it’s been a bit of a dry spell, and i’m glad it’s broken. my poem, “the tower” has been published in the current issue of Grain (in the same issue as a poem by Evelyn Lau — probably the first contemporary young-woman writer i read way back in 1995): https://grainmagazine.ca/shop-and-support/current-issue.
into the weeds/ on reading and the structure of the novel
[edited on December 18th because i screwed up the title of Matrix.]
i have an unusually high number of half-finished books for me (for reference: i’m usually reading 4-5 books at a time, but i do tend to finish most of them in a timely way) — some that have been unfinished untouched for most of the year. so i thought i’d make some headway on that, either by finishing a book or six or by deciding that some of those books were not for me, not for now.
one of those was Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, which i found propulsive and engaging when i started it early in the year, but i couldn’t really remember why i hadn’t picked it up (except to dust the table it was on) in months. and having finished it and thought about it for a few days, i think i have a ghost of an answer.
part of the reason i picked up The Vaster Wilds in the first place was because i’d so liked Groff’s previous book, Matrix (which is so, so good — the writing is propulsive, and the novel is so unexpected in its structure), and while VW shares some of those qualities: Groff’s sentences are so good, and the narrator’s voice rings true in an interesting way. in addition, Groff is doing something compelling with time. the interiority of the novel causes the passage of time to seem longer than it takes. however, the inevitability of the narrator’s circumstances begin to make her interior voice less engaging.
(the next few paragraphs contain brief spoilers, if that matters to you)
first, let me be clear, at the start of the novel, when Zed escapes the colony, there seem to be a number of ways this plot could go. there are various ways she could survive, and conversely, there are a number of ways she could die. at some point, midway through the book, the outcome becomes inevitable, and as the novel narrows into the specificity of how Zed will die, the novel’s propulsiveness seems to dissipate. i will say that this choice contributes to the novel’s sense of realism — and the tension between realism and mysticism, because the narrative voice is so interior, is itself compelling, and will bear much more thinking about.
i’m also trying to decide what i think of that. i mean, one answer is that i put the novel down for several months, and that finishing it wasn’t the inviting, propulsive experience the opening half of the novel was. some of that could absolutely be a me problem (between Gaza/ the American election/ climate catastrophe/ the Canadian political shitshow/ the dark, oh god the dark/ everything else — well, it’s weighing on me).
another answer is that the dissipation of propulsiveness is, in fact, what Groff is trying to accomplish — that the last half of the novel differs from the standard expectations (there is no particularly climactic moment — early on, there are a few moments that might, in a different novel, be climactic — nor a satisfying conclusion) because this is, in fact, a novel about the tension between realism and mysticism, and, indeed, a novel about death and strangeness. in which case, putting the reader in conflict with their own expectations of what a novel looks like… — well, that interests me.
indeed, the notion that “reader” is not a natural/neutral question to occupy crosses into a lot of the thinking i’ve been doing about my own writing and what i want to accomplish (which is to say, a certain amount of wanting to bring the reader into a position of calling their own position and assumptions into question). how to do that without causing a reader to throw my work aside in frustration (which is for sure a possible outcome) is a hard question, and one i’m not sure i have a satisfying answer to.
anyway: a couple of recent columns, and the best of 2024 from a number of Winnipeg Free Press reviewers, which include some of mine under poetry, but which also include a number of compelling reads selected by others.
brief and incomplete: thoughts on Nan Goldin, Josiah Neufeld, money and complicity in the arts
Yesterday, i watched All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, twice in one day. (It was really good. And it’s currently streaming on Crave in Canada and whatever HBO streams on elsewhere.)
The searing way Goldin speaks about her sister — her suicide and the way she was institutionalized as a child and adolescent — and the effect it and her parents’ denial had on her life and art, which is brought into a parallel relationship with Goldin’s recent activism and advocacy responding to the opioid crisis, illuminates and energizes the way Goldin’s art is presented: “I mean that’s the problem,” Goldin says in a voice over, “you know you grow up being told that didn’t happen, you didn’t see that, you didn’t hear that. And what do you do? How do you believe yourself? How do you trust yourself? How do you continue to trust yourself? And then how do you show the world that you did experience that, that you did hear that? And so that’s the reason that I take pictures.”
