The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal, 1941–1960
Roald Nasgaard and
Ray Ellenwood
Douglas & McIntyre, 2009
hardcover, 160 pages, $60.00

Artists I know sweat and worry over their print or painting, performance piece, or video installation; but they agonize and despair over their artist statement, which, they’ve come to know, has the power – this adjunct thing of words, a de rigueur imposition between their work and its hoped-for viewer – to charm or doom them with gallery owners and arts grant juries. At a recent dual-focus show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, pairing etchings by Rembrandt and Lucien Freud, patrons could be seen huddled in dismaying numbers in the show’s vestibule where books and videos discussed the two artists, or around a padded bench, mid-gallery, where there were more videos of artists and arts commentators describing their reactions to the show. At the etchings themselves, which seldom had anyone in front of them for long, a commonly seen maneuver was the glance-and-duck, whereby a seconds-long perusal of the work was followed, as if the square on the wall was magnetized in reverse, by the sudden throwing of the patron downwards and to the side, to read with slow care the description of the work on the wall. The show was well-attended, but it was never difficult to examine a work at length, since the wordless zone directly in front of each etching was usually unoccupied.

I know this because I was one of the side-ducking, video-watching, talking-head-auditing, wall-reading and, fitfully, etching-viewing patrons. Needing, or choosing anyway, all this yakkety-yak about images that needed little or none of it: Freud’s big fleshy nudes; Rembrandt’s miniatures of Saskia or himself or his mother with her knobbly arthritic fingers.

When did it get so hard to just look at art? Was it ever possible? How long before the Lascaux bulls became the Lascaux bull session?

Or, if looking really is so hard, what sorts of words help us, encourage us, to look better? Are there any? Let’s try an oversimplification for its heuristic potential. All words occur after looking; they are autopsies of seeing. In the best cases, these perceptual post-mortems can sharpen our understanding of what must have occurred in the moments of seeing (including clues about how and why seeing stopped); they build the experience retroactively, or they go on building it, by reformulating it; and, when they reach their limit, they provoke the viewer into more looking. They return the eyes to their object. We bounce between looking and talking. (So quickly the processes blur; they blend in a single activity.) To facilitate that bounce, to speed and invigorate it: it is the most words can do, and it is no small service. At their worst, words trap the bounce and pin it in the arms of the verbal; they commandeer looking and will not give it back. They replace it. Art-experienced sails into the fog of art-discussed (it can do so with a solitary viewer, and usually does; the modes of discussion have been internalized since childhood), and it can wander in those mists forever without emerging again; usually it does.

Is it done with malice to looking – this fogging, this trapping? To consider it would take us too far afield, but it had better be admitted that there are many reasons, not many of them pretty, to tame the wildness of art, to reduce it from a living looking to a talking living. And it had better be admitted, too, that looking isn’t always pleasant; it can be uncomfortable, painful, even harrowing. It can be a raw wound and a scream. There are strong, and not always ignoble, compulsions on us all to flee the power of looking, to dress it in a poultice and bandages, to muffle it. It’s no betrayal of, and might be our most eloquent testimony to, art’s power to want to flee it sometimes; but it’s a betrayal if flight becomes the primary experience, if we never try, or even long, to return.

The so-called Automatistes, a group of abstract expressionist painters and other artists centered in Montreal (though often living elsewhere) during the two decades covered by The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal, 1941-1960, were much concerned with the power of words to liberate or constrain art. Which words help, and which words hinder, the making and experiencing of art? The question, with all its trailing doubts and challenges, haunted the Automatistes, and it shadows their recent commentators Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood.

Words that help, and words that hinder. The Word being a shifty and a jealous God, examples of both kinds are plentiful in the volume, sometimes sliding together so promiscuously that they are hard to disentangle. But let us, citing a few instances, try.

*

First, though, a bit more on looking (it is hard not to stray). This book is beautiful to look at, a joy. Visually, if not verbally, art books have advanced steadily – the dinky repro, of dim or otherwise wonky coloration, squinting through mats of text, formerly so common, is now, outside of history texts or dictionaries under compulsions of space, rare if not extinct – and The Automatiste Revolution meets a high standard in its visual presentation. Into 140 pages of text (excluding bibliography and index), it packs 60 colour and 20 black and white illustrations. Packed is the wrong word, though; the book has a roomy, sensuous feel. Many of the colour plates are presented in optimal format: alone on the page, bordered only by glossy white. Others include a discreet text block giving information such as would appear on a museum label: artist, title, media and dimensions, lender and photographer. Only in a few instances (a commendable resistance to financial constraints) are images shrunk amid text or doubled up on a page. These never work as well; the eye roams among them, and the resulting collage, however well it works as a new multi-media work, always leaches autonomy from the individual elements. The book looks good. So good I find myself reluctant to single out individual pages for praise; as in an actual gallery visit, one work steps forward to delight on one pass, then another on the next.

Do they delight in the ways the original paintings would? Do they even look like them? I have no idea. That is, I trust in a certain fidelity; but that trust is based mostly on a general faith in our technological prowess at controlling images. I asked my wife, a painter and printmaker, what she means by “good repro,” an idol which, against its evil twin “bad repro,” she and other artists we know invoke regularly. She answered without hesitation. “Clear, no blurring, bold colours” – now she paused; what if the colours in the original weren’t bold? – “. . . giving some sense of texture.” “Clear . . . giving some sense of texture,” I returned, editing. She nodded. No mention of fidelity. How can you tell? It’s a new work on the page. So while I sometimes assume, lazily, that I’m walking through the show in miniature, I’m only leafing through a book. It’s good to remember that almost everything about the experience is different. Scale, just for starters. Paul-Émile Borduas’s Bercement silencieux (Silent Rocking), is a lovely 8-by-10 inch page on my desk, beside my coffee mug. It was an oil painting, a metre by a metre and a half, on a wall.

The Automatiste Revolution is attached to – pendant to? precursor of? reason for? – a “corresponding” exhibition of Automatiste works, we are told by John Ryerson, Director of the Varley Art Gallery of Markham, in his short forward. The book’s text consists of two essays: “The Automatiste Revolution in Painting,” which has the colour reproductions, is written by Roald Nasgaard, professor of art history, former Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the author of Abstract Painting in Canada among numerous other publications; “Automatisme Beyond ‘The Barracks of Plastic Arts,’” which is illustrated by black and white photos and which considers the artists as individuals and as a collective working in multiple disciplines, is by Ray Ellenwood, professor and author of Egregore: The Montréal Automatist Movement as well as translator of numerous works including Refus global, the seminal 1948 manifesto of the Automatistes.

(Can we pause here for a moment? Ryerson says “the Automatistes . . . are under-recognized outside the Province of Quebec and, as a group, are deserving of recognition internationally.” Their work, he continues, “parallels and is equal to any of the art coming out of Paris and New York at the time,” a contribution to Canadian art history that “outshines that of the Group of Seven in its significance.” It may be true, for all I know; I’m open to believe it. But the exhibition of 2010 went just to Markham and to Buffalo? That is outside Quebec, but just barely; a modest van ride in either case. After all the storm the book chronicles, such a belated drizzle – it seems sad and puzzling and I don’t know quite what. Long ago I read a story by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” whose protagonist, John Marcher, discovered that his terrible destiny (forged by a terrible complacency forged by a terrible fear – it was vintage James) was to be “the man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” Sometimes I wonder – call it insane or merely goofy – if Canada is the John Marcher of countries. No refus is as global as the determination to let nothing rock your world. Only rarely does a tail-slap even ripple the pond; seconds later, it is glassy again.)

The photographs accompanying Ellenwood’s essay are poignantly evocative. They conjure people and a scene, a time. A distant time; the images are infused, for me at least, with the slightly luscious melancholy of the gone. Collars are wide, skirts knee-length or longer; young men often wear ties, even at casual gatherings. A group photo, six friends clustered in an apartment corner, with cigarette and empty bottle and a sketch tacked to a wall between paintings. A page from the student newspaper Le Quartier latin, showing an article on automatism and two advertisements, one for a printery (LA PATRIE) and one for Neilson’s Jersey Milk (Le Chocolat de Qualité). A Jean-Paul Mousseau drawing illustrating a chapbook of poems by Thérèse Renaud. A shot of Muriel Guilbault and Claude Gauvreau acting (holding a tableau, it looks like) in Gauvreau’s play Bien-être. Photographs of the seemingly irrepressible Françoise Sullivan dancing in the snow (Danse dans la neige), dancing in a Queen of Sheba/Robocop getup (Black and Tan); and of her pencilled choreography notations for The Planets. The people look young, fervent, intelligent. Like people you’d be stimulated to meet, to know.

This review could end here, happily. After all, with very few exceptions, pictures are what we have and keep art books for, aren’t they? On the other hand, almost all of the yellow Post-Its now defacing the book are about the words between the pictures. While I contentedly – complacently? – drank in the images, I struggled with the words. Frowning in puzzlement or disagreement, nodding eagerly, peering and re-reading, yawning and slumping. Is that why we have them, the words? To roil things up before they fade? To agitate our gaze; to activate to an alerted will the voluptuous disregard of the eye’s sphincter, contracting and expanding on its own, ingesting the visible like an optical python?

In case that’s true, even a little, I’ll let some of those notes speak for the rest of this.

1. a savage need for liberation. Those are the last five words of Paul-Émile Borduas’s Total Refusal (Refus global), the first and central blast in the collection of documents (including three short dramatic pieces, two essays, and a poem-declaration by four other authors in addition to Borduas) called Refus global. On August 9, 1948, three years to the day after the Nagasaki bomb, the Montreal group labelled automatistes by a young journalist published Refus global in a mimeographed edition of 400 copies. It shook things up. Within a month, Borduas was fired from his job as instructor at the École du Meuble “because, as the official government [my emphasis] letter to his principal said, ‘his writings and the manifestos he publishes, as well as his state of mind, make him unsuitable . . . for our students.’” Over the next year, 100 articles and letters appeared in magazines and newspapers arguing, pro and con, the case of Borduas and Refus global.

2. It is one of the chief virtues of The Automatiste Revolution that it keeps reminding you of a time when art tried to, and sometimes even could and did, shake things up. And it mentions Refus global so often that this reader, at least, was compelled to look up a document about which I’d heard so much but had never seen. Uneasy about my decaying French, I was happy to find Ellenwood’s English translation, first published in 1985 and reissued in 2009. On the first page of the introduction, I found this: “After causing an uproar in the press (and in the lives of some of the signatories), the manifesto was lost from public view for a number of years until its importance began to be acknowledged in the sixties and seventies.” And this: “This is the first time that the entire Refus global pamphlet has been available in English.” (Even in French, it was not until 1972, in a museum catalogue, that the entire pamphlet was reprinted.) Huh? For all the differences in genre and cirumstances, I felt, somehow, as if Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, after grabbing its post-war lockdown by the lapels and declaring its savage need for liberation, had gone out of print for decades.

3. There is a poignant sequence of five black and white photos prefacing Ellenwood’s translation. They are from a two-week exhibition the Automatistes held, in the winter of 1947, at the Gauvreau apartment. The sequence goes like this: Nine artists (well-dressed, those dresses and suits) sit on the floor beneath a wall hung with paintings. Four of them lounge – waiting? – against another wall, Borduas stretched out on what looks like a bed. Madeleine Arbour sits alone on a chair by a door between rooms, like a superfluous security guard in an unattended gallery, reading. A view of paintings in an empty room. Another such view.

4. Yet . . . and so? . . . Borduas insists: “Magic spoils . . . lies ready for our use . . . .” “MAKE WAY FOR MAGIC!” “MAKE WAY FOR NECESSITIES!” “We’ll settle for unpredictable passion; we’ll settle for total risk . . . .” It is not a coherent programme; what total refusal could be? But in its lashings out one hears, confusingly and unmistakably, the voice of authentic rebellion: “To hell with holy water and the French-Canadian tuque!”

5. Artists rebel, above all, against conditions that hinder them from making art. The unconducive conditions exist, inevitably, both inside and outside the artists. When they find conditions hostile to art, they will fight hard to change them; if the conditions prove immutable, they will stop making art or move to where conditions are better. Almost all of the members of the Automatistes kept making art, but many of them had to move to do so. Borduas moved to New York City in 1953, then to Paris, where he lived and worked from 1955 until his death in 1960. Almost all of Riopelle’s painting was done in France, where he lived from 1948 until 1989. Several of the other signatories of Refus global left Duplessis Quebec in the 1940s to live in New York or France for extended periods.

6. Roald Nasgaard calls Refus global “vehemently revolutionary in spirit [but not] finally a call for political revolution.” What, then, was the revolution about? The best clue to the Automatistes’ aims comes from the word which in varied form recurs most often in their writings: “spontaneously,” “spontaneous,” “spontaneity.” The movement was, ultimately, a cry to the artistic spirit itself; a rebellion, as Nasgaard observes, against the “repressive social, political, historical and religious forces that shaped daily life in Quebec,” but particularly against the overall “utilitarian spirit” these represent (as opposed, one assumes, to the liberation of non-utilitarian art). Though Borduas’s manifesto rejects “all forms of INTENTION, the two-edged, perilous sword of REASON. Down with both of them back they go!” – his was not, finally, a rebellion against reason but only against a certain kind of reason; a small-minded reason, if I can put it that way. Indeed, putting “rational effort . . . in its proper place” is the precondition of a larger intelligence: “Make way for the intelligence of the senses.” Unifying the often contradictory utterances of the Automatistes is the impulse to alter conditions so that they can make the art they want and need to make. Of the many significances that could be claimed for any art work, one of the deepest and most universal – at once grandiosely ambitious and pathetically humble – is surely this: the creation of a world in which such a creation exists.

7. The text in art books is most helpful when it sticks to the basics: establishing a chronology (timelines are good; this book has one at the back), introducing the main and secondary characters, and conveying some sense of the cultural climate in which the artist lived. To do just this, otherwise letting the pictures speak for themselves, would in most cases result in a better, and much shorter, book. It is when the text goes beyond this brief to describe or, worse, interpret the image in front of you that words become not only dispensable but misleading and obstructive. They become the fat shoulders you’re trying to peer around to see the art. Following are a few instances where I wish Nasgaard and Ellenwood had subjected received wisdom to a more rigorous scrutiny, contrasted with a couple where they did in fact sharpen my own looking.

8. The “automatic” part of Automatisme, its thematic core, needs a harder and more nuanced look than the book gives it. Of the poem by Renaud and its accompanying drawing by Mousseau, Ellenwood writes, “Drawing and poem were done rapidly, automatically, with no preconceived idea in mind.” Rapidity of execution is verifiable, but what is the connection of that to automatism? The lack of a preconceived idea? What does “done” mean when it comes to art? How long might image or poem have been gestating in the artist’s mind before being transferred quickly to paper? Automatism cannot be understood as simply equivalent to “spontaneous,” if by that is meant the unconstrained and unconceptualized. It doesn’t make sense neurologically or behaviorally. When conscious control is absent or suppressed, isn’t the mind thrown back on its most durable and ancient loops and circuits; doesn’t it, in fact, act from its most preconceived routines? That is the basis for any validity there may be in the power of free association tests to reveal personality. It is also why, socially, when someone who is usually reserved blurts out an opinion, it is generally regarded not as something newly minted but as the expression of a long-held bias. It is because automatism gives access to deeply ingrained psychic structures that, as Breton claimed, its utterances are to be valued as part of “the collective treasure . . . the collective myth.” If the grammar and diction of Renaud’s rapid poem are, as Ellenwood points out, suggestive of “dreams or fairy tales,” this implies that rapidity (more than the vague “automatism,” I would argue) throws the writer back to the oldest and longest internalized narrative structures, those of deepest childhood. If automatism does not generate pure nonsense (if such a thing is possible), then it must be accessing sense-making structures already so firmly in place that they can be accessed instantaneously and without conscious control.

