Purchased at Indigo.ca

Like many readers, I was dismayed when word arrived that he had been diagnosed with ALS and the inevitable end that that meant. The later news that a collection of feuilletons (most first published in the NYRB), The Memory Chalet, was on the way was both welcome — there would be a final collection to read — and anything but welcome: it would be so final.

Tony Judt was born in January, 1948, one month before my own birth. His background and education were English, mine Canadian. But we both grew up and prospered in a post-war global community — I won’t compare my humble journalistic work to his outstanding historical studies, but both of us did end up spending our working lives trying to write about the world around us. The Memory Chalet sat on my shelf for a year simply because I was reluctant to say goodbye to a writing “friend” — it was the reading of Adam Gopnik’s Massey Lectures, published under the title Winter, that convinced me the time had arrived to read Judt’s final volume.

The Preface and two introductory essays in the book brought tears to my eyes. In the very short preface, Judt explains that these pieces were never intended for publication; rather they were dictated by him at the encouragement of fellow historian Timothy Garton Ash “who urged me to turn to advantage the increasing internal reference of my own thoughts.” In the second introductory essay, Judt is unflinching in describing what was involved in the process:

The salient quality of this particular neurodegenerative disorder is that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon the past, present, and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting those reflections into words. First you can no longer write independently, requiring either an assistant or a machine in order to record your thoughts. Then your legs fail and you cannot take in new experiences, except at the cost of such logistical complexity that the mere fact of mobility becomes the object of attention rather than the benefits that mobility itself can confer.

Next you begin to lose your voice: not just in the metaphorical sense of having to speak through assorted mechanical or human intermediaries, but quite literally in that the diaphragm muscles can no longer pump sufficient air across your vocal cords to furnish them with the variety of pressure required to express meaningful sound. By this point you are almost certainly quadrapeligic and condemned to long hours of silent immobility, whether or not in the presence of others.

Nighttime is the worst time for Judt — after being carefully arranged, his body is “frozen” for six or seven hours, with sleep eventually arriving. Before it does, his mind, unaffected by the condition, roams and it is in this process that he discovers his “memory chalet” (based on childhood vacation experiences in French-speaking Switzerland) where he can rebuild and reorder some of his life experiences and place them in a friendly environment.

Don’t let that gloomy introduction put you off the book. It is important for the reader to understand what produced these essays and the author does that — by page 21 of a 226-page book the stage-setting is done and there is not a word of self-pity in the remaining 23 essays of the book.

It is also fitting that Switzerland becomes the “home” for Judt’s chalet — a global financial centre, multilingual and multicultural, socially conservative but politically a sort of leftish neutral, it represents the kind of detached, observant, non-ideological, disciplined place that reflects his own life experience. Born in working class London (home was an apartment above the hair-dressing shop where his parents worked), Judt’s youthful radical days were spent as a kibbutz volunteer. That escapade ended with a scholarship offer to King’s College, Cambridge (the kibbutz would have never let him accept), followed by graduate schooling at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and further study in Germany. Teaching posts at Oxford and Cambridge followed, before Judt headed to the United States, teaching in California, and finally arriving in New York, the global city where he spent the last decades of his life. As he makes clear in some of the later essays in the volume, he was “at home” in some ways in all these places but not really “at home” in any, except perhaps the non-American, global version of New York.

The structure of the book — and each essay — reflects the process he describes in the opening essays. A memory, usually simple, springs to mind and sets off a series of (sometimes remotely) connected further thoughts that become increasingly complex, although never dauntingly so. The first seven pieces in the book proper are inspired by images that come from his childhood — let me quote the opening paragraphs from the first, “Austerity”, as a representative example of the style that will pervade the book:

My wife earnestly instructs Chinese restaurants to deliver in cardboard cartons. My children are depressingly knowledgable about climate change. Ours is an environmental family: by their standards, I am a prelapsarian relic from the age of ecological innocence. But who traipses through the apartment switching off lights and checking for leaking faucets? Who favors make-do-and-mend in an era of instant replacement? Who recycles leftovers and carefully preserves old wrapping paper? My sons nudge their friends: Dad grew up in poverty. Not at all, I correct them: I grew up in austerity.

After the war everything was in short supply. Churchill had mortgaged Great Britain and bankrupted the Treasury in order to defeat Hitler. Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple “utility furniture” until 1952, food until 1954. The rules were briefly suspended for the coronation of Elizabeth, in June 1953: everyone was allowed one extra pound of sugar and four ounces of margarine. But this exercise in supererogatory generosity served only to underscore the dreary regime of daily life.

From 21st century Chinese takeway in cardboard cartons, to Churchill’s war leadership, to postwar austerity marked by the treat of four extra ounces of margarine — all in the space of a few hundred words. Those are the kinds of connections that a great mind, imprisoned in physical immobility, goes through; it is to Judt’s credit that he makes sense out of that strange (dis)order in every essay.

The titles of the seven essays in Part One are pointers enough of the stepping off points for Judt’s childhood memories: Austerity, Food, Cars, Putney, The Green Line Bus, Mimetic Desire, The Lord Warden (okay, that one might need a bit of explanation — it was the flagship British Railways’ ferry between Dover and Calais that was the Judt family favorite). I did not make my first trip to London until 1975, but I can tell you every one of these essays struck a chord with this Canadian.

The eight essays of Part Two are sparked by Judt’s memories as a student — starting with “Joe”, his teacher of O-level German, through “Bedder” (the Cambridge version of the Oxford “scout”) to “Revolutionaries” (it was the Sixties and he was in France) and finally “Words”, the tool that will become his life.

The opening essay of Part Three, “Go West, Young Judt”, supplies hint enough at the theme for the final section — the mature Judt did go West and some of the other titles (“Midlife Crisis”, “Captive Minds”) offer incentive enough to attract any reader. I would point in particular to “New York, New York”, an essay that contemplates the idea of a “world city” through time, with a concluding paragraph that begins:

New York — a city more at home in the world than in its home country — may do better still. As a European, I feel more myself in New York than in the EU’s semi-detached British satellite: and I have Brazilian and Arab friends here who share the sentiment.

I am at a rare loss for words in trying to describe how much I was impressed by the memories and ideas that are captured in this book — I have read it twice already and will be picking it up again soon. Part of me does wonder (as it did with Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending) how much of that positive response comes from being of Judt’s generation — I’ll be interested in how younger readers respond.

Certainly, Tony Judt has a deserved reputation as one of the most outstanding historians of our time. The Memory Chalet provides a highly personal, but equally important, closing chapter to his career. Whatever your age and however many tears it brings to your eyes, it is a book not to be missed.

Purchased at Indigo.ca

In the early examples, it is true that those families tend to come from either the landed gentry (or those close to it) or the abject poor — although cautionary tales about those who futilely dream of rising above their station do represent a significant subset. Post World War II, however, the device acquired another thread — the middle-class dysfunctional family (usually located outside London) and the strains, both internal and external, that it faced became a popular model.

Louise Dean’s The Old Romantic is ample indication that the device is alive and well as the 21st century gets under way. The opening of her novel pays an oblique homage to the form:

People seem to tumble down to Hastings and not get up to go home again. It’s where they turn up, every Jack and Jill that never fell out with family, lost a job, had half an idea, got a bad habit. The town is a huddle of administrative towers and down-at-heel shops with their backs turned on the sea views.

Poor Hastings. The steam train once chuffed proudly into Warrior Square, where the statue of the Empress of India stood with her hooded eyes on the sea. The minor royals played here for a season, the gentry’s carriages drew up at the West Hill lift, the bourgeois bought villas in St Leonards. But now the Olympic-sized bathing pool is gone, the model town vandalized and the pier closed. Rock candy congeals in cellophane under blow heaters, and steel udders drop soft whip in souvenir shops. In the tuppenny arcade, on any given day of the week, there’ll be an old man feeling for change in the trays.

