Category Archives: Chris Fox

Bullfighter flashes cape at gender

Matadora

By Elizabeth Ruth

Comorant

327 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Chris Fox

            Matadora is Elizabeth Ruth’s third novel. It follows Smoke, her second novel, which tells an entransing tale of a small Ontario tobacco town in the late fifties, and Ten Good Seconds of Silence, her first, which now that I’ve read Matadora and Smoke, I will soon seek out. Both previous novels were finalists for a number of literary prizes.

            Matadora shifts to 1930s Spain, but Ruth’s interest in history remains. As Smoke took literary and healing energy from the exploits of The Purple Gang, notorious in prohibition era Detroit, Matadora gains gravitas by invoking the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, Ruth remains interested in the gender queer. In Smoke, a transman steals the show, but in Matadora, the ambiguous, ambitious Luna is the show. She is a wonderfully realized character that we first meet, appropriately (The Sun Also Rises) at sunrise, with the silhouette of a Sangre Caste bull behind her. She is leaping from a wall, spurred by the absence (since birth) of her mother, and sure, at that moment, that she can fly.

We are also introduced to Manuel, who acts as Luna’s double and foil throughout the novel, a character device that serves Ruth well. He is the first-born son of the ranchero owner and meant to be a bull-fighter, but he aspires to be a poet – an ambition as unlikely as Luna’s desire to become a matadora. Both seek flight from their given lives and offer each other what help they can. Their bond, like Luna’s wilful talent, is blood-borne, provoking reconsideration of nature/nurture debates.

Ruth has done terrific research, especially into the details of the making of a matadora. She even introduces “anti-taurinos,” early animal rights activists. (Interestingly, the Spanish word implies that they are anti-bull, not anti-bull-fighting, which is indicative of how aficionados (mis)understand the raising, training, and killing of bulls for loving and respecting the animals. Somewhere here lies my only reservation in recommending Matadora. Despite the many clever metaphoric uses of bull-fighting in the novel, the more primary focus is on actual bull-fighting, which I think some readers may find difficult. I myself wondered how I would write about it; however, I did find the novel’s attempt to convey the aficionados’ and matadors’ perspective worthwhile. Daring the bull has a long and mythic cultural history, and Matadora draws on that heritage. When Luna explains the mystery of it, as she often does, I almost understood.

Moreover, in a clever last pass, Ruth has Canada provide Grace, a young Canadian who has come to help fight Franco. Unlike Luna, who spills blood in the ring, Grace transports blood to the front. Of course she is an anti-taurino. Matadora stages a confrontation between what is bright (Luna and her suit of lights) in the darkness that is bull-fighting and the gaze of the New World struggling to understand the Old. Grace is drawn to Luna, but remains judgemental and although the novel offers Luna Grace, Luna chooses to be only matadora. It is enough for her and probably enough for most readers. Ruth has given us a very well-crafted novel.

Chris Fox is a Victoria writer, editor, and instructor.

 

Novel captures effects of genocide

The Imposter Bride
By Nancy Richler
Harper Collins, 360 pages, $29.99

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride is a haunting, often beautiful, read. It offers history and insight into human relations as it explores how the two shape each other in this story of one woman’s search for the mother who left her, as an infant, to be raised by her father and his family.

Most of the novel, Richler’s third, is told from the perspective of this woman, Ruth, as she grows up in the warm embrace of the Jewish immigrant family that her mother, posing as Lily Kramer, married into before fleeing Montreal for Canada’s hinterland to protect herself. Little Ruthie is hurt by her mother’s abandonment, which her father cannot even begin to explain. At thirteen, at a family Seder, she asks why this mother, whose periodic gift of stones seems to both affirm and to grieve their bond, is not there with them. When her father answers that they “really don’t know,” Ruthie sets the course that she will run when she has become Ruth, an experienced mother herself: “Then maybe I’ll have to find her and ask her.”

