by Diane Wild | Dec 31, 2006 | Books
The books editor of Blogcritics asked some of us for our book of the year. The whole list is here. Here’s my pick:
This was a tough call, since Anne Tyler is one of my favourite writers and released a book this year, but I’m going to go with Lori Lansens’ The Girls. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this book about conjoined twins, but I found myself sucked into a life story I had to force myself to remember was fiction, and felt like I’d lost a friend when I finished reading it. It’s mostly told from the perspective of Rose Darlen, with occasional chapters from her sister Ruby, with whom she’s joined at the head. Lansens makes these women both astonishingly real people and a metaphor for the distance that separates us and the bonds that unite us. It’s fascinating, poignant, funny and beautifully written. The two sisters have vastly different writing styles, and the structure forces us to travel along with Rose’s version of her life until Ruby gives us context we’re missing and forces us to re-examine Rose’s tale.
In a strange case of synchronicity, days after I read and reviewed the book, a woman in BC was reported to be pregnant with twins joined at the head. Conjoined twins are rare, but craniopagus twins (see, I learned a new word from the book and now I can use it in a sentence) are incredibly rare. The woman’s since given birth and the real-life twins – girls – just went home for the holidays.
by Diane Wild | Nov 27, 2006 | Books
Ian Verchère is a former Whistler resident and ski pro, and a current video game producer and friend of Douglas Coupland, who writes the introduction. All of those elements are evident in VON 1B0, an insider’s perspective on the Whistler of yesterday and today (the title is the postal code of the town). The book is being promoted as the Whistler version of Coupland’s City of Glass, which I haven’t read, but V0N 1B0 is definitely Couplandesque.
The North Vancouver native compiles humorous vignettes and a ton of photos on subjects like his first experiences at nearby Whistler, descriptions of perfect – and not-so-perfect – types of snow, the life of locals who work at the ski hill, the weather, the future, the gear.
One short but memorable chapter is on the abundance of Microsoft code names lifted from the area, like “Whistler” for Windows XP, and “Longhorn,” a local bar, for the new Vista operating system. (“It requires some restraint not to come up with a list of reciprocal code Whistler-Blackcomb code names. You know, for chairlifts that regularly freeze. Or condominiums that require frequent updates and patches.”)
Verchère evokes the town before it became BC’s only resort municipality, from the perspective of a local who’s bitter, but not so bitter that he hasn’t decided to support the upcoming 2010 Olympic Games that will further change the town of his memories – if only because there’s not much point in not supporting them now that they’re a done deal.
The birth of Whistler is a far more recent event than I would have guessed – Verchère pegs it at 1965 – and yet the changes since then are astronomical. The book is a subtle elegy for the lost Whistler, with no small amount of scorn for the new Whistler, the Disney-fied Whistler full of Alpine McMansions, the municipality that would rather turn its back on prosaic parts of the town that demonstration the need for locals to eat, or get their cars fixed, or have affordable housing.
“It was deemed that future sales of lots ‘were to remain affordable by being tied to Vancouver housing price indices.’ In retrospect, that’s like tying the cost of ski equipment to the cost of space shuttles.”
The author points out that Whistler’s attempt to hide any signs of normal life is foiled by the fact that the face of normal is visible along the Sea to Sky highway from Vancouver. Yet the Alpine McMansion Whistler is all I ever knew of the place, and all I imagine many readers have known.
V0N 1B0 is not is a cohesive history of the town. It is an unexpected and vivid portrayal of a place many of think we know, written with a strong, entertaining voice that gets us uninitiated folks into the locals-only places. Or as Verchère puts it:
“Think of it this way: if I’m at Disneyland, the picture of Mickey I’m after is one of the actor who inhabits the costume, the guy making nine bucks an hour, with his mouse head off to relive heat prostration, sneaking a cigarette. Now that may not be the picture that Disneyland wants you to see, but it is authentic.”