9. Whatever is automatic is under the strictest control. Instinct is the most constrained, the most necessary. The involuntary blink as a foreign object speeds toward the eye is not rational, and it is not free. Automatism, in art, might mean digging below choice to find compulsion. Getting beyond what we merely wish to do, choose to do, to find what we have to do, i.e. wants that are indistinguishable from needs. This seems to be the conclusion that Refus global gropes toward, and finds near its end: “We reject all forms of INTENTION . . . MAKE WAY FOR NECESSITIES!”

10. “. . . they have been left challengingly raw. They have dared to be exhilaratingly ugly.” This is an example of the kind of art writing I find helpful to looking. Said by Nasgaard about Riopelle’s new oil paintings of 1947-48, it stimulates me to look again (and again) at the example on the facing page. The brio of the line splashes down next to Riopelle’s strokes. It takes a metaphoric leap, exciting in itself, and useful questions climb after it: How can rawness challenge? How does ugliness exhilarate? Is it “ugly” if it pleases my eye? Etc.

11. Here is an example, from the same page, of the kind of art writing I find fatuously unhelpful: “Chance, accident and emotional fervour have motivated the facture, but control is there as well.” Except for the word “motivated,” which can only be speculation posing as certainty, this is a vague formulation about the mix of elements in any work of art (try to imagine a piece you could not say it about). It is a void posing as a net, and only after disentangling its mesh do you realize you’ve caught nothing.

12. Unfortunately, the void-nets and fat shoulders outnumber the metaphoric leaps. It is why my attention flagged so often reading the text. Often the fat shoulder is a phrase or sentence that is puffed up to appear to be saying much more than it actually is. “Riopelle entered the 1950s in Paris about to embrace an alternative formal order.” If this means anything more than Riopelle changed his style in Paris in the early 1950s, I haven’t been able to discover it. Likewise: “Riopelle’s painting was not about chaos or disorder.” Whose painting is? Why not say that painting is always about formal order and structure, and call “automatism” a way of finding and entering new structures?

13. Is art writing so often opaque because a fear of seeming simple-minded or unoriginal has led to a distrust of all clarity? Or is it art itself that spawns the distrust, the paranoia? So much of looking (and the more powerful the looking, the more apt this is to be true) leads to the verbal bare rock of can’t-say or can’t-say-differently or don’t-need-to-say, that those determined or required to say something are sent scrambling to find crannies to stuff words in.

14. And so: “he wanted to capture something of nature’s essence on a grand scale.” Which essence is that? And yet, dammit, from the same page, there is this helpful comment about Monet as a forerunner of abstract expressionism: “Here was painting that, without resorting to Cubist structure, nevertheless resolved itself into powerful and overall seamless compositions made with colour and texture.” Is the Word a rambling drunk that, every so often, just when you’re about to wheel away in disgust, spits out something perfectly lucid?

15. The artists often sound just as confused as their explicators. Or just as confused when they become their explicators. If the method is, as Borduas insisted, to think in “‘painterly thoughts’ – having to do with the act and the material components of painting – and not in ‘literary ideas,’” then why title your painting La Grenouille au fond bleu (Frog on a Blue Ground), making it all but impossible for the viewer to see anything but a whimsically charming pondscape? Likewise with Leduc’s La Dernière campagne de Napoléon (Napoleon’s Last Campaign) or Barbeau’s Rosier-feuilles (Rose-Bush Leaves) – if you really want to let paint be paint, and not make it point to something else, then it seems Sans titre or some suchlike is the only way to go. You can’t have it both ways, renouncing the literary but leaving a trail of verbal breadcrumbs away from the purely visual. If, for instance, Borduas’s 1958 painting Corner Stones really is “utterly devoid of narrative or sentimental associations,” why opine that “At a glance these black slabs might read eponymously, like stone quoins forming the corner of a plastered wall”? Why, indeed, if you are Borduas, do you call it Corner Stones, a title that summons not only homely memory but, easily and quickly, fragments of nostalgic narrative? It is a sly way of having picture hold hands with the picturesque; and it is a perfectly good visual-literary artistic strategy, perfected by Klee who set up intricate dialogues between title and image – but not if you, or your explicator, renounce it.

16. If Borduas’s last painting, left unfinished on his easel, is going to be read as “thick, broad and chunky masses of black paint that rise like a wall threatening to shut out forever the last illusionistic promise of the white ground underneath,” why pretend that you are eschewing the literary or the narrative or, for that matter, the sentimental?

17. (I feel confused writing these notes. Reading most art criticism, I feel confused when not bored. Not challengingly or stimulatingly confused, just confused. The limbs of cognition caught up in bolases of jargon and assumption, tumbling through dull space.)

18. Borduas disparages de Kooning’s gestures as “literary.” Nasgaard analyzes a 1953 Borduas painting that is supposed to be an important step away from “figure-ground structure” in these words: “individualized taches still assert themselves as signs of a sort playing out their own little narrative.” Yet here, a page later, is Nasgaard saying, helpfully, that in another Borduas painting, “The composition . . . had become decentred and dispersed.” That helps me see, by crystallizing how I see, The Amphitheatre of Lutetia.

19. (I’ve gone on far too long here. The last thing art needs is another fat shoulder, another wheeling Word-drunk. Let me wrap this up and step aside.)

20. To get more rigor, more clarity, into our conversations about art, we have to risk appearing stupid by interrupting the art-spiel to ask basic questions. “Barbeau, among his many experiments from 1947, had already produced some striking little paintings in which he quite undermined spontaneity, using the palette knife quasi-mechanically, laying down his nearly identical strokes in a regular, repetitive pattern.” This is puzzling in its assumptions about what constitutes spontaneity. In what sense are regular, repetitive strokes by a painter opposed to spontaneity, any more than one or two notes repeated by a jazz soloist would be? (Or one word by a writer: “Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”)

21. Refus global marked an end as well as a beginning to the Automatiste revolution; soon after it the artists mostly went their separate ways. Francoise Sullivan: “It’s very strange, but there were seven magic years from 1941 to 1946 when it really existed, when it was getting stronger, and then it exploded.” Did it come to end because it couldn’t be completed, couldn’t happen, in the Quebec of those years; or simply because an artist’s forceful articulation of his/her aims always spells the end of that phase of aiming?

Towards the end of The Automatiste Revolution, there is a full-page, soft focus, black and white photograph of Francoise Sullivan and Jeanne Renaud standing on a city street, each looking at a bitten-into apple in her hand. The women look chic and pensive, sun and shadow play behind them over a bulbously gleaming car and what looks like a four-story apartment building. The picture is lush with the passionate and self-conscious commitment of young artists yearning for and forcing change. The date is uncertain: “probably in 1946.” The place is not: It is “in New York.”

When Cheryll pulled her disappearing act, Mr. Greenberg would ask me to make sure she was safe, an easy enough task since she was a regular at a handful of clubs, whose dancers and clienteles I got to know well. I remember in particular one club frequented by a recently divorced engineering professor, bleary-eyed and middle-aged, who had a tendency to paternalistically dote on Cheryll and the other dancers, offering them advice on how they could improve themselves through education.

Looking back I’ve often wondered whether my motives were any more pure than those of the engineering prof, since there was no good reason why I, ostensibly a paralegal, should have spent so much time spelunking into strip clubs. At the time, I thought it was the decent thing to do, but if I were being honest, I’d have to confess that I enjoyed playing at being a hard-boiled detective, immersing myself in some fairly sleazy dives. Up until then, I had had an extremely sheltered suburban life, so this was my chance to indulge a voyeuristic slumming streak that I wasn’t even willing to acknowledge that I possessed.

Normally, I would not sully the august pages of Canadian Notes & Queries with such unseemly autobiographical reflections. But as it happens they are extremely pertinent to the novel the editors have sent my way, Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy, which deals with a college lecturer named Justin Harrison falling hard for a troubled young lady named Jenna Whibley, in the process becoming ensnared in her penumbric world of strip clubs and drug dealers.

HarperCollins, 2010

Girl Crazy has had a mixed reception. Amid the mostly positive notices praising Smith for his compulsively addictive narrative and needle-sharp prose, there have been some harshly negative comments that demonstrate genteel bourgeois prissiness is alive and well in the Canadian literary world. Some reviewers have been hard put to believe that characters like Harrison and Whibley could actually exist, let alone be fit subjects for a work of art. “Is this how guys really are?” Chandler Levack asked on the Eye Weekly website. I hate to destroy any of the sweet illusions of youth, but, yeah, there are many guys, and indeed gals, who are quite as sex-obsessed as the characters in Smith’s book.

Verisimilitude isn’t the only criteria by which a novel can be judged, of course. If a writer is working on a fairytale, as Smith did with his novella The Princess and the Whiskheads, it might not even be relevant. Still, when Smith is composing fiction in his social observational mode, as he is in Girl Crazy, it is worth noting that he is an extremely accurate writer. The strip club milieu, not just the girls but also the clients and the larger netherworld that surrounds exotic dancing, is utterly convincing in this novel, described with great delicacy and attention to local texture. Girl Crazy, in short, is a terrific read and deals with aspects of contemporary life that have only rarely been touched on by Canadian writers, and almost never with Smith’s fidelity to observed reality. Given how accomplished it is, the novel should spur reflections on Smith’s literary stature.

Russell Smith is not Canada’s greatest writer. A formidable cohort of older authors, preeminently Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, will have to retire from competition before Smith has a shot at that title. But for more than a decade he has been, for me at least, Canada’s most fascinating writer, the author whose new books and stories I most eagerly anticipate, whose fiction I approach with a hopeful curiosity grounded in the fact that his early novels gave me a great deal of pleasure and each new volume, whether successful or not, shows a strenuous effort to expand his literary range.

Smith’s first two novels, How Insensitive (1992) and Noise (1998) brought to contemporary Canadian fiction a polished metropolitan wit, much influenced by the tradition of the British social novel best exemplified by Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. These novels made a splash because they described a frenzied Toronto of fashion-crazed clubsters and on-the-make journalists that, at the time, was a novelty in Canadian fiction, although in their wake the urban novel has become a robust genre in our literature. More valuably, Smith’s freshness of language has made his earliest fiction permanently valuable: I’ve returned to both novels over the years with renewed pleasure. Where once they offered news about hip Toronto, now they serve as an evocative time capsule of a long-gone milieu, just as Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) offers the last word on 1920s London high society.

In a generally glowing review of Noise that ran in the Toronto Star on May 9, 1998, Philip Marchand complained that this novel, like its predecessor, suffered from “a certain narrative slackness.” According to Marchand, Smith’s “greatest weakness as a novelist may be his reluctance to consider the importance of story in shaping his material.”

Marchand’s review is a rare example of literary criticism that actually had a demonstrable practical effect. Smith has admitted that Marchand’s critique stung him and inspired him to take greater care in plotting. Perhaps because he needed to work on a smaller scale in order to change his approach to fiction, Smith’s newfound attention to plotting first became evident not in full-blown novels but in two curious short experimental works, The Princess and the Whiskheads (a 2002 novella that used fairytale conventions to comment on the relation between art and society) and Diana: A Diary in the Second Person (a compact 2003 porn novel). As in science, literary experiments aren’t always successful: I found The Princess and the Whiskheads a real chore to read given that Smith submerged all his native talents as a social observer of contemporary life in order to craft an elaborate allegory. But there is no denying that The Princess and the Whiskheads is a very well structured fable, indeed the finesse of plot is all the book has going for it.

Diana was a more successful experiment (or “exercise” as Smith called it). Sex had played an important but implied role in earlier books but it was only with Diana that Smith tackled the difficult job of writing about sex explicitly. The experience of writing the book opened him up as a novelist, and not just in his sex scenes. His earlier novels were marked by a degree of emotional reticence: his characters were motivated by strong desires and compulsions which they couldn’t name or confess to. Since the publication of Diana, the emotional lives of Smith’s characters are much more on display.

Perhaps because it was marketed explicitly as a stroke book, Diana hasn’t received the literary analysis it merits. In the first few chapters, Diana seems like typically episodic smut, one scene after another of foreplay in unusual places leading to the interlocking of two or more torsos. But half-way through the book these episodes start to cohere into an unexpected pattern: among other things the book turns out to be a reflection on 17th century Jansenist theology, a worldview which saw death as the necessary flipside of pleasure. Diana ends ambiguously since we’re not sure if our heroine is embracing her wild lover or a well-coifed incarnation of the grim reaper.

The ultimate outcome of Smith’s experiments are most evident in his two most recent novels: Muriella Pent (2004) and Girl Crazy. Both these novels are saturated with sex and very carefully structured. With its multiple points of view, Muriella Pent particularly deserves to be singled out as Smith’s most ambitious work to date, the one where his skills as a satirist are most successfully channeled into a wide-ranging and complex narrative that allows him to sympathetically portray an impressive range of characters.

More than any other writer of his generation, I’d argue, Smith is building up an oeuvre, a body of work that is both varied but held together by a certain consistent set of concerns. As such, Smith’s books can be read not just as discrete units (which is how book reviewers approach them) but also synoptically, the way Biblical scholars read the Gospels, with an eye towards recurring character-types, thematic obsessions, and narrative patterns. A synoptic reading of Girl Crazy, one that places the book in a larger and still unfolding Smithian canon, helps us see that in this novel he is re-writing, with a much greater concern for narrative propulsion, storylines found in his two earliest novels, How Insensitive and Noise.

If I had to sum up Russell Smith in a phrase I’d say he is a chivalric pornographer. His main male characters are repeatedly shown as being torn by two overlapping but conflicting imperatives: the chivalric fantasy of rescuing women in distress and the pornographic desire to enjoy consequence-free, uninhibited raunchy sex. While chivalric and pornographic narrative traditions both arguably have roots in patriarchy, they also exist in natural tension with each other, a tension which fuels the erratic behavior of Smith’s male characters.

The pornographic side of Smith’s work is easy enough to discern since the novelist has talked about it quite often, but the chivalric dimension of his fiction is worth highlighting. There is a recurring scene in Smith’s fiction where the hero encounters a teary-eyed woman, who draws him into her orbit and leads to both sex and emotional turmoil. The ur-text here is How Insensitive, where the hero Ted Owen is defined by his susceptibility to female weeping: sobbing leads him to be entangled with two very different young women, the slinky model Georgina and the chubby slacker Darlene “Go Go” Ryan. By the end of the novel Owen meets another woman and we can anticipate what happens by the novel’s last sentence: “She was crying.”

