The Stranger’s Child

By Alan Hollinghurst, 2011 

I enjoyed reading The Stranger’s Child, mainly because of the glimpses it offers of gay male life at a series of points in the 20^th century. Or more narrowly, it offers pictures of gay male life in the affluent middle class in England. The first scenes are in the romantic Edwardian period before World War I blew apart the comfortable life of men’s colleges and secret societies. Then, the post-war society of the 1920s is disrupted with social decay and a somewhat bewildered questioning of values. In the upheaval of the 1960s, young men begin seeking each other out but hiding their sexuality when gay male sex was still a criminal act. This develops in the 1980s to a gay biographer looking into the tantalizing details that the relatives of his subject don’t want to talk about. By the end of the novel in the early part of the 21^st century, a campy society of same-sex marriages and funerals is commonplace, but old homophobic values still linger.

The thread that ties them together is Cecil, a charismatic and somewhat creepy young man in the first story who dies a war hero and minor poet. His relatives and numerous others reflect on his life at each point in the 20^th century as his poetry becomes famous, then a cliché, then a source for popular and academic re-examination, and finally the subject of an obscure book search. The connection to Cecil’s story becomes very thin and disputed by the end, which is probably the post-modern point of the book. In fact, the sections dealing with the biographer become almost comic as he puts his interpretation on very little evidence, while other characters actively strive to maintain their preferred interpretation. So, while giving these glimpses of gay life, Hollinghurst is also pointing out how subjective they are, and how they cannot be read simply from our current viewpoint.

While the glamour of Cecil’s privileged background is initially attractive, Paul in the later episodes is to me the most interesting character. He comes from a poor, working class town where homosexuality would be scandalous in the 1950s, and it’s interesting to see how he lives his life in his bedsitting room and banking job, but works his way into the gay literary elite of the TLS. (The picture Hollinghurst gives of the inner TLS culture seems satirically apt.) Paul is the only central character who is not from an affluent background and he seems to struggle with his identity, both as a gay man and as a literary fringe dweller. Class consciousness remains embedded in English society through all the changes of the 20^th century. It merely has different expressions at different points.

The title refers to a poem by Tennyson in which a stranger, looking at things in a new way, discovers anew something that had been lost. In the novel, the characters in each of the vignettes look on the subject and see it in a new way from their own contemporary perspective.

Not a lot happens in any of the vignettes. In a way, they reminded me of the way Henry James writes a scene – the interest is on the changing psychological relationships of the characters more than it is on anything they actually do. The characters have a lot going on internally, from their perspectives at different times and in their different relationships to homosexuality. The early scenes at the Two Acres cottage also reminded me of the domestic middle-class scenes that E.M. Forster described in some of his novels. Ironically, it all ends with a bookseller’s agent looking for saleable clues and finding none. The legend of the charismatic Cecil fades away, much like the gardened cottage that he memorialized in his most famous poem, left a crumbling site for re-development in the final scenes.

As I recall in his previous novels, Hollinghurst writes in the voice of a detached, ironic observer. This allows him a satirical and at times comic tone, although I find the detachment blocks any real engagement with the characters or the limited story line. The short length of each of the segments keeps the book moving, but it also limits a reader’s engagement. There was enough interest for me in the varied scenes of gay lives, but I think it would have been quite tedious to follow any of the characters on their own.

Suite Française

By Irène Némirovsky, 1942/2004 

What a wonderful range of people Nemirovsky created, with such depth that even minor figures don’t come across as caricatures or stereotypes. And it must have been a particular challenge to avoid stereotypes when she was writing during the German invasion of France and her own experience of evacuation to what she hoped would be a safe retreat with her children.

The first section of the book shows the chaos of the flight from Paris as the Germans appear ready to occupy the city. Everyone has different thoughts about what it means for them, from the wealthy bourgeois packing up to move to their country home, the effete artist worrying about his porcelain collection, but especially the Michauds, left behind by their boss but still expected to find their way to their work in Tour and thinking themselves lucky to at least be together. Although there are elements of satire poking at the venality and self-centredness of the more privileged classes, Nemirovsky still shows their humanity, worrying about a son or a parent. This section covers such a range of people and what they discover about themselves and their comrades under wartime assaults that it made me think of the characters in War and Peace as they contemplate war and its outcomes. Tolstoy, however, doesn’t manage to develop any characters below the nobility except as stereotypes, while Nemirovsky has a wide social range.

