1) "No Great Michief" by Alistair MacLeod
There are many beautiful moments in this limpid and haunting novel, the first full-length fiction from the Canadian author of two highly praised story collections: The Salt Gift of Blood (1998, not reviewed) and the paperback As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1996).
Those titles hint at the lyricism that is MacLeod's special gift—and that flowers impressively as the narrator, Toronto orthodontist Alexander MacDonald, looks wistfully back at the history of his family's emigration from Scotland in the 17th century, the life and legacy of his ancestor `Calum Ruadh` ('red-haired Calum`), Alexander's own upbringing by his doting paternal grandparents (after an accident on a treacherous ice floe takes the lives of his parents and an older brother), and his later relationships with his other surviving brothers, rough-hewn miners whose wayward energies propel them into alcoholism, and even murder. Alexander's vacillations between his sophisticated, comfortable present-day `world` and that of his stoical family are memorably captured in frequent shifts between present and past. These give the tale a marvelous variety and color; but redundant contrasts between the romantic-chaotic “then` and the drab `now` (frequently spelled out in lax conversations between Alexander and his twin sister) only make us impatient to return to the MacDonald clan's earlier days. The retold family stories are without exception gripping and quite moving, and are graced by stunning little gasps and leaps of felicitous phrasing (for example, at the funeral of a brother killed in a mine accident, Alexander muses `On the last day of his life he had been deeper in the earth than he now reposed in death`).
If all of MacLeod’s debut operated at this level of intuition and eloquence, the novel would be a masterpiece. As it stands, it confirms his reputation as one of Canada's most sensitive and stylish writers of fiction.
2) "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry
From the Toronto-based Mistry (Such a Long Journey, 1991), a splendid tale of contemporary India that, in chronicling the sufferings of outcasts and innocents trying to survive in the ""State of Internal Emergency"" of the 1970s, grapples with the great question of how to live in the face of death and despair. Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power. The four protagonists (all victims of the times) are: Dina, 40-ish, poor and widowed after only three years of marriage; Maneck, the son of an old school friend of Dina's; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om, members of the Untouchable caste. For a few months, this unlikely quartet share a tranquil happiness in a nameless city--a city of squalid streets teeming with beggars, where politicians, in the name of progress, abuse the poor and the powerless. Dina, whose dreams of attending college ended when her father died, is now trying to support herself with seamstress work; Maneck, a tenderhearted boy, has been sent to college because the family business is failing; and the two tailors find work with Dina. Though the four survive encounters with various thugs and are saved from disaster by a quirky character known as the Beggarmaster, the times are not propitious for happiness. On a visit back home, Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized; Maneck, devastated by the murder of an activist classmate, goes abroad. But Dina and the tailors, who have learned ""to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair,"" keep going. A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams.
3) "The Flying Troutmans" by Miriam Toews
Emulating the comedic stylings of indie hits like Little Miss Sunshine provides a wealth of material and a breath of fresh air for Canadian novelist Toews (A Boy of Good Breeding, 2006, etc).
“Yeah, so things have fallen apart,” declares reluctant narrator Hattie Troutman, summarizing her situation with a postmodern echo of Yeats’ famous lament. Yanked from her Parisian fantasy life as an expatriate living with her leech of a boyfriend, prodigal sibling Hattie rushes home to Manitoba when her sister Min is hospitalized with another catatonic bout, symptomatic of a lifelong mental illness. Hattie is marooned with Min’s 11-year-old daughter Thebes, a goofy smart aleck with a predilection for busting into gangsta rap, and 15-year-old son Logan, a moody renegade who channels his aggression into basketball. Absent of maternal instincts, Hattie decides the best course of action is a road trip to find the kids’ long-absent father, Doug Cherkis. Commandeering a beat-up van, the trio travels through the alien landscapes of Cheyenne, Moab and Twentynine Palms in search of the anarchic artist who reportedly spawned the lesser Troutmans. Life on the road doesn’t increase Hattie’s affection toward her charges. “I thought: Strangle the children, dump their bodies in the ditch,” she notes early in her voyage. With barbed wit, Toews plunders some of the emotional themes from her earlier work, among them absent fathers, the trials of adolescence and the tribulations of single motherhood. The story feels suspiciously directionless much of the time. Fortunately, the snappy personalities of Hattie’s charges and the odd collection of ramblers, Jesus freaks and vagabonds they encounter make for entertaining interludes between the deliciously uncomfortable silences of the book’s primary characters.
Smarter and more thoughtful than its cinematic inspirations.
4) "February" by Lisa Moore
Canadian novelist Moore (Alligator, 2006) conveys a widow’s solitude in a narrative composed of fragments and anecdotes ranging across decades.
When her husband Cal died in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger off the Newfoundland coast in 1982, Helen O’Mara was 30. Cal left her with three young children, a fourth on the way, and over the ensuing decades Helen soldiered on with a façade of equanimity. The book begins in late 2008. These days Helen has plenty of pastimes: travel, yoga, sewing wedding dresses. She’s having long-postponed renovations done to her house, a decision that allows her to share domestic space with a carpenter she lingers near but doesn’t much interact with. She’s also embroiled to varying degrees in her adult children’s lives. But her grief for Cal is still both torment and touchstone, the source of her life’s sweetest, most enduring connection and its most lacerating solitude. Helen’s focus is intensely retrospective, and the novel relies heavily on flashbacks that extend to that awful night in 1982 and beyond. Moore enlivens her mostly plotless narrative by deploying poignant detail; Helen is a sensitive observer, especially attuned to those who, like her, seem isolated and laconic. Though her life has been hard, the mood here is oddly upbeat. Helen’s loneliness began in grief and shock, continued in tribute, grew to habit, and finally hardened into identity—it’s not without its solaces, even its sub rosa pleasures. A quarter-century later, Helen is everywhere attended by her perpetually 31-year-old husband, whose body never ages and whose memory never fades.
