got to understand -- where's he's from, if they say you're an orphan, then you're an orphan. If they tell you to go down a hole, well, you're suddenly a guy who goes down holes…If they tell him to go to Texas to tell a story, suddenly he's nobody but that.

• The tiger part is only a story. That's what we're really serving them, a story.

• Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

When an incident happens at sea, the crew must agree on a cover story (one that will survive a brutal interrogation) before returning to port; a fable that brings comfort to starving orphans can be twisted into a satirical song by the residents of Pyongyang; if the Dear Leader declares a stranger to be your husband, that story becomes fact. Jun Do grows and learns to negotiate this dangerous and shifting environment, and even though he has several opportunities to escape North Korea -- and even though he doesn't have a family to leave behind that could be sent to a labour camp (the threat that keeps the residents in line) -- Jun Do can't abandon the reality that he has created for himself. The first half of The Orphan Master's Son is this straight forward narrative, but then the second becomes something else as a nameless interrogator tries to discover the true identity of an imposter and collect his biography before his execution:

Our team discovers an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations, and then crafts it into a single, original volume that contains the person himself. When you have a subject's biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state. That's harmony, that's the idea our nation is founded upon. Sure, some of our subjects' stories are sweeping and take months to record, but if there's one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it's forever.

The point of view shifts between this interrogator, the subject's life leading up to his arrest, and the news feed from a propaganda loud speaker (which transmits into every home and workplace and is mandatory listening) that includes the serialized Best North Korean Story; an omniscient overview of the subject's actions. These three threads foreshadow and double back on each other, but reinforce the notion that reality is simply what is officially recorded. Throughout its entirety, The Orphan Master's Son gives glimpses into the various classes of North Korean society, never shying from the state-sanctioned brutality, and laying bare the bizarroland existence for the citizens of The Most Democratic Nation on Earth. 

This felt like a really long book and so much happens that it's hard to consider The Orphan Master's Son as a whole. All I really knew of North Korea before came from Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West and that's a very different book: more brutal; more personal; more authentic; a place where people are so demoralized that they don't care what happens to family members -- it's every man for himself (and I do understand that this is the perspective of someone born in a prison camp, but it's a totally different world from what I encountered here). The strange juxtapositions, outlandish adventures, and the demented presence of Kim Jong-il in The Orphan Master's Son read like a Chuck Palahniuk book (if Chuck wanted to grow up and omit the gross-out stuff); this is Palahniuk-style transgressive fiction if that term can be stretched to mean a character in a totally repressive regime wants to break the rules by creating intimacy and rewriting personal stories. It's also Palahniukish in the sense that author Adam Johnson uses the excesses of a weird system to shine a harsh light on America itself -- you know there's a problem if Kim Jong-il praises the American penal system as "the envy of the world". I didn't love The Orphan Master's Son, and despite the many brutal scenes (if you ever get a choice between Commander Park with a box cutter and a shark…), it was often kind of boring. But my biggest complaint would be that it felt overwritten: as people kept circling back to the stories they tell themselves, I never forgot that I was reading a story; that Johnson was creating a reality of his own. And I continue to be confounded by what the Pulitzer Prize judges are looking for.

Edit from 01/18/15:

I'm so disappointed to learn today that Shin Dong-hyuk "massaged the facts" in his memoir, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. Whatever his motivation was (and I have no doubt that he was horribly mistreated during his life in North Korea), it's dispiriting to think that Kim Jong-un and his gang of brutes might now have any basis to deny charges made by human rights groups.

And especially after this fiasco:

Medicine Walk

At first he brung me out all the time when I was small. Showed me plants and how to gather them. Everything a guy would need is here if you want it and know how to look for it, he said. You gotta spend time gatherin' what you need. What you need to keep you strong. He called it a medicine walk.

Medicine Walk is the story of a 16-year-old Native boy, Franklin Starlight, who was raised by an old white man; with occasional and disastrous visits from his alcoholic father, Eldon. As the story begins, Eldon has summoned Franklin to visit him in a remote lumber town, and when the boy arrives on horseback, Eldon explains that he is dying and wants his son to bring him to a particular mountain ridge and bury him in "the warrior way"; sitting up and facing the sunrise. Franklin agrees, and as they make their way to the ridge 40 miles away -- Franklin on foot and Eldon tied into the saddle -- Eldon finally tells his son his life story: about his own parents and childhood; his military service during the Korean War; who Franklin's mother was; and who the old man was who raised him. As in the quote above, Franklin is adept at gathering the food and shelter that they need to keep themselves alive on the journey, and as a bigger metaphor, the stories that the boy is able to gather from his father are what he needs to make himself strong going forward; this is in every sense a medicine walk.

