Reading for the Joy of It

I AM HALF-SICK OF SHADOWS by Alan Bradley (2011) Doubleday Canada, 271 pages

2012-02-04T10:53:00.013-05:00

Intrepid, precocious pre-adolescent chemist and sleuth Flavia de Luce returns in this caper set on her crumbling family estate, Buckshaw. In this title lifted from Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," Bradley places his protagonist in the shadows of her own home when her father rents out the property to a film crew intent on shooting "another one of those blasted country house things" in order to make ends meet for the next patch.

Peopled with familiar characters from previous books including Dogger, Col. de Luce's faithful batman from the war, and Mrs. Mullett, the cook who can't really cook, the amiable Vicar and the spectre of Flavia's mother, Harriet, slipping between the pages of the next Alan Bradley mystery feels like a visit home for the holidays, spent in the company of folks who know you the best and love you in spite of your flaws.

When the crew from Ilium Films arrives with its star Phyllis Wyvern in tow, "her complexion like cream in a summer kitchen," Flavia's older sisters Daffy and Feely are gobsmacked to be in the presence of such a luminous film idol.

When the jack-of-all-tradesman Mr. McNulty is injured on site, the production begins to unravel. A snowstorm means unexpected guests are forced to batten down at Buckshaw and tempers flare. "Bun" Keats, Phyllis Wyvern's personal assistant, takes to bed from the stress of it all, migraine-bound, and Ms. Wyvern herself keeps others awake through the night as she watches over and over again one of her hit films, until, of course, she no longer can. Flavia discovers their famous guest, dead as a doornail, choked with a swath of celluloid tied around her neck in a decorous bow from the very film that continues to "Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!...like a black bullwhip, flapping round and round."

Who killed Phyllis Wyvern and why becomes the delicious mystery that Flavia helps the inspector to solve this time.

Bradley's affection for his protagonist is clear. Only once or twice did Flavia's precocity make my smacking hand itch, but it certainly didn't deter me from enjoying the ride alongside her.

VERTICAL by Rex Pickett (2010) Loose Gravel Press, 403 pages

2012-01-15T09:54:00.014-05:00

Irrepressible rapscallions Jack and Miles reunite seven years later in this sequel to SIDEWAYS, Pickett's beloved debut novel that found its way adapted to the screen by Alexander Payne and the recipient of 350 awards.

VERTICAL is a smart, sassy unconventional picaresque romp from California, through Oregon (where Miles has been invited to be the Emcee at a Pinot Noir bacchanal) to Wisconsin. The first-person Russian nesting doll meta-narrative of Martin inside Miles inside Rex makes my litnerd head spin. In a good way.

Lady luck has been kind to Miles in the interim. He has written a novel that was made into a wildly successful movie called SHAMELESS, while Jack is divorced from his socialite wife, has a kid he adores, but is out of work, his paw outstretched for handouts from Miles. And, though women have been hurling themselves and their potty mouths at Miles because of his celebrity on the wine circuit, Miles yearns for a relationship that delves beyond the surface, one grounded in love and respect. Jack, however, has other ideas for both of them.

Enter Phyllis, Miles's mom. She's had a stroke, is wheelchair bound, and is inching a little closer to death in the assisted living facility they jokingly call Las Villas de Muerte, where she poignantly notes, "I don't feel human anymore." Miles is determined to honor his mother's wish to see her siblings, so decides to do just that with the support of Joy--one of her caretakers--and Jack as his co-pilot of the Rampvan, sharing driving duties and drinks along the way.

The unlikely foursome is joined by a fifth, Phyllis's impetuous Yorkshire terrier who has been living with Miles' ex-girlfriend. And, though there are capers a-plenty including a dognapping, al fresco dalliances and a perfectly conceived bathetic moment in a dunk tank--all rife with Miles and Jack's trademark repartee--it is the heart at the centre of the narrative that delivers its humanity straight up. Sometimes the most difficult moments to face are the ones that will change your life for the better.

Find your way to VERTICAL. Sip your way through. Savour it like a glass of perfectly-aged Richebourg. And, discover what true friendship is all over again.

RIN TIN TIN: THE LIFE AND THE LEGEND by Susan Orlean (2011) Simon & Schuster, 317 pages

2012-01-10T13:29:00.007-05:00

In a year of beguiling canine appearances on celluloid that include a Buster Keatonish Uggy in THE ARTIST, Skeletor in 50/50 (with those eyes like sucked caramels), and Cosmo as the existentialist Arthur in BEGINNERS, the timing is more than right for the release of Susan Orlean's exhaustive and entrancing biography of perhaps the most legendary dog of all, Rin Tin Tin.

"Rin Tin Tin was born on a battlefield in eastern France in September 1918. The exact date isn't certain, because no one who was present during the birth ever reported on it, but when Lee found the puppies on September 15, 1918, they were blind and bald and still nursing." So begins the narrative that traces the remarkable trajectory of a German shepherd and his devoted master from the Front during the Great War to the height of stardom that Hollywood could muster in the 1920s to a life on the tired circuit of promotion to stave off near bankruptcy.

And, as much as I was beguiled by Rin Tin Tin and Lee Duncan's story--a tale of two orphans--and discovered so much about dogs in service during war time, it was the beauty and strength of Orlean's prose that held me in its thrall.

Consider this, for example:

"What lasts? What lingers? What is snagged by the brambles of time, and what slips through and disappears? What leaves only a little dent in the world, the soft sunken green grave, the scribble on a scrap of paper, the memory that is bleached by time and then vanishes bit by bit each day?"

Isn't it heart-thumpingly gorgeous?

You could turn to any page in RIN TIN TIN:THE LIFE AND THE LEGEND and find passages equally moving. Do just that. Find your way to this fascinating, big-hearted gem.

THEN AGAIN by Diane Keaton (2011) Random House, 256 pages

2012-01-09T13:30:00.007-05:00

In a book that is a genuine collaboration between Keaton and her mother Dorothy Hall in both spirit and word, THEN AGAIN will hook you from its opening gambit:

"Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she'd collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table... Mom liked to THINK about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too."

And, write about it, she did. In 85 journals. Literally thousands of pages, excerpts of which are included here along with photographs of those worn pages and personal collages. Just as Dorothy Hall tried to navigate her way through marriage and motherhood and what it meant to be a woman searching for a satisfying creative outlet, so does her famous actress daughter through frank, funny and fearless examination of her own life and relationships.

Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino play supporting roles in Keaton's narrative, though what remains of Pacino is reduced to a list of fragments. Both Allen and Beatty seem genuine friends. I am certainly envious of the billet-doux she shares where Allen writes,"You remain a flower--too, too delicate for this harsh world... And I remain a weed." Or Beatty's encouragement for her to make her own film: "Stop messing around and do it. You'd do it better than anybody. You know more than anybody. Its rough edges would be fascinating....From someone who admired you at a distance last night. Who would like to get to know you better. "

Of course I delighted in the behind-the-scenes perspective of working on ANNIE HALL, THE GODFATHER and REDS, but what intrigued me most about Keaton's journey was her mindful decision to become a single parent to two children, Dexter and Duke, in her fifties. And, the book finishes with them in an open letter to her Mom about how she wishes she were standing side by side, watching her daughter and son "fly down the water slide, laughing all the way." Then again, maybe she is. They are.

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT by Louise Penny (2011) Minotaur Books

2012-01-07T10:19:00.030-05:00

Sitting down with a Louise Penny Inspector Gamache novel is as fine as meeting your closest friends at your favourite bistro, hands wrapped around warming bowls of cafe au lait, leaning in to listen to each others' intimacies. It feels right.

For as long as Penny has been writing her mysteries, I have been reading them. All of them. Over and over again. I am as familiar with the inhabitants of sleepy Three Pines (not on any map, except in your imagination) as I am with the people in my life. I fret about Clara and Peter's marriage, cheer Ruth's every expletive, wish Gabri and Olivier were my gay BFFs and Myrna my off-the-clock shrink. All of them are familiar with heartbreak, and its accompanying room for hope. The light that sneaks in through hairline fractures and widening gaps. And, there is also the Surete du Quebec's head of homicide, the beguiling Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who reminds me of Atticus Finch in his fairmindedness and respect for others, especially outsiders.

At the beginning of A TRICK OF THE LIGHT, Clara is about to enter the vernissage for her one-woman show at the Musee in Montreal, but she's worried that her art won't measure up to the critics and has a panic attack. Heureusement, her dear friend Olivier coaxes her, "on your knees or on your feet, you're going through that door." For those familiar with Penny's books, it's a succulent treat to see the new plot threading back through previous narratives, as shown in Clara's painting The Three Graces that she was working on in DEAD COLD. It's the one that reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyrics "there is a crack, a crack in every thing. That's how the light gets in." Penny uses the piece to navigate through to the chiaroscuro motif that gives the new novel its title.

After schmoozing with gallery owners and agents at the vernissage, Clara hosts a party back home in Three Pines to celebrate her official launch into the art world. The morning after as she impatiently waits for Peter to bring the papers with the critical reviews, something more upsetting turns her world upside down. It seems a stranger has been murdered and dropped in her garden, her bloom a little more than off the rose. Chief Inspector Gamache and his intrepid team including Jean Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste investigate, turning over coins, clumps of earth and fraught pasts in their wake.

I kept changing my mind about the suspect. You will too once you immerse yourself in Louise Penny's beautifully crafted, emotionally satisfying book.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen (2009), Penguin Canada, 375 pages

2012-01-03T16:55:00.014-05:00

Larsen's epigraph from Melville's MOBY DICK--"It is not down in any map; true places never are."--is a perfect touchstone for this idiosyncratic and totally engaging bildungsroman about an extraordinary boy.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a twelve-year-old map-making Midwestern wunderkind who is invited by his mecca, the Smithsonian Institution, to deliver an address about his exceptional work. He instinctively knows that "a map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected." Of course, the man who placed the call is unaware that T.S. is only twelve, or that his journey to Washington, D.C. from Divide, Montana is a risky one, the stuff that dreams are made on.

Nothing escapes T.S.'s need to make sense of his world. Not the watershed, nor the topography of his bedroom with his Lewis and Clarke rug, nor the amplitude of the gunshot that killed his younger brother Layton, whose absence is the ongoing presence in the narrative. Layton hides beneath everything T.S. writes. Even the porch speaks to T.S. Not to mention his dog Verywell, or the Cowboy Winnebago he stows away in to make his train-hopping, hobo-like journey from the West to the East.

As you are beguiled by T.S.'s story, you will want to linger over the marginalia--sophisticated doodles, impeccable maps and wonderous ideas--that helps this memorable protagonist find his way to real belonging.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET is the sort of book that makes your heart sing about the wonder of this life. Do yourself a favour. Read it.

DARK BLOOD by Stuart MacBride (2010) Harper Collins Canada, 469 pages

2011-12-30T13:31:00.014-05:00

When I heard Stuart MacBride on stage at an IFOA evening that featured his fellow Scottish crime fiction writers Denise Mina and Ian Rankin, I knew I'd find my way to his novels.

DARK BLOOD is my first exposure to MacBride's gritty, witty style. I have never guffawed aloud so frequently reading a crime novel as I did in response to the repartee between D.S. Logan McRae and his horny lesbian boss D.I. Steel. Their familiar patter is almost Shakespearean, putting me in mind of Benedick and Beatrice in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, more about noting than nothing.

At the outset, serial rapist Richard Knox (who fancied grandfather types) is being released, having served his time. And, it looks like now that he's found God he's deserving of a second chance to build a life anew. D.I. Steel is not so sure. She knows Knox "is an odious wee shite, and if anything goes wrong" in his reacclimatization with civilized society that she'll be "the one carrying the can." McRae is less than thrilled to be assigned to the team responsible for getting Knox settled into his Aberdeen home, or to be working with D.S.I. Danby, the one who put Knox behind bars for a decade. McRae, like his boss, believes that Knox is not a changed man. That he "didn't need an exit strategy" to protect him from the wrath of citizens who discover he's living among them. Rather, "he needed an exit wound. Preferably from a shotgun to the back of the head."

Knox isn't McRae's only headache, however. Edinburgh gangster Malk the Knife wants a slice of the mini-development boom in Aberdeen and local crime lord Hamish Mowat thinks he has McRae in his blackmailing back pocket. McRae tries to resist, but he can't help feeling dirtied by their thuggish rapport.

With subplots that feel entirely human, peopled by McRae's damaged colleagues and his accommodating girlfriend, DARK BLOOD kept me interested on many levels. And, although I'd hoped to witness retributive justice meted out on the entirely loathsome Knox, I do understand why MacBride gave him the ending that he did. Life is messy. It doesn't come with a guarantee for a satisfying conclusion. Plus, Knox is a sociopath, one who could give "a seven-year masterclass in how to get away with murder."

Because of the crafty, clever way MacBride tells a story, I'll be reading my way through all of his books featuring D.S. Logan McRae.

THE UNCOUPLING by Meg Wolitzer (2011) Riverhead Books, 271 pages

2011-12-30T13:27:00.015-05:00

In the Fall during the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto a savvy editor (who works for a different publishing house) recommended Meg Wolitzer's books to me and I finally made my way to her most recent one THE UNCOUPLING during the Christmas holidays.

A social satirist with the aplomb of Richard Ford, Wolitzer enchanted me from her opening sentence: "People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness." Right? Right.

Enter Fran Heller, a new drama teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt H.S. in small-town New Jersey, a woman with the balls to select LYSISTRATA (the Aristophanes comedy in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war) as the school play. Curiously, a spell seems to be cast over the women in the school, including Dory Lang, a happily married Literature teacher who is abruptly disinterested in sharing a bed with her longtime spouse Robby with whom she previously slept "together frequently, happily, and not just gently, but with the same gruff, fierce purpose as always."

Not only does Wolitzer satirize small town life and the politics of high school as convincingly as Tom Perrotta did in ELECTION, but she also shines the light on the inarticulate, hormonal messiness of adolescence through the actions of Dory and Robby's daughter Willa and Fran's son Eli, "their mouths having not yet opened onto the hot surprise of other mouths, their bodies still unfolded and unrevealed."

When Marissa Clayborn, the talented, gorgeous lead in LYSISTRATA literally takes to her bed in public protest, Fran Heller casts smart, shy chorus member Willa in her place, a decision that has both intended and unintended consequences.

Like the fictional reviewer of the Eleanor Roosevelt H.S. production of Aristophanes' comedy who praises Willa's "heady and almost breathless" performance as Lysistrata, I suggest that Meg Wolitzer is a novelist "who compels us with her urgency, integrity and beauty" in THE UNCOUPLING.

THE END OF THE WASP SEASON by Denise Mina (2011) McArthur & Company, 404 pages

2011-12-18T13:33:00.012-05:00

Denise Mina is a whip-smart lawyer-turned-crime-fiction-writer, and one of the finest of the genre. In THE END OF THE WASP SEASON, her eighth novel, millionaire Lars Anderson completes suicide by hanging himself from the oak tree on his sprawling Kent estate. Nobody seems at all upset by his death, including his wife and teenaged children. It's a bit of a relief to them all, truth be told, to be rid of the right bastard, who wrote in his final note to his wife, "I was a great husband. And in return you sucked the fucking life out of me. You fucking wizened bitch. I hope you're happy." And, no, he was not a great husband, as soon becomes clear. Nor was he much of a father to Thomas and Ella or to his secret second family shacked up in London, either.

What is more upsetting, however, is the apparently random murder of a young Glaswegian woman, Sarah Erroll, home to take care of the business following her own mother's death. She is bludgeoned by her young killers on the stairs as she tries to make her escape, wearing only a t-shirt--a source of embarrassment to the investigating officers who find her corpse indelicately sprawled.

DS Alex Morrow, pregnant with twins, and harboring secrets of her own, becomes the lead investigator in this case that points to a former classmate's sons and forces her to contemplate the nature of family and loyalty.

Through intelligent, character-driven twists and turns, Mina's multi-layered narrative reminds me stylistically of Kate Atkinson's CASE HISTORIES or STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG. I hope they'd both be chuffed to be in each other's storytelling company.

EASY TO LIKE by Edward Riche (2011) House of Anansi, 293 pages

2011-12-15T15:33:00.010-05:00

I enjoyed the warp and wit of Riche's first novel RARE BIRDS, so was pleased to receive EASY TO LIKE which promised a satire of a C-list Hollywood screenwriter Elliot Johnson whose true vocation is becoming a beloved vintner, wine snob that he is. However, like Icarus, Elliot swoops too close to the sun (in his case an influential producer whose wife he refuses to bed), and, although not plummeting to his own death off the California coast, is banished to become a tony bureaucrat in, of all places, Toronto, where he is hired to be in charge of English television programming for the mothership, the CBC.

Although I was mildly interested in the vineyard details and the business of running one that produced a wine that is more than "easy to like," I found the satire skewering the national broadcaster mostly mean-spirited.

What began as a vaguely amusing, watery episode of ENTOURAGE with empty-headed, silicon-breasted femmebots who tweak their own nipples (and, no, I'm not making this up) turned into a ridiculous parody of entertainment programming that included a pitch for LES LES starring "Sri Lankan and South Korean dykes." Oh, and don't forget that his ex-wife leaves Elliot for their Hispanic housekeeper, their former child star son is serving time in prison and there's a zebra escaped from San Simeon, nibbling Elliot's best grapes. I haven't even told you about the worst scenes, involving sex "with crooked arthritic claws," the former t.v. host-turned-hermit living in the Rosedale Valley Ravine, or the rich man's fatal ass-over-teakettle fall from the balcony of the Park Hyatt.

Ironically, EASY TO LIKE was not easy to like. Though, with reference to Vaucluse and Chateaunneuf-du-Papes labels, it did remind me of a splendid holiday touring through the wine caves in the south of France. Riche also used two of my favourite words--"chuffed" and "petrichor--" and raised the specter of the Amazing Kreskin. Remember him?

SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman (2011) Grove Atlantic, 350 pages

2011-12-11T18:21:00.007-05:00

I heard Francisco Goldman interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel during the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto and was impressed by his candor. He not only spoke openly about his vulnerability after the accidental death of his wife Aura two years after they married, but also about how writing this book because of its rawness helped him to face the blame that he continues to shoulder.

Judge this book by its cover as he invited us to do that afternoon. It is a photo of Aura's wedding dress, the same dress that he believed filled with her spirit as it kept him company while he wrote this mesmerizing novel.

What strikes me about SAY HER NAME, and it will you, as well, is how Goldman toys with the form of a memoir, encouraging each reader to reveal their shared experiences together, layer by layer. Like Michael Ondaatje, who similarly plays with the form in his recent and most accessible novel THE CAT'S TABLE, Goldman is winking a little here, dear reader. Yes, there are intimacies that actually occurred between him and his whip-smart, sexy young wife, but he has also used tools of the novelist's trade and imposed a narrative arc that is largely absent from life, to make your experience all the more satisfying.

Read SAY HER NAME, the novel Colm Toibin calls, "a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss." It is winsomely both.

JACQUOT & THE FIFTEEN by Martin O'Brien (2007) Headline, 532 pages

2011-12-09T07:58:00.007-05:00

Set in France, Martin O'Brien's JACQUOT books are as much clever crime fiction as they are brilliant armchair travel through Paris, Provence and the Cote d'Azur.

At the outset, Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot is just one of the boys at a reunion bash for his fellow rugby teammates hosted by their billionaire coach Pierre Dombasle at his opulent residence in the South of France. When one of the middle-aged lads appears to have committed suicide in the stables, however, Jacquot switches immediately into investigative mode, not trusting the casual attitude of the local constabulary.

There are soon other suspicious deaths as well: in a sex club, on a curving stretch of road, and in the comfort of a home. The coincidence is too much for Jacquot and he becomes driven to solve each apparently linked crime.

O'Brien knows about pacing. He could teach a master class in it, to be sure. With each whip-smart plot turn and new assumption, he'll have you flipping the pages of JACQUOT & THE FIFTEEN right through to its surprising and satisfying end.

ALICE BLISS by Laura Harrington (2011) Viking Penguin, 306 pages

2011-11-14T20:07:00.021-05:00

Alice Bliss is fourteen and will experience a lot of firsts in the next year: she'll learn how to drive, she'll feel the blush of first love, she'll manage to nurture a garden on her own, and she'll figure out how to survive her father's deployment in Iraq where he is so many thousands of miles from home.

With experience I've had facilitating children's groups for Bereaved Families of Ontario, I know both Alice and her younger sister Ellie's behaviour to ring true. Alice wears her dad Matt's shirt to feel closer to him, a continuing bond. She's furious when her mom launders the shirt, because now it won't smell at all like her dad's unique blend of "Sawdust. Wood smoke...Aftershave. Linseed oil." There is also the need for these girls to protect the surviving parent from further hurt as the children often become the caretakers when the dynamic shifts.

Before his departure, Matt is pragmatic. He shows Alice an envelope with "some important numbers. The VA so you can get benefits, my lawyer, my life insurance" and assures her that this information is "like carrying an umbrella in case it rains, and then it doesn't rain." This gesture reminded me of these frank lines from Frances Richey's poem "Inventory" about her son serving in Iraq:

Officer Record Brief
Hazardous Duty Orders
Zero Your Weapon

He’s given me his dog-eared copy of Komunyakaa’s
“Neon Vernacular,” underlined:
“We can transplant broken hearts/
but can we put goodness back into them?”

Life Insurance: to be split between Mom and Dad
Emergency Records ... who gets called
battalion wants to know what to read
at your funeral, what songs to play

He looks up from the paperwork,
hard into my eyes:
“You said you wanted to know.”

Now, Alice does not want to know the details that Matt offers up, but she needs to know, especially later when she searches her memories for guidance about what to do when it becomes clear that she and her mom and her sister must accommodate Matt's loss in their lives. As they launch their fragile flotilla to commemorate him, Alice realizes, that like any life, they are mutable: "just for a moment, a moment longer. Here. And then gone."

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes (2011) Random House of Canada, 150 pages

2011-10-28T10:34:00.006-04:00

After reading an excerpt from this year's Man Booker Prize winner in my Grade 12 Writer's Craft class a week ago, one of the boys bought a copy, read it in a gulp or two and loaned it to me yesterday. Like him, I flipped through this little tome on my travels to the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto last night and finished it on my commute to work today.

Before school this morning we had a little conversation about our sense of the ending, which neither of us had anticipated, in its soap opera-ish reveal. Like the protagonist Tony Webster, both Ben and I felt our outsider status because we "didn't quite get it"--entirely Barnes' point, I venture to guess. It took the kindness of a stranger in Tony's life to set him (and us, by extension) straight about the mutable facts of his past.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING explores the unreliability of memory, its essential fickleness. And, although, I didn't really love this novel, Barnes has me flipping back through the pages, as if it were a mystery to be solved from clues I clearly missed.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT IN THE WORKHOUSE by Diana Athill (2011) House of Anansi Press, 196 pages

2011-10-16T19:16:00.017-04:00

In her preface to this collection of previously published stories, 93-year-old Diana Athill writes about "being hit" by her first story "one January morning in 1958." And, that in terms of her writing process, "I did not think about them in advance: a feeling would brew up, a first sentence would occur to me, and then the story would come, as though it had been there all the time." Consider the first sentence in "The Real Thing:" "I went to the dance with Thomas Toofat." Already you know something about the narrator and her attitudes. Or the one from "The Return" where she begins, "'Is bombs from the mountain. Not good,' said the man Christos, scraggy at the table over his plate of beans and oil, and wiped his fist across his mouth." It was this story that won a 500-pound prize from The Observer and woke her up to the fact that she "could write and had become happy."

The seductive quality of Athill's stories makes them feel contemporary, even though most of them were scribbled into existence 40-50 years ago. I knew she was a woman ahead of her time from reading her memoirs STET and SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END, so I should have expected the same progressive attitudes from characters in the stories collected here in MIDSUMMER NIGHT IN THE WORKHOUSE. She writes so convincingly about the distances between men and women and with a wry sense of humour. Take, for example, Cecilia's observation about Charles in the titular tale: "He went straight over to take off the record, assuming that she would prefer him to music." Or, the way she boldly teases him by suggesting, "Please do not sleep with the maids. It can cause pregnancy."

The stories are also rife with ordinary moments that stop your heart as in "For Rain It Hath a Friendly Sound" when Kate returns with her lover David for a last drink and "halfway up the stairs, he turned in the middle of a sentence to kiss her cheek...almost too natural to notice." Later, in "An Unavoidable Delay" Rose decides that "to go on with this architect would be worse than full skirts, flowered cotton and flat sandals, it would be too banal, not to be thought of."

Diana Athill is a wonder. Find your way to these stories. You will be charmed.

THE ANTAGONIST by Lynn Coady (2011) House of Anansi Press, 337 pages

2011-10-16T19:13:00.007-04:00

"There will be time to murder and create." ~T.S. Eliot

Any writer who has the balls to begin their narrative with a T.S. Eliot reference has my attention. Unsurprisingly, Lynn Coady's protagonist Gordon "Rank" Rankin is a scrapper by nature and avocation when he's on the ice, a hockey enforcer, a beloved goon. Just like his old man, Gordon Senior, he's quick to flare. Until tragedy swipes by, that is, and makes a meal of Rank. It changes everything as Rank tries to disappear from university life and the hope of his east coast town.

Twenty years later Rank discovers that Adam, one of his closest university friends, has used the details of Rank's life to write a novel and THE ANTAGONIST forms Rank's impassioned response to that book in a series of emails in which he deconstructs their shared past as well as comes to terms with the sadness in his own.

Rank's voice is confident, clear and convincingly male. And, by the time you've made his journey with him, peering pruriently over his shoulder, you'll understand his apparently paradoxical apology/accusation at the end:

"And thank you for not putting it in your book.
And fuck you for not putting it in your book.
Your friend,
Gordon Rankin"

Lynn Coady is a real talent, one whose words I'll be watching for eagerly.

THE VIRGIN CURE by Ami McKay (2011) From the A.A. Knopf Canada ARC, 351 pages

2011-10-02T21:27:00.018-04:00

Ami McKay's debut novel THE BIRTH HOUSE was a national bestseller and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award. Her second book THE VIRGIN CURE has been eagerly anticipated, and with good reason.

