More on Barnes in a bit, because I want to begin by acknowledging some losses: Gordon Phinn and David Menear.

I published two of David’s short stories in The Danforth Review: Picasso in Prison (2013) and Ragged White Ice (2017). David passed away earlier this year at age 72, according to a note left on his Facebook page by his daughter. I understand he had a career in advertising and in retirement turned to other creative pursuits, including acting and writing. His book Swallows Playing Chicken was published in 2019 by Mansfield Press.

Gordon had many books related to psychic activity, but I knew him as an engaged reader and critic of Canadian literature. I first met him in the early 2000s at a Toronto Small Press Fair, where he was selling his non-fiction chapbook, which included an essay on John Metcalf, which I asked if I could re-print in The Danforth Review. Gordon agreed I could. Gordon also published via Amazon this other Canlit critical summary: Bowering and McFadden: A Short Critical (and Shamefully Incomplete) Appreciation of their Contributions to Canadian Literature (2020). Gordon drove a bus for a living, but his mind was boundlessly elsewhere — and an autodidact I couldn’t help but admire. The last time I saw him he told me how he’d just shared time with Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. I wasn’t so sure about that, but there’s a good chance they’re jamming now. Gordon passed away on April 4.

*

Okay, now Julian Barnes, who remains with us, though he’s just published what he says will be his final book, Departure(s) (2026).

I saw Barnes once, probably in 1992, at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. I pick that date because that was the year his novel Talking It Over was published in Canada, and it was one I read. I remember him as dry, witty, perfectly British.

Subsequently, I noted Barnes when Martin Amis dropped his agent, Pat Kavanagh (Barnes’s wife) in 1995, a story Slate revisited in 2023 after Amis’s death. Barnes and Amis had been long-time friends. After the events of 1995, they were no longer. In Experience (2000), Amis notes his letters to Barnes at the time are the property of his former friend, though the copyright on the contents remains with him. In Departure(s), Barnes writes that Amis once told him that “life is thin gruel compared to literature.” Barnes says he disagrees.

An Art/Life moment.

Along with reading Departure(s) (by audio), I decided to also take in a Barnes title I had long meant to get to, A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989). I’m glad I did, though it wasn’t at all what I expected. What did I expect? I wasn’t really sure, except I for sure didn’t expect repeated references to Noah and the flood. Nor did I expect to find a reference such as this one:

The Canadian writer Marvis Gallant put it like this: ‘The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature — or for love, for that matter.’ When I first read this, I gave it in the margin the chess marking ‘!?’ indicating a move which, though possibly brilliant, is probably unsound. But increasingly the view convinces, and the marking is changed to ‘!!’

Having read Departure(s) before A History, it was odd to find Gallant’s brilliant quotation, or the rest of that paragraph, because it so well summed up Departure(s): the voice, the sentiment, the surrender before the unknown. Both Departure(s) and A History, of course, are categorized as novels. Fiction. Yet, the veneer between the narrator and the author is thin. In Departure(s), the narrator is called Barnes and has Barnes’s life, though let’s acknowledge that the two may overlap, but they remain separate. More or less.

In Departure(s), the narrator Barnes offers a summation of his life, while also telling us the story of a couple he met a university (whom he introduced, in fact) who decided upon graduation to break up instead of get married. Decades later, the man in the couple asked the narrator Barnes to help re-introduce him to the woman. He does, and soon, they do — marriage, this time. Barnes is glad to have them both back in his life. He has a unique role in their love connection and soon is their mutual confessor.

The woman tells him she’s likes his books, but not the ones with magical bits. Stick to the real, please, she asks. The real is mysterious enough, he agrees. He no longer much cares what people think of his work. Old grievances, he can’t even remember. He promised not to write about the couple, but of course he does. We’re reading about it. The couple didn’t survive their second attempt any better than their first. Who could say why? Not Barnes, not even Gallant!! (Literature — and love — is safe, surely.)

Departure(s) is perhaps not major Barnes, but it is a notable summation and coda.

Barnes entered the pantheon for me with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which I read for a course in literary biography as part of my MA, University of Toronto, 1995. Ostensibly a biography of French writer, Flaubert, told via the story of his parrot, the book contains such rich layers of storytelling and irony, it struck me simply as genius. Though I remember one of my classmates, who had attended Harvard, didn’t like it at all. He was of the type of reader Barnes assigned to the woman lover in Departure(s). Not one to take pleasure in magic. #SAD

A History does indeed include 10-1/2 chapters and offer a history of the world, of sorts. It might be more accurately described as a series of linked short stories — linked by theme over time rather than events or characters, though, as noted above, one character does repeat: Noah. If the Bible story is taken at face value (please done), then Noah is father of us all. His story also includes the promise that the world will not again be destroyed. The rainbow tells us so. Barnes manages to find echoes of Noah’s tale throughout the centuries, often in the oddest of places. The book begins with a voice of a creature who stowed away on the arc, a creature small but undescribed, who tells “what really happened,” especially to the magical creatures (who were tasty to Noah’s family, let’s just say).

Barnes’s deep intelligence shines through in A History, though I’d still mark Flaubert’s Parrot above it.

I have a number of Barnes’s books on my shelf that remain unread — for now — but two I’ve read that I want to note are The Sense of an Ending (2011) and Levels of Life (2013). Both of these, by my count, are 10/10. Levels has magical elements, reader, beware lol. My Goodreads review of Sense is short and to the point: “Bought this book in Heathrow airport, London, UK. Finished it somewhere over the Atlantic.” Five stars.

My review of Levels (from my blog, Underground Book Club, June 3, 2013), which I, however, only gave three stars on Goodreads, was somewhat longer:

Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
Random House, 2013

"Early in life," Barnes writes, "the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still — at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) — it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross."

He also writes, “There is the question of loneliness.” Then a few sentences later, “Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.”

Together, these quotations seem to beg the question, Is loss of a spouse like a return to adolescent confusion?

Yet, he is unambiguous. Adolescent loneliness is the worst.

Before I address this question, I should say something about the book as a whole. It is slim, a mere 118 pages. A quick read, it is divided into three sections. Ostensibly, it is about grief; specifically, it is about Barnes’ grief for his wife of 30 years who died in 2008, after a 37 day illness. Cancer in the brain.

But to say the book is a memoir would be mistaken. It is part memoir, part essay, part fiction. The three sections are titled: The Sin of Height, On the Level, and The Loss of Depth. Levels of life, as the title says.

The balloon on the cover is another hint. There is a survey of 19th century balloonists, and also 19th century photographers. This is all interesting, well told, precise in description, alert in metaphor, and … all preamble to Barnes’ use of the first person to describe his experiences following the death of his life-partner.

"There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process; yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical — and vertiginous — while mourning is horizontal."

Me, I like this distinction. Grief has nausea; mourning, sadness.

Let’s get back to the question of adolescence, which Barnes doesn’t develop, but which I would like to push deeper. In my own case, as my wife approached death (and I mean her final months, so there was a period of extended awareness of doom many times longer than Barnes had), I had feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. When you are living with the awareness of doom, yet trying not to be consumed by doom, you focus on the day-by-day. Watch the flowers grow. Take pleasure in the laundry. The future goes blank. You cannot plan. You cannot take for granted that you will be together six month from now. Maybe not even two months from now. “I’ve been here before,” I told Kate. “I know this feeling. I feel twenty-two again.”

History did not record what she said in response. I don't remember. I don't think she said anything. "Do whatever you need to do, honey," or something along those lines.

The future, then, was blank. Full of possibility, yes, but blank. Lonely, too. One quests for love, to relieve the loneliness. Having found love, one can always lose it. It is part of the marriage contract. One must go first. The marriage contract becomes a caregiver’s contract. I will look after you. I will not abandon you.

Barnes writes, “There were 37 days between diagnosis and death.” In my case, there were 21 months. Grief is not competitive, and I don’t mean to be stern; however, the structure of this book is limiting, where it could be broadening. Barnes is careful to say each grief is specific, each experience is unique, yet the book reaches for general conclusions also. Levels of life.

I was not married for three decades, yet I inherited two step-children (and a new partner in her ex-husband), and the future is blank. Full of possibility. It must be. The children demand it so. As they should.

At one point, near the end of Kate’s life, I was speaking to a psychologist. She asked me how I was doing. I said I was listening someone compulsively to the music I used to listen to when I was 15 years old. I told her that for some reason I felt it important to reconnect with that adolescent. He had the whole world in front of him. He had all of his options open. I needed to live like that, I said. I needed to be ready for anything, and I trusted my 15-year-old self to get me through it. She was disagreeable. “We’ll see how that goes,” she said. I would like to report now, in that regard, things went just fine. I have been horribly, horribly sad, but I survived adolescence, and I’ll survive this. (At least, until I don’t. Time comes for all of us.)

I would have liked to have seen Barnes develop this line of thought (find arguments that contradict his absolutes), yet he is fanciful and metaphoric, an auteur, and, let it be said, brilliant. Earnest to a fault. Besotted with love. A true hero. Bravo.

I saw him once, at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. Late-1980s I would guess. It was the slightest of connections, yet I bleed for him, having read of his heartbreak. I wish him happiness, and healing laughter.

Keep passing the open windows, Julian. You know what I mean.

I also read a pair of books by Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (2024) and Twilight of Democracy (2020), which I mentioned here.

Here’s a list of the others:

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

• What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025)

• Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh (1990)

• Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas (2003)

• The Final Days of Socrates by Plato (400 BC)

• Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (1976)

• Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (2026)

• And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs (1944)

• The Women by Kristen Hannah (2024)

• 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England (A Very Very Short History of England) by Ed West (2017)

• The Plague by Albert Camus (1947)

• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

• The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer (2025)

• Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (2025)

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)

• The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876)

It’s an odd list, I agree. These are odd times.

Reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853), by audio, completed an assignment I’d been given in the fall of 1988, ENG 201. I started the book back then. The Penguin Paperback edition is 1017 pages. I decided the Coles Notes version, along with my lecture notes, would get me through the exam. It did. I remembered exactly two things about the book: it rotated around a densely complicated and seemingly unending legal case — and one of the characters spontaneously combusts. Yes, poof! Fire! Dead! These two things were indeed in the book, but there was also much else, many, many, many characters, multiple subplots, endless Victorian handwringing about social mores here, there, and everywhere. The central plot, though, was surprisingly simple — and rotated a girl and her fortune. Will everything turn out all right for her? I shouldn’t give it away, but of course it does. The pleasure in this volume of Dickens — volume as in book and volume as is, well, volume — is in the chattering classes, the vast array of characters, the light humour, the driving quest for turning events toward the right, ultimately, all wrapped in solid Britishness, the common sense of the common people, and all of that. Though it’s money, of course, that matters most, but Dickens wouldn’t put it that way. Too crass. I can say I’ve done it now. Won’t ever again.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025) is the first McEwan title I’ve read. In the past three decades, he has had any number of popular books which I have completely ignored. Probably I had a bias against them, thinking they were too “traditional,” but I’m less prejudiced now against any type of type type type, and I certainly found this new McEwan book to be fantastic. I read it as a comedy, which is probably not how most people would read it. Consisting of two separate but connect long sections, the novel imagines a world roughly a century in the future, post nuclear war, post environmental catastrophe, where literary studies continues and a scholar, in what’s left of England, specializes in the era 1990-2030. One of the most fascinating manuscripts from this era has never been located. It’s a long poem that was read out loud once, existed in only one copy, and was written by one of the leading poets of the era. This poet is imagined by McEwan, but he is said to have been of extremely high status. The poem was dedicated to his wife and read at her birthday party, then presented to her and all other copies/drafts destroyed. The only “readers” of the poem were those who attended the party, and their memories of it — recorded unsystematically a century before the action of the novel — are inconsistent. The poem becomes a kind of holy grail for literary scholars, such as McEwan’s protagonist, but contemporary readers will, of course, be perhaps most profoundly struck by the world of the future — so destroyed, so fragmented, so unlike our own, except so like our own in some ways. Undergraduates still have no interest in the past. Infidelities still happen. Competition among academics is still driven by jealousy and measured by who control the department’s budget. Reading the views of our own age filtered through McEwan’s imagines point of view of the future is rife with ironies, sharp and delicate. It’s all very funny, in my opinion. Then the second half of the novel is a reading of a found manuscript, memoir of sorts written by the recipient of the famous poem, the wife of the poet. No need to reveal anything more, except that things, you won’t be surprised to learn, aren’t what they seem. Deep talent is required to pull of all that McEwan pulls off here. Bravo to him.

Various personal interests pulled me to pull up Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh (1990), Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas (2003) and then The Final Days of Socrates by Plato (400 BC). I have a daughter studying Classics with a side interest in Buddhism. As an undergraduate three decades ago, I decided Plato was not for me, but I wanted a refresher. He’s still not for me, but I understand him better now. Peace is Every Step is welcoming, reflective book. I listened to it in audio format, and it was calming.

As a teenager I found a used, tattered copy of Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953), but I never read it. It was one of the titles I said I would get to eventually, and that eventually was now. “Traditional” in form, the novel is pristine in prose and narrative. The novel tells the story of a Black family, its multigenerational secrets and conflicts, the multigenerational effects of slavery and the Reconstruction failures in the USA. Besides being a terrific stylist, Baldwin displays delicate understanding of human beings and the subtleties of relationships, the pressures to belong, the pressures to succeed, the pressures to remain right with the Lord. A classic for sure, this one.

Reading Tom Robbins after James Baldwin is some kind of contrast, let me tell you. I remember folks reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (1976) in the residence back in undergrad days. I retained some curiosity about the girl with the big thumbs. This book, however, does not hold up. Yes, there are humorous bits, a Vonnegut-lite tone, progressive positioning, but there is also a lot of mid-1970s yuck. Hard pass.

Re: Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (2026), y’all will have to wait. I reviewed this for the Miramichi Reader. Stay tuned.

I discovered that Audible includes free titles, and one of them was And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs (1945; 2008). Having never heard of this one, I was curious. The book was written by Kerouac and Burroughs in alternating chapters, and it’s not difficult to figure out who did what. The book was written roughly a decade before either of these Beat writers became famous, but it shows early inclinations of their style and obsessions. It is based on real events that happened in the social circle in New York that Burroughs and Kerouac were travelling in. It also includes, notably, homosexuality and bi-sexuality, in a matter of fact way within the passages written by both authors. The novel was written to be marketed as a “hard boiled” mass paperback, though it was turned down by publishers. It is a kind of On the Road (1957) without the sweeping Romanticism of Kerouac’s breakout work. Hippos also includes a murder. On August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer and disposed of his body in the Hudson River. Kerouac and Burroughs were familiar with both the victim and the murderer. Hippos finds the writers addressing those events — and the context around them. It was eventually published by Grove Press in 2008, concurrent with the audio release.

The Women by Kristen Hannah (2024) is a book club book, and the book club hasn’t met yet, so I’ll just say I enjoyed it as a reading experience well enough. It is a straight-forward traditional style and form novel about a military nurse who went to Vietnam as a youthful idealist and returned a hardened veteran, only to be marginalized, ignored, and misunderstood — both by the back-home crowd and by other Vietnam vets and the military establishment. She is told repeatedly, for example, that “there were no women in Vietnam.” Obviously, not so — and the path for recognition, respect, and healing is a long one. The novel naturally splits into sections for medical combat service and the return to the home front. A new take on the Vietnam War — and America’s failure to get real about the costs of its warmongering generally.

Re: 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England (A Very Very Short History of England) by Ed West (2017) … What let me to this title, I’m not exactly sure, except it popped up a suggestion on Audible, probably because I downloaded titles on John Milton, etc., so I decided to give it a go, and I’m glad I did. I definitely learned a few things, though West’s tone is light and quite frequently sarcastic. From the point of view 1,000 years past the events described, it’s easy to see where silly decisions were frequently made, leading to the collapse of Anglo-Saxon England to the Norman invaders in 1066, the last time England has been successfully invaded, so it’s quite easy to poke fun at the failures of leadership that led to that “disaster.” Yet what fascinated me was how often England was successfully invaded prior to 1066. The Danes and other Vikings tromped over England, Scotland, and Wales for centuries, so much so that England was practically a Danish colony. Who knew? Not me. West may need to revised his book, however, given BREAKING NEWS that “New research upends history of battle that doomed the last Anglo-Saxon king” (CNN, March 23, 2026). Perhaps Harold wasn’t so dumb, after all, just unlucky.

Two titles by Camus: The Plague (1947) and The Stranger (1942). Camus is so ubiquitous that one has the sense that one understands what the Algerian was all about even though one has never completed any of his books. How fun to write about oneself in the third person, haha. Um, okay. Now I have read them, and they were pretty much as expected. Folks were returning to The Plague during COVID, and I can see why. The way Camus’s plague unfolds is eerily similar to events in 2020. How did he know? What I appreciate about Camus, is the stripping away of sentiment and the presentation of events and human motivation in a direct, minimal manner. The narrator of The Stranger is the classic example. His universe is narrow, but his perspective is objectively sound. Okay, so, mostly. He sees himself and his relations with others within a narrow framework. His understanding of the motivations of others is equally narrow. Is his perspective truthful, honest? Yes. Is it complete? No. In truth, the world is broad, mysterious, not narrow and objective. Yet, like Beckett, Camus achieves profound results by sharpening focus. Uneasy classics, here, both of them.

For a palette cleanser, I turned to The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer (2025). I saw this referenced in The New York Times and downloaded the book from Audible. You’ve seen the movies, you know the filmmakers, do you know the relationships? the mentorships? the interconnectedness of the leading dudes of the 1970s? I didn’t. For example, the book begins with a story about George Lucas winning a film school competition. He wins an internship at a major studio, except the only thing he’s interested in is hanging out with the animators, except there is no animation happening at that moment. Meanwhile, Francis Ford Coppola is making Finian’s Rainbow (1968) with Fred Astaire. Lucas couldn’t care less about the musical, but if there is no animation happening maybe he could shadow Coppola, who he’s heard of and is curious about. Coppola says, yeah, sure, and a friendship is born. Both want to make films outside the studio system, and soon they are making big plans. The extend of Coppola’s big plan making astounded me. His appetite is ravenous. His business planning horrendous. He makes tens of millions of dollars, loses tens of millions of dollars. Lucas — very surprising to me — is one of the original movers of “Apocalypse Now;” he encourages the screen writer; he wants to direct himself. Coppola scoops it away from him, casually. Lucas has a weird space muppet idea that no one understands until Star Wars (1977) explodes. By then, Lucas is building his own empire away from Coppola, who had his own box office explosion with The Godfather (1972). Little Stevie Speilberg catches the wave and explodes with Jaws (1975). Coppola tries to make Apocalypse Now (1979) as a quickie, and everything that could go wrong, plus much more, goes horribly wrong. Still, the movie gets made, released, and explodes. See also Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), made from documentary footage shot by Eleanor Coppola during the shooting of the original film. This parallel storytelling is essential to the story Fischer is telling, especially re: Coppola, because Francis’s domestic life is a bloody mess. Fischer tracks many parallel stories, telling the stories of not just the “big men” but also the web of relationships of wives and mistresses and various partners of all sorts, though his focus is on “the battle for the soul of American cinema.” I’m not sure this is what comes across, though. Because, yes, the studio system circa 1945-70 crumbles, and the 1970s includes the rise of the auteur filmmaker, but it also sets the stage for the sequel heavy blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond. If the soul of American cinema was found in the 1970s, it turned stone cold soon afterwards. But, still, there is a crack in everything, as Leonard Cohen told us: that’s where the light gets in. Carry on.

Oh, boy. Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (2025) excited me. I’ve read a number of Lockwood prose titles (though none of her poetry), such as No One is Talking About This (2021).

The ironic thing about No One is Talking About This is that many people are talking about it. The New York Times named it one of the best 10 books of 2021. It is certainly a book that responds to its time, crafting a voice that positions internet addiction as the primary mode of consciousness.

The line between what is real and what is mediated and/or imagined is repeatedly questioned.

What does it mean to live like this? the book forces us to ask. Then, in the second half of the book, the really real intervenes, the narrator’s sister gives birth to a severely disabled child, one unable to reach its first birthday. The attraction of memes fades rapidly.

Will There Ever Be Another You picks up where No One is Talking About This left off. The novelist/poet narrator’s sister has lost a child. Soon the novelist/poet narrator is infected with an illness (presumably COVID, though not named). The novelist/poet narrator starts having cognitive malfunction, presumably caused by the illness. No one seems to know what to do about it. How to be a novelist/poet without control of language? The novelist/poet narrator’s husband has a shattering medical event, and once again the novelist/poet narrator is contemplating the fragility of life and the trouble of language to capture meaning of any stable sort. The reader sympathizes, as the disjointed nature of the narrative is sometimes hard to follow. Carry on.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899) was another “catch up” book, unread during undergraduate days. Not one I was assigned and failed to read, though. By contemporary standards (see, for example, the Lockwood title above), Chopin’s tale is tame. It remains on the syllabus of Modern American Lit, though, for good reason. What’s most remarkable about it, probably, is its date of publication: 1899. The awakening in question is the awakening of an artistic ambition in the mind and soul of a southern belle, married, settled, and at the outset of the novel otherwise unremarkable. By novel’s end, however, she’s overthrown (however gently) her husband and other busybodies. Into the future she looks, in charge and accountable to no one but herself.

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876) was a random selection. I can’t remember what recommended it to me. It is a long one, but not so long as Bleak House LOL. Once again, here is an English novel concerned with the regulation of a woman. The book begins with the question of ought she to marry the man she loves. Her father is against it. Who is the suitor? Not a gentleman. He has a foreign name: Lopez. But the father relents, the marriage is forged, the new husband turns out to be even more malignant than the father could have imagined. Why is the book called The Prime Minister? Because in a parallel story, Trollope builds a narrative of intrigue around the Liberal Prime Minister, who leads a coalition government. There is an overlapping (financial) scandal involving the PM’s wife and Lopez. Victorian mores are reflected upon from this angle and that. This is my first Trollope novel. It reminds me a bit of Julian Barnes: a mix of the intellectual, the socially conscious, and popular entertainment. Very traditional, though, this one. Okay, as far as it goes.

The first is a novel, and the second is a memoir, but there is so much continuity between the two that it’s hard to distinguish. Nomi Nickel is the 16-year-old protagonist narrator of the novel. In the memoir, Toews reads letters written to her sister by her 18-year-old self. They could have been from Nomi.

The primary difference between the two books isn’t that one is about a 16-year-old and the other the life story of a 60-ish-year-old. The primary difference is the author’s father and sister ended their lives by suicide, and at the beginning of her story, Nomi’s mother and sister have walked away from home, never to return. Their disappearance is never fully explained. Her father, though, is on the scene.

Are suicides ever fully explained? In her new memoir, Toews is still grappling with that question.

“A truce that is not peace” is taken from an essay by Christian Wiman (“The Limit,” The Threepenny Review, 2001):

I’ve come to believe, and in rare moments can almost feel, that like an illness some vestige of which the body keeps to protect itself, pain may be its own reprieve; that the violence that is latent within us may be, if never altogether dispelled or tamed, at least acknowledged, defined, and perhaps by dint of the love we feel for our lives, for the people in them and for our work, rendered into an energy that need not be inflicted on others or ourselves, an energy we may even be able to use; and that for those of us who have gone to war with our own minds there is yet hope for what Freud called “normal unhappiness,” wherein we might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not “closure,” and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.

Toews quotes this passage in the memoir. As someone who has experienced profound loss and written about grief, I paused here because … this is very well said.

I will repeat this bit:

for those of us who have gone to war with our own minds there is yet hope for what Freud called “normal unhappiness,” wherein we might remember the dead without being haunted by them

Toews’s memoir is structured around a request she received to write a piece answering the question “What do I write?” She was invited to Mexico City to deliver her piece, but the organizers of the event rejected her contribution and rescinded the invitation. The memoir includes quotes long passages from letters 18-year-old Miriam wrote to her sister in 1982. They made a deal. Miriam would write and her sister would continue to live. Miriam continues to write. Her sister is no more.

After I finished A Complicated Kindness, I turned to the Internet. What’s with the title? I found the novel a bait-and-switch — I brought to it certain expectations and it turned out to be something else. That’s all on me, of course.

If you want to read the book, read the book, as Douglas Glover wrote.

I read the book and immediately fell in love with Nomi, of course. She is vibrant, vulnerable, funny. But where are her mother and sister? Surely by the end of the novel they will return and the family will be reunited?

Nope. The mother and sister disappear into a void, and the father starts to sell off the furniture and the general collapse of Nomi’s world continues. Except Nomi doesn’t collapse. She carries on until she is, in the end, the last one standing. Offered the opportunity to … do what exactly?

Leave. Follow her dreams, which are, in part, to move to New York City and find Lou Reed. In her dream, of course, her family come with her. In her life, her family leave her to settle her own future. It’s, you know, a complicated kindness.

None of the above makes any sense until you know the geography of the story, which takes place is a Mennonite-centric town south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the kind of place that demands conformity or expulsion. Grappling with the Mennonite inheritance has remained a constant across Toews career.

Here’s Nomi in full flow:

We’re Mennonites. As far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-set of people to belong to if you are a teenager. Five hundred years ago in Europe a man called Menno Simons set off to do his own peculiar religious thing… Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock’n’roll, having sex for fun, swimming, make-up, jewelry, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno.

Strangely, I know a thing or two about Mennonites — though of a different sort. Earlier today I visited my mother in her retirement residence, which was founded by Mennonites in east Toronto. There’s a library room off the common area with a shelf of books by “Mennonite authors.” Two of my books are on that shelf, even though the world in which I am considered a “Mennonite author” is extremely narrow. It may be limited to that bookshelf and this online list.

What happened? Well, in the 1970s my non-Menno parents started attending a Mennonite church, and I spent my teen years there, though my experience was nothing like the one outlined by Nomi Nickel.

In 1983, a year after Miriam and her boyfriend, Wolfie, were backpacking through Europe, trying to decide if they were going to be revolutionaries or artists, the residence where my mother now lives opened, sponsored by two Mennonite churches. I spent part of my teen years, weekends, vacuuming the hallways and cleaning toilets there.

Out of interest I asked ChatGPT “Is Michael Bryson a Mennonite writer?” The answer was WTF are you talking about?!

For which I am grateful, truthfully. I have some inheritance from those years, but nothing like what Miriam continues to bring to the surface. (Note: I have no idea what the AI is talking about regarding “items that appeared in Canadian Mennonite” also appearing in The Danforth Review. Um, nope!)

But enough about me, except full disclosure. Miriam moved to Toronto, and so did her mother, and her mother and my mother are now friends. LOL.

I haven’t written about Toews’s work before, though I did a piece here about the Women Talking film (2022), based on Toews’s book of the same name (2018). It has consistently remained one of the most popular pieces on this blog since.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that the narrative voice of the two books is similar. Of course, this might be because I listened to the author read both books, so the voice literally was the same voice. But what I mean, obviously, is the voice of Nomi and the voice of Miriam, especially young Miriam in the 1982 letters, overlap significantly.

In 1982, I was 14, Miriam 18, but the cultural references between line up surprisingly sharply. If we’d known each other in the 1980s, I would have seen Miriam as one of those older cool kids just as in her 1982 letters Miriam is looking up to her cooler older sister. She carries her sister’s LP for Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) across Europe. Nomi’s idea of Utopia is wherever Lou Reed is (New York City, obviously).

But the biggest shock to my system was to hear Miriam reference The Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks Fuck Off (1981). I’m not going to say I ever had this song on high rotation, but I had a roommate at university circa 1991 who did. Miriam ain’t restricted by the Menno boundaries listed by Nomi above. She fights with the boyfriend from Ireland to Italy in ways that are familiar. The boyfriend quote Kerouac’s “the only ones for me” passage from On The Road (1957). The great roman candle? Yep, I remember being entranced by that. Poor Wolfie, poor Miriam.

In the passage from “The Limit” above Wiman writes of “what Freud called ‘normal unhappiness.’” You may not be surprised that there is a Reddit thread dedicated to the question: What did Freud mean by that? Reddit leads with this bit from the master:

'…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.'

Common unhappiness. Regular sadness. Day to day life.

When you’ve suffered profound loss, frequently feel overwhelmed with grief, the promise of aw shucks, this sucks is greatly appealing. As it should be.

Normal unhappiness is actually a privilege. It’s okay to be not okay.

The self-help books won’t tell you that, but Miriam will.

It is a surprise, though, to consider that Nomi would conclude her journey with a landing pad shaped by a truce that is not peace.

What would Lou say? It’s all good, I’m pretty sure.

In one of Philip Roth’s novels — I’m thinking it’s maybe The Human Stain (2000) — Roth’s narrator drops in a quotation from a real world research article that concluded sadness in the state of normal. That is, psychology could not — should not — cure sadness. To do so, the narrator implies, would be to irradicate the human condition. Sadness is base reality. Awareness of loss. Awareness of death. Awareness of all that is fickle and unjust. Which is why I think it’s in that novel. Humanity is stained with imperfection, Roth is saying. Accept it. It’s not bad advice, IMHO.

If I have anything critical to say about A Truce That Is Not Peace, it might be that it feels incomplete. That is, there are levels of analysis that are hinted at but not developed. For example, at one point the author mentions being in a classroom of literature students — not unlike the classroom that opens The Human Stain, come to think of it — and one student tells her that her time is up. She should stop writing, stop speaking, start listening. This instruction is on theme, for sure, to the question “What do I write?” And the author rejects it; we have the book, obviously. But also she does not engage it as she might have, because it gets at a second question — not Why do you write? but Why don’t you write about other things? or Why is your writing world still so Menno? or Can’t you see what’s going on in the world? Have you nothing to say about — what’s out there, not just what’s in here?

Perhaps not a fair question, given the subject matter to Women Talking et al, but I would challenge the author to go big, go outward, more and more.

To be revolutionaries or artists? Young Wolfie and Miriam ponder the options. In the end, it seems neither is viable. Miriam gets a job delivering the weather news. She marries, has kids, loses first her father, then her sister to suicide. She writes.

Keep going. Keep passing the open windows.

Thank you, Miriam. Thank you thank you thank you.

Here’s a list of the books I’ve been poking away at since my last reading update:

• In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns (2025)

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Greed, Power, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Lynn Williams (2025)

• Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

• Poet of the Revolution: The Making of John Milton by Nicholas McDowell (2020)

• Self Care by Russell Smith (2025)

• The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones (1993)

• Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Janaway (2002)

• Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (2022)

• Jonathan Swift: His Life & Works by Leo Damrosch (2014)

• A Short History of Ireland: 1500-2000 by John Gibney (2017)

• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

• The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch (2019)

• Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1864)

One thing that ought to jump out immediately is the ENGLIT 201 quality of much of this list: Milton, Swift, Donne, Johnson, Boswell, Defoe. If we are going to go outside of England, Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, even that Barbara Kingsolver title, which is delightfully American, though also an update of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, which I made notes on earlier this year.

Not sure why that happened, exactly. One choice followed another, part of my ongoing quest to refresh, update, fill in the gaps of my ENGLIT education.

There are only two new CANLIT titles in the list: the new novel by Russell Smith and the new essay collection by James Cairns. Each of those is starkly contemporary.

Then there are the Americans: classic Fitzgerald, classic Jones (actually a re-read by me to support my post on 2011), and a devastating memoir about the enterprise known as Facebook. Plus, in the middle, a short history of Ireland.

All of the above represent each its own take on troubled times, otherwise known as the human condition.

All right. Let’s get into it.

In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns (2025) and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Greed, Power, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Lynn Williams (2025) provide takes on the world, here and now, broadly. Cairns is an Ontario-based professor, writing from a Marxist point of view. Historical materialism isn’t afraid of conflict, and Cairns certainly isn’t, but he’s often moderate. If the world is in crisis, what do we mean by crisis? Isn’t it often just the regular rough and tumble of life and history. He dismisses, for example, moderate perspectives of Trumpian chaos by arguing that neoliberal chaos was no better. In comparison to the broad historical perspective he often provides, he tells tales of his blackout drunk alcoholism, which started in his teen years and extended through his PhD. Sober, as of the writing of the book, he dismisses the 12-step process; as a Marxist, he recognizes no “higher power,” just the force of will. The mix of world-historical and personal-confessional doesn’t always mix well, but he has a lively mind and “shows his work.” Essays originated in the French “to try,” and try he does, rewarding readers with the effort.

Sarah Lynn Williams also tries, tries, and tries again to bring Facebook within a moral framework that lives up to her youthful idealism. Spoiler: she fails. A former United Nations diplomat for New Zealand, she pitches herself to Facebook in the earlyish days, arguing the company will need formal diplomatic advice as it advances its mission “to connect the world.” She is repeatedly rebuffed initially, then taken on, seemingly without clear purpose. Belatedly, she realizes the mission isn’t about connecting; it’s about becoming really fucking rich. Though Zuckerberg eventually sees the need for professional diplomatic advice, it isn’t in advance of Williams’ idealism. It’s in advance of Mark’s view of himself as the contemporary Emperor Augustus. You know, sometimes you need to enable a genocide, if you are going to ensure your brand achieves the global dominance you dreamed of back in your Harvard dorm. The Rohingya genocide is central to Williams’ story. The dumbed down Facebook platform in Myanmar contain none of content safeguards used in more developed parts of the world. The country had only two content moderators, and they were both in Ireland, and one of them supported the genocide. Google easily highlights the results in articles like “Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook Contributed to Genocide in Myanmar and Why It Won’t be Held Accountable” (Harvard Law School, 2021).

