Review: The Warhol Gang, by Peter Darbyshire

What can we say about books, even demonstrably good books, that wear their influences on the outside? Are we to diminish them just because they bow so low to their antecedents? Think of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a novel that is in no way lessened by the obvious fingerprints left all over it by Nabokov, Rushdie and Amis. In fact, influence may be the sincerest form of progress. After all, could there by any Kafka without Dostoyevsky? How far does Beckett get without Joyce?

Peter Darbyshire’s The Warhol Gang is one of those books that doesn’t make any attempt to hide its influences – in this case, we’re talking about the works of JG Ballard and Chuck Palahniuk: Ballard for the magnification of consumer and media culture and its odious effects on the human psyche; Palahniuk for the stripped down, smash-mouth writing style. Ballard once described himself as nothing more or less than a scientist dissecting the cadaver of the human condition. I doubt Darbyshire would go that far in assessing his own work; indeed, it often feels like The Warhol Gang is deliberately excluding the human condition because it doesn’t want to get its hands dirty. But in terms of a novel that feeds off the vacuum-sealed reality it has created for itself, the book succeeds in what it’s attempting to do. What’s more, it’s also a ripping good read.

The Warhol Gang tells the story of a man named “Trotsky” (at least, that’s what it says on his name tag at work, though it has no actual relation to his real name) who, in some possible future or warped version of the present, is employed by a market research company that uses hologram-generating pods on its employees to test products for future consumers. It’s commercialism taken to the point of neurosis, since Trotsky feels like little more than an automaton placed in full servitude of the reality that his employer is carving out for him and for the world at large.

Yet he soon learns of a rebellion brewing against this hyper-inauthentic society. With a strident (if somewhat vague) mantra “Resist!” spray-painted across various ads and products, the revolution declares itself in opposition to the hyper-consumerism that has taken over the world. Trotsky soon falls in with members of this opposition, and through various highly publicized acts of disobedience and criminality they find themselves dubbed the Warhol Gang.

The novel then follows an engaging if somewhat predictable track. The Warhol Gang’s antics get increasingly out of control and soon it too becomes obsessed with its own positioning and ‘brand’ in the eyes of society. Soon copycat groups that have nothing to do with the gang’s mandate (if they ever had one to begin with) begin committing more and more violent crimes in their name. The group loses its sense of itself and Trotsky begins to think the gang is morphing into everything it hates. There’s more Animal Farm to this (“Four legs good … two legs better!”) than there is Fight Club, by Darbyshire manages the arc of Trotsky’s realizations wonderfully.

The problem with this novel, though, is that it often feels as if Trotsky is the only one with any sense of what it means to be human. Everyone else, it seems, is a kind of robot too over-programmed to come to the realizations that Trotsky comes to. There isn’t, to make a Ballardian allusion, the messiness of the human condition to deal with here. The morality play that could exist falls flat because no one but Trotsky seems capable of feeling much beyond what society wants them to feel.

Having said all that, Darbyshire is a sharp satirist and taut writer who knows how to keep his chapters moving along with short, percussive clips. The Warhol Gang is fast and fast-paced, and can be read strictly at the level of a post-modern adventure novel. There may be something cold, even blasé, left in its wake, but perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps that’s how it separates itself from the books and the writers that have influenced it.

Review: Dancing, with Mirrors, by George Amabile

The true poet knows how long it can take for the heart to distill what the eye sees. In the case of George Amabile, this process can (and often does) take decades. The connection between the eye and the heart – that is, the acute visualization of experience and the subsequent emotional rendering of it into poetry – is the hallmark of George Amabile’s work, a talent clearly and most affectingly on display in his new collection of poems, Dancing, with Mirrors.

I suppose I should disclose here that I knew George a bit during my time in Winnipeg. He and I bent our elbows together on more than one occasion and we had many wonderful chats about the writing life. I also attended the launch of his previous book Tasting the Dark (New and Selected Poems) when it was released back in 2001. That collection had and continues to have a big effect on me: I often pull it down from the shelf and spot-read my favourite pieces from it. So it was immensely pleasurable to see that Dancing, with Mirrors not only extends the explorations of George Amabile’s earlier poems but actually contains echoes of them within it.

The new collection is comprised of 11 cantos, each examining some deeply personal and richly felt aspect of the author’s life. He tackles both the big moments – finding love with a younger woman, having a child late in life – as well as the seemingly more mundane events, like travelling abroad or dealing with another frigid Prairie winter. Yet nothing is mundane in a George Amabile poem. Through a traditionalist’s reliance on the power of description and metaphor, he is able to infuse an entire heart’s worth of insight into the objects and relationships he sees around him. Many lines achieve their ends through the most astounding brevity (a night sky described thusly: “the moon a pearl among diamonds/ the empty sleeves/ of the sea”; or his child Evan in bed: “no blanket, his legs tucked/ under his chest, shadow bars/ like prison stripes across/ his back …”) while others build up over several stanzas to a breathtaking crescendo. What’s more, many of these poems overlap and call back to earlier Amabile pieces in ways that both haunt and elucidate.

