Blogcritics Author: Bonnie

Book Review: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Bonnie — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:19:23 EST

The story is full of twists and turns, perils and triumphs and it is populated by a collection of questionable characters.
When I started reading Gentlemen of the Road (published by Bond Street Books), I could hear my grandfather's voice. I was, in fact, completely transported back to the nights of my childhood when, visiting my grandparents. My grandfather would tuck me in and read to me from Treasure Island. It wasn't just the prose that evoked the memory. In...

Book Review: The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner

Bonnie — Thu, 8 Nov 2007 05:32:19 EST

An environmental evangelical, not of sin and eternal fires of ecological collapse, but of virtue and paradise promised by change.
Like most people of a certain age, I found environmentalism through the hole in the ozone layer and in the muck of the Exxon Valdez, performing years of Blue Box pennance for my sins. At thirteen, I thought that was enough to change things; by 30, I'd mostly given up hope. After all, even as the environment seemed to lose prominence in poltical...

Book Review: The Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole

Bonnie — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:42:12 EDT

Wickedly funny and searingly painful.
I wonder what I looked like on the bus as I was reading Trevor Cole's sophomore novel, The Fearsome Particles (published by McClelland & Stewart)? It's the story of a family on the verge of collapse. At first, it seems that the problem is an immediate crisis: the return of a son broken by undisclosed events in Afghanistan. Yet, as the...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: Not a Happy Camper by Mindy Schneider

Bonnie — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:03:23 EDT

When I was growing up, I fantasized about going to summer camp. Not just a week of day camp like I had always done, but real camp. Sleepover camp. Two or four or eight weeks of being away from home, sleeping in a bunk bed. Daytimes spent swimming in a glittering lake, evenings spent roasting marshmallows over a fire, giggling uncontrollably from the sugar high. I've always suspected that it was an idealized fantasy, right up there with the one where childhood me was discovered by a famous agent at a local soda shop and propelled into child stardom. (The first clue that that would never be: We had no soda shop in my neighbourhood.)The reality is that my camping experience would probably have more closely resembled Mindy Schneider's, as described in Not a Happy Camper. Lured by images of luscious greenery and luxuriant facilities (not to mention a kosher kitchen), thirteen-year-old Mindy convinces her parents that Camp Kin-A-Hurra is the place for her, rather than the rigid, prissy summer camps of the years before.Between Mindy's pleading and a Lyle Lanley-worthy sales pitch, the deal is done. But after the long drive from New Jersey to Maine, the family discovers the camp is something different from what Mindy expected. Unkempt. In disrepair. The luxurious facilities are nowhere to be seen. The activities are minimal and chaotic. Disillusionment is inevitable. But Mindy made this decision herself and doesn't want to have her independence or judgment brought into question, so even as her heart sinks, she puts her chin up, waves goodbye to her parents and resigns herself to a summer that is not at all what she imagined.And, in spite of the dirty bunks, the prison cook, the garbage/food truck and the unending rain, Schneider seems mostly to remember the moments of pleasure and discovery from her unhappy camper days. The book is full of longing for Kin-A-Hurra, sometimes even an overwhelming nostalgia. The angst and the drama are written about with affection, rather than the real, searing pain that Schneider likely felt in 1974.Schneider's humour also serves to show how far she has come since Kin-A-Hurra. Though she is often self-deprecating, it is clear that she harbours a great deal of tenderness towards her thirteen-year-old self, something she surely didn't feel as an awkward, athletic, self-conscious camper. You can tell that Schneider wishes she could spare herself her mistakes with idolized Kenny and cold-shouldered Philip, even as she recognizes those first experiences with boys — and with camp — as important and formative. In the end, Not a Happy Camper isn't really about summer camp. It is a book about what it means to be a thirteen-year-old girl, too old to be a blank slate and too young to be sure of yourself. Rather than documenting singalongs and gimp bracelets and deep moments of oneness with nature, Schneider evokes Kin-A-Hurra's structurelessness, which leaves the girls focused on themselves. Freed from parents and plans, the girls are alone, together, in the wilderness of adolescence.New as it was to Mindy, camp is not an undiscovered landscape in memoir or fiction. As in most books about being thirteen, Mindy's summer is one of waiting to be kissed, of learning the difference between pretty boys and nice boys, and of trying on all the different ways that you can choose to be. Mindy is an everygirl and camp could be any moment that is different from everyday, any of those moments when a girl has to decide who she is. Schneider recognizes that, like Camp Kin-A-Hurra, becoming a teenager promises a great deal, but turns out to be a lot more primitive than its press suggests. Thirteen is a backwoods place where you need to find your own amusement. A make-do kind of place. And Schneider and the other misfit campers put in an effort, sometimes in spite of themselves, forming friendships and happy memories out of circumstances that are never what were promised.Though I never went to summer camp, that's certainly how I remember thirteen. It was a nice place to revisit with Mindy Schneider. It was a visit that made me a little sad and deeply grateful that I don't — and can never again — stay there.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

