Reviewed by Brian Brennan

Jan Wong was a star of The Globe and Mail newsroom, a driven, gutsy, award-winning reporter who observed the Tiananmen Square massacre at first hand, and tested the limits of Canada’s airport security by smuggling box cutters aboard four Air Canada flights in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In September 2006 she wrote a morning-after feature story – a combination of reporting and analysis – on the Montreal Dawson College shooting that left the gunman and one student dead. In her story she linked the incident to two other Montreal school shootings, noting that in each instance the perpetrator came from immigrant stock. Each had been marginalized in a society that valued “pure laine,” which Wong defined as francophone slang for old-stock Quebecers.

All hell broke loose.

Out of the Blue chronicles the crisis that followed for Wong, including her two-year struggle with depression and her fight to have her sick pay restored after the employer accused her of malingering. It’s a candid, compelling, unflinching account, dappled with references to others who battled depression and wrote about it, and packed with well-documented information about the history, causes, symptoms, and treatment of mental illness. It also offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of an intensely competitive newsroom where reporters complained of “severe byline deprivation” if they hadn’t a story in the paper for a while.

The “pure laine” reference, cleared by her editors before publication, plunged her into hot water. Letters of condemnation, 13 of which the Globe published, came from readers including Prime Minister Harper and Quebec Premier Charest. The House of Commons passed a motion apologizing to the people of Quebec for the “offensive remarks.” Wong received a flood of racist hate mail, abusive phone calls, packages containing excrement and mutilated copies of her books, and a death threat alarming enough to warrant calling police.

The Globe let Wong take the fall. It attempted to appease her critics by publishing an editorial saying there was no evidence Quebec’s linguistic struggle contributed to marginalization of immigrants or to any violence perpetrated by them. The editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon, added in a damning column that Wong’s opinions should not have been part of her story. With nobody in her corner, Wong went on extended stress leave, during which she was diagnosed with severe depression.

Wong remained mostly silent following the uproar. After first granting her permission to talk to other media outlets about the backlash, the Globe management slapped a gag order on her. At the same time, the newspaper company’s insurer, Manulife, began questioning her claim that she was stricken with a mental illness and could not return to work.

Though she ended up losing her job at the Globe, Wong eventually received written acknowledgement from the employer that she had been ill and unable to attend work during the time she was on stress leave. She also negotiated successfully for a favorable settlement agreement and removal of the gag order. But that wasn’t the end of the Globe fallout. Left free to write about her ordeal, she landed a contract with Doubleday Canada and spent three years at work on Out of the Blue. She was “a keystroke away” from sending it to final copy edit before printing when her publisher got cold feet, despite having had the book assiduously lawyered, because of some references she made to the Globe‘s “corporate bullying.” Wong refused to change the material, parted ways with Doubleday, and published the manuscript herself.

I’m grateful that she did. Books like this rarely make it into print because corporations generally demand silence as part of settlement agreements with individuals who sue them for wrongful dismissal. Wong took on three behemoths – the Globe, Manulife, and Doubleday – and emerged from the fray with her voice gloriously intact.

Published by kind permission of Talonbooks.

By Michel Tremblay

Her grandmother hugged her tight, unable to say a word; her grandfather swallowed his tears; only her sisters let themselves go and cried, copiously. With her big suitcase beside her, she herself hasn’t moved, her lips quivering slightly but not too much. Strangely enough, no goodbyes have been exchanged though both grandparents and granddaughter know that they’ll probably never see one another again. Don’t say things. Avoid them or arrange so that they don’t exist. A calculated chill instead of outpourings, though they are necessary.

She did not turn around when she climbed into the buggy so she hasn’t seen the dejection in the eyes of Josephine and Meo from whom one-third of what is left of their reason for living is being taken away this morning while they wait for the rest to be cut off. Will the other two leave on the same day or will they have to live twice more through this intolerable scene that should be taking place amid heartbreaking sorrow and cries but is actually happening in a terrifying silence? Will they be able to bear three departures, three times on the same train?

