Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Both my world and literary views were, I will confess, warped by reading The Great Gatsby far too early in life. Fitzgerald's 'spoiled priest' rush to judgment, the notion that one must always remember not everyone has had the same advantages in life, and the obviously untrue concept that life offers 're-dos' have had a profound effect on my life. Luckily I'm open-minded enough to admit when I'm wrong, accept that a re-do at least leads to closure and may be necessary for that reason alone, and have realized that having an opinion is not quite the same thing as being judgmental.

So for many years I have accepted the notion that Zelda was a mistake for F. Scott Fitzgerald, that their marriage contributed mightily to his financial woes and his lack of productivity, and as one of the world's biggest fans of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon, wished he'd married someone else.

I was, therefore (having read the Nancy Mitford bio of Zelda as well as Zelda's own novel, Save Me the Waltz, many years ago), reluctant to read a novel about Zelda. Luckily for me, the Twitter community of readers convinced me to give Z a try, and I'm grateful.

Update: after posting this review, I got a lovely email from Esther Bochner, senior publicist at Macmillan Audio, asking if I'd like to post an audio clip of Z to my review. I said I'd be delighted - and here it is.

Therese Anne Fowler has made me rethink my attitude to Zelda, and to come to some radically different conclusions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's struggles - and about his ambitions. I had never thought about Zelda in the context of her own era - a time when women had so few options and when smart women were no longer content merely to stand by their men, defer to their opinions and be content to be the 'little woman' or 'the woman behind the man.' Zelda's refusal to be overshadowed by Scott takes on a whole different complexion when viewed in this context, as does her desire to achieve. We'll never have the definitive answer to who was more competitive with whom, but in reading Z I was having stomach-roiling flashbacks to a lot of the lines in Gatsby about being able to redo and rewrite the past, as well as some uncomfortable challenges to my own intellectual status quo.

Among the questions Fowler poses in Z are these: why was it F. Scott Fitzgerald was so very willing to promote Ernest Hemingway's work to his agent, editor and publisher, and yet persistently ensured that the most his wife ever got on her own work was a joint byline? Why wasn't he content to be the best writer he could possibly be rather than acknowledged as the best living American novelist? And why did he persist  in emulating the filthy rich to the point of almost-bankruptcy over and over again, while simultaneously despising them and condemning them morally bankrupt? Why didn't these contradictions occur to him? More important for Zelda, why did he insist the women in his life be content with being nothing but decorative appendages whose sense of self-worth derived solely from that of the men to whom they'd attached themselves?

The genius of this novel is not that it's an unflattering portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather that it's finally a fair portrayal of Zelda, a woman caught between a rock and a hard place: her father's social standing (and societal expectations of women in the 1920s) and her husband's overweening ambition. There was little room for Zelda to flourish in that small space. And the fact that she didn't do so isn't really so surprising when you think about it. 

Two by Henning Mankell: The Man Who Smiled and Before the Frost

I'm on a Henning Mankell/Kurt Wallander kick these days but am reading the series in no particular order. I did try to read a non-Wallander Mankell recently and failed in the attempt - it was Depths and I couldn't get past the first five pages. I had similar issues with Before the Frost, but to nowhere near the same degree (more on that subject later).

The Man Who Smiled, first published in 1994 and first translated into English in 2005, is classic Wallander. After shooting a suspect and taking a year-long leave of absence, Wallander has decided to leave the police force entirely. In his time off he's done a lot of brooding, a little travelling (with embarrassing results as a result of his drinking), and finally come to grips with his drinking. Fitter and more stable than he's ever been, he still feels like he's floundering. But returning to police work doesn't seem like the solution, and he's actually in his boss's office, about to sign his retirement paperwork, when he suddenly changes his mind and decides to return to work, convinced that the deaths of a father-son lawyer team are both murders and connected, although the father's death has initially been ruled an accident.

Once again, Wallander's attention to detail and his creative approach to crime and problem-solving makes him the man you want for the job. A visit to the scene of the accident and the discovery of a chair leg by Wallander turns out to be just the clue that cracks the case and leads to Wallander's successfully wiping the smile off the face of The Man Who Smiled. To say more would be giving too much away, unfortunately. But part of what makes Wallander such a richly developed character is his angst, and there's lots of angst here, as he continues to attempt to be a good son, a good father, and to have a life as well as a career. While a minor character, Wallander's father is never dull, and the predicament he gets himself into in The Man Who Smiled is rather comical. So much of Wallander pere's character is revealed when he gets arrested for getting into a fist fight at the liquor store (he took a number, didn't notice when his number was called, tried to jump the queue and insist it was his turn, and punched out both the next person in line and the clerk - oh and failed to pay the taxi driver for the trip to the liquor store as well). All while claiming he had every right to defend himself. It's these moments of black comedy that make Mankell such a compelling writer and Wallander such a fascinating character - because who hasn't had to deal with parental-generated embarrassment at one point or another? And why does it always come at a time when work is at its most frantic and demanding?

