Road to Thunder Hill by Connie Barnes Rose

I recently heard a novelist declare that a great novel achieves three criteria: It's unputdownable, it's unforgettable, and it's timeless. Seeing as only future generations can attest to whether a novel attains the third criteria, I'll concern myself with the first two, which seem valid enough, if not to determine a novel's greatness, than at least as to whether it's worth recommending. By this standard Road to Thunder Hill by Connie Barnes Rose more than succeeds. There are many ways to fashion an unputdownable, unforgettable story. Barnes Rose does it by creating a setting and characters that are so deeply authenticate, honest and affecting it is hard to imagine they aren't as real and present as the folks living next door. The story is told by Trish Kyle, forty-something and at a crossroads in her twenty-year marriage to Ray who spends his weeks working several hours away in salt mines. A freak April snowstorm hits, blocking roads and knocking out power, which exacerbates Trish's loneliness and fragile state of mind. The storm that rages outside is nothing compared to the one wreaking havoc in her heart. Trish is convinced that Ray is having an affair and she's at her wit's end. On Thunder Hill, seeking refuge has always been a way of life for its inhabitants, whether it be in the arms of friends, family, lovers, or escaping in booze and narcotics. Trish has done it all, particularly the latter. Now she has strong memories and emotions to contend with, including an attraction to rugged Bear James, Thunder Hill's 'failed hermit' and Ray's best friend, and resentment toward her alleged half-sister Olive, who now lives in her childhood home and is apparently bent on making Trish feel inferior. When the refugees all find themselves around Olive's kitchen table to ride out the remainder of the uncertain weather, the question Barnes Rose beautifully conveys is when and how - it's never really a question of 'if' - love and forgiveness will finally emerge on Thunder Hill, like the first crocuses of spring.

The Companion by Lorcan Roche

A little while back I wrote that I thought there wasn't enough anger in today's writing. Then along comes Lorcan Roche's The Companion a book about two very angry characters; Trevor a caregiver who gets his kicks busting people's heads, and his charge a terminally ill young man suffering from Muscular Dystrophy named Ed. They both have a lot to be angry about. Ed is an only child. His father is a Manhatten Judge ensconced in his study and cares more for his books than his son. His mother is perpetually convalescing from a minor accident and never leaves her room. It's the most depressing portrait of domestic alienation and emotional neglect imaginable. Money might not buy love but fortunately for this family it can buy services. Enter Trevor, a strapping, young, angry Dubliner who answers an ad to be Ed's companion and caregiver. Ed's an ornery, irritable and demanding handful and caregivers don't last. Luckily, the Judge is only too willing to keep writing cheques to replace them. Trevor, it turns out, is experienced in providing care having tended to his dying mother and worked in a hospital for the clinically insane. He has the physical strength and fortitude to handle anything Ed can dish out. Notwithstanding the fact that Ed is physically wasting away while Trevor is fit and works out regularly in the gym, the two undeniably have a lot in common and find solace in each other. They're both fighters. Trevor sees himself in Ed's predicament. "And some days you're so angry you can literally hiss and spit, especially at incredibly healthy fuckers like me who've never been physically sick, not one single solitary day. And you want to lash out, you want to be cruel, and callous, to injure and inflict as much as your mean little spirit will allow. And maybe the only joy you know is the peace that comes after an argument, the feeling of things being washed away by coarse, salty tears. And you wish you could bleed to death heroically, not just leak like a stain into the carpet." This is Trevor talking about Ed, but also himself. In the end this is Trevor's story. We learn about why he fled his home to come to New York, an act of both escape and repentance. America, through Trevor's eyes, is the perfect place to pay your dues because they're so hard to come by here. "Americans are really shite at apologizing; they think the mere fact they bring themselves to mouth the words absolves them. They're not interested in the rites of penance, in listening to precisely how they hurt you, in understanding how small it made you feel. They want to move on, they want closure which is American for wanting things to go swiftly back to the way they were before. Inside their heads. They cannot comprehend that because they don't really know what they did wrong, that because they really don't need to know, the rest of us find them truly terrifying." Reminiscent of Nick Hornby, the searing voice, the depth and candidness of prose are what makes this book so exhilirating. Highly recommended.

