A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto. Real authors lived in New York and London and the only reason we ever read books set in Toronto is that the Ministry of Education forced us to read them. Authors from Toronto were viewed as hacks, and books set in Toronto … well … Toronto is such a dreary place: the big smoke, Hogtown, Toronto the Good. It’s like Lego ™ with one brick of suburbia snapped onto another. Hence the snickering when Hugh Garner wrote Death in Don Mills. My personal view is that our literary attitude towards Toronto has been strongly influenced by its place in film: Toronto is a cleaner, safer, cheaper version of New York City, and so film makers use it as a stand-in, and so Toronto has enjoyed no status of its own as a place where real lives are lived and real dramas play out on its streets and in its homes.
I don’t believe the disparaging view of course. It’s just that, back then, we weren’t used to hearing ourselves talked about. But that is changing. Just as film and television are beginning unabashedly to locate themselves here (see TV crime drama Flashpoint and films by Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg), so our authors are less circumspect in their descriptions. We now have our own A-list — writers like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, and both have set novels in Toronto — see Atwood’s Robber Bride and Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. See BlogTO for a list of other books set in Toronto.
However, lists of books are necessarily incomplete because they become obsolete on a daily basis. People keep writing books and, more and more, people in Toronto seem bent on writing, and writing books set in Toronto. We are indeed becoming a storied place with a sense of rootedness. I thought it would be appropriate then to offer a handful mini reviews of recent books with Toronto connections. Some connections are more tenuous than others, but all provide evidence of a vibrant literary scene and a lessening dependence on our A-listers to reflect us to ourselves.
Etcetera and Otherwise: a Lurid Odyssey, by Sean Stanley. Illustrations by Kristi-Ly Green. Tightrope Books, 2008.
First, a complaint. Sean Stanley has engaged in misleading advertising. I had first noted his YouTube video here (since Stanley’s effort, video has suddenly leapt into the mainstream as a book marketing tool) and I wrote: “I get the impression that it stands in the tradition of Crad Kilodney‘s masterpiece, Sex Slave of the Astromutants.” My first impression was wrong. While the video itself exhibits a certain sophomoric je ne sais quoi in the spirit of Kilodney, the book is something altogether different. For chrisake, it’s a delicate, bittersweet tale of unrequited love! And it’s good! It’s written loosely in the style of a Victorian allegory. Etcetera and Otherwise are the main characters, love interest and owner of a bookstore respectively. The instant Etcetera enters the bookstore, Otherwise falls in love and openly professes his love for her. She, of course, does not return his love. Otherwise proposes they travel together on a journey to the westest west and she assents, stipulating that after 28 days, any love between them will perish. And so the book takes the form of a travelogue with 28 chapters, one for each day. Kristi-Ly Green’s Victorian drawings give the book a quaint touch and nicely complement Stanley’s deliberately affected language. This book is what C.S. Richardson’s The End of the Alphabet would look like if it were on drugs.
Girls Fall Down, by Maggie Helwig. Coach House Books, 2008.
Alex is a medical photographer, which means he takes pictures of bodies in morgues, procedures in operating theatres, accident victims in emergency rooms. Behind a camera, he can be detached from his subjects, but he finds himself drawn into a greater level of involvement when he witnesses an incident on the Toronto subway. A girl falls ill. She complains of an odour like the smell of roses. Other incidents occur and there are rumours of poison gas or biological weapons. Maybe a terrorist organization is perpetrating random attacks against the city. At the same time, Alex renews an acquaintance with Susie-Paul, a woman he cared about from a distance during the 80s. Susie-Paul’s schozophrenic brother has gone missing and Susie-Paul enlists Alex to help find him. The demands of love force Alex to cast aside his detachment and muck around in the messiness of committed living. If you are expecting a terrorist/exploitation thriller, you’ve got the wrong book. Here, terrorism is the urban condition taken to its logical conclusion. The terror of a paranoid populace produces the ultimate state of alienation because it forces each person to suspect everyone else. Helwig underscores this by presenting to us the image of a spray-painted word – FEAR – as a leitmotif throughout the novel. The lesson is simple: if you want to subvert the quiet terror of daily life in a city, love is your best weapon.
The Incident Report, by Martha Baillie. Pedlar Press, 2009.
Miriam Gordon is thirty-five and an employee of the Toronto Public Library’s fictitious Allan Gardens Branch which Martha Baillie suggests is a composite of several branches in Toronto. The novel comprises 144 “incident reports” which Miriam Gordon uses to record the daily stresses of working in an urban library. In form, it resembles Joey Comeau’s Overqualified (which uses a series of job application cover letters to reveal an underlying narrative). In The Incident Report, the narrative emerges from a series of encounters with street people, angry youths, neurotic co-workers, the mentally ill, the elderly, the broken, the lonely. Miriam Gordon can’t help but measure herself against these people who daily present themselves at her desk. At the same time, Baillie plays on the stereotype of the dry, sexually repressed librarian. (You can get a sense of this from her “Incident Report 20” which she reads on YouTube. The report is set in the Allan Gardens Conservatory, where the video was filmed.) As the reports accumulate, we encounter recurrent concerns: a mysterious protector who leaves behind notes that are both creepy and reassuring, and a young Slovenian man named Janko Prijatelj who becomes her lover and in whose presence she begins to blossom. It’s a beautifully paced book that comes to a startling conclusion. As a bonus, Ballie makes recurrent references to Verdi’s Rigoletto and to Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes. How can I not like such a book?
