Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy

I want to talk to you today about a not so new novel by Barbara Gowdy entitled Mr. Sandman. However, before I do that, let me say a few more words about Carol Shields whose new novel, Unless, I talked to you about last month. I had no idea as I reviewed her book and spoke of her as being at the very height of her wisdom and talent that she had died just a few weeks before, on July 16. She was only sixty-eight, which seems very young to me. All in all, she wrote ten novels, three volumes of poetry, three collections of stories, four plays, a biography of Jane Austin, a book of criticism, and co-authored several anthologies. I have read almost all of her novels, and would recommend to you especially The Stone Diaries, The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Larry's Party, and Unless. I think she was a fine author and an astute feminist and social critic. Do yourselves the favor of honoring her life by reading some of her books.

Turning now to the Barbara Gowdy book, I first discovered her years ago with a book that I have remembered quite well ever since entitled Falling Angels. Everyone who has responded to me after reading that volume has agreed that it is a powerful if somewhat disturbing book about coming of age and about dysfunctional families. I was so impressed with this book that I tried to use it almost immediately in a philosophy in literature course, though it was already out of print. (It has been reissued since, and I recommend it highly.) I picked up Mr. Sandman mostly because of the author, though I have to admit I was struck also by the cover and the title. As I began to read it and laugh, I thought it would be a funny and outrageous read, but I expected little else from it. The bit of cover reviews that I allowed myself to read concentrated on the comedic aspects of the book and praised it as a funny, outrageous book, bordering on lunacy.

I suppose that I read it simply as a lark for the first hundred pages or so. It certainly is outrageous and intentionally unbelievable, but I think Gowdy is doing much more with this book than simply trying to amuse us. For starters, this is one of the only books I can think of that tries to be honest about teenage sexuality. In my experience, the sexuality of teenagers is either denied completely, or exploited in the worst of ways by the sickness of pornography. I remember years ago when I read Jane Lazarre's On Loving Men, a memoir about growing up and growing into sexuality, being struck and humbled by her honesty in describing her own early sexuality as well as her powerful statement as a feminist defending her love of men. I also remember very clearly how in my own early teens my sexuality was ignored or cutified or outright denied by adults, all of which simply reinforced my suspicion about adults and their worldviews. So, in spite of the outrageous and often knee-slapping events described in Mr. Sandman, I found myself impressed by Gowdy's understanding of both the reality and semi-innocence of early sexuality.

Just this aspect of the book would have been enough to keep me reading, but an even more powerful theme began to emerge in the book. the book is ostensibly about a sort of idiot savant miracle child who does not talk at all, is considered mysteriously beautiful but brain-damaged, and yet sits down at a piano at six and begins to play Bach and sophisticated jazz riffs. And this child, Joan, continues to occupy an important role in the book. But I see her role as being primarily a hook to catch and even stun the reader, while the important social/political themes are being played out by other members of the family. Although a bit of a miss-description, I'll call the two main characters the parents of this girl. It takes the reader a bit of time to discover that both parents, Doris and Gordon, are in their deepest natures homosexual, though they have been living the lie that society has demanded of them for many, many years, each doing her/his best to hide this devastating fact from the other.

I remember many, many years ago querying a gay friend about why gay men behaved in what to me were such peculiar ways, and I meant by that sex with strangers, sex in steam rooms, in parks, etc.. He was so much wiser than I and so patient with me as he tried to explain that it was the dominant culture, the heterosexual culture, that determined (at least to a very large extent) the behavior of gays and lesbians. If I were called on to name the main plot in this little book of Gowdy's, I would say that it is an exploration of just this phenomenon. The guilt and the necessary hiding (especially in the past) of homosexuality is a direct consequence not of any perversion among them but, rather, on the sickness of the dominant culture.

In the end, peoples sexuality will out, though if it is repressed enough, hated enough, it may take some pretty bizarre and self-destructive courses. I don't want to give away much more of the book than I already have, but let me have Gowdy speak for herself by quoting a few passages from the book. The longer I think about it, the more clever and revealing I think the book is. If it is a comedy, it is certainly one with socially important punch lines.

Gordon, the homosexual husband worrying as usual about how he is damaging his wife and child muses:

He has been fretting that she is on to him. That everybody is on to him. He hasn't had a lover in over three years but the desire is like a compounding debt. Like owing the Mafia, there's no getting around it, cough up or die. Who can't see the cocks in his eyes is what Gordon would like to know.

Loving his wife and child as he truly does, he cannot let himself enter into a friendly, meaningful relationship with a man, so he tries to bottle the feelings, the drive, only to feel humiliated and shocked when they spill over in quite unfriendly and distorted ways.

In this mood, washrooms are where he lives. He masturbates non-stop, but his erection repels him. It should be shot. He studies his lips in mirrors for syphilis sores, he presses under his ears for swollen glands ... in this mood he believes himself to be a venereal sewer. He weeps for his daughters, because he's already dead—or ruined and behind bars—so that makes them orphans.

And of course as he worries and frets and hates himself both for what he does and what he doesn't do, his wife Doris is also steeped in guilt and regret for the laughably few times when she acts on her desires for women.

