“Up to the wall”: Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

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stonediariesI don’t really understand why I didn’t like The Stone Diaries this time. Did I reread it at the wrong moment for me, somehow? I admired lots of pieces of it as I was reading, but my overall experience of it was that it was too miscellaneous: that it incorporated too many elements that ended up feeling random, that as a novel it felt piecemeal instead of designed. That may in fact have been Shields’s concept, since I think a lot of what the novel is about is how difficult it is to capture “a life” — even if you are the one living it. Not only is Daisy’s own story shot through with unease about her identity, but the reflections we get about her from other people show misunderstandings, misinterpretations, but also readings of her — theories, as one section of the novel calls them — that might well be as accurate as her own theory of herself.

Already, as I try to write about the novel, it starts to feel more interesting than it did while I was reading it. Is that a problem, if it’s that kind of a book, a book that is driven forward more by a concept than by the kind of momentum that comes from following a strong narrative of a more old-fashioned kind? The Stone Diaries is another in the ‘soup-to-nuts’ genre: I was reminded, reading it, of A God in Ruins as well as of My Real Children. By the end — despite its greater fragmentation — it has something of the same inevitable poignancy: a life lived, a life worn out, a life ending, ended. “Something has occurred to her,” thinks Daisy’s daughter Alice at the end of one of her visits to her fading mother:

something transparently simple, something she’s always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we’re still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.

The Stone Diaries does give us a strong sense of that “daily music” of life, but it also divides it into acts and self-consciously jangles those “single things” in our ears right up to its own last minute — most of all, in fact, during those final pages. I think it might be that self-consciousness, actually, that kept me aloof from the book as a whole, even though I paused frequently to retrace sentences I particularly liked.

I feel as if my business with The Stone Diaries is unfinished: perhaps some of my own current restlessness put me at odds with it. At any rate, I have at least reread it now, so that’s one more in my review of Shields’ oeuvre as I prepare to teach Unless again this fall.

This Week in Class Prep: Syllabus Season

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

escher12It’s that time of year again for academics around here: the fall term is closing in, and that means it’s time to finalize the syllabi for our classes.

For me, this is a process that generates equal parts enthusiasm and irritation. I enjoy the optimism of course planning: it’s fun to anticipate the intellectual sparks that can fly if you juxtapose readings in a clever way; it’s exciting to review the readings themselves and be reminded of how interesting and provocative and artful they are; it’s challenging to think hard about what you hope students will learn and practice and achieve in a class, and then to tweak and add and structure assignment sequences and course requirements that you believe will support those goals.

At the same time, it is frustrating trying to formulate class policies that often have little to do with those educational goals and a lot to do with managing student behavior and expectations — not to mention anticipating complaints and appeals. Rebecca Schuman is right that once upon a time, a course syllabus was a much more minimalist document. I still have the one-page (mimeographed!) outlines distributed at the outset of my own undergraduate classes. Things they usually didn’t include: attendance policies; policies on late assignments; statements on plagiarism and academic integrity; deadlines for (or detailed information about) course assignments; explanations of course objectives or ‘learning outcomes’ … the list could go on.

I actually think there are good reasons to include most of these things — I think it’s progress, not a problem, that (for instance) it is now standard to include information about accessibility and accommodation and many of the other support systems in place to help students succeed, while expanding our syllabi to explain academic matters in more detail implicitly acknowledges that students arrive in a classroom from a range of backgrounds. A lot of what used to be taken for granted shouldn’t have been assumed then either. Just saying, as Schuman suggests (facetiously, of course, as is her style, but also with some serious intent) that “what you need is to learn and learn well” is to mystify both the process and the goals of our work in an unproductive way. I also find it very helpful, just in practical terms, to have a common document we can all turn to when there’s a question about how the class operates. Everyone, I always point out (especially when being asked for special treatment), is bound by the terms of the syllabus, including me.

At the same time, I worry that the more we try to spell everything out, the more we unintentionally send the message that anything not made explicit in the syllabus does not apply. And I get frustrated at some of the things it now seems to be necessary to spell out. Why should I need to tell students that they are expected to attend class, do the readings, and turn in their assignments? What else would they think is required of them? Indeed, why else did they register in the course in the first place? Why, too, does my individual syllabus have to reiterate the terms of university-wide policies, as if (and indeed, this can turn out to be the finding, on appeal) a student isn’t bound by Dalhousie’s policies on plagiarism if I didn’t say so in so many words? Where is the role of common sense, in some of this, and of basic respect — not just for everyone else in the classroom, but for the underlying purpose of the whole enterprise? So much of my syllabus is actually aimed, not at the students working in good faith to make as much of the opportunity as they can (and occasionally needing some consideration, because life happens), but at students who would rather not — not do the reading, not show up, not do preparatory work that will make their longer assignments better, not, not, not … unless I coerce them. I try to make the syllabus a positive document, but 20 years of teaching has taught me that it is most needed in the negative situations.