Bonnie — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 00:04:59 EDT

When it comes to music, I know what I like. Or at least, most of the time, I do. Sometimes things sneak up on me. For instance, Nirvana's on my play list these days, even though I remember rolling my teen-aged eyes at all that noise. So if I don't always know what music I like, it probably comes as no surprise that I know pretty much nothing about the science of music. About timbre, rhythm, scale and key. About the science of why things sound good or bad, and why my brain can change its mind that way.Lucky for me, there's Daniel Levitin. Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University, explores the brain's relationship with music in This Is Your Brain On Music and it's a catchy a little number.Music is something we take for granted, and Levitin makes it clear how astonishing our musical faculties are. Take a common scenario: You're in the local mall, and suddenly the piped-in music catches your ear. It's pan flutes and they're playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." You roll your eyes and think nothing more of it (it's probably best that way). It certainly doesn't cross your mind that your brain has just demonstrated an extraordinary feat of identification.I have a recording of a bluegrass group, the Austin Lounge Lizards, playing "Dark Side of the Moon" by the progressive rock group Pink Floyd, using banjos and mandolins. I have recordings of the London Symphony Orchestra playing the songs of the Rolling Stones and Yes. With such dramatic changes, the song is still recognizable as the song. It seems, then, that our memory system extracts out some formula or computational description that allows us to recognize songs in spite of these transformations.Just think about that: The tempo changes, the instruments change, the keys might change — but our ability to recognize it is constant. There is more to music, as it turns out, than meets the ear. And it happens between them. With a background in the music industry (he's worked with Blue Öyster Cult, Chris Isaak and the Grateful Dead, and was president of new-wave label 415 Records before its buyout by Sony), Levitin starts with an aficionado's passion for music and explains the circuitous route that brought him around to studying the subject scientifically. Like many popular science books, there is an affable , avuncular quality to Levitin's prose, which includes analogies between scientific concepts and daily experience, a smattering of puns and the inevitable mention of Phineas Gage. Once Levitin explains the basic science of music, he moves on to music and the brain. It is fascinating stuff. One of the most interesting areas is Levitin's discussion of how music and language both use similar areas of the brain, parts of the brain that seem to seek out structure and patterns. In other words, the grammar of music. The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of the music we like—the equivalent to grammar in spoken or signed languages—and to be able to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won't. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music. Later, Levitin notes thatThe close proximity of music and speech processing in the frontal and temporal lobes, and their partial overlap, suggests that those neural circuits that become recruited for music and language may start out life undifferentiated. Experience and normal development then differentiate the functions of what began as very similar neuronal populations. Consider that at a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory. Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles. We tend to take communication — language — for granted once we acquire it; for most of us, music just is in the same way. It is fascinating and reassuring that science seems to indicate that this is more than mere coincidence. To our brains, it may be that music is just another language that we learn to understand.Of course, the magic of music and language isn't just in the structure. Structure is necessary, but it's not the point. The best music, the best speeches, the best books transcend the rules of their forms. They aren't just technically right: They make us feel something.Even the most uptight and analytic among us expect to be moved by Shakespeare and Bach. We can marvel at the craft these geniuses have mastered, a facility with language or with notes, but ultimately that facility must be brought into service for a different type of communication. In This is Your Brain on Music, Levitin achieves that higher level. He helped me understand the interplay between the physics of sound and the physiology of my brain, he made me feel something bigger. Levitin loves music, and is amazed by how complicated a thing it is that music touches us, that the song remains the same — and different— on a steel pan or a theremin or a Stratocaster. Levitin was curious about music, and in writing about where that curiosity led him, he brought me not just an increased understanding, but also an increased sense of wonder. It's a feeling that echoes every time I listen to a good song. I know what I like, and I like my brain on music.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