The most harrowing example of this happens in the canto called “What We Take with Us, Going Away.” The poem’s narrator, on vacation in Italy, goes out to a café following a tiff with his partner. Upon coming home, his car slams into a motorcyclist who has veered into his lane. The description of the impact is ghastly enough: “[H]is heavy, T-shirted shoulders/ rise and there’s a/ sickening thud/ when his head hammers the roof, just above/ the suddenly spiderwebbed windshield …” But then the poem goes to whole other unsettling level when it conjures up, in post-traumatic fashion, George’s earlier poem “Accidental Death,” about the death of his younger brother when they were children out riding their bikes:

I heard the rattle of a dump truck, a screech

of brakes, then the gunshot

of a burst tire. Over my shoulder,

a splitsecond glimpse of handlebars

raking the air at a sick angle,

milky smoke and a black

smear on the highway. I was in the air

when his body slammed on the grass

shoulder, rolled up in a heap.

I landed running, tearing

his name loose

from my throat.

This version of the poem is slightly different than the one that appears in Tasting the Dark (which in turn is slightly different than the version in George’s 1972 collection Blood Ties, where “Accidental Death” originally appeared); but it’s that variation, that kaleidoscopic view on a singular event through the prism of poetry, that makes the flashback – and thus the traffic accident in Italy – so disturbing and fresh.

This kind of “intertextuality” happens again, this time in the title canto of the new collection. “Dancing, with Mirrors” is of course a variant on “Dancing in the Mirror,” a poem that appears in both Tasting the Dark and in the 1995 collection Rumours of Paradise/Rumours of War. Here I felt less open to George’s textual mischief, but only because I love “Dancing in the Mirror” so damn much. Indeed, it took achieving my thirties (and a few blown relationships along the way) before I could grasp the full impact of lines like “Of course, the telephone/ helps, but those few you could say/ anything to, those you have known/ for years keep slipping away/ into marriages, or solitudes of their own” or what the “bell-buoy heart’s red wash” means. In the new version, the poem switches from second person to third and takes on a mesmerizing mixture of dream-like effervescence and coy specificity:

Slowly,

she begins to trust

her ears; the ticking

snow, far-off, echo-y

tires on wet streets, the sadness

of time. And there’s no one to kiss

her to sleep again, so she hugs

her pillow hard to the hollow

undertow that aches and leaves

her weak, knees

to her chin, her eyes

pinched against the spurs

of light that have already started

to flare in around her

Japanese window shade.

It’s the eye’s job to see and the heart’s eye to know, and this is the wisdom that George Amabile has been blessed with. Dancing, with Mirrors, through the courage of its metaphors and the trust it places in distilled experience, is a book willing to share its quiet wisdom with us. The message could be quaint in lesser hands but here it is siren call to how life itself might be lived: “Love is a mirror/ in which we learn to dance.” So too, might it be said, about the poetry itself.

Review: Hannus, by Rachel Lebowitz

When the past is elusive and historical characters stay frustratingly inscrutable, poetry can often step up to fill in the gaps. Canada has a rich tradition of rendering historical figures through the art of a poem, and it often involves deliberate fragmentation, elliptical imagery, non-linear narrative, or acts of pure imagination to tell us something new about a recognizable character.

Rachel Lebowitz, in her 2006 collection Hannus, takes a slightly different approach to this tradition. Her subject, while not exactly famous, is someone she “knows” intimately well through the lore and artifacts passed down through her family: her great grandmother, Ida Basilia Hannus, a Finnish-Canadian suffragist living in the isolated island community of Sointula in British Columbia in the early part of the 20th century. The community is founded as a kind of socialist utopia within turn-of-the-century Canada, and Ida is a complex character struggling to balance her sharp political beliefs with her role as a mother to children she’s had by two separate men.

Through a scrapbook approach that includes letters, newspaper articles, photographs and other ephemera, as well some beautifully crafted straight-up poems, Lebowitz provides us with a refreshingly lyrical and accessible portrait of a historical persona. The key to unlocking the mysteries behind Ida’s tale is, for me at least, the extensive family tree included at the beginning of the book. This delineation of relationships and timelines is paramount not only for keeping the characters straight but also for opening up the deeper implications of their interactions with one another and the historical context in which they live. Hannus is as much a tale about Sointula’s “failure” with socialism as it is about Ida herself, and the fact that Lebowitz braids these two elements together in a linear way does a lot to make the book a compelling read.

