Are you Ginger or Marianne? (or: the worst book I have ever read)

Let's get to it. I've been reviewing books for - jeez, now I don't want to say how long, nor do I want to say how many I've reviewed for fear of someone out there saying, or thinking, "Loser."

It's a few hundred and yes, I do get paid. When I tell people how much I get paid (because they always ask, just like you'd ask a surgeon or a teacher), they  have one of two responses:

(a) That much, eh?, or

(b) Is that all?

Anyway. Sifting through these hundreds of review copies, I can't help but think back to. . .(now my face gets all blurry and there are harp glissandos and stuff). So I won't give you a top ten or anything, or a bottom ten, but there are a few that definitely stand out.

There was one by Doris Lessing called Love, Again, and it was simply (but not at all simply) about a woman of 60 in love with a man of 20. It was dazzling and intimate at the same time, and it reminded me of why we write (oh OK - why she writes - she's on a whole 'nother planet from everyone else, even won the Nobel Prize a few years ago). At the same time, I was also reviewing an atrocity by Toni Morrison called How Stella Got her Groove Back, which was about a woman in her 40s in love with a man of 20. It amazed me how you could take the same subject matter and either lift it to the level of incandescent art, or throw it down into the gutter.

There was one by Daniel Richler called - what the hell was it called, anyway? Hated it. Just a huge waste of talent. One by Anna Murdoch, then-wife of Rupert, called Family Business, all about the McLeans, a newspaper family that had "printer's ink in their veins". Jesus. If they'd had that, they'd be dead, and perhaps that would be not such a bad thing.

I just want to quote one thing from that book, the only thing I really remember. The McLean family plays a weird twist on the Name Game ("Shirley, Shirley, bo-Birley", etc).

Paper Caper
Nicker-aper, Coo-faper,
Barbar-aper
That's how you spell paper!

But nothing prepared me for a slender volume called Ready to Fall by Claire Cook. This came out in 2000, when email was still considered strange and mystical, with messages coming out of the thin air, so the fact that the book is written as a series of emails must have been a selling point. These are mostly one-way emails that a frustrated suburban housewife writes to her would-be lover, a globetrotting/bestselling author who lives next door. The fact that he stops replying to her on page 27 should have clued her in that he was either dead, or completely uninterested.

The publishers, Bridge Works Publishing Company (which sounds more like a dental office to me) convinced a few authors of some repute to say nice things about the novel, so that next time another author from Bridge Works would say something nice about their novel. That's how it works, folks, just like on Open Salon.

"Ready to Fall is pure delight," burbles one Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence (and I only wish that the silence had been a little bit longer). "A Bridget Jones's Diary for the post-twenties. Fresh and full of pizzazz (oops, I thought that said pizza)."

Mameve Medwed, yes, THAT Mameve Medwed, gushes, "In this stunning debut, Claire Cook creates a whole world through one character's one-way e-mails. . . Bells rang for me on each and every page." Bells?

But Alexandra Johnson sums it all up with: "In Ready to Fall, Claire Cook ingeniously shows us that e-mail is the modern diary beamed into cyberspace. Refracted at dizzying speed and"

Bluggghghg, bluggghhh - sorry, folks, I don't like to throw up in public, but in this case it was just getting too unpalatable.

In the acknowledgements, Cook gives "eternal thanks to my writing group", then names them all. One of them is Helen Fremont - you know, that Helen Fremont, the one who burbles away about Bridget Jones and pizza. "Writer's group" is an oxymoron anyway - writers hate other writers, if not all human beings, and do not run in packs, or run at all. We sit alone at our desks and eat Chee-tohs and get very sloppy. She then thanks her husband and children for "giving" her time to write. I don't know how you can do that, see. Give someone time. If you can give it, you can take it away. If anyone wanted to take away my time to write, they'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

But on to the novel!


