July 2024 – Novel Readings

“Doneness”: Joan Barfoot, Exit Lines

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Ruth sighs. It takes a great deal of energy, week after week, pressing her one remaining desire. “Try thinking of doneness as an awful illness then, and bound to be terminal. If you can’t even imagine feeling finished, you must think it’s a pretty terrible state to be in. So it’s about accepting what a person—me—regards as the end of the line. My definition of a fatal disease, which isn’t necessarily yours.”

A cautionary note about the rest of this post. Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines is about someone planning to end their life. That is a tough topic for most people, I expect; it is certainly a tough one for me, and the novel brought up a lot of painful thoughts about Owen’s death in ways that I talk a bit about here. If you find discussions of suicide distressing, you should probably not read on. Canada now has a Suicide crisis helpline: call 9-8-8 if you need support. The same number also works in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Exit Lines is a brisk, smart, darkly comic novel about four people who move into a retirement community named—in typically euphemistic style for such places—the Idyll Inn. When the novel opens, our protagonists are creeping through the residence’s darkened corridors at 3 am. on a secret mission, the full details—and the outcome—of which we only gradually discover. In the meantime, Barfoot deftly recounts the story of their settling in and making what accommodations they can to their new circumstances—including the loss of autonomy and privacy, the depressingly bland dietary options, the relentless parade of activities that, though well-intentioned, inevitably come across as infantilizing, and the knowledge that the Idyll Inn will be the last place any of them call home.

The novel cuts back and forth between chapters taking us, bit by bit, further down those scary hallways (“Three busy hearts leap and bang. Legs are wobbly, hands a bit shaky, flesh feels fragile. These pajamas, nightgowns, slippers and robes are warm, but the skin beneath is unfairly goosebumpy, shivery”) and chapters that tell us more about Sylvia, Greta, George, and Ruth—including what their lives and families were like before they ended up at the Idyll Inn. They were not all strangers to each other before, but the bond they form at the Inn is a pleasantly bracing surprise. It is particularly important to Ruth, who has determined to control her eventual exit from the Idyll Inn by ending her own life, on her own timeline and in the way that she has figured out will be quickest, least painful, and easiest for those assisting her to cover up. In her new friends she finds (she hopes) allies and co-conspirators, though she waits until she is fairly sure of their loyalty before asking for what she admits is an “enormous” favour, “to be with me come the time. And . . . to help me.”

Ruth’s request understandably shocks the other three:

Friendship is supposed to be companionability, compatibility, trust, empathy, challenge, warmth, goodwill, consolation, and sustenance. Not this. What she’s asking has to be—or is not?—beyond all possible bounds.

What follows is a lot of arguing and and soul searching as each of the characters confronts questions from the pragmatic to the profound:

What do they believe? What are their values, and if any, their faiths? How do these apply to the small figure of Ruth sitting here?

What is compassion, how important is trust? . . .

What exactly is so exceptional about human beings? A single human being? Besides the fact that only human beings can even contemplate such a question.

The single most important question is “Who gets to decide?” Ruth says she does, but Ruth’s friends aren’t so sure, or at least (especially if they are going to help her) they need a better reason than because it’s what she wants (“What Ruth wants: ‘My time, my place, my way'”). “I’m sure I’d have an easier time,” Sylvia finally says, “if you had an awful illness that was going to be fatal.” Ruth’s reasons are not as straightforward as that, and perhaps they are not as good as that—but whose business is that but hers?

barfoot2 The others’ counterarguments are also not that robust. “God crops up,” but none of them is religious, or at least doctrinally secure, enough to insist that her plan is wrong or sinful. They are all in varying stages of physical decline, and the one certainty they share is that they will eventually leave the Idyll Inn the same way other residents have, their bodies whisked away as quickly and quietly as possible so as not to discourage the rest. Still, it’s one thing to die and another to kill yourself, or so they try to convince Ruth (“Those people who struggle to be alive. When we are safe and comfortable here—they feel their lives are precious even when they are so very difficult, but you do not feel your life is?” challenges Greta). Ruth is resolute, however, and finally, one by one, they come around. As Sylvia puts it after her own change of heart, “Whatever anyone says—lawyers, doctors, governments, religions, all those nincompoop moral busybodies that float around like weed seeds—we should be in charge of our own selves.”