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones (1993) and Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Janaway (2002) can be swiftly dealt with. Thom Jones and his 1993 debut short story collection, especially the story, “I Want to Live!”, was the focus of my memoir of 2011. Schopenhauer features prominently in the Jones title, so I did a little refresher on the German philosopher also. Not a lot of it stuck in my memory, frankly, except much of it is grounded in pessimism (antidote to Williams’ idealism, maybe?), and also it highlights that meaning comes from the here and now. The character in “I Want to Live!” is dying of cancer, yet she has never felt more alive, for example. Awareness of suffering highlights the senses and makes one keenly aware of what is important. Life is a struggle, thus the admiration for the pugilist. He lived large, he lived on the edge of death. Some of Jones’ stories feature war in Vietnam or veterans returned to the home front. There is nostalgia for the arena of battle. Joyce Carol Oates was a fan. It’s bracing stuff, not for all readers, no doubt.

Okay, John Milton. One of the giants of English literature. In 1995, as part of my MA, University of Toronto, I read his so-called “free speech” essay, “Areopagitica,” subtitled “A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England” (1644). To print something, then, one needed a license from the government. Milton argued one shouldn’t need a license, because there should be a “marketplace” of ideas. Bad ones could be suppressed later LOL. The 1640s was the era of the English Civil War (1642-1651). What did I understand about that? Next to nothing. Into the breach, then, arrived Poet of the Revolution: The Making of John Milton by Nicholas McDowell (2020). This book, as the title suggests, traces Milton from his childhood through to his development as a major figure. He became an anti-Monarchial propogandist and, of course, poet and author of “Paradise Lost” (1667), which I still haven’t read. McDowell dwells less on the work and more on the influences and events that shaped Milton’s life. He also aims to correct earlier interpretations of Milton, of which there are many. I remain confused, however, as the social, political, religious pressures of the period are complex and swirl about. I would, however, recommend this book as a good introduction to the life of Milton — for those interested. More reading related to this era, at some point, is in my future.

Following my reading on Milton, I thought why not catch up on Donne and Swift? Thus, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (2022) and Jonathan Swift: His Life & Works by Leo Damrosch (2014). Of the three poets, Swift is my favorite, perhaps because he’s only minorly a poet and more often a prose satirist. Rundell’s book made some big noise when it came out. It struck me as competent and breezy. Donne (1571-1631) ended his life as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but interestingly (to me) he started his life as a Catholic, and his mother was a great-niece to Thomas More (1478-1535), who was beheaded by King Henry VIII, a tale recounted in the play, A Man for All Seasons (1960). More refuses to renounce Rome and loses his head; Donne does so with seeming ease and keeps his.

You may be more familiar with Donne as the writer of dirty poems, such as “The Flea”:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead

What I took away from Rundell is that Donne was an excellent self-promoter, great at delivering sermons, deeply wise (for personal advancement) about navigating the social, political and religious pressures of the age. And he had a dirty mind, which most folks didn’t realize until many of his poems were published after his death. Meh.

To be fair to Donne and Rundell, the author embraces a totalizing argument about Donne’s quest for the infinite. As Lara Feigel wrote in The Guardian (April 28, 2022):

In embracing infinity, he [Donne] turned eternity into a mathematical concept, and there is pulsing excitement to his quest for this quality, which runs through his writing about sex, death and God – his three great subjects. To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now.

Swift (1667-1745) is the one I had the greatest relationship with previously, though what had I read by him. Nothing I could remember. Yet, what kid doesn’t know Gulliver’s Travels (1726)? And what undergrad doesn’t cross paths with “A Modest Proposal” (1724)? I even knew that Swift spent time (1694) in Kilroot, Antrim, which includes a graveyard with my 4th-great-grandfather, James Bryson (1770-1832) and other related kin. It doesn’t appear Swift crossed paths with the Brysons. In any case, Wikipedia reports his time in Kilroot was no party: “Swift appears to have been miserable in his new position, being isolated in a small, remote community far from the centres of power and influence.” The Brysons were also Presbyterians, and Swift had no time for them, concentrating as he was on working his way up the Church of Ireland hierarchy. He is remembered, in part, for his Irish nationalism, but his roots — and his thinking — are largely English. He ended his career as the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He was less successful in his career management than Donne, but mostly because he was perpetually writing satires, usually anonymously, poking at the absurdities of everyone around him. Reader, I quite liked the guy.

Following Swift into Ireland led me next to A Short History of Ireland: 1500-2000 by John Gibney (2017). I’ve got a grip on 20th century Ireland, I think, and a general sense of my own family’s history. My great-great grandfather Samuel Bryson (1823-1879) of Kilroot, Antrim, arrived alone in ~1840 in what would later become Ontario, Canada. The family line can only be traced as far back as James, above (1770-1832), but what can be presumed is the ancestors crossed the Irish Sea from Scotland at some point, perhaps in the 1600s as part of the Plantation of Ulster. It’s possible future research will reveal more details, but currently those facts are lost to the fog of time. What is known is that they were tenant farmers, not land owners. None seem to have distinguished themselves in the annals of history. But what is the history? Again, I was curious to find out more. Here I was again, back to the time of the English Civil War and its aftermath. What is the short history of Ireland, 1500-2000? Conflict, conflict, conflict. Perpetual pressure from the English Crown, or in Cromwellian times, just the English state. That said, Gibney tells the story of significant inter-relationships, arising out of medieval times. There is much brokerage and competition for power and land, leading eventually to the emergence of the Irish Free State (1922-1937) and current Republic and separate jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. This separation, obviously, didn’t exist when my Samuel emigrated nearly 200 years ago. Though Northern Ireland is where my mother was born, so there’s that. LOL. What I liked about the Gibney book was its broad scope, its, erm, swift pace, and how it ended each chapter with a summary of the competing opinions of various historians. This is how it should be done, I think; with recognition, even celebration, of the polyphonic conversation. I’m ever more curious about Irish history now, too.

I was quite taken with Damrosch’s take on (and approach to) Swift, so I looked for another title by him and found The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch (2019). Johnson was another throwback to my MA. I spent a half-term reading him and wrote a paper about his notable dictionary (1755). In the social and political conversation between Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), Johnson was reliably conservative, but he had a progressive view of language. In France around the same time, for example, a dictionary of the French language was being written that would codify the meaning of words once and for all. Johnson didn’t see language that way. He knew the meaning of words evolved over time, and he sought different sources for words and highlighted how they could mean different things at different times. His common sense approach remains in use today, as does the conflict between different views of language and meaning: stable or in flux. A lot of The Club is spent on the lives of Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell (1740-1795), a womanizing, aristocratic, bad lawyer, over talker and over drinker, reliable journal writer — and author of Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which relies heavily on Boswell’s daily journal that captured Johnson’s many verbal bon mots and secured a place in literary history for Boswell, Scottish rogue. But what is The Club? A regular social gathering, organized by invitation, to men of the age, who included Adam Smith (moral philosopher and economist, 1723-1790), David Garrick (actor and theatre producer, 1716-1779), and others. Yes, the book is a portrait of “the Age,” keeping Johnson and Boswell at its centre. Damrosch is an honest historian; he does not just focus on the men; he comments on what their perspectives would have excluded, notably the women. Johnson, who had women friends, comes off far better here than Boswell, who had many dalliances and regularly engaged prostitutes. Indeed, Boswell’s poor character kept many details from history for many, many decades, as his family for multiple generations kept his source journals from public view. They also kept his portrait in the attic for many generations until, Damrosch notes, one great-granddaughter brought it out for display so guests could take pot shots at it. Generously, it now has a home in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.

Reading about Swift and Gulliver, I thought to check if the Toronto Public Library has this Defoe classic as an audio book: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719). They did. It was an, erm, swift read. This is another story often absorbed in childhood, as it is often echoed in the broader culture.

More significantly, I have in mind that J.M. Coetzee has returned to the Defoe story multiple times, notably in his 2003 Nobel Prize lecture, which was actually a short story written in the voice of Crusoe. As an adventure story, Defoe’s novel is compelling; as a cultural artefact, it is so much more. It remains shocking to me to read of slavery referenced so casually, for example. Coetzee’s interest in Defoe is integrated with interests of his own work: one of his novels is Foe (1986), which like his Nobel piece re-treads the ground of Defoe’s work to examine and undermine the nature of storytelling. In particular, the confrontation between Self and Other. Is any stable description of this encounter possible? As the 21st century deepens, this question remains ever relevant. (See also Dionne Brand’s brilliant 2001 take on Coetzee and related topics in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.)

My thoughts returning to Dostoyevsky (who I wrote about here earlier this year), I sought out what might exist at the Toronto Public Library and found an audio version of Notes from the Underground (1864). Years ago, I’d attempted to read this, and it stopped me cold. This time, I found it fascinating. Told in the first person, the novel is a confessional, early modern recitation of alienation. The protagonist could well be a contemporary anti-vaxxer — also a critic of the techno utopianism of the AI boom. Which I guess means Dostoyevsky was onto something here, anticipating the culture, articulating its conflicts, and demanding accountabilities, as much as art can or should. Kundera dismissed Dostoyevsky because he thought it shouldn’t. I think it should only if it reaches open-ended conclusions: the conversation must always continue.

Moving on to Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934) is perhaps a dramatic shift. I also got this audio title from the Toronto Public Library, but I had to wait six months for it. By contrast, there was no wait for Dostoyevsky. Fitzgerald remains popular in the Six, anyway. With this title, too, I had attempted to read it years ago and given up. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it this time either in the opening pages (minutes?). Idle rich, young, beautiful (white) Americans lolling about Europe in the 1920s, oh, the Jazz Age, the … barf! And yet, something interesting started to happen. Conflicts and context emerged. The protagonist and his inner narrative became more defined, grew in focus. Dick Diver (terrible name) is described in the Goodreads summary as “a brilliant young psychiatrist” and “both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own.” There are parallels here to Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda Sayre (1900-1948), though Scott was no psychiatrist and one wonders about his choice of lifestyle. Certainly Zelda came from money and demanded Scott provide her with a standard of living she expected, but I’m uncertain how well the biographic parallel holds. In any case, as the novel progresses Diver descends into his own private hell, as his early promise is withered away by alcohol and a failure to ground his personality. He has it good, does he not? So, what’s the problem? Entropy, perhaps. Decay. Collapse. The Underground Man would have an opinion. There is much Fitzgerald lightness in this book, but none of the lyricism of The Great Gatsby (1925). Gatsby had a tragic ending, but Tender is the Night is brutal. I didn’t know Scott had that in him.

Speaking of brutal (I mean this in a good way), holy shit to Russell Smith’s new novel, Self Care (2025). Just look at the cover!

I have read all (or at least part of) each of Smith’s novels as well as his short story collections. I thought I’d written a review of Confidence (2015), but I only wrote a brief response on Goodreads: “I don't think of Smith as a short story writer, but I admired his first collection, and this one might be the best he's ever written. A darker book than he's done before, too. Comic, but unsettling.”

My only other comment about Smith has been one I’ve repeated verbally many times: “We could use more novels like Russell Smith's How Insensitive (1994).” The opening sequence of that novel will live rent free in my brain forever. Certain sequences of Self Care probably will, too, but for different reasons. The darkness I picked up in Confidence is full blown in the new novel, which could be described as a noir take on Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is an incel and Juliet has given up on romance.

The emotion this novel provoked in me was simply sadness. Here’s the plot (circa 2020s Toronto): two twenty-somethings cross paths, hook up, break up. There’s some spoilers I’m not going to give away. Gloria has a weekly column for an online publication. Perhaps she once wanted to be a journalist, instead she is a content creator of clickbait. Often she writes about sex and the social customs of what one well-placed joke in the novel calls the “wokerati.” She has a couple boys for sex on speed dial, one of whom chokes her even though she’s told him repeatedly not to. He says it will help her come. It doesn’t. She can’t come because she’s on anti-depressants. Daryn has a retail job in the suburbs. He’s deeply lonely, paranoid, and misogynistic. Gloria sees him at an incel rally and is drawn to him. Perhaps she can write a column about him. How do incels get so fucked up, anyway? Quickly, she’s no longer interviewing him, she’s brought him home, fed him, and instructed him to peel back his underwear and lie still on her bed, his erection throbbing, his voice pleading.

Yes, there’s some S&M elements here. Daryn quite likes being bossed around. Gloria gets more sexually excited than the choking ever provoked. What future can these two have, though? Within every scene is the threat of violence. Suicide is never far away, close to their circle and within the downtown creative class. Early in the novel, Smith sketches out the social conflict between the so-called woke literati and the reactionary forces symbolized by the incels. Ultimately, though, he doesn’t get deep into it. I detect no theory about the “man crisis.” The conflict is ultimately embodied at the interpersonal level by Gloria and Daryn, but one wonders where Smith’s satirical dagger is pointing. There is “a plague o’ both your houses” sense here (Mercutio, Act 3, Scene 1):

Tybalt, a kinsman of the Capulets and cousin to Juliet, is dueling with Mercutio, a friend of Romeo from the Montague family. Romeo and Benvolio attempt to break up the fight. Mercutio, distracted, does not see his opponent and is fatally wounded by Tybalt under Romeo's arm.

Reconciliation of the polarities, as in Shakespeare, proves impossible, and neither side is redeemed. Violence and destruction, viewed retrospectively, appear inevitable. While the novel depicts genuine moments of human connection, they are fleeting — often undermined by fear, miscommunication, weak and distracted senses of self. The cover of Self Care might be the sharpest image of distraction I’ve ever seen. The novel presents an image of something sharp, too. Of what, though, I’m not sure. Strangely, there are echoes here of both Tender is the Night and Notes from The Underground. The specifics of 2020s Toronto may matter less, ultimately, than the long arc of alienation between the sexes and misplaced idealisms and anti-idealisms (that is, hopes of transcendence and blame narratives for blocking the same).

What’s so crazy about peace, love and understanding, hey? Try a little tenderness!

The biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025), is the latest reframing of The Boss, following the release of Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run (2016), and subsequent Broadway one-man show (2017-21), released on Netflix (2018).

The image on the movie poster is the Bruce we know: guitar in hand, hand raised, band leader, crowd pleaser, rock and roll icon. The character in the film, though, moves heavily against this perception.

He is solitary, lonely, uncertain of his place in the world.

The film opens with Bruce completing the final show of the tour to support The River (1980). The crowd is roaring, the band in full glorious power rock. He walks off stage.

“Great show, Boss!”

He heads to the dressing room, alone. Where is the band? The contrast is immediate and dramatic. The crowd pleaser can’t please himself. He is drained, pushed back on his own resources, which are few.

He may be The Boss on stage, with the band, in the eyes of fans, the record company, the media, but what’s really going on is something else. This pulling back of the curtain is what Springsteen has spent the last decade unveiling. He isn’t who you think he is. Well, he is that — but he’s someone else, too. A man with chronic mental health challenges. He’s depressed, medicated, reliant on “professional help,” which is the plot point this movie leads to (not a secret reveal). The story of the movie isn’t where it goes to; it’s how it gets there.

As the movie opens, Bruce has just had his first top 10 hit (“Hungry Heart”): What next? Bigger and better!

Would you believe a solo album recorded in his bedroom on a four-track machine incapable of studio quality sound for which he would insist on no publicity, no tour, no singles? An album of stark, lonely, sometimes creepy songs featuring Bruce, harmonica, guitar, nothing else?

The album, of course, is Nebraska (1982), just re-released with additional material (2025).

Bruce came into my consciousness with the release of Born in the USA (1984), which spawned seven top 10 singles. I was 15. I believed the hype. The Boss with his 3+ hour live shows, working man ethos, truth teller, charismatic superstar. Also, maybe the fittest man in show business with his bulging biceps and hours-long fitness routine. A dude who made it, stayed grounded, had it all.

This is where a Bruce biopic might be expected to end — with the rock star achieving the summit. Dylan’s biopic, A Complete Unknown (2024), climaxes with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with the folk star breaking into loud rock and blues rhythms. Get out of my way, here I come!

Deliver Me from Nowhere, however, is based on Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (2023). It moves against expectations, doesn’t launch the star into the heavens, and instead forces audiences to consider the recesses of Springsteen’s brain, his violence-filled childhood, his alcoholic father, and a darkness that has spread far beyond the edges of town.

In other words, it takes a world-dominating charismatic word-spitting protean artistic superstar and makes him nearly inarticulate and — small.

What’s going on here?

First, the movie relies on audiences already knowing the Bruce myth. He is huge, he is on a roll, he is unstoppable. If you didn’t, then the Bruce character’s trip into isolation wouldn’t seem nearly as strange as the filmmakers need you to believe. The film doesn’t set up the contrast between the two Bruces nearly enough. If you didn’t know Bruce, you wouldn’t know this Bruce.

Probably because, second, this depressed, isolated, darkness-filled storytelling Bruce isn’t such a surprise. He had previously released an album titled Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), after all. Even Born to Run (1975), that ode to the open road, contains these lyrics: “this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap,” “baby I’m just a scared and lonely rider,” and “everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide/together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness.”

Everybody’s got a hungry heart, right? Everyone feels the pull of the dark.

But not everyone goes so deep down the rabbit hole.

It is perhaps interesting here to remember Kurt Vonnegut’s story diagrams, because what we’re considering here are plot curves. A Complete Unknown introduces the orphan (not really, but Zimmerman says he’s Dylan, educated at the circus and all of that, so orphan), who rises to fame, encounters headwinds, then overcomes the assholes and triumphs. Deliver Me from Nowhere introduces the superhero, The Boss — which he is called throughout the movie, but never earns the title; why would anyone take direction from this loser? — and immediately drops him into a pit of despair from which he only starts to emerge as the movie ends. The Bruce here is like Kafka’s protagonist in The Metamorphosis (1915), awakening to discover he’s a cockroach, a plotline Vonnegut gets to about the 7:00 minute mark.

Which brings me back to Springsteen’s self-demythologizing project.

He doesn’t want the cape; he wants us to know him, flesh, blood, and pharmaceuticals.

He’s not a working class hero, that was his dad.

The only job he’s ever had in his life was musician.

He may be The Boss, band leader, but he signed his record deal (1972) as a solo artist and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999) that way.

Which to me is the most curious thing.

Bruce is only The Boss if he has a band to lead, and I’d like to see the movie about that. For example, Clarence Clemons (1942-2011) was furious that Springsteen would enter the Rock Hall the way he did, without the E Street Band, who entered on their own (2014), but after Clemons’s death. Springsteen addresses this in Born to Run (2016), but the separation and reconciliation (or whatever) between The Boss and the Band of Brothers is the mini-series we all need.

Nebraska (1982) is part of that story. The band version of the album, Electric Nebraska (2025) has only just been released! The perfectionism that kept Springsteen focused on his bedroom recordings — and obsessed with “that sound” — also nearly caused him to toss the master tapes of Born to Run (1975) because he thought they weren’t good enough, were too …. well, something.

Artists, man. Lighten up? Hit the couch?

Or just power on?

Both.

I dig the self-conscious Bruce, don’t get me wrong. He’s done the work — reflecting on his life, his work, his purpose, his creative process, his choices, his path to sanity. His masculinity.

He’s provided a fantastic model for men to follow. Those who dare.

(And thank you to Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, for voicing “you need professional help,” and having the leverage, personal and professional, to make it happen.)

But is this quiet reflective depressive dude more real than the star-studded onstage marathon man?

He contains multitudes, surely.

*

A couple links to articles that expand on the context of Deliver Me from Nowhere and Nebraska, the album and the song, which was based on the film, Badlands (1973):

Bruce Springsteen’s Father Complicates a Powerful American Narrative, by Mitchell Duneier, New York Times, Nov 8, 2025

“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere”: Tamps Down the Boss, by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, Oct 23, 2025

Warren Zanes Interview (author of Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska), WTF Podcast #1436, May 18, 2023

Bruce Springsteen Interview, WTF Podcast #773, Jan 2, 2017

*

But what to say?

Frankly, the book was pretty overwhelming. It contains a chorus of voices, a wild array of characters, shocking violence, extended internal essays and arguments via dialogue. There is a lot going on — on multiple levels. The plot is generally straightforward, though it digresses frequently. There are three brothers born to a boorish father, who is eventually murdered, but why who? and why?

Yes, there is an overlap in theme with Crime and Punishment (1866). I’d listened to that a couple of years ago, and also read J.M. Coetzee’s novel on Dostoyevsky, The Master of Petersburg (1994). I tried to read Notes from the Underground (1864) once, but didn’t get far.

In any case, I felt prepared to take on Brothers, but I was still surprised by its chaotic energy and — contemporary feel. It turned me to thinking, what would a book with lots of dialogue about our current social conflicts look like. Would it not look a lot like Dostoyevsky’s achievement? Entitled capitalists (err, aristocrats), an itching roiled underclass, moderates perhaps spiritually guided attempting to rise above it all?

Into this line of thought arrived the confrontation between Erza Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates (New York Times, September 28, 2025).

I really need to say this over and over again. I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence. I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they said.

But if you ask me what the truth of his life was — and the truth of his public life — I would have to tell you it’s hate. I’d have to tell you it is the usage of hate and the harnessing of hate toward political ends.

Then let me flip that question a bit. Why are we losing?

We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.

See, that feels very fatalistic to me.

It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth.

They’re talking about Charlie Kirk, but really what they’re talking about is how to be, how to engage with those you disagree with, how to work towards a better future, how to build coalitions to make that future possible, how to live alongside people who will never agree with you and never be part of your coalition.

Dostoyevsky’s novel does not speak in these terms, but it revolves around those concerns. There are three brothers of a chaotic father. One goes around saying he wants to murder him. One is saintly, monkish, church-involved, gets along with everyone including the father. The third is caught in the middle, feels torn apart trying to balance it all. Dostoyevsky’s position is solutions are only possible via God. Readers, however, will find themselves captured by the homicidal charisma (and inner vulnerability) of Brother #1.

As I considered my thoughts on Brothers, I was grateful to see The New Yorker (October 21, 2025) publish an essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard on the novel.

“The Brothers Karamazov” is a collective novel—it is about the profusion of voices, how they are intertwined and, though they themselves are unable to see it, how they form one whole, one connection, one chorus.

…

One of the insights of “The Brothers Karamazov” is that identity is a social construct, and part of what the novel rebels against is the notion that man is sufficient unto himself. Hell is isolation; heaven is fellowship.

I like this quotation very much:

It is as if the essential thing about “The Brothers Karamazov” is the experience of it, the feelings it generates in the reader, and this makes it difficult to write about. The moment one steps out of the novel and describes it from a distance, by saying, perhaps, that in a fundamental way it is about freedom, and that in a fundamental way it discusses morality and obligation—to whom or to what, if to anyone or anything, are our actions obligated?—the essential thing is lost from sight. Freedom, morality, and obligation are ideas, abstractions, and if this novel is drawn toward anything it is to the place where ideas and abstractions dissolve into life. If it does battle against anything, and mightily, it is against whatever is fixed. Whatever has been determined once and for all. Whatever is predefined. Therefore, there is no privileged point of view or privileged perspective in the novel. Its meaning arises out of dissonance, which is the place of voices—between people, not within them—and it is always ambivalent.

And ambivalence is overwhelming, yes?

Our world is full of competing claims of “privileged perspective.” Social media has made this worse, making minor differences seem monumental, undermining claims of common humanity, basic decency. Those differences have always been there, and always will be, but only in times of crisis are folks required to choose sides, pull up the barricades, refuse all truck with others. And perma poly crisis is our world now.

Or is it?

Is 2025 different from 1880 in its sense of “world falling apart”? And the options in response to it?

Another title I recently read it James Cairns’s In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (2025), the author’s take on crises person (e.g., his own alcoholism) and also political, social, economic, ecological — and definitional. What is crisis anyway?

Cairns is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at the Wilfred Laurier University. He writes from a Marxist perspective. He does not find the crisis of Trump any more troubling than the crisis of neoliberalism.

Crying crisis is a weapon in battles of interpretation that frame standards of success and failure, inevitability and openness, heroes, villains and horizons of possibility. Understanding how crisis is used in public debate will strengthen our interventions in struggles defining the shape of the future we want and how to build that future.

Political consultants often say a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Put another way, a narrative of crisis is necessary to transform political systems (or public sector operations). The bigger the perceived or asserted problem, the more radical the recommended or imposed solution. Brother #1 gets that. The father Karamazov is beyond reasonable. One plotline has Brother #1 and the father competing for the same woman, for example. Who is going to claim her? They both do. So, who will she choose? The father for his money, it seems. Brother #1 schemes: how to get some money or get rid of ol’ dad? Or just suffer and self-destruct?

The therapeutic advice would be, step back and breathe. Establish strong boundaries. Confront with I-messages. Cultivate a problem-solving environment. The novel does none of these things. Instead, primal desires collide left and right. Oh, the drama. Cue the philosophical reflections. Appeal to the divine.

Knausgaard argues Brothers addresses one question.

What are we living for?

“The Brothers Karamazov” seeks the answer in the little life, among the small people, in the frail, the fragile, the fallible, the failed. If, contrary to the nature of the book, I were to attempt to sum up in one sentence what it is about, it would have to be a quote from a conversation between Ivan and Alyosha: “Love life more than its meaning.”

What are we living for?

To read, surely.

In addition, this post struck hard this week….

Cultural Capital

The dawn of the post-literate society

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one…

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7 months ago · 4188 likes · 369 comments · James Marriott

I mean, look at this graph (taken from the post, which you should read for context and argument):

The post quotes Neil Postman from Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Keeping hope alive requires writing — and readers.

And publishers.

Here’s Ken Whyte recently about “Publishing’s Big Shrink.”

SHuSH, by Kenneth Whyte

Book publishing's big shrink

This is the 296th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button…

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7 months ago · 25 likes · 5 comments · ken whyte

In the US, book industry sales have bumped along from $26.5 billion in 2008 to highs over $28 billion and lows close to $25 billion, landing in 2022 at 28.1 billion. I’m grateful to my friend Thad McIlroy (read him at The Future of Publishing) for the chart below. At first glance, it looks incredibly stable, almost a straight line over fifteen years. But that’s without accounting for inflation. The starting point below is $26.5 billion in 2008. That $26.5 would be about $35 billion in today’s (or 2022’s) dollars. So really we’re looking a decline of 19 percent.

Keep on reading in the free world, folks!

Here’s some new book reviews from me since the last update, all from the Miramichi Reader:

• Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum (2025)

• The Story of ii’ taa’poh’to’p: University of Calgary’sJourney Towards an Indigenous Strategy (2025)

• The Beauty and the Hell of It by Lynda Williams (2025)

• The Gales of Alexandria by Ehab Elgammel (2025)

• The Blue House by Sky Gilbert (2025)

• Soroka by Corin Cummings (2025)

Other books I’ve read since the last update:

• Red Rising by Pierce Brown (2014)

• There is No Blue by Martha Baille (2023)

• Remembering by Sinead O’Connor (2021)

• Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018)

• Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney (2021)

• The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (1995)

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2014)

My response to the Rooney and James novel is here.

My response to Dostoevsky I will do separately, later.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James left me speechless. I thought it was a backstory on when Bob Marley got shot (1976), but it was so much more. I listened to it as an audio book, which was probably the best way to receive it, because the book is told through different sections in different voices. It’s like an oral history, the Kingston gangsters, the Rolling Stone journalist, the CIA operative, the young woman who gets caught up in way more than she ever expected. The Marley near murder happens near the middle of the book. What else can possibly happen that is more dramatic? I wondered. Nothing is more dramatic, but the aftermath ripples and ripples and the breadth and depth of the story becomes mind-boggling. The book was awarded the 2015 Booker Prize.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is another very long book that I listened to as an audio book. For all of its heft, though, it does not linger in my memory as a book of depth. The characters are memorable. Cute. There is plenty of gentle humour. It is a life affirming tale. Oprah liked it.

Remembering by Sinead O’Connor got me remembering Sinead O’Connor (1966-2023). Her first album, The Lion and the Cobra (1987), didn’t make an impression. It came out the year I graduated high school. But her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (1990), with its cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compare 2 U,” was unavoidable. As was her October 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a photograph of the Pope. Her memoir is written in two sections, coinciding with two periods of writing separated by a number of years. The first section leads up to October 1992 event, detailing her childhood and rise to superstardom. The second section is a thematic summary of everything that happened afterwards — the destruction of her superstardom, to her great relief, and her haphazard life, which she filled with music, children, men, and spirituality — leading eventually to her conversion to Islam. Along the way, she says, really, she ought to have been a Priest, but that wasn’t an option for an Irish girl. Yes, along the way she was wild, crazy, often out of her mind. Those are her words. There’s one full life. RIP.

There is No Blue by Martha Baille is also a memoir. In this case, the writer tells the tale of three deaths: her mother, her father, and her sister, who ended her life by suicide. Along the way, Baille, based in Toronto, unfolds the story of her family and presents a haunting picture of the weight of being the one left behind to make sense of it all. This is, foundationally, a brave, direct, soulful book, which is at time difficult to read as I’m sure it was at times difficult to write. But Baille looks clearly at the facts and shows her work as she tries to sort out what she knows, what she doesn’t, what makes sense, and what she will likely never be able to understand, as gaps remain, and sometimes all that’s left is the irrational truth that things happened. A tough one.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown was a book club book. It’s not one I would normally pick out, but it was an interesting detour. Set in the future on Mars, where an underclass of people (the Reds) are enslaved by an elite (the Golds). From the Reds emerges a hero, who sets out the right all of the wrongs. Much violence occurs, but the fascist overlords remain as the book draws to a close. It’s a series, after all. You didn’t think defeating fascism would be that easy, did you?

First, OG Beat Gary Snyder (1930- ) is still alive. I discovered this by reading a recent review of Snyder’s Essential Prose (2025) by James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement. The full review is behind a paywall, but here’s the bit that struck me:

In 1978, before the internet, he told an audience at Oberlin College that “monoculture” was “deliberately fostered. Any remnant city neighborhood … or farming community that ‘wants to stay the way it is’ are threats to the investment. Without knowing it, little old ladies in tennis shoes who work to save whooping cranes are enemies of the state”. For whooping cranes, substitute the pasture that lies in the way of the new road to the latest house-building target in your parish.

Maybe you know Snyder, maybe you don’t. Maybe you know him as the model for Japhy Ryder, Zen pioneer of Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958).

I knew him as an OG Beat and not much else. I first read Kerouac in a flurry in the late 1980s, and around that time saw Carolyn Cassady in Toronto. Then, as many do, I left them behind, seeking other influences.

But that comment above about “monoculture” made me pause. They were onto something, weren’t they? Little boxes, and all of that. It was a bit of a shock to be reminded what I felt I already knew, that our distraction culture didn’t begin with the Internet, and that the threat to, well, fertile culture, let’s just say that, isn’t (just) social media; it’s what Snyder says. The investment. The move to rub out all of the particularity of the different, the distinct, the local, and replace it with head office, mass culture, superstar, new highway, or nothing, broadband, in Synder’s word, monoculture.

Or as Kerouac says in On the Road (1957):

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

That’s the point of view of the young, for sure, and as I said I thought I’d left it (mostly) behind, but still there is the hunger for the authentic, for the real, for the off the beaten path, the under-appreciated, the lost, the marginal, the remnants. But not the nostalgic. Snyder says the ‘wants to stay the way it is,’ but I don’t read into that ‘the good old days.’ What I read into it is, our story is ours, not what is projected on us, or expected of us, from some corporate board room. Also, it’s what sustains us: the whooping cranes. The natural world. In Snyder’s terms, deep ecology.

But it’s complicated. I mean, I love my iPhone too.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” said Hunter Thompson, and I’ve used this quotation recently to help bring context to our moment.

I also found myself ruminating earlier this year about Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), which I read in paperback in 1991. I know it was that year, because it had a big influence on a creative writing project I did in my final term as an undergrad, spring 1992.

What I was thinking, circa 2025, was, we’re living in Vineland now. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one having those thoughts. This Substack crossed my path.

Gnostic Pulp

Pynchon is Everywhere, for Those With the Eyes to See

It began as a joke…

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8 months ago · 38 likes · 4 comments · Gnostic Pulp

Here’s a quotation from a related post:

Is that Pynchon’s hidden warning? That we, preterite masses, have been turned into slop-eating degenerate fools incapable of seeing who are true enemies are because we are too busy drooling over the slim waist and pretty face of Capital?

That’s a starker, uglier turn of phrase, but it also echoes what Snyder says, right?

Also, Brock Vond, the cop in Vineland, is a prototype for a character, a multitude of characters, that are currently in peak ascent. He seems, not so suddenly, everywhere.

Then this interview with Stephen Jenkinson crossed my path.

I’d never heard of the Great Simplification podcast, or its host, Nate Hagens, but I have long known of Stephen Jenkinson. The Orphan Wisdom website calls him

a culture activist and ceremonialist advocating a handmade life and eloquence. He is an author, a storyteller, a musician, sculptor and off-grid organic farmer. He is the founder/ principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. Also a sought-after workshop leader, articulating matters of the heart, human suffering, confusions through ceremony.

He once led the palliative care program at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, and there is an NFB documentary about him called Griefwalker (2010).

I first heard his name when my wife mentioned it to me in early 2012, when she was deep into her cancer journey and months away from dying. She’d heard a CBC radio program about Jenkinson. I listened to it. What I will never forget is Jenkinson comparing the fear of death to the fear of love.

To paraphrase: when you meet someone and you are taking the leap of intimacy to get close, to experience love with another person, you have to get through the barrier of your anxiety and fear. Death is the same way. Most people, he said, don’t actually experience death. They just experience the fear, because they won’t let themselves get past their anxiety and get intimate with death. Once you get through the anxiety, you realize there is nothing to fear.

Just that one anecdote has had a profound affect on my life, and it was also deeply practical advice to me and my wife, as she approached death. And then died.

In the interview in the above podcast, Jenkinson says similar things, but what jumped out at me here was the interaction between Hagens and Jenkinson about what Hagens called the approaching end of the modern era.

I need to sit with that for a while.

Hagens is working a theory that the systems of the modern world are approaching a crisis point. They are breaking down. Our era is ending, a new one is approaching. Within this context, there is, of course, loss and, therefore, grief.

