She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light.
I joined facebook a few years ago, and as a person might, I looked to see if I could find anyone I used to know. I did stumble over a few without making any effort to contact them because, in the end, it felt like there was a reason why we didn't know each other anymore. There was one friend, however, that I regretted losing touch with, and after much searching and eventually finding her daughter, I got in touch with Delight. We talked on the phone and chatted through facebook and eventually got together, face to face. What was strange was that, in answer to the questions, "So what's new? What have you been doing with yourself for the past 15 years?", it was a struggle for me to come up with much more than, "Well, we have one more daughter than when we last spoke and now we live in Cambridge". It's not that I haven't done anything in those years, I don't consider myself bored or boring in my everyday life, but my story does lack grand events (and insofar as that means my story lacks tragedy, I am not ungrateful for it). Sure, I was able to sketch a big picture of a life of happiness and routine, throwing in a few brags about how great my girls are, sharing some frustrations and minor setbacks, but since I was talking to someone who already knows me, I felt like she still knew me, as the "me" hadn't really changed. In the end, my dull story felt like not so much a failure of memory as a failure of memoir.
The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.
In The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields presents Daisy Goodwill Flett as an ordinary person who, as a classic unreliable narrator, tells her life story, flipping from first person to third person omniscient perspectives, witnessing and describing even her own birth, and carefully choosing which stories to include and which long stretches of years to omit. The storytelling is clever: I would be sucked into the narrative, "believing" what I was being told, but Shields repeatedly tells the reader that Daisy can't be trusted:
Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy's representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.
Childhood is a good example of my own failure with memoir. Like most of my later life, my childhood was unremarkable (which again simply reveals a lack of tragedy), but I don't recall it fondly. If I stop and try to remember being a kid, I can conjure some happy and playful memories, but it's the resentments that can come unbidden. When my brothers and I are together, we can fall into a rut of unhappy memories, reminiscing bitterly, and it's not like we were abused or anything-- this is just how we've framed our early lives, and maybe the point is that even the stories I tell myself, about myself, should be taken with a grain of salt.
You might like to guess that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.
Imagine living outside your own story! Of course our lives contain more than the story we're willing to share, more than the truth that we're willing to admit to ourselves, but in the end, what is truth? My husband has a dozen biographies of Elvis Presley, has read dozens more, and I wonder if anyone has been written about more extensively-- there are books on Elvis' career and love life and drug use and family, written by friends and lovers and dispassionate "truth-seekers", his every public word and action, along with many private, have been catalogued and parsed and psychoanalysed, and even if he had written an autobiography, would any of us know the "truth" of his existence? Would Elvis himself? The omissions and reactions and fallacies in The Stone Diaries demonstrate that even Daisy herself can't get at the truth of her own existence. I read an edition of this book that includes the "family photos" and I thought that the picture included of Daisy's parents is genius. After describing her mother, Mercy, as a doughy mountain of flesh, the picture of her looks like a fairly average sized person, maybe a size twelve. Does Daisy imagine that her father adores his wife's generous rolls of flesh because it is she, not necessarily he, who needs to create a soft and matronly presence to disappear into? It's these sorts of details that make The Stone Diaries a technical marvel.
On genealogy: Victoria doesn't believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.
And so we are left with the paradox of not being able to adequately know our own truths, let alone share them with others, and we leave behind generations of descendants who will never glimpse beyond the bare facts of us that they might one day discover. Two more stories: When he was a teenager, my older brother hitch-hiked from PEI, where he was staying with our maternal grandparents, to Nova Scotia to visit our paternal grandparents. This was an unexpected visit and they were uncomfortable to find him at their door (my younger brother and I agree that neither of us would have assumed that any of our grandparents would have wanted us to drop in on them, but good on Ken for trying). While there, Ken asked our grandfather, who had served in WW II for five years, what he remembered of the war. Grampie got upset and angry and had nothing to say on the subject. By contrast, my mother-in-law's father's cousin, Fred Topham, was given the Victoria Cross for bravery during the war, and we've taken the girls to the Canadian War Museum to see it on display; they have even done school projects on him because there is much written about Topham. In the end, which of these ancestors will my girls even "know"? Is an "official" version of the events of someone's life more instructive than an angry old man rebuffing his grandson?
