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Ray Smith’s melancholy century

centuryIt’s hard to know where to begin a discussion of Century, Ray Smith’s corrosive 1986 novel, which was reprinted in 2008 as part of Biblioasis’s Renditions series. The book was first unleashed on an unsuspecting readership following a 15-year silence from the author. Smith’s first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, appeared in 1976, seven years after his debut, the story collection Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada (1969), a technically difficult volume that has been characterized variously as “postmodern” and “experimental.” Smith himself has professed that following Cape Breton, he wanted to make his books more accessible to a general audience.

Century’s accessibility to a reading public weaned on the novels of Jane Urquhart and M.G. Vassanji may not be entirely evident. As a writer, Smith has always been more concerned with language and technique than with the niceties of plot, setting, or chronology, and this is certainly true of Century, whose time frame shuttles backward and forward, ultimately encompassing a little less than the titular hundred years; rather, it spans the neatly anagrammatic period between 1893 and 1983. Even the book’s generic classification is dubious: Smith calls it his best work “as a novelist,” but Century’s six parts discard most of the conventions typical of chapters in a novel and more closely resemble self-contained stories. Indeed, in his preface to the Biblioasis edition, Charles Foran tries out various labels – “novel, or collection of linked stories, or sequence of fictions” – before finally deeming the book “unclassifiable.” The closest description Foran can muster is to call the work a “tonal labyrinth.”

Century’s first section, “Family,” is composed of four parts loosely linked by characters related to one another via birth or marriage; the second section, “The Continental,” follows the American Kenniston Thorson as he travels through Europe, eventually alighting in Germany during the interwar period. The New World traveller in Old World Europe was a favourite of Henry James, but Smith is not at all interested in the master’s brand of psychological realism. Instead of abandoning the postmodern roots he laid down in his debut, in Century Smith actively underscores the fictiveness of his narrative right from the get-go. The book’s opening line – “In the night, Heinrich Himmler came to her as she lay waiting for sleep” – is tinged with a kind of morbid Gothicism, which becomes yet more fanciful and creepy when it is made apparent that the events being narrated occur in the spring of 1976, and the figure of Himmler is actually a spectral apparition that exists on the border between nightmare and waking.

The woman who is haunted by the ghost of the dead Nazi is named Jane Seymour, and her story is related in the first person by a novelist who has not published a book in ten years. He begins writing Jane’s story on a Friday in 1983 and, he says, “story it is, fiction.” The insistence on fiction qua fiction is typical of the postmodernist, but Smith adds layers of ambiguity to this account. “Although there never was a Jane Seymour,” the novelist tells us, “there was a young woman in a bar.” This young woman, we are told, travelled to Barbados over Christmas, and while she was there she killed herself. The novelist appropriates the suicide for the fictional Jane (which is, after all, what novelists do), but this incident also has echoes in a later story, “The Garden of the Hesperides.” In that story, the male narrator recalls his daughter, Jane, who committed suicide while the family was travelling in Barbados. The memory of his daughter’s suicide prompts another, earlier memory, in which little Jane approaches her father in his garden and demands, “Daddy, Daddy, tell me a story!”

This business of making stories is central to one of Smith’s pervasive thematic concerns in Century: the responsibility of art to rescue morality from a debased world. And make no mistake: the world of Century is debased. (”Do I then blame myself?” thinks the father about his daughter’s suicide, “Or this murderous century?”) Debased, and shot through with darkness. The book begins with the ghostly Himmler advancing upon Jane through “the unfamiliar dark,” and ends with “chill in the swirling dark all about.” This is the world as it is rendered throughout the book: cold and frightening, full of rape and murder and betrayal, all of it consigned to a vale of darkness. It is art, Smith suggests, that is able to wrest meaning from the darkness of modern life, but only if it is able to get beneath the surface of human existence. This idea is clarified late in the novel by Toulouse Lautrec, who drinks with the American Kenniston in a Parisian dancehall:

There is at the centre of painting an apparent paradox: painting is an art which takes surfaces for its immediate subject and uses surfaces for its medium. But the only art worth the fleas on a streetwalker’s crotch is art which deals with essences. In some cases it is the essence of generality, in others the essence of a particularity, but always it is essences. How this paradox is to be explained is the central question of all aesthetic theory in regard to painting; and how it is to be solved in practice is the central problem for all painters.