At one point, Hagens asked a question about fear of death and fear of grief, and Jenkinson stopped him. Fear of death, yes. Fear of grief, no. What people have, he said, is grief illiteracy. They just don’t know how to do it. If they did, he said, they would see that grief is not their opponent. Grief is just what is.

Mourning is the verb, in Jenkinson’s view. Grief leads to an understanding of loss, which leads to the process of mourning. Which for profound loss, never ends. It becomes, just what you do. How you move through the world. How you carry the weight of it.

They talk about the anxiety about living amongst crisis, and more than once Jenkinson says he’s not convinced that anxiety is inevitable. That alienation is inevitable. Alienation from what? Jenkinson says “the divine,” but this doesn’t mean God or spiritual being, though metaphorically we can probably say, the Godhead. Or Gary Snyder would have some Zen language to insert.

What I take from Jenkinson, like in the earlier story I heard from him, is that if you can get past fear, you can experience the wholeness of the universe, the real, and experience a calmness, even as the world is falling apart around you. It also suggests you can unplug from the fear-based marketing that is trying to sell you products you don’t need for purposes that aren’t real in response to crises that are manufactured.

Tune in, turn on, drop out?

I’m been bouncing this point around in my head for a couple of weeks. Is this just a retread of the hippie dream, back to the garden? Does it have connections to the fascist vision of return to the good old days? Daddy’s home?

I quite like modernism, myself. I’m comfortable with alienation. I don’t want to join into the one-ness, Tommy-like, sure plays a mean pinball.

I would rather resist the pull of the divine. Skepticism feeds growth.

That’s more how I’m oriented.

But I like my garden, too. My backyard chipmunk. And this morning, skunk.

I like the human comedy, the whole mess of it. But confronting the real by escaping fear is groovy. And the fantasy of experiencing wholeness is tempting. Douglas Rushkoff wrote a recent post about how to help people make connections.

Rushkoff

Borrow a Drill, Save the World

I’ve been telling this one story a lot in my talks, but realize I never shared it right here at home. If you’ve heard it, cool - here’s an easy way to share it with those who you think might benefit or get a kick out of it. And if you haven’t, well, it’s become core to my…

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7 months ago · 66 likes · 16 comments · Douglas Rushkoff

Evading monoculture is a great, concrete goal, too. Like Snyder’s old ladies, save whooping cranes.

In the latter book, a character refers to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), so that’s where I went next. I wanted to test a theory, that Rooney is the contemporary James. What did I conclude?

I won’t leave you waiting, but perhaps wanting. I concluded, well, sort of.

Stylistically they have nothing in common. I have read a number of James novels, and they all leave me frustrated. I do not, repeat, do not like the rolling, clause-filled sentences and bulk out of every James narrative. The plot of The Golden Bowl could be a short story. Paraphrased, it’s quirky and fun.

An American woman, rich, in Europe, marries a non-wealthy aristocrat. She also helps arrange a marriage for her widowed father to an old female friend, also past acquaintance of her new husband. Unbeknownst to the daughter/father is the fact that their respective spouses are also lovers. These facts emerge out of fourteen-thousand set pieces, where the character talk-talk-talk about three million trivialities, until the scandal finally emerges and mercifully the novel ends.

I had a professor in university who once described a James novel this way: “The plot hinges on when one character turns to another and asks, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’”

Bingo.

Mercifully, Rooney’s novels are written in clear, direct prose, though there is also a lot of talking and misdirection and questions about social mores and customs. Here is where Rooney’s work is a lot like James’s. She has the pulse of the moment. She is capable of dramatizing its subtle contours. She can lead the reader through a lot of unease and resolve it, or not, without condescension. Her characters feel like people, contradictory, complex, yet outlined with distinct boundaries. They try, fail, try, succeed, try again. Every day is a new day, and it’s both easy and hard. Like life.

Normal People was excellent, and so was Beautiful World, Where Are You, but I’d give Normal People a slight lead. I know there are various complaints about Rooney’s work. I have read various commentaries over the years and picked up a general drift. The characters are too clever. The perspective is clinical, cold. They’re not really as good as everyone says they are. That latter one reeks of jealousy. Let’s wait 20 years and see if people are still reading them. For now, they’re stellar snapshots of the — now. Or, at least, the slightly receding past.

As I said, I started Normal People previously, and it didn’t grip me. This time, I had more patience and by the time I was halfway through I was ready to give it a gold star. Then it got better. Set in Ireland, it’s the story of a boy and a girl who meet in what in Canada would be called high school. She is deeply unpopular and socially isolated, though from a wealthy family. His mother cleans her house, and he goes to her house after school to pick up his mother. They start a clandestine relationship. They are both super smart and get scholarships to the same big deal university in Dublin, where they keep seeing each other but don’t commit to the boyfriend-girlfriend thing.

The novel covers the next several years, which brings them together and apart, with each other, and with other people. They are the deepest of friends, yet their love is, yes, complicated. How complicated is slowly revealed, as we learn more about her home family life, her nasty abusive brother, and her nasty diminishing mother. At uni, she sticks with one boyfriend who hits her — because she asks him to, though she’d prefer just not quite so much.

The articulation of domination/submission provides a frame to (re)consider the action from the start of the novel anew. When they reconnect (again), they try to figure out what this means for them. Violence isn’t what she wants, and he won’t hit her anyway. But their liaison circles around control. They are not in high school any more. Their lives have become as adult as they (be)come.

Is this Jamesean? Well, consider the plot of The Golden Bowl again. What was all of that talking about, anyway?

Beautiful World, Where Are You is also about young people making the transition from youth to adulthood. Oh, how boring! Why can’t we just stay young and have fun? No, no. This is a novel, not a dance number. Taylor Swift may find it easy to resolve past relationships, but Rooney refuses to. One might feel in the moment that you are never, ever, ever getting back together, but then — this is your soul mate, right?

In this novel, like The Golden Bowl, there are two couples. They don’t overlap as dramatically as in the James novel, but they intertwine. There are two women, two men. One of the women is a young, famous writer. The two women were roommates at university. They are, therefore, bonded for life, except life puts that proposition to the test, as it will. They each keep growing and changing, responding to new pressures and challenges. One principle challenge is finding love, intimacy, happiness, a male partner who fits.

The writer moves to a rural village, where she is definitely the oddball among the young people. She has a Wikipedia page. She hooks up, slowly, through fits and starts, with a local due who works in a warehouse. He’s street smart, earthy, empathic, couldn’t care less about her (so-called) fame, and bisexual. Somehow they are perfect for each other. Her ex-roommate, however, is on a more windy path.

The ex-roommate scrapes enough together for rent by working for a literary magazine. She breaks up with a long-time boyfriend, or rather he breaks up with her. she figures, thus, that there must be something wrong with her. Is she not loveable? Meanwhile, the (slightly) older dude she knew in her childhood, whom she fell into a massive obsessive crush with when she was 15, has remained in her orbit. After she hit the appropriate age, they became on-again-off-again lovers, never confessing that they should actually end up together. Until — no, I’m not going to give anything away.

Is this Jamesean? More surely, yes.

So, there you have it. In conclusion, Sally Rooney is the contemporary Henry James.

Sort of.

It has worked, more or less. I feel more cohesive to myself. Also, I’m okay with Art/Life. More, anyway. I’ve lost the need to choose. I hope I’ve also lost the need to search for a unifying theory. The bits are bits, the bobs are bobs. It’s all good.

So, I came to be looking through my Notes app on my phone, and I found a number of fragments, false starts, notes, whatever I made between 2018-23, and I’m going to post them all below. Some are Life. Some are Art. (For this blog, I gotta choose which, and I’m going with Art.)

These roses are from my garden. They’re a symbol here of pause, be in the moment.

Has it ever smelled as sweet?

All I’m going to say about the fragments, is the first one is the first one I encountered, and I knew it was a false start to a story never written, but it also seemed complete. Not all of the fragments below have that sense. Some probably have no sense. They are what they are. I’m okay with that.

*

THE FRAGMENTS

*

Dean got a job on a film. That’s how it started. He got a job and he was gone, suddenly, sometimes forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours or more.

“This is my chance,” he said, the first time he came back in the middle of the night, not to sleep, or even to talk to us, just to grab a bag full of clothes and a toothbrush.

It was his second chance, we knew, so we didn’t ask any questions. It was his dream, and he’d been so happy that first time, three years earlier, when his friend, Tom, had gotten him a job on set. We were never sure what it was, but he was gone only four, eight, six hours at a time, and he would come back because Gloria wouldn’t stop texting him.

Gloria. No one knows what happened to her after that last time she was in hospital.

*

Scenes

• Bring three books home

• Mindfulness class

• Mexico

• Sunny book waiting room 9 hrs, art book

• Sunnybrook emerg

• Final Sunnybrook

I don’t think we had outrageous expectations. We wanted to live, you know. Just live. Carry on what we had been doing, but together now. Nothing elaborate.

*

We drank a lot in those days, and I regret it, but the world was ending, and it didn’t matter that the prescription bottles said, “Avoid alcohol when taking this medication,” or “Alcohol enhances the effects of this medication,” or other such warnings. It didn’t matter. She was dying, and she died. The world ended. The alcohol didn’t stop that. Nor did the hydromorphine or the Percocets that preceded that. Nor did the radiation or the chemotherapy or the mastectomy or the mindfulness medication or the enhanced nutritional diet. The booze seemed to help, though. So did holding hands and butterflies and casting for sunfish off the dock.

*

Ninety per cent of life was negotiating the male ego. The other 50 per cent was dealing with female disappointment.

*

We drank too much in those days. I know it. I knew it then. I tried to talk to her about it, but it wasn’t something she could talk about. Alcohol, it was her comfort, her crutch, and it had been for a long time. She wanted to live her best life, and alcohol was part of that, made it possible, in many ways, or it felt that way, though it wasn’t true.

• why do I have to deal with everything all at the same time? (maybe easier)

• Book club drinking, delivered late, slept in bathroom, missed psyche appointment, MB called doctor, didn’t tell KO, then next meeting ... explosion

• I can quit any time I want - will for two weeks - not asking you to - just saying do less, you and me, together, but it wasn’t a together thing - next day called me at work, could I pick up something at the LCBO? Yes

• The die cast

• What’s it going to do? Kill me? (Give me cancer?) maybe did, impossible to say

*

Memoir

Lying on a bed in Mexico

Lying on a bed of Mexico

Stop

Marriage, the need to be gentle with each other, I can’t do anymore I don’t expect any more from you I love you

I know that I disappoint you but you did not disappoint me, this whole experience is too much for both of us

The cancer is your experience, but this whole experience belongs to us and it is terrible tragedy to our marriage

I know you want to focus on the moment but I have to plan for the future without you and all of the conflicts that are going to come, you know that I am a planner that we are planners and I can’t wait until the last minute

When the last-minute came there was no time for any of those things it was too late and she apologized to me

*

On February 14, 2012, Valentine’s Day, I was lying on a bed in Mexico, and telling myself I was lying on a bed in Mexico. I told my self this over and over like a mantra because it was a mantra. My wife and I were learning how to practice mindfulness meditation and I was putting it, I thought, into practice. Here I was, lying on a bed in Mexico, but my thoughts were far away, in the future, where my wife was dead and I was alone and living through many difficulties I was doing my best to anticipate, but we were in Mexico to get away from all of that, from her cancer and Everything associated with that. This vacation was our last gasp attempt to live a normal life, well past the time when our lives had stopped being normal. It was Valentine’s Day and we did not make love. I will remember that forever and I don’t know why we did not. For I loved her undiminished, but I was scared and I was tired and I was deeply deeply sad and it was affecting our intimacy and it was affecting my ability to feel close to her and also the cancer was in her spine and it was hard for her to move and I didn’t want to hurt her anymore than she was hurting already.

She died in May and we did have sex again but it became more and more difficult. Later her oncologist asked us when we were in the clinic if we were still having intercourse and it was painful to admit that we were not bad by then she was taking heavy doses of painkillers and physically changing dramatically

Or year or so after she died I had a dream where I asked her as I often ask myself is what is there anything else I could’ve done for you, and she said “yes, you could have asked me how can I give you pleasure? “And I woke up laughing because it was true that is something I could have done and didn’t think of, but it is the only thing that I have since she died thought of, everything else I could’ve done or thought or imagined or attempted I tried

*

Story fiction

She squinted and I knew that she was trying to decide if what I was saying was true, if she found me persuasive

I was just talking, not trying to persuade her, just telling her the story of my life using words that made the most sense to me, and I didn’t want to think about Whether I was persuasive or not

I hope she found the story interesting but I wasn’t interested in arguing but I could see she was sceptical and I didn’t know what to do about it

*

Land Acknowledgement

Story

*

Dream

A woman tasked me with finding someone she could marry. Sort of a dare - e.g., you cannot find anyone I would commit to for life. Long deadline. Lots of looking, lots of thinking. Who could it be, what would it take. Little known about this woman. She is real and identified, but also surrounded by mystery. Must be more to the story. Deadline approaching. Becoming clear that the only person, is me — and is this the answer to the riddle? Would I be able to identify myself? I prepare to identify myself, but first ask this woman — who are you? Is it Kate? As dream ends, it’s unclear.

*

My mother hates Germans. I learned this many years ago when I suggested we take a trip. One of those bus trips of multiple European countries. Or maybe it was a cruise down the Rhein. That part of the story I don’t remember clearly. What I remember is understanding immediately that she had a strong aversion to visiting Germany.

“You haven’t forgiven them,” I said, before I could think about what I was saying.

She was suddenly embarrassed, but she agreed. “No.”

I told this story to a friend recently. We were talking about memoir writing and our respective families. I was thinking about writing about my family, but I felt like I had many fragments of stories and no way to bring them together.

He asked for an example, and I told him, “My mother hates Germans.”

“Why?”

“They tried to kill her. Well, they tried to kill a lot of people. They bombed her.”

“They succeeded in killing a lot of people.”

“True. But she’s never forgiven them, and she never will.”

Later, I thought her anger at the Germans was related the end of her parents’ marriage. The Germans broke up her parents, because they were separated by the war, and they never property reconnected after the end of hostilities.

The hostilities never ended, really. They just became domestic.

It was a child’s logic, but in the 1940s she was a child. And who could say she was wrong?

*

*

“She had needs, but — I don’t know —“

She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

*

I made a mistake. It’s the one everybody makes. It was a risk, and I knew it, and I did it anyway, and later the doctor said, “You were lucky. Don’t do it again.” And I haven’t. Haven’t even thought about it, until suddenly I thought about it. The whole episode, but one moment specifically. I get these flashbacks frequently, spontaneously. Daily. This time it was that moment when I called my wife, my darling wife, and told her that I wouldn’t be coming home directly from work because I had blood in my ear. I’d discovered it on the subway and immediately disembarked at the next station and jumped in a cab, giving directions to the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. It seems to me now that that was ten years ago, give or take. I had cleaned my ear that morning with a Q-tip, and I’d ripped something, which had bled and scarred over during the day. On the subway on my homebound trip, I’d felt an irritation and picked at it with my finger, removing the scar and unleashing a fresh flow of blood. I still remember the shock I felt: “This is not good!” The Emergency Room doctor scolded me, and I admitted that I knew better. I was lucky. I felt relieved. I called my wife and told her: “I’m going to be okay. It’s all okay. I was lucky.” This is the moment I remembered, the moment at the heart of my flashback. My call to my wife, my most amazing and now deeply missed late wife. Kate. It is now seven years since the cancer took her, and what is a little blood in the ear? What is the point of a story about a mistake everyone makes and an admonition to be more careful in the future? It is the simplicity of the intimacy that I miss. Having someone to call. Having someone waiting at home, keeping supper warm, sharing the triumph that luck has held, even though I had done what no one should do, and everyone knows better to avoid, even though they do it anyway.

That right there is love, and I had it, and — here’s the point — it persists.

I had this flashback, and my heart swelled. Just for a moment, a fraction of a second, but I felt it, and I said, “Katie, I know you’re here. I feel you.”

I do that sometimes, speak out loud to her.

I used to have flashbacks about gory moments, like sitting with her in the hospital waiting room, waiting, always waiting, for the doctor, the nurse, the results of the blood test to see if she was well enough for them to poison her.

Lately, though, different memories are visiting me. Memories of intimacy. Small moments of comfort and connection, like the small moment that followed the revelation of my stupid ear-bleeding mistake.

• tomato photo

• Soup making

• Crab patties

• Hamburger making

Lying in bed last night, trying to get to sleep, mind drifting, I catch myself having a conversation with Kate. This is not uncommon, and the subject is not uncommon either. But what is the subject? The exact words are lost to me, but I remember that it was about the end, the last three months, what was happening to her, and what was happening to me. In real time, we talked about this some, but not much. What was happening to her, everyone focused on. What was happening to me, a few people asked about, but it wasn’t my time; it was Kate’s time; I would have time later to sort it out. That time is now, and, even seven years later, I’m still sorting.

Is this normal?

• caregiver support group

• psychiatrist

Dr Warr - live life three months at a time

KO - nope

but now I wish we had prepared

It’s where we became disengaged

I want a letter from her, wish she had left receipts

But of course she did, and lots

I want to walk down the street naked screaming: What and Why?!

Another of the Columbine kids committed suicide - the long legs of trauma

Dr Warr said, “Live your life three months at a time.” He did not say, “Prepare to die,” but he didn’t need to. We understood what he meant, and Kate was not prepared to accept it. Dr Warr said he couldn’t recommend any further treatment. He said there were options, if we wanted to pursue them, but he couldn’t recommend any, because none of them had sufficient evidence to support them. He stressed that he couldn’t say how long Kate would live, but take it three months at a time. He’d seen people in her condition live 15 months, or only three. It was impossible to say.

Kate said, Fuck that.

Bone scan - spine, results

What people want to know is, are you good? As in, “How are you doing? Are you good?” “Yeah, I’m good.” “Awesome.”

Is good as good as it gets?

No. Sometimes I feel better than good.

But good contains multitudes, and multitudes isn’t what people want.

Imagine, “Are you good?” “I have a rainbow of feelings.” “Um,...”

I decided when I was a teenager that I would not have children because life was hard and it would be wrong to perpetuate it.

*

“Ninety per cent of what a parent can give a child is provided in the first seven years of life,” the doctor said. The psychiatrist. We sat beside each other, Kate and I, in his office on one of the upper floors at Princess Margaret Hospital, the palliative care department. He was a young man, Irish, and it showed in the lilt of his language. He was younger than us, anyway, probably in his early thirties. He had a calm, professional demeanour, and he had just asked Kate what she worried about most. She was the one who was dying, but he was my doctor. She had called the hospital and arranged for him to be my doctor. She wanted me to be looked after, and she knew she couldn’t do it. For a year-an-a-half, she had been surrounded by doctors, and for a while we thought it was going to work out, she would live, but then it became clear that she wouldn’t. What did she worry about?

“My kids.”

They were then seven and eleven.

The doctor cited the latest child development research. The parent’s job is ninety per cent over by the time the child is seven.

On another visit, when we were alone, he asked me what I worried about.

“What is going to happen when she dies.”

“What do you mean?”

“I try to imagine it, and I can’t imagine it, and I worry I will be paralyzed.”

I told him that I kept imagine the funeral, and not knowing what I would say. I said I knew this was a pointless line of thinking, and I tried to push it away, but it kept returning.

He advised me to pull out a pen and paper the next time I found myself having those thoughts.

“The thoughts keep coming back because they’re incomplete. If you complete the thought by writing out something, really anything, then there’s a good chance that thought will leave you alone.”

So I did, and it did, but when I told Kate about it, she said, angrily, “Why are you thinking about that? I’m not dead yet.”

There was a lot between us unspoken. She was focused on living, and increasingly I was finding myself consumed with what would happen at the end. How would we survive that rupture, that transition, that horrible, horrible shock.

Kate couldn’t see it as an ending. She thought there must be more, and that she was going to a place where there would be other dead people, her ancestors and lost friends. Not heaven, exactly, but another dimension, but that’s not a word she used. It was just another place, a different place, and believing in it was useful to her, but I knew where I was going to be, and it was the same place where I was, with her, except she wouldn’t be there, and that would make all of the difference.

*

Mother - on regretting she couldn’t convince her mother to come to Canada

M - don’t you think she would have been miserable?

B - no

*

Sam Bryson story about the Squire - reflected through regret about immigration and what might have been back home.....

*

The Mall

That Saturday...

A shift from living in the moment to living across all moments

The mall isn’t what it used to be.

Hey Joe, where you goin’ —

—

Where you goin’ —

Don’t —

—

She stopped. Turned. Careful Josephine.

Frankie, she said. How many times —

—

And you —

The man pulled at his fraying grey beard, a wide grin exposing not more than a handful of teeth.

I’m not sorry —

She didn’t expect him to be, and this time at least he didn’t have his hand down his pants, but still she would expel him.

You’re banned, Frankie, remember? Two weeks. I don’t want to see your face. If I have to walk you out, it will be three weeks, starting today.

Or?

Five more days, she said.

Four —

Six —

Where you going with that gun, Joe?

That grin again.

I’ll give you three seconds to get moving, she said. One —

—

Two —

Okay, okay —

But he didn’t move.

Two-and-a-half —

He stood and took three steps toward the door, then paused as if considering his options, his head drooped, heavy. A shuffle step, then another.

Okay, okay, he said, walking now, his eyes on the floor.

She watched him

Looked down - cup full of urine.

*

Fear Not the Eternal Taboo

At the age of 43, I whispered in my wife’s ear that I loved her, I would always love her, we would be okay, and it was okay for her to go. I repeated these words on a cycle as life released her. She took her final breaths in a hospital bed laid out in what had been, only a week earlier, a living room at the back of our house. She had breast cancer for twenty-one months earlier, and it ravaged our lives.

And yet, it also taught us to focus on what was essential and live intensely — often happily — day-to-day. Or hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute. “You remember to enjoy every sandwich,” Warren Zevon told David Letterman, when the talk show host asked him what it was like to have terminal cancer. This became the spirit of our lives, too, as death approached, and we learned to accept it, so we could remain emotionally present for each other as the disease became increasingly cruel.

Something Stephen Jenkinson, a palliative specialist, said in an online interview was especially helpful. Accepting death is like falling in love, he said. There is much fear of the unknown, and trepidation about whether to move deeper into the experience or not. But when one is open to the experience, the fear melts away. And you are able to be fully present in the moment.

Five years later, my father passed away at the age of 79 after spending less than a week in the Toronto East General Hospital’s palliative care unit. As he lay dying, I found myself talking about my wife’s final days, over and over. Her death was the reference point for my experience of dying, but it was also more than that.

Walking with her towards the edge of the abyss, then watching her disappear into it, I experienced death as a process rather than as an event and acquired the special knowledge that comes from accepting death on its own terms.

How about a personal essay on the rewards I acquired, unexpectedly, after I came to accept the process of dying?

*

Raising Boys

“What did you think he was going to do with it?”

Frank bit the end off another carrot. In the old days beer bottles would have littered the table. “Black Label, remember that? When was that, late-80s? They had this noir branding. They were cool shit, right? You were cool shit when you drank that shit?”

Now they shared a bowl of almonds and a bag of carrots.

Sam’s wife, Jill, was out with their daughter, Gloria, shopping for a prom dress. On the counter the kettle began to boil. Sam opened the cupboard and took down the tea pot.

He lifted the lid and threw in two teabags — green tea — decaffeinated.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Nothing really. I thought it was important to him as a symbol.”

“A deadly symbol.”

“A symbol of danger. A symbol of power.”

“You weren’t afraid?”

“No.”

“You didn’t consider —“

“No.”

Crunch. Frank reached for another carrot.

*

A week earlier Frank’s son, Tim, had stabbed a boy. Another white boy, like him, thankfully. Non-lethally, thankfully. Not with the hunting knife Frank had bought him, thankfully.

Lucy, Frank’s ex-wife, called him with the news.

“‘Find lawyer, find a good one, find one fast,’ is what she said,” Frank told Sam.

She also said it better not have been with that knife. Frank didn’t tell Sam that. Or much else, initially. Details, immediately, had been scarce. The school had called Lucy. “An incident,” they said. What happened? They wouldn’t tell her. A call had been placed. An ambulance had come and gone. Police, too, taking Tim with them. Where was he now? No one knew.

Sam asked later. About the knife. That knife. It had been no secret. That knife, now in the back of a filing cabinet in Frank’s office in the dark corner of the Canadian Tire auto bay. Outside his door read, a grease-stained sign: auto parts manager.

“Why didn’t you throw it out?” Sam asked.

Frank said, “You can’t just throw out something like that.”

“Why not?”

“It was mine.” Everyone who knew about the knife, knew this.

“And?”

“I just couldn’t. Maybe later, but right then, I just couldn’t.”

They were out of carrots and down to 10 almonds. Sam’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at it, then showed Frank. Jill in her prom dress, sky blue, silky, simple, her left leg folded out the slit, her phone held at arm’s length, obscuring her face, all to capture the shining dress hugging her curves, her body.

“Wow,” said Frank. “Stunning.”

Sam turned the phone face down on the table. “We’re so fucking old, man. So fucking fucking old.”

*

I went to get my hair cut because I needed to get out of the house and because Kate, my wife, was going to die. The house was full of people, her family, my family. Days earlier, we’d had a hospital bed delivered and set up in our back room off the kitchen, beside the windows that looked over our backyard and Kate’s garden, her special place. I squeezed her hand and told her I would be back soon. I was just going out to get my hair cut. I was thinking about the upcoming funeral. I would need to look nice. I wanted to get out of the house, to clear my head, but I also didn’t want to have to get the hair cut later. I wanted to pretend it was a normal thing, because it was a normal thing, and through months and months of abnormal things, Kate had insisted, always, that we would continue to live our lives, normally.

An hour, maybe 90 minutes later, I returned home, and she beamed at me as if I had been gone a week, or a month. I don’t remember if she said anything, but her face lit up with pleasure, and a feeling stabbed me, a shock I will feel forever. The love she had for me was so raw and direct, more pure in that moment than it had ever been. Over the past week, she had become ever more ill, worse with each passing day, and I knew this was the approach of death, but it was not here yet, and we would not admit it until the final moment came. We would remain together, connected, until the instant, the second, we weren’t.

*

I don’t know why I always order the burger, he thought. They’re always terrible.

*

Surgery story - start chapter

The orderly came at 6:00 a.m. Thursday morning and said, “You can’t bring your glasses.”

“What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Do you have anything else?”

“My mother came and took everything yesterday, but I need my glasses.”

“Isn’t anyone coming this morning?”

“No, my mother came yesterday—“

I expected to be transferred to a new stretcher, but the orderly had pulled me out into the hallway in front of the nurses’ station on the stretcher that had been my bed for the past five days. I’d been tucked away in a private room on the short-stay ward because the hospital had nowhere else to put me, and I was considered too at-risk to go home.

My heart was unstable. I had chest pains.

The orderly’s job was to take me to the operating room so doctors could split my chest open and a triple coronary bypass, but I couldn’t bring anything with me.

Even my glasses.

“Give them here,” a nurse said.

I took my glasses off and slipped them into the case I’d concealed under the sheets. I handed her the package.

She said, “Tell you mother she can pick them up here later.”

She printed off a label with my particulars on it, slapped it on the case, and indicated it would be kept safe at the nursing station for me.

“Good luck, Mr. Bryson,” she beamed.

I looked down the hallway. A number of nurses were looking at me. They waved. I waved back.

The short stay ward wasn’t meant to have overnight patients. I’d arrived there the previous Friday, the point of departure to and return from the operating room, where I was to have stents placed in the blocked arteries of my heart.

But things hadn’t gone as planned.

*

Three questions

There are three questions. Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? Collective questions. The story of us, together, our bonds, our dreams, our hopes, our fears. The foundation of us, what makes us possible. The risks and powers that would break it all down, threaten us, distract us, impede us, destroy us.

*

Fragment from a Novel Unwritten

“But you were never a heavy drinker,” Steve said, setting free a conspiratorial laugh. “You never had a problem.”

It was after midnight now, and the cats continued to circle. Why wasn’t he in bed? They wanted to settle down, but instead he sat on the couch, earbuds plugged into the sides of his head, iPhone on his lap, his eyes unfocused in the shadowy darkness. Steve was in Seattle and his voice came through, but the video feed didn’t. His iPhone displayed a message saying the network lacked connective power. Steve said the problem was at his end. It didn’t matter. They could still talk, catch up.

Over 30 years earlier they had been roommates during their undergraduate years. Their contact since then had been haphazard. They hadn’t attended, or even been invited to each others’ weddings. They couldn’t name each others’ spouses or children. Had never visited each others’ houses. Steve hadn’t attended his wife’s funeral. Had never even known she existed until after she didn’t. Hadn’t known about his heart surgery until after he’d rehabbed. But in the past five years they had made an attempt to meet at least once a year, usually around Christmas for an after hours drink or three, to catch up and remember.

In 2020, year of the pandemic, no social gatherings, or even Zoom meetings, were arranged. Then he received an email from Steve, asking if he had an iPhone. Could they FaceTime? He did. They could. Steve was in Seattle now, three hours earlier than Eastern Standard Time. When was he free? Suggest some dates. Any day, really. He sent an email summarizing his life. Home alone with two cats. Hardly leaving the house. His step-children living full-time now with their dad, though they video called frequently. To survive the pandemic, he’d settled into a well-managed routine. Daily exercise. Reduction of alcohol to near zero. Reduction of meat eating to near zero. Regular office hours, though now working out of what used to be his step-son’s bedroom. He’d gained 10 pounds after the initial lockdown, but now had lost all of that, plus five more.

Seattle? Steve had a new job at Facebook, and he felt conflicted.

Two days later, at an hour past his bed time, they connected.

“So what’s up man?”

*

An age

He had reached an age where he looked back on his marriage and thought, “We were kids. What were we doing? Playing house.” But it wasn’t so. He was 38 when they married, and she was 39, marrying for the second time. They were both bruised and battle hardened, but now he didn’t see that. What he sees now is a simplicity and an optimism he cannot recognize. Youth, he thinks, for he has no other word for it. The last vestiges of it, anyway. A belief that they would remake their worlds, re-order their lives as they saw best. Set up a house for themselves and her children. And it came to pass, and then it fell apart. At 44 she died, and that was nine years ago now, and he is now 53, and that was a million years ago, except it wasn’t, and it isn’t multiple times a day, still, it feels like it was only yesterday, but not even yesterday, this morning, ten minutes ago, happening right here, right now, he is back in the middle of it, and it has never ended. Fuck cancer. Say it again, fuck cancer. It doesn’t last long, usually. It comes out of nowhere, but he can turn it off, usually. He has a mantra now. CBT-trained, he gives himself replacement thoughts. “We did our best. We were together to the end. No regrets.” Breathe. Focus on the diaphragm. Deep breaths for the stomach. It’s worse at night, his head on the pillow, spinning. The thoughts just go and go, without end. At least he stopped drinking. That’s a good thing, but he misses it. Drunk every day, surfing on sadness, never touching down. Now he can be in the moment. Now he can be real, but who cares? Does he? Remake your world? Re-order your life? What horseshit. Likes flies to wanton gods are we, they play us for their sport. They made their plans, they fell apart. Now he is present, marinated in his suffering, alert to death, no longer young, withdrawn from the body’s insistent demands, even the impulses of desire that began in his pre-teens has disappeared, mostly, or is swiftly addressed, and what remains of himself is the molten core. That’s how he thinks of it. What remains is his core, and what remains of his life will be improvised.

Every day is a new day. Is it, though? He wakes up where he fell asleep, the same place he woke up yesterday—and the day before that. He used to have ambition, but that ended, too. For a while, if he was honest with himself, his ambition was to die. To be with her. But, no. He wanted to live, so he gave up even the idea of ambition. There was today, and presumably there would be tomorrow, but right now there was today. Take advantage of the immediate. Manage the routine. All this, too, would pass. For now, accept, enjoy, take that next step, then another. He had become that guy. Disconnected. Locked into an alternate reality. Some sort of bubble person, and he had long given up any expectation the film would pop. He was the fish out of water, the alien, the stranger in a strange land. Friends had drifted away, giving up hope he would return, no longer recognizing him except as someone gripped by something they could not see. He didn’t blame them. He couldn’t explain it, either, hadn’t predicted it, and he had fought it, poking and twisting to escape, and later just waited for it to expire, fade away, but he knew now it wouldn’t. What was was what was. What had been his life was a moonscape. His life now had richness galore, deep bands of colour and feeling, but he alone seemed to experience them. And each new day began as the previous one had ended. The past was never past. It didn’t recur, it simply never went away, it colonized everything, even the future.

A pillow. She said she needed a pillow. Not a big one, not one to sleep on, more like a small throw pillow you’d put on the end of the couch. But where would we get one? he asked. Here, he meant. Los Cabos, Mexico.

*

That year, a sadness settled on the town. No one knows how long it had been there. Sadness was not new to the town folk. Sadness had always been there, but this was different.

*

The New Furnace

It started the way you would expect. It was cold.

Isn’t there somebody they could call? Jaime wanted to know. Her dad maybe.

“Your dad’s in Florida.”

“He’ll know what to do.”

“We need to call a furnace repair guy.”

But Jaime didn’t trust them.

“They always try to upsell you.”

Her dad said call a furnace repair guy. “I’m going golfing.”

It was seventy-six degrees in Florida and sunny.

Jaime asked, “What’s that?”

Google said: 24.444 Celsius.

“Nice.”

The first furnace guy didn’t pick up. Jim let it ring twenty times, no one answered.

“Who does that?” he wanted to know. “Who has no machine?”

It’s like it’s not even real, Jaime laughed.