One of the things I had to do for my promotion file (now, thank goodness, all assembled) was collect copies of the syllabi for every class I’ve taught at Dalhousie since I started here in 1995. It was more interesting than I expected, looking them over. I haven’t changed my approach dramatically: I’ve always tried to be clear, specific, and detailed. The tone has varied somewhat, though, as I have experimented with being more formal or more friendly, more rule-oriented or more goal-oriented. At this point I don’t think there is one right way of writing a syllabus. (I’m also very aware that context makes a big difference: for instance, this instructor has a lot more control than I do over who joins her class and when — our add-drop period is over 2 weeks long, and students do not need my permission to enroll, so I have to think about students’ relationship to the syllabus differently. Also, and this is just personal, I guess, I hate the idea of spending that much time reading a boring document aloud. I prefer to hit on the key points then come back to larger issues of purpose and motivation over the term, as we approach different tasks.) The only rule I’d stand behind absolutely is clarity — both in how you actually write the document and in how you understand and communicate its purpose to your class. I now think of the syllabus as one important part of the scaffolding of a successful course. Ideally, it’s both stable and open enough that you and your students can rely on it and yet go beyond it to the real course content.

If you’re curious what my current fall syllabi look like, I’ve posted drafts of them here (and last fall’s are here).

“Links with the Past”: Arnaldur Indriðason, Silence of the Grave

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

silenceofthegrave

He no longer heard any tales, and they became lost to him. All his people were gone, forgotten and buried in deserted rural areas. He, in turn, drifted through a city that he had no business being in. Knew that he was not the urban type. Could not really tell what he was. But he never lost his yearning for a different life, felt rootless and uncomfortable, and sensed how his last links with the past evaporated when his mother died.

I finished my second Arnaldur Indriðason novel, Silence of the Grave, last night. The Girl on the Train  is supposedly a “page-turner” but I read Silence of the Grave with much more rapt attention: it’s smarter, darker, and infinitely more gripping. It was almost too dark: there’s always something uncomfortable about being entertained by suffering, and at the center of Silence of the Grave is a tragic account of an abusive relationship in which the brutal physical violence is almost less harrowing than what the victim’s daughter calls the “soul murder” it causes. “She turned out to be like these bushes,” the daughter reflects about her mother:

They’re particularly hardy, they withstand all kinds of weather and the harshest winters, but they’re always green and beautiful again in the summer, and the berries they produce are just as red and juicy as if nothing had ever happened. As if winter had ever come.

The hope that things will turn green and flower and bear fruit again is hard to sustain in this relentlessly grim novel, not only through the history of this tortured family and its eventual, inevitable, cataclysm but through the time we spend with Inspector Erlendur and his family in the present. I noted that in Jar City I didn’t get much sense of Erlendur as a character. Here Indriðason made up for that, most notably through a bleak monologue delivered by Erlendur to his comatose daughter. This speech reveals in both words and tone much more about him, especially how he came to be the man he is, in the place he now has in the world. (There’s also a painful scene with his ex-wife that made Wallander’s family life seem positively tranquil.) The novel’s various elements all illuminate the ways in which families cause each other pain: the case under investigation may be an extreme, but the question the beaten wife asks applies to all of them: “What makes people like that?”

Inevitably, Erlendur’s work forces him to confront the causes as well as the consequences of people’s capacity for cruelty. That hardly makes for light reading, but I’m impressed that Indriðason presents this difficult material without turning us into voyeurs — which was my experience of reading The Girl on the Train, that it stimulated a kind of tasteless curiosity about how bad things were or might get. There’s nothing prurient about Silence of the Grave. There’s nothing slick or glamorous about its violence or its story, either. Indriðason lets it all be ugly, which is horrible but also true. I might be reluctant to read another of his books, though, if he hadn’t ended this one with just a hint of hope.

Recent Reading: Romance, Reykjavik, and Relatives

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

In among my other recent chores and challenges I’ve read a few things chosen primarily for their likely distraction value. I don’t have a whole post’s worth of comments on any of them but I thought I’d round them up here, just to sort out my impressions of them.

juliejamesFirst, two romance novels: Julie James’s Suddenly One Summer and Meredith Duran’s Fool Me Twice. I really liked Suddenly One Summer. It’s more subdued than her others, but for me that was a plus. I still find it mildly annoying that all of her main characters are so relentlessly gorgeous, but the heroine’s anxiety issues in this one were both realistically and sympathetically conveyed, I thought, and I liked that the story line overall focused less on overcoming cynicism (which is often the core problem in James’s other novels) and more on taking risks and learning to trust. Fool Me Twice, on the other hand, ended up a ‘DNF’ for me. It was my first Meredith Duran, and the problem I had with it is the same I’ve had so far with the Courtney Milan novels I’ve tried: for me (and obviously others respond very differently) there was just too much of it. What I’ve found so far is that the longer and more ostensibly complex a romance novel gets, the more judgmental I get about whether it’s really a very good novel, rather than just an enjoyable read, and in these cases, I started finding the books tedious. With Fool Me Twice, I just couldn’t believe in either main character, and yet the novel went on and on about them. I am going to give Courtney Milan another try: I’ve been on the library waiting list for The Suffragette Scandal for a while and my turn just came up. And maybe there’s a Duran that would suit me better: I’m open to suggestions.

