REVIEW: Gossip: The untrivial pursuit

By Anne Kingston - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Reading Gossip, it’s hard to decide what is more intriguing: the book’s clever insights into gossip’s workings or the volume of scuttlebutt shoehorned into its 219 pages. Epstein’s narrative bristles with items about the identity of Annie Leibovitz’s sperm donor, Harold Pinter’s “pukey little poems,” Elizabeth Taylor’s paranoia about her pubic hair, and sundry stories of adultery, incest and plagiarism. There’s even a tepid, recycled nugget about Conrad Black on page 19 that unintentionally illustrates Epstein’s theory that gossip’s power is diluted when spread.

Epstein gossips about gossip with the same elegant erudition that animated his earlier studies of snobbery, ambition and friendship—less concerned with profundity than entertainment. The author, unsurprisingly, is a defender of gossip, or what Earl Wilson, the granddaddy of American gossip columnists, called “hearing something you like about someone you don’t.” Gossip is often false and malicious, Epstein avers, but it’s also “a species of truth,” which is why oppressive regimes block it. It serves as a social connector and occasionally even provides useful information. By exposing behaviour people want hidden—vanities, foibles, hypocrisies—gossip enforces community norms. That we see in his profiles of “great gossips of history,” who include Saint-Simon, the gossip laureate at Versailles during the court of Louis XIV, and Matt Drudge, who calls gossip “unedited information.”

Epstein is not an unequivocal gossip cheerleader, however, recognizing that it’s a distraction that increasingly dumbs down intellectual life. He’s also not pleased about the extent to which it now informs media coverage of news, as leaks, or “well-aimed gossip in political dress,” have new power. The Internet also intensifies gossip’s reach and harm—abetted by a celebrity culture that churns out temporary deities to dish about.

Epstein, who’s more at ease discussing Walter Winchell than Perez Hilton, doesn’t plumb the complexities of gossip as modern marketing tool. But his own name-dropping “diary” woven through the text shows how gossip can be marshalled to elevate one’s insider status and, better, pave the way to a book about gossip destined to be gossiped about itself.

Heather’s fix

By Anne Kingston - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

On Nov. 8, 2011, Canada’s literati gathered in Toronto for their Oscars, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, an event designed to bolster book box office and buzz. Yet the hot topic as guests tucked into their tuna tartare was not literary but corporate—a new plot twist at Indigo Books & Music Inc. Hours earlier, the country’s dominant book retailer announced that Kobo Inc., the e-reader in which it held a 51 per cent stake, had been sold to Rakuten Inc., a Japanese company, for US$315 million. When regulatory hurdles are cleared, Indigo would net an estimated US$150 million.

That Indigo was jettisoning its much-publicized e-asset, one publishers had scrambled to accommodate, was puzzling—at least to those seeking a consistent narrative. Founded in 2009 to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, Kobo was Indigo’s fastest growing division, though only a small fraction of revenues. Minutes after announcing the divestiture, Indigo reported second quarter 2011 results, a loss of $40 million. Sales at Kobo were up 219 per cent over a year earlier, whereas those at indigo.ca rose 1.1 per cent and store sales were down—4.3 per cent at Indigo and Chapters superstores.

Months earlier, in June 2011, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman had talked up the digital/dead-tree book synergies to the Toronto Star: “Indigo is in the business of encouraging people to read,” she said. “We don’t care if people want to read digitally or physically.” A month before that, she predicted e-books would grow to 40 per cent of Indigo’s total book sales. Yet by November, the digital arm was history, shed in part because it would take an infusion of over $100 million to make it globally competitive, and the company was refocusing on a more high-risk area: non-book, or “lifestyle products.” In spring 2011, Reisman told the Globe and Mail that books would decline to 50 per cent of Indigo’s sales in a few years from 75 per cent. “Our stores are about the life of a book lover,” she stressed.

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This year’s winners: the game changers

By Anne Kingston - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

ARCADE FIRE

The once-fringe Montreal band was handed a scad of mainstream music hardware for their third studio recording, The Suburbs, which was praised for expressing familiar big themes with greater bounce and lightness. The multi-talented ensemble was rewarded with Album of the Year at the Junos and the Grammys and International Album and Best International Group at the Brit Awards.

MARK CARNEY

It’s a bird, it’s a plane—it’s Solvency Man, a.k.a Mark Carney, newly named chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international body that oversees the global economy. The 46-year-old Bank of Canada governor is an ideal fiscal superhero—a Ph.D. economist and former investment banker, he’s also a disciplined, fit marathon runner. Who knows better that slow and steady wins the race?

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THIS YEAR’S EPIC FAILURES

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Newsmakers of the Year: Will and Kate

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Chiasson/CP

In a year riven by political turmoil, economic malaise and rioting in the streets, a young, fresh-faced couple formally titled the duke and duchess of Cambridge (but affectionately known as Will and Kate) provided ongoing romantic relief—and distraction. The photogenic pair delighted the masses and were a boon to the media that tracked their every move, real and speculative. Their wedding gave the British economy—along with fascinator sales—a bump. More, it injected a much-needed adrenalin boost to the British royal family itself. Dutifully, smilingly, the duo restored a patina of glamour and vitality to an institution tarnished by divorce, scandal and tragedy.

