Review: More in Anger, by J. Jill Robinson

Fiction should never have a thesis. It should never hold an ax to grind, possess an agenda, or otherwise set to prove or disprove a hypothesis. When an author starts out on the creative path, he or she may have a ensemble of characters, an undercurrent of theme, perhaps a smattering of plot, but any interstitial value beyond these should arise organically out of the writing. A work of fiction should have a life force of its own, beyond even what its author wants for it. The creation of fiction should be as much an act of discovery for the writer as it is the reader; and an author undermines this tenet when she uses fiction to get a very narrow and inflexible point across.

I kept thinking about this as I read J. Jill Robinson’s debut novel, More in Anger – a book that does have a clear-cut argument at its root, and is much the lesser for it. The novel’s triptych structure presents us with the lives of three generations of women from the same family—Opal, Pearl and Vivien. The book sets out to show how anger and cruelty can be passed almost like a gene from mother to daughter granddaughter, and that this anger can be blamed on a single source: a deeply engrained patriarchy. This you can glean from the jacket flap. But while all three protagonists have the potential to be fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters, Robinson never allows them to escape the narrowly defined agenda she has set for them. She constructs each woman as if she were a mechanized toy, then winds her up and sets her off on her predetermined path.

The weakest of the three sections is the first. Opal is born in the late 1800s, and when More in Anger opens, in 1915, she is about to embark on a marriage to a young lawyer for CPR named James “Mac” Macaulay. Opal is both incredibly vain and breathtakingly naïve, and is thus caught flatfooted when Mac reveals his temper and misogyny after they are wed. Robinson wants to jar her 21st century audience with Mac’s ejaculations of ‘shut your trap’ (a well-selected anachronism from the period) and his opinions on female intelligence – too stupid to drive, too stupid to vote, etc etc – and how their place should be restricted to the home. Unable to penetrate the sarcophagus of Mac’s taciturn nature, Opal takes out her womanly frustrations on her children, particularly her moody, brooding daughter Pearl.

Yet there are some inconsistencies of character here. At one point, Mac implausibly purchases for Opal a fully furnished family home – complete with tea towels in the kitchen –  and she predictably unhinges at him because she won’t be able to decorate it itself. Mac’s act of gross insensitivity comes off like a false note because Robinson makes it clear he is a man who believes in clear boundaries between men and women’s roles. Why would he go to such pains to interfere in what he clearly sees as a woman’s domain if he’s such a traditional patriarch? The answer, I think, is that Robinson wants to make sure we know what a jerk he is, since this is a key component of the section’s thesis. It doesn’t seem to occur to Robinson that this isn’t likely something that someone like Mac would actually do.

The second section belongs to Opal’s now-grown daughter Pearl, who is driven to an almost psychopathic hysteria by the patriarchy that floats in the air around her. She hates her mother and everything her life represents. She grows to hate her husband. She hates her children. She hates that fact that she has children, that society made her have them rather than pursue her dream of being a teacher. She eventually goes back to school and becomes a teacher, and then hates her students and the drudgery of the job. She is in a perpetual state of suspicion and rage against everyone around her.

Now I’m not all that concerned that Pearl isn’t a sympathetic character, since I put little value on “sympathizing” with a character – that’s just not how I read. I’m not even ready to accuse her of being unrealistic. Even at her most enraged, I still bought into her as a fully formed person. (Her relentless fury and paranoia even reminded me of an ex-girlfriend or two.) But my beef with Pearl is the lack of nuance to her character. She seems to have a very myopic view on the world, and this again doesn’t strike me as organic. Rather, she’s a pawn in Robinson’s broader argument, and to give her a bit of shading would undermine what the book wants to accomplish.

The strongest section is the final one, where Pearl’s daughter Vivien takes centre stage. She is complicated and far more developed than her predecessors, and Robinson’s prose is much livelier in this section. Vivien ruminates on the complexity of her relationship with Pearl, and even tips her hat to her grandmother Opal’s experiences and how this lineage has shaped her own life. Yet the last 10 pages, in which Pearl has passed away and Vivien tries to make some sense of her mother’s existence, read like a bland summing-up, a reiterating of some underlying hypothesis. It’s like Vivien is saying, “Relationships between mothers and daughters sure are difficult,” and we as readers are there to simply nod and stroke our chins, since this is what the novel has been telling us all along.

In the end, More in Anger makes for a dull and uninspired read. Its trajectory holds no mystery, is never in doubt; its themes are decided for us; its “point” is hermetically sealed and does not allow readers to bring anything of their own to it. It’s almost like we don’t even need to be there. It’s almost like the jacket flap does all our work for us.              