Extrapolating from painting to the written word, Century argues for solving the problem of surface vs. essence by dispensing with the recognizable elements of naturalism and retreating – if that is even the proper word – into a realm of pure language, of texture and technique. If there is a proper metaphor for what Smith’s sentences accomplish it has less to do with the visual arts than with music. The various pieces in Century, with their echoes and reverberations, their layers of images and ideas, resemble the prose equivalent of a symphony. It is appropriate to call the book a novel, because its effect is cumulative: the various parts (movements) are ultimately in the service of a single aesthetic purpose. The book has internal integrity: the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts in isolation.

If Smith’s novel has been unfairly ignored in the pantheon of important Canadian literature, it might be because of its unfamiliarity, but it might equally have to do with the pervading sadness of its vision. The novelist in the opening story finds a kind of salvation in his writing, but the father who is his doppelgänger later on comes to a much more contingent conclusion:

These little trips will help me to bear what I know is coming, but the real solace will be my imaginary garden. Surely the green of it will comfort me when the jumbo jet next disgorges me, and again I will gaze upon the running sores, the twisted limbs, the clutching brown hands, surely cool breezes from it will restore my soul when next I walk into the lazy, swirling colour, the drifting red dust, the blinding light, the hot, sweet breath of Africa.

Surely?

The forlorn tentativeness of that last one-word interrogative suggests that perhaps even the imagination, which is the wellspring of all art, is insufficient to counter the corruption of modernity – an unsettling thought in a novel whose last word is “lost.”

Still, the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners.

2009 07 03 Steven W. Beattie CanLit
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I’ll be damned

Readers of my screed in the latest issue of Canadian Notes & Queries will be well aware of my antipathy toward a certain strain of affectedly poetic, overwrought Canadian novel. Novelist and visual artist Christopher Willard has suggested that my assessment of the tyranny of this kind of novel in CanLit does not hold for all cases, and cites Patrick Lane’s Red Dog, Red Dog, which he calls “truly one of the most magnificently written novels [he's] read in years.”

It might surprise some of you to know that I agree with Willard. Poetic language in itself is not the problem: the problem is self-consciously poetic language. Language that calls attention to itself, nudging the reader in the ribs and keening, “Look at me! Look at me!” For an example of the other kind of poetic language, take a look at a novel by Michael Kenyon entitled The Beautiful Children. It’s not a book you’re likely to hear much about: it’s published by the small Saskatchewan press Thistledown, and is unlikely to make much of a splash amidst the strum und drang of upcoming releases from Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bonnie Burnard, John Bemrose, et al. But it’s worth seeking out: the parallel stories of an amnesiac journeying through a series of expressionistic landscapes and his son, who moves among the druggies that people their home city’s underbelly, are compelling, and manage to be simultaneously tough and sensitive.

My review, from the June issue of Quill & Quire, is online:

The Beautiful Children eschews the kind of naturalism that has become the default setting for most CanLit, but retains a focus on memory as a key determinant of a person’s identity. Sapporo’s endeavours to reconstruct himself involve repeated attempts to concretize fleeting images from his past. Absent this stability, he descends into a mental state that closely resembles madness.

The novel’s syntax is flayed to the bone; some readers may have difficulty orienting themselves within the expressionistic geography Kenyon has created. Sapporo travels “into a sky so large and blue above grassland so bald they must have been immediately connected,” en route to an unidentified desert. The language mirrors Sapporo’s own confusion, but readers accustomed to a more conventional form of narrative may find these sections off-putting.

One of The Beautiful Children’s greatest strengths is the way its form and content are inextricably fused. The language is poetic because it has to be, but it never descends into the realm of showiness or ornament for its own sake. And who am I to complain about that?

Oh, and if you’re interested in my own feelings about Red Dog, Red Dog, you can find them here.

