Tag Archives: literature

Reeling with Reviews

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I assumed the new Facebook message was going to be another invitation to an in-house-selling-stuff-party from one of my girlfriends (events for which I have a lot more sympathy ever since I started hawking books out of the back of my car).

It was actually a message from — you guessed it — my high school boyfriend’s dad, a man I have not seen in over twenty years.  Even so, he had sought out and read my novel.  And he liked it — said he wished the book was longer.  He’s not a professional literary critic but he is someone I admired so much as a teenager I always made myself into an idiot in front of him.  His review of my book — short, private, informal, encouraging – meant as much to me as a printed page in a prestigious publication.

That’s real-me talking.  Pro-writer-me can’t be so sentimental.  Amassing reviews in established, well-known publications is serious business.  It’s no place for getting mushy and indulging in adolescent vindication.  For some of us, book reviews — those columns bundled in newspapers and obscure literary journals, those afternoon public radio programs I listen to while folding laundry — are not idle entertainment.

I treasure all the professional reviews I’ve got.  It’s a huge honor to see half a page of a national newspaper devoted to discussing a story I made up.  In return, I’ve started writing long-form book reviews myself.  The first will appear this winter in a new Canadian literary journal called The Rusty Toque.  Writing a review is time consuming and intellectually demanding.  But I owe it to my community to do it anyway.

Book reviews are also controversial.  Some of the nastiest squabbling in the writing world today revolves around the state and fate of book reviews and literary criticism.  Authors of commercial fiction complain about reviewers being snobs fixated on “serious” literary work and ignoring popular books.  Reviewers who write for established, bookish publications have been known to sneer at other reviewers who start book-blogs and write about whatever they want.  Even more casual than book bloggers are blurb-length reviewers on websites like Amazon and Goodreads.  Some authors denounce these hobbyist reviewers who sometimes off-handedly and ignorantly judge their work — and their private lives.  At the same time, the hobbyists complain about website policies they feel are muzzling them.  In the world of book reviews, everyone’s threatened, no one’s completely happy.

Reviews for self-published books are an even murkier morass.  Most publications still won’t review self-published books.  Among whatever high quality work might be out there in self-publishing, there are literally millions of sub-standard products glutting the system.  Being shut out of the traditional review pool leaves self-publishers to create their own systems for evaluating each other’s work – systems vulnerable to abuse where real reviews can be hard to distinguish from ones that have been bought or swapped for reciprocal but meaninglessly gushy reviews.

All of this might be very important but I’m still newbie enough to just be thrilled anyone is reading and talking about my work.  I’m grateful for any airtime or column space or bandwidth I can get.

And that includes coverage by book bloggers.  I’m not moved by arguments from those who worry bloggers are cheapening and proletarianizing literary criticism.  I think there’s definitely room for plain-spoken, personal reflections on books and reading.  In my experience, there’s some very good writing in book blogs, like Daniel at The Indiscriminate Critic who described the narrative style in my book as “a mental Mobius strip.”  This is exactly what I hoped to achieve even though I didn’t see it that way until he said it.  Authors who’ll agree to interviews are being asked thoughtful questions on book blogs too.  Laura at Reading in Bed came up with a list of questions that excavated the roots of the themes I write about just as well as any professional has done to date.

Book bloggers can read earnestly and critically.  They take their work seriously.  And they can write from a personal angle that more formal reviews can’t approach.  They’re doing for literary criticism what book clubs are doing for publishing – keeping it relevant and accessible to people not professionally invested in the industry.  That’s a great service to all of us.

“Love Letters…” in the National Post Newspaper – A Review by Philip Marchand

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Great news today: Philip Marchand, a book columnist for a national Canadian newspaper, National Post, read my novel, reviewed it, and shared some lovely insights about it.  Here’s the link to his review:

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/08/23/open-book-love-letters-of-the-angels-of-death-by-jennifer-quist/

It appeared in print this weekend, under a “Books and Writers” banner, all by itself in a big square of text, sharing the page with nothing but a large yet low-key ad.  Marchand quoted some of my favourite lines from the story and I felt like he made validating nods at some of the narrative, structural, and substantive risks I took.

Highlights for me include:

“For all this dwelling on mortality, Love Letters of the Angels of Death can be quite perky, mostly because of the personality of Caroline.”