In the Acknowledgments, Richard Wagamese says:

In the Ojibway world you go inward in order to express outward. That journey can be harrowing sometimes but it can also be the source of much joy, freedom, and light. There are many who have been there to share in my inward journey and without their light I may not have found the wherewithal and courage to brave the darkness and shadows. Suffice to say, the re-emergence has been amazing and this story was born out of long nights of soul searching and reflection.

I understand that as a child, Wagamese was taken from his family by Social Services, and after spending time in foster homes in Northwestern Ontario, he was eventually adopted by a family in Southern Ontario. I am going to infer from this afterword that Wagamese was exploring his own experiences with Medicine Walk, but despite this talk of a harrowing inward journey, this book seems to be the least personal and emotional of all the books I've read by this author; the characters the least like real people (and I thought Wagamese did a better job of evoking emotion in Ragged Company).

According to this review, Medicine Walk is primarily "a complex study in how identities are formed and also (a) magnificent illustration of complex ancestry", where the central fact that the reader should realise is that, although Eldon self-identifies as an Ojibway, the Ojibway have no tradition of this warrior burial he wants. So, we have Eldon -- with a white father he didn't know and a mother who raised him in lumber and mining camps without any Native traditions -- who at the end of his life wants to grasp a Native rite, but one that is not authentic to his ancestry. And then there's Franklin -- who was raised by a white man whose survival lessons taught the boy to recover a connection to nature that had been lost to his own ancestors. That's some complex identity-formation, but these facts aren't ever filtered through insight into the characters' inner lives. None of these three are chatty characters, often replying to questions with one word or non-responsive answers, and other than often walking off bursts of anger, none of them have real emotional reactions to anything. (But at least they're a bit more real than the few Native women who are introduced in the book, all of whom are powerless to stop giving themselves to men who will leave or beat or otherwise disappoint them.) 

There didn't feel to be much at stake in Medicine Walk: Eldon's life story didn't shatter me, and other than feeling sorry that he had to wait sixteen years to learn where he came from, the information didn't seem to shatter Franklin either (and if it was really eating him up inside, Franklin could have insisted the old man tell him earlier). For a journey-in-the-wilderness book, the nature writing was very basic and spare (and I thought Wagamese did a better job of evoking nature in Indian Horse). And a last complaint: there was something derivatively Cormac McCarthyesque in the way that the three main characters were constantly referred to as "the kid", "his father", and "the old man" (even though we know the actual names of the first two and are forced to wait until near the end to learn the last), and that didn't work for me.

This is not my favourite book by Richard Wagamese, but I'll still look forward to reading whatever he comes out with next.

Two more points:

After reading a poor report card together, the old man and Franklin have this conversation:

"Do your best at what you can, Frank. There's better and more important learning to be had out here on the land. That's one thing for sure. But somethings you just gotta learn to stand." 

"What I figure," the kid would say, "there ain't one of those little towheads would know how to square a half-hitch or get a hackamore on a green broke colt. But they make fun of me cuz I won't do the math or read out loud."

"How come you won't do none of that?"

"I don't know. I can get the numbers sorted around in my head without scratching around on paper, and I guess if a guy's to read he oughta be able to do it alone and quiet. Works best for me, least ways."

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Rudy again this past weekend. Again, she was incensed about a client of hers, a contractor, who had attempted to give a plumbing course on the nearby Six Nations Reserve -- unemployed youths would be paid to attend his course, and when they were done, they would be employable apprentice plumbers -- but none of the youths were interested. She was angry that the youths would rather collect welfare and remain unemployed, but again I replied that the youths simply may not have had the aptitude. Who are we to say, "You youths there. You have no job, so you will be a plumber. You will be a landscape architect. And you will be a screenwriter." That's a colonial-type attitude that doesn't do anyone any good. Perhaps, like the Franklin character (is this Wagamese recording his own experience?), perhaps these kids on the Six Nations Reserve just don't have the interest in the maths and book work that a course in plumbing would entail (and of course I'm not saying that Natives have lesser minds than those of settlers; just that everyone has a right to decide for themselves what path they'll take.)

