Long Weekend, Labour Day 2016

I am certainly glad that I have one more day off.  (I already went ahead and turned off the alarm on my phone, though I may not ultimately go back to bed.)

I already went into some detail on how Sat. was almost entirely dedicated to getting down the first coat of stain on the lower deck, as well as the second coat on the stairs and railing.

Sunday I had to go off and do the grocery shopping, which included trying to figure out what the kids wanted for school lunches.  Then I finished putting down the second coat on the main part of the deck, running out of stain at the end.  I took my son swimming in Greenwood Park.  As we were leaving, the attendant said that it was the last hour of the last day that the pool would be open.  Summer is really over, I thought.  I don't know why I find that a bit upsetting.  It was a brutally hot summer, and one that basically killed all the plants in the front yard, particularly the new ones I tried to add this spring.  I guess this is something we will have to adjust to.  Perhaps I shall plant cacti.

There is no question, we are a bit relieved that the kids will be back in school and not quite so underfoot all the time... I did just a bit more shopping at the mall for school supplies. I spend a bit of time on times tables with my daughter.  They are probably as ready as they are ever going to be.

At 6:30, I set out for the Theatre Centre.  It did take slightly over an hour to get down there, and it turned out The Glass Menagerie was in fact sold out.  I was number 4 on the waiting list, and it appears that only one person actually came off it.  I guess they can do what they want, but it seems to me their oversold policy is foolish.  There were clearly quite a few seats left, but they won't release them before the show like most theatres do.  Instead, they hold them indefinitely, since patrons can even enter at intermission.  I waited until 8:01 and split.  It seems like next weekend may also be sold out, though having the two matinees will help, but I can't go next weekend due to various obligations.  I'll ponder today if I want to go Wed. or Thurs. after work, since I am fairly likely to be taking transit anyway, as there is rain in the forecast.  I will admit, I am somewhat less interested than I was before, mostly because this evening ended up costing me two tokens.  (Though I'm still not as mad as I was when Ryerson didn't honor my reservation and wouldn't get me in to see their show.  Never again will I cross their door.)

Today I would like to get some rest, though the single highest priority is to track down two receipts associated with our move to Toronto.  I know they got stuffed into a folder, but which one???  If I find that relatively quickly, I'll probably spend most of the rest of the day writing and doing some reading.  And maybe a nap thrown in for good measure.

Deck Follies #9 (the saga concludes)

This will close out the posts on the deck unless in the very near future I have to replace the deck for some reason.  I'm certainly hoping that is not the case, though there are a few individual boards that I may look into replacing.  That seems like a task for professionals, though I suspect they would say it is more cost effective to replace the whole upper deck.  (In contrast, the lower deck seems in very good shape.)

I should actually start off with a report on the work crew.  There was definitely more than a little miscommunication, and I didn't care much for the project manager, though the workers were very satisfactory when they were actually here working.  I had booked some time off work and asked to work from home another day.  It basically took a day for the materials to arrive, and then all the indoor tasks were done in another day.  It was a huge relief to find out that they could put in a legal hand railing right on top of the existing wall.  It would have been a huge mess to tear out the wall, and then rebuild it and paint it etc.  It would definitely have meant they would have been working in the house while I was travelling, which was far from ideal, so I'm really glad it worked out.

There was some mix-up over the stain and who was doing what, and I ultimately decided to do it myself rather than wait around for another half-day.  I think it came out pretty well (the extra paper is there just to avoid drips, but I managed to keep things tidy).

It basically looks as if it has always been part of the stairs, which is incredible.  I think we'll finally be able to invite some of the neighbours over soon, and they can see how the house has been updated, generally in modest ways.

The outdoor task was to staple some chicken wire around the bottom of the lower deck to try to convince raccoons to move along.  We have been very careful not to leave food scraps out, but the lower deck was still super inviting for their siestas.  There's no question this wouldn't keep them out if they were totally determined to get in (or rather under), but it might be just enough to get them to move on into another yard, ideally the next street over...

