Book Reviews

Three new published reviews and updates of recent reading

Excerpts from three newish published book reviews, plus thoughts on recent reading below:

Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 by Gary Barwin (2024), review in Miramichi Reader

A long-time participant in the country’s small press and DIY literary (among other arts) scenes, Barwin has a broadly established reputation for innovation and all out weirdness. How are we to make sense, for example, of stories like “Slice” included in Barwin’s new career retrospective, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory, which starts like this: “My mother buried me with a handful of flour. He will rise, she said, and threw the shovel over the fence. Then she went inside to sing like a lizard”?

In short, we’re not. Stop making sense, The Talking Heads instructed us. Free your mind instead, John Lennon sang. Gary Barwin’s stories sing similar melodies. In his 2023 nonfiction collection, Imagining Imagining, Barwin provides context. Western music, he wrote, was often “conceptualized as narrative” and “evokes the hero’s journey – oh, we’ve traveled far and returned changed.”

But is that how we experience life?

No.

The Diapause by Andrew Forbes (2024), review in Miramichi Reader

Narrated by Peterborough, Ontario-born Gabriel, who begins the book aged 10 in 2020, as COVID-19 hits and society shuts down, The Diapause imagines episodes of Gabe’s life up to 2060. As the pandemic begins, Gabe’s parents take him to a remote cabin, but within month’s their marriage ends, as Gabe’s father becomes increasingly paranoid and his mother wants to return to the city, which she does, Gabe in tow. Gabe’s family ends and so does any vision of harmony for his future.

Forbes is a powerful writer, strong at imagining the plausible implications of the climate crisis and depicting the subtle intimacies of interpersonal relationships.

Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh (2024), review in Miramichi Reader

These pieces extend the narrative of Smarsh’s 2018 memoir, Heartland, a survey of her Kansas-born life into poverty, the generations who preceded her, and a finalist for the National Book Award. If the writing of her life has a key message, it might be that – surprise! – not everyone from so-called Trump Country is a Trumpist and stereotypes about the rural poor are bullshit.

These points are drilled deep again and again, and again and again, in Bone of the Bone. Since this is a collection of stand-alone pieces, each piece needed to be contextualized upon its original publication. This contextualization is repeated ad nauseum throughout the collection, dulling the reader’s experience. We get it, okay. It’s not made more persuasive through repetition. Nor does it need to be. Because to be clear: her case is powerful, clear, necessary, and oddly unique.

*

Other recent books read:

• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf (2015)

• Gilead by Marilyn Robinson (2004)

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1955)

• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

• Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin (2023)

• What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust by Alan Bradley (2024)

• Earth to Moon: A Memoir by Moon Unit Zappa (2024)

• Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (2024)

• On Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham (1915)

Who can disagree with JSou’s Goodreads summary of the Maugham classic (caps in original): “THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A GUY WITH A CLUBFOOT HIS GIRLFRIENDS A BITCH”? I listened to the audio book, so I can’t tell you how many pages are contained so simply in these 13 words, but it’s many hundreds — and many hours of my life I won’t get back. Was it worth it? What I appreciated was the reminder about the pre-WW1 world, the industrious, imperialist emerging modernism so imminently about to crack open in that spectacular and disastrous conflict, the consequences of which are with us still. On the one hand, that world might as well be ancient Egypt, but on the other, JSou is quite right, we instantly get what’s going on — and it’s familiar as hell. Human bondage? An odd phrase, right? Would we call it, now, codependency? A bit, sure. But there’s those Edwardian social codes at play, a little different from our own, but not as much as we would at first guess.

A pair of memoirs: Rushdie, Zappa. So different, yet — they both respond to the trauma plot. Rushdie very nearly died when he was attacked on August 12, 2022 by an incompetent knife wielding assailant. I say “incompetent” because what Rushdie makes clear is, the assailant trained in a gym to be strong for the attack, but he apparently didn’t research how to kill someone with a knife. He hacked at Rushdie without skill and left enough millimeters of life for doctors to work with, miraculously. Rushdie recounts the ordeal and imagines a confrontation with his attacker, who was motivated by — well, stupidity really. I listened to the audio book read by the author, which made for an intimate experience and enabled Rushdie’s wry humour to emerge in the telling.

I’ve seen Rushdie twice in person, once at what was then Ryerson University (early 2000s?). He was promoting a new book. I don’t remember which one. He was interviewed on stage by Bob Rae, I believe. In 1992, at the PEN Canada gala, Rae, then Premier of Ontario, was the first politician world-wide to be seen with Rushdie (after the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses). The reunion of the two was affectionate, and Rushdie was energetic, ironic, and hilarious. Then in 2018, Rushdie appeared at Massey Hall on a panel with Charles Officer and Andrea Fraser. He appeared, to my eyes, tired, less ironic, and more earnest than hilarious. The earnestness also infects KNIFE, but how can it not, given the events he’s responding to. But this is the conundrum of Being Rushdie — how to maintain the hilarity and irony, when circumstances keep dragging you into the earnest and literal? He does his best, which remains better than most.

(Charles Officer, the Canadian filmmaker, died in 2023. He grew up in my neighborhood in East York, and I knew him as a youth via the local scouting group. He was always charismatic and had a big smile even as a 12-year-old. His death is a tragic loss.)