2009 07 02 Steven W. Beattie Book Reviews
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Like a big book club

In honour of the 142nd anniversary of Canada’s national inferiority complex Canada Day, The New York Times‘ op-ed page today features a clutch of transplanted Canadians, such as Seán Cullen, Bruce McCall, and Kim Cattrall, lamenting the things they miss about their home and native land. (Yr. humble correspondent’s favourite: creative director Lisa Naftolin misses the “u” in colour.) Among those represented is Sarah McNally, the proprietor of the Manhattan branch of Winnipeg-based McNally Robinson Bookstores. McNally cops to missing Winnipeg’s winters (?!?), but she also misses something she refers to as “CanLit”:

I miss the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they’ll sound like nerds. In America we tend toward novels published specifically for one narrowly interpreted demographic. CanLit is an unassuming place, very welcome to immigrant writers, and since it doesn’t dice up readership according to profile there is a national conversation about literature, like a big book club.

It’s true that much American writing is ghettoized – rightly or wrongly – into what McNally refers to as “narrowly interpreted demographic[s]“: think chick lit, think technothrillers, think whatever it is Jodi Picoult writes. In large part, this is a result of the size of America’s population. With 300 million people, there is an authentic mass market in the U.S., unlike here in Canada, with a population one-tenth the size. If we have a more monolithic literary culture, this is largely a matter of necessity, not choice.

But McNally elides the downside of CanLit’s stranglehold on our national literary output: the stultifying sameness of the majority of books that are pumped out of the CanLit mill. We use the term CanLit, not in a nerdy way, but rather as code for a particular kind of book: muted, historical, domestic, naturalistic. CanLit calls to mind sepia tones and boxes of faded photographs, woodsmoke from the back yard and the sound of music held at a distance. CanLit is pretty and precious, eschewing dirt and jagged edges. It is never profane, bawdy, or raunchy.

CanLit is welcoming to immigrant writers, but in a melting-pot fashion that seems more appropriate to an American mythos than that of our vaunted Canadian mosaic. Rohinton Mistry may set his sprawling sagas in Bombay; M.G. Vassanji may set his in Pirbaag. But in their adherence to an historical focus and a naturalistic approach, Mistry and Vassanji might as well have been born in Toronto or Halifax. The metafictional gamesmanship of Shahriar Mandanipour, author of the well-received novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story, would not find a comfortable home in the echelons of CanLit. It’s no accident that Mandanipour, an Iranian, has taken up refuge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Montreal or Vancouver. (True, Montreal has Rawi Hage, but back off: I’m trying to make a point here.)

Similarly, America can boast a literary culture in which Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis, Ann Patchett, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy all sell in good numbers; that diversity of authors and approaches does not exist in our “big book club” north of the 49th parallel. Or rather, it does, but it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of what is usually understood by the term “CanLit.” When most people in this country talk about CanLit, they are referring to Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro, not Mark Anthony Jarman, Lisa Foad, and Matt Shaw. (”Who?” I hear you ask. “Exactly,” I respond.)

McNally is correct to isolate CanLit as a national, monolithic catch-all for our literature, the “big book club” that dominates our literary discourse, and more often than not ignores the diversity of output that goes on below the surface of our cultural consciousness. McNally and I differ only as to whether or not this is a good thing.

Happy Canada Day, y’all.

2009 07 01 Steven W. Beattie CanLit Comments (3) Permalink

It takes guts

Yeah, what she said:

Thanks to Bookninja for pointing out This plea for more book reviewing in Canada, and in particular at the CBC. And I agree, Canada Reads is not enough. In my humble opinion the problem has to do with a lack of guts. Yes, guts. It takes guts to be a good reviewer, a good publisher, a good producer and/or editor. One can’t wait for someone else to say what’s worth reading, one needs to go out on a limb and make more daring choices. And then open up those choices to the common reader.

2009 06 24 Steven W. Beattie Book Reviewing Comments (1) Permalink

Notes from the dark side: UPDATED

Bookninja George Murray and I recently had a little e-mail exchange about the culture of book blogging and the implications for readers of a digital environment.

Quoth George:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in six years of blogging it’s that the internet reader who will attach him/herself to your site and stay loyal isn’t someone who’s settling in for a long gawk at a good book or magazine. S/he’s an information addict who wants to pick and choose among info bits (what I call infochum) and meatier pieces. I’ve always done the blog side of Bookninja as a kind of newslog, in which I make brief, pointed commentary on news items and link out to longer articles. The Magazine allows for longer, in-depth forms.