When Monsieur Sanschagrin’s whistle echoed in the early morning chill, Rheauna held out her ticket to the tall man with a moustache who had just asked her if she was Rheauna Rathier due to leave for Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal. He spoke each name in a resonant voice as if they were all exotic destinations on the other side of the world. The door of the car closed with a gruesome bang, she ran to the first window, pressed her nose against the glass and then, as the train was starting to move, her sisters and her grandparents on the wooden platform waved desperately, she allowed herself to weep, to cry, to pound her fist. She wished that the other four wouldn’t see her collapse, that she could wait for the train to pull away from the station.

Before she gave in to her sorrow, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to go away, to cross Canada or visit her two aunts and her second cousin, then lose her way in the big city, Montreal, with the mother she had stopped loving so long ago. She wanted to stop everything — the train that was picking up speed, the course of her life that was branching off in a direction she hadn’t chosen, the nightmare that was starting here, this morning, that perhaps would never end. She thought about jumping off the train, at the risk of breaking her neck, or pulling the alarm bell to stop it. Or throwing herself at the tall, moustached man, who was looking at her wide-eyed, to punch him and beg him to give her back her family. She thought about dying or, rather, that’s what death was: a definitive departure for an unknown destination. Alone. In a moving prison. With no hope of a change.

This time it’s the entire village of Maria that seems to be swalllowed up by the fields of wheat. And rye. And oats. And corn. The steeple of the church of Sainte- Maria-de-Saskatchewan floats for a moment above a square that’s greener than the rest, of wheat that’s not yet fully mature though it will soon be haying time, then it, too, will drown in the waves of grain and disappear for good. Never again will she see that either. She will talk about it all her life, she will describe the colours, the smells, the horror of bushhfires like the one last summer, the beauty of summer sunsets and the northern lights in winter over the vast plains, the tears that will come to her eyes whenever she imagines her grandmother bending over her wood stove where a pot of beef and vegetables is simmering, or her grandfather rocking on his veranda and smoking his smelly pipe, or Devil chewing diligently on a juicy red apple. That’s all over now. She takes out her handkerchief, wipes away her tears, settles into her leather seat and looks out, shattered, at the endless plain that is running at full speed on either side of the train.

Excerpted from Crossing the Continent by Michel Tremblay, translated by Sheila Fischman. Published by Talonbooks, 272 pages, $18.95.

The Governor General’s Award finalists were announced on Tuesday and, as usual, I looked at the drama list and sighed. Not because I wasn’t on it — I didn’t have anything eligible — but because I was reminded once again that we don’t have a proper playwriting award in this country.

Now, let me hasten to say that I congratulate those who’ve been nominated and am happy for them. I’ve been a finalist for the English-language Drama Award myself, and it’s a fine thing. It’s a welcome reward after all those hours at the computer and in rehearsal, it’s a great PR boost, and it may even change your life a little bit

The problem is that the GG is a book award. The only plays eligible for it are ones that have found their way into print in the previous 13 months. That means it’s chosen from a relatively small pool of contenders, especially as compared with the books in other categories. This year, publishers submitted 230 books in the English-language fiction category, 215 in non-fiction, and 170 in poetry. In drama? 39. The numbers are similar in the French-language categories: 173 in fiction, 104 in poetry, 69 in non-fiction, 22 in drama.

There are even strange strictures on eligibility, such as the one dictating that the books must be at least 48 pages long. That rules out the majority of plays published as chapbooks, which is actually a more sensible way to sell plays, unless, of course, you’re looking to make big bucks in the academic market. Needless to say, it also rules out plays that are published online only, which is, in my view, an even more sensible way to do the job. (That’s why I run a site called ProPlay.) But that’s an argument for another time.

So, the GG isn’t an award for the best Canadian play of the last 13 months; it’s for the best one that managed to get put between covers and published in a font large enough to highjump it past the 48 page mark. This out of, what — 100? 200? new Canadian plays produced in any given year? And inevitably the English-language award favours those that have been produced in Toronto, as publishers figure — quite rightly — that that’s where the biggest market is. A quick check of this year’s finalists will confirm, as it so often does, that this is the case.