Bonnie — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:42:59 EDT

Yes, there are spoilers here. Consider yourself warned.Once — I don't remember where or when — I read a quote talking about how you know if an ending is right for a book. The gist of it was that by the time you get to an ending, no matter how surprised you are, no other outcome should seem possible. That is the trick of a satisfying ending. The idea stuck with me, and over time I have come to believe it to be true. A good ending is the only ending that the story will allow.And so, what of the ending of the Harry Potter saga? It's all anyone has wanted to talk about lately. Everyone knows I am a fan of the books; everyone knew how quickly I planned to read the last one. Everyone is asking me how I feel about the fate of the "Boy Who Lived." Did I like the book? Did I like the ending?It's both an easy and a complicated question. JK Rowling managed to write a novel that left me feeling satisfied, feeling like the story of Harry Potter's discovery of himself and his world — his coming of age — was complete. I felt by the end of the book that Harry had grown up well, that he had survived the difficulties he had encountered and made the right choices. Harry grew up, and in doing so he defined himself as a hero.From a storytelling point of view, the saga is fittingly, satisfyingly and conclusively complete. I know everything I need to know about Harry Potter, son of James and Lily, and his two closest friends. I couldn't ask for more than that. (I still want the encyclopedia, though.)Yet Deathly Hallows, maybe more than any other Potter book, drove home for me the problems with the series. Clunky flashbacks full of story-critical exposition play a part in almost every pivotal scene in the book. Letters, memories, articles — incidental discovery is a key to the unfurling of the plot, and sometimes one wonders how anyone as unlucky as Harry Potter can be so lucky as stumble on the necessary information. As with past books, adverbs are dropped onto the dialogue like anvils; Rowling should trust her readers' knowledge of these characters by now and save the adverbs for special occasions. And all-caps anger makes a cameo, a reminder that these are hormonal teenagers undertaking a monumental task, in case the rest of the writing doesn't make that clear. None of these complaints are new complaints, though, and anyone who is reading the seventh book in this series has come to the same compromise as I have: Sometimes a story, a world, is so rich that the writing itself can be workman-like while the product is still an art. I never wish I could write like Rowling, but I often wish I could tell a tale like she does.Deathly Hallows offers up relentless storytelling. From Harry's last goodbye to the Dursleys (and the first of the book's surprises) to his final confrontation with the malevolent being formerly known as Tom Riddle, the book has the pace of a broom under a hurling hex. There is no moment of the book where you can lose awareness of the fact that the hard end will come soon. Among all this, Rowling nods at loyal readers, referencing plot points that have been frequent sources of fan discussion and speculation. (Sirus's motorbike. Dumbledore's correspondence with Petunia. Aberforth. Goderic's Hollow. The list could go on.) Still, other storylines raised in the earlier books seem to never quite payout: SPEW and the Hagrid's overtures to the giants — plotlines bemoaned by some fans — don't pay out with the Battle of Helm's Deep that many had been expecting.The popularity of Harry Potter is unprecedented in the book world. Out at midnight to pick up my copy, I was amazed by the diversity of the customers. I can't think of any other cultural phenomenon that I have shared with millions — literally millions — all around the world. As I was reading my book on the subway, as I was walking down my street past people clutching bags from Chapters, from Book City, from Mabel's Fables, it gave me a Capraesque glow to know that we were all in this together.That is the strength of Rowling's books, a strength that I touched on when I talked about my anticipation for the final volume. Rowling takes the ingredients of countless fantasy stories — magic, dragons, soulless evil, loyalty, powerful objects, quests — and she uses them as a common language as she creates her world. Then, she fills it with moments like Harry's long walk with his parents, his godfather, and his teacher, moments that speak to everyone's feelings of loss and longing. Rowling says she wept when she wrote that; most readers will have, too, I'm sure.The best moments in this book are the moments of triumph that Rowling gives to her characters. Hermione is forced to choose between what she loves and what is right, and she chooses right each time, each choice breaking her heart more. Ron is given a ladder and finally gets over himself, after the usual dithering. Luna is as strange as ever, but she rewards the friendship that has been shown to her. And Neville, once-bumbling Neville, the other boy who could have been the bee in Voldie's bonnet, has what might be the biggest moment in the whole book.It is, right up to the epilogue, a perfect ending. (About the epilogue, as far as I am concerned, the less said the better. It is a fannish wet dream, something that's a little embarrassing to look upon. I like happy endings, but it reduces the messages of the series to offer up a fairy tale of marriage and happily ever afters. Albus Severus might have made me cry in spite of myself, but I didn't need to know, didn't want to be told, that everything is now perfect. There's no such thing, Rowling has made clear for over 2500 pages, so she can't sell it to me now.)So when I am asked about Deathly Hallows, what do I say? What stays with me? Is it the adverbs and the cloying epilogue? Or is it the way Harry grew up, the way Rowling made me cry, the answers that were there all along in a careful reading? The books could never have ended any other way. They will be carried somewhere inside me, in some corner of the soul where stories live on, forever. Like all of Harry's trials and actions, that is enough. More than enough.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen

Bonnie — Thu, 5 Jul 2007 17:03:02 EDT

Over the past couple of years, I have often wondered how the future will judge us. How kids will read their history books and look back on their ancestors in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? As they live with the consequences and ripple effects of our actions and inactions, will they be sympathetic? Or will they be appalled? I am not optimistic that time will remember us well. Take the African AIDS epidemic, for instance. To do this, you could ask for no better guide than Stephanie Nolen's 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa (published by Knopf Canada). Nolen, an experienced journalist, wrote the book as an examination of "the biggest story in the world." The book is structured with one individual's story standing in for those of a million people with AIDS on the African continent. They are the stories of sex trade workers and truckers and health care professionals and grandmothers and scientists and politicians. There are stories from Zaire and South Africa, Malawai and Uganda — AIDS is experienced differently depending on where you live, after all. Nolen's twenty-eight profiles are diverse in a way that illustrates the range and variety of the face of AIDS on the continent. Some stories are hopeful, some are heart-breaking. Most are both. Every one one of the stories is an implicit question: Why? The scope of devastation being wrought by the AIDS epidemic hasn't gone unnoticed, after all. There probably isn't a person in the developed world — certainly not an educated person — who is oblivious to the fact that though AIDS is seen as something you live with in the West, but die from in Africa.Through Nolen's profiles, you get an idea of just what that means. Like this: Zomba is the poorest district in the fourth-poorest country in the world, and one of the worst hit by AIDS. Nearly twenty per cent of adults have the virus, and three-quarters of admissions to the hospital are HIV related. Zomba Central has three hundred beds, and it runs at 400 per cent occupancy: that means two or three skeletal patients in each old iron bed, and many more on the floor. It means sick babies tucked under benches and women in labour left alone in a fly-filled ward. Alice remembers all the niceties of bedside nursing she learned in college, fluffing pillows, wiping sweaty foreheads and offering encouraging words — but there's no time for any of that now: she is one of just six registered nurses in the hospital.Or the fact that almost 1400 children with AIDS die every day, almost all in the developing world: More than 90 per cent of all children with the virus contract it from their mothers at birth. Those infections are easily avoided: used together, a single does of nevirapine given to the mother in labour and baby at birth, a Caeserean delivery and formula feeding lower the risk of passing the virus to a baby to less than 2 per cent. Because it's so simple, fewer than three hundred children were born with HIV in all rich countries combined in 2005. But less than 10 per cent of African women get those interventions (in fact, most aren't even tested for HIV) and so 700,000 children are born infected in African each year.How could anyone look at that kind of inequality and not be mortified? To be sure, there are complications with delivering the same kind of care in Africa as is delivered in, say, Canada. The facilities are more primitive. The poverty is crushing in many places. The values are different. But Nolen and her subjects force the re-examination of some of those assumptions. In one chapter, she talks to Christine Amisi, who assisted in the MSF's anti-retroviral trials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country torn apart by civil war. There is a very real risk of creating drug-resistant strains of HIV should patients not exercise compliance in treatment; this is one of the challenges often cited in treating AIDS in unstable countries like the Congo. And yet, what did MSF find? Patients had, in the long term, a 97 per cent adherence rate—taking their pills correctly and on time — which is higher than the rate at most treatment sites in North America. Only 5 per cent of them had been "lost to follow-up," that is, stopped showing up and became untraceable — again, a number about on par with North America, and remarkable for war zone.People, after all, are wired to want to live. If you're HIV-positive in a country with a 30% prevalance rate, your understanding of the need for treatment and the consequences of the alternative is likely to be acute. The AIDS crisis can not be blamed on HIV+ Africans. Nolen outlines the many conditions that facilitated the spread of the virus, showing us how her 28 individuals came to be affected by AIDS and giving us an idea of why Africa has been hit so hard, so unlike anywhere else in the world. Nolen's been touched by these people; it comes through in her writing. Her profiles are respectful and unflinching. She consistently shows the frustration felt by those who are trying to survive something that threatens whole societies. Almost everyone wants to know where the help is. Whether it is Siphiwe Hlophe in Swaziland — "HIV is like the Asian tsunami: they don't say, 'There is a tsunami but you are not democratic so we are not rescuing you.' AIDS is an emergency just like that." — or Nelson Mandela — "When historians write about HIV/AIDS, when they write about this period in time, they will ask - 'Where were the leaders of Africa?'"— the question is, where is the help? The question is: Does anybody care? If they do — and even more, perhaps, if they don't — Stephanie Nolen's book is a key piece to increasing understanding. Understanding of the scale of this crisis. Understanding of the injustices of treatment. Understanding of the humanity of the 28 million mothers, husbands, sons and sisters struggling to live with the killer in their blood. Understanding that we are them, and they are us, and this is not acceptable. The future will not be forgiving.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

