Ann-Marie MacDonald doesn't disparage Oprah, but don't mistake her for a literary lightweight
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees is the all-time best-selling debut novel by a Canadian and it deserves to be. Her Can lit is both accessible and glamorous, two qualities for which we aren’t usually recommended and that offend all the right people.
Her most recent effort, The Way the Crow Flies, follows Madeleine McCarthy, the daughter of an Acadian mother and a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot father who is transferred in the early ’60s from Germany to a base in mid-Ontario. These are the (loose) facts of MacDonald’s own childhood. And with her wide-angle eye for detail and incisive intelligence, it’s a world she both beautifully and tenderly renders and eviscerates.
Like her breakout novel, The Way the Crow Flies is a tome (it’s over 700 pages long) and it’s encyclopedic. Even her "sources and acknowledgements" run to over four pages – she culls as readily from Acadian folk tunes and Leonard Cohen as Henry Mancini and T.S. Eliot. The book itself is at once a spy intrigue and a historical melodrama, as MacDonald follows the reverberations of historical change, transposing the larger political tensions of the Cold War onto a fraught family setting.
One might expect MacDonald to have a certain ironic detachment from the mores and scenes of the early ’60s, but instead, there’s a sense that she is intrepid, exploring the world’s complexity through her characters. "There’s a naiveté about the times, a goodwill and optimism, I think, which was crucial to express – but on the other side, there was all this denial about everything, from the domestic to the global," she says. "With the technologies that [those in charge] were developing, everyone could be annihilated in a matter of days."
Perhaps the secret to MacDonald’s popularity has something to do with her identity as a mannishly sleek lesbian mother who blue-haired matrons from Topeka, Kansas proclaim as their hero on TV talk shows.
Certainly, MacDonald didn’t pull a Jonathan Franzen when she was taken up by Oprah’s book club – in fact, the idea that a writer might be above commodification is repulsive to her. "It’s sexist, simple as that, because [the book club is seen as being for] women," she says. "I don’t always agree with the book selection, but so what? Getting down off the high horse is fairly easy to do. If the Oprah people wanted a shot of me walking down the beach at sunset, what do I care? I used to be an actor."
This said, MacDonald is hardly an airport-paperback-quality writer, even if Fall on Your Knees has sold more copies than any other Canadian novel. She is, though, a bit of a literary Trojan horse by her own admission. "I don’t write in a socio-political void, and no one lives in one," she says. "It was actually pretty Machiavellian the way I did the lesbian subplot in Fall on Your Knees, because nothing gay happens until two-thirds of the way though, when the reader is already in the book. I’m not gonna say, ‘You can’t come in to my fortress because you’re not gay.’ If I expect people to go out and break bread with my characters I can’t beat them over the head with politics. I really believe it’s as simple as that – tell a good story and don’t treat people like they’re idiots."
3 comments
Having leafed through a few chapters of this book at Indigo! I was overwhelmed by a primal need to wallop Her Oprahness across the side of her head with it. Why? Well, other than the many other reasons that one feels rightly compelled to smack her preaching, moralizing yap shut of course, I suddenly realized that her insipid book club was one of the most annoying things to happen to books as a whole in the last few years. Books like this one, The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald, that are rich and detailed and yes, quite accesible rarely got a break while glorified ‘empowering’ pulp got pushed into the public consciousness like there was no tomorrow.
I’m not saying it rocked my world, frankly the only reason I even read was that I was bored at the time, but I will say that if you like this sort of fem-inclined prose you could do far, far worse. It has a breezy pacing to it that I liked and the characters were well defined. A good start in my book.
I must say that this is one of the better books that I have read in a while. While long, this book is a very accessible read, and is definitely engaging. It is definitely the type of literature that I want to read now that I have time for fiction after finally finishing my Masters and all of the heavy academic reading that went with it. It deals with some very heavy subject matter, and while some subjects are difficult to stomach at times, the reader does not want to put the book down. As a novel, The Way the Crow Flies has many different levels. It is the story of Madeline, a very creative girl who is sexually abused. In many ways, this book is an ethnography of the early 1960s, a time when the world thought very differently from how we do now, a time when the Cold War controlled the lives of many. It also serves as a very interesting mystery with lots of twists and turns. This excellent novel is definitely a must read for not only those who want to support Canadian literature, but for anyone looking for a thoughtful book that puts most of the fluff on the best-seller lists to shame.
I am unsure of whether the people who are commenting on the book have actually read it or are reflexively saying that it is a good book because of the fact that she is canadian as well as the pedigree factor. This is not worth your time or effort . Infact it is so indulgent as to possibly make you sick. Therefore for those with strong constitutions only.