Another interesting passage:

Jimmy said Starlight was the name given to them that got teachin's from Star People. Long ago. Way back. Legend goes that they come outta the stars on a night like this. Clear night. Sat with the people and told 'em stuff. Stories mostly, about the way of things. The wisest ones got taught more. Our people. Starlights. We're meant to be teachers and storytellers. They say nights like this bring them teachin's and stories back and that's when they oughtta be passed on again.

I know  it makes me look looney when I talk about watching the show Ancient Aliens, but this is the kind of story they like to take as proof of their "Ancient Astronaut Theory" and I find the whole thing fascinating: I mostly watch the show because they bring up interesting old mysteries and show intriguing ancient structures that it boggles the modern mind to imagine Stone Age people building. Like everyone else, I shake my head when the people on the show then conclude that aliens must have constructed the pyramids or Stonehenge, but when it comes to oral traditions about being visited by Star People, isn't it interesting to imagine that that could be meant literally? And I'm just saying imagine here, it's not what I believe, but Richard Wagamese must be aware of Ancient Aliens, too. Does he mean us to take a visit from Star People (otherworldly beings that impart wisdom to selected humans) literally? Just something to think about...

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Sidney, I am in trouble with my book. I have much of the data from the States' records and a slew of personal interviews to start the story of the Occupation -- but I can't make them come together in a structure that pleases me. Straight chronology is too tedious.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society starts off promisingly: It is 1946, and through a series of letters, we meet Juliet Ashton; a successful wartime humorist whose recently-published collected essays are making her a celebrity. As she casts around for her next book's subject, a letter reaches her from a resident of Guernsey in the Channel Islands -- the only British soil to be occupied by the Germans during WWII. Through this chance acquaintance, Juliet learns of the titular literary society, and as she becomes more and more intrigued, various members of the society begin to correspond with her, and Juliet decides that they will be the subject of her next book.

The epistolary form worked well enough in this beginning bit: as Juliet and the Islanders tell each other of their experiences during the war, the letters are an organic way of infodumping to one another, and as the info was conveyed through anecdotes, it was also entertainingly told. In addition to stories about the Occupation (which I hadn't known about, so found intriguing) the members of the literary society also shared stories about the books they had read and their profound impact, and as I'm a bookish-type person, I'm interested in tales about literature as sustenance (I was especially touched by the simple farmer, Clovis, and his discovery of poetry). But halfway through the book Juliet decides to visit Guernsey to meet everyone in person and things go off the rails. Instead of concentrating on the Occupation, Juliet sends letters to both her publisher and her best friend, telling them about the now -- which becomes a Jane Austen-lite love-triangle and series of implausible events -- and the epistolary format becomes strained and unsatisfactory.

As for the format, I appreciate lines like, Did you know that the Islanders ground bird-seed for flour until they ran out of it?, but am impatient with lines like, What an inspired present you sent Kit -- red satin tap shoes covered with sequins. (I'm sure Sidney knew what he sent, there must be a more elegant way of introducing those shoes, even if they don't appear again…) And the authors must have felt the strain of committing to the format to the end since they had to introduce a notebook for a character to suddenly record her Miss Marple-type detective work in (the only way to convey info that one wouldn't put into a letter).

And the implausibilities are, I suppose spoilery: Juliet would want to adopt Kit -- and everyone who raised the little girl would be fine with it -- after being on Guernsey for a few months? Or that she would definitely be in love with and suggest marriage to Dawsey in that same time frame (after telling Mark she would never jump the gun again)? That Sidney would tell Isola that he's gay in their first conversation (in an atmosphere where Alan Turing -- who broke the Enigma Code -- could be sent to jail for homosexual acts)? That they would proceed to discuss Oscar Wilde and then discover letters from Oscar Wilde?! Everything about Elizabeth -- from her affair with the one noble German soldier to her heroic sacrifices, even while she had a child to raise. And the whole Billee Bee and Gilly Gilbert subplot, pahlease! /end spoiler And on top of the implausibilities is the feeling that the whole wartime experience was sanitised for your enjoyment: I've read many opinions lately that the German concentration camps should never be used for fictional purposes, and even though this book had POW camps (not Jewish or Holocaust-related), there was something manipulative about their inclusion; a toe-dip of horror for this light-hearted take on WWII.

