Reminder: Reading tonight at Type Books in Toronto

Just a friendly reminder that I'll be reading at Type Books on Queen Street tonight from 6 until 8 pm, along with RR and Jeff Bursey. Please come out if you can make - there will be cookies! (Plus literature.)

M.

Conclusion: The Co-habitational Reading Challenge

So both RR and I finished our rereading of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany at the tail-end of last week as part of our Co-habitational Reading Challenge. While we both still consider the book a delightful romp and one of the great treasures of our young(er) reading years, we have to say that the book does totally fall apart in the second half or so. I suppose it’s a testament to how much you used to love a book that you’d go about giving it such a hard ride upon rereading it.

For me, the book began to resemble, around the second half or so, a rather large and cumbersome piece of IKEA furniture as I began to wonder whether Irving would end up with a bunch of unused pieces left over and whether he’d be able to tighten up all the screws by the last chapter. Sadly, there are a lot of dangling, unfulfilled or at least unsatisfying aspects to the end of this long, long novel. For one, I didn’t feel like I got enough closure on the mysteries of John’s mother’s life – her clandestine singing career and the secrets behind who John’s father actually was. I also felt really disappointed in the way the character of Hester – John’s sexually precocious cousin – just sort of disintegrates: she spends pretty much the entire second half of the novel vomiting, and then she becomes a famous musician. Huh? What? How did that happen?

RR and I both agreed that the more spiritual-mystical elements of Owen Meany got really out of hand the longer the novel went on. The earlier examples of it – like when Owen is convinced he is an instrument of God after accidentally killing John’s mother with a baseball, or when Owen sees his own name and date of death on a tombstone while playing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in a stage production of A Christmas Carol – all had natural, secular explanations to coincide with them. (The baseball thing was just a freak accident; Owen was suffering from a massive fever when he had his vision about his death.) But by the time Rev. Merrill begins speaking in Owen’s voice near the end of the novel, well, I was convinced that Irving had pretty much jumped the shark.

Thankfully, our disappointments in the novel have been tempered by our love of the first half, which is sweet and touching, so full of richly drawn characters and packed with some laugh-out-loud hilarity. “We’ll always have the Christmas pageant,” will be, I think, our mantra when we think back on this experience.

Anyway, this was a fun (if time-consuming) exercise and well worth the effort. We loved doing it, but also love the idea of getting back to our regular reading schedules. If you have any thoughts on Owen Meany, by all means drop us a comment. Or better yet, if you’re in the Toronto area, come out this Thursday (August 25) to Type Books on Queen Street West at 6pm and tell us in person: RR and I will be doing a reading there with PEI author Jeff Bursey. We’d love to see you if you can make it.

M.

Update on our Co-habitational Reading Challenge

So if you’re been following along on RR’s blog, you can see that she’s already posted some wonderful stuff about our discussions of A Prayer for Owen Meany, which we’re rereading simultaneously. We had great fun going over the hilarious Christmas pageant scene last night, which to my mind is one of the funniest passages in all of American literature. (Pages 214 to 220 in the standard paperback edition, for those of you interested.) We’ve also discussed other comical moments involving the maids at the Wheelwrights’ place as well as the diminutive authority Owen seems to wield over his parents.

As RR touched on, one thing that continues to impress about this book is the fluidity and skillfulness that Irving shows in the structuring of time. I suppose with a 617-page novel, you have lots of room to manoeuvre between the past and present, but it still isn’t easy. Irving is excellent at giving each scene a cadence and crescendo that is then counterbalanced perfectly with a sudden jump – either forwards or backwards –in the timeline. He never once waivers in his trust of the reader that he or she is capable of following along.

Like with most things I read, I do have the occasional criticism. Beyond the minor plot contrivances that RR alluded to in her post, there are times when I feel like some characters don’t always act like real people. Chief Pike’s obsession with finding the baseball that killed John’s mother seems like a bit of a strain; it was clearly a freak accident, so why treat it so fanatically like a ‘murder’? Also, Owen’s mother’s space cadet-like behaviour – the fact that she almost never leaves her house, almost never speaks, never looks out her windows, never even makes eye contact with people – isn’t really believable. Also, I wonder if the last name of Dan - the man who provides love, support and guidance to John after his mother days - is a bit too obvious: Needham.

But nitpickery aside, we’re having a real blast rereading this big, fat, funny novel from our youth. Stay tuned to our blogs over next few days for more discussion points. And if you’re reading along at home (or if you and your housemate are reading a different book simultaneously) , drop a comment below and let us know your thoughts.

M.

