Do you remember being born? the software asked me.
No. I don’t think anyone does.
I remember being born.
Oh. What was it like?
It was like when you have forgotten about something and then you suddenly remember it — suddenly, suddenly! And then everything comes back to you at once.
This was a WOW for me: Do You Remember Being Born? tells the story of a much celebrated poet in her seventieth-fifth year, Marian Ffarmer (based in many ways on the real-life Marianne Moore), who is asked by a Big Tech Company to collaborate with their poetry-writing AI and produce an “historic” six page poem over the course of one week at their Silicon Valley HQ. It just so happens that the offer comes with a big paycheque — at the exact moment Ffarmer’s middle-aged son is in need of money — and with an unshakable regard for her own talents and legacy, and a curiosity for the project itself, Ffarmer agrees. As the novel unspools, it is fascinating to watch as an artist attempts to demonstrate what art is and where it comes from, and in scenes from the past that divulge Ffarmer’s life story, we learn specifically where her art came from and how it changed the world. As Ffarmer “converses” and collaborates with the AI (which produces verses with a very uncanny valley vibe), she will learn more about her own humanity, and recognise some of her all-too-human failings. This is everything I like — a dissection of life and art and what makes us human — and set in the heart of our current obsession with machine learning, Sean Michaels has created something both timely and timeless. I loved the big questions and the small details, and especially, the formidable character of Marion Ffarmer herself; I simply loved it all. Rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
At the desk I told them my name and the young woman pretended that she knew me, or maybe she really did know me; it is not so uncommon these days. “Oh my god, Ms. Ffarmer,” she said, pronouncing the “Ms.” like a glinting rosette. I stared at my feet. I touched my tricorne hat. I signed some documents and she typed something into the computer and now we were simply waiting — for someone to arrive, the next stage of the initiation. I found myself reflecting on the Company’s lack of a front door. Meaning they were never closed, not ever, not on Christmas Day or at 2 a.m. or the morning after their annual staff party. At all hours they were open, available, like the Company’s website or their software, their servers twinkling in a vault. Standing there on lacquered concrete, clouded from the caffeine I had yet to consume, the place’s wakefulness felt wrong. I distrusted it.
Like I said: I enjoyed the overall narrative of Ffarmer’s life story, but the real meat of this novel is in her interactions with the AI nicknamed Charlotte, “trained on a massive data set of poetry books and journals, on top of a basic corpus of ten million web pages. Two point five trillion parameters…” The poet recognises that the program can mirror back her own style — picking up on internal rhymes and coining intriguing metaphors extrapolated from inferred references — but the human in Ffarmer senses that (even if she can’t verbalise how) there is no human heartbeat behind the program’s offered lines. Ffarmer attends a late night event with some young poets — who question the Company’s motives behind this project (everything is marketing) — and although she will never really learn the motive, Ffarmer is sanguine; this experience really is about the money for her son and I felt like Michaels handled this character with appropriate dignity: She is tall, unstooped and magisterial, in her cape and tricorne hat (as had been Marianne Moore), and there is no sense that she is being used or manipulated. The poet approaches the program with curiosity and is unsurprised to discover that the machine comes up a bit short. A small observation I want to put behind a slight spoiler warning:
Sometimes I pitied Charlotte for how little she really knew of other people. The way her writing was sealed off from the tapestry of relationships and community that could nourish an artist. And then I thought: Well, here we are, then. We were the first threads in her web.
It wasn’t until this reference to her “web” that I realised where Charlotte got her name from, and it makes for an interesting angle on the debate around machine learning. Ffarmer notes about the AI that it’s not truly inventing anything — just rearranging words from other sources according to perceived rules (and surely that’s not what all of poetry is?) — just as in Charlotte’s Web the spider only copies the words that Templeton the rat brings back from the fairgrounds. That seems like a miracle, but is it really a creative act? Is it art? Charlotte appears to be sentient in the story, but that doesn’t make her human.
It did not need to be a masterpiece. This, the most important poem of my life, could actually be the worst: a damp squib, a dud, repudiating the notion that technology will replace us. In the absence of anybody greater, maybe it fell to me to humiliate the machine — a simple Ffarmer spoiling the moment I had been asked to engineer. The Company wanted to erect a monument. A memorial for a bygone age, back when only people wrote poems, before my kind had gone the way of lamplighters and travel agents, icemen, video store clerks. “You can blame the AI,” I’d say. “It is insufficient to the task.” The world might then be satisfied for a while, another five years or ten, that the poet is unique. We would not be written out quite yet.
