The Sweet Edge by Alison Pick

In my quest for books set in Toronto I often come across those set only partially in the city, which can sometimes make it hard to capture the vibe of this place. Pick's novel, which is set half in Toronto and half in the wilderness of the Northwest Territories, actually manages to be more imbued with the essence of the city in the latter half, through its absence.

The story follows two halves of an imploding couple - Adam, a classic bro-gressive type who moved to Toronto for university and is itching to find himself slash get out of uncomfortable personal situations he's created through his selfishness (my interpretation!), and Ellen, a beautiful, financially stable young woman who lacks purpose, and who follows Adam to Toronto and is now floundering in the city without him. The relationship is falling apart when Adam decides to go on a two month canoe trip in the north. On the first day, he writes Ellen a letter saying things are over between them. At the halfway point, he writes her another one to say that he has reconsidered.

Meanwhile Ellen spends a sticky hot summer working in a small gallery, of which there are about eleven million in my neighbourhood alone, so this definitely rings true. She is devastated and lost without Adam, but eventually meets some older queer women who take her in and begin to try to encourage her to claim some independence and fall in love with the city. Part of this consists of meditation classes (meetings?), where Ellen slowly prepares herself to face true emptiness. As she does, Adam is also beginning to understand emptiness - the question is will this understanding bring them back together, or provide the closure they need to move apart?

The conclusion is less important, I think, than the journey. I wasn't thrilled with how it ended but I did love how it got there, and the characters certainly rang true. As an exploration of a breakup, the novel felt very honest, and the theme that really emerged for me was that there existed more than just Ellen's truth and Adam's truth, that the real story had many facets. That said, I still found Adam to be an unconscionable douche. However, I never found Ellen's feelings for him unbelievable, so that's something.

As I said, I found Toronto had more presence in Adam's story than in Ellen's, just from its absence. The story wasn't totally my cup of tea, but Pick is a beautiful writer and I would definitely read her work again.

Three CN Towers out of five.

Murder on the Run by Medora Sale

I think that there is something to be said for switching perspectives in a novel, but it is a choice that can be screwed up when one is not a good writer, and I think that was part of the problem with this book. Medora Sale seems to be a technically competent writer but could have constructed a much more compelling story by sticking with one protagonist throughout.

The story is a forgettable tale of a series of rapes and murders of female joggers in various parks and ravines around Toronto, with one murder mixed in that doesn't quite fit the pattern. John Sanders is the police detective investigating the murders, who stumbles into some much bigger questions once the teacher, Jane Conway, is killed and it doesn't look to be the work of the park rapist.

As John and his partner Dubinsky investigate, we also get a little peek into the world of Eleanor, a real-estate agent who is John's love interest; the girls' school where the teacher worked; the strange world of Jane Conway that seems to consist of a lot of drugs and partying; and the disturbing mind of the actual park rapist. The author is clearly trying to only give us a little bit of information in each of these pockets of the story, so that the whole thing will unravel slowly, but there is nothing compelling about the mystery, honestly. At no point did I feel really worried that anyone important was in danger, or curious about who killed Jane.

I'm not sure what it is about this book that makes it so dull compared to other mysteries. It is a police procedural, a genre which generally holds some interest for me, but it sort of plods along in a somewhat predictable way and there really never feels like there is any risk involved.

I also had a hard time with how little background the reader is given for the Eleanor/John relationship. I felt like perhaps there was an earlier book in the John Sanders series that I would have to read to understand what was going on here, which is sloppy - a quick paragraph explaining where we're at in this relationship is not hard to include and would really help the reader to be emotionally involved with the characters. As it was I could take or leave that whole plotline.

The use of Toronto was good, and I liked the ongoing placement of where we actually were in the city at that point in the story.

Overall I wouldn't be compelled to read this author again and I'm pretty sure I will soon forget this book, so I'm giving it two CN Towers out of five.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Lately I've been at my wit's end with novels wherein the protagonist/narrator is a writer. I think it's such a boring, unimaginative choice; I know they say write what you know, but surely you can take a small leap outside of your own person for a moment? Well this book is at the extreme end of that scale; it's catalogued as fiction, but not only is the protagonist a writer, she IS the writer. AND she spends all her time with her friends who are actual people, notably the painter Margaux Williamson. And I'm pretty sure some of the transcribed conversations are actual conversations.

