American Innovations : Stories

Before reading American Innovations I hadn't seen the cover blurb that states: The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, reimagined from the perspective of female characters. I don't know if understanding that beforehand would have altered my reading experience -- I am, at any rate, unfamiliar with Borge's The Aleph and Gogol's The Nose -- so I can only evaluate what I found on the page, and it was a somewhat uneven experience. For the most part, these are uncomfortable stories, veering often into the surreal (with one woman's furniture running away and another having a breast appear on her abdomen), but what was confusing to the mind often resonated in the heart. 

Author Rivka Galchen definitely has a master's control of the English language as shown in this example, with a woman speaking on the phone with her husband from The Lost Order:

We hadn’t always conversed in a way that sounded like advanced ESL students trying to share emotions, but recently that was happening to us; I think we were just trying to keep a steady course through an inevitable and insignificant strait in our relationship.

“I’m sorry, Boo,” I say. “I’m the one who should apologize.” I am suddenly missing him very badly, as if I have been woken from one of those dreams where the dead are still with us. Being awake feels awful. I language along, and then at some point in my ramblings he says to me, “I have to go now,” and then he is gone.

I was struck by that "I language along" as the perfect encapsulation of this type of conversation and there were many, many such striking moments throughout this collection. There were also a lot of esoteric bits that lost me like:

I washed my face with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk-ily. Instead, only in close patches.

Fortunately, the NPR book review defined that for me as "A German philosophical term about the total nature of the work of art, first introduced by a mid-nineteenth century German aesthetician named Trahndorff", because I never would have looked it up; I was annoyed by the inclusion of a word like gesamtkunstwerk, and the repeated use of "the Kantian sublime", because they seemed designed to exclude non-academics from total understanding and that would be my biggest complaint: More than anything, American Innovations, with its literary allusions, feminist imperative, and post-post-modern constructions seems elitist; written for professional readers. But.

(Galchen left a "but" hanging at the end of a paragraph like that and I loved it -- one little word, so weighty.) But…like I said, there is much in this collection that is emotionally stirring: from that ironic frission a reader gets when you see characters lying or refusing to answer straight-forwardly, to the powerful way that Galchen captured a young girl's first major and unrequited crush on an inappropriately older man in Wild Berry Blue:

I begin to feel as if maybe I am going to cry because of these accumulated moments of being nothing. That's what it feels like standing so close to this type of beauty -- like being nothing…

He looks down at me, startled, then laughs abruptly. "Hi little sexy," he says. Then he laughs again, too loud, and the other cashier, who has one arm shrunken and paralyzed, turns and looks and then looks away again.

These few seconds seem like everything that has ever happened to me.

My milk somehow purchased, I go back to the table wondering if I am green, or emitting a high-pitched whistling sound, or dead…

I feel -- a whole birch tree pressing against my inner walls, its leaves reaching to the top of my throat -- the awful sense of wanting some other life.

I know those feelings -- just like that -- but hadn't really remembered them until this short story, so that's definitely worthwhile. Perhaps if I could have identified more with Galchen's other themes -- she repeatedly mentions time travel, unemployed young women who have dead fathers and non-understanding mothers, writers who are also scientists, attraction to men with unwashed hair, acupuncture, manatees -- perhaps if more of her themes resonated with me emotionally I could have also connected with them intellectually. 

And my final observation: I read American Innovations because it's on the 2014 Giller Prize longlist -- meant to recognise excellence in Canadian fiction -- but simply being born in Toronto doesn't make Rivka Galchen (raised in and residing in the States) a typically Canadian writer, and this book has nothing to do with Canadian themes. If anything, it seems perfectly representative of the Creative Writing Program at Colombia where Galchen is an adjunct professor, and has much in common with her colleagues Siri Hustvedt (and her The Blazing World) and Gary Shteyngart (and I wondered if her mention of Gary Gnu was a shoutout to him). I wish Canadian prizes were truly reserved for Canadian books. /end rant

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

The 2014 Giller Prize winner is Us Conductors

*****

Back to Wild Berry Blue and the crush on the inappropriately old, older man:

I may have been a preteen at the apex of the young-girl-crushing-on-the-older-man-who-doesn't-think-of-her-that-way-storyline. I was aghast at Tatum O'Neal's seduction of the adult camp counsellor in Little Darlings, but my heart swooned right along with Kristy McNichol over Matt Dillon.

Like everyone else I knew, I was in love with Rex Smith in Sooner or Later and also thought I might pretend to be older than 13 if that's what it would take to catch his eye.