jarcityFollowing up on recommendations from both Miss Bates and Dorian, I’ve just finished my first Arnaldur Indridason mystery, Jar City. (When possible, I always prefer to start at the beginning of a series, even if it might not be the best of the bunch, because that way I’m not missing any pieces.) It took a while to get going, and at first I thought it was a bit too blandly reminiscent of Henning Mankell: is it perhaps an effect of the translations that so many of these northern crime novels sound so much the same? I got drawn in by the case, though, which proved genuinely interesting in ways that seemed quite original to me: I did not expect the story to unfold the way it did, or the motive for the crime to be quite what it was. It provoked some good questions about what counts as justice, but also about families, genealogies, and data — specifically, in this case, data about our genetic inheritance, which is going to be an increasingly pressing ethical issue, I expect. I didn’t get much of a feel for Erlendur himself: he didn’t seem terribly distinctive as a character. But I’ve got Silence of the Grave ready to read next, and maybe as I get to know him I’ll see him more clearly.

trollopeFinally, after being disappointed in Joanna Trollope’s Balancing Act, I decided to reread her earlier novel Marrying the Mistress, which I remembered thinking was excellent (and which I had been thinking of as also fairly recent but which turns out to be from 2000). I can’t quite put my finger on what makes Marrying the Mistress so much better — but it is. It is structurally very similar: it takes a family with a complex and carefully balanced set of relationships and changes the dynamic by introducing a dramatic change, in this case the husband-and-father’s decision to leave his wife of 40 years in order to marry the much younger woman he’s been having an affair with. It’s a cliched scenario but Trollope makes it feel very specific to these people, at this moment in their lives. She also plays in unexpected ways with our sympathies and with her characters’ loyalties; she discovers, for us, ways in which getting what you want, or what you think you want, might be very different than what you expect, as well as ways in which unwanted change, change that’s unkindly forced on you, might be right, and liberating, as well as painful. She’s very savvy about family loyalties and how people push and pull at each other. It’s not a very happy book, but it’s definitely a book about love.

I also read The Girl on the Train last week — but I’m going to be writing about that for an Open Letters feature so I won’t say more about it here.

Coloring Books … for Adults? Sure, Why Not.

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

IMG_0415I’ve watched the recent craze for “adult” coloring books with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia. While some people are celebrating the idea as both creative and consoling, others find it one more sign of the infantilization of our culture. For me, it brings back a lot of memories of family camping trips: coloring books and markers were necessary camping gear for us, along with Scrabble, cribbage, and my dad’s guitar. As I recall, it wasn’t only the children who colored, though I think for the grownups it was more a way of keeping us company than a choice they would have made left entirely to themselves. I’ve held on to and sometimes gone back to my collection of coloring books over the years, and all this fuss has had me thinking that it might be kind of fun to get them out again. In fact, I bought some new markers last weekend (OK, I admit it, I couldn’t resist the back-to-school displays, even though in principle I abhor that they were out as early as July). Maybe a little coloring is just what I need to get me out of my slump!

The coloring books that set off this recent fad are pretty different from mine, though. As you can see from the photos, mine are not abstract or flowery but historical and (though I didn’t realize this about them until recently) political. It was the 1970s when I got them, after all — and, though this too was not something I understood at the time, I had pretty progressive parents (the kind who bought us “Free to Be You and Me” and then, later, Our Bodies, Ourselves, both of which in those days were new and radical). They also never, as far as I recall, stood between us and any book we were interested in reading, which for me meant that I was deep into Jean Plaidy’s historical novels at an early age — not to mention Gone with the Wind (my changing relationship with which I wrote about at length at Open Letters a few years back).

IMG_0416That historical interest explains why two of my favorite coloring books were Tudor ones: Henry VIII & His Wives and Queen Elizabeth I. Both are actually designed as paper dolls, though we rarely cut the figures and outfits out. I do have a loose cut-out of Elizabeth in the “Walsingham dress,” however, even though that picture (done in an entirely color different scheme) is still in my book: we must have had two copies of it at some point. Maybe my sister and I each had one. (Sarah! did I steal your Gloriana paper doll? sorry!) As I recall, I got the Kings and Queens of England book a bit later; I seem to have been taking the coloring more seriously then, as most of the pictures that have been filled in are done fairly carefully according to the information given about the colors of the actual portraits they are taken from — as with this earnest rendition of Richard III (my hero!), which I signed (!) and dated in 1980:

RichardIII

It’s the two coloring books of famous women that strike me as particularly interesting now, though — or, I should say, the book of “great” women and its evil twin, the book of “infamous” women. The childish printing of my name in the former suggests I got it not that long after its publication date (1974); it opens with Sappho and includes Cleopatra, Boudicca, Lady Murasaki, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas, Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Bessie Smith, and Marie Curie, among others. All come with brief biographical notes and usually a literary quotation or two. Infamous Women is copyright 1976; it opens with Semiramis (naked, just by the way) and follows with Messalina, Queen Isabella, Margaret of Anjou, Lucrezia Borgia (of course!), Charlotte Corday, George Sand (?), and Mata Hari. This book has full page biographies for every woman: “Isabelle of Bavaria made herself the most hated queen that France ever had,” begins one; “Naples has had many cruel rulers, but the Neapolitans boast particularly of wicked Queen Joanna: she had, they say, many lovers, killed when she tired of them, and many husbands treated similarly.” What’s not to boast of, indeed?

