Baker and Van Booy: Two reviews

I have a few more books I would like to review before the end of the year; there are some that I've really enjoyed and want to share before year end and all the wrap-up that comes along with that. Plus I will be putting up my Challenge post very soon! I have quite a few challenges that I want to participate in next year, though never as many as Eva dares to do. :) Completely unrelated to the value of each of these books but kind of randomly strange - they are both 256 pages long.

The first that I liked a lot was the short story collection Love begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy. [HarperCollins, c2009. 256 p.]

I read it a while ago, but didn't know how to talk about it -- it is so fabulous! It's a collection of five short stories, set in different places around the world. The first story opens in Quebec, a place close to my heart, though it doesn't stay there for the entire length of the tale. Van Booy captures the fragile emotional states of his characters so well, and encapsulates a whole life in a moment. His writing is elegant and accomplished and enjoyable to read. My favourite story had to be "The Missing Statues", in which a man who sees an empty spot in a row of statues while in Rome breaks down, weeping, recalling a childhood moment in Las Vegas. The images from that story have stayed with me, and the childhood emotion was powerful and moving. I enjoyed this collection greatly - but wish I would have posted about it sooner! (I should also mention that this collection won the Frank O'Connor prize for short fiction, a prestigious award worth quite a bit. Nice work.)

Other views:

Gavin at Page 247 found it "dreamy and lyrical ... perfect for dark rainy afternoons curled up with a hot cup of tea."

Caribousmom says that "Van Booy’s prose is a bit like listening to a complicated musical performance – at once beautiful and elusive."

Bookfool over at Bookfoolery & Babble states that "I don't think I'm ever going to have any trouble at all with that promise I made to myself to read absolutely everything the man ever writes."

Another book I enjoyed recently was Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist. [Simon & Schuster, c2009. 256 p.]

It features Paul Chowder, a poet who has been given the job of writing an introduction to a poetry anthology -- but can not do it. He has a terrible case of writers block; it is so bad that his girlfriend has left him because of his inability to do anything. The book consists of a long disquisition on first, his own personal situation, but secondly and perhaps most importantly, on the state of poetry itself. Paul Chowder is a lecturer, and he gives us lessons throughout the book on rhyme, meter, the horrors of enjambment, the role of music in poetry and so on. It is utterly captivating, and unexpectedly funny. The narrator's voice is entertaining and absolutely convincing, and there were so many really funny bits that I read it with great enjoyment, finding it hard to put down between reading times. It is a quick read but also one with some elements to ponder, and if you like poetry at all I think you will really love this. If you aren't a big poetry fan, you will also enjoy it, as the character of Paul Chowder and his descriptions of the poetry world have enough drama and humour to keep your interest. Will his girlfriend come back to him? Will he ever finish the introduction he is supposed to be writing? These questions lead us forward but are almost incidental to the wave of poetic philosophy that Paul is sharing with us throughout. A wonderful book that I am recommending to many people!

And here is quite a wonderful essay by John Crowley on this book!

Happiness Economics

Happiness Economics / Shari Lapeña
Victoria, BC: Brindle & Glass, c2011.
240 p.

I read Lapena's first novel, Things Go Flying, as part of my Canadian Book Challenge last year. I enjoyed it so much that I knew I had to read this next one as soon as I could get my hands on it. While the cover is nowhere near as appealing to me as the first book, I was still drawn in quickly and enjoyed this read.

The story pits husband and wife -- and their worldviews -- against each other. Will is a stay-at-home dad who spends his days working on his poetry epic. He's been doing this for ten years now, and his immensely successful economist wife Judy is beginning to tire of it. She can't understand why he won't go back to teaching at the university, or even just get any kind of job. She feels that his fixation on poetry is ruining his (their!) life.

Meanwhile, their children (one daughter, one son) are caught in the crosshairs. Their teen daughter seems to be getting bullied at school, and their son is in danger of becoming fat & unpopular -- at least in his mother's estimation. He's fine with his life. But through a combination of factors, both kids end up having to take self-defence lessons, chauffered by their dad. This provides some of the funniest moments of the book, as the instructor is very tough and encourages the kids to scream out obscenities while flinging each other to the ground. It may sound odd but it was highly entertaining.

And there's more to this book than family dynamics. Will has to deal with jealousy over other poets' successes, with the realization of middle age as he develops a highly inappropriate crush on a young, passionate poetry lover (Lily White, who admits that she's a pretty bad poet herself), and with developing his Big Idea -- setting up a Poet's Preservation Society to support all the indigent writers he knows. With his link to the poetry world and his wife's connections to rich people he figures he can't lose. Add to this Lily's peer group of poetic activists and parkour practitioners and you get a Mission Impossible: Saving Poetry situation.

There are also deeper questions of the meaning of Art in our commercially fixated world. Will and his wife represent two perspectives on the question but in the end, poetry -- all art -- is obviously the winner. Judy ponders the idea of a real economic theory, Happiness Economics, near the beginning of the book, and returns to the discussion at the end, and I think this encapsulates the "idea" of this book quite well -- thus the title. Here are the two excerpts:

At the moment she was hastily skimming an article about a new branch of economics called Happiness Economics. It was the first she'd heard of it. She liked the idea that economists could assign an exact monetary value to things like divorce, or the death of a loved one, or once-a-week sex. It seemed inherently right to her to be able to measure human happiness in dollars and conclude, for example, that once-a-week sex (compared to once-a-month sex) offered as much happiness as adding tens of thousands of dollars to your bank account.

Happiness ought to be measured in dollars! Then you knew what you were dealing with.

**

Judy realized now of course that she'd missed the point about Happiness Economics. What did it matter that economists could assighn a dollar value to something that didn't come with a dollar value attached to it? The point was that happiness research consistently showed that the highest value -- the greatest happiness -- was attached not to tangible things but to the intangibles -- to human relationships -- time spent with family and friends. And to the benefits that flowed from strong social policies such as good health care, education, and, yes, culture. The whole point of Happiness Economics was that perhaps governments, when making decisions, shouldn't be so focused on purely economic measures.

While I didn't fall in love with this book as entirely as I did with Things Go Flying, I still enjoyed it. The skewering of personalities in both worlds was fun and yet not too cruel. And I was glad that in the end both Will and Judy were shown to be complex people with no villainy ascribed to either. Definitely a book to put on the "poets in literature" list; I think it would be in great company with Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist and Lynn Coady's Mean Boy.

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For this year's Canadian Book Challenge I've chosen as my theme "Small-Press-Palooza" Thus, for each book I'm including a link to the small press who has published it. Take a look -- there are wonderful small presses all over Canada!


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