And probably most importantly: when Manny showed up on Little House on the Prairie and Laura fell in love with him, and accidentally called him "Manly" that time, and then she fell in the crick or something, and Manny saved her and carried her to his home and wrapped her in a blanket, and Pa showed up and beat up Manny, and Manny tried to defend himself with, "What are you accusing me of? She's just a little girl". I felt just as humiliated as Halfpint as she stood up and yelled, "I'm not a little girl. I'm a woman!" And my eyes watered up as she ran home crying. And what was I (and the other Sooner or Later/Little Darlings-indoctrinated girls) supposed to make of Laura ditching her pigtails for a bun in the next season of Little House and actually snagging her Manly?

Well, what it made us think was that it might be possible to snag our own manly man (sooner or later...) and my own Tiger Beat fantasy dreamboat was Andy Gibb (which is why I named our first dog Andy, and despite the teasing from my brothers at the time, I never regretted it).

I don't see the attraction anymore, but at the time, I certainly did  feel -- a whole birch tree pressing against my inner walls, its leaves reaching to the top of my throat -- the awful sense of wanting some other life. One in Manchester or Melbourne or L.A. -- you know, wherever Andy wanted to live was fine with me.

Dad is Fat

I like Jim Gaffigan; he's a likeable man. I have laughed every time I've heard his Hot Pockets routine, but when my husband says, "Who? Who's Jim Gaffigan?", and I try to do the Hahhht Pahhhckets jingle, he has no clue who I mean, and he definitely doesn't get the joke. "You had to be there," I reply, and I'm glad he didn't listen to Dad is Fat with me: even though Gaffigan -- the seasoned and accomplished stand-up comedian -- narrates the book himself, it's one long (actually quite short) experience of, "I guess you had to be there."

Gaffigan refers to each segment as an essay and that's apt -- these aren't stories or stand-up "bits" but short and straightforward expositions on child and parenting themes. He tackles subjects like home birth, meal times, play times, and sleep times with his five young kids, and each segment is completely linear; these aren't story arcs but straight lines that often end with a joke coming out of left field. In the segment describing his own gruff and alcoholic father (this brutish, selfish, controlling Hulk Hogan), Gaffigan concludes:

By today’s standards, my dad wouldn’t be considered the greatest dad, and I’m sure his dad wouldn’t be considered the greatest dad either. I’m sure my grandfather’s dad would be considered an even worse dad. It probably goes all the way back to cavemen fathers just eating their children. What I’m trying to say is, dads are getting better. Either that or we are all slowly being turned into women. At least that’s what my gynecologist thinks.

That each segment is so short, generally ending with a punchline, made for a disjointed and choppy listening experience, and even worse: Gaffigan is a terrible narrator (which I found so incredible for someone who is a professional public speaker). But that's it for the negative, because I still like Jim Gaffigan; I probably like him even more now.

Along with his wife and writing partner, Jeannie, Gaffigan is raising five children under eight in a two bedroom walkup apartment in the Bowery. Even though that's exponentially more work than my two children in a suburban house made for me, he really doesn't talk about anything outside my own experience: putting toddlers to bed is like negotiating with terrorists for all of us. I kept nodding my head and saying, "Yep, that's what it's like to take kids to a restaurant or to the park or to Disneyworld", but I wasn't laughing, saying, "Oh, Jim, you nailed that". There are certainly funny bits (often self-aware, followed by comments like "cute sentence, eh?" or "thank you, I'll be here all book"), but more than anything, Dad is Fat feels like a love letter to Gaffigan's kids. The Gaffigan home must be an absolute zoo, but never does this book complain. It takes a deft touch to talk about the endless sleep deprivation of parenting without hopelessness or resentment and it's obvious that Jim Gaffigan adores his family -- he only gets defensive when people ask him and his wife if they're "done yet" (Why do you ask? Are you paying their college tuition?).

Dad is Fat is not laugh out loud funny -- no jokes linger that I could share with my husband to bring him onto Team Gaffigan -- but it is sweet.

People treat having a kid as somehow retiring from success. Quitting. Have you seen a baby? They’re pretty cute. Loving them is pretty easy. Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant. Being happy is really the definition of success, isn’t it?

It makes me want to meet the Gaffigans, to wish them continued happiness. It also makes me wish that I had had more than my two precious kiddos. In my imagination anyway.

And also, how sweet is this?

And after listening to the book and thinking about it for this review, I watched Gaffigan's Mr. Universe comedy special on Netflix -- it had some of the same observations about parenting (except funnier because they weren't just awkwardly read) and confirmed to me that he IS  a likeable guy. My only complaint: Now that I enjoyed his book and special for free, I haven't contributed to Gaffigan's quest to move on up out of that two bedroom apartment with his family. So yeah, thanks Jim, for making me feel guilty about that.

Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

Surely it is a failure of our human design that it takes not an hour, not a day, but much, much longer to relay what flashes through the mind with the speed of a hummingbird's wing.

Jonathon Lewis-Adey was raised in a loving home in Toronto by his biological mother -- an aristocratic, British-born writer of some renown -- and her live-in girlfriend, Sid. It was the affectionate Sid who primarily tended to the boy while India worked on her latest novel, so it was upsetting to Jonathon when his two Moms started fighting, and devastating when Sid disappeared from his life without a trace when he was nine. As an adult, after some success as a writer himself, Jonathon tracked Sid down to where she had returned to her homeland of Trinidad and was shocked to discover that his erstwhile Mom's loving eyes were now set in the face of a stooped and aged man known as Sydney.

Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, besides being a totally evocative phrase, is the perfect title for this novel. Jonathon periodically visits Sydney for nine years after their initial reunion, always trying to discover the same whys -- why did Sid drop out of his life and why did she then become a he -- but although they spend long hours talking on a seaside veranda, Sydney always reverts (crablike) to the same two themes: his longterm friendship with Zain -- a Muslim girl he met when they attended the same girls' school together as teenagers -- and a snowy walk he once made to the Irene Samuel Health and Gender Centre in Toronto. Just as Jonathon hears these two stories over and over, sometimes with extra information added, the reader also repeatedly hears them with the same frustration: they don't really answer the whys.

Sydney and I stared at each other. Then, as if he knew my mind, he said, perhaps Jonathon, you've been looking for simple explanations. But there is hardly ever a single answer to anything. And isn't it so that the stories one most needs to know are the ones that are usually least simple or straightforward?

Sydney spoke in a soft voice, calculating his words. Contradictions are inevitable, he continued. You listening to my story is yet another angle; my story is incomplete, you see, Jonathon, without your interpretation -- over which I have little control.

Eventually, Jonathon receives the call he's been dreading: Sydney's health is failing and he would like his son by his side. When Jonathon arrives in Trinidad this time, Sydney expands on his stories, and once Jonathon gains access to Sydney's journals and Zain's letters, he begins to understand, and is able to process this understanding by using Sydney's stories as fodder in his own writing.

In Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, Shani Mootoo has created a fascinating character with Siddhani/Sydney: as a closeted gay teenager in conservative Trinidad, she was conflicted about refusing to conform and also not wanting to be seen as different. She thought it would be freeing to emigrate to Canada -- where she could pursue her painting out from under the yoke of her family's expectations -- but soon realised that it's not just the Toronto winters that are cold: she had somehow traded a loving and tight-knit community of family and friends for a lonely and anonymous existence in a place where she doesn't even know the names of her neighbours. There is much lovely writing about both the snows of Toronto and the sunsets of Trinidad (though there is much more affection in the sections about the people and setting of Trinidad), and I was very interested in following along on Jonathon's journey of discovery, but there was just something missing in this book.

It might be because I wasn't really satisfied with the whys (and this is spoilery): Even if I believed that Sid could have left Jonathon without a good-bye or later visits because India insisted on it (and Sid knew the parting would be too hard), it would have been so much easier for Sydney to be the one to make contact with the grown Jonathon. And as for the why of the gender change: I can understand "man trapped in a woman's body", but that's not what Sid/Sydney ever says -- it's more like "I like wearing men's clothes so people don't think my mannerisms are weird and my breasts ruin the line of a dress shirt". I'm open to transgender storylines but this just left me confused; I think Mootoo could have served Sydney better by eventually crabwalking him toward explanations that would promote understanding. And Jonathon was just too wishy-washy: he refused to ever come right out and ask Sydney for answers and seemed to be perpetually stuck in the mindset of an abandoned nine-year-old.

Overall, this Giller Prize finalist was an intriguing concept with some vivid imagery that didn't quite work for me. 

Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab sure seems like a Canadian prize winner: not just the immigrant experience, but the transgendered immigrant experience. This is not my favourite Canadian book of the year so far (but, then again, my favourites didn't make this longlist...) so this looks like a politically correct choice. Time -- and the rest of the longlist -- will tell.

*****

(Of this longlist the Giller Prize jury wrote, “We’re celebrating writers brave enough to change public discourse, generous with their empathy, offering deeply immersive experiences. Some delve into the sack of memory and retrieve the wisdom we need for our times, others turn the unfamiliar beloved. All are literary achievements we feel will touch and even transform you.” So I take that as a bit of a warning...) 