The Stone Diaries is like a scrapbook: it contains letters and recipes, reminiscences from different perspectives, conjectures and made up stories. Taken together, they make up a life, but in the end, we are instructed to take it all with a grain of salt. I think it's the technical feat of this book that earned it a Pulitzer Prize. The book I read came from the local library, and annoyingly, someone had started underlining every word that refers to stone and every word that refers to plants and gardening. Happily the underlining vandal gave up halfway through the book, but it left me with an eye for the language that I was supposed to be watching out for (and I hope the happy underliner read through to the end where the dying Daisy feels herself turning to stone). So while I can appreciate the mastery that Carol Shields displayed in writing this book, I lacked a connection with Daisy. She compares unfavourably, as a reading experience, to Hagar in The Stone Angel, and so I have to stick to four stars, acknowledging as I do that all of my ratings are filtered through my own history and sentiments; through me.
I found A Fair Maiden on a discount table at Chapter's, and remembering how I cried while reading We Were The Mulvaneys, I decided I'd give Joyce Carol Oates another read. In the end, I'm not certain this slim novella is a fair follow-up to my previous experience with the author, but reading some reviews here, perhaps it is.
Right from the beginning, when Katya meets Marcus Kidder and he asks, "What would you choose if you had your wish?", the teenage girl feels like she's being drawn into a fairytale. The fairytale elements continue until, abruptly, the old man tells her the fable of the Fair Maiden and his intentions become explicit. I don't know if I understand why the author decided to stop the allusions and force the plot in this way, but just as it interrupted the flow of the story for me, it also seemed to break the spell for Katya and she reverts to her former self; the lower class partygirl, so desperate for love and attention, that she offers herself up to her rough and abusive cousin in order to feel human connections. That with remorse she returns to fulfill her destiny with Mr. Kidder rings true with both Katya's own sense of compassion and the requirements of a sort of "happily ever after" ending.
I remember reading a conversation on facebook once where a young mother was lamenting that as much as she wanted to read classic fairytales to her kids, she found it challenging to sanitise them as she went along because they were far too violent and scary. Her friends agreed, this editing is something each of them did, and one of them remarked that she couldn't even show her kids Disney's The Little Mermaid because it was too violent. This is where I itched to jump in, to say that I hadn't let my girls see that movie when they were little because it had been too sanitised. When I read the original Hans Christian Anderson tale, I was struck by the commonsense moral it was trying to impart: a woman should not change herself, give up what is important to her (neither her inherent gifts or her family), for the love of a man. That's a powerful message, one that likely doesn't get through to women in love, and it's a message that Disney totally removed from their version of the story. The last thing I wanted imprinted on my little girls' minds was that they, like Ariel, could give up everything, literally give up their voices, and that would lead to happily ever after. I wanted to tell these young mothers that fairytales have survived all these years for a reason; not despite the violence and fear mongering but because they must satisfy a basic human psychological need. In the end I didn't intrude upon the conversation, just watched it, bemused, as though through a magic mirror.
In this modern fairytale, Oates updated some archetypes for her characters. Like Cinderella, Katya has been abandoned by her father to be raised by a mother and siblings who don't seem to care much about her welfare. In Bayhead Harbor, she wistfully gazes at the castle-like homes and imagines what it would be like to live in one. (I was intrigued when, in the fairytale within the book, it said that the Fair Maiden was raised by her grandmother. I was waiting for it to be revealed that Katya was actually the daughter of one of her sisters left in the care of what was her grandmother, but whom she had been told was her mother, explaining her apparent neglect, but that never came out. Still, I wonder if that's the assumption we are meant to make.) Katya keeps assuming that someday her Dad will come back to her, that like Hansel and Gretel's father, he didn't leave on purpose. And Marcus Kidder is a wolf in sheep's clothing, literally, when he removes his "snow white" wig to reveal a monster underneath.
