Review of Tim Johnston's new novel DESCENT: a page-turner!

 

I received this as an ARC via Librarything.

A well written but strange book. A sort of PG-13 version of the long-term abduction/rape of a young woman...

I've been doing a lot of reading about serial killers the past year or so (don't ask. Okay, it's because of Russell Williams. But that's another story) and I can tell Tim Johnston has read the same Ted Bundy books I have.

For what it is--a thriller with literary aspirations--it is well done. A bit slow moving in spots, oodles of suspense in the last third or so. But I can't escape the glossing over of the horror of two years in the life of a kidnapped 18 year-old woman...for those who couldn't handle the depths of depravity, don't worry: you won't find that in these pages. And I do understand why Mr. Johnston chooses to wrap his story around the daughter about to leave for university (it's on their final vacation as a family that the abduction takes place). It's the same reason that the princess must be rescued in every old video game and movie: the young virginal woman is worth more than rubies (except to Hobbits, maybe).

Still, this sanitized horror uses the pornography of sexual violence to pull our strings.

That being said, I hope he does well with it.

(Find me on Goodreads here)

Some thoughts on The Goldfinch and Donna Tartt's writing

Vanity Fair has a July 2014 article summarizing the critics: "It's Tartt--But is it Art?"

Much of my reading time the past month has been devoted to the oeuvre of Donna Tartt. I was turned on to her work through my book club, which assigned the 2013 Pulitzer-winning The Goldfinch (easily 200 pages too long, making me suspect Tartt never had a darling she was able to kill). I then turned to the other two of her tomes, and read them in sequence: The Secret History (1992), and The Little Friend (2002).

There is no doubt that Ms. Tart is a magnificent talent; as Laura Miller put it in her 2002 review of The Little Friend, Donna Tart definitely has "the hoodoo"...she creates great characters and dynamite atmosphere. BUT...while I read her thinking "Wow, this is a great writer," I finish the books without being able to call them great books. Ayelet Waldman put her finger on the problem with this book, in particular, and all three of Tartt's books, generally: "one day, in the middle of writing the book, she got up, went to work, and suddenly decided to just type the words, 'The End,' at the bottom of the page." The books just aren't satisfactory (The Little Friend being the least satisfactory of the three). The amount of time we invest just isn't rewarded with enough of an epiphany at the end.

And I say this as a reader who would LOVE to love her books, a reader desperate for a new literary immortal, a WOMAN immortal, especially. The main problem, as I see it, is that Ms. Tartt writes atmosphere, character, and dilemma, but she frustrates the reader, sometimes by just going on for unnecessary pages and chapters, but ultimately because she hasn't found themes that resonate deeply enough for me.

May she, one day soon, find her grasp equal to her reach. To make it into Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, Dickens, and Harper Lee territory, she has to write about justice and injustice, plain and simple. A good long--and, especially, an overlong--story simply isn't enough.

I look forward to learning what you think about Donna Tartt's writing...

PS Coincidentally (?), the word "Goldfinch" appears on p. 365 of The Little Friend.

PPS Other reviewers have taken the name Harriet to refer to Harriet the Spy. Why not Harriet for Harry Potter, I'd like to know, especially given the nickname Boris gives Theo in The Goldfinch (Potter)?

My Encounter with Canada Writes: Close Encounters with Science

I just finished up a rewarding stint as a reader with CBC's Canada Writes, science edition. The latest theme was "Close Encounters with Science." It was a moving and humbling experience.

The challenge:

"Send us a true personal story of a close encounter you had with science and technology. We were looking for personal stories that gave us an insight into human nature and how changes in our understanding of the world have made a lasting effect on who we are."

Along with Scott Fotheringham, I read through the 600+ submissions and sent in my choices (I was limited to 15...) Here's the longlist, 29 stories that are worth your time. 

Twenty-nine: makes me think Scott and I only agreed on one, lol. But the truth is, it was incredibly hard to choose. I could have selected 50, or more, that were worthwhile!

(Scott, by the way, is a novelist and PhD from Cornell who no longer works in science, either. I think we probably should talk...:)

 Enjoy this trailer for his well-reviewed speculative novel, The Rest is Silence; I look forward to reading it very soon.

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 Here is an excerpt of the interview I did with Canada Writes my experience reading for the contest:

Can you describe a couple of the stories from the challenge that struck you as standouts?

