"All Those Sexy Things"

I got interviewed by Canadian Notes & Queries:

Congratulations On Everything felt like a very different book while I was writing it, and I think it is, though now that I look at it as a finished thing, I can see a lot of similarities – people in bad relationships, people who mistake passivity for integrity, people who pursue dreams they are maybe not suited to achieve. All those sexy things.

 

"Superstition" is the way at the launch of Congratulations On Everything, May 3.

The band kills it. As does guest singer Alex Lukashevky. I try to keep up on drums.

May 3, 2016 - the night it all happens, or some of it

Swear to God...

... I have things to post here, and will do so soon.

In the meantime, have I mentioned I make most of my bad jokes on Twitter now?

@nathanwhitlock

Philip Larkin, the loveable, hateful old bastard

My review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth in the Toronto Star.

"[Larkin] has few rivals when it comes to conjuring joyful or heart-crushing beauty out of utterly commonplace situations and none in the realm of transforming disappointment into something both hilarious and transcendent."

Read the whole thing here.

The Kids in the Hall's Bruce McCulloch writes a book about being happy, ostensibly

"This country specializes in the knowing chuckle. We prefer jokes that act as gently dissolving humour lozenges, slowly releasing homespun wisdom. (See: Stuart McLean, The Royal Canadian Air Farce, Red Green, Corner Gas, Russell Peters.)

In that respect, the Kids in the Hall are something special."

More of this kind of thing in my review of Let’s Start a Riot, the new memoir-cum-monologue by Bruce McCulloch in the Toronto Star.

Elena Ferrante is my (current) jam

My piece in the Globe and Mail on mysterious Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.

How about you? What are you up to? How have you been?


Sorry to hear!

More books I read for money: featuring David Letterman, Bruce McCall, Gary Shteyngart, the guy who co-wrote "Babe: Pig in the City," and more!

Omnibus blog posts are the best/only kind of blog posts. And so:

Review of This Land Was Made for You and Me by Bruce McCall and David Letterman.

Review of Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart (to which Mr. Shteyngart replied with some Twitter shouting).

Review of Today I Am A Boy by Kim Fu.

Review of The Full Ridiculous by Mark Lamprell. (Who co-wrote Babe: Pig in the City! Which I love! This book not so much!)


Bonus content: getting drunk on CanLit! Watching UFC with poets!

Books I've Been Paid To Read Lately

Life is still elsewhere, but here are some recent reviews:

Of Chris Hadfield's A Guide to Life on Earth.

Of Bill Bryson's One Summer.

Of Eric Schlosser's terrifying Command and Control.

Of The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan.

Of Scatter, Adapt and Remember by Annalee Newitz.

Of Time Reborn by Lee Smolin.


As Daffy Duck might say if he reviewed books, it's not nearly a living.

David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

My review of David Rakoff's posthumous novel in The National Post.

Fetherling's footnotes

The best group of footnotes in George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975 - 2005 (on p. 88):

17 Sarah Sheard (b. 1953), novelist, author of Almost Japanese
18 Douglas Gibson (b. 1943), McClelland & Stewart publisher
19 Lee Harvey Oswald (1939 - 1963), alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy

The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte

My review of Sam Lipsyte's latest in The Toronto Star:

There is a very good reason to read a book about unlikeable losers. Books like that can be very, very funny. And Lipsyte is a very funny writer. The one thing he is constantly doing — even when he maybe shouldn’t, at least not so much — is being funny.

You Will Be To Blame

"I was tired from the drive - all the way up to Dalgleish, to get him, and back to Toronto since noon - and worried about getting the rented car back on time, and irritated by an article I had been reading in a magazine in the waiting room. It was about another writer, a woman younger, better-looking, probably more talented than I am. I had been in England for two months and so I had not seen this article before, but it crossed my mind while I was reading that my father would have. I could hear him saying, Well, I didn't see anything about you in Maclean's. And if he had read something about me he would say, Well, I didn't think too much of that write-up. His tone would be humorous and indulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be to blame." - from "The Moons of Jupiter"

If I were ever to start a tumblr, it'd be called "Alice Munro Just Killing It."

The new new escapism

The New York Times drops a bombshell:

"There is a reason for our attraction to these shows other than that they simply entertain us. 'Downton' and today’s other quality television series also promise a welcome escape from a muddled, technology-addled existence."