Quoth yr. humble correspondent:

Last year, The Atlantic published an article called “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” which quoted Maryanne Wolf, among others, suggesting that the Internet changes not only what we read but how we read. We read horizontally online, we “power browse,” but we don’t allow for a deep immersion in content, and our sense of nuance and ambiguity is affected. Nicholas Carr, the author of the article, writes, “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

The entire interview’s up at Open Book Toronto, should you be interested.

UPDATE: Okay, the interview was up earlier this afternoon, but it appears to have been taken down. I’ll let y’all know when it’s back live once again.

UPDATE: Link’s fixed. Thanks, August.

2009 06 24 Steven W. Beattie Book Blogs
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Sometimes you need to get away from the conventions of realism a little bit

The Afterword has posted the text of Pasha Malla’s Trillium Book Award acceptance speech, which is well worth reading, especially as it makes a point with which yr. humble correspondent could not agree more:

Lately I have been reading a book by Lawrence Weschler about the visual artist David Hockney. The title, fittingly enough, is True to Life. Hockney’s work is concerned with capturing human visual experience and accordingly addresses the failures of photography and photo-realism. People do not, after all, see in fixed-perspective snapshots and moments, but fluidly, over time. With this in mind, in the 1980s Hockney made a series of collages, inspired by cubism, meant to address not what we see, but how we see it. “Hockney’s collages,” writes Weschler, “are a record of human looking. It is exactly the point that an automatic machine could not possibly have generated them.”

For David Hockney, standard photography fails to capture human experience; if unimaginatively used, a camera is only an “automatic machine,” better to be tossed into the uncanny valley. And I agree: what we really need from art are not mechanistic reproductions of the real world, but more expressions of our experience upon it and how those experiences make us feel. And to do that, sometimes you need to get away from the conventions of realism a little bit.

2009 06 22 Steven W. Beattie Pasha Malla Comments (0) Permalink

CNQ launches new website

CNQ76coverSMALLThe new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries is out, complete with a brand-spanking-new website. Yr. humble correspondent has a couple of pieces represented on the new site, both of which find me in a characteristically cranky mood.

The first, from issue #75, is a roundup of the 2008 Scotiabank Giller shortlist, including commentary on the winner, Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce. Essentially, the piece argues that, notwithstanding the vaunted newness of the five nominated authors, by awarding Boyden’s novel the big prize, last year’s jury in fact behaved exactly the way the vast majority of Giller juries before them did:

Set largely in the north, Through Black Spruce focuses on a fractured family riven by alcohol and drug abuse. From its opening lines, the novel offers sentences burnished with simile and metaphor:

When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town.

The narrator here is Will Bird, a comatose Cree bush pilot confined to a hospital bed in Moose Factory. From his coma, he narrates his story to his two nieces, Annie and Suzanne. Will’s narration is cast in the mode of rugged naturalism, but the naturalism is constantly larded with images that, although presumably meant to be evocative, actually come off feeling artificial and unconvincing. Living “between two colours” is only one example. In the frozen north loneliness “grew like moss,” memories “can’t be burnt or drowned,” and winter “settl[es]” on the land, “laying herself out over the forest and the muskeg and the water.” In a similar fashion, Will recalls his youth: “I believed that the northern lights, the electricity I felt on my skin under my parka, the faint crackle of it in my ears, was Gitchi Manitou collecting the vibrations of lives spent, refuelling the world with these animals’ power.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with using metaphoric language to develop character or heighten narrative; what is troublesome is the notion that this approach is somehow new or groundbreaking in the context of Canadian fiction. In its citation, the Giller jury – made up of novelists Margaret Atwood and Colm Toibin and Liberal MP Bob Rae – stated that in Through Black Spruce “Joseph Boyden shows us unforgettable characters and a northern landscape in a way we have never seen them before.” That we have seen such characters before – and in just such a northern landscape – will be obvious to anyone possessed of even a passing familiarity with Canadian fiction. Notably, the frigid loneliness of the north provided the setting for last year’s Giller champ, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. Beyond that, Through Black Spruce would fit comfortably on the shelf with such accepted CanLit mainstays as The Temptations of Big Bear, Tay John, and Wacousta.

