Robert Kroetsch Tribute #1: Seed Catalogue

The Canadian literature community was saddened by the news that on June 21, Robert Kroetsch - author of more than 25 books and winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction - had been killed in a car crash near Leduc, Alberta. When I heard about Kroetsch's death, I put out a call to various writers I know to participate in a tribute to him on this blog. The assignment was simple: choose a book by Kroetsch and write 1,000 to 1,500 words on what it has meant to you.

First up is my good friend Nathan Dueck, whom I knew during my MA years out in Winnipeg. His bio is at the bottom of the essay. For his essay, Nathan chose Kroetsch's seminal (um, pun intended?) 1977 poetry collection Seed Catalogue. Over to you, Nathan.

How Do You Plant a Poet?

1.

But how do you grow a poet?

This is the voice of Robert Kroetsch. This is how he renders it in Seed Catalogue. Kroetsch repeats the line, a question he asks himself often, throughout the long poem. With every repetition, five times in total, the line becomes a verbal tic: the voice is hesitant to write (Kroetsch Catalogue 37); it is insistent about understanding the process of writing (“How do you grow a poet?” 38, 39); and, it is persistent about developing a writing voice (“How do you grow / a poet?” 40). Another speaker replies to the italicized voice. Where the first speaker considers growing, the second voice, presumably belonging to a “poet,” responds with an anecdote about planting. This “poet’s” lines, which lack italics, sound more confidant than the lines with typographical emphasis. It seems that italics appear to indicate intimacy or urgency within Seed Catalogue. Other portions appear more aware, knowing or, more appropriately, self-reflexive. The “poet” teaches us about writing: “Start: with an invocation” (Kroetsch Catalogue 37). And, he inevitably teaches us about dying: “Killed him dead. / It was a strange / planting” (Kroetsch Catalogue 44). The “poet” speaks with a voice that Kroetsch remembers from childhood in rural Alberta. Repetition of such voices is how he remembers the past with Seed Catalogue. Kroetsch repeats these memories in a long poem that resuscitates his own history. Alternately, forgetting the past is akin to suffocation. Perhaps that is why the “poet” uses the gerund “planting,” which implies planting is ongoing, rather than the past tense, “planted.”

In “On Being an Alberta Writer: Or, I Wanted to Tell Our Story,” Kroetsch writes about exhuming a particular seed catalogue from the Glenbow Archives. “I wanted to write a poetic equivalent to the ‘speech’ of a seed catalogue,” he recalls, “[t]he way we read the page and hear its implications” (“Writer” 8). “The writing the writing the writing,” therefore, matters more to Kroetsch than its alterative, “the having written.” Because of that repetition, the writing seems to take on at least three stages: writing the poem, the writing implied by reading it, and the writing in response to it. Every subsequent commentary, essay, or review of “the writing” engages Seed Catalogue in a dialogue that Kroetsch began with his “explosive seed” of poetry. That way, the writing the writing the writing is “a strange / planting” within readers. The writing, etc., like the speaking, goes on, even without the “poet.” That is how you plant a poet.

2.

I knew she was watching me. She was
watching me grow. Like a bad weed, she liked
to say. That pleased her.