In How Insensitive, Owen’s ill-conceived hook-up with Ryan, a quickie that she takes more seriously than he does, leads to the novel’s main dramatic incident. Ryan disappears briefly and Owen and a friend have to go scouring through the grungier parts of Toronto to find her. In Noise, the magazine writer James Rainer Willing has a fling with scorchingly beautiful but troubled photographer Nicola Lickson, a black-clad “Ebola babe” who weeps prior to their first intimacy. Willing and Lickson team up to do a magazine article but when her photos are due she mysteriously stops returning her lover’s phone calls. Working with a friend, Willing has to cycle around downtown Toronto to find her. In Girl Crazy, Justin Harrison’s entanglement with Jenna Whibley starts when he comes across her at an open air phone booth, crying and calling an ambulance. After he helps her through a medical crisis, Harrison and Whibley briefly become lovers. When Whibley drops out of Harrison’s life he, like Owen and Willing before him, has to journey into the skuzzier and hairier sections of Toronto to find her.

A critic of archetypes like Northrop Frye would say that all three of these novels echo the myth of Orpheus, the hero who descends into the underworld in a failed attempt to rescue his love. But in these three novels, Smith’s hero can also be described as an unsuccessful knight, an adherent to a courtly ideal in a world where it no longer makes sense. On his first date with Nicola, James Willing formed a futile plan “to hail a taxi and accompany Nicola to her apartment, where he would in a gentlemanly fashion ascertain her safe entrance and nobly flee.” In Girl Crazy, Jenna Whibley describes Justin Harrison as “a really nice guy. A real gentleman.”

These nods towards the gentlemanly ideal are deeply ironic because in Smith’s Darwinian social world there are really only two types of men: dweebs (who let others push them around) and douchebags (the guys who do the pushing). Variations of the word douchebag (douchy, douche) recur frequently in Girl Crazy, a novel that can be described briefly as the story of a dweeb who learns to be a douchebag. Some of the negative reaction to Girl Crazy comes from the fact that Justin Harrison is such an unlikable character, a single-minded lech. But the desire for novels only featuring uplifting or edifying action betrays a childish literary taste; certainly there have been many great novels about characters who are much worse than Justin Harrison.

Like men, women tend to come in two types in these novels: mildly neurotic but sensible ninnies (the off-stage girlfriend Janet in How Insensitive, Allison in Noise, Genevieve in Girl Crazy) or psychotic sex-babes (Georgina in How Insensitive, Nicola Lickson in Noise, Jenna Whibley in Girl Crazy.) The title Girl Crazy has a double meaning, referring not only to a man who is obsessed with a girl (Justin Harrison) but also a girl who is crazy (Jenna Whibley). Again, it is hard not to see parallels with Smith’s earlier fiction. In How Insensitive, Ted Owen says about Darlene Ryan “she’s so crazy.” In Noise, James Harrison sees someone who reminds him of Nicola Lickson and remarks, “another beautiful mad girl.”

The germ for Girl Crazy can be seen in chapter 18 of Noise, where James Harrison, while searching for Nicola Lickson, briefly assists a crying girl. It’s instructive to compare this chapter of Noise with the first chapter of Girl Crazy.

From Noise:

He crossed the street and waited at the phone. The swinging doors were missing from the booth. There was a girl on the phone, a teenager. She wore baggy jeans and had a bare midriff. She kept poking her head out the booth and looking around the street, and James saw that she was crying, sobbing even, and that her eye makeup had run on her cheeks. She was saying, ‘I don’t have another quarter, so can you promise it’s on its way?’ Her voice was whiny and hiccupping.
James backed off a bit and looked at his watch.
‘Sir? Sir’ She was talking to him. ‘Can you do me a favour?’
‘I don’t have any money.’ . . .
When he came out, she was sitting on the curb, doubled over. People were passing by. He sat next to her. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘there’s cream and sugar in that, you should drink it, and that’s plain water.”
‘I’m hemorrhaging,’ she said, flatly, as if saying, ‘I’m tired.’

In Girl Crazy, Justin Harrison is trying to call his former girlfriend Genevieve when he first notices a striking girl at the phone booth:

The girl was kicking a running shoe against the post that supported the phone. As he stood beside her and picked up the receiver on the next phone he heard her say, “I’ve been here fifteen fucking minutes. I’ve called twice already.”
He glanced over and smiled. She jerked her head towards him and he saw her face, her violently blue eyes. She had full lips, some pale freckle over her nose. And her eye makeup was smudged, as if she had been crying. She did not smile at him. She turned her head away.
He glanced at her breasts as he dialed. They were quite full, and the nipples were clearly visible under the stretchy stuff. And there was a silver stud in her belly button, and maybe another tattoo poking up from her groin.
Genevieve’s phone rang and rang and then her perky message came on. And he hung up.
“I don’t have another quarter,” said the girl. Can you please promise me it’s on its way?” Then she slammed her receiver down and put her face in her hands. She turned away from Justin and leaned against the plastic awning of the phone . . . .
Justin leaned his bike against the telephone and walked over to her. He bent down. “Excuse me. Are you all right?”
She looked up at him. She had definitely been crying. Her forehead was turning pink in the sun. She said, “Could you do me a favour?”
Justin stood up. If she was going to ask him for money, he would walk away.
“Could you just look down the street and see if there’s an ambulance coming?”
“Sure.” He stepped out into the road and looked east. The traffic was immobile for as far as he could see. The air over it shimmered. “Not right now, no. Did you call one?”
She put her head down on her knees again.
“Listen,” said James, “You’re really pale. You should get out of the heat. Can I get you some water?”
“I’m hemorrhaging,” she said flatly, as if saying, I’m tired.

In juxtaposing these two similar passages, I should be clear that my goal is not to play gotcha literary criticism. Quite the reverse: what is interesting about these two passages is that even though there is a strong overlap in narrative content (the classic literary critics called it “the matter”) they read very differently. While Smith might be revisiting some of his earlier narrative obsessions in the new book, stylistically it is a very different animal from How Insensitive and Noise.

Possibly under the influence of Elmore Leonard and Michael Winter, Smith has become a much brisker, more fast-paced novelist. Gone are the elaborate, tarted-up chatty sentences that characterized his earlier books, replaced by punchy paragraphs that always keep the action moving forward. Aside from literature, cinema is an obvious influence and Girl Crazy pulls the reader along at a fast clip like a good thriller by Alfred Hitchcock or Roman Polanski. Rare for a literary novel, Girl Crazy is so successfully tense that it makes your stomach tighten up as you read it.

Consider again the sentence quoted earlier from Noise describing James Willing’s chivalric intention. The sentence in full reads: “Having successfully righted her/him, James’s jacket coming into contact with quantities of beige pancake makeup, they continued toward a brightly lit corner, with a vague plan forming in James’s mind to hail a taxi and accompany Nicola to her apartment, where he would in a gentlemanly fashion ascertain her safe entrance and nobly flee.” To enjoy this sentence, you have to linger over the details: the mock bureaucratic precision of her/him, the detail about the “beige pancake make up” and the juxtaposition of this awkward scene with James’s intent to act “in a gentlemanly fashion . . . and nobly flee.” (The oxymoron of a noble flight itself is chortle-worthy.) This is exactly the sort of sentence that Smith avoids writing in Girl Crazy: instead we have smaller, more tightly focused sentences that keep pushing the narrative forward.

There’s been both a gain and a loss in Smith’s evolution as a writer. Girl Crazy is much more intensely harrowing and involving than anything he’s written before. Just as Justin finds himself irresistibly drawn into Jenna’s world, the reader also has a hard time escaping the tug of the story. Once begun, this is a very hard book to set aside. Especially effective are the powerfully written sex scenes in the novel, notable not just for their explicitness but also for the way sex is convincingly shown to be integral to the emotional lives of the main characters.

On the negative side, I have to say part of me misses the discursive intellectual play of Smith’s earlier novels, even though I know such lofty digressions would slow down the hurtling story. In all of Smith’s previous books, the main characters experienced an aesthetic awakening or reawaking: the ups and downs of their personal lives were tied to their relationship with art. Girl Crazy is a much harsher and darker novel than Smith’s earlier works in part because no such aesthetic awareness is available. We’re told that long ago Justin Harrison had writerly aspirations but they aren’t evident in his actions: his single-minded, almost addictive, hunger for sex (and the social power that goes with sex) defines the limits of his sensibility.

In fact, one could go further and say that Harrison isn’t so much interested in sex as he is in underwear. Thongs in particular are a major fixation. One of the first things Harrison notes about Jenna Whibley is the thongs she has on, and from that point on there are countless thong-references in the novel. To be sure, Smith’s interest in this tiny bit of female apparel dates back a long way. In How Insensitive, Ted Owen makes note of Georgina’s “thong-back underwear” and Diana contains an unsettlingly blunt description of what makes thongs so sexy. But not until Girl Crazy have we had a Smith novel where female undergarments are so frequently and prominently discussed that they need to be considered part of the subtext of the work.

In a review for the National Post, Richard Greene complained that Girl Crazy was “lazily written.” Greene cited two sentences that failed to obey the old-fashion rule about the need for elegant variation: “The apartment was smoky with fish oil and smoke.” And: “There was a woman on the stage under purple light, writhing around in a not unusual manner, and the usual scattered guys close to the stage.” These sentences are best understood though by remembering that, as in How Insensitive and Noise, Smith has fashioned a narrative voice that mimics the main protagonist. Ted Owen was an aspiring writer and James Willing an ambitious journalist: not surprisingly their stories were told in a richer diction than the one Smith has crafted to describe the world of an erstwhile writer who has abandoned his vocation.

Quibbles aside, Girl Crazy deserves to be hailed as a worthy addition to Smith’s growing backlist. Like all serious writers, Smith has a collection of obsessions and themes that he keeps returning to. One mark of his quality is that upon each return to his personal mine, he digs deeper than before and manages to bring up something fresh and unexpected. As long as he continues to write books like this, he’ll remain Canada’s most interesting writer.

McLelland and Stewart, 2009

To say that a given novelist or short story writer’s work is full of “truth” is to risk relinquishing all credibility as a critic or reviewer and to join the ranks of the professionally enthusiastic and unfailingly uncontroversial book talkers who clog most weekend book review sections and lit-themed radio shows, smothering all literature in the same warm, verbal honey.

And to say it about Alice Munro? My God, you might as well follow it up by declaring that Tuscany is “beautiful,” the immigrant owners of a local shop are “charming,” and that twelve-tone compositions “present a real challenge to the listener.”

Munro’s limitations are easily identified and enumerated. Even people who’ve only read one or two of her stories – maybe for a course on contemporary CanLit, or because they wanted to know what all the fuss was about – believe they can spot where her borders lie. She has only ever written short stories (though 1971’s Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of linked stories, has sometimes been taken – and marketed – as a novel). The many dozens of stories she has written appear, on the surface, to vary little in terms of tone or approach or even subject matter (which is usually summed up, a little dismissively, as being the very thing identified in the title of that aforementioned 1971 collection). Her settings are most often small or mid-size communities in Southern Ontario or British Columbia. They are either roughly contemporary or set within a not-too-distant past, though the thematic concerns of the stories don’t seem to change depending on whether they are happening in the Now or the Then. Her stories of the past don’t grapple head-on with huge historical injustices such as slavery or the wiping out of First Nations cultures, and she has yet to set a contemporary tale within the boardrooms of a multinational corporation with a name like CONUNEXT or Global Operating Dynamics. She doesn’t write to expose or explain complex financial and political systems. She isn’t looking to report on some bleeding edge cultural shift or to investigate subcultures. She doesn’t wield the blunt club of satire against deserving cultural villains. She never takes language itself for a run or sabotages her narratives to allow new forms and ideas to emerge from the ruins. Worst of all, the distinct reek of autobiography seeps from many of her stories.

With a writer so closely bounded, so seemingly unambitious, so content to till the same ground over and over in the same way, how can you use so grand and definitive a word as “truth”?

Though it may curse me to a lifetime of middlebrow cooing on the CBC, it can’t be avoided: the one thing that truly is constant throughout Alice Munro’s work – the thing that makes irrelevant all those concerns about too-familiar settings, similar-sounding female narrators, or cultural unhipness – is Truth. To read her best stories is to experience some of the best fiction in the English language. It’s true that there are precious few (if any) bravura sentences, elaborate set-pieces, or startling narrative risks in her work that one could present as evidence to prove this – indeed, Munro’s prose often shrinks down to the level or easy ironies or homespun insights when presented in excerpt form. The greatness of her work lies in its total effect (which puts critics and reviewers at a distinct disadvantage).

All the same, Munro has been publishing for over forty years, and has released over a dozen collections. Even if we are to concede that, yes, she is among the greatest writers of this and the past century, the well must surely be drying up by now.

How is it then, that there is not a single bad story among those collected in 2009’s Too Much Happiness, and more than a few that easily rival her best?

The collection opens with “Dimensions,” about a young woman who frequently, and somewhat clandestinely, travels to the London, Ontario prison to speak to the older husband who, in a fit or rage or pique or something else, killed their three children with his bare hands. In just about anyone else’s hands, this would have been a tale of Dark Obsession or of how Sometimes It’s A Hard World For Small Things, complete with an epigraph from the Old Testament or Johnny Cash or both. In Munro’s hands, it becomes a deeply complex story about desperate human needs that exist outside of love or hate and about the involuntary connections (and disconnections) created by pain and tragedy. How she accomplishes this is just about beyond explication, as the story and its characters grow more mysterious the more we read, though there is never a sense that Munro is engaging in literary obfuscation. We don’t sense the manipulation because Munro is a master of control: even when her tales feel haphazard and breezy, even when we feel we are being given too much incidental colour and too little decisive action, there is almost always a realization (often in retrospect or on a subsequent reading) that everything in a given story is deliberate and perfectly placed and measured.

Munro’s stories are endlessly mysterious not because they are solipsistic, but because they are every bit as expansive and boundless as they are rooted in the particular. Her settings and scenarios seem banal, but reveal vertigo-inducing depths. In “Dimensions,” the woman says she could never forgive her husband, “that terrible person, that isolated and insane person,” but wonders “what was she here for if not at least to listen to him?” This realization does not come upon her as a curse, but as a blessing. The almost mystical effect it has on her would seem ridiculous had not Munro ensured that every detail of her world is felt as real and concrete. It’s a story that, like the best of Flannery O’Connor, is infused with the spirit of a religious parable, while remaining thoroughly encased within the flesh of contemporary realistic short fiction.

The majority of the stories here have the feeling of parable or allegory. It’s surprising, given Munro’s reputation for only writing about small people doing small things in small parts of the country, how many of the stories contain elements of the remarkable or the bizarre. In “Wenlock’s Edge,” a young student befriends a young woman who is in the thrall of a deeply jealous and controlling rich man who likes to have poetry read to him by naked girls. Poetry being read aloud in a highly symbolic manner also appears in “Face,” about a childhood friendship remembered by a retired radio host with a strawberry birthmark covering half his face. A different kind of childhood memory is remembered in “Some Girls,” about a brutal and long-hidden deed carried out by two girls at summer camp.

