Reviews

Review: Whipping Girl by Julia Serano (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:35:56 +0000

Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
(Seal Press)

Review by Sandra Alland

There are only a few people in each generation who truly stand out as philosophers and forward thinkers, who command attention for their intelligence, bravery and ability to communicate. Activist, feminist, performance poet, lesbian and biologist Julia Serano is one such person. Her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity is this decade's must-read.

Not since bell hooks has someone so turned feminism on its head and located the heart of sexism in such a revelatory way. Serano's main ideas are simple but revolutionary — that the prejudice thrown at trans women is more often transmisogyny than transphobia, and that the failure to embrace trans women, effeminate men and/or gender-conforming (as opposed to genderqueer) trans folk demonstrates a fear and undervaluing of femininity and the female.

New ideas require new words. Luckily, Serano's language is accessible, and she repeats definitions throughout each chapter. Perhaps the two most important terms she focuses on are subconscious sex and cissexual. These terms help explain the prejudice behind trans exclusion and gender entitlement (when someone believes their gender is superior to, and more natural than, others).

According to the Oakland-based Serano, our subconscious sex is hardwired to our sense of self, independent of either appearance or socialization. Serano describes being a male-to-female transsexual as, "My brain expects my body to be female." She says subconscious sex and conscious (physical) sex combine to form gender identity — and for the overwhelming majority of us, the two are the same. Such people are cissexual, as their sex/gender is aligned. Transsexuals are not in concordance, and experience gender dissonance if not allowed to bring the two together.

Transsexual is to cissexual as queer is to straight, as female is to male, feminine to masculine, person of colour to white, poor to rich. The prejudice you experience for being on the "wrong side" of any combination of these binaries varies in nature, but is similar in pain: Some people are treated as more valid than others. Serano's particular angle on this is that feminine trans women face several kinds of sexism and that feminine males also experience misogyny.

Whipping Girl has a huge range: Serano gets personal, scientific, historical, theoretical, artistic and philosophical. Her writing style fluctuates smoothly between monologue and essay as she expertly dissects sexism and cissexism in psychiatry, the medical establishment, feminism, the media, the academy, pop culture and in gay, lesbian and queer movements. Her persuasive arguments (and occasional funny moments) expose the many people and institutions that privilege the masculine over the feminine — often more so than the male over the female.

Serano successfully debunks or criticizes Germaine Greer, Bernice Hausman, Diane DiMassa, Betty Frieden, A Mighty Wind, The Crying Game, Trans America, the New York Times, gender essentialists, social constructionists, the sometimes subversion-obsessed trans/genderqueer movement and the Michigan Womyn's Festival.

The last example is of particular importance to women's and dyke communities — women need to understand that privileging "womyn-born-womyn" or those who have "experienced a girlhood" is transmisogynist and cissexist, especially when many events that exclude trans women because of supposed "male energy" allow trans men and butches.

Serano suggests that the way to ensure equality for people of all genders is to "put the feminine back into feminism." She eloquently states her belief that we must learn to value the feminine, in all its manifestations, before anything can truly improve. She also asks us to form alliances (instead of communities where everyone thinks the same) and to challenge all forms of gender entitlement, whether from heterosexuals, queers, genderqueers, men, women, trans people and/or cissexuals. Whipping Girl is a life-changing read because it offers healthy alternatives to the current fragmentation of our communities, and because Julia Serano may be the smartest person alive.

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! August 16, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:30:07 +0000

Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay
(Picador)

Review by Sandra Alland

Jackie Kay made her mark in 1991 with The Adoption Papers, an autobiographical poetry collection about being a black girl adopted by a white Scottish couple. Since then, she has published three more books of poetry, the award-winning novel, Trumpet, and several books for children. But it's her collections of short stories, including the new-to-paperback Wish I Was Here, that truly establishes her as a force of nature.

Wish I Was Here is a thematic work, which at first made me wary, especially because the theme is love. But Kay's writing doesn't falter beneath the weight of such a potentially clichéd subject. She delves into heartbreak, jealousy and notions of fidelity from varied, and sometimes astounding, perspectives.

"What Is Left Behind" is a first-person narrative about a woman cheating on her husband with another woman. Rather than simply describe the lovers' interactions, Kay chronicles the love affair through descriptions of all the motel rooms the women have shared. "Room 99. Room 491. Room 22. Come in. Room, Room, Room. Oh Room. Oh God. Please. Oh my Room 55. Room with a broken curtain rail. Oh, please. Room with the vulgar wallpaper. Don't stop."