I’ll confess that Dean had me hooked with that opening: my knowledge of Hastings is confined to it being the WWII setting for the incredibly good television series Foyle’s War (which would be on my shortlist of “best television ever”, but I digress). Clearly, this is not Foyle’s Hastings. The fact that the television production could find an old town that is a definition of charm indicates that not all of handsome Hastings has slipped into distant memory — Dean wastes little time in showing that a lot of the surrounding area has. Here is her introduction to the area, seen through the eyes of Nick Goodyew, one of two middle-aged sons in the dysfunctional family whose troubled relations are the core of The Old Romantic:

This is not his town; this is his father’s town. This is not coming home. He did that when he moved back to the Weald, where two counties meet in hills and valleys, in a hinterland of hop bine and tractor track, whiteboard cottage and oast house, fruit field and orchard. That morning when he walked the dog, with woodsmoke forming halos above the dwellings, the countryside of his childhood seemed primitive to him — with no tarmac, no pylon, no telephone mast visible at all. Walking brings back memories. He likes to potter into the past and nip into the future, the way the dog moves, a waggy-tailed waverer on the scent of something good and aware too of other pleasures all about.

Nick, a family law solicitor (read “divorce”), is the elder son of the family, estranged for decades from his father Ken who is now 79. Those memories come to mind as he and his common-law wife, Astrid, are pulling up at Ken’s house. Ken, even grumpier now than in memory, has recently “re-opened” family relationships with a series of abusive phone calls — Nick’s younger brother, Dave, has set up a post-Christmas luncheon as an opening attempt to get the family back together.

‘God Almighty,’ Nick says to Astrid now, peeping at his father’s house, humourous and rueful, ‘I did mention to you that my father was a touch working class, didn’t I?’

‘Perchance’ is the name painted onto a cross section of a log varnished and tacked to the guttering over the front door of the bungalow. The front garden is concrete. The other houses have two-foot-high walls for decency’s sake but his has been demolished. Weeds have sprung up in the cracks of the forecourt. There’s a lean-to shelter outside the bungalow, with a corrugated yellow plastic roof and under it is a tall set of shelves stack with various plastic bottles, some with their heads cut off: cooking oil, window cleaner, plant food. There is a decrepit Christmas tree in a pot, and an old Queen Anne wing-backed chair bearing a large string bag of onions.

They sit there with the engine running. She turns the bracelets on her wrist. ‘Grim,’ she says lightly.

Let us allow Astrid to set the stage for the family reunion. The front door of the bungalow opens and Nick’s father and step-mother emerge: ‘She is red-faced and merry; he is pale and disdainful.’ ‘Oh, shit me, it’s the Krankies!’ says Astrid.

It would not be your traditional family roast lunch, she thinks, but then it hadn’t been your traditional Christmas call that got this particular ball rolling. She’d amused their friends with it all on Boxing Day in the pub.

‘I couldn’t believe it! I mean, call me old-fashioned but in our family we have turkey and stuffing on Christmas Day and a call from Auntie Jan in Portsmouth. So there we are, paper hats on, about to pour gravy and the phone goes, and Laura [Astrid's pre-pubescent daughter] is like, who’s Nick on the phone to? And I’m like, It’s his dad, darling, he’s just wishing him a merry Christmas. And the next thing you hear from the conservatory is Nick screaming, And you’re nothing to me either, you old bastard!’

For Nick, the post-holiday roast lunch is a return to the surroundings of his childhood. The driving force of the novel, however, is a different kind of return: Ken’s retreat into a real-time version of childhood, brought on by a futile attempt to delay, or perhaps accept, his approaching end.

The conflicts developed in this narrative stream will be familiar to anyone who has read previous novels featuring dysfunctional families so I’ll ignore them here. There are not a lot of surprises but there is a wealth of wonderful set pieces. Ken, for example, has been filling in time by helping out at the local funeral home which provides the stage for a number. Father and sons take a motor trip to Wales, chasing Dad’s current wife who is eager to escape him. And there is a wonderful scene where the family thinks he has died — it turns out that it was just a very intense forty winks but it takes a while to discover that.

I had read good things about The Old Romantic but would have given it a pass were it not for the novel’s appearance at the top of Tony’s Book World’s 2011 best list (his review is here). Tony’s previous year-end lists have put me on to some genuine finds (he introduced me to Maile Meloy for which I will always be grateful) so that was recommendation enough. Tony describes The Old Romantic as a novel that has “a wicked joy with the meanest and sharpest dialogue of the year” — the quotes I have used illustrate Dean’s descriptive abilities, so dialogue lovers have much to look forward to in the book itself.

I didn’t rate the novel quite as highly as Tony did, but it was genuine entertainment from start to finish. And I’ll admit that the next time we load Foyle’s War into the DVD player (and we will be doing that soon, I assure you) I will be looking at Hastings and surroundings through an entirely different set of eyes.

Review copy courtesy Random House Canada

The original French version of Ru has already garnered an impressive pack of prizes — Canada’s Governor-General’s award for French-language fiction and significant awards in both France and Italy. Foreign rights have been sold to 15 countries, so the non-French reading world is about to be introduced to this book, a best-seller in Quebec since its publication there in 2009.

The jacket cover accurately describes Ru as “a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland” — indeed, “ru” is Vietnamese for “lullaby” but one of its meanings in French (a flow or outpouring) is equally appropriate. The near novella (my version is only 141 pages and many of the sections in it are less than half a page) is a fictional memoir — Kim Thúy was born in Vietnam and the book reflects her experiences as a refugee, immigrant child in Quebec, seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant owner in a cascade of stream-of-consciousness past experiences in her still-young, but now adult, life.

The opening offers a fair portrait of what is to come:

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of the machine guns.

I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered through the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.

I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life’s duty was to prolong that of my mother.

We learn within a few pages that the narrator is now an adult “exile”, a mother of two. Her family was on the wrong side when the North-South Vietnamese conflict ended, escaped when she was 10 as part of the “boat people” phenomenon and ended up in Quebec. The memories of how that global journey came to pass are relevant in creating the context of her life:

As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn’t experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us. They treat us like enemies when it suits them, with no concern for the definition or the role we give them.

An illustration from her own family history:

My mother waged her first battles later, without sorrow. She went to work for the first time at the age of thirty-four, first as a cleaning lady, then at jobs in plants, factories, restaurants. Before, in the life that she had lost, she was the eldest daughter of her prefect father. All she did was settle arguments between the French-food chef and the Vietnamese-food chef in the family courtyard. Or she assumed the role of judge in the secret love affairs between maids and menservants.

Ten years is not enough time for a child’s character to become fully-formed. Life in a Malaysian refugee camp (when the boat reaches shore at a beach next door to a Club Med a storm fortunately breaks it apart — it cannot be turned back to sea) adds another traumatic set of life-learning experiences. That is quickly followed by a completely different, but equally confusing, set in Quebec:

The town of Granby was the warm belly that sheltered us during our first year in Canada. The locals cosseted us one by one. The pupils in my grade school lined up to invite us home for lunch so that each of our noon hours was reserved by a family. And every time, we went back to school with nearly empty stomachs because we didn’t know how to use a fork to eat rice that wasn’t sticky. We didn’t know how to tell them that this food was strange to us, that they really didn’t have to go to every grocery store in search of the last box of Minute Rice. We could neither talk to nor understand them. But that wasn’t the main thing. There was generosity and gratitude in every grain of the rice left on our plates. To this day I still wonder whether words might have tainted those moments of grace.

