Category — books

Title: Charles Dickens: His Life and Work
Author: Stephen Leacock
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Pages: 266
ISBN: 1-55044-767-3
Price: $7.50 – $45.00 (USD – paperback, previously owned only)

I’ve been reading since I was four years old (my first book was a hardback Disney Book Club version of The Three Little Pigs, which I read to my mother), and since then I’ve devoured just about any book I can lay my hands on, but rarely with much thought for the author. Who writes all these words for me to enjoy? What are they like? What sort of lives did they (or do they) lead? What compelled them to write? What sort of conditions did they favour when writing their works?

Despite being a great lover of the written word, despite enjoying several Dickens novels immensely, and even despite carrying around a copy of A Christmas Carol like an adult version of a blankie or teddy bear, I hadn’t really given much thought to the mind of the man who wrote them. This book answered all my questions and them some.

Leacock begins where all biographies begin: with childhood. Charles Dickens’s childhood was not a happy one for the most part; debt, penury, and – finally – debtors’ prison and a blacking factory loom large in Dickens’s early years. His family were good people, but not from illustrious backgrounds, not terribly good with money, and full of overly-ambitious schemes that often came to nothing.

I won’t go through the entire timeline of Dickens’s life. Most people who enjoy reading his books know the basics anyway: a rather unlovely childhood, his rise to fame, his extraordinary public readings of his own work (along with memorable trips to America, and all his editing pursuits and endeavours in England), illness, and then death (not much of eulogy from me, is it?).

But it’s Stephen Leacock’s style of writing that really pulls you in and makes you want to learn more about Dickens. He is cheerfully and politely honest about his subject – this is one of the few biographies I’ve ever read where the person being written about has been presented as a whole person with faults, foibles, and outright character defects, along with the more laudatory stuff about their genius, fame and delightful little quirks. Here, in this book, Dickens is a giant and a legend, but he’s also a man like any other.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Dickens was intelligent – that’s very clear from his books – but I was a little disconcerted (and slightly amused) to learn that for all his characters who lived in terrible poverty, for all the awful mistreatment of children that he depicted, and for all the crime, unkind people, cruel villains, and even murderers, that live in the pages of his novels, that he was actually not very interested in the politics of how people ended up in those predicaments, nor was he exactly a crusader for children’s rights. He had opinions, and he was unafraid of voicing them in his books and poking fun at those public figures that caught his attention, but he wasn’t out with a bit of bristol board stapled to a rake handle protesting either.

I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t exactly a great guy to be married to. He married a lovely woman, had ten children with her (and when I think of those little Dickenses running about in short pants and tiny dresses, all I can think of is the nephew’s line in the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol, “…And how is Mrs. Cratchit, and all the small assorted Cratchits…” as though they were a box of chocolate covered nuts or something) and then, when most of their children were grown and had lives of their own, he rather cruelly forced her to move out and live apart from him. She moved out with nary a bad word against him, and the children that were still young enough to be living at home continued to be raised by their aunt (whom Dickens held in high regard, though not in a romantic way).

Dickens had always seemed to me to be a very “happy endings” sort of guy, there are always happy marriages in his books between loving and lovely characters, but his own marriage was a shambles. Dickens seemed to think his wife rather slow and stupid, but really, compared to Dickens, most people would seem rather slow and stupid. It seems unfair to put away your wife of many years, the mother of your many children, simply because she cannot keep up intellectually with someone who was very much above average intelligence.

Of course, given the attitude of the day toward women, small wonder if maybe she actually was a little slow and stupid. Women were decorations for the home and hearth in Dickens’s time; a bit comfort and someone to make babies with. They were housekeepers (or they at least managed the household), and were not given opportunities to be anything more. It’s easy to give little in the way of intellectual stimulation when you’ve never really had any yourself. To make matters worse, even if she had been an intelligent little spitfire, Dickens wouldn’t have wanted her anyway, because he agreed with the prevailing attitude of the time toward women. Mrs. Dickens was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t.

It ended up being a great lesson between the image (one I didn’t even know I’d been building in my head) of the man, and the man himself. Even then, celebrities led lives that diverged quite a lot from the popular public images of them.