The second piece, titled “Fuck Books,” appears in the current issue (#76), and takes up a related theme. Building on a formula that teasingly appeared in Nathan Whitlock’s debut novel, A Week of This, the essay argues that CanLit’s penchant for highly stylized, pseudopoetic writing is antithetical to creating a vibrant literature that is able to fully engage with the reading public. Two authors in particular find themselves in the crosshairs, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels:

Fugitive Pieces is emblematic of a persistent and virulent strain in CanLit: books that rely for their force and effect upon prose of heightened poeticisms and lyrical trills, language predicated upon an accretion of rococo metaphors and cascading adjectival phrases. The none-too-subtle condescension in such writing is easily identifiable by casual or occasional readers, whose impulse upon encountering it is likely to mirror the vituperative two-word epithet in this essay’s title.

Writing in The Globe and Mail recently, Michaels defended her prose style as a manifestation of her abiding respect for language, “a respect that has been forged out of the deepest despair of language, out of urgency and impotence.” Words, for Michaels, constitute “a moral question,” a “way of grasping at a truth,” and “an argument against loss.” This description of language’s function recapitulates the condescending tone that runs through her fiction, but it also illustrates what I take to be a fundamental misapprehension: there is no writer I’m aware of who would argue that language is unimportant, but instead of using language as a means to communicate emotional truth, Michaels brandishes it like a cudgel, the better to bludgeon her readers into submission.

There’s also material from last year’s notorious Salon des Refusés (which, incidentally, includes my review of this year’s Trillium Book Award-winner, Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method), book reviews by Michael Carbert, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Kerry Clare, among others, a feature on small presses by Andrew Steeves, and on the future of the book by Jack Illingworth. Check out the site, then go subscribe to the mag.

2009 06 22 Steven W. Beattie CanLit
Literary Criticism
Pasha Malla
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The outsider

Whatever. Michel Houellebecq, Paul Hammond, trans.; Serpent’s Tail, $14.99 paper, 156 pp., 978-1852425845.

9781852425845It’s easy to argue that Michel Houellebecq is the poet laureate of alienation in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, but this is at once too facile and too reductive. Houellebecq’s brand of disaffected nihilism owes a debt to literary forebears such as Céline and Nietzsche, but it also incorporates a vicious antipathy toward Western capitalism and its spoils that was largely absent from the work of those earlier writers. Houellebecq shares with Céline a passionate outrage against the dehumanization of modern life, but his vision is distinct (at least in part) from that of, say, Camus. In contrast to Meursault’s recognition of the universe’s “benign indifference” (in L’Etranger), the worlds Houellebecq creates are fiercely inimical toward his characters’ attempts to forge any sort of connection or meaning. Tibor Fischer’s assessment of Whatever, Houellebecq’s acerbic 1994 debut, as “L’Etranger for the info generation” is a glib sound-bite, but one that does the novel, and its author, a disservice.

Which is not to say that Houellebecq doesn’t invite such comparisons. The unnamed computer programmer who serves as Whatever’s narrator speaks of his “total isolation, the sense of an all-consuming emptiness,” which he feels will be relieved by goading his colleague, the hideously ugly 28-year-old virgin Tisserand, into committing murder. The scene of the intended crime is the same as that in which Meursault murders the Arab – a beach – and the aura of racial tension is replicated, even ratcheted up a notch: the narrator suggests that Tisserand kill a woman he’s been eyeing, but the latter replies that he’d rather kill her “half-caste” lover. “Well then, I exclaimed, what’s stopping you? Why yes! Get the hang of it on a young nigger!” That the narrator wants Tisserand to kill the woman (or her lover) with a knife is not terribly subtle in its symbolic resonance: the notion of Tisserand, the virgin, penetrating one or the other of his would-be victims is the culmination of the narrator’s own debased sexual odyssey throughout the novel.

In the book’s early pages, the narrator, who has just turned 30, tells us that he has “had many women, but for limited periods,” and has been celibate in the two years since he broke up with his most recent girlfriend, Véronique. The “feeble and inconsistent attempts” he has made at sexual liaisons in the interim “only resulted in predictable failure.” To assuage his sexual frustration, he writes bizarre animal stories, such as “Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly,” in which a breeder artificially inseminates a Breton cow, allowing the cow “to get stuffed”:

And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.