The second part of the book focuses mainly on the relationship between an affluent countrywoman and the German officer who boards in her home. Even in this section, though, Nemirovsky succeeds in showing a range of complex characters, French and German, drawn as individuals with families and futures at risk. This section, however, makes a contrast with the chaos and confusion of the first section. Here, village life is orderly, regular and commonplace, even with the German soldiers stationed in the village. The German soldiers who don’t speak French, for example, struggle to buy mementos in the local shops as if they were tourists. The French resent their presence, but can’t help treating them as friendly visitors and customers. It’s ironic that when the Germans arrange a grand celebration on the anniversary of the capture of Paris, they tactfully avoid mentioning the reason, although everyone knows it, and the French turn out to watch the dancing, music and fireworks. Everyone tries to act as normally as possible, even while resisting the situation where they can. This gives an interesting insight to life under enemy occupation, where attempting to live a decent human life can later appear as collaboration.

In the second part of the book, it almost seems as if the characters are all together in the upset of the war, until the killing of a German soldier forces everyone to see that they are on different sides, whether or not they choose to be. Nemirovsky touches on wartime collaboration, but in the book as it exists here, she doesn’t have room, or perhaps experience, to explore it as the post-war French writers did. She was killed before the issue of collaboration acquired its later dimensions.

It is tragic that such a humanist writer as Nemirovsky would become a victim of inhuman Naziism as she was working on the remaining parts of the book. The excerpts from her letters to her husband and her publisher are tragic. It’s particularly poignant when in her notes for the book she promises never to take out her bitterness on individuals – she shows the Germans, as well as French people of various classes, as complex real people. For a book written while under the threat of annihilation in war, it’s remarkable that Nemirovsky’s humanism is such a strong theme. Based on this book, I’d look forward to reading some of her earlier books.

The portrait of Mr W.H.

 By Oscar Wilde, 1889

“Art … can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance,” Oscar Wilde’s narrator says in this book. As Wilde so often does, he captures intriguing insight in an epigram. What you see in art says more about you than about the subject.

The subject of Wilde’s novella is simple (though the telling is convoluted). The narrator describes a talk with his friend Erskine, who explains a theory created by another young man that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for Mr W.H., an imagined “boy actor” from Shakespeare’s troupe at the Globe Theatre. Erskine says the story is a fraud, but the narrator becomes obsessed with the idea and analyzes many of the sonnets to show how they support the theory. This part is an interesting reading of the sonnets, giving a way of understanding them that was completely missing in my long-ago reading of the sonnets. In my own reading, the sonnets themselves are often difficult and obscure because the twisted syntax and allusions make many sentences hard to follow, but the story got me to go back and re-read some of them. 

I was interested to read the narrator’s (that is, Wilde’s) analysis because I like the idea of Shakespeare having what Wilde calls an intimate male friendship and writing impassioned poetry to his friend. (Although I wonder if the boy actor would understand the poems any better than I did.) And I read the novella as Wilde’s own interest in the notion of an artist falling for a beautiful young male lover, as he did later in his own life. This novella looks like a disguised way to bring homoerotic attraction to the late-Victorian society that later convicted Wilde for the crime of expressing that love physically. So this is me liking the idea of Wilde liking the idea of the narrator’s obsession about Shakespeare being drawn to an inspiring male muse.

As the story advances, the narrator develops a fascination with the imagined boy actor, his life and the so-called “dark lady” of one group of sonnets. He proposes a re-ordering of the Sonnets to support his reading. He writes up his theory and shares it with his friend Erskine. Erskine reverses his own initial scepticism and declares he is convinced, but the narrator suddenly decides it was a foolish and nonsensical obsession. Erskine adopts the obsession and pursues it further to a tragic but ambiguous end.

This is where Wilde’s epigram on art comes in. Wilde’s narrator reflects on it in after he rejects the boy-actor theory, suggesting that the narrator didn’t want to acknowledge what he saw in the theory. The narrator could not accept his own attraction to Shakespeare’s passion because he recognized that it revealed too much about himself. Erskine initially rejected that same recognition, but then followed it to a tragic result (presaging Wilde’s tragic result for the same obsession). 

