Utopia by Heidi Sopinka

“She’s driving a speed addict’s car in an inside-out shirt, on painkillers, with a hand wrapped in gauze, on her way to find her husband’s dead ex-wife. If she concentrates hard enough, these things will snap into a logical pattern” (146).

If you find these two sentences enticing, then you might be inclined to read Heidi Sopinka’s novel Utopia. In the first section of her novel, we are introduced to two central characters: Billy and Romy, conceptual artists in 1970s America. Billy is a successful artist, primarily by virtue of being male and stealing some of his best known works from Romy. Romy, meanwhile, is taking on ambitious experiential works about light and has a track record of projects that seem in conversation with real-life artist Marina Abramović. Romy has not been as successful and the reason is because she’s a woman. In the opening twenty pages or so of the book, we discover that Romy is a new mother to Billy’s child and we find them all at an artist party getting sloppily drunk. It is on that night that Romy falls to her death, and it’s never quite certain Billy is innocent of murdering her.

From there, we flash forward to Paz, another budding artist and Billy’s second wife. The novel then becomes a sort of inverted version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Sopinka has the good sense to acknowledge directly. While Paz is in conversation with her friend, she starts the conversation, “Last night I dreamed —” and her friend interrupts, “That you went to Manderley again” (23). For those unfamiliar with the novel, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and the novel’s unnamed narrator is haunted by the dead and perfect Rebecca. She feels she is forever in her shadow. Sopinka’s Paz goes through a similar experience, feeling overlooked for her art and by her partner, remembering Romy as an incredible force. As a result, she feels a sense of unreality hovering over her: “I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was in an apocalyptic wall of flames” (23). She then insists that her friend touch the table, and Essa tells her, “Nothing is wrong with this table.” Paz, in turn, “has an uneasy feeling that this does not feel like real life, exactly” (23). When Billy leaves for an exhibition elsewhere and leaves Paz alone at home with his daughter, combined with the fact that she finds Romy’s old diaries, is a perfect storm for her to descend into paranoid speculation and dissociative behaviours.

As the book progresses, Paz becomes less and less certain of herself and more resentful of the gender dynamics in her relationship. Here’s a passage after making love with Billy:

After, she looks over at Billy sleeping. How can he always sleep? She’s always flopping around like a fish that’s been caught. She sits on the bed holding her knees to her chest, wishing she still smoked. Her eyelids flicker. She’s taken a sleeping pill and is fighting it. The curtains move in the breeze and she gets up, hearing a little clicking noise that she follows downstairs, walking slowly. She sits on the couch, the sound of crickets loudly coming through the windows. After a few minutes she walks out onto the porch. In her half-sleep state, she thinks of him sleeping above. He gets to come and go, sleep with her, not give anything away. She lets it happen, but still she can’t help thinking how much power he has. He told her he was glad to be back, and she believed him. But what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again. (114)

The passage captures that sleepy existentialism and morose midnight reflections I’m sure most people have experienced. Sopinka effectively captures that kind of hyperawareness that happens towards night. Paz’s restlessness is very true to life, and the final lines of the passage punctuate the scene really beautifully: “what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again.”

So let’s start again. Utopia is, in some ways, two novels at once. On the one hand, it’s a thrilling and suspenseful mystery: what happened to Romy? On the other hand, it’s a kind of künstlerroman for Paz to discover who she is as an artist. In some ways, it matches the tonal register of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi or Second Place by Rachel Cusk. It’s also like two novels in that it alternates between being tantalizingly uncertain and bludgeoningly direct.