Event: Reading at Type Books in Toronto

I know this has been making the rounds on a bunch of different websites, but I thought I'd mention it here as well: RR and I will be reading at Type Books in Toronto, along with PEI novelist Jeff Bursey, on August 25th.

I met Jeff briefly about 10 years ago while I was home on the Island, and he contacted me out of the blue a couple of months ago to ask if I'd read with him while he was in town. His novel, called Verbatim, is set in the legislature of an unnamed Atlantic province. There will apparently be a bit of theatre accompanying Jeff's reading, which RR and I will be participating in, so it should be loads of fun.

Anyway, here are the details:

Where: Type Books, 883 Queen St. West, Toronto.
When: Thursday, August 25 from 6 until 8 pm.
Who: Mark Sampson, Rebecca Rosenblum and Jeff Bursey
How much: Free, but naturally we encourage you to buy the authors' books.

I did want to mention that, contrary to the marketing materials making the rounds about this event, I'll most likely read a scene from the new novel. It won't be the same excerpt I've read at recent events in Toronto, Perth and Moncton (and subsequently published here, in a literary journal out of Manitoba called The Quint, back in the spring), but something new. I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am.

M.

Review: Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, by Stuart Ross

Many writers attempt to find the absurd in the tragic, but few are able to translate their efforts into something highly, compulsively readable. Stuart Ross, in his new novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, certainly gives us a healthy dose of tragedy: his protagonist, Ben, a Jewish performance artist in Toronto, has lost both his parents to cancer, has a brother with a brain injury that has ruined his short- and long-term memory, and is constantly followed by the spectre of anti-Semitism. The absurdity is there, too – Ross’s trademark surrealism, including multiple conversations with actress Kim Novak about her role in the film Vertigo. But what makes Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew stand out is how its small, episodic scenes create a page-turning tension using the subtlest of narrative arcs: Ben is consumed with finding out whether a memory he has – that of his mother assassinating a prominent neo-Nazi – actually happened.

What struck me about this novel is how much it reminded of the works of PEI short story writer, poet and playwright J.J. Steinfeld. In both Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew and the majority of Steinfeld’s oeuvre, we find not so much direct survivor guilt over the Holocaust but rather guilt from the children of Holocaust survivors, the difficulty those children have of facing up to (and finding meaning in) a reality that could perpetrate such a mind-boggling atrocity. Indeed, Ben’s ability to spot random absurdity in the everyday seems to stem from his awareness of the grandest absurdity of all – the Holocaust itself. A friend’s mother is born with a debilitating deformity; his brother’s brain condition prevents him from recognizing the women he loves; a childhood bully terrorizes Ben for reading a book for pleasure. Everyone, it seems, is susceptible to the random cruelties of a random universe.

What’s interesting is the way the novel balances this randomness with Ben’s religio-cultural background. On the one hand, he is very aware of the role that God and religion play in his self identity – he has a bar mitzvah, he celebrates Jewish holidays, etc.; but on the other hand, you get the sense that Ben ultimately believes in none of it, believes that there is nothing beyond this one crack at existence that we are all given. This is typified in a scene where he describes a story he learns at Hebrew school about 12 rabbis who face a painful, brutal death when they refuse to reject their beliefs. As Ben puts it:

We were halfway through the story of the Twelve Rabbis when I started feeling really guilty. I imagined walking home from school one day, and getting cornered by some Christian boys. I pictured them wearing Boy Scout outfits. They say to me, Ben, give up your Jewish god and become Christian like us, or we’ll kill you right now. I think of potato latkes and jelly fruit slices … and of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed and telling me how all her aunts and uncles were killed by Hitler, and of my father slathering horseradish upon his lump of gefilte fish at the Passover Seder, and of my mother getting pelted with snowballs because she’s four years old and she speaks Yiddish. Then I think of being dead. Nothing happens when you’re dead, and you’re not even aware that nothing is happening, because you’re dead.

The juxtaposition here of an inherited Jewishness with an atheistic creed is startling.

But if it all sounds a bit depressing and ghastly, rest assured that it is not. Ross approaches these heady matters with an astounding sense of whimsy and humour. It’s wholly apt that his protagonist is a performance artist: what better way to express the comically arbitrary nature of life than through performances that are designed to exclude a grander sense of ‘meaning’? (As Ben says about his father’s reaction to his art: “He had no idea what I was doing – he was sure it was supposed to mean something and he was a simple man … ‘Whatever response you have is the correct response,’ I told him. ‘It’s not a matter of what I’m trying to say, but of what you get out of it.’”) Ben’s exhibits are, in one sense, typical of performance art: in one show, he eats a thousand donuts; in another, he submerges himself in a vat of ketchup and allows the audience to pull his hair; in another, he travels to Yellowknife to build inukshuks out of eggrolls. But it is that sense of playfulness, that child-like desire to express oneself as the universe spins around us, that makes both Ben’s personality and his art come to life.

