A Good House by Bonnie Burnard 1999 Giller Prize Winner

The beginning of A Good House by Bonnie Burnard reminded me of the beginning of the movie Far From Heaven (2002). the book starts by following Stonebrook Creek from the countryside into the small town of Stonebrook, describing the countryside and the town, until the creek passes the house of the Chambers family. This is how Far From Heaven, and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk  to which it was paying homage, also began. I used to go to the movies on Saturday and sometimes also Sunday afternoons at our neighbourhood 2nd run theatre, and I saw most of his movies. I could hear the movie theme music playing in my head as I read these opening paragraphs. It was a very cinematic opening.

The story follows the life of the Chambers family from 1949 to 1997. Bill Chambers returns from World War II with several missing fingers on his right hand. He comes back to his wife Sylvia and their children Patrick, Daphne and Paul and tries to lead a happy normal life. A lonely young boy, Murray McFarlane attaches himself to the family and soon becomes accepted as one of them. Each chapter moves the family along chronologically...1949, 1952, 1955,1956. Then there are more years between the chapters...1963, 1970, 1977, etc. until 1997. Sylvia dies and Bill remarries Margaret.  Some of the children marry, there are grandchildren and divorces and an unmarried mother. There are tragedies, happiness and misunderstandings.  I would say it was a melodrama, but there wasn't that much drama.

Ms Burnard has a great eye for detail and description, but perhaps it was the interval of years that kept the characters at a distance. Sometimes between the chapters a character got divorced, but the reader only learned about it as it affected the future and was looking back at the divorce. I didn't feel the immediacy of the moment or the emotions. I enjoyed the story, partly because of the timing...it covers the years when I was a child and became an adult. It documented the same times in which I grew up. But I was never engrossed in the story or the family.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is considered a prize to recognize "Literary Fiction."  For me this books falls more in the category of "Popular Fiction."  I decided to see what other books were nominated for the prize in 1999. The other four finalists were: Pilgrim (Timothy Findley), Am I Disturbing You ? (Anne Hebert), The Mark of the Angel (Nancy Houston), and Summer Gone (David MacFarlane). I haven't read any of these books, so I can't say that I would have chosen one of them instead. I may read one or two of them to see what I think.

NEXT: 2000  Mercy Among The Children by David Adams Richards and Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.

In 2000 there were two winners of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. After this Jack Rabinovitch declared that juries must choose only one winner. I will do one blog for each book, starting with Mercy Among the Children. I tried to another book by David Adams Richards and I didn't like it and I didn't finish it. I actually stopped reading before I was 1/3 of the way through it. So I am approaching this as a chore. I hope this book will be different. Since I read Anil's Ghost in 2001,  I will re-read it for the blog.
  

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro Giller Prize Winner 1998

Let me make clear at the very beginning, I do not particularly like short story collections. So I approached reading The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro without my usual joyful, careless abandon. I feared this would be a task and not a pleasure. I was right. I found myself reading just to finish the book, not because I wanted more.

An article in The Globe and Mail  in July 2013 calls Alice Munro a genius, and gives examples to prove it.. She is a prize winning writer. She is regularly published in The New Yorker for heaven's sake! And, truth be told, she is a beautiful writer. She writes glorious sentences and paragraphs. There is a beauty and a flow to her language. She can capture the smallest details that define a scene or a character. But, for me, somehow all these wonderful pieces do not add up to a satisfactory whole in book form.

I think short stories are best in magazines. You pick up the magazine, read the story. Then you think about what it meant. I think short stories require this more than novels because so much is unsaid. The reader has to search between the lines.With these stories you see a moment in sharp distinction and all the things that led to this moment or will flow from this moment are like looking through haze and fog. What is going on behind the moment is just alluded to.

An example of this is the story Cortes Island.  A young married couple move into the basement suite of a house. Upstairs live Mr and Mrs Gorrie. Their son Ray owns the house, but doesn't live there. Sometimes the young woman has coffee upstairs with Mrs Gorrie. One one ocassion Mrs Gorrie asks if she has ever lived up north. She tells the young woman that she once lived on Cortes Island. The young wife is supposed to be looking for a job, but she stays home and tries to write. Eventually Mrs Gorrie asks if she will look after Mr Gorrie, who has suffered a stroke, so that she can go out and volunteer at the hospital. The young woman finally agrees and develops a way of communicating with Mr Gorrie.  He wants to look through his old scrapbooks which are stacked on a bookcase. They come to a specific clipping that he wants her to see. It describes a fire on Cortes Island. The owner of a house dies in the fire while his wife is away. His son somehow escapes and is found later in the woods with a supply of food. His wife returns on a boat belonging to James Thompson Gorrie.  There are questions about the son and why he had food with him. But the death is ruled accidental and the cause of the fire undetermined. By showing the woman this clipping, Mr Gorrie is telling her who he, his wife and Ray are. Soon after this the young couple have a falling out with Mrs Gorrie and they move.We readers are left to figure out the how, the why, and who are these people.

As I write this I realize that I probably enjoyed the stores more than I thought I would. Probably because as I've been writing I have had a change to think more about each story. In an ideal world, when I borrowed this book from the library, I would be able to keep it out for about 3 months. Then I could pick it up from time to time, when I wanted to read something but didn't want to take on a full novel. I could let the story settle in and think about it, and enjoy the thinking about it.

Some of my favourite passages:
- In Before the Change  this exchange between a young woman and her father captures the man and their relationship. I recognize this man:

What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon?
"Aw, they're just a couple of Americans."
I tried to open the conversation up a bit.
"How do you mean?'
When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don't need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn't need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a par of big tobacco-stained teeth.
"Just a couple of Americans," he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.

- In My Mother's Dream she describes a baby crying:

What is it about an infant's crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm - insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating - it comes out of a rage that can't be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.

If you like a good short story about what people will do for love, try The Love of a Good Woman.

NEXT: 1999 A Good House by Bonnie Burnard



 

Giller Prize 2013 Long List Announced

The Long List for the 2013 Scotia Bank Giller Prize has been announced. The Short List will be announced on October 8 and the Prize will be presented on November 5, 2013. The 13 semi-finalists were chosen from 147 submissions.

The $50,000 Giller Prize is awarded to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English over the past year. The remaining finalists receive $5,000 each. The annual literary honour is named after literary journalist Doris Giller, the late wife of prize founder Jack Rabinovitch.

For complete information, follow this link.

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler 1997 Giller Prize Winner

When I read Barney's Version in 2000, I wrote the following in my book diary:

Great Story. Funny, biting satire. Perfect ending.

When I finished reading it again for this blog, I agreed with that opinion.

In the year 2000, there was a great age difference between me and Barney Panofsky. Now Barney and I are the same age, and I see him in a completely different light. Now I understand his frustration at ageing.

When you hold this book in your hands, you are holding Barney's Version written by Mordecai Richer. But when you are reading this book, you are reading the life of Barney Panofsky written by Barney Panofsky. The book is edited by Barney's son Michael. You find his footnotes and comments throughout, along with an Afterward. This all adds to the conceit that this book is written by Barney. Michael has to correct his fading memory as he mixes up movies, actors, dates and places.  I thought this worked beautifully and was one of my favourite things about the book. This is one feature that makes the book much better than the movie version. If you have seen the movie and didn't like it, try the book.

The first paragraph of the book sets up the whole story. It tells us exactly what this book is about.

Terry's the spur. The splinter under my fingernail. To come clean, I'm starting this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a first book at my advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilous charges Terry McIver has made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, a.k.a Barney's troika, the nature of my friendship with Boogie, and, of course, the scandal I will carry to my grave like a humpback. Terry's sound of two hands clapping, Of Time and Fevers, will shortly be launched by The Group (sorry, the group), a government-subsidized small press, rooted in Toronto, that also publishes a monthly journal, the good earth, printed on recycled paper, you bet your life.

Barney is a man of his times and his experiences. He is not a modern man. He is a curmudgeon, but certainly not a lovable one. He treats people badly, both men and women. He smokes cigars. He drinks too much. He causes scenes in public. But in telling his story he is honest about his faults. He knows he can be an SOB. He would like to be different in some ways, but I think he also likes the way he is. He wonders,"My problem is, I am unable to get to the bottom of things. I don't mind not understanding other people's motives, not any more, but why don't I understand why I do things?" I think the answer is because he doesn't really try.

With all his faults, I liked Barney. I liked his honesty, his crazy pranks, his loyalty to his friends, his sense of outrage at antisemitism, racism and sexism. His fear of looking foolish; his desire to be taken seriously, his vulnerability regarding his third wife, Miriam. As his son Michael tells us in the Afterword, "Barney Panofsky clung to two cherished beliefs: Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understood anybody else."

Barney came of age in Paris in the 1950's as part of a group of young expatriate writers and artists. It is his friendship with Boogie, a writer with unfulfilled promise, that leads to the "scandal" that changes his life. Boogie disappears while visiting Barney at his cottage in the Laurentians. Barney is accused of his murder and even stands trial. He is acquitted, but most people believe he got away with murder. This truly haunts him for the rest of his life. He always maintains his innocence.  He talks about "waking up more than once recently no longer certain of what really happened that day on the lake. Wondering if I had corrected the events of that day even as I have embellished other incidents in my life, enabling me to appear in a more favourable light."

Some of my favourite passages:
- On the Past:  "Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper, but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end, not an answering machine with a ho ho ho message. In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys, Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn't a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings and extractions - one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager offered to pay her cleaning bill and sent over drinks, and she didn't sue for a kazillion dollars, claiming 'loss of enjoyment of life'. If the restaurant was Italian it still served something called spaghetti, often with meatballs. It was not yet pasta with smoked salmon, or linguini in all the colours of the rainbow, or penne topped with a vegetarian steaming pile that looked like dog sick. I'm ranting again. Digressing. Sorry about that."
- On Canadian Culture:  "Our latest, godawful expensive pilot was rich in meaningful, life-enhancing action: gay smooching, visible-minority nice guys, car chases ending in mayhem, rape, murder, a soupcon of S&M and a dab of New Age idiocies. I had hoped it would fill CBC-TV's nine p.m. Thursday slot."
- On Growing Old:  "I freshened my drink and sensed that I was now in for one of those old fart's nights, rewinding the spool of my wasted life, wondering how I got from there to here. From the sweet teenager reading The Wast Land aloud in bed to the misanthropic, ageing purveyor of TV dreck, with only a lost love and pride in his children to sustain him."
- On Wanting Others to Think Well of Him:  "I got into bed with Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, the book I always travel with because I want them to find it at my bedside should I expire during the night."

I liked this book. Mordecai Richler is an excellent writer whose characters live and breathe on the page. I also liked the specific view of Canadian life and culture, based in Montreal, that he presented. I liked that the book was divided into three parts - one for each of Barney's wives. Each of the wives played an important role in his life. I also liked the end. It was perfect. No other ending would have been as good.  Make sure you read to the very end of the Afterward so you don't miss anything.

I am left with one question after reading the book: Will people who don't live in Canada enjoy it as much as I did? Do you have to be Canadian to appreciate the satire...or is it universal? If you are not Canadian and you read the book, please leave a comment with your view.

NEXT: 1998 The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (Short Stories)