Come, Thou Tortoise (2009)

Jessica Grant

Knopf Canada

- Available in softcover March 9th!

- A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2009!

- Shortlisted from the 2009 Winterset Award and Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award!

- Currently in The National Post’s Canada Also Reads Competition!

 Pardon all the adjectives, but this books really is a fresh, innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem. Pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters,  the diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. But I’ll concede, since people demand comparisons, as impossible as they are in this case: Come, Thou Tortoise is everything great about a Miriam Toews novel meeting everything great about the fresh, ultra-modern diction of Burning Rock fiction. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages. “Her skin felt like an old elbow,” “Her brown hair makes a beaver’s tail down her back.” The story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently fresh, unique way: “the wind was flappy,” or “Downtown is a bit smooshed. It takes Verlaine five tries to park the Lada,” or “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?”

“Bullety”; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. And” flappy wind,” a virtually perfect-but-unused adjective for wind, so revealing of her character.  It is no wonder Michael Winter, a CanLit icon known for his attention to detail,  endorsed this novel with a plea, “Please —I beg you dear reader — read Jessica Grant. “

Nutshell summary: Audrey Flowers’ father is knocked into a coma just before Christmas (by a Christmas tree hanging out the back of someone’s truck) and she has to return to Newfoundland, leaving her pet tortoise behind with her friend, Chuck, a dejected player of small-not-big roles in Shakespeare plays. (The tortoise narrates every so many chapters, relaying his chaotic history of ownership and the demise of Audrey’s relationship with her deserting, rock-climbing ex.) Back at home, Audrey, obsessed with the game of Clue, and possibly suffering from a low IQ, ends up slowly piecing together a family mystery and the truth behind her ever-lasting pet mouse, all the while recapping her entire childhood with her unconventional, endearing family. The ending is one of those endings where it is past midnight, and you just want to sleep, but you can’t lay the book down.

As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel.  There is a great sense of humour in the narration, in terms of obsessive references to the game of Clue, two  consistent catch phrases, an offbeat plot and its off-kilter delivery, and a plethora of puns . Random examples:  The narrator purposefully left the L out of her father’s obit, so it read Water Flowers, not Walter Flowers. Her father used to refer to the family unit as “The Bouquet,” (because their last name was Flowers). In the opening chapter, in one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read, Audrey, in an act of delusional heroics,  gets herself into a predicament in which an air marshal is asking for his gun back through the bathroom door (and his last name just so happens to be Marshall). Even before that, we get the lines, “Winnifred is old, she might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff …” (A rock climber named Cliff. And Cliff, by the way, referred to the ceiling as an overhang, because the walls and ceilings of his apartment were equipped with climbing holds, for when he wasn’t busy rappelling from the fire escape). Grant’s outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. The offbeat nature of the book, and constant puns and wittiness aren’t exhausted or cheesy; instead they perfectly fuel what makes this novel an utterly unique gem. This is a book you will never forget. It helps that she portrays the wacky Flowers family in a believable and endearing manner. (Her live-in uncle Thoby has one arm longer than the other, for some reason, so he is obviously the one to change light bulbs or scrape ice from windshields.)

Also, it is okay that eight or nine of these chapters are narrated by Audrey’s pet tortoise, because Winnifred is one of the best characters of the year, and hilarious, and might do for the tortoise pet trade what Sideways did for wine? A quote to summarize all my raving, “Audrey’s brilliant. She’s hilarious. I could read about her all day. Same goes for the tortoise.” – The Globe & Mail.

Check out her renowned collection of short fiction as well: Making Light of Tragedy

The Wanton Troopers by Alden Nowlan (re-relased Reader’s Guide Edition)

Goose Lane (2009), 297 pages

Goose Lane recently re-released the legendary Alden Nowlan’s first novel, The Wanton Troopers, after discovering its missing last page. You can read about that unique story, as well as the remarkable life story of Alden Nowlan by clicking here. This re-released reader’s guide edition comes with features like a sincere afterword by David Adams Richards, and a 36-page long interview with Nowlan, that is quite honestly among my favourite author interviews I’ve ever read. The book is worth it for the interview alone.