Both of the registers have their merits, but I’m more inclined towards the mysterious, paranoid side of the equation. In that respect, the relationship between Paz and Romy is most effective. Paz lives in Romy’s shadow, who had lived in Billy’s shadow, and now finds herself obsessed with her husband’s dead wife. Paz cannot escape her jealousy when she finds Romy’s diary, but also must grapple with the guilt of having read it:

The next time she opened it, she found a thin notebook with pale-blue lines, writing of Romy’s detailing works in progress with a kind of murderous compression that verged on poetry. There was a scrap of paper wedged in as a bookmark that fell into her lap. Paz unfolded it. In Billy’s writing, it said ONLY YOU. Her stomach contracted. The words seemed to leap out at her, bringing a flush of jealousy, and then shame at herself for having looked at them. (25)

First of all, I like the characterization of Romy’s writing as “murderous compression that verged on poetry.” The terse note from Billy that says “ONLY YOU” is just the right phrase to inspire that jealousy in Paz; she is another, which is a serious problem for the circle of women artists that accuse Paz of stealing Romy’s life (including her work). Yet, in flashbacks we see that Romy and Paz seem to have their own special connection, opening up to each other in ways that they typically do not (despite Paz’s completely awkward fan-girling)..

In addition to the ambiguity of whether Paz is married to a murderer, Sopinka turns the screw further when Paz starts receiving postcards from Romy. Romy is supposed to dead, but is her death all a performance piece? There are a number of details that throw question on her death; supposedly only one person saw her body. She had also discussed plans for a big artistic project that takes place in the desert. These tidbits, along with the fact that postcards are arriving to Paz with succinct yet ominous messages, create a great dramatic tension. Is Paz part of a twisted game that Romy is playing? Will she emerge from the shadows to show that her death was all part of a performance piece? After all, she fell to her death and had already taken photos of ‘falling’ (which Billy stole and got credit for).

I opened with the passage of Paz driving into the desert. She accidentally severs her finger, and then drives into the desert to follow a lead on the postcard. Paz follows Romy’s footsteps, which again feels conceptual, and then discovers more and more clues before finding Romy’s final artistic project and sharing in communion with it. I won’t spoil more at this point, because that core mystery is finely wrought.

The other component of the book is a direct commentary on the art world that leaves no room for ambiguity. Setting the book in the 1970s is a smart move in that respect, and there’s a clear pattern of male artists getting away with all kind of misogyny while women are left debating how to make it in the art world. There are some hardline views and debate amongst the women, who at times cannibalize one another and at others try to challenge the fundamentally competitive nature of a patriarchal art world.

Towards the end of the book, Billy is taken to court and questioned about Romy’s death. The presentation is excellent; the narration alternates between court transcripts and Paz’s masterwork art project. Going back and forth every few sentences has a great dramatic flare and it’s an effective culmination to multiple storylines. The court transcripts routinely downplay the importance of art in women’s lives and to pathologize women’s experiences. Here are a few examples:

THE DECEASED’S FUTURE PLANS FOR EXHIBITIONS, HER GUGGENHEIM GRANT, AND THE CREATION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT HAVE BEEN OFFERED UP BY THE PROSECUTORS TO RULE OUT ANY NOTION OF SUICIDE. (OF NO CONSEQUENCE.) 

[...]

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE DECEASED WAS GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OUTBURSTS OVER MINOR OCCURRENCES AND WAS PRONE TO HYSTERIA, PARTICULARLY AS A POST-PARTUM FEMALE. (ADMISSABLE.)

[...]

WITNESSES SAY SHE LIVED FOR HER WORK. (HEARSAY.)

[...]

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL REPUTABLE SOURCES, THE DECEASED’S WORK HAD, QUOTE UNQUOTE, DEATH VIBES TO IT. (215)

The importance of Romy’s work is downplayed as being of no consequence and that she lived for her work is mere hearsay. What does get accounted for by the court is her post-partum depression and that her work supposedly had “death vibes” (which is a hilarious critique and hits too close too home for casual art commentary).

I’ve not presented the climactic moment for Paz that is interwoven with the court case. In part, it’s because I feel like it ought to be experienced. The other component is that, all things considered, it felt a bit saccharine. Towards the end of the book, there are a lot of feel-gooderies and optimistic moments that don’t entirely hit the mark. It’s a bit of a shame because so much of the book is well-written and the tensions in the text feel a little too easily resolved for effective payoff. 

In terms of style, Sopinka is often rich in description and imagery. An early passage in the book really got me invested in her rich language: “From the porch, [Paz] watched the lawn losing its green, like a lens tightening. Bodies of flies piled at the windowscreens. She began to wander when Flea was sleeping, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. She’d move through the rooms looking over her shoulder, with the methodical self-absorption of a thief, even though she knew Billy wouldn’t be home for hours and that it wasn’t possible for the kind of truth she was looking for in a drawer” (25). The image of a lens tightening is fantastic, especially given the artists’ work with photography. Paz’s characterization with “methodical self-absorption of a thief” adds to the awkward tension of her relationship. Elsewhere, in fact from the passage that started the review, Paz captures the spirit of a manic artist beautifully: “Paz is suddenly ravenous. She fishes around but she’s already finished most of what’s on the passenger seat. She kicks off her sandals and drives in her bare feet. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror and sees that her shirt is inside out. The heat makes the scenery look almost two-dimensional. It gives it a radical geometry” (146). At the end of that section, there is some great imagery about the two-dimensional desert and its “radical geometry.”

Throughout the book, since the artworks are often so connected to place, there is a lot of description of the setting. There’s a transcendent kind of moment when Paz tracks down Romy’s work with light—which actually reminded me, partially, of an art work I saw in New York where there was a crisp cut square of sky. In any case, Sopinka’s descriptions offer some rich material. The book offers some great visuals.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a short section that wraps things up. There’s a twist to the book similar to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise which is fine, though not quite as dramatic or mind-blowing as Choi’s novel. The bulk of the book stands on its own well, but the final section adds a few more dimensions and solidifies the feminist impulse of the text.

Overall, I was really impressed with Utopia. There is a lot in the book to like, and even love. The central mystery of the book really finely developed. The characterization in the book is really effective, which leads to strong relationships between characters. The writing is generally strong, if overly ‘clean’ towards the end. Heidi Sopinka is one of the writers I’ve read for the first time this year and is one of my “new writers to watch.”

Happy reading!

Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers by Candace de Taeye

It’s always a bit awkward reviewing local poets that I can conceivably encounter in public. The stakes somehow feel higher and that I need to offer a more thoughtful review. I hope I can do justice to Candace de Taeye’s Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers. It’s a collection of poems divided into a few sections. The first is the titular section, followed by “Blue Collar, Red Hood,” “I, House,” and “For Sale – An Addendum.” The first section recounts relationships marred by tragedy, the second is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, the third an extended metaphor of house and heart, and the final is a reflection on selling a home and moving away.

One of the early standouts in the collection is the poem “Alice” which sets the scene with an opening couplet: “the isolation of finches made famous the tiny islands / evolving independently on the dead ends of rural roads” (5). The poem then describes a budding relationship, where “she was kind, his second choice,” sort of a bleak thought, but followed up with tenderness: “but 60 years later he learned to cook / for her.” The poem describes the relationship between the speaker and the central figure of the poem: “she once scolded me, my dirt bike scaring off migratory birds and a / lost racing pigeon” (5). de Taeye follows up the line with a gorgeous and evocative turn of phrase: “I crafted a wreath of limp songbirds out of spite” (5). The images that follow offer a cohesive package: “gravestones spring up, granite volcanoes, ashes buried” (5). She refers back to “the first choice and the pilot son-in-law” and then comments on “maps discretely embroidered into bomber jacket linings” (5), which again is a great image to offer insight into characters at a glance. In discussing his ashes, “that summer we smoked his humidor clean” (5). I like that poem in particular because it establishes such a rich backstory for the characters in just a short set of lines.

The poem “Green Screen” shares in the strength of “Alice,” offering rich turns of phrase alongside a clear and distinct narrative. The opening lines alone are excellent: “the passage of time layered semi transparent. every boy I’ve ever / kissed here at some point along the trail. Land marking epochs” (7). I’m a sucker for conversations about time and the storied memories that are implied just below the surface. The poem continues, “unspooled familiar static pulling my foot beats along a magnetic cas- / sette ribbon retraced near daily for two dogs or 20 years” (7). I like how de Taeye proposes different methods for measuring time: the standard, years, and the uncommon—dogs. The idea of walking on memories like an unspooled magnetic cassette ribbon is a great image, particularly because of the magnetism implied in traveling the path. Plus, the very image is a callback to an obsolete technology—from roughly 20 years ago, appropriately. The notion of a “green screen” referenced in the title is not the filmic backdrop, but the natural world: “occasionally I’m still present here but most days it’s faded / some would argue the forest is always a background” (7). From there, the narrator comments on taking photos, the most used feature on the camera being macro and she frames the light while taking pictures of small things, like spiders and mushrooms. You’ll notice some similar language to “Alice” in the final lines—ash, maps, tiny islands: “I file away a cache of maps, sand, ashes and tiny rocks of significance / from this forest and all the tiny islands to come” (7).

