Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod is anything but light. In a collection of seven short stories, his characters face the physical reality of life, death, illness, and exhaustion. They are fighters, they are bricklayers, they are swimmers struggling for life against the Nova Scotia tide.

MacLeod structures the majority of his stories with a tight narrative and short sentences that punch. He uses flashback often, but in such a way that it adds to the character’s depth. He writes successfully from a variety of perspectives – his main characters are athletes, young women, widowed men, and weary fathers.

In Miracle Mile, the first story in the collection, MacLeod deftly illustrates the fierce competitiveness among runners, the racing scene, cortisone injections, and laps around the 1500. In order to win, two friends taunt danger, and flirt with their own mortality. Campbell watches his teammate Burner as the “…train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle…the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting.”

Wonder About Parents tells the story in pieces. In chunks. Past and present are interspersed in no particular order, as the narrator deals with his family’s lice infestation. He questions his success as a parent, while meticulously researching the biology and history of the louse. Again, MacLeod’s characters take physical risks, this time as they drive with their ailing infant to spend Christmas with their parents. When the baby must be hospitalized, the narrator seems to wake up, and grow up, to understand that he is responsible. Short, terse sentences drive the point home as the new father confronts the emergency room doctor, “We glare at each other. I sway in my own exhausted stench. Close my eyes for one second. I know what I look like.”

Adult Beginner I is perhaps the most powerful story in the collection. Stacey learns to swim after a childhood of fear due to near-drowning. Standing on the top of the sixty foot tall Holiday Inn, she readies herself to dive into the Detroit River, a feat, a dare, accomplished by her swimming instructor friends. She vacillates. “ ‘I don’t know about this,’ Stace says. She feels in-between. As though she is standing inside one version of herself, while the next person in line, the girl she is about to become, gestures…and waits.” The tension ratchets up throughout the story – will she take the dare?

Read Light Lifting. Be prepared for thick, physical tension that carries the story to unexpected ends.

Light Lifting, published by Biblioasis, was a finalist for the 2010 Giller Prize.

Kurt Cobain once said: I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not. In her short story collection What Boys Like: and Other Stories, Amy Jones illustrates many characters who, in these fifteen brilliantly well-crafted tales, much like Cobain, revel in their own uniqueness of who they are, rather than who they are not. Jones takes great care to explore the tenuous, callous and often humorous boundaries of human relationships, while maintaining one consistent theme, it seems: everyone has something to lose.

In “How to Survive a Summer in the City,” Jones explores the understated love in the mother-daughter relationship at the center of the story. Jones is smart, using a “to-do list” as a witty framework to house her character’s desperate and, at times, wholly disappointing expectations of one another. She does well to balance the heavy moments in the relationship, and in the story, with subtle sarcasm. What buoys the piece is the clever way Jones unifies mother and daughter at the conclusion through the simple act of a spider’s death. Both Stacy and her daughter have been let down, but the end leaves them lighter and content with the realization that the imperfect can, for an instant, sometimes be perfect.

“Julia’s little sister Joey disappeared on the same night Kurt Cobain died,” begins the third tale of the collection, “One Last Thing.” For Nirvana fans, a read of this story might induce humming of the band’s well-known ballad, “All Apologies,” given the cycle of destructive behavior and then remorse that plagues both central characters, sisters Julia and Joey. What is most striking about this piece is Jones’ use of language, which, especially throughout the last two pages, harnesses the damage associated with singer Cobain, and, like him, is bleak and beautiful, dark and delicate.

“Miriam Beachwalker,” mid-way through the collection, is poignant in its depiction of loneliness and the search for voice among all the noise. “The Church of Latter-Day Peaches” gives the reader a new way to mourn, the tale undeniably characterized by grace that can only come from tremendous tragedy.

The beauty of Jones’ work, image, and content is rich, both cynical and optimistic, and a portraiture of life through fresh eyes. Each tale, grounded in both the light and the dark, is smart, full of truth, and jostles the mind into process without leaving anyone out of the remix. Readers will find it hard to shake the pull and anchor of this collection.

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What Boys Like: and Other Stories, published by BIBLIOASIS, is a winner of the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke Award.

Recently, I have been trying to understand how women, as lovers, observers, as teachers and veterans, mothers and wives, and especially as female poets, understand and feel about war in all its many forms. Jehanne Dubrow, in her third poetry collection, Stateside, addresses a sub-culture often without recognition: the women waiting at home for the men who are deployed overseas. Her collection digs into the emotional wax and wan that can build, distress, destroy, or strengthen, both a woman and her marriage.

