Review: A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, by Edna O’Brien

A reviewer recently wrote: “Edna O'Brien was the first Irish woman ever to have sex … the rest just had children.” There is some evidence of this, erm, groundbreaking achievement in A Scandalous Woman, her short story collection originally published in 1974. These eight stories are populated with women who discover both the joy and the anguish that sex can bring – via extramarital affairs, coupling out of wedlock, illegitimate children, and even sexual coercion – and do so in the shadow of the three pillars of oppression in their lives: Ireland, the Catholic Church and, I suppose, Men with a capital M.

For those of you who like short stories that come with a subtle undercurrent of hope, like you’d find in many of the works by Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore, this is not the collection for you. A Scandalous Woman is unapologetically bleak, with nearly all of the stories ending on a soul-crushing note. The last sentence from the title piece sums up the atmosphere of the entire collection: “…I thought ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.”

To her credit, O’Brien is an incredibly lyrical writer and her descriptive powers in these pieces are almost always pitch perfect. I found myself, for example, pausing for quite some time to marvel over a simple description of wallpaper in the story “The House of My Dreams”. Her sentences teem with as much keen observation as they do with venom.

But more to the point: O’Brien has a cold-eyed and unflinching way of looking at the world as she knows it: the women of her generation (she was born in 1932) living in Ireland, and all the senseless suffering that such an existence can bring. In each one of these stories, she is committed to telling the truth as best as she sees it. She does not look away from the hard facts and difficult truths of her characters’ lives. And really, that’s the best that we can ask from an author.

Happy Robbie Burns Day

To all you Scots or Scots-at-heart, I wish ye all a Happy Robert Burns Day. Normally I’m in a jovial mood on this day of the year – turning my thoughts to Haggis and a nice glass of the Glenmorangie whilst reading lines from my favourite of the Romantic poets. Today I’m not jovial. Today I’m under the weather and pissy. I’m still recovering from an on-again, off-again head cold (mostly on-again) and a bone-numbing exhaustion, both of which plagued me all weekend long.

Not that I had time to be sick this weekend, as all three days were action packed. Friday night I was off to Duggans Brewery for drinks with friends. Despite making a reservation, we arrived to see a sign on the restaurant door that read ‘Closed for a private function’. Because the restaurant couldn’t get a hold of us to let us know about the change of plans, they did honour our reservation, allowed us to join the party, and even gave us drink tickets and free food. I would’ve had even more fun had I not been so feverish and been able to stay sentient for the majority of the evening. My friends have since gone on to (rightly) mock me on Facebook. Comments have included ‘He was asleep the whole time!’ and ‘I don’t think I saw his eyes once after 9!’ This is what I get for drinking on an empty stomach and with a temperature.

Saturday night my parents were visiting Toronto from PEI, and so a crew of us went out for supper in lovely Greek Town. Because they drove up (intrepid, those two), my folks were able to bring me the one Christmas present that was too large to fit in my luggage when I flew back to Toronto last month: a giant rice cooker. So giant, in fact, that we had to hide it under the restaurant table until we were done eating. So if anyone saw a group of happy, well-fed people walking down Danforth Ave. on Saturday night lugging a giant cardboard box toward the Pape subway station, that was us.

Sunday, RR and I headed to Hamilton for a lovely going-away party for one of her friends. By the middle of the day I was convinced I had this whole illness thing licked, but then woke up this morning feeling like someone had broken into my apartment and beat me up in my sleep.

So here I am, feeling the shitty and sorry for myself on the great Robbie Burns Day, scowling at the sky and checking every street corner to see if it has one of Martin Amis’ ‘euthanasia booths’ that I could use. I don’t think Robert Burns ever wrote a poem about being stuffed up/feverish/hung over/mocked by friends; the closest thing I’ve found is this piece, “Address to the Toothache”. While my teeth are (for now) perfectly fine, it does sum up the spirit of how the rest of me is feeling today. Enjoy!

Address to the Toothache
by Robert Burns

My curse upon your venom'd stang,
That shoots my tortur'd gums alang,
An' thro' my lug gies mony a twang,
Wi' gnawing vengeance;
Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang,
Like racking engines!