The story has a further reflexive turn at the end, as readers then have to ask what their own response to the story says about themselves. While this self-recognition seems unproblematic for most modern readers, I wonder if Victorian readers were open to it. The story was published only in a shorter magazine form, but Wilde was unsuccessful in publishing the longer version that is available here.

Oliver Twist

By Charles Dickens, 1838

 I think I like Dickens’ truly comedic books more than his melodramas. This one does have many of his engaging features, like situations that evoke a reader’s sympathies, characters so bad that they become villainous archetypes, and settings that match the characters most extreme emotions. And (almost) everyone gets their just deserts in the end, however contrived that may seem.

What makes this novel problematic is, first, that poor Oliver is such a weak character. He has little character of his own beyond his innate sense of rightness and injustice, and since he is always the victim of injustice it takes little virtue for him to object to it. I think that everything that happens to him, whether good or bad, is imposed on him by other characters, from the governors of the orphanage or the evil den of thieves to the wealthy and principled family and friends who save him. Perhaps they would have been less inclined to save him had he not had such a pure and noble character, although they do try to save Nancy, too. But this is also a problem. Oliver is pure and noble only because he was born of a pure and noble mother, not because of anything he learned in his miserable upbringing. But Nancy has a common birth and she is too far gone to be saved, even though she is generous and protective toward Oliver. Dickens’ Victorian morals reserve good character to those of good birth, and only they are saved. I don’t know if Dickens was conscious of this, but it puts his sympathies for the working classes on a very limited basis.

Nevertheless, this is a social satire, and a pointed one. The contrast between Oliver’s true saviors and those who are appointed to help the orphans is acute. The self-serving, greedy middle-class governors of the orphanage and the small business owners who bully and exploit their child workers are little better than the criminal gang that Oliver escapes to – perhaps worse, as Oliver seems generally well-fed and warm with Fagin’s gang, and enjoys the company of Charley and Jack the Artful Dodger. Of course, the gang does threaten and intimidate him into thievery that Oliver clearly wants no part of. He only avoids them by the luck of being captured by good-hearted saviors who turn out to be the only people in London who can discover his true story.

In Dickens, it’s always the characters that make the story memorable, and their strength makes Oliver himself fade away. This story presents the pompous Bumble and the avaricious wife he ties himself to, the cheerful Dodger, the truly nasty Bill Sikes and his unhappy partner Nancy, and the conniving Fagin. These are such colourful characters that they overshadow the purity of Mr Brownlow, Harry and Rose, and even Oliver himself. The villains are always more colourful.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to ignore the anti-Semitism that colours Dickens’ portrait of Fagin, whom he commonly simply calls the Jew and shows hovering over his hoard of stolen treasure. The stereotype of the Jewish criminal miser leaves an unpleasant taste. Fagin only stops being a caricature in his final days when he faces death and Dickens shows his disordered torment with surprising sympathy. 

The Victorians had quite a taste for maudlin sentimentality, and that is one of the forces driving the story. Dickens’ characters and his descriptive writing elevate the novel beyond that, but modern audiences must have a hard time getting beyond the sentimentality. I suppose that’s why modern adaptations like the movies and the musical leave a lot of the story line out to create a celebration of the characters that is fun, if not very close to Dickens’ original.

The Way The Crow Flies

By Ann-Marie MacDonald, 2003 

I am in awe of Ann-Marie MacDonald. She brings together so many current themes, makes them dramatic, and makes them matter to me as a reader in a fluid and coherent storyline. Some elements of the story are intensely uncomfortable, and they are intended to be. Others raise provocative ways of looking at the mid-twentieth century that may not be new, but are insightful. She offers no simple resolutions, but nevertheless takes readers on a satisfying journey with some interesting characters and compelling stories.

The central character, Madeleine, is nine when we meet her, and we see a new home through her eyes. Unlike the over-knowing kids in some books (and movies), she sees and understands, or fails to, in a way that seems to me to be consistent with a nine year old, and her vision is fascinating. She does not understand a lot of what she experiences until she becomes older and tries to make sense of how it has marked her. The fact that she is a tomboyish, mouthy lesbian makes her perspective more interesting, especially as she adopts the voices of her smart-ass cartoon characters. The picture that MacDonald gives of her relationships with her friends and rivals seems completely plausible. As a successful adult queer woman, she later finds her childhood both a source of comedy and a painful impediment to maturity. Her knowledge and insights seem so right-on that it’s hard not to see MacDonald examining her own childhood for a realistic picture of Madeleine’s psyche. (And in some regards, they do parallel MacDonald’s own childhood, but not, I hope, in the traumas that make up the story.)

