The Med Poets Society

Nicholas Ruddock’s The Parabolist is a lot of things— a murder mystery, a love story and a fun comic romp through 1975 Toronto with overlapping groups of poets and medical students. But above all, it’s a tribute to Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, and it’s Canadian.

About the Canadian thing. My biggest complaint about Canadian literature is that it tends to go overboard with establishing its Canadianness. (And, in this case, also its Torontoness and even its University of Torontoness.)

I’m an alumna of that institution, and from the very the beginning of the book, nearly every page gave me a moment of “Oh! Oh! I’ve been in that classroom!” and “Oh! I know where that library is.” At first, it was fun, but after a while, I felt as though Ruddock was desperately trying to ingratiate himself with me (and presumably the thousands and thousands of other alumni out there.) The book is so eager to show off its knowledge of downtown Toronto geography that it includes conversations like this one, as two characters try to find a quiet parking spot where they can have a romantic tryst in a Volkswagen van.

“I know where to go, he said, Tower Road.

Tower Road? I never heard of it.

Maybe not but you’ve been there a thousand times. The laneway by Hart House.

He slowed the van on Hoskin and put on the right-turn signal. Then, with a break in the traffic, he turned into the small road that ran between the playing fields and Wycliffe College.

I didn’t even know it had a name, Jasper, I thought it was just Hart House.”

I’m pretty sure people don’t talk like that, and didn’t talk like that in 1975, either. But my criticism isn’t entirely fair—a big part of the reason the Toronto locations stand out is because I’m familiar with them, and anyone who hasn’t lived there is likely to find the constant street-name-dropping far less irritating. I don’t mean to detract from what is, in fact, a good book. It’s the sort of snappily-written fun book you can fly through in a few hours without putting down.

That fun quality was the most surprising thing about this book, because The Savage Detectives is anything but. While I loved Bolaño’s 2666, which is long, complex and largely filled with descriptions of dead bodies, The Savage Detectives, about a group of poets in Mexico City in the 1970′s, didn’t grab me the same way, and has been sitting half-finished for six months.

But Ruddock has managed to take the best bits of Bolaño’s book—the characters—and let them run loose and get into trouble in Toronto. While the Bolano homage seemed like it was going to be a bit forced at the beginning of the book, Ruddock’s characters and setting are different enough that it doesn’t feel that derivative.

One of the protagonists, a Mexican poet named Roberto Moreno, feels as if he’s wandered straight out of Bolaño’s book and into Ruddock’s. That, I think, is exactly what Ruddock’s going for. Moreno ends up teaching a group of medical students (Ruddock is a doctor) about poetry, in the university’s attempt to produce well-rounded doctors, and several characters get tangled up in awkward romances and a haphazardly investigated murder mystery. The story isn’t so much a mystery, though, then a chronicle of a bunch of quirky people. The book jumps around between characters—poets, med students, a cadaver that’s being slowly dissected, an expert in French idioms, a woman running a shelter for homeless teens and a very creepy psychiatrist—but since they’re all caught up in the same confusing, funny-but-horrifying web, the story congeals into something that’s better than its parts. My one complaint (okay, other than the Canadianness) is the ending, which Ruddock likely designed to be shocking but which feels oddly, clinically detached from the rest of the book. But it doesn’t matter, because unlike the Bolaño book that inspired it, The Parabolist isn’t meant to be great, serious literature. It’s just meant to be fun, and it does that well.

The Return of the Book Blog… in which I move far away, succumb to peer pressure, and write a novel of my own.

After a nearly year-long hiatus from my blog, I’ve decided to start it up again. (Yes, this is probably one of countless optimistic “I’m totally going to do a lot more writing this year!” posts that hit the Internet in the past week.)

But I was busy during all that time when I wasn’t blogging, and for the past couple of months, things have been substantially less busy. This fall, I quit my newspaper job (the job that kept me writing stuff for several hours each week day and had me all worn-out and sick of writing by the time I got home) and moved far away. And right now, I’m not working as much, which means I’m doing lots of reading. (Or trying to, anyway.)

I’ve been intermittently reading Moby-Dick for the past few months, and while it’s thematically appropriate to my newfound coastal surroundings (Nova Scotia), I wanted something lighter to read on my breaks from it. So, I relented to years and years of peer pressure and read the Harry Potter books. All seven of them. And I absolutely loved all of them.

