Holley Rubinsky's Blog: judgment

"Cool" can blow either way. The writing of many intellectual, educated (and often under-edited) young writers can be unrelievedly uneventful. The writing is so perfect, so controlled, so meticulous; the characters are so cool, so suffering, so cynical, or so trashy that this reader can't find their human hearts. Reading these books is as befuddling as finding oneself in a gallery of certain newish, brainy art, containing "found" domestic items, tent-parts, wires, some grainy film media, concrete, splashes of paint, embedded unreadable mutterings, followed by the artist's high-toned take on the art ... this sort of afternoon makes one want to spend one's time elsewhere.

A friend in her mid-to-late forties recommended Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?. My friend thought I might bash it because of its effete distance, its experimental, deliberately anti-novel style. Well, heck yes. The narrator, a person trying to find herself and write a play, droned on with bad dialogue for some time, in fact to the end. I could not care about this girl even when she was being used and abused by .... (Yes, Heti is a media star now and, at least on the Google search page, has great haircuts.) Being involved in the character(s) obviously isn't the point in this writing; the smartness is.

On Sarah Selecky's website, a wanna-be writer will be treated kindly and, possibly, inspired. The website is slick and enviable by everyone who is hacking around with html code on their own. This Cake is for the Party was shortlisted for nearly every Canadian and British prize. So, what's up with me? Tiny movements within a relationship bore me unless Mavis Gallant is writing it. The partnered young pondering whether to stay or go tells me nobody has fallen into old-fashioned love. People who "look amazing, as always" cause me to sigh. I take it all back, however, because of the story "Where Are You Coming From, Sweetheart?" Touching. Really.

Lisa Moore is such a good person in so many ways, and Canadians just went nuts over her Canada Reads winning book, Caught but this reader bogged down at the beginning and never recovered. The character was so engaged in misspending his youth that he lost me.

The Antagonist by Lynn Coady struck me the same way. You get the idea of the loser character (or two or six of them) and then they go and on and on. Well, without me. However, I am looking forward to Hellgoing, described as "difficult but rewarding." On it.

Elizabeth Strout is the author of Olive Kitterridge, a book I thoroughly enjoyed for the humanity of it, the soft take on the imperfection of beings, and the humor. Amy and Isabelle, the author's first book, published in 1998, is clearly a forerunner. This tale of a mother and daughter was good for the first twenty pages -- Strout is a close observer of scenery, setting, and the weather -- and after a stroll through Isabelle's office and the characters in it, I skipped to the end and read backwards until I had the story. Read the sex scene (okay, okay) in the middle between Amy and the ....and that's it. This style reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates and the thorough Southern style mid last century.

David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas has such dismally tiresome old English --"In haste, I bade Henry Goose a good day. I fancy he is a Bedlamite."-- that, alas, this poor reader was blinded to its subtler virtues and swooned into Netflix.

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich lasted a few flipped pages. I may be tired of terrible acts of American racism, even set early in the 20th century. How many times does this story have to be told? "White" people vs "brown" (Indian) people? I am also weary of untangling roots, to find (surprise!), I imagine, people will be related. I apologize to Louise Erdrich whose writing I loved back in the day.

Colum McCann's TransAtlantic kept me up until midnight the other night, delighting in his lyrical language and the sweeping scope, reading aloud particularly brilliant phrases, passages and insights. Wow, I had discovered an amazing writer. (Okay, so everybody else--millions apparently--read Let the Great World Spin. And McCann seems to have written many, many books while this rural honey bunny was out stacking wood.)

Last night I searched reviews of TransAtlantic because the opinions of more erudite readers help to define what I feel or think. Apparently, McCann as a writer has many flaws, including some of the stuff that made me swoon. Theo Tait in The Guardian (June 1, 2013), wrote: "Stylistically, McCann leans very heavily on one particular syntactical formation, the sentence capped by two or more lilting verbless fragments, which comes to seem like a mechanical affectation. ("He will pause a moment, watching. Her hair askew. Her body long and slim and quiet against the sheets. The baby against her.")"

I loved this sort of verbless, visual word artistry.

But soon the deconstructing was on, and I read reviews in the NY Times and the National Post and then the Goodreads reviews (some men were fairly ruthless and made good points). I began to take apart the whole and I thought, Yep, this "novel" started as a collection of short stories. His colleagues, agent and publisher reminded him that short stories are bad (except if you're Alice Munro), so he then began the fragmented threading of his Book One, Book Two, the three famous, important men, the four unimportant, un-famous women...creating brief interactions between these sets of people that don't come to anything, if you want to get into it. And why Hannah (only 72, dear reader, but driving fearfully and acting, in general, much older and, besides, isn't particularly interesting), is the only character in 1st person, the reader doesn't know. And the letter. Aw.


Reading the reviews, thinking like a writer, I was thrilled to unfold the layers, take a critical look, discover the holes in the weaving; I nodded in agreement, I inhaled in excitement over a flaw I hadn't thought of; oh, it was so much fun. I wish I had made so many mistakes on such a grand scale!

Overall, however, yes and yes, nevertheless, as a reader I let it spin and enthrall me. I can't wait to read McCann's other books, in publishing order, to see where this writer started and where his willingness to think big, be tender, throw gobs of controlled and beautiful language all over the page, will take him next.