What’s needed is a national playwriting award based on scripts — not books, scripts — that have been premiered in Canada in the previous year. In this it would be like the American Pulitzer Prize for Drama, although, unlike the Pulitzer, which is also notoriously metrocentric, going as it does nearly every year to a play that’s been seen in New York, our award will have to be properly administered. Basing it on the script of the play, not its production, will be necessary because nobody’s going to foot the bill for a flying squad of jurors ready and able to drop everything and jet off to the latest premiere in Whitehorse (even if such a jury existed). But it will also remove the problem of the production making the play look better or worse than it is. So, just text on paper (or a computer screen). Earlier this year I sat on the jury for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama, administered by the Writers Guild of Alberta, and that’s how it works. There’s no reason the concept can’t be extended nationwide.

Personally, I think awards are pretty silly (even when I sit on the jury). But if we’re going to have them, let’s do them properly. I was reminded today, with the announcement of the nominees for the Carol Bolt Award, that the Playwrights Guild of Canada has the beginnings of the sort of award I’m thinking about. It’s limited to PGC members — that doesn’t work — and plays produced in “professional” theatres — dodgy, subject to interpretation — and it’ll need a good topping up of the $3000 prize to draw the sort of attention the GG does. But it’s a start.

Meantime, I think I’ll start looking around for a wealthy patron who’s itching to endow something. Anybody have a number for David Mirvish?

Frank Moher is a playwright and the editor of backofthebook.ca

As though the tenterhooks weren’t tight enough for Harry Potter 7.2: The One Where It Actually Ends, the Rowling megalith taunted its fans last week with the mysterious offer of . . . Pottermore.

Pottermore, the powers promised, was a Thing That Was Not A Book But Was Still Very Great And Seekrit. Said powers gave the masses about a week to stew and ponder before revealing the actual Pottermore, a sort of interactive online game wherein players are sorted by the Sorting Hat and chased by Dementors or whatever. Also, the books are joining the rest of 2011 and being released as ebooks. So, that’s neat.

Pottermore’s eventual manifestation is less interesting, however, than the anticipatory buzz. In the pre-online days, if you’d heard Something New And Seeekritive was coming out, you and your buddies would come up with a few half-baked theories about Harry Potter Action Figures, and then you would chase a hoop with a stick down to the swimming hole. Your speculative powers were limited to your social circle and the spare time and concern therein.

The intarweb accrues that spare time and multiplies it a squillion-fold. No sooner had Pottermore graced the interwaves than people began hollering out ideas. It’s a theme park! It’s an MMORPG! A Harry Potter Cast World Tour! A remake of all the movies where they LITERALLY LEAVE NOTHING OUT so the movies are, like, two weeks long. AN ACTUAL WIZARDING SCHOOL. Interest was, as they say, piqued.

And Pottermore is actually kind of a rad thing, if you’re into the Potterverse. It may even be as cool as any of the best ideas that were shouted into the inter-ether. But it isn’t cooler than all those things combined, which would be the only way to blow anyone’s mind after a week of rampant speculation unhampered by budgetary or practical concerns (the potential non-existence of magic, e.g.). Imaginations ran wild and they ran everywhere, whereas the real Pottermore could only ever go in one or two directions without becoming an unwieldy mess.

Ultimately fans will be delighted because more HP is still more HP, even if it isn’t a world tour. But this same phenomenon is what killed the finale of “Lost” (okay, well, that and it being a sort of shitty finale). Years of speculation had raised expectations too high while simultaneously killing off the element of surprise. Literally anything they did would have been predicted on someone’s blog somewhere and come off as an obvious choice.

Buzz is an unwieldy beast, and as much as it generates interest it can result in disappointment with the final product. The blurb for Chris Cleave’s 2008 novel, Little Bee, ran along the lines of “we can’t tell you anything about this plot and shit, because that would RUIN IT, and once you read it and haaaaave to tell your friends, don’t tell THEM either unless you are a Ruinous Bastard.” This vague and enticing lure drove expectations for what is just a Very Good Book About Suffering But With No Twists Or Surprises Necessitating Such Seekretive Marketing to unachievable heights, which the book couldn’t possibly hit.