Set in the 1870s in Manhattan, McKay unravels the tale of Moth Fenwick--the daughter of a Gypsy fortune-teller who sells her into service to the sadistic Mrs. Wentworth when she's only twelve. Before then Moth runs through tenements with local hooligans, whose "names were made from body parts and scars, bragging rights and bad luck." In order to escape to a better life beyond the abusive walls of the posh Wentworth home, Moth forges an allegiance with the butler, Nestor, who offers a kindness that "would require everything I had to give."

Moth does escape, but ends up being lured into an altogether different form of service as a whore in a brothel run by Miss Everett, who provides girls who might offer her incurable and tainted gentleman clients not only companionship, but also "the virgin cure." The one good piece of luck that befalls Moth at "The Infant School" is meeting Dr. Sadie, a progressive physician who has a social conscience and tends to the prostitutes and the poor in the Bowery. Dr. Sadie is the moral heart of the novel and based on McKay's own great-great-grandmother who wrote her graduating thesis on syphilis and the deadly myth that a gentleman with the disease could cleanse his blood by deflowering a virgin.

Interspersed with diary entries, advertisements, newspaper articles and period quotations (from songs, books and poems) that lend an enhanced authenticity to the narrative, THE VIRGIN CURE is a rapturous tale told from the perspective of a survivor who makes an indelible impression in your heart.

GLASS BOYS by Nicole Lundrigan (2011) Douglas &McIntyre

2011-10-01T11:44:00.015-04:00

Douglas & McIntyre, the little west-coast publisher that could, does not shy away from tough topics. Earlier this year they published Margaux Fragoso's harrowing memoir TIGER, TIGER, where she chronicles her relationship with a pedophile and through her exquisite pain gives that life full resonant voice in the telling. Nicole Lundrigan's novel GLASS BOYS is calibrated with similar intensity and rendered tenable through unflinching visceral prose.

All families have secrets, hidden away in dark places. None, however, are perhaps as upsetting as the one coveted by eleven-year-old Garrett Glass. When Garrett's stepfather Eli Fagan discovers the contents of his prized pickle jar, he flies into a blind rage, burning the evidence in a backyard fire-barrel.

At the same time, the Trench brothers, Roy and Lewis stumble drunkenly into Fagan's yard and their misstep ends up costing Roy his life. Faced with his own guilt at not being able to save or protect his brother as you would expect a local cop to do, Lewis stokes a life-long hatred against Fagan, the man he holds responsible for Roy's unexpected death. For a time Lewis hopes for a different, more loving future in a life that he builds with Wilda Burry and their two sons. However, when previous darknesses begin to haunt his family and cleave them apart, Lewis realizes that the past is not past. And, all roads, both literal and symbolic, lead back to Eli Fagan's place.

Nicole Lundrigan's GLASS BOYS is paradoxically dark and illuminating. Her strong prose reminds me of Michael Helm's, especially in CITIES OF REFUGE and IN THE PLACE OF LAST THINGS: the way they both unravel a tale about flawed characters is utterly riveting.

THE LITTLE SHADOWS by Marina Endicott (2011) Doubleday Canada, 541 pages

2011-09-11T15:38:00.010-04:00

Marina Endicott's debut novel, GOOD TO A FAULT, garnered my reader loyalty as well as a Giller Prize shortlist nod for her a few years ago. So, I was delighted to receive the ARC of her forthcoming book THE LITTLE SHADOWS, a story grounded in the fantastically rich world of vaudeville in the early years of the 20th century.

After the unexpected death of their father, the Avery sisters, Aurora (16), Clover (14) and Bella (13) take to the footlights to earn a living as a singing trio under the tutelage of their mother, a former vaudeville darling. They share stages with magicians, animal wranglers, and tired comedians across Canada and the United States from 1912 through 1917 always hoping that a future booking will provide them the independent financial security they crave.

Of course there are love affairs that each girl needs to navigate, in the wings and on stage, some of which are genuine and others that are relationships of convenience and cruelty.

Endicott's extraordinary attention to period detail will astonish as you become immersed in the lives and preoccupations of the Avery sisters as they come to realize the essence of a vaudeville life, "dancing, singing, dying, that is all of it."

This year's Giller Prize jury--Andrew O'Hagan, Annabel Lyon and Howard Norman--have plucked THE LITTLE SHADOWS out of the 150+ titles submitted for consideration and given it a place on their longlist alongside Michael Ondaatje and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Because of the grace with which the narrative unfolds I have every expectation to see Endicott's name make the shortlist as well.

THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta (2011) Random House of Canada, 355 pages

2011-09-05T16:23:00.027-04:00

I always greet the news of the publication of a Tom Perrotta novel with excitement and delight. Even if you haven't already read his work, you've at least heard of the two movies adapted from his earlier books: ELECTION and LITTLE CHILDREN. And, if you've seen either of those films, you'll know that Perrotta does not shy away from writing about flawed people like you and me. In fact, through his exposition of their weaknesses, I've certainly come to recognize some uncomfortable truths about myself.

From the opening paragraph of THE LEFTOVERS Perrotta hooked me:

"Laurie Garvie hadn't been raised to believe in the Rapture. She hadn't be raised to believe in much of anything, except the foolishness of belief itself."

In Mapleton (read Anywhere, USA) on October 14th (3 years ago), something tragic occurred: "It was a Rapture like phenomenon, but it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture," because many of the people who disappeared were decidedly not Christian. The Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Mormons and Zoroastrians "hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as their personal saviour." It was a perplexingly (to the loud-mouthed entitled Christians expecting salvation) "a random harvest."

What matters, however, is not who was taken, but rather who is left behind to puzzle out what life means now in the wake of the Sudden Departure. Now that children or siblings or spouses are gone. About loss, Perrotta writes convincingly. When Laurie supports her friend Rosalie as she grieves the disappearance of her daughter Jen and explains to her husband Kevin that "Rosalie doesn't want to finish" the scrapbook about Jen, Perrotta gestures to the timeless quality of accidental death. And, later, when Rosalie decides to join the Guilty Remnant cult (whose loopy motto is "We don't smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith."), Laurie doesn't pass judgment. She becomes, instead, mute witness both literally and figuratively.

Cut to the three-year-anniversary of the pseudo Rapture and certain departure of beloved friends, relatives and lovers in Mapleton and now Laurie's husband Kevin Garvey is the new mayor who hopes to shepherd along the collective grieving process to offer new hope to his traumatized community in which he has experienced direct loss himself when his wife leaves him to become a silent-vowing cult member of Guilty Remnant and his son Tom drops out of university to follow a sketchy self-appointed prophet Holy Wayne, "the most recent incarnation of that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God," who establishes "the Healing Hug Movement." Unsurprisingly, Holy Wayne knocks up one of his teenaged acolytes, 16-year-old Christine, who is carrying the Chosen One. Really. And, Mayor Garvey means well when he pushes for the inaugural Heroes' Day Parade "to channel the grief into an annual observance, relieve some of the day-to-day pressure on the survivors." But, honestly, how helpful can that be?

There were moments in THE LEFTOVERS that had me guffawing out loud. For example, "Nora Durst hated to admit it, but SpongeBob wasn't working anymore." Imagine that. How could he offer succor or be taken seriously when his sidekick Squidward has "got that creepy phallic nose" that "just dangles there?" Even the pastoral caregivers are worn out, like Reverend Jamieson who admits to Nora that he's exhausted and it feels like his body is "full of wet cement."

Each of the characters in THE LEFTOVERS manages to scratch out a new beginning, through happenstance, deceit, determination or belief. Going home, however, is never a viable option for any of them. Tom Perrotta has written a startling book about love and loss and how to find meaning in a life that is empty of one and rife with the other.

LONG GONE by Alafair Burke (2011) Harper Collins, 349 pages

2011-08-28T11:18:00.013-04:00

I found my way to Alafair Burke's books a couple of summers' ago when my friend Jeff saw me reading THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN by James Lee Burke (which Ian Rankin claimed was one of his favourite novels that season) and told me his daughter also wrote fabulous crime fiction. So, first I read the Samantha Kincaid series and then the Ellie Hatcher series. Devoured them, really. Of course I was delighted to discover Burke's first stand alone novel, LONG GONE, published this Spring. I am a devoted and loyal fan of her smart and topical writing.

Set in New York City, ostensibly today, when long-serving neighborhood establishments seem to disappear overnight thanks to the fickle economy, LONG GONE grounds itself in the reality of losing your job without notice. Not because you did it poorly, but because the market no longer exists or because your boss is corrupt and feckless.

Months after a layoff from the development office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--a plum post for any art history grad--Alice Humphrey finds herself in the remarkable position of being offered a job managing a new little gallery in Manhattan's trendy Meatpacking District. There is a catch, of course, according to Drew Campbell, the corporate rep who hires her: the first show must be by the untalented paramour of the gallery's eccentric, anonymous owner. Even with this caveat, Alice seizes the opportunity to carve a professional path for herself out from underneath the shadow of her famous father, a controversial actor.

In spite of the bizarre and controversial subject matter of the first show, work is going swimmingly for Alice, until the day she arrives at the gallery to find the walls stripped bare and Drew Campbell's corpse on the floor. And, when the police show her a photograph of what seems to be her and Drew in a clinch, kissing, Alice realizes that her world is about to unravel.

With twists and turns and compassion doled out in equal measure, LONG GONE had me flipping pages well into the early morning hours. Like Alice, I became increasingly alarmed by the long-hidden secrets that are gradually revealed. Those secrets involving Alice's family, it seems, might end up costing her her life.

A more discerning reader than me might have figured out the clues that Burke buries throughout the narrative. And, for her ability to make me feel almost up to the challenge of solving the enigmatic backstory, I give Alafair Burke full credit for producing such a compelling tale, so cleverly told.

ONE DAY by David Nicholls (2009) Random House, 435 pages

2011-08-23T18:03:00.003-04:00

Having just seen the film featuring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway as Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morely, I was curious to read Nicholls’ novel to see what made the screenplay and what, out of respect for the visual form, decidedly did not. So, when my neighbour Jennifer proffered her copy, I happily accepted and then read the book over two evenings. As Nick Hornby (one of my favourite contemporary voices of fiction: ABOUT A BOY, HIGH FIDELITY, JULIET, NAKED) kvelled on his blog, ONE DAY is “big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable.”

That the protagonists’ journeys mirror a timeline similar to my own (having graduated university in the late 80s) made the story feel all-the-more relatable as Dexter and Emma find their way both independently and then together over two decades, both professionally and personally. Shakespeare was right: “the course of true love never did run smooth.”

If you’ve seen the film, then you know that the narrative is built on the conceit that we peer into the lives of Dexter and Emma on July 15th over the course of 20 years from when they graduate from the University of Edinburgh in 1988 to where they are in 2008.

What I especially enjoyed in the novel were the breezy missives that the two pen to each other because of the intimacies they reveal and the epigraphs for each section where Nicholls relies on beloved work by Philip Larkin, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy to set the tone. I am, after all, essentially a literary nerd.

If you’ve ever wanted someone you couldn’t have (and, honestly, who hasn’t?), then ONE DAY just might be the zeitgeist story for you.

THE CAT'S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje (2011) McClelland & Stewart, 265 pages

2011-08-21T18:11:00.010-04:00

Perhaps I should have cottoned on to the fact that this might be Ondaatje’s most personal novel to date with the epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s YOUTH:
“And this is how I see the East…I see it always from a small boat—not a light, not a stir, not a sound. We conversed in low whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land.” For, it is a cannibalized part of Ondaatje’s own youth that we read about between the pages of this unexpectedly intimate narrative that reads oftentimes like memoir.

It’s the early 1950s and an eleven-year-old boy named Michael boards a ship in Colombo, bound for England. It is “not the magic or the scale of the journey” that concerns him, but “that detail of how [his] mother could know when exactly [he] would arrive in that other country. And if she would be there.”

He is assigned Table 76 for all of his meals: “the cat’s table…the least privileged place,” far across the dining room from the desired Captain’s Table. There he meets two other boys, Ramadhin and Cassius, as well as an eclectic group of eccentric and fascinating adults who help him to pass the time as the ship sails across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and finally to the coast of England where a new journey awaits him.

Michael discovers a cousin on board, the beautiful and elusive Emily who becomes his confidant, as well as the mysterious night walks of a shackled prisoner that he witnesses with Rahmadhin and Cassius while they are hiding in the darkness near one of the lifeboats and one evening “it was as if he was conscious of us there, that he had picked up our scent…He gave a loud growl and turned away.” Breaking curfew, the boys smoke piece by piece a cane chair on a forbidden deck, slide into the swimming pool, float on their backs and feel as though they are “swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean.”

One morning Michael is persuaded by a man known to him as Baron C. to help with a project. That project involves being greased in black oil and slithering through little barred windows of other passengers’ cabins in order to open the door for Baron C. to pillage valuables. It is during one of these excursions that Michael catches sight of himself in a mirror: “the first reflection or portrait that I remember…the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years—someone startled, half formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet.” In the blink-of-an-eye I can conjure a similar moment for myself as I’m sure you can as well. It is paragraphs such as this one that reminded me of Coetzee’s little novel YOUTH. You wouldn’t be amiss in comparing the two men of letters there.

One of the great charms of this story is the interspersed and seemingly random snippets of overheard conversation that Michael dutifully records in school examination booklets he carries with him:

“I thought she was a blue-stocking, at first.”
“Pickpockets come out during a storm.”
“I told your husband when he offered me a three-day-old oyster that it was more dangerous to me than having a sexual act when I was seventeen.”
“Trust me—you can swallow strychnine as long as you don’t chew it.”

Though, I did wonder how an eleven-year-old could puzzle out the correct spelling for strychnine.

Those who are already committed Ondaatje fans will delight in THE CAT’S TABLE and those who are new to this Booker-Prize winning author and accomplished poet will find eleven-year-old Michael’s voyage between the two worlds of his youth an enchanting one.

YEAR OF THE KING: AN ACTOR'S DIARY AND SKETCHBOOK by Antony Sher (1985) The Hogarth Press, 249 pages

2011-08-21T18:08:00.016-04:00

My friend James suggested I read Sher's memoir about the year leading up to his performance in the titular role of RICHARD III for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, because he insisted it "read like butter." Well, James was right about that.

Sher's prose is smooth and I quickly lost myself in his narrative that begins in the summer of 1983, the year after he played the Fool to Michael Gambon's Lear in Stratford during which he ruptured his Achilles tendon, "up the back of [his] leg like a venetian blind." That injury led to 6 months of recovery that included physiotherapy sessions at the Remedial Dance Clinic and the luxury of hours at his easel working on paintings and sketches that he just simply hadn't had time for until this forced rest. Indeed, one of the delights of Sher's book is the inclusion of many pen and ink renderings of his colleagues and his evolving vision for his Richard-the-humpback. There is an ease of line in these sketches and a passion for each subject.

YEAR OF THE KING is an unabashedly honest behind-the-scenes look at how one actor builds a character from the inside out. At one point as he is struggling to find Richard's voice, Sher notes, "it does help me to think of Richard's verbal style throughout as that of a tabloid journalist, that brand of salivating prurience." Of course, Sher is not alone on this journey. He's accompanied by his director, a physiotherapist, a voice coach, a dresser, the costume department, his partner Jim, his fellow actors, all of whom believe they will help him build a unique version of "the shit" that will rival Olivier's watermark performance.

One of my favourite moments occurs when Sher goes to Chris Tucker's home to have a cast made of his back in order that Tucker be able to design a custom-made, lifelike hump. Tucker's masterpiece was John Hurt's head for THE ELEPHANT MAN, which he has displayed "on a little plinth in gruesome three-dimensional technicolour...The bony bits are hard, the pendulous sponges of skin soft and clammy." Next to it stands Gregory Peck's head from BOYS FROM BRAZIL, "with dog bites in the neck" that "looked much better when it was bleeding, of course." Of course.

You will feel Sher's nerves alongside him and feel compelled to applaud with the rest of the audience in Stratford as they regularly call the players back, standing and cheering "for a third time." He's a little star-struck himself when celebrities start flying in to see the show: "Michael Caine, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Peter Brook, Donald Sutherland, Charlton Heston...Charlton Heston? I was making plasticine models of him when he was in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and I was in nappies."

YEAR OF THE KING: AN ACTOR'S DIARY AND SKETCHBOOK is written with such intimacy that you will feel as if you know Sher, almost as well as he has come to know his Richard III.

THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern (from the ARC, due September 2011) Doubleday, 387 pages

2011-08-08T18:38:00.014-04:00

Even the cover art/text on the ARC is entrancing:"THIS ADVANCE READER'S EDITION ENTITLES THE HOLDER TO UNLIMITED ADMISSION/ NOT FOR SALE/ VIOLATORS WILL BE EXSANGUINATED." You might think that the threat is an idle one, but you would be wrong about that.

When you peer between the covers of THE NIGHT CIRCUS, prepare to leave your assumptions about magic beyond the pale and have your imagination take heady flight above the narrative that Erin Morgenstern has spun into filaments of the finest gold.

Set at the end of the 19th Century and moving across two decades, the story begins in early 1873 when Prospero the Enchanter receives an envelope addressed to him at the New York theatre where he is performing. It "contains a suicide note, and is... carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl," his daughter Celia, to whom he snarks, "she should have named you Miranda." Later that same year, Prospero (aka Hector Bowen) takes his daughter to the UK to meet another magician who calls himself Alexander and it is there that the gauntlet is thrown down for an ongoing duel between Celia and another young magician where the winner will take all, including, perhaps the other's life.

In his desire to prepare Celia for this life-long competition, Hector treats her brutally, almost sadistically, as she learns the power she has to repair inanimate objects and to heal her living, breathing self.

So much mysterious happens under the striped tents at Le Cirque des Rêves and you will find yourself breathless with each new discovery as you trail memorable characters like outsider Bailey and his delightful true friends the twins Widget and Poppet who are born into that night circus dream life.

As the competition escalates between Celia and Marco, and you believe in each of their remarkable imaginative powers, you will wish alongside them that they may find a way out of this battle that is rooted in their instructors' egos.

THE NIGHT CIRCUS will entrance you. Just be prepared to pay its heady emotional price of admission.

EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL BEGAN AFTER by Simon Van Booy (2011) Harper Perennial, 396 pages

2011-08-06T19:50:00.018-04:00

There are rare books that conspire to make you part of their narrative, to not only draw you alongside the characters, but also to draw you in as if you are a character yourself. I felt that tug from Simon Van Booy from the opening pages of EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL BEGAN AFTER, a novel that is irresistibly enchanting.

Our reliable, omniscient narrator insists: "For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives--far from anything that was ever imagined for them."

Beautiful, haunted Rebecca moves to Athens to develop her skills as a painter after years of flying "around the world serving meals and drinks to people who found her beauty soothing." In Greece she plans to "live in exile with her desires...as she imagined them on canvas, like faint patches of starlight; hopeful, but so far away" Van Booy's prose already has you in its thrall, doesn't it?

Not long after settling into her small corner of Athens Rebecca meets George, an American from the South "who looked the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed" and whose grandfather was a character in GONE WITH THE WIND (which Rebecca read in French), a minor one in the background, "riding by on a lazy horse." The two become friends and Rebecca kisses George on the cheek "again and again, until her kisses, like empty words, carried only the weight of consolation." Soon Rebecca meets Henry, an archaeologist, at work on a dig, and a man whose allure she cannot resist. As they walk along the Panathenaic Way, Rebecca is drawn to him as "Henry described the statues as though they were part of his family."

Through a series of chance meetings (or, the heavy hand of fate), all three are thrown together and fall headlong into a summer that will forever define them. An unexpected event changes the trajectory of all of their lives, and, as mute witness, you will find yourself entirely caught up in their separate loneliness, which Rebecca explains "is like being the only person left alive in the universe, except that everyone else is still here."

In a narrative that shifts between omniscient third person, limited second person and first person correspondence (charmingly printed as if typed on an old standard typewriter in courier font), Van Booy will startle you with his deft grace and insight.

Do not miss being completely immersed in EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL BEGAN AFTER.

A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving (1989) Lester & Orpen Dennys, 543 pages

2011-08-02T16:18:00.012-04:00

I read A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY annually as a way of maintaining a continuing bond with my brother David who died in 1994. I gave him this copy for his birthday in May of 1992 and it is one of the novels that he enjoyed, set as it is in a boys' boarding school, a milieu in which he was himself immersed from ages 14-18.

The novel opens in the present of the late 1980s when Ronald Reagan is the President of the United States and embroiled in the Iran/Contra scandal and our narrator, John Wheelwright, is teaching English Literature to teenaged girls at the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto.

When I first read this novel, I was also teaching literature to 16-18 year old girls at another private school in Toronto, some of the very titles that Wheelwright teaches (including WUTHERING HEIGHTS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and THE GREAT GATSBY) and I was living in a flat that was walking distance from Winston Churchill Park, so that familiarity hooked me even more.

What is the greatest appeal of this story is its Dickensian narrative approach (and I know from interviews with John Irving that he admires Dickens tremendously), whereby character is revealed layer upon layer by what they say, what they do and what is said about them. It is impossible not to fall and to fall hard for Owen Meany, Harriet Wheelwright and Hester-the-Molester, so fully realized as they are throughout the tale.

Structurally the book owes a great deal to Robertson Davies’ iconic novel FIFTH BUSINESS. And, while its narrative is driven by a stone hidden inside a snowball (the great prime mover in Davies’ tale), here it is a baseball that deals the hand of fate. A baseball that Owen Meany remarkably hits.

From the opening paragraph Irving has you onside as Wheelwright confesses, “ I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” Don’t you want to hear that wrecked voice? Understand how the smallest person he ever knew became the instrument of his mother’s death?

Irving is a master of his craft. Not only are the voices distinct, but each symbol and image woven into the tapestry of the tale--from a taxidermy armadillo, to a dressmaker's dummy, to Owen's obsession with amputation and nuns that give him "the shivers"--is intentional and rife with meaning. From a literary perspective, A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY is worthy of close textual analysis. And, from a personal perspective, I cannot think of another book that makes me feel so viscerally a continuing connection with my little brother, when we too enjoyed the easy and devoted camaraderie that Owen and John demonstrate throughout Irving's incredible novel.

THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL by Lawrence Block (2004) Harper Collins, 294 pages

2011-07-29T21:54:00.016-04:00

Go ahead. Add Bernie Rhodenbarr, Manhattan Antiquarian bookseller by day and burglar by night, to the pantheon of favourite criminals. He's one of those guys you are willing to forgive their occasional felonies because they are so appealing and only marginally morally questionable.

Block hooked me in THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL with the opening word nerd exchange between Bernie and his friend Marty Gilmartin:

"The man is an absolute...a complete...an utter and total... Words fail me."

"Apparently, nouns, anyway. Adjectives seem to be supporting you well enough, but nouns--"

"Help me out, Bernard. Who is more qualified to supply le mot juste? Words, after all, are your métier."

The man in question is Crandall Rountree Mapes, "a worm, a rat...a bounder, a cad... a rotter... a thoroughgoing shitheel," who has just happened to woo Marty's mistress Marisol away from him and into Mapes' perfectly manicured surgical hands. Of course, it's personal. And, of course, Mapes deserves to be taken down a peg or two and Rhodenbarr is just the man for the job that involves cracking into a personal safe hidden behind a painting in Mapes' bedroom, a passable painting of "your basic generic sailing ship." It's a "neat, uncomplicated bit of vengeful larceny that will reap a tidy profit," an offer that Rhodenbarr cannot refuse, especially for a friend.

While waiting to burgle Mapes' upscale abode on a night that he is sure to be out with his wife at Lincoln Center, Rhodenbarr gets restless and to assuage his spilkes he goes out on the prowl, a decision that he begins to regret when it lands him smack dab in the middle of several murders for which he is not responsible, but to which he is irresistibly drawn because of unlikely coincidence. And, Bernie, is never one to let sleeping dogs lie.

With trademark wit, playfulness and respect for the game that successful suspense requires, Block delivers the goods in THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL. And, isn't it fun that well-mannered Bernie gets the girl, even if it's only for now.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick deWitt (2011) House of Anansi Press, 325 pages

2011-07-29T21:41:00.014-04:00

THE SISTERS BROTHERS is one of three titles published by House of Anansi Press that made it to the storied Man Booker Prize longlist this week, a prize that rewards the best book of fiction published in the Commonwealth. Canadian novelist Michael Helm (one of my favourite contemporary writers) has this to say about DeWitt's book:

"In perfect measures of light, darkness and firelit reflections, THE SISTERS BROTHERS engagingly renews the comic novel in a spirit by turns lawless and corrective. This ever-surprising story is dead serious fun."

Narrated by Eli Sisters, this picaresque meets the Wild West tale is all that Helm gestures to and more. There's a hit out on the life of Hermann Kermit Warm, ordered by the enigmatic and threatening Commodore who has hired Eli and Charlie Sisters for the task. They are on their way to San Francisco, where the Commodore's scout, "a dandy named Henry Morris," has gone ahead to gather information about Warm who "pays for his whiskey with raw gold dust that he keeps in a leather pouch worn on a long string, hidden in the folds of his many-layered clothing." Charlie is heartened by the news and tells his brother, "It's a good place to kill someone, I have heard. When they are not busily burning the entire town down, they are distracted by its endless rebuilding."

And, so begins their cross country journey in the company of their horses, Nimble and Tub, a journey that is complicated by toothaches and tempers and temporary fits of loneliness throughout which you'll meet eccentric hoteliers, doctors, hookers and ordinary folk trying to get by. All the while, you will wonder, like Eli "about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be." And, you will continually redefine your notions about good and evil as the tale unwinds to its unexpectedly moving conclusion.

Find out what the fuss is about and pick up THE SISTERS BROTHERS, marveling at DeWitt's muscular prose and respect for delivering a tale well told.