Some have described the book as part memoir, but I would have to say this is a pretty weak memoir. When I was younger (around 17 or 18) I bought a cheap dictaphone and would record conversations at parties, or ask people specific weird questions and record their answers. I should have kept the tapes and used them to write a book, because it probably would have been more interesting - certainly less juvenile and narcissistic -  than this one.

I can't describe the plot to you because there isn't one. Ostensibly it is the story of Sheila trying to find out how a person should be, but if she finds an answer I must have missed it. She spends the book having pointless conversations with her friends about art; not writing a play she has been commissioned to write; moping about; and sleeping with the slimiest man I can imagine. Oh and jetting off to Miami and New York, which I guess she can afford on a part-time hairdresser's salary? On the plus side, there is a lot of Toronto, and a very specific Toronto culture is reflected here.

I'm sure this book would appeal to some people; perhaps members of the culture mentioned above. For me, it is much too twee, to artsy, too navel-gazing, too much forced stream-of-consciousness drivel. It is quintessentially hipster. It makes me want to run back to Where We Have to Go to remind myself that there are writers of this generation who are making substantial and meaningful work. I don't think a book has to be heavy to mean something (Kirshner is delightfully light, in fact), but it can't be made of fluff. Heti's writing is good but the book is air, it is completely fluffy and forgettable. All I got from it that was good was a sense that Heti has great potential to write something wonderful, if she can get her head out of her ass. Perhaps her plays are better.

Two CN Towers out of five

Seduction by Catherine Gildiner

The long-suffering people in my book club could tell you that there are a few things that I hate in fiction: time travel is the big one for me, but another one that comes up often is the use of real, historical people as characters in fiction. I feel it is unfair not only to the memory of the person in question (and certainly to any surviving relatives), but also more often than not it denotes lazy writing; a writer who could not invent a character of their own, or build a world populated with anyone other than the folks we've already heard of.

It was for this reason that I was wary going into this novel, which features a picture of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna on the cover, and hosts a preface by the author in which she describes her extensive study of Freud and Charles Darwin.

The premise of the book is that our hero, Kate Fitzgerald, is in prison for killing her husband (a crime to which she freely admits). She has been there for nine years when her psychiatrist, the thoroughly slimy and incompetent Dr. Gardonne, proposes a temporary absence for her to take on a paid job from him. Kate is an expert in Freud, and a man named Dr. Konzac has been making waves in the psychoanalytic community by announcing that he has some damaging information about Freud that he is soon to release. Gardonne wants Kate to find out what the information is.

Of course she is teamed up with an ex-con-cum-private-investigator named Jackie, and of course they are warned not to become romantically involved, and so of course there's buttloads of chemistry. For the first 100 pages it wasn't this that annoyed me so much as the info-dump style of conversation these two were having. Neither asked questions, they just said everything they knew about Freud in paragraphs-long monologues. It was necessary information for the reader to understand the plot, but regardless, it was distractingly shitty writing.

Things pick up around the middle of the book, and some murders happen, and Jackie and Kate have to turn their attention to solving the murders so as to prevent themselves from being assumed the guilty parties. This being a Freudian mystery, there is much introspection on mothers and fathers and the titular seduction theory. At first the author (and the protagonist) seems to be a big Freud fan, but throughout the course of the book Freudian theory takes a pretty solid beating.

Toronto has a pretty backseat presence in the novel, which is mostly set in various European cities, but there are a few scenes in Kate's lakefront condo.

The characters (outside of Kate) aren't super well drawn, but it is an exciting mystery in parts and I was willing to give this book a fair-to-middling grade, but then it turns out the murderer is [SORT OF SPOILER] an actual person who actually lived. Who then kills themself. WTF is this. Call me uptight, but I just don't feel like it's fair play as a writer to not only make a real historical person into a character in your book, but then to make them murder two people and commit suicide - WHEN THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE - is a really shitty thing to do. You may as well go take a piss on their grave, although this is maybe worse since the author is making money from it.

 On the off chance that there are folks not as offended by this as I am, I give this novel a reluctant two CN Towers out of five.