Month: July 2015

Some Girls – Kristin McCloy

ChristieLeave a comment

somegirlsWhat’s a reader to do when the author of her favourite book of all time, Velocity, encourages her to read another of her books. Said book, Kristin McCloy’s second novel, Some Girls, has been languishing on my tbr shelf for at least four years and clearly I intended to read it at some point – I wouldn’t have purchased it otherwise. The stakes are higher now, though. Not only have I recently re-read Velocity, but I’ve struck up a sort of email friendship with Ms. McCloy and I was terrified to read this book (I have her third book, Hollywood Savage also waiting to be read) for a variety of reasons – not the least of which is that I LOVE Velocity and nothing could ever be as good as that. Also, what happens if I don’t like this book or the next one. Gah!

Ok, I have my reader-angst out of the way.

Some Girls is the story of twenty-three-year-old Claire Stearn who flees Alamogordo, New Mexico for the bright lights of NYC circa  1989. She leaves behind her divorced and bitter mother, Ginny, her older sister, Paula, and her boyfriend, a rancher called Tommy. In many ways, Claire isn’t different from  any other young person who, desperate to escape the confines of their lives,  makes their way to a big city. Claire is “aware of her spine, the strength of her pelvic bones, the arches of her feet. It was all she needed to support her.” She’s ready to become herself.

New York City is very much a character In Some Girls. The 1989 version depicted in the novel isn’t the NYC of 2015.  As Claire rides into the city from the airport she describes it as “a terror, glossy buildings rising out of a slum, a place of anarchy, crooked and lawless, impenetrable.” I remember that New York because I spent some time in the city in the 1980s. It was a little rough around the edges, but for a small-town girl like me still spectacular.

For that reason, I related to Claire’s assimilation. Those first few days, when Claire had “nothing but the speed with which she walked and her sunglasses to protect her” reminded me of me. I was so desperate to blend in, to not look like I knew nothing.  I’m sure, in the early days,  you could smell my terror from twenty paces. And like, Claire, I was constantly pinching myself and thinking “I’m here, I’m in New York City, a shock each time.”

McCloy captures the frenetic energy, the heat and the smells, the blast of icy cold, the patchwork quilt of humanity that is New York City and I liked revisiting the city through her lens very much.

Claire meets Jade the day she moves into her little downtown apartment. (I sort of imagine it in the area of Soho, but I wasn’t familiar with White Street so I had to look it up on the map.)  Jade is, to Claire’s innocent eyes, “a woman of the city.”  When they finally spend a little time together Claire feels “the crushing sense of anonymity that had dogged her ever since she had arrived suddenly turned to reveal its other face.” There is erotic tension between the two women from the start.

This relationship was a little harder for me to relate to than Ellie’s relationship with Jesse in Velocity. I am worldly enough now to know that sexuality is vastly more fluid than I might have viewed it when I was Claire’s age. I think my unease has more to do with the fact that I didn’t particularly care for Jade. She seemed self-centered and reckless and I never felt as though I knew her well enough to understand Claire’s attraction to her. She was startlingly beautiful, but surely there was more to it than that? That said, I felt as though Claire’s feelings – about Jade, about her life, about what she was leaving behind when she said good-bye to Tommy – were authentic. Complicated and messy, but certainly true.

Some Girls does a fine job of capturing a young adult on the precipice of figuring her life out, making choices that are both difficult and blindingly simple. While I may not have been able to relate to Claire’s relationship with Jade, I did love her journey and ultimately, isn’t that the point?

I also loved the writing in this novel. It was different from Velocity, which demonstrates the depth of McCloy’s talents, but still a pleasure to read.

The Silent Girls – Eric Rickstad

ChristieLeave a comment

silentgirlsI picked up Eric Rickstad’s novel, The Silent Girls, on a whim. Creepy cover. Compelling blurb. Killer opening. But. (Trust me, you’ll get it in a moment.)

So, Frank Rath is a former cop turned private investigator who lives in Canaan, Vermont. He’s a single dad to daughter, Rachel, who is away for her first semester at college. By his own admission, Rath was a womanizing asshole, until his sister and her husband were brutally murdered in their own home. Now he’s a middle aged ex-cop with a bad back and too much time on his hands.

