Review: Tarcadia, by Jonathan Campbell

I first learned of Tarcadia after reading and reviewing an anthology that its publisher, Gaspereau Press, put out in 2007, which included an excerpt from Campbell’s novel. His was one of the stand-out pieces in that collection, and so I jumped at the chance to buy his book when I found it in a used bookshop in Charlottetown while home on vacation last summer.

Before I praise Campbell’s writing further – and there is much to praise about it– I do want to get one negative comment out of the way first. This novel suffers from what I have come to call “drowned brother syndrome”, a trope that keeps cropping up in numerous works of Canadian fiction. It has become a running gag in our household whenever I discover yet another Canadian novel that uses a beloved brother drowning in a lake, or a river, or the ocean, as a kind of quick-and-dirty shorthand to imbue one’s protagonist with an air of tragedy. To his credit, Campbell creates a unique twist on this trope by the end of his book, but I nonetheless groaned after reading Tarcadia’s opening sentence.

Now. Despite the dour presence of this “drowned brother” premise – and it is present throughout the narrative, as Campbell chooses to tip his hand on the first page and then work backwards from there – what we find in his prose are sentences that hum with both keen observations and startling humour. The story, set in Sydney, Cape Breton in 1974, details the life of 13-year-old Michael and his older brother Sid, who build a raft out of scraps they find around Sydney harbour and use it to sail around that town’s polluted tar ponds. This crafty invention provides the boys with a much needed refuge from the various trials of life: their parents’ crumbling marriage, looming concerns over their own academic performance at school, and the precarious economic outlook of Cape Breton itself.

The literary allusion here is obvious: this is an homage to Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist of which builds his own raft in order to hide away from some difficult truths emanating from the adult world. But Campbell’s book is also uniquely Cape Breton in its focus, uniquely Sydney. My own father’s side of the family is from there and I made annual visits to the place as a child, so I’m well aware of the details Campbell captures of its culture and its struggles. The steel plant, coal mines, and other sources of industrial wealth can both give and take away; and the families who choose to stay there must live in acceptance of the region’s economic vicissitudes. This is the biggest metaphor in Tarcadia: Michael and Sid’s raft is cobbled together by what the place throws away. “Salvage rights” is a term that crops up numerous times in the story, and it could be a summation of Sydney. It could be an alternative title for this novel.

What sometimes feels missing from Tarcadia, however, is a solid plot. Beyond the framing structure of the “drowned brother” incident, there isn’t really a cohesive narrative arc that holds the book together. Consequently we get what seems like a very episodic story, with the episodes varying in degrees of quirkiness. There is a scene in which the family’s kitchen table collapses right at the start of Christmas dinner, acting as a harbinger of doom. There’s a car accident that nearly kills a young girl. There’s that time Sid went away to cadet camp and came back with stories to tell.

Thankfully, Campbell’s writing is so lively, so fresh and humorous, that we never find ourselves bored even as these narrative installments don’t quite cohere. For a book that reveals its main plot point on the first page, Tarcadia comes with a surprising amount of tension. What’s more, you will no doubt want to live vicarious through the boys’ many sails across the tar ponds as they seek out a life of adventure for themselves.  

Publication: The Puritan

So I'm very chuffed to announce that I've got a piece included in the Winter 2016 edition of The Puritan literary journal, published earlier today. Specifically, it's a lengthy book review of three new-ish titles, all centred around the functions and disfunction's of sleep: Sleep, by Nino Ricci, Bright Eyed, by R.M. Vaughan, and Assembling the Morrow, by Sandra Huber. The first is a novel, the second is a book-length personal essay, and the third is a hybrid scholarly tract and book of poetry.

The issue is also jam-packed with a number of great writers, including Shane Neilson, Emily Shultz, Matthew J. Trafford, and others. I'm really looking forward to tucking into this one, and I hope you are as well.

M.

Review: Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope

Never underestimate the allure of symbolism, the gravitational tug of a good analogical image. This is our chief takeaway from Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel Safekeeping, a book steeped in Judaism, a religion and culture deeply reliant on the symbolic, on age-old images.

Hope actually employs two emblematic devices in her story: the first is a kibbutz called Sadot Hadar, where the majority of Safekeeping is set. Hope frames her kibbutz as a symbol for, and miniaturized parallel of, the state of Israel itself. Sadot Hadar has survived for decades as a socialist commune in the truest sense, but one, like Israel itself, under constant threat from the forces of change.

