Bookworm, no. 16
Fiction by Sarah Gilbert. Non-fiction by Grant Hayter-Menzies. Down the Colorado with Wade Davis. Inside the November issue.
Pillars of the Community
Our Lady of Mile End
Sarah Gilbert
Anvil
208 pages, softcover
When a neighbourhood becomes a tourist attraction, can it remain a community? In the short story collection Our Lady of Mile End, Sarah Gilbert charts the social consequences of gentrification in one of the trendiest areas of Montreal. Historically an impoverished immigrant neighbourhood with a large Jewish population, Mile End began attracting artists and musicians in the 1980s; the yuppies weren’t too far behind. These days, flamenco-themed protests against rent hikes co-exist with tech bros and walking tours. Gilbert’s debut details how firmly and recently established residents experience this shifting urban landscape.
“Made in Mile End,” one of the most affecting stories, follows the elderly Ruth, a former hatmaker who agrees to rent her workspace to a pair of entrepreneurial young women. At their opening, Ruth has a rude awakening about the economy that has discarded her: “People wouldn’t buy her hand-sewn caps…for $15, but they’d come to the new atelier boutique to buy an undershirt for a hundred bucks.” Other stories feature tenants teetering on the edge of eviction, a teenager who steals from her wealthier classmate, and an artist who cleans for the well-to-do and uses their dryer lint in her paintings. Class structures these accounts in ways that are incisive but not preachy, leaving plenty of space for interpersonal nuance.
A cluster of tales that feature the college teacher Evelyn and her daughter Fred depart from this theme to consider questions of pedagogy and the travails of growing up. A longer piece, “Green Eyes,” details the tree planting adventures of a former Mile End cashier. Yet the collection still feels cohesive thanks to the specificity of its setting. Gilbert’s prose is spare, favouring situation and character over poetic flourish. The result is a quiet but effective rumination about how individuals adapt when their community changes.
—Amanda Perry
Good Boy
Freddie: The Rescue Dog Who Rescued Me
Grant Hayter-Menzies
Heritage House
224 pages, softcover and ebook
Many of the biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies’s recent works, such as Woo, The Monkey Who Inspired Emily Carr, from 2019, have been influenced by his love for animals, including his fifteen-pound Pomeranian cross, Freddie. The rescue dog—whom Hayter-Menzies even wrote about in the Literary Review of Canada—gave the writer a reason to live during hard times and caused him to “ponder deeply on the animal-human bond.” In this memoir, he honours his late companion who got “caught in the vortex of exploitation and abuse” but eventually welcomed a “new life with love.”
In 2010, the author and his husband adopted a “fluffy dark dog,” who’d been raised at a hoarder’s puppy mill, from a humane society in Victoria. The traumatized hound didn’t take to his eager owners instantly. Hayter-Menzies repeatedly fed Freddie supper by hand before the dog, who once shied from contact “as if expecting to be hit rather than caressed,” grew comfortable in his new home. In 2016, the couple split, and Hayter-Menzies spiralled into a depression for months. Then he began dating Rudi, a designer who welcomed the downtrodden writer and his pet into his Vancouver apartment. Four years later, Freddie’s health faltered. What started as a cough became a heart murmur. Vets diagnosed him with hemangiosarcoma—“one of the most aggressive cancers a canine can have.” Chemotherapy cured the dog, but eight months later, lymphoma struck. The “embattled warrior” fought for over a year and a half before dying in his owner’s arms. He was around thirteen.
With rhythmic prose, Hayter-Menzies credits Freddie for giving him a “reason to continue when, without him, I cannot say I would be writing these words.” His love for his dog shows throughout the memoir. Hayter-Menzies dreamed about him, penned a nine-page love letter to him, prayed for him, and even consulted a fortune teller who claimed the little guy had healing powers. Freddie teaches readers that “when you save a life, you change more than the life saved.”
—David Venn
Book Tasting: River Notes
As the early morning light fell upon the river at Lees Ferry, and the guides scurried about loading the rafts, I slipped away and climbed a narrow track that rose above the landing. The sound of the water soon faded, replaced by bird songs—yellow warblers, violet-green swallows, and the distant cry of a sparrow hawk. The willows and tamarisk of the riverbanks yielded to cat claw, snakeweed, opuntia, and ephedra. The shift in perspective was startling. From the heights the river ran west through a broad valley that narrowed toward infinity.
The Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell remarked, sublime though it was, demanded patience and effort to be understood. His protégé, geologist Charles Dutton, said that only the most careful of intellectual engagement would render full the wonder of the chasm. These modest reflections were never far from my mind as we finally set out down the river, for however joyous the launch and frivolous the fun of being on the water, there is for everyone who embarks on the Colorado a tremulous sense of anticipation. Too much has been said and written, too many lives transformed by the passage, for anyone to drift casually into the open embrace of the canyon.
New to the river, I felt on that first morning an odd mix of exhilaration and trepidation, not for fear of the notorious rapids, but rather out of concern that this most legendary of white-water adventures might somehow disappoint. Could a journey down a river that had by any definition been plundered and violated still inspire? Could a place where park rangers monitor every broken twig, and where river guides and their clients, out of deference for the many thousands who would follow and camp in the same sands, comb the beaches in search of fragments of food and other micro trash, retain anything of its wild character? If not, what was one to make of this iconic canyon so revered in the American imagination? In the end, of course, the river proved me wrong, making a mockery of my myopic time frame, my parochial concerns. The splendor of the Colorado and its canyon, even today, transcends all that man has done, which is precisely why it so deserves our attention. There can surely be no greater crime against nature than to cause the death of a river, and no greater gesture of restitution than to facilitate its regeneration. In the end my passage down the Colorado and through the Grand Canyon became a cautionary tale of a river hovering in the balance, waiting to be reborn.
—Wade Davis
Excerpted with permission from River Notes: Drought and the Twilight of the American West — A Natural and Human History of the Colorado (Greystone Books). Read the Literary Review of Canada’s take on Wade Davis’s new book in a physical copy of the November issue.
Inside the November Issue
Jenn Thornhill Verma reviews Contested Waters: The Struggle for Rights and Reconciliation in the Atlantic Fishery, edited by Fred Wien and Rick Williams.
“Decreasing disparity is simply the right thing to do.” Dan Dunsky reviews Tom Malleson’s Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich.
Marina Endicott’s latest novel, The Observer, reviewed by David Staines.
And much more!