Maybe it's not fair to make such fun of a technical marvel that is now so creaky. We've since dropped that cute little dash from "e-mail". Anyway. The story. Beth Riordan is trying her best to work up a good case of lubrication for a guy (somebody she doesn't actually know) called Thomas Marsh, a walking nom-de-plume who dangles her for a couple hundred pages before dropping her like a dead rat.

Actually, I see now that he does throw her a couple of crumbs at the start, just enough to get her hooked so she'll pick up his mail and newspapers.  "I stopped to get bagels on the way home from swim practice this morning. . . The whole time I was thinking how nice it would be to walk over to your house with some freshly brewed coffee and the rest of the bagels. Just to say hello and maybe have. . ." (etc. My fingers are getting tired, not to mention my brain.)

He's not home, surprisingly, so she feeds the bagels through the mail slot in his door. "I simply can't believe you're gone, Thomas," she says with a long, shivering intake of breath. "I almost dropped my sandwich when I saw the little bouquet of flowers you had left just inside the door. Were those from my garden?"

Such economy, a sure sign of a man of character! Why go to one of those pesky stores when the flowers are right there in her garden? The rest of the e-mails are sorta one-way and talk about Beth's life sitting in the parking lot waiting for her kids to come out of swim practice. (Claire Cook was quick to tell the media in the mad promotional whirl that she wrote this novel in 15-minute segments while sitting in the car waiting for her kids to come out of swim practice.)

The story, such as it is, comes out in half-page blurts with "e-mail" headings such as:

Date:   Sunday, August 20, 3:49 A. M. EDT
From:   Swimslave
To:     Wanderlust
Subj:   SO ANGRY, SO HURT

I don't remember what, if anything, really happens between Beth and Wanderlust (I mean Thomas), but near the end of the book she waxes hopeful. "But the minute I got within smelling distance of you, I felt this strong, physical pull. A chemical response, something olfactory and beyond. You must have strong pheromones because all of my earlier reservations disappeared." Reservations for the hotel?

But this particular passage is the real reason my mind flashed back to this atrocity, because it left a little fishhook in my brain that will forever be there.

"Do you like hammocks, Thomas? This one IS comfortable. I try to keep my mind clear, but as soon as it empties, an image rushes in. I am in a rerun of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. I try to decide if I am Ginger or Mary Ann. In the long run, is it better to be sultry and sexy or perky and peppy? Ginger looks good now, but Mary Ann will probably age better. Plus she will have developed her personality in a way that Ginger won't feel the need to. But Ginger DOES get all the men. (Reviewer's note: Cook seems not to have heard of italics.) And the good clothes. And you certainly never see her doing any real work. She'd never risk breaking a nail. I decide that women have just talked themselves into thinking they'd prefer to be Mary Ann. We'd all really rather be Ginger."

This passage is too putrid even to appear in Cosmopolitan magazine, but it passed muster in 2000. So long as it's in an e-mail. I vaguely remember, though I'd rather be hung upside down by my toenails than try to find my copy, a mystical novel where a woman was getting emails from a spectral presence, someone who existed only in the realm of Cyberspace. And that one passed, too.

Oh, don't join writer's groups, don't sit in cars scribbling! Why would writers support each other anyway? Do you know how precious and few are the opportunities to get published these days, how pointed the top of the pyramid? Don't hand the prize to your friend, just don't. You've worked hard and it's (to paraphrase Claire Cook) YOURS. To be too generous with your secrets is like a golf pro taking another golf pro aside and saying, "Here, let me show you my special swing, the one that won me the U. S. Open three years in a row."

Only in the writing field (and only among amateurs - take my word for it) are people expected to help each other improve their skills so that the other person can trounce the hell out of you and jerk away a fat contract that is rightfully yours. If you have to show your work to someone, show your mother. Or an agent. There's nothing in between.

