Remind Me

Middle Stories by Sheila Heti (House of Anansi)

I'm reading Sheila Heti's Middle Stories which came out in 2000. Heti writes with that Carver/Hemingway sparseness but few of the constraints of realism. Instead of pure minimalism or rich magic realism, hers is a kind of bare-bones, darkly comic, free-for-all but both full of surprises and laugh out loud funny. She is irreverent and unsentimental but smart and hip. I want to read her new novel, How Should a Person Be because how could you not want to read a book that asks that question in its title and tantalizes you with the hope that the question could be answered in some satisfying way?

Freedom and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd)

I recently read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and found it one of those books that like a new job or love affair or a high fever takes over a huge swath of your life. This obsessive escapist reading is a pleasurable if occasionally oppressive both because the book is such a bipolar feast of great and convincing and moving and accurate passages and deadly, trying too hard, clunky, utterly unconvincing, too political ones.

Reading Freedom has made me want to reread Franzen's previous book, The Corrections, the one he snubbed Oprah over and caused her to get her feelings hurt and cancel her book club. The Corrections, when I read it ten years ago struck me as a near perfect book that really did encapsulate that contemporary moral, emotional, political and personal moment that was the beginning of the new century or millennium. I am recommending The Corrections especially to myself because I need to reread it to get back exactly how it achieves so brilliantly what Freedom so frustratingly almost achieves but doesn?t quite.

Nemesis by Philip Roth (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

The book currently on my night table that I loved the most is Nemesis, by that great misogynist genius, the male, American, nearly Octogenarian writer Philip Roth. Nemesis is about the polio outbreak in New Jersey in 1944. The story is told in simple, plain, terrifying language. It is a tale about what happens to courageous people when their courage fails them. It is a book about character in the moral sense of the word and about dealing with adversity and how we tell ourselves stories about who we are and what our lives mean and what happens when we can't live up to these versions of ourselves. Nemesis is about superstition, prejudice, helplessness, hope and despair but mainly about this one short, athletic Jewish guy, Bucky, who has everything going for him except that he has lousy eyesight so he isn't allowed to enlist and become a war hero or die trying. Instead he is on the home front working as a sports supervisor in the local summer program, trying to keep the kids occupied and everyone calm as their little suburban world is ravaged by polio. I love the clarity and directness of Nemesis, but also that it addresses so many of the big themes: character, fate, love, prejudice, identity and the smallness of our lives but how, of course, they mean everything to us.

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Melissa Steele won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer at the 1999 Manitoba Book Awards. She has taught Creative Writing at the University of Manitoba, acted as a mentor with the Manitoba Writers' Guild and worked as a radio journalist. Her fiction has appeared in journals including Prairie Fire, Zygote, and City Magazine. She is the author of two story collections, Donut Shop Lovers and Beautiful Girl Thumb, both from Turnstone Press. She lives in Winnipeg and is currently Writer-In-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library.

Find out more about the Winnipeg Public Library's Writer-In-Residence program, including how you can submit work to Melissa for comment and critique, here.