Kay skillfully moves her stories from hot to hilarious to lump-in-your-throat sad. The key to her storytelling is voice. You hear her characters clearly in your head, whether it's a young Eastern European lesbian confessing her sins to a stranger on a train, two older Scottish bears who'd risk anything for each other, or a straight Irish workman who's obsessed with his mother. Kay's grip on the personality of speech is electrifying.

She doesn't shy away from experimentation, either. Kay writes in first-, second- and third-person, and as both men and women. Sometimes she switches voice (and language) within one story. In "What Ever," Kay combines four birds with two narrative perspectives to describe the stages of an old woman's life. The section "Robin" is a monologue entirely in Scots English, a language Kay returns to throughout the collection.

"You Go When You Can No Longer Stay" and "Pruning" contemplate the little cruelties of lost love. Both are tales of lesbians whose lovers are having affairs. Kay painfully illustrates the denial we often embrace, the ways we lose ourselves in relationships and the extremes we go to in order not to be alone. And yet there is always a spark of humour and glow of hope, like when the woman in "Pruning" destroys her lover's underwear and says to the reader, "It is addictive, by the way, cutting up thongs."

Wish I Was Here moves back and forth between this kind of realism and Kay's own brand of magic realism. In the comical "Not the Queen," a Glaswegian woman is cursed with the exact same face as Queen Elizabeth II and grows tired of being mistaken for her. In the oddly moving "My Daughter the Fox," the narrator literally gives birth to a fox, and debates whether to let her run wild when she grows up.

Jackie Kay's stories are ruthlessly honest and unapologetically imaginative. There's no other writer like her.

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! August 30, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:25:28 +0000

Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín
(McClelland and Stewart)

Review by Sandra Alland

Instead of taking the chair across from me for our interview, Colm Tóibín sidles up next to me on the bench and drapes his arm across the cushion behind my head. When he starts to whisper conspiratorially in his Irish lilt, I feel I'm meeting an old friend.

Tóibín, winner of the IMPAC Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker, carries with him a strong sense of the familiar, both physically and in his work. Surprisingly, this sense reaches beyond his native Ireland — even when writing about Argentina or the Spanish Pyrenees, Tóibín convinces you he's right at home.

In his recent collection, Mothers And Sons, Tóibín sets eight stories in Ireland and one in a small Spanish village. Unlike many writers, he doesn't generally evoke place by describing landscape or city streets. He prefers houses, and this is perhaps the key to some of his authenticity.

"The houses are probably without exception all real," he says. "It's hard enough making up a character, but Jesus, making up a house?"

Tóibín's house obsession may be great for his writing, but it's not so good for his wallet.

After his first novel, The South, he bought a home in the Pyrenees, right next to where the novel was set — a place he returns to in the final story of Mothers And Sons.

"The amount of emotion I've put into evoking a place, I absolutely can't lose it," he says.

He bought the Spanish house for a song, but apparently there's now another house in his favourite locale of County Wexford, and Ireland is far from cheap. "I'm not going to set novels anywhere new," he jokes. "I couldn't afford it."

Using spare and scrupulous prose, Tóibín conveys information in an almost clinical way. You'd be as hard-pressed to find a flowery sentence in this book as you would a neat ending. Even his dialogue is so clear and clean that he rarely requires words such as "she said."

While in some hands this technique could make for cold and inaccessible writing, Tóibín manages to evoke huge amounts of emotion. There is such physical and psychological distance between people in these pages, yet readers are infused with the pain of each character's unfulfilled dreams. This happens equally in "A Song," a nine-page story set in Ireland, and "A Long Winter," an 83-page story set in the Pyrenees.

"I wonder if it's about northern countries," Tóibín says. "where connections between people, between families, can be very fierce.... Love comes fiercely. But they're not used to hugging each other, kissing each other. Things are withheld. People are withdrawn, stubborn. Everybody knows something that's surrounded with silence."

This is true of all the stories in Mothers And Sons, but perhaps most distilled in "A Song." When discussing this story, Tóibín talks of the extreme bitterness of family breakups in Ireland, where divorce was not legal until the 1990s. The plot is simple, but the tension high: Noel, a 28-year-old musician, stumbles upon a folk performance by his estranged mother. They've had no contact for 19 years; his father returned her letters unopened. Suddenly faced with an opportunity for reconciliation, Noel is paralyzed.

"If I was a really good writer," Tóibín laughs, "I would have him go up to her and say the right thing, anything, and then the next part would be, 'The next day they had lunch together.'"

Withholding that conclusion is precisely what makes Tóibín excellent. It's the sense of longing, of the impossibility of knowing your own family, that draws readers into novels such as Blackwater Lightship and The Story Of The Night.

Difficult parent/child interactions are a strong focus in Tóibín's novels, but he had written four stories in this collection before he noticed the commonality. It was only when he became stuck with a story about a widow, and found a way out through introducing her son's point of view, that he chose the book's title. Thanks to this organic process, the theme never feels forced.