Giving the outlines of the stories like that risks making them sound like the kind of hackish tales that filled magazines in the decades before Munro first started writing. And she does occasionally risk melodrama here, as in “Free Radicals,” in which an elderly widow must outwit a pathological killer on the run. The story is much neater and more direct than anything else in the collection, and the ending comes close to winking at the reader, but nothing in the story feels false or constructed. At worst, it comes of more like a kind of genre exercise by a literary master than an uncharacteristic slip.

The collection is not without its weaker moments, of course. “Wood,” about a man who must crawl out of a forest after twisting his ankle, has the feel of a Jack London tale of man vs nature and is thoroughly engaging, but peters out by the end. And the book’s title story, a fictionalized retelling of the last few days in the life of Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalesky, feels like the result of a momentary authorial enthusiasm, a mere project rather than a fully realized work of art. The story is not dull or poorly written, but feels oddly inert and literal.

However – and here we get back to the gushing – these few missteps only serve to throw the collection’s best moments into sharper relief, and to remind us that, despite her freakish consistency, Munro does not simply write these stories in her sleep. A story like “Fiction” – a decades-hopping story about the fallout from a broken relationship and the unsettling effect of having one’s less honorable moments converted into, well, fiction – is one of the best Munro has ever written, and great works of art are not the result of mere craftsmanship or of skill learned through repetition. With a story like this, littered with so many of the usual Munro motifs but containing nothing that is remotely stale, the rut that she is often accused of writing in is revealed to be the size of the world.

Munro, like every other literary writer who specializes in short fiction and exhibits an interest in the quotidian, often gets compared to Chekhov. It’s not an invalid comparison, but the real effect of her work is closer to that of Tolstoy. In reading Tolstoy’s fiction, as with Munro’s, there is the feeling that one has not simply witnessed an artistic performance, however excellent, but rather of being possessed by a vision of the world. It’s this effect that marks the difference between very good writers and the Great, between brilliant fictions and the Truth.

If you want to make any progress as a moral being, you have to own up to your biases and grapple with your unexamined assumptions. So in the spirit of self-correction, I’ll freely admit that prior to reading Leon Rooke’s The Last Shot, I was intensely prejudiced against pastiches.

The Last Shot, Leon Rooke, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2009

I once thought of pastiche as an inherently second-rate genre, a parasitical form redolent of self-satisfied bookish in-jokes. Pastiches, I believed, should be best left to the nerdy arrested-development types who try to map out the genealogies of Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan (sometimes proving that the great detective and the Jungle Lord are distant cousins). The attempt by various contemporary writers, working under the unhelpful rubric of post-modernism, to ennoble pastiche by making it subversive – I’m thinking here of the appropriation of genre tropes by Robert Coover, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon – has generally left me cold since the novels they’ve produced lack either the unpretentious, light-hearted thrills of sincere pulp fiction or the emotional intensity of genuine literature. The core problem is that a pastiche is always literature about literature rather than literature about life, hence one step too far removed from the lived experiences that must, in however distorted or imaginative a form, make up the seed of truth around which fiction builds its shell.

But, as Leon Rooke has shown time and again in a career unprecedented in its inventiveness, there is no literary rule that can’t be broken by a writer with enough audacity and moxie. “Gator Wrestling,” the novella that makes up the heart of The Last Shot, is a pastiche of the southern fiction of Clark Blaise, with echoes of Blaise’s own lodestar William Faulkner. Yet there is nothing derivative or second-rate about the story. Readers of Blaise’s superb novel Lunar Attractions or his essential collection Southern Stories will repeatedly experience déjà vu while reading “Gator Wrestling” which features a torpid, musky small-town Florida locale complete with alligators and insects, wayward French-Canadian clans (with names like Thibidault and Coombs) who have made their way south, and a furniture store that goes defunct leaving family disaster in its wake. One character uses the phrase “a North American education” (title of a key Blaise story), another character is shamelessly named “little Blaise” and even a “Struthers” shows up (a tip of the hat to critic J. R. Struthers, who edited the volume Short Story, which was dedicated to Clark Blaise, where Rooke’s story first appeared).

All of this might make “Gator Wrestling” sound hopelessly coy and self-referential, like a televised “celebrity roast” where the stars rib each other for flubs they made decades ago on the set of a long forgotten B movie while the audience gawps in puzzlement. Yet “Gator Wrestling” isn’t just an expert joshing of a Blaise story but rather something much deeper than that, perhaps comparable to the musical genre of “the cover.” Think of Joan Baez doing a cover of a Bob Dylan song, where she sings the same lyrics but also reveals new shades of meaning and comments on Dylan’s influence on folk music. Or imagine Miles Davis doing a cover of a Duke Ellington number while also paying tribute to their common debt to Scott Joplin and you’ll get an idea of what Rooke achieves by both covering a Clark Blaise story and also laying a wreath at the tomb of their common father, Faulkner.

Rooke can get away with doing a Blaise cover because the two men share a similar life-trajectory as reverse carpetbaggers, Southerners who have headed (or returned) north. Rooke was born in North Carolina, and Blaise spent his crucial formative years in Florida. Both men are haunted by the South in the same way a defrocked clergyman will remain haunted by Christ. “Gator Wrestling” recreates the country of Blaise’s youth to chronicle the shift from the Old South to the new. As so often in Rooke’s fiction, generational conflict lies at the heart of the drama, in this particular tale the tension between the racism of the traditional south and the rise of a younger generation formed in the wake of the Civil Rights movement.

The characters in “Gator Wrestling” aren’t just crackers and hicks, they are self-conscious crackers and hicks, whose very dialect is knowingly exaggerated. As the narrator observes of two girls, “No one could put [them] in the shade when it came to talking cracker talk.” So when a character refers to a car as “a awe-tee-mo-beel” we’re to think not just of Faulkner but also the long tradition of comic hillbillies such as Al Capp’s L’il Abner. The Old South is no longer a region but rather a giant open air theme park, and even the reactionary politics of the area has an aspect of play-acting. Ultimately “Gator Wrestling” is an elegy, albeit a hilarious one: the south of Blaise and Faulkner, for better or worse, is long gone, and the story offers up a high-spirited obituary.

Blaise and Faulkner are only two of the many writers alluded to, celebrated or even gently tweaked in The Last Shot. The first shot in The Last Shot makes reference to almost all the major modern short story writers from O. Henry to Raymond Carver. J.D. Salinger, no less, shows up in another tale, although he’s only a teeny-bit more forthcoming in Rooke’s rendition than he was in real life. The process of writing also gets foregrounded in the book, as witness titles like “All True Stories have Loose Ends” and “How to Write a Successful Short Story” (the latter allluding to a Ring Lardner collection with a title that has an extra edge of irony when we realize there is no one alive who can offer better advice on this topic than Rooke).

I’ve mentioned my prejudice against “literature about literature” and my distrust of post-modernism. Well, just as some of Rooke’s southerners overcome their racism and indeed transcend the condition of whiteness, Rooke has conquered my literary bigotry. With an author as wide-reading as Rooke, and as skilful as he is in doing riffs in the style of other writers, literature is part of life and a fit subject for stories.

With all its literary allusiveness, The Last Shot almost seems designed to provoke reflections on Rooke’s own status in the pantheon of modern fiction. At this late date in his career, more than forty years after the publication of his first story collection, appraising Rooke’s oeuvre seems both daunting and unnecessary. He belongs in the small, select company of Canadian masters, a peer of Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Clark Blaise. Like them, everything he writes is, almost by definition, worth reading and re-reading.

Tellingly, reviewers faced with the task of surveying the Rooke phenomenon often resort to the same tactics used by hapless tour guides at Niagara Falls, statistics. Rooke has given us more than 300 stories, many but not all of which can be found in his 18 collections, as well as 7 novels, plus sundry plays and poems.

Such quantitative measures tell us nothing about quality. More impressive is the fact that Rooke’s prodigious prolificness is achieved without the vices of prolixity and repetitiveness. Although he’s given over to swooping flights of rhetoric, Rooke’s verbal virtuosity always serves a purpose. There is scarcely an unnecessary word in The Last Shot. The stylistic variety on display is remarkable: aside from his impressive resurrection of Flannery O’Connor’s flint-eyed portrayal of shiftless poor whites (in “The Last Shot” and “A Good Radio Voice”) we also get a sentimental story about angels told by a narrator who is as bluff and breezy, as clubby and cool, as Anthony Trollope unfolding a tale about the doings of a small town vicarage.

What holds the collection together is a concern for family life. In “Gator Wrestling” a family saga is summed up in a crisp sentence: “Junior had been wanting to leave town since he was a boy, the father bound and determined to keep Junior under his thumb and properly beholden, as a child should be.” Here is Rooke’s recurring concern, which is not just the way the old weigh down the young but also the way the young trap the old. Family life in Rooke’s universe is like a spider web, both a home and a sticky constraint. And if they do escape from home, Rooke’s people perversely desire to return there. This desire for home even effects Dark, the personification of death who is the hero of the last story in the collection.

The great cliché about Rooke is that he’s primarily an oral writer, one who flourishes best when he’s on stage. Annie Michaels has called Rooke “a preacher” while Kent Thompson says he’s a “performance artist,” a description echoed by John Metcalf. Like most clichés, Rooke-as-performer is true enough, but it allows readers to ignore the fact that he’s as much an eye-writer as a tongue-writer. To simplify, tongue-writers are the great rhetoricians and monologuists of literature – Joyce, Faulkner, Philip Roth – who hold our attention with a torrential outpouring of words. Eye-writers are the cooler, more observant sorts who like to linger on the surface of things: Nabokov, John Updike, Nicholson Baker.

Rooke’s impossible-to-ignore skills as a tongue-writer have prevented readers and critics from noticing how visually attentive he is. In “Gator Wrestling” a bicycle is limned with these words: “a near-spokeless, wired-together bike . . . seatless but for a protruding metal spike, the bent pedals dragging the dust, the handlebar misaligned, as though an axe heel had been taken to it.” This remarkable bike is a thing of beauty not only in and of itself, it’s a perfect emblem of an entire way of life and region. That region, the American South, gave birth to Leon Rooke, and remains the ground of his being, the wellspring of his remarkable literary career. Just as Dark returns to his mother, Rooke has taken one last trip home, a journey that enriches us all.

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood, McLelland & Stewart 2009

Margaret Atwood doesn’t like hearing her novels called science fiction. In an article originally written for Book-of-the-Month Club/Bookspan and reprinted in her 2004 collection Moving Targets, Atwood explicitly disavows the term, which in her mind involves intergalactic space travel, teleportation, and Martians. Referring specifically to her 2003 dystopian epic Oryx and Crake, Atwood avers that “it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?”

The answers that Atwood comes up with are not likely to soothe hearts made anxious by early 21st-century existential malaise. Set in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, Oryx and Crake posits a world that has been vanquished by human meddling. Before the plague that wiped out most of humankind, society has devolved into a sort of social Darwinian nightmare: wealthy corporations such as HealthWyzer set up compounds to seal off their denizens from the “pleeblands” where “the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies” hold sway. Security has been outsourced to a group of corporate commandos – the CorpSeCorps – and genetic engineering projects have been allowed to proliferate beyond all reason. AnooYoo is in the business of developing and selling products to alter a person’s physique in any way imaginable: “Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier.” For amusement, the Web offers an interactive game called Extinctathon, which measures a user’s knowledge of extinct animals and plants, and there is a practically unlimited traffic in child pornography.

How slippery is the slope on which we currently find ourselves? If the Atwood of Oryx and Crake is to be believed, very slippery indeed. It should go without saying that our devotion to a kind of cutthroat consumerism is increasing the gap between rich and poor in Western societies; the Boomer generation’s defiant refusal to age gracefully has resulted in a vibrant market for plastic surgery, cosmetics, and other palliatives to disguise the body’s inevitable decay; genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have given rise to modifications in food products as varied as rapeseed, soy, and tomatoes; and the Internet is a locus of virtual reality and pornography of all stripes (legal and otherwise). All of these things are extant in our world; Atwood merely ratchets up the volume and pushes them to their logical extreme.

Still, her brusque dismissal of the term science fiction to describe the results seems odd, especially when seen in light of her remarks about another, earlier book, one which was hugely influential on both Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, 2009’s The Year of the Flood. In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atwood asserts that Wells referred to his tales as “scientific romances,” but only because the specific generic classification science fiction had yet to be coined. About Doctor Moreau, Atwood writes:

photo by George Whiteside, courtesy of Giller website

There are several interpretations of the term “science.” If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. As Jules Verne remarked with displeasure, “Il invente!” (“He makes it up!”). The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a world-view that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley, and has to do with the grand concern that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This too may account for his veering between extreme Utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man derived from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood also belong to the debit side of the account book, in that they chronicle the latter days of a species – homo sapiens – that seems hell-bent on returning to a pre-evolutionary state along a road that is ironically paved by our own ingenuity: we are involved in the wholesale pursuit of the very technologies that will serve as the instruments of our destruction. Although The Year of the Flood is ultimately a more hopeful book than its predecessor, there is nevertheless a strain of “the deepest pessimism” running through it.

Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Therefore, by Atwood’s own admission, it is “scientific” in the sense that “it implies the known and the possible.” Why, then, the almost preternatural aversion to the classification science fiction? Likely, Atwood’s hesitancy arises out of the suspicion (at best) and outright marginalization (at worst) that novels designated as such have experienced in this country. As a literary genre, science fiction is ranked somewhere just above chick-lit romances and Westerns in the pantheon of legitimacy. William Gibson and Robert J. Sawyer may be among the bestselling authors in the land, but it’s unlikely they will ever find their way into the kinds of discussions about great Canadian literature that are carried out by our self-appointed cultural gatekeepers, who generally react to sci-fi the way they might be expected to react if they caught someone defecating on their front lawn.

Then again, Atwood is equally cagey when it comes to the matter of The Year of the Flood’s precise relationship to Oryx and Crake. Although her Canadian paperback publisher, Vintage Canada, reissued the earlier book in 2009 as “The First Book of the MaddAddam Trilogy,” Atwood bristles when it is suggested that The Year of the Flood constitutes a sequel. The author told the U.K. magazine The Bookseller, “It’s not a sequel and it’s not a prequel. It’s a ‘simultaneouel’ in that it takes place during the same time span and with a number of people in it who are peripheral in Oryx and Crake but are central in The Year of the Flood.” Ah, yes: a simultaneouel. Right-o, then.

All of these semantic distinctions – science fiction vs. speculative fiction, prequel vs. sequel vs. “simultaneouel” – are little more than window dressing, a lexicographical parlour game that only serves to obscure the matter at hand: does The Year of the Flood work as fiction, on its own terms and with its own internal logic and integrity? It does, but at more than 400 pages, the book is also slower and more diffuse than its predecessor. It’s a bleak work that nevertheless ends on a note of marginal uplift, but the relentless satire that drove Oryx and Crake is diluted, replaced by something that closely resembles melancholy.