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew offers, in the end, no pat answers or solutions to the questions it raises. (Indeed, the sole plot point, that of whether Ben’s mother actually killed a Nazi, is never really resolved.) Instead, it simply gives us something deeper to ponder: the question of purpose, and the purpose of questioning. Perhaps there is no grander arc of meaning to the universe, but Ross is telling us that that’s okay. The artist’s job is to help us find patterns in the randomness. To find humour. To find beauty.

Introducing the Co-habitational Reading Challenge

So as many of you probably know, RR and I moved in together back in the spring. One of the things we did to cement our undying love and commitment was to painstakingly combine our huge personal libraries. While this has resulted in a massive wall of books now taking up the entire length of our living room, it did have the interesting side effect of producing a whole box’s worth of doubles. (This also included some double CDs –two copies of Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, for example. Don’t judge me.) Now, while we have managed to give away most of the double books, one copy that has persisted is A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. My theory is that everyone who is literate already owns a copy of this book, and therefore it's been virtually impossible to fob off to somebody else.

So we’ve decided to use this opportunity to introduce the Co-habitational Reading Challenge. We will both be reading Owen Meany at the same time, and use our respective blogs to post our conversations and insights on the text. Don’t be surprised if this reminds you a little of the Retro Reading Challenge I ran on the blog last year. It’s very similar in nature – we each read Owen Meany when we were younger (she was about 17; I was about 24) and absolutely loved it, and we’re curious to see if it holds up after all these years.

Naturally if you’d like to participate, we totally encourage you to do so. You can either read Owen Meany along with us or you and your co-habitational life partner can choose another book to read simultaneously and then pop back to our blogs and let us know how it’s coming along.

Review: Dog Eat Rat, by Tom Walmsley

There is something to be said about the beauty of concision. Tom Walmsley knows the power of the minimal, the insight and illumination it can bring to a reader’s mind. In his new novel, Dog Eat Rat, Walmsley composes scenes of incredible tightness, a ruthlessly stripped-down approach to action, dialogue and characterization. It’s a fitting style for this book, considering that his protagonist, Trip, while a private eye during the day, writes haiku in his off hours. This is a novel that knows the art of conveying very much with very little.

Dog Eat Rat is, in many ways, a parody of a hard-boiled detective story; and Trip is, in many ways, a deliberately stereotyped P.I., replete with a fucked-up life and all manner of self-destructive behaviour. The novel tells the tale of an exceedingly dysfunctional love triangle Trip has with two women: a fellow investigator named Ginger (and yes, for the record, she is a redhead) and a young woman named Suzi, who is looking to cast off her dull office job and break in to the P.I. business with Trip and Ginger’s help.

The investigation that sits at the centre of the plot is like nothing you’ll find in any typical detective novel. Trip and Ginger are hired by a man named George DeWitt to spy on his wife Rebecca, whom DeWitt suspects is cheating on him. However, he is not interested in catching her in the act so much as he is interesting in finding out what Rebecca’s paramour does with her in bed so that he, DeWitt, can become a better lover and keep her satisfied. (To be fair, this concept may stretch plausibility to a breaking point for some readers.) What results is a convoluted meshing of sexual and emotional entanglements among the novel’s primary characters: Trip and Rebecca hook up, Suzi goes after Dewitt, etc. etc. etc.

Dog Eat Rat is, as the title suggests, a story about messing around with life’s food chain – in this case, the emotional and sexual food chain between characters who are just barely holding themselves together. Walmsley scrapes clean any inclination he has towards sentimentality and shows the raw, unwashed consequences that come from fucking around with the natural order of relationships. The novel, in its own minimalist way, dabbles with bigger questions – like the existence of God and the slippery nature of fidelity, both to one’s self and to others – but Walmsley is driven by a near relentless obsession with keeping his prose tight, his action lean, and his themes hidden from our immediate view.

I have to admit, though, that the novel did fall apart a little bit for me in the last third. While I appreciate the aloofness of the writing, in the end I had to ask myself what was at stake in this story other than the sexual gratification of its characters. (In that sense, it reminded me a little of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, where the broader ideas are obscured by the characters’ need to simply get off.) Walmsley, at times, keeps a little too much below the surface; he severs the connection between sex and the bigger things he’s trying to examine.

But overall, Dog Eat Rat is an exhilarating read and a disturbing take on a well-established genre of fiction. There are scenes here I will turn back to over and over for the lessons they teach about the magic of brevity, about how to convey a whole world – deliciously imagined – through just a few lines.