The week of hallucinatory speculations for Pottermore likely won’t dent its popularity in the long run, and it’s near enough to the best, realistic guesses to soothe the savage muggles. But in some lonely basement at least one HP superfan is legitimately disappointed that it isn’t a wizarding school.

Meghan Cox Gurdon’s Wall Street Journal article on the “explicit abuse, violence and depravity” grown rife in YA fiction must come either from a place of willful blindness or an actual dark rock, under which she has been living. 

Granted, YA fiction has gotten more sexually explicit since 1973 when Judy Blume’s Deenie would touch her “special place” to help herself fall asleep, and more violent since 1967, when S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders fought each other with KNIVES. Oh no, wait. It has always been like, this. FOR A REASON. 

Gurdon calls teen fiction “a hall of fun-house mirrors” that reflect “hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.” I don’t know what means this “hideously distorted.” Dark And Brooding YA is necessary and valuable and popular because this sort of shit happens in real life. (Okay, maybe not the werewolfy bits. But the sudden upheaval of becoming a werewolf [combined with unexpected growth of hair]? Triumph of analogy.)

Gurdon complains that YA lit contains “images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.” As if anyone has ever needed art to help them cope with joy and beauty, and as though literature wasn’t the shoulder on which the damaged, brutalized, and lost can weep.

Life is occasionally very shitty and the teen years are like an uncomfortable, uncertain flame to which said shittiness flocks. There are BAD INFLUENCES above and beyond those nasty books. High school frequently says things like “Bigotry is awesome!” and needs to be countered by novels in which bigotry has real and violent consequences, or is absent altogether. From the outside YA can look like it’s all angst and Chuck Taylors and co-dependency and it IS those things, but it is those things plus BETRAYAL and DISASTER and COURAGE.

Yet Gurdon also takes issue with the ability of YA to meet teens where they are at, and to give them a voice. She complains that writing about such “pathologies” as having been abused (at which I paused to die a little bit and then come back to finish the article), or indulging in self-harm, helps to normalize these behaviors, make them part of the culturally acceptable lexicon, and encourage them in other young’uns. Yet the article earlier asserts that “reading about homicide doesn’t turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won’t make a kid break the honor code.” So which is it? This also presumes that self-harm is a hobby teens pick up because they think it’s rad, not (among other things) a coping mechanism to deal with deep psychological pain. DEEP PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN IS NOT CATCHING. Or, at least, you cannot get it from books.

Sherman Alexie once wrote of his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian that there’s “nothing in this book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet.” Gurdon responds that “one depravity does not justify another.” However, in stark contrast to the internet, which is maintained by trolls and scarab beetles, YA lit is written by adults who love teens, and who get into YA PRIMARILY to be like, Let me help you through these awkward, wretched years. Given the choice of who to let talk to my kids about what sex is and what bullies are and how to escape the Zombie Apocalypse, I’ll always take well-intentioned adults over scarab beetles.

Let’s leave aside for the sake of brevity and of my poor, furious heart that the article discusses YA fiction as though it were a homogenous mass – as though Alyson Noel’s angsty Immortals are equivalent to John Green’s smart-talking, prank-pulling, good-hearted teens. Let’s also leave aside the inherent problems in the sidebar “Books We can Recommend for Young Adult Readers.” (Ship-Breaker is a book about a BOY and is therefore for BOYS and girls will be like, I don’t understand this dystopic business, where are the prom dresses? True Grit is about a girl but she is BADASS so it is ALSO for BOYS because girls should stick to books about “love-struck medieval girl[s] gone mad” [Lisa Klein’s Ophelia]. Who can breathe when they see this in print?)

I feel like I am stating the obvious, like I am arguing that water is excellent for thirst or that apples and baby wolverines are, in fact, two different things. But here we are, having this conversation, and I am both boggled and saddened by the fact that some people still think YA will keeeel you (metaphorically, emotionally, ethically). Instead, it is those teenage years that will kill you. YA might be the only thing to save your ass.

Reviewed by Frank Moher

On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning in the National Post, convinced him of “”the extraordinary professionalism of the police patrolling Toronto this week.” The city was intact: tourists thronged Yonge Street, a band played on the corner. He toodled west along Queen, where he found a line of police staring down protestors. But: “There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw.”

