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| Plenty to celebrate at Margaret Atwood's 70th She's been a brilliant writer since her 20s, and her remarkably versatile work continues to dazzle and innovateI believe that most writers get better as they get older. Unlike, say, rock musicians, exploding in a star-burst of youthful inspiration, novelists take their time. They grow into and with the act of writing; over decades, over thousands of hours and millions of words. One of my favourites, Don DeLillo, for instance, wasn't published at all until his mid-30s, and didn't produce his masterpiece until the age of 61.Margaret Atwood is different, in this, as in so much. She was brilliant from the beginning.An award-winning poet since her early 20s, the Canadian – 70 today – was just 26 when she wrote her first novel, the feminist fable The Edible Woman (it was published four years later). Since then she's had a remarkably productive career, arguably without peer in terms of scope, length, range and quality. She is a novelist of rare lyricism, profundity, inventiveness and humour; an acclaimed poet; an essayist, critic and playwright; an environmentalist and activist. Many of her books – The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake – can confidently be called classics. Among several other prizes Atwood has won the Booker once and been nominated a further five times (and probably should have won at least twice more). She has tackled and mastered a range of literary genres, from realism to historical fiction to satire to cod-classical to SF – or as she prefers to call it, "speculative" fiction. She's reworked the Odyssey and been commissioned to write an opera. Just this year she constructed an entire multimedia experience around her latest novel, the dystopian The Year of the Flood: choirs, CDs, spoken-word performances, ironic t-shirts stamped with the slogans of satirical future products. But what most defines Margaret Atwood, for me, is the way it all seems to come so easily. Where one can imagine DeLillo wrestling with each sentence in his dense, meticulously constructed fiction, one pictures Atwood, by contrast, letting the work flow through and out of her like orchestral sounds sweeping across an auditorium. There is such an easy grace to the writing, such cohesiveness of idea, such artistic boldness and surefootedness. And such playfulness and lightness of touch: that dry, sarcastic sense of humour (which incidentally comes out in person as much as in print). Atwood is not just funny in theory, but will actually make the reader laugh. Underpinning all this is a deep, instinctive sincerity which is, to my mind, fundamental to greatness. How has she never won the Nobel prize? I assume it's because the Nobel is too often awarded on the basis of the writer's so-called "life narrative", and Atwood's adventures have been mostly imaginative ones.No matter. A portfolio this dazzling, a talent this dizzying, doesn't need the validation of awards or citations. Happy birthday, Margaret Atwood – here's to the next decade of pushing back the boundaries of literary possibility.Margaret AtwoodFictionDarragh McManusguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Holiday Books: Cooking Big books from big chefs, recipes from Gourmet magazine, France and Italy, and three volumes of baking secrets. feeds.nytimes.com |
Ms Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum A tale of life in a New York middle school never makes the grade, says Rachel AspdenAmid the turmoil of early adolescence, teachers are one reliable constant: staid, disapproving, definitively adult. But Ms Hempel Chronicles, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's neatly drawn tale of life in a New York middle school, turns the familiar rubric of schooldays on its head. Here, the focus of the awkward, uncertain process of growing up is the teacher herself.Beatrice Hempel, a twentysomething English teacher, is struggling to gain a purchase on adult life. After her promising years at school and university, her world has somehow begun to unravel: her beloved father has recently died, she is engaged to a man who alternately puzzles and repels her, her mother and younger sister are allied against her. Even teaching, with its endless round of planning, marking, bribery and discipline, is losing its allure.For the moment, it is her 13-year-old students who make up for these disappointments. In the first – and most accomplished – of the linked episodes that make up the novel, Beatrice sits in the audience at the school talent show, watching the awkward dance routines and magic acts, half-regretting that she is not performing. In the vacuum left by the disappearance of her own teenage promise – from the age of 15, she remembers, "she felt her greatness gently ebbing away" – her pupils' qualities of "sympathy", "genius", "wildness and beauty and torment" swell to illusorily operatic dimensions.Like her protagonist, Bynum, an Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate who teaches writing at the University of California in San Diego, has a "nice way with words". Beatrice's wavering sense of identity is scrupulously signposted: the recherché vocabulary words she assigns her students – "narcissistic", "precarious" – invade her thoughts, just as she begins to pepper her conversations with the teenage borrowings "mad", "ghetto" and "no doubt". The novel takes a self-conscious delight in description: sticky tape on a girl's costume "caught the light from her parents' flash camera and made her glisten like an amphibian".But for all Bynum's careful portrayal of staff and student quirks, neither Beatrice nor her school ever really comes to life. This is partly the result of Beatrice's own stasis: riddled with uncertainty, she takes refuge in the comforting yearly rituals of tests, reports and trips and longs for her students to "stay in middle school forever". She is overwhelmed by