SHELTER by Harlan Coben (from the ARC, due September 2011) from Penguin Canada, 304 pages

2011-07-29T21:36:00.002-04:00

You may be familiar with Harlan Coben’s protagonist Myron Bolitar, the Manhattan-based sports agent turned exquisite bad-guy ass-kicker, in his crime fiction series. In SHELTER (Coben’s YA debut) Myron acts in loco parentis for his estranged teenaged nephew Mickey, who is trying to accommodate the very different losses of his parents in his life: one to accidental death, the other to addiction.

For a while it seems as though Mickey’s complicated life is improving, until his new girlfriend Ashley goes missing and he is drawn into a nefarious circle to try to find her, a seedy underworld where it is uncertain if he will be able to escape. When he sees the legendary Bat Lady for the first time, he is creeped out by two facts: she calls him by name and tells him that his father “is very much alive.” But, standing there, bearing witness, Mickey knows that “what she was telling me wasn’t true. Because I had seen my father die.”

Navigating the social hierarchy of a new high school is another challenge that Mickey faces, and he ends up making genuine friends with a goth girl called Ema and a geek he nicknames Spoon, “outcasts who… had been sitting alone for so many years that it wasn’t so much cruelty as habit.” Because Spoon’s dad is a janitor at the school, he has access to keys that will enable them to snoop for clues that might lead them to uncovering the secrets behind Ashley’s enigmatic disappearance.

The title gestures to missing pieces: The Abeona Shelter in Africa, an NGO from which Mickey’s dad Brad resigns in order to provide Mickey a chance to call “one place home” and “pursue his passions, especially basketball;” and, Mickey’s predisposition to protect the disenfranchised. As a tattoo artist tells him, “You, like Ema, have a pure spirit. You have blessed energy centers and true balance. You are a protector. You look out for others. You are their shelter.”

If you know a reticent teenaged reader, then SHELTER is the book you need to thrust into their hands. Coben’s authentic depiction of high school foibles, rife with recognizable bullies and jockeying for social status, will have them feeling right at home and the breakneck twists and turns of the narrative will have them flipping pages right through to its satisfying end.

In this first of a YA series, Coben will hook a new generation of readers with his trademark wry humour and masterful plotting as they cheer on courageous 15-year-old Mickey Bolitar.

THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS by Michele Young-Stone (2010) Crown Publishing, 372 pages

2011-07-21T08:37:00.017-04:00

Becca Burke and Buckley Pitank live worlds apart in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Mont Blanc, Arkansas. Raised in the 60s and 70s on different sides of the country both are drawn together through their common experience of lightning strikes. When Becca was eight she was struck down in her driveway and when Buckley was a young teen he witnessed his mother's death as she was seared by a bolt on a family excursion.

Becca's Mom Mary is a drunk. A beautiful drunk. Her father Rowan is a philandering chemistry professor who looks like Cary Grant. Buckley's Mom Abigail is his best friend and he loves everything about her "from the strawberry bumps on her legs where she dry-shaved with her Gillette to the way her black hair knotted at the nape of her neck." He never met his father.

In parallel narrative arcs we follow Becca and Buckley from their childhoods through adolescence and well into their adult lives. Buckley has an especially challenging time as he deals with his odious grandmother Winter (a character who would be at home among Dickensian villains) and his mother's predatory husband, the Reverend John Whitehouse, whose congregation is dwindling so much that he turns to selling Amway as the way of truth and light. While Becca's parents adore her, she senses her own mother's issues with her father, not only senses but feels viscerally the abuse her mother suffered when she, herself, was growing up.

Buckley may be not only one of the most resilient characters you'll meet in contemporary fiction but also one of the kindest and Becca's pluck and determination to hone her craft as a visual artist will convince you that the creative impulse is a balm. And, when they meet through a mutual friend at a gallery vernissage in New York, you will be as relieved as I was that they come face-to-face with someone who entirely understands who they are and doesn't pass judgment.

THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS heralds a savvy new voice in American letters. Keep your eyes peeled for the work of Michele Young-Stone.

HIT AND RUN by Lawrence Block (2008) Harper Collins, 280 pages

2011-07-20T11:59:00.002-04:00

What is not to like about Block’s hired killer Keller, a devoted philatelist who takes “so many precautions” in his paid job that he trips over them? Just imagine what might happen to him if he weren’t the adorable paranoid that he is. And, as he insists to his colleague Dot, this one is definitely the last job (paid up front, of course) he’s going to do before getting out of toxic waste disposal racket.

Keller is in Des Moines, Iowa, awaiting the go-ahead from his client, minding his own business at a stamp shop where he can’t resist adding to his burgeoning collection a few Scandinavian “official reprints. Mint, decent centering, and lightly hinged” that he bargains down to $600 cash. When the background music on the radio is interrupted by a news bulletin with the announcement that the visiting charismatic Governor of Ohio has been gunned down, Keller understands immediately that he’s going to be made the patsy, even though he has an airtight alibi in the shopkeeper.

Like the characters in The Wire who understand “the game is the game,” Keller plays it cool for a while, puzzling out how he’s going to be able to make it back home to New York safely. Dot insists that Keller, “lay low as long as you have to, if you’re sure you’re in a safe place. Don’t even think about doing the job for Al, not as long as there’s the slightest chance that this might be a setup.” Soon enough Keller sees his face plastered on CNN with the caption, “THE FACE OF A KILLER.” And, then, he receives a computer-generated voicemail message, “completely uninflected and straight out of a science-fiction movie” that “pronounced a series of words one at a time: ‘Ditch. The. Phone. Repeat. Ditch. The. Damn. Phone.’” And, just like that, Keller’s on his own.

There are many obstacles that get in Keller’s way as he tries to remain under the radar on his way back to his New York apartment. There is the matter of his appearance, of course, that he only temporarily hides under the peak of a Homer Simpson ball cap; also, the fact that he can’t risk using credit or debit cards whereby his cross-country progress would surely be traced and he’s getting low on cash. If only he hadn’t bought those precious stamps! When Keller comes face-to-face with two great losses in his life, “that filled him with pain and regret,” he realizes that eventually, “you didn’t have to forget things, not really. You just relaxed your grip on them and they floated off all by themselves.”

After driving away from New York with no particular plan, Keller finds himself in post-Katrina New Orleans where strolling one evening he ends up acting out a Tennessee Williams kindness-of-strangers turn and saving a life. And, the fates, for once, find their way and smile kindly upon him in return. There he is able to begin again, hired on by an enterprising contractor, to renovate those devastated spaces and in the process to find out the kind of man he truly is.

Smart, witty and unabashedly take charge, Lawrence Block’s Keller is my newest crime-fiction crush.

THAT SUMMER IN PARIS by Morley Callaghan (2006) Exile Editions, 217 pages

2011-07-16T14:04:00.006-04:00

Originally published in 1963, Callaghan's memoir of 1920s Paris was republished in 2006 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Exile Editions. Callaghan’s memoir of his heady time in 1929 Paris in the select company of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Robert McAlmon is a succulent treat for a literary nerd like me who has always considered that particular expat community the most desirable one with which to ingratiate oneself. It is why I have so adored Woody Allen’s recent cinematic confection MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, too—the impossible imagined delight of being party to that particular passionate coterie.

Due to circumstances that are still a little beyond my ken, I was at Morley Callaghan’s 86th birthday fete in Toronto, so it is more-than-a-tad amusing for me to reconcile the gentleman I met that night in 1989 (who, after we sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” insisted, from his perch at the top of the stairs, his false teeth clacking about in his mouth, “I have never ever been. A. Jolly. Good. Fellow.”) with the nascent novelist so certain of his own place among the greatest writers of the 20th century.

In the early Twenties, Callaghan and Hemingway met in Toronto while they were both working for the Toronto Daily Star. The Hemingways were in Canada for Hadley to give birth to their son because they had heard the health care was excellent, and Callaghan was trying his hand at journalism before finishing his law degree at U of T. When Hemingway determined that young Morley had tried his hand at fiction, he offered to read his stories in exchange for a look at the proofs of IN OUR TIME which Callaghan referred to as “a series of long paragraphs, little vignettes… so polished they were like epigrams, each so vivid, clean and intense that the scene he was depicting seemed to dance before my eyes.” Hemingway offered Callaghan this gift: “You’re a real writer. You write big-time stuff. All you have to do is keep on writing… Whatever you do, don’t let anyone around here tell you anything.”

When he was only 22, Callaghan had a story (thanks to Hemingway’s kind introduction), “A Girl With Ambition,” published in the 2nd edition of THIS QUARTER in Paris and his fellow contributors included James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, all of their names in bold black on its cover. That became a charm and the confidence boost he needed to keep writing. Soon enough Scribner’s in New York signed Callaghan on for a novel and a collection of stories to be edited by Maxwell Perkins, who also was responsible for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, so his literary pedigree was established early.

Once in Paris that summer of 1929, it feels as though you are the third that walks beside Morley and his wife Loretto along those Left Bank streets, sitting in the cafes or at Les Deux Magots, waiting for Scott or Ernest to poke their heads in and scooch beside you to warn you of the dangers of Pernod. You’ll meet Joyce and his Nora, Sylvia Beach (his great protector and publisher at Shakespeare and Company), Scott and Zelda, Ford Maddox Ford, Robert McAlmon, the painter Miro and other luminaries of the Quartier at that time. And, you will be charmed by them all, even when they are badly behaved and irascible or insecure and easily bruised, egos wounded by reviews or a lucky punch in the boxing ring.

One of the sweetest moments for me was when Fitzgerald offered Callaghan his wallet, insisting, “Here, Morley, keep this wallet. I’d like you to have something of mine.” Callaghan accepts: “All right. Write your name in it then.” But neither one of them had a pen. So, Fitzgerald (then struggling his way through the manuscript of TENDER IS THE NIGHT), “put the wallet against a lamppost, and taking out his knife he scratched his name on the leather.”

What a keepsake from “those dreams” Callaghan had of Paris as “the lighted place” where he got to know “Hemingway in his prime…perhaps the nicest man I had ever met.” And, he could “say the same for Fitzgerald.”

Having spent that long ago evening in Callaghan’s company, I feel a little closer to them all after reading THAT SUMMER IN PARIS.

FAITH by Jennifer Haigh (2011) Harper Collins Canada, 318 pages

2011-07-16T12:21:00.014-04:00

If you read and adored Linden MacIntyre's Giller Prize-winning THE BISHOP'S MAN, then you are definitely going to want to pick up a copy of Jennifer Haigh's most recent novel FAITH.

All families tell stories about themselves, stories that become mythic in the re-telling, but there are other tales that remain secrets until someone, intentionally or not, provides the great reveal. For me one of those long-kept truths was offered to me on my first trip to Ireland. There, my cousin Billy took me to a family plot and pointed out not only his parents' graves and that of his brother Eric who died at three, but also the grave of "Aunt Peg's baby." I was gobsmacked. When I returned to Toronto and asked my grandfather (Peg's older brother) about that baby, his first response was an angry, "who the hell told you about that?" With further probing he went on to unravel the shame the family had felt when Peg, unmarried, got pregnant during WWII. Although a nurse who ought to have known better, Peg tried to hide the fact of her growing womb by wrapping it tightly in bandages. The result: a stillborn child and permanent damage that meant she would never be able to get pregnant again. Underneath my grandfather's anger was a profound sadness for what might have been for his little sister.

In FAITH, narrator Sheila McCann returns to Boston when her older half-brother Art, a long-serving parish priest, finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rocks the foundation of their family, not to mention the extended Roman Catholic community. Their mother remains in denial, while Sheila's brother Mike has already convicted Art in his heart and Art himself refuses to defend himself against the perplexing charges.

What is extraordinary in Haigh's unravelling of Art's tale is the insider intimacy with which she writes about the monkish existence of RC clergy. Throughout Sheila doubts her brother's decision to choose a life with such "elaborate privations." His incredible response: "It helps to be a child with little understanding of what he is forfeiting." Sheila confides that it is her "penance to tell this ragged truth as completely" as she knows it--an antidote to the "canon of approved stories" that "are told in the manner of repertory theatre: hang around long enough and you'll hear them all." With such an invitation to the reader to sit a little closer to listen to the likely prurient and certainly upsetting details, Haigh grabs you by the hand and insists that you bear witness to all that has occupied Sheila since her brother's public disgrace a few years' previous.

Father Arthur Breen's story is a complicated one, made all the more difficult by long-protected secrets that have been the source of his own personal shame. By all accounts he is a devout priest and a kind man to whom "even a single life seemed a towering accomplishment." When presented with the opportunity to serve as a father figure to his housekeeper's grandson Aidan, Art takes on that responsibility in earnest, ensuring that Aidan have a place in the second grade at Sacred Heart while his reformed drug addiction mother Kath tries to get her grownup act together.

Like Sheila and her brother Mike, I found myself vacillating between being convinced that Art was guilty of the oblique crime of which he is accused and just as firmly believing that he could not possibly have made such a transgression and that was why he never defended himself against that very accusation. And, when an unintentional and initially enigmatic slip of the tongue clarifies the villain of the tale, you will be outraged. As Sheila confesses, "although they may not forgive me for it, I write for my mother and Mike. If they don't wish to know certain truths about themselves and each other, they should at least know" what we have lost. She writes Art's story "to open the curtains, and let in the sun."

Isn't that what all good fiction does?

A GOOD HARD LOOK by Ann Napolitano (2011) Penguin Press, 326 pages

2011-07-14T12:35:00.008-04:00

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” ~Flannery O’Connor

So begins this gorgeous novel that through the interior lives of vibrant and memorable characters shows how we might live our lives to the fullest.

There are three sections: Good, Hard, Look. And, with those simple and declarative monosyllabics, Napolitano neatly parses the experiences of Cookie Himmel, Melvin Whiteson, Lona Waters, Miss Mary Treadle and Flannery O’Connor through 1963-64 in NYC and Milledgeville, Georgia.

The narrative opens on a hot summer’s evening as “the peacocks tilted their heads back and bellowed and hollered their desires into the night… They didn’t care that there was a wedding tomorrow, or that the groom who had just arrived from New York City, was lying beneath a lace canopy at his in-laws’ house, paralyzed with fear.” And, while the rest of Milledgeville startled awake, the peacocks (like their spirited, uncompromising owner) “were out to do what they liked, when they liked.”

Southern writer Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People,” Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away) is both muse and character and the pulse at the centre of the narrative. She is connected to Cookie through their shared past, to Miss Mary as a neighbour, to Lona as a client and to Melvin as a friend on equal footing, unabashed about offering candid truths. It is her address delivered as an honoured guest at Cookie’s high school graduation that gives the novel its title and both the characters and the reader the challenge: “Take a good hard look at who you are and what you have, and then use it.” Sage advice for all time, don't you think?

Diagnosed at 25 with lupus, Flannery is now 37 and focused on her writing as she tries to keep her constant pain and attending exhaustion at bay. One of the many aspects that I love about this book is how Napolitano so convincingly inhabits O’Connor and offers insight into her writing process: “Flannery gripped the pen in her lap like a baseball she wanted to throw. The two main characters in her novel…stood in the centre of her mind. One was made of flesh and blood, the other was two-dimensional…Rayber, wouldn’t come alive and no matter how hard Flannery pounded the letters on her typewriter, she couldn’t make him so.”

After Melvin reads “Good Country People,” he asks Flannery, “ I wondered what it says about you, that there are no happy endings…All of your characters are left in some kind of pain.” Her response is brilliant: “Maybe I left them on their way to a happy ending…I’m sure you didn’t consider this, but it’s possible that the characters are closer to grace at the end of the stories. Grace changes a person, you know. And change is painful.” Later, when he reads Wise Blood, Melvin thinks, “each sentence felt like a balled-up fist, intent on knocking him out.” Flannery “trapped tiny disappointments, tiny hopes, tiny frustrations, and pinned them down with sentences.” Flannery, herself, knows how to be patient with a scene, “waiting for the violence to start.” She discovered that “she had to go a little mad herself, in order to get the story right, in order to pin him down like a butterfly.” And, in the heart of this tumult, she was tempted to push away from her desk: “a life was coming to a brutal end beneath her chattering fingertips and she wanted to be anywhere but where she was. She wanted to be anyone but who she was.” That total disappearance of self that Flannery strives for in her writing, all of the other characters yearn for as they make meaning of their lives.

The tragedy that closes the first section and transitions to “Hard” cleaves all of the main players, and even though you may see it coming, it is no less awful when it happens. It is through the aftermath of that event that the surviving characters puzzle out not only what it means to live their lives as fully as possible but also how that might happen now that “all has changed, changed utterly,” to reference Yeats.

There’s much I have not revealed about this book, because I want to be mindful of letting Napolitano’s accomplished storytelling wash over you, when you find yourself in her richly evoked world-- a world where the peacocks mirror the uncompromising spirit of their mistress, Flannery O’Connor, and, in the end rise up, feathers spreading, “sea green, inky sapphire, specks of yellow…shimmering.”

Ann Napolitano's literary star is rising. Get yourself a copy of the luminous A GOOD HARD LOOK and prepare to be startled.

Guest post: PETER BEHRENS (author of THE O'BRIENS) on the editing process

2011-07-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

The editing process

To write fiction I need a kick-start, and that usually means letting myself write raw, unedited first drafts in pencil. This is when my subconscious turns loose (I hope!) imagery and scenes my conscious mind has not processed yet. I will spew out a first draft with pencil and paper, and it is messy and ridiculous. I try to do as little self-editing at this stage as possible. But I usually do have a sense of the direction I want to go, a sense of the emotional/tonal/dramatic place that I want the scene/chapter to reach — a place I need that scene/chapter to get to.

When I have that raw and ugly first draft of a scene or chapter down — even if it is unfinished and open-ended, trailing all kinds of loose threads, I usually stroll out of my office feeling exhausted, with a sense of accomplishment. I'm also wondering at the strangeness , ridiculousness, and inefficiency of my process. I leave the raw draft alone for a night. I need some distance from it. It's like it's too hot to handle.

I go back to it in the morning, read over what I've written, and begin seeing how I might make it clearer, better, sharper. From that point on I want to unpack the raw draft, follow all the hints my subconscious has left for me. And eventually I want to be as clear and simple as possible. I try to make my prose glass so you can see through it. I want the reader to feel the roundness of scenes and characters, though literary “realism” is an illusion, of course. The “reality” I'm creating is as structured, composed, and unreal as any other sort of fiction — but I still want the reader to feel they know these characters, I want readers to inhabit their houses and rooms and know the smells, and the quality of the sunlight outside . . . I want to persuade readers to inhabit the characters and their worlds as wholly as possible.

Editing becomes almost endless. It feels endless. Takes months, years. Near the end of it I'm just putting in and taking out commas. Of course it's never really over. When I read the book as a physical book, for the first time, I catch knots in the syntax and grammar that I've missed . . . I see how structure could be improved . . . but it's too late! Time to move on to the next book.

I learned about being edited as a screenwriter where I was paid to sit in a room and listen carefully while people told me everything I had done wrong in my screenplays. One important thing a screenwriter must learn is to LISTEN. You may disagree, and shelve the criticism, but if it's coming from a source you respect, LISTEN TO IT FIRST. Think it through. Don't get defensive; listen. Then, later, make up your own mind whether it makes any sense. Good editors can point out clearly when something is not working, then they leave the fixes to the writer.

THE O'BRIENS by Peter Behrens (2011) House of Anansi Press, 548 pages

2011-07-11T09:38:00.002-04:00

In this sprawling Irish family saga that spans six decades from 1900-1960 you will meet a symphony of voices from the ambitious and resourceful patriarch Joe O'Brien to his philanthropically-minded photographer wife Iseult to Joe's brothers Grattan (an ace pilot) and Tom (a priest) to Joe and Iseult's passionate children Mike, Margo and Frankie and you will feel party to their dark secrets, private agonies and dreams.

The epigraph, a poem by established Irish poet Nuala NiDhomhnaill, is Joe's emotional touchstone:

The storm came
blew with force,
I heard your voice
calling me through thunder.

From the time Joe assumes the role of man of the house when he's only thirteen to the time he navigates himself safely to the Cape Breton shoreline through the calls of his granddaughter Madeleine, he relies on the people he loves best to moor him through storms literal and figurative and there are plenty of both.

Raised in poverty in rural Quebec in the late 19th century, Joe and his siblings accept the kindness of the local parish priest, Fr. Lillis, who "knew he had to help them all, so he began inviting the whole bunch to stop at his house after school for lessons in geometry, table manners, and German... And he taught them the waltz... What he was trying to teach was courage." When news reaches Mrs. O'Brien of her absent husband's accidental death in South Africa, "Joe understood that his father had left his power behind, and that he, as eldest son, had inherited it... He would use it to protect them all." And, protect them he does, though years after he has trusted his sisters Hope and Kate to a convent where they had taken their vows as Soeur Marie-Bernadette and Soeur Marie-Emmanuelle, Joe worries that "in his greed and hurry to escape and seek his own freedom, they were the ones who had paid the price."

While Joe O'Brien is making a name for himself with railroad contracts, Iseult Wilkins is reconciling herself to a new beginning as a recent adult orphan. She decides to move to Venice Beach, California and it is there in the realty office that she meets Joe's younger brother Grattan and "felt her cheeks flushing with thoughts that weren't words, just burrs of feeling, inchoate, startling." In the little Linnie cottage that she decides to purchase with her inheritance, Iseult resolves "she might find clarity and calm, she might find her own purpose." Amid that clarity and calm appears Grattan's older brother Joe, who courts Iseult with fresh flowers and letters in a whirlwind 5-week romance that leads to their marriage about which Iseult believes is " a road, not the place where the road stopped."

In the years of the Great War, there are letters from the Front from Grattan with such vivid and unfiltered detail that it feels almost prurient to be reading them. Joe and Iseult's son Michael is born in early 1914 and he's joined by a little sister Margo, two years later. The family has settled in Montreal in a massive stone home on Pine Street from which Joe continues to oversee his burgeoning business empire and Iseult begins to involve herself in philanthropic work with poor single mothers and their children. There are some trying moments after the war, especially for Grattan, who has a difficult time readjusting to married life with his wife Elise and their daughter Virginia.

When another war appears unavoidable it is the next generation of young men who enlist, Joe's son Mike and his son-in-law Johnny, both of whom write honest, heart-breaking letters home to their families about the kill or be killed nature of life on that Front. In those years, Frankie, Iseult and Joe's youngest daughter, confesses that "doorbell dread was like a sliver of ice entering the intestinal tract." All families feared that knock on the door that portended the loss of a loved one.

Next to his younger brothers Tom and Grattan, over the years "it was as if Joe had taken the weight of his family onto his shoulders and it had shortened, thickened and bent him." Fiercely loyal, but emotionally complicated, Joe O'Brien remains enigmatic throughout the novel; yet, it is the puzzling out of his character that drives the narrative and kept me flipping through right through to its satisfying denouement, anticipated way back in the epigraph. For, in the end, Joe realizes that "All his life he'd needed their voices--outside himself, bright and alive, to take a bearing on, to find his way." In the symphony of voices that Behrens has created in THE O'BRIENS, you, too, will find your way.

NATURAL ORDER by Brian Francis (from the ARC, on sale August 23, 2011) Doubleday Canada, 384 pages

2011-07-07T11:37:00.007-04:00

At a launch for another author’s book earlier this year, I chatted with Brian Francis’s editor who gushed about this forthcoming novel. So, I asked her to send me an ARC once it was available. Hearing a little about its plot and themes, it sounded to me as though it would be a novel along the lines of Stewart O’Nan’s most recent triumph EMILY, ALONE--a book I adored.

NATURAL ORDER opens with an obituary for John Charles Sparks dated July 27, 1984. He was only thirty-one when he died, allegedly of cancer. And, although John’s story is at the heart of the narrative, it is told many years later through the eyes of his mother, Joyce, now an 86-year-old widow living out her remaining days in a nursing home where the buzzers keep her awake at night and she laments the problem of getting old as “time bends and shifts. Memories spring up, uprooted.”

Joyce is spunky and has a dark sense of humour, one of her pieces of emotional armour. When her snoring roommate irritates her, she dreams of hurling the Yellow Pages at her, “never at her head, though I’ve been tempted. Only at her feet.” And, when she is exasperated by one of the many health care aides, she muses, “I could have told her I was pregnant and she would have asked me if I wanted ice in my glass.” One day, a new volunteer, Timothy, drops by for a chat and Joyce is startled by his hands that remind her of her son John’s: “They’re nice. Strong… I feel my heart fold up like a piece of paper.”

Over the course of seven decades, Francis has Joyce unfurl her tale, from the summer she was seventeen and working in the local ice-cream bar with her musical-loving, tap-dancing friend Freddy Pender (who channels Robert Preston as Harold Hill in The Music Man) to her early married years raising her son John to the devastating years after his unexpected death to her widowhood when she “didn’t want to face life without [her] son and husband” to her final days spent in the company of strangers where she finally finds redemption.

In Joyce Sparks, Brian Francis has created an authentic and memorable voice of a woman who has spent her lifetime wrestling secrets to the ground, and who finally comes to terms with the healing power of facing the truth and making amends before it’s too late. What impressed me most about this book was Francis’s keen, clear understanding of a parent’s grief at the loss of a child, where, as for Joyce and her husband Charlie, “things either happened before or after John’s death. The world was cleaved in two.” It is not the natural order to bury your child. He is meant to bury you.

By balancing Joyce’s complicated grief journey with the realities of aging, Francis offers up lessons for all time. I hope very much to see NATURAL ORDER on the important fiction long lists this Fall. It deserves to be there.

THE DISCIPLE OF LAS VEGAS by Ian Hamilton (2011) House of Anansi Press, 340 pages

2011-07-06T19:24:00.024-04:00

Feisty, sexy forensic accountant Ava Lee is back in the second of this entertaining series published by the Spiderline imprint at House of Anansi Press. If you missed her debut in The Water Rat of Wanchai, really you ought to get caught up. Ava is a creature of habit, working through her enigmatic assignments often clad in a black Giordano t-shirt and Adidas sweatpants, sipping on mug after mug of Starbucks VIA instant coffee, tossing a Chanel bag over her shoulder and slipping a Cartier tank watch on her wrist as she scribbles relevant details and provocative questions in a fresh Moleskin notebook.