When fevers burn, or argues freezes,
Rheumatics gnaw, or colics squeezes,
Our neibor's sympathy can ease us,
Wi' pitying moan;
But thee-thou hell o' a' diseases,
Aye mocks our groan.

A'down my beard the slavers trickle
I cast the wee stools o'er the meikle,
While round the fire the giglets keckle,
To see me loup,

While, raving mad, I wish a heckle
Were in their doup!

O' a' the numerous human dools,
Ill hairsts, daft bargains, cutty stools,
Or worthy frien's rak'd i' the mools,
Sad sight to see!
The tricks o' knaves, or fash o' fools,
Thou bear'st the gree!

Where'er that place be priests ca' hell,
Where a' the tones o' misery yell,
An' ranked plagues their numbers tell,
In dreadfu' raw,
Thou, Toothache, surely bear'st the bell,

Amang them a'!
O thou grim mischief-making chiel,
That gars the notes o' discord squeel,
Till daft mankind aft dance a reel
In gore, a shoe-thick,
Gie a' the faes o' Scotland's weal
A townmond's toothache!

Review: The Case of Lena S., by David Bergen

David Bergen has pulled off quite a feat in this novel. He has written a story centred around teenagers going through many of the horribly angst-ridden and overblown things that teenagers go through; and yet the book itself is not horrible, or angst-ridden, or overblown. Far from it. The Case of Lena S. is a quietly beautiful and exquisitely crafted work of contemporary fiction. A real gem.

The strength lies in Bergen’s prose, in his ability to imbue emotional significance to the small, quotidian details of life. The story involves a 16-year-old high school student named Mason and his on-again, off-again relationship with a troubled, depressive, suicidal girl named Lena. The novel is obsessed with how the inner lives of its characters jar against the external world, especially the characters’ own bodies. This a very visceral novel: there are some wonderfully astute descriptions of arms and feet and necks, of the “blue bone” of someone’s shin, and they lend a physical counterpoint to the emotional downward spiral that consumes Lena. As Mason puts it to her: “It’s all so thin … I mean the wall between the outside and the inside.’ He touched Lena’s arm. ‘What we’re made of. Sometimes I can’t believe it.’”

Bergen takes some extraordinary risks in this novel – risks that paid off for me but may not for every reader. Some people may interpret this book as merely expressing a multitude of 16-old-boy fantasies through the prism of a skillful adult writer. The lesbian love scene between sisters. Lena’s convincing of Mason to have anal sex with her. The scene where Lena has broken Mason’s heart and yet pleads with him for help after getting into a terrible situation with another guy she’s picked up in a bar. These episodes form a bewitching patchwork that may leave some readers disturbed and a little bit incredulous.

But The Case of Lena S., like all good novels, is more than just the sum of its scenes. Bergen has full command of his themes and metaphoric imagery, a virtuosic control of his vision displayed on nearly every page. The aim is to show Lena’s depression both from the inside and the outside; how the physical world can poison the emotional one; how the loss of one’s sanity and self can be drowned out in the noise of other people’s agendas. Much like Bergen’s novel The Time in Between (which I’ve also read and loved), this book is a stellar work of fiction that rewards close reading. Go check it out.

Paul Quarrington: 1953 - 2010

News this morning that author and musician Paul Quarrington has died from his battle with lung cancer. Quarrington was an award-winning writer who won, among other things, the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. I've read only one of his books (Whale Music), but know he had built up a loyal readership from across the country over the years.

He'll be missed.

Tell us what you really think, Susan

I stumbled upon this rather feisty rant against the “democratization” of writing on the website for The Spectator, that fabled right-wing rag out of Britain. It seems the author was asked to contribute a short story to some fringe festival to be posted anonymously on a wall alongside other anonymous short stories – some written by published authors, some written by amateurs, including school children, as a kind of exhibit, or something. The author, Susan Hill (I know, I don’t have a clue who she is either), is infuriated that someone would dare propose such an idea to her, a professional author with “a good degree in English” who has studied her craft for 50 years and published some 43 books. She takes what sounds like a well-meaning (or at least innocuous) proposition and turns it into an opportunity to embrace her inner curmudgeon, railing against marginalized peoples, the disadvantaged, the displaced, or anyone else who may have gotten a leg up on all her decades of drudgery because of their circumstances. She sounds off on the Internet while she’s at it, and laments how quality writing is getting drowned out by the noise of shoddy online amateurism.