The second symbol is a centuries-old brooch, brought to the kibbutz in 1994 by a drug addict from New York City named Adam. The brooch in his possession is ancient and gorgeously crafted, and is probably meant to represent Jewish culture as a whole. Adam has come to Sadot Hadar for the sort of reason that only makes sense in overly self-conscious “literary” fiction: he wants to deliver this brooch, which belonged to his now-dead grandfather, to a woman named Dagmar, an old flame that his grandfather had on the kibbutz in the 1940s. The fact that she will show no interest in taking the brooch from Adam proves to be no deterrent, as this gesture will hold the key to his much-needed redemption.

Along the way, Hope introduces us to a passing cast of supporting characters: Ulya, a citizen of the recently dismantled Soviet Union looking to escape to America; Ofir, the aspiring musician turned Israeli soldier who is wounded in a terrorist attack on a bus; Claudette, the Catholic from Canada who has found herself mixed up in life on the kibbutz; and Ziva, the wise old woman who holds the secret to Adam’s desperate, intercontinental endeavour.

Safekeeping’s biggest strength is its meticulous research and keen eye toward describing life on a kibbutz. Hope has obviously immersed herself in the finer details of this culture, and she writes about them with confidence and passion. She has also done a superb job of rendering the zeitgeist of 1994: the internet and cellular telephones are barely a presence; people listen to Walkmans (though perhaps “Discman” would have been better); and the image of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn is a recurrent one. As well, the character of Adam, despite his lack of a plausible motivation, is deeply compelling. His love for his grandfather and his need to salvage some hope for his life is palpable in every scene he’s in.

The other characters, unfortunately, are not nearly as well drawn. I felt throughout the book a certain distance from Claudette and Ofir and the others, as if their emotional worlds were not nearly as accessible. This was a strange feeling, considering there were times when Safekeeping felt desperately overwritten, as if too much character detail was included that didn’t quite cohere to the grander structure of the novel. Each member of the cast of supporting characters felt, to a certain degree, in a state of desperation (and what is the state of Israel, really, except a state in a constant state of desperation), but it just felt like Adam’s situation was privileged over the others.

Still, there’s much to love about this well-crafted novel. Safekeeping skirts right up to the border of sentimentality without crossing over it. And the highly symbolic motifs – the brooch, the kibbutz, the Holocaust, Israel itself – never feel too obvious, and work really well together. For those interested in Jewish, and especially kibbutz, culture, this book will prove, for the most part, a satisfying read.

Review: Myra Breckinridge, by Gore Vidal

I must admit, I am a real sucker for a “voice” novel. From Huck Finn to Money, from The Colour Purple to Everything Is Illuminated, from Come, Thou Tortoise to A Clockwork Orange, I am deeply susceptible to books that strive toward their own zany idiolects. (Full disclosure: I’m putting the final touches on my own zany voice novel now.) Gore Vidal’s shocking, subversive 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge definitely fits into the genre’s grand tradition; and through his wily, transsexual,  psychotic protagonist, Vidal achieves an idiolect as compelling as any you will find in literature.

The story goes: our titular antihero, obsessed with the golden age of film, arrives in Hollywood to take a teaching job at the “Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses,” a two-bit college run by Buck Loner, the uncle of Myra’s so-called deceased husband, Myron. She claims through Myron’s death partial ownership of the school, and while Buck attempts to substantiate her assertion, Myra takes on the chore of teaching classes called “Posture” and “Empathy.” The school teems with mediocre, untalented students (indeed, in the academy’s entire seven-year history, not a single graduate has managed to land a career in show business), and Myra latches on to two current ones: Mary-Ann Pringle and her strapping young boyfriend, Rusty Godowsky.

Myra is determined to force her dominating womanhood onto these two students, to drive a wedge between them so she can exact a kind of revenge on what she considers to be traditional masculinity. What ensues is a drawn-out, incredibly vivid, and utterly believable sexual assault on poor Rusty. Claiming he suffers from a twisted spine that is limiting his acting career, Myra lures him to the school’s infirmary to perform a late-night physical examination on him. By exploiting his implicit trust in her, and by gradually blurring the lines between a clinical interaction and a sexual one, Myra is able to get Rusty strapped face down on a table with his pants off. She then sodomizes him with a strap-on dildo, thus achieving her goal of shattering his manhood and destroying his relationship with Mary-Ann.
     
Yet the plot grows more complex on other fronts. Vidal introduces us to a cunning talent agent named Letitia Van Allen who shows an inordinate interest in Rusty that thwarts Myra’s plans (and also turns the boy into a star). Meanwhile, Buck Loner eventually uncovers the truth about this pushy, mysterious woman teaching at his school: Myra isn’t the widow of Myron at all; she is in fact Myron himself, following gender-reassignment surgery, a procedure that Myra underwent after encouragement from her therapist, Randolph Montag. She also, over the course of the novel, attends an orgy hosted by a group of men called the Four Skins along with some of the more sexually adventurous young coeds from the school.