I enjoyed reading about his trips to America (he offended the Americans on the first one, and made up for it on the second) and his public readings of his own works (so powerful were his characterizations of his own works that people fainted, screamed, cried and generally carried on and had to be carried out).

But, most of all, I enjoyed Stephen Leacock’s writing; his honesty and candour about Dickens’s world and life; it has given me a new way of looking at and reading Dickens’s work. I can now see hints of the man, and some of the people he knew, in the characters he created. I know that many authors draw on the people they know – to some extent – when creating characters, but knowing which people are being drawn from really gives you a sense of being in the inner circle.

If you’re at all curious about Dickens as a person, this is a great book to start with.

Title: The Great Man
Author: Kate Christensen
Publisher/Year: Doubleday/2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51845-1
Pages: 305
Price: $10.91 (USD – paperback)

The book opens with the New York Times obituary of Oscar Feldman, an influential artist of the 1940′s and 50′s, who – unlike his abstract art contemporaries – focused solely on painting female nudes. The obituary praises his work (“ballsy almost to the point of testicular obnoxiousness”) and talks a little of his personality and family. He is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son Ethan, and his sister Maxine (also a painter).

What the obituary fails to mention is that Oscar led two lives and had two households; the other was with his long-time mistress, Claire St. Cloud (called Teddy by her friends) and their twin daughters, Ruby and Samantha.

The relationships between the women in the book are complicated: Maxine despises Teddy (and Oscar too, really) and refuses to acknowledge the children Teddy had with Oscar. Teddy doesn’t like Maxine much either, but can’t quite understand the depth of Maxine’s venom. Teddy is best-friends with Lila – and though they haven’t been lovers for years, is sometimes possessive of Lila’s attention the way a lover would be (which eventually complicates things a little). Lila is still dependent on Teddy’s opinions to a certain degree and is a little uncertain of herself. Abigail seems to be the calmest of them – there is no real outrage that Oscar cheated on her and had children with another woman; she seems calm to the point of indifference which many people mistake for a lack of understanding on her part about the sort of man Oscar was – but she knows perfectly well.

These complications have an element of soap opera drama about them that would obscure the story if told by a lesser writer, but in Kate Christensen’s hands, these complications enhance the story, because more than Oscar’s roving eye and carnal appetites, each woman knows the secret behind two of Oscar’s most lauded paintings, Mercy and Helena – a secret they’ve all kept, even from each other, and must now keep from the two writers digging up information on Oscar for the biography they are each writing.

One of the best parts of this book is how Christensen handles the issue of truth. Truth ends up being something in the eye of the beholder, there is no absolute truth. Each woman in The Great Man has her own picture of Oscar, in some ways those pictures are similar (as are the women themselves) and in other ways they divulge so greatly that it creates resentment and indifference. It makes you wonder how well you can ever really know another person – even if you share their bed and daily life. How much of that life shared is the truth of who a person is?

The weakest part of the book for me was the ending. The complications, the old animosities and relationships, and even the secret about Mercy and Helena are wrapped up too neatly and quickly and are a little jarring. I didn’t quite buy it given how complex the characters and feelings are – or maybe it was just that there didn’t seem to be the same sort of thought put into reaching the endings they came to.In fact, I think only Maxine’s ending seemed possible – and even that was rather abrupt. Another 50 pages might have eased into it better and made it more believable.

Still, it’s going to be difficult to read one of Christensen’s other books – Jeremy Thrane, waiting on my TBR pile – without pining a little for Teddy’s clever wit and Maxine’s incredible bluntness. My life hasn’t been filled with lusty artists and love affairs, but I can’t help but hope that I will be even half as interesting and lively as these women are in their 70′s.

The Great Man is a great read – the writing is excellent, the characters are refreshing and interesting (and have no fear of four letter words, sex, or sensuality) and it was a world I was sorry to leave so quickly.

