Bookworm, no. 86
Adrian Ma reviews “What I Mean to Say,” by Ian Williams. Caroline Noël on Georgia Toews’s “Nobody Asked for This.” David Venn on Matthew Scace’s “Jasper on Fire.” Inside the April issue.
Speak Easy
What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time
Ian Williams
House of Anansi Press
248 pages, softcover and ebook
With What I Mean to Say, the companion text to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, Ian Williams sets an ambitious goal: to spark a conversation about conversation. Through cultural and personal reflections, the award-winning poet, novelist, and professor examines how today’s digitized world has eroded empathy and led to performative communications. And he ponders whether society can once again engage in meaningful civil discourse.
Conversation, Williams argues, is like a piano composition: each hand plays notes that are distinct yet interdependent, unique yet in search of harmony. A great one resembles jazz, rather than classical music, in that either side can improvise or lead. Genuine dialogue is not about persuasion or dominance but about reciprocity. To do it well, we must approach each other with curiosity and vulnerability. We might also have to sit in discomfort while giving our full attention. “A good conversation takes time,” he writes. “If it’s really good, it dilates time.” Williams avoids pithy how-to solutions and instead employs a playfully digressive narrative approach, which mirrors the dynamism and occasional messiness of authentic speech. He leaps from anecdotes about contacting strangers via Kijiji to the sketch comedy show Portlandia.
Purposeful conversation requires emotional, physical, and intellectual effort. Given the overwhelming pace of modern life, it can feel difficult to make that investment, but the payoff can be profound. Considering what’s at stake, can we afford not to make it?
—Adrian Ma
Friends Forever…Not
Nobody Asked for This
Georgia Toews
Doubleday Canada
288 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
With Nobody Asked for This, Georgia Toews crafts a realistic coming-of-age story set in Toronto. Her funny yet sobering novel contemplates whether a person can truly move on from trauma and questions the role friendship plays in one’s recovery.
The twenty-three-year-old budding comic Virginia has a complicated relationship with her struggling best friend, Haley, who often isolates herself in their apartment on Queen Street West: “You make me feel bad about my depression and it makes it hard to come out here and get motivated to go to work.” When a fellow comedian assaults Virginia after a date, and when her stepfather reveals his plans to sell her late mother’s house, the roommates’ long friendship comes to a standstill. “We both have these traumas, and I can’t take yours on,” Haley declares. Hurt and confused, Virginia must re-evaluate Haley’s place in her life and examine how grief has altered their dynamic.
Virginia’s stand-up routine delivers much-needed comedic relief. “People seem too content in Vancouver. They’ve accepted they’re trapped here, closed in by the mountains and living a Truman Show type of a life,” she quips. “In Toronto you have to grind in this filthy little city with its lake and its dangerous levels of E. coli.” A funny-because-it’s-true epitaph from the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s 2022 memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette, might best epitomize Virginia’s suffering: “Coping takes a fuck-ton more effort and energy than thriving ever will.”
—Caroline Noël
Burn Victim
Jasper on Fire: Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise
Matthew Scace
Sutherland House
100 pages, softcover and ebook
Exactly how did an alpine town in Alberta burn in July 2024? In seven tight chapters, Jasper on Fire recounts the community’s unusual history given its location within a national park, the region’s susceptibility to wildfires, and the onset of the inferno, which by the fourth day had scorched 36,000 hectares and levelled a third of the municipality’s structures. Some scenes from the immediate aftermath convey hope (the weary resident who mows his lawn once again) while others evoke despair (the ancient Douglas firs that now lie charred and dead). “Towns burn from the inside out, not from the outside in,” the Canadian Press reporter Matthew Scace writes. Preventive measures, such as replacing flammable cedar shake roofs with asphalt ones, might have helped. But perhaps the final takeaway is this: “Under a changing climate, seemingly random occurrences become more regular.”
—David Venn
Inside the April Issue
“I would describe the estrangement I now feel from the land of my birth—how even my left-leaning friends and family there can’t begin to appreciate this existential moment for those of us here, how they can’t even be bothered to ask about it.” First things first: a note from Kyle Wyatt.
Russell Smith on The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg.
“Too frequently, foreign aid has come with strings attached.” Beth Haddon reviews Ian Smillie’s Under Development: A Journey without Maps.
And much more!