Book #63: Novel or Short Story?

“It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling.  Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute.”

                                                                                                       -Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

A few days ago, I wandered to my neighbourhood bookstore.  I’d spent the morning writing, but that slightly disoriented feeling of coming out of somewhere and blinking in the sun, not knowing which way to turn, had hit me, a sign that my writing might be on the verge of taking a wayward turn …  So I decided to put it aside and stroll to the bookstore.  I was searching for that one perfect novel that would inspire me.  I was craving a novel as tried and true as Edith Wharton’s TheHouse of Mirth – a longtime favourite on my bookshelf – and yet I wanted it to be set in the contemporary moment (not that I don’t love Wharton’s fin-de-siecle New York, of course). 

I flipped through Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the GoonSquad  somewhat randomly.  I had a vague memory of reading a review of the novel when it came out a couple years ago and picked up the Pulitzer Prize.  My eyes skimmed over the epigraph by Proust and launched into chapter one.  And speaking of Wharton’s Old New York …  Here it was, transported to the present.  What luck.  Our heroine, Sasha, a beautiful kleptomaniac, who snatches a wallet from the washroom of a hotel bar near the former World Trade Centre in the opening scene, has distinct hints of Wharton’s Lily Bart, a woman no less fragile and neurotic and unsure of what she really wants.  Not five pages in, I found myself engrossed in Sasha’s world, a place where the possessions of strangers suddenly beckon, throbbing with seemingly animate properties: the coveted wallet is described as “tender and overripe as a peach.”  The scene expertly cuts back and forth between Sasha’s recollection of stealing the wallet and her therapy session, where she lounges on the couch of her therapist, Coz, as they try to make sense of her peculiar predilection for thievery.  Not for money, not because she wants any of the random objects she steals for money.  Something more primal drives her desire to snatch these things – a treasured pen, a screwdriver, a lost mitten – which she displays in a shrine-like way on a table in her flat.  Her psychology struck me as reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s theory about the Collector, a figure who tries to “rescue” objects from the world of commerce to imbue them with a more unique, sentimental value. 

I wanted to know where the novel would go.  I wanted to know where life and love would take this deeply troubled, isolated young woman.  But although the book was nicely packaged to look like a novel – with a blurb on the back that makes it appear that the story is about Sasha – I should have detected that our author is subtly poking fun at the predictable conventions of the novel genre, with all its focus on forward-moving momentum and predetermined endings: “She and Coz were collaborators writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well.  She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she’d made when she first came to New York; a set of goals she’d scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:

Find a band to manage
Understand the news
Study Japanese
Practice the harp”

It turns out that this very sense of “writing a story whose end had already been determined” is what Egan is subverting by telling a story – or series of stories – that do anything but that.  After standing in the bookstore and reading the first story, which reads so beautifully like chapter one of a long, lush novel, I bought the book and reclined on my sofa, only to realize that it isn’t a novel at all.  The stories fan out following the random, fortuitous connections of modern life, with a minor character in the first story (Sasha’s music producer boss, who’s known for sprinkling gold flakes in his coffee, an unusual drug of choice) turning into the main character of the next story, and so on.  Much as I enjoyed the sheer diversity of voices and experimental form that some of the stories take, there was a part of me, I have to admit, that still craved to know more about Sasha’s journey and fate.  My mind kept wandering back to her …  I wanted the novel.  My desire was not entirely thwarted, as a few of the later stories loop back to Sasha, illuminating a past or future moment in her life, now told from other characters’ perspectives.  It was just enough for my imagination to provide a shadow sketch of how own heroine’s life would have unfolded, were we reading a novel.    

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Addicted to House Hunting

Over the past six weeks, my boyfriend and I have been shopping for a house.  I’ve come to realize that I take a strange pleasure in wandering through these houses of varying styles and levels of decrepitude – some still inhabited, others hauntingly empty, others carefully accented with generic furniture brought in by a stager giving the house the feel of a theatrical stage set.  The houses that still shows signs of authentic habitation are by far the most interesting.  There’s something quite delicious about running my fingertips over a stranger’s bookshelf and pulling down a novel I’ve been longing to read and finding a hand-written message inside, or opening a closet and finding a pair of beat-up ballet slippers or a tangled bathrobe.

Yes, I could imagine myself living here.

Back in my moribund grad student days, I wrote a good deal of my dissertation on the relationship between novels and houses.  Although I no longer speak that academic language (thank God!), there’s a part of me that remains fascinated by how novels use houses to tell the story of a protagonist’s state of mind, status and relationship to place.  It’s a sad fate indeed for those characters who can’t find a home – think of Lily Bart, the wayward heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, for instance.  An impoverished socialite, Lily sponges off her wealthy friends who have decadent country houses, yet it’s the comfort of Selden Lawrence’s more modest home that catches her fancy, the bookshelves in particular: “She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke.  Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure of agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities.”  As Lily sinks down the social hierarchy, the novel charts her decline in terms of her increasingly tasteless and dreary surroundings, until she is finally left in a sparsely furnished tenement room: “The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray with tortoise-shell hair-pins….  These were the only traces of luxury.” 