"There's a very elemental relationship," he says, discussing the recurring parent/child theme. "Anyone who's been through illness and the death of a parent... I've never read about it properly. I've never imagined it properly. It isn't ordinary, it isn't about missing somebody. The cells in your body are actually doing something, having an emotion of their own."

"Three Friends" opens with Fergus studying his dead mother in the funeral parlour. Tóibín's description of how death robs the body of personality is unparalleled in its poetry. The sense of the unknowable parent that permeates the book is made larger and terribly permanent in those moments near the coffin. There's also a quiet, visceral logic when Fergus goes to a rave and seeks solace through sex with his friend, Mick.

Tóibín views being a gay man of the pre-adoption rights generation as another cause for his parental focus. "Maybe if you're a gay son you can see it more clearly. It's different than when you have nine children of your own and you end up writing about your children. There's greater intensity in how you imagine it, remember it."

Although he says elements of certain stories are "true," he adds that, "they're not exactly autobiographical, in the sense that I never managed to get my mother into a book. Because she was really more interesting than any of the characters I've ever managed to present. She had a great way of talking and she was very funny, very independent."

Tóibín may not feel he has fully captured his mother, but parts of the woman he describes to me certainly emerge throughout the book. Tóibín is rarely satisfied with his writing, and constant self-critiquing accounts for his high level of accomplishment. He once wanted to be a poet, but considers himself incapable of mastering that form. Arguably, his understanding of poetry is what makes his prose so rich.

After five novels, five nonfiction books and one play, this is Tóibín's first collection of short fiction. He remains unconvinced of his talent.

"When I started to write, I wrote short stories, but they were really no good," he confesses. "I stopped writing completely. I thought that whatever magic wand you need to make short stories, I don't have it. I'm still not sure I do."

Apparently he has more magic than he thinks. He seems to have forgotten he wrote one of the stories in this collection in 1979, the year his mother died, when he was only 24, meanwhile, Mothers And Sons continues to garner international acclaim.

Despite his misgivings, and the fact that writing short fiction is no way to make money, he's determined to stick with the form. There was some pressure to make "A Long Winter" into a novel, or to market it separately as a novella, but he would have none of it.

"I thought, 'Just leave this the way it is,'" he says. "This is the story. Because if you start to think commercially, you'd really be better to get drowned. But also I could get something right, for once in my life, of that length." And he really has. "A Long Winter" is one of the most haunting tales of love and yearning you'll find; it couldn't have succeeded at any other length.

The vastly different voices, points of view and circumstances Mothers And Sons tackles are a testament to the breadth of Tóibín's skill. His next project is a novel — after all something has to pay for those houses — but stories may be where he proves himself a master.

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! March 15, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Art on Black by d’bi.young (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:19:52 +0000

Art on Black by d’bi.young
(Women’s Press)

Review by Sandra Alland

"I write when I see injustice," says 28-year-old d'bi young. "I also write when I need to celebrate."

In the past five years this powerhouse has performed in and written seven plays, recorded four CDs, produced a film and been on TV's Lord Have Mercy. Now she's launching her first book, Art On Black.

Some of young's poems can be seen as scripts for performance, indeed several were part of her various plays and recordings. Young is as gripping on the page as she is performing; she holds her own as a text-based writer.

"If I can access the story on the page, then that's good. If I can access the story on the stage then that's good," she says. "How each person experiences each of those spaces is dependent on their life experience."

But young questions the primacy given to publishing: "All of a sudden you become an authority on something. Which goes to show that classism is alive and well. I try not to limit how I create. I have to admit though that I like writing aloud and oral tradition is what I prefer."

Much of Art On Black is dub poetry, a political and rhythmic Jamaican form; it's also written in "Jamaica nation language." For those unfamiliar with dub, reading is a good introduction. It's similar to experiencing Irvine Welsh's Scots in Trainspotting: You may need subtitles for the movie, but the book poses no such challenges. Young's writing is often phonetic, giving clear indication of both meaning and pronunciation.

With young (as with Welsh), nonstandard pronunciation, grammar and spelling is neither dialect nor stylistic device, but instead an assertion of language as power.

"In the Jamaican context the use of nation language in dub poetry is a direct resistance to racist, classist, misogynist colonial oppression... it is a revolutionary act and a liberational act. Its use is particularly necessary in creating dialogue around the legitimization and validation of people's hybrid expressions. Imperialism has not disappeared so it remains important that we celebrate the ways in which we resist enslavement by writing in our languages."

Art On Black isn't all dub. There are also succinct and meditative pieces, some almost haiku-like. Young shifts easily from the vernacular to the sublime. She delivers a long narrative grounded in a naturalistic lyric, then flies off into the abstract.

