The Flying Troutmans - Miriam Toews

I knew little about Winnipeg author Miriam Toews personal life until listening to an episode of This American Life. In the episode, Toews talks briefly about a road trip with her teenage son and 12-year old daughter. Her son is quiet and brings his CD's for accompaniment. The daughter is chatty and precocious and occupies herself with art supplies and comic books.

Toews' newest book, The Flying Troutmans, concerns a similar road trip. When Hattie Troutman's sister, Min, is hospitalized, Hattie gets temporary custody of Min's children, Logan and Thebes. The three then embark on a road trip to find the children's father. Teenage Logan carves morbid sayings into the dashboard and looks for places to play basketball at every stop. 11-year-old Thebes never washes and talks incessantly. Hattie calls her ex-boyfriend in Paris and tries to keep it all together.

As usual, Toews' prose is funny and lucid. It manages to be both smart and conversational. However, the star in this novel is Thebes. Her purple hair, bizarre outfits, and fondness for making and writing out over sized novelty cheques, are totally endearing and come off as sincere rather than smarmy.

Despite echos of other books (Summer of My Amazing Luck is also about a road trip to find a missing father), this is another gem from Toews.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

I like to read on my lunch break. I hunker down outside on the grass, or in a chair in the staff room, eat, and enjoy a book. "Wetlands" proved to be a problem to this routine.

Explicit. Before the second page, we know that 18-year-old narrator Helen, has terrible hemorrhoids, but has still enjoyed a fulfilling anal sex life. From there on, we're taken into a world of pubic hair shaving, creative masturbation, home-made menstruation devices, and vaginal secretions. 

Now I'm certainly no prude, but this is shock for shock's sake. Admittedly, I read the whole thing, but it was just to see what levels of perversity Helen would achieve. The writing isn't particularly spectacular, the only thing that could save this book, and I felt in the end, that I had wasted a couple hours of my life. Thumbs down Ms. Roche.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had to re-read this book. It's on numerous best-ever lists, lauded in academia, among the favourites of a few friends, and all literate men seem to have a hard-on for femme fatale Daisy Buchanan. I have a dim memory of reading it when I was pretending to be a precocious early teen, but could not recall much more than a vague notion of rich socialites. 

The story of narrator Nick Carraway who happens to move right next door to wealthy and popular Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is a tremendously wealthy young man who has a gigantic house and throws lavish parties. Nobody is quite sure where Gatsby got all his money and rumours abound as to his past. Carraway and Gatsby become fast friends. 

Carraway's cousin, Daisy, and husband Tom Buchanan also live by. Daisy and Tom's marriage is coming apart as Tom has a mistress and does nothing to conceal it. (sort of spoiler alert) Unknown to Daisy, her first love, Gatsby, lives just across the water and the story brings them together and apart in an ultimately tragic ending.

The writing is tremendous; Fitzgerald has a way of putting words together that makes you stop, re-read, and really consider the phrase. However, other than that, I wasn't too blown away. The character of Gatsby is as confounding and attractive to the reader as he is to the narrator, but the rest are somewhat flat. 

A quick read, I'm glad I can now speak authoritatively when I say "what's the big deal?".  

 

"The Withdrawal Method" - Pasha Malla

Go here.

"In Transit" - Mavis Gallant

There's something very appealing about the foreigner abroad. It makes me think the characters in "Lost in Translation", vulnerable and lonely in a strange world. Like that film, this collection of stories is more about the characters themselves than how they experience their environment.

The 19 stories in this collection all deal with protagonists who are away from home. Apart from their own culture and language, not quite living in the real world, these people are perpetually in transit.

Gallant's prose is simple and elegant and peppered with startling and astute observations.

"'Digby is slightly restless, and marriage would settle him,' said Mrs Glover, pitying Digby, who now joined the company of men whose fate had been settled by a pair of women over empty cups." (from "A Question of Disposal")

"Every day had to be filled as never at home. A gap of two hours in a strange town, in transit, was like being shut up in a stalled lift with nothing to read." (from "In Transit")

"He had the soul of a carpet." (from "Good Deed")

Gallant is one of Canada's most treasured writers, but people would be hard pressed to recall her work. Her short stories are highly anthologized and she's often read in the course of English-Canadian literature studies and then forgotten. Gallant deserves much more. 

"Birds of America" - Loorie Moore

I think short story collections are underrated. These books sit on library shelves, passed over time and again for a novel, but the narrative snobbery is unfounded.

Or maybe not. Some of the stories in this collection by Lorrie Moore I loved and can't wait to read again. Some of these stories I was continually flipping through to see how many pages were left. However, when Lorrie Moore is on, she is so on. She is able to portray seemingly ordinary people with such wonderful attention to detail that they practically leap off the page. The word play is tremendous and witty and humorous, though sometimes gets a little out of hand and gives off a "look at me, I'm so clever" vibe.

While I appreciate the melancholy of every day life and not necessarily happily ever after endings, by the end of this collection, I was ready for something more upbeat. The second last story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" (makes sense after you've read it, sort of) follows the parents of a baby who has cancer. I mean, come on. A baby with cancer. It's hard to read and hard to put down, a combination that yields unsettling results. However, the emotion in it is so real that the story itself practically aches.

I think Moore is at her best when portraying the modern romance as seen in stories such as "Willing", "Community Life", and "Terrific Mother". The dysfunctional couple archetype is blown  apart and treated with an empathy rarely found.

These stories are beautiful, sad and funny at the same time. Moore goes on my list of authors to keep an eye out for.

"The Accidental" by Ali Smith

Ali Smith's writing is fun, whimsical, intelligent and breaks all sorts of rules. The trivialities of day-to-day existence are blown apart and rendered fascinating in this curious novel.  

The Smart family has left London to spend the summer in the countryside. Eve, the mother, writes her tremendously popular historical fiction in the shed. Michael, the step-dad, thinks of his liaisons with many, many, students. Magnus, the depressed teenager, mopes and has a sexual awakening. Astrid, the precocious daughter, videotapes the world around her and ponders the mysteries of life. All the narratives are mysteriously interrupted by the presence of Amber, a stranger who appears at their house and ends up staying there. 

The structure of this book is part of its appeal. Three large sections titled, "beginning", "middle", and "end", each containing a chapter for one of the characters. All the characters observe the world uniquely - the step-father's "middle" part is a sonnet sequence and the teenager often thinks in math equations. 

Adventurous, inventive and most of all, fun. Thumbs up. I'll read more of Ms. Smith in the future.