Polar opposites

>> Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love vs.
Rebecca Gowers’s When to Walk

by Juliet Waters

I don’t usually have the time to read more than one book a week. When I do, it’s because I’ve picked up something that I can’t seem to put down, while I’m wading diligently through something I’m committed to. This is how I ended up reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous bestseller Eat, Pray, Love while reading Rebecca Gowers’s more modest literary gem, When to Walk.

Just released this week in Canada, When to Walk was long-listed in 2007 for Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize. The Daily Telegraph described it as “Tristram Shandy meets Bridget Jones.” This is high end, respectable chick-lit. Something you won’t have to hide behind a copy of The New Yorker.

Gilbert is a National Book Award finalist whose magazine article in GQ was the inspiration for the movie Coyote Ugly. In her now mega-selling, post-divorce spiritual memoir, she writes about a time when she read self-help books so shameful she wanted to hide them behind copies of Hustler.

I empathize. I’d way rather get caught reading Hustler than Gilbert’s irresistible God porn. On one hand, I want to cynically slag the self-serving delusion that her serendipitous life as a wealthy magazine writer travelling though Italy, India and Indonesia is convincing proof of God’s love for us all. On the other hand, I have to admit that her story is much more hypnotic than the one told to us by Ramble, the half deaf, hack writer with a “gimpy” leg who narrates When to Walk.

It’s hard to imagine two women more polar than Gilbert and Ramble. Here’s The New York Times describing Gilbert: “If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her.” Here’s Gilbert describing herself: “I can make friends with anybody…I can make friends with the dead…If there isn’t anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock.”

Here’s Ramble’s husband, Con, describing her, right before he leaves her: “an autistic vampire” with a “borderline anti-social personality.” Here’s Ramble describing one of the reasons she avoids making friends in her neighbourhood. “I don’t like going to the pub with strangers. I can’t hear much against the music, multiplied talking and so on, meaning that I’m forced to lip-read; but most pubs are dark, so it’s not that easy to see; and with a stranger, you’re forced to look the whole time at someone you don’t want to look at at all; and your problems are only exacerbated if either of you gets drunk.”

Gilbert heals her broken heart with gallons of Neapolitan pizza, wisdom from New York City’s most sought-after Indian guru, and some down time in Bali. Ramble limps from her dingy apartment to the local mini-mart, while she writes travel pieces about places she’s never been to, and endures her hilariously rude downstairs neighbour, a cockney grifter known as Mrs. Shaw.

Gilbert’s world is melancholy suffused by moments of bliss. Ramble’s world is mostly “a sickening passive alertness. As I sit here, I find one bottle of beer and about three hours’ sleep haven’t done much to alleviate this.” At best, it’s suffused with “a pool of dulled light. The air was still, and sweet, laced with a damp smell I hadn’t noticed previously.”

These are two very different books, but in the end, I’m not sure I could have enjoyed one without the other. Both Gowers and Gilbert are nimble and funny writers. Some readers will find Gilbert a little too self-indulgent. Most readers will probably find Gowers a little too uncompromising. I suggest reading one after the other. Reading both at the same time is a little like meandering between Italy and India. In the end, both resolve with some truly lovely and satisfying scenes. Gilbert’s is the more effortlessly readable, but of the two, Ramble may be the heroine most likely to stay with you.

When to Walk by Rebecca
Gowers, HarperCollins,
HC, 235PP, $22.95
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth
Gilbert, Penguin, PB, 334PP, $18.50