Er, not so much.

We know now, of course, that the police were engaged in widespread brutality and violations of civil liberties all over Toronto that day. But Jonathan Kay didn’t see any of it and, so, of course, the police acted with “extraordinary professionalism.” Or perhaps he would argue that a little head-bashing and snatch-and-grabbery is not really violence, as in, you know, violence, and the police and state agree with him, and so that is that.

We don’t really know what Kay was thinking in the wake of the G20, as he didn’t blog much about it after that, except to call Toronto a “city of wimps.”

And so we come to Mr. Kay’s latest item of “reporting,” a book titled Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. All the tropes evidenced in his G20 coverage are present here, too: perception peddled as reality, ad hominens, and a firm conviction that anyone who sees things differently than he does must be a nut. Kay, Managing Editor of Comment at the Post, bills himself on his twitter feed as an “Engineer-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-book-writing-guy.” But while he is indubitably a journalist and a book-writing-guy, he is not a reporter; he is an editorialist, and remains so here.

I should mention that I am referred to in passing in the book, which identifies me, bizarrely, as a “poet.” (I have worked in theatre and journalism for some 35 years, but the last poem I wrote, other than this piece of doggerel, was in high school.) It also lumps me in with the rest of its specimens as a “Truther,” which is more arguable, though I don’t identify myself as such, not only because the term is subject to the sort of mish-mashing Kay gives it here, but because it strikes me as pompous (kind of like calling oneself a “pro-lifer”). In any event, if I am a Truther, I’m a pretty bad one: I don’t think George Bush or Dick Cheney or anyone in the White House hatched the plot, I do think an airplane flew into the Pentagon, I’m agnostic about what brought down World Trade Centers 1 and 2 (though not so much 7), I regard Alex Jones as a highly unreliable (if entertaining) source of information, and I think Ron Paul would be a disaster as president. If the Truther movement issued membership cards, I’d probably be required to turn mine in.

I also wrote for the National Post for 11 years (including a piece with Jonathan Kay as editor). It was their itchy-trigger-finger syndrome when, in a book review, I alluded to the suspicious stock trading that preceded 9/11, that caused me to stop doing so.

What I certainly am is a sceptic — about the official version of 9/11 as well as much else I am told, whether by government or others who have a stake in a story. That, to me, is what is involved in being a journalist. But Jonathan Kay tells us that too much of that sort of thing can get out of hand. “Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone,” he writes, in the sermonly conclusion to his book — “that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect.”

One thing that can be said for Among the Truthers — it certainly transcends “mere intellect.”

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their bona fides before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” (Update in video below: Zwicker says it wasn’t a chess clock.) And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Kay never addresses the arguments of his interlocutors, because, he tells us late in the book, a New York City editor warned him that “Debunking books don’t sell.” Instead, he refers the reader to various of those books, and sites. This is defensible on editorial grounds; were he to get into his own reasons for rejecting 9/11 Truth theories, the book would be even weightier than it is. But it is also a convenience; it means Kay never has to address what he calls the “anomalies” in the official story of that day. We never learn why his interviewees are so head-shakingly wrong — they just are.

He does, though, fall back on some of the easier explanations for why so-called conspiracism has thrived since the Kennedy assassination: the world is too complex, conspiracy believers can’t deal with its chaos, and so they develop over-arching narratives to make its unpredictability more palatable. All of which is nonsense; the notion that one could take comfort from the idea that Kennedy was killed by a cabal, still unidentified to this day, or that somebody blew up the World Trade Centre towers (and got away with it), is sillier even than the most exotic conspiracy theories. But there’s more where that came from. Kay is a proponent of the “If I Write It, Maybe It’ll Become True” school of prose. As I got deeper into his book, with its explanation that conspiracism is the result of “midlife ennui” (or that, as an alleged “poet,” my day job requires me to “weave a self-invented reality”; I wish), I began to find Among the Truthers as ludicrously entertaining as any Alex Jones broadcast.