Ava’s business partnership with a septugenarian of no relation whom she calls Uncle is a fruitful one and they frequently work for a million dollar retainer. Their clients are “typically Asian, normally desperate, and often irrational by the time they signed up with Ava and Uncle” who unabashedly take “thirty percent of everything they recovered.” This time they are hired by Tommy Ordonez, the richest man in the Phillipines (and a bully), to recover $50 million lost in a land swindle.

Ava’s research takes her to San Francisco, Vancouver, Victoria, bank accounts in Costa Rica and Cyprus and to an online gambling ring in Las Vegas that happens to be run through a First Nations server, hosted by the Cooper Island Gaming Commission and managed by the honourable Chief Ronald Francis. Thanks to her instinct and ability to ask the right questions, Ava uncovers links to infamous gambler David “the Disciple” Douglas and his business partner Jeremy Ashton, both of whom she comes to believe have cheated the online system and have hidden her client’s stolen funds.

Before Ava is able to get to the end of the money trail, she’s beaten up in a Vegas parking garage, has the psychological weight of an attempted suicide on her shoulders, and is forced to call in Uncle’s 150-pound thugs and likely sociopaths Carlos and Andy (who only speak Cantonese) to help persuade Douglas and Ashton why they ought to come clean (using a gun, a meat cleaver and stove top elements.) However, more than their reputations are at stake and what may have been a simple game of cat-and-mouse turns out to be something with high political stakes that risks a diplomatic disaster in the British Prime Minister’s Office.

Always fair-minded and never too proud to appeal to St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes), or to use her terrifyingly precise bak mei martial arts skills, or to compromise for the sake of succeeding on her client’s behalf, Ava strategically negotiates her way through to a satisfying conclusion.

The best news, however, is that the next book in this exciting and entertaining series is already scheduled for February 2012. You can be sure that I will be eager to trail Ava Lee on her next adventure then in The Wild Beasts of Wuhan.

A Reckoning of Reading So Far in 2011

2011-07-04T08:36:00.004-04:00

Both @FadedPaper and @bookgaga are responsible for prompting me to create this list of books I've read so far in 2011. I've listed them in the order in which I've read them. Many of the authors are vivid presences on Twitter and that is why I've reached for their books. You should too.

@_MonicaAli_
@angie_abdou
@thebirdsisters
@robin_black
@rosannecash
@harlancoben
@clairecookwrite
@carahoffman
@LeavittNovelist
@AmyMacKinnon
@emilymandel
@randysusanmeyer
@robertaannrich
@andrewtshaffer
@ajsomerset
@jcourtsull
@haleytanner
@wordrunner
@10Ksaints

All of the books on this list I have blogged about here at Reading for the Joy of It with a few of the most recent posts forthcoming.

1. GONE FOR GOOD by Harlan Coben (2002) Dell
2. THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard (2011) HarperCollins Canada
3. GREAT PHILOSOPHERS WHO FAILED AT LOVE by Andrew Shaffer (2011) HarperCollins Canada
4. THE WATER RAT OF WANCHAI by Ian Hamilton (2010) House of Anansi Press
5. TETHERED by Amy MacKinnon (2008) Random House
6. THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE by Roberta Rich (2011) Random House Canada
7. TELL NO ONE by Harlan Coben (2001) Random House
8. THE GUARDIANS by Andrew Pyper (2011) Doubleday Canada
9. THE SENTIMENTALISTS by Johanna Skibsrud (2009) Gaspereau Press
10. IN HER SHOES by Jennifer Weiner (2002) Simon and Schuster
11. MORDECAI: THE LIFE & TIMES by Charles Foran (2010) Random House Canada
12. GROWING UP JUNG: COMING OF AGE AS THE SON OF TWO SHRINKS by Micah Toub (2010) Doubleday Canada
13. A COLD NIGHT FOR ALLIGATORS by Nick Crowe (2011) Knopf Canada
14. LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL by Emily Mandel (2009) Unbridled Books
15. AS LONG AS THE RIVERS FLOW by James Bartleman (2011) Random House Canada
16. FINDING THE WORDS, ed. Jared Bland (2011) McClelland & Stewart
17. CRIME MACHINE by Giles Blunt (2010) Random House Canada
18. THE WILD WATER WALKING CLUB by Claire Cook (2009) Hyperion
19. PLAY DEAD by Harlan Coben (1990) Penguin
20. THE CANTERBURY TRAIL by Angie Abdou (2011) Brindle & Glass
21. HOLD TIGHT by Harlan Coben (2008) Penguin
22. BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES by ZsuZsi Gartner (2011) Penguin Canada
23. COMPOSED by Rosanne Cash (2010) Viking Penguin
24. DARKEST FEAR by Harlan Coben (2000) Dell
25. THE SALT ROAD by Jane Johnson (2011) Doubleday Canada
26. THE HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (1988) Farrar Strauss & Giroux
27. SANCTUS by Simon Toyne (2011) HarperCollins Canada
28. SONGS FOR THE MISSING by Stewart O'Nan (2008) Viking Penguin
29. THE BIG WHY by Michael Winter (2004) House of Anansi Press
30. ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM by Elizabeth Hay (2011) McClelland & Stewart
31. PIGEON ENGLISH by Stephen Kelman (2011) House of Anansi Press
32. THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS by Randy Susan Meyers (2009) St. Martin's Press
33. IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS by Robin Black (2010) Random House
34. DEAL BREAKER by Harlan Coben (1995) Random House
35. HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE by Zoe Whittall (2009) House of Anansi Press
36. CAUGHT by Harlan Coben (2010) Penguin Canada
37. TIGER, TIGER by Margaux Fragoso (2011) Douglas & McIntyre
38. THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS by Jess Walter (2009) Harper Collins Canada
39. COMBAT CAMERA by A.J. Somerset (2010) Biblioasis
40. VACLAV & LENA by Haley Tanner (2011) Random House Canada
41. THE LONG GOODBYE by Meghan O'Rourke (2011) Riverhead Books
42. EMILY, ALONE by Stewart O'Nan (2011) Viking Penguin
43. TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson (2011) Ecco
44. RAVEN STOLE THE MOON by Garth Stein (1998) Harper Collins
45. BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey (2011) Little, Brown and Company
46. MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU by Louisa Brown (2011) HarperCollins Canada
47. THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen (2011) Crown Publishing
48. UP UP UP: STORIES by Julie Booker (2011) House of Anansi Press
49. MR. CHARTWELL by Rebecca Hunt (2010) HarperCollins Canada
50. THE BEAUTY CHORUS by Kate Lord Brown (2011) McArthur & Company
51. STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett (2011) HarperCollins Canada
52. UNTOLD STORY by Monica Ali (2011) Simon and Schuster Canada
53. THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain (2011) Random House
54. SO MUCH PRETTY by Cara Hoffman (2011) Simon and Schuster
55. SAVING CEE CEE HONEYCUTT by Beth Hoffman (2010) Viking Penguin
56. THE SINGER'S GUN by Emily Mandel (2010) Unbridled Books
57. PICTURES OF YOU by Caroline Leavitt (2010) Algonquin Books
58. THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick DeWitt (2011) House of Anansi Press
59. FAITH by Jennifer Haigh (2011) HarperCollins Canada
60. MAINE by J. Courtney Sullivan (2011) Knopf
61. THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ by Anne Enright (2011) McClelland & Stewart
62. THE TIGER'S WIFE by Tea Obreht (2011) Random House
63. THE BLASPHEMER by Nigel Farndale (2010) Doubleday
64. THE O'BRIENS by Peter Behrens (ARC from House of Anansi Press for blog tour)

Currently reading:

THE DISCIPLE OF LAS VEGAS by Ian Hamilton (ARC from House of Anansi Press)
THE NATURAL ORDER by Brian Francis (ARC from Random House Canada)

Re-reading for work:

THE SELECTED WORK OF T.S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen (Penguin Canada)
THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard (Ecco)
COMBAT CAMERA by AJ Somerset (Biblioasis)
ANNABEL by Kathleen Winter (House of Anansi Press)

THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ by Anne Enright (2011) McClelland & Stewart, 230 pages

2011-06-30T20:46:00.024-04:00

Having adored Enright's Booker Prize-winning THE GATHERING, I knew I'd be predisposed to like THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ. What I did not expect was to be startled at every turn by the visceral quality of her prose. I cannot remember the last time I was so physically and emotionally moved by a book. And, that response is not predicated on a first reading either, because as I was skimming back through its pages to select quotations for this post, I felt the same flutter in my stomach--a palpable yearning.

Set in a suburb of contemporary Dublin, THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ examines "the irreparable slip into longing that can change the course of our lives." In it, thirty-four-year-old Gina Moynihan tells us of her affair with "the love of her life," Sean Vallely, whom she met three years earlier, though saw for the first time several years before that at a garden party hosted by her sister Fiona. Recalling her initial awareness of Sean, she notes, "it's like I have to pull the whole planet around in my head to get to this garden, and this part of the afternoon and to this man, who is the stranger I sleep beside now." Gina holds you in the hollow of her hand as you bear mute witness to all of their encounters and makes you complicit as "you catch a stranger's eye, for a moment too long, and then you look away" and, like Gina, for the moment you are "just breathing out."

While they arrange their furtive and exciting trysts, both Gina and Sean carry on their married relationships with their spouses Conor and Aileen. About Conor, who remains intentionally a nebulous, essentially benign presence in the narrative, Gina admits, "We knew each other. Our real life was in some shared head space; our bodies were the places we used to play. Maybe that's what lovers should be--not these besotted, fuck-witted strangers that are myself and Sean, these actors in a bare room." Yet, in the end, Gina "ended up...not believing a single thing [Conor] did; thinking it was all gesture and expostulation, it was all air."

In losing herself to love and lust, Gina observes, "it was like I had gone to the edges of myself, and what was in the centre was anyone's guess," while Sean thrived on jealousy: "it was his comfort and company--call it ambition; it was his protection from the night." And yet. Even the idea of not being together through courting the notion of walking away from Sean is too much for her: "The pain I felt was so sudden and unexpected, it was like being shot. I looked down the length of myself, as if to share the news with my body, or to check that it was all still there."

In the beginning and the end it's all about a child: Sean's daughter Evie. After both of them have left their spouses and Gina holds Sean, "in the darkness" and tells him that life is about failure, "it has failure built in," Enright whips you back emotionally to the opening line of the novel: "If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive." Gina is capable of forgiving Sean, but I'm not so sure she is capable of forgiving herself. That open-ended ambiguity at the end of her tale where Gina realizes "whether her father stays with me or goes, I will lose this girl," is the true heartbreak of THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ.

SO MUCH PRETTY by Cara Hoffman (2011) Simon & Schuster, 287 pages

2011-06-15T10:58:00.019-04:00

Although the present of this gripping and stunning tale is April 2009, the book moves back and forth from 1992 through 2015 over which you learn about events that have shaped the main players: intrepid investigative journalist Stacey Flynn; trained physicians Claire and Gene Piper; their gifted teenaged daughter Alice, "a riddle, a koan"; and, the sweet, family-oriented late bloomer Wendy White.

By using a variety of prose styles from copies of student essays to redacted oral interviews to personal letters to a third-person omniscient narrator, Hoffman drives the plot forward as it intentionally disorients the reader, mirroring most of the characters' experience with the events of early Spring 2009 in a small upstate New York community.

In the Prologue, you realize that the search underway for a missing young woman is problematic, for she could be "someone with blue or maybe brown or green eyes. She could be five foot six or five-eight. Her hair could also be red, could be an unnatural colour like pink or white." And, the narrator suggests, "as we are well aware, it is easy for a woman who fits this description to just disappear."

After "classic country girl" Wendy White doesn't return home one night, the entire town is enlisted to try to find her. They do side-by-side sweeps across fields, "holding hands over the blunt and broken stalks of harvested corn sticking up from the frozen ground." Fifteen year old Alice Piper wonders if this social impulse is "an example of ethical obligation...to care for a resident of our town...part of the greater good."

Five months later, Wendy's corpse is discovered, dumped at the edge of the woods and reporter Stacey Flynn chillingly observes, "White's body, as it turned out, was put to use for months before being found." Flynn shares her observations with Alice, who she has profiled many times before for the Haeden paper, one of the few good news stories in a town rife with problems including widespread unemployment and poverty both literal and spiritual. Both Flynn and Alice know in their bones that whoever murdered Wendy was not a drifter as so many of the locals pretend to believe, but someone in their midst, a longstanding member of the Haeden community.

As Hoffman unfurls detail after shocking detail, be prepared to question your own moral courage. What would you be prepared to risk for a better life for yourself and for others?

SAVING CEE CEE HONEYCUTT by Beth Hoffman (2010) Viking Penguin, 306 pages

2011-06-14T08:27:00.019-04:00

Cecilia (Cee Cee) Honeycutt is a twelve-year-old single child saddled with the responsibility of a mentally ill mother, a former beauty pageant queen who stomps about their Ohio town tarted up in bright lipstick and tired taffeta, her prize-winning tiara askew. While her father is on the road, Cee Cee luckily has her elderly neighbour Mrs. Odell to rely on for a dose of normalcy in her daily life. It's Mrs. Odell who provides Cee Cee's school lunch and offers up nuggets of reassuring wisdom when Cee Cee is about to crack from the worrisome burden that her mother has become. She tells Cee Cee, "When a chapter of your Life Book is complete, your spirit knows it's time to turn the page so a new chapter can begin. Even when you're scared or think you are not ready, your spirit knows you are."

One day in 1967, "the Happy Cow Ice Cream truck came over a crest in the road and hit Momma so hard she was knocked clean out of her geranium-red satin shoes." The death of Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt means that Cee Cee feels for the first time, "the flutter of a page turn deep within... as a chapter in [her] Life Book came to a close." Soon after, Cee Cee's great aunt Tallulah Caldwell (aka Tootie) arrives to spirit her away to a new life in Savannah to "a big ole house with plenty of room." But, it's Aunt Tootie's invitation, "I'd sure love to have you" that seals the deal. For Cee Cee "Those six simple words...filled the room with light."

They drive home to Savannah in a '48 Packard with a hood ornament called Delilah and therein begins Cee Cee's transition to a life among women brimming with Southern warmth and charm. With Cee Cee you'll meet Miz Goodpepper who has a claw-footed bathtub in which she soaks under the stars (in the company of Louie, a prurient peacock), Oletta, Aunt Tootie's long-serving cook and Cee Cee's sage companion on her grief journey, and "the great gaping vagina otherwise known as Violene Hobbs" who murdered a magnolia tree.

In the months that Cee Cee spends with these succulent wild women, she comes to realize that "Momma had left this world and set herself free, and in doing so, she had set me free too." In the hours that I spent inside the minds of Beth Hoffman's richly created characters between the pages of SAVING CEE CEE HONEYCUTT, I came to yearn for the balm of Southern hospitality and felt, more than just a little, saved by their company .

THE SINGER'S GUN by Emily Mandel (2010) Unbridled Books, 285 pages

2011-06-14T08:26:00.016-04:00

Emily Mandel beguiled me with her debut novel LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL, so I was delighted to pick up a copy of THE SINGER'S GUN, a story rife with betrayal, half-told truths and narrative drive that will give you whiplash.

Protagonist Anton Waker finally gets married to his reticent long time cellist-playing fiancee Sophie. Though raised by criminal parents about whom he never doubted their abiding love, Anton has attempted to set his work life straight by abandoning the family business and working as a middle manager for an insurance company in New York. However, Agent Broden has been tailing Anton and his cousin Aria for years and his luck is just about to run out.

While honeymooning with Sophie on the island of Ischia (and not wanting to involve her in the professional trouble that he feels is coming and his due), Anton suggests that they "should be apart for a while, not a long while, just maybe a couple of weeks." Sophie responds as you'd hope she would by hailing a taxi and claiming, "I carry my passport in my handbag and you can dispose of my luggage as you see fit."

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, Anton's former secretary Elena, "who he'd secretly been in love with since he'd met her under criminal circumstances two and a half years earlier," is dodging Agent Broden's questions that just might implicate her in Anton's previously nefarious life. That's not the only threat that Anton faces, though. His insistent former business partner Aria (who also happens to be his first cousin) has involved him in a final business deal that seems simple enough on the surface (give a marked envelope to a stranger), but will have an unanticipated ripple effect on the rest of his life.

Mandel is an intelligent and convincing writer whose clean prose style will make you understand how each well placed word matters.

MAINE by J. Courtney Sullivan, from the ARC (June 2011), from A.A. Knopf, 384 pages

2011-06-14T08:24:00.020-04:00

The epigraph to MAINE is the novel's emotional touchstone: "Just do everything we didn't do and you will be perfectly safe." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter.

Such a wistful sentiment sets you up for all that is to come: spilled wine and secrets; heartache; love as hard as a stone. Over the course of one summer you will meet the Kelleher women: octogenarian matriarch Alice, her middle-aged black sheep daughter Kathleen, Kathleen's thirty-something writer daughter Maggie and Alice's miniature house obsessed daughter-in-law Ann Marie.

The novel opens with Alice furtively packing up bits and pieces of her summer home in preparation for its eventual gift to her local parish, St. Michael's by the sea, currently overseen by the charming and handsome Father Donnelly who reminds her "of crooners from the fifties." Plus, he "had chosen a vocation from another time and was more thoughtful in a way she didn't know young people could be anymore." Alice slips easily in and out of time, remembering the summer her husband Daniel won the property on a bet in 1945, and how the first time she saw it, she gasped: "The road was from a fairy tale, a long stretch of sand inside a tunnel of lush pine trees." Romantic that he was, Daniel "carved a shamrock into the soft trunk of a birch tree" and "added the letters A.H." for "Alice's. House." Haunted by a traumatic loss in her past, Alice is tricked into magically thinking that her beloved sister Mary would "turn the corner at any moment." Mary's appearance, however, is never to be, save through Alice's memory and the cruel prompting of her then teenish daughter Kathleen.

The MAINE property is replete with family history of children and grandchildren and Alice still feels sentimental about the old cottage, "with its familiar details, and stories from their past tucked inside each cupboard and under every bed....This was where Clare had learned to walk, and Patrick had broken his arm one summer, trying to jump off the roof of the screen porch and fly like Superman....Where she and Daniel had taken countless strolls to look at the stars, hand in hand, not a word spoken." Like Alice, I have been lucky enough to be going to cottage country in the Muskokas all of my life. There, on a property purchased by my paternal grandparents in the fifties, my family has shared both celebration and heartache. Just like the fictional Kellehers.

My parents became engaged at the dock in 1962 and traded stolen kisses in the early days of their courtship. As children we were sent into the bush to pick wild blueberries by our Irish grandfather, toting the pot used to boil corn, when he was fed up with our whining for one more game of Euchre, Old Maid or Rumoli. As teenagers, David, Denise and I learned how to drive the little tin boat, swam across to the island to wear ourselves out before sleep, and hosted countless friends around makeshift campfires out on the slab of Canadian Shield where more often than not David strummed his guitar and sang his way through Neil Young, David Wilcox, Cat Stevens, Blue Rodeo and Garth Brooks. And, it was on that lake that David died in a boat crash, just after his 25th birthday, and the geography took on new, resonant meaning for those of us left behind.

As I was thumbing my way through MAINE, I felt an especial kinship to many of the characters, but particularly to the summer place those generations of Kellehers inhabit. A place that insists that truths be told, no matter how difficult they may be to hear. And, I recognized in Alice's less judgmental response to her granddaughter Maggie's predicament, my own grandmother's open-hearted acceptance of my own follies that I carry with me long after she's gone.

In J. Courtney Sullivan's MAINE, in spite of the sibling rivalry and ever-present pulse of Catholic guilt, abiding, irrational love endures. This book is one of THE reads of the summer of 2011. Treat yourself to a copy.

PICTURES OF YOU by Caroline Leavitt (2010) Algonquin Books, 323 pages

2011-06-03T08:36:00.018-04:00

The older I get, the more I realize the truth in these words from Tennessee Williams' play A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: "you can always depend on the kindness of strangers." This adage is the force that drives through the pages of NY Times bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt's PICTURES OF YOU in which two women, April and Isabelle, are running away from their marriages.

I was hooked from the opening snapshot: "There's a hornet in the car. Isabelle hears a buzz and then feels a brush of wing against her cheek. A grape-size electric motor sings past her right ear." In that moment, Leavitt had me sitting in the car beside Isabelle, ducking and swatting a stinging insect I could hear. That's the magic of well-written fiction.

With the fog that rolls in and makes it impossible to see anything beyond the car's hood coupled with the distraction of the hornet, it is no surprise that Isabelle crashes the car, killing a stranger. What is surprising, though, is how Leavitt negotiates an emotional journey for Isabelle that involves her in the lives of the accident's surviving victims, widower Charlie and his son Sam.

What most impressed me about this book was Leavitt's ability to make the complicated grief that emerges from an accidental death ring true. And, we witness that grief as Charlie navigates a life of "after" with Sam just as Sam, like most kids, yearns to be treated by his peers as he always had been. Charlie comes to realize that the secret is "You never got over what you lost. You always carried it with you, stitched to you like Peter Pan's shadow...the truth was, you wanted to remember it always."

When a hand addressed envelope arrives for his dead wife, Charlie begins to realize that the life they had shared as a married couple was not what it had seemed. While Charlie is trying to solve the mystery that April was, Isabelle focuses on finding ways to help Sam both face his grief and nurture an artistic life through photography. Facing her own survivor's guilt, Isabelle learns to drive again. Her instructor tells her "People who are frightened, who don't know where they're going, they're my best students."

So utterly convincing is Leavitt's tale that you will believe in the flesh and blood existence of Charlie, Isabelle and Sam and find yourself rooting for all three of them as they navigate the messy reality of life after accidental death and come face-to-face with daring to hope for forgiveness for the unforgivable.

UP UP UP: STORIES by Julie Booker (2011) House of Anansi Press, 219 pages

2011-05-24T20:29:00.021-04:00

Lisa Moore's cover blurb for Julie Booker's debut collection promises that the "stories will transport you." And they do. You'll be transported in time and place.

In "Geology in Motion" you'll open water sea kayak alongside longtime friends Lorrie and Katie "where the glaciers calve all night like thunder;" then, take at turn at the piano bench in "Every Good Boy" (remember the mnemonic device drilled into you about the treble clef staff?) and meet the piano teacher's husband, Mr. Acker, the shoe man at Eaton's to whom "saying hello was as important as a size six pump, a size nine in black," and for whom each lady dangles "a shoe like an unlit cigarette."

Try your turn at "Breakup Fresh's" speed-dating in a "Singles' Night at the museum" and experience that "moment before possibility" with Tracy, riding the beat of her anxious heart. Prefer the rugged outdoors? Pull on your climbing gear and journey with Didi to Tibet where she lugs her backpack, called Bradley, "in and out of every truck and bus, infuriating our tour guide," filled as it is with "the Elgin Marbles of her upscale London life."

And there's more. So much more. You'll spend uncomfortable time in an eating disorder clinic, date a tree man "who abseiled from his upper loft bedroom, back down to the living room," experience a clowning workshop that "is nothing like real life," date a mod with "long eyelashes that signalled monarch migration with one flutter," steal tomatoes from an irascible neighbour, cutting them triumphantly "into slices as thick as medals," and finish your journey in Toronto's Don Valley where "the ending will surprise" you.

Each one of these stories is a workshop in how to write fiction. Whether it is two pages long or closing in on fifteen, the story has tension, narrative drive, believable diction and figurative language that will challenge the way you see your world.

Each story is a well-cut and polished gem to which you will return over and over again, breathless in admiration.

MR. CHARTWELL by Rebecca Hunt (2010) HarperCollins Canada, 217 pages

2011-05-24T20:27:00.031-04:00

Winston Churchill is 89 years old and finally retiring from his vocation as a public official in July 1964. MR CHARTWELL chronicles the days leading up to his departure and the weight that that decision bears on him. It is no secret that Churchill struggled with depression and in fact often referred to it as a black dog. Here, in this remarkable debut novel, Rebecca Hunt personifies that dog in Black Pat and through the miracle of magic realism you will come to believe, as I did, in his palpable panting form.

When you first meet Black Pat, he's waiting impatiently for the elder statesman to wake up and when Churchill speaks "in a barely audible whisper....'Bugger off,'" it grins "filthily in the blackness...with unsuppressed relish, 'No.'" Miles away in Battersea, Esther Hammerhans, recently widowed is beginning to question the reason for her husband Michael's death when her thoughts are interrupted by a visitor, a Mr. Chartwell (aka Black Pat), come to rent a room as a lodger. Esther flinches, only barely when she realizes that "Mr. Chartwell was unmistakably a dog, a mammoth muscular dog about six foot seven high....the horror of him mesmerizing." No sooner has Mr. Chartwell offered Esther an extraordinary sum to board, than Esther shows him what will be his room, Esther's husband Michael's former study.

With their distinct forms of depression set against each other for cosmic balance, Churchill's lifelong determination to K.B.O., "keep buggering on," helps to provide a context for the circumstantial depression that Esther will temporarily suffer. And, when they meet when she is sent by the House of Commons to his Kent home to take dictation for his final public speech, he is able to provoke her into believing that she has a choice.

The sweet rapport between Winston and his wife Clementine is obvious throughout. They have pet nicknames for each other, "Mr Pug" and "Mrs. Pussycat," and after 55 years of marriage Clementine knows "when to leave him to the thorns of his solitude."

In the heart of the story, the repartee between Churchill and Black Pat is the stuff of Shakespearean comedy:
"The work you have done is the measure of you as a man..."
"I know what you are scavenging for, vulture."
"And you will be quantified accordingly."
"Are you listening, you rustic ignorant?"

Back at Esther's place Black Pat is performing his daily toilet with a tea towel and a wooden spoon that he has stolen from the kitchen to provoke her and to aspire to have "the smile of Tess of the D'Ubervilles...like roses full of snow." And, at the end of the work day, swigging the fetid water in a vase of wilting flowers, he sings, "with a crooning tilt to his forehead, 'A bone in the fridge may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend.'"

Hours later he's back in Kent with Churchill and they parody the famous exchange Sir Winston allegedly had with Lady Astor:

"You're drunk!"
"And you're naked," Black Pat shouted through towels trying to remember the quote, 'But in the morning I will be sober.'
"Obnoxious guinea worm. In the morning I will be clothed....But you will always be a bastard."