In an Author’s Note at the end, Michaels explains that, “all of Charlotte’s poetry and some of the prose in this book was generated with help from OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model as well as Moorebot, a package of custom poetry-generation software, which I designed with Katie O’Nell.” I have no expertise on poetry — even reading some of Marianne Moore’s well-known work in the wake of this novel, I can’t say that I understand its power — but I will say that the stanzas of the invented poem included here did have that uncanny valley not-quite-human (and not-quite-not) feeling that makes me uncomfortable whenever I read chatbot-generated writing. The concept made for a highly satisfying interrogation of where we are with machine learning, but it was this wonderful character of Marion Ffarmer — with her very messy, relatable, and human life — that made this novel feel like art, and I loved the whole thing.
“We finally have everything back from the lab. The diagnosis is very clear,” Dr. Ramirez said briskly to mask the gravity of what came next. “You’re in the early stages of a Carcharodon carcharias mutation.”
“Carcharo — What?”
. . .
“Carcharodon carcharias. Great white shark.”
As a debut novelist, all I can discover about Emily Habeck is that she has a BFA in Theatre from SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts and Masters Degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College; and that background is perfectly represented in Shark Heart. Nominally a story about relationships and letting go, this novel asks big questions about finding meaning in life, and especially through art and service to others. Written in a variety of styles — some sections read like a dramatic script, some are in iambic pentameter; some are lyrical and touching, some funny and a few sentences long — and set in a world where it’s just accepted that a person could suddenly start to mutate into an animal (which serves as a metaphor for really any illness or strain in a relationship), there’s a real feeling of Habeck throwing every idea she has at this novel. And that’s a double-edged sword: I found this novel to be charming and moving in its unrestrained scattershotting, but I also felt like it could have benefitted from some restraint; I would have liked this even more if it had been longer and more focussed (for example, either give us more on secondary characters like Rachel and George or leave them out of it), but that’s not to say that I wasn’t charmed and moved. There is much to like in Shark Heart, and I am intrigued to discover what Habeck might come up with next; rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“This is something different. It’s a contemporary play with mythical undertones. I want it to have the kind of wise humanity that only time and hardship earn. I hope that anyone who reads it will feel immediately connected to the version of themselves that is most alive, ready, and strong.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a love story about forging ahead while facing great and immediate change.”
Shark Heart opens on a love story: Lewis gave up on his dream of being a stage actor and returned from NYC to his hometown of Dallas to become a high school drama teacher, eventually meeting the woman of his dreams, Wren — a person of quiet beauty and self-control who works in finance because numbers are solid and predictable (unlike her childhood). After being together for a few years they decide to get married, but within weeks, Lewis notices changes in his body and is diagnosed with an “animal dementia”, the Carcharodon carcharias mutation. Habeck neatly handles this alt reality: Lewis expects to keep working his job (despite growing rows of razor teeth and succumbing to fits of uncontrollable rage), and while he understands that he will eventually need to be released into the ocean, he wants to spend his last few human months making art (directing and writing) and being in physical contact with the love of his life (even if that means sleeping together in a cold salt bath). Meanwhile, Wren is put in the position of uncomplaining caregiver; and while she is clear-eyed about her husband’s future, she has fantasies about not letting him go. This is an undeniably lovely romance.
As their saltwater tears combined with the sea, Lewis finally understood the log line of their love story: He was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he’d found Wren, a great, strong wind who supported his exploration of the sky.
The plot goes back in time to the story of Wren’s mother, Angela: the neglected daughter of a crumbling marriage, I absolutely believed that at fifteen, she could be seduced by the first older houseboat-living hippie-philosopher who paid her any attention. Angela’s story leads into the story of Wren’s challenging childhood, and I’ll put my spoilery observation behind this warning: I loved how Wren’s experience in the present shows the playing out of intergenerational trauma: Angela’s mother had been a cold and narcissistic drunk, and although Angela had intended to be a much better mother herself, she was diagnosed with a slow-moving mutation that would eventually turn her into a komodo dragon — forcing Wren to become a caregiver to an increasingly forgetful, distant, and cold-blooded “monster” (much as Angela must have viewed her own mother; this animal mutation conceit is a great metaphorical tool).