In response to the quote I started with (which seems like a mission statement from the authors), Sidney replies:

You already have the core -- you just don't know it yet. I am talking about Elizabeth McKenna. Didn't you ever notice how everyone you interviewed sooner or later talked about Elizabeth? Lord, Juliet. Who painted Booker's portrait and saved his life and danced down the street with him? Who thought up the lie about the Literary Society -- and then made it happen? Guernsey wasn't her home, but she adapted to it and to the loss of her freedom. How? She must have missed Ambrose and London, but she never, I gather, whined about it. She went to Ravensbriik for sheltering a slave worker…Juliet, how did a girl, an art student who never held a job in her life, turn herself into a nurse, working six days a week in the hospital?...Think long and hard and tell me if Elizabeth could be the heart of your book.

It might have been "tedious" to tell Elizabeth's story with "straight chronology", but I rather wish that that had been the book that was written here by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (and the reason for the two authors is an interesting story itself). It was an easy listen, and for the first half I thought I was enjoying myself, but by the end, my eyeballs hurt from rolling so hard in their sockets. Three stars is an average of the good and the bad, not really a recommendation.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

From the author blurb: Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in the west of Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to get it published. After resisting all suggestions to edit her book into something more marketable, an independent press took on the challenge, and since its publication, Girl has won many prestigious awards and upwards of $100k in prize monies. So what's the hubbub?

As I was reading this challenging book, I was thinking it had an oddly disjointed stream-of-consciousness construction, but that didn't seem to be quite right; Girl is unlike anything I've read before. According to this article, it was actually written in a "stream-of-cognition", using language to access the kind of thinking that happens before we turn that thinking into language. Action is immediate and unprocessed, written about in fragments and abrupt clauses, totally ignoring the higher ordering of formal language. I must confess that I found this wearying but I never found it boring -- there's an emotional truthfulness that redeems the work the reader must engage in, and since this is an emotionally charged book, the rewards were often found. I'm going to quote at length in this review because the format and language are as much a part of the book as is the plot.

In broad strokes, this is the appalling life story of an unnamed narrator; no people or places are named except for her mother, Mammy, her pervy uncle, Uncle, and we are quick to realise that the pronoun "you" is used exclusively for the narrator's brother. The brother had a brain tumour removed that led to physical and mental challenges and their father abandoned the family; both happening before the girl was born. The fragmentary nature of the early passages made sense as the girl was experiencing them from the womb:

You white-faced feel the needle go in. Feel fat juicy poison poison young boy skin. In your arteries. Eyeballs. Spine hands legs. Puke it cells up all day long. No Mammy don’t let them.

McBride has said that she was inspired to explore modernism after reading James Joyce, but this is no Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo, but then again, McBride's narrator never had baby tuckoo's sheltered infancy. Buckling under the stress of being a single parent (and feeling the added pressures of the expectations of her family and the Catholic Church), Mammy is caustic and abusive, as in this scene after her judgemental father has visited:

Right then. Right the pair of ye. Do you see what you've done? Are you pleased with yourselves? What did I say about forward rolls? What did I tell you about keeping your knickers covered? She is jumping up the stairs. Take one and two. Crack my eyes are bursting from my head with the wallop. Blood rising up my nose. Drip my head forward. Drop of that. She gets my hair. Listen. To me. Listen. What you've done. Shaking me smack and smack my head. Dirty brat. Shivering. Sharp with rage. Get away from me and push me over to the banisters.

You. Panic. Mammy sorry that I sorry I didn't know. Your hands can't keep her off. She knows all the duck and weave we've done before. And hits you on your ear. On your cheek. That hard. Ah Mammy sorry. Sorry. Sorry please, all you say. She have you by the jumper. Slap you harder. Slap and slap and slap. Push you in the corner. Mammy. Mammy. Getting red face. Getting sore face. Slap again she. Slap again. Screaming. You imbecile. You stupid. I cupping all my blood nose in my jumper. Crouch. You. Bold. Boy. You. Stupid. Stupid. You'll never manage anything. You're a moron. He's right. You're a moron. Hail Mary. How hard can it be? Hail Mary. I've had enough of you. The pair of you. And you. You'll have to go to handicapped school. No Mammy Mammy. Slap you. School for morons is where you belong and you can live there and you can do what you like and I'll never have to put up with you again. I've had enough of you. Both of you. Selfish spoiled brats. Do you hear me? Enough. Morning noon and night and this is what you do to me? Handicapped school do you hear me? Slap slap. Your nose weeping while she pulled you by the hair and then a hard one. A really hard one. Hard down straight upon your brown head. I hear it. Mammy my head. Mammy my my don't Mammy hit me anymore on my head. Holding it, your head, all bent down. Feel it throb you. The shock like sacrilege. Mammy not my head anymore, putting out your palm instead. She didn't then all at once. Pushed you back on the floor. Went into her room. Went into the dark closed curtains of it and shut the door on us.