While Madeleine is interesting, so are the other protagonists, her parents. Her Acadian mother is the image of a 1960s housewife, and MacDonald shows that that means – organizing the household so that her husband is never troubled. The image of her hiding her cleaning clothes so that her husband need never imagine her as less than glamourous is perfectly telling. I never thought to be interested in the inner life of an air force executive officer, but Madeleine’s father Jack also has to struggle with a cruel morality. He makes his choices and pays a price, one of the themes of the book.

Hard moral choices seem to be the central theme of the book, as all of the central characters have to face decisions and painful consequences. This sets a personal framework within the context of the Holocaust and the ’60s space race (or the arms race), the Vietnam War, anti-queer discrimination and prejudice against both outsiders and Indigenous peoples. When the policing system comes into the story, it’s hardly surprising that even a conscientious officer follows the prevailing current in the wrong direction. While no one ends up without damage, MacDonald does find a positive outcome for some. We can only hope to be among the lucky ones who survive the damage.

While these are big and complex themes, MacDonald also manages to bring many other ideas into the plot, including trust and espionage, loyalty and truth, family, grief, pop culture and the news media, nature, and a distinct Canadian perspective on it all. Un Acadien errant stands in as a succinct summary of the storyline. It’s amazing how MacDonald uses philosophical observations on these subjects to move the plot and reflect on her characters.

At times, I felt that MacDonald was writing the story like a Hitchcock movie. The plot moves along like a movie, balancing quick cross-cut edits with slow building tension. I think the novel reflects her success as a playwright. Even the crow’s-point-of-view asides are a deliberate intrusion, an invitation to step outside of the plot and think about what the story means.

I’m disappointed that MacDonald has written only two novels, because I’ve read her first one, and I’d like to read more of her.

The Testaments

By Margaret Atwood, 2019 

In spite of my admiration for Atwood’s writing and her thinking, I could not get to like The Testaments. If I’m being generous, I place it in a category of political satires like those of Jonathon Swift – the interest is in the ideas, but less so in the story line or the characters, who are cartoon caricatures instead of anything like real people.

  This is disappointing in Atwood, because the characters in her other novels have depth and realistic emotions. Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale was not cartoonish, but invited readers to share in her emotions at the horror of her life. None of the three leads in The Testaments, to say nothing of the minor characters, invite empathy because they feel like sketches that an author might develop while working out the plot for a TV treatment that is not likely to be made. Was Atwood rushed into completing the book before she had time to go back and make the characters real? It feels like it.

  This is not to say there is nothing to admire in the book. Atwood’s aphorisms about social life are thoughtful and provocative, and her caustic quips about the hypocrisy and corruption of Gilead are entertaining. Lydia, the senior aunt, ruminates in Atwood’s sharp, ironic, critical voice and that is worth the time. Some incidents, like the abuse of the girls in Gilead, create a sense of what life could be like for powerless young women in our own society. Lydia’s compromises, initially to save her life and later to protect her power in Gilead, illustrate some aspects of how a vicious and violent culture distorts the life and values of its victims. Even the small ways that the powerless girls find to gain some agency and self-protection are a thoughtful illustration of how people survive in our own culture. Generally, though, neither the young girls nor Lydia were convincing as characters from the start through to the end of the novel.

  Atwood also makes good points about media and propaganda, literature misrepresented for the users’ own ends. But she also shows that literature is also a defense, allowing readers to discover the truth and manipulation. This is a theme in Atwood’s other writing, and it’s particularly relevant in the Trumpian political period.

  However, so many details of the novel just feel wrong – that is to say, they don’t match the pictures I have from other, better writing. The spy story aspects, for example, are superficial and unrealistic compared to anything by John Le Carré. (Really? Sending an untrained child into a police state as an agent and expecting that she will extricate herself?) The capture and torture of the women in the initial revolution is unrealistic compared to what really happened in recent Latin American revolutions, for example, or even to the portrayal in The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m sure that Atwood knows better than this, as she reads widely and comments on these very topics in her political work.

