Book Trailer: James P. Othmer, Adland

Canada Reads Book Club: Good to a Fault

It is almost too easy to take on the significance of Marina Endicott’s title for her second novel, Good to a Fault. It is a question for the ages – what is good? Everyday events and interactions demonstrate answers to this question, as we judge ourselves and others on a basic principle of what is good and just vs. what is bad and unjust. With Good to a Fault, Endicott places the reader into a specific scenario where what is good and just is presumed already in the plot, prior to eliciting the readers full engagement with the characters. The reader is then faced with tracing through the story a singular dominant idea of when does being and doing ‘good’ become ‘too good’, when does it become a fault.

Good to a Fault revolves around Clara Purdy, “single, childless of course, took care with her appearance; fortyish, and not in good spirits for some time since her mother’s death.” When driving across town one day, Clara ends up in a car accident with the Gage family – father, mother, three kids, and grandmother. Not quite devastating enough that the family car (and temporary home) is totaled, the Gage family is delivered a second knockout blow when mother Lorraine is diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer.

Lorraine is immediately admitted to the hospital for treatment, and Clara makes the almost-too-easy decision to house the rest of the Gage family with her during Lorraine’s treatment. Clara soon becomes a pseudo-mom to the kids as their father Clayton takes off and the grandmother, Mom Pell, turns out to require almost as much care and attention as the children.

It is at the early plot juncture, where Clara and the Gage family literally collide, that Clara’s story within the novel’s pages and within the character’s mind begins to figuratively and speedily collide and unfold in degrees with all manner of items. Her existence fractures into various pieces, each becoming attached to another person within the story and each triggering off additional contemplations as to how deep and how far does Clara’s goodness run.

These pieces inform the novel’s movement forward, with various characters rotating into the narrative’s first chair. Besides Lorraine, there is Darlene/Dolly, the tween daughter of Lorraine and Clayton who struggles between cherishing her love for her own mother and giving in to the physical comforts and caring that are provided through Clara’s middle class mobility. There is Mom Pell, a shrewd and distrustful woman who works hardest at sustaining the barest minimum of ties to everyone, if only to ensure an outlet and audience for her demands. There is also Paul Tippett, the local Anglican priest who is bearing his own collision of what is good vs. bad, both of which are embodied within his relationship with his soon-to-be ex-wife and in his burgeoning intimacy with Clara.

These rotations, however, are incomplete in formation when compared against the number of characters introduced throughout the story. Little insight is provided in the complexities of Lorraine’s brother Darwin, whose presence is significant for Lorraine, the children, and Clara but remains relatively unexplored. The same holds true of Mrs. Zenko, Clara’s elderly neighbor, who always has a kind word and just the right food for any moment. Then there is Grace, Moreland and Fern, Clara’s own extended blood family, who appear and disappearance without any other purpose than to support the construct that Clara is good.

And to realize that construct, there must be the required contrast of who is ‘not good’. The easy answer to this comes in the form of Clayton, whose abandonment of his family at the most stressful points is expected from the point of his introduction. His is an almost stereotypical literary existence, with little to no elements of dimensionality woven into his fabric for even the briefest of contemplations. This is not to say that he does not hold value – all the characters most certainly do – but rather, that his and the other subsidiary characters value is not as exposed or as hidden to make the excavation and consideration of the story’s central themes and questions all the more invigorating, all the more long-lasting.

Good to a Fault is about prose though, and not plot. Endicott herself has admitted this in interviews. Endicott is quite adept at layering situations and words in order to command focused attention. It is through the layering though that the story does not fully realize it own seductiveness. Is Clara a saint or is she condescending by layering her morality on the children? Is it really Clayton who is selfish, or is it Clara? The answers do not come hard and fast, but with a loping gander that uniquely - and this is a testament to Endicott’s fluid and nuanced writing voice - privileges the good within each reader. There are moments however when a jolt, an unexpected plot spark could have quickened the pace just a bit to give the story additional vivid strokes.

But, somewhere in the office, computer, mind, etc. of Marina Endicott is the rest of Good to a Fault. In a CBC.ca interview, Endicott stated that the novel started out at twice the size of its final 363-page length. This is the version that I would like to get my hands on someday. For all its heft and engaging prose, Good to a Fault feels a bit unfinished. I found myself slipping between the dense lines at times, searching for more and more despite feeling simultaneously weighted down by what was visible on the pages. The fragility, the intangible quality of the answers to the questions raised left this reader slightly unsatisfied. The subtly of the story’s conclusionary moments seemed almost like a brush off more than a heartfelt fade out for the characters. And I suppose from this perspective, Endicott’s lovely novel can be seen as evolving into an emblem of its own musings and considerations – good, to a fault.

