Take hold on the loam, acquire the air

I wish I read more bandes dessinées and had a greater sense of the landscape of this massive continent of the comics globe beyond the classics (Tintin, Asterix, Donjon, Satrapi, David B., etc.). This was my first encounter with young(er than me) artist-author Stéphane Fert, and I was thoroughly charmed. It’s my favourite sort of fantasy experience - an opening salvo that offers glimpses of layered world-building I can’t completely comprehend at this point. The action opens with a foggy landscape, clouds, streams, and trees weaving in and out of each other’s boundaries. A fairy tale landscape. It wasn’t until a second reading that I found the wreck of a modern van in the forest, a gothic trunk reaching up through its windshield like an accusing finger. A medieval mob is pursuing a woman and a swaddled baby. Violence ensues, and when she finally collapses beyond their reach, she’s surrounded by a coven of witches, wearing Halloween hats and smoking like Nouvelle Vague sirens, who debate what the baby is, and what manner of death it deserves. “It’s a girl,” the fleeing woman tells the witches, “She’s just a girl.”

When I say there are layers here, I mean there are interlocking populations who loathe each other: the witches’ coven and their ogress (surprise!) adoptee trying to fight back a demonic mist using only the repellent power of squash vines, the often monstrous local villagers who collaborate with the mist, the country folk who travel to get the witches’ aid for things like unwanted pregnancies, and the Gorges - a vast wasteland of broken skyscrapers where the mist holds sway. I eat the promise of these glimpses up.

But the layers are also visual, and this is what has haunted me about Fert’s work - its strikingly moody watercolour style, shifting its colour palette slowly from scene to scene, sometimes evoking the art deco grandeur of period National Parks posters, sometimes expressionistic horror, sometimes psychedelic swirls, sometimes the glimmering light of Impressionism. Fert is a confident manipulator of pace and place, allowing us to sink slowly into the mood of this otherworld that seems to have sprung, mushroomlike, in the remains of our own.

(I received this book as an ARC via NetGalley. The English-language release of volume 1 of this series - “The Breath of Things” - occurred on September 27, 2023.)

Historical Romance of the Now

September was an active month for reading, in part because the return of in-person teaching meant that I had a lot more commute time for ebooks. October’s continuing in that vein, not least because we are battling a massive mold-remediation project with vast arsenals of vinegar-spray, furniture conditioner, and tea tree oil, which leaves me with many an hour to while away with busy hands and idle ears.

So yesterday I started in on Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel (the first I’ve read of hers), Romantic Comedy, oily rag in hand, trying desperately not to sneeze as I struck up clouds of mold-tinged dust. I’ll just listen to the first chapter, I thought in the morning, and next thing I knew I was sitting in bed after midnight, wide-eyed, listening to the epilogue.

The premise here is a classic rom-com, as many have noted: it’s not a deconstruction or a satire of the genre, and it is not, thank god, interested in sneering at it, a high-cultural impulse that is rooted in deep misogyny. Sally is a writer for an SNL-à-clef called “The Night Owls” or “TNO,” appalled by the idea of performing in the weekly skits and hiding the details of her job from the guys she casually hooks up with. When her office-mate, a clever, belching, aggressively normal dude, meets Hollywood’s A-list starlet du jour while she hosts an episode of TNO, and they get engaged after a whirlwind romance, Sally loses her patience. This is the third or fourth case of a male TNO writer’s dating or marrying out of their league - a woman considerable wealthier, more successful, more famous, and more conventionally beautiful than he is. Society just accepts this as par for the course. But why, Sally asks in a skit, does this rule not apply to celebrated men and typical women? (It doesn’t occur to Sally, a consummate expert at the peak of her career, that she is hardly typical.

This is the impediment when Noah, the most famous pop star in the country, brings his beachy (slightly aged) heartthrob looks and cheesy (Sally’s word) hit songs to the hosting gig. He seeks her out for writing advice, she realizes he’s not a status-flaunting dodo, they banter, she panics, and everything falls apart when she lobs a resentful comment about men who just date models at him.

