Díaz Scoops NBCC Award

Posted 7 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Junot Díaz won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction last night for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Time will tell whether this gives him a leg up in the upcoming Tournament of Books. The general nonfiction award went to Harriet Washington for Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The complete list of winners is available here.

2008 Tournament of Books

Posted 6 March, 2008 in Book News | 2 comments

For those of you who haven’t had your fill of bookish smack-downs in the wake of Canada Reads, an American counterpart, The Morning News’s Tournament of Books kicks off next Friday. The competition is a round-robin format, with literary judges including novelists Nick Hornby, Elizabeth McCracken, and Gary Shteyngart (whose novel Absurdistan was beaten in the final round last year by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), and bloggers Mark Sarvas and Maud Newton.

There are sixteen books in the first round, with four judges (Sarvas, Newton, Ted Genoways, and Mark Liberman) choosing victors from eight brackets of two competing books apiece. The winners from those brackets will compete against each other (with Hornby and Shteyngart adjudicating), and so on until one book is left standing.

The sixteen books in contention include some of the most critically lauded titles from last year, a couple of which I’ve actually read. The competing titles are:

Run, by Ann Patchett
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich
Ovenman, by Jeff Parker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
You Don’t Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem
New England White, by Stephen L. Carter
Remainder, by Tom McCarthy
The Shadow Catcher, by Marianne Wiggins
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, by Stephen Marche
What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke

My review of Run is online, here. I did review Petropolis for the same publication, but apparently neglected to link to it, and now I can’t seem to track down the review online. As I recall, the review was mixed.

In any event, it’s nice to see fellow Canadian Stephen Marche on this list, and I’m looking forward to finding out which book will take the title this year. In the meantime, both Tree of Smoke and The Savage Detectives are on the TBR pile, and I’m hoping to get to them eventually.

If anyone wants to place bets on which title will ultimately prevail in this contest, your humble correspondent is more than happy to act as bookie, for a nominal fee.

Down These Mean Streets …

Posted 5 March, 2008 in Book News | 1 comment

Akashicbooks, the press that brought you Brooklyn Noir, Chicago Noir, Detroit Noir, and Havana Noir, among other hard-boiled anthologies is back with the forthcoming … Toronto Noir?!?

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived here all my life, but I’ve never really considered Toronto that much of a noirish city. I mean, we’ve got our sketchy neighbourhoods, any big city does, but Detroit, we ain’t. However, the new anthology has a terrific lineup of writers, including Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Sean Dixon, Nathan Sellyn, Andrew Pyper, R. M. Vaughan, and Heather Birrell. Yes, Heather Birrell. It’s so wacky it just might work.

I look forward to reading this when it hits stores in May.

On Literary Sex

Posted 4 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted approvingly Russell Smith’s desire to see more sex in novels. Here’s the counterargument, from the Guardian:

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.*

To illustrate his argument, the author of the Guardian piece, Lee Rourke, makes reference to the novels of Michel Houellebecq, which he claims are “saturated with badly written sex scenes.” Houellebecq’s sex scenes are nevertheless “a joy to read,” because “if sex is to be used at all, it should be mechanical, dreary and, most importantly, clichéd, which is precisely what you get with Houellebecq.”

This is disingenuous, because Houellebecq’s novels are nihilistic dissections of modern anomie; they’re about the lack of human connection in a world riven by consumerism, technology, and fanaticism. The “mechanical” sex scenes are manifestations of this; complaining that they are “badly written” is akin to complaining about Patrick Bateman’s compulsively detailed descriptions of the sex in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho — it’s an indication that the complainant has pretty much missed the entire point.

Rourke goes on to complain about the sex in Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach, which he finds self-consciously literary and “laughably unreal.” (By contrast, the “mechanical,” “dreary,” and “clichéd” sex in Houellebecq “seems real” to Rourke.)

Granted, sex in novels is very difficult to pull off. Done badly, it becomes unintentionally funny or embarrassing. Not for nothing is the Bad Sex Award presented every year, and always finds a full roster of candidates to choose from. Russell Smith highlights the difficulties involved in writing sex in his introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person:

The English language is not suited to graphic descriptions of passionate acts. … [T]here are only so many words for body parts and the actions they perform (for in fact, there are only so many actions), and constant use of them becomes repetitious. And really, none of these words is satisfactory: if you use the correct, everyday word for a body part — penis or vagina, say — you risk sounding cold and clinical, like a medical textbook or a how-to guide. Slang words, on the other hand, tend to be either ugly or humorous. Cock and pussy are harsh and, well, childish, and from a register of language that I suppose you’d have to call proletarian; that register does not suit every scene and every character.