Details of the preparations for their April 29 nuptials were meted out like a slow IV morphine drip on www.princeofwales.gov.uk: the Westminster Abbey venue, the guest list, the name of the wedding cake decorator. An estimated two billion people tuned in to watch the ceremony, a pitch-perfect spectacle of royal pomp amid government-mandated austerity. Millions clogged the streets, among them Jean Seaton, a professor of media history at the University of Westminster, who views the occasion as a rare moment of British unity: “People were enjoying it as a kind of celebration of themselves,” she says.

Part of the cheer stemmed from the faith that the couple’s love match was real, not staged like the prince’s parents’. The union of the blond son of a beloved princess to a comely commoner also suggested Buck House was evolving with the times. There was no discussion of virginity: the couple had lived together for eight years. The bride, derisively dubbed “Waity Katie” by the press before her engagement, proved her mettle over the years, coping with paparazzi and gossip. Her unwavering determination to play the role she now has, once a source of criticism, is her greatest strength—one necessary to navigate an institution known to destroy the women who enter it. “It’s a much more negotiated, tested entry [than Diana’s],” says Seaton, the BBC’s official historian. “She knows—to the extent she can—what she’s getting into.”

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT MACLEANS’ OTHER NEWSMAKERS OF 2011

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Hurry up and wait for a CCSVI strategy

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 4:51 PM - 0 Comments

Update 2: The second reading of Bill C-280 is now scheduled for Thursday, December 8 at 6:30.

Update: The second reading and debate for Bill C-280 was pushed off the House of Commons schedule on Nov. 30 due to other business. It hasn’t been rescheduled. Stay tuned.

CPAC is not always recommended viewing but tonight’s programming is must-see-TV. At 5:30 pm EST (and later in endless loop) Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan’s private member’s Bill C-280 calling for a national CCSVI strategy is set for second reading and debate. (If the House of Commons vote scheduled to begin at 6:15 pm goes past 7:01 pm, private member’s business will be cancelled and rescheduled for another time at the discretion of the Speaker.)

Duncan, a Ph.D. and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, was the Liberals’ public health critic when she initiated the 2010 sub-committee on neurological diseases, which called upon Italian vascular specialist Paolo’s Zamboni to answer questions about his hypothesis that venous malfunctions in the neck and chest are linked to multiple sclerosis—and that venous angioplasty can relieve MS symptoms dramatically. The member for Etobicoke North is calling for CCSVI clinical treatment trials as well as a national tracking program for the estimated thousands of Canadians who’ve traveled offshore for treatment—and have been denied after-care upon return. Continue…

Routine mammograms: evil, necessary, or both?

By Anne Kingston - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:12 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care issued new breast cancer-screening guidelines that have raised questions and stoked debate. The task force recommended women under 50 who are not at high risk of breast cancer forego routine mammograms. It also recommended that the interval time between mammograms for women aged 50 to 69 be extended from every one to two years to every two to three years—unless their doctors suggest otherwise. And, contrary to what women have been told for decades, it concluded women should no longer conduct regular breast self-examinations.

To sort through the confusion, Anne Kingston spoke with Eileen Rakovitch, a radiation oncologist and chair of the breast cancer program at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital.

Q: It seems this debate never ends. Let’s start with mammograms. Radiologists in the U.S. and Canada have disagreed on this in the past: in the U.S., the recommendation is that women over age 40 should have regular mammograms; in Canada, the thinking has been that women at average risk should begin screening at age 50. Continue…

In conversation: Diane Keaton

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Munawar Hosain/Fotos International/Getty Images

Diane Keaton is known for portraying memorable women onscreen—Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie of the same name, Kay Adams Corleone in the Godfather trilogy and Erica Barry in the 2003 hit Something’s Gotta Give. Now, in her new evocative memoir Then Again, the 65-year-old Oscar winner weaves her own life with that of her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.

Q: You’ve written a unique memoir, which is not about you per se but a duet with your mother in which you weave her journals and letters with your life story. What inspired you?

A: Well, my mother died in 2008 and there was this mass of information that she had collected over the years, which included journals and letters and scrapbooks and photo albums, and every single bit of detail you could possibly have on four kids, so it needed to be tended to. I’d had an incident earlier in my life, in the ’70s, where I was using my mother’s darkroom and I came across this journal. So I opened it up and there was a harmless entry saying she had gotten a job at Hunter’s Bookstore and she was excited about this. I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of nice,” and then I moved on, and it said, “You friggin’ bastard,” something like this. I just went, “Okay, that’s it, I don’t want to read this.” I didn’t want to know about my mother’s personal problems.

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REVIEW: Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Just who was Pat Nixon, the proper, self-contained wife of America’s most reviled and disgraced president? Of her inner life—her hopes, her regrets, what was running through her head as her family boarded that plane to California in ignominy—there is scant knowledge. Born Thelma Ryan in 1912, Nixon was one of the few first ladies never to pen a memoir; the closest we get is Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, a chirpy biography written by her daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

Now Beattie, famed for chronicling the cynical post-Nixon generation in fiction, unwraps the hermetically sealed “generic president’s wife” in an intriguing, playful piece of literary performance art that melds fact with fiction to explore her own creative process.

Anyone seeking a fully fleshed “reimagining” of Pat Nixon in the style of American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld’s portrait of Laura Bush, will be disappointed—and perplexed by such chapter titles as “Mrs. Nixon Reads The Glass Menagerie” and “Mrs. Nixon Gets the Giggles.” Beattie, who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Virginia, explores Pat Nixon less as a person than as a textual conundrum: “Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions,” she explains. She ascribes thoughts and opinions to her subject, offers alternative scenarios to actual events, and even injects herself into a story that may or may not be fiction.