There were so many wonderful stories, it was hard to choose. But some were just stellar. “Firsts,” about a technician working overnight at the hospital, analyzing blood sent from the ER. Who thinks about the lab tech? We get these machine readouts from our blood tests…we don’t really think about the person at the other end of the pipette. The writer had me right there with him (or her), feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders when called upon to diagnose leukemia in a child. That really touched me. There were many, many stories about electrification, and television. About all kinds of things: Skype and texting, the moon walk. Many were about children learning from their parents; “The New Age” is a quiet story of a kid going outside with Dad and brother to watch Sputnik pass overhead one night in October 1957. “Better Living Through Chemistry,” about what getting the meds right has meant to a person with schizophrenia. A woman who waited six months for an MRI and was so distressed by its claustrophobic nature, she stopped the test. How she was able to depend “on the kindness of strangers.” One about a teacher who knew how to talk physics so that young guys would listen. The experiment a six-year-old designed to identify the tooth fairy…I could go on and on. It was the way the writers communicated the meaning, the emotion, the small epiphanies attached to the scientific or technological experience. The stories I chose all answered that question: how did you feel when it happened? And they did it by bringing me along on the journey.


You can read the 29 stories on the longlist here. Congratulations to all who entered!

"The next task is in the capable hands of CBC host and author Nora Young, who will select the winner of this challenge. That person will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.

The winner will be announced on Canada Writes on Wednesday, December 5th. Stay tuned!"

What women want or 'Fifty Shades' to please your lover (Part One)

After a few action-packed high-culture days in Toronto at the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs biannual conference, I arrived back in Montreal to familiar familial bedlam, co-starring my favourite swisster-in-law and the youngest of her brood, twin two-year-olds, gorgeous and--oh so luckily for all concerned, not mine--at a Mother’s Day barbeque.

Perhaps that’s why I felt no guilt on choosing Fifty Shades of Grey as my next great gulp of prose for ingestion, selected for its “tastes good” rather than “good for you” value.

I was choosing for fun,

I was choosing for play,

I was rationalizing that, to stay in touch with readerland,

I simply must read Fifty Shades of Grey.

Also, I’d given it to the hubster 10 days or so earlier; far as I was concerned, I’d already gotten my money’s worth, even before cracking its spine.

The book’s, I mean.

A couple of weeks back, the New York Times reported that over 10 million copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy had been sold in the USA in the preceding month and a half.

YIKES!

There’s something in these books, like the Twilight series that seeded them, that touches that WWW sweet spot.

Not the World Wide Web, but What Women Want. And if we have any respect for women at all—and we do!—aren’t we are obligated, honour-bound, in fact--to try to figure out what, exactly, is going on here?

At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Am I embarrassed or ashamed to admit I enjoyed the first two novels, number one especially? Would I be telling the world if I was?

Let me put it this way: does it make sense to arbitrarily restrict one’s dietary consumption to caviar, watercress sandwiches, and champagne? Wouldn’t that be a bit…limiting? Some days, I might hanker for filet mignon, other times a greasy hamburger. Doesn’t mean I don’t know that meat isn’t—necessarily—good for me, or that a steady diet of it alone might make me ill.

Well, filet mignon it’s not: Fifty Shades of Grey is the literary equivalent of the popcorn and cotton candy diet, this year’s Thelma & Louise and Twilight, all rolled up and…er, bound together. Another chance for the moralizers among us to throw up their hands in horror at The Turn Today’s Woman has taken, for the gatekeepers of Serious Fiction to turn up their noses at our lousy choices. Another chance for the snooterati to patronize us, the women who make their livings for them. Because the vast majority of books are purchased and read by women. And yet many of our fictional tastes are considered slightly…malodorous.

FSoG is only marginally about BDSM. In essence, it’s an old-fashioned love story, with a few licks of the switch thrown in. The hero—Christian Grey--is brilliant, handsome, young, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He flies helicopters, sails, owns multiple homes, cars, and businesses. But he is also hugely flawed—abused and neglected as a child—and he re-enacts this damage in the boudoir. He meets Anastasia Steele, the girl-of-the-dreams-he-hardly-knew-he-had, by accident: Ana’s roommate, Kate, is scheduled to interview Grey for the university paper, but Kate comes down with the flu and Ana steps up to the plate for her friend.

Vintage romance. Almost, dare I say it, Shakespearian.

Grey is mesmerized (shades of Twilight) and hopes to entice Ana into becoming his BDSM submissive. Ana, quickly (but luckily, not too quickly!) seduced, is ready to sign up for a three month contract as a submissive to Grey’s Dominant.

Until she faces the fact that, delightful as all this sex is, she wants…More.

Of course, Grey also falls for Ana, and much of the first two books are about establishing their relationship, and working out the…er, kinks.

But eventually, Grey is ready to abandon all his “kinky fuckery,” as they take to calling it. Until Ana tells him, essentially, not so fast, buster.

Having read the first two books of the trilogy, let me break it down for you: Fifty Shades of Grey is all about erotic tension, the threat of discipline and punishment more than the actual acts themselves. Like all romance, it’s most potently about the yearning, with the usual massive dollops of needless complication thrown in.