I hope those quotes adequately illustrate the central theme of Ru: What made me what I am? So much seems to be missing.

Those childhood learning experiences, spread globally both in geography and emotion, had absolutely nothing in common. For the adults involved, survival and adaptation to a series of new, immediate realities always was the pressing necessity — for the children, including the narrator, each was not only “new” in a threatening sense, it was also incomplete. The missing aspects of the memories are as much a part of arriving at maturity as the concrete ones are.

The result is an adult who is as perplexed by what was not there as she is aware of the vast array of different circumstances that did define her life. As the book goes on, more and more of the narrative is devoted to more recent memories of her attempts to fill in those gaps — but even when she returns to Vietnam as an adult she discovers that while she may indeed by a modern example of the “world” citizen, there is no place where she feels “at home”.

I can fully understand why Thúy’s book has seen so much success and confidently predict the translation will see even more. It would take a very callous reader not to enrol in the empathy that the book demands. Unfortunately for me, however, that empathy was not enough — as much as I wanted to engage with the narrator and her story, there was too much surface and not enough depth. Yes, in many ways that is the result that Thúy is trying to convey and she succeeds; I found it powerfully descriptive, but curiously remote, given the personal drama that is involved at each stage.

Don’t take that critical assessment as a rejection of the work. I had much the same response to Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, Emma Donoghue’s Room and Helen Garner’s The Spare Room and those three novels all have passionate advocates (and outstanding sales). Any novel that relies so much on empathy also risks landing as sentimentality with some readers — that’s what happened with me with all four of these books. I will be the first to acknowledge that many other readers will find that their response tilts towards a much more meaningful and sympathetic resolution.

(A special note for Canadian visitors here: Random House Canada’s hardcover version of this book is one of the most appealing physical books that I have had the pleasure to hold in a long time — an evocative, embossed dust cover; gorgeous deckled edges to the pages; and perfect, diary-like dimensions. Even if you don’t intend to buy it, check it out if you see it in a bookstore — this is what a proper book is meant to look and feel like.)

Gift from Lee Monks

My 2012 plan is to always have one or two collections on the go, available by the reading chair for a half-hour or one-hour read. I’m not organized enough to have created a physical collections shelf but I do have a mental one: some Russians (Chekhov and Tolstoy), American short story specialists (John Cheever, Tobias Wolff), Canadian greats (Alice Munro, Carol Shields), and that Montreal gang I referenced in a couple of reviews last year (Clark Blaise, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, for a start). Then there’s a whole separate shelf for favorite novelists who also wrote short stories (Edith Wharton, Henry James, William Maxwell, Larry Watson). And my friends at Calgary WordFest keep an eye out for me on debut collections from Canadian writers — a couple of which always seem to feature in Prize longlists come fall.

I have read examples from all of those authors (and the list above does not require buying a single book as all are on hand) — disciplined approach or not, it is pretty obvious that this project needs to extend well beyond 2012 even if I don’t add to the existing store of collections.

And that store will inevitably expand along the way, so it is fitting that the first review in the project involves a well-known American short story author whom I have never read. David Means’ third collection (of four), The Secret Goldfish (2004), came into my library a few months ago as a present in a book exchange with Lee Monks, a frequent commenter here. Critics have lavished praise on Means — the Wikipedia entry on him shows comparisons to Munro, Cheever, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver (ouch, there are three more to add to the project list already). My first exposure suggests those comparisons are entirely valid.

Means was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and a number of the 15 stories in the collection are set in northern Michigan. He has obviously spent time in the Rust Belt states, also reflected in this collection. And he currently lives in New York — The Secret Goldfish has stories from the Hudson River Valley, Connecticut and Cape Cod.

So, unlike Munro, Cheever or Carver, there is no “Means” country. Rather, if this collection is a fair indication, there is a distinctive Means’ story style with two central traits. His characters come from society’s underclass (carnies, longshoremen, couples falling apart all feature here) and they are not responding well to their challenging circumstances. And, even more important, the author structures most of his stories in a rapid-fire series of vignettes, most only a page or two long, and the spaces between the vignettes are as important as what is contained in them.

“Petrouchka [with Omissions]” is the story in this volume that illustrates that style best, since unlike many others the “omissions” of this story are included in the text. It opens with the scene-setting current reality:

A pianist was beset with panic because his right hand had frozen up, grown heavy, during a Schubert sonata, missing several notes during the Andante, sending a soft murmur — accompanied by biting coughs from angry throats — through the audience. All was suddenly asunder, his command faltering, the normal alliance between his skill, his talent, and what might be called genius, broken. The audience settled into stunned silence, an aural black hole from which emerged a few more tight coughs. As most everyone knows, his grand celebration, his triumphant return from Moscow, was ruined. And as many of you might have guessed, the sense of panic that began that night would not subside. His fingers — in the parlance of his profession — stayed heavy. Those fingers — I’ll admit — are mine.

That quote is the entire opening section; in the next Petrouchka moves on to a hospital visit with his dying father (“certainly you know him, probably have listened to him play when he was principal French horn with the Philharmonic”). And then we get the first [Omission], the parallel thought that is going on in Petrouchka’s brain or happens later, but which is not really part of the current reality narrative:

Omitted from this section: He disagreed with his father. Of course there in the hospital room he wasn’t about to argue. To linger over one or two composers for an entire career seemed like an exercise bordering on cultist adoration, maybe religion; he was no monk. Later that night his father died. Nothing dramatic. Then days of arrangements — the funeral parlor, the minister, and then the funeral, attended by a few retired members of the Cleveland Philharmonic. When he got back to New York he met up with Antoinette right away, at a place on Madison near her building. When someone tells you something just before he dies, he said, it kind of sticks to you like a residue — is that the word? — and you can’t, at least I can’t, just shrug it off.

Those parallel structures continue throughout the 20-page story in an action-reaction exchange that eventually builds a comprehensive picture. “Petrouchka [with Omissions]” is different from many of the other stories in this collection because it makes the exchanges explicit; in many of the rest, the reader is left to fill them in himself.

I have focused on only one story here because I wanted to be able to include enough quoted material to illustrate Means’ style — his distinctive use of language is as important as his distinctive structure. Here are thumbnail descriptions of just a few other stories that illustrate both those strengths and equally impressed me:

– “Lightning Man” tells the story of Nick Kelley whose distinction, as the title implies, is being struck by lightning — seven times over a number of years and in a number of mid-West locations in the course of the story.

– “Sault Ste. Marie” is my personal favorite of Means’ Northern Michigan stories in this book. Ernie, Marsha and the narrator are a trio of low-life drinkers/drug-users on a minor crime spree in the area around the city of the title (lake freighters, longshoremen and locks all feature in it). Minor turns major when “Ernie shot the guy named Tull in the parking lot”.

– “Dustman Appearances to Date” illustrates another aspect of Means’ style — there are no central characters in this story. Rather, the vignettes in this one chronicle the appearances of dust figures that resemble humans across the United States from Crazy Horse in the West, to Truro, Massachusetts, to Nekoosa, Wisconsin (the author observes in this section of the story: “By the way, Ben Franklin was a big believer in dustmen”). For an author who delights in creating the empty spaces between reality in his stories, it is fitting that he devotes an entire story to ephemeral dustmen figures.

– The title story, “The Secret Goldfish”, features a six-year-old goldfish (“outstandingly old for a fish”, the norm being about one month, as we all know) who has outgrown a series of tanks. The parallel line in this story is that the fish has outlived the marriage of his owner’s parents — that collapse is the surrounding story.