The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson said that his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights was his most Jewish novel. It was possibly the most Jewish novel ever written, the author claimed. Well I'm here to tell you that he was wrong. Possibly the most Jewish novel ever written was Jacobson's 1999 autobiographical bildungsroman The Mighty Walzer. A book he calls his "history of embarrassments," it's also possibly one of the funniest, most insightful and touching Jewish novels ever written. Jacobson showed with Kalooki Nights that he, and Jews, have a thing for games (kalooki is a card game akin to gin rummy). As a tribe, we have shown a talent for other games too, like chess for instance - according to one source, almost half of the all-time greatest chess players have been Jewish or of Jewish decent (think Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fisher). In the early decades of the 20th century, it could be argued that ping-pong was the Jewish game. If you don't believe me look up the name Viktor Barna. Given the cultural and religious emphasis we place on education, Jews excelling at thinking games is not hard to understand. But a game in which players use rubber-coated paddles to slap a small white ball back and forth across a table? Although I can't explain it myself, I can remember the ping-pong table we had in our basement. And we were by no means the only family in our predominantly Jewish neighbourhood to have one. We had a large basement that was divided into two rooms. One side was for ping-pong and hockey slapshots. The other side held a full-sized snooker table. It was an unspoken understanding among my friends and me that the billiard side was reserved for the grown-ups. We spent hours on the other side playing impromptu ping-pong tournaments. And once, I recall that I spent an entire afternoon at my best friend's house around the corner batting the ball back and forth on his ping-pong table in an attempt to establish a new world record for the longest unbroken ralleye (a world record had to exist.) Ping-pong was still a fixture of a 1970s boyhood, and it's a measure of the game's importance, not merely recreationally but also culturally, that the disappearance of those tables from home basements coincides with the advent of revolutionary technology; the pock-pock of wooden paddle and plastic ball replaced by the bleep-bleep of dials and luminescent dashes on a black screen, and the era of home computing was upon us. I may have been born a generation after Howard Jacobson, but I 'get' his visceral connection to the game. In his brilliantly layered exposition of its various facets, ping-pong, which he says "suffered from too modest a conception of itself," becomes the perfect metaphor for a withdrawn, sexually repressed, working-class Jewish kid's struggle for both social and self-acceptance in 1950s Manchester, England. Oliver Walzer discovers early on that he doesn't possess many talents, but one that he does have involves batting a ball against a wall using a copy of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His other talent, if one can call it a talent, is to make paper dolls out of pictures of his female family members and jack-off to them in the bathroom. As disturbing as this sounds, Jacobson succeeds in making it seem borderline charming. And that's his game as an author, his (Jewish) talent, the ability to perform unlikely literary feats with grace on a tightrope strung fifty feet in the air between two poles; anxiety and hilarity. Oliver's first non self-inflicted sexual encounter is with the always-eager-to-please Sabine Weinberger, and even that plays out like a ping-pong match, with Oliver lying on one side of her and his buddy Sheeny Waxman on the other. But it's ping-pong playing Lorna Peachley and her 'moving parts' that Oliver genuinely fancies. His love is true, so much so that he must continually lose to her in matches. Outside the game, Oliver helps his father make a living selling 'swag' to 'punters', but bemoans that everything is becoming 'tsatskes' and worse, 'machareikes', "that moral infection of triviality to which both sides of my family had always been susceptible." (If you're unfamiliar with Yiddish terms a copy Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish will come in handy). At one point Oliver complains that in spite of winning trophies and being named to represent Britain at international table tennis tournaments, his anti-Semitic headmaster neglects to announce his accomplishments publicly at school assemblies. Echoing this situation is Jacobson, who, in spite of his literary accomplishments, has failed to gain the international recognition he so richly deserves as a major novelist. Hopefully this will all change with a Booker Prize this year. His latest novel The Finkler Question is a finalist. I still can not fathom how The Mighty Walzer was ever missed. It is quite simply a coming-of-age masterpiece.

World Cup Wishes by Eshkol Nevo

When we were in Israel recently we watched a 'reality' tv show called "Mehubarim," ('Connections'). It carries a tag line that translates as something like "five men exposed". The promo showed men lined up at urinals, doing their business, when suddenly the bathroom walls are pulled away and they are standing 'exposed' in broad daylight in the middle of a busy downtown street, passing ladies, hands to their mouth, giggle with embarrassment. The show features videos taken by a group of men from very divergent backgrounds candidly sharing the trials and tribulations of their daily lives. One participant is an eighteen year old who tells of living on the street after he was thrown out of his religious home by his father for, well, doing what most North American teenagers do, smoking, drinking, having sex etc. Another story follows a single dad raising two kids and the mayhem that ensues, both at home and in his dating life. If this show is any indication, Israel is going through a male identity crisis. The tv show's depiction of the sensitive male would have been unimaginable just twenty years ago. Israel is a society that has prided itself on its machismo, from the rejection of the 'weak Jew' of the Holocaust that attended the founding of the modern state in 1948, to the establishment of military service as the very core of the new country, not just as a political and strategic necessity, but as a social phenomenon. In recent years, beginning with Israel's participation in the 'unpopular' (and unwinnable) 1982 war in Lebanon, and continuing through the military operations in the West Bank and Gaza during the Intifadas, service in the military has become questioned among young Israelis, and the role the institution has traditionally played as an agent of social integration and pride among men has been eroded. Eshkol Nevo, in his new novel, makes mention of the seminal Israeli film Late Summer Blues (1987) about a group of high-school graduates on the eve of their conscription. Whereas for earlier generations of young Israeli men military induction would have been a moment embraced, even celebrated, as a significant rite of passage, the cohort in the film is depicted enduring personal conflict, uncertainty and dread. The end of their innocence is shaped by the senseless death of one of the friends in an army training accident. The film is mentioned, one imagines, because it was probably important to the young Nevo when he was growing up (he was sixteen when the movie came out, the same age as the kids in it). It also signals that this novel, about a group of four buddies from Haifa, aims to explore the meaning of friendship and identity for the generation of young men that came of age in the post Lebanon War era. The premise is simple. Four soccer-loving friends since high-school agree to write down three secret wishes which will be revealed at the final of the next World Cup in four years time (2002). The idea is to see how close each has come to achieving his wish during the intervening years. From the outset the reader understands that we are reading a manuscript written and narrated by one of the friends Yuval Freed, and that it has been edited by another friend, Yoav Alimi aka 'Churchill'. Part of the mystery is to find out what happened to Freed, and why Churchill is responsible for editing his book. The two other friends are Amichai and Ofir. Pervading the narrative is another question; how much is true and how much made-up. Off the bat Churchill relates that he is 'ridiculed' in the text, claims that the book is riddled with 'factual inaccuracies', but out of loyalty to his friend, has resisted making changes. The story revolves around an axis of loves and heartaches, loyalties and betrayals. Yuval's charismatic best friend Churchill has stolen away Ya'ara, the only girl Yuval knows that he will ever truly love. Nevo's depiction of Yuval's suffering is heartwrenching. After Churchill's infidelity, Ya'ara briefly returns to Yuval to seek solace. They make passionate love and Yuval writes, "The morning after that night, we both knew there would never be another one like it. That I could never hurt her as she needed to be hurt without faking it, and even though she might want to believe that she could, the truth was that she couldn't live more than a few hours with the unconditional love that I have to give." Misfortune is visited upon the other friends too. Ofir has a nervous breakdown, and routine plastic surgery on Amichai's wife Ilana goes tragically wrong. The friends grow and change, move apart and come together again. When it seems that all is lost and what remains of the friends' wishes is merely the remnant of naive fantasies and dashed hopes, it is the story itself that offers the possibility of salvation. With this second novel Nevo is well on his way to becoming Israel's next major novelist. Highly recommended.