Review: The Rise and Fall of Communism, by Archie Brown (Unfinished)

 I can’t do a full review of this book, obviously, because I never finished reading it, nor do I intend to. I spotted this book last summer in England when I was there on vacation and was very interested in it. But rather than picking up the cheap mass market paperback at the time, I waited until I got back to Canada and found out that it was available only in hardback here.

I should have saved my money. While Brown’s examination of the history of international communism has its obvious model—William Shirer’s far superior The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—it possesses none of the narrative drive and small details that make the geopolitics in that previous tome come to life. Instead of sharing what the real impacts of communism were (and still are) on real people, Brown mires us in page after page of pointless backroom dealings and back-stabbings that defined various communist regimes. He relies too heavily on the long lens, the bird’s-eye view of history, rather than the nitty gritty. He’s crafted a relentlessly dull narrative as a result. Reading this book, I found myself wanting to know such things as: What did Chairman Mao eat during his visit to Moscow in 1949? What was children’s television programming like in Poland in 1972? What was typical day in the life of a North Korean in 1985? I gave up when it became clear the book was not going to provide that kind of detail.

Regardless of whatever long-tail approach a work of popular history takes on its subject matter, it still needs to be filled with engaging people living through the clear and minute realities of that history. Brown’s book—at least the first 274 pages I managed to get through—was severely lacking. I wish I had my $39.95 back.

Side note:

Sorry it’s been so quiet on the blog over the last few weeks, especially since the announcement last month of my big news. All I can say is things have been quite (but wonderfully) busy around here, especially with the new book coming out and with all the awesome plans for the wedding later this summer. But I'll try to post more often - I promise!

Acceptance: Dundurn Press

It is with tremendous joy (and a great deal of relief!) that I can finally announce to the world that Toronto's Dundurn Press has accepted for publication my new novel, Sad Peninsula, set for release in the spring of 2014. The manuscript, completed about a year ago, has been under consideration with the press since September, and I received and signed the contract earlier this week.

Sad Peninsula, set in South Korea, explores two interconnected stories: that of a former Korean “comfort woman” named Eun-young, a sex slave from the Japanese occupation who struggles with her past of rape and violence; and that of Michael, a troubled young Canadian arriving in Korea to teach ESL, whose principles and humanity are tested by Seoul’s seedy expatriate underbelly. An excerpt of the novel was published about a year ago in the literary journal The Quint, which you can read here.

Dundurn Press is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Traditionally known for its nonfiction, the press has been building out its literary fiction line over the last number of years and I'm very excited to be working with the talented editor Shannon Whibbs. Dundurn published more than 100 books last year, running the gamut from military histories and memoirs to literary novels, YA books and mysteries. By sheer volume of annual titles, it's one of the largest publishers in Canada.

So stay tuned here to the blog for more details as they develop. Needless to say, I'm very excited and will be screaming this news to the rafters in the coming weeks and months.

M.

Review: Attack of the Copula Spiders, by Douglas Glover

Writing manuals fall into two general categories: those that teach you how to write from the tip of your pen and those that teach you how to write by showing you how writers should process and function in the world around them. The most extreme case of the former would, I suppose, be Strunk and White’s seminal The Elements of Style, and an example of the latter would be something like Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction. Both are dedicated to helping writers improve their craft; but one works at strengthening the sheer technique that occurs at the writer’s point of contact with the page, while the other works to help the writer understand what she must do (or become, or witness) before she can even begin to write.

While Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders straddles both of these camps in certain essays, his allegiances remain with good writing that comes via the tip of the pen. In both the title essay and the bluntly named “How to Write a Novel” and “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” Glover offers a clinical approach to strengthening works of fiction at the level of the sentence. His sortie on the verb “to be” in “Attack of the Copula Spiders” is particularly brilliant: he shows how overusing of this verb and its variants (is, was, am, etc) can really weaken a work of fiction and make it appear devoid of any legitimate action. By identifying these verbs and coming up with alternatives, any writer can introduce more forward momentum to his or her prose.

Glover also dissects thematic patterning, plot structures and dialogue writing, and introduces a nifty explanation of sentence-level conflict or tension called the “but-construction.” A lot of this is highly technical and may be somewhat off-putting to the novice writer just starting to learn elements of the craft. But for those who feel ready to graduate from, say, Jack Hodgins’ A Passion for Narrative or Stephen King’s On Writing, then Attack of the Copula Spiders can provide a more in-depth look at how writers plan, structure, write and improve their fiction.