misplaced nostalgia for her own schooldays and demands that her mother keep her teenage bedroom untouched.A similar paralysis seems to settle on the narrative, which meanders from the classroom into diversions – a trip to a reconstructed settler plantation, a dream filled with symbols of Beatrice's Chinese ancestry, disconnected episodes from her years as an aspiring punk – that vaguely suggest the fluidity of history and identity. But filtered through Beatrice's hazy consciousness and mired in paragraphs of elaborate description, they fail to cohere.The novel's lack of propulsive energy is not helped by Bynum's decision to elide the significant events of Beatrice's life: the failure of her engagement, her eventual decision to leave teaching and her pregnancy are conveyed only through offhand retrospective references.The final episode of Ms Hempel Chronicles jumps forward a decade to a chance encounter between Beatrice – whose chronic drift has somehow led her into a new career in urban planning – and a beautiful former student. "You're Ms Hempel forever. At least to us," insists Sophie, a nod to an old certainty that reminds Beatrice of the delight she once took in "people at the age when they were most purely themselves… just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practised at dissembling".But even this brief rapture dissipates into an aimless, opaque dream sequence with which the novel ends. Despite its good intentions, Ms Hempel Chronicles, like Beatrice herself, remains frustratingly directionless.FictionRachel Aspdenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates | Book review Joyce Carol Oates sails bafflingly close to Nabokov's Lolita, and predictably comes off second best, says Elizabeth DayIn 1998, film director Gus Van Sant released a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. It took him several years to bring it to the box office and when he did, the movie received a thorough drubbing, most critics agreeing that it was an exercise in vanity. Besides which, it was simply not as good as the original.In A Fair Maiden, Joyce Carol Oates has not, thankfully, attempted a scene-for-scene rewriting of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but there are enough self-conscious echoes to ensure that a parallel is drawn. The central character is 16-year-old Katya Spivak, who has landed a holiday job as a nanny for a well-off family in the seaside resort of Bayhead Harbor. Here, she meets the seemingly debonair 68-year-old Marcus Kidder, an author of children's books and a man whose surname and profession are presumably designed to jog along those readers who might be a bit slow to grasp the plot's paedophiliac undertones.Katya's superficial coating of street-smartness masks an unhappy upbringing in New Jersey at the hands of an abusive single mother. Her father is missing and her only experience of affection has been a messy entanglement with her violent cousin, Roy. Bayhead Harbor offers the prospect of an enticing new world, far away from the "soft, formless, graceless things, soiled and sagging sofas, worn vinyl chairs" of her home town.Teetering on the brink of adulthood, Katya, like Lolita, is both innocent and knowing. Flattered by the attention shown to her by "Mr Kidder", Katya is gradually drawn into a sexual world that she does not understand. Her unwillingness to confront her own ignorance has predictably sinister consequences.Quite why any writer would want to take on Nabokov, arguably one of the greatest prose stylists of the last century, is a matter for conjecture. Unsurprisingly, Oates suffers by comparison. Although there is the occasional lyrical phrase – "Shadows through a lattice window moved restlessly against a wall, appearing, disappearing" – much of the writing is wilfully slow and ponderous.Oates has a tendency to repeat expressions of which she is especially fond ("sick-sinking" appears more than once) and she frequently breaks out into breathless italics in order to convey Katya's tortuous thought processes. On page 95, we read that: "Mr Kidder is my friend, Mr Kidder would never hurt me." By page 142: "Dirty old man, what right d'you have… what right, damn you, hate you." And so on.All this is a shame, because Oates is a far better writer than this book allows her to be. Her strength lies in her subtlety, the way she gives us telling glimpses of her characters' back-stories without ever fully explaining them. Here, such virtues are wasted, because Katya Spivak is fatally constrained by the unnecessary central conceit. Instead of trying to make her a 21st-century Lolita, Oates should have allowed her to become her own woman.FictionVladimir NabokovElizabeth Dayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Scream of the crop From High Fidelity to Heathcliff, the novelist presents the novels that epitomise teen spiritTiffany Murray's first novel Happy Accidents was shortlisted for the Bollinger/Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Diamond Star Halo, her second, was published earlier this month. She studied at UEA, and has taught creative writing there and elsewhere. She lives in the Welsh Marches.Buy Tiffany Murray books at the Guardian bookshop "What is a 'rock'n'roll novel'? Rock'n'roll – from Robert Johnson to Jack White – is a coming-of-age sound that allows us to find ourselves, and maybe others. Writing about it is complex, with clichés lying in wait at every turn. I love these novels because they attempt to capture threshold, anarchic times where anything might happen; that, to me is rock'n'roll. Remember Marlon Brando in The Wild One? 'What are you rebelling against, Johnny?' 