I've been keeping an eye on the wire, and so far it hasn't been disturbed, so fingers crossed.  I did see a big pile of racoon poop on the deck this morning, but it might just have been their calling card, letting me know how they didn't appreciate me messing with their den.  They stopped just short of the area where the new stain had been laid down, so maybe staining the deck will also change the smell of the deck enough to dissuade them from coming back, which would be an extra bonus.

This weekend looked like an ideal one to go ahead and stain the lower deck, since there is no rain in the forecast until next Wed. or so (and it was much less hot than the previous weekends have been).  I did get a somewhat late start, and only my son wanted to take part this time around.  So I didn't finished getting the first coat on until 4:30 or so.* 

Here are a few photos of the work in progress.  I actually had to get a ladder out to reach a few sections, and we stained the sides of the stairs, which clearly hadn't been done the last time around.

I came back around and took care of the steps and the railing that goes around the deck.  Those are some of the trickier bits.  I thought about pushing on, but my arms were tired, it was getting kind of dark, and the first coat was still quite tacky.  I think I should be able to wrap this up in 90 minutes to 2 hours tomorrow, and then I'll be entirely done.  Yea!

I'm debating whether to get a small charcoal grill and perhaps a hammock, though since the season is almost over, I might just wait until next year.  On the other hand, if there are some really good sales, that might be enough to convince me to go ahead and get something now.  Again, I am not entirely sure I've gotten them out of my yard, but I am definitely planning to use the lower deck more now that we have put in all this effort and hopefully reclaimed it from the raccoons.

Update (9/4) - Well, perhaps it should not be a surprise that there was a small snag.  I ran out of stain at the end.  This deck has used up 4 full cans of stain!  They don't sell a smaller version, and I decided for the time being to leave the corner with just one coat of stain and touched up just a few places that looked particularly thin.  Had I not stained the backs of the stair risers a second time, I probably would have had enough.  But sometimes it is just time to say: this is good enough.  That's where I am right now with this project.

* It turns out that there is no matinee of Glass Menagerie this weekend, though there will be some next weekend.  I guess that actually worked out for me, since otherwise I would have had to leave the job half done or lost out on the ticket.  It's looking like I will go tomorrow for the evening performance.

Last Hip Post

This will most likely be the last posting I make about The Tragically Hip, but I wanted a bit of a round-up.

I got home from our trip (still not documented - alas) and found that for whatever reason the PVR had not recorded the Aug. 20th Kingston show (the one watched by 11.7 million Canadians!).  I wondered if it had been some blackout on recording, but others had mentioned it worked, though it cut off the end of the concert, since they hadn't added an hour to the end of the official broadcast time.  We had planned ahead for that, but the recording never started in the first place.  Very frustrating.  One possibility is that we do get 2-3 minute power blackouts at least once a week, and that might have thrown things off.  (I grant you this is less serious than others dealing with daily brown-outs, but it still feels pretty unacceptable given the rates we pay Hydro.  Maybe too many squirrels and raccoons chewing on wires in Riverdale?)

I had said I would buy a DVD of the concert, and I still expect to do so, but in the meantime it wasn't all that hard to track down someone who had put the whole thing up on Youtube.  And with a bit of additional searching, I tracked down the August 12 and 14 concerts in Toronto.  I did like the 12th (featuring Fully Completely) just a bit more than the 14th, which went a bit deeper into Road Apples, but also featured Now for Plan A.  The second half of the Hamilton concert on the 16th featured World Container, so that was also worth streaming.  The final concert is a bit of a masterpiece, and the only thing I would have wanted to see was So Hard Done By, perhaps in place of Toronto #4.  I just don't see how they can top that, and almost any concert after this would be an anti-climax, though I am sure people would be understanding if Gord's cancer goes into remission and they do tour again.

I'm fairly sure at some point I owned Day for Night (which features So Hard Done By and several other classic cuts), but I couldn't locate it, and I gave in and ordered another copy.  It arrived last night, and I played it through.  I don't believe I've ever listened to the entire CD in order, which is kind of strange, so maybe I didn't own it after all.  Anyway, it will take quite a while for it to sink in, and I don't think it will ever replace Fully Completely, which is basically burned into my brain from repeated listening over the years.

I was talking with my friend about the Hip and this half celebration/half wake tour, and we agreed that it was the right way to go out.  In a way, it gives the fans more closure (again assuming that the band really does break up) certainly than they got for Prince or Michael Jackson.  David Bowie did manage to get out his last album (a dark mini-masterpiece that I'll probably always mentally pair with Man Machine Poem), so that helps a bit.  It's never easy to let one's musical heroes go, since it just reminds us of the "Inevitability of death," which is yet another song off Day for Night...

P.S. (9/3) I don't know a lot about Gord Downie's background, but he strikes me as a bit of a working-class poet in a guitar band.  His lyrics really are quite interesting, even though it may take many, many listens for them to actually sink in.  After going to the hipmuseum site, I learned that the song Courage features a significant chunk of Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night.  I read the book many years ago, though I wouldn't have recognized a passage out of it (I don't have that kind of memory).  I suspect the link will inspire me to move the novel a bit higher on my reading list.  Downie has quite a few references like this, to something he had been reading, like Blaise Pascal, Tess Gallagher (Raymond Carver's wife and a writer herself), and quite a few others.  Downie himself lists several other writers that influenced him: Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Sam Shepard and Raymond Carver.  While it is just my opinion, I find his lyrics the most interesting and often profound for a Canadian musician, second only to Leonard Cohen, but the difference is they are played in the context of an always rocking, raucous guitar band (hence the interesting dissonance) whereas Cohen's lyrics are generally more front and center, though some versions he does are quite rocking as well.

10th Canadian Challenge - 4th Review - The Book of Negroes

I wasn't sure I would actually get to Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes during the challenge this year, but I brought it on the trip to New York and Chicago, and I managed to read it in 3 or so days (aided by layovers in airports and so forth).  It is well-written and the plot moves along at a rapid pace.  I don't know if it was a mistake or not to start with the narrator, Aminata (or Meena as she is generally called), appearing before Parliament as an old woman, testifying against the slave trade.  It is somewhat difficult to remain in a state of suspense throughout the whole novel, when you know the main character survives all kinds of suffering.  I think that might have been a mistake, but that was the way Hill wanted it.

To cut to the chase, I thought this was an entertaining and solid book.  I don't think it is a great book for a variety of reasons.  Most fundamentally, while Aminata was somebody that you would root for throughout, she felt a lot to me like a person from our era thrown into the late eighteenth century.  She had a sense of her own worth and willingness to fight for her rights that frankly seemed very out of place for that time and era.  Interestingly, Hill sort of hints that she would have ultimately been very out of kilter in her village where societal pressures would have been unrelenting for her to conform and marry the local chief as his second or third wife.  While she is somewhat tempered in her thinking by the end of the book, she expects far too much out of people, particularly Lindo Abraham, and she generally refuses to accept compromises.  (It must be nice to live a life where one does not make compromises.  Perhaps ironically, the last time she spurns a chance to hash things out with Lindo* and perhaps see things from his perspective, she has been working for several months with the British, writing down the names of the free Blacks in the Book of Negroes, along with slaves and indentured servants that were going to Canada along with their British masters.  If she was going to be so self-righteous with Lindo, she should have looked in the mirror right about then, since she was just as much an enabler of the slave trade at that particular moment.  She does gain a bit more perspective after her return to Africa.)