It was still funny then, their situation. An adventure, a challenge. They were in it together. She liked to watch Jim sort things out. It was minus fifteen outside and still over fifteen inside. She’d located the camping stove and was setting it up on the kitchen table.

“You have to take that outside.”

“It’s cold out there.”

“You’ll poison us if you turn it on in here.”

Right. Bad idea. But she wanted her coffee.

The second furnace guy had no appointments that day and suggested they needed someone right away, before the pipes freeze.

“Loosen your taps so that there’s at least a slow drip.”

Right. Water flow. Jim couldn’t believe he’d forgotten.

“My dad didn’t mention that,” Jaime said. “The tub too?”

Yep.

The second guy recommended the third guy, who couldn’t come to the phone. His wife answered and said he had COVID, but his colleague would call them back, which he did two hours later. By then they’d already called the fourth, fifth, and sixth guys and fried half the eggs in the fridge and a whole package of bacon. The temperature in the house was down to nine degrees.

“You can go to your sister’s,” Jim said. “I can wait for the guy.”

One for all and all for one, Jaime said. “I’m staying.”

“Too bad we don’t have an electric heater,” Jim said.

Jaime reached for the car keys.

“Canadian Tire got them?”

“For sure. And swing by Timmy’s on your way back?”

From The Miramichi Reader:

• The Left in Power: Bob Rae’s NDP and the Working Class by Steven High (2025)

• elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham (2025)

• The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields, edited by Nora Foster Stovel (2024)

Other reading:

• Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (2022)

• Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed by Charlie Angus (2024)

• The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner (2013)

• The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner (2011)

• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024)

• At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand (1999)

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024)

• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (2007)

• The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (2025)

• Soroka by Corin Cummings (2025)

• Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1876)

• The Blue House by Sky Gilbert (2025)

• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)

Let’s begin by noting the books I’ve already posted about here: all of the Kushner ones, plus Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Soroka by Corin Cummings and The Blue House by Sky Gilbert have reviews forthcoming in The Miramichi Reader. So that narrows the field.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (2022)

Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed by Charlie Angus (2024)

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024)

Each of these three is both a memoir and a portrait of an era, a time and place, and each is excellent in its own way. Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, has been repeatedly rewarded (“A New York Times Notable book! One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022! Winner of Canada Reads 2023!”) — and deservedly so. It’s harrowing, and I’m sure I’ll never forget it. I started thinking, I wonder how she’s going to draw those monster trucks, and I finished it thinking, men are shit and how horrid is the violence so casually directed at women. Beaton tells of her journey from Cape Breton, where she finished university, broke, to Alberta to get the cash to pay off her student loans. It’s a journey many from “Down Home” trek, and she meets many from Atlantic Canada, ex-fish plant workers and others “Gone Down the Road.” It’s a deeply intimate portrait of her challenges and aspirations, while also capturing the weird world of the petrochemical “man camps.”

Charlie Angus, former Member of Parliament, former Catholic Worker House Coordinator, former punk rocker and ongoing member of The Grievous Angels, tells of his political and musical coming of age in the 1980s, the Decade of Greed.

Though Angus is more than a few years older than me, there’s a lot in this book that overlaps with my own coming of age in East Toronto. For one, the Catholic Worker House that Angus helped to found, near Greenwood and Queen Street East, was in a neighbourhood I know well. Plus all of the musical contemporaries he shared stages with were the bands I followed in high school, as the early 1980s coincided with the explosion of music television and the well named New Wave.

I read Angus’s book back-to-back with The Left in Power: Bob Rae’s NDP and the Working Class by Steven High. In spirit, they have a lot in common, though there are interesting differences. High knows the inner workings of government, how the gears of policy grind against stakeholder expectations and party politics. He is really good at explaining how the sausage is made, and the trade offs politicians often have to make — but also the great leaps they also some times pull off against all odds. Whereas Angus is a part theologian, full on punk rock activist. Though he shares none of Andrew Breitbart’s politics, he agrees with his maxim: "politics is downstream from culture" and that to change politics one must first change culture. His memoir is chock full of examples of artists, musicians mostly, pushing for—and achieving—political change.

Kara Swisher’s story starts where Angus’s leaves off, in the late-1980s, early-1990s, at a moment where the culture is shifting in many ways. Geopolitically, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Communism in Russia, indeed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. But more significantly for Swisher, with the rise of the Internet — and ultimately, the tech bros. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story is Swisher’s love letter to the tech boom — and also its obituary. So much promise has led to so much destruction. So much optimism has sunk into a swamp of cynicism. “Information wants to be free” has morphed into the New Fascism. Swisher’s got it all. Elon’s spiral into chaos, and Steve Jobs surprising subtle moments—and vision—for humanity. Did you know Zuckerberg sees himself in Emperor Augustus (sure he did some bad things, but he had to; running an empire is tough)? I shook my head so much through this book. Remember Google’s “Do No Evil”? HAHAHAHAHA.

At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand (1999)

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (2025)

I wanted to like At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand; I just didn’t. Why? Does it matter? It just seemed a weak version of Toni Morrison. I mean, it was okay, but I wanted more.

Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love was a book club pick. It was neat, pleasant, charming, organized, easy to follow, educational—it mixes a contemporary story with a story about the poet Rumi (1207-1273) about whom I knew next to nothing and now know a bit more.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1876)

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)

I took in these two expansive 19th century British novels as audio books, part of my ongoing project to catch up on the so-called Classics. I mean, I have two English degrees and there are still so so many books I feel like I ought to have read. These two are now off my to-do list. Both, in general, follow my dictum about British literature; they’re about, generally, the regulation of women. Though also about much else.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, um, I mean, okay. I’ve read a number of Eliot novels in recent years—Middlemarch, fantastic (and, yes, super long)—and I heard that Daniel Deronda was maybe her best. Not by my estimation. The novel has two converging stories, one about the title character, who slowly learns of his Jewish identity, and another about a young woman who marries foolishly because she wants to live the pampered life and then discovers she is miserable, superficial, trapped in an empty bubble of her own creation. I, for one, did not feel sorry for her. But a lot of ink is spilt explicating her troubles. There’s much sophistication in the writing, sure, but Jesus wept, this is definitely not punk rock.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, on the other hand, won me over in the end. I am not predisposed to enjoy—or admire—Dickens. And a lot of this novel is a lot of people talking nonsense, stupid British nonsense, the kind of nonsense that Monty Python skewered deliciously. Dickens skewers it, too, but again, Jesus wept, what a long bloodly novel of people quacking on and on about nothing. It was nice to finally meet Uriah Heap, though. Dickens was brilliant at creating characters molded around characteristics that give them All Star status. Heap is one of those, Ebenezer Scrooge another. Copperfield is apparently Dickens’s most autobiographical novel. It has a wonderful growth from beginning to end, expanding with the age of the title character. But what is going on with all of the love interests? David is hopeless in love—and hapless in understanding women. He is too much an observer, not enough a participant in his own life, perhaps. This enables the overall comic frame of the novel, I suspect. It’s quite a beauty—and my favorite Dickens yet.

Yes, like most people, I came to Johnson via his hallucinatory short story collection Jesus’ Son (1992), published the year I completed my undergrad, though it didn’t cross my path until 2006, over a decade later. Strange that it took that long, but true.

In 2006, for The Danforth Review, the lit mag I started and edited, I asked a number of writers to suggest titles/stories they would place on a “Short Story 101” syllabus. Denis Johnson came up three times. I must read this, I thought.

I have read a number of Johnson titles since then, but I haven’t written about any of them, except this three word review on Goodreads for Angels (1983): “Oh boy. Wow.”

Rachel Kushner includes a brilliant summary of Johnson in her essay collection, The Hard Crowd (2021). I will give a far less brilliant summary here of the Johnson books I’ve read or poked into:

• Angels (1983)

• Jesus’ Son (1992)

• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (2001)

• Train Dreams (2002)

• Tree of Smoke (2007)

• The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018)

I have a hard time comprehending how Denis failed to cross my radar before 2006, before that TDR feature, but so it goes.

I’m going to tackle the short critiques first. Despite writing, “Oh boy. Wow,” I don’t remember much about Angels. In my mind it blurs with Richard Ford’s The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). Two books from a similar era, responding to similar cultural pressures. Coming to terms with America, post-70s, post-60s counterculture crash. Two white heteronormative dudes. I mean, I thought they were great, but the specifics haven’t stuck.

Regarding Train Dreams, I think I read 10 pages.

The idea of Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond excited me. I read about half of it. Yes, I heard echoes of Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas (1971)) and Henry Miller (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)). Another journey through the American Berserk, I thought (which, incidentally, didn’t start in 2016).

I had in mind that “American Berserk” came from Philip Roth’s essay, “Writing American Fiction” from Reading Myself and Others (1975) [originally a speech at Stanford, 1960]. In that essay/speech, Roth begins by telling the story of a grisly murder in Chicago that held the public’s attention. It played out over days in the press. As a narrative, it revealed layers and layers. How can the American novelist compete with the American Berserk thrown up daily in our social media feeds tabloids?

Except that’s not what he says, exactly. What he writes is:

The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

The mind hovers over the word “almost.” LOL.

The American Berserk is Rothian, though. It comes from his novel, American Pastoral (1997), I found after asking Mr. Google:

The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk.

In any case, I was keen to take a ride on Johnson’s trip through the American Berserk. I’ve read about half the book so far.

I read The Largesse of the Sea Maiden in hard cover, shortly after it came out, but that was in the quiet years, when I was withdrawing heavily, still trying to process the grief arising from the death of my wife in 2012 and all of the chaos that followed. Don’t ask me anything about this book. I don’t remember any of it, except I appreciated it. Might be time to pick it up again. My memory is better now.

So, okay. Jesus’ Son. Like apparently many others, this book reordered my mind. The scene in the hospital is imprinted on the back of my mind like a prehistoric cave drawing. This book is the literary equivalent of Springsteen’s Nebraska (1982), stripped back, down to the core, earth quivering. Essential.

Which brings us to Tree of Smoke.

I enjoyed it. I appreciated it. I admired it. After finishing it, I looked it up. It won many awards. Most interesting to me was, I found a link on Wikipedia to a real hateful review in The Atlantic (Dec 2007) by B.R. Myers (the hateful ones are always more fun, no?): “It’s the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall. And it’s astonishingly bad.”

Denis Johnson is, in short, the sort of novelist whose work one expects to be reviewed on the cover of every prominent newspaper’s book section, as Tree of Smoke was in September. Equally predictable was the reviewers’ implicit injunction that we should ask not what the book can do for us, but what it can do for Johnson’s place in American letters. This much is standard Important Writer treatment, and for all I know, Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), Jim Lewis (The New York Times Book Review), and other reviewers consider Johnson worthy of it no matter what he puts out. What I find difficult to believe is that they admire Tree of Smoke. For one thing, their own prose is better than anything in it.

Oh boy. Wow.

I mean, Myers is right when he says Tree of Smoke relies on previous narratives. It’s a a bit Joseph Conrad, a bit Graham Greene, a bit Don DeLillo. Maybe even a bit Philip Roth, a bit of Francis Ford Coppola, a bit of Pynchon. The American Berserk is infused on every page, but why wouldn’t it be. The backdrop is the Vietnam War. It tells, in part, the pre-story of Bill Houston, protagonist of Johnson’ first novel, Angels. But it tells many other stories, too.

Here is a portrait of America, filtered through 20th century modernism, High and post-. It is large, ambitious, dark, satirical, heavy with pathos, challenging the tabloids and the social media feeds — to tell a truth, assert a level of meaning that Tik Tok can only dream of (if androids had dreams).

Roth asked in 1960 if novelists can keep up with the tabloids. In our current batshit crazy, what can Art do? Tree of Smoke was a bit shot at tackling the actuality. I think Rachel Kushner does a great job of it, too. Douglas Glover’s challenge to remember the carnivalesque nature of language / the real stays with me perpetually also.

A big theme in Tree of Smoke, actually, is communication (and information). Some of the characters are early CIA plants in Vietnam. They try to make sense of things and also try to insert sense into things. What is real, baby, and what is not. The conversations get more than a bit theoretical, but to a former rhetoric student it was all fascinating. Myers hated it, of course.

Tree of Smoke was long, but it hit me like Jesus’ Son. Right between the eyes.

• The Flamethrowers (2013)

• The Mars Room (2018)

• The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020 (2021)

• Creation Lake (2024)

I dug them. I’m a Rachel Kushner completist now, so I’ve got a few more titles to go.

I first took note of Kushner when The Flamethrowers came out. At one point, I booked it out of the library, but we didn’t jive, me and that title, that time. Last year, I decided to try again, audiowise. Kushner was the reader: reader/writer. I have part of her on autoloop now.

I am 10 days older that Kushner. We are both 1968 Libras, both Year of the Monkey. When she speaks, I think, yeah, that’s about right.

However, I have never ridden a motorcycle, and I’m not about to start now. Motorcycles feature heavily in The Flamethrowers and there’s an essay in The Hard Crowd that explain why. When she was younger, Kushner rode motorcycles with a crew, all of whom are now dead, she writes. She easily could have been, given the risks the hard crowd took.

Living life on that edge might be the throughline to these novels: one about 1970s Italian terrorism, one about domestic violence and prison life, one about eco-terrorism in France, or at least the appearance of it. In The Flamethrowers, the protagonist is the American girlfriend of an older artist, who is from a rich Italian family, whose business is targeted by the Red Brigades.

In Creation Lake, the protagonist, also an American woman, is undercover as the girlfriend of a Frenchman associated with a “back to the land” movement. Who she is working for is unknown? Not a state, but related interests. She once worked for the FBI and framed a young man for eco-terrorism in California. She sets about instigating action and state response, treating the reader to lots of self-reflection.

The protagonist in The Mars Room, an American woman, killed a man and is incarcerated as a result. No reader would blame her though, given the events that led up to that bloody encounter. She has a complex back story and an unclear path forward. To be or not to be, that is the question. Does it matter whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? She took action. She had to. The consequence plays out.

Life on the edge, full of risk. So it goes.

What is it that I respond to most in these novels? I want to say something like, the anarchist energy. You never know what is going to happen. The simple categories of left/right, progressive/reactionary, whatever this/whatever that, cannot be sustained in these novels. The worlds Kushner presents are wild, barren, uncertain. Her art does not offer comfort, except the sort of comfort that says the simple solutions won’t work. Go back and look again. It’s all more complicated than you first thought.

I don’t have a big long argument to make here. This might be it.

Short post.

Here’s Kushner at the Toronto Public Library, 2024….

Not that I’m a Frank Zappa (1940-1993) fan. At least, I wasn’t.

Not because I didn’t like Frank’s music, but because I knew almost nothing about it. I kind of liked Frank. As a personality, counterculture weirdo.

Last year, I read Moon Zappa’s memoir and learned more than I needed to know about the Zappa family. Moon didn’t write much about Frank’s music, though she did note that her brother Dweezil got Frank’s guitars after their father died of cancer.

At least one of those guitars was in Dweezil’s hands on April 26th.

Dweezil even handed it to an audience member, an 11-year-old superstar.

At one point, Dweezil said introducing Frank’s music to new generations was his purpose. Could Frank’s art still have purpose? Could it find new audiences?

Most of the audience at the Toronto show was, well, old. Standing in line before the show, the dude in front of me asked me how many times I’d seen Frank. Um, none.

Prior to this show, when I thought of Frank I thought of this:

Also, this:

Which is to say, I could name two Frank Zappa songs: Valley Girl and Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow. I had heard the former and somehow absorbed knowledge of the latter.

So, every song Dweezil played on April 26th was new to me, except Rush’s Tom Sawyer (on duck call).

In the room, it was much louder than this video suggests. The audience roared. Dweezil giggled. The previous song had ended with a bit of duck call that morphed into O Canada, then Dweezil joked that they thought they’d play Tom Sawyer, then the audience responded with such force that they did.

Dweezil also played a Van Halen song that kept pace with Eddie. Dweezil is a scorching guitar player, without any of the posing or ego struts. He lets his fingers do the talking. On the WTF podcast #688 (March 10, 2016), Dweezil talks about opening the front door one day to find Eddie Van Halen standing there, wearing the same duds he’d recently worn in a VH music video. Eddie had dropped by to see Frank. Dweezil asked him to show him some guitar tricks. He did. They’ve stuck.

My overall take on the show?

It was super fun. In a couple of the songs, I felt transported to San Francisco 1969, true psychedelia. Other songs felt like MAD Magazine set to music. Is there a weirder lyricist than Frank? He’s even more bizarre than John Lennon at his most surreal.

2025 certainly feels as super surreal as 1975. So I would answer in the affirmative that Frank’s music continues to speak to the contemporary blah blah blah. His fans are certainly deeply passionate. Anyone looking for something outside the mainstream could do well worse than to follow Frank down a slimy Youtube rabbit hole.

ADDENDUM:

I should add that after the show I picked up a slice of Pizza Pizza at Broadview and Danforth, scanning the late-night urban scene: the beggars, the passed out, the rowdies, those like me, the anonymous zombies. I hopped the subway to Main Street, then picked up the GO to Scarborough. The 11:32 p.m. train was packed with Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys and Metallica t-shirts. The Leaf fans were depressed following the team’s loss to the Senators in Ottawa. The Metallica fans were riding hyped waves of adrenaline. Seek & Destroy, man! A Motley Crew after a motley night. O Canada.

“I want to know why there’s no school, Ma.” “Must you know tonight?” “Yes. Why can’t I go to school?” “Well … it’s because there may be war with Canada.” “With Canada? When?” “No one knows. But it’s best if you stay home until we see what’s going on.” “But why are we going to war with Canada?”

from The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

I haven’t done one of these book review summary posts in a while. Here’s what I’ve been reading in 2025, so far.

• Orientalism by Edward Said (1976), audio

• Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (2006)

• Lament for a Nation by George Grant (1965, 2005 edition)

• The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse (1943), audio

• The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday (2014)

• Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer (2003)

• Culture & Imperialism by Edward Said (1993), audio

• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1904), audio

• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (1999), audio

• The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (2018), audio

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004), audio

• Elseship: An Unrequited Affair by Tree Abraham (2025)

• Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart (2025), audio

You may recognize themes in the above, the prevalence of audio books, for instance. Certain political trends, perhaps. I read the Tree Abraham book for The Miramichi Reader, so a review will be appearing there, not here. I already wrote about The Glass Bead Game on this blog, so I won’t be doing again here. I also did a bit on Lament for a Nation already here, too. I’m not going to write about the Kushner book now, either; reading some other Kushner currently, so will do a Kushner-specific post later.

Still, that leaves quite a bit to write about.

It’s probably unfair to Said to start with an anecdote about Christopher Hitchens, but I saw Hitchens in the late 1990s at the University of Toronto. He spoke to a very small audience in support of the Palestinian people, after showing a documentary that had been created/produced, if I remember correctly, by Said (1935-2003), who was then Hitchens’ friend. Later, they were not friends, over Hitchens’ support for Gulf War II and Hitchens’ fever dream about implementing liberal democracy via US military might in Iraq, a story he recounts with some hubris in Hitch-22 (2010), his memoir, wherein he confesses his pipe dreams had failed. Dreams of sipping cocktails by the Tigris a year after the invasion collapsed into horrendous homicidal nightmares. Shock and awe. He also recounts his falling out with Said, while also praising the Columbia University professor’s close reading skills.

I feel like I have been bumping into Orientalism and Culture & Imperialism for years, so taking them in was long overdue. One immediate impression is that Hitchens was right. Said has a tremendous skill for close reading — and a breadth of knowledge about the canon of English and Western literature that one would expect from a Columbia professor. He is not anti-Western. At least, not unable to see and praise great art when he sees it. At the same time, as I noted in my piece on Alice Munro, with great prominence comes the requirement to stand up to great scrutiny. And great scrutiny is what Said provides in these two ferociously argued books. Imperialism, via politics or art, is brought under withering light.

I don’t know what else to say, except Said provides a model of how it ought to be done.

How would I summarize? What did I take away? What is “orientalism”?

You can get a definition via Google or ChatGPT. I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive summary or definition. But what did I take away? Admiration for Said, first of all. The volume of information and depth of analysis is astounding. I can’t say my understanding of history was re-framed so much as my understanding of history was enhanced. He references so many events that either were simply vague to me or nonexistent in my knowledge. Then again, regarding art, I knew that Jane Austen wrote about slavery in, for example, Mansfield Park (1814), her third novel, but Said contextualized it and analyzed it, at least for me, in deep, new ways.

I was about half-way through Culture & Imperialism when Said went into an extended analysis of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Nostromo (1904). I stopped listening to Culture & Imperialism and got the audio-copy of Conrad’s novel from the Toronto Public Library. Wow, that one’s a doozy! A number of years ago I took note of Maya Jasanoff’s intriguing The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017). I have a copy, but I haven’t read it. I did read, tough, a comment on Substack today, that the world is more Pynchonesque than Pynchon, linking to this post. What Said convinced me of, is that the world today was predicted by Conrad. International capitalism circa 1904 is not so different from the 21st century. But then, Trump’s affection for the Robber Baron era should be a clue, too.

The plot of Nostromo concerns a silver mine in the fictitious South American republic of Costaguana. The mine is owned by an Englishman, who dies and leaves advice to his son, his heir, that he should walk away from the mine; it will bring disaster. But his son is optimistic and determined both to seek his fortune and bring Enlightenment to foreign shores. Culture & imperialism, a double gift. Except the New World isn’t what it seems from “home” and all kinds of disaster befalls the would-be benefactors and their allies. What a novel to begin the 20th century! My local book club recently decided to read Kate Beaton’s graphic novel, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022), about Beaton’s time in Fort McMurray, Alberta, a journey that rivals Conrad’s own. More on that later.

In any case, after listening to Nostromo I returned to Culture & Imperialism. Then I turned to Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025). This is another story that could have activated Conrad’s pen. Two words: Christian nationalism. One word: motherfuckers.

Suddenly, I’m thinking about how I started writing book reviews in 1991 for the University of Waterloo student newspaper, Imprint, with a review of Milan Kundera’s Immortality. It’s all of a piece. Engaging with art to make sense of the world.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Motherfuckers.

Stewart has followed this beat for a while, but her tale here is the amplification of what was once marginal. Michael Ignatieff, writer, thinker, professor, and former Liberal Party of Canada leader, recently wrote a post attempting to contextual America: “Donald Trump and the Angel of History” (March 23, 2025). Having just read Stewart’s book, I asked Ignatieff in the comments about where he saw the role of Christian nationalism in this story. He responded:

Honest answer is I don’t know. Christian nationalism does go with white resentment at ‘displacement’ and it goes with anxiety about the impact of the sexual revolution on the family. What I can’t figure out is whether it is a driver or follower in this story. What are your thoughts?

I wrote: Increasingly a driver.

Having read Stewart, it’s hard to answer otherwise. Christian nationalism, she concludes, is the point.

Oh, these are heavy and depressing books, aren’t they?

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (2006) can take us into a happier place, yes?

This was my book club pick recently. The blurb on the cover from Time magazine said: “Profoundly funny, genuinely moving and wholly lovable.” My conclusion: wow, spicy. I mean, like Anora (2024) sexy spicy. There is a lot of sex in this book, despite the fact that the protagonist is a 300 lb gargantuan Russian youth. Am I saying it’s Rabelaisian (e.g., like Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532))? Well, yeah. I thought the book club would enjoy it because the world today is, if nothing, absurd, and this book promised to present absurd as fun. Did it deliver? Well, I laughed out loud in a couple of places. Other authors who’ve made me laugh out loud? Mordecai Richler. Anyone else? No. (Well, me. I’ve read some of my old stuff and couldn’t believe I got away with that.)

One thing to add is, I thought Shteyngart had invented the word “absurdistan,” but Wikipedia tells me otherwise.

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday (2014) isn’t exactly a fun book, but it’s not about impending disaster, either. It’s about using disaster to … make omelets. You can’t make without breaking eggs, and all that. Actually, Holiday bases his case on Marcus Aurelius (121-180), author of Meditations — and the Stoics. My take away here is if you try hard and persist you will get ahead. Also, identify the obstacle to your success, then use it to achieve success. Examples across history are provided. I didn’t believe any of it, though there were some fancy tales told.

Another fancy tale is, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer (2003). Multiple tales, actually, as this is a collection of personal essays. Dyer is definitely not of the school of The Obstacle is the Way. More the opposite. The obstacle is a good reason to sit by the poolside and taste a good Chardonnay. In a broad way, these are travel tales. Dyer appears in Thailand and other locales and suffers existentially. It’s quite entertaining, if not illuminating. Not all of this has aged well, though perhaps well enough.

All we have left now is:

• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (1999), audio

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004), audio

I’ve been noticing references to bell hooks for years, but I’d never read her. At some point, I picked up her book All About Love: New Visions, but I didn’t read it. Then I gave it away to my younger step-daughter. Then I looked it up on the Toronto Public Library, and they had an audio version. It was an easy “read,” optimistic, too, considering its subject matter. I endorse it. I don’t want to say much about it. If you are looking for a theory of love, this is a good place to start. If you are anxious about the chaos of the world, the Beatles were right. Love is all you need. hooks knows how to implement it.

Now, Roth.

I have never written about Roth, though I’ve read most of his books. Some people really don’t like him, though I don’t understand why. If you look across the entire oeuvre, there is such a variety. Yes, some books are kind of nasty. I can understand how female readers can be turned off, though one female writer once told me that there was no way Roth was a misogynist. Her evidence? The most unlikely novel: Sabbath’s Theater (1995). She said, “Anyone who can write that way about menstruation can’t be a misogynist!”

I have an idea to write an essay: Jersey Boys: Roth & Springsteen. Don’t hold your breath, but it might happen. My thought is that Springsteen memoir shows more self-awareness than Roth ever did. Springsteen calls some of his songs misogynistic!

Anyway, The Plot Against America isn’t one of those Roth novels. When it came out, people asked him if it was about George W. Bush’s America, and he said it wasn’t. But this war with Canada bit is truly contemporary, no?

“I want to know why there’s no school, Ma.” “Must you know tonight?” “Yes. Why can’t I go to school?” “Well … it’s because there may be war with Canada.” “With Canada? When?” “No one knows. But it’s best if you stay home until we see what’s going on.” “But why are we going to war with Canada?”

I mean, Timothy Snyder is writing about war on Canada. The Bulkwart is writing that Trump’s Lust for Canada Echoes Putin’s Lust for Ukraine. The Atlantic is reminding readers that American has invaded Canada before and it didn’t go so well. And now Snyder, and other anti-fascism scholars, have left the USA … and have come to Canada.

But Roth’s book is just a novel, a speculative novel, about Charles Lindberg, aviation hero, Nazi sympathizer, becoming US President, for a while, before, Roosevelt is restored to the presidency, and history continues as we know it.

The speculation is fictional, of course, but now students are being disappeared.

Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk.

Trump has also taken aim at the Smithsonian.

Last time, I wrote about a different book: February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (2023). Which may be relevant because, well, I dunno.

To me, The Plot Against America stands as an outlier in Roth’s oeuvre. Historical fiction isn’t his thing. On the other hand, he gets pretty speculative in Our Gang (1971) about President Nixon, and in Operation Shylock (1993) about a fiction Philip Roth and accused Nazi war criminal & US autoworker, John Demjanjuk, and in … actually, many other Roth works. So maybe not an outlier?

The “Jewish themes” of the novel are certainly not an outlier, as Roth stresses the question — what does it mean to be a minority within America? America promises self-actualization and the Jewish community, in Roth’s presentation, prioritizes self-protection (as a collective) over individual growth.

This is a whole other conversation, and if I ever write my Roth/Springsteen piece I’ll have to get into it. For now, I’ll just say that in most of Roth’s work he comes down in favour of the individual. In The Plot Against America, preservation of the collective takes precedence.

They weren’t collected in my trade books, but in 2010 I self-published a collection of whatever left-over stories I had on hand, titled it How Many Girlfriends, and sold certainly less than 10 copies. Less than 5 copies. Perhaps exactly zero. In any case, that product is no longer available.

So, I thought, if I can find them, buried in old e-files, I’ll re-post them here. Reader, I found them. Interestingly, I also found a variation of “The Coming Anarchy,” titled “The Jazz Age,” so I will paste that below as well.

What can I say about them? “How Many Girlfriends” is a microstory, perhaps more of a prose-poem. It has no plot, but a compelling voice. “Everywhere I look there are signs pointing to washrooms, but there are no washrooms,” it begins. This is one of those lines straight out of life. I was somewhere, needing the WC, and everywhere were signs for washrooms, pointing to washrooms, yet where were the washrooms. One wanders around a nondescript commercial space, could be any nondescript commercial space, anywhere, and there are signs, but no reality. Signifiers, but no signified. The voice prattles on after that, seeking resolution or perhaps epiphany.

“The Jazz Age” and “The Coming Anarchy” feature folks you’ll recognize: Scott and Zelda. I don’t know what I was doing with that. Trying to imitate some Bright Lights, Big City urban satire or something. The heavy dialogue approach is influenced by Commitments-era Roddy Doyle, surely. The two stories overlap, share sections, but they also differ in perhaps interesting ways. Both are kind of bleak, but the latter is bleaker. Does that make it more interesting? Or just darker? More cynical?

I didn’t want to write cynical, but I would tend to flirt with it. My characters, often couples, would circle each other, attempting connection, often failing. “How Many Girlfriends” hints at this too. We want each other. We want attachment. To affirm what is real, we are thrown back on our alienation, our one source, ourselves. I kept trying to find ways around that, I think, only sometimes succeeding. Maybe.

The stories…

*

HOW MANY GIRLFRIENDS

Everywhere I turn there are signs pointing to washrooms, but there are no washrooms. I know you have been here too.

It has been years since I have heard a bird sing. When did the change happen? Every day there are more cars, bigger cars. Not so long ago all of this seemed resolved. There was an oil crisis. Baby seals, whales, wetlands, the whole bloody planet was dying. Everyone went green. The change came.

The economy is improving. At work everyone gets a new computer. It is a banner day. People are talking to each other. We make plans to go for lunch. The manager gives a speech about working smarter, not harder. Half of the people head to the water cooler, the other half stare at the floor. Tomorrow I will start to look for a new job. I don’t need this, I think. I have choices. I have options.

Once it seemed possible to have a separate existence. To pull away. Step out. Carve a hole in some rock and waste out eternity in silent starvation while everyone else died happily eating cheeseburgers, back bacon and homefries. What happened to that feeling? What happened to Once upon a time? I have strong memories of beginnings. I remember thinking that time would never end. I remember making promises.

You can say what you want about pocket watches, but time piles up whether you wind them or not. My grandfather’s pocket watch runs fast. It sped him to his early death. I buy those ninety-nine cent digital watches you can get at Becker’s. They don’t biodegrade even in one-thousand years. I don’t have a problem with that. One-thousand years is no time at all. I’d like to make a mark against eternity. A small scratch on our ever-expanding universe.

It’s the position you take against the sun. It’s how your shadow falls. It all depends on a change in government. We are never without weather, though the weather is changing. It isn’t what it used to be. It’s always changes. Some changes are bigger than others. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

You never get over your first love, you just integrate that trauma into your new reality, your new personality. This is the line of argument I take with my new girlfriend. I am talking too much about my first love. I am jealous of her two ex-fiancés. Both of them keep calling her. One calls a couple of times a week. I talk about my first love, but I don’t call her. My girlfriend think I’m not over her. You never get over your first love, I say. I tell her I don’t call her, which is true. I don’t call her. I admit that sometimes I want to, but I don’t.

From time to time one has moments of intense intimacy with complete strangers. A glance, a smile. On the subway, at the library. Sometimes you might even think someone on TV is staring deeply into your soul, but this is never so. Sometimes it may seem that way, but it is never so. Sometimes you wish it were possible, but it is never possible. Somewhere scientists are trying to track and crack the untrackable and uncrackable, they are trying to make it possible, but they never will. Television is one arena the soul will never enter. Scientists know a lot of things, but they don’t know everything. Poets are like that, too.

My new girlfriend has pretty eyes and a complex about her body image. What’s a guy to do with information like that? She has a deep relationship with her hair dresser. She drinks too much. She believes in the ideal of romantic love and regrets she isn’t more fun-loving. She is not so unusual. Not as unusual as she thinks. What’s a guy to do with information like that?

It is possible to be lonely and inside someone, lonely and have someone inside you. This is a truth no one wants to acknowledge. Everyone wants to be inside someone, or have someone inside them. The Pope is not always wrong. Sometimes there are better ways to spend twenty minutes. On Friday nights you can rent a sheet of ice by the hour. The nets are often unguarded.

How many ex-girlfriends does it take to form a pattern? She said love denied isn’t love at all, but I wasn’t so sure. More kinds of love than Eskimos have words for snow. More kinds of aftermath. I have a friend who calls it “back story,” as if it all adds up to something more, something larger. The sports bar on the corner has a new waitress. She looks like the old waitress, only cuter. Only younger. Years ago I thought I would stop making this distinction. Years ago I thought another story would emerge.

Girls make good hockey players. No one should be surprised by this. The evil agenda to keep us apart is crumbling. Soap operas are a tool of the devil. Blondes have more fun, but that will change, too. Urban sprawl kills trees. We knew that a long time ago, but we keep doing it. The elements that add up to a meaningful life are ephemeral. That doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. No silver bullet exists. You can’t hold love forever.

How many ex-girlfriends does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to list your faults, one to sing your praises, one to change the damn light bulb.

Let there be light. Let the world shine on.

*

THE JAZZ AGE

Scott watched her undress and sipped his brandy. It was 3:30 in the morning. The party had run late. He had already finished off more brandies than he could remember. They had taken a taxi home, sitting close together in the back seat, holding hands. Every time they stopped at a red light, he pulled her closer and kissed her. She had ruddy cheeks and a full figure. She often complained about her weight, but it meant nothing to him. He had never stopped desiring her, and she knew it. Her complaints echoed with a tinny ping against the lonely drum of her self-esteem. They didn’t touch Scott, but they didn’t stop.