The lesson of Seed Catalogue must be the writing the writing the writing. And, especially after Kroetsch’s death, it seems important that I keep this lesson in mind. My first thought after learning about the tragedy was, “well, I guess the field notes are finally complete.” Weeks later, I still do not know how to feel about this ending for the lifelong poem. I cannot convince myself that death is the end. That is to say, the voices that Kroetsch captured in writing still speak to me. I am convinced his dialogue with readers, somehow both intellectually profound and emotionally provocative, goes on. It seems remarkable to me that Kroetsch achieved such a range (with such rigour) by writing the tones of those who tend the land (instead of the pretensions of those who teach in ivory towers). An example from another long poem, “I’m Getting Old Now” from Sounding the Name, indicates how he engages with his upbringing. In this poem, the speaker relates a dream wherein his mother speaks to him as though he was still a child. It is unclear, though, if she is more “pleased” to watch her boy “grow,” or to repeat what they say about “a bad weed” (Kroetsch “Old” 202). With the next stanza, he speaks of awakening to realize that “I’m getting old now . . . Death is not quite / the enemy it was. It is a kind of watching” (Kroetsch “Old” 202). Then, in the final stanza, he feels that, in his old age, “Death begins to seem a friend that one has almost / forgotten, then remembers again.” If “Death” does not represent an end within “I’m Getting Old Now,” it is because the speaker has come to terms with aging. At the same time, aging necessitates memory in the poem. If forgetting represents a betrayal of history, remembering is a delay, or a deferral, of the inevitable end. I suspect this lesson about memory – a form of aging – from Sounding the Name is comparable to the one about writing – a form of speaking – from Seed Catalogue. If so, the writing the writing the writing is how Kroetsch “remembers again.”

3.

After the bomb/blossoms Poet, teach us
After the city/falls to love our dying.
After the rider/falls
(the horse West is a winter place.
standing still) The palimpsest of prairie

under the quick erasure
of snow, invites a flight.

Driving up the Queen Elizabeth II highway to Kroetsch’s memorial service in Leduc, a friend revealed what she took away from Seed Catalogue: “it shows me the effectiveness of simple writing.” The four of us in the minivan – three friends from graduate school and one of our professors in the Department of English at the University of Calgary – agreed. We had all, at one time or another, approached Kroetsch for help with our writing. And, he generously obliged us all. He read drafts of our dissertations and manuscripts. He introduced us to other writers. I cannot confirm this, but I would like to say the discussion took place as we unknowingly steered around “the home place: one and a half miles west of Heisler, Alberta, / on the correction road / and three miles south” (Kroetsch Catalogue 30). Later, when I returned home, back to shelves that bow with books by Kroetsch, a line from Seed Catalogue went over in my mind. “Poet, teach us / to love our dying” (Kroetsch Catalogue 45). Now, with the long poem in hand, I am struck by the implications of another verbal noun. The italicized voice speaks of “dying” instead of “dead.” Farther along that column, the speaker provides a sense of what archaeology means to Kroetsch. Throughout Seed Catalogue, archaeology is a practice that forms the object of which it speaks. It offers us a way to speak of the past and of the shifts in epistemé to organize memories in writing while referencing the limits of the writing itself. In the opposite column of the long poem, the “poet” speaker repeats a principle theme of the long poem. He refers to an earlier passage where he remembers falling off a horse when he was a child. “The horse was standing still,” of course (Kroetsch Catalogue 29). Because of that repetition, it seems necessary to consider what compels the “poet” to embarrass himself. Perhaps he wants us to share the pathos of his memory. If so, he can align with his readers to experience “a strange planting” of voice on the page. The effect of this identification is why reading Seed Catalogue makes me uneasy. It is also why I feel compelled to remember how Kroetsch, the poet, affected me. His death is not the end, but it is a line break.

Nathan Dueck is the author of the poetry collection King's(mere) (Turnstone Press, 2004) and has had poems appear in CV2, Canadian Literature and other places. Originally from Winkler, MB, he now lives and writes in Calgary.

Review: Guesswork, by Jeffery Donaldson

It’s rare for a poetry collection’s jacket copy to say something succinct rather than hyperbolic about a poet’s work, but whoever it was at Goose Lane Editions that wrote the back-cover blurb for Jeffery Donaldson’s new book, Guesswork, certainly knew what he or she was doing. The copy describes Donaldson’s verse as “[r]evealing a mind at once conversant with literary deities and the subtleties of the everyday …” Anyone who has read Donaldson’s previous collections, particularly his formidable 2008 book Palilalia, knows that this description suits him perfectly. Whether conjuring the ghost of Northrop Frye, punning playfully on terms like “Play Doh’s Cave”, or riffing on the works of Rilke, this is a poet who believes not only in the existence of literary deities but in contemporary poetry’s ability to extend their conversations, to build upon them and reveal the rich nuances of the world around us.

