An actress in love and in trouble

Lucinda Yates is 28 years old, single, and a renowned Canadian actress at the beginning of The Indulgence, Leslie Hall Pinder's new novel. Cast as Hamlet, Lucinda is interviewed by Eva Ryder, a freelance journalist who happens to be lovely and seductive. They begin a passionate, obsessive affair. Lucinda would like Eva to leave her husband so they could revel in a less secret, less stressful liaison. Eva, however, is unwilling to  divorce Lance; the affair with Lucinda ends; and Lucinda begins a relationship with—and eventually marries—Jack, a therapist.

Thirteen years later, Lucinda, now even more renowned, remains childless and her marriage to Jack has hit a rough patch. Eva is now a world-traveling, successful writer and has a 13-year-old daughter Norma back in Vancouver, and is divorced. Norma, suffering from her mother's indifference and her father's emotional abuse, runs away repeatedly, ultimately hiding out for five days with Lucinda. Norma is reported kidnapped and when the police find her with Lucinda, Lucinda is accused of kidnapping and sexual abuse of a minor (she is, after all, immoral). The Crown prosecutor has a cause, and the press has fresh meat. The last section of the book covers Lucinda's trial for these crimes..

Pinder studied English at the University of Saskatchewan and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. She received her law degree from the University of British Columbia and began practiced law in Vancouver in 1977. She was a courtroom litigator for 28 years. In her first job at a large firm, she was told she had to enter the firm's exclusive men's club by way of the servants' entrance because she was a woman. She went through the front door. Her employment ended.

The Indulgence is Pinder's fourth novel, joining Under the House, On Double Tracks, and Bring Me One of Everything. Margaret Atwood no less said an earlier book was a "haunting . . . novel by a writer of great talent and sensitivity. It treats a difficult theme with humanity and admirable complexity." If Atwood hadn't said it first (and better) I would have sad the same about The Indulgence. Here's an example of the author's writing: "A law firm on a Saturday had the feeling of a place where something counterfeit was being produced to send into the market first thing Monday morning."

My two paragraphs at the beginning of this piece do the author and the novel a disservice. They do tell you the story, but they do not begin to suggest the richness and complexity of the characters and their emotional lives. Nor have I mentioned a major character, Judge Terrance Semple who presides over Lucinda's trial. "Maybe he hadn't always been portly. He had the thin legs and barrel chest of a man past middle-age who had gradually become top heavy. He'd be tough to push over, so long as he was expecting it; but if he were taken unaware, or was especially tired, even a slight nudge would topple him. He often wondered how would he get up again."

Here's an example from several possible that evokes Lucinda's existence as an actress: "Shedding herself for a new life each night on stage was thrilling and Lucinda flourished. The problem was the ordinary. The theater was so intense, having to notice everything, respond to what another was doing, whether scripted or not; it took all her power. At home, she didn't want to be in charge of anything; blindness set in, even before the cocktail hour. Part of Lucinda' myopia was she didn't see that Jack had become a bit flat and predictable, in service to the exhilaration and exhaustion required of Lucinda's high wire profession."

Presumably because Pinder is writing from the inside, her evocation of the judge's thoughts and her report of the trial are persuasive. The text jumps forward and back in time and from Lucinda's to the judge's to Eva's point of view but the reader (this reader, anyway) never becomes lost. I thought Pinder was writing herself into a corner, into a situation where a last minute witness would have to appear to set everything to rights. But no. The Indulgence ends plausibly and satisfactorily and without a surprise witness.

What would you do if you lost all your memories?

Although I've now read Burhan Sönmez's Labyrinth twice, I'm afraid I'm going to have to rely heavier than I would like on the press material that accompanied the review copy (and, like the book, forgo quotation marks), mostly because the publisher's description says clearly what the novel is about and does not get lost in the maze as I might well have.

Turkish blues singer Boratin has attempted suicide by jumping off Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge, which, crossing the Bosphorus Strait, links Asia to Europe. He has suffered a broken rib and almost complete loss of memory. The novel, translated by Ümit Hussein, is a stream-of-consciousness look inside a mind that doesn't know itself. Sönmez uses amnesia as a literary device to explore memory and identity, and what happens to a life when everything that makes up a person—his memories, opinions, thoughts—are stripped away.

The text switches between first- and third-person point-of-view as if Boratin is sometimes regarding himself as a figure independent of himself. As he does so he tries to reconcile who he might be (devoted son, responsible brother, popular musician, feckless lover) with the person people have known for years. In trying to rediscover himself—from how he likes his coffee to whose heart he's broken—he must rely on others to fill in the blank spaces. Trying to rebuild his life from the roots is more than difficult when his friends and family know much more about him than he does. Hearing snippets of his past, with no context or sense of how they fit into his life, is more frustrating that having nothing.