Stripmalling, by Jon Paul Fiorentino. Illustrations by Evan Munday. ECW Press, 2009.
In brief: Stripmalling is a novel/graphic novel hybrid which features a whacked out gas pumper from “Trashcona” outside Winnipeg who laments the arrival of “Hypermart” and the wasteland it creates, then moves to Montreal with his queer studies, feminist, doctoral student girlfriend where he tries to write a novel called … Stripmalling. Even though Fiorentino lives in Montreal and the novel is set in Winnipeg/Montreal, I’ve clumped this novel in with my Toronto selections because the illustrator, Evan Munday, lives here. The novel is fun, playful, and works (like an increasing number of new works) at pushing at the boundaries of a form that’s beginning to show its age. The book even blessed me with a religious insight. In a section titled “Mystery Shopped!”, Fiorentino explodes the much-cherished Christian edict “just as you did it to one of the least of these …” (Matt 25:40) with a parable of his own — the parable of the mystery shopper. The main character works at “Hypermart” where he is visited by a mystery shopper who happens to be his ex-girlfriend, who happens to enjoy her power over him, and who happens to use it to exact revenge. “God was particularly proud of the mystery shopper. Of all the men and women he had created, this model was the closest to his own image.” It’s a funny episode, but its ethical consequences for religious people is dark and deserves fuller treatment in a separate post. The book is a quick read — a quiet evening — but cheeky and good fun.
Where We Have To Go, by Lauren Kirshner. McClelland & Stewart, 2009.
Lauren Kirshner is a recent grad from U. of T.’s creative writing M.A. program where she was mentored by Margaret Atwood. She illustrates my introductory point: younger Toronto writers no longer carry around all that self-conscious baggage about inferiority of place. In Where We Have To Go, the narrator, Lucy Bloom, is a young teen growing up in Toronto and so we get glimpses of the city in all its particularity. I had fun following Lucy through familiar neighbourhoods, including a visit to her ailing grandfather in the hospital where I was born. Lucy Bloom is an imaginative only child trying to cope with immigrant parents of Jewish Bulgarian stock who don’t share her imaginative bent. This is neatly underscored by the fact that her father works for a travel agency but has never gone out of the country. We witness Lucy’s social awkwardness, an eating disorder, and first sexual experience, all of it set against the tension between an anxious dull mother and a failed alcoholic father who can’t seem to shake his desire for another woman. Kirshner does a particularly good job of revealing the dysfunctional family dynamics in the Bloom household. I found it a bit self-conscious (and unnecessary) that Lucy Bloom referred to Catcher in the Rye. I had already drawn the parallel before she mentioned it and I don’t think readers need the cue in any event. In fact, if I were to draw a parallel, I would use another coming-of-age story — one set in Toronto — David Gilmour’s Lost Between Houses. Looking forward to novel #2.
More to Keep Us Warm, by Jacob Scheier. ECW Press, 2007.
The first volume of poetry by Toronto native, Jacob Scheier, was awarded the Governer General’s Literary Award for poetry amid allegations of conflict of interest (Scheier had ties to two of the jurors) which his publisher (successfully, I think) dispelled. I can’t help but think the controversy did a service to poetry in Canada by demonstrating to a wider group of onlookers that there’s a passionate community of artists in this country who are fierce about what they do. Was Scheier’s work worthy of a national award? I find that Scheier’s poetry is accessible and demonstrates commitment. I say “accessible” because much of the poetry is confessional. The volume is dedicated to the memory of his mother, Libby Scheier, also a poet, and some of the poems address themes of loss and absence in a way that readers can readily understand. I say that it demonstrates commitment because Scheier struggles to ensure that his poems are for something. Some, like “Footage From Haifa”, “Kaddish For Ariel Sharon”, and “Dear Officer of Homeland Security” are overtly political, while “Stuff” and “What Keeps Me Up At Night” (“I am afraid/books are more commodity/than prayer”) concern themselves with the everything-for-sale ethic that has overrun our world. Pervading all the poems is the question: do these words have any connection to the real world? Or are they poetic masturbation? At the outset, Scheier offers us the figure of Jacob wrestling for a blessing (“[f]ight dirty if necessary”) and the blessing he seeks may well be the affirmation that poems can touch people, move them to action, make a difference in the world. The wrestling begins with the epigraph from Ernest Hemingway: “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” It continues with “Kaddish For 1956” which reflects on Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and its impact on McCarthy-era American: “But, I fear the best minds are no longer, the best minds were the ones destroyed by madness, or the ones who grew up and got real jobs.” His fear is not merely personal, but extends to all of CanLit because, as he observes in “Alexandria”, “here, poetry can’t hurt you.” Many expressions of fear, but, wisely, Scheier doesn’t try to answer his question. I suppose that’s our job.