It is perhaps this limitation of language that rouses the ire of people like Rourke. Certainly it has stymied writers, even otherwise talented and worthy ones. John Updike, whose influence in breaking down barriers in terms of descriptions of erotic acts in mainstream literary novels is enormous, has always evinced difficulty in this regard. His 1968 novel Couples was scandalous at the time for the explicitness with which it threw back the veil on the sexual lives of middle class American suburbanites. However, much of the sex in that novel seems to be cut from the self-consciously literary cloth that Rourke has such disdain for:

She showed behind and between her legs a wealth of listening curves and damps. She tugged her gown to her throat and the bones of her fingers confided a glimmering breast to his mouth, shaped by an ah of apprehension; when with insistent symmetry she rolled onto her back to have him use the other, his hand discovered her mons Veneris swollen high, her whole fair floating flesh dilated outward toward a deity, an anyoneness, it was Piet’s fortune to have localized, to have seized captive in his own dark form.

The overly clinical term “mons Veneris” would no doubt have Smith cringing, but the “wealth of listening curves and damps” is equally disconcerting, as are the fingers that “confided a glimmering breast to his mouth” (”glimmering”?) and the overly twee alliteration of “fair floating flesh.” This, safe to say, is not writing that one could get lost in.

Part of the difficulty with passages such as the one above is that there is no sense of exuberance to it, nor a sense of danger. In short, it doesn’t feel as though anything is at stake. In Amy Sohn’s novel My Old Man, Powell, the screenwriter who has an affair with the book’s much younger protagonist bristles at the thought of wearing a condom during sex: “I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” Powell understands that sex needs to have an edge, which is often what is missing from literary depictions of the act, which frequently feel too dryly intellectual, stripped of all passion and spark.

It was precisely this edge that made Nabokov such a compelling writer when it came to sexual matters. Not just the fact that he took up taboo subjects — sex with an underage girl, incest — but that he wrote about sex with abandon, as though he were allowing his pure id free rein on the page. Van’s dream from Ada, or Ardor, for example:

Bad Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it, varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan, Lucette’s mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters’ avid lovely faces were now close together, doleful and wistful in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the pool of his blood.

Nabokov is intentionally pushing buttons in passages such as this, and his description of the ear of ripe Indian corn could be read as a bawdy parody of Freudian dream analysis. It is the vibrancy of the language commingled with a sharp sense almost of discomfort — due in large part to his wanton flouting of the incest taboo — that gives the passage its full effect.

The energy — of both language and substance — that Nabokov displays is also apparent in Harold Brodkey’s masterful short story, “Innocence,” which features an extended, twenty-page description of a man trying to bring a woman to orgasm orally. Brodkey’s great insight — “Bad sex can sometimes be stronger and more moving than good sex” — is rhymed off almost as an aside, and the pitch of the story follows the ebb and flow of the lovers’ exertions. It is a bravura performance, and should be more than sufficient to put the lie to naysayers such as Rourke who believe that there is no such thing as a good literary sex scene.

(Thanks to Claire Cameron for pointing me in the direction of the Guardian article.)

*An odd redundancy, that.

“Shakespeherian” or “Shakespearean”: To Be or Not to Be Obscurely Clever

Posted 3 March, 2008 in Uncategorized | 13 comments

I’m on the horns of a dilemma.

First off, let me extend my sincerest thanks to the good folks at the CBC for inviting Alex Good and your humble correspondent to participate in last week’s online chat around Canada Reads. I had a good time and, if my site stats are any indication, people were paying attention, which is encouraging.

And herein lies the genesis of my problem. Kimberly Walsh of the CBC was kind enough to link the coverage from this site on the Canada Reads 2008 Facebook group page. Towards the end of last week, I had occasion to chat with a buddy of mine, who is a senior editor in the Canadian publishing industry. Seems a bunch of publishing types had come across the posts via the Facebook page, and pretty much all of them thought that the name of my blog had been misspelled.