Sadly, Before the Frost, published in 2002 and translated in 2004, is far less satisfying. The angry, confused, unstable and much-worried-about Linda Wallander has decided as she approaches 30 to join the police force and has just finished her training at the police academy. She's waiting to join the Ystad police force when her friend Anna disappears. She's staying temporarily at her father's apartment, and, having always been an elusive and shadowy character both to her father and in the other Wallander mysteries, I was excited to find out more about her. Unfortunately, this one doesn't really work, because Linda just isn't a developed or empathetic character. She persists in intruding her concern about her missing friend into her father's current investigation, and while it turns out she's not wrong to do so, there are some really implausible scenes in this novel (the one where she throws an ashtray at her father's head and the willingness of the Ystad police force to let her trail along and insert herself into their interviews is also a little hard to swallow). Sadly we get little of Kurt's perspective on the investigation, and as a result the examination of cult mentality and behaviour suffers as a result.

Luckily I can circle back and read some of the others in the Wallander series I haven't got to yet, because while Linda Wallander is definitely her father's daughter, she just doesn't work as a character. In trying to figure out why, I've concluded it's not because Mankell's trying to write from a female point of view, it's because what makes Kurt Wallander work as a character can't be superimposed onto a woman half his age who hasn't experienced the societal and criminal sea change her father has. The impatience and weariness works for Kurt, who's continuing to push himself while trying to cope with the fatigue of middle age. In Linda this manifests as brattiness, an unwillingness to listen and learn. And while that might augur well for character development in future books, I can't foresee it happening. While all the curiously about Linda that's built up over the course of the Kurt Wallander novels is satisfied in Before the Frost, I ended up regretting having been curious. And that's never a good thing when novel-induced.

Helen Humphreys' Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother

A beautiful book with a beautiful cover, I think I will always be grateful to Helen Humphreys for writing Nocturne.

It's fascinating on a number of levels, and as usual there is an odd synchronicity in my reading. I'd just finished Therese Ann Fowler's novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and was reflecting on how unfair I've always been to Zelda, blinded by my fangirl reaction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Z, while fiction, makes a strong case for Fitzgerald's struggle to finish Tender Is the Night being not the need to support Zelda and Scottie, but for his own alcoholism and lack of self-discipline, his desire to party with and pretend to be one of the independently wealthy, as the reason he struggled with his novels.

To my surprise, Humphreys' elegy to and ongoing conversation with her brother Martin, who died at age 45 of pancreatic cancer, is a meditation not just on grief and loss, but also on the sacrifices inherent in choosing the artist's life. If you've read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Tillie Olsen's Silences, you'll already know how hard it is to be a woman and a writer - particularly a married woman and a writer. (Add children to the mix and it's amazing there are any female writers.) One of the things that makes Nocturne provocative is that Humphreys takes this idea one step further, renders it non-gender specific, and explains what is required (at least for her):

'...to write well, to write fully, to really get inside a novel, I have to leave the world I actually live in. I can't have distractions from the story, which means living alone, and creating an environment of calm and routine - wearing the same clothes day after day, eating the same food - so that nothing from the real world interferes with the creation of the fictional one.

Over the years this has worn me down and created a kind of loneliness that is hard to live with, and surprisingly hard to leave....

My being is enmeshed with what I do. And this is why, in spite of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you one last time. Writing is what I have, and it's how I make sense of experience.'

Martin Humphreys was a concert pianist, composer, music teacher, son, brother, friend, boyfriend. You can still hear some of his recordings on his MySpace page, and I am listening to him play Leos Janacek's "Our Evenings" as I write this review. And I am close to tears, not because of the music but because of the sad truths of Nocturne:  "Increasingly I would rather live a perfect day than write about one...."