I was intrigued by the inclusion of crystal meth in this book as it dovetails with some of my reading this year. I must be naïve, but I just don't see meth around me. But, watching Breaking Bad on Netflix and reading books like Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction and Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines, I am told that it is everywhere around me and destroying lives and families. As Tina Fey said in a prayer for her daughter in Bossypants: When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with Beer. This is a prayer I've never thought to say-- could this be the greatest danger my kids will have to face? Is this the real moral of this story? I also recently watched the movie "Winter's Bone", and find Katya to be similar to Jennifer Lawrence's character in that she's from a low income neighbourhood, surrounded by meth users, has a missing father (who in the end has a similar fate), a mother who is more needy than nurturing, and a community that is not above dealing violently with her. Is this the modern day dangers that the author is trying to warn the reader about? And does it take the creepy Lolita scenes, the discomfort and danger of this fairytale situation, to imprint the dangers on a deep psychic level? Maybe I'm answering my questions as I ask them, but if there's a way to have my kids turn out more like Jennifer Lawrence's character than Katya, I'm ready to hear it.
I can usually find a few quotes to mark and savour but in A Fair Maiden I did not. These seem to be some favourites of others:
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.
A female is her body. A guy can be lots of things, not just his body.
While these might be some interesting observations (and in the second case, while it might be more trope than truism, it at least illuminates Katya's thinking), I don't find them to be examples of amazing writing. And if I may share a peeve about the author's writing in this story: why did she repeat the phrase "sick-sinking feeling"? I think it occurred four times throughout this short work and it jolted me every time I saw it repeated after liking it the first time.
I can understand why this book was on the discount table-- it wouldn't be for everyone, but it did give me some things to think about. I'll definitely give Joyce Carol Oates more opportunities to enlighten me, knowing that she's not likely to sanitise her storytelling.
The climax of Bossypants comes on a September weekend of 2008: Tina Fey, as the Producer of 30 Rock, had to schmooze Oprah Winfrey into filming a scene for her TV show; she was convinced to do an impression of Sarah Palin for Saturday Night Live; and she was busy planning a 3rd birthday party for her daughter Alice on the Sunday. How Tina Fey got to that point, and how she manages those three threads of her life, is really the substance of this book. Regarding this weekend in particular, Fey says: By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your f--ing life.
I listened to the audiobook and would recommend the experience highly; Tina Fey treats the reading as a performance, doing voices and levels that keep the story funny and personal. It is also through her voice that you get the point of the title "Bossypants"-- Fey wants you to know that she's smart and capable and in charge, but she also wants you to like her; she's the boss but she's not really bossy, and I just wanted to be able to tell her, "It's okay to be the boss, own it, don't apologise for it". She makes it sound as though the opportunity to create her own show just fell into her lap, and as proud as she is of 30 Rock, and as hard as she works on it, the show is kind of an underdog and she loves it despite its indie-cult status. (I did like her confessional tone in saying that while she appreciates that people think it's hip and quirky, she was actually trying to make a big hit and this is what came out. It's a bit of a cheat, however, to only mention in passing the wagonload of Emmys she's earned for it.) Because of her producing role, Fey threads many nuggets of advice throughout the book for women in the workplace, whether in positions of power or not. Some examples:
So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.
Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.
If I was going to actually recommend a book on what it's like to create and develop and run a network comedy, it would beYou're Lucky You're Funny How Life Becomes a Sitcom by Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, but that's not entirely what Bossypants is about.
Tina Fey also outlines her acting background in this book, starting with her exposure in summer camp and going to college to study drama and joining Second City in Chicago. Once again, she describes joining the Second City company as though it was no big deal, but everyone knows it is (own it Tina!). There are some funny stories about touring and about standing up to the men in charge who don't think an audience would ever want to see just two women in a skit, but it seems to be missing an element of paying her dues. She then explains how, through a terrible interview, she landed a writing job at SNL, was promoted to Head Writer when the former one left, and then was asked to audition to appear in the Weekend Update. Each of these (huge) accomplishments is mentioned briefly as though she doesn't want to brag about them, and for an insider, she doesn't give a lot of insight into how SNL works. I was very interested in the story of how Fey was asked to come back and do the Sarah Palin impression-- I had no idea that it was in response to an internet phenomenon (much like when there was the groundswell of support for Betty White to host SNL). I was surprised that Fey was so nervous because, even though she had a background in improv and sketch comedy, she didn't think of herself as much of an impressionist. More surprising was how she didn't want to be seen as politically partisan. I do remember seeing that sketch live and finding it hilarious, but it wasn't untilBossypants that I realised what was so wonderful about it: it would have been very easy for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to act out some catfight as Palin and Hillary Clinton, but they were able to be funny without demeaning the characters as women-- by making the sketch about an appeal for the sexism in the media to stop, they were true to themselves as actresses, didn't stoop to partisanism, and were funny, to boot. My favourite Amy Poehler/SNL story:
Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday read-through to start. There were always a lot of noisy "comedy bits" going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike."
Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said: "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it."
Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. "I don't f--ing care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit …
With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not f--ng care if you like it.
So if I was going to recommend a book on what it's like to pay your dues and work hard to learn the ins and outs of sketch comedy and get hired on Saturday Night Live, it would beThirty-Nine Years Of Short-Term Memory Loss by Tom Davis, but that's not entirely what Bossypants is about either.
Tina Fey also weaves through a thread of more personal memoir, starting with talking about why she doesn't talk about the scar on her face, through her relationship with her parents and adolescence and dating and marriage and motherhood. These are probably the least funny of the stories, but they are warm and interesting, and because it was an audiobook, listening to them felt intimate and personal. Here's her A Mother's Prayer for her Daughter:
First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.
May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.
When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with Beer.
Guide her, protect her when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.
Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels.
What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.
O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers and the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.
And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.
“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.
Amen.
It's in her most personal stories, when talking about her parents or husband and daughter that I think Tina Fey shines; she loses the tone of apologising for her success, or acting like it all happened apart from herself. I found it poignant at the end ofBossypants that, as successful as she was, riding the success of30 Rock, the Palin impressions, and the $5 million book advance, Fey is torn between having another baby and capitalising on her peaking stardom by looking for some movie projects. Forty at the time of writing she says, "It feels like my last five minutes of being famous are timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a baby." She's so likeable that I can grant her this moment of angst even though I know she now has a second daughter and a leading role in a movie in theatres right now (Admission).
In the end, I admire Tina Fey the person and the performer. She doesn't come off as the man-hating-feminist-pinko-lefty that I had thought she was. While this wasn't a perfect book, it was a fun experience and I can't give it only three stars (3.5 would likely be my fair rating). It shines when Fey stops apologizing and is true to who she is (or at least who she paints herself to be). I can't imagine what it would be like to be famous and have strangers judging you, securely behind their anonymous usernames, so I liked this bit of revenge:
Dear Internet
One of my greatest regrets is that I don't always have time to answer the wonderful correspondence I receive. When people care enough to write, the only well-mannered thing to do is to return the gift, so please indulge me as I answer some fans here.
From tmz.com
Posted by Sonya in Tx on 7/4/2010, 4.33 pm
When is Tina going to do something
about that hideous scar across her
cheek??
Dear Sonya in Tx,
Greetings, Texan friend! (I'm assuming the "Tx" in your screen name stands for Texas and not some rare chromosomal deficiency you have. Hope I'm right about that!)
First of all, my apologies for the delayed response. I was unaware you had written until I went on tmz.com to watch some of their amazing footage of people in LA leaving restaurants and I stumbled upon your question.
I'm sure if you and I compare schedules we could find a time to get together and do something about this scar of mine. But the trickier question is what am I going to do? I would love to get your advice, actually. I'm assuming you're a physician, because you seem really knowledgeable about how the human body works.
What do you think I should do about this hideous scar? I guess I could wear a bag on my head, but do I go with linen like the Elephant Man or a simple brown paper like the Unknown Comic? Too many choices, help!
Thank you for your time. You are a credit to Texas and Viking women both.
Yours,
Tina
P.S. Great use of double question marks, by the way. It makes you seem young.
From Dlisted.com
Posted by Centaurious on Monday, 21/9/2009, 2.08 am
Tina Fey is an ugly, pear-shaped,
bitchy, overrated troll
Dear Centaurious,
First let me say how inspiring it is that you have learned to use a computer.