Then local cop, Harland Grout, calls about a missing girl who happens to be the daughter of his wife’s cousin. He wants Rath’s help. Looking into the case, another cop, Sonja Test (yes, all the names are this weird) discovers that there have been several other missing girls in the area over the last few years. Rath starts poking around, as you do, allowing the reader to meet a strange (and often reprehensible) cast of minor characters complete with the requisite red herrings.

As far as mysteries go, this one is okay. Not fabulous, not horrible. I think part of the issue for me was that there was – perhaps – too much going on. The latest missing girl is one thing. All the other girls another thing. And Rath’s own troubled past also factors in and contributes to a completely implausible denouement. I don’t mean to imply that the plot is convoluted; it’s not hard to keep track of any of this. It’s just that…

I was distracted by the writing. So, instead of staying with Rath the whole time, Rickstad chose a less limited point of view. Okay – fair enough. However, he had this weird writing tick that drove me nuts.

“She sort of seems familiar. But. In that way that reminds you of someone from TV or a dream.”

*

“But. State borders aren’t going to stop a sicko,” Sonja said.

*

But. How did one person, or even two people, choose these girls. And why?

*

“Of course I can read.” Gale sighed. “But. Her handwriting is a first grader’s. I’ll give it my best.”

*

“That was when I thought you were an intruder. I’ve been known to fib, if circumstances warrant. But. He’s harmless.”

I’m sure you get my drift. It would be one thing if one character said “But.”  in this manner. Unfortunately, Rickstad uses it in exposition and every piece of dialogue I’ve quoted above is a different character. Is it a Vermont thing? Drove me bonkers.

Is The Silent Girls a page-turner? After all, that’s why we read books like this, right?  I was intrigued by the book’s opening  – which was uber-creepy and reminiscent of the movie The Strangers. (It took me three tries to watch that thing) but I can’t say that the rest of the book lived up to its promise. I didn’t really care for any of the characters and I hated the ending. I turned the pages, sure, but I wouldn’t turn the book over to someone else.

Meet The Ludic Reader Jr.

Christie2 Comments

If you are regular reader of this blog, then you may remember when my son, Connor, did a guest review of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. This week we spent not one, but two days at Indigo because Con was intent on spending $150 worth of gift cards and he couldn’t wait. That got me thinking about Connor’s love of books, and I thought he might make for an interesting interview subject. I sent him the questions and here are his answers, in his own words – with only minor editing for clarity. (He’s a writer, too, my son.)

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Tell me about where your love of reading began.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to read (or being read to). I think I owe it to my parents for making me into the reader that I am today. When I was young – too young to pick up a book of my own free will – I was read to almost constantly; I’m willing to bet there wasn’t a night that went by where I didn’t read with some family member. And if my mom was not reading to me, my grandmother was, and this bled into my early childhood and then into my teen years, which makes it very difficult to pinpoint a precise time (think of trying to find a particular grain of sand on a beach). I really do think that a love of reading has a lot to do with genetics and so for the sake of clarity and of this belief, I’ll just say that my love of reading started in the womb. My conception is synonymous with my corruption, really.

Tell me about the first book you remember reading.

CoralineThe first book that I remember choosing and reading on my own is absolutely Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Every singular detail surrounding this book – details that, with any other book, would be vague – I remember in an almost frighteningly visceral way: the store from which I bought the book (Loyalist City Coin, a local second hand shop), the weather on the day in question (bright and hot; the pavement was steaming and the sky was aching blue), and all manner of other smells and sounds and little facets. Even the exact location of the book in relation to the store remains in my memory, with clarity: it was in a dusty plastic bin with other paperbacks right at the front door, practically on the front step, in a golden slant of sunlight. It was a bleak little thing, with a black cover and yellowed pages, a cracked spine, dog-eared pages and the title on the front in looping, blood-red script. I was taken by the cover artwork (by Dave Mckean) and the description on the back terrified me half to death, which I somehow knew meant that the book was good. When one looked at the front cover from a certain angle, blind spot glossed hands, rats, needles and threads jumped to life. I couldn’t refrain from purchasing it.

