Library Limelights 260

 

Miriam Toews. Fight Night. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

So worth the wait for a new novel from this remarkable author! Our narrator, the nine-year-old precocious kid (Swiv), gives us a running account of her time with Grandma (Elvira) and Mom (Mooshie) as the three of them navigate everyday life, each fighting her own upstream battles. Not ordinary lives, by any means! The novel is in the form of a letter Swiv writes to her missing father; writing a letter is an assignment from Grandma in her home schooling. Because Swiv was expelled from school for aggressive behaviour. Swiv doesn’t tell anyone for whom the letter is intended. While Mom, the actress, seems to be at rehearsal all the time, Swiv is the dawn-to-dusk carer attending Grandma’s fragile health. They get along like a house on fire, and part of the charm lies in Toews’ usage of the trite sayings we all know. Swiv also accompanies Grandma to California for a family visit, producing some of the funniest scenes Toews has ever come up with.

While they all appear uninhibited, Swiv’s candid observations reveal more depths about each. When Mom’s anger gets triggered, the other two expect scorched earth. Triggers are elements they have to constantly fight against, like evil proselytizer Willit Braun, or evil developer who wants to buy their house, Jay Gatsby, or argumentative theatre directors. Oh, and Mom is very pregnant with Gord, whom they’ve already named. Their doorbell rings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” so Grandma and Swiv can shout “Ball Game!” Seen through the youngster’s eyes, this family is nonconformist, outspoken, sentimental, anxious, liberated, rude, comical, and always fighting for survival on their own terms. The characterizations are pure Toews. Fight Night overflows with life, bursting with love and humour, everything we expect from this splendid author.

One-liners

▪ She says Mom does the emotional work for the whole family, feeling everything ten times harder than is necessary so the rest of us can act normal. (7)

▪ Mom told us that Willit Braun had phoned wanting to talk about salvation with her or Grandma and she’d said, Wrong number, this is Satan. (117)

▪ I set my alarm for twenty minutes earlier than Mom’s because I was the only one who knew how to get Grandma’s compression socks on, even though there are YouTube videos and Mom could just watch one and focus and learn. (121)

▪ I didn’t want to be found passed out on a toilet like a depressed celebrity. (228)

Multi-liners

▪ This can be today’s math class, said Grandma. If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death? (31)

▪ I told her the next day I’d help her shower and we could use Mom’s expensive Italian shower gel. Mom wouldn’t notice because she was too preoccupied with going insane. (89)

▪ The woman put her pinkies in her mouth and whistled, and a cart that was zooming along slammed on its brakes and stopped right beside us. So far in my life that whistle was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. (166)

▪ What if everyone on the boat got drunk? How would we get back to the dock? I watched Ken closely to see what he was doing so I could sail the boat if everyone died suddenly from alcohol poisoning. (183-4)

▪ He’s still harassing you, huh? Ken said huh instead of eh because he’s an American now. (192)

▪ She did the fighting against everything, and that wasn’t easy for Grandpa. He thought men should do the fighting and so did the town. (203)

Cops calling

The doorbell rang again. Ball Game! It was the two cops from the two ends of the street. They were all smiles. They had their hands on their guns. They asked Mom if they could ask her a few questions. She said no. They asked Mom if she had seen any suspicious activity around here lately. Yours, she said. Close the door, honey, said Grandma. Mom asked the cop if she could see his gun for a sec. Honey! said Grandma. She hobbled over to the front door and said out, out, thank you, Knight Rider, and then closed it. (37)

School sports

I told Mom about King of the Castle. I told her I was obsessed with being King of the Castle. I fought everybody, even grade six boys tooth and nail to be King of the Castle. I bled every recess and all my clothes got ripped but I won and I like my clothes like that and it was worth it. Mom said congratulations, that was definitely a fight, but not exactly the kind of fight she was talking about. That’s a lonely position to be in, isn’t it? she asked me. I hate that therapy voice she gets but I was happy when she said the question was rhetorical which means I didn’t have to answer. (69)

Pals

Geoffrey and Gretchen knew this bank where we could get free doughnuts if we asked them about retirement planning. We went up to the teller and said we wanted to ask her about retirement planning. She said oh just get lost, the doughnuts are over there on that table. When we walked away she said god, I hate my life. (84)

Third trimester

Early this morning Mom went off to have an ultrasound of Gord that we could put on the fridge and Grandma was sitting at her table playing online Scrabble with a person whose code name was SINtillating. I don’t want to put a naked picture of Gord on the fridge, I said to Grandma. That’s mean and stupid. Grandma said Gord is a fetus in utero, not naked. What happens to a kid if everyone in her family is insane? I asked Grandma. Well, for starters, said Grandma, I think quite a bit of anxiety? (95)