In many ways, Guesswork picks up where Palilalia left off. The overarching trope of that earlier collection was to examine, through the prism of poetry, Donaldson’s and his son’s own palilalia, a subset of Tourette’s syndrome characterized by the involuntary repetition of words or phrases. Palilalia did this is a number of ways, most cleverly by utilizing the pantoum and other poetic forms that rely on repetition for their power. The first piece in Guesswork, “Guillotine”, is a narrative poem that once again renders a Touretter’s tic into an exquisite work of art. (You can watch a well-crafted YouTube video of the poem, comprised of images and Donaldson himself reading.) Donaldson’s descriptions of his disorder are breathtaking here; he sweeps us up in a relentless flow of metaphors tripping madly over themselves to get out – much like the very tics they describe:

… I’ve made my peace

with the spinning dynamo’s monotonous hum,

engine’s run-on, clockwork’s unnerving tick.

Somewhere above, a sloshed puppet master

grapples his tangled lines – the heartless jerk! –

pulling my leg. No unmangling the doublespeak,

the trickster-muse’s obscure hieroglyphic,

his cryptic morse tapping itself out in broken

longs and shorts …

From this launching pad, Guesswork ascends into a stratosphere rich in delightful preoccupations. One might surmise that the collection’s title is ironic, since none of the poems here come off like guesswork at all; rather, they feel forged out of obsessions or observations that may have taken years, or even decades, to incubate. While there are some wonderful one-off poems in the book (“On the Return of Allegory” and the collection’s title piece are stand-outs), for the purposes of this review I want to focus on four longer sections that act as Guesswork’s key pillars.

The first is the seven-poem sequence called “Book”. Here, Donaldson provides a kind of chirographic history of the codex: indeed, “Book I” is laced with cursive flourishes as it describes the world’s first text: “but for nourishment insinuates/ a wriggling, intermittent cuneiform./ The bark curls back, dried and peeled …” By “Book III”, books have become a fetish item, almost erotic in their smells and textures:

I sniff your pages, thumb fanned,

from front to back, back to front.

I am addicted, stirring your musts,

your spine glues, your inks

and endpapers, the weak sweet

of pulp, your woody tones

like varieties of steeped tea.

And by “Book VII”, the book reaches its inevitable, digital end, a “homeless elegy” for the e-text “destined to wander pixilated/ on white screens, cut and pasted,/ resaveable, its next untyped/ character blinking with disbelief?” What’s remarkable about this sequence is that, despite their accessible trajectory, the poems never once feel tedious or played out. Donaldson keeps his metaphors fresh and his observations as sharp as the end of a quill.

The second section I’d like to touch on is the ekphrastic long poem “Torso: Variations on a Theme by Rilke.” (To hear Donaldson briefly discuss the ekphrastic form, you can listen to this recent interview he gave on Art Waves with Bernadette Rule.) Thankfully, Donaldson provides the full text of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, (translated by Donaldson himself), on which the sequence is subsequently based, allowing him to achieve a couple of different ends.

The first, I would say, is to frame his long poem as a kind of re-translation of a re-translation. The source poem, like much of Rilke’s work, can vary wildly from translation to translation. (Indeed my version, taken from The Essential Rilke, selected and translated by Galway Kinnel and Hannah Liebmann, differs from Donaldson’s in small but important ways.) Each sequence not only retranslates the poem, but re-imagines and re-interprets it, sifting and re-sifting its imagery and altering its voice. This achievement is worth showing in detail, even in the first stanza alone. Here is Donaldson’s translation of the source poem’s opening salvo:

We cannot grasp his outlandish head,

where the eyes once ripened like apples.

