Literature

Faulkner is one of those writers who makes me feel woefully underqualified when I attempt to write about his work. Faulkner insisted that Go Down, Moses is a fragmented novel made up of related short-stories, what we here in Canada would most likely call a short-story cycle (indeed, the first edition of the book was published by Random House as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories). No matter Faulkner’s own opinion (which anyway I didn’t know until after the fact) I read Go Down, Moses as a short-story cycle. Any discussion of Faulkner’s work must necessarily deal with issues of race and family, both of which are central to this book. The various stories relate the history of the McCaslin family from a time not long before the American Civil War until roughly 1940. “Was”, which opens the book, can be a difficult story to read given that Faulkner treats… Continue Reading →

My home town is in this novel! That’s right folks, Dryden, Ontario makes a brief cameo appearance, in all its Boréal glory. Alright, since I’ve already mentioned Dryden, I should start out by saying there are two things that bothered me about this book (pet peeve sort of things, not hugely important, but they got under my skin), and it’s better to get them out of the way before dealing with the more important parts of the novel. The first thing is distance. There’s a fictional Ontario town in The Killing Circle called Whitley. Judging from the landmarks (West of Thunder Bay, with Dryden being the next town on the Trans-Canada, etc), it should probably be roughly where the real-life town of Ignace is. Pyper describes this town as about a half a day’s drive from cottage country. Double that, and he’d be closer to accuracy. Folk in Southern Ontario… Continue Reading →

The novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing” (Emily Dickinson, right?), at just over a hundred pages, is obviously intended to be the centerpiece of this collection. Unfortunately, it’s by no means the strongest story in the book. Ultimately it’s a tragic tale, but it is—or at least I think it’s supposed to be—more of a comedy for the first fifty or sixty pages. It’s actually quite a bit like an episode of The Office or Arrested Development, in the sense that the majority of the humour comes from paying excruciatingly close attention to the socially awkward. And excruciating is the word. The premise is a good one: misfit teenagers entertain themselves by collecting kitschy souvenirs autographed by obscure, washed-up celebrities, with hilarity and tragedy ensuing. It was just too much to stay with for so many pages. It wasn’t that I got bored by Dave and Todd manipulating Murray Mortenson for… Continue Reading →

I have not always been especially kind to the late David Foster Wallace in these metaphorical pages—I believe respect for the dead (and the living as well) requires both honesty and full disclosure—but those comments were always in regard to his non-fiction, and today we are dealing exclusively with his short fiction, of which I am a long-time fan. I’d read two of the pieces collected here before, the phenomenal “Mister Squishy” and “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” both in McSweeney’s. The obvious place to start a discussion of Oblivion would be with “Mister Squishy,” as it is quite clearly a DFW signature piece, and overwhelmingly verbose and precise account of a seemingly innocent and quite banal but actually bizarre series of events. I won’t say any more about it, though, as Mr. Beattie has already covered it quite well. The other story in the collection that could be… Continue Reading →

I hate to say it (you have no idea how much, I assure you), but I was not particularly impressed by this book. “We Miss You,” the remarkable piece Mr. Beattie wrote about in August was one of the few bright lights for me in this collection. The kind of work that so impressed me in Samuel Johnson is Indignant, the one or two sentence prose-poems, the meditations and koans, often seemed little more than filler here. The longer works, like “Cape Cod Diary” and “Helen and Vi,” length not being one of Davis’ strong points to begin with, seemed to collapse under their own weight like dying stars. Another story I disliked, and this is most likely due almost exclusively to my own prejudices as a reader, since I find that Diane Schoemperlen has one or two stories that I dislike for similar reasons, was “What You Learn About… Continue Reading →