This primary narrative unearths itself almost like a mystery while Ruth’s seeking also provides the raison d’être for a layered narrative, based in Montréal, but also reaching back to Amsterdam, Poland, and Palestine during and after WWII. In particular, Richler’s deft development of the back-story of Ruthie’s two grandmother figures, which are brought together, initially, by the imposter bride, is heart-warming. Initially, both are quite unappealing characters, but as they befriend each other and share their stories, readers will find themselves befriending them, too.

Richler’s rich tapestry of characters allows readers to share several diverse stories of Jews who, like the grandmothers, escaped Europe earlier to settle in Montréal, as well as immigrants like Ruth’s mother, who came later and is beginning again, post Second World War, bereft of relations, with only a stolen identity and her dream of “Canada.” Her first impressions of Canada’s endless “dark forest” and towns that are “mere specks in the eye of the desolation that surrounded them” recall accounts by Susannah Moodie a century before and also mirror the impossible losses that haunt “Lily” and underwrite the novel as a whole. In Ruth, and her children, we see Canadian Jews discovering their heritage in order to live more fully in the present. This makes The Imposter Bride an excellent springboard for consideration of the effects of war and attempted genocide and how these horrors distort individual lives and reverberate through generations. Richler’s novel is filled with adroit and apposite prose that, paradoxically, holds its own stone, a respectful silence, at its heart.

Chris Fox is a Victoria writer who recently completed her PhD in English.

Bechdel’s mother narrative too static

Are You my Mother?: A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

297 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Fans of Alison Bechdel will be interested in her second family-based graphic novel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama.  The graphic skills that made Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic immensely satisfying and readable are on display in Bechdel’s latest offering.  I was thrilled when Bechdel made the leap from comic strip to graphic novel with Fun, which I read voraciously and loved.  So perhaps my expectations of Are You My Mother?  were impossibly high.  While Bechdel’s drawing retains its appeal in her third book, the narrative is less lively than that of Fun.  Nor is the work as a whole as compelling as Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, the 2010 Canadian graphic novel that also tells the tale of a dyke and her mother.

While Fun was the story of Bechdel growing up in a funeral home and focused on her relationship with her closeted father, Mother? addresses the author’s more conflicted relationship with her female parent.  The narrative line of Fun takes Bechdel through childhood and to university while Mother? explores primarily either the infant Bechdel or her adult self in therapeutic or romantic relationships.  The most common settings of Mother? thus lack the graphic energy or interest that her more mobile childhood afforded.  Far too many frames present Bechdel sitting with her therapist, a static situation that is not particularly graphic-novel friendly.  Bechdel also recounts several dreams reminding me that, often, dreams are most fascinating to the dreamer (and possibly her therapist).

Ironically, I find Mother? leans too heavily in the direction of the academic essay.  Although I have studied Jacques Lacan, it demands too much of the graphic memoir for Bechdel to present the theories of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Alice Miller, and Lacan in such detail.  Although I am in shocked awe at her boldness in titling a chapter, “Transitional Objects” and somewhat amused to see Lacan’s Écrits given graphic treatment, I found the many panels of text (complete with highlighting) excessive – and too static to enliven graphic narrative.

Nor does Bechdel quote psychoanalysts only.  Virginia Woolf, one of my favourite authors, serves as her literary touchstone.  Mother? includes textual panels from Moments of Being and To The Lighthouse.  The Woolf references in Mother? parallel Bechdel’s use of James Joyce in Fun.  It’s interesting, and slyly appropriate, that Bechdel uses the iconic father and mother of high modernism to anchor her relations to her own father and mother.  Readers may also note a nod to gender in the colorful rose (or is it pink?), which gives many frames in Mother? the effect of retinted old photographs, and contrast with the verdigris of Fun.