Last August I was deeply and happily involved in the edits for South of Elfrida. This August the writers at Mystery Camp gave me some clues as where to start my mystery reading. (Besides Ruth Rendell, Henning Mankell, Dorothy Sayers, and Peter Abrahams, I was in the dark.)

On campers' advice, I started with Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble, part of his Jack Reacher series. The morality in this book (and probably the others) is "an-eye-for-an-eye", and, actually, I didn't mind because the characters were so obviously, truly and deeply bad. A friend thinks of Reacher as being the man in the white cape. Childs is a powerful, physical writer, who moves in fast and gets the story going; Reacher, smart with square roots, numbers in general, and gifted in figuring out next moves through fiddling with his hands (i.e. napkins and a sugar container) holds the reader's due to his personal anomalies. Character delineation -- writers struggling with defining characters should study how Lee Child does it.

Second book: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny. She nearly buried me in the first fourteen pages when I was stuck four pages too many at a board meeting of the Lit and His Society, but perseverance paid off. No eye-for-an-eye mentality here in this "cozy" (apparently the style of mystery that Penny writes -- no thumbs through eyeballs in front of the reader, for example.) Inspector Gamache is charming and powerful in his own rich way -- I liked how she developed his power through his silence and gaze and lowering the tone of voice. In this book he is a man suffering guilt. I hung in to the very end, following the two cases, suspense building in each one, could have done with less overwriting (or maybe the term is underscoring) that I suppose mystery writers must do, to bring the flaky, distracted beach-umbrella reader up to date.

Third Book: Henning Mankell's new book, A Treacherous Paradise isn't really a mystery so much as as exploration of place, flimsily based on a woman who did actually exist. It's interesting to read a failure by the assured writer of the Wallander series that I thoroughly enjoyed, for their Swedish brooding about a case while viewing of the weather and worrying about one's outerwear, for one, and the completely believable character of Wallander with his smoking and sandwich-eating, and the other detectives as well. But Hanna/Ana in this book: Nope and nope. Some clumsy bridges as an editor tried to make it a novel is my bet.

Tomorrow's book: I start on This Body of Death by Elizabeth George.

... Days later: Elizabeth George is a very thorough, descriptive writer, for whom I had no patience after a while, and so skipped through this book, read the last few chapters, did not feel I'd missed much. Wordy.

Found A Lonely Death by Charles Todd at the library. It's "An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery". This writer is diligent and correct but doesn't hold my interest so I'm feeling a bit negative just now and want to run down the hill and pick up another Lee Childs.

However, Carl Hiaasen holds great promise. The voice of obit reporter Jack Taggert, narrator in The Basket Case, is engaging, entertaining and, most important to me in this kind of reading, the story moves right along...

Carl Hiaasen went back to the library zippo. The narrator was too cute and the story insipid.

By the time I discovered Goodreads (God knows what I was doing before then), they had been taken over by Facebook.
Yesterday I received an email from Sum of Us regarding an imminent strike by (yes, I do know) underpaid, non-unionized Walmart workers.

And, guess who is advertising on Goodreads today, smiley Rollback face and all?

Let's think this through -- Facebook, Walmart, Goodreads, Walmart, Facebook, Google, Amazon, gmail...Goodreads, Facebook.

Need I go on? We are dupes and stupes. Finally, I find a place to share my reading (a bit late, I understand), and now...

where do I go next?

The Author pages are very generous of Goodreads, but I'm in a bind, as being listed as Author of At First I Hope for Rescue. I did like that book, which was published a year after Yuri died -- in fact, he didn't know Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada had accepted it. She was intending to phone that Sunday in January, 1996, but decided to wait until Monday.

My issue with Goodreads is that, because Rescue is my book that most people have commented on or rated, it is the book -- published 15 years ago -- next to my name on the bar. And yeah, people, some of those ratings are not very good, unlike the print reviews that followed, but I imagine the writers of the GR comments were barely out of their teens when the book was published. And the news back then is certainly different from the news today.

I'm living in the sticks of B.C. surrounded by mountains, down here beside Kootenay Lake, and waving, hoping to call attention to South of Elfrida, published in March 2012.

Hey, Goodreads, heads up.

Writers have a hard time writing about other writers, particularly in Canada, a small country in terms of the literary life.

Writing reviews or comments on Goodreads about books that fellow writers, friends or colleagues, fellow people who showed up at your bookstore reading, whom you met on the radio (hello, Bill Gaston!) or at a festival -- how can you be truthful about your tastes as a reader? Because, guess what, you may not love the book, and, moreover, may not even love one of your own published books ... more about that one some other time. Writing about other writer's books is one of those razor's edge situations that writers tend to avoid, unless you're being paid for a review.

If you do read a colleague's book, someone you admire and respect, you hope and you hope that you will find the book a four or five star read. (Doesn't the "star" rating system remind you of elementary school? Back in the day, before the advent of the plethora of "good job!!!" stickers, a little gold star on your paper could make a little child blush.)

So I go back and forth, playing the stars -- three, four? My evaluation of a book isn't an absolute judgment. Not my cup of tea, one thinks. But someone else will love it. Is it condemned by my three stars so that readers won't bother?

Too much responsibility! In my judgment, many books could use fifty fewer pages, some tightening around the middle (as could I), and a good editor who kept the writer on track. But when editors have many other projects and you, the writer, are surrounded, literally, by hundreds of pages scrolling on a screen and/or hundreds of draft pages on the desk behind you, it is very easy to meander until, suddenly, the deadline is upon you, and yes, you may die.