The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and other stories by Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is one of my favourite writers. One of the under appreciated masters of American belles lettres. Even as his fiction and essays have appeared in every major magazine and newspaper and his non-fiction books have been NY Times bestsellers, one has the sense that Epstein is a bit of a throwback, and might have achieved the recognition he truly deserved had his work appeared twenty years earlier when books were more central to American culture. Epstein is no flavour of the month sort of writer. He writes crafted, crisp, clearly-thought-out prose; no flower and very little sentimentality, in fact, he has a bitter aversion to the pretension of artsiness. His chosen subject matter is often Chicago Jewish males, and in the case of this new collection, men about the author's age, in the third act of life. It's very much Saul Bellow territory and one may wonder why Epstein has never written a novel, though guesses are easy to hazard. For one thing the novel is a 'messy' form (Mordecai Richler, when asked why he wrote novels instead of poetry or short-fiction, famously said that novels left a lot of room for error.) For Epstein, it is apparent from his prose, that any 'messiness' would be intolerable. Another reason may be that novels about Chicago Jewish men of a certain age and ilk are Bellow territory, and he's smart enough to know that it would be unwise to cross that boundary and risk being compared to his illustrious predecessor novelist. It's too bad really because I think Epstein's work would stand up quite well. His doesn't have Bellow's penchant for excess (over-thinking, over-writing, over-indulging.) An Epstein novel, I believe, would be tight and satisfying, perhaps even surpassing Bellow's late period novellas. I know this is pure speculation but the economy and humour of Epstein's prose allows him to manage in a few words and sentences what it often took Bellow pages to describe. For example, in the story "Bartlestein's First Fling" about a man in the plumbing supply business who flirts with the possibility of living a life of passion for the first time, Epstein writes, of the protagonist, "He found the Lexus to be the perfect car for him: dependable, not too showy, efficient, quietly luxurious. He has himself become a kind of human Lexus." In another story, Epstein says of a businessman, "he laughed a lot but I never saw him smile." The comparisons with Bellow, admittedly unfair, are inevitable. It may be why I read the modus operandi in "My Brother Eli" as Epstein's response to what Bellow himself was known for; writing family and friends into his fiction, particularly as a way of humiliating ex-wives. Eli is a Bellow-like character, a novelist, winner of every major literary prize, the toast of Chicago and the literary world, married multiple times, irredeemably self-centered, indulgent and miserable despite his 'success'. Eli keeps getting bailed out by his older brother Lou an auto parts salesman and narrator of the story. When he reads Eli's novels, Lou can't make heads or tails of them, "I had to drag my eyes across every page, thinking who could possibly give a damn about all this. So the hero of the books is sensitive, and the people he is forced to live among aren't. I didn't see the big deal." Epstein mostly sides with the uneducated, the uncultured, and the stalwart. He has genuine affinity for hard-scrabble, hard working, self-made men, particularly those who came of age with WWII, and who might have skipped university in favour of building lives for themselves and their families; men who sought and achieved a quietly noble existence. In the collection's exquisite coda "Kuperman Awaits Ecstasy" one such man is introduced to the pleasures of classical music by a dying woman while providing the ideal companionship to her in the last stage of her life. Every story in this collection seems to be about the search for dignity, which arrives, often unexpectedly, in the form of a gift from a relationship between two complete opposites. In "Beyond the Pale" that relationship is first between a boy and his grandfather who teaches his grandson to read Yiddish. Later, the boy, now a young man and literary editor, becomes the last hope to rescue from oblivion the reputation of a famous Yiddish novelist. As I said, Epstein is a superb craftsman of character whose prose are diamond-cut, hard and precise, not a word wasted. Where his stories tend to lack is their endings. They fizzle out instead of crackle-pop. And maybe that's another reason why Epstein has avoided the novel, plot is not his strong suit. One ending that does provide the required punch is "You Could Also Love a Rich Girl" which closes with a Vaudeville-style zinger.

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

Desmond Bates is a retired linguistics professor who is going deaf. His octogenarian former-musician dad is too. We meet Desmond at a gallery party performing the 'Lorenzo Reflex', not the latest dance craze but the way a person who is hard of hearing bends into a speaker to hear them better. The speaker in question is an attractive blond PhD candidate named Alex (short for Alexandra) Loom who is writing a dissertation on the linguistic/ syntactical peculiarities of suicide notes. Desmond doesn't hear a thing she's saying but nods his agreement anyway. You don't have to be Carnak The Great to predict that trouble is on the way. Desmond narrowly avoids getting lured into the unstable and sexy machinations of his needy protege and Lodge masterfully takes him (and his reader) to the edge of the professor's better judgment. Lodge captures with wit, sincerity and wisdom Desmond's relationships with his second wife Fred (short for Winifred), children, colleagues, and most importantly his crotchety dad who refuses to be put into a 'home'. A touching, funny, bittersweet, multi-layered story about love, family, (mis)communication, human frailty and death - or was that deaf - every sentence crafted with effortless grace. No literary pyrotechnics or violence, just everyday fine, deeply satisfying storytelling. A rare (these days) pleasure.