  What’s most disappointing to me, however, is the thinness of the ideas she presents here. Aside from shallowly exploring how a senior apparatchik rationalizes her participation, there’s little here that is not presented better in The Handmaid’s Tale, or in a large number of other novels about political dissidence.

  In the acknowledgements, Atwood calls this a thought experiment, and that's probably the best way to think of it. It follows the threads of the earlier story in some new ways, but it's not a fully developed exercise (in spite of the many people who seem to have contributed, and the 400 pages). Clearly, many people react viscerally to its depiction of violent patriarchy, but this is a book that should and could have been much better.

The West Indian

By Valerie Browne Lester, 2019 

An exotic locale, a superficial sham of English culture, ruthless egotism and acquisitive colonial commerce are the backdrop to this story of one woman’s survival and the launch of her son into another form of English culture.

I first heard of this novel as an imagined pre-history of Heathcliff, the romantic hero of Wuthering Heights. It does not touch at all on the events of Wuthering Heights, as it ends with the arrival of an uncouth youngster in Liverpool harbour, and the barest hint that he is the orphan Heathcliff, adopted into the Earnshaw home in Yorkshire. But The West Indian does recreate the impassioned emotions and extravagant behaviours that Emily Bronte conceived.

Wikipedia says Wuthering Heights “was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. The novel also explores the effects of envy, nostalgia, pessimism and resentment.” All of these are themes in The West Indian. Here, however, instead of heroic romantic passion, Valerie Browne Lester presents a kind of inverse – the male protagonist makes his fortune in colonial trade (and keeps slaves on his plantation and in his home), is obsessively possessive and self-centred but without a reciprocating love. Like Heathcliff, he ignores or abuses his actual wife, Martha, but also demands that she allow his lovers to dominate her home. Initially, this arrangement works because his lover is a charming and generous domestic slave and Martha makes a deep friendship with her. A later lover, Antonietta, is lazy and self-centred, and antagonizes Martha. Meanwhile, Martha has formed her own relationship with the local pastor, in an enlightened and idealized model. There is even a passionate story of a horse-back struggle through a storm to find help and save the life of a loved one.

Browne Lester also makes a lot of the contrast between the cultured Martha, from a destitute middle class family in England, and the pretense of high culture among the English Jamaican colonials, again echoing the contrast between the Earnshaw and Linton households in Wuthering Heights, though drawn with greater extremes. While the violence and uncouth behaviour in Wuthering Heights seems confined to Heathcliff’s household, it is at the centre of the Jamaican colonial culture, reflected even in the behaviour of the women and men at the top of its European society.

The landscape similarly contrasts in the two novels, with the Yorkshire moors being bleak and threatening, while Jamaica features the exotic beauty of colourful flowers, lush vegetation and gorgeous birds. The Yorkshire setting represents the bleak world of Heathcliff versus the cultured charm of Thrushcroft, while the beauty of Jamaica contrasts with the venality of its white residents.

Browne Lester shows some incidents from the perspective of young Peter, a wild child raised with few boundaries who wonders at the foolishness of civilized society. Through his eyes, we can see what life might be in a tropical paradise outside of colonialism. Again, this both parallels and contrasts with young Heathcliff, who finds himself banished from the established culture and is fiercely resentful as a result.

One frequent theme in The West Indian that is not represented in Wuthering Heights is literature. Martha and her friends enjoy literature and find comfort and inspiration in making up songs, sharing books, translating the classics, even reading Tristram Shandy. Perhaps for Browne Lester, this is a beacon of hope that an elevated culture will eventually transcend the violence of colonialism and slavery. Her Jamaican character does live on through his appearance in Wuthering Heights.

No doubt because the author is a scholar of 19^th century lives, this novel has the details of life, language and character that are illuminating and interesting. It’s an enjoyable, provocative read.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie, 2015

In this artful and amusing book, Salman Rushie combines a clever riff on the Arabic 1001 Nights tales with a harsh critical look at both Islamic and Euro-American ideological narrowmindedness.