I hate for our correspondence to be confrontational, but you have offended me deeply. To say I'm an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair. I'll leave it for others to say if I'm the best, but I am certainly one of the most dedicated trolls guarding bridges today. I always ask three questions, at least two of which are riddles.
As for "ugly, pear-shaped and bitchy"? I prefer the terms "offbeat, business class–assed and exhausted", but I'll take what I can get. There's no such thing as bad press!
Now go to bed, you crazy night owl! You have to be at NASA early in the morning. So they can look for your penis with the Hubble telescope.
Affectionately,
Tina
From PerezHilton.com
Posted by jerkstore on Wednesday, 21/1/2009, 11.21 pm
In my opinion Tina Fey completely
ruined SNL. The only reason she's
celebrated is because she's a woman and
an outspoken liberal. She has not a single
funny bone in her body
Dear jerkstore,
Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been overcelebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a "missing girl", and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to "where she was last seen" and "how she might have been abducted by a close family friend", and I thought, "What is this, the News for Chicks?" Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she's secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What's Michael Bay's next film going to be?
When I first set out to ruin SNL, I didn't think anyone would notice, but I persevered because – like you trying to do a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle – it was a labour of love.
I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I feel safe with you, jerkstore, so I'll say it. Everything you ever hated on SNL was by me, and anything you ever liked was by someone else who did it against my will.
Sincerely,
Tina Fey
PS You know who does have a funny bone in her body? Your mom every night for a dollar.
And finally, after several examples of Tina Fey asking women to stop sabotaging each other, it's ironic that Taylor Swift couldn't be the butt of a joke by Fey and Poehler without accusing them of doing the same. I'm glad that Ms Fey never apologised for that-- own it Tina!
I like reading short stories even though the form confounds me a bit. I've heard it said that short stories are harder to write than novels, so I often wonder why an author like Alice Munro chooses the format, and as a reader, as much as I love her collections, I feel a bit deflated as each story ends and I am compelled to pause and decide if I want to immediately start the process of meeting and understanding a whole new cast of characters on the next page. With A Bird In The House, Margaret Laurence blends the two formats with eight short stories about the same family, all from the perspective of Vanessa MacLeod, jumping back and forth between the ages of eight and fortyish. This felt like a bit of a cheat to me: even though I understand that each story appeared on its own in some magazine or other over the years, it was hard to consider each a complete work, knowing that the narrative would continue, that the characters and setting would be familiar, right there on the next page. This isn't a complaint, it just read like a novel instead of a collection of short stories, and it was a satisfying way of jumping through time to watch Vanessa mature and find her place in her family and the wider world.
The title of A Bird in the House has two meanings. In the first, Vanessa's gentle grandmother Connor has a pet canary:
She would try to coax the canary into its crystal trilling, but it was a surly creature and obliged only occasionally…When I asked my grandmother if the bird minded being there, she shook her head and said no, it had been there always and wouldn't know what to do with itself outside, and I thought this must surely be so, for it was a family saying that she couldn't tell a lie if her life depended on it.
In grandmother Connor's view, the world is a scary place and staying in the safe and familiar (even remaining married to an abusive bully of a man) is preferable to venturing into the unknown. I am routinely astounded by the strength of the women in Margaret Laurence's books. While the people of grandmother Connor's generation might have valued respectability and the good opinions of neighbours above all (and submitting to this can take its own form of courage), their granddaughters, the Hagars and Morags and Vanessas, are given the self-awareness to rebel against these stifling restrictions and seek a selfish fulfillment, that by today's standards, is every person's birthright. I can be a bit impatient with strident feminism, but I do appreciate how far women have come in a relatively short period, thanks to the brave social pioneers who came before. Although grandmother Connor wasn't lying when she said that she didn't think the canary minded the cage, Maya Angelou, of the brave social pioneering generation, got it truer:
The free bird leapson the back of the windand floats downstreamtill the current endsand dips his wingsin the orange sun raysand dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalksdown his narrow cagecan seldom see throughhis bars of ragehis wings are clipped andhis feet are tiedso he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird singswith fearful trillof the things unknownbut longed for stilland its tune is heardon the distant hill for the caged birdsings of freedom
In the second sense of the title, a hired girl remarks, upon freeing a sparrow that had found its way through a storm window, that a bird in the house means a death in the house. Vanessa's father dies soon after and the girl realises that death was always there, waiting to strike. Whether sitting beside him at church or later finding an old love letter that had been hidden away, Vanessa realised that she never really knew her father, not his inner thoughts anyway, and this theme is repeated throughout the book. When grandmother Connor dies, the family is shocked by how hard grandfather Connor takes it, and wonder if she ever knew the depths of his feelings. When the old man himself finally dies at 96, his daughters wonder if they had been too hard on him, not understanding enough.