Bonnie — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:14:50 EDT

I hadn't intended to read this book. When the chance to review it was offered to me, I had just finished reading and writing about Choke. As I said at the time, I think Chuck Palahniuk is a damn good writer, but his style, his attitude, his subject matter are all things that I can only handle in small doses.But there I was, opening up my package, and tucked away beneath American Youth was Palahniuk's latest, Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey (published by Random House Canada). Oh well, I thought, I guess I'll read it. After all, I do have a train ride coming up. Plus, I thought, it'll be a good exercise to try and come up with something new to say, something different than just rehashing my conflicted feelings about the angry young man's poster author.Turned out to be an easy exercise, finding something different to say, because Rant is something different from other Palahniuk works that I've read. There are similarities — descriptions of bodily effluvia, sociopathic behaviour explained as raging against the machine, repulsive characters, casual sex, boys and their mothers and compulsively readable writing are nothing new for Palahniuk. There's enough here to quickly identify Rant as a Palhaniukian work.While the themes and the tics might be the same, though, the form is something different. The first thing you encounter in Rant is an author's note:This book is written in the style of an oral history, a form which requires interviewing a wide variety of witnesses and compiling their testimony. Anytime multiple sources are questioned about a shared experience, it's inevitable for them occasionally to contradict each other.Instead of Palahniuk's traditional, unreliable first person narrator, in Rant we encounter a series of voices, of whose accounts we are forewarned to be skeptical. This is a forehead-smackingly obvious choice in its perfection for Palahniuk, who has always seemed fascinated by the lies of self-agrandizement and self-flagellation. Are these narrators victims of the foibles of memory? Or are the consciously creating mythologies to support the lives that they have chosen?The book is the story — the mythology — of one Rant (aka Buster, aka Buddy) Casey, either a villain or an iconoclast for reasons that are revealed layer by layer as the book unfolds. The mystery of Rant's significance combines with the near-future SF-setting to leave the reader with the kind of disorientation felt by an adult entering a childhood bedroom after the house hass been sold. There are no spaceships, no teleporters, no aliens, no nuclear holocausts, but there are phrases, appalations, take-for-granted details that are left unexplained. Like clouds gathering before the storm, they fill up more and more of the story, keeping you reading your way toward the thunderclap payoff.Rant has me standing by my previous assessment: Chuck Palahniuk is a mighty good writer. Even better, though, is the sure knowledge that he's still got surprises tucked up his sleeve, surprises like Rant Casey.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: American Youth by Phil LaMarche

Bonnie — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:04:47 EDT