Also notable in a first book of poetry is that young moves beyond the confessional first person to embody other experiences. She has equal grace with truth and fiction, a talent that takes many poets decades to master.

If you're torn between reading or watching young, you can do both for the launch of Art On Black. She'll be performing with her band, dubbin.revolushun.gangstars, as well her mother Anita Stewart and Lillian Allen.

"As a young queer black woman, to know that Lillian Allen came years before talking about similar issues, grounds me in the knowledge that I am a part of a long legacy of resistance and storytelling.

"I grew up watching my mother tell stories. The biggest lesson mom taught me was integrity. No matter how poor, how alienated, how other you are, you always have the choice to act with integrity."

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! March 2, 2006.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: The Children of Mary by Marusya Bociurkiw (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:04:54 +0000

The Children of Mary by Marusya Bociurkiw
(Inanna Publications)

Review by Sandra Alland

In our personality-obsessed world, it seems unlikely that someone who isn't a superstar could have written one of the year's best books. But Marusya Bociurkiw has done just that with her first novel, The Children Of Mary.

What begins as a typical tale of an immigrant family surviving Canadian hardships quickly becomes a breathtaking map of the long-term effects of trauma. The Children Of Mary is the story of three generations of Ukrainian women. The book has two narrators — Sonya and her grandmother Maria — and alternates time and place, mainly from Winnipeg to Toronto, from 1930 to 2000.

As teens in the '70s, Sonya and her sister Kat join the Children Of Mary, a religious group for Ukrainian and Polish Catholic girls. Kat is obsessed with sacrifice, going as far as to pierce Sonya's hands and feet to make stigmata. After this incident, Kat goes to spend time with her estranged father, and Sonya with her herb-boiling grandmother.

When the girls are reunited, something has inexplicably changed. Kat throws herself into the spirit of the '70s, enjoying sex and drugs, but her teenage life soon spins out of control. Eventually, she stops talking to her family altogether, then disappears. Soon Sonya finds out Kat has died in a car accident. This is where the book truly begins.

Bociurkiw is not as concerned with plot as with the aftermath of plot — with loss and grief and the long fingers of memory that reach into our lives years after a difficult experience. Sonya's life continues, but is constantly infused by the past. Everything that happens as she becomes an adult occurs beneath the shadow and mystery of her sister's life and death.

Although this novel is mainly Sonya's story, her grandmother is also a huge presence. Maria is the voice of tradition and history. From the time she steps off the boat, she struggles to protect her family. Bociurkiw creates all of her characters fully and richly, and is equally convincing in bringing to life a teenager and an old Ukrainian Baba. Her style is both funny and moving, poetic and down-to-earth. She has an exceptional ear for dialogue, expertly capturing the idiosyncrasies of speech.

Bociurkiw also offers us a smorgasbord of Canadian dyke and activist history: female Trotskyists in '70s Winnipeg who believed women's lib was counterrevolutionary; socialist feminists in '80s Toronto who naively idealized a woman-centric world; '90s lesbians who began the obsession with babies and marriage. Bociurkiw takes us through the bars and political scenes of each decade with equal measures of humour, tenderness and critique. There is no nostalgia here, no oversimplification. Bociurkiw weaves issues of class, gender and race into the book in refreshingly complex ways.

Historical novels can be weighed down by the clunky insertion of facts. But Bociurkiw guides us through the racialized forced labour and resulting socialist uprisings of Depression-era Canada with the same ease that she recounts the history of the women's movement. She has such a knack for getting inside of things you'd believe she's been around a lot longer than she has.

The central image of The Children Of Mary is the mythological rusalky, Ukrainian river spirits who steal children. The presence of rivers is constant — the flooding Red in Winnipeg, the many buried rivers of Toronto. Bociurkiw reminds us of the changeability of life and to look beneath the surface of our histories. But she also cautions that there is a time to just let go and let things wash over you.

The Children Of Mary is a masterfully written novel about the search for truth and redemption, the constant process of healing and how bittersweet the journey can be.

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! December 7, 2006.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Apikoros Sleuth, by Robert Majzels (Sandra Alland)

Julie Wilson (The Madam) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:30:42 +0000

Apikoros Sleuth by Robert Majzels
(Mercury Press)

Review by Sandra Alland

The form of Robert Majzels’s Apikoros Sleuth is lusciously satisfying for both brain and soul. The story meanders and changes tack. The narrator slyly interrupts himself. We’re never certain a conversation has taken place, or what traits characterize the murderers and victims in this unusual thriller.

Fiction writers rarely explore this Modernist literary landscape. The best comparisons are perhaps to painting and poetry.

