That May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes hits the ground hard and running from the opening pages will let you know quickly if you have the intestinal fortitude and heart to continue. The book launches immediately into the first and most visceral of a series of insanely horrible things that happen to a family in less than a year. The sequence of woe is so over the top at times that it seems like a macabre, Tarantinoesque cartoon of violence and perversity. Running parallel to the gutwrenching but – it must be said – often darkly hilarious mayhem, parts of May We Be Forgiven are also lyrically wonderful testaments to spirit, optimism, resilience and forging new family structures out of the ashes of old ones.

For professor, Nixon scholar and nebbish Harold Silver, the old family structure consisted chiefly of his childless marriage with Claire. Rapid-fire tragedy rips asunder the lives of Harry’s brother George, a prominent TV executive, George’s wife Jane and their pre-teen children Nate and Ashley. It falls to profoundly traumatized, reluctant and harried Harry to reconstitute a new and viable life for his niece and nephew. Along the way, he falls sweetly and deeply in love with the children, and learns to appreciate and respect a cast of eccentrics this newly minted family draws to itself along the way.

Homes has a love for her flawed, battered, prickly characters reminiscent of Nicola Barker (whose singular novels I’ve rhapsodized about here and here). Homes also wields bracing social commentary in a fashion reminiscent of Tom Wolfe at his best. At the same time that she’s pointedly criticizing everything from Internet sex to consumer culture to the correctional system, Homes also casts a sympathetic gaze (albeit with a gently skeptical cocked eyebrow) at caring for prematurely overly mature children and aging parents. She poignantly captures the conundrum that nowadays, we seem most “connected” with strangers, and most estranged when we’re with our ostensible loved ones:

“There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.”

In an interview in late 2012, Homes explained with fervour what was clearly her aim in May We Be Forgiven, not to mention the riveting journey of Harry and his evolving family and sense of family:

“I want to push back against the pessimism. I can’t bear to accept that everything is basically going to shit. And everything is: the economy, the family, the social structures, the class divide, the political process in this country, global warming, random violence from terrorism. Unless you want to live in denial, I feel that you have to train yourself to find hope. The logical response is to get incredibly depressed, but what’s the point of that? Especially if you’ve got children.”(1)

May We Be Forgiven will rattle and possibly repel the more faint of heart reader. If one can ride out the rollercoaster dips in what feels like a century’s rather than a year’s worth of trauma, it’s well worth it. Even at its most horrific, May We Be Forgiven is satisfyingly redemptive as well as an irresistible read.

Notes:

1. AM Homes on her new novel May We Be Forgiven
The acclaimed novelist AM Homes talks about her latest dark satire of 21st-century America
by Richard Grant, The Telegraph

See also:

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes – review
by Harvey Freedenberg in Bookreporter.com

Dear Life, like every new Alice Munro collection, is like returning for what will be a wonderful visit with a cherished, wise and quietly wicked good friend. Does it feel that way even if you are discovering Munro for the first time? I suspect it does, although for this reader, that firsthand feeling is now many books ago. This renewed visit with Munro is possibly my most cherished of all.

For good reason, it’s rare when an Alice Munro book gets something resembling an indifferent, much less a bad review. One smartypants sentence perhaps doesn’t count as a review of any ilk, but yes, trains and train schedules do appear a lot in this collection, and they literally and symbolically link the stories. Much of Dear Life is about arrivals and departures of all kinds and, with gentle perversity that characters often stoically withstand, how life’s moments and milestones don’t always materialize to an expected schedule.

Once again, with crisp but not heartless precision, Munro cultivates a rich undercurrent beneath every seemingly benign exterior. Sometimes, that undercurrent is more perceptible to the reader than the protagonist. However, that doesn’t make us love or admire any less the oblivious but resilient bride-to-be or the cheerfully determined woman who doesn’t know she’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s but acknowledges that others might be fighting it and should be accommodated accordingly and compassionately.

“She likes how the lattice provides a touch of fantasy. Public buildings have been changing in the past few years, just as private houses have. The relentless, charmless look – the only one permitted in her youth – has disappeared. Here she parks in front of a bright dome that has a look of welcome, of cheerful excess. Some people would find it fakey, she supposes, but isn’t it the very thing you would want? All that glass must cheer the spirits of the old people, or even, perhaps, of some people not so old but just off kilter.”