The story begins in the same situation as the earlier novel: a pandemic, which Crake developed while working in a biotech lab, has been set loose and created a wasteland where genetically altered animals – pigoons and wolvogs and rakunks – run rampant and the CorpSeCorps security contingent has clamped down. The two survivors we meet at the book’s outset are Toby, who has taken refuge in the AnooYou spa where she was working when the plague broke out, and Ren, a trapeze dancer at the Scales and Tails strip club, who was quarantined just prior to the outbreak because she was bitten by a client who might have been carrying a sexually transmitted disease.

Toby and Ren are erstwhile members of a strange eco-cult known as God’s Gardeners, a back-to-the-earth group of vegetarians with bad fashion sense led by a scientist-turned-prophet called Adam One. In stark contrast to the brutal and misogynistic theocracy that dominated Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the religious faction depicted in The Year of the Flood is largely benign: they grow their own food on rooftop gardens and sing atrocious hymns and prepare for the coming of the Waterless Flood:

A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to over-population and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to replenish the Earth. Or something like that.

Readers will forgive the Gardeners a certain theological fuzziness because they are for the most part benevolent, especially when compared to the rapacious CorpSeCorps guards who protect the wealthy corporation workers and ruthlessly put down insurrections from the impoverished pleebmobs. When Adam One discovers Toby, she is working at SecretBurgers (the secret involves the burgers’ key ingredients: suffice it to say that stray corpses don’t last long in the pleeblands), where she is repeatedly raped by her boss, Blanco.

Atwood has often had difficulty with her male characters and Blanco is no exception; a broad caricature of a sexual sadist, his function in the novel is purely to antagonize Toby to such an extent that she is willing to flee with Adam One, and then to hide out at AnooYou once her whereabouts is discovered.

But, strangely, in this novel the women also seem like ciphers, or at the very least somewhat underdeveloped, each one evincing a dominant trait or characteristic that is sounded again and again through the novel like a chorus. Toby is the tough one. Ren is the naive one. Amanda is the artist who creates living eco-art. There are a host of other characters, including Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake), who reappear from the earlier novel; Zeb, one of the Gardeners who goes on to create MaddAddam, the online entity that runs Extinctathon and becomes a nexus point for the survivors of the Waterless Flood; and Rebecca Eckler a solidly built black woman who unfortunately shares a name with a skinny white journalist (who won the opportunity to have a character in the book named after her in a charity auction). None of these characters makes a huge impression on the reader during the course of the novel, and none remains in the reader’s memory for very long afterward.

This is because The Year of the Flood is more a novel of ideas than a novel of character. Atwood is more focused on the details of her plague-ridden, Apocalyptic wasteland than she is on the nuances of the people who move across it. This is evident from the opening page:

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it’s been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.
There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there’s no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier?

This is what sticks with a reader long after the final page has been turned. The persistent feel of rot and decay, of stink and ash, but at the same time, the determination of life to find its way through the wreckage. The finale of the book brings us full circle to the final scene in Oryx and Crake, and while we discover the identity of the three mysterious figures at the end of the previous book, there is still ambiguity: What do the figures carrying torches off in the distance portend? Is it redemption that approaches, or final annihilation? (After all, Crake has been compared to Dr. Frankenstein, and we all know what the figures with torches portended in that story.)

Critics have suggested that in her speculative mode (to use Atwood’s preferred term), she is acting as the figure of Pandora from Greek mythology, opening up her fictional box and allowing the chaos to swirl out around her and her readers. I prefer to think of her as a different mythological figure: Cassandra, who warned of impending doom, but in vain, for the gods saw to it that there was no one who would believe her. Atwood has been eerily prescient in the past (her 2008 Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth predicted the global economic downturn in scarily precise terms); if it is true that The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent,” then the novel should stand as a cautionary tale about the slippery slope that we are all on, and what we can do to reverse our course before it’s too late. As prophecy, The Year of the Flood is not so much a dystopian thought experiment as it is a horror story. Just don’t call it science fiction.

The Mechanical Bird
Asa Boxer
Véhicule Press, 2007
78 pages, $16.00

Gwendolyn MacEwen famously wrote that “Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry. Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder, is the sound you make when you come and why you live and how you bleed and the sound you make or don’t make when you die.” With such a statement, essentialist as it may seem, MacEwen foregrounded the vital role that sensory experience plays in the writing of poetry. Poems have ideas in them, research behind them, but if they remain purely intellectual, then such poems are as husks, perhaps virtuosic in form but dead from the gut down.

Adam Getty’s second collection, Repose, and Asa Boxer’s first book, The Mechanical Bird, are both manifestly concerned with poetic craft as necessary artifice. The crafting of poems, the poets demonstrate, can serve as a form of opposition to the deadening forces of production that define our lives in the 21st century.

Getty’s poems are as deeply lodged in his literary and scholarly syllabus as they are entrenched in the industrial stench of Hamilton, with its wreckages, steel mills and slaughterhouses. His poems reference Dante, Milton, Kafka, Lacan, Blake, Sappho, Lee, Adorno, Breton and Wordsworth; echoing lines from Thomas (“in my craft & sullen art”), Moritz, and the Bible. His facility for fusing world and text varies from heavy-handed disjunction to a sleek weaving of seemingly disparate threads, as with “Pender & Hamilton,” a poem reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers’ “The Loving Shepherdess,” in its first person characterization of a lonely yet curiously joyful individual who is tending flocks, “sheep/ and swine both. I love the little roads though:/ cemented, dirt, it doesn’t matter… No matter/ if even I am shut out. I love to turn/ and look upon the placid valley road.”

Similar to the aim of The Fugitives, a critical collective that emerged in the 1920s consisting of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and others, Getty’s primary goal appears to be to inscribe an opposition to the obvious but still sad fact that, as the jacket blurb notes, “employment is anything but a democratic process.” Thus, Getty’s deployment of traditional forms, prophetic rhetoric and classical allusions would appear to go hand in hand with his resistance to the desecrations of modernity, his desire to return to, or at least to retain the illusion of, a more gracious era, akin to the “wisp [that] remain[s] in light/ when water churns above [his] prow” in the book’s epilogue.

A smattering of poems in the collection powerfully rise to these exalted aims. Throughout “Comment on Blake’s Garden,” Getty counterposes the period and slant rhymes in his second and fourth lines with mostly perfect rhymes in the first and third lines to create an effective tension between the speaker’s physical chaining and mental sense of being free: “At Appleby no apples. hang./ you children playing here/ steel binds the limbs of men/ and rule. The clouds draw near.” This last stanza, with its verbal ambiguity in the word “hang,” which visually and literally becomes suspended without a clear referent, and the final dactylic hexameter lines that march to their ominous close, fuses Blake’s nightmares of Urizenic domination with contemporary fears of corporate control. Such a style is almost equally well employed in the poem “Hamilton,” a piece that also echoes Thomas’s “In my craft and sullen art,” each of the four stanzas beginning with “I step through each sullen street,” and evolving into images of eerily quiet factories, men who “slap their spouses” and a pavement that “jars the spine” with its irrevocable hardness.

“Poetics Essay” is an evocative piece too, though it sags in the middle with the dull cant of industrial panic: “The dollar’s rising too fast… the dollar’s too low.” Its depiction of the “grey men” who “run in circles” trying to increase production whirls in the mind like a painting of Adam Smith’s dreams as rendered by Hieronymous Bosch, while its repetition of the word “calm” at the beginning and the end of this piece – “Be calm, you said”; “You told me, be calm. I will not be calm” – shapes a sonorous portrait of one man’s autonomous struggles against the masses’ flailing for more more more. Digging even deeper into assembly-line horrors, “Reply to a Caseworker” shifts from steel mills to the slaughterhouse, and here, when Getty is drawing from personal incidents of endurance, he is at his most potent as a poet, the quintains taut, consonance bold in words like stuck/rankle/killing, as well as in the half rhymes at line ends like the first stanza’s smell/walls/while/sprawl. Assonantal slashes of pairings such as brutal/pulled and stinking/pink also contribute to the felt violence of the subject matter, both the hog slaughtering and the human numbness to animal suffering.

However, with the introduction of the “(Croatian I think)” woman in the last two stanzas, Getty sidesteps his own vital experience of this dirty job, substituting the woman’s rather vague reaction to it. A reaction which, detached from the previous scene, the speaker is incapable of imaginatively inhabiting and thus connecting his readers to. In fact, apart from the intriguing opening to the poem “Boundary,” which entices the ear with its Aristotelian leap from presence to absence, “O Jennifer, there is no Jennifer,” every time Getty inserts a female character – usually a classical archetype or stereotype – into one of his pieces, the poem deflates into cliché and sentimentality. Even worse, into that gracious, oozing brand of poetic misogyny common to a certain class of literary charmers, such as James Dickey or Patrick Lane.

Getty’s chorus girls include the statue of the “green woman,” the crone who “peels a boy’s skin,” a high school hooker whose body is “open/ to all who come,” “O Adrienne” from the awful “Awed Gesture” (a piece that chimes “jouissance” and “mischance,” together with the clumsy onomatopoeia of “nicker-neigh”), the virgin mother, a paean to Melissa Etheridge whose skin is grotesquely “flushed as wine,” and various anonymous females with “eiderdown” or “depending” breasts, lovely necks and black-lined eyes who are frequently depicted as false, serpentine, or potential Medusas.

I realize Getty, throughout Repose, is working not only with echoes of classical form and allusion, but also old-fashioned gender constructs and an overall antique aura, but it remains unclear just what he is trying to “re-pose” by parading out these crude, and ultimately insulting, figures. The recurrence of such similarly dead tropes is part of the reason why Tom Henihan, in his review of Getty’s first book, Reconciliation, wrote that Getty’s preoccupations are “passé” and the poems are not “divined but willed into existence.” Getty’s “over-willing” of his “thesis” in Repose detracts from the rich material grounding these poems, the lush imagery as in “the orange streams from the sun [lying] like ivy over clouds” from “Pastoral” or from “Song Against the Earth,” “the tulip is no part of you, fighting under snow,” as well as the compellingly apocalyptic and prophetic aura that hovers around Getty’s “rage against the machine.”

While Asa Boxer’s first book, The Mechanical Bird, exhibits, especially in the fourth and sixth parts, imagery akin to Getty’s – the wheel, the tool, the gear – Getty’s poems attend more often to installing them in the macrocosm of history, both through his allusive apparatus and his decorously shaped ire. Boxer’s “thing” pieces are closer-cropped, zoomed in à la PK Page or Naomi Shihab Nye, on the gear-train, the apron or even on the lie, which becomes, in his fifth section, a near-tactile object to be classified, itemized and thereby deconstructed. The tools in his sequence “The Workshop,” which won the CBC Literary Award in 2004, are “annointed king(s),” purifiers, miracle-makers, deflectors of injury, crypts, lizards, silverfish, a “zodiac of power,” woodpeckers and other naturalized or mythical metaphors. Boxer isn’t afraid of grand poetic leaps. Though the mechanical clock in “The Mechanico-Corpuscular Age” is said to coldly divide “the globe” and coordinate “war,” most of the tools humans use in Boxer’s book are treated tenderly, returned to their old-fashioned origins, placed on a nostalgic pedestal. Even the Gear-Train whose mechanisms are described as functioning through the number of “kisses” the “pallet” smacks upon the “scape-wheel.” Perhaps because Boxer sticks to the non-human for the most part – only his second, politically overt section, weakly reeling in a disturbingly symbolic Hitler and a somewhat more palatable but still sentimentalized portrait of Ahab who should be a movie star but is instead “fixed above a dirty sink” – does he steer clear of the contrivances of character that mar Getty’s collection, especially in relation to his female “types.”

Boxer is strongest when creating dark hymns to species such as the polar bear. In possibly the most powerful poem in the book, the “animal of ice” emerging in its melancholic wholeness through the five quatrains’ caress of the bear’s muscles, jaw, organs, dreams and fur, its metaphors carefully paced, thus enabling Boxer to avoid some of the heavy-footed anaphora of other pieces like “The Travellers”: “He trusts/he trusts/he knows/he must/he must.” Getty’s allusiveness is mainly on the surface, at times more than a little awkwardly inserted, as in “Valentine’s”: “You remind me of the father in Kafka’s Judgment.” Boxer’s references are generally submerged in his Biblically-resonant tone and even metre, apart from poems like “The Birchbark Canoe” that fall into the sing-song patter of nursery rhymes with its litany of invited cultural voyageurs: “Louis Cyr will manage our impossible portage and Kravitz will buy us the land.”

Though Aparna Sanyal suggests that Boxer’s “great artistry might be better exercised in remoter regions,” I think that it is in the close and known that Boxer shines, his rhythms tightening, his images honing themselves on the whetstone of smallness and humility, from the “muzzy lobster” gawped at by the “smutchy children,” to the toolboxes and their “clatter of metal/ clunk of clamps.” Language often accomplishes more with less; the aural dearth that regularly dogs Getty’s Repose as it slackens and meanders into pompous generalities is less an issue in Boxer’s Mechanical Bird due to his attention to the world’s tangible “calabash and pith.”

“Without the reflection of characters scarred by traumatic events, such as war, depression, natural disasters and genocide, to name a few, Canadian literature would lose its essence, not to mention its most celebrated authors.”

That is one of the more harsh and sweeping (not to mention deadly funny and sadly accurate) condemnations of the current state of Canadian fiction I have come across in a while. It is not a Canadian invention, nor do we have any particular monopoly over it, but it does often seem that the Sensitive Person Remembers Bad Things novel is one of our literature’s specialties. As a literary culture, we are the Good Grandchildren, the ones who come to visit, bring treats, and sit patiently through stories of past hardships.

Unfortunately, the assertion quoted above was meant as a compliment. It was written by National Post journalist Katherine Laidlaw in response to Post columnist Barbara Kay, who had complained that the “gushy” profile of Lisa Moore that Laidlaw had written for the Post “smothered – rather than aroused – my interest in reading [Moore’s novel February],” and went on to posit that the book was likely yet another weepy, narcicissistic snorefest.

Kay was pretty funny, harsh, and sweeping herself, writing that the “Giller-endorsed” books she had previously subjected herself to were now “jumbled together in memory” as “feminized paeans to a sepulchral past, mired in poetically lyrical, but navel-gazing narrative stasis.” (That “feminized” is a bit of a giveaway that Kay had more on her agenda than mere literary engagement, and indeed Kay’s hobbyhorse rocks furiously into action with her complaint that such novels depict “men immobilized in situations of physical, psychological or economic impotence… rather than demonstrating manly courage in risk-taking or heroic mode.” It makes you wonder if Kay sees MacGyver novelizations as the apex of literary achievement.)

As for the novel that started this minor hubbub, it is hard to find a better word than “reflection” for the dominant theme in February.

Of course, some characters have more reason to be reflective than others. At the centre of the book is Helen O’Mara, a widow and grandmother in her late fifties in present-day Newfoundland (there are numerous slightly awkward references to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign to help situate us in time). The traumatic event that scarred Helen is the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig in 1982, roughly a quarter-century before most of the events of the novel. The rig sank in a violent storm on Valentine’s Day, a sickly symbolic date, given that Helen’s husband Cal went down with it. Helen has never fully processed the loss of Cal, feeling it put her “outside” her own life: “By outside Helen meant that there was a transparent wall, a partition between her and the world. She could be yelling her head off – Stop with the goddamn ball – but nobody heard her.”