What interesting artifacts these books are. Recently I joined in a bit of a communal Twitter rant about this piece on women’s “forgotten history”: forgotten by whom, is a reasonable question? Women’s history is actually a pretty venerable field now, so I think the real (if inadvertent) point is not that it is forgotten so much as that the writer, and apparently the authors she interviewed, took their own relative ignorance of women’s history as definitive. The wheel they’re busy reinventing wasn’t brand new in 1974 either (my first book is just one of several scholarly works looking at women’s history in the 19th-century) but second-wave feminism helped turn it into a vast and vital area of research. It’s easy to see Great Women as part of this feminist reclamation of the past, yet the pit-and-pedestal pairing of it with Infamous Women shows that simply bringing women into the story doesn’t necessarily transform the story itself: much depends on the underlying assumptions the facts are used in service of. There’s no doubt, though, that these coloring books are one way that I learned that history was not just the story of great men.

That, plus the nudity and the accompanying stories of sexual misdemeanors and often quite chilling violence (my parents clearly did not worry at all about corrupting my young mind, for which I sincerely thank them) means that my childhood coloring books were pretty adult fare to begin with! Now: should I start in on Eleanor of Aquitaine (quick: guess which book she’s in), or bring poor pallid uncolored Jane Seymour out from the shadow of the ever-dominant Anne Boleyn?

IMG_0418

By the way, I am more than thrilled to discover that Bellerophon still carries these coloring books! If enchanted forests aren’t your thing, you can order your own copy of Infamous Women and have some fun with cruel Queen Joanna yourself.

Not a Very Good Week

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I’m in a slump — a writing slump, mostly, but (and relatedly) also an emotional slump. I will come out of it, I’m sure, but so far I haven’t figured out exactly how. Some of it is my usual summertime blues, which have been exacerbated this year by how grey and rainy it has been here. Some of it is discouragement about the writing I did over my sabbatical, which right now seems to have led only to dead ends. Some of it is frustration because the teaching tasks I turned to, to cheer myself up by at least getting something concrete done, haven’t gone that well. For instance, twice while I was entering my long list of reserve readings for my fall graduate seminar the library’s form timed out on me after I’d put in all the information — which is a painstaking process, believe me! (Third time’s the charm, thank goodness.)

That’s small potatoes, though, compared to discovering that the work I’d put in on my Blackboard site for my fall intro class has been completely wiped out (my section was mistakenly reset instead of someone else’s). I can do it all again — I’ll have to, obviously. But what is torturing me at the moment is that back in June, when I last worked on the site, I had hit on what I thought was a really good way not just of reorganizing the course materials but of explaining and introducing them: after several tries, I’d found a tone and wording that I thought hit just the note I wanted. And now, of course, I can’t remember exactly what I’d said and done. No doubt it was not perfect in some ideal way, but in my mind now there will always be an imagined but inaccessible Better Version. Working on Blackboard is so fun, too: who wouldn’t want to spend more time on it! That will teach me to start early.

Then there’s the Amazing Disappearing Notebook. For every seminar class I teach, I use a spiral-bound notebook for preparing my own class notes and for taking notes during discussion. I have a shelf full of these notebooks! It is very helpful to leaf through previous versions of them when prepping for a new iteration of a course, so naturally I went looking for my notebook from the last time I taught my grad seminar on George Eliot — and it is nowhere to be found. I have emptied filing cabinets and shelves and done all the insane things you do when you are sure something is in the room but you can’t see it anywhere. It’s not as if I absolutely need it: I wasn’t going to actually use it for teaching the class this time. But I really would have liked to have it as a prompt and a reminder! So, one more small source of frustration that adds to my cumulative feeling of failure.

On all these fronts and more, the fix is simple, in theory at least: I need to take a deep breath and just get back to work. I need to commit to a new writing project and stop second-guessing its interest or value; I need to get the darned Blackboard site back into shape, even if it isn’t the perfect shape; I need to finish drafting my syllabi and handouts and organizing reserve materials and rereading key materials so I’m ready for the first day. I need — and this one is harder — to return to my sabbatical writing and figure out (again) how to shape and direct it. I will do all of these things. In my entire life, I have actually never not done the things required of me — so there’s that to remember, when I exacerbate my slump by criticizing my own lack of resilience and lapses in productivity.

I did get my application for promotion completed, so that’s one (pretty big) thing crossed off my list. I suppose that means this is not a good time to mope in public! Someone in a position to (and with a mandate to) judge might be watching. As I’ve said before, though, I think it’s misleading to pretend everything’s going swimmingly all of the time. Who knows: my discouragement might actually end up being perversely encouraging for someone else who is also feeling stymied. It happens! You’re not alone. We’ll get past it.

Update: I went for a walk, then got some small but necessary things done (finished a draft syllabus, did final edits on a submission for Open Letters, played around with my book order for a winter-term course). I feel a bit better. Maybe tomorrow I might even be ready to tackle some of the big things!