First things first: I hate the boy.It's not that high school freshman Teddy LeClare, main character of Phil LaMarche's American Youth (published by Knopf Canada), isn't worthy of a story. It's "the boy" that I hate, LaMarche's stylistic choice that ensures we never forget for a moment just how alienated this kid is. It's the kind of technique that works well in a short story, providing an instant idea of where one stands in relation to the tale, but a novel begs for something subtler: The boy knew it was dangerous, driving with a drunk. He'd seen the commercials. He'd been subject to the campaigns in school. But to care about your physical well-being, you have to care about your physical well-being. The boy's drunk mind fantasized about crashing full speed into one of the broad pines on the side of the road - his body flying into the dashboard, through the windshield, headlong into the trees and small saplings. Pain was what his body craved. It pleaded to be burned and scalded and dashed to pieces. It longed for relief.It makes it very clear that Teddy doesn't inhabit himself, but it keeps me from getting close to him, too. It overpowers things, like serving horseradish as a side dish instead of a condiment - it distracted me from the more delicate components.In spite of this common complaint, "masterpiece" makes a frequent appearance in the buzz and reviews for the novel. Thematically, the book covers attention-getting ground. The key event of the story is a shooting that leaves one of Teddy's friends dead; the book is the story of what follows. But American Youth isn't so much a book about guns as it is one about cultural conflict and change. Teddy's economically-depressed small town is becoming a suburb, and there's an us versus them element as the population changes. As Teddy is adopted by a gang of suspender-wearing, morality-focused, Second Amendment-defending teens (the titular "American Youth"), it becomes clear that it isn't the deadliness of the bullet that mattered so much as the illuminating flash of the gunshot. It's a real world discussion that is so polarized that understanding the other point of view seems impossible, making it the perfect place for fiction. Unfortunately, the boy's alienation keeps the reader from getting close to any of the points of view involved. And LaMarche sometimes resorts to facile stereotypes. They act, perhaps, as signposts (like "the boy"), but they don't put the reader any closer to understanding Teddy and his world, or themselves and their own. Take, for instance, this description of the gunshop-running mother of one of the American Youth: When they got close, she looked down at her watch and shook her head. She was a big woman with short gray hair, but when she shook her head, the boy saw that it was long in the back. "Would it kill you to get here on time?" she said."I have school, Mother," George said."Don't give me that."Where is the surprise in that? For me, this is the novel's biggest problem. It's not a bad book — it is a quick and often compelling read — but the alienation and the lack of surprises ultimately left me feeling merely lukewarm. As I started to write this review, I realized that I had strong memories of the events that opened the novel, but dim ones of its ending. The book's surprises — and, indeed, the story I wound up wishing it had told, the story of Teddy and his mother's attempt to protect him, and herself, and their family — are in its first few chapters. Though some of these ideas are revisited as the book concludes, the payoff never seemed to happen. Like Teddy, I never felt that I was any closer than "somewhere inside [my] skull, watching the room through the windows of [my] eyes."It's close, but it was never close enough.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Book Review: Bang Crunch by Neil Smith