This is a departure for me, as I’ve spent 13 or 14 years complaining that the books are stupid, targeted at 11-year-olds, and too black-and-white and simplistic. And… I was wrong, on all counts. I think part of the reason I resisted them for so long is that they came out when I was too old to read kids’ books, but too young to read them as an adult, and I was afraid of people (gasp!) thinking that my reading level was lower than what it actually was.

Everyone knows what the books are about, so I’m not going to review them other than to say that J. K. Rowling has created a world that I want to live in. The characters are all believable—against an epic backdrop of magic and a battle between good and evil, Harry and his schoolmates are, above all, teenagers. That means that while they’re sometimes insufferable, they’re always realistic and relatable. Rowling’s prose isn’t especially memorable, but it’s clean and it propels the story along. There’s so much crammed into those seven books that I was actually kind of lonely when I finished the last one.

Also, I took advantage of my newfound unemployment to participate in National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that challenges thousands of people all over the world to dump 50,000 words of fiction onto the page during the month in November. I “won,” meaning that I finished, as did about 14% of the other participants. (I can’t brag, as I had very few other obligations in the month of November, aside from reading the Harry Potter books, taking lots of walks and bike rides, and baking a lot of cookies.) The book, which I’m planning on revisiting and editing at some point this year to see if it’s actually salvageable, is a satirical detective novel loosely based on a town I once covered for work (a New England town that shall not be named, though I will hint that it rhymes with “Beast Frampton.”) That’s all I’m saying for now.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Like Margaret Atwood

I have ambivalent feelings toward Margaret Atwood. I read several of her books when I was younger and enjoyed them. Then I moved to Toronto and studied at Atwood’s alma mater and decided (not entirely fairly) that she was too uptight and her prose is dull and she only writes about a very narrow swath of boring people in a city full of interesting ones. (And she dismisses science fiction as all being about interstellar cephalopods.)

The problem with Atwood is that Canadian Literature, as an academic field, is big on her sort of thing, at the expense of other writers.

But then there’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which, set in a dystopian Boston, was a welcome change from her other books. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when fundamentalists of any type take control.

It’s a classic and a staple of many literature classes, and deservedly so. A few years after extremists (in this case, far-right-wing Christians) have taken control of the United States and turned it into a theocratic nightmare, Offred (Fred’s handmaid—her real name is never mentioned) is pushed into service as a handmaid for a powerful family. Her main duties are running errands and more importantly, producing a baby for the family to raise.

The biggest problem with this book is that the characters aren’t fully developed. The reader gets some insights into Offred’s past, but a lot of it seems to have been forgotten. This is effective, because it shows how the government has managed to repress even a strong woman like her. But the other characters show no real personalities. Offred’s master and mistress, who have more freedom to do what they want, are dense and unpredictable.

But even in Offred’s memories, characters like her husband, Luke, and her mother seem empty. Her mother is the worst—she’s almost a caricature of a 1970s second-wave feminist, with views so extreme she almost comes across as a parody. It was a sour note in what is otherwise a very good, very feminist book.

The Power of Words

As soon as I started Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, I knew it would be something different. It’s narrated by the personification of death, who decides to tell the story of a girl growing up during World War II because simply because it moved him.

Death, as a narrator, is surprisingly gentle. Death simply does what he has to do. He even shows pity and genuine affection for some of the people whose souls he collects. Since it’s World War II, he’s incredibly busy, but there’s something about Liesel Meminger’s story that draws him in and makes him want to share it.

Liesel is almost 10 at the beginning of the novel, when her mother takes her and her sick younger brother to a poor Munich suburb to live with a foster family, the Hubermanns. En route, her brother dies, and during his hasty burial, Liesel steals her first book: The Grave Diggers Handbook. That book is as dull and depressing as it sounds, but Liesel gets her foster father to help her read. Papa reads with her every night, and she soon moves on to stealing whatever books she can find.

Hans, her new Papa, is gentle and plays the accordion; while Rosa, her new Mama, hurls noisy insults at Liesel as her way of showing affection. Though the adjustment is difficult, Liesel becomes a part of the family.

The Hubermanns’ generosity goes beyond taking in Liesel. Later, they agree to hide a 24-year-old Jew named Max, the son of one of Hans’ old friends. Liesel and Max grow close in their time together, exchanging books and drawings. The books help Liesel understand what’s going on around her. Words and books, she realizes, are incredibly powerful, and can be used to good and for evil.