It sounds so simple, even inarguable, put like that, but the long journey our characters take to get there reminds us that it isn’t, as does the lived experience of anyone with direct experience of suicide. Details matter, of course. What Ruth is seeking is closest to what here in Canada we have termed “MAiD,” medical assistance in dying, although the help she asks for isn’t strictly speaking medical—but that is precisely because she does not have the kind of “awful illness” Sylvia initially thinks would be the only justification for death on her own terms. Sylvia is thinking of a physical illness, and that generally seems to be the easiest scenario for people to accept. The availability of MAiD to those with illnesses other people can’t so easily see for themselves, specifically mental illnesses, is more controversial. I’ve had several painfully searching conversations about this issue since Owen died: I am fortunate to have people in my life who are deeply thoughtful as well as remarkably kind, and I have been truly grateful to be able to talk with them about what having this option might have meant to Owen, as well as how I expect I would have felt about it as his mother. If I have reached any conclusions, they rest, as Sylvia’s does, on the primacy of autonomy as a right and a value. But there is nothing simple about any of it—the hypotheticals are as terrible for me to contemplate as the reality, if in different ways.

phillips Barfoot simplifies things for her characters by emphasizing Ruth’s clarity of mind and purpose: whether you find her desire to die more or less acceptable as a result is going to depend on your values, but it does, I think, help answer the question “who decides” in her favour. Illnesses like depression affect, perhaps distort, people’s perception of reality: it is harder to defer to their autonomy, then, although perhaps it shouldn’t be, as what makes the most difference to someone’s quality of life is how they experience the world, how they experience life, not what other people insist it is actually like. Of course, we want to believe things will change for them, that they will get better, and most depressed people will. What does that mean about their right to say, as Ruth does, “my time, my place, my way,” or our right to intervene? One of the most insightful discussions I’ve heard about suicide since Owen’s death is an interview Hermione Lee did with Adam Phillips about his book On Giving Up. Phillips argues that we should be “able to acknowledge, not happily, that for some people, their lives are actually unbearable,” that the dogmatic insistence on life as the ultimate unassailable intrinsic good (what he calls “the ‘life is sacred’ line”) “means you are absolutely compelled to suffer whatever it is that’s inflicted on you,” which he rejects as an “intolerable position.” I agree, while recognizing as he does that this does not make any part of such a scenario anything other than heartbreaking, tragic. Phillips notes that the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott never tried to dissuade anyone from suicide: “I just try to make sure they do it for the right reasons,” Winnicott said. I find that a defensible and principled position—but this is a case in which my head and my heart are in profound and perhaps intractable conflict.*

Is Ruth seeking death for the “right reasons”? I think Exit Lines ultimately answers this question in the negative, although I won’t go into spoilers about what exactly happens. I found the novel’s ending disappointing in some ways, because it seemed to falter from its own hard won and, to my mind, justifiable position. On the other hand, Barfoot’s characters do find comfort in the choice Ruth has fought for, in knowing that they do not have to “be helpless,” that “this could be a strong thing, although [they] did not dream of it before.” They feel better knowing that they do not have to drift passively into that good night but can stay in control, so that each day is really their own unless or until they choose otherwise. Planning for this eventuality gives them a long-term project “more riveting than playing bridge, watching TV or turning needles and wool, click, click click.” The tone of the ending, which is uplifting without being saccharine, is well suited to the book as a whole, which I have probably made sound much heavier going than it actually is. I began by describing it as “darkly comic” and it really is quite funny, and exceptionally clear-eyed about people’s weaknesses and hypocrisies and moral compromises. I really appreciated Barfoot’s ability to combine a brisk, entertaining story with such important questions about life and death. The book I read right after it, Elizabeth Berg’s Never Change, tries to do something similar—it is about someone with terminal cancer making decisions about the end of his life—but by comparison it seemed pat, simplistic, and emotionally manipulative. barfoot3

It was Backlisted that made me go looking for something by Barfoot to read: their conversation about her earlier novel Gaining Ground (aka Abra) was completely convincing about the quality of the novel. Exit Lines is the only one of Barfoot’s novels held at the Halifax Public Libraries, which is why I got to it first, but it turns out the Dalhousie library has a lot of them, several of which I checked out on my last visit to the stacks. I don’t know why I hadn’t already read more of Barfoot’s fiction: I had certainly heard of her, and I think I actually read Dancing in the Dark many years ago, but somehow I had never gotten any further. I plan to make up for that in the next few weeks.

