REVIEW: The Film Club by David Gilmour

Admit One: David Gilmour offers his son an entirely different kind of education in his heartfelt memoir, The Film Club.

I’d heard about The Film Club, written by Canadian writer and critic David Gilmour, through a friend who’d read it and recommended it to me. I told the friend in question I was interested, but soon pushed the book back in my head and forgot all about it, until I heard it mentioned again when the author was interviewed on a French morning show on Radio-Canada. Gilmour, an anglophone from Toronto, expresses himself wonderfully in French and must have charmed more than one listener that morning — and he did, my Mom called me a few minutes after the interview was over to tell me about it herself. I was leaving for a weekend at my family cottage the next day so I bought the book and read it over the weekend. It’s that kind of book. 

 The Film Club is a true story of Gilmour and his son, Jesse, who had lots of difficulty in school as a teenager, so much so that his self-confidence reach alarmingly low levels. Things couldn’t go on the way they did so Gilmour proposed a bargain to his son: he could drop out of school and continue to live in his house for free and obtain pocket money on the condition that Jesse watched three movies selected and introduced by his father every week (oh, and also not do drugs). 

There have been a lot of these kinds of memoirs in recent years where people try to get over something difficult by binge eating, binge running, binge reading, or bingeing on something in a way that is organized enough that it actually gives a new purpose to their lives. I’m sure it works well for all these people, but does it necessarily make a good book? Well, in this case, yes. What makes The Film Club so successful as a narrative is that it doesn’t simply enumerate all the movies watched by these two guys over several years. In fact, the movies are quite secondary. What Gilmour sets in the foreground is the relationship between the father and the son, and more specifically the absolute, unbearable love the father bears for his son. The film club in question became an opportunity for them to take a break from the torments of their lives and spend quality time together, during a period in a child’s life when time with your father is about the last thing you want to have, but potentially one of the most important things you need. 

That’s not to say we don’t hear about a few good movies along the way. Gilmour is a true film fanatic, and a wonderful guide into the world of cinema. He is careful never to kill a movie when introducing it, and always warns his son (and the reader) to look out for iconic scenes. From Truffaut’s Les 440 coups to Rocky III, loads of movies get their chance to shine, but as a whole they really do form their own kind of education. By the end of the experiment Jesse — countless movies seen and discussed, able to define the Nouvelle Vague, give precise examples of Hitchcock’s use of suspense, and name Bergman’s favourite cameraman — has received what certainly amounts to a degree in film studies. Of course, the battle against teenage rebellion is won in the end and Jesse also returns to school of his own accord. That’s the great thing about teenagers: they grow up. 

The other great thing about The Film Club is that it’s compulsively readable. Gilmour is a master of pace, and he intersperses the actual movie watching in the book with bits and pieces of his and Jesse’s life. The rhythm he achieves is pitch-perfect. Where he sometimes goes over the edge and risks losing the reader is in the emotional intensity and sensitivity of the son, who descends into very very deep black holes whenever he has girl problems, and eventually breaks one of the rules of the film club. Of course, as these things go, a father’s love (especially one ready to write a memoir about his son) is unconditional, and as memoirs go the plots itself is hard to criticize because, of course, the author can defend himself by saying that it’s all true. In the end The Film Club is another heartfelt and moving reminder that art can bring people together and change lives for the better. I sincerely recommend this book to fathers and sons everywhere, and anyone else who may get between them. 

 

PROFILE: Diana Athill

The vivacious and charming Diana Athill.

This post is also featured as a guest-blogger article in this week’s #FridayReads blog.

I was very ill the first time I read one of Diana Athill’s books. I left school early on a Friday with a bad cold, my head pounding and my nose dripping uncontrollably. As soon as I got home I drew myself a hot bath and slipped into the steaming water with the elegant but unassuming hardcover edition of Yesterday Morning. Diana Athill, as it turned out, was just what I needed that day. Yesterday Morning is as unassuming and elegant as its cover, but it’s also touching, human, funny, and written with beautiful simplicity — as are all of her books. Reading Athill on a bad day is like having an adorable grandmother there to take care of you.

I’ve now ambled my way through the four books at the core of Athill’s memoirs: Stet, about her career as a literary editor to such big names as Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul; Yesterday Morning, in which she revisits her happy childhood in the country manor her grandparents owned and the complicated relationship between her mother and father; Somewhere Towards the End, her Costa Prize and NBCC award-winning account of growing old with wisdom, wit, and lots of optimism; and Instead of a Letter, which is mostly about her doomed love affair with a man to which she was engaged, who stopped writing for years during his military service, eventually communicated with her by telegram to break up the engagement so he could get married to someone else, and finally died in the war.