Intricate, eye-dazzling word patterns occupy visually stunning magazine-size pages. Stories are literally inside stories. Laid out like the Talmud, a Jewish religious text that scholars and sages added to over thousands of years, Apikoros consists of a "main argument" surrounded by additions and footnotes. Majzels adds the occasional shock of colour to a mostly black, white and grey palette.

The shapes of words are as important as their meanings here, in the convention of concrete poetry. Alternating bits of text and white space affect our perception of the events described. Juxtapositions of various languages form pieces of a puzzle that’s as much visual as literal. As the narrator wraps his cold legs in newspaper, he asks, "Is it content that contents or form that feels good?"

If you’re not into formalism, don’t despair. Apikoros is a whodunit and a fascinating take on language and ethics. By repeating certain words and phrases in different contexts, Majzels reveals more (or less) of the mystery, changing the meanings of words and questioning actions. A particularly moving passage repeats the word "Sarajevo" as a noun and verb until all meaning has been squeezed into and out of it.

Majzels’s repetitions aren’t always effective. At times they become clunky and monotonous. Fortunately, he succeeds more than he fails.

Although Apikoros Sleuth is challenging, it’s not alienating. It’s easy to relate to the sections about absentee landlords, loss of community, the desire to kill one’s dentist and the search for meaning in disastrous times.

(Review orignally appeared in NOW Magazine, April 7, 2005.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Dance Hall Road, by Marion Douglas (Laurie D Graham)

Reviews Editor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:36:55 +0000

Dance Hall Road, by Marion Douglas
(Insomniac Press, 2008)

Reviewed by Laurie D Graham

Marion Douglas’ novels boast a dizzying breadth—her character rosters are long, her attention to the minutiae of everyday life is unwavering, polyvalent, and metaphorically ornate, and her examination of characters’ inner conflicts is exhaustive, all the while hinting at an inevitable inexhaustibility. Everyone in her novels has a complicated brain, and an endearingly, amusingly idiosyncratic way of using it, even through—or perhaps due to—struggles with grief, confusion, and loneliness. Even at the worst of times, you can bet jokes are cracked, and situations morphed from tragic into poignant, even petty.

Dance Hall Road, Douglas’ fourth book, takes small-town southwestern Ontario—the author’s birthplace—as its backdrop: specifically, the fictional town of Flax, Ontario during 1969 and 1970. The novel reads like Douglas’ ode to home in all its quaint, receding glory. She bestows upon the reader a high vantage point: there’s the telephone exchange, the East Flax general store, the high school, the shallow sludge of Minnow Lake, the dentists’ office in front, the dentist’s house behind. There, too, are the dentist’s son and that strange, tall Farrell girl, the one with the shattered leg, talking in front of Lalonde’s restaurant; there are the old bachelors pontificating in the general store; there’s Mrs. Farrell creeping up to the shed beside the dance hall, and here comes Jimmy Drake up the road in her direction. The reader becomes an honorary, all-seeing citizen of Flax, immediately knowing how people will talk, how the facts will be misconstrued and overburdened, once everyone learns them, which they will. Douglas knows this town well, and translates it deftly and with pinpoint accuracy.

At the same time, it takes work to acquaint oneself with all the players and how they are connected; one has to labour for one’s citizenship. The sweep of characters is wide: we are in the heads of no fewer than a dozen of the town’s (mostly reluctant) inhabitants throughout. The action, though, centres on a rough handful of adolescents and their trudge and flail toward maturity and the presumably solid ground of sexuality. Add fierce ostracism, the kind of gossip only a small town can monger, and a devastating premature death, and, inevitably, the casualties will accumulate.

Uncannily, though, through depression and suicide, parental adultery and substance abuse, this book is funny, brainy, and endearingly strange. This is the payoff: the world rendered is fierce in its originality and compassion; each character is thoughtful and perceptive, in a particularly “Douglasonian” way, yet one comes to believe, staunchly, that all the people of Flax think in this way. Even strange, tall Maddy Farrell—whose mind is compared to a void of one size or another by numerous townsfolk, and is accused for a time of having a hand in a classmate’s death—is an elaborate metaphor-maker:

When you were pregnant, you showed. Maybe when you were guilty or presumed guilty, you showed in other ways. Swelling, lumps, maybe one night…she had swallowed a small animal that was now trapped between her muscles and skin, its desperate scurrying visible beneath her shirt and along her neck line. Tense your muscles and maybe you could suffocate the little thing. Or wait long enough and it would be digested by your bloodstream, carried off by the white blood cells. There had to be some end in sight.

