Bookworm, no. 60
Emily Mernin reviews Alan MacEachern’s “Becoming Green Gables.” Alexander Sallas on Spencer Gordon’s “A Horse at the Window.” Caroline Noël reviews poems by Simina Banu. Inside the October issue.
Webb Pages
Becoming Green Gables: The Diary of Myrtle Webb and Her Famous Farmhouse
Alan MacEachern
McGill-Queen’s University Press
294 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook
This year, Prince Edward Island celebrates the 150th anniversary of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s birth. Over the summer, locals and visitors participated in costumed tours, lectures, and theatrical renditions of her novels about a red-headed orphan named Anne. Among the festivities was the launch for Alan MacEachern’s Becoming Green Gables, an insightful history of Montgomery’s relatives and the estate that turned into a beloved heritage site.
Myrtle Webb took possession of her family’s plot in Cavendish in 1909, one year after Montgomery published the first book in her best-selling series. The picturesque acreage, which once belonged to the novelist’s aunt and uncle (Webb’s parents), attracted literary pilgrims looking for signs of the fictional dwelling. In 1924, the forty-year-old farmer’s wife began the diary on which MacEachern centres his book. Through her clipped, enigmatic entries, he reveals how Anne of Green Gables shaped the Webbs’ life, their land, and the surrounding region. The farm operated as a somewhat lucrative tourist destination that kept the family afloat during the Depression. In 1936, they sold the attraction to Parks Canada, which promised that they could stay on as wardens. But the end of the Second World War brought new administrative plans, and the government evicted them in 1945.
The book will draw in devout fans as well as those interested in literary fandom and its economic bearing on real places. While the structure sometimes verges on tedious—as even the best diaries often do—Webb’s solemn voice in detailing her life’s work makes for a memorable read. In MacEachern’s history, another woman is responsible for creating Green Gables. Montgomery imagined it, but it was Webb who brought it off the page.
—Emily Mernin
Hocus Focus
A Horse at the Window
Spencer Gordon
House of Anansi Press
144 pages, softcover and ebook
Twenty-five dramatic monologues comprise Spencer Gordon’s genre-defying A Horse at the Window. Each entry moves at a feverish pace as it blends highbrow with lowbrow: Kantian philosophy, pagan theology, and modernist literary references meet OnlyFans, Top Gun, and Twitch.
The poet and short story writer’s frenetic style mimics the overstimulation of modern life. His narrators struggle to establish their identities amid the barrage of outside influences force-fed to them through smartphones, social media, and the non-stop news cycle. At best, his observations are exciting and introspective. In “Reasons for My Success,” an aging go-getter bemoans having spent his formative years being unilaterally nice, such that his current acts of kindness are “merely neutral, drifting wisps of vapour.” With “Motivation,” a jaded Torontonian questions the city’s culture of perpetual self-improvement: “What’s it matter if it’s only your own suffering you’ll ever feel?” Elsewhere, the insights read more like disjointed rants. Across four pages, “Sandōkai, Non-Binary” covers Elon Musk, the Wayback Machine, the Giller Prize, Mariah Carey’s larynx, God, anti-vaxxers, and literary critics, who too often are doomed to be losers “for this life and the next” (ouch).
Perhaps messiness is the point. We live among relentless forces—dings, pings, and rings—competing for our attention, which A Horse at the Window models. Gordon effectively recognizes our overburdened condition and reproduces it with great accuracy, though mirroring a disoriented contemporary consciousness also replicates its faults. Regardless, the scattered bits of deep reflection make for a worthwhile read.
—Alexander Sallas
Lyrical Chairs
I Will Get Up Off Of
Simina Banu
Coach House Books
72 pages, softcover and ebook
Standing up is harder than it seems. There are too many distractions, obstacles, questions. Better to stay put and wait. But what if sitting keeps you from living? Simina Banu considers this question in I Will Get Up Off Of, an incantatory poetry collection and delightfully morose rumination on mental illness.
Colloquial, playful, at times heartbreaking, Banu’s fifty poems describe the speaker’s absurd yet earnest attempts to get out of her plastic stackable chair. Can she use “bananas taped all over the walls to hoist myself up”? Perhaps she should “just cover the monobloc with a bedsheet” and forget the whole thing. But memes bite at her ankles. McNuggets clog the faucet. She can’t find her healing crystals. And “something hurts (an organ? a bone?)” While her discomfort persists, the metaphorical throne “has been sharpening its edges...My monobloc tells me I don’t want to live.” Bridges, ledges, and fire become ubiquitous symbols of distress. Desperate and afraid, she resolves to “shut it all down.”
With acerbic wit, I Will Get Up Off Of breaks away from typical reflections on suffering. Instead of outright satirizing mental illness or professing cynicism about healing, Banu believes that art can capture hope: “If even one art molecule / can find the secret stash / it might let loose / the rest.”
—Caroline Noël
Inside the October Issue
“The prospect of destruction seemed remote.” Amanda Perry remembers Jasper, Alberta.
Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship and Jonathan Manthorpe’s On Canadian Democracy, reviewed by Andrew Torry.
“If you thought HBO’s Succession was unbelievable.” Kelvin Browne on Stephen Kimber’s The Phelan Feud: The Bitter Struggle for Control of a Great Canadian Food Empire.
And much more!