Divided into three parts: pre-deployment, separation, and post-deployment, her collection gives readers a truth, that lest they are the one bound to the shores, going to the mailbox alone, they will never completely fathom.

According to a May 25, 2010 Washington Post article, 94,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan (one of many stations world-wide). At least half of those troops presumably have left their loves behind. Part One’s poem, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”, introduces a clever intermingling of quiet wit and blatant irritation. The poem’s internal dialogue gives the piece a two-fold texture of the speaker’s anger, yet desolation.

Foxtrot the Navy, I yell into the phone,
the first time that my husband groans deployed,
a word we’ve waited for since war began
four years ago.
[Let whiskey slide as slow
as bullets down my throat. Let foxtrot be
both verb and noun].

There is controlled stillness in the cadence and phrasing of the lines that lends itself to the overall ebbing texture of the collection. The poem “Nonessential Equipment” adds a quiet reality.

The seabag must be light enough to sling
across his shoulder, weigh almost nothing,
each canvas pocket emptied of regret.
The trick is packing less. No wife, no pet,
no perfumed letters dabbed with I-love-yous,
or anything he can’t afford to lose.

During Part Two, Dubrow explores the undeniable affects of being left behind. She also, perhaps unintentionally, explores the undeniable great love that grows from this distance. Loyalty, growth, self-preservation and temperance, anticipation and introspection find home in her verse here. “In Penelope’s Bedroom”, one of a series that brings modern verse to the known faithfulness of Odysseus’s Penelope, Dubrow laments on the necessity of the unchanged, despite her beloved being ever absent.

The right side of the bed must stay
his side. She slips into her negligee,
as if she’s dressing still for him.
Perhaps her body cannot learn its grim

topography. She knows that life
has dried her up. How terrible to be a wife
made widow and yet still remain
married—what inaccessible terrain.

England’s Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had one of the greatest love stories of all time. When he passed, Prince Albert’s room remained a shrine to Queen Victoria’s continued love. Nights she slept with a photo of him by her side. Much like “In Penelope’s Bedroom”, changing the room’s dynamic would reflect an admission that the beloved will never return.

The language and movement in many of Dubrow’s poems is full of beauty and measured breath despite inevitable anxiety that appears in the last section of poems. The transition from “overseas” to “stateside” is addressed with an intensity of voice that reflects both the measure of circumstance, and the measure of a woman in constant pendulum. In Part Three’s “Situational Awareness” she writes, “—I’m hypersensitive,/stretched thin as a length of wire, a hair–/trigger mechanism”. In “Stateside”, the title poem, this feeling continues with, “then we are stretched/nearly to the breaking./The wait becomes my pulse,/come home come home”.

Jehanne Dubrow’s collection not only examines what it means to be undone and to redo, but her collection gives readers a truth: the women behind the tears and welcome home banners, the women behind the hugs seen on CNN, the women waiting to be mailed. The smallness and quality of moment and movement in her work lends to the reality that we are always waiting for love; some women just have more tenacity. “There is courage/in collision,” she writes in her poem “VJ Day In Times Square”.

Stateside, published by Northwestern University Press, was named a 2010 Book of the Year Finalist in Poetry.

Following up the recent review of Once, Sheila Lamb interviews the author, Rebecca Rosenblum. Once, a collection of sixteen short stories, is the winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award and published by Biblioasis.

—

When did you begin writing? Has writing been consistent throughout your life?

I wrote some small things–mainly poems, bad ones–in my journal starting around age 11-12, but I don’t think it was with a thought of “literature” or anything. I just thought I had so many feelings that they needed to be expressed in poetry. In high-school, I started writing humour bits for the yearbook and the school newspaper and pretty much anyone who asked. I also did some short stories in high school–even some that didn’t suck–but I was pretty inconstant. Stories and I had a long engagement. I flirted with the form all through university without ever really committing. I was always struggling to paste them together into something longer, or to break down the story form into something else–I tried writing a fugal story, a stochastic story, etc. For years after that, I tried to write a novel, and it was only grad school that I realize that short stories and I *clicked*, and maybe I should make the most of that.

Tell us about your graduate program at Toronto. How did the program impact your writing?