My favourite story in the collection is Horses of the Night. Vanessa meets Chris, an older cousin who comes to live in Manawaka to attend high school. He has a free spirit that matches her own and they become good friends. When the circumstances of the Depression prevent him from attending university, when every plan he had to travel or make something of himself fails, he ends up back at the dirt poor farm he started out from. When Vanessa goes to visit him, he is the first person to ever freely share his innermost thoughts with her:
"People usually say there must be a God," Chris went on, "because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that's ridiculous. If the stars and planets go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren't ever created. Look-- what's the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal. What else could He be? You've only got to look anywhere around you. It would be an insult to Him to believe in a God like that."
(I also like this quote because it reminded me of one of my all-time favourite quotes by John Banville in The Sea: Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.)
Vanessa is so embarrassed by Chris' naked frankness that she pretends to be asleep until he stops talking. This felt the most relatable-- there are people I can regret not knowing better, but I can also be embarrassed by the idea of closeness. One of the reasons I decided to challenge myself to write reviews here is in an effort to leave some sort of record of myself behind; this is a fairly low risk venue for putting down some memories and impressions, perhaps my kids will be interested someday in reading what I thought of some book or other, maybe a grandchild? (If I were to insert a hello, would it be from the grave?) Although this is my challenge, and one that I wish I had taken up sooner -- oh, the lovely books I have read and not reviewed! -- I can't see my sharing anything terribly personal here, or anywhere. Like Vanessa, I don't know if I would even want to know the innermost thoughts of the people around me-- I don't want to know those of my parents. I wouldn't want to know dark secrets of my grandparents. How far back would I need to go before the blood is thinned enough that I could dispassionately hear the secrets of my ancestors? How far forward would I go through the generations before I could comfortably choose a descendant to learn mine? I might be closer to grandmother Connor than Maya Angelou after all; the bird in my house doesn't long to be freed.
A couple of nice lines to end on:
In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.
No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father's death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.
As a final note, I am sorry that this is the last of the Manawaka Series that I had to read. Over the course of five books, Margaret Laurence created a lovely little time capsule, a true treasure.
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes her time living roughly on Lummi Island as she wrote a "difficult book". I'm assuming that was this book, and as difficult as it may have been to write, it is also difficult to read. Not in the sense that it's too deep or incomprehensible, but in the sense that it's unlike other books, as though Dillard was inventing the form as she went along.
I listened to the audiobook of The Living and may have therefore lost many opportunities to stop and reread passages, but there was one benefit: the narrator spoke in a flat tone, matter-of-factly describing scenes of violence and hardship and senseless deaths, and while this may sound like a drawback, I don't think it was accidental. The characters in this book are accustomed to loss and hardship and take it all in stride:
How was it possible to endure the losses one accumulated just by living? Sentiment based on fact was the most grievous sort, she thought, for the only escape from it was to shrug off the fact -- that babies died, say, or that people lost lands they loved, that youth aged, love faded, everybody ended in graves, and nothing would ever again be the same. She pounded herself to tears with these melancholy truths, as if to ensure that she would not betray herself by forgetting them -- which, however, she knew full well that she would, as all other grown persons have done, to their manifestly improved mental balance.
It was curious to me that Dillard spent more time in describing the hats worn by every last character than in describing the thoughts contained in those hat-wearing heads. When Rooney collapses in the bottom of the well, Ada doesn't start screaming for help or collapse with grief. Her immediate and sole reaction:Without knowing she did it, Ada pressed both hands to her jaws. When her neighbour George joins Rooney, in the well and in death, she and Priscilla both stand mute. And at the funeral for their men:The Lummis wailed, but this was not the way of the settlers, who tried for impassivity. This impassivity is a hallmark of The Living and I think it contributed to my disconnection with the characters. Had Ada started keening and wailing at the sight of her dead husband, I was prepared to join in. Because her reaction was foreign to me, the situation remained foreign.
