I also disagree with the contention that edgy work drops off the radar because the filters are broken. Certainly, the fact that this work is published at all indicates that the first level of filters is not broken. And as Steven pointed out, its failure to succeed is, in large part, a product of small promotional budgets. Books can’t persist in the national imagination if few people have read them.

Canada’s fundamental problem is a small market. An agent can’t afford to take a chance on a first novel by an unknown; sales are unpredictable and are not always tied to quality, and names count. The large publishers, also, predictably will prefer to work with writers who have a proven track record of sales. This isn’t a broken filter; it’s a business, and the aim is to make money. So they wait for small press writers with good reviews and good commercial potential to move up.

The interesting question is, do those small press writers who move to bigger and (presumably) better things start producing less interesting work? I’m not even sure that’s true, personally.

Or, is less interesting work more commercially viable in Canada, and why?

Also, it’s true that smaller houses with limited marketing budgets are producing edgier work that is more of-the-moment. It’s equally true that neither Jane (a successful literary work, in my opinion) nor Paul’s Case (less successful, I think) were or are likely to get much attention. The houses that published them (The Mercury Press in the former case, Insomniac Press in the latter) don’t have access to the media machine that would allow them to promote their books in the way that Random House or HarperCollins can, and the continued insistence on peopling literary juries (I’m looking at you, Giller) with elder statesmen and women who share a single literary sensibility precludes a broad recognition of the very real diversity that our literature has to offer.

The work remains, as I described it, an example of historical fiction — i.e., a work containing substantial historical content. Flashbacks, movements between time-present and time-past, even placing characters temporarily in the future can all be ingredients of a work that also contains substantial historical material.

Incidentally, I’ve never disagreed with your call to reconsider the clear preferences of the Canadian literary establishment; that’s one reason I read this blog with such regularity (and such — dare I say it? — joy). My disagreement is with your blanket characterization of historical fiction as prime cause of the Canadian LitCult malaise — its (as you have put it) blandness.

Two reasons for this disagreement come to mind: first, in a general sense, I have never bought the argument that historical fiction is a genre in the strict sense; unlike SF or mysteries, where one very occasionally finds works that transcend genre, in historical fiction one finds this very often — from (my personal list of faves here) Graves’ I. CLAUDIUS to Singer’s THE MANOR to Rolvaag’s GIANTS IN THE EARTH to Undset’s KIRSTEN LAVRANSDATTER series, one finds works that are successfully literary. As I said a while back, history is just the now as it once was. Some writers seem able to channel that better than others.

Second, if you want — really, truly wanna wanna want — change in CanLit, I think you’ll agree that one is wisest to identify the causes of its malaise first before agitating for transformation. Personally, I strongly support your ongoing campaign to reform the Gillers, and I disagree with the commentators here who have criticized you for paying too much attention to them and then writing critically about a fair percentage of the titles on their shortlists. Criticize on, I say. That’s the mark of a serious critic. Don’t water down what you really think and feel, and stay in touch with your guts.

My disagreement instead is with your apparent assertion that replacing a hegemony (“hammerlock” was your original term) of one form over the other is going to solve anything. For one thing, is it even true that historical fiction dominates Canadian literary production as a percentage? I lived in Canada for most of my life, spent immense amounts of time reading books, reading reviews, and visiting bookstores. Certain works of historical fiction sold very well (as Kim MacArthur has recently observed), but a lot of the small press material took the form of bildungsroman and other species of autobiography. When one includes short stories and poetry (also, obviously, literature (your category of choice in your comment above)), this becomes even more true. And when one factors in the great vitality of personal journalism, including its underground variants, like Bruce la Bruce and Donna Lypchuck, it becomes truer still. The problem in CanLit has tended to be that good, vital work gets ignored, or not published at all. That’s the problem.

You cite a few posts back contemporary topics a writer might focus on — the Conrad Black scandal, etc. Fine, good suggestions. But consider what happened several years ago when the Paul Bernardo trial took place. Not just one but two novels were written about it — Lynn Crosbie’s PAUL’S CASE and Jude MacDonald’s JANE (I’ll have to double-check on this, but that’s how I remember it). [Fringe theatre note: a production entitled CREEP CRUSH also got staged.] Both novels have effectively been forgotten. This is what happens in English Canada. We ignore work, we stifle it.

The filtering process doesn’t work in my dear old native land. It doesn’t work at the level of manuscript selection among agents and acquisition editors. It doesn’t work at the level of contemporary canon formation.

Reform the filter.

I think this is an accurate description of the sensibility one associates with Roth. And that in turn raises a few (from my point of view, at least) interesting questions:

1. Why so little sex of this sort in CanLit? Yes, we’ve got our Smiths and our up-and-comers (no pun entirely intended) such as — and here I’m going on the review descriptions — Foads and Joneses. But the words Roth is inclined to use — crude words, unambiguous words — set off alarm bells of the most visceral sort among CanLitty types; at least, this was the case when I was still in Canada seven years ago. Can it have changed that much?

2. Just so it doesn’t seem I’m unquestioningly in favour of Roth’s favoured approach (“testosterobatics” indeed), I have sympathy for those who want heartfelt emotion in their lit and not just priapic drive; I used to be a Roth fanboy when I was young; his act has gotten a bit tired for me now. But Roth *is* direct, *is* blunt. These characteristics tend to be muted — if not punished — in at least some Canadian literary circles. The reality is this: write about sex frankly in Canada, and you reduce your chances of getting published by a country mile (2.3 kilometers, I believe, with the conversion). What is to be done?

3. Steven, if you’ll allow me an “esprit d’escalier” moment here: a while back I asked you for a list of clearly towering works, and you provided three: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, AMERICAN PASTORAL, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (none Canadian, incidentally).

First, a preamble: I’m not entirely convinced these works won quite the universality of praise you imply; Pynchon has as many detractors as admirers, and Roth is primarily — as this post makes clear — a biographer of the Lusting Self, not a social novelist. In other words, AP is not a representative work of his oeuvre, and therefore I don’t think the good reviews the novel did indeed garner possessed the same passion that would have greeted a mid/late-career work by a writer who had mined the same thematic material for many years. Therefore, AP is admired, but not loved with the sort of fulsomeness that, to use your phrase, is rewarded to a work that is *immediately* seen as towering. (I don’t have an opinion one way or another about Rushdie).

Now, here’s the thing: all these works are — badabing! — examples of historical fiction. What gives? Clarification would be appreciated.