Priority None: Mel Lastman's looking smarter every day

I was living in Toronto during the storm of 1999, and I remember it well - buses sliding backwards down hills, switches on the subway freezing, and the hoots and catcalls from the rest of the country after Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman called in the army to help with snow removal. As someone who grew up in Ottawa, it was a little hard to understand why Toronto was so ill-equipped to handle the snow, and word at the time was that Mel and the rest of Toronto City Council hadn't yet signed the contract for snow plowing and removal and that's why the city was brought to its knees by this early-season storm. Oops. Ottawa used to get at least two blizzards a year - nowhere near as many as Montreal. But I remember snow piles that were at least five feet high.

Little did I think, however, that I'd end up living in a place where it snows (a lot) and yet the city's snow removal strategy was 'wait till it melts.' [Update November 15, 2012: from the minutes of the Lethbridge City Council meeting held November 13, 2012. When the Deputy Mayor and another member of Council (who had read my blog post) raised the issue of snow removal and snow plowing at this meeting (thank you!), the City's Director of Infrastructure Services indicated 'Priority 4 roads. (local streets) are not plowed or sanded even in an extreme event.  Intersections may get sanded when icy conditions are identified as a hazard.' [emphasis added] So despite the fact Lethbridge's public transit system is inadequate and you may not be able to get to a bus, that's pretty much it - you're on your own.]

Welcome to Lethbridge, AB, and chinook country.

Being good without faith: review of The Young Atheist's Handbook

This review appeared on Goodreads in July 2012 while this blog was in limbo, but I had always intended to review it here, so here you are - with some additional content:



In his foreword to Alom Shaha's Young Atheist's Handbook, A.C. Grayling talks about the importance of developing a questioning mind. Shaha quotes Ani DiFranco when she asks, 'What if God is just an idea/Someone put in your head?' In The Young Atheist's Handbook, Alom Shaha asks – and answers for himself – the question, 'What if God is just an outmoded concept we no longer require now that we have generated more data about our universe than any one of us can ever hope to successfully process?' And, by implication, he is also asking, 'What will it take for us as a species to accept that no life will be filled with unalloyed joy and good luck, and how can we learn to cope with misfortune without the crutch of religion while remaining good people?' His handbook is an attempt to answer that question on a supremely personal level, although, as he admits freely, it is not precisely a handbook.

Alom takes us on his journey of loss, inconsolable grief, defiance, and ultimately the acceptance of his lack – rather than his loss – of faith. Part of that journey includes an examination of the familial and socio-cultural pressures put on children to accept and observe a faith they are not permitted to question.   Islam may be the most difficult of the world's major religions in this sense, as the form in which it is exported throughout the world often amounts to the prophet's words being repeated and  obeyed without translation, study or debate. (I should hasten to add that I am not an expert on Islam – or on any other religion, although my own defiant and questioning attitude made me, shall we say, an unsuitable candidate for Sunday School).

Louis meets daisy

Louis meets daisy, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

The blog has been rescued from the limbo in which it's been suspended for oh, I don't know, a year now.

It's been a year of changes and technological and reno challenges, not least of which is my decision to adopt a kittoon. Technically Louis was already an adult by the time I got him. But don't tell him that.

I now spend my mornings drinking coffee while burbling at the cat. This morning I decided to tell him how much I love him (really, I am truly, madly, deeply in love with this animal) as a 10-pound cat attempted to drag a 10-kilo bag of cat food from its hiding place on a low shelf in the kitchen into the living room. Because I might forget it was breakfast time. Hang on, Louis, it's not 8AM yet - we're on a schedule here. Oh - and mwah. Mwah mwah mwah.

Pemberton Springtime

Pemberton Springtime, originally uploaded by dbsteers.

I will have my ashes
scattered here
so you can visit, love.

Reader review/Booker correlation or not?

Yesterday someone tweeted it would be interesting to see whether the Booker Prize went to the novel with the most reader reviews (using the Guardian Books as the reader review source). I think this is rather unfair, since it's a British publication and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending was the hands-down winner on that site (only four of the six shortlist nominees this year are UK authors; the other two are Canadians).

So as the 2011 Booker is about to be announced, I thought I'd use another reader review site (Goodreads) and we'll just if there's a correlation or not. Here are the stats:

The Sisters Brothers - 4685 reviews
Jamrach's Menagerie - 2046 reviews
The Sense of an Ending - 1862 reviews
Pigeon English - 1730 reviews
Snowdrops - 1013 reviews
Half-Blood Blues - 581 reviews

Update: And The Guardian called it!

This just in via Twitter:

ManBookerPrize Man Booker Prize 

The winner of the 2011 #manbookerprize is Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending!