Tag Archives: Fiction

Review | Gold, Chris Cleave

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There were two kinds of people when a light turned red. One kind accelerated, the other kind braked. [p. 63 of the ARC]

Chris Cleave’s Gold is about Zoe and Kate, the best and second best cyclists in the world, as they prepare for the final Olympics of their careers. Best friends and training partners, both are summed up neatly by the above quotation: Kate, a natural athlete with a husband and child, lives cautiously, while Zoe, a daredevil with a major chip on her shoulder and a bit of a death wish, blazes through red lights without bothering to check both sides of the road. Gold is a fast-paced, exciting sports novel. The cycling scenes are almost poetic, lyrical, and even though I have never been a cycling fan, I was completely caught up in the adrenaline rush. Take this excerpt for example:

Being chased down by another human being is a very intimate thing. She’d never been caught before. She heard each gasp of Jack’s lungs…

And then Jack said something to her. He didn’t have to shout, because he was so close now. He said, “Sorry, Zoe.”

He was sorry. She knew it was the only kind of apology that meant something. With both of them at 200 heartbeats per minute, with the peace of exhaustion coming over her, she understood the effort it took him to say that. She realized what it must have cost him. [pp. 108-109 of the ARC]

I am not an athlete, but wow, Mr. Cleave. The intimacy, the adrenaline, the human connection all in that passage — amazing. Gold is full of passages like that, capturing the spirit of a moment, the complexity of emotions I imagine top athletes must experience, the rush that I imagine compels them to keep competing, to keep training. Gold romanticizes sport — the novel infuses the physical struggles of training with the warm glow of competition. We want these women to win because we are caught up in the intensity of their love for the sport.

More than a sports novel, however, Gold is also a story about friendship. How can their friendship survive when they are forced to compete with each other for their final chance, ever, to participate in the Olympics? We also learn that the story of their friendship is even more complex than just a sports rivalry. From the first chapter, we see Kate’s insecurity over her marriage to Jack, and her concern that the more aggressive, vibrant Zoe might win him over. We also see that Kate and Jack’s daughter Sophie is seriously ill, and while Cleave veers into the maudlin at times when talking about Sophie’s condition, the child’s utter geekiness (she deals with her poor health by imagining her life in terms of Star Wars) keeps her absolutely endearing.

Zoe’s drive to win is extreme and selfish, but it also verges on desperate. Zoe’s competitive drive is deeply rooted in a childhood tragedy, and Cleave highlights her vulnerability. In a particularly poignant observation, Zoe says,

Happy people believed in someone. That was the difference between her and Kate, right there. Expecting company, people like Kate walked with a careful space beside them. Even in their worst moments they could imagine the possibility of someone. [p. 111 of the ARC]

In a way, I felt like I was supposed to root for Zoe. Even her coach (who trains both Zoe and Kate) has to admit he wants Zoe to win. While Kate wants to win, Zoe needs to win, and the coach admits he worries how Zoe will go on living if she ever loses. However, I found myself on Team Kate the entire time. Zoe annoyed me with her utter self-centredness, and even though Cleave does a good job keeping her angst understandable, I thought she went too far too often. Zoe may have the championship mentality, but her single mindedness compels her to do anything — manipulate, injure, wound — in the name of winning, and this disregard for the off-track lives of her rivals makes me less sympathetic to her situation. Perhaps it’s also because I could relate more with the softer spoken Kate, who may lack that single minded focus that makes athletes into champions, yet who also cares deeply about what is important to her — winning gold, yes, but also her husband and child.

At one point, when Zoe’s selfishness threatens the stability of Kate’s family’s comfortable lifestyle, I found myself actively hating Zoe. On one hand, I understood that Zoe’s actions, especially in that case, were spurred by deep, deep pain rather than just malice, but the extent of the damage she could cause was too much, and I hated her at that point. That, I think, is a testament to how deeply Gold gets into you: the characters are no longer just fictional constructs on a page; they feel like real people, and their actions feel like they have real consequences.

To Cleave’s credit, he keeps his characters complex. Even selfish, single-minded Zoe has her moments of kindness, even sweet, maternal Kate has her edge. Kate’s husband Jack is given texture by his love for Scotland. I especially love this scene where he sings The Proclaimers song “500 Miles” with Sophie:

It was a shout of defiance, was what the song was. It was the reason he and Kate and Sophie all knew she would get better. In his heart Jack was sure they could all win against this leukaemia just being sufficiently Scottish. [p. 113 of the ARC]

Isn’t that beautiful? Beautiful and heartbreakingly, tragically, futile. There’s the competition of cycling down a track, and there’s the daily struggle of facing your daughter’s leukaemia. In his author’s note, Chris Cleave writes, “Caring for sick children is the Olympics of parenting.” Indeed it is, and in a way, the stakes feel so much higher. This is me, speaking as a non-athlete and a non-mother. I can’t imagine pushing my body to its limits day in and day out for that elusive gold medal, but I don’t even want to imagine waking up day in and day out knowing my daughter is in pain and that she can die at any time.