The novel ends as subversively as it begins. Myra is involved in a car accident that results in her losing her silicone breasts and unable to take the hormones needed to maintain her femininity. She soon reverts back to being a man – at least, a castrated one – and ends up living with Mary-Ann. Vidal, through all this, is trying to undermine various notions around sex, gender, dominance and rape, and what he has created is a zesty, provocative exploration of all these things and more.

Vidal wrote this novel, or so the story goes, in just a couple of months, and it took just a few more after publication to sell 2 million copies. It’s a book everyone seemed to be talking about in the late 1960s, but not one that gets a lot of attention now. This may partly be due to Vidal’s overall standing in our literary culture, which has suffered greatly since his death in 2012. But this is a book that people should still be reading, because its themes and obsessions are very much relevant today. And as far as voice novels go, it is definitely one of the best.

Review: Hedda Gabler, The Pillars of the Community, and The Wild Duck, by Henrik Ibsen

It was somewhat fortuitous this month that I began reading a collection of Henrik Ibsen plays (picked up for 50 cents at a street-side yard sale in our neighbourhood last summer) as my wife and I had tickets to Canadian Stage’s production of Hedda Gabler going right now. I was hitherto unschooled in the works of this great Norwegian playwright – somehow Ibsen just never landed on my radar – and Hedda Gabler was a fabulous place to start.

Engrossing, comic, and tightly constructed, the play is an exploration of willful ignorance, career anxiety, and the manipulations of the soul. Hedda and her new husband, the recently graduated PhD student, Jorgen Tesmen, have just returned home after a luxuriating five-month honeymoon abroad. They move in to what Tesmen assumes is his bride’s dream house, and prepare themselves for Tesmen’s interview at a local university where he is all but presumed to land a position that has just opened up. But we soon learn that there is more to their marriage than first meets the eye: Hedda is deeply unsatisfied with life and looks for ways to shake herself free of her melancholic, housewife boredom.

The situation takes a turn when the couple finds out that a rival of Tesmen’s, a ne’er do well named Ejlert Lovborg, has returned to town and has just published a well-received book in the same area of scholarship as Tesmen’s. Now there is competition for the role at the university, and Hedda, driven by an unconscionable desire to cause harm to those around her - and her own complicated past with this rival - sets in motion a plan to stop Lovborg. Her wayward accomplice is a local judge named Brack, who is manipulating the situation from behind the scenes. Ultimately, the plan that Hedda launches backfires against her and she must now face the life that cannot be hers. With a nod to that famous Chekhovian maxim, she makes her ultimate decision.

The play does a tremendous job of examining Hedda’s psychopathy, her need to control the fates of those around her, to destroy lives at her whim so that her own life may have some meaning. The Can Stage production takes a gamble by moving the play out of its standard timeframe (the late 19th century) and into the 1950s. But the new adaption works, and actor Cara Ricketts is stellar as Hedda. Her longing and anguish is nearly palpable on the stage, to the point that we come extremely close to feeling something like sympathy for this play’s titular character.

Reading The Pillars of the Community and The Wild Duck alongside Hedda Gabler reinforced what are obviously a number of Ibsen’s key themes. Pillars looks at the length a man in power will go to maintain his status in and influence over society. Reading this play, about an industrialist who manipulates those around him to gain access to a treasured piece of land, reminds us that there is a thin line between exploiting opportunities and exploiting people. The Wild Duck, in turn, conjures more Chekhovian references, with a death scene at the end that echoes the same, powerful conclusion to Hedda Gabler. All three plays reveal a writer obsessed with the derangement that comes when intense desires we don’t even understand feel just beyond our reach.    

Update: Time change for January 28 reading

For those of you looking to come out to the reading I'm taking part in here in Toronto, along with writers Jeff Bursey,S.D. Chrostowska, and Rebecca Rosenblum, please note: Due to a double booking on the part of the venue, Supermarket, we need to begin the event earlier. The doors will now open at 6 pm and the readings will start at 6:30 sharp. Hope y'all are still able to come out.

M.

My Quill and Quire review of Last Words, by Hugh Graham ...

... has been posted to the Q&Q website. My review of this one was fairly mixed, though I did feel that Graham made the most of the (very well-covered) territory he chose to write about. Interconnected short story collections are always tricky, but I felt Graham handled the book's structure and characters fairly well. If the book sounds like something you'd be interested in, I recommend you go check it out.