A paragraph passes and she’s on to a completely different hypothesis:

Miss Eustace had done her best to inflame them with the splendour and parsimony of Einstein’s theory. Fine. Time might be a dimension but Maddy preferred to think of it as furniture that could be moved around and then replaced. Sit upon it and conjure up a future arrangement, move it all back and behind the current day so that what you had done was in fact still a plan, kissing Rose Drury a fantasy yet to be acted upon.

Brainy idiosyncrasy—this metaphor-making-as-coping-mechanism, as protection—is the norm in Dance Hall Road, the aspect that both unites and individuates each character. When Rose Drury, older sister of the troubled, alienated Adrian Drury—the kid whom the book claims as its main or major character—says “Nothing in Flax was difficult,” we know immediately the truth and impossibility of the statement in an almost eerily intimate way, so ensconced are we in the social polka of this town.

Two parallel timelines add to the intricacy of Dance Hall Road, the second one italicized, in present tense, in Adrian’s perspective, and picking up a few months after the past tense timeline ends. In doing so, Douglas has created a novel that grows richer with each read, its plot farther-reaching, its writing more unexpectedly graceful, and its characters even more tenuous and likeable than they were on first read. No clear-cut bad seed emerges in this novel because Douglas gives any perceived or potential antagonists a turn at being the main character, at stating their case. We may not like everyone in Flax, but we can’t help but understand where everyone's coming from.

Alfred Beel is an excellent example of just such a misguided character, one of strongest secondary characters in the book. I defy any reader not to share in his shame as he makes the drive to London to “run into” the much younger Cora Farrell, a girl for whom he harbours a crippling infatuation, only to learn that he’s wearing a grossly out of date suit, his only suit.

It’s Douglas’ care with even the most minor character details that makes this novel so strong. One great example of this is a page devoted to Rose Drury’s depiction of a classmate we don’t see more than twice:

Bonnie, the girl with the tipsy walk and the sideways, knowing smile. Anastasia said she had a birth defect, some form of palsy, but all the boys liked her, girls too. Why? Bonnie Lalonde was off-kilter. And she could act. She couldn’t walk like she herself was intended to walk but she could imitate Mr. Rigg’s springy gait and read announcements over the p.a. system exactly like Mrs. Liebling, everything one and a half times but with differing inflection: Mr. Hodgetts, you have a call on line one; Mr. Hodgetts, line one.

Through this brief representation, Bonnie becomes not only veracious, but emblematic of every character in the novel: each possesses some perceived defect—physical, emotional, social—and remains likeable in spite of and because of it. Defect obliterated.

This is true of the town itself: Flax is beautiful but sad, dying but hopeful, weird yet warmly tight-knit yet cold and confrontational all at once. In other words, Flax is real, as real as any place, and Douglas has worked hard to make it that way.

Salman Rushdie’s great early novel Shame, in negotiating both a family lineage and the new Pakistani state, has the unnamed narrator say, “Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” This could well be the motto of Flax, carved into the sign that welcomes visitors into town. However, shame in Dance Hall Road is never static, it mutates, jumbles up its properties until it acquires a bizarre new sheen and becomes almost pleasant, unimaginable any other way.

(Review originally appeared in The Malahat Review.)

Laurie D Graham writes poetry, fiction, and reviews. She is assistant editor for Brick, A Literary Journal.

http://lauriedgraham.wordpress.com

Pitch interests: poetry, short fiction, the prairie, hockey, the long poem, history of the Canadian West, gardening, reggae and roots music

Review: Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, by Randall Maggs (Laurie D Graham)

Reviews Editor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:00:31 +0000

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, by Randall Maggs
(Brick, 2008)

Reviewed by Laurie D Graham

Is it possible to write poetry on hockey without conjuring a monolithic national mythology, built on the figure of the defiant young hero? Perhaps. Michael Ondaatje writes, in his poem "To A Sad Daughter," on a girl's love of "angry goalies / creatures with webbed feet." The hockey player in his poem is belligerent and otherworldly and a possible, probable antagonist. Or, take Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players,” which conjures the world that surrounds and subsumes the game he called "a Canadian specific / to salve the anguish of inferiority." Purdy bookends his poem with the quieter notions of injury and childhood failure, which suggests that the places where the myth falters in the individual have an equal hand in that myth's creation.

Randall Maggs, in his new collection Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, subverts the sport's place in Canadian myth in a different way: he centres his collection of rough-pitched, understated narrative pieces around goaltender Terry Sawchuk, one of the most successful and most tormented men to mind net during the days of the Original Six. No one has yet surpassed Sawchuk's record for career shutouts, but a league darling he was not; known for his erratic and depressive temperament, he died before he could quit the game, as a result of injuries from a brawl with New York Rangers teammate Ron Stewart. Maggs leads us through a patient and, in places, fictionalized chronology of Sawchuk's life and career, from his childhood in Winnipeg, the son of Austrian Ukrainian immigrants, to his last minutes in the I.C.U. of a New York hospital. He draws from stories told to him by players and others who knew Terry, years of reading and research, and his own experience as a young player. "As far as pure veracity is concerned," he says in his afterword, "I don't know which of the three would be the most unreliable." Maggs credits Tolstoy as one of his guides for this work, who, in War and Peace, calls the factual historian "'a deaf man trying to answer questions that no one has asked him.'"