On top of her grief, she feels guilt that she is still around, still living despite the fact that the husband she loved is gone: “She betrays him in this way, every single night of her life, and it’s exhausting. She denies him, she forgets him. Every time she says no to him in a dream she forgets him a little more.”

The innaccuracy of this notion – that she is forgetting Cal bit by bit – is manifest on almost every page of February. Indeed, on the same page as the above quote, there is this: “She remembers the time he poured boiling water on his foot….”; “She will never forget his face. She won’t forget the green cotton scarf he had.”; “To remember his voice she has to think of him speaking to her on the phone.”; “Helen thinks of Cal on the phone and she can hear his voice perfectly. Or she can remember his voice if she thinks of him singing.”; etc. Helen won’t forget the night of the disaster, either, or the immediate aftermath. She is convinced Cal’s ghost passed through the house that night to say goodbye, and is obsessed with knowing exactly how he spent his last hours, trying to recreate them in her imagination.

If the basic premise of the book – aging widow grieves for long-lost husband – weren’t enough, Moore’s prose style makes it sufficiently clear that this is a novel of remembering, not forgetting. As she did in her two short story collections and her first novel, the Giller-nominated Alligator, Moore employs a style that rarely rests, rarely settles into one smooth, chronological track. It swirls around, moving backward and forward, occasionally from sentence to sentence. Once in a while, this shifting even occurs within a single sentence. (From the novel’s first page: “The [skate] sharpener vibrates the counter beneath her fingers; John had phoned last night from the Singapore airport.”) It is a style reared on minimalism, or perhaps essentialism, one that is more interested in isolated moments than in fleshed-out scenes. It zooms in on one signifcant line of dialogue or single visual image, and then zooms back out again. Such a method can be very effective in depicting the way someone like Helen is perpetually submerged in her own past. All of her memories and experiences are concurrent, and she struggles to stay in the now. In ways like this, Moore is very good at suggesting fictional lives that exist beyond the bounds of the narrative, rather than brought into spontaneous existence at the moment of their introduction.

The problem with the book is that there is so much of this non-chronological swirling around and remembering. It would be priggish to demand that Moore stop monkeying around modernistically and employ what James Joyce derisively referred to as “wideawake language of cut and dry grammar and go-ahead plot.” At the same time, must every single character be so drowned in memory? Must every scene be so thoroughly haunted by the past? Must every paragraph fidget in its seat like a little kid? In some cases, the sudden cutaways from the present come off as nothing short of bizzare. For example: Helen’s globetrotting son John (the novel’s other main character) receives a phone call while in Tasmania telling him that the woman with whom he had a brief fling in Iceland is pregnant with his baby. He tells this to a single mom he happens to meet at a hostel he’s staying at, and she comes back with this: “I’ve been to Iceland, the woman said. I had my throat slit in Iceland. John looked and saw that she had a thick white scar across her neck.” With the very next line, the scene cuts away to John remembering, at length, a dream he had the night before. It later cuts back to the woman with the slit throat, then back to John’s dream, back to the woman, and so on. In the context this feels almost insensitive, as if Moore couldn’t quite bring herself to allow another character’s memories to take precedence, even for a single scene, over those of the two people at the centre of the book. The woman seems to be trying to speak over John’s thoughts, to unintentionally comic effect.

These party-crashing flashbacks also come dangerously close to bringing about Barbara Kay’s dreaded “narrative stasis.” Moore seems to want to tamp down any forward momentum – all narrative streams are dammed and re-directed the moment they begin to flow.

This wouldn’t be such a problem were the material rich enough to sustain this kind of structure. But that is the fatal flaw of the book: beneath all of the tricky narrative back-and-forthing, and despite its many local riches (and there is a lot to enjoy in the book on a page-to-page level, quick characterizations that are spiky and funny, domestic scenes that brim with life), February is a deeply sentimental, even corny novel at its heart. You should never judge a novel by its bare plot, but Moore can’t quite conceal the fact that her novel is about a widow who learns to accept her husband’s death – and even finds new love! – just as her restless son settles into the role of proud father and new life is brought into the world. Making it worse, it’s abundantly clear from very early on in the novel that this is where we are headed, making a lot of what follows feel like a kind of delaying tactic. Most of the book’s third quarter is water-treading, with endless recapping and stretching of themes that have already been well worked over. That the character of the contractor is never fleshed out, and only fully enters the book at the very end – just in time to watch an unbearably symbolic New Year’s Eve fireworks display with Helen before later making love to her – only helps flag him as a mere plot device. The prose may reach for Virginia Woolf, but the emotional and narrative core is pure Harlequin.

Katherine Laidlaw argued that doing away with endlessly reflective characters would be to do away with the “essence” of Canadian literature. From the evidence of February, we could stand to let a little of that essence go down with the ship – er, rig.

The Golden Mean is that rarest of beasts – a wonderfully controlled first novel that isn’t the usual autobiographical bildungsroman. In its subject matter (Aristotle and his most famous pupil, the young Alexander the Great) and its unashamed grappling with ideas, it’s also more European than North American. As Michael Enright remarked on CBC Radio, it’s an unusual novel for a Canadian to write, which is precisely what makes it such a startling and exhilarating read. How refreshing to find fiction – and Canadian fiction, at that! – unafraid to make demands on its readers’ intelligence, unafraid to tackle a deeply unfashionable subject, unafraid to eschew postmodernism’s stale devices of fracture and discontinuity. How refreshing to find a woman writer who assumes, as she should, that access to the world is her right, and who boldly proceeds to slip into the skin of a third-century BCE Greek intellectual – and not just any intellectual, but the ancient world’s most famous philosopher. Combine all that with the dense economy of the prose, the utterly contemporary voice of its protagonist, and the result is rich, fresh, strange, and deeply original.

On the face of it, a chapter from Aristotle’s life doesn’t seem the likeliest subject for a novel, and I wondered how Lyon was going to inject some narrative momentum. Yet from the first sentence she sweeps us into his world with a vigour and authority that leaves readers gasping to keep up. She creates an Aristotle for our time even as she estranges us, plunging us into a world of animal sacrifices, slave markets, and multiple gods. Her setting, pre-Christian Macedonia, is a warrior culture, brutal and male, yet she also evokes its vitality, its sensuality, the earthiness of lives – both male and female – unshielded by safety helmets, antibiotics, and computer screens.

Lyon has written historical fiction before – two of the novellas in her collection The Best Thing for You are set in 1940s Vancouver and in Europe and Canada during World War I – but nothing could have prepared us for this novel. The protagonist of that collection’s title story is a woman who plots her husband’s murder, but The Golden Mean offers nothing so immediately dramatic. The bigger challenge Lyon sets herself here is to bring Aristotle to life in a way that a modern audience, largely ignorant of his ideas, can respond to. That she succeeds in rendering him as a vibrant, living human being, a man of the world as well as ideas, is a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy. Lyon’s Aristotle is a thinker, yes, but one who finds himself surrounded by men who value battles and strategy, not abstract discussion. In this arena, trying to instill the skills of critical thinking in his brilliant but stubborn young charge, he’s a fish out of water. It’s the reader who becomes Aristotle’s real pupil, who is given the privilege granted only by fiction – that of entering another’s being.

As the book opens, Aristotle is travelling to his homeland of Macedonia after a twenty-five-year absence. “The rain falls in black cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey.” This sentence, the first, functions as a microcosm of the entire novel. The “black cords” that “lash” the little entourage (and Aristotle himself) foreshadow the dark choice he must soon make. When his boyhood friend, King Philip of Macedon, asks him to stay on to tutor his young son Alexander, Aristotle is horrified. He has loftier ambitions: to return to Athens, to the Academy where he was once Plato’s student and which he hopes one day to lead. Compared to the Athenians, the Macedonians are barbarians. Yet how can he refuse Philip?

The same image prefigures Aristotle’s depressive episodes – “his old usual,” he calls it, describing it as “sucking colour from the sky and warmth from the world.” Whether the actual Aristotle suffered from clinical depression, history doesn’t tell us, but Lyon’s intuitive attribution of this disorder to her highly gifted protagonist feels right. As for her wonderful phrase about Aristotle’s notetaking, it can be interpreted two ways: metaphorically – Aristotle the rationalist, making mental notes in the midst of fucking – and literally – Aristotle the empiricist, writing detailed descriptions of the world around him. Already he is a modern, grounding his rationalism in that most modern of enterprises, the scientific method. Poor Pythias, whom he will often treat in the same clinical way, and who (in the same sentence but twenty-four hours later) “weeps silent tears of exhaustion”!

The brilliantly evoked relationship at the heart of the novel is a long way from the Hollywood paradigm – the charismatic and indefatigable instructor who succeeds in catalyzing his pupils against overwhelming odds. Alexander is, sometimes, deeply engaged by Aristotle’s demonstrations of science, drawn in almost against his will by his teacher’s Socratic method. But he’s also of royal birth, destined to rule a kingdom; though he admires Aristotle, he doesn’t (perhaps cannot) flatter him through imitation. To Lyon’s credit she doesn’t pander to contemporary taste by hinting at homosexual attraction, though she makes it clear that homosexual relationships are an accepted norm. (Alexander’s relationship with his lifelong companion Hephaestion is one such.)

The Golden Mean, in fact, shows us just how narrow our dramatic expectations have become. Though sex and intrigue and violence are present, the focus is on two men who exemplify two great life choices: contemplation versus action. Aristotle comes down squarely on the side of apollonian reason against unreason, thinking against unthinking instinct. Early in the book his nephew and apprentice, Callisthenes, recounts an incident from a night out when he’s witnessed the killing of one man by another over a drink. “What kind of a people is that?” he asks his uncle, who says, “You tell me.” “Animals,” Callisthenes answers. “And what separates man from the animals?” asks Aristotle, ever the teacher. “Reason,” Callisthenes dutifully replies. “Work. The life of the mind.” To which Aristotle’s ironic answer – “Out again tonight?” – underlines Callisthenes’ lack of real commitment, in Aristotle’s terms, to being human.

Moments like this – moments that demand full reader engagement to comprehend – occur throughout the novel. We’re forced to pause, to re-read, to think more deeply. Lean, taut, stripped down, The Golden Mean is dense with meaning while also managing to be crisp, direct, and contemporary. Lyon has a poet’s eye without allowing her prose to become poetically languorous. She’s especially good at verbs: “The Athenians sharked up and down the coast,” for example. But she also understands that metaphors in abundance do not make a novel literary – that instead they’re best used sparingly, like salt (a lesson apparently lost on a number of highly acclaimed Canadian writers).

She also rips up the conventions of the historical novel. Instead of the pseudo-realistic “at your service, my liege” school of dialogue, the voices here roar along like a freight train. These are men who use words like “fuck” and “balls” and “bitch,” whose language has the crude vitality it must have had then. Lyon succeeds in making ideas and argument exhilarating, sexy even. She also risks deliberate anachronisms, although occasionally she pushes too hard. “It’s not that he has no boundaries,” Aristotle tells Pythias at one point, speaking of Alexander – using an analyst’s terminology some twenty-odd centuries before Freud! Late in the novel, when Alexander suggests assassinating the new director of the Academy (chosen over Aristotle), Philip’s regent in his absence, a general named Antipater, tells him no. “You are not going alone to Athens to snuff some hundred-year-old egghead with a protractor for a dick. You’re a prince of Macedon. That particular freak show is not for you.” All of this worked for me, except for “freak show.” A matter of individual reader taste, perhaps, but after “snuff” and “egghead” and “dick,” it seemed forced and over the top.

Lyon uses flashback rarely, but late in the book we meet Aristotle as a young man of eighteen when he first entered the Academy. We’re aware of the parallelism here between Aristotle and Alexander, the poignancy of this glimpse of Plato’s potential (but forever thwarted) heir. He’s also a typical adolescent, avid for sexual experience; the chapter ends with “The girl had licked and bitten, licked and bitten, until I didn’t know myself.” It’s a vigour echoed throughout the book, both in Aristotle’s relationship with Pythias, given to him as a gift when she was fifteen – “gods forgive me but I went at her like a stag in rut” – and in his later attraction to Herpyllis, Pythias’s maidservant, whom he marries after his wife’s death.

Lyon’s wonderfully complex Aristotle spends little time simply writing or thinking, apart from those long bouts of depression. He is in the world, even if not always fully of it, as shown by the emotional detachment, almost cruelty, that accompanies his elevation of reason as a virtue above all others. When Pythias is dying, she tells her husband of recurring dreams, sent by the gods, that foreshadow her death. Aristotle, who has never had such dreams – “My mind is too busy in waking,” he tells us, arrogantly, “to suck for fuel during sleep” – treats this as yet another teaching opportunity. He uses scientific explanations rather than affection to comfort her – explanations that, amusingly to us now, are not “scientific” at all. “The body’s sense-organ, the heart, needs natural intermissions, called sleep;… the goal is to give rest to the senses,” he tells her. Pythias, calmed, repeats an earlier lesson about the heavens and “all the spheres, and the outermost sphere that was black but all full of pin-holes, so that the great fire behind shone through as stars.” How foolish, we think condescendingly. And then, as I’m sure Lyon intends, we catch ourselves. What misguided beliefs do we hold today that, centuries hence, will be scoffed at by a more “enlightened” world?

Alexander, too, is a vivid portrait: an impetuous, sulky adolescent, used to getting his own way, yet with a quick and resourceful mind. Along with ethics and rhetoric, astronomy and botany, he studies zoology with Aristotle, who dissects a chameleon for Alexander’s benefit, cutting it open with his surgeon father’s knives. “I detach the bloody nut of the lizard’s heart and hold it out to him. He takes it slowly, looks at me, and puts it in his mouth. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he says. ‘I was with my mother.’ ”

Once again Lyon demonstrates the depth of her characterization and her seamless fusing of image, gesture, and dialogue. How apt that Alexander, in a display of bravado, eats that symbol of courage! And does so while staring defiantly at his teacher, thus undermining his apology. How disturbing, too, that this gesture is linked with his mother, giving his relationship with her an erotic edge. In fact his parents are estranged and he’s been forbidden to see her, so he’s defied his father, too. The same oedipal relationship is played out between Aristotle and Alexander throughout the novel – Alexander wants Aristotle’s approval, yet is ultimately contemptuous of a life of inaction. “You must look for the mean between extremes, the point of balance,” Aristotle tells his student – the golden mean that gives the book its title. But Alexander doesn’t. He chooses an extreme – chooses, in fact, to become his father, as perhaps he must. “I want to fight,” he tells Aristotle, dismissing diplomacy as useless. “War is the greatest means to the greatest end, the glory of Macedon.”

Still, he learns those early lessons all too well. In a searing episode, when Aristotle (for scientific purposes) dissects an enemy corpse after a battlefield victory, Alexander arrives, clearly traumatized by the fighting, and uses those same skills to skin the man’s face. A horrified Philip says to Aristotle, “You teach him this shit. What kind of animal are you, anyway? Who does this to a body?” Another irony, since Philip himself is arguably an animal, a soldier operating not from reason but instinct. And what about Aristotle? Is he self-deluding, just an animal after all? Worst of all, is that what he’s really taught Alexander? It’s clear that the boy, for the second time in the novel, is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – “soldier’s heart,” Aristotle calls it. Is it possible to be civilized and a warrior, or does one have to choose? It’s a dilemma we still haven’t resolved.