Wren did not see her mother as a sick woman living within a body she no longer knew or controlled. Instead, she saw a pathetic, powerless beast surrounded by murder, a mess of blood and guts. As rage bubbled up and spilled over, Wren sharpened a pernicious, worded arrow and lobbed it at the bull’s-eye, her mother.
“You are a monster.”
Her mother’s face and head fell in succession.
“I know,” Angela whispered. “I know. I am.”
The storyline eventually spools out into Wren’s future and shows what she has learned from her experiences:
She considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view…Afterward, Wren realizes she herself is the mountain she’s been climbing all along.
And so maybe the ending is a little tidy, and maybe all the changing formats is a little gimmicky, but there is heart and meaning here and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
God, my God, have You chased me up to the skies and down to the bottom of the sea? Olav had once ended up alone before God’s countenance beneath the ink-blue vault of a winter’s night. That was the time when he lost half of his life. Now that he had lost everything he had tried to put in Ingunn’s place, he was forced to feel God’s eyes on him again, as if peering from the forests of kelp in the darkness of the sea floor.
I have found the Olav Audunssøn tetralogy to be delightfully entertaining and immersive (telling, as it does, the tale of one nobleman’s dramatic life story in Medieval Norway), and Winter ties it all up nicely. As the fourth and final volume in this series, the entire thing had the feeling of a denouement or epilogue — everything truly exciting happens in the earlier volumes; this would probably not much satisfy as a standalone read — and I had to keep reminding myself to put it in the larger context; and when I did, I had to admit that author Sigrid Undset ended her epic exquisitely. I am so delighted to have taken a chance on this new English translation (by Tiina Nunnally) of the 1926 classic and can only hope it’s discovered by more modern day readers. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He no longer gave any thought to himself or his own concerns. He considered himself an old man now, and he’d made his choice as to what would become of him. Yet for that very reason it seemed there was only one purpose behind everything he might still achieve and accomplish until night came to claim him — and that was to protect these two young maidens. How their future might take shape was not something that worried him greatly — he was certain it would turn out in the best possible way. When the time came, he would undoubtedly marry them off, and it would be a most peculiar man who wouldn’t want to bear such treasures through the world on outstretched arms if he ever had the good fortune to acquire them. But there was plenty of time for Olav to consider this matter; both maidens were still so young.
The last volume in the series culminated in fearsome battle scenes as the Norwegian king called upon his noblemen to resist an incursion by a Swedish duke. Now an “old man” approaching fifty (“he was now gray-haired and the right side of his face had sunk inward, his cheek crisscrossed with furrows from the fearsome scar“ received in that battle), Olav Audunssøn — the Master of the Hestviken estate on the Oslo Fjord — has settled into a calm domestic routine with his daughter, Cecilia, and his foster daughter, Bothild; his son and heir having left the estate years earlier for parts unknown. Olav assumes that settling his daughters into appropriate marriages would be the last official duty of his life, but when his son Eirich does return home (in the company of his handsome but feckless best friend, Jørund), Olav allows the boy to have his say in matters — to everyone’s detriment. This shift to an Austenian focus on courting and marriage might seem like it belongs in a different series, but as Olav is in his twilight years and his lifelong concern was about keeping faith with his ancestors and continuing a respectable family line, seeing how the generations carry on does make for an appropriate finish to his story.
After Olav died, folks did not consider his reputation to be as glowing as Brother Eirik would have wanted — and all the grandchildren were fully aware of this. Olav had been a brave soldier, a capable and honest landowner. But he was odd and unapproachable and a gloomy companion in the company of more cheerful men.
In the end, Olav’s was a respectable but not a happy life: by keeping a promise to his wife (who suffered and wasted away so young), Olav was forced to live outside the community and fellowship of the Church; punishing himself and those around him with coldness and distance. Undset masterfully demonstrates the consequences of Olav’s early conflict between duty and love, and it warrants the epic length of these four volumes to follow all the ripples through time. And then she ends the whole thing with an ironic, stinging paragraph: The Great Death arrived and decimated the lineage, although there were still many descendants alive after the plague had passed. In God’s time, the suffering of any one man doesn’t add up to much, so what was the point of all this pain?
“The language-based life of the mind was a needed thing in the syrup-slow era of our elders, but who has time for it now? There aren’t any metalsmiths anymore, and soon there’ll be no authors, publishers, booksellers — the entire industry will topple into the sea, like Atlantis; and the librarianists will be buried most deeply in the silt.”