The impact was huge, and hugely positive–I was extremely lucky. I am always able to shut down mean-spirited “can anyone really *learn* creative writing in school?” conversations by saying, “I did.” I don’t mean that I don’t think I had any natural talent, or that I didn’t work hard on my own, but I’m not a natural loner, and I found writing on my own very hard. I’d go off in a million directions, lose interest in projects, lose motivation, and I just didn’t know what writing seriously *looked* like. Before grad school, I had a lot of people in my life who thought it was great that I wrote, I had a lot of support, but no one who could actually *help* me. To go to UofT and talk about writing every day, to hang out with people who wanted to do what I wanted to do, to have to be disciplined and meet deadlines and think of writing as a job rather than a lark was also very useful to me. I love to workshop–I know it’s not for everyone, but I love to get a million different opinions and sift through them until I know the right answer. And at UofT, I got to workshop with great writers, and hang out with them a lot besides. And Leon Rooke was my mentor and thesis advisor for my second year–you see what I mean about good luck. The best creative writing teachers are the ones who take the time and care to figure out what the student is actually *trying to do*, and then help that student get there. Leon helped me so much–with listening, with writing exercises, with loaned and gifted books and reading lists, with coffee, with tough criticism delivered kindly, and genuine celebration when I managed what I was striving for. There was also a lot of hand-holding–mainly metaphorical, occasionally literal. Leon was (and is) a brilliant teacher and a tonne of fun. Yes, lucky indeed.

How did you gather the stories for Once into a collection?

I didn’t quite do that, actually. I really just took the best things I’d written over 3-4 years and put them in a pile, then let my editor pick the ones that fit into a book. It hurt to let some of them go, but I knew it had to happen–no one is going to buy a 400 page short-story collection from a first-time author–so it was best to let an expert do the choosing. Some of the stories are linked in Once, but that happened really naturally. I’d write one story as a stand-alone, and then someone would say, “What ever happened with this character that only has two paragraphs?” And at first I’d think “I have no idea,” but then I’d realize I did now and I could write about it. So we did try to keep all the linked stories in the collection and kind of spaced throughout, but that wasn’t necessarily the plan at the beginning. Well, there wasn’t any plan, really, at the beginning or ever.

Where do you find your characters  - or do they find you?

They find me, I guess. As I was saying in the last question, sometimes I’ll just sort of wonder about a what a person would be like if he or she had certain characteristics, certain problems, this sort of car, etc. Not knowing anything definite about this person in reality–since he or she *isn’t* in reality–forces me to create a fictional character that I can know in a satisfying, thorough way. I try to just really think about who this person is and what he/she would care about, and who would be the major players in his/her life and how would they interact, and how would they all react if, say, one of them got fired or they got a new puppy, or anything that seems to make sense in the context. And then that’s, somehow, a story.

Where do you think the short story fits in modern publishing?

It’s a beautiful genre to read, and a challenging one to write…but so are all the others. I think modern publishing needs to do as many different things as possible–neo-formalism and po-mo, comic and tragic, epic and short–in order to keep us on our toes as readers. And despite all the Chicken Little headlines about how short stories are hard to publish, we still see a new crop of brilliant collections every fall and spring. It’s a tough economy: everything’s hard to publish! Great TV shows don’t obviate our desire to watch movies. Though an individual might prefer one or the other, the best bet for a well-tuned brain is to sample everything.

We’re looking forward to The Big Dream. What’s next?

Thanks! It’s too soon to tell what spaghetti strand is actually going to stick to the wall–my pattern has seemed to go: failure, finished book, failure, finished book…so I definitely don’t want to make any promises! I am thinking in terms of a book, though–I like the scope of 200ish pages, though I don’t necessarily feel a need to sustain one single thing throughout it. That sounds a bit opaque: I mean I want to see what I can do with a book-length narrative that’s not a novel. I did a bit of that with The Big Dream — the stories are all linked by place and shared circumstances (all the characters work for or are somehow involved in the fortunes of a magazine company called Dream Inc.), and there’s a bit of a longer plot arc through the book. But I’d like to do more with the form of the linked short-story–I  feel like there’s a lot of possibilities I haven’t fully considered yet. But this is all pie-in-the-sky: I’ve been writing mainly non-fiction since I finished The Big Dream, which was only a couple months ago, anyway. Right now, I’m ok with not knowing what comes next!

Once, by Rebecca Rosenblum, is a collection of short stories that immediately grabs our attention. The stories are grounded in the reality of our daily humdrum, portraying the lives of people we’ve met, or walked past, most likely without noticing. A waitress at the local diner, skaters at the bus stop, Jamesy, the kid with earbuds but no Ipod, whose grandparents shower him with mixed tapes on his weekly visits.

Rosenblum takes the commonplace and unfolds it into full view. Take, for example, Chilly Girl. We identify because we’ve been there. We’ve been too cold in an over-air conditioned room. Or we’ve forgotten a sweater before going to the movie theatre. Who would guess that returning a pair of borrowed socks would put the character on the cusp of a new life?