The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff

An altogether enjoyable read that treads the line between adult and YA fiction. Yes, Joshua is that Braff's brother. And although Jacob Green was published in 2004 it bears re-visiting since the author's second novel is due out this coming spring. Jacob Green might have been the conventional 1970s-era suburban coming of age story of a sensitive boy on the cusp of adolescence dealing with the dissolution of his family, if not for the overtly Jewish religious component, which adds a certain freshness. Braff's writing moves at a good clip with lots of snappy dialogue, crisp descriptions and clever narrative devices (for example, Bar-Mitzvah thank-you notes that provide some of Jacob's funniest and most revealing visions). The writing is a little too tight, and part of the reason I see this novel as possibly YA more than adult fiction. I was waiting for the voice to loosen up, become more ruminative, with more of those "unthinkable thoughts" promised in the title, so something would stick. Admittedly, the terseness may come with the territory of telling a very tense story about a narcissistic, frustrated father always on the verge of rage (and frequently erupting), an oppressed, personally unfulfilled mother, and rebellious older son. The enraged terrorizing religious father reminded me of Shalom Auslander's memoir. I wonder if the association between religion and domestic violence has arisen as a motif in the Jewish American narrative as a legacy of 9/11. Okay, that may be stretching it. But the brutality we've been reading about is a far cry from how Chaim Potok depicted religion in the home, and ratchets up the angst-level way past the typical Philip Roth household. Here is a Jewish family of the me-generation, post-feminism, post-hippie, and to put in mildly, in shambles. The ideals of the sixties have given way to a harsh, misguided, desperate conservatism inspired by observance to Jewish law; the dad, Abram Green, pathetically tries to maintain order and instead ends up the bumbling babbling Queeg at the helm of a mutiny. It rang painfully true to me. This is not to say that this novel doesn't have lighter moments. There are plenty of laughs - the aforementioned thank-you notes being highlights. And when Jacob's older brother Asher liberates him from Hebrew school to go on a sexy, drug-filled joyride to celebrate the elder's acceptance to art college, I was in the car with them and remembered that feeling of hope and possibility available only to youth. Also, what it felt like to grow up too soon.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I'm feeling a bit more hopeful today, largely because I've just finished Chris Cleave's latest novel Little Bee. This tale of two opposites, an African girl and a British preppy (do they use that term anymore?) who save each other's life has restorative power, and what more can you ask from a work of literature? It is a story about the unlikely places we find refuge and the true meaning of freedom. Cleave is equally skilled at capturing moments of horror (and there are a few devastating scenes) and sheer beauty. Highly recommended.

'The Lay of the Land' by Richard Ford

My friend the Montreal writer David Hamburg once had the privilege of having dinner with John Irving. Over the course of conversation David mentioned that when he started reading a novel he always had to finish it come hell or high water, even if he was hating it. Irving reponded that that was moronic (I paraphrase). He operated on a 20 page rule (I think it was 20, though it may have been 40, it was surely less than 50), meaning the number of pages he gave a book before he dumped it if he hadn't been completely captivated. Life is too short and there are too many good books out there to waste your time on something you don't like, was his explanation. I tend to agree. However, until a couple of years ago I was, like David, a masochist must-finish reader (or in a more positive light an eternal-optimist reader.) I was also a one-book-at-a-time reader. Nowadays I have at least two or three novels going at the same time. So how to explain the fact that I stuck with Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land' for over a year? It was a novel that I had started last summer, read half, put it down over the winter and then picked it up again to finish this summer. We're not talking about a 1000-pager like 'Infinite Jest' (my traditional limit for a novel is 350 pages max). The novel is a dozen or so pages shy of 500, though it reads like 1000. Yes, I am a slow reader, but this is a slow-reading book, and I mean this in the best possible sense. I followed the Irving rule and within the first ten pages I was enthralled: every sentence, every paragraph and page is so carefully crafted, so rich in detail and sharply-worded that to be properly appreciated (like a gourmet meal accompanied by a vintage wine) it requires time for savouring and proper digestion. When I returned to the novel after an eight month hiatus it was as if I'd never put it down. The main character, ex-writer and now-realtor Frank Bascombe had entered my bloodstream and was still circulating through my body. Picking the novel up again was like bumping into a friend, not an 'old' friend, but someone I'd met last summer (in a bar, if I went to bars, or on vacation down south) and who'd left an enduring impression. There was an attachment, as if we'd become memorably and intimately acquainted in a short span of time before regretfully having to go our separate ways. On my second go with Frank this summer, the moment I turned the last page of the novel and shut the cover I instantly felt a vacancy. So maybe I took so long to read it because I wanted to make it last as long as possible.

The term that keeps repeating itself in my mind to describe the achievement of this novel is 'monument'. It marks a life lived; Frank is facing his own mortality having been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But it also memorializes (and solemnizes to a certain extent) a particular time-period and landscape, namely, millennial America during the weeks of suspended animation ("suspended aggravation") between the 2000 Presidential election and the US Supreme Court decision to award George Bush Florida's Electoral College votes that handed him the Presidency. The setting is the New Jersey Shore where Frank works as a realtor and the novel takes places over a few days leading up to the American Thanksgiving holiday. Frank is bringing the remnants of his shattered family together (for a holiday dinner catered by Eat No Evil), daughter Clarissa who is back with a man after a stint of lesbianism, and no-goodnik son Paul who works for Hallmark in Kansas City, and is shlepping with him a timecapsule to bury in the sand. Frank's also dealing with the fact that his second wife, who has brought him as close as he's likely to be to true happiness, has recently run off to England to be with her first husband who suddenly showed up after being presumed dead for two decades. And there is the everpresent memory of his deceased son Ralph - the most moving passages in the novel deal with Frank still trying to come to terms with this loss.