More, she cleverly reveals writers’ habits (poets sleep most, she claims) and her own writerly bag of tricks. Metatextual references abound. One chapter depicts Richard Nixon’s marriage proposal in the style of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Another echoes James Joyce’s “The Dead,” rendering Halloween circa 1990 at the Nixons’, where the ex-president greets trick-or-treaters wearing Richard Nixon masks.

A writer of less stature and skill would be branded self-indulgent for eclipsing her subject so boldly. But expect Beattie to be lauded for rescuing Mrs. Nixon from her fate as a Watergate footnote. And she has, in this genre-bending memoir-novel-biography hybrid: now the still-enigmatic Mrs. Nixon is a literary footnote as well.

Italy’s oversexed billionaire buffoon

By Anne Kingston - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tony Gentile/Reuters

It wasn’t the notorious “Bunga, Bunga” hooker orgies that did him in. Nor was it any of the 19 criminal and civil charges over 17 years, including allegations of bribing judges, tax fraud and embezzlement. Nor was he felled from within, like Caesar, or rejected by the vox populi. It took a deus ex machina—global financial markets freaked out over the eurozone debt crisis—to unseat Italy’s scandal-saturated prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Concerns over Italy’s high bond rates, not some kinky bondage escapade, forced the 75-year-old billionaire to resign last week, with less than two years left in his term. As with the mobster Al Capone, who was imprisoned for tax evasion, the train Berlusconi couldn’t hear coming was the one that hit him.

Not that Italians hadn’t grown weary of the Silvio Berlusconi reality show, a grotesque burlesque that dominated—and distracted—national life for decades. His public approval rating, down to 30 per cent, had been in decline since 2009, the year the perma-tanned, pomaded, seal-like “playboy” permanently shifted from satyr to satire. His second wife, Veronica Lari, publicly announced she’d filed for divorce, fed up with her husband “consorting with minors,” and a parade of prostitutes boasted they’d shared paid intimacy with him. The final straw came last February, when Berlusconi was ordered to stand trial for paying for sex with an underage erotic dancer, Karima El Mahroug, who goes by the stage name of “Ruby Heart Stealer.” He was also charged with abusing his office by interfering in a 2010 police investigation when El Mahroug was being held for theft, accused of calling a police station and claiming she was the niece of then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Discontent with the man once dubbed “Il Cavaliere”—the Knight—was evident last month as women took to the streets calling for Berlusconi’s resignation with signs proclaiming “Italy is not a brothel!” Local elections in June saw a leftist mayor voted into power in Milan, Berlusconi’s birthplace and former stronghold. Some 40,000 residents swarmed the Piazza del Duomo chanting “Berlusconi go home” and “Berlusconi, you are finished.” Frustration with Berlusconi’s reign was also on full display after his resignation in Rome last Saturday with the kind of dancing-in-the-streets jubilation seen after the fall of dictators Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi. The analogy is apt: the media tycoon became the world’s first democratic despot by shrewdly exploiting the resources he controlled. Long before he was elected, he’d amassed wealth and cultural power; later, he built on it by nimbly navigating a media-saturated world. The self-styled political saviour was the “first postmodern” politician, says Alexander Stille, author of the 2007 book The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi. “He’s about selling an image, personalizing politics; he’s not about ideas or policy or winning legislative battles,” Stille told Maclean’s.

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REVIEW: On Canaan’s Side

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

How corrosive is grief, 89-year-old Lilly Bere asks at the outset of Barry’s beautiful, elegiac new novel: “Could it be seen in an X-ray? Is it like a rust, a rheum around the heart?” If anyone has cause to ask, it’s Lilly, as she writes her amazing life story in the 17 days after her grandson Bill’s suicide. Lilly’s life, writ against the history of the 20th century, is crammed with loss of staggering proportion. But the death of the young man she raised from age two proves the final, unbearable burden on her heart.

Her life began with loss, with her mother’s death in Wicklow, Ireland. It continued as her Catholic father, head of police under the British regime, became an “enemy of the new Ireland.” Her beloved brother Willie’s death in the Great War set off events forcing Lilly’s lifelong exile from her homeland and family. America brought hope, often dashed. She loved and lost two men in stunning circumstances, worked as a domestic, raised a son, baked a pie for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw wars destroy those she loved.

A lesser writer would have made melodrama. But Barry, whose ability to craft heart-stopping moments is given full flight here, has created a riveting, unsentimental portrait reminiscent of James Agee’s Knoxville: Summer 1915 and James Joyce’s short stories. But Lilly is an original—humble, pragmatic, empathetic and thoroughly Irish with her qualified negatives: “It hadn’t been good news,” she writes, recalling the latest devastation.

As Lilly plays the film reel of her life, it’s “nonsense things, the deepest most important things” that remain—a happy roller-coaster ride, her son Ed’s first word, Bill’s faded blue shorts, sitting on a beach looking at a “strange map of blue veins on my upper legs, a map to nowhere.” She’s a “grateful relic” for what she was given, if not what was taken. “The devil only comes into good things,” she concludes, with an optimism that makes one smile and weep.

Beaver be dammed

By Anne Kingston - Friday, November 4, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Stephen Gregory

Sen. Nicole Eaton had no idea when she stood up in the Red Chamber last week to propose the polar bear replace the beaver as Canada’s national emblem that she was about to mine a national nerve.