In Words, the character, Colleen, is unsure of how to deal with her mother’s sudden death and equally sudden reunion with her part-time father. She goes to Bible study, the only way she can rebel against her pot-smoking, musician dad. “I want to say, I want to say, I want to say…” Rosenblum illustrates Colleen’s desperate attempt to communicate as she unleashes her words in the form of intellectual bathroom wall graffiti.

In The House on Elsbeth, Rosenblum successfully portrays the impotence that many of us feel – even if only for a moment – when faced with domestic violence. Housemates have gained cheap rent because of one roommate’s own encounter with violence. When they hear fighting on the other side of their townhouse wall, the housemates are careful of their roommate’s reaction, and stupefied by their own inaction.

“A single snarl of anger, braiding alto and tenor until the blow fell, again, again, again… ‘Does he own that place too?’ We all knew he was going to ask but actually mentioning the neighbors aloud was startling.”

The art of Rosenblum’s work is this: Something remains in your memory and you’re reminded of it later, whether it’s through graffiti in the movie theatre bathroom, skateboarders in a parking lot, or an arguing couple. Pho 99, a story which brings together two working class women, teenaged skateboarders, and a Vietnamese waitress, really hit me when I noticed for the first time in my hometown a similar restaurant, Pho 234. Complete with skateboarders in the parking lot.

The characters are people living in the moment. They don’t reach great heights or achieve big dreams, but they make do with what they have. Nor is there a clean-cut resolution. In her own poetic and precise style, Rosenblum sees the beauty in the everyday and tells the story of the everyday. Everyone, everywhere has a story.

Once, a collection of sixteen short stories, is the winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award and published by Biblioasis.

Bloodflower (US title: The Returning), by Christine Hinwood, is a fantastical tale of the people of Kayforl, and the town’s catalyst, Cam Attling.

Cam has returned alone from war in the foreign north, where Lord Ryuu, an Uplander, rules from his castle in Dorn-Lannet. No one in Kayforl is unaffected by Cam’s solo return. Their hero is much changed after his time in Uplander country. Besides missing his right arm, he has a dark side few can pierce.

The townsfolk badger him with questions about their missing loved ones, and ask why no other soldiers survived. He refuses to answer, pained by the memories of war. Pin, his sister, Graceful, his promised bride, and his best friend Ban, must deal with the suspicions surrounding Cam’s questionable reputation.

“ ‘And what did he see, do, all those years of fighting to come back half Uplander?’ Ardow was in very earnest. ‘Some say he fought for the Uplanders, not ours. Some say he killed all ours, else how did he come back so fine, horse and sword and all, Uplander in his ways?’ ”

Hinwood weaves complex story lines for the inhabitants of Kayforl. Pin, Graceful and Ban are brought together with other characters as Cam’s presence impacts them all. One of the most compelling scenes introduces young Acton, an orphaned boy whose father died in the wars. Acton stubbornly waits for days for an apology from Corban Farmer, the man who shot Acton’s dog for trespassing. Farmer, tormented by those who sympathize with Acton, has had the glass smashed out of his windows.

“The first light of day showed Corban Farmer walking about his yard. He kept bending down. Picking up glass, Acton realised, and felt a strange unease. Farmer paused and stared up at the ridge, at Acton. Anger crowded out any other feeling and, carried by it, Acton climbed atop the post and yelled, ‘You killed my dog, Corban Farmer!’ The man staggered, as if Acton’s words hit him bodily…”

Cam himself must face his enemy, the man who took his arm – but not his life – the Lord’s son, Gyaar. Restless, he returns to Dorn-Lannet in an effort to heal his psychological battle scars. Cam’s journey unwittingly bring together the two worlds of north and south, the Uplanders and Downlanders of Kayforl.

Hinwood creates a new world for her readers, exquisitely describing the customs, dress, and speech of the Uplanders and Downlanders. She illustrates each facet of their lives, such as details of the Lord’s home, and the Lady’s robes of silk. The reader follows as Pin grows into a young woman and her coming of age ceremony is another example of a society richly detailed and designed by Hinwood. Unique poetic, lyrical language sets the story in its mythical time and place.

Bloodflower is a riveting epic fantasy for all ages, that is well worth the read.

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Originally published in Australia by Allen and Unwin Press, Bloodflower will be released in the US in April of 2011 under the title The Returning. Preorder your copy today!

That Paris Year by Joanna Biggar (Bethesda, Maryland : Alan Squire Publisher, 2010) is a novel that recounts the adventures of five southern California ‘Junior-Year-Abroad’ female college students (dare I say ‘co-eds’) in Paris during academic year 1962—1963 while attending the Sorbonne’s Studies in French Language and Culture (Cours de Civilization Française) designed for visiting foreign students.