California convertible

The roof was off and Grandma’s white hair was blowing straight up from her head. She was wearing her giant welder’s glasses and Ken’s cut-off UCLA sweatpants. She drove fast. It felt like Grandma was younger now. It felt like I was driving around with Mom or Beyoncé or someone. That’s why old people get so furious when young people tell them they can’t drive anymore. Aha! Look at that! she said. She had found the home. When she got out of the car she was normal Grandma again, shuffling. (207)

Michael Harvey. The Third Rail. USA: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

The usual players in a gritty but unusual plot. Chicago police and Detective Rodriguez are stunned by two sniper killings on the city transit system. Next, motorists are shot on a city highway causing huge traffic chaos. By then the FBI has entered the case, with all those events seemingly connected. Ex-cop Michael Kelly, now a private investigator, is mystified right from the beginning why the killer seems to be drawing him, Kelly, into the centre. FBI agent Katherine Lawson allows him to pursue a hunch on the periphery of the investigation; his buddy Rodriguez is helpful, and internet whiz-kid Hubert Russell digs deep for a possible link to Kelly. On visiting a retired cop for further information, Kelly recalls the horrendous train crash he’d been in when a youngster. Meanwhile, the hardcore pragmatic mayor of Chicago—acutely portrayed―expects Kelly to bury the perpetrator, literally.

At first Lawson is not inclined to believe Kelly’s theory that more than one shooter is involved, until they find a dead man. But Kelly hasn’t told them everything he recalls. The stakes increase dramatically when his girlfriend, Judge Rachel Swenson, is taken hostage and brutally attacked. The perp also has a hate on for the local archbishop (don’t drink the holy water). It’s a fast-moving thriller in superb style with all the right touches of humour; lots of guesswork for the reader. Definitely an author to visit again.

One-liners

▪ “I’d offer your badge back, but you’re too much of an asshole to accept it, right?” (45)

▪ She spoke in that flat, loud, cringe-inducing tone Americans are beloved for the world over. (88)

▪ A smile limped across her face and back into her pocket. (123)

▪ “You sniffed out what might be a chemical weapons attack against the city and gave us our best lead on this guy.” (175)

▪ The pieces of this case, maybe two or three cases, held together by the thinnest of wires: circumstance and an educated guess. (244)

Multi-liners

▪ When you got right down to it, there were very few atheists in the foxholes of life. It was something the Catholic church had understood for centuries. (30)

▪ “I live on the South Side, honey. We get people shot up all day, every day.” (103)

▪ “When Homeland Security shows up, we smile and go along. Listen to their happy horseshit, express appropriate concern, and send them on their way.” (252)

▪ “You may think you’re John Wayne, and maybe you are. But the feds don’t give a shit. They’ll roll right over you and never miss a beat.” (253)

▪ It was easy to pull the trigger. Too much so. The courage lay in putting the gun back in my pocket and walking away. (266)

Meet the team

Rodriguez and I walked into FBI headquarters at a little after noon. A young Asian woman in a blue suit took our names and guns in exchange for plastic IDs. Then she walked us through a door and down a hall way, where she passed us off to a young white man in a brown suit. He put us in a small office and told us someone would be with us shortly. An hour later, the door to the office opened. On the other side was a young black man in a gray suit. He took us another twenty feet to a conference room, filled with all sorts of men and women, clad in all sorts of suits. They all stopped talking as we walked in, and everyone seemed exceptionally good at not smiling. (33)

Meet the boss

The bartender got a nudge from a patron. I could see him starting over to us. Then he caught a glimpse of the badge and retreated back behind the taps.

“Why don’t you just tell me your story?” I said.

“What story?”

I spread my hands out, palms up.

Lawson let a smile slip. “Cops all have stories, right?”

“I know I do,” I said. “Hold on while I get a beer.”

I went up to the front. The six people in the place now had an idea who we were and why we were in the area. I could feel their eyes on me as I waited for a pint. Finally, an old-timer at the elbow of the bar spoke up.

“You involved in that stuff down by the lake?”

His voice was full of smoke and whiskey. A doctor might call it a walking advertisement for emphysema. I found it comfortable. (131)

Kelly’s dad

He called me into the kitchen sometime after midnight and asked me what I saw on the train. I told him nothing. He beat me with his fists, asking the same question with every blow. I kept saying nothing because I didn’t know what answer would be better. But there was no right answer. And there was no beating that was going to hurt worse than knowing what my father was. And knowing that every time he looked at me, he’d see his own cowardice reflected there. And hate me for it. (205-6)

Putting it together

I’d given Homeland Security its black case and whatever tale it told. Then I went to work, scraping together what I needed from the files I had, the Internet, and a few phone calls. The mayor called around eleven, and again at midnight. He’d given me the bits and pieces I’d asked for. Hadn’t asked too many questions. The mayor was too smart for that. (255)

Graham Hurley. Limelight. UK: Severn House Publishers Ltd., 2020.