Means’ stories are strange enough that you really do not want to read more than a couple at a time (and hence he was a perfect introduction to my project). The reader needs to take some time after each one to figure out just what pieces of the puzzle the author has provided and which are missing and need to be filled in by the reader himself. It is an approach which distinguishes the author from many of the others named in the opening paragraphs of this review — it also shows why Means has attracted such positive and well-deserved critical attention. Now if I can only get some of those other collections read, sometime in 2014 or 2015 I could get back to more David Means .

Purchased at Indigo.ca

Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap is the most recent example. The “slap” of the title takes place at a Melbourne barbeque when an adult disciplines an unruly, spoiled four-year-old (not his son). Complications ensue for a couple hundred pages — for author Tsiolkas, “ensuing” included a 2010 Booker Prize longlisting and a popular TV mini-series. Two years earlier, Steve Toltz had used a variation of the form to take A Fraction of the Whole to the Booker shortlist (sorry, that is pre-blog so no review here — KfC thought it good, not great).

I am late to the game with a review of this book, but I would say that both Tsiolkas and Toltz owe a debt to Elliot Perlman for re-introducing the form. First published in 2003, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a 623-page model of the fictional device that they will come to adopt in the next few years. And in its own way it has been just as successful, even if I am almost a decade late in getting to it.

Here are the elements of the central event. Simon Heywood is an unemployed teacher, laid-off partly because of economic contractions, perhaps even more because of effects of reputation fallout based on the kidnapping of a young boy whom he was tutoring in post-school hours. In his loneliness, Simon starts obsessing about a university affair he had with the beautiful Anna — and a chance sighting of her with her young son, Sam, fuels that obsession.

The seriously-disturbed Simon has a friend, Angelique, a prostitute whom he first “engaged” in search of human contact (but didn’t sleep with) and who has now become his only friend — she both feeds and consoles him. Simon’s obsession with Anna climaxes when he arranges things so he can pick up (“kidnap”) her son after school. Angelique discovers what has happened when she drops in to Simon’s, the three enjoy cocoa and chocolate milk and Angelique calls the police. No harm, no foul, for the most part. Not in the novel, however.

Perlman, wisely, has a secondary plot. Anna’s husband, Joe, is a stock broker involved in a major deal which is dependent on Australia approving relaxed rules for U.S.-style private hospitals. An analyst colleague, Mitch, has insider political data that says unexpected approval of privatization will go ahead (which means millions in market profits) and Joe is the front-man for putting a deal together.

The primary plot supplies the ground for studying individuals, the secondary one creates opportunities for a broader look at Australian society.

That’s it as far as “action” goes for Seven Types of Ambiguity — every thing else is back story or fall-out. Don’t take that as a negative, because Perlman exploits the device in a highly effective fashion. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in Singapore causes a snowstorm in New York City (sorry about that), the “innocent” kidnapping of a young boy has a wealth of unforeseen consequences.

As the title of the novel implies, Perlman chooses to tell his story through the voices of seven narrators with widely-varied perspectives in discrete sections:

– The psychiatrist whom Simon is seeing before the kidnapping;

– Joe, the husband/prostitute client;

– Angelique, the prostitute who is the “muse” who keeps the story together;

– the brilliant stock analyst, Mitch, first name Dennis, who consults the same psychiatrist after the central event;

– Simon — he doesn’t show up as himself until part five;

– Anna, part six;

– and the psychiatrist’s daughter who discovers his journals after his death and narrates the denouement in the final section.

The waves that ripple out from the central and secondary events have impact in a 360-degree circle, a strength of Perlman’s structural approach. It allows for different voices (and different interior structures) to explore these impacts which is certainly a positive. Here is one example: the opening section narrated by the psychiatrist, presented in the form of a journal directed towards Anna:

Your husband doesn’t always get told the whole truth. But Simon doesn’t hold that against you either. It’s just that gradually he has been gaining the impression that you have invoked Sam as a device for gaining some kind of secret autonomy from your husband. Simon’s concern is that Sam is not benefiting from this. I’m sure you’ve rationalized this to some extent. Don’t tell me. It goes along these lines: if you are happier, this will somehow trickle down to Sam and maybe even to your husband; the trickle-down theory.

That quote illustrates one of the problems of the structure, however: 623 pages is a lot of reading to be able to maintain interest in a first-person observer narrative voice, even if the voice changes seven times. And using seven different voices also means that, for every reader, some voices are better than others. For what it is worth, my favorite was Mitch/Dennis, a section done entirely in exchanges between him and the psychiatrist, tangential to the main plot, but anchored in riffs of content (specifically, how to count cards at blackjack) that caught my attention the most.

Riffs are an important part of the book. As Tsiolkas and Toltz will do in their later novels, Perlman uses his structural device to maximize the opportunities it presents for a wide variety of set pieces observing modern Australian life — in many ways, they are the best part of the novel.

Those who know literary criticism better than KfC will already have identified one of the set pieces (indeed, an ongoing sub-text). Perlman has borrowed his title from William Empson’s 1930 classic work of literary criticism which defined the “New Criticism” school. The homage extends well beyond the title: Simon (himself a bit of a literary critic) has a dog named Empson, Perlman does list the seven types of literary ambiguity (I am sure those more familiar with symbolism than me will find a host of examples of each in the novel itself) and there is a great set piece in mid-book on post-modernism. Let me indulge in a quote to illustrate it — it comes when Simon is complaining to his shrink about how the post-modernists turned his university English faculty into a “cultural studies” department “with all that that implies”:

“What does it imply?” [the shrink asks].

“Where do I start? It implies a rigid doctrinaire embrace of certain amorphous schools of thought often grouped together under the mantle of post-modernism. Now, you’re probably thinking this is just another fad within the social sciences or the arts to which some people will subscribe and others won’t. Who cares?”

“That’s not quite what I was thinking but if it had been, you would have put it very well.”

“The real and grave problem with this particular fad is what it includes and what it has come to exclude. When English departments become departments of cultural studies, it means that decision makers within them embrace, adhere to, or, to put it more aptly, are under the sway of Jacques Derrida’s deconstuctionism….”

The set piece goes on for a few pages — it is entertaining throughout and I have quoted only a teaser but it is great fun, a tribute to Perlman’s ability.

That, in fact, may be my summary of the book. It ranks on the positive side of neutral overall and certainly has some superlative moments, but there is a fair bit of dross along the way. I am glad I read it, but I’d have to say I would be careful about encouraging other readers to make the time investment — for those with the right set of interests, it would be exceptionally good; for others, it would be a time-wasting chore.

KfC as Worry, the Wombat

(Note: Elliot Perlman has a new novel out, The Street Sweeper, — see publisher’s data here. I was interested enough in Seven Types of Ambiguity that I will be trying the 2012 release. Stay tuned.)

Purchased at Indigo.ca

Lightning is the third (and apparently final) instalment in French author Jean Echenoz’s trilogy of short, tightly-written fictional biographies. The exceptional Ravel, a look at the last 10 years of the composer’s life, kicked off the project a few years ago. That was followed by Running which featured the legendary Czech distance runner, Emil Zatopeck.

While Echenoz used real names in those two, Lightning‘s central charactor is a precocious engineer, Gregor — but the flyleaf informs us that he is “inspired by the life of Nikolai Tesla, often called ‘the man who invented the twentieth century.’”