As the narrator was three-years-old in this scene, I still accepted the fragments (and note that Mammy's speech is recorded as proper language, even if the formatting is still jumbled) and expected the language to evolve as the narrator matured -- but it doesn't; this is fragmentary "stream-of-cognition", beginning to end. Even though Mammy makes threats about sending the brother to "handicapped school", she is perpetually in denial about his condition, and it is later at public school that the narrator first realises that her brother is "different", and that realisation makes for a barrier between herself and her family:

We went to school. We went on the bus. In the cold lunch break they are kicking football on the muck pitch. You run. Run. Run. That bad eye I know cannot keep up with a ball nor does it see one of them and his doing you for the crowd. Behind your back. For their laughter is a mighty thing to invoke. Your little limp. Sometimes the way you shake your head. It's brilliant that the worst one on the whole field doesn't know it. See him do it. For their roaring. For their great lads fun. He does your voice like a think tongue. Pass it here lads after you say it. They kick it to keep you to and fro. No one's playing. Only you now but you don't know. Round of laughing. I see you stop them. Something twigging within. Look around. To the clumps of them doubled-up in two quaking squealing. Happy pigs getting fed on you. The way your hand hangs down or you stumble on a ruck. He smears a muck bit down his forehead for the scar that you've got. Jesus f-ing spastic Christ. And you were saying, what is it? Hey lads what's going on? The more they look the more they laugh. You now getting all het up. Can smell the joke descend on you. How did you get your scar again? A knife. A knife? Oh was it? Very funny. I heard you got your brain cut up. Did not. That you're brain-damaged. I am not. You're a brain-damaged liar. No listen you said. Handicapped. Ugh they're sticking tongues in their bottom lips. You stumbling towards them. Not thinking. Thinking how to stop them say at this. In the mud you stumbled over. Caught yourself. Stood back up straight. Listen. Listen lads. All they say is uuuuuggggh. I could kill them for this or you. I could roar. I could cry. I do not. Anything at all. Just stand feel it worse and worse.

This disconnection that the narrator feels makes her a target -- first for the pervy (married-to-Mammy's-sister) Uncle, and then for all the boys in school, and it feels tragic but honest that this is how a thirteen-year-old girl, from a history of abuse and oppression, could become the schoolyard slut, seeking degradation to muck up her outsides to match her insides. This fractured mind matched the fractured sentences, and I still was waiting for the character to mature out of it, as when she moved away to college:

City all that black in my lungs. In my nose. Like I am smoking am not but still. I’ll have a creaky bed up in some woman’s house. For too much a week, that I don’t guess. Will do. Maybe soon. Unpack my socks and. Oh. That’s being lonely. Lying here. Head and feet not knowing where they’ve come to. The rest and. Both of ye. And shocking. That.

By this point, I realised that the fragments were permanent, and as the narrator engages in progressively more dangerous and violent sex, it's obvious that the damages from her childhood were also permanent. As her family life becomes increasingly catastrophic, so too do the girl's thoughts become increasingly disjointed:

Stick it ionthe don’tinside wwherhtewaterisswimming htroughmynoseandmouth throughmysense myorgands sthroughmythrough. That. A. My brain. He. Like. Now. Ithink i smell of woodwherethe river hits the lakebrownwashfoamy up the bank side Isee allcreaturesthere fish ducklings inthespring spring water going throughmyveins sinktheocean seeoutfar my salt my. Sea firsttime. Ahhhh pisses.