In real life, Alexander led his father’s troops into battle at sixteen, became king at twenty, and was dead at thirty-two, having conquered Persia and Egypt and reached as far as India. He was also, by then, an alcoholic, prone to depression and fits of violent rage. As for Aristotle, he returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum, dying in exile on the island of Euboea a year after Alexander, at the age of sixty-one. The novel, however, ends with his departure from Macedonia soon after Philip’s death, with Alexander now king. “No more doctoring, politicking, teaching children; no more dabbling,” Aristotle tells himself. “Soon I’ll be alone in a quiet room where, for the rest of my life, I can float farther and farther out into the world; while my student, charging off the end of every map, falls deeper and deeper into the well of himself.”

Is Aristotle merely justifying his own choices here? Or is he expressing a paradox – that the real act of courage is the journey that leads to knowledge of the Other through engagement with self, while a life of outer engagement leads only to self-entrapment? Perhaps he’s doing both. In any event it’s an apt description of the novelist’s art, that image of floating farther out into the world. But Lyon has already announced her intention, and her novelist’s credo, in the quotation from Plutarch she chooses for the novel’s epigraph. “The most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.

Sharon McCartney writes about relationships, almost always in terms of loss, and her first book’s epigraph from Frost (“Here are your waters and your watering place/ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion”) is an articulation of her method. The book begins by tracing a genealogy of knowing, with the poet describing herself as a fetus, a something that is “nothing yet.” This is the first poem, and the McCartney persona has yet to be established, but she caps it with what will become a signature move, using the final lines to give the poem a lift, a terse what-for, with her Mother’s reflection on the local conditions: “It’s unnatural, she thinks, all this growth/ and no rain.” It’s impossible not to think that McCartney the poet is having her mother think of her as being unnatural. This is the first relationship in the book: what begins as “nothing” becomes a strange pairing.

The next poem, “My Mother’s Face,” introduces loss as McCartney’s major subject. Her sick sister’s brain cancer is introduced as a triangulating influence on her mother’s attention. McCartney is “too young to be told/ my sister will die” but she is aware enough to “know something’s wrong when I smell it,/ the breath of ash/ on the oven’s tongue.” And so the dominant dynamics of McCartney’s family life are established: the father is peripheral and the mother, rendered as a creature of domesticity, in terms of a vacuum cleaner and socks, will forever be grieving a child – a circumstance referred to as a “grim marriage.” McCartney’s family poetry is totemic: it offers up the mother and the father as sad, grievous creatures. The father is distant, unreliable; the mother is locked into a kind of perpetual terror. McCartney gets to the heart of knowing her mother and herself when she writes in “Nickels in a Cup” that “I was only 20 but I believed/ I was old enough to walk away…/ thoughtless, gleeful as a mother/ who’s never lost a daughter,/ who doesn’t know how a woman can hate a body and hurt/ so much she won’t say it…” Here McCartney is simultaneously expressing the cheerless selfishness of her younger self while also acknowledging that her mother was deeply wounded by the death of her daughter and that there was integrity to the mother’s bearing of that pain. McCartney may have been twenty then, but the crafter of this poem knows better.

Which brings me to the question of confessional ethics. A certain Mommy Dearest anti-ethic often lurks behind a book of this sort, painting others as culpable and the poet as blameless victim. McCartney is far too honest, and complicated, for that. She writes in “Niagara, 1968” that she
hate[s] the scene we’ve become—

silver rails sparkling

with spray, my mother

on her knees—and the people

who stare, women in bright

slacks, mortified children,

together in a way we will

never be.

McCartney confesses to what would be typical in that situation, a resentment of her lot, the artful use of the word “mortified” being a sly reference to the death in all of us, the death of the “scene” being transferred to all the other children. It cannot be forgotten – McCartney will not let us forget, because it is central to knowing her as a poet – that she was a typical child faced with unfairness. There are other moments of vulnerability, as when McCartney’s poetic self whispers “fuck you” to her dying sister or when McCartney writes in “I’m Outside on the Bricks” with regards to that flailing, incontinent sister that “I would/ feel sorry for someone if this/ were unusual.” McCartney is no saint and gets at a truth of human nature: a willingness to respond to minor impositions, while desiring to avoid greater ones that require a duty, a duty which would distort her life.

The ur-moment in the collection comes when McCartney’s mother in “Yellow Sun Dress” does home physiotherapy on her dying daughter’s limbs and looks at the quailing healthy daughter and asks her “What, after all,/ do I want?” This is the essential utterance of McCartney’s poetry: McCartney with her failings as daughter, unable or unwilling to accommodate the bully death, the perfect “after all” a commonplace elevated to the most significant piece of conversation in the book. After what? After being healthy, after being able to live, but also after coming through with a dying sister, after knowing things that no child should ever come to know so soon. After wanting rebellion, and choosing rebellion against her own unique circumstances. “After all” are two words that carry much freight, effortlessly conveyed.

In what will come to be more fully developed in Against, “Halfway Up The Coast, I Phone My Mother” marks McCartney’s first use of sex in her poetry and it is interesting to note how it is linked with pain. McCartney writes that she is “testing the curve of muscle,/ testicles dark and tender,/ penis rising as inevitably as pain.” Thus even sex is knowing, Janus-faced, and it says something psychologically about this mature poet whose first rendering of sex in verse is not in terms of joy, but rather hurt. She ends the poem with “Already, I am closer,” meaning that she is not only closer to her lover with this knowledge but also closer to truth.

But then, ah, to love. The dedicatee of Under the Abdominal Wall was her husband Mark Jarman. In “Jarman Motors” she addresses him poetically, enamoured and headlong, writing “Everyone I meet has your name” in the first-line admission that is typical of the lovestruck, seeing the lover in the fated everything and the fated everyone. She then ominously forecasts later in the poem “It’s like dreaming about someone/ who’s dead.” Which means that McCartney in her first love poem links the totality of love with the cosmos of impermanence. This is a link that is fundamental for understanding what matters for her as a poet. And it will not be the last such linkage: her later, more powerful collection Against is a post-mortem of this same relationship. It is eerie that the poet-self’s pessimism was a kind of wish-fulfillment, that love first ventured in this early poem as obsessive became finite and somewhat elapsed in what must have been the poetic equivalent of calling her shot. Here is that ruthlessness again, that path to self-knowledge. It’s the kind of confessional poem that might cause trouble in real life, that might trouble the husband and kids. McCartney is blunt and direct about her own longing and desire (“We fucked like collaborators”) that, in turn, cannot help but seem doomed. It would be almost transgressive if the central character in the poem weren’t herself complicit, if there weren’t blame allocated to both parties. “Lower Muscatine” is a brutal poem, a poem that renders two people as separate as they can be. Poems like these always have consequences. Even the kids are held hostage: a new mother in a poem of the same name with details of childbirth can’t know her child without also knowing that she is now gravid and “craving… the person/ she was before she became/ someone she can’t understand/ without bleeding.” The title poem of Under The Abdominal Wall is about the birth of her son, a surgical procedure, and one might expect that McCartney is just being tough, describing the suture and the invasion first in order to write something in the second half about the beautiful bond with her son. McCartney indeed does write of breastfeeding, but in an enigmatic and rugged way that refuses to offer a pat, warm-n-fuzzy ending. The mother and son instead are “climbing each other,/ like pines treading the timberline, growing/ into gravel and edges.” This is complicated, McCartney is saying, and it will grow more complicated. And yet the love articulated here is fiercer for all that, and demonstrated over several more poems that occupy the central portion of the book and bring us to the family circle: McCartney understands her mother better through her own near-death experience in giving birth.

For most, the rubric of low-risk obstetrics applies: the majority of mothers could give birth on their own without intervention. But for McCartney, her past informs her present; for her, family will never be easy. It is another instance of destiny. McCartney clearly needed to make sense of her experience: ten poems, none of them repetitive, deal with the same event of giving birth, the final poem of the series still blood-soaked but because of the grimness able to give voice to what endures in the final few lines: “it was like coming home,/ like crossing the sill,/ dazed, bleeding,/ longing for the joy/ of arrival.”

Like a good novelist, McCartney plots her collection. We begin with motherhood and death, we move to motherhood tinged with the possibility of death, and then we move to the death of McCartney’s own mother in “Dying, My Mother.” In a delirium the mother thinks she has just given birth in what, if true as anecdote, must have been a kind of hell for the poet. And we must remember the mother who earlier in the book looked at the child and asked “What, after all, do I want,” for the tables are turned in this poem and “Now, she stares/ at me, convinced that I, at least, will tell her/ how she lost that dark/ bundle that purpled/ her legs.” The “after all” finds its apotheosis in this “at least”; McCartney isn’t just caring for her mother, she is once again in the position of having to articulate the history of her own pain and leverage it against the love she has for this person.

Karenin Sings the Blues

If I have mostly dwelt on theme and content thus far, it is because McCartney was still becoming a poet in her first collection: she was turning to first principles, reifying what mattered to her, and getting those things straight was the focus. Under The Abdominal Wall could be thought of as a thematically rich meditation on what it means to lose as a woman, remarkable for its wisdom if not notable for its means. It is in Karenin Sings the Blues that McCartney hits her stride poetically with a longer line and majestic enjambment, trading her earlier stark, harsh terseness for more fluent dexterity, more playful word combinations, a greater flair and showmanship. The words are assembled in iterative waves of phrases. McCartney gives herself more time and room to say a thing, allowing herself the credentials of what Hopkins has called the “in-earnestness of speech,” a style of careening image, still shocking in its primacy but more certain of itself, as in “Frou-Frou, After Vronsky’s ‘Awkward Movement’ at the Last Obstacle of the Steeplechase Breaks Her Back”:

One minute, I’m devouring the course,

flinging fine clods of crescent-shaped

turf up the snouts of the clods who can’t

touch me. The next, his ass down hard

on my spine and I’m shattered, a hammer

to my skull, intact but scattered, shards,

crystals in the shape of a horse.

Stand back and pay attention! the poet is saying. Note the assonance of the first line’s “devouring” and “course,” the heavy, Hughesian consonants of the remainder, the internal rhyme of “shattered” and “scattered,” the end rhyme of “hard” and “shards,” and sundry slant rhymes and alliterations. McCartney pokes her head up out of her relationships and considers the pleasure-seeking audience without sacrificing her trademark kernelized wisdom (bourbon can be as “dark as dismay”) but this wisdom is embedded and is not the sole point of the poetry. Every poem is an expert ventriloquism that lets the poet try on new, fancy clothes.

Consider “Anna’s Morphine,” a poem about an inanimate object (which will become her dominant method in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder):

I am the fat tongue unlocking her lips,

booted knee scything her snug thighs,

gloved finger that orbits her pursed nipple,

breath on her nape, engine, engendering—

We’re in the realm of the sexual straightaway: the unlocking of lips, the snug thighs, etc. But the “engine” of the poem is the language: the long vowel sounds, the chiming of “lips” with “orbits” and “nipple.” This is a technique of concision, of poetic certainty: the poet has become fascinated with pulse, with kinesis.
But to content for a moment. Though over half of this book is an apocryphal treatment of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the first poem establishes McCartney’s usual pessimistic formula: “If there is a rule of the cosmos,/ it is disappointment, disillusion.” In another poem the Countess Vronsky is made to say “childbirth is the wound that never heals” and in another Kitty calls marriage a “footpath that narrows and wanders” but ultimately “devolves.” McCartney lets the mask slip a little when one of her characters states, “We are more than our bodies. We must be./ If not, what is the purpose of pain?” This is not a moral rhetorical question, a wish that there be some kind of purpose to our instruction; it is, quite simply, a scream. And it’s these feelings that McCartney never loses sight of. In “Seryozha, Anna Karenina’s Son, Many Years Later” McCartney crafts an elegant elegy that could only, I think, have been written by an actual mother. Not a mother who hopes that she has made a mark on her child, that she will be remembered after her death, but a mother who grieves that her child will always be bereft, that the loss of the mother will always be paramount and defining for the child. Seryozha’s is a palpable ache initially beaten into shape by physical detail:

I thought I spotted her in every shuttered

carriage, behind every purple veil, each

solitary figure strolling the colonnades,

her soft round arms in buttoned sleeves…

McCartney is honouring the source text here: by mentioning early Anna’s arms, she invokes the “bare exquisite aristocratic elbow” of Pushkin’s eldest daughter said to have inspired the character in Tolstoy’s mind. The child then recalls how he was told of his mother’s death, and through the grim tutelage of his father he learns

… it was easier

not to look for her….

I called this growing up,

but the truth is I was diminishing.

This is the son who has his mother permanently imprinted, doomed in looking for her (by his disapproving father, and by caretaking a ghost) and doomed in trying to live without her. He is existentially betwixt, and frames his loss in personal terms: his allegiance is somehow not enough of an allegiance. The poem concludes with another of McCartney’s screams, this time a twisting of Wordsworth coming in Seryozha’s self-conception: “The child is father to the fool.” This is not a self-denunciation, not an angry pronouncement; it is an admission of inadequacy, a resignation to doom. It would be far easier for Seryozha to rebel; but as is typical with McCartney, he is inextricably bound. This is the poem of one who has looked on a child and wondered what will be.

The Anna Karenina poems are the best poems of this book. After, Karenin McCartney returns to the fraught realm of motherhood, seemingly never able to know a thing well enough. In “What My Mother Considers Essential” McCartney excoriates herself first (“I move to Seattle, get drunk,/ get pregnant, get an abortion…) and then articulates her mother’s misunderstanding (“When I marry a man she once feared/ and hated, a man she once insisted/ would rape and rob”), but concludes the poem on the plane of domesticity, the only real way of approximating her mother, who doesn’t attend the wedding (this is the classic McCartney family messaging system) but who “sends me a set of stainless steel pots/ and a Teflon baking kit,/ wants to be sure I’m prepared.” What one appreciates in McCartney is not just the eschewal of the holier-than-thou in her self-exposure, but her lack of bitterness in what must have been a cataclysm in her life. These emphatically are not arguments, but rather circular journeys (the poem begins with a little girl practising domesticity, and ends with a woman thrust into it) that orbit her. To return to style for a moment, the formal sophistication McCartney acquired in her Anna Karenina take-offs reverts a little to the shorter-lined, less breathless methodicalness of Under The Abdominal Wall.