  The story is first of all an amusing literary recreation of the 1001 Nights in modern times. Here the jinn are sometimes evil and sometimes benevolent, but mostly uninterested in the pathetic low-lifes that inhabit Earth. That changes when their vanity drives some of them to undertake a cataclysmic battle for the attention of humans. Rushdie has fun with his readers in creating a satire that draws parallels through a wide range of literary allusions and human foolishness. I particularly liked the mystery Baby Storm who destroys careers by causing the flesh of the lying and corrupt to decay hideously.

  A more profound theme underlying the book is the conflict between reason and unreason, or religion as Rushdie identifies it. Cleverly, Rushie identifies the rational thinkers with the descendants of the Islamic scientist and philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rushd in Arabic. Thus, his descendants are Rushdis and, like Rushdie, targets of repression by religious fundamentalists who gain their power by convincing their followers to believe their pronouncements, however irrational. The book is in part an attack on the Islamic fundamentalists who tried to have Rushdie killed for ridiculing Islam. In one section, parasitic jinni of the irrational forces occupy human bodies and turn them into airline attackers and suicide bombers. And while it seems nightmarish, Rushie makes it a comedy, with his cutting satire and imaginative storyline. Ibn Rushd and his rival, the mystic Al-Ghazali, for example, dispute philosophy in life, and then centuries after their death, the conflict becomes so intense that their dust is driven to resurrect their debates. So while a philosophical debate underlies the novel, Rushie’s skill as a storyteller makes it an amusing and moving tale.

  He also allows love, perhaps the most irrational of all human activities, to lead the fight against the irrational, so he’s not a simple rationalist. And while Rushie shows clearly which side he wants to win, he ends the novel by saying that in the new world of peaceful freedom, reason has left God out, but now we don't dream. Life is good, but we sometimes yearn for nightmares, he says.

  It’s also interesting to identify the varied links that Rushdie drops to world cultures, ranging from the Muslim cultures to the touchpoints of Western culture, including Greeks, Candide and contemporary television and movies. These references not only tie Rushdie’s thinking to world cultures, but they make the novel more than a fantasy. They show that it is a serious novel relevant to contemporary readers.

  Rushdie’s writing style is as entertaining as his story. Often I stopped either to laugh at an ironic or ridiculous image or to credit an eloquent phrase or social observation. Some critics have objected that the characters are not fully developed, they are cartoons, and the storyline is too simple. This is true, but it didn’t reduce my enjoyment of the novel. It is, after all, a fable, and fables are not written for complexity. They are written to make a point in a direct way. In this, I expect that the novel is a parallel to the 1001 Nights – a series of fairly simple stories that make a point. (But I don’t want to be definitive on that, as I’ve only read the 1001 Nights in a simple version years ago.)

  Rushdie makes his point, and entertains at the same time. All in all, this is a thoughtful and amusing read, and it encourages me to watch for more novels by Rushdie.

Heartlands: A Gay Man's Odyssey Across America

by Darrell Yates Rist, 1992

I initially thought that this would be a light and entertaining travelogue with pictures of gay life in various American communities. It is a travelogue, but much more. It becomes a gay man’s search for the meaning of life in the early years of the AIDS crisis.
  I don’t usually read personal memoires, but this book shows how memoire can combine personal experience and reflection in a compelling and illuminating story. The author Darrell Rist slowly reveals more of  himself as he explores gay life in many varied American communities. Initially, perhaps, he does not even know why he has begun his journey, suggesting that it is a journalistic attempt to portray his community in a time of crisis. He visits the gay mecca of San Francisco and finds a community divided along lines of class and race, suggesting a sociological perspective that interested me. In the mountain states, he finds loners with a self-serving critique of gay urban life, as well as military members willing to make compromises for their careers. In the desert, he finds visionaries living outside of society and rodeo cowboys and girls who are bitter that the regular rodeo circuit won’t tolerate them. In one experience after another, Rist shows that if one can even speak of a gay community in America, it is a community with so many different issues and perspectives that even when everyone seems to recognize that they live in a homophobic society, they don’t share a sense of a common oppression.
  It’s interesting that one of the most touching incidents occurs when Rist helps some illegal Latin migrants in the desert and observes that their fear has shut down their capacity for empathy and intimacy. It becomes clear that Rist is talking about himself and his own fears.
  Gradually, Rist tells his own stories of loss, the ways that his friends deal with AIDS, some rising above their medical complications, and some falling into despair. The loss of an intimate friend who was a spark of energy and life seems to lead to Rist’s own sense of despair, and his acknowledgement that he cannot find meaning in other people’s life stories, but he has to find his own sense of meaning. The fact that he shares an alienation from mainstream life with many, perhaps most, gay men does not allow him to accept their answers or accommodations. He continues to search, he finds something like a queer paradise in Hawaii and some individuals living in strange solitary networks in the hostile extremes of Alaska. Toward the end of the book, he fails to connect with a black gay New Yorker, who doesn’t want to live in white gay society because he can never be comfortable there.
  Rist describes the specific details of the lives of a wide number of men, and a few women, but he places it in a broad social and naturalistic context. His poetic descriptions of the physical landscapes that he passes through are I think an attempt to link himself and his readers to a more universal world. They sometimes strike me as overdone, but the language does take his personal stories into a place beyond their specific settings.
  Rist does find resolution of a kind in the last chapters, although not a resolution that can be simply stated. He calls it redemption and the experience of universal love, but the experience he describes is appropriately complicated. Meaningful life and death in a time of AIDS cannot be simple, but his experience does seem to give Rist some resolution.
  As a reader, I felt that this book offered a satisfying insight, not only into the time and place it describes, but also into the larger themes of life and meaning that Rist wants to address. It’s worth taking the time to read it slowly over a period of time, reflecting on the range of experiences and ways of living that Rist finds in America.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