And what a geyser she hit. Within hours of her statement, inflamed blog posts and “shocked and appalled” letters to the editor were flowing from the inhabitants of a nation built on lust for the once-fashionable, highly lucrative beaver pelts, one so great the Hudson’s Bay Company adorned its coat of arms with four of the rodents in 1678.

Since then, Castor canadensis has become enmeshed in the mercantile fabric of the country, as apparent in the swift reaction from Michael Budman and Don Green, co-founders of clothing company Roots, which has had a beaver on its logo since 1973, two years before the animal received official emblem status from the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. They immediately launched a “Save the Beaver” petition online, collecting more than 6,000 signatures by early this week. The senator’s remarks also triggered response from foes of the aquatic rodent, rallying a group of 100 Ottawa-area farmers who’ve seen trees destroyed and land flooded by a surging beaver population.

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Beaver, be gone

By Anne Kingston - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 0 Comments

Rick Harris/Flickr

Yesterday, the Canadian Senate took a page from HGTV as Conservative Sen. Nicole Eaton puckishly launched a national “emblem makeover” campaign to replace the industrious, homely beaver with the “majestic and splendid” polar bear as “Canada’s symbol for the 21st century.”

At first glance, the scheme appeared a masterstroke, given concerns over the polar bear’s looming extinction. What better way of squarely facing the ravages of global warming? Sen. Eaton’s gesture even appeared a bold jab at the government that appointed her—one whose record addressing climate-change is an international joke.

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The sleepover dilemma

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 7 Comments

Katrin Thomas/Getty Images

Seven years ago Veronica Redgrave made a decision that many parents wouldn’t even consider. The Montreal-based publicist permitted her 17-year-old daughter to have her steady boyfriend sleep over occasionally. “Our communication was always very open,” says Redgrave, who was raised in a strict British family where sex was not discussed. “She had her own space in the basement. And I respected it.” Her daughter is now 24, a graduate of the London School of Economics and living in Amsterdam. She’s still involved with the same boyfriend.

At the time Redgrave knew her permissiveness was unconventional by North American standards. But now, with the November publication of Amy Schalet’s Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex, it turns out she was “being Dutch.” As Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, reports, nine out of 10 Dutch parents sanction such arrangements, versus the “not under my roof” directive maintained by nine out of 10 American parents.

Schalet interviewed 130 parents and teenagers in both countries to explore the cultural gulf. Dutch parents “normalize” teenage sexuality, Schalet concludes, as a way of maintaining a connection with and continuing to exert an influence over their teenagers. It’s an extension of a Dutch matter-of-fact attitude toward sex ushered in since the ’70s: sex education begins at age four and contraception is readily available. Yet it’s far from an “anything goes” attitude, Schalet writes: Dutch parents have to feel comfortable that their child, generally 16 or 17, is old enough to be sexually active, is using reliable contraception, and is in a stable relationship with someone who will fit into the family unit. Dutch parents also expect teenagers to abstain from sex until they’re ready.

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The trigonometry of tortellini

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

George L. Legendre; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Like many brilliant, if lunatic, brainstorms, the idea for Pasta by Design was hatched late at night over good food as the red wine flowed. Architects George Legendre and Marco Guarnieri, who share an address in London’s Bermondsey district, were dining on spaghetti all’aglio, olio e peperoncino two years ago when talk turned to the mathematics of various pasta shapes. Such inquiry comes naturally to the Paris-born, Harvard-educated Legendre. The 42-year-old principal of IJP Architects uses a “mathematics-based knowledge model” that reduces objects to schematics and trigonometric equations which are then used as a blueprint for everything he makes—from bridges to playground slides.

Why not subject fusilli, orecchiette and linguine to the same scrutiny, they wondered. So Legendre did. The result is an oddly surreal, poetic paean to pasta that invites readers to view it not as a carb smothered under sauce but pure, beautiful form in itself.

Legendre has created a taxonomy of 92 pasta types—from tiny peppercorn-shaped acini di pepe to tubular ziti. The presentation is elegant: on one page, a photograph of the pasta; beside it, its ghostly reproduction in Matrix-like schematics with a trigonometric equation, cross-section and data on its physical properties. A brief note on regional provenance and serving suggestions is also supplied. Curled gramigna, or “little weed,” from Emilia-Romagna, we learn, is best with a chunky sausage or light tomato sauce. As a bonus, Legendre includes a zany three-page pull-out, “Family Reunion Seating Plan,” a phylogenetic diagram of pasta types that’s delightful in its inscrutability.

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Everyone’s a curator now

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images, iStock; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

The verb “curate” has become such an overworked—and distorted—marketing buzzword, it’s now in need of curation itself. Writing about designer Tom Ford’s new cosmetics line in September’s Vogue, Plum Sykes didn’t simply say Ford “selected” the colours in his four-colour eye shadow compacts. No, each compact offers “a complete look curated by Ford,” befitting its US$78 price tag. Even processed foods are treated as objets d’art in the Louvre: Loblaw Companies’ cookbook, The Epicurean’s Companion, part of the launch of their new high-end black label line, boasts “recipes inspired by the thoughtfully curated President’s Choice black label collection.”