It’s the fourth in his Enora Andressen series: this woman lands in more trouble, not of her own making, than a toy poodle in a pack of starving coyotes. Enora goes to visit old friend Evelyn, blissfully retired in seaside Budleigh Salterton. She finds an immediate rapport with Evelyn’s neighbour Christianne and spends a delightful day bonding with her. But how could Enora miss the signs of physical dysfunction in her new friend? Christianne’s husband Andy McFaul is less sociable but extremely devoted to her; the couple has had an adventurous life together. Unbeknownst to Enora, Christianne has motor neurone disease and plans to end her life with Andy’s collaboration. So the sick woman suddenly disappears the next day, assumed drowned. Her local friends—former ambassador Sir William (Bill), narcissistic Beth, lawyer Nathan―reinforce the suicide notion with stories but Andy’s not saying a word, especially to the police who perforce must investigate all angles of a missing person case.

Inspector Bullivant suspects that Andy killed his wife—euthanasia is a serious crime in the U.K. But Andy disappears. Months later, a landslide crashes down near the town, unearthing a coffin containing Christianne; she’d been buried on a cliff overlooking the sea. Enora is bewildered by the policeman’s new theory that all her friends were complicit in the mercy killing and burial, including Enora. In fact the tenacious Bullivant has built an impressive, but mistaken, case that Enora alone administered the fatal drug. Good thing a shocked Enora knows Tony, a handy lawyer to get her out of jail; her journalist friend Mitch also pitches in to help. It’s always a pleasure to read Hurley; the novel works as advocacy for medically-assisted death thanks to his intelligible characters and smooth plotting. An interesting aside, almost mischievous, is when Bill’s son Sylvester gloms onto Enora’s son Malo, both of them keen to sell super yachts for end times.

One-liners

▪ To watch my son turn down free alcohol is a pleasure I’ve never had before, but by now I sense he’s keen to impress this man who’s just stepped into our lives. (56)

▪ “What he’s after, what he needs, are people with a great deal of money who are sufficiently alarmed and sufficiently gullible to take fright at where the world is taking us.” (80)

▪ “So, what would happen if I could prove that Christianne killed herself?” (112)

▪ A story like that, a bust-open coffin on a beach, will reach every corner of the planet. (186)

▪ Conspiracy to murder is a very ugly phrase, and I’m suddenly aware that the next twenty-four hours could put me inside for a very long time. (229)

▪ Tony Morse is being stern, telling me to get a grip, telling me simply to obey orders for once in my life, but I barely hear him. (233)

Multi-liners

▪ Beware, I warn him. Things only last if you take very great care of them. (2)

▪ Both Malo and I are beginning to realize exactly why Sylvester Penny has tracked us down. This wasn’t a neighbourly errand on behalf of the lovely Sir William, far from it. He’s knocked on my door to lay hands on my son. (59)

▪ “I remember the phrase she used. ‘I want the ocean to take me away,’ she said. ‘I want it all to stop.’” (108)

▪ “Malo’s still a kid. He rolls over easy.” (147)

▪ “Our CID friends like to tidy up. People going missing offends their sense of neatness. It probably sounds anal but sometimes it turns out they have a point.” (151)

▪ Helplessness is too small a word. A bunch of strangers have taken a very close look at Christianne’s departure and decided that I’m to blame. Telling them they’re wrong, trying to point out that the whole thing is absurd, simply confirms their suspicions. (237)

After diagnosis

“Fifteen minutes on Google scared us to death. Weakening grip, balance all to fuck, rubbish coordination. Then your speech starts to go, and you’re slurring like an idiot, and finally even swallowing, even breathing, becomes a problem and so you end up in a wheelchair with a tube down your throat. All that just to stay alive?” He shakes his head. (71)

Malo the salesman

“We’re selling Doomsday. The end of the world. It’s either the bomb or global warming or maybe some pandemic or other. You take your choice. All three are on the schedule. If the Americans don’t blow up the world first, then you can rely on climate change or the demon virus, bet your life on it, or your kids’ lives, or their kids’. There’s a neat little pictogram Sylvester’s designed. It’s a graph line, basically, and by the time you get to the bottom of the page, we’re all dead. Scary stuff, Mum.”

“Unless you have a super yacht.” (87)

Enora forgets ‘no comment’

“You couldn’t be more wrong.”

“About McFaul?”

“About everything.” (236)