GILLER GREEN ROOM, 2006

Green Room:

Alex: Now that the party's over and Vincent Lam has gone home with the prize, it's time for the really interesting part of our discussion to get started. Let's begin by going around the room and getting everyone's picks for how they ranked the finalists.

Michael: I’m afraid I have to begin by saying I didn’t catch the Giller bash on TV. I was at the Air Canada Centre at my umpteenth Bob Dylan concert. All I can report is that Bob didn’t indicate his preference for a winner in the Scotiabank Giller contest.

My own ranking is as follows:

(1) De Niro's Game
(2) The Perfect Circle
(3) Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
(4) Home Schooling
(5) The Immaculate Conception

Without getting into the Giller jury’s decision, here’s my quick assessment of the books and a quick overview of the reasons behind my rankings.

Hage’s book was the clear #1 pick for me. Why? It was the only one that gave me a knot in my stomach. None of the other books gave me the same kind of emotional engagement. A large part of the power of the book comes from the extraordinary circumstances of the story: the Lebanese Civil War. In structure, it’s essentially a buddy story and quite simple, as is its prose. I found the references to Camus’s The Stranger unnecessarily literary. Hage’s novel is existentialist, yes, but readers should have been left to reach that conclusion on their own. 

I ranked the Quiviger book second because I felt the author managed to pull off a delicate balance. This is the story of the end of a love affair in Italy, reflected through the memories of the female narrator, who’s from Canada. In a novel in which nothing happens, she maintains a narrative of strength and confidence. The narrator makes clear that this relationship touched her profoundly, and she is able to expound at length about her thoughts and feelings.

Lam’s book is the one I picked in the preliminaries to win. After reading it, though, I felt fearful that it actually might take the prize. It has strengths, yes, but also not insignificant weaknesses. However, I’m ranking it third because, next to De Niro’s Game, I found it the most compelling (in parts). Lam has all the basics of storytelling down, and he has unique subject matter: the lives of doctors. I would summarize this book as journalistic in tone and uneven in literary ambition. 

Windley’s Home Schooling is a museum piece. If someone was going to attempt to create from scratch a piece of canonical CanLit, this would be it. Where the rock band Sloan rips off The Beatles, Windley here is channeling 1970s Alice Munro. Is there a problem with that? Some would say no: Windley has provided us with new, serious fiction. Some would say yes: we’ve heard it all before. My take is, like Bob Dylan re-interpreting old folk and blues songs, Windley has taken a strong stab at re-inventing the wheel. Do we need a new wheel? I dunno.

The book I ranked fifth is The Immaculate Conception. I first read this book last spring, and at the time I thought it had a seriousness of purpose that overcame its weaknesses. Upon revisiting it, however, I found it difficult to get past what seems to me to be leaden prose and a deadening earnestness. ‘Nuff said.

Alex: I did watch a bit of the show on TV. I don't think you missed much. I do love those little interviews they do on the red carpet before the show. Notable this year was Beverly Thomson (CTV news anchor) saying how much she appreciated the short synopses they provide for each of the books because most people don't have time to read them. I turned the sound off after that, but at least it didn't look too bad.

Anyway, this is how I ranked them:

(1) Home Schooling
(2) De Niro's  Game
(3) Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
(4) The Perfect Circle
(5) The Immaculate Conception

I know I said in the Preliminaries that Carol Windley was the most likely to win because she was the nominee who came closest to "being" Alice Munro. But that was meant as a compliment. And I just thought that in a short list dominated by first-timers (as noted before, even Soucy's book is a first novel), Home Schooling stood out as the most polished, professional work. The only story I didn't really care for was the first, "What Saffi Knows." It seemed out of place, and the tone of it - an awkward blend of whimsy and the macabre - just seemed wrong. The rest of the collection was very strong though. Like Munro, Windley takes the material of everyday life - jobs, family relationships, dinner-table conversations - and through her ear for conversation, her eye for the detail of a gesture or a glance, she creates stories of incredible texture and density. "The Reading Elvis" has all the punch of most novels in only 30 pages. 

I know some people object to this sort of writing as being somehow stereotypically Canadian or CanLit. Maybe it is, even down to Windley's foggy, West Coast Gothic sensibility. But the bottom line for me is that it's very well done.

Hage's book was certainly the flashiest, the most exciting. Nothing stereotypically Canadian about it. No question he's an exciting new voice to take heed of. I loved those long, visionary sentences that just sort of ramble on like he's riffing on the Beats, or when Bassam's imagination starts riding loose through history, to the point of seeing Napoleon's officers parading through the streets of Paris. On the other hand, while I applauded the stylistic pyrotechnics I sometimes wondered why Bassam, who apparently isn't taking a lot of drugs, always seems to be tripping out. I also thought that the book, like all "tough guy" fiction, came very close to self-parody on occasion. The violent yet uber-cool anti-hero is always in danger of turning into a cliché. Bassam the Beirut Bad-Ass is no exception. I found myself groaning at some of the poses. Like when Bassam claims God is dead and then walks through the streets with old women shrieking and crossing themselves when they see him. Or when he finds out that George has taken up with his girlfriend and he drives up to the top of a cliff and empties his gun into the hills. By the time he gets to Paris and finds a copy of L'Etranger in his hotel room . . . I agree Mike, I think we'd already got the point.

