Novel Pleasures

This is turning out to be a bumper season for Canadian fiction. The superstars are not on this year’s list—Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje, Vanderhaege—but many of our most solid prose artists, as well as many promising rookie voices, are on display in the stores with new novels and story collections. Regular LRC readers will have seen, or will see in the coming months, in these pages full-scale reviews of works by Mark Anthony Jarman, Mary Swan, Libby Creelman, Joseph Boyden, David Bergen, Donna Morrissey, Joan Barfoot, Fred Stenson, Nino Ricci, Joan Thomas, Patrick Lane, Kenneth J. Harvey and Josef Škvorecký.

That’s a rich list, but it is not complete. There are many more fiction titles worth discussing this season, and we simply do not have room for them all. So in the run-up to the Christmas season, we have decided to give our readers just a short taste (more descriptive than critical given the space constraints) of ten more Canadian novels that might appeal to you or to someone in your reading family. For these mini-reviews, I thank our in-house readers: Robin Roger, Rosie Aiello, Anna Candido, Moira MacDougall, Helen Walsh and Mark Lovewell.

The Flying Troutmans

Miriam Toews

Knopf Canada

Miriam Toews follows up her Governor General’s award–winning novel, A Complicated Kindness, with this book, a hilarious and heartbreaking road tale about the search for a missing father. Hattie, recently dumped by her ashram-bound boyfriend, returns home to Canada from Paris after an SOS call from her eleven-year-old niece, Thebes. Things have fallen apart again and Min, Hattie’s mentally ill sister, is comatose in bed. Logan, Thebes’s 15-year-old brother, is skipping school, carrying condoms, shooting hoops and refusing to talk. Hattie hospitalizes Min and, panicked at her inappropriateness as surrogate parent, packs Logan, the purple-haired Thebes and a very thinly sketched game plan into a van that has seen better days, and heads off across the United States in search of paterfamilias Cherkis, driven away years earlier by Min’s craziness. Readers of Toews’s work will recognize the precocious teenage dialogue of her earlier novel, pitch-perfect in its flatly ironic tone and pop culture references, that depending on the page leaves you either laughing or aching for its vulnerability. It is a journey both physical and emotional, as the narrative weaves between the events of the current day, and events of Hattie and Min’s childhood, including attempts at suicide, murder and redemption.

Dragonflies

Grant Buday

Biblioasis

Revisiting Homer seems to fascinate contemporary Canadian writers. Margaret Atwood gave The Odyssey a spirited feminist spin with The Penelopiad, and now novelist Grant Buday takes on the action-charged final sequences of The Iliad, including the resonant episode of the Trojan Horse, and invests them with all the psychologically invasive traits of the modern novel. For younger readers in particular, who may find the Homerian epic itself too daunting, Dragonflies is an intriguing way into the story of the Trojan War, made more accessible particularly for female readers because Buday spends a lot of time on Odysseus’ longing for Penelope and Telemachus, and on Penelope’s spitting hatred of her cousin Helen. Since the story is told from cunning Odysseus’s point of view, and he is far from being the most bloodthirsty member of the original cast, Dragonflies is not as violent as its famous progenitor (although it has its moments). Buday enjoys portraying Odysseus as a secret non-believer in a god-drenched age, which gives his retelling of the epic an especially contemporary twist.

Distantly Related to Freud

Ann Charney

Cormorant Books

The title of this novel aptly captures both the depth and the pretentions of Ellen’s Montreal family of Central European Jews displaced by the war. From an early age, Ellen grows up learning not to get attached to people and not to explore history, two classic refugee traits. Naturally, the book takes the reader on Ellen’s journey of relearning. But it is also a Bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl, describing Ellen as she grows, slowly and quite painfully, into a writer. One has to admire Charney’s willingness to people her novel with a cast of unlikeable, suspicious, often untrustworthy characters, including her protagonist. The flatness of the narrative tone also reveals the emotional disjunction between Ellen and the “normal” North American life going on around her, such as the friends she makes and the boys she goes to bed with. Although Charney indicates that Ellen eventually learns how to connect, both with others and with her history (including her relationship with that famous long-gone ancestor), the effect one is left with is that of a prickly outsider whose life will always be a struggle. But of course, that’s where the art comes from as well.