V0N 1B0: General Delivery, Whistler, B.C. by Ian Verchère is published by Douglas & McIntyre.
by Diane Wild | Nov 13, 2006 | Books
As he demonstrated in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a canine murder mystery from the point of view of an autistic boy, former children’s book author and illustrator Mark Haddon has a gift for reaching inside the inner world of characters whose minds should prove difficult to penetrate.
A Spot of Bother is Haddon’s second novel aimed at adults, and again he writes his characters with great affection despite the fact that they’re deeply flawed. Or, in the case of Bother‘s protagonist, George Hall, deeply insane.
The Halls are a family of people preoccupied with their own problems, largely centred around preparations for a backyard wedding. His daughter, Katie, is marrying a man no one, including Katie, thinks is good enough for her. Wife Jean is having an affair with one of George’s former colleagues and struggling to plan the on again, off again wedding of her stubborn daughter. Son Jamie’s reluctance to invite his boyfriend to Katie’s wedding destroys that seemingly stable relationship.
Poor George finds his family falling apart and lacks the emotional tools to deal with the chaos head on. “Talking was, in George’s opinion, overrated … The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.”
Newly retired George’s own issues are an extreme example of the fretting the rest of his family – in fact, the rest of the world – exhibits. When he discovers a lesion on his hip, he leaps to the conclusion of cancer, and contemplates suicide. He gets caught up in the details of the how, discarding each method, including getting blind drunk and crashing the car – because what if he encountered another car?
“What if he killed them, paralyzed himself, and died of cancer in a wheelchair in prison?” George wonders.
The whimsical humour of the escalating hyperbole reveals a man who ponders the worst case scenario to an amusingly absurd degree. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that this is no momentary flight of imagination or coping mechanism. George’s insanity often escalates his worries beyond the point of reason.
The novel follows George’s almost-logical reasoning. The spot could be more than eczema. The doctor didn’t express himself with perfect certainty. He’d misdiagnosed Katie once. But George takes it several steps beyond reason.
Haddon doesn’t inflict George with the cute insanity some fiction falls into, but the true to life confusion of being and dealing with someone who can seem no more odd than the average person on occasion, then lapses into genuine, over-the-top insanity.
A Spot of Bother is an often sweet, often heartbreaking story of a family falling apart and coming together. It’s a deceptively funny, easy read with genuine poignancy. These compelling characters fumble their way through mental illness in the family the same way they fumble through their romantic relationships – sincerely, humorously, and ineptly.
The novel is published by Doubleday Canada and is available in hard cover and unabridged or abridged audio CD or downloadable audiobook.
by Diane Wild | Nov 5, 2006 | Books, Movies
Hollywood and Me: My Wild Ride Through the Golden Age of Television by Bernie Rothman never quite lives up to its title.
The subtitle is flat-out deceptive. I’ll leave aside my objections to his tamely written “wild ride” and focus instead on the “Golden Age of Television,” which usually refers to roughly the 1950s. This book apparently self-defines it as the period when Rothman was working in television, in a career that spanned the 1960s to 90s.
The front page blurb goes on to explain that the book reveals “tales of my time with Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Rudolph Nureyev, George Burns, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, and many more.” Some of those names barely appear in short anecdotes that don’t rate a mention on the cover, except to inject some star power, of course.
In the introduction, Rothman writes:
“This is not a memoir. … Only famous people write memoirs, because people want to read them. Publishers aren’t stupid, you know. So if a memoir is what you’re expecting, read no further. This isn’t one.”
Of course it’s a memoir. The fact that Rothman isn’t a household name is exactly the reason for the hyperbole of the front cover, the redefining of TV’s golden age, the name dropping of people who barely appear on the pages inside. Publishers aren’t stupid, you know.
Rothman’s career began as a writer low on the food chain, and moved up to executive producer on various television specials. Highlights given space in Hollywood and Me include The Danny Kaye Show, The Judy Garland Show, specials featuring Liberace, Diana Ross, and skater Elizabeth Manley, and a Humanitas-award-winning TV movie about autism, Son-Rise. He also won Emmy awards for producing the specials Danny Kaye’s Look-in at the Metropolitan Opera and the Julie Andrews-Rudolph Nureyev starring Festival of the Lively Arts.