One of the highlights and challenges of the collection is that there are such echoes and connections between poems. The benefit is that, when reading the collection as a whole, the poems elevate one another. The downside is that some of the poems don’t really ‘work’ when taken out of context. Such an example is in the poem “proprioception”, which recounts a definition in a terse four lines:

        from Latin proprius
meaning “one’s own” “individual” and perception
is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body
relating to stimuli produced and perceived within an organism (48)

This poem provides a good idea for an unclear word, and taken on its own would be unlikely to stir up much emotion. It’s only when taking a look at the following poem, “exoskeleton,” that proprioception serves its purpose. “exoskeleton” talks about “steadily / becoming your body // not just a heart / this space an extension / of your experience // nourish and entertain yourself / inside me / beloved parasite //// I can insulate a nude /unkempt/sickly you //// as I breath [sic?] with seasons / floors and window panes adjusting” (49). We’re going to get a little bit complex here. First, we ought to recognize that these poems appear in the “I, House” section of the collection. The start of “I, House” replaces the phrase “Home is where the heart is” by saying that the heart is the home. So, here, the metaphor is about a house growing around the resident, the “parasite.” So, we see proprioception in action, where the house reacts to its internal stimuli and grows around it, “floors and window panes adjusting” to the resident’s breathing. Without the context of the proprioception poem, the “exoskeleton” would not really stand on its own—conceptually, it’s a brilliant move.

I think what prevented me from being fully immersed in the collection is some of the ambiguity that arises when connections are missing. This sometimes happens at the level of the sentence, where the connective tissue of punctuation and conjunctions has been removed, progressing in a more impressionistic mode. For me, I found some of this presentation more perplexing than necessary. I’ll try to offer an example here with the poem “salmon tangent,” where there are some areas of connective tissue that appear to me to be missing or ambiguous:

no one is watching you
tossing ghost dimes
to the koi/carp/no salmon
against the current
dragons
change into golden rolls
        demons drunk
        neighbor - H- - - - - - -!
        increases the height of the
    
         falls often slur dam(n) the potential
         buyers wishing phrased right of way

100 years takes over 3 months

most fish are retracing a
couple straying up/changing shape/getting desperate
falling a part a little maki at the local sushi place one last time (61)

To be clear, there are actually a number of things I like about the poem and I think the central idea is clear. There are several parts of the poem, though, where there is an ambiguous connection between clauses that I don’t think serves the poem very well, although perhaps it plays into the idea that buyers’ expectations are inconsistent. For example, the “koi/carp/no salmon” is ambiguous. Is the ‘no’ an interruption that corrects to salmon, or is it saying there is no salmon? With the word “current,” it is unclear whether that is a noun or an adjective. The noun would make sense, contextually. As an adjective, it could also be that there are current dragons that are changing into something new. Similarly, when talking about “the “demons drunk,” similarly it’s unclear if it’s being used as a verb or a noun. Towards the end, “increases the height of the // falls often slur dam(n) the potential / buyers wishing phrased right of way” is very obscure to me. The falls might be little waterfalls in the pond. I don’t know what to make of “buyers wishing phrased right of way.” I do like the twist at the end that moves by association from a koi pond to visiting the local sushi place before moving away. It’s darkly comic and I like it.

Speaking of darkly comic, there’s a poem in the collection called “a wedding” that is similar to Margaret Atwood’s fish hook poem in both tenor and delivery. de Taeye writes, “Maimed birds carried over the threshold / concussed brides in the maw of the cat through the dog’s door” (42).