He had poured himself another brandy the moment he had entered their apartment. He didn’t know why, except that he felt thirsty. He poured one for Zelda, too, but she didn’t touch it. She left it sitting on the table in the kitchen and then disappeared into their bedroom.

Scott followed, taking up a position cross-legged in the middle of their bed, and watched her undress.

They were not married. They were unlikely to get married. They had exchanged no vows. He had never told her he loved her, although she had said it once, spitting it out before collapsing in his arms. When he caught her, he thought she was crying, but she wasn’t. She was trying to stifle a fit of giggles. She never told him what the giggles were about. “Don’t go there,” she would say every time he asked about it. It became a kind of game for them. “Don’t go there,” she would say. Then she would try to touch him, laughing, as she groped him, and he touched her back, and she screamed, “Don’t go there. Oh, don’t. Don’t.”

That day, he had picked her up at a bridal shower at the home of one of her childhood friends. She had childhood friends like he had cousins. Never really there and never really not there. They were like designer blue jeans, or Jamaican rum. Fade-resistant. Like digital audio. There was no loss over time, though nature’s laws said there ought to have been. He told her this was so because she had gone to private schools and he had not. He communicated regularly with only two people he knew in public school, and even then only a couple of times a year. She told him this was plainly bullshit, socialistic, and a cover for his own inability to maintain social relationships. She also pointed out that he was a man, and this factor was more than a coincidence, didn’t he agree? No, he did not. Well, yes, perhaps he did, but that did not invalidate his original statement, which remained true. She had been a private school girl, which was the same as joining a life-long clique; life-long cult he said when he was truly angry. She spoke severely about each of her so-called friends behind their backs, but she continued to pass through the stages of life with them, celebrating each new ritual with the same worn collection of bitches.

That day, she had consumed a large amount of champagne. The heavy pink of her cheeks had turned a rosy hue. The bride-to-be, the least favorite of her childhood coterie, was marrying a banker from New York. The groom had already bought her a house. She had already chosen the names of her children: two boys names, two girls names. Charles, Peter, Dorothy, Susan. The night before the shower Zelda told Scott the bride was best known for running naked through one of her parents’ garden parties shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Zelda repeated the rumours about the bride’s sexual preferences, about her summer of lesbian love in Spain, about her fantasies for large, athletic black men. Scott had heard it all before, or at least he had heard similar stories. He was a novelist, and Zelda tried to impress him with details. The details of her friends lives, mostly. But also details she had heard about strangers, conversations she overheard on the subway, or tidbits she heard around the newsroom.

Zelda staggered out of the bridal shower and slid into Scott’s arms.

“I love you, honey. I really do,” she said.

He had spent the afternoon golfing. He had recently bought his first set of clubs. He had recently sold the film rights to his first novel. He had major cash in his life for the first time and also the combination of leisure time and the desire to spend it. That day, he broke 100 – for the first time – and was happy.

He took Zelda’s declaration of love like a slap in the face.

“Honey,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

He felt her breasts against his arm. She seemed to want to push herself into him, perhaps through him. He staggered backwards on the verandah and threaded her arm through his.

“I love you, I love you,” Zelda said again.

Scott said, “Let’s get you home.” He led her down the front stairs of the house and along the sidewalk to where he had parked. He had a strong desire to kiss her, and did. She repulsed him. She didn’t say anything. A streak of lipstick smeared her left cheek. She wrapped her arms around him as he opened the passenger-side door. He felt the heat of her body. Perspiration had soaked through her dress. Her hair was damp and stuck to her neck. Red blotches were beginning to form on her skin. It was what happened when she over-heated. Her arms still wrapped around him, he pushed her hair away from her left ear and kissed it on the tip, on the side, and on the lobe. She released him and slid into the car. He lifted her purse in behind her, and closed the door.

They met when she was just seventeen. She was going through her promiscuous period; he was in law school; and it was he who fell for her hardest. She insisted they not talk about love. He always felt on the verge of losing her. She made him no promises. She demanded of him time, money, and affection, and gave him – besides her body – nothing in return. She told him not to phone her. She made and cancelled many dates. As they lay in bed sticky and contented after making love, she talked to him about her other men. Her other companions, as she called them then. She talked about her school friends and their competitions. It was a world foreign to him. He had never felt such anxiety, such fear.

He had other women, too. At that time, he had to. Other women kept him sane, even if they didn’t satisfy him. He thought about Zelda all day and all night, and the thought that she might desert him caused his blood to melt. Then for six months he didn’t see her, he didn’t hear from her. Without telling him, she moved to Europe for the summer. She had just finished high school. Then in September she moved to Montréal to begin a degree in religious studies. He found out these things by tracking down one of her friends – Zadie – a sickly looking bulimic-anorexic who worked at the cosmetics counter at the Bay downtown.

Zadie said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of you. The lawyer, right?”

“Law student,” Scott replied.

“Okay,” Zadie said. “Whatever.”

She smiled at him when he told her he was looking for Zelda.

“You mean she didn’t tell you?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh, God,” Zadie said. She flashed her fingernails at him, and said, “Okay, it’s like this.” When Scott didn’t say anything, she said again: “Okay.”

“Okay,” said Scott.

Zadie told Scott that Zelda wanted to “clean out” and “start over”. She had moved to France to live in a convent and practice her French. She had given up booze, boys, and bad living. “It’s, like, an experiment, okay?” Zadie said. “Zelda has this premise she wants to test out. So, it’s like an experiment. I can’t believe she didn’t tell you, but maybe that’s part of the experiment. I’d tell you more, but Zelda was kind of weird about it. All I know is that it’s an experiment, like. It doesn’t mean forever, but maybe it does. Who knows? It’s an experiment. An ex-per-i-ment. Okay?”

“Okay,” Scott said.

He felt like he was giving his permission or his resignation. Zadie gave him her business card and wrote “Nice talking to you!” with a little heart on the back. He never called her and didn’t see her again until years later, when she showed up at the house party he held with Zelda after they moved in together. She had put on twenty pounds, and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

Zelda wrote a weekly column about young people for the local newspaper. Many of her friends had found jobs in publishing. One of them had even taken over the editorship of one the country’s prestigious small press houses.

*

THE COMING ANARCHY

Scott watched her undress and sipped his brandy. He had already finished more brandies than he could remember. It was 3:30 in the morning. The party had run late. They had taken a taxi home, sitting close together in the back seat, holding hands. Every time they stopped at a red light, he pulled her close and kissed her. She had ruddy cheeks and a full figure. They were not married. They were unlikely to get married. He had never told her he loved her, although she had said it once.

Scott sipped his brandy and watched her undress. He sat silent like the Buddha cross-legged in the middle of their bed, looking at her impassively, and she ignored him as she slipped out of her bra and pulled on her nightgown. He had poured the brandy the moment he had entered their apartment. He didn't know why, except that he felt thirsty. He had poured one for Zelda, too, but she'd passed it by on her way to their bedroom.

It was dark outside, except for the flashing blue light from a snow plow, which pounded through the window.

Zelda took down her hair and shook it. She circled their bed and disappeared into the bathroom.

Scott sipped his drink, loosened his tie, and, without thinking, padded after her.

They were one of the city's darling young couples - one of the couples you find in photographs in the style section of the weekend newspaper; one of the couples on the A-list of all the best parties in town, no matter who's hosting, or what their sphere of influence. Admired and envied, they inspired many stories, both true and false, among the young, the hip. Scott's and Zelda's sexual histories and tales of their current living arrangements, dominated the rumour mill, circulating frequently, particularly among their peers in publishing and the newspaper biz. Every couple of months, someone would pull Scott aside at a party and ask him - wink, wink - had he heard? Usually, he had not. Occasionally, he was appalled. Inevitably, he would pause over his sipping rum, shake his head, and thank his friend for the information and their honest communion.

In the bathroom, Zelda flossed.

Scott watched her, then placed his hands on her hips and slid them around her until he could feel the warmth of her tummy on his palms.

She had put on twenty pounds since they’d first met, though she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known. She complained about her weight, but it meant nothing to him.

They had been together seven years, and it had never been better.

Suddenly, she said: "Do you know what he said to me?"

"Who?"

"You know who."

"Him?"

"Yes, him. Do you know what he said to me?"

"Why do you let him get to you?"

"It's outrageous what he says."

"Yes, but you don't have to let it get to you."

"Do you know what he said?"

"The usual."

"The usual, yes. But there was more this time. He said: 'Scott's writing is shit. I'm not saying he writes poorly. In fact, he writes well. His writing is strong, clear, and interesting in its own way. I would never ask for more. But at the same time, it's shit.'"

"That's what he always says."

"Not in so many words."

"He was more direct this time."

"He asked me if I could see myself five years from now reading your book. He talked about the test of time. 'Good writing aims at permanence; all else is shit,' he said. 'I can't see Scott's writing standing up against time, but maybe I'm wrong.' He admitted he could be wrong."

"That's good of him."

"He was drunk, of course."

"Of course."

"And I smiled at him. When he was done, I smiled at him. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming at him and causing a scene."

He pulled his arms tight around her and buried his face in her hair.

"Oh, Zelda," he said.

He could feel her crying, and he thought he could kill the bastard. If only the bastard were brave enough to show up at their apartment. If he walked in right now. If he showed up complaining about a flat tire, he could kill him for the pure meanness in his soul, for his cruelty and malignant self-confidence.

Seven years earlier, it had been he who had fallen hardest.

He had been in law school. Just seventeen when they met, she insisted they not talk about love. He had never felt such anxiety, such fear. She told him not to phone her. She talked to him about her other men. Her other companions, she called them. She talked about her school friends and their sexual competitions.

At first, she had been the latest blonde bombshell in a long series of blonde bombshells. But she had been the one who demanded of him time, money, and affection, and gave him - besides her body - nothing in return. He always felt on the verge of losing her.

Then she disappeared.

For six months he didn't see her; he didn't hear from her.

She finished high school and disappeared.

He tracked down one of her friends - Marilyn - a sickly thin girl with streaked blue hair who worked at the cosmetics counter at the Bay downtown.

Marilyn said, "Oh, yeah. I've heard of you. The lawyer, right?"

"Law student," Scott replied.

"Okay," Marilyn said. "Whatever."

She smiled at him when he told her he was looking for Zelda.

"You mean she didn't tell you?"

"No," he said.

"Oh, God," Marilyn said. She flashed her fingernails at him, and said, "Okay, it's like this."

When Scott didn't say anything, she said again: "Okay."

"Okay," said Scott.

Marilyn said Zelda wanted to "clean out" and "start over". She had moved to France to live in a convent. She had given up booze, boys, and bad living.

"It's, like, an experiment, okay?" Marilyn said. "Zelda has this premise she wants to test out. So, it's like an experiment. I can't believe she didn't tell you, but maybe that's part of the experiment. I'd tell you more, but Zelda was kind of weird about it. All I know is that it's an experiment. It doesn't mean forever, but maybe it does. Who knows? It's an experiment. An ex-per-i-ment. Okay?"

"Okay," Scott said.

Marilyn gave him her business card and wrote Nice talking to you! with a little heart and her home phone number on the back. He didn't see her again until three years later, when she came to the house party Zelda threw to celebrate the fact that they had moved in together.

Zelda returned from Europe after two months in the convent and began a religious studies degree at McGill. Home for Christmas break four months later, she called Scott and offered to meet him anywhere any time. She was, she said, in the middle of three concurrent affairs - one with a professional hockey player, one with a bartender, and one with a rabbinical student - and she felt like she was flying apart.

"Now," he said. "Come now."

When she arrived, Scott cut a line of cocaine and blindfolded her.

They did the coke together, then he took her, still blindfolded, on a tour down Queen Street. The first place they stopped was an underground bar west of Bathurst, where he introduced her to strange men and asked them to interview her about her fantasies. The first man, who said he was a speech writer for the provincial government, bought her a peach schnapps and asked if she had ever kissed another woman.

"Yes," she said.

"Passionately?"

"Yes."

Scott, sitting beside her, pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket, and lit it.

"When?" the man asked.

"What do you mean?"

"How old were you?"

"Fourteen or fifteen."

"Did it only happened once?"

"It happened more than once."

"With the same girl?"

"No, with different girls."

"How many?"

"Three."

"When was the last time you did it?"

"I was probably sixteen. Three years ago."

"Why did you stop kissing girls?"

"Who says I've stopped kissing girls?"

The next man, a plumber, asked her about masturbation: frequency, intensity, level of satisfaction.

"Onanists Pride Day, that's the one I'm waiting for," he said. "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, and neither does anyone else!"

The third man, a gay TTC bus driver, asked her about real estate.

"Location, location, location. Give me three places you want to get it on, and they better be good!"

Scott took her to four bars, witnessed fourteen interviews, then dropped her in a cab and sent her home, drunk, sad, and exhausted.

The next day she called him and told him she loved him.

"Don't talk about love," he said. "Don't ever talk about love."

"Okay. Not after this," she said.

Then she told him again that she loved him. They were soul mates. He was the only one for her. She would be true to him forever.

"Clichés," he said, and hung up.

But after that, things turned around.

She went back to Montréal to finish her degree, and was not chaste, but she was also not the slut she had been. Then they moved in together, and the past seemed both like a blur and like something that hadn't happened. It seemed like something that had happened to someone else, which is maybe why the rumours meant nothing to him. They were about someone else, too. Someone devious. Someone deviant. Someone who deserved to have rumours spread about him. Scott was not that person. He was only a minor novelist living in a marginal country at a transitional moment in history when the Industrial Age was breaking down and no one knew quite yet what was going to replace it.

It was begun in 1931 in Switzerland, where it was published in 1943 after being rejected for publication in Germany due to Hesse's anti-Fascist views.

I was first encouraged to read it in 1990 by a young woman who thrilled me with her mind and — well, that’s another story. I did read Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf (1927) back then, but the premise of The Glass Bead Game struck me as ponderous and dull.

Now that I am old, ponderous, and dull myself, its premise strikes me as charged, even brilliant, though it remains complicated to summarize. First off, the game exists, but it is never described in enough detail to be implemented. At the same time, the game is of central importance; it is the book’s grounding metaphor. So what can be said about it?

The action in the novel takes place centuries in the future, reflecting on past events in a world based on our own, yet divergent from it. The location of the novel is an alternate reality or a kind of parallel universe to our own, similar enough to be recognizable, different enough to be strange. Within this world are two spheres of influence, one organized around the playing of the Glass Bead Game and the other the quotidian world of jobs, families, politics, organized religion, and all of that.

The players of the Glass Bead Game consist of a kind of non-religious priestly caste, trained in a monkish way from childhood, educated broadly in music, science and high-level abstract thinking, while also being separated and told very little about history, politics or the ways of the world. The inhabitants of each sphere of influence accommodates the other, while also believing their own mode of existence is the best.

The Glass Bead Game itself involves players making associations between different threads of knowledge, theories, practices, events in the development of human thought. I took it, overall, as a metaphor for Enlightenment thought, practices summarized by the term, Ivory Tower, a common put-down term by those who prefer to celebrate “the common sense of the common people,” e.g., Fascists.

Not that Hesse frames anything in the novel as bluntly as that. While the two spheres in the novel exist in tension, conflict between them is muted. Engagement between the two spheres is limited, though it does happen. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that the two sides have a non-aggression pact. They don’t compete; they show little curiosity about each other.

Except, that is, for the figure at the centre of the novel, the infamous Magister Ludi (Master of the Game), Joseph Knecht.

Going forward will involve spoilers, so forewarned is forearmed. I began the book, having done no research. I had no idea what to expect, beyond having a general understanding of Hesse’s storytelling, which I knew from Steppenwolf all those years ago. I would have said something like, Hesse explores the life of the mind and the life of the body and the integration or lack thereof between the two, including the use of concepts from both Eastern and Western mysticism and spirituality.

Yes, The Glass Bead Game has much of that, but it’s on a bigger scale than the storytelling in Steppenwolf. In fact, the storytelling in The Glass Bead Game is fragmented. There are three major sections, linked, yes, but each distinct. The main section tells the life of Joseph Knecht, narrated by a historian in the future, who has access to much information, but who also admits some events and explanations have been lost to time.

Britannica summarizes the novel this way:

The book is an intricate bildungsroman about humanity’s eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the active life.

Why did I turn to this novel at this time? Did it have to do with the arrival and behaviour of the new U.S. administration? Well, yes. This novel was published as the Nazis occupied Europe, but it doesn’t have a political program; it has an aesthetic intellectual program. It explores complexities of Art/Life divergence, topics of interest to this blog. It also reminded me of disagreements I had with my friend who recommended this book to me, so many years ago. How to synthesize the intellectual and active life?

The Glass Bead Game suggests pursuit of intellectual abstraction is arid without a connection to the world of things, and the world of things risks meaningless chaos unless it welcomes the insights of higher levels of thinking and engaging “reality.”

The word “feuilleton,” which the novel introduced me to, can take the analysis deeper — and the abstraction higher — moving us in opposite directions toward the end.

The online almanac, Huxley, for example, has this to say about feuilleton and The Glass Bead Game:

Feuilleton — this French word (from feuille — leaf) refers to light entertainment articles in daily newspapers. Feuilletons were first printed in France on single sheets (hence the name).

The age of feuilleton, or intellectual levity, is essential — the age in which we live.

Hermann Hesse first wrote about the feuilleton era in «The Glass Bead Game». It is the first and only science fiction novel to win the Nobel Prize. Hermann Hesse became a Nobel Laureate in 1946 «for his inspired work, which displays the classical ideals of humanism, as well as his brilliant style».

The book describes the lives of future intellectuals living in a cloistered community and trying to circumvent the age of feuilletonism.

Striking similarities to our own time! After all, when the novel was written (1931–1942), there was still no internet or television, and the author did not get intoxicated by talk shows, social media, and the like.

Here’s another find.

Annette Hamilton wrote an extended reflection on the contemporary feuilleton (November 2024), including the following insight:

The Age of the Feuilleton is completely dominant today, ever more so with the consequences of AI development and universal internet access on every phone – the mastery of the Machine indeed.

I had started reading The Glass Bead Game thinking it would tell me something about how to respond to the current politically chaotic moment, but it has lead me instead to highlighting how our culture is drowning in the superficial — something Hesse saw and outlined a century ago and Neil Postman was a more recent guru.

The future historian narrator of The Glass Bead Game cannot fathom how people were obsessed with such inanities, and yet they were, and we are.

Joseph Knecht would certainly recommend mediation as a response to such anxieties. Instead, I tried poking around on the internet to see if I could bring some structure to my thoughts about the current politically chaotic moment.

Meditation might have been more useful.

One thing led to another until I read the following by Robert Pinsky in The New Yorker (January 30, 2025), which responded more directly to what I considered the current predicament:

In many responses to the first days of the second Trump Presidency—expressions of an outrage denied the refuge of surprise—a historical analogy recurs: Is this how it felt to be a progressive liberal in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor?

No analogy is perfect, but a different historical moment feels, to me, more immediate and more challenging as a reference point.

Czesław Miłosz’s prose book “The Captive Mind,” first published in 1953 (in a translation by Jane Zielonko), still in print and as authoritative as ever, is a clinically observed, intimately first-person account of how Polish poets and novelists—people who had lived through the Nazi occupation—dealt with the Stalinist regime that began after the Allied victory in the Second World War.

Milosz. Hmm. I have that book. I’ve poked around in it a bit, and I don’t feel like I have a handle on it. I often had the sense that Milosz was used to bash whoever one disagreed with — it’s always the other side, right, that’s captured — rather than seek synthesis of the intellectual and the active life.

I concluded, though, that Milosz would likely be a player of the Glass Bead Game. Keeping the mind free and open — not captive — is critical to health, personal and social, individual and collective. It’s one step on the journey, anyway.

Joseph Knecht ends up leaving his role as the Master of the Game, taking a teaching job in the world of things. The life of the mind isn’t enough, he finds. He wants to engage with the world, live outside the Ivory Tower. However, very quickly he dies. He drowns in a mountain lake attempting to follow his pupil in for a swim.

In the novel’s final section, similar tales of spiritual leaders — in different cultural traditions — meet similar fates. The mixing of the spheres, Hesse seems to suggest, leads to disaster. The final section is presented as the writings of Joseph Knecht. Wikipedia suggests more pattern to the final section than was obvious to me!

The three lives, together with that as Magister Ludi, oscillate between extroversion (rainmaker, Indian life—both get married) and introversion (father confessor, Magister Ludi) while developing the four basic psychic functions of analytical psychology: sensation (rainmaker), intuition (Indian life), feeling (father confessor), and thinking (Magister Ludi).

Wikipedia also includes the following:

In his biography of Hesse[, Pilgrim of Crisis], [Ralph] Freedman wrote that the tensions caused by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of The Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times. "The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time. It became the 'island of love' or at least an island of the spirit." According to Freedman, in The Glass Bead Game, "contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design."

Everyone needs a Switzerland.

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We can choose to see Glover's tales as predictive, or we can see them as a warning about the dark currents of desire. Or we can just see them as stories, good stories. Stories that feed the heart, and the mind, and fill all sorts of cracks in between.

I am pasting here below my own Glover completist collection (so far), which includes 2001 and 2012 interviews with DG I did for The Danforth Review and reviews of the following:

• 16 Categories of Desire (2000)

• The Life and Times of Captain N. (2001, 1993)

• The South Will Rise At Noon (2004, 1988)

• The Enamoured Knight (2004)

• The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Interview with Douglas Glover by Bruce Stone (2004)

• Savage Love (2013)

For biographical details on Glover, see his Canadian Encyclopedia entry (of which I wrote a draft in 2010, later updated online by someone else) and his Wikipedia entry, which notes his remarkable online magazine, Numero Cinq (2010-17), and a list of contributors, including me.

See also his personal website… Also his Substack, Out & Back.

Glover won the 2003 Governor-General's Award for Fiction for his novel, Elle (2003), and was nominated for the same award in 1991 for this short story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour (1991).

Glover’s work includes short story collections, novels, memoir, essays, and what I’ve going to call literary instruction, which sounds drier than it is. I mean, how dull can a book about writing be when it’s called Attack of the Copula Spiders (2012)?

My own response to encountering Glover’s work was a strange (as in awe struck) recognition. I was trying to do something with my own writing and struggling to articulate what. Then I read Glover and I went, oh, that’s what I’m trying to do. Something along the lines he’d already figured out.

I didn’t write a review of Glover’s memoir/essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (1999), but it had a profound affect on me, how I understood what I was trying to do, some new insights and some validation of old insights. I hope to explain more in a future Art/Life post.

For now, here’s the DG Collection (so far….

*

Interview with Douglas Glover

[The Danforth Review, Summer 2001]

TDR: Your novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (Knopf, 1993) has just been released in trade paperback by Goose Lane Editions (2001). Are you self-consciously placing your work with (and/or moving your work to) smaller presses? Or does this move say something about your original publisher's support of this work? In your book of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (Oberon, 1999), you mention that your agent once warned you about the fate of your career. I wonder what the move of Captain N. from Knopf to Goose Lane says about how your work fits into the literary marketplace. Perhaps you could comment on your experience working with both large and small presses.

GLOVER: The Life and Times of Captain N. I sold myself, without an agent, to Alfred A. Knopf in New York. McClelland and Stewart later bought the Canadian rights from Knopf. And the way I sold the book went like this: Gordon Lish took a story of mine for THE QUARTERLY. I included that story in A Guide to Animal Behaviour (published by Goose Lane). At some point, I sent Lish a copy of the book to see if he could help bring that out in the U.S. He responded with his usual astonishing speed, asking me if I had a novel instead. I sent him the first fifty pages of The Life and Times of Captain N., and he bought it.

While my book was coming out, Lish's wife was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and his son had assaulted him and he was on the outs with Knopf and its parent Random House. Soon after his wife died, Knopf fired Lish. I had no editor there; the book languished. I fell into my own period of desuetude going through a divorce and re-establishing myself afterwards. When I poked my head up again a few years later, I couldn't get a publisher or an agent interested in me. I'd become a middleaged, midlist pariah living on the wrong side of the border.

At this point old friends rallied round my bloody, tattered standard. John Metcalf at Porcupine's Quill, Karen Mulhallen at Descant, Philip Marchand, Liz Philips at Grain, and Kim Jernigan at The New Quarterly were most encouraging in a dark time. Dilshad Engineer offered to do my book of essays at Oberon Press. And Susanne Alexander took my book of stories and has now reprinted The Life and Times of Captain N. at Goose Lane Editions. I am grateful to them all. As a writer, I seem to be doing fine — books are coming out — though I notice I still don't have a career or an agent, and there is a marked scarcity of money in the environs.

TDR: I have been reading backwards through your catalogue, and it seems to me that your narratives often articulate the boundaries of different conflicts political, aesthetic, sexual, sociological, etc. simultaneously. You seem to be both seeking the appropriate terms to define a certainty and also never arriving at one. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you say about East German writer Christa Wolf: "She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere" (62). Similar sentiments repeat in The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place in the context of the backwoods warfare of the American Revolution ("We Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians are having a violent debate whose Subject is the Human Heart" (162). Your approach appears to be both sensible and relatively unique on the Canadian literary scene, which often frames its purpose in sociological terms (i.e., Canadian culture is necessary for national identity). Are you self-conscious about working against popular conceptions about what it means to be a Canadian writer? Is Canadian literature all it's pumped up to be?

GLOVER: The setting up of opposites as a mode of conjecture is, of course, the form of the aphorism. Kant uses a version of this in the sections of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Antinomies and the Paralogisms, where he juxtaposes apparently true but contrary propositions about the nature of reality and argues for both. Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. Adorno's gorgeous Minima Moralia is all aphorisms. The aphorism is an ancient ironic form, highly artificial, but with a bite. You can only write aphorisms in the attack mode, with a tone of arrogance. Here's one I wrote to a student who was complaining about having to learn aphorisms: There are two kinds of readers--the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the wienies who, lacking courage themselves, find it an affront in others. The Life and Times of Captain N. contains passages of extended aphorism called "Oskar's Book about Indians" in which oral cultures and literate cultures are opposed on a variety of verbal torsion points: e.g. history, memory, names, ritual, story-telling, books. Nietzsche called his aphorisms "Versuch" — "trials" or "experiments" — much the way Montaigne called his essays "essais". I think a person who writes from this rhetorical position is always on the outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive.

Whether Canadian literature is all it's pumped to be is not a question that interests me. On the other hand, there are some books written by Canadians I love.

TDR: In The Art of the Novel and elsewhere, Milan Kundera has argued that novels ought to do what only novels can do. He has argued that movies have made the 19th century-style realistic novel redundant, and claimed that most contemporary novels are a sub-genre of journalism. None of this, I think, pertains to your work, since you seem (like Kundera) to be interested in the history of ideas and their place, overt or subterranean, in forming individual identities and life-stories. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you return a number of times to the different ways readers approach literary works and how those approaches are often the cause of mis-readings. In particular, you're fond of Vladimir Nabokov's distinction between reading for aboutness and reading for artistic appreciation. Kundera might say that aboutness is what the movies are good at, and what serious novelists should somehow transcend. Could you explain Nabokov's aboutness/artistic appreciation distinction in the context of your own work particularly in terms of how you approach your writing both in the process of production and when you are attempting to explain it to readers/editors/critics?

GLOVER: I used Nabokov's distinction in an early essay though I find it a bit over-simplified and misleading. And even in that essay I built on the distinction to say that good novels deploy a wide variety of technical structures some of which promote verisimilitude (i.e. they seem to be about something) and some of which are more purely formal (structures of repetition, image patterning, subplotting, etc.) which tend not to be realistic at all. Every novel contains elements of both in a rough tension with each other. Experimental novels foreground structural elements or some playful or inverted version of them; so-called conventional or realistic novels foreground elements that promote verisimilitude. My argument is mostly against anyone who takes one or the other as being definitive — how sick I am of all those turgid, log- rolling arguments about whether novels should have ethical messages or whether they should be purely aesthetic confections. Most writers strike a balance that somehow suits their particular temperament. Why some feel called upon to climb on soap boxes and campaign for the primacy of their particular brand of novel-writing is beyond me.

My own work is tilted toward the foregrounding of repetitive structures. It's a kind of Ciceronian or embellished style, though occasionally I write something in the plain style, too, and I am always delighted. But I am also pretty sure I am writing about something when I write. The Life and Times of Captain N. is clearly about a set of ideas and a group of people during the American Revolution and some of these people really existed and even did some of the things I imagine them doing. But when you get caught up in arguments, especially critical arguments, you find yourself having to explain things to benighted individuals who want to oversimplify and make categorical statements, and you're forced to try to disabuse these people, not by responding in kind, but by being complex and ironic.

TDR: At the height of the Y2K anxiety a couple of years ago, American academic and media critic Neil Postman released a book called Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. In that book, he claimed that most of the ideas we should carry forward with us into the new millennium originated in the 18th century and that we should return our focus there before blindly rushing into the future. You had already done that years earlier in The Life and Times of Captain N., which contains quotations like: "I do not believe in God (old Europe, the King, loyalty, and authority) or reason (Locke's blank slate, history, atoms, laws, freedom, and democracy). To think that men can govern themselves is as idiotic as thinking they will forever bend the knee to someone better" (158). What was it about the 18th century that attracted you? Is Postman right to say that the conflicts of the 18th century still frame our debates today? You seem to concur with some of Postman's assumptions in Notes from a Prodigal Son, when you write, "literary feminism is the last gasp of the 18th century liberation philosophies" (37). Briefly, please explain.

GLOVER: If you look closely at the quotation you cite (which is in a character's head in a novel), it says Hendrick doesn't believe in either set of ideas, a state of mind which, to my way of thinking, is a sign of wisdom or madness though no external observer would be able to tell which. The succeeding sentences refer to the mystery of the human heart which, the text implies, is not accurately described by either set of ideas.

My sense of the history of ideas is that ideas thread through cultures and individual minds in hugely complex and playful ways. Human beings being what they are, we try to catch onto a set of ideas here and there, hold onto a branch as we float by (to mix my metaphors). The 18th century itself didn't attract me because I thought the 18th century ideas were appealing. It attracted me because there was a moment in history when narrative and aphorism seemed to combine in a way that I could write about in a novel. Also these ideas are still operative in the culture into which I was born so in seeing how they originated I was reliving something of my own mental makeup ab ovo. Perhaps that is what Postman means, but I wouldn't say these ideas frame our present debates any more than Plato or Aristotle or Duns Scotus or Augustine frame them. The idea of a frame is reductive. It implies the existence of something beyond the picture that explains the picture. I like those writers, historians of ideas, who track the threading of an idea through history or structuralists like Foucault who find traces of old social structures in the new.

TDR: In Notes from a Prodigal Son, you write: "My apprenticeship ended with the realization that the goal of literature is not simply truth, which is bourgeois and reductive, but a vision of complexity, an endless forging of connections which opens outward into mystery" (166). Perhaps you could briefly chart the progression of your apprenticeship, including the role "Mikhail Bahktin and his ideas about discourse and the dialogic imagination" (Prodigal Son, 37) play as an ongoing literary influence in your work.

GLOVER: My life has been an apprenticeship for whatever comes next, though I do periodically think I have reached some more definitive threshold of existence only to find later that it was just another painful learning experience (a lot of these). But in the process I find certain writers and thinkers to be companionable. Bakhtin, when I read him, seemed to be saying things that made sense of what I had been trying to puzzle out about writing and my life. As he says, language is war. Most of my life I've been fighting a war against the discourse of rural Tory provincialism, the Ontario miasma of my youth, and the various discourses that seemed allied with it: all sorts of conventionalisms, including all those perky new ones that keep popping up in the little villages of academic criticism and literary journalism. So much of what I say can be viewed as a moment in a battle: I am saying this is me and I am against that. It was a relief to read Bahktin who seemed to imply that I wasn't so dumb to feel embattled, that my sense of struggle, my dissatisfaction, even boredom, with certain ways of doing things, was natural. Bakhtin didn't show me something new, but he said everything again in a succinct and elegant way.

He also tied the notion of language as a battle of discourses directly to the form of the novel. This seemed like a very useful way of thinking about form. I don't mean that I think it's the only way of thinking about novel form. But it's very useful sometimes to look at form from a different angle. Instead of talking about characters, one can sometimes usefully talk about the habitual language games a character uses. Two characters using different language games will clash over everything including just how to describe their realities. They will fight over words. And then words like "love" and "translation" might begin to have interesting parallel definitions.

TDR: Who are some contemporary writers and/or books you're hot on? Why?

GLOVER: I don't read much newly published work. I have two children, two dogs, two rats, a cat, several money-making jobs, and I read what is necessary to keep me excited. I am reading David Copperfield to my boys. We just got to the lovely, sad part where David marries Dora and then realizes she is just a "child-wife" and not the "counsellor" and companion he had dreamed of marrying. Oh, my heart. I love Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and the novels of Hubert Aquin and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man and much of Alice Munro and Leon Rooke's stories and John Metcalf's Adult Entertainment and his new Ford stories and Karen Mulhallen's (a fellow southwestern Ontario refugee) poetry, her brave and brittle romanticism. There are a lot of new Canadian writers I come across reading for Best Canadian Stories, some individual stories I admire immensely. I admire Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, Peter Handke, Max Frisch, and Witold Gombrowicz. Which means, I guess, that I like literature that deploys a complex of ideas and inquiries about the nature of modern life and has already taken into account a good deal of current and historical philosophical debate. I also like Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter--my love of the baroque and bloody whimsy, I guess. Then there are a number of so-called Third World or colonial or peripheral writers I admire — Narayan, Rushdie, Carey, Ruolfo, Tutuola, Cortazar — because I feel they are coming from a socio-political and imaginative universe parallel to my own. Any list here is incomplete, dodgy at best: I have a bookcase full of what I think of as important books, maybe a hundred. They keep changing.