Before getting to the book under review, however, let’s contemplate some common aspects of the “trilogy”. A composer, an athlete and a scientist — three fields of endeavor with virtually no overlap. Yet each of the three didn’t just push the envelope or break the mold in their chosen area, they added a whole new dimension. Ravel’s Bolero remains unique to this day. Zatopek’s “style” of running was so awkward and removed from the conventional norm that the experts marvelled that he could actually complete a race, let alone set world-record times. And Tesla lived so far in the scientific future, visualizing inventions ranging from radar to cellular technology decades before their “discovery”, that no one understood what he was really about.

In all three books (Lightning is the longest at 142 pages), the author succinctly documents those achievements. But from the start, he is also careful to portray another common side of his exceptional characters. They all shared aspects of social ineptness, despite wanting to fit into the world around them. And they all had what might best be generously described as “attention flaws” which made many aspects of daily living a challenge.

What is best about the three books, however, is Echenoz’s interest in another aspect shared by the three: all brilliant careers, whatever the field, must eventually ebb and come to an end. And all humans, however exceptional, die just like the guy next door. It is that decline which seems to interest the author the most, with the final third of each book devoted to the theme — and what makes each of these three characters so fully-formed. Here’s his introduction to that part of this book; it follows a list of the aging Gregor’s later ideas (an elastic-fluid turbine, a locomotive headlight, a hydraulic turbo-alternator):

Well, these ventures, like so many others, will never come to anything. And not only because of the indifference of his contemporaries, as Gregor mournfully maintains. Because in a man’s life, it sometimes happens as well that nothing works anymore, that the inventory of fixtures falls into disrepair. Here and there, bit by little bit, one sees how the mind deteriorates: just like matter does. It happens via addition and subtraction: sly elements join in — dirt, dust, mold — while precious ones degenerate through wear, fatigue, erosion. And then there’s the corrosion that attacks, chews up, and devours nerve cells the way it does atoms, producing all sorts of slowdown, cracking joints, aches, negligence, and hit-and-miss messiness. It’s a long, tortuous process, imperceptible at first, but which can sometimes, abruptly, become as plain as day.

I don’t think that I have ever read a better summary of a brilliant individual’s inevitable decline — and, yes, there are similar ones for both Ravel and Zatopek as they hit the closing period of their creative lives.

Back to the beginning. Gregor arrives in New York from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, already bursting with ideas: a tube at the bottom of the Atlantic to carry mail between Europe and America, a gigantic ring immobilized above the equator “so that we could go inside it and circle the earth at about one thousand miles an hour…going “around the world” in a day.”

Obviously, these are not small-minded undertakings, for Gregor is bent upon confronting challenges of vast dimensions. Early on, along these lines, he becomes convinced he’d like to do a little something with tidal power, tectonic movements, or solar energy, phenomena like that, or — why not? — just to get his hand in, the falls at Niagara. He’s seen engravings of them in books and they’ll fit the bill. Yes, Niagara Falls. The Niagara River would be good.

Thomas Edison has already developed a system for delivering electricity but, alas, it is based on direct current and transmission losses are so great that users literally have to live within sight of the power plant. Gregor/Tesla introduces alternating current, an advance which immediately sweeps the market — his royalties should make him the richest person in the world, but he agrees to amend his contract with George Westinghouse and accepts a one-time payment of $198,000 for his invention. (There’s that daily life problem, showing up already.)

Still that success puts him in contact with America’s richest capitalists who are eager to back new ventures. He has some successes, even more good ideas that don’t get developed, but still has the legendary J.P. Morgan’s backing to construct a massive electrical tower on Long Island which not only means the development of radio transmission as a by-product, but also (only Gregor knows this) would supply the world with free electrical power. Alas, Marconi beats him to the post with a radio transmission across the Atlantic and Gregor has to come clean to Morgan about the larger aim of his project:

But, well, the great John Pierpoint Morgan might be touched by the vastness of the enterprise, you never know.

But really, of course you know: Morgan won’t be the least bit touched. Having never embraced the profession of philanthropist, the financier shows no enthusiasm at the idea of delivering current as free as the air to countries peopled by penniless Moldavians, Ainus, or Sengalese. Assuring Gregor that he continues to enjoy his deep personal sympathy and moral support, Morgan cuts off all credit with a stroke of the pen. Work on the tower comes to a halt at the snap of his fingers. Screwed again.

Please understand me, Morgan points out. It doesn’t work at all, your system. If everyone can draw on the power all they like, what happens to me? Where do I put the meter?

While I am giving it short shrift in this review, the author does every bit as good a job at portraying Gregor’s social ineptness. He is famous and successful enough with Westinghouse that he acquires champagne tastes — bespoke suits, hand-made shirts and a massive collection of shoes and ties. He lives, on credit, in a suite high in the Waldorf Astoria (his notion is that they should be honored enough by his residence not to tender a bill and, for a long time, they don’t).

The mental decline may be inevitable, but it is those human failings that hasten the lifestyle decline. Gregor still has a wealth of big ideas but increasingly no one is willing to listen. His ego was always bigger than even his grand ideas, so the scientific community has never welcomed him. The financiers abandon him in frustration. Society no long wants to be his patron. Everything that is contemplated in that paragraph that I quoted above starts to come to pass.

My knowledge of the history of science is sketchy enough that I can’t even hazard an opinion on how much Echenoz has exaggerated Tesla’s ideas and accomplishments — for this reader, Gregor came so fully to life that it doesn’t matter. My experience with the first two biographies had me aware early on, without the author’s forebodings, about what would be happening in the latter third of the novel. I wasn’t disappointed at all.

This is the sixth Echenoz novel reviewed on this blog (see all the reviews here) so he is obviously a KfC favorite. If you haven’t tried him, you should. And if Echenoz should happen to decide not to halt his fictional biographies with this one, I will be first in line to buy number four.

Review copy courtesy Random House Canada

While Queen Victoria occupied the throne for 63 years, she really only reigned for twenty, because as soon as her consort Prince Albert died, she went to ground and spent the rest of her life, fully 40 years, as a pampered and self-indulgent recluse, neglecting her duties as Queen and flaming the always nascent republican sentiment in the land. She was a dour, joyless woman whose only contributions were the naming of an era and populating the thrones of Europe with her progeny. Not a lot of return for the vast amounts of wealth she and her large brood took from the British treasury over her lifetime.

Her great-great grand-daughter is a very different story. Queen Elizabeth was not born to succession and, had history played out differently, she would have been a mere member of the royal family, an interesting cousin to the King, perhaps, and could have chosen her own path in life. When her uncle Edward the Eighth abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson, Elizabeth’s father was thrust on to the throne with no preparation or training. He ruled for only sixteen difficult years, including all of World War II, before succumbing to cancer at just 57. His daughter has now been Queen for longer than he was alive.

The story of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign is the story of modern Great Britain. A study of her reign is a study of the evolution of society as expressed through politics, morality, the class system in the UK, and an institution which has always had to adapt or die. While many of the adaptations the monarchy has had to make have been painful, this Queen has been masterful in understanding what needed to be done, and implementing change with care and sensitivity, ensuring that the institution stays relevant as the world inevitably changes.

Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith is a very readable narrative description of the life of Queen Elizabeth. It details her reign from the beginning to now and is really the story of her “job” and her life as told though the events in her life between 1952 and the present day. Because Bedell Smith is an American, she spends much time discussing the Queen’s interactions with various American diplomats, presidents, and luminaries. The author relies heavily on other published works as well as interviews and, while there is nothing new or startling in this book, it will be appealing to American readers who are interested in the quotidian details of the work of the monarch, and her family, and the devotion to duty which is embedded in Queen Elizabeth’s DNA.

Purchased at Indigo.ca

Purchased at Book Depository

To fully understand and appreciate this remarkable Diamond Jubilee, it is necessary to understand the role Prince Philip has played, and Eade’s book is a look into the circumstances and decisions that shaped the man.

