Review of The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve
for The Greater Toronto Reading Group Meeting hosted byDave Mandel

Reviewed by Carol Richards-Sauer

The Pilot's Wife inspired lively and eclectic discussion among our rather benevolently opinionated members. A seemingly simply, and to some, non-literary book provoked heated exchanges about characters and themes. Where some saw promises of profundity, others saw a story that needed to explore deeper below the surface to capture more poignantly the psychology of its characters and their motivation. With this, the novel might have passed from the category of commercial fiction designed to "move volumes" to more engaging literature designed to challenge, provoke and give insight into the chaos of life and relationships.

As we all noted, we expected, right from the start, to discover something disturbing and dark about our pilot. Why else would we have learned from the first few pages that he was dead. We didn't necessarily expect that he would turn out to be a political bygamist/terrorist. The novel smacked of a formulaic disclosure very early on.

We were divided about the pilot's level of "badness", but agreed that evil was an inappropriate word to describe him for it suggested greater complexity and alarm than given to him by the author. One thing was clear; the way we responded to the pilot and his wife very much depended on our personal values and experiences about intimate relationships and trust.

There was at least one moment in the novel, the metaphor of unraveling the scarf and thus unraveling the wife's life, that captured in a somewhat interesting way the emotional journey of the wife, the legal wife who knew nothing of the pilot's other life. But overall there is a sense that she was too passive, too much in denial about the signs of potential dangers in her marriage. Perhaps she should have suspected that he was not beyond disappointing her, if not deceiving her.

Whatever the failings of the characters and the author's construction of her material, we see recognizable truths about trust, deception, integrity, bravery and cowardice, universal themes in a novel whose half-life may be short. These very ideas, however, allow the novel to reach higher than its actual grasp. And because of these ideas we were able to spend time discussing its merit and insight.

Meeting Overviews
Special Guest: Mike Tanner, author of Acting the Giddy Goat
Meeting hosted by Cassie Fleisher April 1, 2003

Overview by Allegra Robinson

On Tuesday, April 1st, we met at Cassie's to discuss Acting the Giddy Goat by Mike Tanner. Cassie had met Mike through a mutual friend, and the author kindly accepted Cassie's invitation to come to the meeting and talk about his novel. Mike turned out to be a gorgeous, intelligent and very interesting man on the cusp of 40. He talked enthusiastically for several hours about his writing and his life. He seems to have combined the passion of composing and playing music and writing fiction with teaching the elements of writing into a very balanced lifestyle. There are certainly autobiographical elements to Acting the Giddy Goat (a book whose title was inspired by an expression of the author's grandmother). Mike still spends a lot of time in bars playing guitar with other members of his band. Cassie, Susan, Ian and I went to hear Mike play at The Red Lantern a few weeks after the meeting and were impressed by the number and range of songs he can cover. I was particularly excited when I saw that Skyline Pigeon, a favorite old Elton John song that nobody else ever seemed to have heard, was on the play list. Mike sang the number, along with almost all the others we requested throughout the night. Cassie and others returned to The Red Lantern last week to hear the band again. Mike has even generously offered to talk to Cassie about her writing, and we are still hoping he will invite us to the next salon, a meeting of curious, open-minded people that takes place at Mike's house on an irregular basis.