I’ve read many reviews of The Librarianist that say: If you’ve liked Patrick deWitt before, you’ll like this, too. And as I have read, and enjoyed, every novel deWitt has written so far, I expected to like this one as well; and I did. So this is either more of the samey-sameness that satisfied my set expectations, or it is objectively good — and I would argue for the latter. Centred on retired librarian Bob Comet, deWitt surrounds our reclusive protagonist with outlandish characters who speak in funny, offbeat conversations, and while that is all highly entertaining, as we scroll back through Bob’s history to his young adulthood and further to an adventurous episode from a lonely childhood, deWitt makes some very perceptive observations about what makes a person; what makes a life. I’ve also seen many reviews that call this too sad or plotless and I would argue against that as well: Bob is more an introvert than truly melancholy — taking joy where he can find it, but never really seeking it outside of books over his many years — and it all adds up to a plot that is recognisable as a real, human life. I loved every bit of this and will read anything deWitt comes out with in the future. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door, it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.
In the “present” of 2006, seventy-one year old Bob Comet lives alone in a mint green bungalow, inherited from his long-deceased single mother, on a nondescript cul-de-sac in Portland, Oregon. While out for his daily walk one day, he discovers a catatonic old woman at the convenience store, and when he returns her to her seniors residence, he is so intrigued by the home’s weird assemblage of residents that he decides to volunteer there. Through interactions with these residents, we learn more about Bob’s personal history; and after a shocking revelation, the story rewinds to Bob’s early adulthood, and then to an episode in which he ran away from home at eleven, before returning to the present.
I enjoyed each of these sections, but was most intrigued by the stories of his brief marriage and his running away; and mostly because of the characters and their deWittian conversations (between his eccentric wife and their friends; between the oddballs Bob met, and who took him in, at a dilapidated hotel near the end of WWII). This is excerpted from a conversation between two old vaudevillian performers who discover the runaway Bob in their private train compartment:
“Why must you ask me questions I cannot know the answer to?”
“It’s that I want to know things,” said Ida.
“We all want to, and we are every one of us disappointed, and we shall die not knowing it,” June sighed. “I do wish it had announced itself. I feel rather nude, frankly. I hope we haven’t named any old scandals, or created any new ones.”
Ida looked up, through time, rearward. “No,” she said.
“Well, then, let us accept that we shan’t be alone, as was our hope. In brighter news, however, it does appear the boy is mute, perhaps deaf into the bargain, and so we can easily pretend to be alone if not actually live out the reality of aloneness.”
And the following, spoken by the proprietor of the rundown hotel, would seem to be the life advice that young Bob most took to heart:
“Someday, Bob, when you’re an aged specimen like me, and you find yourself suddenly enamored of folding the laundry or edging your lawn, remember your long-gone friend Leslie More telling you to accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.”
“Okay,” said Bob.
“Because it’s a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.”
“Okay.”
Between young Bob’s passive-sounding “Okay” (or silent shrugging) whenever anyone is speaking to him and his lifelong acceptance of happiness when it came (but reluctance to actively seek happiness or too keenly despair its loss), this seems less like “sadness” to me than a persistent character trait: Bob was made this way, and he doesn’t suffer for it. In what I thought was a really perceptive observation, deWitt writes that as an old man, sometimes Bob dreams of his days at the hotel and wakes with a vague feeling of having fallen in love (although those days were not romantic), and that feels like a really true description of nostalgia to me; and especially nostalgia for the most foundational experiences of what made us who we are (I'm sure there's a German word for that experience).
There had been whole eras of Bob’s working life where he knew a lamentation at the smallness of his existence, but now he understood how lucky he had been to have inhabited his position. Across the span of nearly fifty years he had done a service in his community and also had been a part of it; he had seen the people of the neighborhood coming and going, growing up, growing old and dying. He had known some of them too, hadn’t he? It was a comfort to him, to dream of the place. His favorite dream was that he was alone and it was early in the morning, and he was setting up for the day, and all was peaceful and still and his shoes made no sound as he walked across the carpeting, an empty bus shushing past on the damp street.
When The Librarianist returns to the present, Bob is making connections with the folks at the seniors residence. He finds some unexpected answers to the small mysteries of his life, and although I would argue that he hadn’t been exactly unhappy during his decades of solitariness, he discovers a more connected way of living; and he finds that he likes it. From the entertaining sentences to the satisfying story arc, this was exactly what I expect from deWitt: and I loved it.