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

The 2014 Giller Prize winner is Us Conductors

The Lives of Others

Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus about the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about?

The Lives of Others is one of my favourite types of books: a multigenerational family saga set in an unfamiliar locale in which I can learn about how other people live; their social customs, food, clothing, education, etc. In this book, set in the late 60's, we meet the Ghoshes -- three generations of upper-middle class Bangladeshis -- who all live together in a four storey home on the south end of Calcutta. The patriarch -- starting with nothing but the self-confidence resulting from a privileged upbringing -- built a paper mill empire, and his five children and their families all occupy the family home he established; their status within the family fixed by which floor they are assigned to live on, what food they are served to eat, how many outfits they are bought for festivals, and a multitude of other cues that reinforce their standings daily. The attitudinal gaps between the generations quickly become apparent: the patriarch and matriarch believe in hard work and expect the rewards that will follow; the sons of the next generation understand that they are to join the family business, and since duty forces them to comply (even if they feel that they are suppressing their own dreams), they find subtle ways to rebel; and the third generation, long used to luxuries without effort, descends into decadence and degeneration. The exception is the oldest grandson, Supratik, whose inability to recognise how the family fortune was indeed earned leads him to become influenced by the Communists while at university, and growing disgusted by the extravagance and petty jealousies displayed at home, leaves to join the militant Naxalites:

Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own. Forgive me.

I was familiar with the Naxalite movement from last year's The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, so the diary segments from Supratik's time with them were fascinating to me: even though they carried out a radical and militant form of Communism (using bombings and targeted murders in an effort to spark a nation-wide revolution) that appalled me, the descriptions of the working life of the rural poor (and not just the back-breaking work and near starvation but their manipulation by the landowners and moneylenders) would lead anyone of a compassionate nature to want to make radical changes to Indian society. The politicians and police are at the service of whoever will bribe them the most, and as surely as if it were really written on the foreheads of the poor, no one is able to rise above their station; there truly is no connection between effort and reward, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. And yet, author Neel Mukherjee doesn't lionize or mythologize the Naxalites here: every action has its consequences -- generally unfavourable, sometimes incredibly gruesome -- without changing the big picture. Even the family's long-serving cook Madan (from a very poor village but brought in when he was 10; now considered more family than servant) begs Supratik to begin his charity at home:

Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?

The Lives of Others is a very well written book, an epic full of fascinating details and interesting plotlines, all asking us to question the status quo; to indeed imagine the lives of others, to stretch empathy to the point where we stop bickering about who has more but wonder who needs more and how to give it. I will be interested to see how the Man Booker Prize judges weigh this rather traditional narrative against the more difficult volumes on their shortlist -- my instinct is that they're going to favour the inscrutable. Pity, that.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2014, with my ranking:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

As J  hasn't been released yet I'll make my unasked-for prediction based on the five I have read: I think the winner will be How to be both since this kind of "alternative storytelling" is the focus of this year's list. From the shortlist, my favourite would be The Narrow Road to the Deep North, followed by The Lives of Others (with my favourite from the longlist being the overlooked History of the Rain). Now, to crack the Giller Prize longlist.

Bird Box

How far can a person hear? 

As I write this, it's literary prize season and I've been reading a lot of dense and tricky books, and in between, listening to an audiobook of Bird Box -- and thoroughly enjoying it. As much as I admire clever construction and layered meanings and intelligent wordplay, sometimes a person wants to just switch off the brain and surrender to a well-told story; and that's what Josh Malerman delivers here.

Bird Box is told in alternating time streams: in one, we meet Malorie as she discovers she is pregnant on the day that ushers in a post-apocalyptic event, eventually leading to her joining a safe house; and in the other, it's four years later and she is leaving the safe house via a dangerous river journey with her two small children. In both streams the danger is the same: something, some kind of creatures, have suddenly appeared that are so incomprehensible (like staring at infinity?) that if anyone should see one, that person will be compelled to commit suicide, taking out any innocent bystanders before doing so. Malorie is blindfolded outside the house, and inside, she and the children sit in the dim -- boards and blankets covering the windows -- training the children's hearing (but just how far can a person hear?). The river journey is harrowing (imagine making such a trip blindly) and, as Malorie thinks back over the intervening four years, small mysteries are dangled that must eventually be solved by the narrative from the other time stream -- and the tension is skillfully maintained: I kept asking myself, "Yeah, but what about…and why not…and who was it…?", and for the most part, my questions were eventually answered. And while it might be possible to nitpick some of the storyline choices, I completely bought into this world and accept it as written; I was looking for escapism and got it.