Still, a very good book. And a terrific first novel.

I liked Lam's book but didn't find anything special about it. Medicine is, as all the television networks know, inherently dramatic. Each patient, just like each client in a legal drama, is a story. And so I found Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures less like a collection of short stories than a bunch of episodes from a prime-time medical series, an impression strengthened by the way Lam sticks with the same cast of characters but has no overarching narrative.

It's a quick, enjoyable read. The episode structure provides a lot of variety and prevents it from ever getting dull. Could have used better editing in places, but I'm not sure a lot of people care about that. And the stories are quite artfully constructed, even by "literary award" standards. I guess I just didn't find anything here that took this from being a good book to a great book. But, as with De Niro's Game, it is a pretty impressive debut.

There was so much I liked about The Perfect Circle I wanted to rank it higher. It's a charming little story. And there's nothing sentimental about it. It takes the whole romantic cliché of the May-December, foreigner-local love story and turns it inside-out. And at times it's hilarious. The dinner scene in particular was terrific, a wonderful comic set-piece I'll never forget.

Unfortunately Quiviger mortars this material with lengthy meditative, poetic passages that didn't work for me at all. In part because the writing seemed overdone, but I think more because she was straining a point that was so obvious. Of course Marianne has to break free to truly be herself, and of course the perfect circle of life in the village with Marco and his mom is a trap. "Show, don't tell" is still pretty good advice for most writers. If Quiviger had followed it I think this could have been a gem of a novella. 

Finally, I didn't like The Immaculate Conception. 

It wasn't all bad. I thought the setting, Soucy's lower-class Montreal populated by diseased, repressed grotesques, was fascinating. But it suffers from serious "first novel" problems - the needlessly complex narrative and overwrought dramatics being clear examples. The worst thing, however, was the aggravating "I've got a secret" narrative technique. I remember seeing Ian McEwan interviewed a year or so ago and his being asked what the most common mistake was that he saw new writers making. Without hesitating he said it was starting off a novel by holding on to a secret.

So true. Why? Because it's such an obvious, artificial device and it just irritates the reader. I nearly exploded when I read the first chapter here. Remouald sees "something terrible" . . . and that's all we're told. Such a clever way of building suspense. Really keeps the reader guessing. 

Of course by the time all of the (many) mysteries are revealed - what's in the cabinet, what happened to Remouald when he was a kid, what was going on behind the wall, etc. - the reader either doesn't care or has lost track of what the point was in the first place. (As an aside, I had the same problem with another novel by a Quebec writer I just reviewed recently: Jean Barbe's How to Become a Monster.)

Hate to go off on a rant like that, but I have to say that I found this book so flawed, even for a first novel, that I'm shocked it made the list. And the jury really went out on a limb to pick it too. Nathan, you said in the Preliminaries that you "found it difficult to believe that this jury honestly thought a twelve-year-old French novel translated into English was among the best of the year." Having read it, I can only say I share your sense of disbelief. Not because it's a twelve-year-old French novel translated into English, but because it's just not very good.

And yes, I found the jury's decision pretty surprising too. But more of that in a bit. On to you Dave.

David: Flipping back between CNN and CTV, it's a crazy life I lead. My list ran as follows 

(1) Home Schooling
(2) Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
(3) De Niro's Game
(4) The Perfect Circle
(5) The Immaculate Conception

I think the best thing that came out of this year's short list is the remarkable collection by Carol Windley. If it's a book for another time, fine. Sentence for sentence it's also the class of the field. There just wasn't a weak link in the book. "What Saffi Knows" and "Family in Black" are standouts, but again no weak points.

This is everything short fiction should be and I'm trying not to reference the Globe article that discussed the short list, but what the hell is wrong with hearing bebop in 2006 if it's singularly fine bebop? I'm just not concerned that the stories may have a stylistic throwback quality to them. Quebec Gothic a la Soucy has been done before as well.

Windley was, for my money, the clear winner.

I had mixed feelings on Lam's book initially, but I went back and reread most of the stories last week and the guy has all the tools. There's a cumulative power there. I'm not much for medical settings, and the sameness in terms of the setting is a sort of elephant in the room. I'll reserve a fuller judgment until he sets something outside of his comfort zone. I suppose I can live with the jury's choice, though. Lam is a smart, economical writer who gets dialogue right, and he shares with Hage a cinematic quality that is immediate and punchy without being self-conscious. He wins out over Hage by just a bit because he exercised more control over his characters.

Rawi Hage has put together a solid narrative pull throughout De Niro's Game, but it feels like a film script in spots. That's not a criticism as such, but the main character Bassam felt a bit sketchy. Indeed George seemed a fuller creation.