More than anything, Aminata is basically a Mary Jane, that is a character that is so astoundingly perfect and exceptional in every way that it gradually gets a bit boring.  She can pick up languages amazingly quickly, by the age of 10 or so, she is an experienced midwife, she learns herbal medicine on a plantation in South Carolina (where she is also taught to read English -- she already knew a bit about reading the Qur'an, possibly in the original Arabic), and after she is sold to Lindo Abraham, he teaches her bookkeeping.  There is almost nothing she can't do, although as I already said she basically does not accept the complicity of average Southerners in the slave trade.  I'm not entirely sure what point Hill is trying to make when he focuses several times on the fact that slavery existed in Aminata's home village (and the chieftain's wife is actually most horrified that they are enslaving proper Muslims rather than that slavery exists at all).  This is actually a fairly daring subplot, as well as spending quite a bit of time late in the novel examining the actions of Africans who sold other Africans into slavery.  But it does make me question why Aminate is so particularly unforgiving towards Lindo when she was exposed to many of her kinsmen who engaged in slavery of one sort or another and that she herself facilitated the British bringing slaves to Canada.  The single weakness or flaw in her character comes when, despite having been warned several times, works out a deal to go with African slave traders in search of her home village (which she had even been told had been completely wiped off the map!).  Not too surprisingly, they eventually plan to sell her off as a slave yet again (quelle ironie!), but she figures out their plot (due to knowing yet another African language) and she miraculously escapes.  On the one hand, Hill may be trying to humanize her a bit and give her a flaw, but it just seemed a bit too unlikely that she would ever have trusted the slavers in the first place.  Of course, had I been in her place, I would never have thought it worth going back to Africa at all.

What I particularly liked about the novel was that it exposed me to a very under-reported aspect of history, namely that there was a small colony of free Blacks in Nova Scotia that was established in the aftermath of the American Revolution.  The Book of Negroes is an actual historical document, which kind of blew my mind.  (And there was a back to Africa movement many decades before Marcus Garvey.)  I also thought it was interesting how the British tried to stir up trouble by basically promising American slaves their freedom if they served on the British side.  (I wonder if Abe Lincoln knew about this aspect of history when he read out the Emancipation Proclamation, about which I will write more in my review of Father Comes Home from the Wars.  Abe was slightly better on the follow-through than the British, though at least some slaves got their freedom that way during the American Revolution.)  There were some very interesting debates in the novel about what it meant to stick up for the Americans and their "freedom," when it very quickly became obvious that this didn't apply to slaves.

There were quite a few characters that I relished reading about, whereas I was just sort of meant to admire Aminata on a pedestal as it were.  While Rosa Lindo is almost too good to be true herself, I still enjoyed the passages where she introduced Aminata to their home and far more genteel way of life.  If I recall, she actually had a bit of impishness about her and might have been the only white person that made Aminata laugh.  Certainly she and John Clarkson were about the only two whites she ever trusted or around whom she let down her guard.  I liked the passages with Daddy Moses and his ministering to his congregation in New York.  Finally, my favorite character was Georgia, who essentially becomes a second mother to Aminata when she is brought to the indigo plantation in South Carolina.  She struck me as someone who belonged in her own book, something along the lines of a Zora Neale Hurston novel.

I should add one final note of appreciation.  I thought it was rather profound how Hill discussed map making of that time and how the maps of Africa mostly showed a blank or a Terra incognita.  This frustrates Aminata to no end, since she hoped to learn a way back to her home village from these maps, but they are useless.   Towards the end of her time back in Africa, she decides that it isn't entirely the Europeans' fault but that Africans were also engaging in strategic withholding of information.  I particularly liked Aminata encountering this passage from Jonathan Swift's On Poetry, which seems particularly apt:

So geographers, in Afric maps, 
With savage pictures fill their gaps, 
And o'er unhabitable downs 
Place elephants for want of towns.

The entire poem can be found here.

On the whole this is an interesting and even important novel covering an obscured historical moment when Africans (free and enslaved) came to Canada.  It is a bit difficult to fully relate to the main character, who is a bit too perfect throughout, but there are several secondary characters that I enjoyed encountering.  It will certainly end up on my notable book list for 2016, though I am not expecting it to land in the top 5.