Actually, let it not be said in passing, but rather let it be dwelt upon, since for Houellebecq, sex and commerce are inextricably linked. This connection will reach its apogee in the sex tourism business that Michel and his girlfriend, Valérie, establish in Houellebecq’s third novel, Platform, but it is here, too, in the narrator’s belief that economic liberalism and sexual liberalism are “strictly equivalent”:

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

Thus does the laissez faire attitude promulgated by the sexual revolution reduce some members of society to the level of erotic paupers. Sexual liberalism, like economic liberalism, is “an extension of the domain of the struggle,” reaching “all ages and all classes of society.” Or, in the formula the narrator posits: “Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy.” This is bracingly satirical, and exemplifies what Houellebecq is best at: the snidely pithy diagnosis of modern urban anomie.

The phrase “an extension of the domain of the struggle” is the literal translation of Whatever’s original French title: Extension du domaine de la lutte, a phrase that is at once more appropriate to Houellebecq’s core concerns in the novel and more teasingly elliptical. The debased English title highlights the narrator’s ambivalence toward pretty much everything – his life, his job, other people – but elides the righteous anger that seethes underneath it: anger at a society that has consigned itself “primarily to consumerism,” the sole remaining “consolidation of [its] being.” This consolidation is made manifest in the “leprous façades” of Paris, “behind which one invariably imagines retired folk agonizing alongside their cat Poucette which is eating up half their pensions with its Friskies,” and in “the inevitable advertising hoardings flashing by, gaudy and repellent.”

Here we find one of the most evident cleavages between Whatever and L’Etranger: whereas Camus wrote about an existence devoid of God, in which Meursault is forced to reckon his free will in the face of what Warren Zevon termed “the vast indifference of Heaven,” there is a God in Houellebecq’s novel: money. The narrator (like Houellebecq himself at the time) is a middle manager at a computer software company, where employees are counted as “assets,” and he moves in a society in which losing a car “is tantamount to being struck off the social register.” (It’s no accident that one of the few characters described as “happy” in the novel is a socialist.) The God of commerce hovers remorselessly over the novel, and this God, like the breeder in the narrator’s short story, is “not … a merciful God.”

Early on, the narrator spots a piece of graffiti that reads “God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice,” and “muse[s] on who the person so well informed about God’s designs might be.” The note of sarcasm is readily apparent, but it’s undercut later on by the acknowledgement that “a totally liberal economic system” fosters and exacerbates the very inequality that a capitalist God must want. It is only at the novel’s close, when the narrator finds himself in a meadow, with none of the appurtenances of modern consumerism at hand, that he feels, “with impressive violence, the possibility of joy.” He goes on: “The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss.” This is perhaps the final, ironic twist in Houellebecq’s aversive little narrative: under the rubric of modern consumerism, divesting oneself of material desires only serves to lead one to the heart of the abyss.

2009 06 19 Steven W. Beattie Book Reviews
Literary Criticism
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Malla, Dodds win Trilliums

Last afternoon, at a luncheon at the Park Hyatt in downtown Toronto, the 22nd Annual Trillium Awards were handed out. Jeramy Dodds, the author of the debut collection Crabwise to the Hounds, won the Poetry Award, and Pasha Malla took home the Trillium Book Award for his debut, The Withdrawal Method. Malla’s acceptance speech was notable for using the new Pixar movie Up to illustrate why writers need not cleave to a naturalistic approach in their fiction, and for challenging journalists to come up with the correct spelling of the term “choked-uppedly” (which is how he described accepting the award).

Speaking about the books in the running for this year’s prizes, the National Post’s Afterword blog quotes one of this year’s jurors, who sounds eminently sensible (and is probably knee-shakingly handsome to boot):

Juror Steven W. Beattie said he was struck by range of work coming out of Ontario. He was also encouraged to see the prizes go to two young writers – Dodds is 34, Malla is 31.

“You hear so much these days about the death of the book, and the fact that nobody’s reading anymore, and the fact that there’s nobody coming up to take over from the old guard of the Atwoods and the Ondaatjes, and I think that’s bollocks,” he said. “I think this award, and certainly the strength of the younger writers who were shortlisted for the award … is really hopeful and a good sign for writing both in Ontario and in Canada.”

The other two English-language jurors for the 2009 Trillium Awards were the estimable Emily Schultz and Meg Taylor.

2009 06 17 Steven W. Beattie Awards
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Are there any world-class CanLit writers?