Isn't this great stuff? Truly.

When Churchill is in fine form, good naturedly responding to questions from the press about his retirement during which he pledges to "delight my wife with my unabated company" and crush champagne grapes at the Pol Rogers' chateau in Epernay, Black Pat behaves like a petulant child, his power over Churchill for the moment waning.

MR. CHARTWELL feels like the genuine article. You will believe in this version of Churchill and admire the strength of his character when facing losses no parent ought to endure. Rebecca Hunt has written about depression from the inside out, scaffolding it through Black Pat's gestures and behaviour and both Churchill's and Esther's responses to him. This is a brilliant book and I am so grateful that it crossed my path.

THE BEAUTY CHORUS by Kate Lord Brown (2011) McArthur & Company, 430 pages

2011-05-18T17:00:00.042-04:00

My grandmother's baby sister Elsie served in the Canadian Women's Army Corps during the Second World War, so I've been curious to read THE BEAUTY CHORUS because it focuses on the lives of three young women who meet because they volunteer, just as Elsie did, to make a unique contribution to the war effort by being trained by the Air Transport Auxiliary Unit to fly and ferry planes between the air bases in England, the existence of which I previously knew nothing about.

In selecting "High Flight" by 19-year-old Spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr. to serve as the epigraph to THE BEAUTY CHORUS, Kate Lord Brown establishes the mood for the novel even before the narrative unfurls:

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds--and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of..."

It's New Year's Eve, 1940, and the lithe and winsome debutante Evie Chase finds it difficult to join in the celebratory fun at her father's annual fête while the war rumbles on about her. Raised in great privilege and provided the finest things her indulging father could offer, twenty-year-old Evie is beginning to understand the dissonance such a life provokes as bombs fall nightly in nearby London. Evie realizes that her life ought to be about more than parties and picnics and riding her horse Montgomery and she dreams of making a real contribution to the war effort. When her childhood friend Peter introduces her as "a very good pilot" to Captain Eric Bailey who helps to run the Air Transport Auxiliary at White Waltham just down the road, Evie is thrilled.

When Edie appears at the ATA training centre wearing her full length mink and high heeled shoes, she turns more than a few heads and assumptions are made about her character, but those assumptions are wrong. Edie is strong-willed and prepared to do what it takes to prove that she is worthy of the task, especially in the eyes of sexist men on the base. Edie suffers no fools and finds herself bunking with two other young women in a modest cottage close to White Waltham. Like Edie, Megan and Stella have an abiding desire to participate in the war effort. Megan's a hardworking Welsh farm girl who has suffered the loss of her only brother in the war and Stella says she's a widowed single mother whose only child has been evacuated to Ireland where he is staying with her in-laws for safety. All three young women are plucky and resourceful and totally supportive of each other, especially during difficult moments, of which there are many.

They have a model female pilot in Amy Johnson, an actual historical figure who ferried many planes for the ATA until she crashed into the Thames Estuary, as she does in a flashback sequence. Amy functions as a ghostly presence in the novel, the philosopher queen waxing about her passion for the skies and her mortal ingratitude for life's little pleasures and her intention to "not leave these girls" and "be their guardian angel, flying beside their Spitfires' wings. When they are looking for a break in the clouds, I shall be the wind that parts a safe course home." And, for the most part, you would do well to place your faith in the spectre of Amy Johnson. It is only when an engine is intentionally sabotaged that her ghostly presence is ineffective and the consequences are dire.

To keep the subplot sporting, Lord Brown includes love triangles for each of the girls. Megan has Bill and Peter angling for her affection; Stella is tethered to the idea of her dead husband Richard while she's also drawn to the artistic kindred spirit of Michael; Evie is engaged to Jack, an American pilot who adores every inch of her, yet also is drawn to "Beau," the complicated instructor who trained her.

I was impressed by Lord Brown's fanatical attention to the mechanics of flight and felt that although the girls were very comfortable with the idiosyncratic language involving gauges and dials, that I, by contrast, remained a dullard.

The final fifty pages of THE BEAUTY CHORUS are riveting. Through private letters Evie discovers some upsetting information not meant for her eyes that alters her perspective on what really matters, Beau's secret assignment leads him into dangerous territory both physical and psychological and Stella receives news that will change the course of the rest of her life. As each of these narrative threads resolves itself, your heart will be adrenaline-pumping alongside the characters, hoping beyond hope that they make it safely home.

Grab a copy of THE BEAUTY CHORUS and settle in to your favourite reading spot as you immerse yourself in this wonderful story, convincingly told about a group of women whose contribution to the war through their dedicated service to the Air Transport Auxiliary was essential in its support of the Allied effort.

Follow @katelordbrown on Twitter and be sure to visit the blog "Ask Evie" that provides news about the book at http://thebeautychorus.blogspot.com/ and to drop by Kate's personal blog to find out "What Kate Did Next": http://katelordbrown.blogspot.com/

STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett (from the ARC, on sale May 27, 2011) HarperCollins Canada, 353 pages

2011-05-13T14:35:00.038-04:00

I've long admired Ann Patchett's prose from her memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY about her extraordinary friendship with Lucy Greely to her Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel BEL CANTO to her gem-of-a-graduation-address WHAT NOW? It seems to me that her literary star has already risen and secured itself in the heavens, but her most recent book STATE OF WONDER has proved me wrong. It is her most accomplished book to date and her apotheosis is yet to come.

Here's the brilliant, beguiling opening:

"The news of Anders Eckman's death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who knew they still made such things? This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insubstantial that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world."

Years ago, Dr. Marina Singh traded a frenetic, tension-filled life as an ob-gyn for a less stressful life of research in a pharmaceutical lab. At Vogel, she met both Anders Eckman, her lab mate, and Mr. Fox, its CEO and her current lover, a liaison about which she remains guarded. When the letter arrives from Dr. Annick Swenson in the Brazilian jungle where Anders had been sent to report on the progress of an extraordinary drug in development and Swenson pens, "I will keep what little he had here for his wife, to whom I trust you will extend this news along with my sympathy," Mr. Fox knows he must be the one to break this devastating news to Anders' wife Karen. He is the one, after all, who put his life at risk by sending him to the Amazon on Vogel business.

Marina accompanies Mr. Fox to the Eckmans's home and recognizes right away that the family dog, Pickles, a golden retriever, "would have to stand in for their minister if they had one. The dog would be Karen's mother, her sister, whoever it was she wished was standing next to her when everything came down. The dog would have to be Anders." Later that same night Karen phones Marina and challenges the news: "But say he's not dead. I know you don't believe it but just say. Say that he's sick and needs me to come and find him." And, because Karen cannot leave her young sons, she asks Marina if she would go in her place. Marina agrees.

To prepare for her journey into a remote part of the Amazonian jungle, Marina takes antimalarial medication. The Lariam leads to recurring childhood nightmares of being separated from her father in a crowd in India when she was just a little girl: "the people around them rose up like a tide and she was then forced to let him go...her deepest fear, her father's hand slipping from her hand." Before Marina leaves, she visits Karen to read Anders' most recent letter to Karen for clues and it's then that Karen knowingly confides, "Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it."

Arriving in Brazil, Marina is met by a local fixer called Milton who is gracious and welcoming and sets her up in a hotel room in Manaus where she must wait for either Dr. Swenson to come to town to pick up perishables or for Dr. Swenson's protectors, the Bovenders, a young married couple who seem to have the job of preventing access to the very person Marina needs to see. While waiting for either to appear, Marina immerses herself in Dr. Swenson's writing about the reproductive endocrinology in the Lakashi people, an isolated Amazonian tribe "whose women appeared to give birth well into their seventies" or she reads the Henry James novel she brought to distract herself from the upsetting business of finding out what actually happened to her friend.

In one of her few phone calls home to Mr. Fox, Marina learns that the Lakashi "chew some sort of bark while it's still on the tree" and that is why they remain fertile well past the expected years of any other women. With that information, we have a hint of what might be to come and why Vogel pharmaceuticals continues to pour an endless supply of money into the mind-blowing research that Dr. Swenson is conducting in the heart of the jungle.

Throughout STATE OF WONDER there are plenty of allusions to Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS and Kingsolver's THE POISONWOOD BIBLE and your reading will be all the richer if you have those two novels in your mind's eye. However, the reverence for the natural world is the novel's watermark:

"The quiet that was left without her was layered, subtle: at first Marina only heard it as silence, the absence of human voices, but once her ear had settled into it the other sounds began to rise, the deeply forested chirping, the caw that came from the tops of trees, the chattering of lower primates, the incessant sawing of insect life. It was not unlike the overture of the opera."

And, there are equally terrifying scenes: one that had my heart thumping involved an anaconda. Yet, Patchett, being Patchett, pens this wondrous strange moment with grace.

So much of what happens at the heart of this remarkable book must not be revealed. You need to peel back the layers yourself and marvel moment to moment alongside Marina as she discovers truths about the jungle and herself.

When I first heard the title STATE OF WONDER, I immediately thought of Glenn Gould's landmark recording of the Goldberg Variations. And, it is a rather apt analogy for a book in which lives are improvised from variation to variation using humanity as the bass note.

STATE OF WONDER is sure to be one of the most talked about books of 2011. You must read it.

UNTOLD STORY by Monica Ali, from the ARC (forthcoming June 28, 2011) Simon and Schuster Canada, 259 pages

2011-05-08T19:59:00.032-04:00

In a turn grounded in magical thinking, Monica Ali explores what might have happened had Diana, Princess of Wales, not been killed in the car crash in that Paris tunnel in August 1997, pursued by paparazzi as on every other day of her very public private life. What is the price of fame? What would a person desperate to reclaim more than a shred of her privacy be willing to do? Imagine having a secret so precious that you cannot disclose it, especially to those you love most.

The opening caveat, "Some stories are never meant to be told. Some can only be told as fairy tales," is the perfect set up for what follows as you peel back the layers of the death and rebirth of an individual as famous and charismatic as the former Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, at one time the most recognizable face on the planet.

Using a masterful mélange of third-person omniscient narration, private diary and personal letters, Ali forms a convincing portrait of her protagonist from those whom she has allowed to know her best. In the present, it is April 2007 and three girlfriends, Suzie, Amber and Tevis have opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and are waiting for their friend Lydia to arrive to celebrate her birthday in one of their homes in sleepy little Kensington on the east coast of the USA. When Lydia's co-worker Esther arrives for the party and explains that Lydia took the day off from her job caring for dogs at the local shelter, the women are appropriately alarmed that Lydia has not shown up. The Lydia they know is always on time.

Flipping back the clock, Ali sketches in the details about Lydia's quiet domestic life in small town America and gestures to her much more lavish and demanding past life through the diaries of Princess Diana's Private Secretary Lawrence Standing, whom we quickly discover was responsible for organizing her "death" and "rebirth" a decade previous. Through his diaries and their conversations, we learn how committed he was to protecting her and how much she literally trusted him with her life. Even when Standing unavoidably disappears from Lydia/Diana's life, she continues to correspond with him in a series of letters that help her to make sense of the world around her.

The stakes are raised when she realizes she is being trailed by a photographer she recognizes from life before, John Grabowski, who through a stroke of extraordinary luck (because she had stopped wearing her brown contact lenses and he matches up images of her world famous baby blues) manages to trail her and capture her new life on film. Yet, Grabowski has his doubts, "for an instant it was hard to believe that she wasn't just what she seemed to be."

What I found compelling about the narrative was how Ali included so much of Diana's vulnerability. Lydia is paranoid, she's worried that she's simply not smart enough, she is especially kind to those weaker/needier, and she is at ease with the broken animals in the shelter, recognizing in them her own human frailty.

Reminiscent of Curtis Sittenfeld's AMERICAN WIFE that re-imagines an authentic sympathetic and fictional life for Laura Bush, Monica Ali's UNTOLD STORY convincingly portrays the possibilities of an alternate ending for a cultural icon who "broke all manner of rules," and "was a gorgeous bundle of trouble." Add this marvelous, heartening tale to your pile of summer reading. It will be out just in time.

THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain, 2011 audiobook, Random House

2011-05-08T19:58:00.012-04:00

THE PARIS WIFE is Hadley Richardson's perspective on her life with Ernest Hemingway and what a fresh, compelling voice Paula McLain has created for her. We meet the dashing newspaperman as Hadley does at a party in Chicago in 1920. She is the archetypal older woman, though only by a handful of years. Through a courtship of letters and train journeys, they confide their dreams to each other and at times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on their lives, even moreso for me since I listened to the audiobook, convincingly read by Carrington Macduffie.

For anyone who has read either THE SUN ALSO RISES or A MOVEABLE FEAST, the life that the Hemingways share in Paris and in Pamplona will feel very familiar. McLain masterfully uses setting and circumstance to create the entirely credible backstory for both of those books, so I was not surprised to hear that Hemingway filled handwritten journals in 6 weeks with the first draft of the manuscript that offers the wistful sentiment, "isn't it pretty to think so." And, your heart will crack a little when thirty years later (when they're married to other people), "Tatie" calls up his true love and reminisces about those heady days they shared in Jazz Age Paris with "Mister Bumby," Miss Stein, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach as he tells Hadley about the collection of personal essays he's working on. They were published posthumously, after Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in the same way that Hadley's own father had.

Hadley Richardson may indeed have been Hemingway's PARIS WIFE, and it seems here, in this rapt telling of her tale, that she's the one who mattered most.

VACLAV & LENA by Haley Turner from the ARC (forthcoming May 31, 2011) The Dial Press (Random House), 285 pages

2011-04-24T13:02:00.018-04:00

Do you remember your first crush? Mine was inexplicably on Scott Campbell, a neighbourhood kid in my Grade 4 class who stabbed me with his thick soft leaded pencil. I remember confiding to my little red diary with its tiny gold lock and key in my careful schoolgirl script, "I love Scott Campbell." It was the first of many unrequited loves and I am doomed to remember his name because I carry that piece of lead with me, under the pad of my ring finger on my left hand.

Vaclav and Lena meet when they are 10 and 9 years old at P.S. 238 in Brooklyn as ESL students who carry the immigrant burden of being obviously different among their American-born English-speaking peers because of their thick Russian accents and their stilted developing language. Vaclav is completely obsessed with the idea of becoming a magician like David Copperfield or Harry Houdini, expecting that Lena will be his assistant because she "is necessary for all the illusions." He is an inveterate list-maker and for me that is part of his charm:

"THINGS THAT ARE:
1. One day being a famous magician
2. Lena being lovely assistant
3. Perseverance towards those goals in spite of any and every obstacle"

At the beginning, Lena buys into Vaclav's fantasy and supports him as he practices simple acts of prestidigitation. However, Lena's troubled home life becomes all consuming: "Vaclav does not know that to Lena, he is a place to go instead of nowhere. If he knew, he might be happy to be her somewhere, but he does not know."

Vaclav's mother takes the two children to Coney Island and to Lena, for the first time in her young life, "it looked as if the world had been coloured in." In that moment there is such hope. But, there is little room for that yet in Lena's world and soon Vaclav's doting mother Raisa makes an alarming discovery and Lena vanishes from Vaclav's life without even a whisper.

Vaclav is devastated, but determined, and many years pass before Lena re-enters his life like a balm.

VACLAV & LENA is a genuine love story. Once you meet both of these quirky, resilient characters, you won't soon want to leave their remarkable world. Haley Tanner has penned a sparkling debut about trust, betrayal and enduring unconditional love.

THE LONG GOODBYE by Meghan O'Rourke (2011) Riverhead Books, 297 pages

2011-04-18T22:19:00.026-04:00

As soon as read the excerpt from THE LONG GOODBYE in The New Yorker, I knew I would have to read this memoir. I had been carrying the excerpt around with me as a talisman, a charm to force me back to the pages of the manuscript I am revising about my only brother's accidental death many years ago.

In O'Rourke's epigraph she refers to an Iris Murdoch quotation, "The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved," and nothing could be truer, except perhaps the one attributed to A.S. Byatt, who wrote, "grief turns you to stone."

This harrowing account opens gently with reminiscences about bucolic childhood summers spent as a family in Vermont where "the days seemed created for our worship" and "there were words even for the weeds: goldenrod and ragweed and Queen Anne's lace." Days that were "holy and lazy and boring." Remember those? Then there is O'Rourke's intimation of mortality: "When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason." Like the time when her mom sent Meghan and her brother out to catch fireflies in jars with poked holes in the lids and she remembers,"the air was the temperature of our skin." Beneath the seat of reason.

O'Rourke's account of her mother's diagnosis, treatment and death as a result of metastatic colorectal cancer is not only frankly personal, but also a profound meditation on loss itself and how the rituals of public mourning have mostly fallen away. I found absolute belonging in her admission that, "In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked down the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth, most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting....I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible insistent truth about the impermanence of the every day." There is the public mask of coping and there is the private reality of feeling completely rudderless.

And, people become impatient with your grieving. Platitudes are dealt, and advice doled out, by well-meaning friends, relatives and neighbours who are invested in feeling better themselves about your sorry state rather than trying to understand why your loss is so profound and enigmatic to them. To try to make sense of her grief, O'Rourke, admittedly at her nadir, cuts herself, suggesting, "I did not want to hurt myself or die. I just wanted to create some embodiment of the heartbreak eating me up."

What moved me most about THE LONG GOODBYE were the moments remembered in flashes of brilliance like the time her mom gave her a Dick Francis novel when it wasn't Christmas saying, "Why do we wait for holidays to give gifts?" And O'Rourke writes, "her voice was shaky, and it was the first time as an adult that I really felt that one day she would be gone." Such flashes hurt. "They light up your stomach. Then you breathe, look out again. At a party you say my dead mother...It hurts...You are learning the narrative. You are establishing the catechism, responses to the questions."

The death itself was familiar to me, having witnessed as I have the final extended raspy, rattling breaths and pauses between them of both my grandmother and my friend Richard. It is both ordinary and extraordinary: a moment that is essentially awesome. Full of awe.

On Christmas Day 2008, Barbara Kelly O'Rourke died at home: "In the beginning was the wind, the wind made by breath, the word of the wind, and in our hearts we kept telling the story over and over of how we loved her and were there, there, there, once we were all there, and she took a breath like a gasp and her eyes opened and took us in, all of us there, and then she breathed once more, the last breath, and we were there and she was not..."

Her only daughter Meghan bore witness then and bears witness now in this heartbreakingly beautiful book that demystifies what it is to mourn fearlessly and well.

EMILY, ALONE by Stewart O'Nan (2011) Viking Penguin, 255 pages

2011-04-17T09:47:00.026-04:00

Even before I began the story proper, O'Nan's sweet nostalgic dedication, "For my mother, who took me to the bookmobile" and the Virginia Woolf epigraph: "Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life-- startling, unexpected, unknown?" drew me in.

EMILY, ALONE explores the ordinary day-to-day intimacies of widow Emily Maxwell, now well into her seventies, whose remaining companions are her sister-in-law Arlene and her aging Springer Spaniel Rufus.

Under O'Nan's storytelling spell, each sentence seems like a prayer about aging and memory at once familiar and slightly foreign: "Often she searched for words, trailing off in midsentence, then waving away the incomplete thought, one hand flapping." Remembering formal occasions "trying to pinch open the clasp and marry it to the tiny eyelet" of her necklace, Emily is nostalgic about Henry, her dead husband, who when alive "would stand behind her like a valet...She'd find him admiring her in the mirror and while she discounted his adoration of her beauty--based as it was, on a much younger woman--she also relied on it, and as time past she was grateful for the restorative powers of his memory." Isn't that restorative power of memory what we all yearn for as we age, often messily, inconveniently, ungraciously?

Emily waxes philosophical too, especially during the bleak midwinter, resigning herself to the notion that the past is another country and admitting the paradox that "Time, which had her on the rack, would just as effortlessly rescue her. This funk was temporary. Tomorrow she would be fine."

I suppose the great appeal of this novel is that everyone can relate. Each one of us has an Emily in our lives, an aging mother, or sister or great aunt or grandmother who is determined to be independent and not a bother or a burden to daughters or sons, and determined to "wait through everything else to do the thing you wanted." In Emily's case that means "Easter, her garden, Chautauqua." Though, "she thought there should be more to live for."

As soon as she's able to get out and putter in her garden, Emily feels the relief of time lifting from her: "She and the bees and the worms--even the spiders--all had their jobs to do. Left to her work, she forgot everything but the task at hand, falling into reverie." Even now I know how that feels, to be completely absorbed and to be outside of time, totally immersed in place. For weeks Emily avoids visiting her husband's grave and "finally it was only by writing his name down on the calendar as if they had a date that she made herself go."

EMILY, ALONE is a beautiful beautiful book. Make time for it and O'Nan's spell in your busy life. You'll be glad you did.

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson from the ARC (forthcoming June 2011 from Ecco) 383 pages

2011-04-13T11:43:00.023-04:00

Remember how Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD set book lovers abuzz in 2010? Well, get ready for Eleanor Henderson's TEN THOUSAND SAINTS to shake you up and leave you breathless in 2011.

It's the end of 1987 and full-time friends, frequent stoners and all-time slackers Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn are celebrating Jude's 16th birthday beneath the stadium seats of the football field in small-town Vermont, sharing "the dregs of last night's bowl" that they had stolen from the glove box of Teddy's mom's car. Although they only have $140 saved between them, the boys hope to "save some more money and when they were both old enough to drop out (Teddy would be sixteen in May), they were going to buy bus tickets to the Port Authority and stay with Johnny [Teddy's eighteen-year-old half brother] until they could find a place of their own."

Enter Eliza, the daughter of Jude's absentee father Les's Upper Westside girlfriend Diane. Eliza is on her way back to Manhattan from a holiday ski-cation with friends and she stops in Vermont ostensibly to meet Jude and his sister Prudence face to face. A party girl herself, Eliza not only gets Teddy high on cocaine, but also encourages him to have sex with her. And, it's the consequences of that decision that turn everybody's world upside down in a cascade of "what ifs" and drive the plot forward for the next three hundred pages.

Teddy's fatal overdose is not a secret-- you know from the opening page of his death--however, what happens as a result leads to the heart of the novel where there are secrets kept and told by all of the main players, secrets about paternity, true love, AIDS and abortion. Yet, being young, they continue to dream. Eliza imagines "Annabel Lee" growing inside her, Jude believes he can really form a good punk band that will get gigs, Johnny's determined to remain "straight edge" and do the right thing to honour his brother's memory, and Rooster hopes that he will live to see another day with his true love by his side.

There is not a misplaced thought or gesture in TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. With impeccable pacing and enviable prose, Eleanor Henderson has written a lasting portrait of two generations struggling to understand each other in the modern age. I believed every word.

RAVEN STOLE THE MOON by Garth Stein (1998) HarperCollins, 441 pages

2011-04-09T10:56:00.013-04:00

I came to Garth Stein through his most recent novel THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, featuring Enzo, a canine protagonist with an obsession for race car driving and the uncanny ability to scent cancer. How I loved that book and wished that what transpires in it could possibly be true.

His earlier novel RAVEN STOLE THE MOON proves to me that Stein is not a one hit wonder. He's got storytelling legs. And, like literary thriller wunderkind Kate Atkinson, each book is different from the last, yet equally accomplished and satisfying.

On the anniversary of her young son's death, Jenna Rosen abandons her materially comfortable Seattle life by skipping out on a networking party she'd been barely tolerating with her ambitious husband Robert. She's tired of his tired jokes and decides on a whim to get in his car and drive until she can clear her head. That drive takes her to the ferry docks where she offers to buy a young couple a ticket to Skagway because they've lost one of theirs. Through this kindness of strangers gesture, Jenna finds herself also drawn to a northern journey back to Wrangell where her son Bobby disappeared two years previous. And, the young couple offer her a gift of a handmade necklace featuring an Indian spirit called a kushtaka. Jenna is both touched by their gift and intrigued by its enigmatic symbolism.

A mother's grief is fierce. Once Jenna returns to the site of her only child's death, she is determined to find a way to assuage his restless spirit. With the help of local strangers in the Alaskan wilderness, Jenna tries to sift through the terrifying beliefs of her ancestors, the Tlingit. What she must face is bone-chilling and Stein will have you believing that each heart-thumping turn is the genuine article. By mixing Jenna's emotions with her Native cultural inheritance, Stein challenges the power of grief to set things right.

RAVEN STOLE THE MOON is an engrossing tale about loss and redemption and the work essential to turn grief into something more lustrous.

BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey (2011) Little, Brown and Company, 275 pages

2011-04-09T10:53:00.025-04:00

Tina Fey's BOSSYPANTS is a collection of personal essays (some familiar if you read The New Yorker), lists, anecdotes, work advice as well as 30 ROCK and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE script excerpts that will make you feel as if she were sitting in your living room blithely recounting the unexpected and remarkable trajectory of her life.

The cover artwork will either amuse you or creep you out. With perfect makeup and sporting a flattering haircut (both of which she defies in most of the other photos included in the book), Fey's head is photoshopped onto the torso of a middle-aged man. It would truly make me happy if those arms turned out to be Alec Baldwin's--Fey's inspiration for 30 ROCK's antithetical Baldwin: Jack Donaghy.

Tina Fey is at the top of her game. She was the youngest person to be given the Mark Twain award for Humour, has an armful of Emmys for 30 ROCK which she produces, co-writes and co-stars in on NBC, has been on the big screen with her pal Amy Poehler in BABY MAMA and Steve Carrell in DATE NIGHT, and written for the big screen (MEAN GIRLS) and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE to which she returned to play Sarah Palin opposite Poehler's Hillary Clinton. What is obvious about all of these successes is that Fey takes none of them for granted.

Although I'm a bit older than Fey, I do share with her the horror of the YOU ARE A YOUNG LADY NOW pamphlet, secreted in my underwear drawer when I was ten and other mortifying coming-of-age milestones like publicly trying on a bra outside of my clothes in a department store. While I didn't work as YMCA receptionist as my first grown up job post-college, I did work as a temp for a social services agency in Toronto, where it was common place to witness tattooed street youth convulsing in heroin withdrawal while I answered the phones and set up appointments for them with their social workers.