Hopefully I've quoted enough to allow other readers to decide on their own whether A Girl is a Half-formed Thing will be their cuppa tea; this won't be for everyone. Anecdotally, I've noticed that women reviewers (the pros and on goodreads) have rated this book higher than men, so I'll throw that out there. As for me, this never became the book I was expecting, but I'm finding it unforgettable -- it touched me on a deeper level and I can't resent McBride for making me work for that (I am fairly haunted by the image of the little boy and girl -- after their Mammy beat them up above -- who then went into the darkened kitchen to warm her up a can of tomato soup as a peace offering; an offering she took as her due before shooing them to their own beds, hungry. I don't think this would have been as affecting in a straightforward style of writing.) And to be clear: while McBride may have been influenced by Joyce, this is no Finnegan's Wake; the style takes some getting used to, but it's not incomprehensible, and the effort was worth it for me.

And another interview here that I found enlightening.

March : A Novel

It's funny to me that my immediate reaction to finishing March is the same as it was for another Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Hours: in both cases, an author has used a literary classic as the source material for a new work, and after reading in the afterword of the additional books that Geraldine Brooks says she borrowed from liberally, it all seems so easy and obvious (but again, as with The Hours, I'm undecided whether "obvious" equals "lightweight", and again, am curious about the Pulitzer jury and their processes). With March, Brooks starts with the basic narrative from Little Women: the father of the four sisters has joined the Union Army as a chaplain during the Civil War, and from his perspective, we learn of his service there and, through his memories, questions from the original storyline are answered (how he met their mother, how his fortune had been made and lost, what his occupation was before the war, etc.) Since the sisters were based on Louisa May Alcott's own, Brooks used the journals and collected letters of Alcott's famous abolitionist father as the inspiration for Mr. March and surrounds him with characters lifted from contemporaneous works of fiction and memoir; placing him in the middle of well-documented Civil War battles; and having him pass through the various settings of other books she mentions as research. Since his basic story is laid out in Little Women -- March goes to war, takes deathly ill and Marmee visits him in Washington, Marmee must return home to attend on sick Beth, March is home for Christmas -- and everything else that happens to him is based on actual, documented events, I can't get over the lingering feeling that this is such an obvious creation (but again, as with The Hours, I need to hedge and note that if it's so obvious, it would be done all the time, so there must be something more at work here).

What Brooks does well here is to update Little Women from an adult perspective -- in the original, the parents are one-dimensional paragons of virtue, forever encouraging their daughters to Christian ideals of hard work and self-sacrifice. In March, we see that they struggle with fatal flaws of their own: March is prideful, thinking that his dubious battlefield ministry is more important than taking care of his wife and children, and Marmee is lustful, jealous, spiteful and hot-tempered. There's a scene in Little Women where Marmee cautions Jo to try harder to control her temper, explaining that she, too, used to lose control until March helped her to overcome it. This came as such a shock to Jo, but it shouldn't have -- March is forever shushing or removing his wife, even restraining her with a hand over her mouth when she can't control her stinging tongue. I had a hard time reconciling the Marmee I knew with the one who went to Washington:

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.

If that seemed out of character, I was more than a little put off by the following, the thoughts of the same woman who would ask her daughters to go without breakfast on Christmas so as to feed the truly destitute:

But where he might retire to his study and be wafted off on some contemplation of the Oversoul, it was I who felt harassed at every hour by our indebtedness and demeaned by begging credit here and there; I who had to go hungry so that he and the girls might eat. Oh, he gardened to put food on our table, and chopped wood for others when the larder was truly bare. And what praise he won for it: “Orpheus at the plow,” Mr. Emerson hailed him. (No one thought to attach such a poetic label to me, though I might wear myself to a raveling with the hundred little shifts necessary to sustain us all.)

But while I might not have truly believed that Marmee would go that far, she is at least humanised. (And that would seem to have been one of Brooks' goals here. When her mother first encouraged her to read Little Women as a girl, Brooks' mother warned: “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.”) One last complaint about her character: it's charming in Little Women that her children call her "Marmee" and I felt robbed of that when it's explained in March that "Marmee" is a childhood nickname that everyone uses for her. In the same vein, I was charmed when March referred to his daughters as his "little women" once in a letter home in the original book, but grew impatient that he always referred to them that way in this book.