Kay does offer an interesting history of conspiracy movements (though this leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge that some are legitimate; again, we never find out what makes one plot real and another not). And he is right that, for some adherents, 9/11 Truth evolves into a kind of religion. The comfort believers find in it, however, comes not from a simplifying explanation of the world, but from a group of shared verities, repeated over and over in incantatory fashion. Mind you, this could also describe the editorial pages of the National Post.

Less harmless than Kay’s pop-psychologizing is his zeal to eradicate ideas other than his own. Having concluded that “any effort to engage committed theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time” — because, of course, they refuse to come around to his way of seeing things — he offers, in his final chapter, a proposal to shame them out of their wrong-thinking, by “applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades.” What he has in mind are first-year university courses using an “anticonspiracist curriculum” to teach students “to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought.” In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, kill their young.

Well, okay. Sounds like an interesting course. Of course, the problem is that if it were taught in any way other than Jonathan Kay, dreamer-upper, envisions — if, say, discussion as to the merits as well as the vagaries of the 9/11 Truth movement were allowed — then Jonathan Kay, National Post writer, would no doubt take off after it. Kay got his start on this beat when, as he reminds us, he discovered that a Liberal candidate in the 2008 federal election had six years earlier reported on some of the findings of various independent researchers into 9/11. He immediately employed the Post in a successful campaign to have her turfed as a candidate. More recently he’s been trying to work the same voodoo on a student at the University of Lethbridge. For all that Kay affects to be really, really interested in 9/11 Truth as a sociological movement, and to really, really want to understand its actors, Among the Truthers is of a piece with his daily journalism. He isn’t out to understand them; he’s out for their scalps.

 
Six months after the G20, Jonathan Kay had a bit of a rethink. “A few weeks ago,” he wrote in his Post blog, “I thought the police response to the G20 protests was yesterday’s news — and I never really reconsidered the opinion I formed at the time of the event, based on what I saw with my own eyes.” But then the Toronto Star got on the case of Adam Nobody, the G20 peaceful protestor tackled and beaten by cops, and lo-and-behold: “. . . it’s now clear that there was some thuggish police behavior that that went on.”

“Thuggish.” So it’s a start.

We can hope that someday some mainstream publication gets on the case of 9/11, thus allowing Jonathan Kay to reconsider that also. We can hope, as he approaches midlife ennui, that he decides it’s okay after all to have heretical thoughts — or, at least, to let others have them. We can hope that he learns to use YouTube. Meantime, we can be reasonably sure Among the Truthers will have little impact, except to buttress the beliefs of the orthodox in the same way he claims (quite rightly) that the outpourings of the Truth movement reinforce its gnosticism. It’s a Battle of the Bibles, whether Kay accepts their equivalency or not, and, Brother, it’s not going to be settled in my lifetime.

But while debunking books may not succeed, neither do books that aren’t better at peddling their hortatory wares than this one. I would have liked to read an insightful study of conspiracy movements. Among the Truthers, on the other hand, is a failed salvo, that might just as well have been titled The Protocols of All Those People Who Make Me Think Twice.

***

Jonathan Kay in debate with Richard Gage, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka on TVO’s “The Agenda”:

Review By Rachel Krueger

The blurb-o-matics must be killing themselves over this. Alone in the Classroom has NO PLOT. Or it has many plots. A surfeit of plots.

Thank god it also has ssssssecrets. (And is weirdly amazing.)

It begins with the death of a little girl but that is the last minute you will know what the point is. From there the narrative threads become hopelessly, fascinatingly tangled. The little girl, she dead. And you probably think this novel’s about her (don’t you) but then Connie Flood, Random Journalist sent to cover the trial of her alleged murderer, runs into Parley Burns, Deeply Unsettling Man From Her Past.

And so now it is the past, and Connie Flood, Fresh Upstart Teacher, is trying to teachify Michael, Young Boy Resistant to Teachifying. Meanwhile, our friendly neighborhood narrator is all “Given what Parley Burns did and what happened to him in the end,” the sort of ominous foreshadowing to which I am extremely partial. And you, dear reader, have a very loose and slippery conviction you know where this foreboding is coming from.