Ford's greatest quality as a writer, one that puts him in the category of the very best, like Updike and Bellow, is the way he turns his protagonists into emblems of their time and place (think Rabbit Angstrom or Moses Herzog). And though Updike and Bellow were two of the great figures of 20th century American fiction, Ford's distinction is that his creation is undeniably a transitional figure to the 21st century, making the author perhaps the first great American novelist of the new century, and TLOTL perhaps its first classic. It is a quintessentially American novel, and unCanadian, in the way that the mundane is utterly inseparable from the grandiose. The 'important' themes of death, sacrifice, memory, love, and loss that are at the core of Frank's story (indeed, the human journey) are not trumpeted front and center as they tend to be in Canadian novels. Rather they are woven in seamlessly into Frank's quotidian concerns, his business dealings, his friendships and family relationships. Frank is, in so many respects an American everyman and what makes him such a genuine and charming host is that he's experienced too much and for too long to take himself seriously. Yet, the underlying seriousness of Ford's narrative is never in doubt. As the filter through which we experience millennial (and get a foretaste of post-millenial) America, Frank is the ideal guide to the 'state of the disunion' as he takes us along for a drive up and down the New Jersey shore, with a copy of Shore Buyer's Guide rolled up next to us on the front seat. There are stops to witness a hotel demolition (complete with grandstands and souvenir sellers), and to have a few drinks in an after-hours lesbian bar among others, on Thanksgiving eve. There will be dissertations written about this novel, but suffice to say that it is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny, head-shakingly witty and heartbreakingly wise. As unforgettable as Frank is. And if this is your first Ford novel, as it was mine, you will likely be as impatient as I am to dig into the first two installments of this trilogy.

My summer reading

It's been an odd summer, and not just weatherwise. My reading has been as sporadic as appearances of the sun. I started with one goal. To finish Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land,' a novel I'd started last summer, read half and let it sit on my bedside table all year. I haven't succeeded yet. Ford's novel is a curious reading experience. It's over 500 pages long but reads like 1000. After leaving it to stew for about nine months, I had no trouble picking it up again and remembering exactly where I had left off. It's a rare book, more monument than novel; a character study so detailed, inseparable from a landscape and zeitgeist so richly imagined and uncannily authentic, it seems to transcend the normal boundaries of time and narrative. That having been said, it's also not an easy read and is completely uninterested in plot. It's about loss and a 'Permanent Period,' a stage of life reached in which regrets are few and mortality comes knocking. It's tough going, but so rich and rewarding, with a voice that's so pitch perfect and fully-formed, it's like getting to know an old friend intimately again. In short, it's a novel that demands finishing. I suppose I'll have more to say once that's done.

Instead, of working on Ford, I spent most of the summer getting distracted. I'm almost done with Rawi Hage's latest 'Cockroach' (stay tuned for a review coming soon) but in the interim I picked up a book of short stories by Bruce Jay Friedman called 'Black Angel' that I can't put down. This little gem cost me fifty cents from the charity table at Hanniford's grocery store in the strip mall beside the highway in Saint Albans, Vermont. I've had some luck with that table in the past. Picked up a copy of Elyse Friedman's extremely enjoyable debut novel 'Then Again' last summer from that table. (There appears to be some connection between being an author named Friedman and turning up on the charity table at the Saint Albans Hanniford's). I was curious about Bruce Jay after reading a whatever-happened-to piece about him on Nextbook.com. Apparently he's still writing, though his name has been established less from literary fiction than screenplays. For a while there he was on the fast track to literary stardom, published in the New Yorker, a critically lauded novel called 'Stern'. Now he's perhaps best known as the guy who wrote the screenplay to the movies Splash and The Heartbreak Kid.

Correction Road by Glen Dresser

Glen Dresser can be proud of his debut novel. It's a solid work of fiction, written in a prose style that is as understated as it as rich, much like the rural prairie landscape it describes so well. It took me a bit by surprise. I'm not typically a fan of prairie fiction and don't seek it out (I think the last novel I read set on the prairies was Who Has Seen The Wind.) But I was almost instantly drawn in by Dresser's surehanded, thoughtful, if somewhat unspectacular style. I'm using unspectacular, in this instance, as a compliment, mind you. I've become somewhat tired of the overblown "original" "inventive" new fiction trumpeted by publishers, in other words, books that seem to be getting all the attention. Give me authentic characters, a well-drawn, evocative setting and a believable storyline any day. In Correction Road the setting is the late 70s in a sleepy town on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border. There are three main characters: Hugh an exterminator for the Alberta Rat Patrol (did you know that Alberta had an agency which kept the province rat free for decades?) his girlfriend Joan who works at the local liquor store and Walt, a taxidermist who runs a museum of stuffed animals and various oddities. Each is floating aimlessly through his/her respective life, like clouds in a prairie sky that sometimes float into each other's airspace, or not. On the surface their relationships are leisurely and non-committal, and if that was all Dresser gave us, this would be one deathly boring novel. But he's smart and adept enough as a writer to convey the unspoken story below the surface, where simmering human (and nature's) drama really takes place. The reader's question for most of the novel is, when will all the subsumed tension bubble up to the surface (like an infestation of rats) and how will it play out? Which brings me to the other main character in the book, a tricky, omniscient rat (half-instinctive, half- intelligent) living within the walls of Walt's museum, and confounding Hugh's attempts to find and catch him. I know it sounds hokey, but the rat tells part of the story from his subterranean point of view, and it's a tribute to Dresser's imagination and skill that he pulls it off so well. Dresser does make some of the mistakes of most debut novelists, overwriting, overreaching and trying to show how much he knows when he should be focused on keeping the story rolling - the big themes are all here, the eternal conflict between man and nature, artificial versus natural boundaries, there are even healthy doses of Canadian politics (as a backdrop, Quebec separatists are preparing for the 1980 referendum.) Often, flaws of overwriting slip in to debut novels due to a lack editorial guidance typical of small independent publishers, in this case Ottawa's Oberon. But this novel suffers less than most, because Dresser is such a thoughtful, engaging and competent writer. Correction Road is a worthy addition to prairie fiction.