Oh who knows? 'You haven't touched me in over ten years" was what she intended to throw at Gordon if he ever found out, and you bet it was a good excuse but it wasn't the reason. Her yearning for Gordon and her yearning for women ran on two separate tracks. That much she had always felt, and occasionally she felt the delicacy and the imperiousness of the division, a bit like the reminder when you choke on food that you breathe from one place and swallow from another. The only thing she was sure of was that loving women was dangerous. Don't think she didn't fight it.

Always the lack, the sense of guilt, the shame, and then the choosing (or being chosen by) the wrong person, the wrong time. Anyone who simply laughs at this book, has, I think, missed the point. It is much more a tragedy than a comedy. Even if her critics don't see this, Gowdy does. She is funny, she is outrageous, and I'm convinced she has important things to tell us, especially those of us who are straight.

Unless by Carol Shields

I want to talk to you this morning about a novel written by an author who is at the very height of her powers. The author is one whom you have probably read before, Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries, The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Larry’s Party) and the book is entitled Unless. Although I never even bother to review novels that I think are mediocre or worse, I have often talked to you about novels that are worthy of mention more for their promise than for immediate content. I say this in order to set this novel apart from any whose authors are still struggling to find their voice or their message. If this is not a great novel, it has more to do with the acuity of the novelist and the ambitiousness of her project than any failure of perception. Indeed, the story-line here is secondary, it is what the author feels she must tell us that is paramount.

In many ways, Shields plays with her readers in this book. The heroine is a novelist who is, surprise surprise, writing a novel as she speaks to us. And she is not only a novelist, she is also a translator, from French to English, of one of the leading feminists of the day in Canada. Thus, she is able to talk about the novel as a political form compared to the much clearer and more direct essay. Shields lets her readers worry along with her about just how difficult it is to write a novel, to create believable characters whom the reader cares about, and to do something more than simply divert readers from the ugliness and complexity of the real world. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, our writer heroine is also struggling to recover a lost daughter and to come to understand just why she is lost. Indeed, if the novel has any weakness, it is that the story-line takes second place to the ‘message’.

So, we have a novel about writing novels that contains as well an aesthetic theory, and to add one more ‘little’ enterprise, a treatise about goodness, what it would mean to be good in this nasty, big world we live in. Our novelist heroine’s name is Reta, her lost daughter’s Norah, and the famous old feminist whom she translates, Danielle Westerman. Via the character of Danielle, Shields is able to ponder what it must feel like to have dedicated a life to political causes, especially feminist issues, and to have seen so little real change as the world spirals to ecological and economic chaos. Through Norah, the lost daughter who sits on a street corner with a one word sign around her neck, “Goodness”, she is able speculate about why a young woman who really cares about good might decide finally that the only course open to her is spiritual and literal resignation.

But if Norah chooses resignation and asceticism, Shields certainly does not. If the ship is sinking, Shields will be one of the last and loudest and most articulate voices to sound alarms and point to causes, and at the very least, to stew and stew and stew about solutions. I find myself simply amazed at how much Shields knows about people and relationships, how artfully and doggedly she struggles against the awful temptation to give up given the apparent impotence of good people to change the course of greed and economic imperialism. In a series of humorous black comedy letters to famous people of the day (and in response to essays she reads in current periodicals), Reta asks these famous and influential men how it can be that no women ever appear on their lists of the noteworthy or in their essays—essays about authors, painters, political writers, simply people of worth. As funny and clever as some of these written but rarely sent letters are, they are also deadly serious and heartbroken, spiritbroken. Lucky for us that Shields is stronger and more resilient than her heroine.

But instead of continuing in this attempt to capture the cleverness and insights of this novel, let me have Shield’s, via Reta, speak for herself.

In her last years Danielle [the feminist essayist] has become cranky, even with me, her translator. She suspects I’ve abandoned the ‘discourse,’ as she always calls it, for the unworthiness of novel writing. She has a way of lowering her jaw when she skirts this topic, and her eyes seem freshened with disappointment. She is such a persuasive force that I often find myself agreeing with her; what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes?

Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior ‘discourse,’ but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they’re just so much narrative crumble. Unless, unless.

Unless is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence ....

Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough. Unless keeps you from drowning in the presiding arrangements.

And these are only a few of the unlesses; Sheilds goes on to articulate the many ways that unless you happen to live in the wake of an affluent country (affluent at the expense of the majority, the poor and miserable of the world), you are already in the darkness, already in the despair. Unless you are white, unless you are male, unless you have a job, a house, a doctor ... then you are in the condition of the many and not the few.

Perhaps Kate Chopin’s lead character responds to her impotent despair by walking into the ocean, and perhaps Reta’s daughter Norah will choose, in her search for goodness, infinite resignation, but not Carol Shields. Though she may question the effectiveness of writing novels as the unjust world burns around her, her voice is strident and clear. At the very least, she must sound out a warning. Not a warning, but a siren-song of warnings. “We only appear to be rooted in time. Everywhere, if you listen closely, the spitting fuse of the future is crackling.” Shields listens carefully, and she writes with clarity and thunder.

It may be tempting to withdraw into the self, to search for the causes of world-weariness from within. But the answers are out there, in the arena, in the unjust world. And goodness, if it is to found at all, is only to be found and practiced there. Along with Murdoch who takes Socrates to task for his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, Shields urges her readers to get off their collective asses and enter the struggle. “The examined life has had altogether to much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air.” For the novelist as well as the person in the street, the challenge is to change the nasty world we find ourselves in.

The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

I want to talk to you this morning about yet another first novel, this one by Lisa Tucker and entitled The Song Reader. While this is her first published novel, she is clearly an experienced writer who knows a good deal about the world. I continue to be amazed by first novels, especially those that can be classed as coming-of-age novels, and while this one may not be among the best or most profound, it is a very clever story and its serious content more-or-less sneaks up on the reader.

The problem will be to tell you a bit about the story without giving away anything important, since the plot has several twists in it. This is really the story of two sisters, the older of whom mothers her younger sister and cares for an adopted boy-child as well. The reader knows from the beginning that there is a father somewhere, though he left when the youngest girl, Leeann, was about to begin school. A couple years after his departure, the mother is killed in a traffic accident, and Mary Beth, twelve years older than Leeann, becomes sole parent and sole provider. Mary Beth has a special talent which she sees as a calling; simply by asking people what songs they listen to, what songs recur in their day and night dreams, she is able to intuit much about them—about their loves, their fears, their problems, even their childhoods. Although working full time as a waitress to support her family, almost immediately upon discovering her talent, Mary Beth has cards made up advertising her calling: Mary Beth Norris, Song Reader/Life Healer, Let me help you make sense of the music in your head, [Family problems a specialty.]

And so this little novel begins, racing along, a kind of lark for the reader. Clever idea, I thought, and not so baseless. Indeed, it seemed I could read quite a lot about my own life simply by paying attention to the songs that have stuck with me, the ones that appear as if by magic upon my waking, and hover like the Norah Jones’ song, “One Flight Down” as I go through my day. The younger girl, Leeann, though never doubting her sister’s talent nor doubting the diagnoses and advice she gives to others, is mired in her own problem, namely, finding her lost father. Add a baby boy whom Mary Beth takes on almost as a kind of payment for one of her successful song readings and the story is ripe for development.

A nice read, I thought, between serious books—a kind of cupcake book to get me rolling again as a reader. But somehow, about half way through this book, it turned quite serious. Some questions I had been asking myself about how wise it would be to offer advice on the basis of song-reading began to emerge in very serious ways for Mary Beth. She runs into a tough case; a troubled woman referred to Mary Beth by a caring but rather desperate husband, but this woman insists that she has no songs, no song-memory. After a series of stunning successes, helping women reveal themselves to themselves via their song obsessions, Mary Beth is faced with a difficult case.

Having no songs is like having no dreams. It only happens when your mind is shutting down. Hiding from something.

And sure enough, here is a woman so intent on repressing what her father did to her long ago that she has become flat, one-dimensional, and depressed almost to the point of motionlessness.

Ah, but the secret is simply to uncover what has been covered up, to remember and confront—tell her husband, her son, and finally with those two men who love her as her shield, to confront her father once and for all.

I have no intention of revealing to you how this treatment turns out, but the book certainly becomes more interesting, deeper, more important from this point on. There are other additions to the mix: a man who comes to Mary Beth for help (although only after being somehow tricked into it by his concerned sister) is welcomed into the family. It turns out that he is a graduate student who is working on depression and brain chemistry, and if he is not overly impressed by Mary Beth’s song-reading methods, he is struck by her incredible sensitivity to others as well as by her beauty and her huge heart. His contention, however, is that Mary Beth concerns herself so often and so totally with others simply because she is unwilling to attend to herself. While she insists that taking over her sister’s care when their mother dies, taking on the unwanted baby of one of her clients, taking on every new person in need who comes to her, is simply a matter of course, he sees it as her frenzied attempt to hide from her own emotional problems.

Mary Beth’s breakdown and self-doubt are inevitable; she is aware of what her gift allows her to see, but not aware enough about the tremendous power and risk that comes with it.

No doubt there are some weaknesses in this plot, some problems too neatly solved, some serious questions that any attentive reader will have to ask themselves about the wisdom of song-reading. Still, there is a real beauty to the book, and even some genuine wisdom. Leeann comes to see how poverty limits possibility; she sees also that simply seeing the truth is not enough, and that confronting others with acts they have hidden is neither easy nor always wise. Men can and will lie even in the face of revelation, and the more awful the secrets, the more horrible the abuse, the more vigorous and bulldozing the defense and covering over. Only on television and in the movies does truth inevitably win out.

So, this is not a great book, but it is a good one. The bond between the sisters is wonderful and convincing, and the song-reading theme much more thought-provoking than you may think initially.

Of course the jacket cover proclaims a stunning debut by a major new voice, while the writing is described as achingly beautiful with every page inspiring courage. We are used to hyperbole on jacket covers. Instead, this is a very good first novel, and I would be surprised if it were not followed up by others at least as good, perhaps better. It’s also short and easy to read, and I recommend it to you.