by Karen X. Tulchinsky, 2003 

It takes a fairly audacious author to name a contemporary Canadian novel after the foundational literature of Judaism, but while Karen Tulchinsky’s book may not achieve the significance of the original five books of Moses, there’s a good basis for the reference. For Tulchinsky at least, the times and incidents that are the basis of the novel are a part of the foundation of the Jewish experience in Canada.

  The novel describes in concrete detail the pogroms that drove Jewish immigrants out of their Russian homeland and to a new promised land, and then of the struggles they faced in their new homes. It deals with tradition and family as sources of strength as well as limits to personal adaptation.

  Tulchinsky brings together some key historical facts from the period and ties them into the Lapinsky family history. They face poverty in the 1930s, the oppressive antisemitism and almost equally oppressive heat and humidity. I had known a little of the history of antisemitism in Canada, but Tulchinksy makes it real with stories like blatant bypassing of a job application from the literary son of the family and the antisemitic riot at the Christie Pits baseball park. These incidents effect the family in dramatic ways, causing family splits that everyone regrets but can’t seem to change. They drive the central story of Sonny, who takes out his fury both in the army and in the boxing ring.

  Through their telling and retelling of the family stories, the Lapinskys make their history and their connection to their culture a strong part of their life. But the private recriminations and reliving of their mistakes also lets it eat away at their mental health. And the guilt that family members feel comes back over and over and it works on them even after they have achieved successes in Canada. It continues to affect the contemporary narrator who is putting together notes for a family history.

  The details of everyday life keep the story personal, a specific family story set against larger histories. Tulchinsky has clearly done a lot of research and uses it to create a particular time and place. Her description of the light in a shop in the stetl or the sound of horses hooves on a Toronto bring me as a reader right into the scene. For me, these details are one of the strengths of Tulchinsky’s writing.

  Happily, Tulchinsky uses a light touch and humour as well as her historical research. In one comic spin on the stereotype of Jewish guilt, she works her way around five members of the family, each agonizing over how he or she is guilty for the debilitating injury of the youngest son. And the local lovable crime boss is almost comic in his characterization.

  I would not have thought that I’d be very interested in a story that spends a lot of time on the inner life and the physical experience of a boxer, but Tulchinnsky makes the details and the life fascinating. She gets into Sonny’s life so closely that I often wondered if Tulchinsky had not taken up boxing herself.

  If I have a criticism (beyond the occasional excess of details from the Toronto newspapers), it’s in the stories of the sons as young boys. It seemed to me sometimes that their thinking was too advanced for their ages – Sonny at 10, for example, is more focused and driven than anyone I’ve known at that age. Lenny is drawn into a literary world at 12, which is a little hard for me to imagine. I can agree that they live in times different from those I’m familiar with, but I think I’d have accepted more of their thinking if they had all been a few years older.

  Nevertheless, I’m happy to have found the book and read it. It gives me a sense of Jewish and Canadian lives and how they are linked to the past, and how the past continues to relate to the present.