“Curation,” from the Latin “to care for,” morphed beyond galleries over a decade ago—from indie music festivals “curated” by Matt Groening, Sonic Youth and the like, to high-end Paris boutique Colette, feted for pioneering the retailer-as-curator concept. Technology, too, paved the way to the “curated” identity on Facebook, iPod playlists and Flickr. It also created the market for “curated consumption,” the term coined by trendwatching.com in 2004 for the growing role style and cultural arbiters have in influencing buying decisions. In the recently published Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators, Steven Rosenbaum argues that huge opportunities exist for businesses able to cull the digital deluge to offer unique “curated” goods, services and experiences for customers. The result is a consumer universe in which credit card companies can be “curators”: Tourism Toronto’s recent “Toronto getaway” promotion, for example, was “curated by The Platinum Card for American Express.” Shopping itself can be an act of curation, Toronto jewellery designer Jane Apor recently told the Toronto Star: “Anyone can wear an Hermès bracelet, but layering it with leather bracelets and a mix of other pieces I’ve picked up on my travels, I’ve curated my own wrist.”

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REVIEW: The marriage plot

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

If the student essay title “The Interrogative Mood: Marriage Proposals and the (Strictly Limited) Sphere of the Feminine” summons a smile and an eye roll (especially the parenthetical part), then Eugenides’s new novel will likely strike a major chord. This baby Bildungsroman traces three characters who meet in the 1980s as students at Brown University: the lovely, rudderless Madeleine Hanna, author of the aforementioned essay; her friend, Mitchell Grammaticus, a twitchy, brilliant religious studies student who believes he and Madeleine are fated to be together; and Leonard Bankhead, the charming, hyper-articulate, manic-depressive lost boy who captures Madeleine’s heart.

Eugenides’s skill depicting disparate worlds with pitch-perfect authenticity and wit is in full force. The former Brown alum captures student life against a backdrop of Talking Heads, impassioned arguments about Jacques Derrida, getting drunk and agonizing over the next big step. They all venture into thorny terrain—Madeleine and Leonard’s stormy marriage, a lithium-doped Leonard exploring the wondrous, complex mating habits of yeast in the lab of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Mitchell wandering the world and landing for a time at Mother Teresa’s home for the dying in Calcutta.

It’s a patchwork, and reads like one at times. Eugenides teases out big ideas like a cat with yarn. Early on, one of the characters makes the observation that all books are about other books, a truism believed ardently by students. It’s definitely true here: the novel’s title itself is derived from a literary term describing 18th- and 19th-century novels focused on complications of courtship that end with the nuptial payoff, once the focus of Madeleine’s research. Eugenides’s bold attempt to reframe the “marriage plot” for the 21st century may not succeed fully, but it’s only a minor failure. He has created an absorbing universe of a book—so much so readers will turn the last page still hoping for more.

The computer as modern art

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 2 Comments

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he did something that would have been counterintuitive for any other consumer-product company CEO: he showed the back of it first. “I’m in love with it,” he said of the elegant, shiny surface reflecting the Apple logo in matte relief. “It’s stainless steel; it’s really, really durable. It’s beautiful.” By then Apple devotees expected such attention to detail from the man in the black mock turtleneck who took computers from geek to chic—the imperative was embedded in his company’s very DNA.

In his 2009 TED lecture talk about inspirational leadership, Simon Sinek observed that Apple challenged the status quo and expressed its ability to think differently precisely by making products that are consistently “beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly.” And certainly the public’s appetite for innovative, human products is reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for Apple products. But Jobs’s greatest design legacy was reframing its parameters in the mass market. As he told the New York Times in 2003, Apple didn’t see design as product veneer: “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The iPod, coveted to the point of theft, exemplified Apple’s fusion of function and form: the technology was revolutionary (“You can put your entire playlist in your pocket,” Jobs boasted), yet every user touch point was carefully considered to be familiar and seem pleasing—its gift-like packaging, playing-card proportions, intuitive scroll wheel, even the tiny clip that prevented its distinctive white earbuds cord from tangling when it was packed up. The Museum of Modern Art put an iPod in its collection and extols the device for raising expectations for all consumer products—and also “stimulating manufacturers to recognize the importance of good design and to incorporate design considerations at the highest levels of their corporate structures.”

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What it’s like to find out your husband is a rapist

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 18 Comments

Courtesy Of Random House Canada

Last year, Shannon Moroney wrote a letter to the wife of convicted rapist and murderer Russell Williams. If anyone could understand the singular hell she was going through, Moroney believed she could. For she too had been blindsided by a spouse who committed a horrific crime. She’d been married only a month when, in November 2005, her 36-year-old husband, Jason Staples, abducted two women and raped them in their Peterborough, Ont., house while she was away at a convention in Toronto. In 2008, Staples was deemed a dangerous offender and imprisoned indefinitely.

But Moroney’s story, as told in her thought-provoking memoir Through the Glass, differs from Williams’s wife in a significant detail: the high school guidance counsellor married Staples knowing violent crime was part of his past. But, madly in love and believing in redemption—and the evidence his crime was a one-time event—she forgave him.

Staples was convicted of second-degree murder in 1988 when he was 18; he served 10 years in prison. When he met the 27-year-old Moroney in 2003, at a subsidized restaurant for low-income patrons in Kingston, Ont., where he worked, he’d been on parole for five years. Moroney, a compassionate woman, was volunteering with her students. She was drawn to Staples’s good looks and intelligence, she writes; minutes after meeting him she noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and wondered if he had a girlfriend. Staples disclosed his past on their first date, explaining he’d killed a female roommate in a sudden fit of rage after she rejected his sexual advances, and would understand if Moroney bolted. She didn’t. Though shaken, she was curious; his candour and remorse impressed her. “I was surprised to find my heart going out to this man, even as I was repulsed by what he had done,” she writes.