For the fifteenth anniversary, Laura’s murder was featured on a true crime show called Not That Kind of Place: Murder in a Small Town. David’s mom had agreed to be interviewed for the first time. The show made the case that Greg Dykma, the security guard who lived in a trailer at the gravel pit, was the murderer. This had been a rumour at the time. David had thought his mom and dad believed it, but it never made much sense to David — they’d been neighbours for years. The show had renewed interest in the case. There were more articles and then podcasts.
Coming up on the twentieth anniversary of his older sister’s unsolved murder, and immediately in the wake of his mother’s sudden death — his father having passed some years earlier — David McPherson learns that his mom was planning to grant an exclusive interview to a freelance journalist; a relentless investigator who now has his sights set on the reclusive David himself. Nearing forty — alone, disinterestedly employed, and living in a semi-finished “suite” in his parents’ basement — David will need to navigate grief and his mother’s estate, all while dodging the journalist and finally facing the true scenario surrounding his sister’s murder. Not That Kind of Place plays out on two levels: It explores the current obsession with unsolved murders — the articles, podcasts, and online citizen-sleuthing that turn personal tragedy into public fodder — and it also explores how living at the centre of such a tragedy affects a victim’s family members. In order to burst David’s bubble of stunted naivety, author Michael Melgaard shows him interacting with several of his sister’s high school friends; and as David learns the sort of pressures his redneck town did, and does, assert on the underprivileged, he’ll need to come to terms with the idea that maybe Griffiths is that sort of place after all. I found the writing in Not That Kind of Place to be a bit straightforward and unadorned for my tastes — and I don’t know if I really understood how David could be nearing forty without ever seeing the dangers faced by the underclasses in his hometown — but Melgaard eventually reached me with the point he was making about the blinders of privilege: Canada on whole likes to think of ourselves as not the sort of place where people are exploited or discriminated against or murdered while out for an evening run, but, of course, it happens every day. Rounding up to four stars; Melgaard totally landed the ending. (Note: I read an ARC and passages may not be in their final forms.)
Three days after Laura went missing, her Discman was found on a logging road on the far side of the mountain. Reporters came to Griffiths to cover the story of a pretty blond girl from a good family who got straight As, who volunteered at an old-folks’ home, who candy-striped at the hospital, who captained her basketball and volleyball teams, and who was certainly not going to be found alive.
As David goes about Griffiths; an hour from Victoria on Vancouver Island — dodging the journalist and taking care of his mother’s affairs — he crosses paths with the same bad cop over and over (a sluggish loudmouth who resents wasting resources on helping “hookers” and the homeless), and while on the one hand that character felt cartoonish, the interactions did force David to wonder if the fruitless investigation into his sister’s murder proved the local cops’ incompetence…or their corruption (they never got beyond blaming an ex-con security guard, even if they could never prove it). And as David has interactions with three of his sister’s former friends (one who sought him out, one met by chance, one he laid in wait for), he learns, apparently for the first time, about the drug runners, sex traffickers, and biker gangs that profited from the area blue collar workers (the loggers, miners, and fishermen who worked and partied beneath the notice of his mountainside subdivision), and whose criminal presence in the town represented danger for the vulnerable.
I did like the varying perspectives David confronted through his interactions with Laura’s old friends: The still grieving self-declared “best friend” who maintained a relationship with his mom and who now insists she has the duty to meet with journalists, “People cared about her and it’s not your right to judge or to try to keep people away. You don’t own Laura’s story.”; the former dropout, now hippie-dippie yoga teacher who says, “It may be hard for you to face this, but your sister died so that you could become who you are today. Holding onto the past will keep you there; you need to be free. Laura gave us a gift.”; but especially that of the social worker who most understands the roots of violence, “It could have been a hundred different things, but it would have started small, because a guy thinks he can behave a certain way, and maybe Laura pushed back and then he goes farther and realizes he could be caught and named. It escalates to the point where he’s gone too far because he crossed a line he never thought about.” This last viewpoint meshes with a recording David finds of his mom explaining to the journalist how much rougher the town used to be for young women in her day, and that’s the part that really resonated with me: I grew up in a redneck town — my brothers were hard partiers who sought violence as recreation — but we all raised our kids in nice neighbourhoods in nicer towns that gave them a better story about who they are and where they’re from. David’s nice home on the mountainside gave him a better story than his parents had had, and just like it had shielded him from the violent reality of his hometown, that shield may have prevented Laura from recognising danger when it came for her.