*I am not interested in debating the ethics of suicide here, or in defending either Owen’s choice or our understanding of it. I was recently reminded that this is a subject on which some people feel free to judge and criticize both the person who died and those who grieve them. Comments along those lines will be deleted.

Recent Reading: Kennedy & Barrera

July 13, 2024July 13, 2024Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Kennedy I’m trying to get back in the habit of writing up most (maybe not all) of the books I read so here we go with a quickish update on two novels that I recently finished.

I heard a lot about Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses from other readers when it was first out, all of it good. It took me a while to get around to it, but I’m glad I kept it on my radar and grabbed it up when I came across it not long ago—a perk of being slow off the mark is that I found the nice hardcover edition on a sale table! (I often wait for the paperback, not just because hardcovers are so expensive here now but because I just prefer holding and reading paperbacks. But there’s still something satisfying about a hardcover, isn’t there?) Trespasses was definitely worth reading, though it is rough going emotionally. I thought Kennedy’s strategy of leading off chapters with quick rundowns of news items, in the same way Cushla does this with her students, was a deft way of contextualizing the novel’s plot, but also of reminding us that the “news” is not something that happens only to other people. Often I did a double-take when I realized that what seemed like just one more item was something that had happened to one of the novel’s characters. The effect was a building sense of dread, which was exacerbated by the general expectation of some kind of catastrophe, an expectation established by the setting and the specific mix of characters in the novel.

Kennedy keeps us primarily focused on the very personal story of Cushla’s life and especially her relationship with Michael Agnew, but it is impossible for this story to be only personal, for two people to just be “themselves,” exempted from politics or society. It is hard not to feel angry and frustrated on their behalf at the prejudices and persecutions that they have to navigate, but at the same time Kennedy avoids trite “can’t we all just get along?” messages, not least because both Cushla and Michael have and act on ideas about how the world around them should be—they are not bystanders or neutral observers.

Barrera In contrast, I had never heard of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross Stitch when I first spotted it in the bookstore a couple of months ago. Its title caught my eye because I do cross stitch myself, though it has been a while since I picked up any of my works in progress. (As my eyes age, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever finish the series of Henry VIII and his six wives that I began around 30 years ago. But never say never! I bought one of those around-the-neck magnifiers and it may make all the difference.) The novel’s blurb was appealing, but it took me a few visits to decide to actually give it a try—and unlike A Month in the Country, which I hesitated over for so much longer, Cross Stitch was not so good that I wished I had read it sooner. It wasn’t bad; there were things I really liked about it. It is a bittersweet story about friendship and the odd and sometimes sad paths it can take as people grow up and apart. The three women (initially girls) at its center, Mila, Dalia, and Citlala, are avid embroiderers, and the novel intersperses its first-person narration (by Mila, the writer of the group, of course) with reflections on needlework, including quotations from scholars and critics and other writers who have offered ideas about its role in women’s lives and in cultural history. One of these sources is Roszika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch, which was also an important source for the chapter on needlework and historiography in my academic monograph.

But I couldn’t really see what the embroidery material, or the women’s stitching, meant to the story Barrera tells of their lives, even though some of the explicit comments she makes about stitching and (or vs) writing were clever or thought-provoking. “I’ve never, and will never, read one of those books on how to write fiction,” Mila remarks at one point,

but it occurs to me that a novel could be written based on the instructions in needlework manuals, taking the following statements as if they were wise, disinterested pieces of advice:

‘When embroidering the foundation, always use a sharp needle.’

‘Don’t pull the thread too tightly; if you do, the loop becomes narrow and the effect is lost.’