But all is not lost! You might be asked by the publisher to write some effusive back-of-the-cover bumph for your friend's new novel, a little neon sign for your own pet project. You won't be paid for it, but hey, be grateful: it's exposure, isn't it? Maybe next time, SHE will write some nice juicy bumph for YOU.


But don't count on it.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Teeny tiny terror: the doll that pees!

My doll history: frightening.

Actually, I didn't have much of a doll history until now. Until I cracked the code, or something, and came to realize with a subversive little shiver just how pleasurable it can be to dress and undress dolls. . .especially with clothes you've made yourself.

As a kid, I was sullen, uncooperative, usually bad-natured and mainly interested in bugs and half-metamorphosed tadpoles, awful blobby things with legs that my mother wouldn't let me keep in my room. Murky jars abounded in the basement right next to the preserves.

I just wasn't a proper little girl. At all. My mother, at a certain point, noticing I wasn't Quite the Thing, pressed a doll on me. Her name was "Deb" and she wasn't even a real doll, not a baby doll or a Barbie. In fact, she looked a little bit like my mother, bland-faced, her hair a perfect helmet of black. Deb was short for Miss Debutante, and how an eight-year-old would understand that word or be able to prounce it is beyond me, but my parents howled  when I referred to her (coldly) as "Miss De-BUTTON-ty." She was quickly discarded along with the manicure set designed to make me stop biting my nails.

I don't know, I guess a Barbie or two drifted my way, I'm not sure I recall, though I do remember one of them ended up in a sarcophagus wrapped in perfume-soaked strips of white pillowcase. Most Barbies, no matter how impeccably dressed, always seem to end up at the very back of the closet, naked with their legs obscenely splayed, their hair in a feral, impossible frizz. No one knows what happens to the clothes.

Not long ago I became fascinated with the dolls of Marina Bychkova, a Russian-born Vancouver dollmaker who creates disturbing pubescent creatures that exude an air of captivity, their eyes often brimming with tears. Their alabaster skin suggests a strange sort of necrophilia, their identical bodies (all hideously jointed) a uniformity that is kind of scary. They're often naked, elaborately tatooed, with realistic genitalia and even pubic hair, or  else heavily costumed to the point of suffocation. Here is where Bychkova truly excels: it's hard to believe what she is able to create with beads and brocade. And those tiny, tiny shoes.

I couldn't own one of these dolls because they cost upwards of $10,000.00. But some time ago, a couple of years maybe, I was scouting birthday presents for my granddaughter Lauren, a sunny soul who so valiantly carries what might be the burden of Type 1 diabetes that she seems to send it whimpering into the corner.

Every year the family takes part in a jolly occasion, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure.  Our team is called Lauren's Ladybugs (or "wadybugs" as she used to call them), so anything ladybug-esque is of interest to her.

I was dithering around not finding anything, standing in an upscale toy store too expensive to think about buying in, when!

I saw THIS.

Me, who hates dolls? who never played with dolls? who thought dolls were dumb? who didn't know why anyone would even purchase a doll? let alone play with one? Oh my goodness. This was LOVE. Then I turned and walked away, talked myself out of the whole thing. Far too expensive! I was on the other side of the mall when I realized Lana Ladybug was only twenty bucks, and how could I NOT buy her anyway??

But that's not the last of it, or even the beginning, because as L. L. slept in my closet awaiting wrapping, "something" began to eat at me.

I WANTED that doll. I wanted to hold that doll, take its dress off and put it back on again, set it on my bookcase to watch over my most cherished books.

It took a while before I gave in, and even at that, it's only recently I've started to make clothes for it. Actually, not for mine (and I have two of them now - only two - so far, that is - ) but for my granddaughters'. They must have at least ten of these Groovy Girls stuffed in a box (and they're almost always naked, perhaps a sort of tribute to their ancestral goddess, Barbie).

 These little doll-smidgens are ideal to knit for: long, slim and tubular, so that you can make tops, skirts and dresses all along the same lines.