POST-INTERVIEW INTERVIEW

BRYSON: I thought it was interesting that you said "Most of my life I've been fighting a war against the discourse of rural Tory provincialism," but when I asked you about being self-conscious about working against popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer, you didn't tackle it from this angle. Maybe it's too simple to say the two are connected. Do you see those things as connected at all?

GLOVER: Actually, it never occurred to me to connect the two ideas because the "rural Tory provincialism" I grew up with didn't even acknowledge the existence of writers and art, or so it seems to me. In other words, it operated somewhere beneath or beyond "popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer." In the world of my youth, a writer was someone like my great-grandfather who wrote patriotic limericks for the Mail and Empire or doggerel in a French accent in the style of William Henry Drummond while he managed the family store in St. Williams. That's why Hubert Aquin rings so true with me. I forget which book of his it's in, but he has a line about this country not being able to produce any real writers at all, just notaries and sickies like himself. Canada today is lucky in that it even possesses "popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer." I don't know if the philistinism I grew up with somehow threads its way through some of these popular conceptions. That might be an interesting idea to explore. But a lot of these debates amount to journalistic or academic log-rolling and aren't very useful in the long run. The struggle I was talking about in my case is much more personal and has to do with the place and time I was born into.

BRYSON: I see I haven't asked you anything about your most recent short story collection 16 Categories of Desire (Goose Lane, 2000). The way I read it, that book seemed to be an exploration of the different connotations of the word "desire" - but most significantly an exploration of the cultural inheritance of Romanticism. In a review in The Danforth Review, I called Mary Shelley a precursor. If 16 Categories is an exploration of desire in all its connotations, what did the process reveal to you?

GLOVER: When I was touring the Soviet Union in 1988 as a guest of the Soviet Writers Union, I met an older writer named Daniel Granin, who said, through my interpreter Alexei (who otherwise made his living delivering tapes for an underground video store in Moscow), "All my life has been an effort to liberate myself from love." This struck me as an odd idea at the time, though gradually it began to obsess me. Some version of this sentence recurs in three of the stories in 16 Categories of Desire. I wrote these stories as narrative experiments on the nature of love and desire. I don't think I am done with the subject yet, but in writing that book I began to see desire as dark stream of want pouring out of the abyss of the unconscious (the empty pit at the centre of the self). I don't claim this idea as original — I know it comes to me partly from reading Schopenhauer years ago.

Putting Schopenhauer and Granin together in my own head, I imagined desire as an endlessly unsatisfied craving eating its way through life; each of us is only a particular moment of the World Desire. Most of the conventional ways we talk about ourselves and love are cheery little fairy tales or dark, romantic hero stories meant to make us feel better as we pursue this course of metaphysical gluttony. By the logic of grammatical substitution, you get all sorts of interesting equivalents and paradoxes out of this: The Unconscious is unknowable and is thus equivalent to Death, so Desire originates in Death, and Love, which is an expression of Desire, originates in Death. To fall in Love is, in one sense, to devour the loved one. I could go on, but I think you can begin to see how some of the ideas in the stories develop. (Also, as you can see, my formulations run to the gothic. Your intuition about Mary Shelley was astute. But Robert Louis Stevenson is also iconic for me: the gentle, cultured doctor trying to ride herd on the shambling beast of desire he has created out of himself.)

The book also explores some of the ways particular expressions or styles of desire are created. For example, in "Lunar Sensitivities" I was thinking about the triangulation of desire, the way we acquire certain desires by watching what other people desire. In a way, the self is created by imitating the desires of others (who are imitating others). This is the way modern advertising works; it treats us all as if we were servants of Death, and what we like to romanticize by calling it personality is really just a copy of someone else's copy of....

Is there any escape from this? I don't think Schopenhauer really thought so. Nor did Freud. But in my own small way, I am a mystic. One begins by understanding the situation (Wittgenstein's fly in the fly bottle) and one begins to imagine modes of departure. Then oddly and paradoxically the word love comes back into play because love, in some constructs, is about leaving desire behind and simply attending (paying attention to, gazing at, looking at) to the loved object. Language, which itself sometimes seems to be part of the trap of life, contains words which exist on the edge of language looking out: love, gift, prayer, goodness, beauty, courage. In this vast nostalgia for what is beyond desire, there is some glimmer of redemption.

The idea of redemption keeps coming back. In The South Will Rise at Noon, Tully Stamper is comically redeemed in a mythic re-enactment of the death and rebirth of ancient gods. Phoenix imagery runs through the book. I know I was thinking then of the idea of grace, the idea that a god, for whatever mysterious reason, could reach down and touch a man so eminently unworthy as Tully. In The Life and Times of Captain N., Hendrick says that becoming an Indian would be like entering a swarming madness, but it might redeem you. He doesn't mean "going Indian" in any stupid back-to-the-land, romance-of-the-noble-savage way; he means having the courage to go right out of your self (personality, culture) and into the other. This is a kind of perfect love; the one ethical injunction espoused in the novel is "Love difference." And in the story "My Romance" in 16 Categories of Desire, there is a moment when the protagonist and his wife, destroyed by grief over the death of their son, fuse and redeem themselves in an act of love.

BRYSON: What are you working on now?

GLOVER: I'm writing a novel based loosely on the suicide of my great-grandfather who killed himself in 1914 in St. Williams, Ontario, ostensibly because he had been accused of sleeping with someone else's wife. He kept a store in St. Williams, called himself the village bard, wrote mediocre poetry, had two teenage daughters and a dog named Gyp, and I can't for the life of me figure out why he killed himself. In the Ontario Archives, I found the letter books belonging to the lawyer who was suing my great-grandfather for Criminal Conversation (what they called it in those days). There doesn't seem to have been any credible evidence of misconduct. So I am making up what happened. Like my earlier work, it contains threads from at least a half-dozen ongoing investigations: desire, love, redemption, Canadian history, myth and folklore, the nature of language. The working title is The Speaking of the Dead, but my working titles rarely make it to the cover of the actual book.

*

16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover (2000)

[Review first appeared in The Danforth Review]

One of the definitions of good writing is that it demands good criticism. Easy praise is rarely earned, nor is easy dismissal usually fully justified. Douglas Glover's latest short story collection, 16 Categories of Desire, is a case in point. Against most standards it is an excellent, highly readable, complex construction of literary craftsmanship. And yet, what value do those accolades have without being attached to a critical examination of the metaphorical patterns which repeat with seismic regularity throughout Glover's 11 stories? Surely, little (or not enough).

And so, off we go in pursuit of a deeper criticism. The word "desire" in the title is a large clue, and a good place to start. A clue about what? The author's intentions? Perhaps, though we can move to a broader plane if we follow Barthes and kill the author. What patterns repeat in the stories? Patterns of desire. More specifically, patterns of desire which conjure adjectives like "dark", "Gothic", and "destructive." Mary Shelley is only one of Glover's obvious precursors. Margaret Atwood might be another, though Atwood's lovelorn tales nearly always smack of the overt subtext of contemporary sexual politics, a current less strained in Glover, though not wholly absent.

The extent of Glover capital-R Romanticism —and the vein is deep — makes 16 Categories of Desire a collection with a potentially lasting impact. It is, for example, eminently teachable. It is veritably awash with essay questions.

1. Compare and contrast Glover's depiction of a released mental patient ("Bad News of the Heart") with the monster in Shelley's Frakenstein (or with Wordsworth's madmen, for that matter);

2. Why do Glover's characters repeatedly say things like: "My entire life has been a struggle to liberate myself from love" ("Lunar Sensitivities")?;

3. Compare the emotional lives of Glover's characters with the one Goethe provides for his Young Werter.

4. Contrast the post-French Revolution politics of early-19th century England with the disillusionment of Glover's PR hack made rich by stock market fraud ("The Indonesian Client").

In short, Glover's 16 Categories of Desire is a good book because it tells compelling stories in clear, accessible language. It is an excellent book because it contains a recognizable rhythm of metaphor, imagery, and rhetorical purpose. It relates to a tradition of writing — and a tradition of thinking and feeling — which many people have absorbed and repeat without conceiving a single iota of consent or intent (often with self-destructive consequences).

It would be naive to believe that in Glover's view of the world we are all as doomed as his protagonists. We are not. We can choose to see Glover's tales as predictive, or we can see them as a warning about the dark currents of desire. Or we can just see them as stories, good stories. Stories that feed the heart, and the mind, and fill all sorts of cracks in between.

*

The Life and Times of Captain N. by Douglas Glover (2001, 1993)

[Review first appeared in The Danforth Review, 2001]

Early last fall, TDR ran an interview with Douglas Glover. This review was meant to accompany that interview. However, it didn't get written until many weeks later. Life intervened (as life does), but something else happened, too. A kind of writer's block. Something closely related to fear. Fear of what? Fear of failure, yes. Fear of forgetting, also. Fear of forgetting something important. Fear of failing to say the right thing. Fear of not "getting it right."

More than perhaps any other, this is a review I wanted to "get right". In the end, I didn't get it done. And now I can only offer notes towards the review that should have been, but never was.

In short, I think this is more than a fine book. It is one of those books that sent a shock down my spinal cord. Readers should always approach books with high expectations, even though that usually means we are disappointed. Less often we are merely satisfied. Rarer still, we can say we read a book that startled and shocked us. This is the experience I had with The Life and Times of Captain N. I believe it is a rare book in the Canadian canon — and deserves a much higher profile that it currently commands.

Writers are often asked about influences. My thought is you find your influences through diverse reading. More specifically, the linear progression commonly implied when writers are asked about influences is misleading at best, and at worse, false. Your influences are the writers you are attracted you; they are your family of origin, even though you may not find them until you are well on your way to developing your own outlook on life — and your own literary "voice".

Such was my experience when I read Glover's essay in "The Masks of I" in The New Quarterly in 1999 (reprinted that same year in Glover's nonfiction collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press). Glover said things I had been struggling to articulate for my own. He referenced other works I had found important. And he used The Life and Times of Captain N. as an example:

The following is an example of precisely this kind of Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian criticism taken from a review of my own novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (my God, Percy! — four points of view, two of them the same person only years apart, interpolated essays on history and anthropology, dream images traveling back and forth between characters — absolute bloody chaos!).

What is "Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian criticism"? According to Glover, it's the kind practice by literary critics who hold that the novel ought to reflect a singular point of view, as articulated by Percy Lubbock in 1921 in a volume called The Craft of Fiction. As Glover notes (and as Glover practices), there is another school of thought that celebrates novels with multiple points of view, as articulated by E.M. Forster in 1927 in Aspects of the Novel. Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel is a later proponent of this school, as is the work of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin.

In an earlier editorial in The Danforth Review I made reference to Glover's TNQ essay. At the time (March 2000), I was ticked off by a review Andrew Pyper had written about Michael Turner's The Pornographer's Poem in The Globe and Mail. To use Glover's terms, I saw Pyper as a "Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian":

For Pyper, reading experimental prose is like a "wrestling match between 'straight story' and 'pure idea'." Pyper's use of the term "narrative pleasure" is a hint about the assumptions he brings to reviewing (and his own fiction, like the recent popular novel, Lost Girls). Another hint is the false conflict he sets up between "story" and "idea". Contrary to the assumption in Pyper's argument, stories and ideas are rarely, if ever, separated. Stories have been embodying ideas for millennia. In fact, it could easily be said the stories with the deepest ideas are the ones that survive the sands of time, while "narrative pleasure" reeks of Hollywood blockbusters, special effects, manipulative music scores, and plotting rigged to trigger the heartstrings of the sentimental.

Well, whatever. All of this is a lead up to say that making a case for raising the profile of The Life and Times of Captain N. also requires the promotion of a way of reading that is outside of the mainstream. Glover makes the case firmly in "The Masks of I". I won't make it again here —only reaffirm it. The Life and Times of Captain N. does represent four points of view, but it is not "absolute bloody chaos!"

What about the story? Here's an outline: The setting is the back country of upstate New York at the end of the American Revolution. War is raging, and Glover presents a multi-sided narrative that takes inside the hearts and minds of many of the players. One of the dominant players is Oskar Nellis, a young man who writes admiring letters to George Washington, but who is kidnapped by his father and forced to fight for King George's army. Oskar lives into old age, and the narrative includes parts of his "Book on Indians." Through Oskar, readers see snapshots of the multiple conflicts of that age (and ours?).

This is the point where I wish I had more to say, but I can only point to the book. Go there; find out for yourself. If you are a reader of literary books, please do yourself a favour and read this one. It ought to be a touchstone for a new generation of Canadian readers — and writers. Share the wealth. Pass it on.

*

The South Will Rise At Noon by Douglas Glover (2004, 1988)
The Enamoured Knight by Douglas Glover (2004)
The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Douglas Glover w/ Bruce Stone (interview) (2004)

Douglas Glover won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2003 for Elle. About that novel, the GG jurors said: "This headlong, intense interior monologue combines humour, horror and brutality with intelligence and linguistic dexterity to forge a revised creation myth for the New World."

Elle told the story of a 16^th-century French maiden thrown off a ship in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence for sexual improprieties. Abandoned for dead, she manages to survive through the winter with the aid of local Native people. The following Spring, she is picked up by the crew of a passing vessel and returned to France, where she takes up with writer, monk and physician, François Rabelais (1494-1553), author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Along the way, in the wilds of Canada and later, she [imagines she] is transformed into a bear.

And some people say Canadian literature is all about wheat fields and small town alienation. ‘Tis not so. Some of our writers, thank ye quivering quills, have managed to escape Canlit’s tradition of esthetic Calvinism: emotional restraint, naive realism, the victim-as-survivor metaphorical universe Northrop Frye called a "garrison mentality" and Margaret Atwood made popular in Survival, her "thematic guide to Canadian literature."

Sure, Elle’s protagonist survives, but her struggle is not a quest for self-definition in opposition to the natural forces lined up against her (as per Atwood’s representation of Susanna Moodie in her 1973 poetry cycle The Journals of Susanna Moodie, for example). Rather Elle revels in the comedy of an unlikely life (Glover has based the story, in part, on historical record). Elle is among that category of Canadian novels distinguished because they are rare: Novels that stem from a tradition of novel-writing that brings together narrative and ideas in a way that shows less concern for mimesis, or any attempt to mimic so-called reality, and instead foregrounds the artifice of art. In recent decades, this tradition has been called post-modern. In fact, it is way, way pre-modern. There is also another word for it: Rabelaisian.

Qua? Let’s look at the question from a different angle. In Survival, Atwood said Moodie in Roughing It In The Bush was determined "to preserve her Wordsworthian faith" in the beauty and bounty of the natural world despite "the difficulty she has in doing so when Nature fails time and time again to come through for her" (51). Atwood wrote: "If Wordsworth was right, Canada ought to have been the Great Good Place. At first, complaining about the bogs and mosquitoes must have been like criticizing the authority of the Bible" (50). Atwood gathered evidence to support her one-sided theory: To be Canadian is to be a victim, to be a Canadian writer is to struggle against imperial esthetics that are insufficient to communicate post-colonial reality.

A closer reading of Roughing It In The Bush, however, reveals that far from complaining about mosquitoes, Moodie inscribed herself as one who learned to "defy" the mosquitoes — along with the "black flies . . . snakes, and even bears" (329) — and milk a cow despite her fear of the beast:

Yes! I felt prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote. . . . I had learned a useful lesson of independence, to which in after-years I had often again to refer (183).

If Canada isn’t the "Great Good Place," neither is it a void that makes victims of all of us. All it is, is a place like any other: A complicated mix of the comic and the tragic, the ordered and the chaotic; bound together by high-strung ideals and pulled apart by the need to face reality with a pragmatic frame of mind. It is, to borrow a favourite word of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, "carnivalesque." Rabelais would have agreed; variety is more than the spice of life; it's reality. Promoting any particular pattern minimizes the influence of phenomena that falls outside the pattern.

C'est Canada: A little bit of everything, as humourist Will Ferguson re-affirmed recently: "What I find most interesting about this country is its sheer variety" he told The National Post (October 20, 2004). In his works like Why I Hate Canadians Ferguson has probed this nation's popular mythologies. If Canada was build by giants, lumberjacks, courier de bois, railway men, arctic explorers, etc., who carved a country out of a wilderness (and, yes, pushed aside multiple First Nations in the process), why do Canadians at the turn of the 21^st century tend to Canadians look back on their past and see midgets and victims? Why does Canadian history emphasize the country’s unimportance in virtually every area except international hockey?

Trolling the ‘Net of this subject, I found someone tackling similar questions: Our former Governor General, Romeo LeBlanc. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave while in office in 1996:

We all see Canada as a model of openness, tolerance, and generosity, a country of perseverance and progress. You have heard similar words before. Some would say they are clichés about our national character.

But there is a rival cliché. People used to talk of Canada as inward-looking, timid, anonymous.

Margaret Atwood found in our literature, French and English, a "sombre and negative" tone, and a preoccupation with mere survival. Northrop Frye, and I quote the Canadian Encyclopedia, saw in our literature "a 'garrison mentality' of beleaguered settlers who huddled against the glowering, all-consuming nothingness of the wilderness." I am sure he was not speaking of Toronto.

So we may ask -- what is our true nature? Generous and open, or a garrison mentality hiding from the world?

http://www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=64

What is our true nature? Conflicted surely. As the soul of every nation can’t help but be.

An example from recent history. Some media commentators called George Bush’s November 2004 re-election "a decisive victory," but the popular vote split 51 per cent for Bush and 49 per cent for John Kerry. Even in Texas, 40 per cent of the electorate voted against the conservative, home-town hero. The headline of a recent column in The Globe and Mail by William Thorsell said it plainly: "America is a country still at war with itself" (October 25, 2004), though Andrew Coyne pointed out in The National Post on the day after the election that talk of a "divided nation" may be overblown. Isn’t that what elections are all about? Yes, but more importantly, that’s what the soul-life of a nation is all about. It’s our conflicts that unite us; the challenge to find common strategies to solve common problems that bond us; the impossibility of ever resolving all conflicts into a still point of unity that keeps our common story moving forward.

Which brings me (finally) to the book at hand: The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover’s 2004 novel that was also his 1988 novel (it has been re-released in a quality paperback edition by Goose Lane Editions).

As the title suggests, The South Will Rise at Noon is a novel about the American Civil War. Goose Lane’s marketing copy calls the novel:

. . . the first full-length embodiment of Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination. Here, the past is a crazy pentimento that the present never completely conceals. Disarmingly intimate and energetic, The South Will Rise at Noon is wild and sad, hilarious and cautionary, farcical and strangely moving.

The first two sentences of the novel are:

Looking back, I should have realized something was up as soon as I opened the bedroom door and found my wife asleep on top of the sheets with a strange man curled up like a foetus beside her. Right away I could see she was naked.

Glover’s publisher summarizes the rest of the plot thus:

Tully Stamper, just out of jail, stumbles home to Gomez Gap, Florida, and into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her new husband, Otto Osterwalder. Otto, a flamboyant movie director, has cast the townspeople in his melodramatic re-enactment of a Civil War skirmish, the Battle of Gomez Gap. Tully, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, a drunk, and a flagrantly deadbeat dad, is also a modern-day knight errant who tries to win back his loved ones in the midst of the supposedly imitation battle.

The phrase "a modern-day knight errant" is an obvious reference to Cevantes’ hero, the mild lunatic of Don Quixote. Cerventes' life (1547-1615) overlapped briefly with the life of Rabelais (1494-1553). The former was Spanish, the latter French; however, their work has come down to us through the centuries mixed in spirit. If Elle is Glover's Rabelais novel, The South Will Rise At Noon is his Cerventes novel. Though if these broad generalizations mean anything at all, they only suggest that Glover draws inspiration from the broad tradition of the Renaissance humanists. Both Elle and The South Will Rise At Noon question how "story" (history) is constructed -- as does Glover's other novel, The Life And Times of Captain N., which takes place at the time of the American Revolution and incorporates the perspectives of the Loyalists, the Revolutionaries, and the First Nations in a swirling tour de force.

If Goose Lane is right — that The South Will Rise At Noon is "the first full-length embodiment of Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination" — then we can expect to find across Glover's oeuvre patterns that were initially laid down in that 1988 novel. As I noted above, yes, those patterns are there.

To dig deeper, though, we must ask ourselves what that phrase means: What is Glover's "historical imagination"? What is he up to in these three novels?

The Enamoured Knight
by Douglas Glover
Oberon Press, 2004

"If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."

— Douglas Glover

The above quotation comes from Douglas Glover’s book-length essay, The Enamoured Knight (Oberon Press, 2004), on Cervantes’ great novel, Don Quixote. In his essay, Glover assails simple-minded critics who read the novel as an extended allegory that recommends reality over illusion, fact over fiction, the quotidian over flights of fancy. While Glover does say that Cervantes’ work is that strange thing, a book against books, he is clear that it is not another thing, a work of the imagination against the imagination.

In The Enamoured Knight, Glover returns again and again to critics who look into Don Quixote and see a world of either/or and argues theirs is a view too simple to be credible. To some, Quixote, the mad knight, represents the danger of the dream world, while his trusty friend Sancho represents the sane simplicity of the solid (real) everyday world of facts and mortgages. Glover shows the irony of that position: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book." The words (facts) between the first page and last page of Don Quixote reveal a far more complicated world than the sentimental critics would have us believe.

Two recent reviews will help with the illustration.

First, the January 2005 issue of Quill & Quire included a review by Sarah Ellis of Tales of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, retold by Barbara Nichol. (That’s right, retold by Barbara Nichol.) Ms. Ellis wrote in her review that she

kept Nichol in abeyance for a week or so while [she] immersed [herself] in the original, a first-time read for [her]. As [she] meandered along with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, [she] asked [herself] what was potentially appealing to children about this narrative.

Ellis finds two items potentially appealing to children:

• "the Winnie-the-Pooh factor. Don Quixote is a knight of very little brain and in this story the reader is always smarter than the hero"; and

• "humour. Like a comedy smorgasbord, this story has slapstick, satire, puns, farce, guys dressed up as damsels, scatological jokes, and a particular form of post-modern Monty Pythonesque absurdity."

Mitigating against Don Quixote’s appeal to children Ellis counts "its length, confusing digressions, and the fact that many of the incidents don’t make any logical or emotional sense. [Her] most common reaction while reading was ‘Huh?’"

Well, well. Too bad so sad for Ms. Ellis that Glover’s The Enamoured Knight came too late. Though to be fair to Ellis, she does end her review advising readers "to consult the big fat original and have as good time as [she] did." Ellis also manages to identify in the big fat original "post-modern Monty Pythonesque absurdity" (a redundancy, surely). What she doesn’t get is that the "confusing digressions" are part of the scheme. As Glover points out, Cervantes has the narrator in Part II, which was published a decade after Part I, comment on the fact that readers complained about the digressions in the first published volume. (In other words, the digressions are ultimately part of the joke, but you need to read the novel as a whole before you can be in on it.)

Don Quixote is a book that comments on the fact that it is a book — and the fact that it is actually two books in one (Parts I & II). But the narrator also comments that the story has been recovered from other texts. The story is a story about telling stories. Of course, the most basic reduction of the plot line is that Quixote believes he is a knight acting out the plot line of a Romance novel. He is deluded into believing he is the hero of a book. But he is the hero of a book! Just not the book he thinks he’s the hero in! From this point forward, Glover points out, things become more complicated – and any attempt to reduce the novel to a simple plot can only be less than satisfactory.

Reader beware: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."

The Enamoured Knight includes, among other things, one of the best summaries of the history of the novel you'll read anywhere. An excerpt has been included on The Danforth Review.

Another excerpt is on The Globe and Mail website.

The second review I want to highlight here is The Globe and Mail’s review of The Enamoured Knight by Darryl Whetter (January 15, 2005). Whetter lauds Glover’s book-length essay, but ends his review with what he considers the essay’s paradox:

If, as Glover and company suggest, Don Quixote is indeed the progenitor of the novel, and if, as Glover assiduously points out, it is a novel more concerned with writing self-consciously about a fictional world than directly portraying that world, why has the vast majority of subsequent thinking about the novel preferred the latter to the former? If the novel didn’t begin with a "realistic" rendering of the world, why is it expected to do so now?

In actual fact — one is tempted to say "as Whetter would have seen if he had read the book" — Glover explicitly points out:

the novel followed several historical trajectories at once. While one kind of novel followed the path of conventional realism, what we might call an alternative tradition of self-consciousness, complexity, experiment, elaboration and playfulness has flourished simultaneously, though perhaps with leaner commercial success (88).

In my reading of The Enamoured Knight, I found Glover careful not to claim Don Quixote as the "first novel." I don’t believe this is the question that interests Glover. In an interview I did with him in 2001, I said I thought he was like Milan Kundera, in that he was "interested in the history of ideas." It was my attempt to ask him about "traditional" versus "experimental" novels. In response, he said:

My argument is mostly against anyone who takes one or the other as being definitive — how sick I am of all those turgid, log-rolling arguments about whether novels should have ethical messages or whether they should be purely aesthetic confections. Most writers strike a balance that somehow suits their particular temperament. Why some feel called upon to climb on soap boxes and campaign for the primacy of their particular brand of novel-writing is beyond me.

I believe The Enamoured Knight is consistent with the above quotation, and that Whetter has mis-read Glover’s book-essay on Cervantes’ novel. It’s not a matter of preferring one over the other. It’s about recognizing the novel-writing universe for the complexities that exist within it. If you want to understand the solar system, you gotta get out there and take photographs up close of Saturn’s moons. "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."

In Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Glover has an essay ("Masks of I") that outlines two opposing theories of the novel: one championed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) and one outlined by E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel (1927). Glover shows the opposites do not need to negate each other. Novels are about making up things. In the make-believe world, we can co-exist quite unremarkably. As John Lennon said, "All you need is love."

As for Whetter's second question: "If the novel didn’t begin with a 'realistic' rendering of the world, why is it expected to do so now?" The answer to this is quite simple. The question is a red herring. The novel is expected to do many different kinds of things by many different kinds of readers. See quotations from Sarah Ellis's review above. Some readers are interested in how novels chart the history of ideas; others are more interested in the "Winnie-the-Pooh factor." This is also unremarkable.

Another quotation, this one from John Barth:

Traditionalist excellence is no doubt preferable to innovative mediocrity (but there's not much to be said for conservative mediocrity; and there's a great deal to be said for inspired innovation).

Finally on this quotation: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book." What I think Glover is getting at is, read the book for what it is; don't try to impose one sets of expectations on a book that the book itself cannot sustain. Put another way: Dear Reader: Respect the author. Let the author take you on a journey. Surrender. Listen. Read with both calm and fury. . . .

And consider this! Consider the challenge I have set for myself: To answer the question, "What is Glover up to in these novels?"

I have read the novels, but have I read the novels?

Dear Reader: This is for you to decide.

The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover
Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Douglas Glover w/ Bruce Stone (interview)
Oberon Press, 2004

The blurb on the back cover tells you what you need to know:

The essays collected here are meant to help readers navigate the complexities of Glover's literary terrain. Taken together, they deal with the total oeuvre, suggesting something of the scope of Glover's work and the range of his vision, which is limited only by the imaginative capacity of his audience. In Glover, readers are uplifted by being introduced to other possibilities of being, transcending the common, the ordinary and the familiar.

In his essay, "The Problem of the Artist in 16 Categories of Desire," Philip Marchand, books columnist for the Toronto Star, writes:

Glover, along with Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, has been part of a threesome of English Canadian writers who have a very strong comic and satiric bent, and have spent a lot of time meditating on Canada. ... Glover's meditations ranked highest on the scale of intellectual sophistication (130-131).

High praise indeed: Glover more intellectually sophisticated than Atwood and Richler. Hopefully I've articulated some of Glover's complexity in comments and quotations in the first two sections of this essay. For a quick illustration of Glover's dexterity of mind, I quote from the interview with the author that concludes The Art of Desire:

GLOVER: ... Language, it seems to me, is this wonderfully elaborated symbolic system for modelling reality which doesn't work. That's the pathos of logos (172).

"The pathos of logos." The tragedy of logic, might be one way to translate that. Glover elaborates:

GLOVER: Think about this. Books, like sentences and words, chop reality into bits. They offer a fantasy of closure. A good book ought to do away with that particular lie and abolish the end. So in Elle, for example, I enclose the book in another story. The second story — the one-eyed man, the children and their sand statues, the stolen boy — implies that beyond the book there is something going on that is inexplicable, morally alien and strangely recursive. The outer story is bigger than the inner story (172).

"The outer story is bigger than the inner story." If you want to read the book, you need to read many books, might be one way to translate that. No story is ever complete, might be another paraphrase.

Northrop Frye begins The Educated Imagination (1963) with a series of questions: "What good is the study of literature?" "What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude?" Then he begins to answer these questions, saying "The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind of problem that you ever 'solve.'" All of this occurs on the first page. What I remember from The Educated Imagination is Frye's assertion that the order you read books will affect how you read them. That is, for example, if you read Orwell's 1984 before you read Martin Amis's Money, then you will understand the allusion Amis is making when he refers to "Room 101." But it's not just that, as a reader, you will understand individual points of story or metaphor — it's that the more you read, the more you ought to see the connections between all stories. "Intertextuality" is the lit crit word for this. Of course, Frye went on to argue that the Bible was The Great Code — but we don't need to follow him there to see the common sense of his earlier position. Which I bring up because, it seems to me, having a sense of intertextuality is essential to grappling with what's happening in Glover's novels.

Incidentally, I can't swear that Frye actually does say what I've suggested in The Educated Imagination. I flipped through my copy (read 15 years ago) and couldn't find that passage underlined. What I did find in my ancient scrawl was a quotation from Aristotle I'd written inside the front cover: "What is impossible but can be believed should be preferred to what is possible but unconvincing." I have no idea where that quotation comes from.

The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover: A quick overview:

• 172 pages

• Editor Bruce Stone "first encountered Douglas Glover's fiction at a public reading given by the Vermont College faculty, a regular component of the residency sessions for that institution's MFA program" (7).

• The Art of Desire consists of six essays, a short interview with Glover, and two introductory surveys of Glover's work.

• The first survey is titled "A Writer's Guide to Douglas Glover's Fiction" and is written by Bruce Stone (pages 11-67).

• The second survey is titled "The Fictions of Douglas Glover: A Preliminary Survey" and is written by Louis K. MacKendrick (pages 68-81).

• The six essays explore different aspects of Glover's fiction. Briefly, the topics are

  1. "voice," complexity of; Glover's innovative use of;

  2. "meaningfulness" in Glover's fiction;

  3. "ironic reconsiderations of Canadian/American stereotypes" in Glover's fiction;

  4. "historical fiction" and how that term may or may not apply to The Life and Times of Captain N.;

  5. "the problem of the artist" in Glover's fiction; and

  6. the influence of Don Quixote on Glover's fiction.

For the purpose of example, here's the beginning of "La Corriveau," the first story of 16 Categories of Desire, Glover's 2000 short story collection:

I wake up the next morning in my little rented tourist flat on rue des Ramparts with a really terrible headache and a strange dead man in bed next to me.

First, let me tell you that nothing like this has ever happened to me before.

In bed with a dead man — never.

Often they may have seemed dead. You know — limp, moribund, unimaginative, sleepy or just drunk to the point of oblivion. But until now I have avoided actual morbidity in my lovers (11).

This fragment, perhaps, is enough to suggest how the core of Glover's fiction revolves around the essay topics listed above. Okay, let's set aside "ironic reconsiderations of Canadian/American stereotypes" and "historical fiction" for now. Those two topics aside, we are left with a compelling fragment of a woman's voice. Here is what Claire Wilkshire, author of the essay on "voice" has to say about that topic:

Reading strategies that favour voice reveal aspects of fiction that might otherwise remain obscure: the ways in which direct and indirect speech function both in characterization and in constructing the oppositions that create narrative tension; the complexity of the relations among figures (for example, the author, implied author, narrator and characters) and the points at which they overlap or separate; and the broad range of languages that combine to form that strange and variegated thing that is called narrative voice (82).

In her essay, Wilkshire examines Glover's story "Red" and suggests "to pay attention to voice is to expose the opposite characteristics that create character, the tensions and contradictions between utterances, to uncover the multiple voices at work within a narrative voice" (90). If you want to listen to the voice, you need to listen to the voices. Think, for example, about Hamlet, perhaps literature's most famous internally conflicted character. His representation of himself to others is inconsistent. He becomes the centre of concern in the Royal court. What's up with Hamlet? Perhaps, even now, it's impossible to say. What we can say is, the Prince of Denmark is working through his issues. The play dramatizes his anxieties. Within the play, meaning is highly unsettled. So it is in Glover's fiction, and the way Glover constructs character through voice is one way to examine his approach to fiction. In the fragment from "La Corriveau" the voice says "this has ever happened to me before." The shock of the unexpected situation repeats in Glover's fiction. In Elle, the main character is thrust off a 16th century French vessel and deserted in the Canadian wilderness. Kafka is often cited as a postmodern precursor because of the predominance of "dislocation" in his fiction. Glover's work explores similar themes — but I hesitate to link him too closely to the author of The Castle. Each is distinctive, also.

"Meaningfulness" and "the problems of the artist" are two other topics from the essays in The Art of Desire. They are closely related. Generally speaking, the problem of the artist is "how to make meaning" or "how to communicate something meaningful." But what is "meaning"? And if one understands meaning to be problematic, as Glover clearly does ("the pathos of logos"), then one's conception of art can only be problematic also. Though must ask, problematic for whom? the artist/writer? the audience/reader? all of the above?