* I was checking out some other reviews, and it "triggered" my memory that the novel does entirely strain plausibility when Lindo shows up in the nick of time to prevent Aminata from being returned to her evil first master.  Not only does he just happen to be in New York and find out about the case, but he happened to be travelling around with her bill of sale.  Come on now...  And yet after this miraculous deliverance, she still can't bring herself to talk with him for more than a minute or two.

Missing paintings at the AGO - a poll

I decided that the last post was just too much of a downer and I wanted to put up something else, though it could be taken as a passive-aggressive attack on the AGO, which isn't precisely my point.

Most people realize that museums don't put all their paintings on display, but what isn't as commonly known is that it generally is only 5-10% of the collection that is actually on display.  Some museums are a bit more conservative in terms of what is on view and what is in storage.  The public basically expects to see key paintings and is going to be fairly disappointed if they are no longer on view.  Other museums rotate a bit more frequently.  My interpretation of the way the AGO works is that they have a few galleries that hardly ever change, esp. the one with all the paintings crammed together on the 2nd floor.  Since the remodeling, they seem to be pretty much stuck in leaving the model ships in the basement, as well as rotating within the Thomson collection on the 2nd floor.  Given that the 4th and 5th floors are given over to contemporary art, this leaves them with only a tiny area to actually change things up.  This article goes into the storage aspect and discusses the dilemma of taking popular works out of circulation.  I'm probably not quite as sympathetic as I should be, or I find what they have chosen to put on view doesn't really measure up (in some cases) to what is in storage.

Here are some paintings that I feel ought to be put back in circulation.  Most, but not all, are in the recent Highlights of the AGO book, and to my way of thinking, people will be somewhat disappointed if they can't see the paintings that the AGO itself claims are its highlights.  It is of course possible that one or two of these are actually on view, but I don't believe so, since I have visited only last weekend.  (Also, the AGO has perhaps the worst digital presence of any major museum I've come across.  You cannot search their collection on-line at least not in a straight-forward way, and obviously there is no way to tell which paintings are on view, which is increasingly common on museum websites.  I can only hope this is something they are working on, since it is a very major failing on their part.)

If I can manage it, I will put a poll in this post and at the end of summer, I will supply the results to the AGO management.

Here are the entries: 

James Tissot, The Shop Girl, 1885

Paul Cezanne, Interior of a Forest, 1885

Edouard Vuillard, The Widow's Visit, 1898

Marc Chagall, Over Vitebsk, 1914

Wassily Kandinsky, Grey Circle, 1923

Joan Miro, Untitled, 1926

Yves Tanguy, The Satin Pillow, 1929

Lawren Harris, Grounded Icebergs, ca. 1931

Henri Matisse, Ivy Branch, 1941

Franz Kline, Cupola, 1960

Mark Rothko, No. 1, White and Red, 1962

Mary Pratt, The Service Station, 1978

Jeff Wall, The Goat, 1989

Ta-daa the poll.  Please vote for your favorite (only one vote per visitor).  Or if it isn't actually your favorite, the painting (or photograph) you feel most ought to come out of storage and be displayed.

Some quick house-keeping.  The poll will only work in the web-version of the blog, not a mobile version, so you may have to switch over (if that is an option) if reading on your phone (sorry!).  Also, it takes a minute or so for the votes to be recorded, and then you have to refresh the page to see your vote.

Please note that I plan to close this poll down on August 29.

(Unfortunately, in order to pin this post and the poll, I have to monkey around with the post date.  It was actually posted July 14.  Sorry about that.)


Here are the final results.  While this post got an unbelievable number of views, essentially no one voted on it, probably because the poll didn't work on mobile phones.  Certainly something to keep in mind for the future.  As mentioned elsewhere, the AGO has rehung The Widow's Visit, and Grounded Icebergs was actually part of The Idea of North exhibit (only in Toronto).