She agonized over becoming involved, while admitting she’d “fallen in love.” She spoke with Staples’s psychologist, who said he wasn’t at risk of reoffending. His parole officer called him a model prisoner, “our best guy.” Moroney’s friends and family liked him immediately. The couple moved in together quickly, four months after meeting, and married two years later. Moroney depicts the relationship as blissfully harmonious as they fixed up their house and planned a family.

With the shattering news of Staples’s crimes, Moroney learned she was more than a collateral victim: he had photographed her—and others—in their bathroom with a hidden camera. Yet neither she or her family turned away. The memoir charts how Moroney supported Staples through the justice system while despising his crime and the damage he’d caused. She faced stigma herself: some friends shunned her and she lost her job. The situation became a test of sorts, she writes. “I could tell fairly early on what someone’s character was made of by how they reacted to my story.” The couple divorced in 2009 but remain friends. Staples supported her decision to write the book, and even edited the first few drafts.

The experience inspired new purpose and a career change: Moroney is now a paid speaker and advocate within the field of restorative justice, which focuses on victims, offenders and the community. After fearing she’d never trust and love again, she remarried last year after an eight-month courtship.

Through the Glass is a compelling documentation of a flawed penal system, a nuanced look at the humanity of a violent criminal, and a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance required by romantic love. Most of all, it’s a meditation on forgiveness, which Moroney shorthands brilliantly. “Forgiveness is a process; it’s not a single act,” she writes.

The book raises a myriad of questions, some unanswerable. Sitting in her publisher’s office, a poised and articulate Moroney fields them candidly. She likens Staples’s reoffending to “someone having cancer years ago and you’re told it went away and is never coming back and then it’s stage four,” which reflects her wilful optimism. She also addresses the “How could the wife not know?” speculation. At trial, a repentant Staples admitted he was “wired wrong, specifically sexually.” But their sex life was normal, Moroney insists, although looking back there were signs. Staples suffered from delayed ejaculation, she writes, which he blamed on being institutionalized. He also took long showers. “It’s not like I was naive—little tiny things I picked up became very important later,” she says.

Moroney never heard back from Russell Williams’s wife, which didn’t surprise her. She herself had been deluged with ugly mail after her address was made public. The cases are different, she agrees. Staples reoffended, which subjected her to harsher judgment. “People assume I’m a woman who sought out a violent offender but that’s something I don’t relate to.” She bristles at an “I married a murderer” headline about her memoir that appeared in a magazine. That may be how it appears to the world, but the man she married, she believed, had paid his dues.

There was a lot of anger and confusion to work through. “I’d visit him with a list of questions: ‘Were you ever with prostitutes?’, ‘Did you ever hurt anybody else?’ ” He said no. Many would not have trusted Staples’s reliability by then; she did. Seeing him in a dissociative state in court helped her understand how he could have snapped, she writes.

Why he snapped remains a mystery. Later he revealed that while in prison for murder, he developed a porn addiction and had been gang-raped; he said he’d been sexually abused as a child by his mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder.

Staples didn’t receive any treatment in prison, only assessment, which included monitoring his response to violent porn. She learned that the parole board dealing with his case had no record of his mother’s mental illness. “I knew more about the kids whose timetables I changed,” she says, referring to her job as a guidance counsellor. She wrote the book in part, she says, for victims’ families: “Corrections Canada says one of the most important things for prisoner rehabilitation is family contact. But they make it so difficult to get to the door of a prison—inconvenient hours, they’re located so far away. And when you’re visiting, you’re treated like a criminal yourself.”

Moroney doesn’t see getting involved with Staples as an error in judgment: “Jason wasn’t the wrong choice knowing what I knew, the beautiful life we shared. What happened had nothing to do with my choice. It only had to do with Jason’s choices.” (Her current husband volunteered his financial and legal status when they started dating.)

“People would say, ‘You forgave him once. You’re going to forgive him again?’ as if there should be a maximum. I want people to understand forgiveness is more for the victim. It’s more for me. I didn’t want to make a lifelong commitment to anger and resentment. It’s too much energy.” It’s “practical,” she says. “I could see a long road ahead and asked myself: ‘How am I going to get to a place where I’m capable of being loving, happy, trusting?’ ” That she has reached that point is her payback, she says without smugness. “What better revenge on the person and the system that hurt me so?” ANNE KINGSTON

***EXCERPT FROM THROUGH THE GLASS BY SHANNON MORONEY***

My heart was pounding. I had learned that Jason and I would have a “closed” visit, sealed from each other and from other visitors and inmates, but I still didn’t know what to expect. When I reached the door it clicked open and I entered a tiny room divided in half by a thick sheet of glass extending up from a steel counter. There was a small metal stool bolted to the floor in front of the counter.

I was still getting my bearings when Jason came through the door on the other side of the room—face down, drawn and grim. He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. Was this my husband I was seeing through the glass? Jason looked up, our eyes met, and we both began crying uncontrollably. I put my hands up to the glass.

“Jason . . . ”

But he couldn’t hear me. He pointed to a phone receiver on the wall beside me. He picked up an identical receiver on his side. I cried into the phone, “Jason, what happened? What happened?”

“I don’t know . . . ” He was sobbing, almost unable to speak.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

We stood there for several moments, each of us holding a phone receiver in one hand, the other hand pressed against the glass, our palms together but unable to touch. It was hard to stop crying, but I had a million questions.

First, I asked my mum’s question: “Jason, didn’t you know how much I loved you? How much we all loved you?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry, I didn’t really know.”