Used copy purchased from Alibris.com

Regular visitors here will know that I am a fan of the newspaper/journalist novel, since that was my wage-earning trade. On a completely different front, reading Clark Blaise’s exceptional story collection, The Meagre Tarmac, earlier this year reminded me how much I have enjoyed the Montreal-based writers of the 1950s and 60s in my reading career. Mordecai Richler is a favorite on this blog (my reviews of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version rank first and sixth respectively on the all-time hits list as this blog approaches its third anniversary). Back in the 1970s, when I had a weekly book column in the Calgary Herald, my favorite author was Hugh Hood — I’ll be revisiting some of his works in 2012. Mavis Gallant, Brian Moore and John Metcalf were all part of that Montreal gang as well; Canadian book publishing was in its infancy, but Montreal had a group of authorial stars that ranked with London and New York.

All of which made chasing down a copy of William Weintraub’s Why Rock The Boat a worthwhile objective. I did not realize until the physical book arrived that 2011 marks the half-centenary of its first publication in 1961. The book is long out of print (allthough Kobo, Sony and Kindle all have an e-version for only $3.99) but a little bit of chasing around the web will produce some reasonably-priced used print copies (and some outrageously-priced ones as well). Weintraub hung out with the group cited above, was a reporter at the Montreal Gazette and Weekend Magazine before getting into book writing and KfC’s memory said Why Rock The Boat was one of the funniest “journo” books that I had ever read. My first reading came before I started my own journalism career in 1968 — would the novel hold up in a reread almost 50 years later?

Yes, it does — although it has to be admitted that the journalistic set pieces (which are what I remember) fare quite a bit better than the central “love story” line. Actually, a fairer assessment would be that the love story line is there only to create an opportunity for the set pieces, so we’ll concentrate on them here.

Harry Barnes is a 19-year-old cub reporter at the Montreal Daily Witness and we meet him on the chilly steps of a Gothic Montreal church, taking down the names of those who are attending the funeral of a local worthy to be published as an addendum to the story on the funeral itself — yes, we were still doing that when I started in the business, since lists of names assured readership not only from those named, but many of their relatives and friends.

It’s no use, you can’t write with gloves on. Putting the notebook and pencil into his mouth, Harry Barnes pulled off the gloves and once again the snowstorm bit into his hands like a salted cat-o’-nine tails. Shuddering, he stuffed the gloves into his overcoat pocket and waited for the two men coming up the steps.

“Your names, please?” he asked.

“H.R. Tapscott,” said one of the men.

“Gordon Enright,” said the other.

It was dangerous, it was cold — but it was exciting. To be only nineteen years old and to actually speak to the great H.R. Tapscott! And who would be next? Eagerly he peered down to the curb, where the big limousines were debouching their passengers and vanishing down the windy whiteness of the street.

Harry figures he will be on the funeral beat long enough that cutting the finger tips out of his gloves so he can keep them on as his compiles his names is a good idea. Already, however, he has promotion in mind — perhaps he can graduate to the “hotel” beat where you tour the hotels to interview prominent guests who are visiting the city (yes, the young KfC did that as well in his early newspaper career). That is, if he doesn’t get laid off first — the Witness is in serious financial trouble and “there was talk of a drastic staff reduction coming up, a bloodbath of an economy wave. Heads were going to roll and right now they were selecting the heads.” That, too, is a very contemporary sentiment — there is not a newsroom in the English-speaking world right now where the Internet, social media and shrinking paid readership are not producing entirely legitimate fears that yet more layoffs (and there have already been many) are inevitable.

Our next assignment with Harry is a luncheon meeting of The Bellringers, named for the massive bell that the president smashes with a silver mallet each time there is a “violation” of the club code by a member that demands a fifty-cent contribution to the Kiddie Kamp Fund. There is much competition among reporters about covering these service club meetings, not because they involve great content but rather they produce a free meal. Every junior reporter could rank the city’s clubs on the basis of meal quality and volume, the free lunch being a perk that significantly extends the meagre salary. (For the record, the Calgary Herald favorite when I started there was the Knights of the Round Table — no bell, no charity, indeed no service, just good leftish talk and even better food.)

The heavy emphasis on service club meetings was in keeping with the principle that what people are most interested in reading about is what they already know. Thus each service club member would want to read the account of the speech he had heard the day before, even though no one else in his right mind would. In this way circulation was built, slowly and laboriously — sixty Bellringers, ninety charity donors, thirty Auxiliary ladies. It all mounted up.

The other Montreal papers occasionally ran stories that were quite absorbing, but the Witness was beyond that. And Witnessmen were proud of the massive boredom their paper was able to achieve; there was a certain grandeur about it that only professionals could fully appreciate.

The exact form might be anachronistic today, but that business strategy has evolved into a modern version. The next time you visit a newspaper website, check out the comments on one of the “lifestyle” stories (or the host of picture “galleries” for reader-submitted photos) — do you really think anybody looks at these, except for the people who submit them for their own brief moment of “fame”?

Why Rock The Boat has a host of set pieces like this (a hotel fire at a nudist convention, the annual journo ski weekend/drunk in the Laurentians, phoney “practice” stories featuring the managing editor in embarrassing circumstances that find their way into print) but I’ll offer just one more. One of Harry’s practice stories (the “corned, loaded and pissed” managing editor has been sentenced for drunk and disorderly conduct) has found its way into the paper. Harry has not been caught — Fred Sullivan, recently demoted to the Religion beat after twenty years on Police, has been deemed the culprit and given his Rockefeller, the Witness newsroom label for severance cheque.

Old Sullivan, Harry realized, would by lying in state at Krasco’s. Lying in state was the term used to describe the traditional three- or four-day drinking marathon staged by Witnessmen to celebrate being fired. It lasted until the Rockefeller was spent and, while it was on, fellow journalists would drop by to commiserate with the bereaved, to suggest new employment possibilities, and to discuss the character of Philip L. Butcher [the managing editor who takes great pleasure in determining the victim/Rockefeller recipients]. Like most civilized mourning customs, lying in state assuaged grief in a sensible way.

(Digression: For visitors here who know Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey, another newspaper novel, those who know the Montreal author community of the time say that the Montreal Gazette’s H.J. Larkin was the model for both Moore and Weintraub’s fictional newspaper editors. Weintraub’s memoir, Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s — which I have not read — features a description of Larkin, who actually did fire Weintraub, as well as interviews with most of the Montreal authors mentioned at the start of this review.)

I’ve managed to complete this review without reference to the plot thread that supplies its central theme — a young woman reporter from a rival paper walks into that all-male Bellringer lunch and young Harry falls instantly into infatuation. Okay, it is a very, very slender theme, but, hey, you need some interior structure to create the opportunity for the set pieces.

The newspaper business has certainly mutated over the last 50 years, but if there is one overwhelming impression that this re-read left it is how little has really changed. The nature of the rituals may have evolved, but there are more similarities than differences in what exists today. And I laughed just as hard this time around as I did when I first read Why Rock The Boat before beginning my own newspaper career, a 27-year journey that involved almost every aspect of the editorial side of the business. If you have any fondness at all for newspaper novels, Why Rock The Boat is worth tracking down.

Unlike many readers who have a comprehensive plan for their reading year, I rarely know more than two or three books ahead what I will be reading, so this annual exercise is always a revelation even to me about what my 12 months of books ended up being. A few observations now that I have made my choices:

– KfC’s 2011 list features far fewer unread or reread classics or older books than normal (eight of the 10 were published in 2011). I hold Adam Mars-Jones at least partially responsible for that (read on to find out why). It was also an unusual year in that it featured the publication of a number of very promising titles early in the year which is normally when a dearth of contemporary titles sends me back into the stacks to pull out some overlooked volumes from previous decades or centuries.