Moon Unit (born 1967) Zappa. Did you know the “Unit” part comes because she was the first child of her parents, Gail and Frank Zappa, and thus she made them “a unit”? Thus was Moon’s proto-hippie beginning. What’s the trauma here? Maugham would call it human bondage. We can recognize it as parents without boundaries and wild, just wild, codependency, or as Moon calls it, “the family business.” Were they a family or a business? Like, you know, both, bitches! The tone there is, of course, taken from Moon’s public debut, Zappa’s 1982 hit song, Valley Girl, featuring Moon as comic filler. Moon tells how the song came to be: she saw her dad not so much, because his recording studio was in the basement, and he worked all night, slept all day, so as a 13-year-old seeking connection she wrote her father a sarcastic letter, posing as an agent (“Moon is available for contracts, please reach out to me to make arrangements”), and slipped it under his office door. A few days later, he woke her up in the middle of the night and said he was recording something and he needed her downstairs. She had been making him laugh, imitating the “valley girls” from her school. He wanted her to do those imitations as part of his new song. She did. It became a hit, and Moon continued to go to school with the girls she’d imitated. Her and Frank also awkwardly appeared on David Letterman.

Moon is almost exactly one year older than me, and it was weird listening to her read her memoir, recounting a timeline I’m very familiar with, except her life events are circus-like. As the oldest child, she was thrust into a parent-like role with her siblings, because her parents had no ability to set boundaries. Frank’s groupies were constantly in the house, for example, and Gail turned to Moon, frequently, to “make things right.” Much therapy and spiritual questing followed. The family exploded, and relations between the siblings remain poor or fractured. She knits the day-by-day and year-by-year together with generous openness and, ultimately, a regenerative love, but all’s well has not turned out all that well. But survival is a good goal! Moon can be hilariously self-deprecating, such as her story about how she decided Jon Bon Jovi would be her future husband, tracked him down, and then dumped the idea when she learned (from him!) his birth sign. Check out her WTF interview with Marc Maron (August 12, 2024) to hear her grounded tone and take on her current life and more wild details of her story.

I read Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin (2023) to help me position my review of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (2024), noted above. That review covers off both books, sort of.

What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust by Alan Bradley (2024) is the 11th book of the Flavia de Luce mystery series. Bradley is also my first cousin once removed. Alan’s father was my grandmother’s brother. Said another way, my father and Alan were childhood mates, first cousins born a year apart. It was a pleasure to catch up with Alan’s latest. Also watch for Flavia on the silver screen (it started shooting in the UK this month).

I finally caught up with Gilead by Marilyn Robinson (2004). This book slowly unfolds its various complexities. It seems a simple story of an aged pastor in the American mid-west, but it is clear that it is anything but. No spoilers from me. Read it.

I read The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf (2015) for my book club, and then knew it was time to read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962). The Carson book is touted as kicking off the modern environmental movement.

Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which ones were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the manufacturers.

The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed.

The sentence above about the legacy of Silent Spring is also the legacy that Andrea Wulf tries to claim for Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in The Invention of Nature. I had never heard of von Humboldt, yet Wulf argues he is foundational to everyone from Darwin to Thoreau to Carson. He certainly led a remarkable and compelling life, sharing scientific insights with Thomas Jefferson and helping inspire Venezuela revolutionary hero, Simón Bolívar (1783-1830). The web-of-life thesis and notion of the planet as Gaia, a single system, is broadly known today, though that knowledge … how shall I put this? Remains imperfectly integrated into our political and economic systems? Is robustly ignored by too many idiots with power?

Silent Spring may be 60 years old, but it terrified me, man. It made me remember this old news story (2005!) about the number of chemicals wildlife painter Robert Bateman found in his body.

An Ontario organization called Environmental Defense tested samples of the blood and urine of 11 volunteers across the country, including wildlife painter Robert Bateman and chief David Masty of Whapmagoostui, in northern Quebec.

Participants were tested for a total of 88 chemicals – including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), flame retardants and insecticides.

Lab tests showed a total of 60 chemicals, with an average of 44 found in each volunteer, some in trace amounts.

Which brings us to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1955), the best catch there is! I listened to the audio book. I have seen the film (1970) a number of times, so many scenes and much of the plot were familiar, but I was surprised to find the chapters structured as portraits of different characters. Each moves the plot along, but episodes repeat from different perspectives. This is not just a page-turner; it’s a bookish artefact. Ha! It’s a bookish book, literary art. I heard someone say recently (jesting, but not), about a 1980s film, “This is either a classic or a hate crime,” and the same could be said of Catch-22. Readers will easily find within it what today is called rape culture, but which we can maybe more neutrally note as plain ol’ misogyny.

There are jokes made at the expense of women. Far too many. Not going to set those aside, but still look at the broader context and say, there is an attitude melted into the core of this book that sorely needs recuperating. Heller captures a world out of control, and our world now is even more off its axis, surely. Like peak Rushdie, Heller is sharp ironic and hilarious. His satire is grounded in an earnest desire for a stable reality, even as he reminds us of the impossibility of it ever coming to pass.

Perhaps a bit of plot summary. The scene is WW2, Italy, American air base housing bomber crews. The protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, seeks a means of escape after watching too many friends die. Perhaps he could claim insanity and get sent home? Well, yes, he’s told, if you are insane, we need to send you home, but if you say you are insane, then clearly you are not insane, so you have to keep flying missions (link goes to 2019 Hulu version). Catch-22 demands it. Catch-22? No one can define it, but everyone knows what it is (and now it is in the language generally). The best catch there is!

In school, we learn satire has a social purpose. It can function as a corrective, making fun of the powerful and the absurd. I recently saw Billy Bragg in Toronto, and he sang his 40-year-old protest songs, and then he said music can’t change the world. Ditto satire. It can, hopefully, inspire us to work together, to organize, to engage our collective power to demand change. And incrementally achieve it.

Lots of folks these days, though, are demanding change of a different kind.

Catch-22?