Although there were instances when characters did react strongly to their situation, I can't recall a single time when the narrative was being told from that person's point of view. When the surveying crew find the Skagit impaled on the stake, it is the immature perspective of the young John Ireland that is related, not that of the grief-stricken Yekton. Later, when John Ireland is watching the expulsion of the Chinese immigrants, he seems to lament more the death of his fondly held socialism than truly empathising with his fellow men. When Minta loses first her husband Eustace and then her two youngest children, her immediate reaction isn't shared at all. Hugh, about whom it has already been revealed is a person of particularly strong and private emotions, never shares his feelings about the accident that he caused. Throughout The Living, emotions are flat or never revealed. If this was meant to illustrate the acceptance and stoicism necessary to survive pioneer life, it contrasts with Susanna Moodie's true life experiences in Roughing It In The Bush-- of course life was hard, the work was hard, it was a struggle just to eat at times, but losing people wasn't borne in silence.
The exception to this emotionless life occurred repeatedly when young people met and fell in love:
When, over the following months, Minta Randall found that Eustace apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that she and Eustace had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like them.
All the more reason, I would think, that Minta would have been given a scene of public grieving at his death. On this subject of love, I was amused by how many hard-fought courtships ended with regretted marriages. Glee worked very hard to win Pearl, only to "despise" her in the end. Anyone would think that John Ireland had a happy homelife with June, yet all the while he wished he could be a hermit off on some island.
The historical aspects of The Living were fascinating: the transformation of Whatcom from a clearing in an immense forest to a proper town; the daily routines; the booms and busts; the opening of the West through railroads; and the slow evolution of the locals from people who would let newcomers sleep in their own homes until they were on their feet to business-minded folks who were looking to make a buck off every claim-jumper who passed through. This latter is done without resorting to idealising the times past-- the rise of individualism and capitalism is accompanied by advances in education and medicine and governance. By the end of the story, Whatcom has produced in Hugh and Vinnie the ideal of young man and woman. He has gone to study medicine at university and can roll up his sleeves to pitch in at the farm when at home. She has spent her life excelling at school, helping in the family store, watching over a constant stream of siblings, and with her stunning good looks and charm, has developed a graceful manner for declining marriage proposals. That they have found each other bodes well for the town as the story ends:
Hugh held the lantern aloft and saw it illumine the stiff boughs of trees; he set the lantern down. He stripped to his union suit, and somebody handed him the heavy, knotted rope. He could feel Vinnie low beside him, shivering and excited in the dark. Her wide skirts and many petticoats nudged his bare ankle once, then twice, and a pang ran through him. Before his eyes in every direction he saw nothing: no pond, no ocean, no forest, sky, nor any horizon only unmixed blackness.
"Swing out," the voices said in the darkness.
"Push from the platform, and when you’re all the way out, let go."
When? he thought. Where?
The heavy rope pulled at him. He carried it to the platform edge. He hitched up on the knot and launched out. As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
And so, ultimately, we the living all pitch ourselves into the void, hoping for, but never guaranteed, the safe landing. I wanted to love The Living, but it just didn't work for me. I thought that the business with Clare and Beal was going to redeem the whole thing for me, but I couldn't understand the motivations or reactions of either of them. In the end, this may well be a masterpiece, but I was never moved.
A few nice lines to end with, because the words and sentences themselves are fully glorious throughout:
--The shore looked to Ada as if the corner of the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened. The ocean just filled in the tear and settled down.
--How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.
--From deep in the bay he could see Mount Baker in the east, holding the sunset aloft like a cone of coals after the stars came out.