Her use of quotation, which lacks the full integration of a really good academic essay, suggests Bechdel has not achieved quite enough distance on her therapy to integrate it fully into the literary graphic novel.  The question in her title acknowledges that the story is about Bechdel’s search for a mother rather than about her mother and its present tense implies that that search is on-going, not yet resolved.  Mother? might be read as Bechdel’s own  Drama of the Gifted Child (the Miller book she quotes) – her sincerity and her gifts are indisputable.  Certainly, readers who share similar issues may well forgive the dynamic limitations of Mother? and not only enjoy, but benefit from Bechdel’s psychoanalytic research and insights.  For me, there isn’t enough graphic comic in this Comic Drama.

Chris Fox recently completed her PhD in English – which has not diminished her sense of humour

Celona updates foundling narrative

Y

By Marjorie Celona
Published by Hamish Hamilton Canada, $30

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Marjorie Celona has updated the foundling novel for the 21st-century. Set on Vancouver Island, the back story of the abandonment, essentially that of the birth parents, is as developed as foundling Shannon’s story. Celona alternates events in the two stories with great skill to create a compelling, suspenseful narrative that finally unites both strands, and in doing so offers characters – and readers – penetrating insights into what constitutes “family.”

Celona’s novel gives a postmodern meta-nod to Tom Jones and like its foundling, Tom, Shannon has a lusty appetite for food: “I don’t want to eat at all if I can’t eat like a wild animal.” However, there the resemblance ends. Unlike Tom, Shannon’s appetite disappears at significant times, and is more likely to extend to illicit substances than to sexual adventures. Readers follow the contemporary foundling (and her sometimes unreliable narrative) as she is moved from one “at-risk” placement to another, finally arriving to relative safety with Miranda and her daughter Lydia-Rose. Here, Celona effectively captures the naïve, strangely confident demeanor that accompanies the troubled, but determined, 16-year-old Shannon’s first steps into independence.

Because there is suspense in this story, I hesitate to give too much away; however, it is no surprise that a child who’s been abandoned wonders how and why she was left and seeks the identity of her biological parents. Shannon’s drive to “find the why” of it all takes her to the Y(MCA), and to the hard-knock downtowns of Victoria and Vancouver. Her earlier traumas make her vulnerable to others, but though Shannon still hurts herself, she has, miraculously, developed a strong sense of self-preservation that impels her to flee the greatest dangers.

Shannon is also lucky. Her luck is that she attends to key pieces of advice given to her by her strongest mother, Miranda, a kindly social worker, and a street musician. This faculty (and the Times Colonist story of her birth) leads Shannon back to Victoria’s YMCA and to Vaughn, the man who witnesses Shannon’s mother leaving her four-pound preemie newborn at the Y’s doors at sunrise. Vaughn is Y’s guardian angel, a weight trainer at the Y. He is a seer, and one who believes he can affect how the future unfolds. Vaughn helps Shannon with her quest by giving her nourishment, mobility, wisdom, and companionship.

Celona’s writing, more gritty than lyrical, makes this compelling tale believable, keeps us reading long after bedtime because we care about Shannon and we want to know what happens. In part, it’s Celona’s use of concrete detail that draws us in. For Victorians, it’s also satisfying to read about “our town” written by a local writer. Celona was a graduate of UVic’s star-studded Creative Writing Program before gaining an MFA from Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Y’s characters drive in and out of Victoria along Douglas Street, as have we all, passing the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, the Mayfair Mall, and Thompson’s Foam Shop. She also captures the liveliness, friendliness, and desperation of the Dallas Road and downtown park night life as Victoria’s homeless and addicted meet and share drugs. Celona’s vision is empathetic and compassionate; she enables readers to understand the innocence with which horror can arrive and destroy lives.

But she doesn’t leave us there. Shannon’s life begins again – signalled by a clever repeat of the novel’s opening paragraphs – and this time she is more solidly and consciously a part of the family that has been hammered out in the forge of her coming of age quest.
I had to “Add” Celona to my spellcheck as I wrote this; I recommend we add her to the Canadian literary canon as well. Y is a worthy Giller nominee.

Victoria resident Chris Fox just completed a PhD in English, with a focus on Canadian literature. She has been published in The Malahat Review, Ariel, Atlantis and Studies in Canadian Literature