The Wanton Troopers is a novel in line with of Wayne Johnston’s The Story of Bobby O’Malley or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, except there is less humour and a more poetic prose. Troopers precedes them both and relies more heavily on the power of language and the irrevocable potency of moments. It should be noted up front that Nowlan was primarily a poet, a renowned poet. When you hear of a novel written by a poet, you expect a certain brilliance in the writing itself, and in the case of this novel, he follows through. There is a consistent attention to detail that boasts itself in the very opening line: “It was raining so hard that Kevin thought God must have torn a hole in the sky and let all the rivers of heaven spill upon earth. The cold spring rain hit the roof with the force of gravel.”

The backcover describes the novel very well: Kevin O’Brien is caught between heaven and hell, torn between the tenderness of his young, adulterous mother and the brutality of his work-gnarled, drunken father. Kevin’s world is unrelenting: bone-crushing poverty, bullying, his first adolescent yearnings, and the fire of sin. Yet, in Kevin’s imagination, there is hope.

It is in Nowlan’s capturing of moments, most notably the shared moments of peace and intimacy between Kevin and his mother, where this book shines. Brightly. As an example, speaking of his mother washing him, “The wind howled like a drowning beast. Inside, there was the warmth and light and music of his mother’s hands and body … he might have been part of her body. She washed him as she washed her own hands. He was, all of him, hers: not the smallest part of him belonged any longer to himself. And in this surrender, there was pervasive peace.” That is one of many passages of Kevin clinging to moments of tenderness and love in an otherwise hostile home, in an ensnaring town that breaks men like horses. And it is no coincidence that during these moments of shared peace and intimacy, his father is never around, or he pipes up to ruin the moment.  His father is always skilfully and intentionally portrayed with beastial imagery: always “roaring” or “glaring” or “growling” but never simply saying or asking, always described like a wretched animal — “Judd O’Brien’s arms were bludgeons, and his horny, yellow fingernails reminded Kevin of hooves.” This was in harsh contrast to his angelic mother and their shared, ethereal moments. “His relationship with his father attained its epitome through the strap,” and these violent scenes are the ones that linger. The ones that taint everything, as Kevin periodically despises himself and even his mother. “He hated her when she caressed him before his father, for he knew that Judd despised all caresses as symptoms of weakness.” 

But it’s the glimmer of resilience in this story, and the humanity of it, the real life story of Alden Nowlan, and rooting for alter-ego Kevin that resonates. Nothing captures this sentiment more than Kevin’s symbolic admiration, on pages 21 and 22, as he identifies with beaten horses. “Something in him responded to the secret light he saw in their eyes, the freedom and grace that could never be wholly destroyed by work or punishment but ended only with death.”

This novel  is tender, it’s bold, it’s beautifully written. It affects you in a very important way. It hurts to read; it’s a pleasure to read. It is honest and resonates as it cuts through to the core of humanity and the need for human connection and self-discovery in the least fertile of places.  That said, some readers will find that, in places, the novel loses momentum into a questionable digression. And, in parts, Kevin’s dated and ineffective dialogue of “Gee” and “Gosh”come off as weak, mismatched responses to pivotal, intense moments in the book.

Nowlan’s The Wanton Troopers combines the authenticity of autobiography with a born poet’s lush prose, and the effect is affecting.

Yes, I am being purposefully witty: February’s book of the month is February, but also because the softcover version just hit stores.

As I read February, I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was, for the first time, reading the work of a fully evolved writer. In terms of bare-bones writing, in terms of sentence-level writing, and how well an author crafts a sentence to capture a moment in words: There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore’s elegant rendering of language. Lisa made her mark with Open, and Alligator got all the attention it deserved. But with February, she’s peaked. She’s distinticve, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters, and project their stories up off the pages in the most meaningful ways, with her tender, visceral diction. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Through her rendering of the main character, Helen O’mara, I have felt the irrevocable and deflating loss of a spouse. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work. 

If my words aren’t enough, the backcover is graced by the following endorsement from the legendary Richard Ford:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her beloved Cal the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. In no way does Moore exploit, sentimentalize, or overuse that real-life tragedy. Instead, with a truly shocking and core-penetrating skill, she shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life, her watching her grandchildren or helping her son cope with the reality of an estranged, impregnated fling are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really works, the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random. Her memories come at random to pierce through the mundane chores of every day life. This is an important work, and perhaps the apex of CanLit, if not simply a shining example of what is meant by creative writing: sentences that evoke emotions in their reader; words strung together with an artful, calculated precision so that a reader feels what they’re reading.