Subtle and perceptive, but offering little respite from a sometimes monotonous tone of lyrical earnestness.
5) "Annabel" by Kathleen Winter
In a remote coastal town in Newfoundland in the 1970s, a young person of mixed gender struggles for identity, acceptance and understanding
Joining a select group of novels including Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002) and Alan Friedman's Hermaphrodeity (1972), Winter's affecting first novel is the story of Wayne Blake, who is subjected to special corrective surgery as a newborn, raised as a boy and given injections and hormone pills to maintain his masculine traits. His mother, Jacinta, a cosmopolitan-minded outsider from the city of St. John's, is torn over quashing his female qualities and interests but wants even less to go against the wishes of his closed-off father, Treadway, a trapper away for months at a time. Only Thomasina, a worldly, free-spirited midwife who privately calls the child Annabel—after the daughter she lost in a freak boating accident that also claimed her husband—asserts that nature should be allowed to take its course: "That baby is all right the way it is. There's enough room in this world." Even as Wayne unhappily goes along with the program, his body asserts its true self, most shockingly when doctors operating on him to release trapped menstrual blood discover a fetus. As Wayne comes of age, he must endure losing his closest friend Wally (a girl), being viciously attacked by bullies after he moves away to attend college and strange looks when he quits the drugs and assumes his natural self. The Montreal-based Winter, a native of Newfoundland, possesses a rare blend of lyrical brilliance, descriptive power and psychological and philosophical insight. Her way with fate and sadness recalls The World According to Garp, without the cute irony.
A compelling, gracefully written novel about mixed gender that sheds insight as surely as it rejects sensationalism. This book announces the arrival of a major writer.
6) "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje
Canadian poet/novelist Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987, etc.) assembles, mosaic-fashion, the lives of four occupants of an Italian villa near Florence at the end of WW II. The war-damaged villa, its grounds strewn with mines, has gone from to German stronghold to Allied hospital, its sole occupants now a young Canadian nurse, Hana, and her last patient, a born victim. They are joined by David Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian friend of Hana's father but also a thief used by Western intelligence, and Kip (Kirpal Singh), an Indian sapper in the British Army. So: a dying man and two wrecks--for David has become a morphine addict after his recent capture and torture, while Hana, who coped with the loss of her soldier sweetheart and their child (aborted), has been undone by news of her father's death. Only Kip is functioning efficiently, defusing the mines. Ondaatje superimposes on this tableau the landscape of the pre-war North African desert, with its strange brotherhood of Western explorers, filtered through the consciousness of Harm's patient. Though he claims to have forgotten his identity during the fiery fall from his plane into the desert, it seems the putative Englishman is the Hungarian explorer (and sometime German spy) Almasy, but such puzzles count for less than his erudition (his beloved Herodotus is the novel's presiding spirit), his internationalism ("Erase nations!"), and his doomed but incandescent love affair with the bride of an English explorer--an affair ignited by the desert and Herodotus, and a dramatic contrast to the "formal celibacy" of the love developing at the villa between Hana and Kip, which ends (crudely) when Kip learns of the Hiroshima bombing, discovers his racial identity, and quits the white man's war. A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvelous account of Kip's adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor.
7) "Lullabies for Little Criminals" by Heather O'Neill
Winsome debut novel about a precocious girl’s peripatetic life.
From the perspective of 12-year-old narrator Baby, she and her father, Jules, live a glamorous life in Montreal’s red-light district. Only 15 years older than Baby, Jules conscripts her in his colorful, often fruitless schemes to make a quick buck. Baby knows that Jules is a heroin addict, but when he is high, his love for her is grandly theatrical, their grinding poverty a colorful adventure. But when Jules begins rehab, Baby enters the foster-care system. Deprived of the excitement that took the sting out of her marginal daily existence, Baby clams up, becoming a faithful, if mostly despondent, observer of the small rituals that hold her new families together. Just as she acclimates herself to new companions, she is uprooted, until finally she lands on the doorstep of her newly sober father. Jules, now grimly vigilant about worldly corruption, winds up driving Baby away. She moves in with a pimp and begins turning tricks to support her own heroin habit. After a few wretched months, she finds Jules again, and they plot a new beginning together. The story is a strange mix of heavy plotting and grotesque characters—as if the cast of an Elmore Leonard novel had wandered into a tale by Dickens—but Baby’s voice holds it all together. Baby is the real triumph here; Jules’s charm is utterly believable, but Baby’s yearning for him, even for his cruelties, aches to the bone. Baby believes she is guided by reason and conviction, but O’Neill shows us that Baby is all emotion and instinct. Moving from foster home to foster home, Baby becomes adept at thinking logically and remembering details. This translates into an unselfconscious gift for breathtaking metaphors, perhaps the most mesmerizing aspect of this author’s prose.
An oddly appealing trip down and then out.
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