Leave it to Munro to save the most powerful impact for almost the last page. Whether you were convinced already or not, the eponymous story “Dear Life” (part of a “finale” sequence that Munro suggests is autobiographical) proves that those very words form not a placid, sentimental phrase, but are fused into something utterly urgent, even harsh, often hard won, always vital. Based on what might have been a misunderstanding, filtered and interpreted through the fog of years, mutual unstated grievances, tenuous memories, Munro believes that her mother once rescued her from strange but real danger:

“Perhaps that daughter, grown and distant, was the one she was looking for in the baby carriage. Just after my mother had grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life.”

Again, Munro’s deceptive economy of expression leaves a potent, moving, unforgettable impression. Let’s hope it’s not her last, but treasure it if it is.

See also:

• Recalling Lives Altered, in Ways Vivid and Untidy
  (The New York Times)
• Dear Life by Alice Munro – review
  Lauded Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro gives tantalising glimpses of her own life in this fine collection
  (The Guardian / The Observer)
• Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137
  Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson
  (The Paris Review)

Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home opens with a careering, hands-off-the-steering-wheel plunge down a perilous road. You’re given little opportunity from the outset to catch your breath from there to the framing repetitions of this same ride towards the end of this slender, gripping novel.

The story’s chronology commences with the startling arrival of an interloper and the even more startling invitation to the interloper to stay, amidst a group of vividly unhappy vacationers sharing a villa on the French Riviera. That intruder, Kitty Finch, makes her entrance as a mistaken dead body in the villa swimming pool. She proceeds via wiles combining Edie Sedgwick, Sylvia Plath and a mermaid to seduce or unsettle all of poet Joe Jacobs, his war correspondent wife Isabel, their teenaged daughter Nina, the Jacobs’ guests Mitchell and Laura, villa house staff Jurgen and elderly villa neighbour Dr. Madeleine Sheridan.

That Kitty claims to be, among many things, a botanist – albeit one with a particular fascination for beautiful, poisonous plants – fits perversely well with the hothouse confluence of characters with relationship, financial, emotional and psychological problems, and problems relative in some cases to lack or excess of age and experience. She also claims to be a poet, obsessed with getting Jacobs to read one poem of hers that could hold something potent and revelatory for both of them – and how that is or isn’t revealed is also perverse.

For a book so lush in imagery – veering from plants and foliage to weaponry to water to real and toy animals – the overall effect of the book is still spare and spacious. There is much room to wonder what just happened and what will happen next between various troubled couplings and encounters, most of them provoked directly or indirectly by that maybe uninvited, maybe dangerously desired guest with the name combining predator and prey.

You won’t know until the very end if any of this largely unsympathetic but still fascinating cast of characters manage to swim home safely. As the story and voices linger long after you’ve finished this slim novel, you’ll continue to wonder if, in fact, you assessed correctly who did swim home … and even what is home, and if perhaps some found it instead by letting go and slipping under the surface.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing an advance copy of Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy.

See also:

September 20, 2012
Deborah Levy: ‘It’s a page-turner about sorrow’
Booker-nominated writer Deborah Levy talks to Kate Kellaway about her dazzling novel and why repression is more interesting than depression

Deborah Levy speaks to a Waterstones interviewer at Waterstones Piccadilly bookstore about her story, Black Vodka, and novel, Swimming Home.

NW is not Zadie Smith’s best. However, it shows a writer at her finest and bravest exploring diverse terrain and experimenting with different methods and vocabularies with which to present those explorations. That makes Smith’s examination of intersecting worlds and lives in the northwest corner of contemporary London a still fascinating if sometimes frustrating read.

NW focuses – as much as the intentionally disjointed storytelling and multiple narrative voices overlaid with a range of stylistic syncopations can be said to focus – on the lives of two women who have known each other since a fateful childhood encounter: red-haired Leah Hanwell, a charitable lottery administrator of Irish descent and Natalie Blake (who selectively abandons her birth name of Keisha), a lawyer of Jamaican descent. Both struggle and flirt with ambition, identity and personal reinvention against a backdrop of societal and economic changes happening, at times very literally, on their doorsteps.

Smith propels the story with varying degrees of success via a carousel of styles and formats from stream of consciousness narration to numbered and labelled lists and paragraphs to even a touch of concrete poetry. In the end, plotlines dangle or simply deflate. What endures for this reader is that the two central characters seem able to pick up their sometimes suspended conversations and relationship, and continue caring for each other through revelations, attempted transformations and missteps. The foundation of their friendship is grounded on a recognition of the essential persons under the layers of time and circumstance. Likewise, this reader will wait for and seek out this author’s future literary transformations, recognizing the essential craft and character at the foundation of whatever she attempts next.