Let me say that I agree with the spirit of Ms. Hill’s column. Writing is a difficult craft: it takes years of training and practice and reading the masters to do it well. What’s more, it’s often thankless and ill paying and prone to cause long bouts of self-loathing or feuds with one’s mother. (I’m looking at you, Houellebecq.) And it’s always frustrating to those of us who do write professionally to see subpar, unschooled work getting undue attention. Or to see someone argue that there is no inherit hierarchy of value from one piece to the next, that they’re all “equal”. By why spew such hatred at groups of people whom you can only describe with the most hackneyed of clichés? Can I really trust you as a novelist if you see the world in such simplistic, one-dimensional terms?

Ms. Hill should be proud of her accomplishments and leave it at that. After all, she won the Somerset Maugham Prize and the Whitbread Book Award back in the early `70s. And then, 15 years later, something called the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. (Thanks, Internet, for the research help!) And now she writes for The Spectator. She should let the babies have their bottle and get back to working on brilliant books that none of us are equipped to appreciate.

Another indy bookstore bites the dust

The Afterword posted a depressing piece about the closing of Duthie Books in Vancouver earlier today. This is yet another high-profile independent bookseller who has gone out of business in the last year. (The other closings I'm thinking about are Frog Hollow Books in Halifax and Pages Bookstore and McNally Robinson here in Toronto.)

Mark my words: five years from now the only place to buy books in this country will be online at Amazon or in small Ch-Indi-Coles outlets in malls.

Boo.

M

Review: Misshapenness, by J.J. Steinfeld

I hesitate to label this a review because I’ve known J.J. Steinfeld for five or six years now and he has become a good friend. J.J. moved to Charlottetown in 1980 after abandoning grad school in Ontario to become a full-time writer, and in the years since has quietly amassed a varied and impressive body of work – some 13 books, including two novels, nine short story collections, and two collections of poems, of which Misshapenness, published by Ekstasis Editions just before Christmas, is the second.

Not nearly enough readers are aware of J.J.’s work. In fact, despite having grown up in Charlottetown, I didn’t even learn of his existence until I was nearly 30. You may not see many of his books around, but if you’re a big reader of literary journals here in Canada, you’ve no doubt encountered J.J.’s stuff. This man has been published everywhere. You’d be hard pressed to find a single literary journal in this country that hasn’t published at least one of his stories or poems over the years.

The poems collected in Misshapenness (many of which were previously published in journals in Canada, the US, Britain and even South America) pick up on the themes that J.J. explored in his first poetry collection, 2006’s An Affection for Precipices. His preoccupation with the absurdity of daily existence, with the Kafkaesque turns that life can throw at us, as well as with the lingering effects of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors (of which J.J. is one) are all here. And yet I found that Misshapenness affected me more than anything else of his that I’ve read. It’s a powerful distillation of what he has been exploring, book after book, for the last 30 years. There is a line in the collection’s opening poem that captures so perfectly what J.J.’s lifelong work has been trying to record: “the heartbeats of madness overheard.”

These are poems that bear witness to and shake a fist at the very notion of evil, of senseless and unpredictable chaos, of the randomness of both joy and pain. But before you go thinking that this is all too bleakly existential to bare, take heart: so many of these poems are teeming with humanity and a profound tenderness. The closing stanza of “The Sun Aglow in Wisdom” left me brimming with hope: “another morning/the sun aglow in wisdom/and I feel devout”. And I smiled all the way through his poem “During the Unhappiest Happy Hour”, wondering if love really does weigh more than sadness, if my insecurities will ever be lighter than my arrogance.

J.J. addresses the idea of God in a number of these poems, but I wonder if Misshapenness comes at itself with an atheistic sensibility. It’s as if the collection is saying: life is a window of chaos between two infinite periods of oblivion, and there is much to witness there in the randomness, both cruel and beautiful. It is really all we have. It is our unhappiest of happy hours.

And how bewitching, that such an idea would fill me with hope.