Uproar

Jack MacLeod

Porcupine’s Quill

A mid-life crisis descends upon an unsuspecting professor of economics, J.T. McLaughlin, when his beloved wife of 24 years, Trish, leaves him to pursue a career as a local daytime talk-show host. Between his closed-door office at Chiliast University and the disrepair of his marital nest, McLaughlin drowns his grief in single malt scotch and Pepto-Bismol. The love of his children and the concern of revered intellectual colleagues are no match for his mounting anxiety, dilapidating health and the general rupture of his orderly life. His plans for isolation and incoherence are interrupted when he hears from an old college friend (and reappearing MacLeod character) Francis Z. Springer (aka Zinger), whose antics and camaraderie may just pull J.T. out of the senselessness of loss. MacLeod colours the characters and landscape of Uproar with a contemporary Canadian sensibility. He infuses a universal tale of loss and healing with the familiarity of physical and intellectual locales from Toronto’s lively neighbourhoods and, with an evocation of Saskatchewan newspapers, manages along the way to delineate Canadian communications theory from Innis to McLuhan. Ultimately, Uproar is a story about the possibility for reconstruction and joy amidst chaos and wreckage.

Eva’s Threepenny Theatre

Andrew Steinmetz

Gaspereau Press
Patrick Dennis had his Auntie Mame, Graham Greene travelled with his Aunt Augusta, and now Andrew Steinmetz joins the ranks of eloquent nephews with his brilliant portrayal of his memorable Aunt Eva. As with Mame and Augusta, Eva breaks both the mould and the rules, but in her case, there are darker, richer shadows in a life that begins as a Lutheran in pre-war Breslau and shifts unexpectedly to a Nuremberg-defined Jew escaping to Canada. Before Hitler rewrote her religious status, she defied convention by joining the theatre and performing with the first cast of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Her theatrical skills were life savers, enabling her not only to flee Germany but also to get herself and her dog airlifted to safety. Steinmetz calls this work about his Aunt Eva a “fiction about memoir,” meaning that key aspects of the book are not invented, least of all the character of Eva Steinmetz, but a significant portion is. Although it is disconcerting that they are blended together without distinction, the result is a compelling, evocative work that gives us another depiction of a life shattered by Hitler. Eva is so fascinating a character it is hard to know why her nephew felt the need to add fancy to fact.

Vishnu Dreams

Ven Begamudré

Gaspereau Press

Canadian readers have feasted on the exotic, the tragic and the challenging elements of immigrant narratives. The bar has been set high. Ven Begamudré attempts to inject this story with the exotic by framing it with Hindu tales of Vishnu: “So he dreams the lives of his people, even those who have crossed the Black Water into so-called civilized lands. For, however far his people may venture, they can never leave his dreams.” But the dream that unfolds is painted sparingly with a reliance on the stereotypes of Americans in the late 1960s and early ’70s: cheerleaders, romance with the gun and an uncritical love of U.S. history. It is told from the perspective of two children, Durga and her younger brother, Subhas, as they make their way in the so-called civilized land. In the end, the classic immigrant father’s career frustration splits the family apart. Mother accepts a teaching post at the University of British Columbia, and daughter journeys north with her to a life that includes a stint with the Seaforth Highlanders’ reserve. Subhas, the young male protagonist, is no match for the humiliating taunts of his father or the reality of American aggression. The final myth of Kurma Avatara makes for an incomplete resolution, however much Vishnu insists that he needs humans as much as humans need their gods.