This is a fairly common occurrence. The default is to assume that “Shakespeherian” is incorrect and to fall back on the more common spelling “Shakespearean” (or “Shakespearian,” depending). This is one reason why the URL for this site is my name, and not the name of the blog (although people do have a tendency to get this wrong, too: I’ve had letters from family members addressed to “Stephen Beatty”).

Point being, there seems to be some fairly widespread confusion about the provenance of this blog’s title. In the sage words of my publishing buddy, “No one gets it.”

First things first. The title of this blog is NOT misspelled. It comes from the “Game of Chess” section of T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Waste Land”: “But / O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag — / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.” Now, I recognize that this is a rather obscure reference, but when I was selecting the blog’s name I wanted something appropriately literary, and Eliot’s phrase seemed to fit the bill nicely.

But, I’m disturbed that “no one gets it.” I’ve sent out résumés with the blog’s title on them; how many editors, not spotting the reference, have passed me over because they assumed that I was careless in proofreading, or that I simply didn’t know how to spell the word “Shakespearean”?

So, my question is: Do I stick with the obscurely literary title and suffer the slings and arrows that come my way as a result, or do I rename this monster something more accessible? Thoughts?

UPDATE: Thank you all for your kind words. The votes are in and the opinion (notwithstanding that of M. Pound — il miglior fabbro) is overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the blog’s title as it is. So, the title stays.

Reading Canada Reads

Posted 2 March, 2008 in Canada Reads | 2 comments

WRAP-UP

Best Panelist

Steven: Lisa Moore. She consistently had the most substantive things to say, and was always quick with a snappy comeback. Perhaps I gravitate towards her because she’s a novelist and she was the one panelist to consistently engage the books on a literary level. Nevertheless, she was my fave.

Alex: I would pick Lisa Moore too, if only because it seemed like Ghomeshi was riding her a lot. She put up with it and didn’t lose her cool.

Least Impressive Panelist

Alex: I thought all of the panelists did a good job. Radio isn’t easy. But Steve MacLean has to take some lumps for his strange insistence on reading works of fiction so literally. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like talking cats or singing sheep or zombies. He even got upset that King Leary was smearing the memory of Francis “King” Clancy! His performance on Day Three was much better, but I thought it odd that his best moments came when he was talking about books other than Icefields.

As a close runner-up here I have to mention Zaib Shaikh. After starting out strong he really went downhill, at least from a strategic point of view. Why he didn’t talk about Not Wanted on the Voyage as a warning about the dangers of fundamentalism, which was a gimme, is a mystery. Instead he got bogged down in an unwinnable argument with Moore over feminism in the book, and then talked about its environmental message. Finally, on the last day, with everything on the line, he chose to read a passage that he thought showed Noah in a better light! Instead of defending his book he was defending Noah! A virtually impossible task, I would have thought.

Steven: I liked Shaikh’s dramatic reading, in part because he has a great radio voice (second only to Jemeni’s on this year’s panel), and in part because his training as an actor gave the reading real dramatic force. Yes, he was trying to highlight a passage that humanized Noah, but I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with this, particularly given Moore’s insistence on criticizing the book for its unidimensional, archetypal characters.

I agree with you, Alex, that the weakest panelist was Steve MacLean. You have to give him props for participating — he’s an astronaut (and, as you reminded us the other day, the only physicist on the panel), not a literary critic, so he was operating somewhat outside his comfort zone, which was a brave thing to do. However, his unwillingness to accept singing sheep in an obviously fantastical story like Not Wanted on the Voyage or zombies in what Jemeni rightly pointed out was a novel steeped in Afro-Caribbean religiosity proved a real stumbling block. If you can’t make these imaginative leaps, books like Not Wanted on the Voyage and Brown Girl in the Ring will remain closed to you regardless of their other evident attributes.

Biggest Surprise

Steven: MacLean doing a complete 180 in the bottom half of the final show. After spending the entire week talking about how he had to remain true to his principles and vote against King Leary, his dramatic about-face was frankly inexplicable to me, unless he was voting strategically to get King Leary kicked off because he thought it was Icefields‘ biggest competition. His change of heart pains me even more because had he stuck to his guns, Not Wanted on the Voyage, which I liked more than King Leary, would have won.

Alex: If I pat myself on the back any more I’ll probably throw my shoulder out, but after correctly predicting the first two books voted off and the ultimate winner, I have to ask myself “How much more right could I have been?” And I believe the answer (as Nigel Tufnel would put it) is “None.” There weren’t many surprises. Though my eyebrow did tremble upward just a bit at MacLean’s switch in the final vote.