In the Prologue, our narrator, J.J., is one of the group that includes fellow students Jocelyn, Melanie, Gracie, and Evelyn. In 1972, a decade later, as commencement speaker for her alma mater, J.J. attempts to describe to her audience the “virtues of going abroad” by reading from letters received from Jocelyn, her roommate at college and in Paris, and the others. Reasons given include adventure, improving language skills, searching for freedom, desire, love, and other such platitudes as J.J. opines. Gracie’s wit cuts to the chase: three words “for better or worse” capture her reason for travel abroad: liberty, equality, maternity. But it is Melanie’s trenchant observation that provides the undertone of adventure, romance, and a theme of the novel itself, which is a familiar quotation from Pascal: Le Coeur a les raisons que la raison ne connait point / the heart has its reasons which reason itself knows not. (Pp. 12, 314)

Following a night of revelry at a masquerade party in a posh neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the ensuing Santa Ana forest fires that destroyed several homes, our five members of the college’s Women of l’Ancienne Maison Française decided to go to Paris on the (imaginary) ship Jeanne d’Arc, debarking at Le Havre then by rail to the City of Light: “How disparate and how different our lives were to be one from the other was clear from the moment we set foot in the Gare Saint-Lazare. The beautiful webs of Paris, full of irony, contradiction, glorious seductions, and unforeseen despair, would soon enmesh us all, and were already being spun.” (p. 82).

And this web will include experiences of lodging in a crowded, dismal, cold apartment in the Latin Quarter, discovery of French food and wine and cafes and the disparate odors of neighborhoods while walking about the city, and learning the language and ways of the French. Or, at least, of Parisians. We are familiar with some of the Parisian iconic urban geography: the Boulevard St-Michel, St-Germain des Pres, the Boulevard Raspail, Café de Flore, Café des Deux Magots, Cluny. And farther afield, Montmartre and nearby Pigalle to the north, and the Luxemburg Gardens and Montparnasse to the south, the Place de la Concorde, Avenue des Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, and the Tour Eiffel “on its monstrous, ghastly industrial legs, casting the huge shadow of an iron spider” westward. Immediately across the river Seine is the Louvre museum and on the Ile de la Cite, Notre Dame Cathedral. The ‘web’ is conveniently tied together by the Metropolitan (Metro) rail transit system.

The web includes as well the music of Edith Piaf blaring from café juke boxes and the new wave cinema of Godard and Truffaut. We can see actress Catherine Deneuve “going right down Saint-Germain [looking] like Sainte Genevieve [patron saint of Paris]. Twentieth century version.” (p. 300) The cinematic epic Lawrence of Arabia is popular as is shopping at the Galleries LaFayette store. We encounter epigrammatic truths of Arthur Rimbaud and Blaise Pascal and the existential ennui of Albert Camus and absurdity of Eugene Ionesco. And our students are surrounded by the political haze of the just-ended Franco-Algerian War and the just begun Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) and its ramifications for France, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

The intertwined amorous and academic events of that year in Paris are comic and nostalgic. Such as Gracie’s encounter with roommate Camille, from the provinces, according to ‘Madame,’ who rents rooms to students, and Camille’s defense of the hamburger (‘amburg-air) as a delicacy when prepared at Le Drugstore on the Champs-Elysees. But not a true American dish as the turkey! Gracie then and there decides to cook Thanksgiving dinner and invite all her friends to chez Madame (p. 144). Or, Jocelyn’s encounter with existential Sorbonne professor of American Studies, Alain Saint-Georges, his hand on her thigh while both enjoy onion soup with cheese in the ‘worker’s’ cafe Au Ventre du Chochon (pig’s stomach) in Les Halles, the central market place of Paris (p. 169). Or, Melanie’s examination at the Sorbonne by sympathetic Monsieur le Professeur Lapierre and intimidating Madame le Professeur Grimbaud whose questions (what is the importance of the Massif Central, and what do the dates 800 and 1800 have in common?) require mountains of reading (p. 214). Later on, after Jocelyn and J.J. have left Paris for Marseille and the south of France, they receive in the mail their diplomas from the Sorbonne, elegantly printed documents that would “justify and proclaim all that seemed unreal and ready to recede into the uncertain terrain of memory.”(p. 305)

The grey (‘grisaille’—p. 270), cement skies of Paris give way to the full sun of Marseilles and the Cote d’Azur of Provence, Avignon, Nice, Arles, and even a jaunt to Venice. For our narrator, J.J., it is an opportunity to find connection with her grandmother, ‘Gran’ (for Grand’Mere) and “to understand why in some ways Gran’s world seems so much closer to me, even though I am still a stranger here, than my mother’s and her passion for junk and her West L.A. ways.” (p. 323) We recall Gran at the beginning of the story during the Santa Ana fires and now we learn more of her roots growing up in one of the hilltop villages of the Vaucluse in the shadow of Mount Ventoux and fields of lavender, the scent of which is especially noticeable during the fires whipped up by the Mistral wind.

Unlike their arrival at Le Havre aboard the Jeanne d’Arc, our adventuresome five’s departure is “scattered, separate, a quiet disappearing.” (p. 309) Yet, upon her return to Marseilles, J.J., after nearly a year’s travel in
Paris and elsewhere, realizes she has come “full circle into the lives of the others again, the demoiselles who had been so much a part of me that I hardly know where their lives ended and mine began. By the time I left Marseilles for the last time, we were inseparable.” (p. 447) And as in the beginning of our story with the reading of letters from her fellow students at the commencement ceremony, J.J. toward the end of that year in Paris shares with the reader letters from her old friends.

Our narrator in The Epilogue realizes that some of those young students may have missed classes due to J.J.’s recollections about travel abroad. J.J. ends the evening’s dinner with her mesmerized listeners with an admonition: Evelyn’s Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not turn into thy mother. (p. 459) while at the same time saying to them that it is okay to turn into one’s grandmother (we think of ‘Gran) and leaves it at that without further comment. Our story ends in southern California where it began with Evelyn’s wedding, “Thursday, the twenty-first of November nineteen hundred and sixty three. . .” the day before the assassination of President Kennedy, and the world would never again be quite the same.

That Paris Year is, for this reviewer, a souvenir of a golden
age, of cherished memories. While J.J. and her ‘vielles copines’ were struggling with the Sorbonne’s Cours de Civilization Française and the agony of romantic attractions, I was a Freshman at the American College in Paris in the 1962—1963 inaugural class of a hundred American students who, a few months earlier, had just graduated from mostly US military high schools in Germany and France. I came to the ACP from Orleans American High School along with two other OHS graduates. The College (now the American University of Paris) was housed in the American Church, 65 Quai d’Orsay, VIIe, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and some classes were taken in the American Cathedral, Avenue George V, VIIIe, a ten-minute walk over Pont d’Alma from the Church. The College’s library was on the Champs Elysees not far from Le Drugstore and I resided as a demi-pensionnaire with a French family in the Rue Marbeuf off the Champs Elysees, a stone’s throw from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Metro Station.

I may have sat next to Jocelyn in the Theatre Ionesco watching the Bald Soprano, or across from Melanie in the basement of Le Chat Qui Peche listening to the Jackie McLean Quartet. In a station of the Metro, I saw apparitions of Gracie and Evelyn, faces in the crowd, petals on a wet, black bough, to share Ezra Pound’s fascination with such images. And as for J.J., I am sure she often accompanied me on our walks about the city in that Paris year.

Although I’m not generally a non-fiction reader, Robin Meloy Goldsby’s Piano Girl–more a collection of snapshots than straight up memoir–is a bright and fascinating peek into the life of a professional piano player. Beginning with Goldby’s teenage introduction to the biz–via a job in a bar on Nantucket, where Goldsby was paid in a mixture of food, cash, and advice–we skate through her time playing venues as diverse as lounges, high end hotels, and roadside motor inns.

Some of Piano Girl’s stories are sweet, such as Goldsby’s time connecting with her unborn daughter while experimenting with her own compositions in a cozy lounge setting; others are outright disturbing, as with her frighteningly detailed sketch of the time she was stalked to and from her job at a ritzy hotel in New York. Despite the occasional anecdote worthy of an early I Love Lucy (abandoning her post at the piano to Heimlich an elderly patron without teeth), Goldsby’s narrative never slips into the macabre or ridiculous.

Goldsby’s prose is rich and vivid (particularly for a collection of such short stories), but her true strength is character work. Even the most mundane seeming figures are lively and well-drawn, while the more, er, unique never cross the line from light and amusing into caricature or the grotesque. Nor is Goldsby a name-dropper; her writing about a friend and restroom attendant running a glamorous boutique out of the disabled stall in a well-to-do hotel is just as detailed as those portions about her associations with several big names (including the beloved “Mister” Fred Rogers), if not more so. But while the middle of Goldsby’s narrative is consumed with philosophical musings, the latter third of the book segues into a cohesive story, carrying us through a second courtship, marriage, and kids (Goldsby’s first marriage is mentioned in a fleeting, two-story kind of way), to a happily ever after touring castles in Europe.

Not all of the stories are gems, though. In places, particularly in the middle of the book, Goldsby loses her sense of plot, giving into an already strong tendency to wax poetic about the piano, falling into long, rambling ruminations about music more at home in a collection of essays. Here, her language stalls, too, stumbling into a pedestrian rhythm not quite in tune (pun intended) with the rest of the book. Other stories are a little too “dear readerish,” with Goldsby’s voice overshadowing the funnier aspects of an event (as in the Heimlich story mentioned above). Yet even as she missteps, the voice of the book is open, friendly, and honest, inviting the reader in for a cup of hot chocolate and a chat, and it’s hard to be frustrated with the book’s shortcomings for long.

One of the reasons I don’t read non-fiction, and memoir in particular, is because it’s so easy for a memoirist to slip into flights of ego and self-praise. At no point, though, does Goldsby toot her own horn; the book is as much as list of her insecurities as it is her triumphs, and the candor therein is immediately captivating. Better still is Goldsby’s refreshing lack of perfectionism. Though clearly a skilled pianist, she focuses more on the joy of music, piano, and people than she does performance, making the music world more accessible, and less frightening to the uninitiated.

Open-hearted and easy to settle into, Piano Girl isn’t, on the surface, a profound book. And yet, there is such a wealth of life tucked away in the pages, life in motion, and emotion, that as a whole, the book does take on a kind of profundity, like a road map or cheat sheet on how, at bottom, we’re all human, and that we all deserve a good laugh.

–
Piano Girl: Lessons in Life, Music, and the Perfect Blue Hawaiian by Robin Meloy Goldsby, Backbeat Books, published April 1, 2005, 280 pages.

Joshua Ferris’ second novel, The Unnamed, is a book best read by daylight. It’s a book that has to be read piecemeal, chunked into digestible bites, partially because of the disturbing plot, partially because of the purple prose.

Tim Farnsworth is a lawyer at a firm reminiscent of Boston Legal’s Crane, Poole, & Schmidt – it’s a less farcical, more real world take, complete with kinky fetishes and ass-kissing wannabes looking for an in to the upper echelons. Forced to leave due to what, we slowly discover, is a pathological need to walk, the book chronicles Tim’s frustrations with his condition, bouncing from the shock of a relapse to normality and work, to a second relapse and a pathetic kind of acceptance all within the space of 313 pages.

Throughout, Tim and the separate, third person narrator take turns assuring the reader that Tim’s condition is a disease, a purely physical illness with no mental component. But the constant reminders soon take on a doth-protest-too-much feel, and I found myself looking for signs of Tim’s psychological issues, paying less and less attention to the more central “see how illness can affect a family” theme.

Vivid descriptions of weather and feet abound; there are only so many ways an author can write about walking before the text becomes trite, the metaphors overused. The third person telling creates a distance that’s hard to get past, making sympathy, let alone empathy, a difficult ask of even the most compassionate reader. Add to that Tim’s overwhelming self-pity, followed by a period of almost ridiculous self-sacrifice, and you have a story so ripe it almost makes light of Jane’s alcoholism and Becka’s struggle with an (intentionally?) unnamed eating disorder.

The world of the book is small; despite Tim’s ever-increasing journeys, we remain firmly planted in his head, catching at half-formed realizations and internal philosophical discussions which make little sense by the end of the book, some of which are almost evangelical in nature. Worse, halfway through, Tim crosses from unrelatable to unlikeable; were it not for Jane and Becka, I probably would not have finished the book.

There’s much wrong with Ferris’ latest effort, but there are moments of true beauty and suffering, often entwined, throughout the story. Jane and Becka keeping vigil at Tim’s bedside, trying to distract him as he rattles his restraints; Tim’s admission that not knowing, not having a name for his condition is worse than the condition itself; the moment that passes between Becka and her father when she discovers him at one of her shows. These fragments suggest a deeper narrative, a portrait of a family struggling with guilt and depression in a way familiar to many who’ve been touched by long term illness. Such moments, however, stand out for their stark telling, heightened by an already overly-emotional story.

Despite my oh-so-many issues with The Unnamed, I am glad I read it. The story, stripped down to its core, is a haunting one, with a PSA, “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your kids are?” tick that still occasionally eats into my nighttime hours, keeping me awake well past midnight.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde, Viking Adult, published Dec. 29, 2009 by Viking Adult. 400 pages.

There’s something compelling about a Jasper Fforde novel, something that sucks you into the story, tossing you along until the end when it finally grinds you up and spits you out before you even know what’s happened. Fforde is a true satirist, not just pulling apart the way we tell stories, but pulling apart accepted critical conventions and putting them back together again, reinterpreting criticism and analysis from the inside out.