'What have got?' Well, there's a lot of that in these narratives. "As with some of these stories, my own novel Diamond Star Halo isn't written from the point of view of the rock star, rather from that of an observer, Halo Llewelyn. After all, rock'n'roll is a spectacle – of beauty, truth, all of that – and it's one you want to drink in."1. Reservation Blues by Sherman AlexieRobert Johnson arrives on The Spokane Indian Reservation, "with nothing more than the suit he wore and the guitar slung over his back". Misfit and storyteller, Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, wants to set Johnson's guitar on fire and smoke some salmon over it (on the Spokane Rez, they're salmon people). The guitar has different ideas. This guitar talks, sings the blues, and tells Thomas, "Y'all need to play songs for your people…Y'all need the music." And so Thomas, Victor, Junior, and Chess and Checkers Warm Water become the band Coyote Springs. I love everything Alexie does. This is a blues plunge into the magical real, and the all-too-real, of modern Native American life.2. The Commitments by Roddy Doyle"The Labour Party doesn't have soul. Fianna fuckin' Fail doesn't have soul. The Workers' Party ain't got soul … The people o' Dublin, Our people, remember, need soul. We've got soul." So says Jimmy Rabbitte, with the help of Joey The Lips Fagan. Jimmy knows his music. Jimmy knows his preaching, too, and when the Commitments are formed, for one sparkling drip of time, history is made. A brilliant debut from Doyle back in 1987, (and a brilliant film from Alan Parker, too).3. High Fidelity by Nick HornbySelf-confessed "arsehole" and record-shop owner, Rob, shares his life of lists – girlfriends, break-ups, dream jobs, variously documented favourite songs – and tells us, "In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn … but nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot … That's what happened to me; that's what happens to most people." 4. Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo"In endland, far from the tropics of fame," rock star Bucky Wunderlick, holes himself up in a bleak apartment on Great Jones St, NYC, after a final tour where he can tell his star is fading because "boys and girls … were less murderous in their love of me". Bucky's intense, crazed narrative voice conveys both the gloriousness and the plain weirdness of fame. With an insert from Bucky's conglomerate management, Transparanoia, entitled "Superslick Mind Contracting Media Kit, 'The Bucky Wunderlick Story', told in news items, lyrics and dysfunctional interviews", the myth of the dead or disappeared rock star and the hovering subjects of money, drugs, terrorist groups, and possibly Bob Dylan, all hum through a 1973 novel that is not showing its age.5. Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëOK, bear with me here, but to me – or perhaps the teen-me – the ultimate rock star was Heathcliff. He's flinty, elemental, feral, beautiful, violent, mad, gothic, and so very, very rock n' roll. I picture Jack White, although Jack is perhaps too nice. Brontë's narrative structure – with the two outsiders, Lockwood and Nelly, telling the story – gives it the air of an exposé: the common man and woman, watching, reporting. You could call it a 19th century Almost Famous. This is why Wuthering Heights haunts Diamond Star Halo.6. Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnesIt's 1958 in London – specifically the shabby west London "Napoli" where our narrator lives – and "youth culture" is taking its first swaggering steps. There's sparkling modernity in the new language MacInnes indulges, too. "So I went out of the Dubious to catch the summer evening breeze. The night was glorious … The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping noisily beyond the their neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury avenue canals, like gondolas."7. Popular Music by Mikael NiemiSwedish author Niemi proves there was rock'n'roll life in his country long before Abba. The narrator, Matti, will charm you as he dreams of becoming a rock star in Pajala, his ice-bound village, in the 1960s. The first time he hears Elvis he's "petrified". The first time he listens to the Beatles with friend Niila, there's "CRASH! A thunderclap. A powder keg exploded and blew up the room……we splattered down on the floor in tiny damp heaps…Rock'n'roll music…Beatles."8. Owen Noone and Marauder by Douglas CowieAn open-mic evening in a bar in Peoria, Illinois, a young boy watches Owen Noone play an impromptu rendition of "Sweet Child o' Mine". That young man soon becomes the Marauder, Owen's musical sidekick. This is an on-the-road novel, and as we follow their story we imagine what American folk-punk might sound like ("Yankee Doodle" and "The Wild Mizzourye" are some of the tracks, pilfered from Alan Lomax's collection of American Folk Songs). So genuinely rock'n'roll that French band Deskaya have released an eponymous song.9. The Ossians by Doug JohnstoneConnor Alexander is lead singer of the Ossians, a Scottish band made up of his twin sister Kate, girlfriend Hannah, and best mate Danny. Connor loves gin, and more, "I'm the troubled artists, amn't I? The old Cobain syndrome, nobody understands my torment and all that pish." Named after a third-century Scots Gaelic poet, with a record called The St Andrew's Day EP, the Ossians embark on a tour of the Highlands and dive into the underbelly of modern Scotland. As Connor tells a journalist, "it's not as simple as 'It's shite being Scottish'… it's both shite and great being Scottish, often simultaneously." 10. Groupie by Jenny Fabian and Johnny ByrneMy father said this was the book at the end of 60s. I see his point. It's not exactly fiction, but what is? The groupie, Katie, a thinly veiled Fabian, was encouraged by Byrne to "write it just as you want and I'll help you with it". There's plenty of sex and drugs to go with the rock'n'roll, and there's great slang ("plating" in particular sounds very odd for what it describes). Ultimately Katie is the most interesting thing in the book. The boys, the rock stars, are rather one-dimensional, bless them. I suppose that might be the point.  FictionBest booksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |