Happy Meridian

Tuesday's car errands had me between Granville and Burrard, heading west along a chronically unremarkable section of town that, because of Broadway Line construction, has passed from anonymity into witness protection. Only at Arbutus did things come into focus, namely Fletcher's Cleaners, and a couple of blocks west of it, Tanglewood Books, where I stopped to look through its very small but always rewarding DVD collection.

Tanglewood has two narrow 7'-high shelves at the ends of two fifty foot-long units that allow the store its three aisles. The shelves face the cashier's desk by the door and are marked RECENT, I believe, a sign I thought referred to RECENTly acquired used books but are in fact new books. I've always found the books on these shelves to be uncannily in tune with the times (as the times appear to me), and I said as much to the clerk who told me it is the owner who does the selecting, and he'll be happy to hear it.

I purchased two new books from these shelves, and as is my habit, begin reading both at once. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) I had first purchased at the Granville Book Company the year it came out, at the recommendation of one of its co-operators, Christopher Mooney, but never got past the judge's heckling of the evangelist, while Happy Hour (2020) by Marlowe Granados was published by my friend Martha Sharpe, the first book in her and Emily Keeler's Flying Books Publishing joint, though the copy in my hands is the Verso edition from the following year.

Separated by more than a third-of-a-century, these books are even further apart in form and content, a reading experience that allowed for a dream that had, for a fleeting moment, Cormac McCarthy dragged around a mid-2000s Brooklyn by Happy's Hour's we-know-better besties Gala and Isa, and Marlowe Granados dragged around an 1840s American southwest by Blood Meridian's The Kid. Although I didn't dream to the end of these scenarios, I didn't need to. We know it's never ending. It's just enough to think it so.

Summer Reading

My novel reading of late has been based on chance encounters. I found Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) at a small thrift store on Kingsway; Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) at the Value Village on Victoria Drive; and Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (1985) in the People's Co-op Bookstore "Loonie Cart" (actually, Kim from Paperhound noticed it first but gave it to me when I said I have always wanted to read it).

Something common to all three novels is a woman in love. In Tess, the woman is Tess, who loves the proud and high-minded Angel Clare; in A Farewell to Arms, it is Catherine, a British army nurse, who loves Frederic, an American lieutenant in the Italian Army Ambulance Corp; and in Slash it is the activist Maeg, whom Slash meets after his (final) return home. All three women pass away by the novel's end: Tess is executed for killing the man who convinced her that her husband (Angel) would never return to her; Catherine dies after a difficult childbirth; and Maeg is killed in a car crash.

Of the three novels, the death of Maeg hit me the hardest. I knew something was coming, but with a third-of-a-page remaining (before the "Epilogue"), I relaxed, thought otherwise. Then, out of nowhere, Slash tells us:

"Two days later, Maeg came home in a box. A car had hit theirs and killed her and her two friends."

Something about the suddenness of Maeg's passing, and the matter-of-fact -- if not harsh -- response by Slash. But Armstrong knows what she is doing and this, now that I think about it, is an instance of a form and tone consistent with the structure of a character and the world this character has made of himself -- in words.

I am sorry Maeg had to die to make it so. But that's life, right? At least it was in the early-1980s, when Armstrong was writing Slash. Had she started writing this book today I wonder if the story might be written from Maeg's perspective.