The Tristan Chord

Bettina von Kampen

Great Plains Publications

Bettina von Kampen, whose first novel, Blue Becomes You, was nominated for the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, brings an encyclopedic knowledge of music from her career as a violinist to her new novel, The Tristan Chord. Taking its name from the chord first heard in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the novel examines the reclamation of a German identity apart from the guilt of World War Two—an identity that is founded in German culture, food and, especially, music. Like the multifaceted sound of orchestral music, this novel intertwines different narrative perspectives: first-person diary entries of an anti-war composer in 1944 Germany, the third-person point of view of an SS soldier who helped the composer with his opera and a present-day account of a German Canadian, still shouldering the grief of her experiences in the war. Although the characters may be ideologically opposed, the juxtaposition of viewpoints reveals a mutual understanding, one that is predominantly based on music. While the book does address the horror of the Holocaust, it is essentially an exploration of many functions of music: music as an escape from the atrocities of real life, as a unifying force and as a healer.

Good to a Fault

Marina Endicott

Freehand Books

The happy/unhappy family trope gets a refreshing workout in this second novel by an Alberta-based writer whose first book, Open Arms, was serialized on CBC’s Between the Covers. Spinsterish Clara is driving through her home town of Saskatoon one day when she hits another car and suddenly acquires an instant family. The mother in the other car has cancer and the feckless father vanishes, leaving Clara with three small children and an inherited mother-in-law from hell. There are comedy, pathos and melodrama aplenty to be wrung out of this situation, to be sure, but Endicott’s prime concern is the state of Clara’s soul: is she taking this hardscrabble family under her wing out of guilt, generosity or covetousness, or some very human combination of all three? Endicott excels at capturing the slapdash nature of family life, reminiscent of earlier North American classics like Ah, Wilderness! or You Can’t Take It With You. There is also a great deal of poetry in this novel, and large airy doses of spirituality. But it remains anchored in harsh truths (cancer being one, the closed nature of families being another) that save it from overdosing on charm.

Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth

Edeet Ravel

Viking

Edeet Ravel comes from the only generation of writers whose fate it is to have been reared by the tortured, humiliated and haunted survivors of Hitler’s extermination campaign. In this novel, set in post-war Montreal, she describes a group of survivors’ children who live with two dilemmas. First, there is the parental torment, irrationality, tyranny and eccentricity that conditions every breath of their day and every dream of their night. Second, there is the bleak recognition that their parents are so different from anyone else’s that they cannot convincingly convey how bizarre and extreme they are in order to get help or understanding. These parents just cannot be understood by anyone else on the basis of shared human experience. The shocking culmination of the adolescence of these friends illustrates the way in which trauma is not only transferred from the generation that suffered it to the next one, but can literally destroy it. Ravel brings a paradoxically bitter compassion to her subject, conveying characters whose struggles make them harsh, weak, distant, superficial, cruel and pathetic, but most of all shattered. It is a poignant lamentation for a generation that ultimately could not free itself from Hitler’s brutality.

The Soul of All Great Designs

Neil Bissoondath

Cormorant Books

This is a tale of intrigue from a seasoned author extending his thematic range with the portrayal of an urbane schemer, Alec, who is aiming for commercial success as an interior decorator. Required to don a gay persona, Alec discovers the emotional costs of closet heterosexuality. For a while, he loses himself in his career, surrendering occasionally to nights with female escorts. Then he meets Sumintra, a young Indian woman eager to escape the stultifying world of her first-generation immigrant family, their time in Canada already scarred by the Air India disaster. Tragic formula and political statement fuse as Alec and Sumintra’s affair moves to an inexorable conclusion, with a romantic pas de deux played out against the backdrop of a forbiddingly rendered contemporary Toronto. In “this new and slightly manic city,” where exhaust fumes are overpowered by the smell of money, the fleeting pleasures the pair derive from their various deceits are finally punctured. If a role-playing poseur like Alec is able to survive, it is because he is crafty enough to plot ahead in his dangerous game. Within this stylish novel—Bissoondath’s sixth— lies a fully formed script for a future Hollywood thriller.