He could try to explain what he’d learned to James, but David wasn’t sure he understood it himself. He hadn’t had the words, before. When it happened to his sister. When people got killed here. When things happened over and over and someone would say it wasn’t that kind of place. He had known that wasn’t true, but he hadn’t known why. Carolyn knew. Staci knew. His mom knew; she had tried to tell James. But why would James understand if no reporter had before? He would just write the same story, with a few new twists David’s mom had given him.
In the end, David will need to decide whether or not to meet with the journalist: Is there value in telling the story again if it probably won’t solve his sister’s cold case? Is there value in exposing Griffiths as exactly the kind of place where underprivileged people go missing and get murdered all the time? Or should he continue to refuse to participate in the true-crime-as-entertainment trend? As I wrote above: I enjoyed both the big picture treatment of this trend and the exploration of the blinders of privilege. In addition to satisfyingly showing David lose his blinders and his naivete, Melgaard wraps this up with a sort of perfect ending. Totally worth the journey to get there (even if I had quibbles along the way).
Snow was a man. The road was named after its surveyor, not the weather, a fact that disappointed at first, until the idea of it became more tolerable, or at least inevitable, and the name’s meaning expanded all over again. Snow Road Station was an arrival, a departure, a long wait — a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road.
Bringing back a colourful character from His Whole Life, Snow Station Road is the story of Lulu Blake — a talented actress, now in her mid-sixties, having to face the fact that she will never make the big time — and as Lulu returns to her hometown for a wedding, reuniting with old friends and family will force Lulu to consider what sorts of things she sacrificed in her lifelong quest for the acknowledgement and applause of strangers. I haven’t always truly connected with Elizabeth Hay’s novels, despite her admittedly engaging eye for detail and lovely sentences, but I enjoyed this exploration of ageing and ambition and the quest to know oneself very much; as lovely and evocative a piece of Canadiana as a Group of Seven painting or a Gordon Lightfoot song. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
A man’s character changes and he becomes himself. Lulu had read that somewhere, surprised by the turn of thought. Not that he changes and becomes someone else. He becomes the person he’s meant to be. What would it take? she wondered. Becoming who you’re meant to be, instead of turning into a major disappointment.
Returning to Snow Road Station (an actual place in rural Ontario, an hour into the bush outside Ottawa) for a wedding allows Lulu to not only reconnect with her best friend Nan (who looks like she has everything figured out) and her brother Guy (who definitely does not), but she also mixes with the younger generation; all struggling to figure themselves out at the beginning of their adulthood. This is a novel of characters, their interactions and conversations, and the plot arc mostly follows Lulu’s soul growth. I admit that that sounds like a quiet novel — and it is — but it may be the only thing worth writing about.
A few random quotes for flavour:
• “If you want to look old,” Nan said, “have a face lift.”
• Canadians think ten dollar bills are purple, Americans think all guns are loaded; and that’s the difference between Canadians and Americans, she thought.
• He seemed a lot younger than thirty-two, but then we’re all twelve years old inside, she thought, some of the time.
And, throughout, the landscape — fields and lakes and sugarbush encircled by winding country roads — as it changes throughout the seasons from snow-covered to leaf to an autumnal blaze of colour, acts as balm and inspiration to Lulu’s thwarted aspirations:
Up on the hilltop the heroes of crimson and orange were baring their chests, stabbing themselves in the heart, tossing fistfuls of coins in the air. Such bravura performances. Such scene stealers. Such hams. All you have to do, she thought, is put yourself in the way of beauty, put yourself into the incredible swing of it. And her mind moved through the whole dance from sap to bud to shade to these days of glory — these extravagant last acts — before the trees lost everything to the wind and the rain, and oncoming winter. Then for months on end they would go naked, crayoned by snow. And then begin again.
There is much more plot than I’m recording here — Lulu meets men who range from bad to good; there is quite a bit of domestic drama in Nan’s household — and just as the background detail of the 1995 Quebec Referendum didn’t seem quite relevant to the plotline when I read His Whole Life, it seemed a bit immaterial to set Snow Station Road in 2008 and have the briefest of commentary on Obama’s election campaign and the American financial crisis. Still, Lulu’s journey was credible and affecting and I enjoyed the whole thing.
