Category: Reviews

A writer reads: Book review #3

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The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

I was nervous about starting The Book of Love. What if my expectations were too high for this novel? What if I didn’t love it? When her last book came out (White Cat, Black Dog), I was that person who pre-ordered a copy, ran to my local bookstore as soon as it arrived, and then took it to a local park to start reading it right away — because I couldn’t wait till I got home.

Because while this is Kelly Link’s first novel, it’s not her first book — she has published four short story collections and won a lot of major awards. So even if you’ve avoided reviews before picking up The Book of Love (as I did), you might already have read her work.

(And even if you haven’t read her short stories yet, you may have heard her compared to people like Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Angela Carter.)

My own introduction to Link’s writing was “The Specialist’s Hat” — which I discovered after someone in a workshop said her name in that kind of hushed tone that writers use for their real heroes. And it felt world-changing to me when I first read it — it shook me in the same kind of way I remember being shaken when I saw the Blair Witch Project in a theatre back when it came out. Like that film, Kelly Link’s stories often upend the rules and drop you into a weird world that doesn’t make sense and yet feels believable, where surprising things happen quickly and without explanation, where you are left feeling unsteady and uncertain: what just happened? 

That’s an overall effect thing that I don’t want to try to dissect. But one of the factors may be a craft decision that so often sticks with me from the stories — a sense that Link is intentionally leaving loose ends and unfinished elements — defying writing “rules” that require stories to be tidy and to hit certain marks.

So her style is subversive and bold. It’s thrilling. But that past experience also made me a little anxious about picking up this novel — because what if the rule-breaking didn’t work in a longer format?

Or worse still — what if The Book of Love didn’t break the rules at all?

I approached The Book of Love cautiously, starting by looking at the cover for clues:
Four rows of images of moon phases, each row with a profile silhouetted in one of the waxing or waning moons — signalling that this will be a complex, layered story of multiple characters, and that there will be lots of changes.
Plus, of course, the moon symbolism.

And I am reporting back with good news. Very good news: The Book of Love does break a lot of the rules I hoped — especially the ones I’ve seen in well-known instructions to novelists, the types that would make the story predictable. 

It also follows the rules that matter more (at least to me): the characters are treated with respect (and yes, love). 

And where details matter, Link takes them seriously. As a former campus radio kid who used to play in bands, I can be pretty sensitive about music details (probably far too sensitive). Would a kid in X type of band really play Y kind of guitar? Does the author really understand about the complicated relationships in bands? 

And I’m happy to report that the answer to both of these questions is yes: while the kid’s band in this novel is probably not one I’d want to listen to in real life, their passion for it feels very authentic — and so does their taste in guitars and amplifiers. (At least Link is speaking the language of my music friends and past bands, having a character yearning for a Gretsch; even a Gallien-Krueger bass amp makes an appearance.)

Part of Kelly Link’s playlist for The Book of Love, available on Apple Music and Spotify.

You can read other reviews if you want to know more about the plot — but I hope you won’t. (Or you can go over to Cory Doctorow’s review, where he calls this book “A deceptively quirky tale with rusty razors at its core,” and carefully avoids spoilers.)

And I won’t say anything at all about the story, because I hope you will experience it the way I did, without knowing what to expect, except that Kelly Link is definitely a writer who knows what she is doing, and that she cares a lot. 

As for me, yes, I did love, love, love The Book of Love. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long time and I have already recommended it to a lot of my friends. I hope it’s the same for you too. 

More of Kelly Link’s playlist.

Notes and more info

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Looking for more info about Kelly Link? This interview with Helen Oyeyemi feels very relevant! Horror Stories Are Love Stories.

A writer reads: Book review #2

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Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay

Yellowknife, from Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

Here is book review #2 in this series of reading from a writer’s perspective. And I need to start it off with an admission: this is going to be at least as much about me as it is about the book — maybe more than usual. 

I have never been to the North, although I have worked in radio — which is probably why people have been recommending this book to me for years.

And more than that, I love radio. There is something magic about it, and emotional — faraway people going straight into your ear in a way that feels like what you’re hearing somehow belongs to you and only you. (Ira Glass said it much better: “I think that radio is a machine for empathy and intimacy… and not seeing the person actually makes it more intense. Like you’re on the phone in the dark with someone you love.” From a 2014 interview in Vogue Magazine.)

Also, there is my own experience working in radio, for many years as a volunteer at my university station, and then a little bit at the CBC — although in a very small and part-time way. All those hours in front of a microphone and a mixing board were magic too — even the smell of the acoustic tiles and decaying album covers in dimly lit studios was intoxicating. And I experienced or at least saw many of the same things in the hallways of those radio stations that happen in the book: the disconnect between the complicated physical people and their beautiful voices, the built-in and inescapable technical and time constraints, the fiefdoms and politics (even feuds), the rigid separations between the different roles. 

(Note to self: Should we have more books set in radio stations? Radio has all the ingredients of successful literature: strong personalities, and strong emotions, and beauty, and illusion. I’m going to give this more thought.)

A 1970s-era radio studio setup, from Wikimedia.

And now on to Late Nights on Air — and thank you for your patience.

This novel isn’t just a way to experience the North, or personalities in a radio station, although it is definitely those things too. Elizabeth Hay brings a tonne of research and life experience to the book, and on top of that she is also a masterful writer.

The canoe trip, closer to the end of the book, is an extended polished gem, full of beauty and exquisite observations, as well as echoes of history. 

There are also tragedies here, some more low-key and subtle than others, some foreshadowed well in advance and inevitable-feeling, but not all. 