Weirdest Moment

Alex: Jemini lost me when she said that the magic elements in her book are part of an authentic religion and there is scientific evidence that people can be made to behave like zombies. At least I think that’s what she was saying. This may be true, but . . . so what? I don’t think there’s any scientific evidence for seven-foot skeletons walking around in top hats or invisibility spells. It’s as if Shaikh had tried to defend Not Wanted on the Voyage by offering scientific evidence of a great flood. Maybe she was trying to win over MacLean. But Brown Girl in the Ring is a science-fiction fantasy. I thought this was a crazy approach.

Steven: I agree with you: that was kind of weird. But, to give Jemeni credit, I think her point was that there are elements of Brown Girl in the Ring that arise out of Afro-Caribbean religious experience, and that the other panelists’ insistence on reading the book as a completely imaginative speculative fiction elided this aspect of the book. Fair enough.

For me, the strangest moment was Ghomeshi’s inexplicable misunderstanding of Moore’s comment that Hopkinson’s book was the least well written and yet took her to a place she hadn’t gone before. Somehow, Ghomeshi interpreted this as Moore saying that she thought Hopkinson evinced the best writing of the five books, even though Moore had been fairly explicit throughout in saying that Gallant was the best writer.

A close runner-up, and perhaps not a “weird” moment, so much as a baldly indefensible one, would be Bidini’s assertion that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would have the same effect on a reader of Twain’s era as it would on a modern-day reader.

Grading the Host

Alex: I’d give him a C+/B-. He kept things moving, but he didn’t always seem to be on the same page as the panelists. As you noted Steve, he flubbed an exchange with Moore badly, and I thought he picked on her a bit much. A number of the discussion topics he tossed out didn’t go anywhere, and/or weren’t worth pursuing in the first place. When he floated his David vs. Goliath idea at the end there was almost a revolt. But I guess it was his first year on the job, taking over from Bill Richardson. I’m sure he’ll get better.

Steven: I’d be a bit more generous, giving him a B. It can’t be easy to manage five disparate personalities, and I thought he hit the right combination of allowing a free-form discussion and keeping control of the proceedings. He did attempt to get some discussion going, but I think to a certain extent he was hampered by a panel that was a bit overly determined to remain congenial and polite at all costs. (The exception to this, as always, was Lisa Moore.) Given that this was his first year on the job, I thought he acquitted himself just fine, and he’ll likely only improve as the years go by. Also — and Panic Girl is sure to appreciate this — he didn’t reference David Bowie even once.

Remembering Milton

Posted 1 March, 2008 in Poetry | No comments

Several centuries before Timothy Findley crafted his revisionist tale of the biblical flood in Not Wanted on the Voyage, John Milton reconstituted another story from the Book of Genesis — that of Adam and Eve and mankind’s fall from God’s grace — into his epic poem Paradise Lost. To a certain extent Milton has fallen out of favour in today’s secular society, largely because of his ardently devout nature; when, at the beginning of Paradise Lost, he renders the invocation, “Sing Heav’nly Muse,” there is scant indication that this is to be taken metaphorically.

Nevertheless, the glory of Milton’s writing has not diminished one iota in the years since his death, as Claire Tomalin eloquently reminds us in her appreciation of the poet in the Guardian:

Milton makes you think, provokes you into arguments about power, good and evil, about responsibility, innocence and the right to knowledge. He shows God forbidding this right, but we remember that Milton had himself defended it furiously in his essay on the freedom of the press, “Areopagitica”. The clash between Milton the Renaissance humanist and Milton the faithful servant of God makes things interesting.

Indeed, Milton’s “Areopagitica,” written in 1644, sounds as relevant today as it ever did, particularly when viewed through the prism of the Harper Conservatives’ draconian Bill C-10, which would deny tax credits to film and television productions that the government deems “obscene.” Milton was speaking of the written word, but his sentiments could as easily be applied to any artistic medium: “[A]s good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”

While I agree with Tomalin’s assessment that Paradise Lost is “as thrilling as a novel,” my sentimental favourite among Milton’s poems has always been “Lycidas,” written for a friend “unfortunately drown’d” in 1637. It contains perhaps the most stirring valediction to a departed soul I’ve yet read:

Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas, sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walks the waves,
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With Nectar pure his oozy Locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now Lycidas, the Shepherds weep no more;
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.