Maggs lays bare the process of mythologizing in Night Work in order to qualify how it’s used, and, by doing so, betray its impossibilities. In "The Last Faceoff," Maggs' Punch Imlach—coach of the Maple Leafs in 1967—likens Sawchuk to Horatio for the benefit of the press after their Cup-winning game, and it is significant that he does so with such clumsy intent:

"Here he is,
you fucking negative Nellies, here's our Horatio,"
the happy foul-mouthed Imlach hugs his battered goalie
and brays at the press, "you know, that guy
who guards the fucking bridge."

We see, through Imlach, how the act of myth-creation is used to weld butts to stadium seats and pacify reporters, but such rhetoric doesn't spring naturally from the coach’s lips; his Horatio metaphor may betray the emotion attached to witnessing his aging players win, but he skips over the physical effect of Sawchuk’s intense “doing.” No wonder that Sawchuk is a "battered," nameless figure, practically missing while Horatio is invoked.

"Transition Game," a self-effacing praise piece on the work of the goalie that is narrated by Maggs’ Sawchuk, compares guarding the net to a “life in the land / of do, devoid of ought and thought, which only shift the load, / the barge tilts, swings across the current, the bottom / of the Detroit river, toxic, leaden, waits.” Night Work is most concerned with and sensitive to that “land of do,” a place of bare action and the desire for bare action replete with a sense of transience, of potential ecstasy, of isolation, even in the midst of a stadium whirring with fans. The goalie—and Sawchuk in particular—stands alone, but, despite the bruises and the stitches, he stands in praise.

To get at that aloneness, and to highlight how Sawchuk stood apart from the people and players around him, Maggs assumes a number of voices, and one of the most captivating things about this collection is the grace of its polyphony. His poems glide from Sawchuk’s voice to Red Wings coach Jack Adam’s, to a goalie from Corner Brook, where Sawchuk travels with the Bruins to play some dubious, publicity-driven games—no work by Maggs would be complete without a nod to Newfoundland—and then into the poet’s/interviewer’s head, as he listens to stories told by referee Red Storey and sceptical ex-defenceman Gary Bergman. Transitions from one poem to the next are smooth and unhurried, and if it takes about a stanza for readers to parse out whose head they’re in, the honest demotic lines keep them interested until they know who’s speaking. The poems’ arrangement into a loose chronology—and, more significantly, a series of suites that show how intractable Sawchuk was, his desperation to guard the net at all costs, and, by consequence, the importance of memory and, in a roundabout way, love that comes with involvement in the sport of hockey—gives an almost novelistic shape to the book.

In Night Work, we are party to a fully realized world through one man, which should successfully draw hockey devotees and neophytes into the work in equal measure. If his readers’ expectation is for a poetry that touts the robust-hockey-nation line, then Maggs has not delivered. What he has done, though, is shown us our hopes in relation to a sport like hockey, what we demand in relation to how the players sacrifice. Night Work’s greatest feat is that it incites the battle with national myth by examining one of its giants, in an attempt to translate the imperfect pitch of his most human voice.

(Review originally appeared in The Malahat Review.)

Laurie D Graham writes poetry, fiction, and reviews. She is assistant editor for Brick, A Literary Journal.

http://lauriedgraham.wordpress.com

Pitch interests: poetry, short fiction, the prairie, hockey, the long poem, history of the Canadian West, gardening, reggae and roots music.

Review: The Man Game, by Lee Henderson (Anna Leventhal)

Reviews Editor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:52:24 +0000

The Man Game, by Lee Henderson
(Penguin Canada)

Reviewed by Anna Leventhal

Lee Henderson’s epic novel The Man Game is a kind of creation myth that imagines the early days of Vancouver as shaped by the rough and ready logging teams, shifty capitalists, and timid but determined middle class who together bring the city to life.

With a fierce and brawny grasp of language, sprawling narrative style, and the hairiest, sweatiest, crustiest cast of characters since The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, The Man Game is an iconoclast among historical novels.

The story begins in 1886, with intrigue, suspicion, and swearings of vengeance within a shiftless crew of lumberjacks called Furry & Daggett’s Logging Concern. Two of their own have been exiled for rumours of involvement in the recent fire that razed the city.