“Throughout the novel, her husband addresses Caroline in the second person…The technique works in the main, however, conveying to the reader the very strong impression that these two love each other.”

And my publicist’s favourite:

 “There is great tenderness…in this powerfully emotional novel.”

 

So, What’s It About, Anyways?

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What’s this book about and where does it fit?

Ever since I got my book deal last autumn, I’ve been fumbling with the inevitable, perfectly natural question of, “So what’s your book about?”  Maybe I’m over-thinking it but I find this question difficult.

The first thing that makes my book hard to explain is the fact that it doesn’t fall neatly into a genre — and I’m not just saying that to try to sound cool and transcendent and stuff.  If the book was about sorceresses with magic necklaces and metal undies I could say it was fantasy.  If it was peopled with smoochy vampires it would be paranormal romance.  If it was about stabby psychopaths I could call it a crime novel.  If it prattled on about dating and shopping it would be chick-lit.  But it’s none of those things.  It’s kind of lovey-dovey, a bit creepy in parts.  It’s a little otherworldly yet it’s realistic and earthy.

When I was still submitting the manuscript, still ticking boxes in search engines of databases listing publishers’ interests, the box that fit best was called “literary fiction.”  And it’s the classification now stamped on the back cover of the book.  However, it’s also a term that gets sneered at for its elitist implications.  Who’s to say what’s of literary merit, and on and on and on… Still, if for no other reason than its acknowledgement that a flashy, racing story-line can come second to arty, thematic prose, literary fiction is the category that suits the novel best (she said, cringing, hoping not to sound elitist).

Another category fits simply because of my geography.  It’s “Can-Lit” — Canadian literature.  I am Canadian so, in some ways, I can’t help but write Canadian literature.  I’ve fallen back on this description a few times.  But Can-Lit has gained a character of its own over the years and when I offer it as an answer, I need to be prepared to embrace that character.  I need to be able to wave my hand and believe myself when I say, “It’s CanLit — you know, bad weather and complicated relationships.”

Nothing I say is very precise or descriptive or satisfying for nice people asking about my book.  So here’s a short Q&A with me about my novel.  It appears in my publisher’s online literary mag, Salon .ll., and hopefully it will shed some light on what I’m writing and why someone might want to read it.  Go ahead and click the link below.

http://www.lindaleith.com/posts/view/280

The Art of the Happy Family: Review of Padma Viswanathan’s “The Toss of a Lemon”

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A gorgeous novel by Padma Viswanathan, an author who kindly provided a “blurb” for the cover of my own novel.

A few weeks ago, I did my first interview leading up to the launch of my novel.  It should appear in the Summer issue of Montreal Review of Books.

One of the questions I was asked began by acknowledging that books about happy family situations – like the high-functioning marriage central to my novel — are scarce.  I’ve thought about this a lot since the interview.  I’ve tried to make a mental list of memorable, happy literary relationships.  Maybe another reader could do better, but for me, it’s a short list – one full of characters who usually end up dead within the first quarter of their books.  Most often, a happy relationship is a preamble for a story – a cheap tableaux meant to be quickly dismantled.  Otherwise, it’s the pat-ending of a story – the trite song-and-dance finale.  The interviewer who posed the question is right.  Seldom does a happy relationship make up the balance of a story, especially in literary fiction.

When most readers want to know how to behave and be happy in a family, we reach for the self-help shelves of the bookstore, not the literary fiction section.  I think the reasons we’re not interested in seeing happy families in fiction are fairly simple.  Happy relationships are typically written as uneventful.  They’re boring.  Their sweetness is cloying.  It’s mapped out in cliches and feels contrived.

And that’s a mistake.  It’s not the relationships that are boring but the way writers approach them. Happy families come with their own difficulties and complexities – ones I find fascinating.  They’re surprising, interesting and, obviously, I believe they ought to be explored in literature.

I recently came across an example of a novel that portrays a generally happy family in a way that’s both believable and compelling.  It’s Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon.  Set in the final decades of colonial India, spanning two world wars, and sweeping changes to the traditional Hindu way of life, the book comments on the intricacies of religion, class, and politics without the tedium of a history or the tiresomeness of a polemic.