But his Torso still shines like a candelabra

in which his look, turned back down

to a luminescence, lasts …

Here is Kinnell and Liebmann’s:

We never knew his stupendous head

in which the eye-apples ripened. But

his torso still glows, like a lamp,

in which his gaze, screwed back to low,

holds steady and gleams …

Now here is the first sequence of Donaldson’s poem:

His missing head is amazing. It is not for you

to know the apple of his eye, softening.

But the torso glows as by its own candlelight

with a gaze that, turned all the way down,

gathers and gleams …

And the second sequence:

The statue has no head. But without one

the remaining torso can see all around it

by a light that shines, it seems from the inside,

that fills with your gaze and then gleams with it.

The statement here about the fragmentary nature of art (in the case of the statue of Apollo’s torso, quite literal) is clear. The unfixed shapes before us – the poem and the statue – demand many interpretations and reinterpretations. If this were not enough, Donaldson also exacts a second intention with his poem – one of ventriloquism, of voice appropriation. By section IV, we find ourselves in the midst of a child’s observations about the statue (“Papa, look, here’s a funny one!/ How come he has no head? …”); by section V, we’re being led around a gallery by a slightly smug tour guide (“Oh Madam, we ask that our guests/ not touch the stone. No, not even lightly,/ and yes, even if it is already broken …”). In a way, these shifting voices tell us that, for better or for worse, art and its elucidations belong to everyone, and everyone will translate the experience of art differently. Moreover, each translation takes us further and further away from the source material, begetting whole new works, and this is in no way a bad thing.

The third section I want to touch on is Guesswork’s long poem about hockey, playfully called “Enter, PUCK.” I spotted excerpts from this piece (in slightly different versions) in the Winter 2010 issue of The Fiddlehead, and I admit I was skeptical about whether something as savage and artless as hockey could be rendered into poetry. But Donaldson proved me wrong: once again we find his well-pondered metaphors and crisp descriptive writing on display. What makes these pieces so strong is that Donaldson is unafraid to eschew an immediate correlation between his metaphors and the game in favour of a more nuanced association, one that needs to be mulled over before a connection can be made. Take, for example, these lines from “Defencemen”: “Cowboys at heart, they can circle the wagons,/ face showdowns one-on-one, grapple feisty ones/ broken loose, stare down the six-shooters.” Or take this salvo from “The Referee”: “High-strung stars drift and divide now/ on both sides of the milky firmament/ and slowly gather into mirrored symmetries.”

Whereas some parts of “Enter, PUCK” are dense and elliptical, other parts are explicitly recognizable. I’m thinking specifically of “Play-by-Play”, where Donaldson captures with uncanny precision the cadence of a TV’s commentator’s call on a hockey game:

Now here’s Cournoyer breaking in … drop pass

to Beliveau, cuts on the Short S-i-i-i-i-i-de, Ohhh …

how did Gamble get his glove on it! …

Under ten seconds to go! There’s Keon

over the line, cutting in on the wing …

Keon closing in, a scramble in front,

rebound … backhand … he Sc-o-o-o-res!

Through perfect vocabulary, alternative spellings, and well-placed line breaks, the verisimilitude of the call is incredible. The energy of the poem feeds off the energy of this excerpt.

Finally, being a born and bred PEIslander, I can’t help but touch on Donaldson’s long poem “Province House.” Having grown up in Charlottetown, I couldn’t escape having this provincial landmark in the centre of the city – with all its connotations of nation building, bourne from the impromptu meeting in 1864 of the future “Fathers of Confederation” – stamped into my small-town brain. Indeed, Charlottetown’s ruthless appropriation of this historic site for the purposes of tourism and kitsch does not seem lost on Donaldson: there are times when his poems seems fully aware of how silly the notions of regionalism or nationalism can be. In tercets, the poem summons the boozy ghost of Sir John A. MacDonald and the role he played in putting Charlottetown’s little legislature on the map.