In my opinion, it’s one of the front runners of children’s fiction. The prose is, even by a middle grade novel’s standards, really quite beautiful. And it is for children –   the back of my copy, which reads Ages 8 up, strikes me as funny because if I were to have read this book as an eight year old, it would have had a much more profound and, perhaps negative effect on my psyche. The book is short (around 40 000 words) and weirdly sophisticated for its audience, with a strong and grim undercurrent of very disturbing themes that sometimes contradict each other (what I got out of reading it was mainly this: sometimes parents aren’t as present as you want them to be, but the real thing is always better than a replica). The plot follows a young girl called Coraline Jones (the running joke being that practically every character mistakenly calls her Caroline) as she enters the microcosm of flat-life. She lives in the flat below a crazy old man who claims to be preparing a mouse circus and above the flat of two (absolutely hysterical) old ladies – ex-actresses – and their bevy of Highland Terriers. To make a long story short, there is a door in Coraline’s flat that, one day, opens on to a brick wall, and then another day, does not. Coraline decides to venture through the door, and what follows is the most insane (albeit unfortunate) acid trip of a novel ever.

I love this book.

Tell me about the book that changed your reading life. let-the-right-one-in

Until about grade six, I was stuck in the endlessly rotating gyres of middle grade literature. I made my leap of faith to adult literature when I was about twelve, with John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire epic Let the Right One In. (The name alone still gives me chills, even though it is a reference to a Morrissey song.) It was an odd book for me to choose – I remember having little faith in it. (I’ve always thought vampire stories were a little bit campy. I’m not sure why I chose it if I didn’t think I would like it). I did end up liking it, however. A lot.

The story takes place in the early 1980s, in bleak and boring Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm. It centers on Oskar. Lonely, morbid, Oskar. He is tormented at school; his father is an alcoholic living a hermit’s life in the countryside; his mother is distant, and he spends a distressingly great deal of his time researching murder. One day, a girl named Eli moves in next door to him. She’s odd. She doesn’t smell very pleasant, she walks around in the snow in her bare feet, and she’s over 200 years old.

Vampirism, really, is only the underpinning to to this novel. Lindqvist uses it as a vehicle to explore any number of hopelessly depressing topics (familial dysfunction, alcoholism, bullying, pedophilia, murder, gender identity, drug use, loneliness). These themes, however,  are used very strategically to underscore some really important lessons throughout the book, the value of friendship (kitschy, I know) and the importance of parenting (do you notice a theme in my literature choices? I’m fascinated by parent/ child relationships and how they are portrayed in novels, what can I say?). The book plays host to a selection of other pleasantries as well: disfigurement by acid, a toothless 12-year-old boy prostitute – I’m sure you get the picture.

This book completely changed my reading trajectory. I’d never before been exposed to something that addressed sexuality and violence in such a stark way. Don’t let my descriptions put you off – Let the Right One In is a really beautiful read, with incredibly complex characters and a heartbreaking plot – I’m just not quite sure if I would ever reread it. It was sooo depressing.

How do you choose your books?

More often than not, I choose my books by their cover. And I know (or at least I think I know) it’s one of the unspoken rules of book-buying, but what purpose does a cover serve if not to influence you to buy it? Judging a book by its cover has served me well, and some of the best books I’ve ever read I’ve ventured with to the checkout without even reading the description.

You recently went on a book buying binge. Tell me about those books.

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I’ll just list my purchases and say a little about why I bought them!

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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

I love the cover of this one (see!). It’s designed by my all time favourite graphic designer Peter Mendelsund, whose covers are pure genius. I also fail to understand what stream-of-consciousness writing is, no matter how many times my mom explains it to me, so I feel like the best way to learn will be to read something by the man himself!

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I love the cover of this one. Also, almost every book that I bought was a classic because I never read classics which has suddenly become horrifying and unacceptable to me for some reason; I’m not sure what changed. I also love me a good, depressing novel as you probably now know, and this seems like it will be a good fit!

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A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

This  is the only non-classic on this list. Also, did you know that I love the cover of this one? The writing in this one is weird as hell (really beautiful though) – it’s this confused, fragmented back-of-the-mind-speak. The plot seems hard to describe as well – it seems to just be about a woman, blindly navigating her life. I’m excited about this one.

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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Nice cover (it’s the 50th anniversary edition). It’s also one of Donna Tart’s favourite novels which means I’m actually required by law to read it. I’ve actually started reading this book around three times, and I always get about 100 pages in, around which time I forget that I’m reading it. (Not a bad sign for Nabokov, I’m just senile).

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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

My copy is a Modern Library Classic (they really hit covers out of the park). I’m not sure why I was so intent on getting this book, it just seems like a very calm and quick read, with just the right amount of miserable undertones. I wanted to buy my own copy of House of Mirth,  but this was the only Wharton the book store had.

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David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens is about to become my main man. I’m more than half way through Oliver Twist and it seriously so good. That man can write a beautiful passage about death. David Copperfield seemed like a logical next choice.

You’re on a desert island and are only allowed three books. Which three and why?

Just three? Am I not allowed to bring three bookstores instead? Can I bring The Strand?

If you’re really forcing me to do this (I’ll have you know I’m calling CPS on you for making me do this horrible thing) I think I’d choose Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin (a really odd little semi-autobiographical novella about this really listless and passive guy doing a bunch of drugs), The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (the more I think about it, the closer this one comes to being my favourite. If I had it my way, I’d choose all three of her books but I didn’t think that would be fair), and, to throw a childhood favourite in there, The Ersatz Elevator by the king of opening lines, Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler.

Ok, it must be genetics. Like me, you buy more books than you’ll ever be able to read. What’s up with that?

Hey – I have like10 books to read. You have like 1000.

I know you are a book cover aficionado. Tell me about some of your favourite book covers.

I already mentioned that Peter Mendelsund is my favourite cover designer, next to Chip Kidd. I like Peter more, because he’s so minimal. I love his covers for James Joyce. I love his redesigns for Simone de Beauvoir, Koji Suzuki, Julio Cortázar, Plato. (Except I hate his designs for Dostoyevsky, sorry!) My mom bought me his beautiful coffee table book, Cover.

Recommend one book everyone should read.

secret_historyEveryone should read The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Other than that, everyone should read whatever they want. This is not to say that recommendations cannot/will not be enjoyed by whomever they are recommended to, I just think that venturing into the world of literature without a map is more exciting – and more important – than any recommendation I could give you. Ignore age and gender demographics. Read picture books, read middle grade, read literary fiction, read Harlequins shamelessly, read the most tedious collection of philosophy essays. It doesn’t matter.

As long as you’re reading.

Did I luck out when they were handing out kids, or what?

Velocity – Kristin McCloy

Christie2 Comments

velocityA couple of days ago on Information Morning, I talked about how I wished that I could carve out some time to revisit some of my favourite books. I mentioned three in particular: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Kristin McCloy’s Velocity. All three of these books had a profound impact on me, the first two when I was much younger and McCloy’s book when I first read it as a twenty-something. Of those three, I have actually already re-read Velocity numerous times and I just finished reading it again.

I think I am going to have a difficult time articulating exactly why I continue to find Velocity so compelling, but I do want to honour the book and its place in my personal canon here, especially because I recently had the very good fortune of exchanging a couple emails with the novel’s author, Kristin McCloy. (Insert fangirl squee here.)

When it was first published in 1988, Velocity caused quite a stir and earned copious praise. I am not sure what year I picked up my copy, perhaps 1989, but I definitely purchased it at The Strand in NYC. I devoured the book then for reasons that will surely become apparent a little further on.

So, what’s the book about?

Twenty-five-year-old Ellie Lowell has returned to her backwater North Carolina hometown to scatter her mother’s ashes. Ellie’s an only child and she’s been living in New York City for the past six years, so she’s finding it difficult to connect with her taciturn father, a local cop. They share the family home like two strangers might share a taxi ride to the airport – making small talk, but never really connecting.