– I had the feeling as the year unfolded that it was an exceptional year for Canadian fiction and this list confirms that. Four titles here are new books by Canadian authors and those four don’t even include the Giller winner, the two Canadian titles that made the Booker shortlist and a number of other Canadian titles from the Giller longlist that were also on the KfC longlist (and all of those are worthy volumes). I have been reading Canadian fiction for almost a half-century now and I can’t recall a year that had so many high quality novels and collections.

– an indication of how dreadful this year’s Booker jury was is that four of my 10 selections were Booker eligible (and that doesn’t even include the eligible titles from Canadian authors) and only one of those four (the eventual winner) made their longlist. It was an exceptional year for U.K. fiction as well — and a very bad year for the Prize to have such a dreadful jury.

– three of my 10 are debut novels, another good sign for readers. I don’t consciously try to read first novels but neither do I avoid them so the fact that three are included is an indication we have much to look forward to in the future.

The list is arranged alphabetically by author; there is no way I would attempt to rank the top 10 because I allow myself the serendipity of putting books on the list based solely on “liking” them and I “like” books for a whole bunch of different reasons, as you will discover. I’ve tried to indicate my “why” with each book — rest assured, I heartily recommend all 10.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. In a reading year characterized by such a disastrous Booker jury, it is almost embarrassing to see their winner first on my list — but put that down to Barnes’ early appearance in the alphabet. There is no way that this exceptional, 150-page novel could be left off. Tony Webster is in his early 60s, retired from a working career where stablity and security were much more important to him than conventional notions of achievement, and entering the period of contemplating a life lived. The short novel opens with scenes from his school days but picks up dramatic pace when he receives notice of a £500 bequest which also promises the copy of a diary from an old school friend. One of the things that Tony is already thinking about is the difference between shame, guilt and remorse — and the strange bequest sends him off on a search that will bring that difference to life. If you check the comments in my post, you will find that some readers are perplexed by the unresolved confusion of some key elements in the novel: my explanation would be that while some (not all) younger readers may find that troubling, those of us who are of Tony’s age are only too aware of the uncertainty that comes with memory, even memories of important events in our own life. The Sense of an Ending should be regarded as at least a 300-page novel (and maybe 450) — you will want to read it more than once.

The Free World, by David Bezmozgis. The Free World may be David Bezmozgis’ first novel but it is not his first book — indeed, it could be characterized as a prequel to his 2004 story collection, Natasha, which made the Giller shortlist (and which I read pre-blog, so alas no review here). We meet the Krasnansky family on a railroad platform in Vienna in 1978, Jewish refugees on their way from Latvia to Rome, which will be a holding station for some months before they move on to a new life in the United States or Australia or (as was the case with the author’s parents) Canada. The storyline about the uncertainty of the months in Rome is good but the most powerful themes of the book are the memories of what the previous life was like. The grandfather was a Soviet hero, even if his recent time there has soured him on the whole experience, and not at all sure about this emigration. Polina, the wife of one of the Krasnansky sons, has even more conflict in her memories. The Free World is an impressive debut novel (and equally outstanding second book) — I look forward to reading more Bezmozgis in the future.

The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise. My only criticism of the 2011 Real Giller jury is that they left this short-story collection off the shortlist (the link will take you to a guest review as well as my own). Blaise is a veteran master of the form and these 11 stories are an outstanding example of another Canadian fiction phenomenon: the “immigrant” novel. Okay, it is a story collection not a novel and they are set in the U.S. but still…the author is Canadian. The index page says they are meant to be read in order: in fact, the collection tells the stories of five Indian immigrants in two and three story sets. Blaise’s characters are not refugees or even middle-class: they have been very successful in their North American experience but all of them are trying to cope with emotions that draw them back to the land where they were born and still have strong family ties. The theme is powerful, the prose even more so. Blaise deserves to be ranked with Canadian masters of the short story such as Alice Munro and Carol Shields (it is a genre we are very good at) — this rewarding collection is ample indication of his talent.

We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant. When I read this book in January, there is no way that I thought it would make my year-end top 10 list — it is a testimony to Linda Grant’s novel, that it grew consistently better in memory as the year went on. The central character, Stephen, was born in 1946 which makes him one of the first baby-boomers, and is now on the verge of becoming a senior citizen (not unlike Barnes’ Tony Webster) looking back on his life. Born and raised of mixed ethnic parentage in California, the defining event of his life was winning a Rhodes scholarship — he met his wife during the turbulent 1960s at Oxford and has been in the U.K. ever since. The title of Grant’s novel captures her over-riding theme: those of us born in the post-war 1940s (KfC was born in 1948) really did have it “so good” and only now are coming to the realization that we wasted the opportunity to make a difference. Given the real-world events of the last few years, it is no wonder that We Had It So Good became more impressive as 2011 wore on.

Ripley Under Ground, by Patricia Highsmith. This selection probably qualifies more as a Lifetime Achievement award (and I have only read the first two of five Ripley novels and none of the rest of Highsmith’s extensive catalogue) but that is no reason to leave it off the 2011 list. If you don’t know Tom Ripley, he is one of fiction’s most interesting evil characters — and if you only know him from the excellent Ripley movies, rest assured the original books are even better because they contain so much more than can be captured in even the best of movies. As for other Highsmith fiction, let’s just say Hitchcock was a major fan. The link will take you to reviews of both this book and The Talented Mr. Ripley — make sure you read the comments, because many visitors here have read and recommend far more Highsmith than KfC has got to so far. She will be making at least one appearance on this blog in 2012.

Cedilla, by Adam Mars-Jones. As noted above, I am blaming Adam Mars-Jones for the lack of classics on this year’s top-10 list. Cedilla (733 pages) is volume two in his multi-volume chronicle of the life of John Cromer — I knew it was due out in March and had not yet read volume one, Pilcrow (525 pages), so a lot of first-quarter reading time which is when I normally return to the classics was devoted to Mars-Jones. It is hard to believe that 1,250 pages (the link connects to reviews of both books) could be described as a “quick” read but the author succeeds in making Cromer interesting on every page. Cromer has Still’s disease and is confined to a wheelchair — Pilcrow takes him to the end of adolesence, Cedilla is mainly about his days at Cambridge, with a fascinating global sidetrap. Cromer is not only an interesting character, Mars-Jones uses the setting of his confined life to offer some perceptive observations on the England of the mid-twentieth century. At least one more volume is promised — I assure you taking on the trilogy (or tetralogy if that is what it turns into) is worth the time and effort.

The Spoiler, by Annalena McAfee. This is a highly self-indulgent pick but I hope to convince at least a few people to try it: I love newspaper novels and this is an excellent contemporary example. Honor Tait is “an old-school journalistic heroine” with a raft of achievements (e.g. interviewing Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Madame Chang Kai-Shek some years later) and awards to her credit. Honor spent her money as she earned it and is now reduced to recycling old news stories in book collections to finance her lifestyle. At her publisher’s urging, she reluctantly agrees to a promotional interview with a quality tabloid — which bring Tamara Sim, a “regular casual” at The Monitor, into the story. Sim spots an opportunity for scandal, lucrative from her young, ambitious perspective. McAfee has impressive journalistic credits from the quality English broadsheets — she is married to author Ian McEwan, so she also has experience on the “celebrity scandal subject” side. If you are interested at all in what produced the current Murdoch fiasco (the novel is set in 1997 London), you will find this debut book more than worthwhile — and have some very good chuckles along the way.