 February earned its way onto numerous “best of 2009″ lists, most notably the  Quill & Quire’s and Globe and Mail’s.

Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, Syr Ruus

Breakwater Books (2009),  248 pages

Syr Ruus’s Lovesongs of Emmauel Taggart is an off-kilter but ultimately insightful novel that will have its ideal audience reflecting on or relating to its universal story. It stars a well-wrought character, Emmanuel “M” Taggart, whose antics, at times far-fetched but always endearingly human, speak to the universal quest for meaning in modern life. Emmanuel, like far too many of us, is a man boxed in by cubicles and shackled by bad ties and to-do lists that leave no run for play, or possibly even identity. At times that can send a man into moments of introspection, or, in M’s case, a full-on, sad-funny breakdown. This book is a spotlight on a mid-life crisis, done in a fresh, fun way. Taggart does it all: small-scale road trips, new relationships, unfounded infatuations with perfect strangers, mind-numbing introspection, and like so many men in a time of self-examination,he questions the choice of a perfectly good partner like M’s wife, Emily, or, as he more affectionately calls her, “little m.” To quote the book, they call each other “Em & Em. Big M and little m. M&m.” (Aww…)

Considering the caliber of her writing, and the hefty thematic material she handles insightfully, it is hard to believe this is a debut novel. The perk of Lovesongs being a debut is that it takes chances and stretches the bounds of literary fiction in ways that all too often only a first novel dares do. Lovesongs is a well-written little gem, in a style all Ruus’s, that evokes all the senses, at times putting the reader in the character’s body, let alone his head. It’s a compelling, contemporary, and punchy style, without being trendy. It’s catchy and readable. It’s funny. It’s serious. Replete with much life wisdom that isn’t overly heavy-handed or opinionated, just deft and true, and is only occasionally out of context.

It is perfectly normal but tragically human to question your life from time to time, and in the case of Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, it certainly makes for a good book, especially when the writer is one like Ruus, and the main character is a certified hypochondriac with more worries than problems. Syr Ruus plays with the big questions of life in this book, in a way that feels like she has the answers, but holds them back from her fumbling lead character, so that he has to come to the book’s fine closing revelation all his own, as we all do. We can’t change the world, Emmanuel Taggart, but we can change the way we look at it.

The title, by the way, is an homage to T.S Eliot’s epic and much anthologized 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  click here to read it.)

Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. As a writer, reading her is like holding on to fire works. It’s a thrill to be so fondly jealous you never wrote these stories yourself. No detail is left blandly described, and it is all so fresh and vivid. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route,” and you know what she means. You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Where most writers might say Gary was confused, or Gary was disoriented, she’d say “Gary felt like he’d stepped inside some weird foreign film, like he should be looking around for subtitles to make sense of it all.” Even each gesture is given a unique visual. For example: “She shook her head like there were flies buzzing around it” or “She held her fingers ruler straight.”

Take the opening story, “Scrabble Lessons.” The detail is there, she talks about the clinking sound of the tiles as she hears her mother and grandmother playing scrabble in another room, and describes everything in a way you see; she really puts you there with lines like: “Rob was two-handing his beer glass like it might get away from him.” And there is some sort of harsh, intentionally paradoxical contrast in many of the lines in this story: a lot of the most vivid violent sentences are played off so casually. Example: “Just about the time the steering wheel was punching through Dad’s chest, Mom was joining VELO to CITY, her V boldly claming the red square of a triple word score.” You get a juxtaposition of the violent, unfathomable death of her father laid over the mundane, everyday routines of her life, except this day, her father dies in a car accident and with these sentences stacked the way they are, you really get a sense of the narrator’s shock via Vryenhoek’s command of language and lingual wizardry. When her mother shares her scrabble wisdom, or lessons, is it not a metaphor for life, done in a subtle way for the deeper reader? A clever parallel between the game of scrabble and the game of life; the approaches to each.

I could make some half-apt and flattering comparisons, so that anyone reading this might get a feel for this book. I could say, “Scrabble Lessons is Lisa Moore’s short fiction meets Kathleen Winter’s,” but there’s something here that’s all Leslie Vryenhoek’s, and that’s what excited me the most. A new voice, and I love it. This is a perfect collection of short stories: punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something. Jammed in around all these skilfully constructed sentences is raw emotion you feel, seeping out through the words. These are stories you feel as a reader and admire as writer.