Forgotten Classics: "Shmucks" by Seymour Blicker

The premise is as ingenious as it is simple. It's 11ish pm. A divorced Jewish property manager named Levin turns his car into a downtown Montreal alleyway, taking a shortcut so he can get home as fast as possible to bed the woman he's just picked up at a local bar. His car is three quarters through the alleyway when a taxi driven by a Romanian immigrant (Pelzic by name) pulls in to the laneway headed in the opposite direction. What ensues is a high-noon stand-off, two equally angry, equally self-righteous stubborns, both perenially unable to catch a break from life, who have decided to make this confrontation their last stand. Each stays in his respective bubble not budging and watching from afar (except for the odd "Fock you!") the comings and goings in the other person's vehicle. They include a drunken millionaire wanting to be taken home and a fourteen year old girl looking for spare change.

It's an allegory of prejudice and miscommunication in a world that's gone crazy, in other words, a world of shmucks (a particular joy is reading Levin's explications on the nuances of the Yiddish term.) The beauty of this story is that neither Levin nor Pelzic seems to realize how he's one of them, a shmuck that is.

I had to track this short novel (128 pages) down on the internet and managed to snag a reasonably priced copy from Abebooks. A writer friend had recommended it as a work that he found had stood up surprisingly well over time. Extremely well, I say. It's absolutely hilarious and has a sad poignancy and an underlying seriousness that still resonates.

I have a vague memory of the time this book first came out in the early seventies. I was about seven or eight years old and Seymour Blicker lived around the corner in Hampstead on Gayton. I used to play with his kids on occasion at Gayton Park across the street, particularly the eldest son Jason, who you might know from his successful acting career. We never asked Jason about what his dad did for a living, though the word around the neighbourhood was that it wasn't a 'normal' living. Still, they lived in a nice house and the kids (four of them, Jason had a very pretty, very smart, older sister and twin younger brothers) seemed to have everything that the rest of us had who came from shmatta, legal or accounting families. When "Shmucks" came out I have a hazy recollection of an adult (it might or might not have been one of my parents) mentioning that what Mr. Blicker wrote was smut. I imagined something out of Penthouse Forum. Something akin to Roald Dahl's ribald naughtiness would be more accurate. Actually, the sex scenes and references in the novel which were deemed so outrageously crass and vulgar, often feel dated, even quaint, which tells you something about how far we've come.

One of the many pleasures of this book for me was how Levin's being harrassed by his tenants. At one point he decides to use his time in the car to answer their complaint-filled correspondences. (I got a particular chuckle out of how, in the absence of cellphones and Blackberries, each complaint was communicated to him and had to be answered by letter. By the end he's having enough of it, answering one formally-worded complaint in a dream by simply saying, "And perhaps you could do a little favour for me, Mr. Sanderson... perhaps you can go fuck yourself" - okay maybe you have to be in the property management game as long as I have to truly enjoy that response.)

The resolution is as simple and ingenious as the premise, and also as satisfying, leaving the reader with a sense of hope. I won't give it away, but I'll say one thing, both Pelzic and Levin finally win out in their own little way, and in the process each gains a glimmer of insight into himself. If there is a publisher out there listening, please re-issue this book! The hardcover I managed to obtain is already cracking at the seams.

Happy Purim!

Yesterday, my wife brought home from the library this absolutely mind-blowing graphic novel version of the Megillat Esther by J.T. Waldman. This book is a genuine work of art and literature; multi-layered, multi-referenced, original, beautifully composed, visually stunning and intellectually rich, like a Judeo-Persian feast for the eyes, mind and heart.

Dip in to the Megillat Esther website to get a taste.

My all-time favourite author

His parents encouraged their children to pursue their artistic interests, to the point that when Steig’s brother Henry expressed interest in becoming a dentist, his mother discouraged him. Henry became a jazz musician, a novelist, and a jeweler instead. William was willing to study art, at least sporadically: He dropped out of City College after two years, the National Academy of Design after three years, and the Yale School of Fine Arts after five days. He dreamed of going to sea, and had papers to ship out when, in 1929, the stock market crashed, and took his parents’ savings with it. He had to go to work, making pictures.

Who's your favourite author? Some writers avoid that question like the plague, for a host of reasons. Because favourites change over time. Because it's easier to talk about books that we've loved or that have influenced us than authors. Because we don't want to look stupid: Truth be told maybe it's not Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway or Bellow. Maybe it's ... William Steig. When I think about my favourite authors Steig is the name that keeps coming back. Okay maybe it's because I've read a lot over the last thirteen years and ninety percent of it has been picture books (my eldest daughter is fourteen, my youngest three). I'm re-reading (for probably the hundredth time) the entire Steig oeuvre and I am convinced more than ever that he was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. For me, there is absolutely no doubt that the combination of drama and mordant lyricism in "The Amazing Bone" equals anything by Hemingway. "The Zabajaba Jungle" is as harrowing as "Lord of the Flies" only more subtle in existential depth. "Gorky Rises" is positively ethereal. Okay, I'm being somewhat facetious, somewhat. But I've always fantasized about writing a thesis on Steig. Read him. Drink in the simple artistry of his pictures, bask in his language, delight in his dark humour. And check out this article about the conflicted soul of the master storyteller:

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=792

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee

My first Coetzee, unbelievably. I'll be reading many more.

This is a delightful, multi-leveled, multi-layered novel that reminds me of a three tiered chess game, and gamesmanship is the operative term here.