Edit (4/10/2017): I read an interesting article in the Star today about how the permanent collection will be shaken up and more art from the vaults will be brought up.  (I definitely hope that they will be using a few rooms, particularly the corner galleries, better.)  It sounds like the Kline will be back on view.  The Chagall became part of the Mystical Landscapes exhibit, so it is probably off to the Musee d'Orsay now.  Anyway, I should head over to see the rehung paintings soon, but also to check out the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit.  Depending on the weather, I might be able to bike over this Friday, and then plan to take the kids on April 22.

Theatre in Toronto (early Sept) and beyond

Just a short notice that Father Comes Home From the Wars has 4 shows added this week - Mon - Thurs (Sept. 1).  Tickets available here.  They may bring this back next season, but there is certainly no guarantee, so this is your last chance to see a moving exploration of how slavery distorted family bonds and other relationships.  I probably won't be able to get around to my extended review (which will be spoiler-heavy anyway) until the weekend, but I would recommend this for anyone interested in the African-American experience and how it is portrayed on stage.

I would recommend passing on High Park this year (All's Well That Ends Well and Hamlet), though if interested, it runs another week or so.

I just found out that Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie will be opening this week at the Theatre Centre and running for about two weeks (details here).  I expect I'll go, as I haven't seen this in years.  Maybe I can combine the show with a trip to the Stephen Bulger Gallery to see the Vivian Maier exhibit, which runs through Sept 10.  I've seen several exhibits of her work, and it is definitely worth checking out - and indeed, the unofficial pairing with The Glass Menagerie and its unfulfilled longings seems quite appropriate.

I've already written a bit about Tafelmusik, Tarragon and Soulpepper, which will kind of fill out the main artistic season for me.  I'll start getting tickets fairly soon.  I'm still debating Hart House where I really want to see Mouawad's Tideline and perhaps 7 Stories by Morris Panych, but I think I'd skip the rest of the season.

Anyway, let me jump to next summer, since both Stratford and Shaw have posted their upcoming seasons!  Stratford is here, and Shaw is here.  Per usual, Stratford interests me more, and I am just more likely to go out that way, since I hate trying to get to Niagara-on-the-Lake.  (I read that the outgoing director didn't like thinking about traffic and how to get out-of-towners to turn up, but it seems like a no brainer to me to try a shuttle bus, since it has been so successful for Stratford.)

At Stratford, I will definitely see Middleton's The Changeling (finally, though I did have the opportunity to see a modern take on it at the Storefront Theatre*) and Sheridan's School for Scandal.  I will probably pass on Twelfth Night, just because I've seen it several times and I can't really justify Stratford prices for that.  I am sort of torn on Murphy's The Breathing Hole, which sounds sort of interesting, but at the same time might be a real incoherent mess.  I guess it depends just how much they are charging for it, and if I can come up with one weekend to see everything.  I very much doubt I would travel to Stratford just to see The Breathing Hole.  That pretty much covers it.  They did Romeo and Juliet just a few years back, so I won't go to that, and I clearly won't go to Tartuffe, since I hate the play so much.

Shaw is less interesting from the get-go.  There is a small chance I would see Saint Joan.  I don't really care for Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa.  I actually saw Eno's Middletown at Steppenwolf several years back and didn't think it was all that great.  I certainly wouldn't go a second time. Michael Healey's 1979 is a bit of a wild card.  It could be fairly clever, and no question if Video Cabaret was doing it, I would go.  But I would rather see it in Toronto (or even Ottawa in April 2017) rather than going down to Shaw, so I am leaning against.  That is kind of the way I feel about An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.  I'm pretty sure this is a play that would sort of enrage me (for good and bad reasons very much like The Shipment by Young Jean Lee) and I'd probably go if it gets transferred to Toronto, but I am not going to travel down there and then sort of stew about the play the whole drive home.  So I might go to Saint Joan, but even that is fairly questionable.  It is interesting that they appear to have cut things back to just one musical (no question that the musicals from the past two seasons were critically panned), but Shaw still isn't really my cup of tea.