Table of Contents: When Madeline Was Young

Author: Jane Hamilton
Publisher/Year: Doubleday, 2006
Synopsis: When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers a head injury in a bicycle crash, she is left with the mental capabilities of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own. Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest and exquisite portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes the boundaries of love.

What Others Have To Say:

The Washington Post
"Jane Hamilton has created a story that goes to the heart of the mystery of caritas , and she has revealed in the apparently flat line of a good life a vital and absorbing human drama."

The Boston Globe
"Hamilton concentrates on something far more extraordinary -- simple human decency -- in the remarkable ability of one family to discover that what remains of life after tragedy can still harbor its own treasures and charms."

USA Today
"Hamilton suggestively shows how change happens, because for one, invisibly broken person, it never does."

San Francisco Gate
"...a curious book, laced with drama though eerily vacant in analyzing its repercussions."

Extras:
Read an excerpt from chapter one.
Reader's Guide

Adaptation: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Canada Reads Book Club: Wayson Choy

Three books down and two to go! Well, actually, we have read all five but feel that we should re-read Generation X and Fall On Your Knees after all these years so all can be fairly reviewed.

Loved, loved The Jade Peony! Kept turning the pages to keep reading the story -- after we had reached the end! Good thing we have All That Matters on order.

Read the first chapter online.

To pass on the love, we have some information on the novel's author Wayson Choy that we just know you want.

Brief Biography
Raised in Vancouver's Chinatown by both his adoptive parents and his extended community.
Attended the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the late 1950s to study creative writing.
Taught English at Toronto's Humber College in 1967-2004, where he was also a faculty member of the Humber School of Writers.
Inducted into the Order of Canada in 2006.

Honours and Awards
The Jade Peony
1996 - City of Vancouver Book Award
1996 - Trillium Book Award (shared with Margaret Atwood)

Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood
1999 - Globe and Mail notable book of the year
2000 - Edna Staebler Creative Non-Fiction Awards
2000 - nominated for a Governor General's Award

All That Matters
2004 - Trillium Book Award
2005 - ScotiaBank Giller Prize Shortlist

Interviews and Articles
Asian Canadian Interview
Quill & Quire Profile



Reviews
Canadian Literature
Curled Up
The New York Times

Table of Contents: When I Was Puerto Rican

Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Publisher/Year: Random House, 1993
Synopsis: Esmeralda Santiago passes her childhood as a jíbara, a Puerto Rican country girl, living in a small village. Her life changes when she is thirteen, and she moves to New York City, where being Puerto Rican means occupying an indeterminate place in a bewildering hierarchy of Blacks, Jews, and Italians.

How Esmeralda overcomes adversity and eventually wins acceptance to New York City's High School of Performing Arts is a record of a tremendous journey, and a remarkable and affirming story of the changes brought to a young mind as it experiences poverty, love, despair, adolescence, cultural confusion, and hope.

What Others Have To Say:

Entertainment Weekly
"Puerto Rico is part of America, but Santiago illuminates the brilliantly hued chasm between them."

Booklist
"When in the epilogue Santiago refers to her studies at Harvard, it is both a stirring and poignant reminder of the capacities of the human spirit."

The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"What is particularly appealing about Santiago's story is the insight it offers to readers unaware of the double bind Puerto Rican Americans find themselves in: the identity in conflict. Is [she] black or white? Is she rural or urban? Even more importantly, is she Puerto Rican or is she American? [One] can only be grateful that Esmeralda Santiago has chosen to explore her culture and share what she has found."

San Juan Star
"You will see how one particular woman's journey from a rippled metal shack in a Puerto Rican countryside barrio becomes a story rich in reverberations about all those who have made a transforming physical and spiritual journey in life."

Extras:
Readers Guide

Canada Reads Book Club: In Hypothetical Defense of The Imperialist

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist is not my favorite work of Canadian fiction. Truthfully, it is difficult to conceive of it hitting a list of my favorite Canadian novels at all. And yet, when taking up the challenge to hypothetically pick a novel to defend as part of the Canadian literary exhibition that is Canada Reads, The Imperialist is the only novel I could envision to hang my fighting hat on.

It is a conundrum of wits to be sure, to conceive that a novel I have only read once because I had to, would be the recipient of my flexed championing muscles. Surely the intent of Canada Reads is to select a novel that impassions a retention of its prose, that spurns forth proclamations of its literary excellence in conveying morality, nationality, emotionality, pick an –ality. But, alas, that is not to be the case here.

No, my championing roots itself in a singular movement of time when my embracement of our nation’s past and its seemingly stagnant stances on Canadianness moved from respectful distance to a warmth-filled bear hug.

The Imperialist came to my attention back in the early 1990s, during a course on Canadian intellectual traditions. During that same time, my University adopted a new slogan – “…it makes sense.” One day, our professor proclaimed the slogan as the ideal example of the themes portrayed within The Imperialist. Puzzled by her enthusiastic outburst, we began to contemplate her proclamation and turned the classroom into our own version of Elgin, the fictitious background to Duncan’s, and now our, play acting.

Some took up the positioning of the Murchisons, finding within themselves identification with the family’s yearning for the top of the social strata but coming up short against reality. Others cozied up to Lorne – who personifies the novel’s title - and his struggles to reconcile his imperialist ideals with his burgeoning romanticism towards the stoic Dora. Then there was me, who found myself aligning with Elgin itself.

See, The Imperialist is not a novel that seeks to define a Canadian identity anymore than I have ever sought to establish my own definition of such a thing. Duncan is enviously confident in the concept of a Canadian identity though, of a Canadianness that eases through all the nation’s participants. But there is no ‘one size fits all’ cloak to be worn, her novel betrays. Rather, The Imperialist is charmingly elegant in its portrayal of a kind of Canadian identity, that which swells within a legacy of…common sense?

Post-Confederation it was thought that imperialism was the best means for fulfilling Canada’s national destiny. This thought informs the basis for Duncan’s thesis, and the challenge she puts forth to her inhabitants. Lorne is charged with taking up the imperialist movement wholeheartedly in Duncan’s narrative and his reward is to be summarily and crushingly rejected for his willing sacrifice. Imperialism was too elitist then for longevity, and today it does no more than niggle in our collective consciousness. Its promiseful engagements are relegated to the back seat in our lingering quest for a true and steady destiny, for something that makes sense.

Our infant country embraced the Social Gospel movement instead, which brought forward the principle of common sense. The movement became an overt influence in the day-to-day lives of people through education and activism. Supporters believed the mind to be more important than the emotions and the body, and common sense its reasonable and rational understanding. The understanding was accepted as universal in its applicability and in its aspiration to unite for a better quality of life because it made sense.

Yes, this means that we are a country centred on, around, through common sense. Ours is not an in-your-face passion-filled ‘clutch your breast in pride’ existence. We are but a country of high hopes and slow lopes, of lofty dreams and starry visions, of mighty pragmatism and irreproachable logic. This is our Canadianness – to weeble wobble in any direction yet yielding to what is right, to what makes sense.

Duncan, with her deft hand, gets right to the heart of this with Elgin being the embodiment of our yearnings and yieldings. To my eyes, Elgin reflected back the vibrancy of my own contemplations on existing between individualism and collectivism; practicality and romanticism; yearning and attainment; distinction and commonness; passion and duty; idealism and realism; and on and on. She streamed a Canadianness before me that I had not conceived of as tradition, and I winked welcomingly, knowingly upon its passage as it all began to make sense.

Yet, I have never sung the praises of The Imperialist or reflected upon some memorable passage. I have never loaned out the book or admitted to have even read it. Partly my actions (or lack thereof) speak to the snob within me, the one who highly favors contemporary fiction over anything published in 1904. Moreso though, I have never felt words captured the engulfing presence of The Imperialist in my small world. After writing those previous words, I am feel more sound in this belief than ever before. My focused efforts at articulation are too slight and too plain.

So, my championing comes from living The Imperialist’s brand of passionate influence, its yearning consciousness, its quietest contemplations each and every day. You too. It makes sense that I know exactly where the novel resides on my cluttered book shelves, but not necessarily where it resides in the Canadian canon. It makes sense that I remember the moments of its reading, and the moments of its discussions in class all those years ago, but not to write such moments into the spotlight for personal recognition or literary acknowledgment.

And yes, it makes sense that I could conceive of championing within this hypothetical Canada Reads arena a novel – this novel - that I have only read once because I had to. The Imperialist continues to weeble wobble within me an affection and affectation like no other work of Canadian fiction. And like any true Canadian, my head yielded to that which is reasonable and rational, and auspicously so too did my heart and my imagination.

Line By Line: Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."

"I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is."

"But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all."

"Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense. "

"An empty frame, in which the picture is always changing, makes a statement about how time is always passing. It doesn't really stop, even in a single image. It just feels that way."