‘Do exactly the same but in mirror image, reducing by one line at each step.’

‘When you stop embroidering, the work should be taken from the frame to allow the cloth to breath.’

I wonder whether, if I reread Cross Stitch really attentively, I would find that she has applied these lessons to the novel she’s narrating. I don’t expect I will reread it, though: it just wasn’t engaging enough. It had very little momentum, something I should perhaps have anticipated from the way the text is broken up into smaller and larger pieces, separated (a bit too cutely?) by small images of a needle and thread.

As a coming of age novel, Cross Stitch definitely had its interest for me: Barrera is Mexican (the novel is translated by Christina MacSweeney), so it comes at those themes from its own angle, including both the girls’ experiences growing up in Mexico and their travels to London and Paris. I never know with a translated novel how much of my experience of it is actually a result of the translation; I found Cross Stitch a bit stilted or flat, but that’s something I find with a lot of English novels these days too, as cool, crisp writing is very much in vogue, so it may be as much a decision about how to present Barrera’s writing as it is a reflection of what it’s like in the original.

“Ah, those days”: J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

July 8, 2024Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

Ah, those days . . . for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of hayfields ripe for harvest. And being young.

If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

I had heard A Month in the Country referred to so often, with such admiration, that I avoided it, rather cynically, for years, doubting it could live up to the hype. Now I wish I hadn’t: it is perfectly lovely—although if you haven’t read it, please don’t interpret that as meaning it is lightweight “feel good” fiction. It isn’t even bucolic, despite the title, and despite Carr’s wonderful evocations of the country landscape that envelops Tom Birkin when he goes to the village of Oxgodby to restore the obscured medieval mural in its otherwise unremarkable church:

The rain and ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass, gossamer drifted down air-currents, a pair of blackbirds picked around after insects, a thrush was singing where I could see him in one of the ash trees. And beyond lay the pasture I had crossed on my way from the station . . . then more fields rising towards a dark rim of hills.

It’s a tiny novel, a novella really, and one thing that makes it so remarkable is how much is in it even as so much is deftly left out. It is, as Tom says of the view from his window, “immensely satisfying.” We get just enough detail, about, for instance, the horrors Tom experienced during the war, or his grief about his broken marriage, to feel how deeply wounded he is, and yet we know this only from glancing references or occasional confidences, never from extended exposition. Tom doesn’t want to dwell on these painful things, but we understand that they are always with him, no matter how little he says about them, and because what he does say is so devastating. Carr also doesn’t offer us, or Tom, a month in the country as the simple cure for what ails him. This is no Eat, Pray, Love: in this book, trauma is trauma and stays that way, even as its sufferers discover that, though unrecovered, they still have the capacity for love and joy.

Carr2 Throughout the novel there is a neat but never pat association between the restoration of the mural and Tom’s reconnection with a world full of life and colour—and along the way we get to follow Tom’s growing excitement about the painting itself, which he comes to believe is a true masterpiece:

It was breathtaking. (Anyway, it took my breath.) A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red, like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.

You can tell, although the point is never forced on us, that the restoration process is at once literal—described with rich technical detail, inviting us to marvel at the human capacity for creation and the way art touches and enlivens us across time and difference—and metaphorical, with the painter’s dedication to his task, in the full expectation that it will not last, that it will be lost to obscurity, standing in for our own commitment to our lives, which also will not last, which will also be obscured by the relentless passage of time. Faced with that prospect, we can either throw ourselves into it, as the artist does, giving it the very best we have, or retreat, succumb, despair. But spelling it out like this spoils it a bit, just as Tom knows that if he tries too hard to perfect the details of the uncovered painting he risks ruining it.

Tom is tempted to idealize his time in the country, but he recognizes and resists the lure of nostalgia, even for lost love, and this is the smartest thing about the novel: it at once celebrates and refuses the dream of what might have been. The promise of that idyllic interlude could never be sustained, or regained:

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

“All this happened so long ago,” Tom says at the end of the novel, “and I neve returned.” There is deep sadness at the irrevocability of his loss, but in leaving he also preserved the memory (“it stays as I left it”), which will never lose the beauty of its unfulfilled promise.

June Reading Wrap-Up

July 1, 2024July 1, 2024Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

QEP June began slowly, as a reading month anyway, as I was in Vancouver for the first 10 days of it and, as is pretty typical on these trips, I was too busy to settle down with a book. I did read about half of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce on the plane, and most of Donna Leon’s Drawing Conclusions while I was there (I borrowed it from my parents’ well-stocked mystery shelves but did not manage to finish it before I left). I’m definitely not complaining! It was a cheerful visit, made more so because Maddie was with me and I loved sharing my favorite people and places with her. Because we were also sharing a suitcase, I was also very restrained and did not buy any books while I was there. The only one I acquired was a very cool gift from my mother: a second impression of the first edition of The Waves, from the Hogarth Press.

I tried to make up for lost time when I got back: by the end of the month I had read seven, nearly eight, books (I finished the eighth one, Michael Cunningham’s Day, this morning, so I guess technically it counts towards my July reading). I already had my say about Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and David Nicholls’s You Are Here; the other stand-out is Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief, which is a well-told account of Arthur Barry, a daring and debonair “second-story man” who stole thousands of dollars worth of jewelry from the rich and privileged during the Jazz Age. His life story has many other surprising twists and turns, including a violent prison break and a tender and lasting romance. Jobb includes a lot of contextual information about the times and places and people in the book, all based on impressively thorough research. At times I did find myself thinking “this is how you turn one good idea into a whole book”—not that this material is padding, and certainly not that it doesn’t add anything, but the book got me pondering the whole genre of narrative non-fiction, not least because I had the same reaction to The Golden Spruce, that while all of its detail about the history and processes of the lumber industry in BC were interesting enough, the book also gave the impression of a single man’s story elaborated or built up with background and contexts until it made a large enough whole. Sometimes I just wanted to get on with the actual events!

I enjoyed Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station, enough that I passed it along to a friend I thought might also like it, but not enough that I felt compelled to give it its own post. I found Emily Henry’s Funny Story fine: it passed the time, she writes OK, but I can’t imagine re-reading it (or any of her novels, for that matter). Funny Story had me thinking again about when a novel with a romance is a romance novel, a gambit nobody seemed interested in in my post on You Are Here. I’m pretty sure Funny Story is a (genre) romance, and by the time I’d finished it, I was more convinced than before that You Are Here is not, but it’s possible that You Are Here is just a better version of the same form. Better how? I want to say it’s richer, more thoughtful, more expansive, something like that, but I’m not sure I could defend those claims or demonstrate what I mean with examples. Anyway, I did enjoy Funny Story, about as much as I did Carley Fortune’s Meet Me At the Lake (which I read in May), but not enough to understand her massive best-sellerdom (or Fortune’s, for that matter). Any Emily Henry fans out there who would like to explain her specific appeal for them? henry

My other June reading was Tammy Armstrong’s new novel Pearly Everlasting, which I am reviewing for the Literary Review of Canada. As I told the editor, I almost certainly would not have picked up a book with its premise (it’s about a girl who is raised with a bear cub as her “brother”) to read just for myself. But it can be good, productive even, to read outside your comfort zone for a review, and I do always try to approach a book on its own terms, at least initially. We’ll see how this turns out! (What is it about CanLit and bears, though?)

And that’s my June reading! One thing I have figured out is that I get further these days if I settle in to read in the mornings than if I assume I will get around to it in the evenings. This isn’t really an option during the academic term, when I have to be up and out in time for classes and meetings, but my schedule is pretty flexible most days in the summer, plus I wake up quite early nowadays, meaning I can often get in an hour or two of reading before 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. and then start in on the day’s business. By 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., on the other hand, I am often past the point at which I can really concentrate pleasurably or productively on the page, so that’s a good time for P&P (podcasts and puzzles!), or crochet in front of the TV. It still seems to me that there are more hours in the day than there used to be, a phenomenon I’ve learned is shared by others who have found themselves living alone after years of busy parenting and cohabiting. Sometimes those hours do drag! But I am learning to fill them, and trying my best to consider them a luxury, or at least an opportunity, rather than a slog.