This book is a perfect artifact of the internal experience of a recent historical moment. Noah comes to host (and Sally writes her sketch about the inequities of celebrity dating) in 2018, when the American social landscape is shot through with a sense of doom about gender exploitation and the rise of Trump. The anxieties the alienate Sally and Noah from each other, despite their obvious compatibility, are suffused with the justified anger that the Weinstein and Cosby scandals, not to mention the discourse surrounding Clinton and Trump, had dragged to the surface in the preceding years.

But then there’s a record-scratch time leap of two years, as the novel shifts to the epistolary form. Stuck in lockdown, and recovering from a terrifying case of COVID in the very first US wave, Noah sends a questing email into the abyss: is Sally still to be found at this address? If so, he’s sorry for how their nascent friendship ended. Sally is still to be found at this email, as it turns out, but she fled the city when lockdown began, horrified by her quick descent into isolation and near-starvation, and is living in her childhood bedroom in her step-father’s house in Kansas City. What follows is one of the best literary descriptions I’ve seen so far of how scary and high stakes everyday life and its most basic actions in 2020 were and felt. The painful details of caring for a sick octogenarian become, in breathtaking (pun intended) fashion the grand gesture of romance that levels all distinctions between the lovers. It’s a testament to how well Sittenfeld renders these chapters that, although I am one of the least COVID-denying or -normalizing people I know (I still mask everywhere public and avoid unmasked indoor encounters in 2023), I was taken aback by this vision of a society where privileged people were still extending caution and care and worry - I hadn’t almost forgotten that this was even possible. Such is the gravitational pull of the Normal towards erasure.

Genre is essentially a marketing construct, which is to say there is little essential and everything constructed about it. This is marketed as literary fiction, and it is a classic romance, very well wrought, as are many that are marketed as Harlequin-style mass-markets. I’ve been trying to work out my ambivalences about that - I’m glad if it gets a greater readership or acceptance for the genre, a genre that has kept publishing afloat in many ways, especially since the rise of ebooks. But I’m wary of the allure of respectability politics. Why does this novel get such acclaim and acceptance, when so many equally excellent ones published as romances don’t? How would this book have been received by reviewers at major newspapers if it had had a couple in passionate embrace on the cover?

A nostos long foretold

Hallo all. Fancy meeting you here in (checks notes) 2023.

Much has happened since I last posted nearly nine years ago. I had a baby, uncoincidentally, in the year after that last post. Where has the time gone? (Into the endless churn of motherhood and global crisis.) In that first year of my child’s life, I experienced some pretty severe anxiety. Uncoincidentally again, this correlated with my home country’s (and much of the rest of the world) abruptly open embrace of fascism. I went to live in New Orleans for a year while on parental leave (thank you, Canada, I do not know how any nation can call itself civilized without acknowledging the physical, mental, and social toll of having an infant), ate very well, slept almost never, and probably permanently affected my child’s hearing and flamboyance with the number of parades we went to. We went to live in London for six months during a sabbatical, during which we watched in terror as Trump was elected, and, each day, managed to roll out a new policy horror at about 11 p.m. GMT. We went to a lot of theatre, and slept very little. When my daughter started at full-time daycare and then school, I became more heavily involved in union work. Then: a global pandemic. We got chickens, which we named after Greek goddesses. We got bees, which got eaten by bears in the first year, destroyed by mites the second, and have now swarmed in the third. One of my parents was starkly immune-suppressed. Every time it seemed safe (and possible - we were on different sides of a close international border for a big chunk of the pandemic) to visit, a new variant surge would occur. Finally, just as we felt comfortable visiting with the supports of testing/vaccination/masking, he was diagnosed with cancer. A year later, my father died.

That brings us up to the present moment, and all sounds pretty grim when I put it down on paper, a paragraph of nine years.

But why this homecoming to Sycorax Pine? Well, I’d like to redevelop a practice of public rumination on my reading. (An extension, I suppose, of the fact that I publicly ruminate on my reading in a classroom several times a week.) I’d like a deeper record of what I’m reading and seeing. I’d like a community, though I know that the past nine years have also been transformative for blogging as a community and practice, and not necessarily in a good way. We’ll see how it goes, even if I am just ruminating into the abyss!