What stands out, though, is how much Donaldson himself – or at least his speaker’s voice – does not feel like a tourist to Charlottetown. With just a few skillful brushstrokes, he captures the essence of the city’s downtown and casts vivid imagery in the reader’s mind.

In the end, Guesswork stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Palilalia as a collection of thoughtful joys and insights from a poet at the very peak of his powers. Donaldson lends a big heart and a lot of patience to these poems – and has, as a result, created something of lasting beauty. I’m anxiously looking forward to what he does next.

Review: Campfire Radio Rhapsody, by Robert Earl Stewart

There are many ways to show courage through poetry. Some poems dare to let their beauty arise through the gaps in meaning, in the lacunae they create to thwart our immediate understanding. Others dare to say something outright, to take the risk of making bold, definitive statements about some aspect of the world, to conjure that whiplash snap of recognition in the reader’s mind.

Robert Earl Stewart, in his new collection Campfire Radio Rhapsody, has both of these types of poetry covered. But what makes this book unique – and delightfully chilling – is the third type of courage it shows: the courage to process explicit acts of violence through a keen, well-honed poetic eye and then lay them bare for the reader. Whether summoning the mentality of a Siamese cat on the hunt (“I’m a 300-pound puma and I pounce/ on a rat and its intestines bloom/ from the furry cavity like a pink carnation …”) or relaying the human-wrought horror of an abattoir (“The pig screams for mercy, as the screw draws near/ busting gristle, popping skulls,/ using a brisket against flesh in an orgy/ of grinding and juice …”) Stewart is not afraid to make his readers squirm. There were times when this collection left me with an unrecognizable, inscrutable sense of unease. And I mean that as a compliment.

Stewart wears many hats in his life – he is a parent; he has worked as an editor for a small-town newspaper; he sings in a band called Waker Glass – and he brings many of these experiences to bear on his poetry. Campfire Radio Rhapsody maintains a precarious balance between its moments of explicit violence and its more implicit instances of tenderness, acting, I suppose, as a receiver for life’s more extreme ends of the spectrum.

Contrast, for example, Stewart's poem “The County Reporter” with his poem “Not Yet, Thomasin.” The former is about the everyday carnage that a small-town journalist can encounter in the line of his work. In part 2 of the poem, labeled Wave Pool, he describes with Ballardian accuracy the destruction of a car crash – “She removed some paperback novels/ and a tartan blanket dripping with kernels of windshield/ from the back seat ...” and moves on to the powerful image of a horrendous death:

And now, with your Buick glacially still

in the stifling corridors of corn, struck down

just north of the Dairy Freez, just south

of the last place you drew breath,

I snap the shot that will become synonymous

with your death: the dull grey hood rippled

in curtains of impact …

Compare this with “Not Yet, Thomasin,” a piece about the poet watching his sleeping son have a dream. It’s such an affectionate moment between father and child (but again, laced with an undercurrent of disquiet) as the speaker learns what his boy was dreaming about:

but he remembers his dream:

his little sister turning into a balloon and floating away,

and how he caught her and brought her back down

to his side

And he is not devastated by his dream’s

power … but rather, seems buoyed

by the assurance he’s gained in his ability to be

the protector; the boy who anchored his sister to the earth.

The fact that this collection can straddle so successfully two such disparate moments – one of cataclysmic devastation, one of familial innocence – speaks to the breadth of this poet’s abilities, his fearlessness in tackling a wide range of subjects along the frequency of life’s experience.

Whether unbraiding a brief anecdote or exploring a lengthy childhood memory, Stewart shows a well-groomed talent in nearly every stanza. Campfire Radio Rhapsody, with its mix of the gentle and the vicious, is full of small joys and larger meanings.

Review: The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

Oh, Stephen Fry. It takes a certain kind of genius to write a series of memoirs and still make the reader feel welcome even if he hasn’t read them in order. I’m certainly in this boat, not having encountered Fry’s earlier autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, before cracking the covers of his latest tome, The Fry Chronicles. No matter. Fry, that famed British actor, author, and exuberant ambassador of the sublimities of a life of the mind, is so adept at turning a phrase or unwinding a story that you don’t really mind the missing context. You’re in it for the roller coaster ride of his language.

The Fry Chronicles picks up where Moab left off – at the tail end of Fry’s adolescence, where he, among other things, spent time in prison for credit card fraud and is now pleading his way into a life of higher education. The memoir is framed around a fascinating conceit: each chapter and subchapter uses a word or series of words beginning with the letter C (Comedy Credits, Church and Chekhov, etc), a tipping of the hat, I suppose, to the word ‘chronicle’ or perhaps his alma mater, Cambridge, his time at which making up a significant portion of this book.

One could argue that The Fry Chronicles is a tad overwritten, but again, Fry’s love of language warrants a lot of forgiveness. Not many writers could get away with a 15-page description of a childhood addiction to candy, but Fry does it with aplomb. Or take this passage, illustrating the simple pleasure of lighting a pipe:

The sulphurous incense tingles in my nostrils as I tip the lit match at an angle over the bowl and then slowly flatten it out. Each inhalation sucks the flame downwards over the prepared tobacco which fizzes and bubbles in welcome, its moist freshness imparting a thick sweetness to the smoke. Finally, when the whole surface area is lit and just before my fingers burn, three flicks of the wrist extinguish the match. It tinkles as it hits the glass of the ashtray … I am puffing now. One, two, three, four, five draws on the pipe, smacking the lips at the side of the mouth. Each hard suck stokes up the boiler so that, on the sixth or seventh pull, I can breathe in a whole lungful.

The book details his brief period as a teacher at a private school, his time at Cambridge where he discovered his theatre bug, his early years cracking into England’s stage- and TV-acting scene, and his ascent from poorly paid participant in the highbrow arts to an increasingly wealthy player in England’s burgeoning celebrity culture. Along the way, Fry forges important relationships with the likes of Emma Thompson (clearly the most successful actor he went to school with, having gone on to win two Academy Awards), Rowan Atkinson, Douglas Adams, and all manner of behind-the-scene kingmakers in London’s TV and film industries.

Fry also gives us a window into the budding obsessions that accompany his growing wealth. Some, like his fascination with the emergence of personal computers and their various technological accoutrements, are benign and even charming. (The scenes of he and Douglas Adams getting together like teenaged boys to play with their latest high-tech acquisitions are very endearing.) But when Fry starts to purchase several cars, a house in the country as well as a flat in London, and other trinkets of grandeur, we begin to worry about him. The introduction of cocaine into his life, near the end of this memoir, becomes the obvious and ominous next step in this progression.

One criticism that I do have about The Fry Chronicles is that Fry spends too much time undermining his own celebrity in the name of self effacement. It gets dull, very quickly, to read him downplaying himself and his accomplishments in comparison to Atkinson, Thompson and others. Even the captions for the book’s photos are full of pot shots at his behaviour and self image. It’s not that all of it is unnecessary, but its disingenuous persistence does break an unspoken covenant with the reader: we clearly know Fry is a big deal – otherwise we wouldn’t be reading this book – so can’t we just leave it at that?

Another pain point for me was the ending. It’s one thing to begin the second volume of a memoir in medias res; it’s another to finish it so abruptly, and under the presumption that he will not only write a third volume, but that we will read it. The final scene in The Fry Chronicles has him snorting cocaine for the first time and then closes with this: “I did not know it but this was to mark the beginning of a new act of my life. The tragedy and farce of that drama are the material for another book. In the meantime, thank you for your company.” Needless to say, I felt a little ripped off.

Having said all that, The Fry Chronicles is, on the whole, a wonderful read and a fascinating window into the mind and life of one of England’s most appealing public figures. For my money, this autobiography holds its own with the likes of Little Wilson and Big God and Are You Somebody? two exemplars of the memoir form from the U.K.