All this to say that sometimes the poems felt more obscure than I would have liked. Even when referring to the love interests in the poems there are “The Arborist” and “The Actor”. Other characters are named, so I don’t see why they couldn’t have been given names—it felt weirdly mythic, and it just didn’t land for me in that respect.

Overall, there are some really brilliant moves in the collection that demonstrate an ambitious poetic vision. Maybe it’s my own jealousy, but sometimes the poems just seem too high brow for my own understanding, so the collection didn’t consistently resonate with me. Still, I’m happy to know that I live amongst such ambitious and thoughtful poets.

Happy reading, everybody!

The Haunted House of Plautus

    The first time I moved into a house that was not my parents’ was around 2009. It was an attic bedroom in a student house in Kingston, and when I went into the closet I discovered a set of history textbooks someone had left behind, sometimes with post-it notes still embedded. One of those books was an anthology, Classics in Translation Volume II, edited by Paul MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up the book so many years later, but the first play in the collection is The Haunted House of Plautus, elsewhere titled Mostellaria.

    Most of us, I think of classics as exclusively Greek tragedies, but Plautus offers here a Latin comedy. You know that trope in movies and TV where the kids are having a house party and then the parents come home unexpectedly and everyone has to hide and pretend there was no party? Well, that’s The Haunted House. Philolaches is a young man whose father, Theopropides, has been abroad for three years. While he’s been away, Philolaches has been engaging in debauchery with his friends, hosting alcohol-fueled ragers. He has also paid to have a sex worker become his exclusive mistress. When they discover that his father has returned, the house goes into a panic and Tranio, one of their slaves, has to take action.

    Tranio develops a plot that requires more and more effort to sustain. He tells everyone to lock themselves inside the house and then when Theopropides returns, Tranio emerges to warn him that the house is haunted and that by even knocking on the door, he may be cursed. It’s like an episode of Fraser from there, where one lie requires another, requires another, requires another, requires another. Tranio is nearly a comic version of Iago, praising the value of lying as he digs himself in deeper. Philolaches owes a lender money for all the booze and Tranio develops a plot to have Theopropides pay off the debt because—oh, it’s not for booze or buying the freedom of a sex worker—it’s because the house was haunted, so they bought the neighbour’s house at a huge discount. When Theopropides wants to go into the house, Tranio has to approach the neighbour and say that Theopropides is looking to do some renovations and wants to inspect the house. Luckily, he’s able to get in and inspect without too many questions, but the tension of the play is that the lie is ready to unfold at any moment. It’s a fun, short little piece that tells an essentially sitcom-esque story. I think it’s hard to genuinely connect with a piece so old. Our expectations of stories have changed over time, and so there’s always a bit of a distance (cf. Irving Howe’s History and the Novel). I think comedies in particular are difficult to sustain over a long period, but the comedy comes primarily through the situation rather than the language, so The Haunted House maybe has an advantage in that respect.

    Structurally, the play is pretty interesting. The opening scene of the play is an interaction between the city slave and the country slave to set the stage. Throughout the play, we get songs (?) where characters offer their life philosophies. There are also tangents that take up a significant amount of time, the most notable of which is a lengthy exchange between Philematium (Philolaches’ mistress) and her elderly maid Scapha with Philolaches eavesdropping. It’s a comic moment where Philolaches offers comment on Scapha’s advice and he’s getting increasingly annoyed with her.

    Other than Tranio, Philolaches is probably the character about whom we learn the most. In his life philosophy song, he explains how life is like a house that needs constant repair. He displaces responsibility from himself and blames his father for not maintaining him well and allowing cracks to form in him. In those cracks, love seeps in and now he sees himself as no good, giving up his life for his lover. It’s an insight into Athenian life, which is also noted in the introduction by the translator, about how much influence parents ought to have on their children.

    I wouldn’t put Plautus on the same level as current playwrights, but I was surprised by how ‘modern’ the work seems relative to other narratives. Perhaps it’s because the play had to appeal to lowest common denominator, but it actually has stayed an entertaining premise, even if it’s not going to change my world.

    Short play, short review. Happy reading!