--Mabel and her cousin Nesta, and flat-nosed Cyrus Sharp, and his youngest brother, Horace, were tying each other to a tree. They had found a length of line and were tying each other to the cottonwood tree. Clare watched from the kitchen. He had forgotten this piece of information: children tie one another to trees. Children find wild eggs, treasure, and corpses; they make trails, huts, and fires; they hit one another, hold hands, and tie one another to trees. They tied Horace Sharp to the tree; he cried. They tied Mabel to the tree; her flat beret fell off, and she could not break away.
Clare had looked out past the pie safe. Here is a solid planet, he
thought, stocked with mountains and cliffs,where stone banks jut and deeply rooted trees hang on. Among these fixed and enduring features wander the flimsy people. The earth rolls down and the people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks, not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other. It was singular. Loose people clung in families, holding on for dear life. Grasping at straws! One would think people would beg to be tied to trees.
Added two days later: And this is why I enjoy magical thinking: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/24/i-5-bridge-collapse-caused-by-truck-hitting-span/ If I hadn't read this book, I wouldn't have a mental picture of the geography of "Skagit Country". This bridge collapse nicely illustrates the consequences of the hubris of those who thought to bridge the unspannable distance through the rough terrain to Canada. (And I am, of course, only enjoying this irony because no one was hurt)
Something about The Dinner makes me want to give it only three stars but it feels like a four star book, and as it has lingered with me while I found the time to write a review, I'm going to rate it from my gut.
I'm intrigued that so many people here call Paul a textbook unreliable narrator, but that seems imperfect to me, according to how I interpret the device. The definition from Wikipedia:
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually to deceive the reader or audience.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his or her unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
While Paul, as a character, appears truthful and forthcoming, Herman Koch, as an author, has constructed a form that reveals information so haphazardly, out of sequence and context, that by the end the reader does need to go back and re-evaluate each of the characters and their motivations. I'd say this story is like peeling an onion, but even that has a logical order, from outer to inner. The Dinner is more like eating an artichoke carelessly; randomly plucking first a sweet and tender inner leaf and then a tough and woody outer one, arbitrarily choosing one or the other until the meaty center is reached. Yet, I wouldn't call the pacing of this book arbitrary: the information is doled out so carefully that I didn't feel cheated or tricked by the author-- or the narrator. To me, the textbook unreliable narrator is Roseanne McNulty in The Secret Scripture, with a reveal that made me gasp, so Paul felt like something else.
While the plot and characters and format of The Dinner merited four stars, the writing itself is pretty much just okay. It's rare that I read a book and don't mark some lovely phrases that I'd like to remember. I was also struck by Koch's (or the translator's?) frequent use of colons, which is a little funny, since I was recently awed by Lisa Moore's use of semicolons. In her novel February, the semicolons focussed my attention on certain passages, while in The Dinner, the colons caused me to stop abruptly, trying to fathom their purpose. A random (and maybe not the best) example:
The pinky vaulted over the crayfish to point out two brown toadstools, cut lengthwise; the "chanterelles" looked as though they had been uprooted only a few minutes ago: what was sticking to the bottom, I figured, could only be dirt.
I may need to concede that I'm not an expert on punctuation and literary devices (like unreliable narrators), but anything that stops the flow of my reading will adversely affect my experience, and I see colons so infrequently that spotting several on one page seems quirky at best. The Dinner also had a screenplay (rather than literary) feel, and I wasn't surprised to see in the author bio that Koch works in television. Each scene is so precisely set that I could imagine the film version and that heightened my enjoyment, to my surprise.
This is the only passage I marked, not for its literary value, but because it neatly sums up a complaint I recently made about David Rakoff, Jon Stewart, and David Sedaris:
The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn't eat the flesh of mammals and was anti-American or, in any case, anti-Bush: the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything anymore. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place and could behave like a boorish asshole toward anyone around him.
There were so many surprises in this book, revealed in a masterful way, that any literary shortcomings were overcome by my overall enjoyment. Perhaps "enjoyment" is a loaded word-- to what extent can you enjoy despicable acts and unlikeable characters? This reading experience was similar to when I read We Need To Talk About Kevin-- it touched me as a parent and made me wonder how I would react in the same situation. Are there moral absolutes when you're talking about your own children? I need to urge someone I know to read this book so we can discuss it-- perhaps over dinner at a trendy restaurant.
