I finished “Spadework” last night. It was a really thick book but it didn’t take me long to read. Deceiving. The font was large and there weren’t many words on each page. I like that in a book because I feel speedy. I also like finishing books because then I feel accomplished.

The end of the book came about pretty much with what I was hoping for. Clever-ish. Actually I’m the one who’s clever. I was thinking to myself during the last few pages that this was the story of a bunch of peole who just go about in an ordinary way, living their lives, routine, and that the novel catches them just when the routine is broken, and less-than-ordinary things start to happen to them. I don’t want to say “exciting” or “extraordinary” things because they aren’t. But given the context, things go astray. The image I had in my mind was that of a string, that we live our lives along a string and then at some times that string frays, or in the case of “Spadework” breaks apart with a *pop* (this is just the picture in my head). But then all those bits of fible that make up the string start to heal, and grow back together into a single string again, and routine is restored, and if it’s a novel then the characters are left with a suggestion that things are going to be OK.

What makes me clever is that the author had the same image in mind, pretty much. The last image of the book is that of a river, obstructed a a dam, and then flowing on unchallenged. And that’s what the whole novel is. People overcoming obstacles that aren’t your run of the mill everyday obstacles, but nothing overly dramatic. And at the end I was pretty sure that everything was going to be alright.

I was also thinking as I read that this was little more than a perfectly crafted work. That’s fine, I just like when novelists go a little wacky with their structure.

I’m reading “Spadework” by Timothy Findley. My first of his. At first it seemed a boring book, it’s in the prose of mundane American fiction. And then everything seemed too perfect: a woman and her family living and working in Stratford, Ontario, the man an actor, the woman an artist/ props maker. The child precotious. Being me, I just waited for something to break the normalness of it, like you do in a suspense film (which I don’t like, by the way). Slowly, the normal routine of the family is altered, elements sneaking in. Also, the perspectives of the periferal characters are sneaking in as well. The easy prose, the extra details that so far seem only to be filler where I would rather they contribute to something, as foreshadowing maybe, or is the subtext -all the details of the setting, for example- I hope they all add up to something in the end. I think it’s a sneaky book. I think the simpleness of the writing and the normalness of the family is a trick and both are going to fall away in the end into a clever resolution.

P.S. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and I was reading my book while lying in the sun coming through my window. I spent the day getting rid of stuff and organizing. I recycled a whole pile of junk paper that I was keeping for the purposes of crafts. But really it was mostly paper I’d obtained from recycle bins in the first place and since I hadn’t used it yet, back it went.

I cleared my bookshelf too. All my manga is going. I’m a grown up now (?). As well I’m getting rid of all my ancient philosophers. I’m a person of the contemporary age (?). Except for The Poetics because my copy is pretty. Also, do you know how many paper-dictionaries I have? Four. One is for cutting out of. One is my pocket Oxford. One was my dad’s and had a fetching red cloth cover. One is my concise Oxford with the thin paper. I like how the thin paper feels.