At the end of the parody list "Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat," I could kiss Fey for writing, "We should leave people alone about their weight. Being chubby for a while (provided you don't give yourself diabetes) is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican." Also, about surviving in the workplace, she sagely intones, "don't waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions...Do your thing and don't care if they like it."

By the end of BOSSYPANTS I was happy to know that Jack Burditt wrote the line from the episode "Rosemary's Baby" starring Carrie Fisher (herself surely a smartypants script doctor as well as the iconic Princess Leia) as a crazy former-era comedy writer about whom Donaghy snarks, "Never go with a hippy to a second location." Most of all, however, I would like to meet Don Fey, her dad, the man to whom powerful men like Lorne Michaels and Alec Baldwin "stand down." After meeting him Fey admits, "it rearranges something in their brain about me...What are they realizing? I wonder. That they'd better never mess with me, or Don Fey will yell at them? That I have high expectations for the men in my life because I have a strong father figure?" Right on both accounts, I hope.

The best advice before reading BOSSYPANTS: have a prophylactic pee. You'll need to read this romp on an empty bladder. Or else.

MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU by Louisa Young (from the ARC, forthcoming May 2011) HarperCollins Canada, 325 pages

2011-04-03T23:03:00.024-04:00

If you are already a fan of Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy and her novel LIFE CLASS about the confluence of visual art and emerging reconstructive facial surgery as a result of injuries on the World War One front, then you will be completely predisposed to be entranced by Louisa Young's MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU.

In 1907 as a young boy in working class London Riley Purefoy happens to be insinuated into the lives of the posh Waveney family when patriarch Robert Waveney suggests he be a face model for a painting by Sir Alfred: "He wants to put it in a painting, on top of a goaty-legged faun. What do you think? Could you sit still long enough for him to paint you? He'd probably give you a shilling." There, under Sir Alfred's tutelage over the course of 7 years, Riley goes from brush cleaner and occasional model to becoming a painter himself, one his patron refers to as "a miniature Roger Fry." In the studio, Riley meets Nadine Waveney, the educated and beautiful daughter and dreamily falls in love, half-knowing that theirs was an untenable one because of class.

Nadine and Riley are 18 when the war breaks out and both are determined to make a genuine contribution. Riley enlists and is an ideal soldier, ready to be told what to do and to do it. Nadine also does not shy away from what is required of her as a volunteer nurse; she applies herself with equal measure to both the drudgery and the emotional aspect of the work, admitting, "When no one was looking she kissed the dying, their cheeks, their foreheads, their mouths...They whispered, 'I love you.' 'I love you too, darling,' she whispered back. Because in the face of death, really, who cares about love?"

While serving on the Front in France, Riley sustains a ghastly injury and is invalided home to England where he comes under the care of the progressive physician, Major Dr. Harold Gillies. Gillies is a pioneer of plastic surgery and specializes in facial reconstruction. (See his seminal 1920 text, "Plastic Surgery of the Face" for actual details.) At the heart of this novel Young shows how Gillies not only rebuilt faces, but also lives. When he is strong enough to contemplate writing a missive to his mother and to Nadine, Riley lies about the severity of his wound--it is that form letter that gives the book its title.

In truth, Riley admits (in an inspired extended analogy), "he looked like a scarlet crater, rimmed with a half-formed pile of earthworks, a fallen-over pile of dirty sandbags. Grey bruising and purple swelling and black scab, hanging loose over nothing. The metal chin support, like revetting. Seams between pads of flesh running across his face like trenches, swelling like sandbags. A few loose stitches like barbed wire. I look like fucking no man's land."

Because of his deformity, Riley decides to protect Nadine from what he now perceives to be an impossible love. Yes, he is a decorated soldier, but he is a decorated soldier without a face. He enlists his nurse Rose Locke's (cousin of Riley's Commanding Officer Peter) help to perpetuate the lie; she willingly obliges. And, because Nadine believes the lie, she asks for a transfer out of London to France where, "Everything was as wrong as she felt. She was glad. She took all the dirtiest jobs. She didn't complain. She didn't join in...Night and work were her blankets...Death had a happy ending every time. Peace. She liked their poor corpses, safe on their way to a numbered grave, cosy within the system built and created for them. Not lying out there, in the dark, alone."

After many surgeries, when Riley has the opportunity to meet Mrs. Ainsworth, his fellow soldier Jack's widow, that moment is transformational. Her kindness and lack of judgement sets Riley on the path of real healing.

MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU held me in its thrall, even during moments that I felt squeamish from the brilliant surgical detail. In the end, you will realize that all of the characters bravely faced wars of their own.

THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen (2011) Crown Publishing, 287 pages

2011-04-02T21:11:00.029-04:00

Rebecca Rasmussen's debut novel (to be launched to the wider world on April 12th) will tug at your heartstrings. Guaranteed. The tenderness demonstrated by her characters had me weeping by page three when protagonist Twiss receives an injured goldfinch from a little girl after her mother's minivan "severed one of the goldfinch's wings and crushed the other one." Here is what started my tears:

"She'd offer the goldfinch a teaspoon of millet and peanut butter and hold him up to the window so he could see the sky. Once a bird lost his ability to fly, not much else could be done in the way of mending him. Losing a wing was a little like losing a leg and the freedom of movement, of spirit, it granted you; most people could live without the former but not the latter."

THE BIRD SISTERS is a fully formed narrative. From the beginning I thought of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and how the summer that Dill came to Maycomb County, everything changed in Jem and Scout's lives. Something akin happens here when Twiss and Milly's older cousin Bett comes to stay in the summer of 1947 and changes the course of all of their lives forever. Each of the characters you will meet seems like flesh and blood relatives from a less complicated, albeit occasionally harrowing, time.

The spinsters, now in their seventies and still living together in the home in which they were raised, carry talismans with them as comfort: worn advice from their mother who repeatedly told them, "Bone china is like your heart. If it breaks, it can't be fixed," and a copy of The Curious Book of Birds, inscribed, "For Milly, Because."

Rasmussen carefully balances the heartache with moments of levity that surprise and delight, often found in comments from each of the teenaged girls who are 14, 16 and 18 or through their candid observations about the limited small-town world in which they live. Fourteen-year-old Twiss asks her 16-year-old sister Milly, for instance, "How would you like to be stuck with someone like Adam?" And, instead of waiting for Milly's response, offers up her own: "I would have eaten that apple too. Just to get away from him."

When Henry the parrot suffers a bout of insomnia before his musical debut at the town fair where he sings "Ave Maria" in Latin, his human companion Mrs. Bettle tells the girls that he "says the most appalling things after a night of no sleep." Of course, I imagine Henry swearing a blue streak and needing to go to confession to be absolved of his instinctive naughtiness. The faithless Father Rice would certainly be amused. When a pushy parishioner demands, "What if I refuse to live in a godless world?," he counsels, "Then, I'm afraid you'll have to shoot yourself, my dear. Either God doesn't exist or He's too busy to do it Himself."

Like Carol Shields, Rasmussen manages to show what is extraordinary in the ordinary lives lived by ordinary folk. There are well-placed stones along the narrative path that gesture towards what is to come: a fortune teller's advice; an almost drowning; the heady promise of first love; the agony of betrayal; an unexpected proposal; forged letters; a ride in an airplane; bars of lavender soap shaped like seashells; a tractor-shaped buttercream cake; purple prairie happiness tonic; secrets kept and told; a book shaped like forgiveness. With each deft reveal, the story will have you in its luminous thrall.

And, there is wisdom woven through. Teenaged Twiss realizes, "Maybe it was easier to tell your life to someone you didn't know than to tell it to someone you did." At the same time, from her perch atop the Ferris wheel at the county fair, her older sister Milly sees "that everything below her...was too good to be true and, like the Ferris wheel, would eventually have to come down." Most importantly they both know, and this knowledge binds them just as much as their blood, that "You can't always explain why you love the people you love." You can't.

In "Anthem" Leonard Cohen wrote, "there is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Make room for the light in THE BIRD SISTERS. It will split you open and fill you up. It is a blindingly stunning debut.

THE HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (1988) Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 214 pages

2011-03-31T14:31:00.006-04:00

Edna O'Brien is considered by Alice Munro to be perhaps the finest short story writer anywhere. THE HIGH ROAD is a mid-career novel set in a Spanish enclave where there is a circle of women who yearn for loves past and present.

You'll meet Charlotte, a former debutante who has chosen a life of withdrawal; Iris, an imperious aging self-absorbed harpy; and Anna, the narrator, who senses in hotel maid Catalina her chance to defy social expectations of suitable relationships and renew hope for true love.

It seems to me that O'Brien was trying to push conventions of the day aside and establish herself as a writer who experiments with boundaries both stylistic and sexual. Reading the novel almost 25 years later, it feels decidedly dated.

SANCTUS by Simon Toyne (from the ARC forthcoming May 2011 UK, Sept 2011 Canada) HarperCollins, 474 pages

2011-03-28T18:44:00.015-04:00

Are you a fan of smart literary thrillers? Think of Andrew Pyper's LOST GIRLS, THE WILDFIRE SEASON, THE KILLING CIRCLE and THE GUARDIANS or titles by Kate Atkinson including CASE HISTORIES and STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG. Well, Simon Toyne is a sparkling new voice in the genre. SANCTUS is his debut novel and has already sold to 40 countries, is due to be translated into 23 languages and the enthusiasm continues to build worldwide. It will be published by HarperCollins Canada in September 2011.

I am lucky enough to have been given an Advance Reading Copy. It arrived on a Friday and I shirked social commitments that night to read it in two sittings. Toyne's storytelling is seductive and addicting. You'll see.

Set primarily in contemporary Turkey on a mountaintop above a tourist destination, SANCTUS also travels to Rio de Janeiro and New York City to landscapes more familiar both physically and emotionally. The epigraph, "A man is a god in ruins," (Ralph Waldo Emerson) exquisitely gestures to the crux of the story. But, tempting though it is, I will not reveal that here.

What you may know, however, is that there is a secret society of monks who live a reclusive life in Ruin, Turkey where they protect their Sacrament with a ferocity and determination that borders on sociopathology. No one outside of their cloistered community knows exactly what the Sacrament is, though one brave soul, Brother Samuel, risks his life to show the world clues to the rebus preserved inside their Citadel. When his dangerous, symbolic act is witnessed not only by tourists milling about, but also through the transmission of that very act through hand-held devices and lurking media, the world soon knows about this extraordinary moment.

There are immediate rippling effects that only a few folks understand: development aid worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of her intimates dare to hope that a new beginning is at hand; New York City reporter Liv Adamsen wonders if perhaps what might be the reappearance of her long lost brother will help her to solve lifelong questions she's had about herself.

The chapters are short. The pace lightning-quick. I found myself putting off routines like preparing meals and walking the dog to keep reading.

Simon Toyne has penned a gripping, taut narrative that will have you questioning everything about the characters, about yourself, and about the true nature of faith. You don't want to miss this brilliant debut, the success of which will surely herald more books to come.

SONGS FOR THE MISSING by Stewart O'Nan (2008) Viking Penguin, 277 pages

2011-03-25T16:09:00.011-04:00

What strikes more fear into a parent's heart than a missing child?

It's the summer of 2005 and for high school senior Kim Larsen, "It was the summer of her Chevette, of J.P. and letting her hair grow. The last summer, the best summer, the summer they'd all dreamed of since eighth grade... an extension of their best year." In what turns out to be their last conversation, on the day before Kim disappears, she takes her bookish younger sister Lindsay to Dairy Queen and tells her, "You know, dude, I'm really going to miss you." Lindsay, in typical teenish disbelief and pitch perfect mumbling monosyllables, retorts, "No you won't."

Once the police are contacted, Lindsay's mom bends under their constant questioning and admits out loud, "I think someone took her." At first it's the extended neighborhood and church community who gather and form teams to comb through areas that Lindsay was known to frequent. Their well-intentioned but limited searching soon gives way to a media frenzy and the investigative support that leads to real answers.

Throughout this harrowing ordeal, Lindsay's parents Fran and Ed don't sit passively waiting for her miraculous return. They turn their attention to schedules for the volunteers, make earnest pleas for radio and television audiences, appear at Lindsay's high school, trying to get her story out to the wider world any way they can. Months pass as the family tries to carve out a new normal--a life without Lindsay in it, though they dare yet to hope for her return.

In a Tennessee Williams turn, it is the kindness of a lonely stranger that finally offers the Larsens the only succor left to them.

SONGS FOR THE MISSING is my first exposure to Stewart O'Nan. His prose is powerful and rife with emotional resonance. Already, I've got his newest novel, EMILY, ALONE, lined up to read next. If it hadn't been for Washington Post Book Critic Ron Charles' enthusiasm for O'Nan's work, I may never have found my way to his books. And, what a shame that would have been.

THE BIG WHY by Michael Winter (2004) House of Anansi Press, 374 pages

2011-03-24T09:52:00.007-04:00

Abandon any preconceived notions you have about historical fiction and leap headlong onto the ride that Michael Winter provides in this richly realized imaginative portrait of American painter/engraver Rockwell Kent. (He provided the illustrations for Moby Dick) Although the father to young children and husband to the lovely Kathleen Whiting, Kent is totally feckless. He leaves his family in New York City because he has tired of the superficial art world that has become his bread and butter and travels to Brigus, Newfoundland just before World War One where he dreams of establishing an artists' colony. There he plans to get a house in order and to bring his wife and children from New York once the weather improves in this tiny coastal community.

Winter has breathed real life into Kent and all of his supporting characters, characters from an intimate community where everyone is sure to know each others' business and heartache as predictable as the tide that thrashes against the shore. Always suspicious of any outsider, especially one who dines out on a story of being invited by the Prime Minister, the locals keep a watchful eye on this suspect vegetarian womanizer even as his family settles in for a time.

Kent is surely his own worst enemy, something that he comes to realize after he has hurt those he has loved the most. It is Kent's friendship with Newfoundland's fabled explorer Bob Bartlett, however, that leads him to his existential heart when after disclosing a long-kept secret Bartlett insists, "the question is not were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that's a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. That, my friend, is the big why."

Did you get to be who you are? It's a profound question. You might begin to form the answer to it by looking in the mirror with Rockwell Kent in Michael Winter's extraordinary novel THE BIG WHY.

ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM by Elizabeth Hay (from the ARC) forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart, April 26, 2011

2011-03-20T18:03:00.029-04:00

I am predisposed to like Elizabeth Hay's writing, having adored A STUDENT OF WEATHER (2000), GARBO LAUGHS (2003) and the Giller Prize-winning LATE NIGHTS ON AIR (2007). Plus, she is warm, engaging and attentive in person.

ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM flips back and forth in time between 1929, 1937, 1982, 1999 and 2007 as narrator Anne Flood, driven by curiosity and a need to define herself, explores the lives of the women in her family, especially her father's sister Connie whom she has always admired the most, because of her independence, intelligence and style.

In this early paragraph, Hay offers up the heart of the Anne's story:

"You touch a place and thousands of miles away another place quivers. You touch a person and down the line the ghost of relatives move in the wind....So interwoven are the strands of human life and so rich is the loam in which we lie that the same cemetery holds my grandmother and Ethel Weir and the man accused of her murder and the principal who knew them all, the bane of Connie's existence and therefore an abiding interest of mine."

Yet, we don't begin at the beginning. ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM opens in the Ottawa Valley in August 1937 when "the whole landscape was a painting come to life" on the day that 13-year-old Ethel Weir goes to pick chokecherries, berries "abloom with ghostly light that erased itself" and does not return home. Soon the town has picked a suspect, the young man who "almost stumbled over the corpse." Connie, now a journalist, has recently returned to Canada after working in Europe. In the town library she meets Hannah Soper (Anne's mother) who offers up her mother's boarding house when asked about renting a room. Click click. Part of the unknown future comes into focus.

Time travel back to Jewel, Saskatchewan in 1929 where Connie begins her career as a schoolteacher, working for a seemingly sophisticated but creepy principal, Mr. Ian Burns, known as "Parley." As Anne enigmatically hints, "Given what Parley Burns did and what happened to him in the end, Connie never tired of mulling over what kind of person he was deep down." You'll spend most of the novel puzzling out what Burns actually did in that prairie classroom and wondering whether or not what happened to him in the end is mete and just. Two things galvanize Connie's relationship to Jewel: a devastating fire and her blossoming trust from Michael Graves, one of her students who has been made to feel less than all of his young life. When Connie discovers in 14-year-old Michael what special talents he has and publicly praises him, he offers her a miniature gift: "One afternoon he pocketed a piece of blackboard chalk and returned it days later, setting on her desk a minute bird carved like the tiniest of lilies."

For those of you who have spent time in a classroom, you will know the following to be true as it is for Connie when she awakens in Michael a desire for learning: "A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in the water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it's marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher."

Flash forward to Christmas 1982 where Connie is visiting her brother Jimmy (Anne's dad) and his family in town from Boston where she is back teaching. On Boxing Day, Michael Graves drops by the house to visit with her. Connie's 71 and Michael's 67. Anne, herself married with young children, observes "I had never seen sex mow everything down before. His eyes stayed on her face, assessing, measuring, saying everything for her benefit, waiting." And, later, when Anne shows Michael her mother's paintings, he remarks, "They're beautiful, mysterious and full of meaning."

Many months later Anne and Michael reconnect and she is entranced by his way of interpreting the world."'We forget nothing,' he said. 'It's all there, waiting to be triggered...The facts don't matter....It all blurs and merges and contributes to a way of seeing the world.'" And a decade later at a funeral Michael explains, "A tender, tender thing comes over you when you get this old. It's a marvellous thing when you learn how to live. As my mother said, you give over."

Anne knows what Michael means: "A dead child becomes a flower. A gardener weaves her back into the tapestry of life. It doesn't lessen the tragedy, it makes it resurface every spring, a little shock to the heart."

That is what ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM is in its secrets kept and told. It is a sublime little shock to the heart.

PIGEON ENGLISH by Stephen Kelman (2011) House of Anansi Press, 263 pages

2011-03-20T18:02:00.016-04:00

Narrator Harrison Opoku, a recent Ghanaian transplant to London, lives with his older sister Lydia and their mother in one of the housing projects that is bursting with new immigrants and native residents on the dole. Harri is only eleven, but, with his father back in Ghana supporting his grandmother and his baby sister Agnes, he feels he's the man of the house, responsible for the welfare of the women in his life.

PIGEON ENGLISH opens with the discovery of the corpse of a neighborhood boy familiar to Harri. Harri observes that "the dead boy's mama was guarding the blood. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away but she wouldn't let it. She wasn't even crying, she was just stiff and fierce like it was her job to scare the rain back into the sky." Harri remembers another death he witnessed in Ghana: "An orange lady got hit by a trotro, nobody even saw it coming. I pretended like all the oranges rolling everywhere were her happy memories and they were looking for a new person to stick to so they didn't get wasted." The way Harri processes death is true to my experience with children his age puzzling it out through symbol and analogy that makes sense to them. However, in the projects, in spite of the police appeal for witnesses to come forward, the community responds with complicit silence.

Harri is wide-eyed and keen to absorb the world around him. As a kid, he feels the pressure to try to fit in culturally, so he draws Adidas stripes on his generic running shoes and tries to fill his head with unfamiliar slang: "In England there's a hell of different words for everything. It's for if you forget one, there's always another one left over. Gay and dumb and lame mean all the same. Piss and slash and tinkle meal all the same (the same as greet the chief.)"

Not much escapes Harri's curious gaze and he is as entranced by the idea of the CCTV cameras as extra help for God "for the places where the devil is very strong" as he is by the pigeons who make the housing estate their home, birds he plans to befriend because he admires their ability to fly. If he runs fast enough, he'll be "just like a spirit."

When it's his sister Lydia's birthday, Harri gives her the unexpected gift of being remembered in the future when he spots wet cement that they can jump in and make their mark, then sign their names: "The footprints are there to tell everybody we were here."

Throughout PIGEON ENGLISH, Harri's ebullient attitude towards the new world of which he is now a part reminded me of Baby's matter-of-fact wonder about her equally challenging life in Heather O'Neill's LULLABIES FOR LITTLE CRIMINALS.

The novel is broken down into five sections, marked by the months March through July and each of those sections is affiliated with an emblem that helps Harri interpret the significant changes in his life: airplane, fingerprint, closed circuit camera, waves, and pigeon. Those icons may seem enigmatic to you now, but when you read this tour de force fresh-voiced narrative, you will weep with their resonance.

If my word is not enough, consider what Emma Donoghue wrote about PIGEON ENGLISH. It's "a wonderful novel with a Ghanaian-Londoner child narrator you'll never forget. Simultaneously accurate and fantastical, this boy's love letter to the world made me laugh and tremble all the way through." It's a triumph.

THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS by Randy Susan Meyers (2009) St. Martin's Press, 307 pages

2011-03-17T11:02:00.023-04:00

Randy Susan Meyers (@randysusanmeyer) joins the list of fabulous women writers whose work I've discovered through the heady cyber company of the book community on Twitter: @AmyMacKinnon @rosannecash @clairecookwrite @robin_black @angie_abdou @julieklam and @EmilyMandel--I've reviewed books by all of them here on my blog.

I've been especially keen to read Meyers' novel knowing that it explores that complicated relationship between a father and his children after he commits a heinous and violent crime.

My mother was raised to believe her father was dead when the truth was he was in prison for fraud, a fact she discovered quite by accident when she was in her early twenties when she met his brother. I know how deprived she felt when the prison chaplain returned her letter insisting that she was better off not knowing the man her father had become. And, though she forged a relationship with her uncle, she never did meet her father, even after he had served his time, because he was too ashamed about abandoning her when she was just a child. It is heartbreaking even now many decades later.

When THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS opens in July 1971, Lulu is nine going on ten (her birthday is the next day) and her younger sister Merry is almost six. One night their estranged father pounds on the apartment door and demands that he be let in to talk to their mother. Lulu explains that her father "wanted things he couldn't have" perhaps most of all "he hungered" for her mother and her "pin-up girl façade." Knowing that she's not supposed to let her father into the apartment, Lulu weakens when he reassures her using her pet name: "Don't worry, Cocoa Puff. Mama won't get mad. I promise."

What transpires as a result is shocking and traumatizing. Not only does their father kill their mother, but he also wounds Merry, who spends swaths of time alone in hospital because of the narrow-minded attitudes of her mother's relatives. For a time the girls are raised by their grandmother, but when she dies and no relative will saddle themselves with the responsibility and stigma of the murderer's daughters, Lulu and Merry are put in an orphanage, where they learn to fend for each other at all costs. Even when the girls are fostered out to a wealthy New York doctor and his social worker wife, they realize that they can only really rely on each other.

Told over the course of 30 years, THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS is an unconventional bildungsroman that offers what feel like emotionally true perspectives from both the victims and the criminal who tries desperately to make amends.

IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS: STORIES by Robin Black (2010) Random House, 268 pages

2011-03-15T21:33:00.017-04:00

Richard Ford says that in literature he found belonging. That literature made him believe in a better place.

His statement has never been truer for me than between the pages of this debut collection of short stories. There were moments that I felt as if Robin Black were whispering in my ear truths about my own life, both those obviously known to the world around me and those I hold secretly in my heart.

In each of the pieces in IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS there are characters coming face to face with real transitions in their lives, moments that are tender and agonizing. For example, in "The Guide" a protective father must offer up to his blind daughter on the cusp of college an opportunity to forge independence; in "If I Loved You" a middle-aged couple struggles with terminal illness and the complication of telling a developmentally delayed son; in "Immortalizing John Parker" a portraitist mourns the loss of a love affair while realizing her subject is dying and wonders about letting go of her past; in "Tableau Vivant a mother worries about her adult daughter's infidelity; in "The History of the World" a recently separated woman finds herself in crisis after an accident while traveling in Italy and discovers through the kindness of a stranger that her lifelong assumptions about herself just might not be true.

Black's hand tapped me on the shoulder and swiveled my head when she wrote in "Divorced, Beheaded, Survived,"

"The truth is that sometimes even more than a day goes by before I remember to think of my brother. It's only natural, I've told myself, time and time again. It's human nature, I've thought--as though there's consolation to be found in that. And maybe there is. Maybe it's a gift to be able to let go of the remembering."

Just as the rare faint scent of Fleurs de Rocaille (my grandmother's perfume) will turn my head on a street, in a theatre, in a bookshop, hopeful in that olfactory moment that she'll round the corner even though she's been gone for 16 years, Black's words bring me to my only brother and how my life "changed utterly" (to reference Yeats) after his accidental death in 1994.

In a recent post Black wrote for Beyond the Margins she explained that there is "the point at which an author gives the story to the reader. Here, I am finished. It belongs to you now. Do with it what you will." That leap of collaborative faith between the writer and the reader is part of the magic of fine fiction. Fiction that helps you find belonging and believe in a better place.

Robin Black's exquisitely drawn portraits of flawed people like you and me in IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS will indeed give you pause. Your heart will skip a beat, or two, and you'll feel all the finer for it.

DEAL BREAKER by Harlan Coben (1995) Random House, 343 pages

2011-03-15T21:32:00.013-04:00

Although this is Coben's first Myron Bolitar novel, it's not the first time I've met Myron or his psychotic, but critically helpful, former university roommate Win because I haven't been reading the series in order, but rather as each book finds its way to me.

Myron is building his business as a sports agent and he's guided ably by his assistant Esperanza, a former wrestler known as Pocahontas on the ladies' circuit, who suffers no fools--especially the ones who are bullies. His current high profile client is Christian Steele, a football star whose fiancée Kathy Culver mysteriously disappeared from her university campus 18 months previous. The Culver family recently suffered another unexpected loss when Kathy's father Adam was murdered in his own home in what the police regard as a botched robbery. Myron is not so sure that there was a robbery at all or that Kathy and Adam's cases are unrelated. The cases are complicated by Myron's previous relationship with Kathy's sister Jessica and by his undercover instinct to set the record straight.

One of the aspects of Coben's character building that keeps me hooked is his playfulness with popular culture references. In DEAL BREAKER I was continually amused by the Broadway musical theatre posters that decorate Myron's office walls and Myron's ability to reference a song or a moment from one of those very shows as a way to test his closest friends.