“Sailing Into the Darkness”: John Bayley, Elegy for Iris

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

elegyforiris

Twice, Iris has said to Peter Conradi that she now feels that she is “sailing into the darkness.” It was when he asked her, gently, about her writing. Such a phrase might be said to indicate the sort of inner knowledge that I had in mind. It seems to convey a terrible lucidity about what is going on. . . .

Every day, we are physically closer; and Iris’s little ‘mouse cry,’ as I think of it, signifying loneliness in the next room, the wish to be back beside me, seems less and less forlorn, more simple, more natural. She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.

Elegy for Iris is a strange book, at once rambling and inexorable, solipsistic and generous, celebratory and poignant. It’s Bayley’s tribute to his wife, but it’s also, inevitably, as much his story, and he’s not always a very likable guy. In fact, he often comes across as a bit of a stodgy old fart (a description I’m not sure he would necessarily have disavowed). One of the main reasons it’s hard to like him, though, is that he’s not always very nice about or to Iris. Yet it was actually when his behavior to her was least admirable that I found myself liking his book the most, because the moments of painful, shameful honesty (“The rage was instant and total, seeming to come out of nowhere. ‘I told you not to. I told you not to.’ In those moments of savagery, neither of us has the slightest idea to what I am referring”) admit both the real difficulty of their situation, and offset the possibility that he himself would emerge the hero of the book. He’s no saint: he just loves his wife and sticks — doggedly, affectionately, imperfectly — to his commitment to her.

One of the most interesting aspects of Elegy for Iris, I thought, was actually how he views their marriage. For him, a good marriage is a condition of being alone though together: “the apartness is part of the closeness,” he says, “perhaps a recognition of it.” “The solitude I have enjoyed in marriage,” he explains,

and, I think, Iris too, is a little like having a walk by oneself and knowing that tomorrow, or soon, one will be sharing it with the other, or, equally perhaps, again, having it alone. It is also a solitude that precludes nothing outside the marriage, and sharpens the sense of possible intimacy with things or people in the outside world.

“So married life began,” he reports of their wedding,

And the joys of solitude. No contradiction was involved. The one went perfectly with the other. To feel oneself held and cherished and accompanied, and yet to be alone. To be closely and physically entwined, and yet feel solitude’s friendly presence, as warm and undesolating as contiguity itself.

“Apartness in marriage,” he says a bit later, “is a state of love, and not a function of distance, or preference, or practicality.” This seems to me a fairly unconventional idea(l) of marriage, nowadays at least. I liked the freedom it suggests — the priority it implicitly places on letting each partner simply be, and be different, rather than obsessing over being together or being the same. It certainly seems to have been the right idea for John and Iris, and it also seems to have prepared them — or John, at least — for the unexpected variety of apartness inflicted on them by Iris’s Alzheimer’s. As he tells it, she was always somewhat elusive to him, always ineluctably other. The disease painfully perfects the mystery, and yet seems, somehow, to leave their union intact.

Elegy for Iris is full of interesting bits and pieces: reflections on Iris’s novels, for instance, and her relationships with other novelists and philosophers; comments on art and artists, including the Canadian painter Alex Colville, whose work she greatly admired; descriptions of their peculiar and somewhat disturbing housekeeping methods, which basically consist of “letting things go” (“a principle which we had once followed almost unconsciously, [but which] was now asserting itself as a positive force”); many scenes of swimming, a cherished shared pleasure. Inevitably, though, these snippets of a life fully lived are overshadowed by our knowledge, and his portrayal, of Iris’s mental decline. Always gentle, she seems to get softer and softer as the disease encroaches, puttering confusedly or anxiously but never angrily — that’s for him to feel. In her prime she had, he says, “Christ-like qualities of tolerance, amusement, and good nature.” This unworldly, or other-worldly, Iris becomes the child-like Iris who watches Teletubbies with rapt fascination: “They trot about, not doing anything much, but while they are there, Iris looks happy, even concentrated.” That’s terribly sad, though she isn’t, which may itself be the hardest and strangest thing about this voyage of hers “into the darkness.”

“But which?” Jo Walton, My Real Children

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

MyRealChildren_Jo-WaltonWhich were her real children? Poor Doug and dear Helen and brilliant George and troubled Cathy? Or sensible Flora and wonderful Jinny and talented Philip? Was Sammy or Rhodri her favorite grandchild? Only one set of them could possibly be real, but which? She loved them all, and there was no real difference in the quality of her love for them.

Is there a name for the genre of novel that tells one person’s story from birth to death? Bildungsroman isn’t right, as the point in this case is not development towards a place in the world but rather passing through the world, through the ages of life, from start to finish. Any Human Heart would be an example, and so would A God in Ruins (tricks aside), or Moon Tiger. I suppose ‘biographical novel’ would do, but that sounds dull so I’m going to call them “soup to nuts” novels and then claim My Real Children for the list  — though Walton’s trick here is to double it up, giving us not one but two stories of the same person’s life. In a way it’s Life After Life Lite, and it’s hard not to wonder if Walton was influenced in any way by Atkinson’s success. Perhaps she was just annoyed by it, as My Real Children did not, as far as I can tell, get anything like the attention, but then, both the premise and the execution of Walton’s novel are less showy than Atkinson’s.