As I looked into Jason’s eyes, I recalled a school picture taken when he was six years old, the year his dad died. In it, his face was solemn and his eyes were dark with sorrow and profound loneliness. They were the exact same eyes I was looking into now, 30 years later.

“Jason,” I said, “the police told me you said that you never wanted to see me again—why did you say that?”

The expression on his face changed from sorrow to confusion, and after a moment he said softly, “No, Shanny, I said, ‘My wife never has to see me again.’ ”

I felt a pulse of relief. It was something to hold onto amidst the confusion.

Jason went on to confess that he had been gorging himself on pornography over the weekend while I was away, and that he had gone to see a very violent movie at the theatre. I despise pornography, and I had no idea that Jason even looked at it, let alone the extent to which it was part of his life. He said he’d stuffed himself with junk food that day until he was in pain—something he now admitted he had started doing frequently a few months before, during the night while I slept. I winced as I recalled teasing him about eating too much junk food while I was away.

“How long have these things been going on?” I asked. He said he’d become addicted to pornography while he was in prison the first time. It was something he was ashamed of, and that’s why he’d never discussed it with me before. The issues with food had come and gone to greater or lesser extents throughout his life, beginning in his early teens. The voyeurism was new in the last few months. He explained that he had always known something was wrong with him, but that he convinced himself that he was in control of whatever it was, experiencing long periods of time when he was “unplugged” from his demons, times when there was no “interference with the wires in his brain.” Recently, the addictive behaviours had been building again, though he couldn’t explain exactly why. In agony, I asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m sorry. I was so afraid. I wanted to keep you out of it; to protect you from it. I thought it would go away.” This choice was one of the biggest mistakes of his life, and he knew it. He shook his head. “I see now how wrong I was, and it’s too late.” “You could have told me anything, Jason. I would have done anything to help you. We could have prevented this, if only you had the courage to tell me—or anyone—what was going on inside.”

“I know. I know that now.” He looked strained and without hope. We cried for several minutes, unable to speak. It pained me to find out that Jason had let himself fall into the spiral of this degradation. Learning about his hidden habits repulsed me completely. Jason had fooled himself into thinking his addiction would go away on its own, and in so doing, he had victimized me and others. He had denied the seriousness of his compulsions and let shame and fear prevent him from getting help. Then he exploded, wreaking havoc on the lives of the two women and countless other people who were now affected. I felt helpless, and completely betrayed.

How to stay married

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 19 Comments

Michael Blann/Getty Images

Cynthia is a 68-year-old woman in a 45-year “committed marriage” who has figured out how to keep it that way. Every other month or so she goes out to lunch with her college boyfriend Thomas, who is also married and has no intention of leaving his wife. Usually their outings end in a hot and heavy “petting session” in his Mercedes. Sometimes, he rubs Jean Naté lotion, the scent Cynthia wore in college, onto her legs and compliments her beautiful feet. They’ve never consummated their relationship, nor do they intend to. Being with Thomas is “like a balloon liftoff,” Cynthia reports, one that eases some of the tensions between her and her 74-year-old physics professor husband. “I’m a nicer, more tolerant person because of this affair,” she says.

Cynthia’s story is one of more than 60 confessionals from long-time wives that punctuate Iris Krasnow’s new book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. And what their stories reveal is that marital longevity requires wives to establish strong, separate identities from their husbands through creative coping mechanisms, some of them covert. Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years, who report taking separate holidays, embarking on new careers, establishing a tight circle of female friends, dabbling in Same Time, Next Year-style liaisons and adulterous affairs, and having “boyfriends with boundaries.” Yoga and white wine also feature predominately.

The 58-year-old Krasnow, an author and journalism professor at American University, writes she was “stunned by the secrets and shenanigans” in her journalistic journey through American marriages. She comes to the subject from the vantage point of her own 23-year marriage to an architect she loves but admits to “loathing” occasionally. She credits summers spent apart, separate hobbies and her close relationships with male buddies for some of their marital stability.

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Loblaw’s targets gourmet tastes

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

Cole Garside/Maclean's

Last week, Loblaw Companies invited some 60 guests from media, fashion and food circles to “The Dinner Party” at a Toronto art gallery in a gritty west end neighbourhood. The stylish, if incongruous, soiree represented stealth marketing at its most overt—as the country’s largest supermarket chain bestowed “gourmet” imprimatur on its new line of 213 President’s Choice “black label” products slated for mid-October rollout at 140 Loblaws, Zehrs and Fortinos stores in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia—with broader national distribution potentially to follow.

As waiters passed trays of appetizers—mini Waldorf salads, baby scallop ceviche, beef sliders with “umami aioli” alongside signs indicating which black label oils and condiments were used in preparation—marquee Toronto chefs plated a superb four-course dinner using items from the line, including Soy and Ginger Marinade, Sea Salt With Fresh Herbs, trendy Argan Oil, and Bacon Marmalade and Dark Chocolate Couverture.

The scene bristled with the sort of over-the-top exuberance Loblaw was known for in the 1980s when President’s Choice (PC) pioneered the upscale private label in Canada and master marketer Dave Nichol brought extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and “Memories of” sauces to the masses.