It also presents a picture of a large, mulit-generational family that manages to function and produce healthy, happy members in spite of inevitable adversity.  The central character is a matriarch, a child-bride widowed and left with two children by the age of eighteen.  She manages to maneuvre within the strict limitations of her caste, her gender, and a crushing notion of fate to shield her grandchildren from the self-destruction of the family’s patriarchs.  There’s an amazing irony at work in the book: the place where the matriarch seems to be weakest – her utter servitude to oppressive customs that keep her marginalized and invisible to the world outside her family – is also the focal point of her greatest strengths.

The rest of the cast of characters is large and complicated and badly flawed in places. Like any story meant to deal with realistic ups and downs of daily life, the books has its share of illnesses, untimely deaths, and family spats that drag on for years.  Yet the tone of the book is not dark or dour.  It’s sun-lit and warm.  The book’s heart is like a real heart – one that is much more than the sum of its parts.  Its warmth is at once miraculous yet credible with a bittersweetness that only comes with honesty.

I really enjoyed this book. It was strange to find myself feeling so at home in a novel set in a Brahmin household.  Maybe the familiarity springs from the lines Viswanathan drops into the narrative expressing sentiments exactly like ones I’ve felt in my own family life.  For instance, when she says that certain burdens only become heavier when we share them, I know just what she means.  Sometimes, even in a close family, the best way to handle suffering is privately.  For me, Viswanathan is not only a story-teller.  She’s someone who seems to understand family in much the same way I do.

A large part of being happy in a family – or maybe in anything – is understanding and accepting the limitations of what it can make possible and forgiving and forgetting the absence of what it was never meant to provide.  That’s what the women in The Toss of a Lemon do.  As Viswanathan writes of them in the aftermath of a disaster, “We were not shattered.”

In writing the book, Viswanathan drew on her own family history.  Maybe that’s what gives the story its organic, authentic, universally relatable feel.  Reality — even an unseen, faraway reality — comes with a badge of truth.

Thanks to my family history, writing about a happy family came naturally for me.  That’s what I told the reporter when she asked me if writing a good marriage was difficult.  I don’t know why, but it’s my excellent fortune to have only ever lived in happy families.  It may be a rare way to live but it’s real and it’s worth the work it takes to give it a voice.

Lost in the Post: My Silly Ambivalence for Epistolary Novels

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The first epistolary book I ever disliked.

At one point during the painful process of compressing my novel into a tiny synopsis to print on the back of the book, we ended up with a paragraph that described the book as a series of letters.  Letters — I guess the connection between the book’s back cover copy and the title, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, on its front should have been obvious, especially to me.  So it must have seemed pretty strange to everyone else involved when I objected to seeing “letters” mentioned in the synopsis.

I blame L.M. Montgomery for my aversion to the epistolary novel — a work of fiction imagined as a bundle of personal correspondence.  Yes, I said Lucy Maude Montgomery, the Canadian author of the Anne of Green Gables series – the woman I hold personally responsible every time I cringe at a fellow Canadian using “delicious” to describe something that cannot fit into a mouth.  She’s also prone to portraying fat people as bad and birch bark as important enough to interrupt everything with a lengthy description of it.  She might be onto something with the birch bark but she’s definitely wrong about the fat people.

Naturally, after our visit to Prince Edward Island when I was nine, my mum bought me the first book in the Anne series.  Maybe because we moved so much, we were often without many books to read and I was stuck with Anne.  Then came the rest of the series.  I enjoyed the books well enough that I started adding to the collection myself.  They were great resources for soaking up vocabulary and learning to discern the sublime in domestic life.

The worst of the Anne books is Anne of Windy Poplars.  It does nothing to advance the larger story arc.  It’s like a long detour.  And it’s the volume of the series written as a collection of letters.  I must have balked at the idea of the novel I’ve written getting filed in the same letter-book category.  The little girl reader still working somewhere inside my consciousness didn’t want our work to bear any similarities to the book we remember as one of the most boring reads of our adolescence.  Readers accumulate some strange, complicated baggage.

It’s true that my book’s title does contain the word “letters.”  But my book lacks the form and lexicon of letter writing – or even diary writing or any of the other gimmicks that flag a book as epistolary.  There is no “Dear,” no “To Whom it May Concern,” no “Yours Truly” with a signature at the end — not even a token date dashed beside the chapter headings.

The reason I put “letters” in the title is to orient readers to the book’s second person narrator.  Most of the writing we produce and read – all of our emails and texts – is written in the second person.  Poetry and song lyrics are typically written this way too.  A second person narrator speaks as “I” but he doesn’t just ramble to himself.  He’s talking to “you, you, you.”  With all our experience reading short pieces in the second person, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to ask readers to follow this familiar point of view throughout a book-length piece.  An introduction to a second person narrator, along with an informal, intimate tone was all I wanted out of the epistolary form.