It is also clearly based on Twilight, the residue of which remains in repeated corny references to blood—throbbing, pulsing, singing through veins, heating up, etc. Not to mention the endless self-analysis, which can get old pretty quick. At least in James’ version, the reader is frequently distracted from the “whatever shall I dos?” by sex, much of it “vanilla,” in the characters’ words.

FSoG is a sometimes hilarious melange, an homage to the work of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum¹, Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series ², and Helen Fields’ Bridget Jones Diary³.

It’s also often incredibly shallow and occasionally dumbfounding to this long-married middle-aged woman (what is she on about with all this talk of the way Grey’s jeans hang from his hips?? If anyone out there has half a clue, would they please enlighten me? Please send pictures!)

As well as Twilight, I kept thinking Taming of the Shrew, though it’s a good long while since I’ve seen or read the Shakespeare. There is a Katherine in FSoG, but she isn’t the heroine. Besides, Ana isn’t a shrew. A beautiful twenty-two year old virgin, in this day and age, who not only has never had sex, but has never even held hands with a man before? Most surprising of all perhaps, in this Apple-heavy escapade, is her lack of a laptop. But perhaps even the oft-repeated Apple references are symbolic rather than product placement.

 

Or maybe not. (Maybe they're just symbolic of Twilight, come to think of it!)

If I had to pick a fairy tale that FSoG most resembles, I’d choose Beauty and the Beast. And what a mouth-wateringly lovely Beast he is, if you’re into the young, drop dead gorgeous, self-made millionaire type, trying simultaneously to feed Darfur and wrestle a Tragic Secret Past to the ground. Is it any wonder complications ensue? Fifty Shades is nothing if not formulaic romance, albeit with a riding crop and a couple of pairs of lined handcuffs thrown in for frissons.

Oh and clambering. Lots and LOTS of clambering. I start tracking the word after it appears twice on p. 177 in book one, underlining recurrences on pages 353, 355, 361, 368, 444, 455, 469, 476, and 491.

Note to fledgling authors: avoid this and similar marquee words—“clattering” is another that comes to mind--like the plague.

Also, train yourself to avoid clichés such as “like the plague” like the plague.

E.L. James employs numerous literary references, perhaps to trick us into imagining this is higher-brow fiction than it is. Sort of like giving the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the names of Renaissance painters. Or maybe this is just more of the Twilight fan fiction motif, with Tess of the d'Urbervilles subbing for Romeo and Juliet.

It is often guffawingly funny, sometimes unintentionally, as with Briticisms like “rucksack” and “sidelight” (which I think might mean night table lamp), which are corrected in the second volume in the series, as is the clambering, unfortunately. But there are many times when, I am convinced, James is intentionally hilarious.

“Grey—you’re on my shit list and I’m watching you,” BFF Kate at one point hisses at our gorgeous but sadly warped stud muffin.

Then there’s this moment near the end of the first book, as Christian prepares Ana for her sophomore sexploits in the Red Room of Pain (p.487, James’ emphasis):

“I am going to tie you to that bed, Anastasia. But I’m going to blindfold you first and,” he reveals his iPod in his hand, “you will not be able to hear me. All you will hear is the music I am going to play for you.”

Okay. A musical interlude. Not what I was expecting. Does he ever do what I expect? Jeez, I hope it’s not rap.

It is to laugh out loud.

There’s even a character introduced as Mr. J. Hyde near the end of book one.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” snaps my inner cynic. “Mr. Jekyll N. Hyde, I presume??”

Mercifully, though, the character’s name is Jack, sans N. I know immediately we’ll be hearing more of him in book two (he’s Ana’s new boss, an editor at the small literary publisher where she’ll be a paid intern. Another joke, methinks). And I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something tells me he may be a bit of a villain.

Bottom line: it may lead to a smidge more sex in suburbia—and who could really be against that?—but I’ll wager Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t nearly the threat to the morals of America some are suggesting. Given the mainstreaming of porn the past couple of decades and that our kids witness tens of thousands of violent fictional murders before attaining the age of majority—Brad Pitt recently saying he’d have a harder time with his kids seeing him portray a cinematic racist, “than someone who would shoot a guy in the face”--it seems a little weird to be “oh my-ing” about a smattering of soft core sex.

E.L. James clearly had fun putting it together, so why can’t we simply just lie back and think of England? Why can’t we just swallow it all down in the spirit in which it is offered: as a bit of a lark, Ana in chains having a wee bit of a romp with her Sir Galahad, aka the King of Pain?

If my own experience is anything to go by, what these millions and millions of mostly married North American women may want is the opportunity to read, talk about, and experiment with the more than fifty shades to please your lover.

Notes

¹Joe vs. José, Taylor vs. Tank, the feistiness and clutziness (but no cars are destroyed in the commission of this novel), the many cars in the condo garage (visions of Rangeman enterprises), all that body wash talk--Ranger uses Bulgari

²All the talk of alabaster skin, the references to blood e.g. singing in the veins, the deep dark secret, the hero’s father’s name: Carrick vs. Carlyle. The fact that one of his parents is a doctor.