A book like this seems almost easy to have written: you think up a novel situation and then consider every logical reaction to it and populate a book with enough characters to act out each idea. That's pretty much what Bird Box is, but it's also well-written, tense, and surprises kept coming right to the end. Taken for what it is -- evaluated as a story and not some lofty literary effort -- it definitely deserves four stars.

My main question throughout Bird Box was: if the only danger the creatures pose is to people who see them, wouldn't you blind yourself? Wouldn't Malorie have blinded the babies from birth? Blind people negotiate our world just fine (and I imagine, those born blind adapt quickly enough) so there felt like a soft prejudice against the blind in his book -- like that was so taboo that people wouldn't even talk about it (and I can understand not wanting to voluntarily give up one of your senses in a post-apocalyptic world; survival was hard enough as it was, but...). The issue was, eventually, kind of brought up -- Malorie, alone in the safe house with her six month old babies, was on the brink of pouring paint thinner into the girl's eyes when she lost her nerve -- but I still thought that blinding them would have been the compassionate choice. I had the same reaction to The Day of the Triffids, and even as I was enjoying this book, I thought that Josh Malerman was reimagining some John Wyndham themes (and totally succeeding). 

How to be both

Ah, Ali Smith and How to be both; how to be both of what? You see, everything is connected and entwined, like the double-helix of DNA, like a snail's shell, like the past and the present, and hey, let's twist again like we did last summer, where the boys turned out to be girls and the girls had boys' names and it didn't matter anyway because the girls preferred the other girls. 

How to be both is split into two sections: one called "Camera" and one called "Eyes", both identified as "Part One", and as it doesn't matter which order you read them in, the physical copies of the book are sold, randomly, both ways, and the ebook includes both formats. My copy started with Camera -- in which a young girl, George, is mourning the death of her mother, finding salvation through the friendship of her new pal H, and trying to reconnect with her mother through remembering a trip they had taken to Italy the previous summer to view a remarkable fresco painting. In Eyes, the life story of the 15th century fresco's painter is imagined as the spirit of Francesco del Cossa is summoned by George's interest (and to muddy the waters further, this section might simply be a school project on Empathy/Sympathy produced by George and H).

This book is a hall of mirrors, but no funhouse. There is constant wordplay and timeshifts and meditations on the natures of narrative and history and art (with gender and the oppression of women never far from the surface). The following passage (in which George contemplates a picture she took of a double-helix statue) summarises this book as well as anything:

It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history, though they were always going on at school about how DNA history had been made here in this city.

What if history, instead, was that shout, that upward spring, that staircase ladder-thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different history? What if received notions of history were deceptive?

Deceived notions. Ha.

Maybe anything that forced or pushed such a spring back down or blocked the upward shout of it was opposed to the making of what history really was.

How to be both is a bit of a slog -- it doesn't seem meant to be friendly to the reader -- but with a large font and wide margins, at least it's not as long as it looks. It is as well-constructed as a fine brick wall and as artful as an iconography-rich Renaissance portrait; with much to say about who witnesses and how we witness and how we can subvert the messages that those in power would like to preserve -- it's not that I didn't understand this book, but it's all construction, all clever-clever, and like all the other books on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist that I've read so far, seems more steak than sizzle (and if a writer wants me to care about her characters, I need some sizzle). To bolster myself, I'm adding this opinion from The Guardian:

The Francesco passages are littered with poetic fragments that pull the chronology forward and back and so out-of-shape that sometimes, it is difficult to know what is happening. But sentences like: "down to/that thin-looking line/made of nothing/ground and grit and the/gather of dirt and earth and/the grains of stone…" are undeniably beautiful, so does it matter if you can't work out what's happening?

Personally, I preferred George's narrative and could have happily read an entire novel which consisted of a more conventional plotting of her story. I admired the Francesco passages rather than feeling engrossed by them and occasionally it felt as if Smith's ideas were so clever they were in danger of getting in the way of the story.

Having said all that, I do recognise what Smith accomplished here and my four stars are to recognise what she created, not my reading pleasure.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2014, with my ranking:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

All I can say so far is that The Narrow Road to the Deep North is my favourite book on the shortlist, but this one, How to be both, has prize-winner written all over it. Sigh. It's unlikely that I will be able to read J (which has yet to be released) before the winner is announced, so this mad dash to consume the list beforehand might be pointless -- made further pointless by my lack of reading enjoyment; I may need to find a new favourite literary prize.