I can imagine Jack, belting out songs at the top of his lungs in the desperate belief that this can keep Sophie alive. I can imagine Kate, pumping her legs beyond all endurance, because Sophie is cheering her on. I can see Sophie, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the book, cleaning vomit off her Star Wars Millennium Falcon ship, before her parents find out how sick she’d been that evening. I can even imagine Zoe, desperately needing to win gold, yet realizing the price she may have to pay to achieve it.

The romance of sport infuses Cleave’s Gold, but it is tempered by the harshness of life outside the track. Gold is a beautiful, gripping story, and, with the 2012 Olympics coming soon, a timely one. Gold takes us from the rush of competition to the reality of everyday life. Sometimes the twists seemed soap opera-like, but we are so invested in the characters that the narrative still works. Fantastic book, beautifully written.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Chemistry of Tears, Peter Carey

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A woman I met at the Peter Carey event in Toronto Library’s Appel Salon told me that she loved Peter Carey’s books because of his beautiful way with language. I told her I had read only the first few pages of The Chemistry of Tears, and that I was enjoying it so far, to which she replied that the rest of the book was nothing like that. The first chapter, about museum conservator Catherine Gehrig finding out her married lover had died, barely touched the surface of Carey’s prowess with words, and when the story really gets underway, the language becomes practically breathtaking.

I relate that incident because I think the woman’s assessment sums up really well why the book would appeal to a certain type of reader, and why it ultimately didn’t work for me. I generally look for a gripping plot, a story that will transport me, and unfortunately, Chemistry didn’t do that. The language is, indeed, pretty. Lines like “How she loved him — she was alight with it…” are used generously, infusing the book with emotion and romance. Carey also employs old-fashioned cadence often, giving the book a bit of Victorian charm:

Trapped — my little criminal, in the middle of the white-washed room, shaking, crying, crumpled letter in his hand. Then it was knock knock knock and rattling on the handle and here was the accomplice, “The maid of the room,” a red kerchief around her wheaten hair. [p. 52]

The woman I met was right — Carey has a unique way with language. The language didn’t transport me, as it had transported her. To be honest, I think after a while, it just felt indulgent to me, especially as the heroine, Catherine, wallows in her grief in a particularly loquacious, poetic way. Still, indulgent for some, breathtaking for others.

Chemistry is about grief, and how people can deal with it. For Catherine, whose relationship with her lover had been a clumsily kept secret (in the sense that everyone apparently knew, even though they had to keep up appearances of not knowing), she immerses herself in her work, which means investigating a mechanical swan from the Victorian era. In a particularly poignant moment, she emails her boss that “it was highly ‘inappropriate’ to give a grieving woman the task of simulating life.” The boss clearly means well, and Catherine later does find solace in the task, but the irony of the assignment is indeed painful.

Parallel to Catherine’s story is Henry’s, the 19th century man who commissioned the mechanical swan. He had actually commissioned a mechanical duck, a treat for his dying son, but the inventor decided a mere duck wasn’t quite grand enough. As with Catherine, Henry has to deal with the loss of a loved one — his son is dying and he can’t stop it. The creation of a mechanical bird is a lovely, but ultimately futile, gesture.

Henry’s story had potential, but it never came to life for me. He travels to find someone who can create an automaton for him, and there are some fairy tale type scenes where he meets colourful characters who warn him about other shady figures. This is where, I suspect, I could have been transported by the language. Unfortunately, I just found the story meandering. Part of it is that I knew how it would turn out — we have Catherine in the 21st century reading Henry’s journals and working on Henry’s swan — so Henry’s anxiety over his automaton lacked urgency for the reader. Also, however, Carey seems to be attempting to infuse this storyline with an almost otherworldly air, and yet doesn’t quite succeed. It’s a different world, but not one that captivates, and so instead of being caught up in Henry’s adventures, I wanted to get back to Catherine’s.

Catherine’s story was a bit more interesting. Her pain in struggling to keep it together is palpable, and her snappishness and mood swings realistic. Along with reading Henry’s journals, she is obsessed with deleting her lover’s emails to her from his work computer — why they communicated such intimate material on their work emails rather than their personal ones is a minor irritant that I still don’t get. This preoccupation is endearing, and even though, as a character later points out, there are far more efficient ways to go about the task, I can understand Catherine’s desire to draw it out, turn the email deletion into a ritual that keeps their relationship going for as long as possible.

Catherine’s grief does feel indulgent after a while, and I think it struck me as such because Carey’s narrative indulges itself in her thoughts and emotions. We as readers barely get relief from her pain, and what little distraction there is — her work on the mechanical swan, or her conversations with her lover’s family — is so intricately linked with Catherine’s grief that it compounds rather than distracts. I can certainly understand the overwhelming nature of grief — I just thought this book tipped over the line.