Review: Empire Falls, by Richard Russo

I first learned of Richard Russo’s work back when I living in Korea. At the school where I taught, his novel Nobody’s Fool got passed around among the teachers faster than the flu. I remember it being a hugely funny, expansive novel full of richly drawn characters and an intricate plot – something reminiscent of the best of John Irving. The consensus seemed to be that Empire Falls was an even better book, but I’ve only now gotten around to reading it.

Empire Falls is certainly more expansive. Its central character is Miles Roby, a 42-year-old man who runs the Empire Grill in his small hometown in Maine, having turned his back on his education and a promising future 20 years earlier. Life has grown increasingly tough for Miles in the intervening decades: his wife Janine has recently left him for a much more virile man; his daughter Tick may be suffering from anorexia; his small town of Empire Falls is rapidly dying as all of the jobs move south; and Miles, forever gentle to the point of being spineless, is still beholden to the obscenely wealthy old woman who owns the diner where he works and most of the rest of the town, Mrs. Francine Whiting, whose family history is intricately tangled up with Miles’s own.

Russo is a big proponent of not only omniscient narration but also of the omniscient author: he has, like Irving, no qualms about playing God with his characters and with the entire world he creates for them. A lot of readers may find this old fashioned, but it can be a refreshing change of pace if you’ve been reading a lot of narrowly focused, minimalist fiction recently. Empire Falls is, in nearly every paragraph, a novel about the American way of life – how capitalism and the pursuit of personal success can bleed into every other crevice of existence: your family, your religion, your self image, your very humanity. Russo uses a wide canvas to paint his themes of self reliance vs. co-dependence. Empire Falls is long and tangential, regularly skirting off to provide lengthy backgrounds for secondary characters or descriptions of the history of Empire Falls itself. It’s an enriching experience to let yourself get carried off by the depths of Russo’s vision and to immerse yourself in the world he has created. It will feel infinitely real and entirely plausible.

Still, there are a number of things that undermine this book. Chief among them would be some fairly lazy, clichéd writing that Russo allows to seep throughout the text. I’ve spotted lines like “Mrs. Whiting also radiated … a sexuality that was alive and ticking,” (shouldn’t it be alive and kicking?), or “…young Zack, another apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree …” or the cringeworthy “… his head and body aches had returned with a vengeance …” These clichés are signs of an author on autopilot, a writer too preoccupied with the big picture to concern himself with the importance of making every line, every sentence fresh and original.

The other issue I had with Empire Falls is how many of the secondary characters, while richly drawn, often lack multidimensional motivations. In short, some of them are just plain evil. Miles’s father Max is a near perfect portrait of a mooch; yet he’s missing even the slightest hint of a redeeming quality. Miles’s “soon-to-be ex-wife” Janine is flawless in her vanity and self-centredness, never truly cluing in to how her ambitions are damaging those around her, and her comeuppance near the novel’s end is never in doubt. And Mrs. Whiting is like the embodiment of pure evil, to the point where we never gain access to any modicum of her humanness.

But despite these flaws, Empire Falls redeems itself in the end. As Miles finally shakes off the yoke of his weaknesses and takes action to save his daughter from an explosive tragedy at her school, Russo shows himself to be in full command of his grand vision. The novel’s multitudinous loose ends tie up in satisfying ways without coming off as contrived. You walk away from Empire Falls feeling like the author has given you a portal into an entire world, one that had a grand design behind it the entire time.

Review: The Italian Girl, by Iris Murdoch

As I pointed out last year in my review of her novel The Black Prince, I came to Iris Murdoch’s work with a completely unwarranted perception of it –unwarranted because I had hitherto read exactly nothing by her. Something about it being dry, prim and claustrophobically British. Of course, The Black Prince blew the wheels off that prejudice, and her 1964 novel, The Italian Girl, does it again. I’m not sure where I acquired my stupid bias of her work, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong. Iris Murdoch was one of the cheekiest and most daring writers of the 20th century.