The setting is an apartment building and actually each page is divided into three sections. The top section is occupied by the writings of Senor C, a South African born 72 year old author of some renown living in Australia, an obvious stand-in for Coetzee himself. The contents of this uppermost section is a manuscript of his "opinions" being prepared for publication in Germany, lofty thoughts on a myriad of subjects including, Harold Pinter, Australian politics, apology, probability, Zeno, the afterlife, the body, paedophilia, terrorism, the slaughter of animals, the nature of the state, compassion, avian flu, competition, Guantanamo Bay, Al Qaida, Dostoevsky, boredom, ageing, JS Bach and the list goes on.

The middle section is comprised of Senor C's more informal, intimate thoughts about a young Fillipina he meets in the apartment building's basement laundry room. More than forty years his junior, he is nevertheless smitten with Anya and decides that he will make her his "secretaria" (secret aria) by offering her the job of typing his manuscript.

The bottom section is written in Anya's voice. She is a street saavy survivor who immediately sees through the old man's ploy, and uses her sexual assets to draw him in. Her crass, oversexed, money-hungry boyfriend Alan isn't terribly pleased with the arrangement. He concocts his own plan to use Anya (who is using Senor C, who is using her in turn) to steal the dormant wealth amassed by the old man from his writing.

The narrative is a multidimensional house of mirrors. Suspicions give way to trust and vice versa. Perceptions and realities alter as positions shift. Anya's down-to-earth, heartfelt beliefs begin to 'soften' Senor C's writings as the two draw closer in a relationship of genuine mutual affection.

My favourite line comes from a section titled Insh'Allah. "Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of the present joy and future grief." This masterfully crafted story resonated with me symphonically long after the last page was turned.

The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier

This French novella is a tasty lozenge of a book. Perfect for three hours on the plane.

Since being dumped by a girlfriend without explanation after a four year relationship the navel-gazing narrator was never able to get on with his life. Now, out of the blue, she calls and invites him to be the mystery guest at the birthday party of a conceptual artist friend of hers. Every year the artist makes a birthday party for herself and invites the exact number of guests corresponding to her age, with one mystery guest, someone unknown, like the extra candle on the birthday cake representing the year to come. He goes to the party expecting to confront the ex-girlfriend once and for all. He ends up confronting his own insecurities (seen oddly in his penchant for wearing tutleneck undershirts) and discovering that real life and fiction are more interconnected than he'd ever imagined.

To truly enjoy this novel you have to cut plenty of slack to the narrator's voice, rendered in a self-obsessed, hyper-sensitive Proustian style of prose; deeply "literate" (with a capital L, literary references play a significant part, particularly Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway), passionate, and with a tinge of snobbishness that sometimes marks books written in the "language of love."

You have to appreciate moments like this, as he screws up his courage and rings the doorbell at the strange house, a bottle of vintage wine wrapped in tissue cradled in his arm as his birthday offering: "No buzzer buzzed. No echo greeted this act, which, it seemed, set nothing in motion, as if nothing had taken place, as if - in a word - I did not exist. And for a fraction of a second the world flickered before my eyes and grew dark. How could there only be silence when everything within me cried out that I'd done something tremendous." And it goes on.

The translator does an admirable job, although some phrasing doesn't quite make it into English intact. At times it feels like the translator is figureskating in construction boots. For example, "And I thought she must have noticed certain things about me, too, which she was keeping to herself and which couldn't have been all that pretty, either - and could it be that every second of this party would be a trial and an affront and a calvary of endless disillusionment?" Calvary of endless disillusionment?!

What saves the narrator from being completely insufferable are his insights and clever observations, like when he observes that none of the celebrities at the party look to him like celebrities. "To me they looked more like little bits of bread bobbing around and sinking in a bowl of milk."

Also the book's length is a saving grace. At a 126 pages it's like meeting someone at a party, chatting, sharing a few drinks, and departing before the buzz wears off and the company gets stale.

Beaufort by Ron Leshem

"You're a different generation, a generation that asks questions. And we are obligated to give you answers."

The quote comes from the novel Beaufort and is spoken by General Kaplan, the only character that the author claims was based on a real person. No truer words are said in the book. This novel questions the sacrifice made by a generation of Israelis who fought an eighteen year military stalemate against Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists in Southern Lebanon. Lebanon has been called Israel's Viet-Nam. Until now it was a wound which was too sensitive to touch.

This bold, imaginative, raw and powerful story was a sensation in Israel when it appeared in 2006, and for good reason. Narrated by twenty-one year old second Lieutenant Erez Liberti it maps the loves, intimacies, fears and doubts of the commander and his squad of "puppies" (a dozen or so men barely out of high-school.) They are stationed at Beaufort, a real-life Crusader fortress located in the so-called "security buffer zone" north of the Israel/Lebanon border. The story covers two tours of duty ending with the harrowing withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.

Erez calls Beaufort “a cage of ugliness right at the center of heaven.” It's a perfect description. The geography is magnificent, but just below the fortress in the surrounding villages terrorists plan ambushes, rocket attacks and plant roadside bombs along the access routes in and out of the outpost. The "ugliness/heaven" contrast also decribes the experience of the commander and his crew. War after all has its own absurd logic, breeding a kind of euphoria via a surreal co-existence of opposites; stretches of unendurable boredom and fatigue jutaposed with sudden, razor sharp life-and-death moments; love and mutual dependency between comrades juxtaposed with terrible pain and anguish when one is killed. Erez thrives on it. At least for a time. He says, “My soldiers – I was prepared to die for them, I swear it: I really was ready to die for them. That’s not just some slogan; I felt good about it. Seems to me they were willing to die for me, too, and that’s an incredible feeling.” And later, when his second in command is seriously wounded, “That’s Lebanon, you’re totally smeared in blood and the guy lying there is your best friend.” This portrait of these courageous young men is like the book itself, at once heartbreaking and exhilarating. Note: The movie on which this novel is based is up for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film this year.