There’s a bit of a contretemps going on over at Quillblog (which seems these days to be where I’m getting all my material) about an interview that Nigel Beale did with John Metcalf, in which Metcalf defends the utility of negative reviews, even those that resort to invective and insult to make their points. I’ll let that debate simmer away over at Quill; what most interests me in the Beale/Metcalf interview comes later on, when Metcalf turns his attention to the Canadian canon and asks whether Canada can be said to have produced a world-class writer. In Metcalf’s view, this country has produced only one work worthy of being set alongside the best writing from England and the United States: Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman. Beyond that single novel, Metcalf claims, anyone looking for important literary writing must look outside our home and native land:

Anybody with any literary sense whatsoever knows that a really important book of literary fiction comes maybe once every ten years, out of England or the United States and not here, because we don’t have an audience hard enough to exact one.

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The Canadian critic’s duty is to be vitally aware of what is happening in England and what is happening in the United States and to compare Canadian output with the best from those two countries. Of course, when you do that, the result is painful. I mean, we’re not even on the same planet.

Metcalf’s detractors will put this down to simply more colonial bitterness from an inveterate curmudgeon and complainer, but this knee-jerk response gives his argument short shrift. One presumes that Metcalf is confining his attention to literature written in English, which is why he singles out Britain and the United States (and not, say, Latin America) as the twin hubs of significant literary output. Were Metcalf to look past Canadian literature written in English, he might be surprised at the wealth of talent coming out of Quebec, even that small percentage that has appeared in translation. (It wouldn’t be hard, for example, to make a case for Marie-Claire Blais’s stature as a world-class author.) And there is a sense that Metcalf is engaging in a bit of hyperbole to make his point: even he admits that Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant are important Canadian writers.

Still, his basic contention is worth considering: if one were to build a literary canon of significant books from the past 50 years or so, how many works of Canadian literature would fit comfortably on it? I would suggest, for example, that Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride – arguably Margaret Atwood’s two best novels – are important works in the annals of Canadian writing, but would their lustre not be the least bit diminished were they to be placed alongside the best of Philip Roth (Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral)? Or Don DeLillo (White Noise, Underworld)? Or Jeanette Winterson (The Passion, Written on the Body)? In such august company, would Atwood’s novels not come off looking just the slightest bit parochial and twee?

It’s been pointed out that in the chronology of world literatures, Canada’s is a relatively young one. We may indeed now be entering the period of literary development that the States found itself in at the mid-20th century. Still, by that point American literature had produced Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, not to mention Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Nathanael West, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Carson McCullers. Where are the Canadian writers to compare with these canonical names? Where in Canada are we to find such technically audacious, philosophically inquisitive, or cosmopolitan writers as José Saramago, Julio Cortàzar, Vladimir Nabokov, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, Alasdair Gray?

In his essay “Confessions of a Book Columnist,” Philip Marchand wrote, “Not even the most fervent partisans of Canadian literature will say that Canadians have done fundamentally new things with the novel form, or changed the way we read in the manner, say, of a Joyce, a Kafka, a Nabokov, or a Garcia Marquez.” Perhaps this partially explains the experience of a colleague of mine on a trip to France. Speaking about her work in the field of CanLit, she was questioned about imortant Canadian writers. Atwood’s name drew blank stares. The people she was speaking to had some vague notion of who Michael Ondaatje is, but that was about it. If being world class means being recognized abroad, this anecdotal experience suggests that we’re not doing terribly well.

Metcalf thinks this is because we don’t have a culture of tough criticism, and I for one would be hard pressed to disagree. The culture of boosterism and cheerleading to which we have consigned ourselves precludes us developing “an audience hard enough to exact” a literature that is able to compete with the best of what’s being produced internationally. Even Canadian writers feel this: ask anyone working in the trenches of CanLit about what’s exciting them in literature these days, and they’re more likely to name Joseph O’Neill than Anne Michaels. This is a shame. Where are Canada’s answers to Bolaño and Saramago, to Ali Smith and Haruki Murakami? They don’t exist – yet. But it is only by holding ourselves to the highest literary standards that we may hope to rectify this situation. We need to develop the “hard” audience that Metcalf advocates. We should not hesitate to judge Canadian writing against the best of what is being produced internationally, nor should we hesitate to point out those instances in which our writing comes up wanting.

2009 06 12 Steven W. Beattie CanLit
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