So that's what I'm doing, to surprise them. I had to try them on my own dolls, of course, and that's when I got this strange feeling. What was it? Intimacy? Can't be that. The doll's pliable arms and legs made it possible to bend her limbs in half. So she was malleable. Vulnerable. Recognizably human. Her face was sweet, her hair a tousle. I don't know! What's happening to me? Am I going all soft? Is this weird or what?

It feels good to dress these dolls, as if the little girl in me, the one who never had a chance to develop because she was too busy being a tough little survivor, is finally coming out to play.

I see my blondies, my grandgirls, all done up in their sparkly butterfly tshirts, their glittery shoes that light up when they run, fluffy little tutus, stripey candycane tights, and I think: I missed that. All that. I was all done up in my brother's castoffs. In some cases they'd been through two brothers, who were five and ten years older than me.  So those clothes were very old and very shabby indeed, usually held on me with big safety pins.

Is this Cinderella awakening in me, or what? Why now? I'm not happy, don't ever get that idea. I'm one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. But I'm not dead inside. Not quite. Bad mental health, rotten luck and being thoroughly cursed has not quite stamped out that tiny ladybug of joy at the centre of my heart.

Goodbye, Harold. I loved you very much.

Beautiful Ruins: Liz and Dick on the rocks

Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
HarperCollins
EDMONTON - The wistfully lovely dust jacket for Jess Walter’s latest novel — tiny blocks of houses piled on top of each other on the teetering summit of an oceanside cliff — should have a protective plastic cover, not just to preserve the picture but to keep out beach sand and lake water. But in this case, “beach read” is a compliment.
If summer readers want high entertainment, they’ll find it here, for Beautiful Ruins has a quality of spectacle, the epic journey of people who enthrall us with personalities that are bigger than reality. But because Spokane-based author Jess Walter knows his way around a novel (The Zero and, most notably, The Financial Lives of the Poets), his extravaganza teeters atop a bedrock of hard reality, speaking uncomfortable truths about the frail, often narcissistic nature of identity.

The gorgeous ruin on the cover is Porto Vergogne (“Port of Shame”), a tiny Italian fishing village completely isolated except by boat. This is a misty Brigadoon of a place that does not appear on the map and which some people say does not even exist. Presiding over the one dingy hotel he inherited from his father is Pasquale Tursi, a dreamy young man waiting “for life to come and find him.” The cramped, uncomfortable place seldom draws guests, but on a certain day in 1962, all that changes — and so does Pasquale — startlingly, and forever.
If the dreamlike atmosphere of the Hotel Adequate View is not cinematic enough, it’s about to burst into Technicolor with the arrival of a lovely young woman, Dee Moray, a movie star, they say, working in Rome on the set of the most talked-about picture in decades, Cleopatra.

Yes, that Cleopatra – the overbudget epic, the disaster-in-the-making already guaranteed a huge audience by the raging scandal of Liz and Dick. Moray is only marginally connected to the movie, and has come to Porto Vergogne — or rather, has been sent there ­­— because she has just been diagnosed with “cancer” (i.e. a scandalous pregnancy).
Just as we sink into this complex, delectable story, suddenly there is a jerk away from the romance and bubbling eroticism of 1962 to present-day, and a completely different scene involving the nasty world of Hollywood deals and pitches. Michael Deane, a producer in his seventies from a different sort of Hollywood, looks “prematurely embalmed,” a stooped old man “with the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.” He signs a ludicrous deal for a movie called Donner! about the cannibalistic Donner Party of 1849, just to get himself out of a studio contract.

As we’re batted back and forth in time and place like the balls in Pasquale’s imaginary cliffside tennis court, threads begin to tie the different scenarios together. An elderly Italian man appears to confront Deane, not with a gun but a dog-eared business card that Deane gave him 50 years ago. Pasquale has never forgotten Moray, the lovely blond actress who spent just a few days at his hotel in 1962, and demands to know what happened to her.

The answers are not so simple, because by then several more storylines have leaped to the forefront, most taking place in different times and locations. As if that weren’t enough, there’s Richard Burton drunkenly spouting Shakespeare as he tools off by boat to the Hotel Adequate View.

Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”

Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam

East River Monster Mystery: SOLVED (already!)

Now, I'm as easily petrified as the next person. Maybe more so, because I somehow need to jazz up my super-boring life.

But when I see pictures like THIS one, of bizarre bloated hairless things washing up on shore, things with human-looking fingers and toes, well then. . .

I get a little disconcerted.

Scientists have already done one-o-dem things, you know where you go in that tube? An MRI, or an IBM or something. Or a Cat Scan, only this isn't a cat.

Here is what they found.

It all seems to match up, even if they had to fill in the missing half of its head.

Though it's obvious that this ain't no pig, another possibility reared its snouty little head. . .

Ooo.

Not too friendly, is it? And as for being the "wrong size", they ought to live around here where they can get to be 50 pounds, easy. Those bastards can leap fences and ruin your newly-sodded lawn in a few minutes by rolling it up like a bloody carpet and eating the grubs underneath.

OK, so it might be a slightly deformed raccoon, but a lot of things do seem to match up here, even the long bony tail. So I don't think there's any human DNA here, unless humans like to eat grubs at midnight.

Shee-yiii-iiiiit. And here I thought I was on to a good one.

FOUND!: Cujo's rogue DNA

It was getting dark, and getting lonely sitting out on the rickety old back porch. Sam threw his live cigarette-butt on the grass, watching a small plume of smoke rise above it. Shit, he hated his life! Why didn’t he just admit it? He hated to be “one of those”, one of the people who’d given in, who’d let the whole world see that they had given up on the human species and had turned to something very different.

Something that had never quite been seen on this earth before.

Oh, but we’d seen them all right. From the dawn times, when humans were barely human, slouching and grunting and smelling as bad as Bigfoot, we’d recognized Wolf, yellow eyes flashing in the moonlight. We’d coaxed that wolf toward tameness with enticing scraps of food, and gradually Wolf learned to be a companion and guardian, a protector of human safety. So were things really any different now? Didn’t protecting one’s sanity from the horrific effects of social alienation count as guardianship?

And look at all the dog breeds that existed now. Hundreds, probably, and all the result of deliberate genetic tampering. So maybe this was just taking the next logical step.

Really, not so many people minded any more. Not like years ago, when it was an abomination even to think of mixing things up like that. Now that cloning your dead pet had become standard and even affordable, things like the “Up, Boy!” breeding program were slowly grinding their way into respectability.

It had become almost a status symbol to have someone like Flash. Well, almost, like tattoos and piercings and things. Though really, he shouldn’t have given him that silly dog name, what with his innate (or rather, engineered) superiority. This dog was no canine; anyone could see that. He was just a little bit More.

Flash trotted into the room, tail waving. An ordinary German Shepherd, except for the size.  Don’t look for long into those eyes, which were too blue even for a husky’s.

“Flash,” Sam cooed, scratching the ruff around his neck. Without even being asked, Flash lifted a front paw. But instead of “shake-a-paw”, he did something else.

He began to massage that tender place in Sam’s knee, the old football injury he used to call it, before everyone caught on to the fact that he got it falling down the stairs after a big pissup. These were no ordinary dog-paws: the toes were long and fingerlike, supple enough to know just where that tender spot was.

“Funny feet,” people said about Flash. They didn’t look too closely at his back paws, which were most un-doglike and even freaked Sam out sometimes. Their tracks made him think of a barefoot baby.

“Rururwwww,” he said.

“Yes, big buddy.”

“Irur wooo.”

“I know.”

“Ur are you?”

“I’m great, old pal.” Flash had cost him plenty: had to sell his bike and take out a second mortgage on this dump, but who cared when every female he had ever cared about had stomped all over him like he was nothing.