To counterbalance the highly technical side of the book, Glover has also included some thoughtful essays on the works of Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, Leon Rooke and others. The pieces examine these writers’ works at the level of craft, getting under the hoods of some excellent writing to show us exactly how they function. It was interesting to read his essay on Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” very shortly after I read K.D Miller’s brilliant piece on Munro in the most recent issue of CNQ. The differences between these two explorations typify what I mean by the writing-from-the-tip-of-the-pen-versus-not mentioned above. Glover is concerned more with the minutiae of Munro’s craft, the small devices that elucidate meaning, the turns of phrase, and the way the time sequences in the story are so carefully layered. While Miller’s essay also covers many of these things, she’s more interested in taking a bird’s-eye view of Munro’s feats—that is, the type of person Munro needs to be in order to write this kind of emotive, empathetic and highly charged fiction. Miller is concerned more with the soul of the writer; Glover is concerned more with what happens below the writer’s wrists. The two essays are wonderful complements to each other.        

If I had one criticism of Attack of the Copula Spiders—if this even counts as a criticism—it’s that many of the excellent technical bits that Glover provides often lack concrete examples from the world of literature. I often found myself wanting to write “For instance?” in the margins of the book, especially during the “How to Write a Short Story” essay, where there is a paucity of quotes from canonical short stories that would help illustrate the (very fine) points Glover is making. If Attack of the Copula Spiders shares a kinship with any one writing manual, it would be James Wood’s How Fiction Works; but whereas Wood appears to have the entire body of English literature at his fingertips, serving up examples hand over fist, Glover seems sometimes to limit his examples to just a handful of books in any particular section. Often, these examples come from his own works of fiction.

But this doesn’t detract much from the overall value of Attack of the Copula Spiders as a resource for both intermediate and experienced authors. It can hold its own with any of the writing manuals mentioned above, and is as rich and engaging as they come. Glover is a pro and well worth paying attention to.  

Review: No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems, by Bruce Taylor

In his luminous and bewitching new collection of poetry, Bruce Taylor uses his artistic eye to find the big worlds contained within little things. In a suite of 30 new pieces that complement a selection of older work going back nearly 25 years, Taylor examines the macro complexities that exist inside small, everyday objects or experiences.

The title of the collection, No End in Strangeness, comes from the second poem in the book, a long piece called “Little Animals” (“And there is no end to them,/ no end in numbers,/ and no end in strangeness/ no end to their appetites…”) where Taylor writes about the clockwork machinations of scientific exploration and the bodily richness one finds in the animal world. The poem begins with

That old book has a million moving parts,
and when you open it to look inside,
they all spill out, like the escapement
from a sproinged clock,
spelling up the life and correspondence
of a Dutch cloth merchant called van Leeuwenhoek

and goes on to obsessively track the minutiae that connects the visceral discoveries of biology with the automations of the machine. This could be a metaphor for Taylor’s book as a whole. Indeed, this obsession with the small permeates many of these poems: from the glimpse the poet gets of his own heart in “Echocardiogram” to the experiment of growing mold in the opening piece “Nature”, the poet provides us with a window into the hidden worlds that surround us all.

Taylor is also adept at painting a picture of human behaviour inside a framed microcosm of experience. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a flame war on the Internet will recognize their ordeals in “Entities”, where the narrator goes online to get some simple gardening advice on tomatoes and finds himself embroiled in, among other things, mudslinging about the US Civil War. The dynamic is as hilarious as it is apt.

Not every poem in the collection worked for me. Sometimes the subject of a piece warranted a tighter, more concise execution, and a few of the poems—especially “Our Things”, a poetic personification of everyday objects—felt a tad overwritten.

As for the older poems in the selection, while they don’t hold together with as much of a common theme as the newer poems do, there are still some real gems here that stand on their own. I’m thinking specifically of “Tackle”, a beautifully descriptive romp through a fisherman’s box of lures, and “March 1”, a meditation on both time and Time as the author turns 35.

Taylor’s gifts are apparent in nearly every poem—a keen eye, a talent for metaphor, and a quiet, understated ability to lift an object up to get a view of its fascinating underbelly. No End in Strangeness will provide the reader with no end in treasure.

Reminder: Reading tomorrow night in St. Catharines

Just a reminder that I'll be reading, along with RR, tomorrow night in St. Catharines as part of the Virus Reading Series. Here are the specific details:

Where: MahTay Cafe, 241 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines
When: Tuesday, May 8 2012, at  7:30 pm.

Hope to see you there!

M.

Three poems in This magazine

I'm very happy to report that the new issue of This magazine has landed on newsstands, and inside you'll find three poems by yours truly. The issue also contains poems by Helen Guri, a piece on new ways bosses can screw you, and lots of other delightful stuff. Go check it out.