And Hay makes you stir your brain pot to keep the connections straight. Like, it is still the past and the narrator is like: Connie Flood is talking to Parley Burns’ wife while a girl of 17 listens in. That girl has curly hair. Her mother is this person I referred to earlier named Anne, whom you may recall but possibly not because it is only page 13 and I have already referred to an insupportable number of characters. I was named after Anne, my grandmother. This will be important later.

It is like MATH. And I wanted to be angry at all this deliberate obfuscation, but it was so intricate and balanced and Heavy With Meaning that I couldn’t help tugging on the plot-strings to see if any would loosen up. Sometimes Hay’s love of muddling gets away from her. Non-characters, characters serving only to flesh out other minor characters (who are in themselves merely plot-flesh), crop up to confuse the issue of who is actually Doing Shit in this book and who is merely providing the local color against which Shit Is Done. But the end ultimately justifies the means.

Because the rubbernecky interest of a murdered child (and another, later Terrible Thing), and the focus on Connie and creepy Parley are misdirections. In the interstices, this book is about family connections that are all, if not profoundly unhealthy, at least a little fucked. You CANNOT sleep with your favorite aunt’s old boyfriend, no matter how much said boyfriend gets around, without disturbing some serious shit. But it is those relationships that make this book weirdly compelling, that justify the looping chronology and mass of relevant characters, and that keep the whole thing on the outskirts of Tawdryville and Salacioustown.

They are also what make this book hella hard to pin down. It is both a meandering plot hole and a pleasure to read, for the usual reviewy buzzwords like “characterization” and “poignancy” and “Seriously, having a relationship with your aunt’s ex is pretty messed. I don’t care how rugged he is.”

Rachel Krueger also blogs on books at booksidoneread.com

George R R Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, while long a big deal in fantasy basements, is now officially a Big Deal™. The HBO series based on the first installation, A Game of Thrones, has both brought the series into the fantasy-abjuring eye and put a much-appreciated amount of pressure on his GRRRRRRMness to move his ass, the aforementioned first novel having been published FIFTEEN! YEARS! AGO! The fifth book comes out (allegedly and after a slew of false release dates) in July of this year.

It’s like that joke Lewis CK tells about traveling cross country in ye olden days, where a bunch of you would die along the way and babies would be born and by the time you got to where you were going you were all new people. When I started SoIaF I was a young, newly married student, working on a BA, and now I am . . . okay, I am a terrible example. But other people, people who started the series when it started and who have managed to do things in the intervening 15 years (have children, change careers, give up on the project altogether, die and reincarnate) are, metaphorically, all new people.

Which is always dangerous in publishing, because the new people these people are might not have the same urge as the old people these people used to be to snap up your product. You must CAPITALIZE! Strike while you are still a hot iron, etc. And I’ve been hearing rumblings around the Tubes that authors need to bump up their production, and that it’s not fair to make readers wait MORE THAN SIX MONTHS (or, ye gads, a YEAR) for the next installment, an attitude for which I blame Netflix Streaming. You want me to wait a FULL BUSINESS DAY and then put on PANTS and go to my MAILBOX before I watch this movie? You presume too much.

Ultimately, it is a question of value. I don’t really want to spend my afternoon watching “Outsourced,” but if I can stream that instead of waiting a day for the infinitely better “Community,” I will.  But where I am lazy about my television diet, I am passionate about my literary one. Yes, some authors churn out subsequent books every six months, but I strongly suspect those books of not being terribly good (or those authors of having James-Frey-style fiction factories in their basements). There is a certain ballsyness in asking your fans to wait six years for Book Five (particularly when Book Four ends with something like, I wrote the thing and it was too long so here’s half and the other half is soon forthcoming), but those balls are predicated on a confidence in your work’s value.

So I will (willingly, if not cheerfully) go about my business and grow old while I wait for Martin (or Diana Gabaldon, or Robert Jordan before he pulled a Robert Jordan *coats both Martin and Gabaldon in bubble wrap*) to do what they do.  I am not a toddler.  I will choose a cheesecake later over a Ding Dong now.