Title: Bossypants
Author: Tina Fey
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages:277
ISBN: 978-0-316-05686-1
Price: $16.96 (USD – hardcover)

So, I’ve had this book for a couple of days now and I finished the last few chapters last night as I lay around in bed. I grinned and giggled to myself (mostly) trying not to disturb Joe, who was playing a game quietly on his iPad. And then I read a passage about breast milk vs. formula that made me have one of the worst laughing fits I’ve had in ages, a fit so bad that it made my abs (such as they are) hurt:

“However, the baby was thriving. I was no longer feeling trapped, spending thirty minutes out of every ninety minutes attached to a Williams-Sonoma Tit Juicer. But I had an overwhelming feeling of disappointment. I had failed at something that was supposed to be natural.”

I’ve never had a baby, and thus never had to take sides in the breast-milk vs. formula debate, but this struck me as absolutely perfect – and hilarious. Maybe it was the very idea of Williams-Sonoma selling something called a “Tit Juicer” – or maybe it was that only Tina Fey could make something so damn funny out of a subject that other people get into heated debates and fights over – whatever it was, she nailed that part. I laughed until I hurt.

I had been a bit skeptical about reading this book when my friend loaned it to me. It’s not that my friend has terrible taste in books, or that I thought she was lying about the book being good, but more that I’ve always thought that books by celebrities were always poorly written, shameless money-grabs about rehab, sex-tapes, and buying expensive cars.

Well, I was wrong about this one.

Tina Fey writes about her life, and her beginnings in comedy and showbiz with both humour and grace. I learned that showbiz, and comedy in particular, isn’t necessarily a glamorous business – it’s a lot of long hours, a lot of rejection, and a lot worry that what some executive loves today, might put 200+ people out of work tomorrow because he’s changed his mind and decided to cancel whatever you’re working on.

She writes quite naturally and unaffectedly about the people she’s worked with – some of them are very well known, big names in the business too – and I liked her total lack of snobbery about it. It was never, “…and then, I had lunch with Mr. Hollywood Movie Star, and he was just darling!”, it was more, “So I worked on SNL for a long time, and I got to meet some really awesome people – how lucky am I to have such a cool job?”

I was also impressed by how she handles her personal life in the book. She tells just enough to give you the general idea, but never so much that you feel like you’ve just witnessed a yearly, full physical exam.  Her life is exactly like most people’s:  she’s a working mom, she works ridiculous hours at her job and she’s just one of the lucky ones who actually enjoys her work and, I assume, makes a good living at it. The way she writes about her life made me feel like she’s someone I could be neighbours with – she’s that normal and down to earth.

While some of the humour in the book fell a bit flat for me because it seemed to be trying just a little too hard, I took that in my stride. I’m sure for the few, clearly meant to be funny bits, that I didn’t laugh at, there are any number of people who laughed themselves silly.  It’s no different at a comedy club, or watching an SNL skit, really  – some people will laugh, and some people won’t. Humour is a personal thing.

I loved reading about her working with Sarah Palin, and the pains she took to ensure that Mrs. Palin wouldn’t be booed offstage, or embarrassed; while Tina Fey had no problems poking fun at her, she’s not mean and she put any personal feelings and politics aside to make sure a fellow human being was treated with some measure of respect and dignity. Would that we were all so decent and professional! On the other hand, readers are also treated to stories of the more bizarre aspects of working in comedy (it involves jars of pee, I will say no more).

Tina Fey also shares some excerpts from her favourite bits of writing and comedy written by people she genuinely admires, and while I won’t spoil your own reading by talking about all of them, I will quote my favourite here from 30 Rock:

C.C.
(giving in)
No one can know we’re together,
Jack. Not even your friend Tracy
Jordan out there.

JACK
I don’t think we have to worry
about Tracy.

CUT TO: Tracy in front of the building, talking to a pigeon.

TRACY
Stop eating people’s old french
fries, little pigeon. Have some
self-respect. Don’t you know you
can fly?

That right there? That’s some good writing – I can tell because it made me laugh.

If you’re looking a for a good read that will make you laugh (and reconsider everything you think you know about magazine shoots and the supposed “glamour” of it all) – this is the the book to pick up.