Bonnie — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:39:45 EDT

I read Bang Crunch, Neil Smith's debut collection of short stories (published by Knopf Canada), on a train, on my way to visit a grieving friend. Her partner had died: Too young, too soon, too good for it to be fair. I would read a story and glance out the window, at the gray, industrial world by the tracks, and I would think about how life is so beautiful and cruel, all at once. Then, I would return to the pages, to Smith's enchantingly wrenching tales of striving and failure, wrapped in a blanket of beautiful melancholy as the train rocked me back and forth. Smith's stories are full of broken-hearted dreamers, people in the midst of being struck by the realization that the world is not what it should be. From the opening salvo, "Isolettes," in which a parent's idealized view of parenthood is shattered by medical complications and emotional ambivalence, to the parting shot from Madeline, an avenger of ordinariness, in "Jaybird," these stories are full of hospitals and broken hearts. Each tale manages to be both stark and tender, like a punch in the face followed by the aid of a stranger. Much of the solace comes from the bittersweet imagery in Smith's writing. There is hair the colour of construction boots and a "rain puddle look" on a dissed boy's face. A scrapbooker explains away her failed attempt at journal-keeping: "Words simply toddled across the page like a string of daycare tots." Smith's writing about Montreal makes me want to make a return visit to the city; when it appears, it is often a character in its own right. Montreal is most highlighted in "Green Fluorescent Protein," perhaps my favourite story in the collection. ("Isolettes" and "B9ers" are also in contention.) "Green Fluorescent Protein" is a coming of age story (sexuality, family upheaval) about the meaning of beauty, and about technology, and about the way in which we manipulate our world. I fell for Max almost instantly; just-the-way-it-is observations like this one sealed the deal: The nurse's name is Charlotte, a pretty, twenty-year-old girl who probably didn't get cast as Juliet because she's black and fat. In Max, Smith perfectly captures that moment in a teenager's life when they know everything and nothing... and know it. In "Isolettes," Smith again uses the world of science as a parallel to the inner life of the character. In this case, it's An, a woman whose independence frightens her and leads her to the decision to have a baby. Smith's ability to forge a character in a sentence is again present when we learn: In her foolish twenties, she'd shared a loft with a boyfriend whose puppy-dog good cheer had made her want to drive him out to the country and leave him there.It's an image so perfect that I wondered, staring out the train window, why no one had ever conjured it up before. The "B9ers," conversely, had a Palahniukian feel, with its distrust of sincerity and kindness — not to mention the support group motif and the story's resolution. A more ethereal, less gritty Palahniuk absent the potential for accusations of misogyny, mind you. There were occasionally other echoes of familiarity. The ash filled curling stone that featured in two of the collection's stories was reminiscent of Men With Brooms, not that the world isn't big enough for two memorial rocks. The title story, meanwhile, has a passing resemblance to The Confessions of Max Tivoli in the aging-gone-wonky circumstances of the protagonist. (In Smith's case, he dubs the condition "Fred Hoyle syndrome," again using science as the scaffolding for his human story— Hoyle did not support the Big Bang theory, though he coined the term, supporting instead the idea of Steady State.)These echoes are mentioned as trivia, not as criticism. Smith's work is original, from the most ordinary of the stories to the most extreme ("Extremities"). His ability to capture wistfulness in all its hope and desperation charmed me. His unwillingness to romanticize situations or subjects shocked, delighted and devastated me. Smith clearly loves the world in all it's messy, car accident glory. Bang Crunch is the sound of life, an onomatopoeia of what it feels like to be alive. It was the perfect book for the journey I had to make, and I am grateful for it.

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.