Inspired and trained by a visionary woman with theatrical flair, the men learn to perform a kind of ritualized boxing match/sport/dance routine that’s as hated and feared by the authorities and the well-to-do as it is addictive and necessary for the competitors. Oh, and they do it naked. Let’s call it Canuck capoeira.

You could think of it as Fight Club: The Canadian Gothic Edition. The Man Game deals in tropes of masculinity and the nature and philosophy of violence. In fact, violence is more or less a character here, with enough shades, nuances and moods to rival Anna Karenina. The book chronicles the racial tensions between the indigenous Coast Salish people, the white newcomers, and the Chinese population, all of whom have a vested interest in the game. It plays out the dynamics between men and women, bank managers and whores, loggers and vaudeville performers in wholly vivid and unsettling hues.

And it gives us this strange hybrid creature, the Man Game, as some kind of metaphor or meditation on – what? Life? Art? Human Nature?

Whatever it is, in terms of books that combine delicious, burly storytelling with a hunger for broaching the Deep Questions, The Man Game is as good as it gets.

(Review originally appeared at 2BMag.)

Anna Leventhal is a Montreal writer and book lover. Pitch interests: short fiction, long fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, feminism, queer, urban, theory.

Contact info: anna [dot] lev [at] hotmail

The HSW Literary Agency
The Art of Trespassing (editor)
Twitter: @annalevz

Review: Annabel, by Kathleen Winter (Anna Leventhal)

Reviews Editor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:35:19 +0000

Annabel, by Kathleen Winter
(House of Anansi Press)

Reviewed by Anna Leventhal

Wayne Blake, the protagonist of Kathleen Winter’s much-buzzed first novel Annabel, is born in 1968, in the far reaches of Labrador, a place most of us know only as a footnote to the CBC’s scheduling announcements, a semi-mythic, half-hour-late region. Already we are thinking, Oh dear. Things do not bode well for young Wayne, who has both male and female genitalia, and parents eager to give their child a “normal” life.

Because they see no way to raise an intersex person, they designate him male, and thus he is split into two – the visible Wayne, and the hidden Annabel.

As a “perfect hermaphrodite,” Wayne is a rare creature, but his coming-of-age story is nevertheless familiar. Annabel’s protagonist recalls in some ways Madeleine of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies – a bright, awkward, dreamy kid who senses no room for herself in the standard accoutrements of either gender. We see hints of grown-up Madeleine’s queerness in her childhood alter-ego Mike, her theatricality, her unusual worldview, her struggle to widen the architecture of her young life, just as Wayne’s hidden gender and sex suggest themselves to his parents and close friend Thomasina in various ways, such as an untoward enthusiasm for synchronized swimming. Wayne proves a compelling narrator, full of strange, funny, and touching observations, and we watch his creativity and selfhood unfurl with held breath, whispering “Hang in there, kid – It Gets Better.” But does it?

There is an emblem of colonialism and patriarchy in this book, with Wayne’s body as the territory presided over by medical men, denied autonomy, limited and controlled. But Winter’s text resists a black-and-white reading: some doctors are kind, and while Wayne’s father Treadway is certainly the Master of the Masculine, tasked with tightening up and battening down his son in preparation for a harsh Labradorian manhood, he turns out to be more than a stereotypical domineering dad. His internal tension vis-à-vis his love for his child and his fear for that child’s future is heartrending. And his best friend is an owl. Some of these father scenes are so sentimental and bathetic that they transcend questions of good or bad, like a Jimmy Stewart movie: you are going to choke up, don’t even try not to. And you’re going to enjoy it.

Annabel is a book oddly lacking in sexuality, given that desire would be a way of seeing Wayne act as an agent rather than acted upon as an object. But Wayne seems almost entirely uninterested in fucking – understandably enough, given the trauma imposed on his body by forced medical procedures, hormones, and the fear of being outed to his small community. Still, although there are a few moments that hint at some groiny awakenings, Wayne for the most part seems more like a mythical creature than a human teenager or young person. Perhaps this is Winter’s intention; it does, at least, succeed in surrounding Wayne with the kind of light that shines on eunuchs, mermaids, and forest elves.

Ultimately Annabel is a novel about self-determination. It’s less about Wayne’s search for “the truth” than about the development of his inner life, which is rich and manifold, and his struggle to find a way of living it authentically in the external world. The truth is, none of us knows what any of us is going to turn out like, and that’s always a story worth telling.

(Review originally appeared at 2BMag.)

Anna Leventhal is a Montreal writer and book lover. Pitch interests: short fiction, long fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, feminism, queer, urban, theory.

Contact info: anna [dot] lev [at] hotmail
The HSW Literary Agency
The Art of Trespassing (editor)
Twitter: @annalevz