Wandering Istanbul's streets and exploring the crevices of a new (to him) home, Boratin wonders if it would be better to leave his past behind. He is afraid that if he were to recover old memories they will come with the feelings—knowledge? despair? anguish?—that led him to try to end his life. But without memories, what is he? Even as friends declare he was lucky—managing to escape whatever pain he'd been in, yet alive to create a new life and new memories—Boratin struggles to move forward in an unfamiliar life in a stranger's body.

The author, Burhan Sönmez, has written four novels; two others, Istanbul, Istanbul and Sins and Innocents have also been translated into clear English by Ümit Hussein (although I do not envy her chore in following Sönmez's Turkish). Sönmez was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before moving to England as a political exile. His Labyrinth explores the value of memories in how they form our identities, challenging whether it's our past or our future potential that forms its base.

Given the challenge Sönmez has set himself—to create a consciousness that is struggling to create a reality on a tabula rasa—the writing itself is clear and interesting. "Within the mute walls [of my apartment]. I wonder which of us has become forgetful, have I forgotten my house, or has my house forgotten me?"

A couple more examples: ". . . I regard even my own face in the mirror as a stranger. I'm like a blank sheet of paper. I have no inside and no outside. My east and west are hazy, as are my north and south. No matter where I step, I feel as though I am about to tumble into a void. I spend my days waiting for night to fall . . ."

". . . He remembers this taste, even though it's the first time he's eating simit [a small loaf of ring-shaped bread]. The brain works in strange ways. It's got me in the palm of its hand, without saying a single word to me. Who belongs to whom, do I own my brain, or does my brain own me?" (To that question I would ask: Who wants to know?)

Labyrinth raises more questions than it answers, which is not a criticism. It is worth, I believe, more than one reading. As a meditation on the meaning of life and the inevitable and cruel passing of time, it will not be to every reader's taste. But then, what is?

After this I want to read more Alice McDermott

The fall issue of the Paris Review has an interesting interview with Alice McDermott, a writer I'd never heard of, this despite the fact that she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (l998), and her novel That Night (1987) was a finalist for another National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Her At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was also a Pulitzer finalist.

My ignorance would not, perhaps, surprise McDermott. Reportedly when she won the National Book Award, she settled her class of fiction-writing students by offering a hundred dollars to anyone who could name the previous year's winner. Not one of her M.F.A. fiction students could recall the book or the author. Such, such is fame.

Among the points that I found interesting is McDermott's remark that she always has two novels in progress, "in one stage or another. It's a terrible thing to do, don't do it. It just means it takes me twice as long to get one finished." She also remarks about sentence-making: "As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something's gone wrong." This is one of my complaints about much MFA writing; the sentences seek to dazzle rather than serve the story.

Now introduced to McDermott, I found her 2006 novel After This. It follows the ups and downs of John and Mary Keane, a Catholic working-class couple, from before they are married after WWII to the 1970s. They have four children, move to Long Island, John works, Mary has children and remains friends with a woman she'd known when she worked in an office in New York. During the course of the novel, the  family visits a Long Island beach. Mary and her daughter Annie go to the New York World's Fair. Jacob, the younger son, is drafted into the Army for the Vietnam war, and more, and more. It's a family saga in less than 300 pages.

Ordinarily I don't care for family sagas, so I'm trying to decide why I think I got sucked into After This and to explain why I think it's so excellent and certainly worth your time, especially if you are interested in writing yourself.

Ordinarily, I don't care for constant shifts in point of view, but McDermott does it and it did not bother me, but it added depth and diversity to the novel ( probably her point). She could not have told the story she tells without using multiple points of view, which is another way to say that the novel as it stands feels as if this is the only possible way it could have been told.

McDermott is able to use language to describe the world and the people in it in a way I find masterly. Here's the first paragraph in the book: "Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—and felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves."

The."pinprick of pebble and grit . . ." The "slivered shards of mad sunlight . . ." The "rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves." It's not showy writing, sentences that say "Look at me! Look at me!" but tells us we are reading something special. And she's able to sustain it. Here's another sample paragraph I've taken from a random page toward the back of the book:

"In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else—the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself 'the odor of aging female flesh,' and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner."

After This was a nominee for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, which Cormac McCarthy's The Road won. It had to be a a difficult choice for the committee. Me? I would have gone with the family saga over dystopia almost any day. McDermott's novel closes on a positive—although entirely earned and justified—note. I'm embarrassed it's taken me this long to find her, and I'll now read more of her work.