As Liesel gets better at reading and writing (and stealing) she comes into her own, going from a nervous 1o-year-old to a self-confident 14-year-old. She needs that self-confidence, because this is not a cheerful book. As the war goes on, friends and neighbors go off to fight, and bombs start falling on Himmel Street. Liesel is an independent, well-developed and believable character, and it’s an absolute delight to watch her grow up. Despite all the horrors going on around her, there are lots of sweet and sometimes funny moments between her and her family and friends. I was sad when the book ended, not only because, well, the book is sad, but because I liked Liesel and I wanted to keep reading about her.

Zusak’s Australian, with German and Austrian parents, and Liesel’s world is vividly depicted. Zusak generally foregoes long descriptive passages, instead dropping in quirky comparisons like calling Rosa “a wardrobe of a woman.” All these offbeat details add up to make Himmel Street feel real. In the setting and subject matter, though not necessarily in the writing style, The Book Thief is reminiscent of some of Günter Grass’s novels, like Dog Years and Cat and Mouse.

This is a young adult novel, although it was apparently marketed to adults in Australia. Regardless of who its intended audience is, it seems like it would have near-universal appeal. It doesn’t feel at all juvenile, though it’s fairly easy to get through.

Zusak takes a lot of risks—there’s the decision to make Death the narrator, and his tendency to digress from the narrative to share facts and anecdotes. Zusak doesn’t shy away from peppering the book with German words, offering translations and plentiful context clues. It’s clever and original and most importantly, moving.

One Day We’d Be Fighting In A Suburban War

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is essentially a long treatise on death and environmental psychology, but he’s managed to make it hilarious.

Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies somewhere in Middle America, but he can’t even speak German. His life, at least superficially, is the 20^th century American ideal. He lives with his third wife and their various children in a comfortable suburban existence. While he’s studying Goebbels, his family is being indoctrinated with a different kind of propaganda—consumerism. (One of his daughters, when in a state of shock, recites car models as a sort of mantra. His son constantly spews random factoids he’s learned on television.)

Though the book starts as a satire of American family life, the Gladney’s world is shattered when an “airborne toxic event” happens after a crash on a nearby railroad track, forcing an evacuation from their home and exposing Jack to toxic chemicals—ones so mysterious and new that doctors can’t tell him what will happen. After the clean-up, the Gladneys return home, but Jack becomes more and more obsessed with his own impending death. Complicating things, his wife’s odd behavior sends him on an almost Kafkaesque search for a mysterious psychiatrist who’s pushing drugs that, ironically, are promoted as a solution for all the problems Jack is facing.

While a lot of the book deals with Jack’s psychological torment, DeLillo’s at his best when he’s observing the weirdness of modern life at its most mundane. The supermarket is full of elderly people who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows. Some people are too small to reach the upper shelves; some people block the aisles with their carts, some are clumsy and slow to react; some are forgetful, some confused; some move about muttering with the wary look of people in institutional corridors.

Passages like that don’t seem new or insightful, but they capture the emptiness Jack and his neighbors are wandering through. DeLillo infuses everything with his sardonic sense of humor but he doesn’t tell jokes, just observes people’s idiosyncracies.

I’ve read two other DeLillo books, both of which dealt with the same themes. His newest, Point Omega, is written in a sparer, bleaker style. Underworld (which I loved) was in many ways White Noise on a larger scale, with the same observations of pop culture and postmodernism stretched over several decades and several plotlines.

Though White Noise was written in 1984, it doesn’t feel dated—it’s an America of shopping and mindless television and antidepressants. The Gladneys’ world is entirely familiar. There isn’t much of a plot underneath all the disjointed episodes, but it doesn’t matter, since it’s about confusion and alienation.

There’s a lot crammed into this book, throwing the reader into the same fog that Jack lives in.

Lost In A Book

It starts with “Once upon a time,” but at least in the beginning, The Book Of Lost Things avoids feeling clichéd. From the very first page, John Connolly had me captivated as he told me the story of David, a young boy who loses his mother and becomes obsessed with books. The setting is London on the eve of World War II, and David’s world is turned upside as his father remarries, his stepbrother is born, and the family moves out of the city to avoid the bombing.

The first few chapters are absolutely delightful, though sad—Connolly’s narration is pitch-perfect, to the point where I heard the whole thing in a warm, English movie narrator voice.

Then, suddenly, David gets transported in a magical fairy tale world, where a war is brewing between the king (who came from David’s world years earlier), and an army of wolf-human hybrids. There a knights, trolls, dwarves and mysterious creatures, and David wanders through the world trying to meet the king, only to find himself followed by the mysterious villain, The Crooked Man.

David’s new friends, a woodsman and a knight both recite fairy tales to David, stories that seem familiar until they’re abruptly flipped on their heads. Connolly does a good job taking the old familiar tropes and turning them into something darker, in which characters don’t live happily ever after because they’re too busy being ripped to shreds, or doing the ripping.

Some of the details in the magical world are great: an evil huntress who kidnaps children is terrifying, the Little Red Riding Hood tale that begat the Loups is  disturbing, and a group of Communist dwarves is almost Pythonesquely funny.

But between all the charming and funny details, there isn’t much of a plot—most of the situations David finds himself in seem too easily resolved (except when they’re too confusing), and the ending is too predictable. Though I loved the beginning of the book, parts of it felt tired and clichéd. Some of the characters feel like they’ve been dropped in from other books.

One of the clichés Connolly could have updated was that of the wicked stepmother, and other female villains. Female characters do not come across well in this book—for the most part, they’re either evil or waiting to be rescued. (David’s real-world stepmother is the exception: she seems to be a perfectly decent woman, but we only see her through his disapproving eyes.)

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which I read earlier this year. Both are about young people from our universe who get transported into a fairy tale one, a common enough plot. But what sets the two books apart from others is that they subvert the fantasy world into something much darker, more disturbing, and funnier. Connolly uses more traditional fodder for his stories, basing them on stories like those of the Brothers Grimm, while Grossman nods to more recent authors like J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis.

The Book Of Lost Things feels like a kids’ book—entertaining, engrossing, and quick. While it didn’t always feel original, it’s fun, escapist read.

Getting On The Bus.

My initial reaction to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was “This book is so 60s.”

Then I stopped and thought about it for a moment, and realized that since almost everything I know about that time comes to me through pop culture, the book actually just reinforced the preconceived notion of hippies that I already had. The notion I had involved a lot of drugs and ridiculous clothing and good music and semi-coherent rambling about enlightenment and politics. So does this book, and Tom Wolfe does a great job of taking all that stuff and turning it into something not only coherent, but also extraordinarily entertaining.

Basically, this book is colorful and fast-paced and I barreled through most of it over a weekend. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun with a book.

What initially drew me to this book was that it’s largely about Ken Kesey. He wrote two of my all-time favorite books, the more famous One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and the superior Sometimes A Great Notion, both of which I’d like to re-read sometime soon. While I was familiar with Kesey as a writer, I didn’t know much about Kesey as a person, and this book offers some insight.

Shortly before Sometimes A Great Notion was published, Kesey and a group of friends bought a bus, painted it with Day Glo paint, and started driving from California to New York. They start calling themselves The Merry Pranksters and they invent nicknames for each other, but there’s no real plan. Kesey, charismatic and impulsive and articulate, is the unofficial leader, and everything falls apart later in the book when he flees to Mexico to escape drug charges.

Because there’s no plan, this book doesn’t have a real narrative. It’s just two years in the lives of Kesey and his followers. Wolfe himself does a good job of keeping himself out of the story and just focusing on the Pranksters. It’s not clear how much of the story is fact and how much is Wolfe filling in the blanks with his own ideas of what happened, but the book works seamlessly. He’s a detached observe, a Southern gentleman in a white suit tagging along with the craziness, but he barely even appears as a character. He’s on the outside of the group—he just documents the Pranksters’ activities, though there are hints of cynicism about the hippies’ experiments.

Wolfe plays around with language to try to convey their outrageous experiences, and while the stylistic switches can be jarring, it just adds to the effect.  PASSAGES:: ARE WRITTEN:: LIKE THIS!!! while others are poems. Shazams and bangs and booms and other sound effects abound, and the whole book feels like it’s pulsing and flashing in a million different colors. This is a great example of a book that actually achieves that “you-are-thereness.”

Though I’ve been meaning to read this book since high school, I’m glad I waited to read it. I’m old enough to realize that driving around with all my friends on a bus doing drugs is not necessarily a good idea. I was actually a bit disturbed by the way the Pranksters got so caught up in their ideas and keep reinforcing them without questioning anything—groupthink, which can make people do all sorts of dangerous or evil things, or in this case, just silly ones. “Everything was becoming allegorical,” Wolfe writes, “understood by the group mind, and especially this: ‘You’re either on the bus… or off the bus.”

The book lags in places, and I admit I started losing interest toward the end, despite all my enthusiasm. But there’s something in here for everyone—this is a historical document, a travel book, a drug manual, a Kesey biography, a journalist and literary experiment. And above all, it’s fun.