Review by Tara Hughes

From its shocking opening to its moving conclusion, Cynthia Holz’s new novel, Benevolence, examines the destructive effects of fear and spiritual exhaustion on a marriage, and the rough healing that sometimes follows.

Holz takes the reader deep into the lives of a childless, aging couple for whom hiding one’s true desires has become second nature. In the process, she asks whether the divide between daily life and the life of the soul can ever really be narrowed – and answers, perhaps surprisingly, Yes.

Renata and Ben – a psychologist and psychiatrist, respectively – spend long days helping damaged people, or turning them away when they cannot. But in their personal lives they are lost. Bitter with disappointment, each afraid of censure from the other, they have become dessicated, their marriage a dry husk of what once was green and alive.

As we meet them, though, they encounter two patients who will challenge their professional remove and force them to grow. The faster Renata and Ben run from their fears, the more inexorably Holz draws them towards, respectively, a young pregnant woman and a potential kidney donor who – in a lovely reversal – help their therapists to heal.

The story alternates between the points of view of the two protagonists, interspersed occasionally with that of Ben’s mother, Molly. While Renata and Ben are likable characters, they are also so frustrating in their fear and anxiety that the reader turns with relief to Molly and her surrender to “It is what it is.” Seventy years old and a widow, she has lived alone for 15 years. Now, with the return of a former lover, she must face her own secrets and desires.

“The looking, that was it,” Holz writes of Molly’s reawakening, “– the way he looked deeply into her eyes and past them. The way he gave his full attention, then and now, made something widen in her chest, and suddenly there was room in her for all his faults and goodness, for joy and suffering. What was this big space, this quietness, she wondered – and then she knew. Forgiveness.”

Molly learns that life is not about expecting miracles, but accepting the present moment and allowing oneself to be surprised. Hers is a gentle rebirth, a beautiful counterpoint to the more tortured struggles of Renata and Ben.

Holz’s secondary characters are delightful, believable, and beautifully rendered. She peppers the book with symbols of life’s comings and goings — trains, rivers, births, deaths – and uses recurring images of floating to suggest the surfacing of the heart, of desire. While the story is simply told, the effect of the characters’ epiphanies is cumulative and Benevolence gains power as it develops.

I found some of the author’s choices occasionally sensationalist or predictable — the opening dialogue almost florid, the ending slightly contrived. Regardless, I will keep and reread this book simply for the wisdom contained within its pages. In the end, Holz’s characters find goodness in themselves in the most unexpected ways. They stop running from their fears and land in the now, reminded of nature’s interconnectedness and life’s capacity for new beginnings. In these moments, they renew their ability to love, and leave us with hope for their future.

Benevolence will surprise you – if you take the time to let it do so.

Tara Hughes is a writer, producer, and actor living in Toronto.

Amy Chua is terrible at jokes.  She told one in early January about forcing her seven-year old daughter to practice piano “through dinner into the night” with no breaks, and no one laughed.  The punchline is that the daughter got good at piano.  Har.

An excerpt from Chua’s memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, ran in the Wall Street Journal prior to the book’s publication, to the tune of over a million hits and 7000+ comments.  Reactions ran from bemused to annoyed to sincerely pissed, but no one was like, “How droll.” When Chua appeared on “The Colbert Report” last week she protested, “It’s supposed to be funny.  It’s a self-parody . . . It’s also about my mistakes and making fun of myself.’ 

But the excerpt doesn’t read like parody.  Parody usually has a nod or a wink or an elbow in somewhere, to be all, “Fun and games, eh wot?”, but this particular section reads like a cold-hearted snake explaining how she is better than other moms.  The title the Journal slapped on it, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” was not chosen by Chua, and she claims it does not reflect the book as a whole, but it sure as hell reflects the mood of the excerpt.

Chua professed surprise at the reaction, which means she is either an idiot or being disingenuous.  Because this was a genius marketing strategy.  Everyone is FURIOUS about the excerpt and showing their disapproval by showering it with links.  Look at me now, adding to the pile.  And I ain’t even mad at it. 

In fact, I say kudos to Chua.  She may have lousy comedic timing. But she has excellent business sense.

No joke.