He saw one of those reality shows the other day called “But They’re my Babies!”, all about how a large segment of the population now cared more for their dogs than they did for humans, any humans, even their parents, spouses, children.

They’re my babies. Ar-rur-rur-rooo. How are you?

His cat wouldn’t go anywhere near Flash and hissed and arched and spiked alarmingly if he even saw him across the room. Flash would shake his head and say, “tsh-tsh-tsh”. Too bad. So far the scientists had left feline DNA alone, and perhaps that was wise.

This interspecies stuff – why was it considered so controversial? It didn’t cost that much, did it? Of course he’d only gone for the minimum, the ten per cent.

Ten per cent of human genes inserted into the DNA of a dog. A handsome dog. The human, well, not so handsome, it was really just Sam, but now he had a son just like he had always dreamed about. He even saw a bit of a family resemblance. Not just to him, but to his parents and his old Uncle Charley.

“Flash. Get me that – “

Flash ran over, his paws making that odd barefooted scurrying sound, and retrieved the remote, then, carefully setting it down, depressed the Guide button.

“You always know what I want, Flash.”

“Rur-roooow.”

He knew people knew, knew something was Different, that this dog carried himself differently, like it was striding along beside him, with a certain human kind of companionable gait. He knew its predatory side had been somewhat watered down – or not? Maybe just substituted with a different sort of predator.

People really were narrow-minded about “Up, Boy!” and the huge strides it had made in genetic research. The company advertised their services as a “step up” in pet ownership, an upgrading of a simple canine into something “so much more”. And if you had turned your back on your fellow humans, as so many people had done, the possibility was even more attractive, even essential to your emotional survival.  In fact, though it was strictly illegal, they were willing to go as high as 30 per cent if you were willing to fork over the quarter-million in cash.

Oh, all this had been illegal, illegal as hell for quite a long time. But just as the two-headed baby that would have been strangled fifty years ago eventually had its own reality show, the culture had learned to embrace the unusual. “Why do we do this?” the “Up, Boy!” brochure asked. “Would it surprise you so much if we said – because we can? Would it surprise you even more to learn that – you can, too?”

It was now possible to insert human genes into practically any species, any strand of DNA. One of the scientists joked that he wanted his son to look like a birch tree. Some of the early experiments were a bit creepy, of course, chimps being born with only ten per cent concert pianist DNA who could play Rachmaninoff with no lessons, or cows with hands, well, sort of hands, fingers anyway, but who the hell cares if a cow has hands or not? It just made for some great jokes about a self-milking cow. What difference does it make to the larger scheme of things, so long as human curiosity is satisfied?

But then there was the other side of it. Out of all this wonderful, groundbreaking research, a highly stigmatized group of “citizens” had arisen, so shady and secretive that many people said they didn’t exist at all, that they were merely an urban legend. These were the “down, boy” dogs: half human and half dog, or even mostly human, walking around with hocks facing backwards instead of knees, pads on their hands, forward-thrusting faces and gruff voices that elongated their speech into a series of groans.

Humans were mixing it up, all right. And why not? Hadn’t the color palette been predictably drab for long enough? The next experiment was inserting resurrected dinosaur DNA into frogs. Or was it humans? Imagine having that sort of Godzilla-like power! Talk about a roar! Or maybe you’d just end up with a certain reptilian ruthlessness, an absolute, utter, stone-hearted, glacial disregard for anything approaching decency or – Oh, it was Flash again!  It was amazing how he had learned to carry a plate without dropping anything or even salivating on the pastrami sandwich.

And how had he known he was hungry? And for what?

“Hello, boy.”

“Roarw are you?”

“Not so great, old pal.”

“Roarw you roanly?’

“Yeah. That’s the word, Flash.” He threw another live cigarette butt into the garbage can.

“Roanly.”