See also:

NW by Zadie Smith – review
Adam Mars-Jones finds himself stumbling on the cracks in Zadie Smith’s new novel
The Guardian

Zadie Smith’s new novel is filled with voices from everywhere
by Lisa Moore
The Globe and Mail

Wielding deceptively simple, straightforward prose, Alix Ohlin draws us into the labyrinthine lives and emotions of a set of connected characters who spiral out and back on their own journeys in Inside. The book’s opening scene, where a woman skiing alone literally stumbles across a man who has failed to commit suicide in snowy seclusion, draws the reader in as swiftly and intimately as the characters’ unusual collision.

From that breathtaking start, Ohlin takes the reader through the complicated lives of Grace, a perhaps overly dedicated therapist; John, a traumatized former international aid worker; Annie, a troubled teenager turned aspiring actress; and Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband and a therapist himself who has worked in Canada’s Far North. As the overall story moves back and forth in time and from Montreal to Iqaluit to New York City to Hollywood to Rwanda, Ohlin maintains a steady hold on the characters and their intersecting paths, to offer the reader an enticingly, compulsively readable experience.

At the recent International Festival of Authors, Ohlin took part in a combined reading and group discussion with her fellow Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist nominees. (In this season of literary awards, Inside is also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.) In an elucidating exchange with discussion moderator Carol Off, Ohlin observed that Inside connects its characters through unanticipated acts of kindness. It’s a touching and potent way of encapsulating the entire book. Inside strikingly balances the precious gift of strangers reaching out to help strangers against the bittersweet conundrum of those nearest us and most beloved often being the greatest strangers and enigmas of all. This reader suspects that beautiful dilemma will continue to haunt and intrigue the most.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of Inside, by Alix Ohlin.

See also:

• Alix Ohlin official web site

• On Not Letting Go: An Interview with Alix Ohlin (Fiction Writers Review)

Swallow by Theanna Bischoff is a lush exercise in pairings, forged and broken, and multiplicities, often layers and layers of them. That this rich layering doesn’t become affected or overpowering is testament to Bischoff’s ability to keep the effects balanced against the clear, emotionally resonant account of a young woman coping with the sudden loss of a beloved sister and the unravelling around her of other relationships and support.

The story of Darcy and her younger sister Carly is as unsettling yet infectious as Carly’s bubbly, off-kilter personality. Separated by six years, older Darcy moves steadily towards comparative maturity and security from high school to moving away to university and career, establishing connections outside her family. Carly tries to embark on her life’s path, but it’s an uneven and fraught start, to say the least. Carly’s youthful wackiness and unpredictability – endearing to some, infuriating to others, such as Darcy and Carly’s stepfather – grows into recklessness and to behaviours possibly indicative of clinical attention deficit and bipolar issues. Darcy is wrenched between her love and concern for her sister and her desire to forge her own life – until she is abruptly and cruelly relieved of that dilemma by her sister’s suicide.

Of what, then, is Swallow so lavishly composed to both frame and cushion this harsh central tale? The matryoshka doll conceit of the old nursery rhyme “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” not only contributes to the book’s multi-faceted title, but stitches the book together structurally and thematically (who is swallowing whom at each unhappy turn?) as well as hearkening to a childhood whimsy that Darcy and Carly perhaps never really enjoyed.

Recurring images of and references to broken and injured bodies, lost or possibly stolen children, abandoned children and families, absent and surrogate fathers and most pervasively, twins and partners – some potential matches, some comfortably or uneasily together, others sadly separated – all echo the troubled and troubling lives that Darcy, Carly and their frustratingly enigmatic mother navigate with diverging degrees of success. Darcy and Carly’s surrogate father, a gentle widower nicknamed Papi, rescues stray cats to which he gives the names of Toronto subway stations. The subway is the literal and figurative undercurrent of Swallow, acting as both a connector and a dramatic element of disconnection. (And again, that title … Darcy reclaims the subway but doesn’t allow it to swallow her in the end.)

The most potent symbol playing on that ever-present title is only mentioned once:

“Did you know, Darcy, that swallows mate for life?”
… “Maybe you’ve seen people with tattoos of swallows before. It actually dates back to sailors, who often had to go away for a long journey. Swallows symbolized hope for their safe return home, back to those they loved. And if someone didn’t survive, if a person drowned at sea, legend said that swallows would find the person’s soul and carry it up to Heaven.”

In the end, the dizzying multiplicities are stripped down to simple singulars – the most poignant that of one parent and one child, soldiering on. That ultimate resolution perhaps seem all the more stark, but also simple, courageous and even hopeful, because it emerges from so many complex, almost suffocating layers to get there.

Thank you to NeWest Press for providing a review copy of Swallow, by Theanna Bischoff.