If I had one criticism – not that it is one, really – it’s that we don’t necessarily get enough examples of Lebowitz’s own verse in every section. This is a strange thing to say about a poetry collection that totals some 170+ pages, but I sometimes felt like the ephemera was crowding out the poetry in certain places. There is no doubt that Lebowitz has some serious chops – she is a writer we should be paying attention to – but I did long to see even more of what she’s capable of. Thankfully, the scuttlebutt is that she has another book on the way, so no worries there.

Side note

Here are some examples of other “poetic renderings” I’ve enjoyed in the past.

king’s(mere), by Nathan Dueck (Turnstone, 2004) – about our kookiest Prime Minister to date, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Tom Three Persons, by Yvonne Trainer (Frontenac House, 2002) – about the fable First Nations rodeo star.

Bloody Jack, by Dennis Cooley (Turnstone, 1984) – about the Manitoban outlaw John Krafchenko.

The “Province House” section of Guesswork, by Jeffery Donaldson (Goose Lane Editions, 2011) – about Sir John A. Macdonald. My full review.

Review: Anna Karenin, by Leo Tolstoy

My plan to finish Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, arguably the most romantic story in all of world literature, by Valentine’s Day fell a bit short. This, despite having begun the novel during the third week of January (the darkest part of winter being, of course, the ideal time to take on heftier literary tomes.) Indeed, according to my reading log, it took me 24 days to get through the book’s 853 pages. Please do not interpret this as an indictment on the book’s quality or on my abilities to read. It was a very busy few weeks.

Many consider Anna Karenin to be the greatest novel ever written, and now, having actually read it, I can attest that the reputation is probably warranted. The story—and its tragic ending—are well known by now: the titular heroine abandons her loveless marriage to take up a passionate affair with a younger cavalry officer named Vronsky. Anna is strong-willed and desirous, but also prone to paranoia and other forms of emotional unhinging. Put in the impossible position of choosing between her lover and her son (not to mention her place in Russia’s deeply hierarchical aristocracy), her predicament slowly unravels. The novel ends with what is probably literature’s best-known scene: Anna, in a fit of absolute despair and insanity, throwing herself under the wheels of a train.

There is much to be said about Tolstoy’s uncanny skill at diving into his many characters’ many psychological layers. Saying that even the most peripheral player in this novel is drawn in three full dimensions seems both obvious and inadequate. Anna Karenin is written from the sort of omniscient third-person perspective that has become increasingly rare in our literature, to its detriment. Tolstoy makes every examination—from Anna’s simple hatred of her husband’s jutting-out ears to the complex relationship between Levin (considered to be a stand-in for Tolstoy himself) and his love interest Kitty—believable and warranted. There is no fat to this text, despite its length. Everything fits into the broader theme.

What that theme is may vary from reader to reader, but for my money this is a novel ultimately about fidelity. Fidelity, that is, in the grandest and most multifarious sense of the term. We’re not talking simply about Anna betraying her husband or society betraying her back for her wanton ways. We're not even talking about Levin's undulating faith in himself and Kitty's love and loyalty to him. What we face in this book is the shifting plates of what fidelity means in a world overcome with change and upheaval (as Russia was during the time that this novel is set). Even the scenes that detail at length the agricultural history of Russia, as told through the lens of Levin as a rural landowner, fit into this greater dichotomy of fidelity to an ideal versus the ability to change with the shifting of one’s heart. It is, however, through the character of Anna herself where we see these ideas play themselves out most disastrously. Anna must learn that sometimes an act of infidelity can be the best, most moral decision one can make. And when that step is made, we must come to trust the new reality it creates, to become faithful to the choice we make. This is her chief failure—not to believe in the love she has built up with Vronksy—and it is, ultimately, the catalyst of her undoing.

Tolstoy has left us with not one but two landmarks of world literature. War and Peace may be an epic on a grand, geopolitical scale, but to my mind Anna Karenin is the superior work. It is more human, more tragic, and thus a much richer experience.

Reminder: Reading this Sunday at The Only Cafe

Hey friends and neighbours: Just a friendly reminder that I'll be doing a reading this Sunday, February 12, at one of my favourite watering holes here in Toronto, The Only Café, as part of the Draft Reading Series. The event starts at 3 pm, but I recommend you get there early as the space is small and the headliner is the always-engaging Stuart Ross, who tends to draw a crowd.