Despite the awkwardness, Ellie decides to stay home for the summer, leaving her fledgling career in the film business and her boyfriend, Dec, back in the Big Apple. She gets a job at a local diner and before you can say two eggs over easy, she’s hooked up with Jesse, the half-Cherokee biker who lives down the road. Ellie knows he’s trouble. She says

…it occurs to me, a thousand woman, he’s had a thousand women, and every one of them has fed him everything she had.

Even though Jesse isn’t much for talking, Ellie finds herself pulled into his orbit. The attraction is sexual, of course, and she remarks that his “crazy height and that straight hair down to [his] shoulders, even from the shadows of [his] porch, the way [he] stared at me would’ve burned a hole in a blind woman’s side…”

When she’s with Jesse, she doesn’t think about anything else and that’s a good thing because what Ellie doesn’t want to think about is that her mother is dead. She can’t avoid the knowledge that “Everything crumbles. The walls, the rooftop…every structure will fall. Everything known, all that is so familiar, will vanish. Including myself.” What she can do, however, is push that knowledge away and although she is “aware of [her] grief waiting for [her], patient and thick,…right now it is remote.” Jesse is in its path.

At her age I was doing much the same thing, which is, I suppose, why Velocity struck a chord with me when I first read it all those years ago. I don’t recall what I was running from, but I sure knew what I thought I was running to. My guy, let’s call him S., was crazy tall, mostly silent, beautiful, at least to me, and he’d often disappear for days at a time, throwing me into a frenzy of longing, and then reappearing like an apparition. Like Ellie, I read into the smallest of gestures – a moment of tenderness could sustain me for weeks. S. wasn’t a criminal, but he definitely had his own demons and he was in no position to give me what I so desperately wanted. Our relationship was doomed from the start, but that didn’t prevent me from showing up where I’d know or hope he’d be or using sex as a bargaining chip. Our whole relationship was just fraught. And the weird thing is, 30 years later, I still feel that little electric charge on the rare occasion that I see him around.

When I read this book back in the day it was ALL about Jesse and Ellie’s relationship. I believed that Jesse did, in his own way, care for Ellie. I excused his bad behavior because Ellie excused it. I wasn’t blind to Ellie’s grief, but I hadn’t experienced real grief yet and so, although I could sympathize, I couldn’t personally relate to that part of her story. I knew exactly how she felt with Jesse, though. I knew that “electrical current” and the “pleasure like mercury.”

So, how does the book hold up upon rereading? Um – it’s still freaking fantastic. And here’s why. McCloy is a beautiful writer. That has always mattered to me. From the book’s opening line:

Sometimes in my dreams you rise up as if from a swamp, whole, younger than I remember, dazzling, jagged, and I follow you into smoky rooms, overwhelmed by the sense of being in the presence of an untamed thing, full of light, impossible to control.

…until the final pages, McCloy’s writing is fluid and evocative and painfully honest. But we readers know that beautiful writing only goes so far; we have to care about the characters, too. From this vantage point (on the slippery downward slope), I want to tell Ellie what I’m sure she already knows: he’s not the right guy. But I never wanted to shake her and say “Ellie, you’re acting like an idiot.” Her grief is palpable. I feel it like she feels it “a fist, hard-knuckled and small.”

She is so clearly out of control and there is no one able to ease her pain. Her father is caught in his own. Dec is helpless in New York and when he arrives unexpectedly, his presence just muddies the waters. It’s easy to see why Jesse becomes the center of her universe. He doesn’t ask questions that she can’t answer. He doesn’t ask anything of her at all, he simply “hunted down [his] needs – simple and precise – and in those days, it was me.”

Velocity is a novel about loss. And grief. It just so happens that it also has some incredibly erotic sex scenes; trust me, you’ll feel it in your knees. But here’s something interesting about my reread: this time, for the first time ever, I cried.

Now I understand. Since the last time I read this book – and it’s been a few years – both my parents have passed away, my mom in 2006 and my dad in 2009. I get Ellie’s frantic desire to sublimate her grief. Everything about her journey seemed organic and honest to me. I ached for her. I missed my parents. I also missed, strangely, that feeling of being so crazy in love with someone that you can’t think straight. All those things are lost to me now.

Velocity is a special book. Thanks, Kristin, for writing it.