I was about to say Anne of Windy Poplars made such an enduring, negative impression on me because it was the first epistolary novel I ever read but then I remembered Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  (This one counts as epistolary even though its second person messages are sent through prayers.)  I read this book during the same time period (ahem) as the offending Anne book but I’m fairly certain it didn’t bore me.

With more thought, I realized there were other fictitious diaries and letters I had forgotten on my bookcase.  There’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Brontё’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!, my husband’s copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige – a novel I’ve been meaning to return half-read to my brother-in-law for ages.

I enjoyed some of these books – but not all of them.  When I was enjoying them most, their letter-writing form slipped past my notice.  While I didn’t remember that Dracula was epistolary, I do remember getting up at night to quiet my baby while I was reading it and being idiotically afraid of running into undead Lucy in the hallway.  I felt many things for all of these books but I never felt confused or alienated by their narrative styles.  It works.

I’ve over-generalized my dislike for the epistolary form.  Rejecting it was silly – the result of a tenacious childhood prejudice.  I wrote an epistolary novel.  And that’s okay.  It’s not the kind of thing that should amount to a scrap with an editor — though I did feel a little lighter when I flipped my advance reading copy onto its back to read the synopsis and saw the word “letter” had disappeared.

Judging My Book by Its Cover

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The Cover of "Love Letters of the Angels of Death"The book itself won’t be out until August 2013 but this week my publisher released the image that will be the front cover of my debut novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death.   And I couldn’t be happier with it.

Before the cover was created, my publisher, Linda Leith was generous enough to ask for my thoughts.  She asked me even though visual design is not a talent of mine.  It’s the same with me and music.  I know what’s good and what I like when I actually encounter it but creating something from my own imagination is a dodgy venture.  Not surprisingly, my first few suggestions were way off the mark.  But Linda still didn’t dismiss me from the process.

Finally, I said, “I wouldn’t mind a pair of birds as long as they weren’t too maudlin.”

It seemed risky to me — the possibilities for sentimentality putting two birds on the cover of a book about a marriage could inflame.  It’s not that I actually feared I might end up with a book cover with a pair of pastel, cartoon lovebirds canoodling on it.  But just to be sure we all understood what I meant, I did an image search and came up with a picture posted on a British wildlife photography website called Warren Photographic.  As time went on, we agreed we didn’t just want something like this photograph.  We wanted this photograph for the cover of the book.

The birds – with their long tails and iridescent blue-green plumage — are magpies.  Even though this pair has probably never set foot on the North American continent, western Canada, where most of my book is set, is teeming with their far-flung cousins.  They don’t migrate with the seasons.  They stay here all winter long making noise, scavenging food, and cleaning up the remains of other animals naturally selected out of the harsh environment.  They’re the most beautiful carrion birds I know — especially when they’re quiet.

The first time I noticed magpies – as an angry teenager newly arrived in southern Alberta from Nova Scotia – they were perched on some statuary outside a Lethbridge cemetery.  I assumed the city must have planted them there – like the swans in the Halifax Public Gardens – to make the urban landscape more exotic and elegant.  Every Albertan I’ve ever told this story laughs at me.

Like other corvids – ravens and crows and jays – magpies live in mated pairs.  And what I love about the pair on my book cover is the way they’re facing different directions but looking at the same thing.  The smaller one (which my prejudices tell me to call the female) is closer to what they see and the male is watching her as part of what he sees.  It’s like the narrative structure of my novel where the male narrator addresses his vision of the world directly to the female – the “second person” to whom he is narrating, the one individual who’s included in everything he sees.

I love the rest of the cover too.  I’m thrilled to have a blurb by Padma Viswanathan as the header.  Even after seeing it in print, I didn’t have a fit of self-consciousness and start hating the title (something that would not have been uncharacteristic of me).  And I’m grateful the surname I lifted from my husband when I married him is distinctive (unlike my first name and my McMaiden-name) while still being short and easy to say.  Hooray for my fine, Swedish in-laws, doggedly justifying the existence of the little-used “Q” section at the dry-cleaner’s – and now, hopefully, at the bookseller’s.