The secondary characters were compelling. Catherine’s boss is kind and understanding, the kind of boss people probably wish to have until he reveals certain secrets about himself. Catherine’s assistant is a psychological loose cannon, but highly intelligent and in certain ways, more intriguing a character than Catherine herself.

The Chemistry of Tears had promise, but the book never really took off for me. The cover design is absolutely beautiful — one of my favourites this year, and certainly representative of the lyrical emotionality of the text. The story had some powerful elements, yet didn’t have a powerful overall impact. Carey uses a mechanical swan as a symbol and focal point for life, death and loss, a potentially potent symbol, yet not compelling enough an object in this book to make me care.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a finished copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Next Best Thing, Jennifer Weiner

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I like Jennifer Weiner. I like her Bachelorette tweets, and I applaud her for calling attention to the gender imbalance in mainstream book reviews. I loved In Her Shoes  — that scene where Cameron Diaz’s character (who has difficulty reading) reads a poem for her sister’s wedding makes me cry every time. And yes, when I read it in the book, that scene made me cry as well.

So, when in the mood for a fun, lighthearted read, I decided to pick up Weiner’s new book The Next Best Thing. The book is about Ruth Saunders, a young writer who moves to Hollywood with her feisty grandmother and gets the green light for her sitcom, the eponymous Next Best Thing, about a young chef who moves to the big city with her feisty grandmother. Fine. A lot of writing is autobiographical, and even with the additional meta layer (meta meta?) of Weiner herself having been a screenwriter, I could deal with it. After all, I started the book looking for a fun, lighthearted read, not an earth shattering emotional tale.

Weiner adds gravitas to her character by giving her physical scars. Ruth’s parents died in a car crash when she was a child; she’d been in the car with them and her scars had never healed. In one of the few truly poignant scenes in the book, eight year old Ruth writes in her diary, “I will never be beautiful.” Personally, I thought it was a bit much — physically scarred Ruth writes about an overweight chef, hoping to inspire other girls who don’t fit the traditional idea of physical beauty. Ruth also falls in love with a man who is paralyzed from the waist down. It’s a bit heavy handed with all the physical and emotional scarring, though to Weiner’s credit, she never gets maudlin about them.

Here’s the thing though: I really didn’t like Next Best Thing. It read like a mediocre sitcom meandering from plot point to plot point yet never hitting its stride. My overall reaction: meh. And in my view, such indifference may be an even worse reaction than utter disgust. 50 Shades of Grey at least, while much, much more horribly written, at times fell into the “so bad it’s funny” category. Weiner had some funny lines — I especially love the description of one man as looking like a favourite uncle who’d bring you the latest Baby Sitters Club book, and one woman whose cleavage was big enough to hide an iPad. Overall, however, I was reminded of something a character said about the process of a screenplay being turned into a TV show: it’s a lot of waiting. Reading this felt like that, checking off plot point boxes one by one while still waiting for something to happen that’ll make you care.

The crux of the plot is that Ruth had written a screenplay that would inspire the everywoman. Her character was plus size, insecure, yet witty, and that character’s success will inspire the viewers to go for their own dreams. Hollywood takes over Ruth’s show and begin to turn it into a standard sitcom, with a size zero heroine, crazy sex-crazed elderly lady and stupid, sexist jokes.

This story could work only if we believed that Ruth’s original screenplay was worth fighting for. It’s not. We are given scenes with Ruth’s unadulterated vision, and later see her dismay at the studio’s interference, and all I could think of was that while the edits did make the show more stupid and offensive, they weren’t much worse than the original. The scene that Ruth was so proud of, an emotional, rah rah scene between the heroine and her grandmother, just sounded trite. I admit, a confrontation scene between the heroine and an ex-boyfriend did make me cheer, but that was one good moment in a TV show pilot that we’re supposed to believe would have been the next Golden Girls, if only Hollywood hadn’t interfered. It’s not. Even Ruth’s original is blah, and because of that, the stakes for the entire story are depressingly low.

As for the subplots — Ruth’s relationship with her grandmother and her crush on her boss (the aforementioned paralyzed man in a wheelchair) — again, the stakes just aren’t high enough to care. The grandmother is the most colourful, most interesting character in the book. I love the description of her waltzing into a restaurant like a movie star and the maitre’d wondering  who she was. Unfortunately, she isn’t given many interesting things to do, and serves mostly to provide rah rah support to her granddaughter. Even the big conflict that put Ruth and her grandmother’s relationship at risk — while it did have the potential to be big and emotional — barely fizzles. The romance is sweet, and the sex scenes endearing, but again the conflict feels contrived and the outcome easy.

I wasn’t expecting to be blown away, but I was expecting to be entertained. Unfunny and lacklustre, The Next Best Thing failed to deliver.