My Real Children might also be called a “fork in the road” novel: its deceptively simple premise is that its protagonist, Patricia, is confronted with a dramatic “now or never” choice, a proposal, and her decision shapes everything about her subsequent life. But the novel opens with the elderly Patricia “very confused” in her nursing home, unable to remember which life — the “yes” life or the “no” life — she actually lived, and the rest of the book takes us in alternating chapters through both possibilities. That in itself gives Walton plenty of interesting things to do, not the least of which is working out how Patricia’s character is itself affected by the events of her life, either as “Tricia,” who marries Mark, or as “Pat,” who does not. What is fundamental to someone’s identity and what is susceptible to experience? How does someone’s individual personality express itself under different circumstances? How, to look at it from our point of view, can we see double and yet accept the Patricia of the novel’s opening and closing as the same woman we’ve followed along two such different paths? Walton does this with both ingenuity and some subtlety, I thought: arriving back at the nursing home, there’s no awkwardness, no dislocation, as the histories merge.

Both stories are also persistently interesting, though there’s not much artful about Walton’s narration: it’s one-thing-after-another storytelling, without flourishes (the governing premise aside, obviously). Both lives have their share of joy and sorrow, but the highs and lows are related with the same flat affect throughout, so that (for me, anyway) scenes that might have been moving or uplifting were not, or not very. Since the novel sounded the same all the time, I also sometimes forgot which story I was in at the moment and had to ferret around for the last time Patricia was named — and sometimes, even then, to consciously remind myself what that name meant about which story I was following. The sense of a life (or lives) unfolding, though, has its own momentum and, eventually, inevitably, its own poignancy.

There is one other dimension to My Real Children: in both cases, the backdrop to Patricia’s (or Tricia’s or Pat’s) life is not quite 20th-century history as it actually played out but an alternative version — one in which, for instance, John F. Kennedy is killed by a bomb, or the stand-off over Cuba leads to nuclear bombs falling on Miami and Kiev. I didn’t try very hard to keep track of how these variations played out in each case, but at the end of the novel Patricia helpfully sums them up:

Trish’s world was so much better than Pat’s.  Trish’s world was peaceful. Eastern and Western Europe had open frontiers. There had been no nuclear bombs dropped after Hiroshima, no clusters of thyroid cancer. There had been very little terrorism. The world had become quietly socialist, quietly less racist, less homophobic. In Pat’s world it had all gone the other way.

Are these world-historical differences in any way the result of her choices, as her different personal lives are the consequences of her answer to Mark’s marriage proposal? Why is the “better” world the one in which she accepts that early proposal? Is there any necessary connection, she wonders, between her own loss (it’s a terrible marriage) and the world’s gain? She alludes to the “butterfly effect“: I didn’t notice any hints along the way that  we were supposed to make causal connections of that sort, but that might be because I was focusing primarily on the personal elements of the story. This section at the end made me think I might have underestimated the novel I was reading. I found the alternative history aspect mostly just a distraction: I couldn’t see (still can’t really see) why the novel couldn’t have played out its two possible versions of events right here in the real world. Dorian pointed out on Twitter that it wouldn’t really make sense to do that — that’s the unbearable lightness of being, after all. And yet there’s nothing stopping a novelist from playing with possibility in that way, and Walton could have left it open-ended which version, if either, was the “truth” of Patricia’s life.

As it is, though, we’re left with a metaphysical puzzle and also a moral puzzle, both without an answer:

She had made a choice already, one choice that counted among the myriad choices of her life. She had made it not knowing where it led. Could she make* it again, knowing?

The only constant, it turns out, is love: “Whichever way she chose she’d break her heart to lose her children. All of them were her real children.” I liked that, and I was also touched by the evocation of old age that frames the novel, and by the idea of confusion that just might, in its own way, be knowledge.

*My edition actually says “Could she made it again, knowing?” So did the hardcover edition I could ‘look inside’ on Amazon. It’s a mistake, I’m sure, so I’ve made what I think is the proper correction.

“An Act of Reconstruction”: Carol Shields, Swann

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

swann

The faces of the actors have been subtly transformed. They are seen joined in a ceremonial act of reconstruction, perhaps even an act of creation. There need be no suggestion that any of them will become less selfish in the future, less cranky, less consumed with thoughts of tenure and academic glory, but each of them has, for the moment at least, transcended personal concerns.

Carol Shields’ Swann is a very clever book — too clever for me, in the end, because as it went on it became more and more clearly a conceptual set-up, the people in it more evidently pieces in a game. I like novels to have ideas. I think I probably criticize more novels here for lacking intellectual depth than for sacrificing character or feelings to abstractions. But the novels I like best (including Shields’ Unless) balance head and heart: they are both thoughtful and, at some level, sincere about their characters’ humanity. There are certainly touches of that sincerity in Swann, especially in the section about town librarian Rose Hindmarsh:

She cannot possibly be the one who set in motion the chain of events that led to Mary Swann’s death since she has never been capable of setting anything in motion. Never mind her work in the town office, in the library, and in the museum — she has always known, not sensed, but known, that she is deficient in power. So many have insisted on her deficiency, beginning with her dimly remembered soldier father who failed to come back home to Nadeau to take his place as her parent, and her grandmother who told her, moving leathery gums stretched with spittle, that she had the worst posture ever seen in a young girl, and her mother who said looks weren’t everything …. and the seditious blood that is pouring out of her day after day after day, making her weaker and weaker so that she can hardly think — all this has interfered with her life and made her deficient in her own eyes, and it is this that mercifully guards her against self-recrimination, from believing she is someone who might possibly have played a part in the death of the poet Mary Swann. Rose is a person powerless to stir love and so she must also be powerless in her ability to hurt and destroy.

For me, Rose’s deficiencies show Shields’ strength: she’s great at hitting that fine line between pathos and poignancy, creating sympathy without overloading us with sentiment. In Unless, she controls these elements with her acerbic first-person narrator. In Swann, though, I felt that she subordinated these emotional layers to the point she wanted to make.

So what is that point? I think (to put it bluntly and thus, inevitably, reductively) it’s that criticism is inimical to art. Swann opens with Sarah Maloney, a feminist professor (at 28, already somehow the author of a bestselling book based on her Ph.D. thesis — yup, that happens all the time!) now building her reputation as an expert on an obscure rural Canadian poet whose work she “discovered” in a classic act of feminist literary recuperation. She narrates one section; Morton Jimroy, who’s writing Swann’s biography, narrates the next; our sad friend Rose, who rather exaggerates how well she knew Mary Swann personally, gets a section; and then Frederic Cruzzi, who published Swann’s slim oeuvre. The final section brings them all together (about this part, more in a minute!).

All of the individual parts have their charms. Even Jimroy, who’s a self-absorbed twit, is occasionally endearing, especially in his meditations on the imperfect glories of biography:

The disjointed paragraphs he is writing are pushing toward that epic wholeness that is a human life, gold socketed into gold. True, it will never be perfect. There are gaps, as in every life, accidents of silence and misinterpretation and the frantic scrollwork of artifice, but also a seductive randomness that confers truth. And mystery, too, of course. Impenetrable mystery.

His phrase “impenetrable mystery” is a hint, it turns out, at the futility of everyone’s attempt (or pretense) to really know Mary Swann. The more they think they know about her, or claim to know about her, the more elusive she turns out to be. Sarah wonders how a woman who seems in every other way to have been unbearably ordinary could have produced extraordinary verse; Jimroy struggles to grasp what her life was like and how it might connect to or illuminate her poems; Rose builds her minimal acquaintance into a story of intimacy that she knows is illusory; Frederic Cruzzi knows almost nothing about Swann herself but is the only one who knows the poems on which everyone else’s interest hangs are themselves already half-truths salvaged from ruined manuscripts. As they try to create a full picture, the scraps of evidence one by one disappear, leaving them less and less certainty. Though there is a story about where all the evidence went, the literal explanation is clearly much less important, thematically, than the symbolic one: their subject evaporates, leaving only their theories of her, which reflect who they are, not who she was.

And they aren’t that great, really: they are indeed selfish, cranky, consumed with thoughts of tenure and academic glory. Their better selves emerge only when they put those unworthy motives aside and turn, purified, to “reconstructions” of Swann’s vanished work. Swann struck me as very much a book of the 80s, and surely “reconstruction” is offered as the better alternative to “deconstruction,” or (since none of the characters is, strictly speaking, a poststructuralist) to theory. Swann is, in part, academic satire á la David Lodge: the culminating sequence at the “Swann Symposium” would fit right into any of his early novels, in flavor if not so much in form. In this section Shields makes the whole academic enterprise look both silly and futile: what do the meanings spun out in deliberately elliptical fragments have to do with the meaning of the lines of poetry we read, or with Mary Swann’s own obscure, tragic life? Her short verses are a flimsy foundation for the edifice constructed on them.

Shields’ satire isn’t blistering: there are some acknowledgements that without the attention of scholars and biographers, many great poets — especially women poets — would have stayed unknown. She also makes each of her characters more than just a caricature, so that it is possible, at least provisionally, to sympathize with their quests to find out more, and to define their own lives through someone else’s. The final section, though, inexplicably presented as a script, strips away much of the nuance and turns the characters’ interconnected stories into an odd and, for me, uncomfortably arch farce. This was the point at which Shields lost me — both the strange formal decision, which I found both distracting and sort of lazy, and the turn to comic maneuvering.

As I finished reading Swann, I found myself thinking of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which deals with a lot of the same thematic elements. It has been quite a long time since I read Possession, so I may be misremembering, but in my recollection, while it does bring out the comic aspect of scholarly obsession, it also cherishes it, even indulges it, matching its satire with a love story — and I don’t mean (just) the historical love story that’s uncovered but the romance of knowledge itself. The scholars’ quest, there, is balanced by the humanity of their subjects, which is given the kind of scope Mary Swann never gets in Swann. I would have liked the last part of Shields’ novel to be hers — for Shields to use her novelist’s licence to solve her “ineffable mystery,” maybe even to allow for the possibility of something more — something that’s not ridiculous — between the creation and the critic, the subject and the scholar.

“A Place Like This”: Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

bitterns

“It’s this area, you see, the birds and the people, we’re all intertwined, caught up in one another’s history. We could never let it perish, a place like this.”

Despite my wariness of new (or just new-to-me) mysteries, I took a chance on Steve Burrows’ A Siege of Bitterns because when I peered at it in Bookmark, I was immediately caught up in the opening pages. It’s not that Burrows leaps right into any suspenseful action — quite the opposite, in fact, though obedient to the rules of the genre he doesn’t take very long to get to a corpse. What I liked was the description of the Norfolk marshland:

At its widest point, the marsh stretched almost a quarter of a mile across the north Norfolk coastline. Here, the river that had flowed like a silver ribbon through the rolling farmlands to the west finally came to rest, spilling its contents across the flat terrain, smoothing out the uneven contours, seeping silently into every corner….

At the margins of land and water, the marsh belonged to neither, and it carried the disquieting wildness of all forsaken things. Onshore winds rattled the dry reeds like hollow bones. The peaty tang of decaying vegetation and wet earth hung in the air. An hour earlier, the watery surface of the wetland had shimmered like polished copper; a fluid mirror for the last rays of the setting sun. But now, the gathering gloom had transformed the marsh into a dark, featureless emptiness.

That’s really good scene-setting: it’s full of specific details addressing all the senses, and it’s elegantly but not floridly written. The scene is full of both beauty and menace, the images suffused with unease but with no heavy-handed ka-thumps of threat or suspense. Here, I thought, is a place I’d like to go — both the marshes and the fictional world this author has created.

cleymarshes

And overall I was not disappointed in A Siege of Bitterns. It is well-written throughout, particularly its descriptions of the landscape, which are consistently both evocative and precise:

Jejeune looked out at the night sky, mesmerized. If he had to give up everything about this part of the world, it would be the skies he would hold onto until the last; the endless, blue, forever skies of the days, and these nights, vast and clear and soft with stars spangled across them as far as the eye could see. The day’s thin tracery of white clouds had been peeled away by the evening’s breezes, and above him now was a spectacular velvety black tapestry shot through with glittering points of light.

The marshes are not just the backdrop to the novel’s crimes: Burrows does a good job at integrating the crimes — the people involved, their motives — with the setting so that we feel that the violence has arisen, in some sense, from the place itself and requires  an understanding of and appreciation for the landscape to solve it. It’s a useful device to have a lead detective who is new to the area, so that our knowledge can grow along with his, even as our interest in it is piqued by seeing it through his birder’s eyes. The birding, too, is not just an accessory, a novel but ultimately unnecessary bit of characterization. It does contribute to our sense of the kind of man Jejeune is — a “watcher,” as he himself thinks at one point, but also someone curious, questing, patient, and moved by flashes of beauty. But it’s part of the case, too, which makes sense in the context of the marshes where, as we’re reminded several times, there’s a particularly high density and variety of birds and thus a correspondingly high number of birders, resident and itinerant.

I really enjoyed the birding material in A Siege of Bitterns. It played right into my general fondness for “neepery” of all kind, for one thing, but Burrows also conveys its specific appeal very well — again, there’s a useful device in the form of Jejeuene’s partner, Lindy, a non-birder, who thus gives the many birders they encounter an excuse to proselytize. I read most of the novel sitting on our back deck, and I admit that I became increasingly aware of the birds around me: there are lots of them around at this time of year, but I can’t identify most of them better than “sea gull” or “blue jay.” I’m pretty sure I saw a humming bird this morning, and sometimes I definitely hear woodpeckers. But which kinds exactly? This site could presumably help me figure it out …

The only element of the novel that I wasn’t really convinced by was Inspector Jejeune himself. On Twitter last night Liz commented that, reading the novel, she “felt like I was coming into a series in progress.” Now that I’ve finished the book, I know what she means: I wondered if the many hints dropped in the first half about things that happened before the story’s own timeline would be resolved, but we never really do get a clear account, either of Jejeune’s family situation or of the case that has turned him into “media darling.” Perhaps this reflects the awkwardness of starting up a new series when some really fine ones in the same style have been running for so long (P. D. James’s Dalgliesh series launched in 1962, for instance, and Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels in 1987). It seems preferable to me to let your character build over time, but maybe relative newcomers feel the pressure to create a kind of instant depth. It didn’t work all that well for me, at any rate: we have to take a fair amount about Jejeune’s brilliance on faith, and sometimes Burrows seemed a bit too insistent on what he’d clearly chosen as Jejeune’s trademark qualities. The secondary characters too felt a bit forced.

dovesThe plot is good, though, and the writing is good, and the concept is original — though I wonder how long you can sustain birding as a genuine theme, without its lapsing into a gimmick. I liked A Siege of Bitterns enough to want to read A Pitying of Doves, the next in the series. If that goes as well as the first one, I might press on to A Cast of Falcons. And who knows — I might even see if I can figure out just what birds are in my own backyard.

At least as a footnote, I do have to say that there is a very shocking error on page 67 of  A Siege of Bitterns! Dundurn Press should be pretty pleased about this series, but they should also be sure to fix that as soon as they can.