In light of my love of this novel, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the most evocative houses I toured during our house hunt were places that I wouldn’t want to live in.  They’re places that give me glimpses into other people’s lives – lives on the “other side of the social tapestry,” as Wharton puts it.  On a whim, we visited a dilapidated white clapboard house at Bloor and Lansdowne that turned out to be an illegal rooming house.  I know from my father that after the war, my grandparents ran a boarding house in this part of Toronto, and so I felt that in a curious way, I was getting a glimpse of that other world and time while peering into these cramped, dingy quarters and gingerly walking up precarious staircases and knocking on bedroom doors (or at least, the real estate agent did, while I cowered behind).  Many of the boarders didn’t want to let us in, and it made me sad to think about how this was their last-ditch effort to claim a kind of squatter’s sovereignty.  Yet even as they shut the door in our faces, I found myself peering over their shoulders, entranced by the curious shrines some of these people had set up on their dressers, candles and incense burning all round, the hint of earthier substances in the air, and one woman had a string strung around the entire perimeter of her room, from which dangled hundreds of pairs of colourful sunglasses.

Although we weren’t serious about buying houses of this sort, I remained eager to keep touring them as a kind of research for my historical novel, part of which takes place in the Bloor Lansdowne neighbourhood in the 1950s, in a boarding house similar to my grandparents’….  So for me, the house hunt was doubling as a sort of field expedition, but I think our real estate agent was getting tired of our dithering.  Alas.

Yesterday evening, we purchased a fairly decrepit, but structurally sound Victorian house full of architectural possibilities (Chris is an architect, so we are looking to take on a “project” house).  The house is at the slightly more gentrified end of the Lansdowne neighbourhood, but close enough that I will be able to walk past my grandparents’ old house every day, communing with ghosts of my family past.

Photo from: here

Am I Addicted to Tragedy?

"And besides, what was there to go home to? Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room - that silence of the night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral on her bed." -Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

The other day I got into a discussion with a new friend on Goodreads (this great site where readers from all walks of life talk about the books they can't put down. Also an excellent place for moral support and pure distraction). Anyway, this friend, this e-friend, this woman I'll never meet but instinctively like, broached an interesting discussion about Thomas Hardy, noting his tendency to favour tragic endings and heroines who remain trapped in their own circumstances. She was somewhat critical of Hardy for condemning poor Tess to sexual violation, backbreaking labour, lost love, and a fate too horrible to fathom. I saw what she was saying... and yet, what could I say? "The most memorable heroines for me," I confessed, "tend to be women like Lily Bart, Tess and Isabel Archer.... Am I addicted to tragedy?"

Recently, I'd re-read the ending of The House of Mirth, and found myself enjoying a good cry, lingering on the pages where poor Lily ends up addicted to this drug called chloral. It's her only escape from the drudgery of her job at the hat shop and the bleakness of the tenement house - a far cry from the ornate ballrooms and late nights dancing that consumed her youth. At the same time, I was finishing Shanghai Girls (I always like to have more than one book on the go), and this story is no more uplifting. Forced to flee their beloved homeland in Shanghai during the Second World War, Pearl and May survive rape, imprisonment and interrogation, before immigrating to America and eking a living in L.A. One thing after another goes wrong. Pearl's miscarriage. Persecution at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities. Tragedy compounds tragedy.

I wonder what draws me to literature that celebrates life as a constant drumbeat of sorrow. Ever since I was a kid, I was aware that something powerful - drug-like, almost - beckoned to me from within the pages of a good depressing book and a box of kleenex. Whenever something went wrong in my life - a friend made fun of me at school, or I didn't get invited to someone's party - there was something very comforting about losing myself in three hundred pages of someone else's turmoil. As I got older and acquired real problems - health problems, career blues, a slew of crappy relationships - I came to depend on tragic literature as my shelter from the world, my sacrosanct retreat from My Own Problems.

It was interesting that some readers wrote on Goodreads that they liked reading about characters pushed to deeper insights at their breaking points. Even though it's too late for them to save themselves, the reader is rewarded with an epiphany. I agree, but I also think there's something more primal at play. Back in grad school, I recall reading the anthropologist Mary Douglas. She writes about how in primitive society, people use ritual and art as a means of representing - and thereby holding at bay - the things that they most fear about themselves. In other words, there's something reassuring about exploring and making concrete the potential crises lurking at the back of your mind.

Lily, Tess, Pearl, Isabel.... If these tragic women embody elements of myself, perhaps getting it out in the open, through literature, holds the key to moving on....

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Book #8: Unpacking Daddy's Library

"When are you going to put together my reading list?" Daddy asked.