The Italian Girl is a marvel for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it takes a premise that is easily one of the most clichéd in literary fiction and makes it fresh and new again. Her straight-laced and teetotalling protagonist Edmund Narraway has just returned to the home of his estranged family following the death of his mother, Lydia, and while there confronts all manner of strife conjured up by his bizarre kin and troubled past. How many novels and short stories have we seen built upon this exact narrative basis? Yet Murdoch knocks the cliché onto its boot heels by eschewing the dour, introspective tone we’d expect for a biting, caustic humour, and by plotting the relationships between her characters so carefully.

The stand-out here is Edmund’s brother Otto, a stonemason who has descended into alcoholism (a fact revealed, hilariously, during Lydia’s funeral, when he explodes into an inappropriate laughing fit), a force of nature in the household, a man with large appetites and a tenuous grasp on reality. As one character describes him: “He’s primitive, gross. Otto’s the sort of man who’ll pee into a washbasin even if there’s a lavatory beside him.” Edmund soon learns that Otto is cheating on his neurotic wife Isabel with a promiscuous young girl named Elsa, who is the [correction - sister] of Otto’s apprentice, David. This fact leaves the prudish Edmund thoroughly aghast – but oh, if only it ended there. It is soon revealed that Isabel, by way of strange irony, is cheating on Otto with David. If that were not enough, poor Edmund also learns that his niece Flora, the daughter of Otto and Isabel, is also having a love affair with David, and in fact has fallen pregnant by him. If that were not enough, Edmund, against his reserved and conservative nature, finds himself sexually attracted to Flora, and is manipulated into helping her acquire the abortion she so desperately needs. And if that were not enough, there is also the question of Lydia’s will and how much of the old lady’s vast estate she has left to whom.

The centrepiece character in this grand farce is, of course, the “Italian girl” of the title, a woman named Maria 'Maggie’ Magistretti, the household’s long-time servant and nursemaid to Lydia. She is nearly an anonymous presence in the house, and just one in a long line of indistinguishable Italian girls employed to help Lydia raise Edmund and Otto when they were small. And yet, Murdoch grants her the best bird’s-eye view of all the machinations and back-stabbing going on as the novel unfolds. It is strongly suggested that Maggie, in fact, had had, at some point, a lesbian affair with Lydia. This should make the novel’s big reveal at the end – exactly whom Lydia has left her wealth to – contrived and predictable. But it doesn’t. Murdoch is so skilled with her humour, with her nuances, with her pacing, and with her keen sense of story, that we allow this novel to lead us anywhere we want to go.

The Italian Girl is a masterstroke of setting up an expectation of predictability and then knocking it askew in sublime, delightful ways. Even the novel’s theme – the redeeming bonds of family, the conflict between obligation and rational self interest – is handled expertly and in fresh ways. This novel reveals a consummate professional at the very height of her powers. It’s an entertaining read, through and through.

Back home

Well, vacation is over and I've safely returned to the ensconcements of my Toronto routines. England was lovely - 11 days of travelling around London, Oxford and Manchester seeing the sites and taking in the fun and beverages all around us. Highlights including watching a Tom Stoppard play in London, visiting the International Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester, visiting the British Museum, pretty much all of Oxford, and drinking at least three or four pints of proper English ale every night. Oh, and Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolates. Yes yes, I know we can get them over here, but they're not the same, I swear. The milk is different over there, or something.

Speaking of addictions, I had a little run-in with a wonderful condiment called clotted cream. It's supposed to be eaten on scones but I was prone to munching the stuff clean off the knife. Considering it's about 60% pure fat, I'm glad I was able to leave it behind.

There were shockingly few developments waiting for me upon my return, I'm disappointed to say. But I'm looking forward to getting back into the grind: working on a new essay as well as some poems and some reviews. Will keep you all posted if there's any news.

M.