And there are complicated characters, mostly people from elsewhere in Canada who have arrived in Yellowknife for their own complicated reasons, including for the Berger Commission, about the possible building of a pipeline. (This ends up being a triumph but in a way is another tragedy — if we knew the true costs of pipelines in the 1970s, why did Kate Beaton have to write (the brilliant) Ducks almost 50 years later?)

Syncrude oil sands mine works, Mildred Lake, Alberta, from Wikimedia Commons.

And yet I almost didn’t read this book. At least three times I picked it up and started, but on page 2 was so angry at Harry, one of the main characters, that I put it down again. Finally I set the book aside for a while and picked up where I left off — after that scene that upset me so much, and putting it out of my mind — and then finally I felt the way about the characters that I think I was supposed to. 

In the end, after I finished the book I went back to the beginning and checked in on all the seeds that Hay had so carefully planted in the first few pages: once I knew what would happen, it was so impressive to see how she had laid so many details in place almost from the start. 

As for Harry, he had won me over by the last page, but I was still enraged all over again when I came across that scene at the beginning. Once again I thought that I would never have forgiven him, and I couldn’t see how anyone would want to be friendly with him.

But that was my present self talking. 

What about my long-ago radio self? Would the old me have forgiven him? One thing I know for sure, from all these years later: my old radio friends and colleagues forgave bratty clueless me for a lot. 

Maybe I could be a little easier on Harry. 

A writer reads: Book review #1

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When We Lost Our Heads, by Heather O’Neill

Execution of Louis XVI By Isidore Stanislas Helman [detail] — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain.

I’m trying a new thing this year: writing the occasional review.

It could be about books, movies, music, or other things that are somewhat or slightly connected to the experience of being a writer.

This is an experiment — let’s see how it goes.

First of all: Books can be powerful. We all know that, at least on some level. That’s why some people want to stop other people from reading them.

And when I’m writing, I always feel like I have to be extra careful about what I read. I worry I’ll start unintentionally imitating the voice. (Although I haven’t seen much evidence of that lately, I still think it will happen.)

I also worry that I’ll read something that will discourage me. That’s what’s happened to me when I asked for George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain for a Christmas present last year. I know other writers loved the book and got a lot from it, but that kind of close examination of the Russian masters triggered my over-zealous internal editor, and turned out to be fatal to my own writing for a few very painful weeks.

Ideally, when I’m writing, I want to read books that are the literary equivalent of that old story about the Velvet Underground: they didn’t sell that many records while they were still together, but everyone who bought one started a band.

So what I always hope for is the kind of book that makes me run to my notebook or computer. The books that make my head buzz with ideas. That make me pull over my car to write down descriptions or plot lines quickly before I forget. 

Second: No one else writes like Heather O’Neill.

And her books are always strong stuff.

And… sometimes I just don’t feel tough enough for Heather O’Neill. I’ve been gutted and messed up by her books before, starting (like a lot of other people) with Lullabies for Little Criminals. 

On the other hand, earlier this year I watched an excellent video where O’Neill talks about writing, and reading, and writing community, and the differences between English and French storytelling traditions, among a lot of other things. (“McGill24: Writing your story – Heather O’Neill in conversation with Kasia Van Schaik.”)

It was energising. It started to give me that get-out-and-start-a-band feeling.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill, a copy from the Vancouver Public Library.

And a couple of weeks ago — by pure luck — I managed to get a copy of When We Lost Our Heads at my local public library. 

Now back to that second point: No one writes like Heather O’Neill. 

So, a little nervously at first, I dove into When We Lost Our Heads. And I was glad I did. To extend the Velvet Underground / rock & roll metaphor a bit further, I felt right away that she is not at all interested in sounding like everyone else on the radio, or changing her topics or style to appeal to a broad audience. And if she buffs something it’s to make it gleam — which is a lot different from sanding down the edges to make it less dangerous.

More than that, after reading and getting accustomed to quite a lot of utterly devastating but also very “show, don’t tell”-style literary writing over 2022, it was deliciously bracing to spend time in the world of this book, with its unashamed telling and the snicker-snack of O’Neill’s vorpal blade cutting through the bullshit with startling directness.

What bullshit? Oh, you know, just in general. Look around. Her subjects here include capitalism, misogyny, social inequality, gender roles and identity, sex work, social history, feminism, female friendship, cruelty, selfishness, female sexual pleasure, reproductive freedom, the divide between the English and French in Québec, and many other kinds of injustice. (In no particular order. And just to name a few.)

Her characters are almost entirely women, and almost entirely not anyone you would want to have a beer with. (I say almost because I would very much like to have a beer with George.) They are mostly or entirely named after major French Revolution figures, and they are generally pretty unpleasant, in the ways their names would imply. 

(I’m not super confident about this, but I think O’Neill is pulling names a bit more broadly than just from this one set of historical events — although my own spotty education and limited Wikipedia browsing may have let me down here.)

As a reader, I felt like I was watching O’Neill make an announcement: “I’m not going to waste our time being subtle about the symbolism here. Here are your archetypes. Let’s go!” 

An overdrive pedal, from the author’s collection.

After an announcement like that, some people will say this book is not for them — just like some people will leave the bar when they see the band walk in with big guitar amps.

But for me this was a signal to hang onto my chair and see where the author was going to take me. 

For me, this was an invitation to get out my own guitar and tube amp and overdrive pedal, and make some noise. 

And yes, I did have to stop my car yesterday, so I could write down a story idea.

I loved this book. Thank you, Heather O’Neill.