In the "problem of the artist" essay, Philip Marchand looks specifically at the collection 16 Categories of Desire. He suggests:

the book's most salient theme [is] the figure of the failed artist -- a figure who showed up, in one form or another, in most of the stories. On re-reading the book ... I realized how much this failed artist motif was intertwined, in the stories, with Glover's characteristic meditations on Canada, and specifically on the relationship between English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Canada (130).

Here we might note that the themes of two of the other essays were "Canadian/American stereotypes" and "historical fiction." And also that the fragment from "La Corriveau" is spoken by an anglophone narrator in Quebec City. The title of that story is also, obviously, French, while the author is not. Again, we find ourselves talking about instability, the crossing of boundaries, and we are not far from discussing how language constructs realities which conflict in an innumerable variety of potentially dramatic combinations.

Indeed, Lawrence Mathews, in the "meaningfulness" essay, notes a 1991 interview of Glover:

Glover's conscious abandonment of "moral fiction" ... is neatly illustrated by Melissa Hardy's attempt to get him to talk about the significance of the fact that in many of his stories men leave women, or are about to leave women. Glover replies by saying that his primary concern is not thematic in this sense at all: "...it's simply a kind of game-playing -- you have conflict, and you don't have conflict in the man and woman agree on everything... when I put men and women on the page, I am thinking of strategies for generating plots rather than symbols." This sort of attitude leads Hardy to comment, later in the interview, "I think if someone were to adopt a critical stance to what you're saying, I suppose he would say, if Douglas Glover is just playing games, he's not writing from the heart, he lacks sincerity." Glover replies: "It depends what you mean by sincerity, I guess. If you mean, Does Douglas Glover sincerely believes in the factual truth of his stories? Is he sincerely advocating some political or ideological line? then I'm not sincere. But if you mean, Is Glover sincerely trying to make the most beautiful piece of writing he can?, then I'm sincere" (93-94).

The pathos of logos. Glover's fictions do not represent reality because reality cannot be represented. Language is a system of arbitrary signs. Stories are language patterns that repeat through time. Literature = beauty.

The fragment from "La Corriveau" is clearly not "realistic." The voice is comic, the situation exaggerated, the verisimilitude stretched beyond credibility. It is, thus, clearly a fiction — and a compelling fiction. Who doesn't want to know: What happens next? The situation is set; the voice clear, direct; the writer has his readers on edge; he has created dramatic tension; we're off to the races.

One critical note: if you want to "navigate the complexities of Glover's literary terrain," to my mind, first read Glover's essay collection Notes Home From A Prodigal Son. Then read The Art of Desire. Notes Home... presents Glover on Glover. The Art... presents others on Glover. And if you only read one thing, read (as I noted above) read Glover's essay in Notes Home... "Masks of I" — which outlines two opposing theories of the novel: one championed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) and one outlined by E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel (1927). Glover shows not only that opposites do not need to negate each other and that novels are about making up things. He also says a lot about his own approach to fiction -- and his influences: notably Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera. Other influences noted in Notes Home... are East German writer Christa Wolf and Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin, suicide victim in 1977 and winner of the CBC's "Canada Reads" program in 2001 for his novel Next Episode.

In Notes Home... Glover says about Wolf's work:

She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere (62).

One could easily say something similar about Glover's fictions.

*

And it is here, once again, that we turn ourselves to the questions: What is Glover up to in his novels? What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"?

*

First, the territory under discussion, the novels:

• The South Will Rise At Noon (1988)

  • In which a movie production invades a small Florida town to recreate a U.S. Civil War battle. Narrated by "a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, and a tippler of corn juice" (back cover, Goose Lane edition, 2004). The novel begins with the narrator recently out of jail bursting in on his naked ex-wife and her new husband: "Lust took me by the throat the instant I caught sight of those familiar tan lines" (3).

• The Life and Times of Captain N. (1993)

  • Takes place at the time of the American Revolution in the Niagara Frontier. Partly based on real events. Henrick Nellis "a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians ... kidnaps his own son, Oskar, for King George's army. ... Oscar, haunted by dreams, ... tells this ambivalent tale of war and redemption" (back cover, Goose Lane edition, 2001).

• Elle (2003)

  • Partly based on a true story. Chronicles "the ordeals and adventures of a young French woman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's ill-fated third and last attempt to colonize Canada" (cover flap, 2003). The Island of Demons is Canada. The narrator, a teenage girl, is transformed into a bear. Or maybe not.

Now is the appropriate time to go back to the two essays in The Art of Desire that directly address historical elements in Glover's fiction. First, Phil Tabakow looks at "Canadian/American stereotypes" in Glover's story "Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm's Mill (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814." Then Don Sparling considers how the term "historical fiction" is commonly understood and how it may or may not relate to The Life and Times of Captain N..

Tabakow:

Douglas Glover's apparently tongue-in-cheek postmodernist short story from his 1989 collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour about a skirmish in Ontario between American frontiersmen and Canadian irregulars during The War of 1812 deconstructs with a surprising blend of deadpan humour and poetic imagery the enduring myth of the Violent American and the Peaceable Canadian (109).

Sparling:

Glover uses the American Revolution as a kind of paradigm for when "the modern view of history" begins, with the separation of the individual from the past and community (history) and the present and the surrounding world (nature). This kind of history is discussed by Oskar, who sees it as "a hypothesis about past events, cast in terms of cause and effect, based on evidence and stretching back further and further in time." In contrast, there are the myths and legends of the Indians, which "explain the world as if it had formed just yesterday. They are organized like dreams and, in retelling, become the collective dreams of a people." Oskar goes on: "By writing history down, we try to extend the explanation of the present deep into the past. But the savage, in his dreams, seeks to extend the present laterally, as it were, across the axis of time" (128).

Sparling concludes: "This extending the present laterally, across the axis of time, seems to me to be a major part of Glover's understanding of how contemporary historical fiction should work" (128).

Indeed, this concept of time on two axes is key to grappling towards an understanding of Glover's "historical imagination." As is an understanding of the differences between written and oral cultures, and the narratives of the powerful and the dispossessed.

Two of Glover's novels are set in the past (The Life and Times of Captain N. and Elle), but they are deeply concerned with concepts and "issues" that are starkly contemporary, while the other under discussion here, The South Will Rise At Noon, uses the conceit of a film set to pull the past into the present, or at least the 1980s, the present when the book was published.

Of course, any "historical fiction" could be said to work on two axes, since the reader always reads the book in the present and the action is always set in the past. But what Sparling is articulating about Glover's fiction is much more than the difference in time between the reader and the narrative action.

For example, when Tabakow says Glover uses "a surprising blend of deadpan humour and poetic imagery [to deconstruct] the enduring myth of the Violent American and the Peaceable Canadian," he's saying (wink, nudge) that Glover is writing against the Canadian Nationalist Impulse (CNI) that encrypts all Canadians at birth with the knee-jerk reaction: Canada, good; USA, bad. The CNI has been broadly credited with being a positive life force, especially post-1967, though it has waned since the Free Trade Election (1988), and flared in spikes now and again, most notably perhaps in the broad consensus against the U.S.-led War in Iraq II. CNI as a literary influence was cooled considerably since the 1970s, but there remains remarkably little Canlit that "complicates" the mythology of the nation's mother-milk. Glover's fictions, if they do nothing else, complicate inherited narratives. His stated influences (Aquin, Wolf) are dissidents, and Glover is perhaps Canada's leading dissident writer. While Atwood rails against the US Empire (an astonishingly easy target), Glover better than anyone holds up the mirror to our national camp tales. He is the mirror-holder, Canadian nationalism the smoke. Glover questions. He "deconstructs." He tells us "language ... is this wonderfully elaborated symbolic system for modelling reality which doesn't work."

Is this getting too complicated?

In The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler (An Oral Biography) ["by" Michael Posner], Richler is quoted saying, "The novelist's primary moral responsibility is to be the loser's advocate" (41). Richler surely believed that during the early stage of his career, when he was a loyal socialist, or at least well-schooled in Marxist influence (see The Acrobats). Marxism defines society as a narrative of class struggle. President Bush could have been an adherent when he said, "You're with us or you're against us." The Cold War was a Marxist construct, one the world is rapidly recreating. (Okay, bi-polar politics go back before Marx — but the point here is simple: one can see the world as "us" and "them", or one can see a world awash in ambiguity, measured by tools that don't seem to reflect the "reality" we experience or behave in the ways we expect.) Plato spoke of philosophy as a means to truth; Aristotle spoke of rhetoric as the available means of persuasion. Is there eternal truth? Or is there only the passing sands of time? Certainty versus uncertainty. The "moral responsibility" of the novelist versus "the pathos of logos."

Or as Glover wrote in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son:

My apprenticeship ended with the realization that the goal of literature is not simply truth, which is bourgeois and reductive, but a vision of complexity, an endless forging of connections which opens outward into mystery (166).

Glover follows Nabokov in rejecting the moral responsibility of art. But that doesn't mean he is on the side of the owners against the workers. He rejects the bi-polar nature of the proposition. As he told Melissa Hardy, his approach to his writing is to "sincerely try[] to make the most beautiful piece of writing he can." His approach, within Canadian letters, has caused confusion. Is he one of us or not? Is he picking fights or not? Specifically, Glover is not picking fights. He is respectful of different aesthetic approaches — he also challenges his readers to move beyond the over-simplification of categories most commonly accept as fact (e.g. Canadian nationalism is an unalloyed good). He is speaking from a high vantage point, articulating a historical perspective of the novel too seldom heard in Canadian literary discussions. As quoted above, here is Glover again on the history of the novel:

the novel followed several historical trajectories at once. While one kind of novel followed the path of conventional realism, what we might call an alternative tradition of self-consciousness, complexity, experiment, elaboration and playfulness has flourished simultaneously, though perhaps with leaner commercial success (The Enamoured Knight, 88).

Glover's book-length essay on Don Quixote makes clear not just his interest in, but his knowledge about, complicated narrative techniques, devices, patterns — and his engagement in the eternal struggle between the quotidian and the way people use language to create both the functional and dysfunctional mythologies that enable and disable their lives. Cervantes great protagonist might be history's greatest and best example. Though Glover's characters are superb contemporary Canlit examples, too.

What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"? Our histories are our stories, our stories are us, our stories make no sense, and neither do we. At least, our stories don't make sense in the ways we normally think that they make sense. (How does one "make sense"? Take a large pot, fill with water .... double, double, toil and trouble ....). (Is Glover our Shakespeare? No, that's someone else's essay. ...).

What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"? To my mind, it is most alive in The Life and Times of Captain N. , which convinced me that if Glover is not our Shakespeare, he is at least our Faulkner.

*

An interlude, as we sputter towards the conclusion (from my 2001 interview with Glover):

TDR: I have been reading backwards through your catalogue, and it seems to me that your narratives often articulate the boundaries of different conflicts political, aesthetic, sexual, sociological, etc. simultaneously. You seem to be both seeking the appropriate terms to define a certainty and also never arriving at one. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you say about East German writer Christa Wolf: "She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere" (62). Similar sentiments repeat in The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place in the context of the backwoods warfare of the American Revolution ("We Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians are having a violent debate whose Subject is the Human Heart" (162). Your approach appears to be both sensible and relatively unique on the Canadian literary scene, which often frames its purpose in sociological terms (i.e., Canadian culture is necessary for national identity). Are you self-conscious about working against popular conceptions about what it means to be a Canadian writer? Is Canadian literature all it's pumped up to be?

GLOVER: The setting up of opposites as a mode of conjecture is, of course, the form of the aphorism. Kant uses a version of this in the sections of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Antinomies and the Paralogisms, where he juxtaposes apparently true but contrary propositions about the nature of reality and argues for both. Nietszche wrote aphorisms. Adorno's gorgeous Minima Moralia is all aphorisms. The aphorism is an ancient ironic form, highly artificial, but with a bite. You can only write aphorisms in the attack mode, with a tone of arrogance. Here's one I wrote to a student who was complaining about having to learn aphorisms: There are two kinds of readers — the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the wienies who, lacking courage themselves, find it an affront in others. The Life and Times of Captain N. contains passages of extended aphorism called "Oskar's Book about Indians" in which oral cultures and literate cultures are opposed on a variety of verbal torsion points: e.g. history, memory, names, ritual, story-telling, books. Nietzsche called his aphorisms "Versuch" — "trials" or "experiments" — much the way Montaigne called his essays "essais". I think a person who writes from this rhetorical position is always on the outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive.

Whether Canadian literature is all it's pumped to be is not a question that interests me. On the other hand, there are some books written by Canadians I love.

Ah, yes. What was I trying to get at there? A long preamble, followed by two quick questions. The second question got a short quick answer. The first question got an answer that is dense, though interesting, and, on the surface at least, beside the point. What was the point? The study of Canadian literature has tended to focus on definition ("what is Canadian literature?") and it has tended to canonize books that assist with the definition of Canada ("what does it mean to be Canadian?"). Glover's fiction, at times, seems to be intensely interested in these questions — Elle's narrator, for example, makes off-hand comments about the troubles of Canada, comments rife with complex humour — but, at the same time, Glover's narratives often (always?) resist reductive or definitive readings. "That's the pathos of logos." Glover's narratives are, to borrow his own words, positioned "outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive."

If Canada is the world's most post-modern country, a con-federation (a country conned into believing it's federated) — a country that not only embraces multiculturalism, but is made up of multi-nations — (and it is) — then Glover's fiction, more than the fictions of anyone else to date, entrances us with beauty, opens us into mystery, shows us that we can be our stories and take them apart, too. But we must take them apart, if we are to keep them alive, if they are to keep us alive.

The book is called The Art of Desire for a reason. Desire is the affirmative response to life. It is also the cause of heartbreak and misery — and the core of stories. Desire sets up expectation, narratives fulfill or deny that expectation. In The Enamoured Knight, Glover wrote powerfully about the role of desire in Don Quixote and other novels. Desire provides the narrative stickiness in Glover's work that verisimilitude, perhaps, might provide in the work of other writers. In a world where, as Glover says of Christina Wolf's fiction, "to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible" — is a world where language does not work — desire is perhaps the universal glue. It is the still point around which all else turns.

Glover on desire:

It's occurred to me that human nature is paradoxical in relation to difference and identity. We all want to stay home and be comfortable and yet we're also drawn to love, exploration and translation. We go back and forth, or some of us are more one way than the other. Change can be awfully irritating. ... And if you're not ready for it, you curl up and die. ... Sometimes redemption is just an intrusion. ... And sometimes, when you crack out of yourself and really see the other, you become a better person (The Art of Desire, 172).

Glover defines redemption as "being brought back, pulled out of, rescued -- it gets you out of one place and into a different place. Difference is the operative word. Redemption means changing yourself" (169). It means, I think he's saying, to be made interesting. Staying within oneself, never challenging oneself with the stories of others; this is not interesting; this is heat-death; this is "the end of history;" this is ideological purity and the NHL lockout and all things wrong with the world. Desire forces us out of ourselves, to confront others, to live, be made interesting, redeemed. This is the core of Glover's famous historical imagination. The past is never past, said Faulkner. Glover goes one better. Not only is the past in the present, but the present is in the past. The confrontation between the two is to the redemption of each. Hallelujah!

More Glover (from the story "16 Categories of Desire" from book of same title):

Mama, I say one time, why it so hard to get a man to do you? Seem like it ought to be a simple thing. Say come here fella and bathe me in your jets of sperm. Mama pretend she don't hear me. And I ain't found a man yet man enough to respond to that particular request. I miss Sister Mary Buntline, who would be laughing now. She say her snatch was a miracle, the eighth effing wonder of the world and a proof of God. I say, Mama, Sister Mary Buntline some kind of saint. And Mama sniff and say Sister Mary Buntline end up married to an ex-priest named Leonard Malfy and three rat-face apostate children running a AIDS clinic in Seattle. Boys, I say, that sure sound bad all right. Sound like Hell on earth. It sound like pure-d evil all right. Jesus. Married with kids and a job. What sane decent woman would want that?

This passage is not only terrific prose, it shows how Glover uses desire to set up expectations in the reader, then confound those expectations in interesting ways. At the beginning of the third section of this essay, I quoted Glover — "The outer story is bigger than the inner story" — and suggested intertextuality was key to understanding his approach to fiction. In the end, I didn't say much about that, specifically, but I want to reinforce that point here: "What sane decent woman would want that?" Why is this funny? Because we've heard echoes of it before. If we are readers, we hear echoes of all stories in all other stories. As readers, we are open to the mystery that fiction invites us to participate in. In The Enamoured Knight, Glover showed how stories fit within stories in Don Quixote. The process of story-making, in Glover's fictions, in all fictions, has no end. If you want to read the novels, read the novels. Read all of the novels. All novels. Turn off the computer. Read.

*

Have I read the novels? Really, I'm not quite sure. Maybe I'll go back. Start again. ...

*

TDR INTERVIEW (2012)

The following interview with DG was published on The Danforth Review, March 12, 2012, and focused on DG’s Attack of the Copula Spiders: And Other Essays on Writing (2012).

I must start with, what's up with the title?

The title of the book is also the title of one of the essays which is about writing sentences, especially paying attention to verbs.

I found a while ago that if I could circle all the instances of the verb to be on a page of student writing and connect them up in a spider diagram (copula spiders), then I could teach the student something concrete about improving the prose by showing him how to rewrite some of those sentences using active, interesting verbs.

I quote from some of letters to students (acerbic, comic). I think I actually manage to make writing sentences sound exciting.

Can you please provide a summary of the book's content?

The book is a sequence of essays beginning with two pieces on novel and short story structure. These are followed by a couple of essays on sentences that gradually lead to larger issues of form (its complexity, formality, artificiality).

Then I segue into a series of essays that are meant to show readers how to read good writers for technique and structure. "How to Read a Mark Anthony Jarman Short Story" or "The Mind of Alice Munro." Also novels by Leon Rooke, Thomas Bernhard, Cees Nooteboom, Juan Rulfo, and more.

I close with a couple of essays about novels in a larger, more philosophical context. One explores the relationship between novels and history and truth, the other talks about endings and what I call the comforting lie of art (which the best writers try to reveal).

The second essay in the book is called "How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise." Besides discussing plot, image patterning, thematic passages and time control, I also give an exercise that offers a stripped-down short story paradigm. It often seems to help student writers get their bearings inside the mysteries of the craft.

Does the book outline your personal approach to reading, re-reading, or whatever we now call the act of criticism or engagement with literary production?

On a certain level this book is about the act of reading. Really what I am pushing is a critical aesthetic that is a bit like New Criticism and a bit like Formalist criticism but to my mind as a writer just seems reasonable and immeasurably expands comprehension. You read the book or story and pay some attention to how it's put together and, beyond the illusion of story, you suddenly engage with the text on a whole other, rather exciting, level of rhythm and meaning. You begin to SEE connections that hitherto you vaguely passed over supplying your own dreamy connotations (as you're taught to do in high school). We're at a moment in our culture when differences in the ability to read and comprehend a text are crucial.

And I can't remember the moment when I invented the phrase copula spiders, only vaguely remember circling over and over again all the to be verbs and then NOTICING that I could really make a diagram out of this and the diagram could look like a spider (with far more legs than it should have). The real issue, the shocking point, is that when you teach writing you are basically teaching the same student over and over again. It doesn't matter whether the student is writing nonfiction or fiction or that the student thinks the burning piece of paper in your hand is the next War and Peace because he has put his heart into it and it comes out of his own original personal thoughts and is DIFFERENT (he believes) from anything ever written before (or in the future). The shocking thing is the uniformity of mediocrity. The shocking thing is that intelligent adults can't think of another verb to use (actually most students jog along with a verb repertoire of about five: to be, to look, to sit, to stand, to see--absolutely the most popular verb choices).

The crucial connector here is to realize that part of the reason proto-writers don't notice they are doing this is because they don't know how to read. Eighty percent of what I do every semester is teach students how to read like writers, that is, with attention to structure and the intensities of well-written prose. So the two aspects of my book are necessarily joined: you can't teach people to write simply by telling them what they are doing wrong; you have to show them where it is done right, that is, you have to show them how to read.

What have you been up to recently? What are some short stories (either singles or collections) that you've particularly enjoyed recently?

Last week I was in New York at the Center for Fiction to give a reading and a craft class. The craft class was on novel writing, based on my essay "How to Write a Novel" in Attack of the Copula Spiders. It's on Youtube.

Also at the Center for Fiction, I gave a little 5-minute reading, micro-stories. That's on Youtube as well.

Right now I am working mostly on a novel. The stories I am reading are mostly re-readings. Isaac Babel, Mark Anthony Jarman, Chekhov (I just went through "The Duel").

*

Savage Love by Douglas Glover (2013)

[First appeared in Music & Literature, October 22, 2013]

Instability recurs throughout Douglas Glover’s new short story collection, Savage Love. As the title suggests, love (or at least desire) is the dominant theme, but it is a love so unstable, so rife with conflict, so twisted against itself, that it shakes the confidence of its moorings. This is not love patient and kind, nor slow to anger; it is not a love that leads to calm plains of the soul; it is not the kind of love that will help you achieve satori, young bodhisattva. It is the kind of love that Toni Morrison once described as “one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy at the same time that he shot her just to keep the feeling going.” In this book, Glover takes us far, far out into a vast sea of imaginative possibilities, shadows, violence, and twisted logic. There is a persistent questioning of the real consistent with his post-modern precursors, but there is also a disappearance into myth and mystery, which isn’t a denial of the world in a swirl of signifiers, but an embracing of its ultimate instability. It is a world that is knowable in fragments; it’s just that the fragments keep falling apart. Glover has always embraced the absurd, but he’s more grounded in facts than Kafka — witness the unlikely and extremely intriguing title of an earlier short story, “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon.” Glover’s catalogue of opening sentences would nearly make a book on its own. He is a master at setting up the awkward and the curious, often romantic, situation that demands explication. The frisson of desired transcendence lost in repeated failure veers seemingly inevitably toward catastrophe. Carol Shields used to say that Alice Munro’s stories don’t end, they swerve into mystery. Glover’s stories enter mystery early and never leave. Readers are drawn along for the journey on slipstreams of luminescent prose.

Glover’s previous short story collection, 16 Categories of Desire, built into its title the author’s persistent interest in explicating desire as narrative strategy. The push and pull of what we want from each other, and the inevitable conflict (and often humour) that results is a repeating characteristic of Glover’s work. The title also makes obvious the diversity of experiences linked to that emotion. Here’s a line from the title story of that earlier collection: “She say the Lord invented the orgasm so people would make babies but it one of those inventions that got away from Him.” And here we have another persistent Gloverism: the sense of being out of control and existing in a world of the inexplicable and the chaotic. The stories in Savage Love continue in this vein. The stories growl off the page, as if read in the voice of an octogenarian Delta Blues master or one of the more recent Bob Dylan protagonists. As in many Dylan songs, these are stories “after the flood.” These are not stories of millennial angst, fearful of a coming apocalypse. Glover is a writer aware that chaos has long been loose in the world. In Savage Love, Glover takes us where Shakespeare takes us in “The Tempest,” into our imaginations, all the better to understand “we are such stuff / as dreams are made on.” The imagination holds clues to meaning, if only fleetingly.

In the second story, “Crown of Thorns,” we are told about Tobin, eight, who fell in love with his babysitter, an emotional attachment that affects the course of his life. Define his life, in fact. Such an insensible thing, an unplanned thing, could only make sense, become beautiful, in a Douglas Glover story. When he is eight, the babysitter is dismissed after Tobin’s mother catches the boy’s father erotically entwined with the paid caregiver. Tobin imagines the girl is killed, and so begins years of therapy and trauma response. The boy’s hurt is exaggerated beyond the point of being ridiculous, but then again, is it? The disturbance of our attachments can lead to absurd consequences; on that point the story is clear. On the other hand, while it may strain credulity, the logic of the story must make sense to us as readers, if only on an intuitive level, or else we would dismiss it as not worth reading and crazy. Glover’s artistic achievement here is to push us into the grey zone where “told reality” is both more weird and more meaningful than common sense allows. The real is not real; it is a story; but only through story can we know the real. Glover’s stories both affirm our experience (we all had childhood attachments) and undermine them, make them unstable, force our memories to slant into uncertainty. Could a childhood crush on a babysitter turn into a lifelong obsession? We can’t discount it, such is the oddness of life, but the exaggeration entertains, too.

A writer (and teacher) long concerned with the intricacies of form, Glover gave a nod to his writing technique in his essay, “How to Write a Short Story:

In every story . . . Form creates a structure that seems necessary and logical. The imaginative variation and development of material in the gaps opened up by form make the story seem alive and unplanned. Art is a strange and paradoxical thing. Out of these apparently opposed and antithetical elements, it creates beauty, meaning and the illusion of living characters.

Glover’s well-proven rhetorical complexity is best read, in other words, not for “aboutness” but, as a painting, with an engaged awareness of the medium in motion. Story demands forward movement, but language need not lead to clarity or certainty. In fact, remaining in ambiguity can only lead to more story, and it is the writer’s talent and obligation to make what is fabricated and manipulated “seem alive and unplanned.” In Savage Love, Glover gives us the odd and the awkward, the violent and the hopeless. Dark humour is woven deeply into all of it. He has stretched his oeuvre to a new plateau where it demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner. He challenges readers to enter winding caves of mystery, not in search of answers, but in search of experience, and he challenges writers to question what a story can be, as only the best scribes can. He reminds us that asking is better than knowing, and that asking never ends.

Savage Love begins with a brief Prelude, which is followed by 21 stories divided into three sections: Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies. The Prelude introduces what follows. In a page-and-a-half of imagistic prose, the narrator describes moonlight, dancers, “the liquid amber gum tree” and tells us “the throw of language is deceptive. It’s much better for describing things that don’t exist than for pinning down reality.” Glover provides all the hints we need here about what is to follow. The real is both real and not real. It is presented to us as language, and language isn’t to be trusted, but it is also the medium of knowledge, and to proceed we must navigate this instable relationship. The first of Glover’s Fugues, “Tristiana,” is the longest story in the collection. A major work, it cultivates chaos for forty-odd pages. It contains more than a nod to Blood Meridian and is clearly demotic. It begins, “1869, Lost River Range, Idaho Territory,” and it recounts one man’s journey of murder and mayhem, beginning with his farm animals, then his wife, then his dog because “the snow surprised him” and “against the winter he had scrupled not to lay in a sufficiency.” He survives the snow and then forages into wilderness and discovers a girl, “just breasted,” legs frozen into the ice. He digs her out, hacks off her diseased feet, carves her new ones. Across land they go, and he murders virtually everyone they meet. Out of these apparently opposed and antithetical elements, the story creates beauty, meaning and the illusion of living characters.

Glover also engages in the notable Canadian literary pastime of historical fiction. Glover’s novel, The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place at the time of the American Revolution, attempts to recast the founding myths of two nations, and also injects readers deep into the worldview of the contemporaneous Aboriginal peoples. Glover has long been presenting the instability of history and myth, or the instability of the myth of history. The inability of desire to overcome or bind together the gaps, though also the inevitability that people will keep attempting that strategy because it seems to work for a while, and just feels so darned good. Here, the fourth story (“The Sun Lord and the Royal Child”) and the fifth story (“A Flame, a Burst of Light”) take readers through ambiguous and ambitious historical narrative muck. The narrator of “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” lives (present day) on a southern Ontario farm, land that was once fertile hunting and communal territory for the Iroquois. He is friends with an archaeologist who made his fame on telling stories about the Aboriginal past of the region, particularly about a dead baby and a dynastic succession. The narrator has also been romancing the archaeologist’s wife. Superficially the story about an unstable man, loose with his affections and under considerable existential threat, the story also argues that the narrative of the land is as wobbly as he is. Farmed for generations of descendants of United Empire Loyalists, Royalists who fled Republican America following the Revolution to stay loyal to the British Crown and sensible Presbyterianism, the geography holds mysteries the eighteenth-century geopolitical power play swept cleanly aside. As a historian, Glover is a dissident. He refuses to provide tales of nationalistic uplift. In this instance, the attempt to grapple with the past is reduced to near farce. The archaeologist, who is presented as clearly competent, confronts his error and what had once seemed like enlightenment becomes another small town mix-up.

In “A Flame, a Burst of Light,” we are back in the swampy nineteenth century among soldiers and ultra-violence. We are among bloodied Upper Canadian irregulars engaged to the death with invading Americans. Glover took us there before in “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” (from A Guide to Animal Behaviour). The newer story is darker, but it retains at its core a note of thumping absurdity. War may be hell, but in Glover’s version there’s a mysterious woman among the dead and dying — and what can a woman mean among all this masculine destruction except the possibility of something else; sex; love; domestic comfort—but then she disappears and no one knows what happens to her. There is no resolution, only reconciliation with the depraved. And it is the depth of the engagement with depravity that astonishes in this collection. Perhaps also its relentless repetition. Articulating chaos has always been part of Glover’s work, but the stories here delight in a darker manner than we’ve seen before. The teenage girl protagonist of Glover’s Governor-General-Award–winning novel, Elle, begins the book sweaty with sex and then dashes into the St. Lawrence River, off a boat, circa 1542, chasing a dog and a tennis ball. Lost in the Canadian wilderness for a year, she not only survives the winter, she shape shifts into a bear, beats back the black flies and makes friends with strangers from a culture she couldn’t have even begun to contemplate, before returning to France. In the stories in Savage Love, there are no such rescues. The narrative mazes here are often terror traps and the telling of the tale a perpetual tightening of the screw.

Glover wrote a book-length essay on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the notion of the book being a book about books is second nature to him. So, yes, some of these stories are stories about stories. The first Comedie, for example, “The Lost Language of Ng,” is an anthropological thriller about a mysterious Aboriginal people, or more specifically about the last know speaker of a mysterious Aboriginal language. That is, it warbles with a vibration that can only induce giggles. Another “book world” and “real world” story is “A Paranormal Romance,” which has echoes of Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” wherein the narrator gets injected into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, with the intent on romancing the title character. Glover’s story is shorter, but the blurring of “book world” and “real world” is clear. In Glover’s fiction, comedy includes mass murder and no wedding feasts. Here is the ending of “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree”: “And, truth be told, except for the catering assistant found with a pitchfork in her throat behind the barn after the reception, everyone lives happily ever after. For a while.” That’s about as good as we might reasonably expect in our early-twenty-first-century world of weakened expectations. Love will not release you from despair. It’s more likely to draw you into intricate absurdities from which you will never escape. Glover has been hitting these related notes throughout his career. Savage Love takes us down these paths to deeper and darker mysteries. These stories resonate along complex frequencies that reward our best reading efforts.

One line in my essay, skimming it today, jumped out at me more than others:

Orwell was a reality-based person. 1984 was his version of what can happen when language and reality become separated.

(Yes, language and reality are not identical, and language is a system of self-referential symbols, and reality is that thing that Nabakov said should always be surrounded with scare quotes — “reality” — but in this context that sophistication is offside.)

The big learning I took away from re-reading Orwell’s novel in 2003 was that it wasn’t speculative, not really. There is “world making,” sure, and language-abuse practices are pushed to extreme, but those practices are based in our world. As Margaret Atwood says of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Everything that happens in the novel has happened in the world. The same, I believe, can be said for Orwell’s novel.

And is even more true now. More true now in 2025, than in 2004. Propagandistic arts flourished in Orwell’s time. They are overwhelming now. Just this morning I saw Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, call fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” He was justifying the coming massive tariffs against Canada and Mexico and lesser ones against China. Less than 1% of the fentanyl entering the USA comes from Canada, but WMD is the regurgitated phrase, echoing, of course, George W. Bush’s bogus rationale for the post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Fentanyl is a scourge, yes, a weapon, no, a tactic used to attack the US from Canada? The suggestion is outrageous. The shifting of the policy conversation onto such outrageous grounds is the point. Newspeak is the point.

Orwell’s novel became a bestseller in 2016, when 47 was 45. Its lessons remain relevant. Reality is still reality is still reality — for those able to see it.

Cutting through the BS is harder than ever, the trends touched on below are now only more deeply dug in, but finding separation from the crap not only remains possible, it remains crucial.

MB 2025

(See also my take on Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses (2021))

*

Let's talk, eh? A contemporary response to Orwell's 1984

[The Danforth Review, January 2004]

In 1984, Winston and Julia read from the secret book supposedly circulated by the rebels of Oceania. The book is a lampoon of Marxist rhetoric; it is the equal opposite of the Party's lies. Poorly written. Poorly argued. As much a killer of thought as the Thought Police. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell sought to provide a remedy — better language, better politics, better world.

It has been twenty years since I first read 1984, and while much has changed with the world and me, the book is still powerful. The first time I read it, I was fifteen years old. The year was 1983. There was much talk in the popular press about whether Orwell’s "vision" had come true. I wanted to read the book before its calendar year arrived. I did, and it burned images into my brain.

How indelible those images were I’ve only just discovered. Reading 1984 again, I experienced many flashbacks. Most prominently remembered was an image of myself, Orwell’s novel clutched between my fingers, my adolescent body laid out on a bed in my grandmother’s house. She had died earlier in the year. It was Christmas season; time was running out; I had to read this book, perhaps my first "adult" book ever.

Other flashbacks came from the book itself: the girl from the Fiction Department, O’Brien, the Golden Country, telescreens, the diary with the speck of dust, rats, and, of course, Room 101. Some of these provoked true flashbacks, others are images that have never left me or have been absorbed by the culture at large. Room 101, for example, plays a role in Martin Amis’s novel, Money.

However, the book also startled me. First, I hadn’t expected to find a subtext about language. In the world of 1984, the official language of the Party is Newspeak. I’d forgotten this, though I remembered some of its ramifications; such as the slogan WAR IS PEACE, which is classic "doublespeak," itself a Newspeak word.

The second fact that startled me stems from the first; the tool of power in 1984 is language. The Party is all powerful, and it uses all of the institutions of the state to maintain its power, including violence on a global scale (war) and violence on the personal scale (torture). But its primary means of maintaining power is language, and Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, is intimately involved in both constructing and deconstructing the "how" of the Party’s dominance.

When I was fifteen, Orwell’s focus on language in 1984 couldn’t have been more than a curiosity to me; however, in the twenty years since I read the novel, my personal and professional interests have circled around and around this subject so many times that it is at the centre of my thoughts on many subjects. To speak more plainly, I left high school, picked up two English degrees, and now work as a communications professional for the Ontario government.

In my post-secondary education I read Orwell’s famous essay "Politics and the English Language," which begins:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

This essay makes it clear that Orwell assumes language is "an instrument we shape for our own purposes." His rhetoric is optimistic. We shape language, he argues, therefore, the hope for the English language (and politics, and, by extension, the fate of humanity) lies in people making good choices. What’s interesting here, I think, is that 1984 implies the opposite; 1984 is bleakly pessimistic. The citizens of Oceania do not shape language; they are shaped by language.

Orwell published "Politics and the English Language" a half-decade before 1984, which was first published in 1949. Which raises the question: Did Orwell change his mind? Did his optimism wither? I think not. I think he was arguing the same position from opposite sides; that is, he choose separate, opposed rhetorical strategies to argue the same point. What’s his point? Language is the tool of power — and to avoid creeping totalitarianism one must demand clarity and plain speaking.

By the late-1940s, Orwell had been through innumerable ideological battles – and he knew only too well the intellectual and physical costs of war and other forms of power-mongering. One is tempted to say that his idealism had been shattered; he had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War and was nearly murdered by fighting between factions on his own side. During World War II, he joined the battle against the Axis powers by taking a post at the BBC, where he worked as a type of propagandist for the Empire his earlier writings (such as his personal essay "Shooting an Elephant") had worked so hard to undermine.

In his book on Orwell, The Crystal Spirit, Canadian essayist George Woodcock documents Orwell’s conflicted influences, particularly how the Toryism of his private school days that never left him, even during his days down and out in London and Paris. (During WWII, Woodcock was in England, an anarchist and pacifist, and the object of scorn in some of Orwell’s wartime journalism; though when they met, Woodcock was surprised to find Orwell so pleasant, non-adversarial, even charming.) Quintessentially British, Orwell was ever the polite gentleman, though he was vigorous in his thoughts and could be cold-blooded in his words.

And so, I do not believe he was ever as optimistic as "Politics and the English Language" suggests, nor as pessimistic as the tone of 1984 might lead one to believe. And here I would like to add a point from Thomas Pynchon’s recent introduction to a new edition of the novel. Pynchon pointed out that 1984 includes an appendix — The Principles of Newspeak — which is written in the past tense: "Newspeak was the official language of Oceania." The use of the past tense implies that either Newspeak is no longer the official language of Oceania – or perhaps the nightmare of Oceania has ended; the proles have revolted and won.

*

Since I started writing this essay some months ago, I've been reading newspapers with an eye for examples of reportage that link the world today to the world of 1984. There are many, too many to cite in volume. I want to draw attention to only a few, some that draw attention to the "language is power" thesis outlined above.

On September 11, 2001, we began (or were drawn into) a War on Terrorism. I say "we" to mean not just Canadians, or Americans, or "the West," but all who wish to continue the post-Enlightenment project: building a world based on individual liberty, justice and rationality. This is, of course, not how President Bush frames the question of the war, but it is how I frame it. I also want to know that I have used the phrase War on Terrorism without quotation marks — and have not called it the so-called War on Terrorism. An international battle has been engaged and our best interests are served by winning it.

However — I know you were waiting for the however — the War on Terrorism is not a real war (yes, I know: people have died, are dying, will die). The War on Terrorism is a metaphor, like the War on Drugs (which has also killed people), or the War on Poverty (which kills people, too). A real war is between states or between groups of states. The War on Terrorism is a metaphor for a global police action; it is necessary, tricky, and — like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty — it is likely to go on for a long time.

However — yes, another one — here we enter the territory of 1984. I am not the first to say this, but it bears repeating; the War on Terrorism as it has been framed by President Bush draws a striking parallel to the perpetual war the people of Oceania find themselves in. Hobbes, The New York Times reported recently, is Vice-President Cheney's favorite philosopher (on the campaign trail George Bush said his was Jesus Christ). Hobbes — who is not a comic strip pet tiger — believed that society was in a state of perpetual war. As the Merriam-Webster online dictionary states it: "the Hobbesian theory [was] that people have a fundamental right to self-preservation and to pursue selfish aims but will relinquish these rights to an absolute monarch in the interest of common safety and happiness." If you're not with us, you're against us; the enemy is out there clamoring to get you. Join us, and we will protect you; abandon us and we guarantee nothing.

This is the world of the current American administration; this is the world of Oceania, one Orwell opposed, one Orwell analyzed in order to articulate how language helps the powerful gain and maintain status and control. But let me state again that I do not believe Orwell was pessimistic. In fact, in re-reading 1984 I was surprised to find some lyrical passages that owe a lot to Keats and nothing to Kafka. The Golden Country: Orwell's Jerusalem (to borrow an image both from Blake and the Bible). The place where Winston and Julia hide from the Party, make love, talk freely, listen to birds sing, dream of a world where they don't have to watch every word, censor every thought. Preston Manning was fond of calling the Reform Party's politics "the common sense of the common people." That phrase contains the danger of nativism, but it is also the root of Orwell's optimism. As Woodcock argues in The Crystal Spirit - Orwell's Toryism never left him; he never shook the belief that individuals, if they trust themselves, contain a common sense that cannot be obliterated. No matter what Big Brother says. No matter how much professional jargon or other abstractions infect the English language. Individuals can choose; individuals can make a difference — perhaps only individuals can make a difference; everyone making good choices, maintaining appropriate decorum.

What I want to reinforce here is this . . . If there is hope, Winston Smith says more than once, it must lie in the proles. Why? They never lost their humanity, and humanity is naturally good (the kids are all right). The Party cannot defeat the proles; it can only manipulate them (and in 1984, the Party is very nearly perfect at doing that, though Pynchon's argument is intriguing; perhaps the revolution has come and gone).

The point here, of course, is that Hobbes was wrong. That is one of the pillars of Orwell's legacy. He followed another 17th century philosopher: John Locke. Locke's views are often contrasted with the views of Hobbes. I quote from the biographies website:

In uncivilized times, in times before government, Hobbes asserted there existed continual war with "every man, against every man." A time of "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." On this point Locke and Hobbes were not in agreement (emphasis added). Locke, consistent with his philosophy, viewed man as naturally moral. The reason man would willingly contract into civil society is not to shake his brutish state, but rather that he may advance his ends (peace and security) in a more efficient manner. To achieve his ends man gives up, in favour of the state, a certain amount of his personal power and freedom.

Locke maintained that the original state of nature was happy and characterized by reason and tolerance. He further maintained that all human beings, in their natural state, were equal and free to pursue life, health, liberty, and possessions; and that these were inalienable rights. Pre-social man as a moral being, and as an individual, contracted out "into civil society by surrendering personal power to the ruler and magistrates," and did so as "a method of securing natural morality more efficiently." To Locke, natural justice exists and this is so whether the state exists, or not, it is just that the state might better guard natural justice.

*

From The New York Times (September 11, 2003):

Israelis' ability to adapt, and defy, these bombings demonstrates the amazing strength of this society. When bus bombings first started, for a week after an explosion few people would ride the buses. Now they're right back on them after an hour. The radios used to stop playing upbeat music after a bombing; now they don't hesitate. I have an Israeli friend who constantly worries about suicide bombers. But when I asked her to ask her teenage daughter, Tali Weiss, whether she felt angry about them, her daughter snapped back at her mom, "I'm angry that you don't let me go out" after a bombing.

Continuous war. Fear. Control. If there is hope, it lies in the proles: "let me go dancing." The quotation is from an article by Thomas L. Friedman, which concludes:

Suicide bombing is becoming so routine here [in Israel] that it risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture. America must stop it. A credible peace deal here is no longer a U.S. luxury — it is essential to our own homeland security. Otherwise, this suicide madness will spread, and it will be Americans who will have to learn to live with it.

The danger — Orwell tells us — isn't that suicide bombings will spread (the continuous war will continue); the danger lies in the way the war maintains the status and control of the Party. The physical violence is a manifestation and expansion of the violence against language. In "Politics and the English Language" Orwell writes: "Now, it is clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes . . . and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration."

What is "political regeneration"? One might more easily say what it is not. For this point, I thank Doug Saunders and his December 13, 2003 column in The Globe and Mail. In his column, Saunders recounts two recent encounters with people who told him they have decided to "tune out" mainstream media: one because he believes mainstream media are too right-wing, the other because she believes mainstream media are too "liberal." Saunders concludes:

About seven years ago, a U.S. professor names Joseph Turow warned that we are breaking up into "image tribes," which see only the information that advertisers present to their pre-selected group. He was almost right: Instead of having this tribalization done to us, though, we are increasingly deciding to do it to ourselves.

What is "political regeneration"? Orwell would say it has something to do with small-s socialism. Martin Luther King would say it has to do with civil rights. Pierre Trudeau would say it would provide everyone with equal opportunity. Gloria Steinem would say it would have to include the full integration of women into all roles in society. I'm not going to attempt a definition, except to say that Orwell obviously meant to generate momentum for progressive causes, to give voice to the have-nots, to fight against arbitrary power and inherited influence. And let's also say that he was against stupidity on both the left and the right. Let's be clear that no political platform is bereft of idiocy. "The common sense of the common people": it's all we can depend on — and it's ever shifting.

My cousin tells me her nine-year-old daughter rolls her eyes every time 9/11 is mentioned on the news. When the Twin Towers fell, she was only seven. She is already tired of all the 9/11 talk she hears. She reminds me of the catch phrase from an ancient television commercial: "Where's the beef?" Orwell would like that question; it's simple, direct, to the point. "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" is the question that may yet bring down the government of the United Kingdom's Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Both the style and substance of George Bush's administration is shaping up to be the "ballot question" for 2004's presidential election. American democracy is "self-correcting" wrote the American diplomat who quit is high profile post in the months leading up to Iraq War II. A lot depends on whether or not that statement is true. A lot depends on whether one believes American democracy needs correcting. (A lot depends on a red wheelbarrow, said William Carlos Williams — who knew what he was talking about.)

Political regeneration is impossible if the trend outlined in Saunders column expands. In a recent essay on book reviewing, I wrote:

You'll never learn anything unless you are open to the other; at the same time, you have a right to stake out your ground and defend it. Some might say it's more than a right; it's duty. Book reviewing confirms the paradox of relationship: How to be open to the other and secure in the self at the same time? It's no contradiction. It's the essence of the job.

What's good for book reviewing, is good for democracy. What's good for democracy, is good for all of us. Being "open to the other" is not rocket science; it is the necessary component that turns debate to dialogue. It can make information knowledge, can even make it wisdom.

In another article from the September 11, 2003 New York Times, Robert Wright wrote:

Putting yourself in the shoes of people who do things you find abhorrent may be the hardest moral exercise there is. But it would be easier to excuse American who refuse to try if they didn't spend so much time indicting Islamic radicals for the same refusal. Somebody has to go first, and if nobody does we're all in trouble.

Wright is author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

*

George W. Bush is the greatest threat to world peace. So said Margaret Atwood, Canada's honorary camp counselor, according to Shelagh Rogers when she hosted CBC Radio's "Morningside." Orwell might have agreed with this, too, but I doubt it. In fact, if British journalist and political commentator Christopher Hitchens is right, Orwell may well have enlisted at Camp Dubya. (He worked for the BBC during WWII, remember; Orwell was no friend of the British Empire, but the Axis powers needed to be defeated.) I find Hitchens argument hard to believe, however. He clearly hopes the military action in Iraq, for example, will create Arab democracies, but he displays little of his usual fierce skepticism for the motivations of Empire.

(Bush is the anti-democratic president; won office on fewer votes than his opponent, locks up suspects without trial or access to lawyers, invades countries by declaring "pre-emptive" war, uses his State of the Union address to spread lies about Iraqi uranium . . . and then there's his domestic policy agenda . . . . See, for example, Bob Herbert's description of the Bush administration's amendments to medicare [New York Times, Dec. 8/03]:

The drug benefit will be delivered almost entirely through private insurance plans. It would have been more efficient and cheaper to deliver it the same way other Medicare benefits are delivered. But that's not the idea. The Bush administration has mastered the art of legalized banditry, in which tons of government money — the people's money — are hijacked and handed over to the special interests.

The Newspeak spin on the Bush administration's changes to medicare are, of course, that the administration is selling the biggest changes to medicare since 1965 as "giving seniors peace of mind".)

The challenge 1984 presents us with is the same challenge Orwell confronted in 1939: How to do what's right without doing what's wrong? In 1939 (and earlier), Orwell struggled with how to pursue progressive politics in a highly polarized climate that presented no ideal options. Fight the evil that must be fought, he concluded. Fight one battle at a time. WWII won, he turned to saving the English language — and promoting "political regeneration." Today, we face a similar crisis: How to defeat the terrorists without turning our democracy into a lie? without turning our democracies into Oceania?

This is no idle question.

In the months after 9/11 (cue rolling of eyes), the U.S. released a foreign affairs policy paper that called for U.S. global dominance.

Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin reiterated the week before he was sworn in on December 12, 2003 that American authorities must honour Canadian passports (contra to the experience of the Syrian-born Canadian whom U.S. authorities shipped from New York to a Syrian torture chamber). The U.S. ambassador to Canada responded by saying the U.S. would do whatever it felt necessary to protect itself. Yes, but. Dear America: Do not kill those things that make you great. The rule of law is the rule of law; it cannot be reconstructed arbitrarily. Just ask Bill Clinton. It doesn't matter what the definition of "is" is. One of the pillars of your revolution was the fight against arbitrary power; do not accede to it now.

In 1984, Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. His job consists of re-writing old news stories to ensure that the past matches the present. People who have fallen out of favour are removed from official photographs. Industrial quotas are revised. Old enemies are now allies - and have always been allies. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera writes about how this exact thing happened in Soviet-run Czechoslovakia. My opinion is that Orwell was projecting his own thoughts and feelings about the contemporary media of his day into his depiction of Winston's job.

Closer to home, it has become common practice for new government's coast to coast to revise the financial statements of previous administrations. Clearly, the past is not stable. The New York Times famously publishes "all the news that's fit to print," but one does not need to be a Noam Chomsky acolyte to see that the media — and government's — construct and defend their version of reality (Chomsky calls this "manufacturing consent") in every detail of their presentation.

[Seminar question: Is The Danforth Review any different?]

Let's look at how we now view Syria, for example. Syria was once described as a terrorist-sponsoring state. Now, U.S. authorities are nonplussed about shipping a Canadian citizen to a Syrian jail. Is Syrian now a democracy? No. What has changed? Bob Dylan asked similar questions 40 years ago in his song "With God On Our Side":

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

And then there is this quotation from Time:

The President claims not to follow the polls or even read the newspapers. On issues from tax cuts to Iraq, he refuses to flinch when the numbers and sometimes the facts are against him. When he changes course creating a Department of Homeland Security after he dismissed the idea or speeding up his timetable for giving Iraq its sovereignty he is loath to concede there has been any correction at all.

Another columnist noted that Bush was surprised to learn from moderate Muslim leaders during his recent trip to Indonesia that the standing of the U.S.A. amongst Muslims internationally had gone down since 9/11. The columnist noted that the President doesn't read the newspapers — and has said he has only one source of objective information: his staff. As the columnist noted: "Two words: emperor, clothes."

There is not — never has been and never will be — an objective source of information. That's why democracies encourage dialogue, debate, vigorous cross-fertilization of views. The founders of our modern democracies created public institutions in order to facilitate the integration of opinions — in order to build strong public policy. The leader of the world's self-proclaimed beacon of democratic light seems to have forgotten this.

"I am a unifier, not a divider," Bush said during campaign 2000.

Yeah, right.

*

George W. Bush is the greatest threat to world peace, said Margaret Atwood. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell argued: "People who write in this manner have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying." Orwell is referring to sentences such as: "The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song." Like W.H. Auden, who also came to the conclusion that genuine communication cannot happen unless cooler heads prevail, Orwell wanted writers to be "scrupulous" (attentive to detail), something Atwood's criticism lacks (it does not engage the world as a complex phenomena; it presents a simplicity where a complexity is needed). Note that Orwell's argument is pointed at the critics of the regime.

In 1984, Winston and Julia read from the secret book supposedly circulated by the rebels of Oceania. The book is a lampoon of Marxist rhetoric; it is the equal opposite of the Party's lies. Poorly written. Poorly argued. As much a killer of thought as the Thought Police. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell sought to provide a remedy — better language, better politics, better world.

Hitchens recently released a book called Why Orwell Matters. Orwell matters because he consistently argued both sides against the other. He was a dreamer, but not a utopian. He was an empiricist, a lover and tester of facts. He pressed above all for clarity, knowing it was a precious commodity, knowing that it in itself struck fear into the heart of the powerful, whatever their political leanings. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell wrote:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence he writes, will ask himself four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?

2. What words will express it?

3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?

4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I have put it more shortly?

2. Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?

Atwood, and others, enflame an argument that needs to be cooled. Yes, George W. Bush has created the deepest bruise on the U.S.A.'s body politic since Richard Nixon. On January 12, 2004, Paul O'Neill, Bush's initial Treasury Secretary, was in the news saying Bush wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein right from the first moments of his administration; seven months before 9/11 the administration was talking about "how to get it done." (And, of course, the dangerous stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found.)

(George Bush: "The problem with the French is, they have no word for entrepreneur." I saw a comedian on TV repeat this. His routine: "I got beat up in a redneck bar for making fun of George Bush. I quoted him.")

Even as the U.S. administration scores some policy successes, such as Libya's moves to accept nuclear inspectors and other moves that inch that state away from pariah status, unilateralism remains an unsustainable policy — specifically a unilateralism too often shrouded in secrecy and driven forward by lies. There are significant threats in the world, yes, but they are threats that require carrots as well as sticks.

The solution, I suggest Orwell would argue, lies in stepping beyond tit-for-tat politics.

Let's give former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien the last word in this section. From The Globe and Mail (December 9, 2003): “In this era of globalization, the strength and influence of a nation are no longer determined by the number of cannons or missiles in its possession,” Mr. Chrétien said, echoing words Queen Elizabeth II during President Bush's recent visit to Buckingham Palace (she praised international cooperation and multilateral institutions). Chrétien again: “They are measured by the civility and tolerance the nation demonstrates toward its international partners and its openness to dialogue with them.”

Perfect and plain spoken. Orwell couldn't have said it better.

*

2004 is an election year in the U.S.A. Hmmm, democracy in action. By all accounts, the election will be the nastiest yet. Both the Republicans the Democrats are building their campaigns around their core constituencies, and there is little common ground between them.

Bill Clinton was famously a successful president because he "triangulated" well. He could play both sides of an issue and appealed to "swing voters" who would vote either Republican or Democrat depending on the issue. Traditionally, the electorate is considered to be 40 per cent Republican, 40 per cent Democrat, and 20 per cent undecided. However, in 2004, there are few undecided, and both parties are gearing up for a brutal winner-take-all battle.

This essay suggests that polarized political debate is not the best way to achieve strong public policy. Yes, stake out strong positions, but be truly open to compromise, negotiation, collaborative problem-solving. Perhaps it's just the Canadian Way? Perhaps the American electorate will just be re-fighting Hobbes vs. Locke? Perhaps everyone should sit down and re-read 1984 before they go vote? Free your mind instead, John Lennon sang.

If there's any hope, any hope at all, it lies in the proles, if there's any hope at all.

*

Finally, I want to recognize the failures of this essay. Probably I'm too hard on Atwood. Where's the context? What was she really saying? What about 1984 as a novel, not as a set-piece for criticizing the Bush regime? What about the benefit to the world of getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam? Let the questions multiply, let the criticisms pile up. I think I have provided plenty of evidence, plenty of argument; I want to present it with the understanding that it is not perfect. It is an invitation to dialogue. It is a plea for collaboration based on common interests. It is a plea to end "if you're not with us, you're against us." It is a request for a new decorum. A plea for a new decorum. A plea, yes, for peace in our time.

*

November 2004 Update:

So George W. Bush has been re-elected. Does that change anything I wrote a year ago? No, it doesn't.

First, the election unfolded as I predicted. It was a brutal, polarizing, winner-take-all affair.

Second, in his concession speech John Kerry called on all Americans to be united. In his post-election news conference, the President said he was "happy to work with anyone who shares my agenda" [emphasis added]. (Bette Midler: "But enough about me, what do you think about me?") Ain't this "my agenda" stuff just "you're with me or you're against me," in different words?

(Bush also talked about his "mandate" and his "political capital" ... and, fair enough, he did win ... but he has never acknowledged the validity of the opinions aligned against him ... nor chosen — a la Clinton or Chretien — to steal the best ideas of his opponents, thus absorbing their criticisms into his agenda and blunting attacks against him. His approach — "I'm the President of the United States; I don't need to explain myself," as he told Bob Woodward — is to dominate, not co-opt. Strategies of domination can only lead to more conflicts, not fewer.)

Third, the New York Times ran an article two weekends before the election that quoted a former communications person in the White House. The former White House staffer accused the Times' writer of being "one of those reality-based people," and accused him of not understanding the new state of the world: the USA sets the reality, everyone else adjusts to it. Yes, this is the new reality: the Bush Doctrine: the USA is the world's only super power — and it has enacted public policies to ensure that it maintains that position.

What the former White House staffer apparently doesn't understand, is that the rest of the world well understands the White House's position: They just don't like it. Some have chosen to violently fight against it. Others, some seeing a precursor in Orwell, find the White House's position morally repugnant. John Kerry just ran a campaign that emphasized how poor the Bush Doctrine actually works in practice (that inevitable base of reality that the White House apparently prefers to avoid) — and 49 per cent of the American electorate agreed with him.

Orwell was a reality-based person. 1984 was his version of what can happen when language and reality become separated.

Another quotation in that NY Times article was from the President: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." The quotation was from a cabinet meeting where the President outlined his approach to the Israel / Palestine conflict: Hands off. Let Israel show the Palestinians who's got the power. Interestingly, when I was in England in April 2004, there were numerous articles in the press comparing the US military's approach in Iraq with the lessons learned by the UK in Northern Ireland. Basically, if you want to win the "hearts and minds" of a hostile population, showing your power and your willingness to use it won't work: You will only create more enemies, not friends. A more complicated strategy of engagement, not domination, is necessary for victory. Sometimes a show of force by one side can make things a helluva lot worse.

Finally, to those students of post-modernism who bristle at the notion that language mimics a thing that can be called "reality," do not dispense of your skepticism; instead, note the irony that it is the absolutist George W. Bush, not the relativist Bill Clinton, who is the first post-structuralist President. Yes, literary theory long ago dispensed with the notion that language mimics reality — the sign, says semiotics, has an arbitrary relationship with the object. But the body bags are piling up in sizeable numbers for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, and mothers of dead soldiers don't need Foucault to tell them "what's real and what is not."

As Bob Dylan noted, what's real and what isn't doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden (where all is okay, after all), nor are there "truths outside" Paradise (the expulsion of Adam and Eve wasn't call "the Fall" for nuthin'). It's clear, on the other hand, that George W. Bush has mixed far too much theocratic idealism with his politics — he's confused where he stands and where we all live — he's confused this world with the next one. "You can be certain and still wrong," John Kerry told Dubya during the debates — but the President doesn't do ambiguity.

Another Dylan line: If the Bible is right, the world will explode.

Ah, don't think twice, it's all right. This here's the story of the hurricane ....

Recent published book reviews:

• The Topography of Pain by Ivan Lesay (2024); translated by Jonathan Gresty (Miramichi Reader)

• Vantage Point: On Media as Trans Memoir by Chase Joynt (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• The Coincidence Problem: Dispatches 1999-2022 by Stephen Osborne (2024) (Miramichi Reader)

• Best Canadian Essays 2025 (2024), selected by Emily Urquhart. (Miramichi Reader)

• Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren (2024) (Zoomer)

Other recently read books:

• Toxemia by Christine McNair (2024)

• On Beauty: Stories by rob mclennan (2024)

• Unless by Carol Shields (2002)

• February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (2023)

• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994, English 2019)

• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994)

Toxemia by Christine McNair (2024)

Christine McNair’s Toxemia makes for harrowing reading. A memoir told in lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs and more, this book takes the reader to the edge of life. On the back cover, Elee Kraljii Gardiner calls it “a beautiful etiological study,” a term I had to look up more than once to remind myself: what am I reading here? The question recurred because the purpose seemed to shift, if only in my mind.

I started with a vague sense that this was a story about complications from pregnancy. By the time I finished, I realized what an idiot I was — and I was drowned in respect for McNair for the numerous subtle turns, explanations, and descriptions she provides of multiple near death experiences and the mysterious, tenuous connections between cause and effect, especially as related to the fragility of life and the monstrous uncertainties that regulate (or not) the human body.

Toxemia is the former name for what is now called preeclampsia (webmd.com):

…. happens when you're pregnant and have high blood pressure, too much protein in your pee, and also swelling in your legs, feet, and hands. It can range from mild to severe. It usually happens late in pregnancy, though it can come earlier or just after delivery.

The only cure for preeclampsia is to give birth. Even after delivery, symptoms of preeclampsia can last 6 weeks or more.

McNair has two children. She experienced preeclampsia with each. She also writes of a suicide attempt as a teenager. The narrative is non-linear, looping back and forward, pulling in historical analysis and soaking in poetic reflection. These things happened. They put her life at risk. In past centuries, they killed many women. Modern medicine continues to find them mysterious. Narrative loose ends abound, as in this situation they must. The bottom line is life persists, the book was written. And it’s terrific.

One line jumped out at me: “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.”

Amen.

On Beauty: Stories by rob mclennan (2024)

The line in rob mclennan’s short fiction collection, On Beauty, that jumped out:

All my life, I’ve been attempting to uncover the connections between things. Attempting to comprehend, and articulate, whether chicken or egg.

As I wrote that, I thought, Oh, it’s sort of an etiological study. Hmm.

By my count, On Beauty includes 46 pieces, including “Baby Names” (published by me in The Danforth Review #60, June 2015). The pieces are short, often imagistic. They are often portraits of characters via voice, characters attempting to map their place in the world, their path through events, their pin point in time, per the quotation noted above.

Among the 46 pieces, are 14 titled “On Beauty,” linking all and sundry to the theme. The reader is best advised to approach the work with an open mind and intuition. The narrative logic flows through the subconscious, that is, cause and effect is not always obvious. “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.” You know what I mean.

Unless by Carol Shields (2002)

The mystery about why and how things happen is also central to Carol Shields’s 2002 smash hit, Unless. Spoiler alert: I’m about to give away the plot.

Central here is the narrator’s undergraduate age daughter, Norah, who sits at the corner to Bloor and Bathurst in Toronto, a bowl in front of her to collect change and a sign hung around her neck emblazoned with one word: GOODNESS. The narrator is Reta, who is heartbroken. What has happened to her daughter, raised solidly middle-class and now acting out moral purity and homelessness?

Ultimately, I read Unless as a satire on the cluelessness of middle-class white women. This, of course, is not how this novel is typically presented. LOL. For example, a 2020 piece in The New York Times began this way:

When Carol Shields died of breast cancer in 2003, her obituary in The New York Times remembered her as a novelist whose work highlighted the “profundity of the mundane,” while The Guardian mentioned her “commitment to commemorating otherwise ordinary lives.” Shields specialized in fiction devoted to women characters and their experience; nearly two decades later, the province of “ordinary” women in fiction still needs defending.

As the story of Reta, a writer of modest gifts, a mother and wife, a friend and suburbanite, Unless fits the stereotype of a portrait of an “ordinary woman,” albeit one who finds herself in an extraordinary situation. The reason I read the novel as satire is because Reta’s explanation and presentation of cause and effect is ridiculous — opening up questions of racial presentation and meaning. The racial erasure in this novel is extraordinary itself.

Because the reason Norah is on the street corner is, she intervened when a Muslim woman set herself on fire, killing herself by self-immolation. The Muslim woman is mentioned a total of three times in the novel, twice as a causal aside, then finally as the source of Norah’s deviation from middle-class normality. Who is this Muslim woman? Why did she do such as extraordinary thing? Reta couldn’t care less, nor could many of the reviewers and early readers of the novel, as noted by Margaret Steffler in her essay, “A Human Conversation About Goodness” (Studies in Canadian Literature #34, 2009):

Reviewers and critics of Unless have tended to minimize the details of the actual interaction between Norah and the “young Muslim woman,” largely because of Shields’s own minimalist treatment. Catherine Lockerbie, for example, noting that the “full reasons for Norah’s withdrawal … are almost glossed over,” points out that “Reta’s response to this family crisis is far more moving and involving than the crisis itself, which is resolved with almost unseemly speed.” Lockerbie speculates that “this may be seen as a minor flaw in the structure of the book or a deliberate avoidance of any more grandiose denouement” (H8). The “crisis” is not “resolved” in any sense of the word, but rather than a structural flaw, the lack of attention accorded to the incident deliberately demands the reader’s engagement. The delayed relation of the incident of the burning woman is heavily invested with assumed significance because it is withheld for so long; however, its actual substance is never revealed, despite the apparent “answers” it provides about Norah’s behaviour. Neither Reta nor Shields pauses for very long in the description of the moment when Norah touches the “other” woman, but the encounter is crucial precisely because of its brevity. If Shields writes about “the hidden, the unsaid” (Hughes 138) by concentrating particularly on gaps and silences, it is safe to assume that the mysterious uncertainty surrounding Norah’s act is important. Although the meaning of the moment may be elusive, it calls for its own pursuit. In fact, it is difficult or even impossible to ignore the strange vagueness that hints at so much but tells so little. Shields talks about the way in which readers are often left “tugging after the narrative thread” in order to speculate about what is missing or unrevealed (“Narrative” 20), and there is no doubt here that the reader is compelled to tug and work at the thread connecting Norah’s intervention to her subsequent display of “goodness” on the very street corner where she touched the “other.”

Nora Foster Stovel notes the lack of commentary concerning “the cause of the woman’s self-immolation or the relevance of her religion,” pointing out that Shields concentrates instead on “the effects of witnessing the death on Norah Winters, presumably her despair at this shocking symbol of the powerlessness of women to make their voices heard” (69n19).

Similar concerns are addressed by Smaro Kamoureli in “In/visibility, Race-Baiting, and the Author Function in Carol Shields's Unless”:

Smaro Kamboureli, drawing on Shields’s essay “Writing from the Edge,” reads Unless as a text that constructs the Muslim woman as an authorial ruse in order to both raise and problematize matters of “race.” Keeping in mind Shields’s views about writing and distinguishing between the novel’s historical author and the author as inscribed in the text, Kamboureli focuses not only on the technologies of visuality and control that comprise the protagonist’s first-person narrative but also on the ways in which they are ironically inversed by the author function. It is this reversal, she argues, that both questions and upholds the narrator’s representations of otherness. With particular emphasis on how the narrator visualizes her household, as well as Toronto’s urban imaginary (where her daughter and the Muslim woman are situated), as panoptical and circumscribed constructs, she reads the Muslim woman’s minimalist representation as a calculated manifestation of authorial agency designed at once to lure critical attention and to put Canadian civility to the test.

Kamoureli’s essay is available in Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders, edited by Nora Foster Stovel (2023), which is available from Indigo, if you have $200+. The Toronto Public Library does not have a copy.

February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock (2023)

The context here, of course, is Germany, is Hitler. February 1933 is when the Dictator becomes the Dictator, taking on the role of Chancellor and taking over the full levers of power. The subtitle is the theme. What does the Nazi takeover mean for literature? For writers? There are immediate consequences, which some anticipate (and thus flee the country) and others downplay (and therefore dawdle). Further others see nothing to worry about, in fact much to celebrate, thus, ultimately, destroying forever their reputations.

Wittstock has scanned dozens of historical documents, diaries, memoirs, etc., to piece together a day-by-day account of the actions and decisions of Germany’s leading writers. The Mann family, of course, features prominently. They are among the dawdlers, though they (mostly) realize quickly enough that things have changed irrevocably. Arguments break out between writers about how best to respond. Others offer sanctuary to those most at risk, anyone identified as Jewish, obviously, either overtly or more cosmopolitan-ly “integrated” (the Nazis make no distinction, though some writers/intellectuals insist too long upon it, with dire consequences).

Yes, many of the arguments presented (to stay or go; the risk is real or not) read as frighteningly contemporary. Nationalist populism suffers no fools, this requires no repeating, however foolish its own foundations. Inserting Yeats here:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994, English 2019)

This was a book club book. The plot is, on an island in Japan the population suffers a kind of progressive, forced mental illness. Objects and their respective words disappear from the collective consciousness, one after another. Birds, for example. Suddenly, there are none, and no one can remember what those flighty things used to be called. The world, obviously, gets conceptually smaller and smaller, except for some people, life continues as normal. These are the ones at risk of being picked up and disappeared by the memory police.

The Winter of Literature? Um. Well, the process takes more than a month, though onward it marches. The protagonist is a novelist, and eventually even novels disappear. This is an easy read, if an unsettling one. My query was, why are the bad guys so vague? Yes, the memory police are the antagonists, but what dark purpose are they working for? It remains unstated and, therefore, unsatisfying. Incomplete?

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994)

I listened to this one by audio book. A teenage boy in the early 20th century on the US - Mexico border has an adventure with a wolf, loses his family, drifts hither and yon, as McCarthy does his thing: confronting the reader with existential loneliness. Is there anybody out there? Is there a point to anything? Life in the meantime powers on.