As I have come to expect with Coben's novels, DEAL BREAKER is rife with wit, tension and a messy protagonist's need to make things right.

HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE by Zoe Whittall (2009) House of Anansi Press, 296 pages

2011-03-08T12:54:00.016-05:00

Don't you just love it when you find a new-to-you writer whose first book is such a treat that you can't wait to get your paws on the next? Even though HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE is not Zoe Whittall's first novel (BOTTLE ROCKET HEARTS is), it is the first one of hers that I've read.

An unconventional love triangle between a paramedic (Josh), a former teen-sensation (Billy) and an emerging filmmaker (Amy) is at the heart of this gritty, urban narrative that roams streets familiar to me from the different lives it feels I've led here in Toronto. Though it is decades since I enjoyed my twenties like these three, Whittall triggered memories of what it was like to feel on the cusp of something good and new and true. When every moment felt like a possibility.

In addition to the palpable tension between the main players, I enjoyed the behind the scenes peek at a working life for Emergency Services--the adrenaline rush and necessary emotional distance required of medics and police and firefighters on the front lines of trying to keep us safe from ourselves and each other. It's not only the story Whittall tells that had me hooked, but also the way she tells it. Sentences thrum with the rhythm of life and there are many that reveal her poetic heart. Consider "Canadian art movies" that "exist as though poured from the rusty taps of the local indie rock bar," or "Memories run through her brain like the soft strokes of a watercolour brush." Fantastic, right?

Like Russell Smith, Zoe Whittall slices the piece of the Toronto pie that she knows and loves so well and serves it up in style.

CAUGHT by Harlan Coben (2010) Penguin Canada, 388 pages

2011-03-08T12:52:00.014-05:00

High school senior Haley McWaid is a model student, sister and daughter, but when she doesn't return home one night, her parents are right to worry in earnest. Reporter Wendy Tynes is on a mission to identify and confront sexual predators through her nationally televised program Caught in the Act . Dan Mercer is a divorced middle-aged man who works with troubled teens. Their three paths cross unexpectedly and the result is enough to tear a community apart.

With what I have come to regard as trademark intelligence and tension, Harlan Coben has the courage to inhabit each character convincingly so you are kept just enough off balance to second guess yourself about who the actual villains/victims are. Some are obvious, but others are not. Criminal Defense Attorney Hester Crimstein returns in CAUGHT and she is as irascible and sharp-tongued as ever. She will never suffer fools gladly, even if that fool is her own client.

Having read many of Coben's crime novels by now, I continue to be amused by his ability to weave social networking into his plot, so that it is not only a plot device and a tether to our real world, but also a character itself. Here he reminds us how easy it is to fake cyber identities on Facebook and blogs wherein damaging rumours are handily perpetuated.

What I like most about Coben's stories, though, is how he leaves room for the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. As Leonard Cohen wrote, "there is a crack, a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."

TIGER, TIGER by Margaux Fragoso (2011) Douglas & McIntyre, 320 pages

2011-03-06T18:39:00.010-05:00

Picture this: you are an only child of a phlegmatic jeweler father and a mentally ill mother. You are used to tip-toeing around on figurative eggshells in your own home because tempers flare. Frequently. One day you're swimming at the local pool and introduce yourself to a father figure who seems so much more fun than your own and your mother agrees. Later, your mother will even suggest that maybe he was Jesus in a former life. You are seven when you begin to spend time with this charismatic and caring man who has a house filled with exotic pets he lets you tend and the most lovely and tender mutt named Paws who becomes your friend. His place is a paradise that encourages your imagination to run wild. And you do run wild. And so does he.

Like most pedophiles, 51-year-old Peter Curran preys on the most vulnerable children. Children like Margaux Fragoso who are willing to trust all too easily in a stranger who shows them that he loves them and does not threaten to beat them when they disagree or disobey.

I'm not sure that any book has made me feel so viscerally ill as I read it as TIGER,TIGER did. I kept thinking about my own fortunate childhood and how I didn't have to think about the choices Margaux makes to stay close to Peter until I was well into my twenties. I still can't quite grasp how she was able to write her story of horrific sexual abuse (that lasted 15 years and only ended with Peter's suicide--not a spoiler, by the way) without a whiff of self pity. Her prose is strong and vibrant and her approach unflinchingly honest. And, she is a compelling narrator.

By the end of this harrowing memoir, I felt emotionally gutted, just as I did after watching BLUE VALENTINE. Both have taken exquisite pain and given it full resonant voice in the telling.

THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS by Jess Walter (2009) HarperCollins Canada, 290 pages

2011-03-06T18:38:00.008-05:00

I'd read a lot of enthusiastic comments online about Jess Walter's most recent novel and decided to pick up a copy to see what all the fuss was about. I was predisposed to like the book because of its loopy premise: finance journalist decides to quit his day job (at the worst possible economic moment) and tilt at the windmill of his dreams by creating a website devoted to such journalism written entirely in blank verse. Plus, the epigraph, attributed to Saul Bellow, "Poets have to dream and dreaming in America is no cinch," clinched it for me.

Matthew Prior and his wife Lisa have been circling the debt drain for months now, since Matt quit his job and Lisa embarked on an E-bay buying binge that resulted in boxes of unsellable stuffed animals and figurines piling up in their garage. In addition to their own obvious financial stress, they have two young boys to raise as well as Matt's increasingly demented father who lives with them.

One night, a fateful one it turns out, Matt heads out after midnight to the local 7/11 to pick up a jug of milk so his sons will have it for their breakfast cereal. There he meets some neighborhood stoners who lure him into sharing some of their stash. He complies and soon finds himself drawn to the tantalizing possibility of selling for profit to turn what remains of his 401K (whittled down to a measly 9K and change) into an amount that might allow him to produce a balloon payment for his overdue mortgage that will permit his family to stay in their home.

Matt loves his wife Lisa. He loves their sons. He's a responsible son to his increasingly confused father. However, he hasn't been truly honest with anyone and he keenly feels how everything that matters in his life is slipping away. And, really, it's his fault. So, as Lisa moves to her side of the bed and texts her high-school quarterback ex-beau, Matt plots how he can win her love and affection back. And, his plan isn't all that complicated, but it is illegal.

Soon Matt finds himself knee-deep in a drug cartel and then, more upsettingly, on working terms as a narc. All the while, he worries about his wife's growing attraction to gainfully employed, handyman-about-town Chuck the Lumberland King and processes situations that upset him by expressing his social satire through poetry. One of my favourites is the one spawned by a Costco visit where he sees a MILF with her "four kids/ little stepladders, two-four-six-eight" and she's wearing a thong and he wonders aloud, "When did Moms start wearing them?" And it seems to him "the Fabric of America/ would be just fine/ if there was little bit more of it/ in our mothers' underpants./ And that is the issue I will run on/ when I eventually run: getting our moms out of thongs/ and back into hammocks/ with leg holes." You're smiling, aren't you?

If desperate financial times call for desperate measures, it is no surprise that Matt has to hit rock bottom before he's able to see his way clear and find a route back to all he holds dear, when he is finally "broke but free."

COMBAT CAMERA by A.J. Somerset (2010) Biblioasis, 255 pages

2011-03-03T15:19:00.015-05:00

Protagonist Lucas Zane is a burnt-out war photographer who finds himself making rent money working for an odious impresario of low budget pornography, Richard Barker in Mississauga. When an incident with one of the young actresses, Melissa, moves Zane to action, the two of them begin a journey that could possibly lead to their salvation.

The opening of COMBAT CAMERA hooked me. The prose is visceral and clean. Somerset writes like Hemingway by way of Richard Ford, and any of you who know me know how much I admire Ford's work: there's no finer social satirist writing today. Read the first paragraph and you'll understand what I mean:

"The most alarming development now confronting Zane was his suddenly frangible reality. Even his routine moments had become fraught with risk. Suppose, for example, a glint of sunlight was to catch the crack traversing his grime-smeared windshield; a disturbance as trivial as this could inexplicably fracture the entire tableau, could set fragments of his past tilting and sliding through his mind like pieces of coloured glass in a broken kaleidoscope. Things finally come to rest in a jagged landscape of unwelcome memories, and then where in hell are you?"

On almost every page of COMBAT CAMERA there's a found poem, like this one:

frangible reality
routine moments

fraught with risk
could fracture

the entire tableau
could set fragments

of his past
tilting and sliding

like pieces of coloured glass
in a broken kaleidoscope

Somerset never wants for narrative drive nor does he resist describing the horrors that haunt Zane from his experiences as a photographer on the fronts of civil wars in Liberia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone. Each flashback comes in a thoughtfully framed image and I felt as though I were peering over Zane's shoulder daring to take a closer look at each moment with him. Several times those photos brought to mind the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange--photographers whose visual perspectives defined moments.

Somerset's writing is not surprisingly filmic. He is able to turn a visual image into such convincing prose that it felt consistently as though I were working my way through a photo essay.

Consider the final paragraph as well:

"Zane stood at the window in the failing light and looked out over the freight yard, over gulls wheeling above steel and crushed stone, over wooden railway ties slick with rain, the river beyond sliding and eddying down to meet the sea. A lone man in a rain slicker walked between the rails. He carried a plain aluminum lunch box and a thermos, and with every step his feet slipped in wet gravel. The man walked with his head down, plodding, and Zane watched him until he disappeared behind graffiti-scarred cars that still stood patiently rusting in the endless rain, long after discharging their loads of mysterious freight."

Fantastic, isn't it?

I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Canadian novelist Ray Robertson calls it "a lean, mean piece of story-telling machine" and COMBAT CAMERA won the 2009-2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award.

A.J. Somerset is a writer whose trajectory I am keen to follow. And, to do my bit in promoting his work, I plan to put COMBAT CAMERA on my curriculum for Grade 12 Writer's Craft for 2011-2012. It will be a perfect compliment to Dexter Filkins' series of personal essays in THE FOREVER WAR.

LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL by Emily Mandel (2009) Unbridled Books, 247 pages

2011-02-27T14:33:00.012-05:00

Emily Mandel is another writer whose work has come to me through Twitter (where you too should follow her @emilymandel). That is a pretty impressive pantheon so far that includes Rosanne Cash, Amy MacKinnon, Harlan Coben, Angie Abdou, Andrew Shaffer and Robin Black. Since I read about 150 books/year, I am always keen to find a new-to-me narrative voice. Mandel's debut novel LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL simply knocked my socks off.

Like my current favourite movie, WINTER'S BONE, LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL comes at you quietly, and with intelligence. It is perfectly structured and the prose is luminous. In it, absence is poetic.

Lilia Albert has been on the run since she was abducted by her father when she was only seven. She is unable to remember her early childhood before that winter's night when her estranged father scooped her off her feet, out of the snow and into the safety of his arms. Now in her twenties and in a loving relationship with Eli, Lilia realizes that it just may be impossible for her to stop running, because that is what she has known.

Flight is a recurring motif in the novel, symbolized by paintings of Icarus by Matisse and Bruegel, by the feathery costume wings Michaele dons and by mariposa--the Spanish word for butterfly. Several characters are in flight: sometimes from their past, other times from their present and from the idea of their future.

In reading Mandel's elegiac LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL you will learn that coming to terms with sacrifice and abandonment may be the only way to find your way home.

AS LONG AS THE RIVERS FLOW by James Bartleman (2011) Random House Canada, 247 pages

2011-02-26T11:16:00.012-05:00

I heard James Bartleman read from this novel on Wednesday night at the Harbourfront Reading Series. I am predisposed to like his work, having enjoyed RAISIN WINE, his memoir of growing up Native in Muskoka and admiring the real work he has engaged in following his tenure as the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario--promoting literacy and mental health.

Throughout his travels to fly-in Native communities in the far north, Bartleman discovered the suicide epidemic of children who hanged themselves "to show how worthless they were; how fundamentally deserving of pain." AS LONG AS THE RIVERS FLOW is a composite portrait of such a place that has inherited the residential school legacy of previous generations and the shame and pain that entails with the younger generation of children who need to re-establish a cultural identity in order to heal.

Martha Whiteduck, the protagonist, remembers what it was like to be raised with respect for the land and the old ways before she was flown away to residential school from age 6-16 where she was beaten by the nuns and molested by the priest, Father Antoine--damaged emotionally in ways from which she would never heal. Returning to the reserve partially educated and distrusting, Martha runs wild. She gets pregnant and gives birth to a son, a boy she names Spider because of the birthmark on his brow.

Unable to stop drinking, Martha loses Spider to the Children's Aid and he is raised by a loving White family in suburbia who try to honour his Native traditions, but cannot begin to understand his temper. Spider's trajectory is a predictable one, where, as a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, he ends up storming out of his adoptive parents' lives and finding belonging in a homeless community in Toronto, living rough under the Gardiner Expressway, stopping in at Evergreen on Yonge Street for a warm meal and panhandling to feed his addictions.

Meanwhile, Martha becomes pregnant again and gives birth to a daughter she names Raven. Her mother begs her to leave Raven with her to be raised in the traditional ways on the reserve and Martha agrees, because it gives her the opportunity to try to find Spider.

Years pass and Raven finds herself pledging a suicide pact with her pre-adolescent peers who feel so desperate about their futures that they plan to kill themselves on their thirteenth birthdays. Only when Raven confides in the chief does she get the support that she needs and he arranges for a Healing Circle for the community to face the horrors of their past and present and to find their way to forgiveness where actual healing may begin.

Bartleman does not shy away from ugly realities that continue to plague Native communities nor does he excuse anyone from their culpability. That Martha manages to offer forgiveness as a true gift is what is remarkable to me in this story and a reminder that the work of Truth and Reconciliation is essential.

FINDING THE WORDS, ed. Jared Bland (2011) McClelland & Stewart, 297 pages

2011-02-26T11:15:00.010-05:00

This FINDING THE WORDS anthology celebrating WRITERS ON INSPIRATION, DESIRE, WAR, CELEBRITY, EXILE AND BREAKING THE RULES is a fundraiser for PEN Canada, one of the organizations I have supported for years. PEN centres around the world defend freedom of expression and support writers who have been silenced because of their work. As the editor explains in the introduction, "To ensure that as much of the anthology's cover price will go directly to PEN Canada, McClelland & Stewart is contributing all of its resources in the publication of the book and Random House of Canada is contributing its warehousing and shipping costs. Friesens is also providing its printing services at a significant discount."

Between these carefully curated pages you'll find pieces by Canadian luminaries including David Bezmozgis, Emma Donoghue, Steven Heighton, Lisa Moore, Alice Munro, Heather O'Neill and Michael Winter. There is even a transcription of the conversation between legendary British editor-turned-memoirist Diana Athill and Alice Munro from the Opening Night International Festival of Authors event that I co-chaired in October 2009.

What strikes me about each of the pieces included is their intimacy. You'll read about one author's father who struggled to become literate as an adult and another who confesses that "the solitude of writing is nothing compared to the emptiness of being between books."

Using language is a right that must be defended. Please do your part and purchase a copy of FINDING THE WORDS and check out other ways to support PEN Canada by visiting its website: www.pencanada.ca

CRIME MACHINE by Giles Blunt (2010) Random House Canada, 294 pages

2011-02-25T10:26:00.009-05:00

What a delight to return to the sane company of Detective John Cardinal, Algonquin Bay's contemplative and fair-minded investigator.

CRIME MACHINE finds Cardinal working on cold-case files during the day and spending platonic evenings with his work partner Lise Delorme a year after his beloved wife Catherine's unexpected death (Read BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS for her emotionally complicated story). Cardinal has moved out of the home he shared with Catherine and their daughter and now lives in a cramped apartment that's walking distance from Delorme's place.

The winter quiet that has enveloped Algonquin Bay like a blanket is soon fractured by the deaths of two out-of-towners who are discovered beheaded in a summer property that had been on the market. As lead investigator on the case, Cardinal soon realizes that appearances are deceiving. Puzzling his way through this case, Cardinal becomes entangled with the FBI, allegedly upstanding members of the local community, the press, the fur industry, a young Native woman and possibly the Russian mafia. And, though Cardinal does solve the current crime and one of his cold cases, it's not before both his and Delorme's lives are put at risk.

What is remarkable to me about this novel is how Blunt so flawlessly inhabits the minds of all of his characters, so you not only feel sympathy for the victims, but also for the monstrous villains as well.

THE WILDWATER WALKING CLUB by Claire Cook (2009) Hyperion, 239 pages

2011-02-23T08:11:00.012-05:00

Noreen Kelly takes a buyout from her long-time employer and is dumped by her clandestine boyfriend in one fell swoop. With a trunk full of staff-discounted top-of-the-line running shoes, Noreen decides to reclaim her health, both physically and mentally by striding towards it one step at a time. She is soon joined by her neighbours Tess and Rosie and the three women pledge to clock 10,000 steps/day and plan to reward themselves with a long weekend getaway once they've met their goal.

As part of her package, Noreen attends a weekly group session with a career coach who encourages her to define herself in ways that do not relate to her professional identity and by doing just that she is able to make breakthroughs in other aspects of her life, including in her romantic relationships. Noreen's awakening is helped along by observing Rosie's chickens (nicknamed The Supremes) and their loyal protector, the rooster Rod Stewart. I am not kidding here, folks. The chickens have it all figured out before Noreen does. They don't tolerate disloyalty, and, in fact, had previously pecked to death a former rooster due to his transgressions. As Noreen quips, there's a lot to be learned from chickens.

The three women finally agree on a reward destination: west coast lavender farms, where Rosie is sure to pick up tips to improve her own family-run lavender business and all three of them will enjoy touring local vineyards like the characters in Sideways.

THE WILDWATER WALKING CLUB shows middle-aged women coming to terms with their own identities and contemplating, then accommodating, the balancing act that the responsibility of aging parents and young adult children requires.

PLAY DEAD by Harlan Coben (1990) Penguin

2011-02-21T22:26:00.009-05:00

Are you a diehard basketball fan of the Boston Celtics? Have you ever fantasized about having a supermodel as a spouse? Do you like to read thrillers where past mistakes stick to present circumstances like stink on skunk? If you've nodded yes to any of these questions, then chances are PLAY DEAD is your kind of book.

After eloping in Australia, newlywed Laura Ayers finds herself mourning on her honeymoon the unexpected loss of her husband, Celtics superstar David Baskin who appears to have drowned near the Great Barrier Reef. Laura turns to David's best friend, former college roommate and current cop TC for help to uncover the final hours of David's previously charmed life. And, when some of the details just don't add up, Laura discovers she's just not sure who she can trust. Not her family nor her closest friends, it seems, will be able to help Laura inch closer to the truth. And, it's a truth about an horrific incident in the past that threatens to cleave Laura's heart even more in the present.

Coben adds tension to Laura's journey by introducing David's long lost brother Stan, an obvious degenerate who pretends to woo Laura's equally troubled sister Gloria and revealing moment by moment troubling secrets that bind Laura's parents Mary and James, who from the outside appear to be upstanding members of Boston society.

Although I found the ongoing reference to Laura's current beauty and previous ugly duckling adolescence more than a tad tiresome, it didn't deter me from flipping through this well-paced thriller, eager to discover who the true villain was. There are plenty of red herrings to mislead and as a result I felt connected to Laura and her own frustration as she puzzles out the truths about the past and her present.

THE CANTERBURY TRAIL by Angie Abdou (2011) Brindle and Glass

2011-02-18T22:01:00.010-05:00

CBC radio devotees like me will recognize Angie Abdou's name from the recent Canada Reads competition where her first novel THE BONE CAGE (an allusion to BEOWULF, by the way) was championed by Georges Laraque.

From the outset, her new novel THE CANTERBURY TRAIL is about a group of west-coast snow enthusiasts who try to finish out the season with one final spectacular run. Completed as part of a PhD program, the story also appeals to literature geeks like me who will recognize both broad and specific allusions to Chaucer's THE CANTERBURY TALES, a series of competitive stories told by pilgrims to amuse themselves and each other along their journey. So, for example, if you are aware of the "misdirected kiss" and Chaucer's predisposition for lewd and licentious detail, you will happily discover Abdou's contemporary appropriation of it in her savvy detail.

Just as Thomas King has each narrator embellish and one-up the previous storyteller in GREEN GRASS RUNNING WATER, so does Abdou move from Hermit to Ski Bum to Mother to Urbanite to Redneck to Hippy to Miller layering scatological detail and sexual tension until both resolve in unavoidable eruptions that are equal parts amusement and prurient disgust.

When all of the characters find themselves sharing a not-so-idyllic space at Camelot, tempers flare. And, although many of the disgruntled folk manage to make amends, it's only Mother Nature herself who can truly clear the air.

In THE CANTERBURY TRAIL Abdou walks a tightrope, balancing elements of comedy and tragedy with equal poise and shows herself an able inheritor of ribald Chaucerian tradition.

HOLD TIGHT by Harlan Coben (2008) Penguin Books

2011-02-15T08:55:00.009-05:00

Mike and Tia Baye realize that they are losing touch with their increasingly secretive teenaged son Adam. Since the suicide of his best friend Spencer, Adam has become predictably moody and withdrawn. In a paradoxically responsible and desperate step, Mike and Tia decide to have spy software installed on their son's computer to try to monitor his online behaviour and to figure out what he might be struggling with that simmers just below the surface and beyond their ken.

The Bayes aren't the only family with secrets, though. A neighbourhood family, the Lorimans, is also struggling with the upsetting reality of their 10-year-old son Lucas's rare degenerative disease (FSGS) and without a kidney transplant Lucas is not likely to see his next birthday. Mike is involved in Lucas's case tangentially because he referred the Lorimans to his medical partner Dr. Ilene Goldfarbe at New York Presbyterian, one of the finest transplant surgeons in the country. Time is running out for Lucas as it is difficult to find a matching donor and since Lucas is an only child, his best hope, a sibling, is out of the question. And, there are other complicating factors that involve high stakes secrets of their own.

With prescient heartache just below the pulse of daily life in the community there is also a pattern of gruesome killings of women and an apparent stalker/serial killer who threatens to destroy any remaining sense of security.

In order to try to save his son, Mike finds himself entwined in a dark underworld that involves prescription drugs (to which he has ready access as a medical doctor) and pursued by the FBI.

In HOLD TIGHT, Coben probes parental fears about abduction and loss and leads you along the twisted path to redemption. There were moments during my reading that I felt my pulse quicken and my heart pound as I worried what could possibly come next.

Like Alafair Burke, Harlan Coben creates a world that is immediately recognizable and all the more terrifying because of those knowable details. And, so far, I can trust him to mete out suitable punishment to those whose inhumanity to man is sickening and to recognize the tenderness at the heart of most human relationships, messy though the journey may be.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES (2011) from the Penguin Canada ARC

2011-02-05T22:12:00.007-05:00

Forthcoming from Penguin Canada in April, ZsuZsi Gartner's new collection of short stories is as smart, satiric, playful and wicked as her previously acclaimed and bestselling book ALL THE ANXIOUS GIRLS ON EARTH. In BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES (perhaps the most provocative title of 2011), Gartner opens with a gentle Horatian approach in the Darwinian "Summer of the Flesh Eater" where unisex-named Kim may have contemplated a "crack wax" during his spa day and and we learn alongside the nosey neighbours that "Boys who can burp the Lord's Prayer at age eight retain the ability, like a vestigial limb flaring to life, well into their thirties."

Each story has a shadow self and with precision Gartner deftly reveals the dark potential in us all, especially in "Investment Results May Vary," and her Juvenalian take on adoption in "The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion," which was for me the most heart-breaking piece in the collection.

What impressed me in each of the stories is Gartner's remarkable talent for unique analogies. Witness a "tortoise, heavy lidded and benign...a little like Sinatra in his later years." Or in "Floating Like a Goat," where a mother kvetches in a missive to her daughter's uncreative art teacher and suggests that synesthesia may well be an antidote: " 'Your voice is damaged swimwear,' I told a stranger waiting for the bus.....'You sound like fresh cement,' I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials."

Above all Gartner is an accomplished social satirist. Don't be surprised if you don't like what you see when she holds the mirror up to your face for reflection.

COMPOSED by Rosanne Cash (2010) Viking Penguin

2011-02-05T22:11:00.014-05:00

As a beloved songwriter and previously published author of a children's book Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale and the adult short fiction collection Bodies of Water there's no doubt that Rosanne Cash is an accomplished writer. With this memoir Composed, her most intimate book, Cash mines her life's work so far and reflects on the paths that have led her to where she is today as a mother, a musician, a wife, a sister, a daughter and a friend.

The great strength of this book is the frankness with which Cash expresses herself, a daring boldness that never borders on arrogance or entitlement, though at times she was certainly spoiled as the daughter of an American icon who was happy to take care of her and her siblings both financially and emotionally. It's heartening to discover that her father especially savoured their company in his challenging final years, when even the idea of family meant so much to him.

As an eldest child myself I could relate to the young Rosanne's innate sense of responsibility for her younger siblings, especially when they lived in the desert north of L.A. in Casita Springs where rattlers where commonplace and she "developed a near-psychotic fear of snakes that resonates to this day" after watching her mother chop off their heads with a garden hoe and "hurl their writhing bodies like a javelin onto the fence."

Throughout COMPOSED I felt as though I were being invited to bear intimate witness to Rosanne's life in all its joys and sorrows--and there are plenty of both. What impressed me, though, was the genuineness with which she approached each moment with gratitude and oftentimes infused it with her permeating dark humour. COMPOSED is an eloquent testimony to a life well lived and an acknowledgement that the best may be yet to come.

DARKEST FEAR by Harlan Coben (2000) Dell

2011-02-02T16:00:00.010-05:00

Edgar Award-winning novelist Harlan Coben writes another gripping Myron Bolitar tale in DARKEST FEAR.

When Myron's longtime ex-girlfriend Emily visits him at his parents' place, she brings news that makes Myron feel that he's been chopped at the knees. Her 13-year-old son has contracted a rare degenerative disease that is fatal without a bone marrow transplant. Problem is that the equally rare matching donor, registered through a bone-marrow bank, has disappeared without a trace. Emily appeals to Myron's decency and professional acumen to help track down the donor and confesses that Myron has more than helping a past paramour at stake.

In spite of the unconditional support of his trusted friend Win, Myron finds himself entangled in a dark mystery that involves the FBI and a history of brutal kidnappings. Forced to face truths about the past and himself, is it possible that Myron has done too little too late?

Harlan Coben is my new favourite thriller writer, joining my particular pantheon of crime writers including Kate Atkinson, Alafair Burke, James Lee Burke, P.D. James, Denise Mina and Ian Rankin.

THE SALT ROAD by Jane Johnson (2011) Doubleday Canada

2011-02-01T21:31:00.020-05:00

Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett, a successful investment banker living a comfortable life in London, is given an enigmatic gift from her cryptic estranged father following his sudden death. There is a box with her name on it in the attic of his home and inside is an exquisitely carved amulet, something in her father's letter that he refers to as a waymarker for her life. In his long overdue apology from the grave, Isabelle's father confesses, "I know I have been a great disappointment to you, as a father and as a man. I do not ask for forgiveness or even understanding." The legendary archeologist abandoned Isabelle and her mother when Izzy was only 14 and from that time forward her mother openly blamed her only daughter for ruining their great love affair.

Determined to discover for herself the history of the amulet, Isabelle travels with her best friend Eve to Morocco to try to find out more about the charm as well as dig up clues to her archeologist parents' past. There, on a risky rock climbing adventure, Isabelle has a fall, damages her ankle and finds herself depending on the kindness of a stranger, Taib, a knowledgeable and handsome antiques trader who introduces Izzy to the heady culture of the resilient Tuareg people. Through Taib, Izzy learns that eventually you can go home again.

Izzy's narrative is interwoven with the story of Mariata, an independent Tuareg woman descended from the legendary Tin Hinan in the not-so-distant past who traveled across the desert alone after she believes her husband has been savagely murdered. Through the kindness of an intersexed blacksmith, Tana, Mariata feels strengthened to continue her dangerous journey in the company of her unborn child and an obstinate camel. Time after time Mariata faces obstacles both natural and human and each time she prevails, even when it means she must embrace a life of solitude to survive.

In a tender scene where Izzy finds herself preparing for burial the body of an elderly Tuareg woman, I was momentarily irked by the serenity of the woman's passing because, "her expression was beatific, her eyes closed, her mouth curved up in a smile." In the deaths I have witnessed of people I've loved, no mouth has ever curved up in a smile. All mouths have been left agape at odd angles after the final breath escapes. So, while I was more than prepared to suspend my disbelief about nomadic desert life, this one romantic description of an extraordinary death, became a chink in the believability.

Nevertheless, Johnson is clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the landscape and the rigors of a nomadic lifestyle and I found myself envious of Mariata's unwavering connection to all that binds her to both. And, as Izzy moves closer to the emotional truth about her own sense of belonging, abandoning her previous allegiance to materialism at the feet of fine furniture and designer labels, I cheered for her every inch of the way.

GONE FOR GOOD by Harlan Coben (2002) Dell Publishing

2011-01-30T10:14:00.012-05:00

Eleven years ago Will Klein's first love, Julie Miller, was murdered in the basement of her parents' home, in the New Jersey neighborhood where they grew up. The suspected killer: Will's beloved older brother Ken. Then 24, Ken disappeared, managing to evade an international search. Will has never believed that Ken was capable of such violence, plus he happened to see another figure lurking about the Millers' home the night of the murder and he's pretty sure he knows who it was.

Now Will's mother Sunny is dying of cancer and confides to him on her deathbed that she knows Ken is alive. Will is perplexed by his mother's insistence, but when he discovers a hidden photograph in her bedside table drawer, he begins to think that perhaps his brother is not gone for good.

Will works at Covenant House in Manhattan, a respite for homeless youth. There he met the second love of his life, Sheila Rogers. Sheila has alluded to a difficult past of her own, but refuses to offer up any details. Shortly after Will's mom dies, Sheila disappears from Will's life, leaving a note that says "I will always love you."

After a threatening visit by a ghost from his past, John Asselta, Will turns to his friend "Squares," a hardened criminal turned Yogic guru, for help. Squares and Will embark on a journey that leads them to explore the darkness in Sheila's past and her apparent ties to Will's missing brother Ken. The FBI gets involved as well as a coterie of threatening thugs from Will's past. With heart-pounding speed and adrenaline-stoked narrative twists and turns, Coben spirits you along the perplexing path to Will's complicated future.

THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard (2011) Ecco

2011-01-28T09:17:00.014-05:00

Told in the bewildered third person plural, THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY contemplates the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell one Halloween, from the perspective of the teenaged boys in her life, not only at the time of Nora's likely abduction, but also later in their lives as young married men with children of their own. Their collective guilt at not being able to find Nora and keep her safe leads to magical thinking about the life she may well have found without them.

Because the imagined reality of Nora's abduction and subsequent torture is too painful to conceive, the boys spin an alternative life for her where she is pregnant with twin girls and waiting tables at a restaurant in Arizona. There she's hired without any previous experience because she tells the manager "I'm a blank slate. Teach me and I'll do exactly what you say." Nora falls for the old Mexican cook, a man so unlike the boys in his tenderness and desire to care for Nora and her babies.

The boys keep secrets, or at least try to, as they grow up with Nora's absence a haunting presence in their lives. Like the time Danny Hatchet accidentally killed the Wilsons' lab or the creepy shenanigans of the Junior year boys in the balcony at the film night that especially traumatized a group of girls. They also confide in each other about terrible truths including a mom's suicide and an adult friend's Lolita-fueled fantasy about one of their own daughters.

We ride side by side with these boys from their confusing Senior year in High School to the cusp of their 45th birthdays and attend the funerals of parents and classmates along the way. All the while we wonder, like them, if Nora could have possibly found an alternative life blossoming with love, even though the cold hard facts reveal a life snuffed out at its height of promise.

THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY will remind you of your own adolescence in its heady confusion and equal dreaminess: a shared belief in the possibility of a fantastic future that will be realized in spite of any obstacles that may come your way. Through Pittard's masterful narrative I am haunted by a disappearance from my own childhood in the 1970s. Sally Ann Hanson, a country schoolgirl, disappeared when I was in Grade 4. Other than the imagined terror of her fate befalling any one of my classmates, I never considered a future for her. Until now.

This book has traction. I think it's going to be 2011's ROOM.

GREAT PHILOSOPHERS WHO FAILED AT LOVE by Andrew Shaffer (2011) Harper Perennial

2011-01-24T20:25:00.009-05:00

Writer Andrew Shaffer is another Twitter find. You'll spot him there as himself @andrewtshaffer and also as the amusingly wicked aliases @EvilWylie and @EmperorFranzen, having outed himself in Galley Cat and then revealed more in a wonderful interview by @ninatypewriter. You don't need to be a big book geek like me, however, to enjoy Shaffer's fascinating debut GREAT PHILOSOPHERS WHO FAILED AT LOVE.

Anyone who has taken a philosophy 020 course as an undergrad will remember the names Aristotle, St. Augustine, Descartes, Engels, Goethe, Hegel, Hume, Locke, Rousseau and Sartre, but scratch the back of your brain and try to come up with something lasting that one of these guys has thought or said. Fret not. Their pithy remarks about love and women are conjured here in tantalizing entries. And, if you think you've made your fair share of mistakes on the love parade, be prepared to sit in the rumble seat, because the errors these great thinkers have made will push you further than a back-seat ride.

According to Diogenes the Cynic, Aristotle would "walk up and down discussing philosophy with his pupils until it was time to rub themselves with oil" while women were confined to the home and barred from public functions. After he indulged in "hellish pleasures" with his lover for more than a dozen years, St. Augustine's mother set HIM up with a "respectable woman" (a 10-year-old girl). And, then he converted to Catholicism. Camus was clear about his inability to love his wives or any other woman for that matter: "to love someone means to be willing to age with that person. I am not capable of such love." John Locke claimed that his "health...is the only mistress." Such a romantic.

The craziest, to me, however, is Ayn Rand, who when abandoned by her much younger lover (who happened to be heating it up with a fashion model at the same time) insisted, "The man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged would never want anything less than me! I don't care if I'm ninety years old and in a wheelchair!" You see? Capital C-Crazy. Take solace. You may drink and dial, but you'll never be as mad in love as Ayn Rand.

Pick up GREAT PHILOSOPHERS WHO FAILED AT LOVE , sit back, relax and enjoy the deliciously lascivious and often kooky ride. Besides, it'll make you look good.

THE WATER RAT OF WANCHAI: AN AVA LEE NOVEL by Ian Hamilton (ARC, forthcoming February 2011) House of Anansi Press

2011-01-23T21:20:00.018-05:00

Ava Lee is a feisty, intelligent, resourceful and polite 30-year-old forensic accountant from Toronto who happens to be business partners with a septugenarian "Uncle" in Hong Kong who works unofficially on white collar crime and who may or may not have connections to the Chinese Triads.

At first glance, the petite, glamorous Ava seems physically unthreatening (immaculately groomed and fashionably dressed in Chanel), but as someone trained in the ancient and secret martial art of bak mei by Grandmaster Tang, she is her own lethal weapon.

When one of Uncle's old friends persuades him to help his nephew Andrew Tam, Ava is enlisted to find the missing money, a whopping five million dollars. The money trail takes Ava from the comfort of her Toronto condo to Hong Kong and into the arms of katoey culture and corrupt, but helpful, law enforcers. From Hong Kong Ava travels to Guyana where she meets her wily match in Captain Robbins, who also happens to have daughters back in Toronto, attending Havergal College, Ava's boarding school alma mater. Robbins, a former Bajan cop, and one of the few white men in Georgetown, looks and behaves like a mafia godfather. And, Ava is in the precarious position of needing to trust "The Captain" at his word.

Just as Ava is closing the deal with a bank in the British Virgin Islands and hoping to return the missing funds in full to her client in Hong Kong, Captain Robbins, through his equally corrupt and menacing younger brother Jack, turns the tables on her and she finds herself needing to access all of her resources with the hope of making it off the island without her Canadian passport and returning home to Toronto where she'll contemplate taking Uncle's next great case.

In Ava Lee, Ian Hamilton has created an appealing and memorable heroine with a voice as fresh as Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce in his debut novel THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE.

As the first mystery in House of Anansi's SPIDERLINE imprint, THE WATER RAT OF WANCHAI has introduced me to an intelligent, feisty and impeccably polite woman who is sure to have my attention with each subsequent adventure in the Ava Lee series. And, I'll only have to wait until July 2011 to join Ava on her next journey, all of her resources in tact. How clever of Senior Editor Janie Yoon to see the promise in this series. It is sure to become a beloved blockbuster.

TETHERED by Amy MacKinnon (2008) Random House

2011-01-22T10:24:00.015-05:00

Has a book ever made its way to your hands and then inched its way into your heart, leaving an indelible mark?

After hearing about TETHERED from the Friday Reads meme on Twitter I special ordered a copy from one of my favourite independent booksellers here in Toronto and I picked it up on Thursday after work. Because Nicholas Hoare Books is down at the foot of the city, I ended up taking the Queen streetcar home which gave me almost an hour to immerse myself in the exquisitely created broken lives of Amy MacKinnon's characters, characters who seemed so frankly familiar to me.

The tenderness with which protagonist Clara, a mortician, prepares the corpse of a cancer victim in the opening scene had me weeping openly, not only from the care with which the moment is rendered but from the recognition of such an imagined kindness performed on the bodies of my brother and my grandparents after their deaths. Those unfamiliar with the business of preparing bodies for burial or cremation might find the visceral description almost untenable, but as the title implies, as a reader you will be tethered to that moment.

There were revelations throughout this sensitive and shocking novel that I felt as if MacKinnon were peeling back secrets of my past, my family's history. Like Clara, my mother lost her mother as a young child. In fact, her only distinct memory is approaching the open casket, with violets gripped in her furled three-year-old hand, made to put the flowers in with her mother's cancer-ridden chilled corpse, grazing those frozen fingers. And, like Clara, I too tore out clumps of hair as a child (apparently in my sleep), leaving spongy patches, scalp tattoos barely hidden by skillful parts. Something I had entirely forgotten until I read about it here and recognized myself with horror.

In funeral home director Linus, MacKinnon has created someone immediately knowable to me: a man who understands the privilege of his position and his role as pragmatic comforter in chief to the recently bereaved. A man who can reassure those in acute emotional distress because he has walked the walk himself through the unexpected loss of his only son.

When Clara discovers Trecie, a neglected little girl who seeks refuge in the funeral home, she reluctantly befriends her, wary of the emotional truths that will be revealed, both about Trecie and about herself. And, when Detective Mike Sullivan, no stranger to loss himself, starts prodding Clara about an unidentified child's corpse she prepared three years' previous, she finds her life shift in a profound way.

From the opening gambit to the immensely satisfying end, with life-threatening and life-changing detours along the way, TETHERED is a haunting debut, rife with man's inhumanity to man and the determination of those who are essentially good and true to abide by what is right.

THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE by Roberta Rich (from the ARC, on sale February 2011) Doubleday Canada

2011-01-22T09:44:00.011-05:00

THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE is Roberta Rich's glorious debut novel.

Hannah Levi, a young married Jewish woman, is known for her midwifery skills throughout 16th century Venice. When a Christian nobleman arrives at her ghetto door under the cloak of night, imploring Hannah to aid his dying wife, believing that she is their only true hope of a safe delivery, Hannah's faith is tested. As her aging rabbi reminds her, for a Jew to minister to a Christian is not only against the law, but also punishable by torture and death.

Then the Conte offers Hannah an unthinkable sum of money, an amount so generous that Hannah could possibly buy back her husband's life from the Knights of St. John by whom he has been captured and forced into slavery in Malta months before. Hannah is willing to take the risk of not being able to save the Contessa's and her baby's life and being caught ministering to a labouring Christian woman in order to live with the real hope that she will be reunited soon with Isaac, her true love.

Complicating Hannah's journey are the toxic younger brothers of the Conte who are threatened by the idea of an heir to their brother's estate (let alone a living, breathing one) and the sweeping presence of the plague that fills barges daily with diseased corpses of old and young alike.

Written with an eye for relevant historical detail and a capacity for rich sensory experiences exquisitely rendered, THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE surprised me at every narrative turn. Robert Rich is a novelist to watch.

TELL NO ONE by Harlan Coben (2001) Random House

2011-01-18T08:26:00.015-05:00

Harlan Coben is a new-to-me crime fiction writer. I have become familiar with his name through Twitter where his fellow novelist Alafair Burke (with whose work I am happily familiar and utterly committed as a reader) has commented about his writing and what a swell guy he is and where I also follow his 140-character tweets @HarlanCoben. Last week I was talking up Alafair Burke's books to a colleague and he just happened to recommend Coben and offered to loan me his favourite: TELL NO ONE.

As part of the Criminal Plots Reading challenge, Coben's TELL NO ONE serves as the book by an author who has blurbed a crime novel I've already read--in my case the overexposed Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

TELL NO ONE follows Dr. David Beck, a widower who continues to grieve the loss of his wife Elizabeth eight years after the traumatic evening he heard her piercing screams and she was abducted, the last night he saw her alive. His friends worry about Beck and encourage him to accommodate Elizabeth's loss in his life and move on. Beck immerses himself in his work as a pediatrician who serves a slum community where many of the parents he sees are children themselves.

However, one day Beck receives an enigmatic message on his work computer and the content of that message opens up a sliver of hope that perhaps Elizabeth isn't dead after all. Beck becomes obsessed with the idea that Elizabeth's death was a hoax and he enlists his sister's partner Shauna (his university roommate and most trusted friend) to help him puzzle out the truth.

In a story that Dennis Lehane calls "an exhilarating, bang-up, Porsche turbo of a novel," Coben unravels a narrative with twists and turns that take you to the precipice at Beck's side wondering how he will ever possibly elude the gangsters and federal officers who now pursue him with equal zeal.

This first exposure to Coben's style has me convinced to read my way through all of his novels, looking forward to what I expect to be gripping, intelligent, morally-driven stories that matter.

THE GUARDIANS by Andrew Pyper (2011) Doubleday Canada

2011-01-15T22:19:00.011-05:00

The launch of a new Andrew Pyper title is cause for excitement for fans of smart literary thrillers. I've been shoving copies of Pyper's books into the hands of discerning readers for years: LOST GIRLS, THE TRADE MISSION, WILDFIRE SEASON, THE KILLING CIRCLE and now THE GUARDIANS. Each time I wonder, baited-breathedly, if the new novel will match the excitement, intelligence and sensitivity of the previous one and each time I am relieved and delighted to see that it does. And then some.

Trevor, Ben, Randy and Carl are boyhood friends and hockey teammates who grew up in a small Ontario town in the 1970s and are bound by ties that they don't yet fully understand. Now, in their early 40s, the four come together again on the sad occasion of Ben's accidental death. Trevor, recently diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's Disease, has already come face to face with the idea of his own mortality through his trembling limbs. When he reunites first with Randy, and later with Carl, the unspoken specter from their past becomes prescient in their present.

With breathtaking tension and a capacity to reveal human frailty, Pyper leads you by the hand alongside these broken men towards their path of redemption.

As someone who believes that Pyper is already writing at the top of his game, there simply aren't enough superlatives to shout from the rooftops about THE GUARDIANS. If you haven't already found your way to Andrew Pyper's books, well, isn't it just about time?

THE SENTIMENTALISTS by Johanna Skibsrud (2009) Gaspereau Press

2011-01-14T14:55:00.004-05:00

Let me begin by confessing that I have an M.A. in English Literature and that the time I spent in graduate school has me predisposed to perhaps not only read fiction regarded dull by others, but also perversely to seem to enjoy it.

When Johanna Skibsrud was named the recipient of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize (ostensibly the finest book of fiction published in Canada in a given year) by the three-member jury of broadcaster Michael Enright and novelists Claire Messud and Ali Smith, I was curious to read her novel THE SENTIMENTALISTS. Published by Gaspereau Press, a small east-coast firm that takes pride in its fine product, this novel was the talk of the town last fall because another house joined Gaspereau to keep up with the demand for copies after Skibsrud was crowned the Giller Princessa in November.

Before opening THE SENTIMENTALISTS I'd already read three of the other four short-listed titles: Kathleen Winter's ANNABEL, Sarah Selecky's THIS CAKE IS FOR THE PARTY and Alexander MacLeod's LIGHT LIFTING. Each of those three books impressed me both stylistically and in terms of engaging storytelling. I couldn't imagine, really, how the winner could be decidedly more accomplished.

Well, I was right about that.

THE SENTIMENTALISTS is clunky and dull and wants for narrative drive until page 109 (out of 218 pages) where the pace is at least lively and the characters temporarily engaging. The Epilogue is a tagged on interview that for me was an irritant and did not contribute to my greater understanding of the protagonist and his demons.

In a season in which there were such strong titles as Steven Heighton's EVERY LOST COUNTRY and Alison Pick's FAR TO GO that were neglected by the shortlist makers, I am truly baffled as to why this book made it to the top of the list.

If you disagree with me, please let me know. I would like to try to understand what I missed.

IN HER SHOES by Jennifer Weiner (2002) Simon and Schuster

2011-01-12T15:30:00.004-05:00

If I happen to be online while Jennifer Weiner is live-tweeting episodes of THE BACHELOR, I am sure to be amused by her wit and snark, which is why I ordered this novel from her chick lit canon last week.

I have not seen the Hollywood movie adaptation starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette, so I happily leapt between these pages without any expectation other than being entertained by the story.

Rose and Maggie Feller are sisters with not much more in common than their shoe size and DNA. Rose is a Princeton-educated (like Weiner herself) attorney making her way in a Philadelphia law firm and her younger sister Maggie is a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants 20-something stunner who makes most hetero men's heads swivel when she enters a room.

When Maggie yet again oversteps her mark in Rose's life, this time her transgression is not so easily forgiven. Yet, Maggie is a survivor and manages to find her way into the Florida retirement community where her estranged grandmother Ella lives and there discovers truths about herself and a way back to the present where she is able to make amends with Rose after all.

I enjoyed witnessing Maggie's emotional growth through her service to Corinne, a blind woman who lives near the Princeton campus where Maggie is squatting in a library and through the rapport she builds with the retired folk in her grandmother's community. It is amazing what we are all capable of when we finally find the courage to be ourselves.

MORDECAI: THE LIFE & TIMES by Charles Foran (2010) Knopf Canada

2011-01-07T18:46:00.013-05:00

MORDECAI: THE LIFE & TIMES is a brick of a book at 717 pages, but this exhaustive and engaging biography of the Canadian literary icon is worth every minute that you will spend in its heady company.

As Booker-Prize-winning novelist Yann Martel explains in his cover blurb, "Charles Foran vividly renders the life of Mordecai Richler, in all his complexity and with all his contradictions." Foran had unlimited access to Richler's archives both public and private thanks to the generosity of his widow Florence and this accessibility combined with Foran's own talent as a storyteller (he's published nine books of fiction/nonfiction) has produced the definitive biography of an indefinable character.

Foran is careful to balance Richler's public irascibility with the private tenderness of a father to five remarkably creative children (Daniel, Noah, Emma, Martha & Jacob) and the old-fashioned devoted husband to the woman he most respected and loved, Florence Mann. In understanding Richler's family history, and specifically those in-your-face coming-of-age years in Montreal, Foran has provided the falsework for all of the novels. And, in so doing has made me want to revisit THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ, SOLOMON GURSKY WAS HERE & BARNEY'S VERSION for starters.

Travel to London and Paris with twenty-something Mordecai and mingle with legendary editor Diana Athill, expat fiction writer Mavis Gallant, fellow novelist Brian Moore and rising film star Sean Connery. Find out how Richler believed that Pierre Trudeau "could never be elected Prime Minister," how he championed THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by a young novelist named John Irving, and why he regarded Brian Mulroney as one of the finest liars of all time "who lied even when it wasn't necessary just to keep in shape, his voice, a dead give-away, sinking into his Guccis whenever he was about to deliver one of his whoppers."

I really loved this book and hope that it will be named the recipient of this year's BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction later this month as well as a contender for the Charles Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction not to mention make its way into the hands of grateful readers keen to read a real story well told.

GROWING UP JUNG: COMING OF AGE AS THE SON OF TWO SHRINKS by Micah Toub (2010) Doubleday Canada

2011-01-07T18:45:00.005-05:00

I received this copy of Micah Toub's memoir from @cbcbooks for tweeting book reviews to their feed. Having recently taught Catherine Gildiner's SEDUCTION and introduced students to the theories of Freud and Jung, I was happy to thumb my way through GROWING UP JUNG and relieved that I hadn't shared Toub's coming-of-age experiences.

Toub admits that some of the time what his Jungian therapist parents shared with him and his half sister was often flaky, but also occasionally profound. However, I can't ever imagine the mental health benefits of discussing my sex life with my mother as Toub so readily did with his mom who insisted that he "BE the penis." Or, that pursuing an active "animus" could lead the "synchronicity" of a fiancé.

What I did enjoy about Toub's narrative was the frankness with which he wrote and the Jungian theory refresher that reminded me why I had at one time been drawn to Jung's ideas about dreams and the shadow self.

Micah Toub writes a biweekly column about relationships from a male perspective for THE GLOBE AND MAIL and may be followed on Twitter @MicahToub.

A COLD NIGHT FOR ALLIGATORS by Nick Crowe from the ARC (due Feb 8, 2011) Knopf Canada

2011-01-05T09:18:00.010-05:00

First time novelist Nick Crowe, one of Random House/Knopf Canada's New Faces of Fiction for 2011, opens his tale with a scene that will be a familiar worry to many city commuters, at least those who travel to and from work as I do along the subterranean trail of the TTC. Our 20-something narrator Jasper observes with curiosity a man on the subway platform. And the scratch at the back of his brain tells him to be wary, but not before this stranger pushes him into the charging path of the incoming train.

Seven months later Jasper wakes up from a coma and becomes preoccupied with the disappearance of his older brother Coleman 10 years previous. On his birthday Jasper receives a phone call, but on the other end of the line there's only silence. Not ready to return to work, he embarks upon a southward journey with unconventional companions, Donny (Jasper's ex-girlfriend's devout new flame) and Duane who are planning to participate in a fishing derby en route to Florida where Jasper hopes beyond hope to get a trail on Coleman.

Eventually reunited with his mom's sister, Aunt Val, and her lazy, meth-addled and brutal husband Rolly Lee, Jasper begins to discover that his past perceptions that protected him through the lens of childhood memory are not necessarily reliable.

Through flashbacks of his family vacations to Florida where "watching the sunrise from the back of a station wagon... is a very fine thing indeed" and memories of Coleman's idiosyncracies before he disappeared, Jasper moves closer to the emotional truth and comes face to face with loss in his life.

A COLD NIGHT FOR ALLIGATORS made me squeamish at times with its moments of gratuitous violence, but I couldn't put the book down.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD by Jennifer Egan (2010) Knopf

2010-12-28T18:22:00.008-05:00

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is my first exposure to Jennifer Egan, but it certainly won't be my last. I'll be shuffling through her backlist as soon as my local library branch can source each title. Her narrative is smart and her prose clean and sometimes startling.

The novel weaves together the stories of Bennie Salazar, a 60-something NYC record exec with a punk rocker past, with Sasha, his glamorous and competent assistant with a storied past of her own that includes kleptomania, anorexia and more than one attempt at suicide. And, although Bennie and Sasha are oblivious about the essential details of each others' complicated lives, we are party to every secret along the way from a family safari in Africa to getting lost and found in Naples, Italy to San Francisco's punk scene in the early 70s and New York City today.

There are supporting characters that move in and out of Bennie's and Sasha's lives and the gaps between their entrances and exits serve as musical rests in the symphony of each life. We come to understand that the silences are as resonant as the notes themselves. Sasha's 13-yr-old son Lincoln is obsessed with the pauses in songs and it is his obsession that leads Sasha to realize, "the pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL."

Egan uses a variety of narrative techniques that embrace and satirize contemporary forms including texting and PowerPoint. For me, each page was a revelation, a pause on each character's path to redemption. Isn't that what we all yearn for?