* It also means I'll probably pass on Shakespeare Bash'd's staged reading the play (currently slotted in for Nov. 13 at the Imperial Pub).  I'd rather go into the Stratford not knowing much about the play (aside from there are lots of bloody betrayals) and let the plot unfold.  However, I am fairly likely to try to see Shakespeare Bash'd's full production of Twelfth Night this winter (and possibly take my son) rather than pay Stratford prices for a play I've seen many times.  Not saying that I won't ultimately go to Stratford for this, but I generally like smaller, more intimate productions of Shakespeare's comedies.

What am I looking for (fiction edition)?

I've been struggling with my reading choices for a while.  Quite a few of them seem to end up as books that I should be reading (or I tell myself that I should be reading) rather than books I enjoy.  I think I am getting a bit more out of the non-fiction books, or at least the proportion of books that I feel actually merited my time is higher, and maybe I will just continue along that track.  Still, I have piles of unread books in the basement, and I would like to get through most of them by 2020...  I guess the one positive is that I am much less likely to hold onto marginal books than I used to be.  If I know I am not going to reread it and it isn't a stone-cold classic that the kids might need, then I have been donating the books as I go through them.  Six of the last 10 books I read have been donated.

In general, I am also trying to convince myself to give up on books sooner.  It is still a bit of a challenge for me, since I would rather read through to the end and then never bother with the book again, especially if the critical consensus is generally positive, than to wonder if I should give the book another go somewhere down the line.  However, for Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, the impressions I had of each book by about the 1/3 mark never changed by the end, and in both cases, I probably would have been better off just stopping midstream and turn to something that I enjoyed more.  (I actually do have some thoughts on the Roth book, but I'll blog about that later in the week.)

I have taken that to heart with Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go.  It was certainly blown up in certain quarters, but in my opinion, it doesn't live up to the hype.  I thought pretty seriously about pushing on, but two things happened to change my mind.  First, she just started piling one thing after another onto this family (and she kind of over-egged the pudding with how the father lost his job to the point I found it unbelievable).  I get really weary of this sort of thing (and I probably should just discard my copy of Mistry's A Fine Balance, since I remember even at the time thinking when will this misery end, though it is a brilliantly-written book...).  Second, the folks at Goodreads have hinted that there is sort of a happy ending in sight but only when this non-traditional family bonds back in Africa, which feels both unbelievable given the circumstances and too much like a Lifetime special.  Maybe more to the point, I am just so sick of Ivy league MFA-types getting so much hype for these under-baked first novels.  (I found the exact same thing with Iman Verjee's In Between Dreams, which I also didn't finish.)  One minor advantage of the Toronto Star over the NY Times is that the focus of the book section is on Canadian authors and not these not quite ready for prime time Ivy league authors.

Anyway, it is probably not possible to completely distill what I am looking for in a novel or novella, but I am starting to come up with some main themes.  I want interesting characters, not ciphers.  I am willing to make some exceptions for very short stories or extremely clever postmodern fiction.  In particular, I want characters who are at least of average intelligence rather than silly moppets who make bad choices purely out of ignorance.  I prefer characters who have some common sense, though they can certainly be led astray (by their emotions typically) or can be placed in very unusual situations (Malamud's God's Grace or the Scorsese movie After Hours).  There are some rare cases where strong secondary characters can make up for dull or insipid or silly or simply unbelievable main characters.  The secondary characters are the only reason I have hung onto Bowen's The Death of the Heart and Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek.

Most of all, I am one of those boring throwback readers who still wants plot.  Bad things can happen to the characters, but just piling on one thing after another is alienating and eventually boring. Maybe the single most important criterion is whether the characters have internal integrity.  If we think we know a character, then they can't all of a sudden act in a completely contrary manner, just to serve the plot.  That doesn't mean that they can't have hidden depths, but if they have these multiple layers, then they have to be earned, rather than just sprung on the reader.  It doesn't really seem that much to ask, does it?  But quite a few books I've read have not really passed this test, or I just wasn't interested for some other reason.  Perhaps I'll come back around to this at a later date.