A hush fell over the kitchen. He'd been asking me about this for weeks now, and wasn't it the least I could do? After all, I'd taken his handouts during not one, not two, but three degrees in English Literature.

Recently retired, Daddy had decided to take up reading for reasons that were characteristically quantitative. The house was crammed with novels, memoirs and anthologies that my mom and I had been reading all our lives and their sheer number had convinced my dad that there must be something to this reading thing.

Now that he was no longer building steel plants, it was time to roll up his sleeves and delve into the world of literature.

"Why don't you just go online?" I said. "Google 'reading.' A bunch of lists should come up."

"That's no good." His cheeks hardened. "Those lists are impersonal - based on polls or the whims of some critic who doesn't even know me. I want a list that's just for me."

I rolled my eyes. With everything else on my mind, did I have time for this?

Then I recalled an essay I'd read in grad school, Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library." What drives someone to read and collect books, Benjamin suggests, is anything but rational:

"I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways."

Despite Benjamin's mystical language, his point is simple, I think. He's saying that what draws a person to one book over another cannot be explained purely in terms of the book's reputation. Rather, the reader yearns to connect on some deeply personal, childlike level with the world in miniature that the novel brings to life imaginatively. This is a matter of the novelist being able to predict - almost magically - your idiosyncratic fantasies and wishes that go back to your earliest memories and desires.

It's a beautiful coincidence when reader and book unite in this way, the beginning of a lifelong relationship.

So my old man wanted a reading list. But what did I know about his earliest memories and unconscious drives?

Photo from: here

Book #7: Bloomsbury Blues

“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry as sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?”

I put down Mrs. Dalloway and blew my nose.

My first boyfriend Josh reminded me of Peter Walsh, Mrs. Dalloway’s childhood sweetheart. There's something about the way Mrs. Dalloway never forgets “his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings” that was all too familiar. Had Josh been a British gentleman, like Peter, he might have headed to India for the empire's last hurrah. They were eccentrics who loved their travels, sword collections and foreign women. Their larger than life personalities splashed into conversations at parties, made outrageous claims, got everyone riled up, started fights, and then, at the height of it all, slipped out the back door.

Years ago, when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, I told Josh that he reminded me of Peter. He eagerly began reading it. But the depiction left him incensed. “You're mean. Is this your way of saying we're not going to end up together?”

Although I'd shook his comment off with an ironic toss of the head, the feeling was darker than irony. I had been mean - meanness was a way of controlling that manic mouse scaling the walls of my stomach.

I had wanted him to leave me. At the time, I thought it was so I could be alone with my own thoughts. That fragile, self-contained world of dead authors waxing lyrical on god knows what.

Now I had all the time in the world to read my shelf full of books, but was there any reason to get out of my pajamas in the morning?

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Book #2: Going the Way of Lily Bart?

Day by day, as I sat at my childhood desk, I could feel myself slipping. I couldn’t bring myself to return emails from old friends – smart, practical friends who’d seen the writing on the wall and baled on English literature after one degree and gone on to law school and HR certificates. Their career prospects appeared to be soaring – job offers in New York, business trips to Frankfurt – while I languished in this dead-end profession.

Maybe that was why Edith Wharton spoke to me. She knew how to make beauty of the mess that misguided, bleary-eyed girls make of their lives.

Wandering through a used bookstore, I found a dog-eared copy of The House of Mirth, and re-reading the opening paragraph was like rediscovering an old perfume, the smell of Chanel No. 5 as it first smelt at age eleven: “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.” From there, the intriguing images unfold before you, from Lily’s “desultory air” to her “air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose” to Selden’s fascination with “the modeling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair.” Everything about this woman – from her unpredictable moods to the minute details of her appearance – catches Selden’s fancy. Yet thanks to her aspirations to marry the biggest Sugar Daddy in New York, Selden is all too aware that he’s “far out of her orbit.” He’s like the nice, nerdy guy in high school who befriends the beautiful, popular girl by flirting when she’s had a bad day and offering to do her homework.

The thrall and mystery of female beauty. What woman doesn’t secretly desire such power? A guilty pleasure, no doubt. As modern women, we’ve transcended such nonsense – the vanity, the narcissism, the endless desire to be desired. Long evolved beyond all that, we’re supposed to be rushing off to meetings dressed in boxy suits, staying up late to write the Long-Term Plan, kicking butt at the Curriculum Committee Meeting. Yet Wharton’s brilliance is that she can awaken flutters in even the most liberated of readers by showing what it would feel like to possess, vicariously, Lily Bart’s power and vulnerability – to be immersed in the milky, mesmerized gaze of some idealized admirer.

I remember that when I first started really enjoying sex (by this point, I was on my third boyfriend), it had everything to do with seeing that look on his face, as he shoved a firm pillow beneath my butt and his eyes swept over my flesh. I reveled in the feeling of relinquishing control, and the sense of suspense was irresistible.

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