Instead of a Letter is the first volume of memoirs Athill wrote, when she was 43, and the latest one I’ve read, in order to unwind at the beginning of the spring holidays. I was surprised to find as much of her bright intelligence and wonderful understanding of the human nature as in all of her other books. There’s a fair bit of overlap in subject matter between all of these, so I wouldn’t recommend reading all of her books in one go, but it’s charming to plunge into one of them every so often. The repetition is part of the charm, part of way Athill tells her story, just like you’d expect a slightly extravagant British lady to recount bits of her life to you.

Yet writing is not Athill’s principal vocation. It’s something that happened to her along the way and something she’s always done on the side. Because of that, I think, she writes with an honesty that is rare and appealing, especially in an era of celebrity memoirs and loud voices that have nothing to say. Athill doesn’t shy away from writing about deeply personal things like sex and humiliation, and lays out her emotions with touching truthfulness and a deep understanding of herself — but she never falls into self-pity. Her prose is simple and straightforward, but all the more enthralling because she doesn’t seek to embellish or excuse. Athill’s goal is to write about life “just as it was”, and it makes her life — and prose — all the more fascinating.

Essential reading, Life Class collects several of Athill's memoirs in a single book.

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers. 

Speed Writing

You need serious speed writing skills for this kind of sensation publishing...

If you thought Nora Roberts and James Patterson were productive writers (they both publish over four new books every year (granted, Patterson doesn’t really write them himself, but still)), think again. Following two events last weekend that grabbed the world’s attention — the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) on Friday, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden by the US military on Sunday — books related to these events are now being published in record time.

The book about the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden is actually more of a lucky opportunity for the author and publisher than a planned commercial tactic. The book, SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper, by Howard E. Wasdin, was scheduled for publication at the end of may. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Publishers Weekly announced on Monday that the book’s publication would be rushed and should be widely available in the US by the middle of next week. Of course, the book won’t deal directly with the assassination that has spurred such interest in the special counter-terrorism unit, but it should give an interesting insight to those who are interested about life as a SEAL Team Six sailor. The media attention that focused on Bin Laden’s assassination was not always of very good taste, but it was a godsend for the publishers of this memoir. I don’t think many of us realized what “SEAL Team Six” was before we read about it Monday morning. According to The Guardian, the book moved up to 29th place on Amazon’s sales chart on Tuesday, from bellow 4,000 before bin Laden’s death was announced.

The cover for SEAL Team Six employs the bright, block-lettered patriotism common to books on the US military.

Royal wedding enthusiasts have had an even shorter wait for a book about Will & Kate tying the knot. In fact, there was a book published about the wedding in record time: 72 hours after the event. The man behind it is Andrew Morton, also Diana’s biographer, who, according to The Guardian, “picked the photograph for the jacket 100 minutes after the couple kissed, completing the text for the book’s final chapter on the day of the wedding.” Copies of the book, printed in Italy, were delivered to Waterstone’s Charing Cross on Monday afternoon. Obviously, over three quarters of the book was already written before Friday. The only thing the author had to add some details about the wedding day itself, as well as some photographs. The book will therefore only be repeating stuff we saw over the news and online all weekend. Michael O’Mara, the publisher of William and Kate: Their Lives, Their Wedding, has applied to the Guinness World Records for an official record.

On sale only 72 hours after the royal wedding. The first book to come out, but certainly not the last.

This kind of commercial, rapid-publishing phenomenon has been seen before. Shortly after Michael Jackson’s death, in 2009, several writers and publishers had tried to cash-in on the icon’s death, resulting in a tsunami of Jackson biographies, which ranged from the well-researched to the merely gossipy. The phenomenon is bound to get only worse. The growing popularity of e-books and the easy access to live information on web-based platforms means that if a subject is hot, a book can reach the readership hours after the writer has punched in the final period, because publishers can skip the lengthy operation of getting the thing printed and shipped. Naturally, when it comes to making books, rushing it always means botching it. But then, in the market for celebrity bios and sensationalism, no one really cares about quality. The only thing that matters is timeliness.

Time is of the essence — the quicker you get the books on the shelves, the more you'll sell it before the subject is out of fashion.