³That email really boosts the page count, doesn’t it?

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Want more Bev? Watch this interview about her book, The Meaning of Children, now available on Amazon.com:

Review of 'Malarky' by Anakana Schofield

There are few things I dislike more than to be told a book is “blackly funny,” “uproarious,” and “comic,” and then not to find it so.

It makes me feel humour impaired, it does. Being as I’m a fifty-something Jewish woman who birthed three babes with narry a drop of anaesthetic till it was time for the stitches down under, you must understand why that cannae be so.

Malarky is such a book.

Thank the goddess for Graham Greene, whose The Comedians proved to me soon afterward that I am still humour intacta, to wit,

I said, ‘I’ve often heard shooting. They act more silently as a rule.’

‘Who are they?’ Mr. Smith asked.

‘The Tonton Macoute,’ the purser broke in with wicked glee. ‘The President’s bogey-men. They wear dark glasses and they call on their victims after dark.’

Mr. Smith laid his hand on his wife’s knee. ‘The gentleman is trying to scare us, my dear,’ he said. ‘They told us nothing about this at the tourist bureau.’

But I digress.

I can only surmise that calling the book hilarious is a marketing ploy. Or a decision taken by someone who doesn’t like middle-aged women. As a middle-aged woman myself, you will understand if I decline to be amused.

Malarky, to this reader, is not comedy but tragedy. Accomplished tragedy certainly but  tragedy nonetheless. If you’re looking for satire, I recommend the Greene… but, again, I digress.

Malarky is the story of ‘Our Woman,’ a middle-aged frump, from the sound of it, who lives in Ireland with Himself and her boy Jimmy. In short order, she comes across her son in flagrante delicto with a young man from the neighbourhood.

The shock takes her to a squat.

A sunken squat.

An utter of shock.

Before she moves quietly off, she takes another look. She has to see it again.

They’re still at the same malarky. It’s her son, her boy, and he’s shaking himself stronger against that young fella. He cannot bury himself deep enough in him. Flagrant; he’s got him by the hips, rattling in and out of them, almost like he’s steering a wheelbarrow that’s stuck on a stone, going no place.

In short order, Red the Twit comes up to Our Woman in a bar and reveals she has been sleeping with Himself.

Our Woman’s world is rocked by these events.

Are you laughing yet?

Our Woman then goes on a strange voyage of discovery that engulfs a local shop security guard of Syrian origin, and attempts to recreate the sex scenes of Jimmy’s she has witnessed. To bedlam and back.

For anyone who needs a demonstration why beginning writers are admonished against using multiple points of view, Malarky can be read as a textbook. Still, despite zooming between first and third person versions of Our Woman—whose name, we finally discover, is Philomena—Malarky works.

Malarky works because sometimes we must bear tragedy but still needs find some way of distancing ourselves from it.

Malarky is also a textbook example of the “what if” story: what if you were an Irish farmwife, minding your own business, pouring the tea, doing the endless cooking, cleaning, and ironing, only to find out your son, the only child of your three you were close to, is gay? Knowing this would create an unbridgeable schism in your family, with Himself being the way he is.

I expected more from you, Jimmy said. His father he could understand, but you, I thought you got it.

I do, I wanted to tell him… but… I married the man. I married a man and if you marry one, this is what you do. You organize the things that disturb him. I wanted to tell him to be careful if he marries a man. There are things to worry about when you marry someone.

And, oh yeah, Jimmy’s father’s been cheating on you. Even though “their lovemaking” has been sporadic, “every few months, maybe longer,” this rutting rut has still been part of the bedrock of Our Woman’s life.

What if the comfortable life you’d built for yourself—not luxurious, mind (after all, the entire countryside’s been blindsided by the economic collapse), but built on the certainty that was supposed to come with hard work—is turned upside down in a few short episodes?

Would you go a bit mad? You would.

Would you fight back? Become, in the words of Lynn Coady’s book blurb, “a sexual outlaw/anthropologist”? You might.

What if Himself cuts the boy off, the boy leaves school for the army—the American army—and gets himself killed?

What if your life was bulldozed like this? And then, both men died?

How would you feel? Hilarious? What blarney. That’s Malarky.

Anakana Schofield

Now living in Vancouver, Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of essays, fiction, and literary criticism. Her credits include the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe & Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. Malarky is her first novel. She worked on it for ten years.

Malarky is at times strange, and less focused in the latter third. But it is utterly filled with the wisdom—the tragedy, respect, and the sheer determination–of the middle-aged woman. There are also some marvellous lines. For example, this: “The thing people don’t realize about patchwork women like me is how given to exasperation we are.”

Read the book: to honour the middle-aged woman, not to laugh at her.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Review.

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Biblioasis | 225 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926845388