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

When it comes to graphic novels I'm of two minds; I've never been entirely captivated and moved by one the way I have been by a novel. And yet, good ones have an indeniable quality that rises above the so-called lo-brow comic book format. I express this ambivalence in my review that appeared in the Saturday Gazette (link below). I say in the review that I think the term "graphic novel" is unfair, because it leads the reader to expect the work to possess excellence on both visual and narrative levels, which seems to me somewhat unreasonable. I've yet to read a graphic novel that manages to reach a level of storytelling that matches its obvious visual quality. Most graphic novelists are, in fact, trained graphic artists and not writers, and it tends to show. The form is actually most suitable for collaboration. Just as in film there are writers and directors and cinematographers, each bringing his/her own expertise to the artform, why do we not see more graphic artists collaborating with novelists on books? Exit Wounds is recommended. The work has depth and it's visually quite exquisite. But reading it I still could not help but wonder if more could have been done with the narrative in terms of character development and plot.

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/books/story.html?id=4859a06e-cea5-489a-9ce0-7940fbff58d6

The Uninvited Guest by John Degen

The writing is crisp and controlled. This is an enjoyable, if not completely successful, first novel by a writer most definitely worth watching.

Hapless, aptly-named Stanley Cooper has been laid to rest and has passed the torch as guardian of Lord Stanley's Cup to Tony Chiello. Tony's first task as keeper of Canada's illustrious symbol of hockey supremacy, is to escort it to Romania. The prized hardware is to be the special guest at Dragos Petrescu's wedding in his hometown. It's an intriguing premise, and the reader can't help wondering who came up with this strange tradition of allowing each player of the winning team to spend some personal time with hockey's Holy Grail? The possibilities for plot curves and detours seem endlesss. Instead, Degen chooses to play it straight, no fancy deking or headfakes, just the literary equivalent of a slapshot between the legs.

The story has two main parts. The first is about "Two-Second" Stanley Cooper, so-named when he costs the Toronto Maple Leafs a game in the 1951 championship because of a timekeeping flub. This section is really a set-up for the second part about Tony's sojourn to Romania in the company of Drago's family, particularly his father Nicholae and cousin Diana, whom Tony fancies.

Tony plays second fiddle to the Cup, or as Tony himself puts it, the Cup takes him along on its travels not the other way around. Tony's a former hockey player who didn't quite make it to the pros. He's on the defensive, along for the ride in love and life, and we know that part of Degen's play is ultimately to bring Tony out of the shadows and into his own. Still, I had a problem caring about Tony, and I think it's because we simply don't get to know him intimately enough. When we learn about Tony's brief and intense relationship with hotblooded, insatiable Ewa Loest, it feels plunked down in the middle of the text.

The same goes with other episodes meant to add texture, like that of Valentin Propescu, the pervert music teacher from hell who's not shy about throwing his substantial girth around to get what he wants in return for his clients' social advancement. And again in the end, when the recently immigrated Petrescus recall being visited by a former member of the secret police in Montreal (another uninvited guest) who makes unexpected amends to Nicholae in a very satisfying way. It feels without precedent, a structural hitch which might have been remedied by introducing Ionescu earlier in the story. Transitions could have been handled more smoothly with a little more editing.

Still, when the narrative lands on Romanian tarmac Degen shows what he's capable of as a writer. The prose shifts from an anecdotal tone to one possessing a more layered and rewarding literary quality. Degen appears to have an insider's sense of what it felt like to live under totalitarian rule in Ceaucescu's Romania, and conveys well, the daily travails of life in a police state, coping with paranoia and secrecy. He uses backgammon as a powerful motif expressing the Romanian pride, humour, courage and determination of citizens living within a political system in which gamesmanship was the currency of existence, and everyone had to be a player of one sort or another to survive.

When I closed the novel, the lasting questions were not about Tony and where he would go from here, but about the real Stanley Cup. I wondered about the trophy's venerable history. Is it true what I'd heard that one time a hockey player (from the Montreal Canadiens?) had taken the Cup home and on the way suffered a flat tire? After changing it, the story goes, he forgot the trophy on the side of the highway. There must be dozens more bizarre tales of the Cup's travels. I'm grateful to Degen for opening that door and look forward to his next outing.

Excellent Stories

We all know that story collections don't get their due, except if you're Alice Munro. So many are published to relatively little fanfare and are quickly forgotten. It's arguably the most difficult literary form. With a novel you have to persist but at least, as Mordecai Richler once said, with novels there's room for error. Poems are compact and therefore manageable. Short fiction requires the author to have the plot/character sense of a novelist and the word sense of a poet. A tall order that has frankly confounded me. When they are well-executed short stories encompass entire worlds, entire histories and entire musical scores.

Some of the most memorable books I read last year were story collections. I wanted to recommend two of them which I fear are destined to slip away unnoticed. The first is Tamas Dobozy's "Last Notes and Other Stories." These are funny, witty, playful, serious stories, one of which is a comic masterpiece called "Into The Ring" about a husband and wife who settle their marital conflicts by boxing.

The second is a new collection I've just finished called "Blood Pudding" by Art Corriveau. A Montreal native, I'd never heard of Art, but he's been quietly garnering some impressive publication credits mostly in the US (where he lives) and the UK. These are beautifully crafted tales about fully-realized characters in which the author delicately maps out the emotional landscape of relationships. My favourite in the collection is "Loss of Gravity" about a woman who has lost her husband in a tragic car accident and decides to take action as a way of dealing with overwhelming grief. Both books are worth your time.