A clever satire set in a dystopic/post-apocalpyptic future, Shades of Grey conjures a disturbing new world with a society defined by color perception, and ruled by a fearsomely rule-abiding Colortocracy. Prefects are appointed according to their perception values; Greys, unable to see any color at all, are a largely ignored working class. When Eddie Russett plays a prank on a Prefect’s son, he’s exiled to East Carmine, a town on the Outer Fringes, to learn humility–and conduct a chair census. (The accepted number of chairs per person? 1.8.) An untested Red with a Chromaticologist, or color-doctor father, Eddie is an average, hard-working member of society on a half-promise to Constance Oxblood, the very eligible daughter of a high-ranking Red family. But the more time Eddie spends in the Outer Fringes, the more he realizes the world is not as neat and tidy as he thought–particularly when it comes to Jane, a Grey with a tendency to clobber people who compliment her charmingly retrousse nose.

Ridiculousness in the extreme is something of a catchphrase for Fforde. In 2006‘s The Fourth Bear, he uses, amongst other things, Somme World, a realistic theme park (complete with simulated shattered corpses) based on the Battle of the Somme to make a statement about war. But Shades of Grey moves beyond the simplicity of a war-inspired theme park. This world, fully realized, is a stark, near-colorless landscape filled with carnivorous trees, megafauna, and giant swans. Spoons, a casualty of progressive Leap Backs, are no longer manufactured, and have become a hot commodity on the black market. Funny, disturbing remnants of our time–the last rabbit, risk maps, statues of characters from the Wizard of Oz–are wildly misinterpreted, yet in a very plausible way, a way that made me cringe with something between horror and delight. The very fine amounts of detail, however, hide a few glaring holes, like the scarcity of information about the Previous and the Something That Happened. While Fforde’s glossing over the particulars is skillful–his allegorical exploration of colors/political theory, much like the earlier Madeleine L’Engle book, A Wrinkle in Time (remember the grayness of the world Meg visits when rescuing her father?)–the lack of Big Picture information hinders the story.

Perhaps more interesting is Fforde’s supporting cast–Tommo, Lucy, and Jane are well-sketched, with clear motivations and believable, relatable personal baggage. Eddie himself is less interesting, more of a not-quite invisible tour guide leading the reader through a mixed bag of swans, megafauna, spoon hunts, and enforced–often extreme and ridiculous–societal mores. When Eddie does have the odd moment of growth, it’s an epiphanic second with little prior development, less of an aha! moment and more of a groan. The writing is better than his previous novels, with no forced punnery, and dialogue and scenes flow naturally, making it easy to get lost in the story, though there is no clear sense of time. In many ways, Fforde’s latest novel is a work of genius. It turns accepted tropes on their heads, deftly shows the absurdity of racism and the color divide etc. etc. And yet, like one of Shakespeare’s best beloved heroes, it has a fatal flaw: there is no real plot.

Reader: No real plot? How can you say that?
Me: Um, easily. I mean, I just did, right?
Reader: But–but it’s a book! A Jasper Fforde book! There must be chases and criminals and a triumph of good over evil! That’s how all Fforde books go!
Me: Not this one. Sorry. I mean, there is a plot, but it’s not much of a plot, really just a foil, a thinly veiled draw card, something to get you inside the book and force your head into its pages for a while until the insanity takes hold and you can’t do anything but finish the story. It’s a bit Seussian that way.

Shades of Grey, while mocking literary device (like all Fforde novels), treats plot–a prince, if not the king/queen/emperor of storytelling–as a mere device, an excuse to meander around a dystopic world in an Umberto Eco-esque manner. Just like Seuss in Green Eggs and Ham, Fforde hangs all on, as Mr. Creosote would have it, a wafer-thin plot, then plays with words, making the reader work for every nugget of information and hoping it is enough.

Although all the details necessary to understand the final revelations are introduced throughout the story, they’re handled in a subtle, almost sly way, presented as trivial detail and tricking the reader into a certain unwarranted sense of security. Feeling more like a set up for another story, the ending falls flat on its arse, particularly since everything is neatly tied up, but only just neatly, like a child’s first attempt at shoelaces. Unsurprising, since Shades of Grey is the first in a projected trilogy. That said, the ending, though intensely unsatisfying, is chew-worthy, and could keep the deeper reader in food for thought for quite a long time.

Despite its faults, Shades of Grey is a worthwhile read, perhaps more so than Fforde’s other novels. Though Eddie’s realizations border on the banal, the world and its supporting cast provide a funny, thought-provoking break from reality while at the same time making life, even with its many frustrations, all the more appealing.