Even though I learned that many of the situations March was put into were lifted straight from historical accounts, they were interesting nonetheless -- and especially the liberated plantation where the former slaves were now to be paid for working the fields as an investment for a Northerner. This was a fascinating story of how the ideals of the abolitionists were hard to put into practise -- and especially with the incompetence of the Union Army behind them -- and Brooks did an admirable job of showing both sides of a lot of thorny issues (the racism of some Union soldiers who did not believe the Civil War was about abolition, the slaves who might remain loyal to their former masters, mercenary carpet-baggers disguised as white knights). That March remained a naïve idealist throughout his war experience might be a little patronising, but his prideful belief in the value of his own contribution (despite repeated proof to the opposite) is at least true to the effort to humanise his character, too. It did annoy me that March knew so many famous people in the book (he socialised with Emerson and Thoreau, met Nathaniel Hawthorne, and supported John Brown) but this was apparently true of Alcott's father. I also thought it went too far when his vegetarianism (a strange trait, I thought, to give to a 19th century man) led to March giving up silk and wool (because the materials properly belonged to the animals that created them) and later foreswearing milk and cheese (as robbed from calves). In the afterword, Brooks explains that these were also beliefs of Alcott's father (who tried to create a Utopian commune that wouldn't even steal manure from animals to fertilise the fields) but, although that explains the strange details, where truth is stranger than fiction, perhaps these truths shouldn't be borrowed for fiction.

The best of March comes at the end: the touching scene in the original book -- wherein March returns, a weak but treasured presence, in time for a Christmas reunion with his family -- is seen anew through the adults' eyes. Marmee regards him as her "inconstant, ruined dreamer", and March himself thinks, So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand. His PTSD (and forsaken dreams) add a rich inner life to the scenes that follow in the original book and Marmee is left with her own demons to wrestle: all while the two of them endeavor to remain models of perfection for their daughters. 

In the end, I don't know if my course of rereading Little Women before tackling March was a good idea or not: every time Brooks has a character doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, I recognised Alcott's hand in the story. It felt implausibly prescient for Marmee to say the following in her first conversation with March:

Perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh, how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do!

To later learn that much of what the absent March experienced was lifted straight from historical events had the same effect -- to what extent did this book write itself? And is that true of all good historical fiction? And should it matter? March is an easy book to read, interesting enough and well written, but I didn't love it; and I can't reconcile the Pulitzer.

All My Puny Sorrows

Thou creepest round a dear-loved sister's bed
With noiseless step, and watchest the faint look,
Soothing each pang with fond solicitude,
And tenderest tones medicinal of love.
I, too, a sister had, an only sister —
She loved me dearly, and I doted on her;
To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows

This Coleridge poem is the source of the title of Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows and its subject matter (the loss of the poet's only sister) must have served as a particular font of inspiration for Toews as she attempted to process the loss of her only sister through the writing of this remarkable book. Toews drew on her own background -- situating the characters (at the beginning) in a cloistered Mennonite community, referencing her own suicidal father, including hospital bedside conversations with her suicidal sister (more about all this here) -- and by the turning of the last page, the reader can only conclude that this is the book Toews was duty-bound to write, and I hope it brought her peace to do so.

All My Puny Sorrows begins in the small town of East Village, Manitoba; a Mennonite community in which the church elders attempt to control every aspect of its citizens lives. The main character Yolanda (Yoli) and her big sister Elfrieda (Elf) are being raised by pious but free-thinking parents and their indulgences are the talk of the town, leading to a "raid" by the bishop:

He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car (they never carpool because it's not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car) and my father and I watched from the window as they parked in front of our house and got out of their cars and walked slowly towards us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line.

The posse is there to discuss the troubling rumour that Elf might want to attend university one day (Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book) and before their cowed father can make a response, Elf plays a frantic and flawless Rachmaninoff piece on the contraband piano in the adjoining room and their father knew in that moment he had "lost everything": approval from the elders, his authority as head of the household, and his daughter, who was now free and therefore dangerous. Elf goes on to study piano with European masters and grows into a world famous artist; a person with everything: a satisfying career; a loving partner; a beautiful home; a supportive family; exotic beauty; and as shown in chapters that alternate with the childhood memories, a death wish.

Yoli, on the other hand, is a mildly successful author of YA rodeo novels, twice-divorced with a teenaged child by each marriage, living in a pest-infested apartment in Toronto, and sleeping around with men she's only weakly attracted to. Yoli must repeatedly drop everything and fly back to Winnipeg whenever Elf makes an attempt on her life, and more than anything, Yoli struggles to understand the why: why her sister -- who not only "has it all" but who also understands (because of their father) how devastating a suicide is for those left behind  -- why would Elf be determined to kill herself? The conversations the sisters have around this issue are fascinating and devastating and lead to a discussion about going to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal even for those who have simply "lost the will to live". Would it be more compassionate to allow Elf to go out on her own terms? Or, if her depression could be controlled by the right mix of drugs, wouldn't Elf have an obligation to try every solution offered? This notion of control over one's own life was brilliantly juxtaposed against the controlling efforts of the Mennonite elders (even as a bishop intrudes unwanted upon Elf's hospital room and she can only force him to leave by stripping naked while reciting poetry at him).