Hollywood and Me is more the story of the “me” than the “Hollywood.” For one thing, to be literal-minded, Rothman talks about his career in Canadian television, with pit stops in Australia and England, as much as in American TV.
We learn of Rothman’s privileged Montreal upbringing, where he went to summer camp with lifelong friend Leonard Cohen, who also appears in the book as an anecdote or two. After following his father into the tailoring business, Rothman realizes his real love is the theatre, where he becomes a producer before entering the more stable – but not actually stable – world of television.
Rothman has a distinctive voice that is an obvious attempt to duplicate speaking patterns, with streams of sentence fragments, interjections, and colloquialisms. Depending on your taste, that could be charmingly folksy or annoyingly forced. He also breaks into the narrative with self-conscious passages that began to grate on me:
“See what I mean – this really isn’t a memoir. If this were a memoir (notice, I use the subjunctive to denote a contrary-to-fact clause), I’d be telling you all about my own career, making myself the hero of it all.”
It’s a puzzling case of he doth protest too much, because that is pretty much exactly what he does in Hollywood and Me, though not always particularly well. There are a lot of subtle and overt “I told them so”s peppering this tale of one man’s ups and downs in show business, but the anecdotes never get into enough detail to present a full picture of what went wrong during the bad times – except Rothman’s assurance that it generally wasn’t his fault – or what went right during the good times – except his assurance that it generally was his doing.
We don’t learn very much about the famous people in Rothman’s often amusing anecdotes. Some he seems to have barely met, others seem to be too close for him to spill their secrets. Though we get superficial mentions of George Burns, Liberace, and Diana Ross, there is an entire fawning chapter – which nonetheless reveals little – about Connie Chung and Maury Povich. Ah yes, the golden age of television.
Rothman’s personal story is interesting enough for a memoir. He turned his back on the easy career path offered by his father, struggled in a dog-eat-dog world of television production, was caught between family and career demands, encountered the famous and infamous, and learned his craft from some interesting behind-the-scenes personalities.
Too bad a memoir’s not what he intended to write, because this collection of choppy anecdotes could have benefited from a more unified story, instead of an insistent voice that strings together encounters with the famous and semi-famous with smatterings of that personal story, and tries to tell the reader what to think about the narrator and his tales.
by Diane Wild | Oct 28, 2006 | Books
A good book can draw us into a world far removed from our own, or shed light on our own experiences. A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age by John Doyle is a good book that demonstrates television can accomplish the same thing.
Doyle is the television columnist for The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, where he writes about his subject with the same degree of affection and analysis.
A Great Feast of Light is a memoir of the social awakening of a boy and a country. Doyle grew up in tiny Nenagh, County Tipperary, where the church and rigid social hierarchy made sure citizens knew their place in the world.
“We were tucked away in a country town that was comfortable, almost entirely Catholic and ignorant of the outside world, and we’d fit into our assigned places as easy as we sat in our assigned desks in the schoolroom.”
In 1962, when he was six, Doyle’s father brought home their first television set, and suddenly the world expanded, getting even bigger as his family moved to larger towns – finally to Belfast – and his TV got more channels.
The six-year-old Doyle recognized his Irish hometown of Nenagh in the American frontier world of Bat Masterson at the same time as he realized Bat’s who-cares attitude and suspected Protestantism would make him an outcast. He watched Gaelic programming that connected him to his country’s past and heritage. Talk shows and news reports connected him to the present, and British and American comedies predicted a future when the Catholic church didn’t have such a stranglehold on the country.
Most poignantly, Doyle talks of the horror of seeing footage of Bloody Sunday on the television, interspersed with his memories of the anti-establishment bite of Monty Python. It’s a technique he uses throughout the book, juxtaposing real-life events with his young self’s thoughts on television, until the culmination, when J.R. Ewing and the Pope fight for the soul of Ireland. Doyle isn’t exactly on the side of the pontiff.