Here are the particulars:

Where: The Only Café - 966 Danforth Ave at Donlands (it's actually in the next-door café section called, wonderfully enough, The One. [But don't worry, you can still bring beer over from the bar side.])

When: Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 3 pm.

The lineup:

Ann Elizabeth Carson

Kathryn Mockler

Stuart Ross

Mark Sampson

Noreen Shanahan

And SPEAKING OF BEER: The Only is famous around these parts for its vast selection of European and Canadian beers. Their array of Belgian (Leffe and Duval being among my favourites), German and Quebecqois beers, not to mention a number of high quality Ontario craft brews on tap, is pretty much peerless in the city. Plus, check out the place's ambiance and tell me it doesn't remind you of your first apartment during undergrad. Anyway, it's a fabulous place to drink away an afternoon, so I hope you'll join us on Sunday if you can.

M.

Review of Off Book

Yeah, I know - I'm just as surprised as anyone. But yes, there's a new review of Off Book over on Daniel Perry's blog that popped up yesterday. Perry's got some nice things to say about the book's characters and story, and he's spot on when he describes it as a "hybrid of the academic novel and the bildungsroman." He is also, sadly, spot on when pointing out the text's various flaws and errors, about which I'm in full agreement. Still and all, I'm grateful for the attention.

(He says he's also looking forward to the release of my Korea novel. That makes two of us. Still no publisher, though. I'll keep you all posted if that ever changes.)

M.

Review: Opium Dreams, by Margaret Gibson

It’s not so much the idea as what you do with it. This has been the mantra of countless critics, reviewers, writing profs and editors, and it’s generally true. You can write about something as ordinary as surviving a trip to the supermarket (as, say, Amy Jones does brilliantly in her short story “How to Survive a Summer in the City”) or something as extraordinary as surviving the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (as, say, Dennis Bock does in his novel The Ash Garden); and provided you do so with panache and originality, you can get away with it. The understanding, however, is that if you’re going to use a lot of well-worn ideas, you better find a way to make them new.

Margaret Gibson’s novel Opium Dreams travels unapologetically across some very familiar landscapes. Here is a book that explores memory and the past (sound familiar?), loss, sexual abuse, a parent dying of Alzheimer’s, and the impacts of war on the psyche. Published by McClelland & Stewart in 1997, Opium Dreams very much follows the Atwood-Urquhart-Michaels template popular with M&S at the time (think The Underpainter or Fugitive Pieces): elliptical narratives with no real sense of plot; a structure fragmented in, dare we say, predictably unpredictable ways; and characters who in no sense resemble real people but are instead navel-gazing manifestations of pure emotion.

Okay. Having said all that, there were times in Opium Dreams when Gibson was able to cut through this formulaic pap and write scenes that took my breath away a little. Her protagonist, Maggie Glass, is a writer, a single mom (referring to her son simply as The Kid), and sibling to a brood of women known variably as The Sisters Three. Maggie spends the novel trying to piece together the past of her Alzheimer’s-suffering father, especially his time spent in northern Africa during World War II, and how that relates to her own experience of being molested as a young teen, her subsequent suicide attempt using poison, and her incarceration in a mental institution. What grabbed me was not just Maggie’s ability to adopt the perspective of her father in relaying his narrative, but rather her ability to invert that perspective so that she can actually see herself through her father’s eyes and describe herself in a brilliantly dispassionate third-person point of view. This sort of thing is incredibly difficult to do well, but Gibson handles it with precision and skill.

Alas, that’s about the only positive thing I could get out of this novel. The rest of it is undone by its obsession with high-minded and overly literary fragmentation, not to mention a protagonist strangling on a brand of solipsism that seems unique to the Baby Boomer generation. (No one else has experienced a dying parent like I have experienced it. No one else has endured sexual abuse like I have endured it.) Is it possible to feel as though a novel is too autobiographical without actually knowing very much about the writer’s life? That’s the sense I got from Gibson, that she was working out a lot of issues in her personal life with this book and often lost control of that gushing hose of sentimentality:

What is there left to lose?

Any more.

Clarice hissing out, A boy … Down-there.

My father’s arm, the bolt of the door.

A sky turned black.

Screams.

Mine.

Secrets. How many more secrets, how many more tender, mercy-giving strokes of the knife blade until … until … one is emptied?

Emptied of everything.

To which I wrote in the margin: Oh, get over yourself! Opium Dreams is a novel that needs to learn that less is often more, that emotional resonance comes best—and paradoxically—from concision and detachment and well-chosen details, not from a relentless mucking around in the self and vague ejaculations about the past. This is no more the case than when you’re writing about feelings and experiences that have been written about so many, many times before. Do it new. Show me how this is different. Tell me why I should care.