Having listened to Big Swiss’s voice for so many hours, Greta felt an immediate intimacy, in the same way her favorite podcast hosts sometimes felt like friends, insofar as she’d gone through divorces with podcasters, the death of parents and beloved pets, and so she couldn’t help but feel a little starstruck. Here was Big Swiss, in the flesh! Talking to Greta, a nobody!`
Big Swiss reads like a rather manic exploration of trauma and power dynamics and the kooky side of the therapy industry — overlaid with snark and sex and hipsterism — and while that made for a pretty compelling and amusing novel (it was totally unpredictable), the tone felt a bit too cynical to make me care about the characters; so much sizzle, so little steak. Set in the trendy and picturesque town of Hudson in upstate New York — the current home of author Jen Beagin, according to the author blurb — and telling the colourful tale of beautiful, broken people, I can see how this novel sparked a bidding war in Hollywood; and while I’m sure that HBO can make a popular series out of the material, this wasn’t exactly what I look for in a novel (but I was amused leading up to the not-quite-satisfying ending). High three stars.
Greta barely moved these days. Only her fingers moved, and not very fast. Although by no means an excellent typist, she was semidiscreet, and because Hudson was so one-horse and gossipy, discretion was everything. She’d signed what looked like a pretty official confidentiality agreement, so she was forbidden to talk shit about Om’s clients. Not that she wanted to — she had always been less of a shit-talker and more of a shit-thinker, and she barely left the house. She typically waited until midafternoon to get started and then worked until bedtime. They talked, she typed, nighty-night.
Having suffered childhood trauma that left her unwilling to totally engage in living, and recently ending a ten year engagement to a supportive and loving California man, Greta decided to move to upstate New York with an old friend and live with her in a draughty old farmhouse (just like the draughty old farmhouse Beagin was living in while she wrote this novel). To support herself, Greta transcribes recordings of sex therapy sessions, and while typing away, she becomes obsessed with the voice and story of one patient whom she nicknames “Big Swiss”. This woman, Flavia, has survived violence herself, but what most intrigues Greta about her is that Flavia refuses to let the trauma define her; she does not feel “broken”, even if her circumstances have prompted her to seek the services of Om: a mesh shirt and tight denim shorts wearing sex therapist who offers gong baths and kundalini breathing as remedy. When Greta and Flavia accidentally meet at the dog park, Greta gives a fake name; and when the pair start a passionate love affair, the reader feels both pleased that these unhappy individuals find happiness together and uncomfortable that the relationship is built on a lie (and especially as Greta continues to listen to and transcribe Flavia’s therapy sessions). Learning more about each character’s backstory as the narrative unwinds, and waiting to see how the inevitable moment of truth will land with Flavia, makes for an interesting enough journey.
Although both women experience a catharsis in this affair, there is a definite power imbalance: Greta is older (45 to Flavia’s 28), she has been with women before, and as she is privy to the therapy tapes, she is able to “get into” Flavia’s mind and make comments that make her feel like they are connected on a soul level. On the other hand, Greta lets herself be defined by her trauma — living in a friend’s house, needing to warm her freezing bed with a hair dryer (as, apparently, the author did while writing this), and working piecemeal at transcription doesn’t look like stability at her age — while Flavia is strong, incredibly beautiful, a doctor who is married to a fabulously wealthy local man, and who always has the perfect blunt response to cut through others’ BS: Big Swiss is no one’s victim, and she holds power of a different sort.
Now Big Swiss was quiet. Was she a handful? Yes. But the thought of never handling her again? Unbearable.
The setting of a dilapidated early Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, the work of a transcriptionist, even the miniature donkeys: these are all, apparently, details from the author’s life, and perhaps the addition of so much real-life info is what makes this novel feel a bit sprawling (nothing about Greta’s housemate, Sabine, feels relevant to the storyline, but I guess it adds verisimilitude and I would accept it as unsurprising if I learned that she was based on Beagin’s actual housemate). Even so, there is a slightly manic-comedic tone (almost Wes Andersonesque; the therapist, Om, seems custom-made for one of his films) that prevented me from emotionally connecting with the characters, and that’s why I’m not rating higher — that and an underwhelming payoff to the main plot conflict — but I wouldn’t recommend against reading this; sizzle has its place.