The documentary also presents a clear-sighted critique of the way money has made art as an institution complicit in great harms committed in the world. In the documentary, the critique focuses on the Sackler family (they of the Purdue Pharma company), but it’s a critique that dovetails with Josiah Neufeld’s article in The Walrus last month, “How the Giller Prize Became Associated with Genocide”, wherein Neufeld reports on the fallout from the protests at the 2023 Scotiabank-Giller gala: “The writers I spoke to for this piece, however, told me that a literary organization more afraid of losing corporate sponsors than of losing authors has failed to understand something fundamental about what it means to write [. . . .] It’s precisely because writers earn so little from their art that they can’t afford to squander the cultural capital they do have. That capital — the kind created by honest, piercing, revelatory art — is a currency corporations like Scotiabank can never amass on their own.”
Relatedly, Neufeld’s book, The Temple at the End of the Universe, is similarly clear-sighted and unsettling in the best kind of way. I had the thought, as i was finishing it, that having spent my time trying to be good, be obedient, but increasingly good and obedient are insufficient to meet the moment. Perhaps it was always so (and i can be an exceptionally slow learner) — and i haven’t figured out how to bring that thought into the world, but still, it’s there.
To end, i don’t often remember to share my most recent poetry column in The Winnipeg Free Press.
into the weeds: on writing about writing about memoir
In a move that is extremely on point, i want to talk about a review where the writer’s judgement of the book (that it’s not great) is not one that i particularly disagree with, but whose reasons for that judgement have been needling at me since i read the review just over a month ago.
In The Guardian on August 27, 2023, Rachel Cooke writes of Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful that “the cloyingly titled You Could Make This Place Beautiful is all the bad things at once: self-pitying, but also self-regarding; incontinent, but also horribly coy; trite and mawkish and bulging with what even its author acknowledges as ‘woo’.” Beyond its faux-profundity, Cooke observes that Smith’s prose style is “grindingly workaday.”
And i agree with all of that.
If Cooke had just stopped there, i’d have kind of nodded and thought no more of the review or the memoir. But, of course she doesn’t stop there. In the conclusion to her review (after needlessly swiping at the American reading public), she writes: “Personally, I could find among its pages no evidence that Smith did not love herself plenty already. Her husband, she suggests, left her in part because he was envious of the “fame” that came her way when one of her poems went viral. But this isn’t really my point. Self-optimisation – self-adoration – is the great disease of our age, a social pathology that makes a virtue of a certain kind of narcissism, and scapegoats of everyone else, and this, in the end, is why Smith’s book repulsed me. Its true moral is inadvertent. Every page serves as a reminder that it is far, far better to understand yourself than to love yourself.”
The charge in the conclusion isn’t that Smith’s writing is bad or that her memoir is boring. The charge is that she thinks too highly of herself, that she loves herself too much, that she’s insufficiently abject in her suffering. And that’s kind of a gross charge. What she cites as evidence for this is a statement Smith makes about why her husband left her (because of the fame brought on by the virality of her poems). This seems less a statement of sentiment than one of fact. Smith is famous. Her poems did go viral. And while we can never know why her husband chose to have an affair, it doesn’t seem an implausible conjecture that it was retaliation for her outshining him. To state it so baldly seems in bad taste to me, but the charge at issue isn’t (merely) bad taste. That case had already been made in the review, and, as i said, i’m sympathetic to it. Rather, the charge is of narcissism and immorality.
Cooke is, in that paragraph, accusing Smith of setting herself up as a false idol, and, by implication, she extends this accusation across a culture of, presumably, women, who just can’t shut up about how they are worth more than the way people have treated them.
The other thing that needles me about this review is the assumption that showing one’s suffering in detail is somehow required, that we owe to readers a fair measure of suffering in order to earn our books. This is a base assumption of memoir that i’d like to challenge — or at least, i’d propose that an absence of textual suffering isn’t necessarily evidence of suffering’s absence. I’m using lots of hedging language here because i’m speaking less as a critic and more as a writer, with my own work and fears about being on the receiving end of voyeuristic judgement in mind. For all that i don’t think You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a particularly good book, I think the choices Smith makes to avoid textually representing her abjection are deliberate ones.
Whether or not i’m right about Smith’s intent, my point stands that these choices have an effect that is not makes for a boring book. Rather, the choice to not depict herself at her most abject nudges the project of memoir away from the voyeuristic economy that insists on more and greater suffering, on seeing it in order to believe it. Smith’s choices to not dwell in the specificities of her suffering reminds me of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, in the way both books draw attention to the way some sets of experiences (for Smith romantic abandonment, for Jamison recovery from alcoholism) share a shape, and this commonality becomes less obvious when we focus on the specifics of individual experience.
melanie brannagan frederiksen 