Also applies to movies, novels, poetry, music, friends, children, bike rides, food, alcohol, sex, masturbation, and sleep.

J.K. Rowling's Casual Vacancy has much casual brutality

My review of a new novel by a promising up-and-comer in the Toronto Star.

A taste:

The obvious thing for [Rowling] to have done would have been to write a kind of methadone novel for Potter addicts, something that bridged the gap between the world of Hogwarts and our own. No one would’ve begrudged her writing a mystery story, or a work of castle-heavy historical fiction, or even a work of grown-up fantasy (i.e., wizards with sex lives and drinking problems). Instead, she has written a book that plants its flag right in the middle of some very dark territory, where curses abound, but spells are non-existent. Readers looking for a little of that old Potter magic will be shocked by the new novel’s numerous scenes of drug abuse, marital discord, domestic violence, and unbridled despair. It’s the equivalent of Raffi making a late-career swerve into death metal, or Mr. Dressup doing David Mamet.

Welsh and Brooks

Just flew down from the Fortress of Solitude to offer this review of Irvine Welsh's Skagboys and Ben Brooks's Grow Up in lieu of something good. They say you should start an idle car at least once every couple of  months just to make sure the engine can still turn over.

Back to the fortress.

Captivity: 118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War by James Loney

My review of James Loney's Captivity appeared in the Toronto Star yesterday.

One of the enduring myths of contemporary Western society is that we are a culture desperate to be tested. We are a fatted, decadent, overly complacent bunch (the myth goes), which makes us yearn to be stripped of our comforts (at least for a little while) to see how we hold up under pressure.

Comfort is inauthentic; stress and fear and adrenaline are “reality.” How would you act in an extreme situation? How strongly held are your ideals, and how quickly would you abandon them in order to survive?

The problem is that in reality, a true testing of one’s ideals never yields a clean result. When push becomes shove, and shove becomes kick, ideals splinter and multiply. Every breath becomes a test, and we often only survive to be tested again.

Get the whole scoop here.

Review two-fer: The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise and A Description of the Blazing World by Michael Murphy

Two reviews of mine appeared this weekend - the new Clark Blaise in the Toronto Star and Michael Murphy's debut novel in The National Post.

Read the Blaise review here and the Murphy review here, if only to confirm that I am not filling this endless blogging hiatus with wine, women, and song.

The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber

I haven't exactly been riding this blog and putting it away wet lately - in fact, I only just realized I hadn't posted this review of Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature, which ran in the Toronto Star last weekend.

Here's a taste:

The jacket copy for Garber’s book positions it as something polemical, even reactionary, in the vein of E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987) and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), but if anything, it is a witty and fleet-footed argument against literary polemics. In fact, for the first few chapters, it’s a little tough to work out what ultimate point Garber is trying to make. There are seeming digressions into scholarly disputes of the past, the use of literary allusions, the rise of graphic novels, the idea of a literary canon and even a brief look at some of the other books that use the phrase “the use and abuse of …” in their titles.

Eventually, however, it becomes clear that this digressive method is the message: Literature is not something about which one should write manifestoes, but something that needs to be seen as uniquely welcoming to contradiction and a diversity of thought. It also becomes clear that Garber sees both the “use” and the “abuse” of literature as two sides of the same coin — the inevitable distortions of meaning merely create new meanings.

And here's the whole thing.

Are You Married to a Psychopath? by Nadine Bismuth

Interrupting my long winter's nap* here to note that my review of Nadine Bismuth's Are You Married to a Psychopath? ran in the Toronto Star yesterday.

A taste:

Though most of these 10 stories feature young, urban women whose sense of self-esteem relies heavily on the whims and fancies of their male counterparts, Bismuth’s fiction is far too scathing, intelligent and clear-eyed to be considered Chick Lit. There are no Cinderellas here, no Prince Charmings, no problem-dissolving baby bumps and no happily-ever-after.

Bismuth is singularly interested in laying out the problems faced by fallen women in a fallen world, but makes no guesses as to where redemption may lie. She is doing literary forensics, not spinning fairy tales.

Read the whole thing here.


* the semi-bitter, semi-sweet irony being that I have probably slept less in the past few months, thanks to daily pre-dawn novel-writing sessions, than I have at any point in my life - other than those times when my kids cut teeth. As with that teeth-cutting, I hope all this pain, frustration, and fatigue results in something bright, hard, and useful, but the odds are against me.