A Good Man, by Guy Vanderhaeghe. There is a fair amount of self-indulgence in this pick as well — A Good Man is book three in the author’s loose Western trilogy (The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing are the first two) and I have been an enthusiastic supporter for years. While the first two books were grounded in the conflict between invading white exploiters and settlers and the First Nations peoples, that conflict is in a “mop-up” stage in this book. The central character, Wesley Case, comes from a powerful Ottawa family and is a failed North-West Mounted Police member as the book opens — he buys a farm in Montana but runs messages between American and Canadian forces to help out with funds for the set-up. The direct wars with aboriginal tribes may be over — the white men have already found lots of grounds on which they can plot and fight with each other. A Good Man is another excellent example of Vanderhaeghe’s ability to capture Western North American historical fiction (you don’t have to read the trilogy in order, incidentally).

Montana 1948, by Larry Watson. Watson is my “discovery of the year” in terms of productive authors whom I have not previously read and I owe that to Trevor at the Mookse and the Gripes whose enthusiastic review of this novel moved me to buy it a few years ago. The story of Montana 1948 is told by 52-year-old David Hayden who looks back on a sequence of events that took place in Bentrock, Montana 40 years earlier — the 12-year-old didn’t really understand what was happening with his sheriff father and family then, but the wisdom of age brings the dreadful experience into focus. Watson impressed me enough with this book that the preceeding post on this blog is a review of White Crosses, another novel featuring another Bentrock sheriff.

Touch, by Alexi Zentner. The fourth novel here from the 2011 Giller longlist and third first novel on this list, Touch is a fitting, closing example of the highpoints of KfC’s reading year: a new Canadian author with much promise for the future. The narrator of the novel is an Anglican priest who has just returned to the British Columbia gold rush town of Sawgamet (“founded” decades ago by his grandfather) to attend to his dying mother. The narrative moves between the three generations and is proof positive that the Canadian “frontier” novel is still alive: it features both native and Christian spirits, backbreaking physical survival and a 30-foot snowfall. The Canadian cover would be on my shortlist of “Covers of the Year” as well.

On to 2012. I hope you found 2011 as rewarding in reading as I did — and that the next year might be even better.

Purchased at Indigo.ca

Whenever a fatality occurred in a highway accident, a white cross was planted at the site, one cross for each death. Cautioning other travelers was the idea, to tell them that someone had died here, because of speed or carelessness or hazardous road conditions or simply bad luck. No doubt it made sense and had an effect — you approached that railroad crossing and saw five crosses bristling up from the weeds alongside the tracks and perhaps you looked carefully before proceeding. But were those five crosses from five separate accidents, indicating that here was a crossing where trains came out of nowhere, or were all the crosses from only one accident, from the night five teenagers heard the Empire Builder’s whistle and saw its light but still thought they could beat it to the crossing? What if you drove a highway only once, and by the time you noticed that single cross in the ditch you were already past it — what lesson could you take from that? Jack had seen bouquets of those crosses in places so dangerous they made you nod your head and say silently, yes, no question but that a heedless driver could meet his death here. But he had also seen crosses in places that brought nothing but puzzlement, that left you scratching your head and wondering what the hell a driver must have done to get himself killed along this ribbon-straight stretch of road.

Now two more crosses were going to be stuck in the soil of Mercer County.

(Digression: When I include quotes in reviews here, I hope that they offer visitors a capsule indication of what to expect from the author’s style and that very long one above is certainly meant to do that. One of Larry Watson’s distinctive characteristics is the tangential paragraph that delves into some detail what lies behind a seemingly mundane observation, like white crosses at the side of a rural road. Some readers may find it distracting — for this one, it adds a richness and depth that I very much appreciate.)

Sheriff Jack’s thoughts on the white crosses are a deliberate distraction for him because he wants to avoid thinking about the fatal accident before he gets there. It is graduation night in Bentrock, which means parties and drinking for the students — those who drink regularly, drink even more on grad night; those who don’t, often choose that night to start. The northeast Montana prairie town has been lucky so far, with no grad night fatalities, but that clean record seems to have come to a close.

When Jack arrives at the scene of the double fatality, he is not surprised. It is a dangerous 90-degree bend: “If you missed the curve, you were off the road in an instant and sailing toward a slough”. He knows the accident will mean doing something that he hates in his job, delivering the news to next of kin and that sparks memories of various previous bad experiences doing just that.

Matters quickly get worse for Jack, however. While the bodies have already been removed, his deputy supplies the news that will form the backbone for the remainder of White Crosses. Yes, one of the students was a graduand, Junie Moss. The other, the driver, was Leo Bauer:

Leo Bauer — a man who reminded Jack of himself in certain ways. Leo was about Jack’s age, tall, soft-spoken, a veteran. Leo had thinning hair combed straight back over his large head. A serious man. Jack had pictured him in the clothes he always wore — black Wellingtons, dress slacks, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a narrow dark tie. This was Leo’s uniform. He was the principal of Horace Mann School in Bentrock, grades one through eight, but even off the job — at a barbecue or at a town council meeting or at a high school basketball game — he was likely to be dressed the same way, perhaps without the tie. Oh, yes, Jack could see Leo Bauer clearly. And he could see Leo’s wife and son.

It takes the stumbling deputy a while to get to it, but he eventually informs Jack that there were three suitcases in the car: two of Junie’s and one with Leo’s clothes, although the name tag on the bag was that of Leo’s own graduating son, Richard. Still, the obvious conclusion has to be that the tight-laced elementary school principal was running off with a high school grad.

Jack arrives at another conclusion almost immediately: Bentrock cannot accept this scandal. In a review of Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary which I posted just a week ago, I highlighted a quote that included this observation: “…the fair surface of life was honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. Every respectable household had its special arrangements for the private disposal of family scandals….” Wharton used that to explain the way that high society New York preserved some of its dirty secrets. The rural Montana of Larry Watson shares exactly the same approach to keeping disturbing events discreetly buried — and Sheriff Jack decides it needs to be applied to deal with this dreadful accident.

So he creates another version of the story — the tangled web of deceit is put fully in place early in the novel and I am not spoiling it for any potential reader with what I have said so far. The bulk of the book concerns how the seemingly compact web of lies turns into a cat’s cradle where a pull on the string off to one side affects the whole structure. And at the middle of that complex web of lies — the only one who knows the real story — is Jack Nevelsen.

Regular visitors here will no recall how impressed I was with my first Larry Watson novel, Montana 1948, a few months back — it gives nothing away to say you will be reading about that novel again when I post my list of 10 best books for 2011 in a few days. That novel also is centred on the way that Bentrock goes about preserving secrets and also involves a sheriff. The “honeycomb of moral sewage” in the small town Prairie west is of every bit as much interest to Larry Watson as New York City’s is to Edith Wharton. And both of them are excellent at exploring their fascination with the power of the phenomenon.

Is White Crosses as good as Montana 1948? For this reader, no it’s not, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading this novel — the latter ranks close to 10 out of 10, this one rates more like 8.5 or 9, which still makes it excellent in my eyes. Montana 1948 (published in 1993) has a powerful spareness in its 169 pages that brings a sharpness to Watson’s portrayal of smalltown life that I have found in very few books. White Crosses was published five years later and its 371 pages have many more of the kinds of thoughtful musings that are illlustrated in the first paragraph that I quoted — they certainly add value, but they dull some of the razor-like perceptions that are Watson’s greatest strength. However you rate the two that I have read, I can only conclude that Larry Watson deserves to be mentioned with the best of the authors who portray the North American West.