Toews not only uses All My Puny Sorrows to explore and understand suicide, but she also uses it lay bare the subpar medical care that psych patients receive; as though an illness of the mind is more the fault of the patient than an illness of the body. 

Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you. I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don't know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred per cent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health -- to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will be my failure, not yours. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain.

That imaginary care is contrasted against what Elf actually receives: constant condescension and infantilising; not allowed meals or phone calls unless she makes the effort to go to another room to retrieve them; a doctor who refuses to even speak with her if she insists on communicating through written messages. (And perhaps worst of all: no continuity of care, so that doctors and nurses who don't know Elf's -- and Toews own sister's -- full history can be manipulated into issuing day passes.) Although there is much bitterness in these passages, Toews concludes on a lighter note:

Nurses in cardio are far more playful and friendly than they are in psych.

If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than in your head.

And there are many lighter -- and even funny -- threads in this book as Toews weaves together a full and compassionate tapestry of this all-too-real and all-too-painful situation. The sisters' mother is a tour-de-force, and her sister even more so: this is, in many ways, the story of these women's triumph over the paternalistic Mennonite society (We descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen). For some reason that I don't remember, I didn't much like A Complicated Kindness and I may need to revisit it; the Toews I'm reading here is truly a masterful story-crafter. But I have a couple of quibbles: this book is littered with pop culture (The Wire, The Weepies, La Dolce Vita) and literary (Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Calvino) references, and with people reciting lines of poetry to each other, so that it felt too often that the story was detached; self-consciously filtered through a literary lens. Also, I appreciate the discussion of suicide as a valid life-choice (and am gratified that compassion has been publicly shown in the recent cases of a mental sufferer -- Robin Williams -- and a physical sufferer -- Brittany Maynard), but can't actually agree that a suicide isn't ultimately a selfish choice. **spoiler** I understand that Toews had the characters in her book commit suicide by crouching in front of an oncoming train because that's what her sister did in real life, but I think the effect on the drivers of those trains is unforgiveable. I can be convinced that a person has the right to control their own end only where no one else is scarred for life: you can't fling yourself from a tall building onto a public sidewalk; step into traffic; hang yourself in your livingroom for your children to find. I suppose this makes the case for the Swiss solution.

At one point, Yoli notes: My mother was often asked to write eulogies because she had a breezy style that was playful, good with details and totally knife-in-the-heart devastating. Those same characteristics apply to Toews and her writing style with All My Puny Sorrows; this is a masterwork and a fitting tribute to a lost sister.

All My Puny Sorrows was shortlisted for the both the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (which it won) and the Giller Prize (which it did not win). I am pleased that it won something; this book certainly deserves recognition and whatever bump in sales these honours might bring. This is the last of the big-prize-nominated books that I have to read (the one for which I was on the library waiting list for the longest) and it's a totally satisfying end to a long process for me. I may rethink this read-them-all project next year...

2014 Finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (with my personal ranking):

·   Miriam Toews (Toronto) for All My Puny Sorrows 

·   André Alexis (Toronto) for Pastoral 

·   K.D. Miller (Toronto) for All Saints 

·   Steven Galloway (New Westminster, B.C.) for The Confabulist 

·   Carrie Snyder (Waterloo, Ont.) for Girl Runner 

The longlist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize (with my personal ranking):

·  Sean Michaels for his novel  Us Conductors  *

·  Miriam Toews for her novel All My Puny Sorrows *

·  Claire Holden Rothman for her book My October 

·  David Bezmozgis for his novel The Betrayers  *

·  Heather O’Neill for her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night *

·  Frances Itani for her book Tell  *

·  Kathy Page for her short story collection Paradise and Elsewhere 

·  Rivka Galchen for her short story collection American Innovations 

·  Padma Viswanathan for her book The Ever After of Ashwin Rao *

·  Shani Mootoo for her novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab 

·  Jennifer LoveGrove for her novel Watch How We Walk 

·  Arjun Basu for his novel Waiting for the Man

* also on the shortlist