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Now Martha Stewart’s daughter is giving advice

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Killian/Wireimage/Getty Images

Alexis Stewart has made a career of detonating her famous mother Martha’s carefully constructed mythology. On her radio show, Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer, she and co-host Jennifer Koppelman Hutt exchanged banter that would make Howard Stern blush. Their TV show, Whatever, Martha, mocked old episodes of Alexis’s mother’s TV show. (“Oh my God, she’s sandpapering the roasting stick,” Alexis groaned, watching her mother make s’mores.) Now the strafing continues in Whateverland: Learning to Live Here, a wry, anecdotal how-to manual for people who “hate how-to manuals.” Written with Koppelman, the book dispenses practical advice on everything from living an ordered life (make your bed every day: “What are you, still 10?”) to unclogging a toilet without a plunger (fill it with hot water and wait) to “five things to do with your panties on a date.” Continue…

REVIEW: Love Times Three: Our True Story of a Polygamous Marriage

By Anne Kingston - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 1 Comment

The HBO show Big Love’s depiction of a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon marriage stoked controversy and drew a big audience. Now the family that inspired the series have written an intriguing, rotating, first-person(s) account of their union that produced 24 children. It reveals that polygamy requires more labour and sacrifice than most of us are willing to put into a monogamous marriage.

The Dargers, all raised in plural unions, knew one another growing up. Joe’s simultaneous courtship of cousins Alina and Vicki, though disconcerting, is candidly rendered, with the women experiencing jealousy and insecurity, suppressed passions and much negotiation. Joe and Alina wed legally in 1989; the same day he married Vicki in a church ceremony. A decade later, Vicki’s twin, Valerie, and her five children joined the clan after she was given a church “release” from her union to an abusive husband. Eventually, the quartet began speaking publicly to engender tolerance of what they see as their right to religious expression.

Obvious points of curiosity are addressed. Sexual intimacy (“nothing kinky,” writes Joe) is organized on a rotating nightly schedule; the wives never discuss sex lest it spark jealousy. Polygamy is no male sexual bonanza: “there are easier and cheaper ways for men to get sex,” Joe writes, as only a man with two wives sharing a birthday and two with the same wedding anniversary would know. The women, all distinct and opinionated personalities, view one another less as rivals (though it happens) than as “soulmates.” Their 5,500-sq.-foot, 10-bedroom Salt Lake County house is run with precision but also flexibility. That polygamy renders women vulnerable is addressed, if in passing. Imprisoned Mormon sect leader Warren Jeffs horrifies him, Joe writes, as did some Big Love plot lines—which isn’t surprising. Real life in this case is far more tame.

Why these shoes matter more than an M.B.A.

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:30 AM - 7 Comments

David Selman/Corbis

The British sociologist Catherine Hakim is no academic wallflower. More than a decade ago, her “preference” theory positing that personal choices, not gender discrimination, governed women’s involvement and advancement in the labour market, won praise, sneers and influenced social policy. Now she’s back tweaking nipples with her new book, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, which argues that “erotic capital” can be as professionally useful as a university degree, that women have been conditioned not to exploit their attractiveness for economic benefit and that prostitution is a rational, lucrative female career choice.

Predictably, a book published in 2011 by a respected scholar (a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics no less!) that contains such sentences as “Becoming an ‘idle’ full-time housewife is a modern utopian dream for most women” and bills itself “a truly feminist manifesto” has hit a cultural nerve: debated on the BBC, discussed in the Wall Street Journal, and pilloried by female columnists with attractive head shots.

Hakim is brashly wading into contentious terrain on several fronts: the ongoing intellectual war questioning the sexual revolution’s benefit to women; the continuing puzzling out of workplace gender inequity; and the new academic focus on the “beauty premium,” as explored by economist Daniel Hamermesh in Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, which reveals tall men are paid the most, fat women the least.

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REVIEW: The reinvention of love

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

History, that incubator of stranger-than-fiction stories, provides the plot outline for Humphreys’ intriguing new novel set in the literary ferment of 19th-century Paris. Its focus is the doomed affair between journalist and literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve and Adèle Hugo, the wife of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve’s friend and neighbour. It’s a tale whose potential scope is as epic as a Hugo novel, given the sensational details. Cross-dressing! Hermaphroditic genital malformation! Social climbing at the court of Napoleon III! Literary rivalries! Insanity!

Yet Humphreys, a nuanced, evocative writer, chooses to fill in the bold outline gently, even pallidly, with pastel hues, alternating Charles’s and Adele’s voices over 30 years. Their affair, conducted in hotel rooms and furtive public meetings for which Sainte-Beuve disguised himself in his mother’s clothing as “Charlotte” with odd alacrity, is truncated, though not because of Sainte-Beuve’s hermaphroditic genital malformation, “a sex the size of a snail,” which turns out to be a bonus for Adèle, who doesn’t want more children. When the arrogant Sainte-Beuve boasts to Hugo he’s bedding his wife, the writer moves the family across the Seine and later to virtual exile in Guernsey, where lovesick Sainte-Beuve later pops up.

It’s not a spoiler to say they don’t live happily ever after. The pompous Sainte-Beauve spends his life pining for Adèle, social climbing at court, travelling in circles that include Chopin, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand (another cross-dresser), and philosophizing about love and his encroaching mortality.

The sympathetic Adèle fares more poorly: tethered to a self-preoccupied husband who flaunts his mistress, devastated by the drowning of her eldest daughter, and unhinged by her daughter Adèle’s dramatic descent into insanity. Her death of heart trouble warrants only one line in Sainte-Beuve’s account. It isn’t the only glaring misstep. In another, Sainte-Beuve, who died in 1869, mentions Marcel Proust, born in 1871, which would make him clairvoyant. Then again, given the extraordinary details that animate this pale yet oddly compelling fictionalization, maybe he was.