The third section of the book, “Persuasion,” again returns to the most formative relationship in McCartney’s life, the one with her mother, but filtered through an Austen prism. There are classic pronouncements (“Did/ she really think happiness could be that easy[?]”) and references to marriage as “a conclusion as final, as boring, as death” that establish the McCartney abacus of human relationships, their recourse to pain. But there is also an admission in “My Mother’s Dresser” that her mother represents a kind of nostalgia, not that pain is welcome but that resolve is. What might have first found its expression in adolescent rebellion – a shouted NO! – has ultimately come round to understanding, as an adult daughter ponders the personal effects of her mother. It would have been much easier for this poet – and there would consequently have been far fewer poems – if she could have merely rejected her mother, but her mother’s acceptance of the worst of circumstances – divorce, dead child – kindles the poet’s wonder. In “Sorry,” the last poem of the collection, she writes “When my mother tried to tell me she was dying,/ tried to shuffle off the frail morphine blanket,/ hallucinations, opiate-induced out-of-the-body/ travels, to reach me, I failed to understand… ” This time it is the longstanding indemnification that finds its ultimate expression as regret in this poem, this exquisite technique of culpability.

The risk of the latter two sections of Karenin is the courting of repetition, the possible overdevelopment of the themes that made Under the Abdominal Wall riveting and formative; but McCartney developed so much as a poet in the intervening period that revisiting these subjects is more like a tentative celebration. The difference is one of apprehending poetic adolescence: the subjects of the first book were hers, but not yet her own, and raw emotional power came to be distilled over time into little devastations, into elegant verbal uppercuts. The family poems that showed promise have here become a deliverance.

The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“[W]hat human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive…”
—Joseph Brodsky

With her ability to channel characters from literature and jack them up in dizzying exposition, it probably seemed logical for McCartney to do the same with the beloved Little House books from her childhood. But Tolstoy is a much better literary trampoline than Wilder, and even the Karenin poems occupied only a section of a book. There is a creative exhaustion to The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a drawn-out, nth-degree sense that the poems started as ideas because they could be done. Though Love Song contains many good poems (“Mary’s Eyes” and “Blackbird in the Corn” particularly stand out), it is minor McCartney, her only dissatisfying outing, borne of a good idea that could not be sustained.

The Little House world is a stand-in for poems about an idyllic childhood that McCartney never had. The first poem is titled “Ma” and this character, rooted in domesticity, is smothered in self-denial. The second poem is about a dead child and a grieving mother. Though there is the same verbal momentum as Karenin McCartney proves that her earlier achievements were no fluke – there is no immediate personal drama. Opting for the dramatization of the personalities of inanimate objects further compounds the difficulty. Only so much can be written about actual characters in the Little House books, forcing McCartney to excavate the inanimate (thirty-two out of a collection of fifty-three poems are odes to objects, and only so much can be made of their collective lament of not being put to good use). It is hard to care for a procession of objects like “Pa’s Big Green Book,” “Uncle George’s Bugle,” or “Ma’s Green Delaine Dress.” In fact the latter poem is uncharacteristically restrained in its staidness. The mystery of the prior two collections, about how a mother can repudiate what makes her human and the effect this repudiation has on her daughter, gets downgraded into the language of the mother’s poverty – a mother who in Karenin would never say the words “love” or “cancer” even though those were the two most powerful forces in her life. It is the daughter, however, who turned out to be the poet, best at ameliorating her fundamental aloneness by relentlessly and painfully connecting her loves. McCartney attempts to infuse life into the poems, as opposed to her more successful and familiar strategy of letting the poems into the life. This backs her into abstraction, grasping at aliveness, as in “Ma’s Rocker,” a poem which finally gives up: “An emptiness carved into me, not/ vacancy, but capacity, designed to hold.” It is hard to think of the rocking chair as truly sentient if it is rendered so imprecisely and with such frantically faux-profound gesturing. Another example of bathos comes in “Churn” which concludes:

The problem is never how to remember,

but how to forget, to transform rawness,

pain, eternal confusion into something

more appetizing, resolve, reconciliation,

the realization that softens winter’s stark

brown loaf, unpalatable potatoes.

The problem is how to write at once abstractly and well. One can try to tether a concept (like remembrance or forgetfulness) with an actual physical entity (odd that this is a poem about an object) but to cram so many concepts into one stanza (nine by my count in six lines) is to overload and ultimately topple the performance into meaning just about anything the reader could want it to mean. Usually McCartney sanctifies the word “pain” in her poems; she almost never misuses it, except here.

But objectification is not the only problem with Love Song. When McCartney does deal with people, her usual strength, the results can be cringe-inducing. Take the title poem, which should bear more scrutiny than, say, a clearly humourous poem about “Pa’s Penis.” McCartney has always had sex as a chief concern in her writing. But the decision to make over Laura Ingalls Wilder as a lesbian in the title poem strikes me as a transgression of the source text. If a writer stays true to her influences, then those influences will see her clear; this poem just perverts the Little House legend unnecessarily. It begins:

Let us go then, Lena and I, on black ponies,

half-wild, bareback, like straddling locomotives,

surging across the prairie steppe, Cossacks,

Fourth of July stunt riders, skirts up,

worsted drawers damp, dappled with horse sweat.

So there is the echo of Eliot’s sexually frustrated Prufrock in the first line that later invokes the sexual symbol of horses and then browbeats us with suggestive imagery like “bareback” and “skirts up” and “drawers damp.” This first stanza sops. But we move from mere suggestion to the travesty of outright enactment:

… Lena comforts, strokes

my forehead same as Ma, asks do I know

what men do to women? Yes, of course.

But do I know how the man lifts the woman’s

muslin shift, like this? Yes Lena. How he

touches her, here, kisses her breasts, nipples,

how tender he is, his tongue? Yes Lena.

At about this moment I think of fidelity to the source material, of the monstrous injection of sex in what was originally a family-rated tale. “Pa’s Penis” is fair game as a poem because it is playful, and because Pa’s heterosexuality is not bent; but this poem is not just impudence, it’s not fair, nor is it earned. Laura Ingalls Wilder is not a central character in this collection despite the title; the poem projects lesbianism on her as the poet’s wet dream. It is more like a Little House girl-on-girl period-porno than a poem. The final affront is an attempt to capture orgasm in the poem’s closing lines:

… I will always remember

how you tasted of granite, of lightning

and thunder, a fiddle string humming.

There should be no such thing as a money shot in verse, unless one wants a Bad Sex award to be created for the poetry category. To insinuate lesbianism into the Little House saga at the last moment, in the last poem, fails as an “update” because so little work has been done to develop the possibility earlier in the book.

Against

McCartney is always coming full circle. Her first book was dedicated to her husband; her last book is about her husband. Against (full disclosure: a book I edited) is a feminine update on Meredith’s Modern Love. It is about what was foretold in Under The Abdominal Wall: the end of the affair, the post-mortem on doomed attachment. The first poem, “Decaf,” admits that something is “ungraspably awry,” that there is “pain” in the poet’s “skull.” The poem then moves on to outright doom: “I thought the end was coming, no way to stop it.” So far, so expected – but then McCartney turns the sense on its ear, speaking of “redemption,” of the “surgeon glancing up/ from the chart, saying no, we were wrong, it’s nothing after all.” This might have been enough distance to cover, McCartney could have ended here on the hopeful note, but instead she fuses both senses, and both are true in the closing line of the poem – when poets are at their most conscious: “the blade bites deeper, and realizing you are married to him.” This poem admits defeat, admits that defeat will always be felt in terms of pain, and this awareness informs the rest of the collection.

McCartney cares less about extrication from a disaster than preserving the memory of what was once a great love. For all her emotional morbidity, McCartney doesn’t favour pain over love. No, her great redemption is the blade behind that pain, that deeper bite. In a later poem she is abject: “Weakness, weakness, how impossible/ it is to will oneself into or out of love.” But even so overcome by emotion she can’t help but commemorate the feeling, again in the fully conscious and quailing last lines of “Remains of the Day”:

… Because, at the end,

nothing will remain but that, watching you

leave, almost unable to breathe, my body

a gutted mansion, galleries stripped, barren.

This is another scream, a scream of abandonment, a still shot of a loving woman utterly rent by failure. Not for nothing does this poet – for whom motherhood has been the chief subject – close the poem with what must have been the hardest epithet of all.

If anything, the longer line introduced in Karenin is often drawn out into a drawl in Against, it’s finessed and sussed and allowed to tumble. The style is meant to reflect a compendium of event and emotion, the two being inseparable. Consider “Against Skinny-Dipping”:

… then it dies, the good feeling,

the talk turning to getting naked, what a lark it will be, relentless,

revisiting wheres and whens, beaches, baths. I hate this. Can’t

undress for anyone, every disaster torched on my body in scars.

So fucked to be that. I see what’s ahead, a mixed-up weekend

of hurt, every mild sorrow tumbled at my feet like sour clothing,

looking away while three pale immortals mount the surf.

Because this is a collection of retrospect, where events are found to resonate in memory (the poem is here-and-now, but McCartney has already experienced the end of the affair), the lines themselves must possess a sense of time. McCartney is paradoxically rushing to express something that happened long ago. The poems are comma-rich crammings, with multiple collisions and pauses for breath. But Against also has variety. McCartney can be precise, as in “A Relationship,” short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

Though the old cat both fears and detests

the dog, she wants the warmth of the room.

The dog curled beside me, the rest of the house

unheated. She hooks a claw under the door,

then thins herself to slip through the crack.

Pauses on the rug beside the bed, staring

at us, alarmed. If the dog moves,

she jumps, imagines he means harm.

But he’s just preparing to leave.

Cats are “feminine,” and this one is even referred to as a “she.” The dog is a “he.” This is a poem of wariness, of alarm, embodied in the behaviour of the cat. But the dog isn’t just incidental to the cat’s distress, nor is the cat hysterical; it’s the fact that the dog will leave that is the actual harm. Obvious parallels to the human principals of Against aside, here we have stylistically a rather spare, unadorned description of a domestic scene. So McCartney can be in free-associative agony, but she can also be possessed of cold appraisal.

Like many breakups, hers was stuttering. In “After Little Italy” there’s not quite reconciliation, rather persistent need: “You’re/ a little bewildered; first, I want out, then, I want sex. Forget/ what I said.” Or in “Against Sanitation,” another carnal plea, the speaker wants her husband not to clean himself after a hockey game: “… don’t rinse it away, come home to me with your ignominious/ arm-pits, your skunky rancor, truculence, your love of violence and/ force, your putrid, decaying-from-the-inside leather-of-the-glove stench/ of your fingers as they enter me…” And in “Impending Death of the Cat,” a near-perfect sonnet, it appears the decision to end the marriage has not been made yet, but like the terminal illness of the cat, it looms. Despite the recourse to words like “food” and “shit” and “vomit” there’s still that bundle of longing and grace in perhaps the most devastating reversal of a couplet I’ve seen: “And yet, remark her purr, her carriage,/ how capably she embodies the state of our marriage.” It is this gift, this ability to cherish, that keeps McCartney ethically clean: this is not a First-Wives-Club enumeration of grievances (in one poem she concludes that there is “no blame to shed but my own”) but rather a reclamation effort, a deep-sea salvage. Whole poems can be devoted to the simple moments when people connect, when they know each other carnally and existentially, as in “Lady Ashley”:

What stays with me now is not his ardor,

his matador’s grip, but the laughter when

he paused, inside me at last, and we locked

eyes, focussed—oh it’s you!— like the moment

when you unwrap a gift…

Irving Layton once wrote that poets are always on the tightrope between sex and death, but that major poets dance on the rope whereas the minor poets tentatively just make it across. A poem like “Dorothy” about sex with the Tin Man (Forget the heart, I tell him. What you’ve got is way better) demonstrates McCartney’s jazz hands. McCartney’s death in this collection is metaphorical, but her sex is present and realized and without it there would be no credible counterpoint. Whereas Love Song is a compendium of objects protesting that they have feelings, Against is replete with wounded human feelings that find salvation in their welcome remembrance. McCartney utters her retrospective post-marriage ethos in “Against Form”:

my mother’s subtracted

future laid out for her at twenty, a floral arrangement,

funereal tones deepening as it dried. Anything

but that.

Which is basically saying that she got what she wanted, that rebellion against her mother was a proxy way of adopting her mother’s definition. By aligning herself “against,” she merely becomes an inverse of her mother – one could switch the numerator and denominator and have the same being; she is not different. Later in the poem she chooses “pain,” that word again, as a way to “see what befalls.” McCartney’s mother did her poet-daughter the supreme favour: she bid her to feel, to feel it all, and these feelings are what give McCartney’s poems a beating heart. The title is ironic: McCartney clearly isn’t against form, she’s just desperately trying to be against type. And it is certainly ironic amidst this torrent that her most emotionally controlled poem – paradoxically one of the most affecting – is a geometric construction. Here’s the opening of “Against Parallelism”:

The sadness, two vectors, equidistant,

soldiering along side-by-side, in tandem,

but separate. The most microscopic gap

equals an abyss, unbridgeable. Why

doesn’t one or the other veer off?

Change course? End it?

They’ll never meet—

This is the tragedy of incompatibility, all the more remarkable because McCartney is a poet of connectivity. This poem of separateness is the starkest kind of devastation, recalling Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” and its lines

As lines, so love’s oblique, may well

Themselves in every angle greet :

But ours, so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

This allusion leads to the more emotion-inflected ecapitulation of “Sixteen Years Ago”: “Ridiculous, wasn’t it,/ to think I could bank on love?” But the rejoinder is that she sought it out, in fact couldn’t have done anything else. It is perhaps fallacious to introduce the concept of poetic destiny, to pontificate about a poet and what they were meant to say, but McCartney was in many respects made. She draws us in through knowingness, which for her is a mirror of self-awareness. It is good that love has never made her feel safe, that it was a levy and not a boon, because it is human nature to appreciate more the things we pay for. Even though the results may be too costly, there is always the matter of the search for a decision, the ability of the poet to take solace from choice, or, as she says in “Against Marriage”: “craving… a pain that belongs to no one but me.” This is a line that foreshadows a later poem’s realization that there is no use in “trying to love/ what he loved so that he would love me more./ And that/ not working.” McCartney’s grief is invited to the table of poetry, the discomfiture of her art becoming ours.

“Dazzling…” —The Globe and Mail

“Swedish crime fiction, like the country itself, has both class and a social conscience. It was only a matter of time before it produced its own War and Peace…” —The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“This novel is almost impossible to put down.”
—Times Colonist (Victoria, B.C.)

“A rip-roaring serial killer adventure.”
—Mail on Sunday (U.K.)

“The ballyhoo is fully justified…”
—The Times (London)

The following quotation is taken from the book’s climactic scene. Blomkvist, the hero, has been captured by the Villain, Martin Vanger, serial killer. Blomkvist is manacled in the theatre of operations in the basement and is about to be buggered before the slicing and dicing proper begin. The Heroine, Salander, has climbed into the house and on her way down to the basement has armed herself with a golf club. She swings and breaks the Villain’s collarbone.

‘Do you like pain, creep?’ Salander said.

Her voice was as rough as sandpaper. As long as Blomkvist lived, he would never forget her face as she went on the attack. Her teeth were bared like a beast of prey. Her eyes were glittering, black as coal. She moved with the lightning speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focused on her prey as she swung the club again….

Oi vey!

“[A]n utterly fresh political and journalistic thriller that is also intimate and moral. In spite of its dark unearthings Steig Larsson has written a feast of a book, with central characters you will not forget.”
—Michael Ondaatje

It sure does make you think, don’t it?
—John Metcalf