You can almost hear the lilting Irish accent in A Great Feast of Light, with the eejits and fellas and culchies and acting the cods. The book is specific to Irish history and social conventions. But it’s universal in its depiction of television’s role in documenting and even precipitating social change, and the wonder of seeing a new world onscreen, or a new take on our own world.
John Doyle is no cousin to Frank McCourt and his brethren. This isn’t a tale of hardship and family secrets, and rarely dips into deeply personal matters, creating only the barest sketches of Doyle’s family. Instead, it’s the portrait of a quiet, studious boy (“I could have been mistaken for a houseplant”) and his education at the hands of his schools, his church, and his television.
A Great Feast of Light is available in hardcover or trade paperback.
by Diane Wild | Oct 17, 2006 | Books, House
If I had a tendency towards megalomania, I might think The Medical Science of House, M.D. was written specifically for me. It fills such a peculiar niche, I can’t quite imagine the broader audience for it.
House happens to be my favourite show at the moment. It’s not, however, even the highest rated medical show on the air; that would be Grey’s Anatomy. And the book doesn’t explore the world of Hugh Laurie’s alter ego in any depth. It’s mostly a Dummies Guide to the Health Care Industry, with the show as its jumping off point, so anyone reading specifically for real insight into House might be disappointed.
That said, I really enjoyed it. But I’m a nerd.
Author Andrew Holtz, a health journalist with a master’s of public health degree, writes with obvious affection for the show and careful recognition that fiction has no duty to strict reality. For the most part, he refers to the show’s cases that, while improbable, are possible.
At times, he gently points out where the cases depart from reality, but always in order to make some broader point. For example, the treatment of House’s Vicodin addiction in the “Detox” episode is one clear example of the show deviating from medical reality. The episode’s proof of addiction – withdrawal symptoms – are no proof at all, say the real-life doctors. But Holtz doesn’t dwell on the bent truth except to mention the reality the fiction illuminates; he uses the case to bring up the very real problem of impaired physicians.
The author brings expert testimony, through research and interviews, to a discussion that’s often quite unrelated to any specifics of House. Holtz’s purpose is not to nitpick the show, or to glorify it as an example of medical realism, but to wrap a discussion of the health care industry and medical ethics in a palatable coating. The lengthy, explanatory sidebars – which are unfortunately confusingly presented in the middle of the main narrative – usually don’t even pretend to be connected to the show.
Still, it’s an interesting discussion for those who aren’t intimately familiar with the system or all the issues. It’s perhaps especially so for us non-Americans who might relish an engaging lesson in the US health care system we think we know so much about, usually from fictional sources.
A scan of the table of contents gives an accurate idea of the focus of the book – and what a wide-angle lens Holtz is using. He covers the patient’s first presentation, the physical exam, tests, computer analysis, the whiteboard of the differential diagnosis, choosing treatments, bedside manner, and the health care team.
That last one, which discusses nurses among other careers nearly invisible on the television show, is one sign that we’re not really talking about House.
Holtz quotes a nurse at an actual hospital in Princeton about how she would deal with House’s attitude: “I would have that physician in my office, and there would be a discussion about what appropriate communication is, and how I would not accept that kind of behaviour.”
A wordy disclaimer on the cover informs the reader that no one involved with the show authorized or endorsed the book – they might as well have said “they wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.” So I suppose it’s futile to hope that creator David Shore might be inspired by that particular quote, because I would pay good money to see how well that discussion would go over with our fictional hero.
The perspective on the character of House is far different in Holtz’s book than on the small screen. The renegade hero of fiction is the dinosaur of reality, according to one physician: “In some ways, it is a vision from years past of the doctor as an iconoclastic brilliant, virtuoso free spirit, who does it his own way and the hospital is there to do his bidding.”
Fortunately, Holtz’s informative book never loses sight of the fact taht an iconoclastic, brilliant, virtuoso free spirit is likely to be far more interesting than the tamed doctors who supposedly exist today. Plus, the glimpse of how well House stays rooted in reality, while taking liberties for dramatic flair, actually highlights the beautiful balancing act performed by the show each week.
The Medical Science of House, M.D. by Andrew Holtz is available from Penguin books.