I would welcome genre stuff on what has been a shortlist that routinely shuts out genre, and Hage's book worked pretty well as a thriller. I'm not sure Hage is there yet, but the book stayed with me after I finished it and the last third of the novel after Bassam got to France was solid.

I don't have any major criticisms, but nonetheless De Niro's Game is in the middle of the pack. It's entirely possible, however, that Hage's next book could bury the next effort by anyone else on this list.

Pascal Quiviger's book is wonderfully written, but doesn't have the craft of Windley's book and both characters were deficient. Our guy Marco is not someone I could buy as being an object of obsession. Even the first villager Marianne meets merely describes her lover as "good old Marco."

He lives with his mother, gives more of himself to dogs than people and has it bad for a hunt that rarely produces a trophy. I just don't see getting worked up about him.

As for Marianne, she is entirely declarative in her feelings for Marco. The story trips on a very simple "show, don't tell" rule. I also kept wondering if this novel grew out of a short story. There were stretches that felt unnecessary.

I'll read Quiviger's next book because the writing is quite good, but this first effort is just that. Fourth place.

I was going to invoke the Golden Rule here. I really can't find anything nice to say about Gaétan Soucy's book. I must have missed something, but unless absolutely everything isn't as it seems, then there's really nothing to drive a nail into. A great whack of plot points that take forever to resolve and then . . . what exactly? For a novel so over the top, there didn't seem to be much of a payoff. At least when I was (much) younger Anne Rice laced all that purple prose with a vampire or two.

That was the only book I had real trouble finishing.

Nathan: I watched about five minutes of the show. I have an allergic reaction, I think, to Justin Trudeau, and had to turn it off. I did turn it back on at the end to see who won, and could only say, "huh?"

I will admit right off the bat that I have not read the two books in translation. I didn't get the Soucy, and I just never had the chance to read all of the Quiviger, though I did read parts of it, enough to get a sense of the tone, style, etc.

As for the other three:

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage - This is the one I enjoyed the most, and the one I picked to win. The story felt a little familiar, it goes flat in the last few chapters, and, unlike Alex, I found the page-long run-on sentences that crop up every five pages or so became an annoying tic. On the other hand, the book is a compelling read, and never shrinks from, or attempts to sentimentalize, the violence of the story and of the setting, war-ravaged Beirut. Hage has a excellent sense of pacing, and does not hesitate to portray his protagonist as an occasionally nasty, vengeful shit. (Not that he isn't usually justified in being such a shit.) I groaned, too, when he started reading the Camus in Paris.

Home Schooling by Carol Windley - I picked this as next most likely to win, after the Hage. I think the writing in the book, on the level of craft, is probably the best of all the books on the shortlist (at least, ahem, the ones I read), but there was also the sense that Yes, she's the most talented writer, line by line, but I think that ends up not meaning much if the book feels dated right out of the gate. The Munro comparison is obvious, but I think Windley lacks Munro's psychological acuity. Even when Munro is treading some very well-worn ground - OK, even when her stories are dull - she is yet able to expose characters' motivations in a way that is almost clinical, and occasionally a little scary. I found myself rarely able to believe in Windley's characters. They seemed like creatures that could only exist in a work of literary fiction. Everything was abstract obsession and vague desire and passivity. I remember reading a piece by Anthony Lane where he - following Gore Vidal, who did it a few decades earlier - reviewed the top-10 books on the NY Times' bestsellers list. The best thing in it was when he went on about how, in trashy genre fiction (Danielle Steele, etc.), characters are allowed to indulge in the full range of human psychology - lust, greed, ambition, vanity, etc. - but in middlebrow literary fiction, everybody is emotionally constipated. Lust is reduced to longing for someone while staring out a rain-streaked window, or making a symbolically significant meal. It's not entirely fair to say this about Windley, but I kept thinking about that essay while reading the stories.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam - This is an uneven collection that starts strong and ends strong, but stumbles in the middle. I really like the stories about Fitzgerald, especially the earlier ones about his failed relationship with Ming. I was happy to see him reappear, because, as with the Hage, I am always up for deeply flawed, occasionally repugnant main characters. I was worried, going into the book, that Lam would feel the urge to make his stories more "literary" - i.e., more passive or reflective - but for the most part, he writes with immediacy, and is able to immerse himself
and the reader in his fictional worlds. I have to agree with Sandra Martin that some of the book felt like experiences that hadn't been fully digested yet, but on the other hand, that probably accounted for some of the immediacy of the stories.

Lam must be sick of having his stuff compared to ER. On the other hand, it's very hard not to think of it in some of the more "you are there" stories and scenes. Fortunately, there are only a couple of those. The best thing Lam accomplishes is to show a whole realm - that of doctors, nurses, and hospitals - that is strangely underrepresented in literary fiction. Thriller and mystery writers see the imaginative potential, but surprisingly few literary writers.

I think picking Lam shows how pointless it is to wonder whether these books are picked because they are the "best." The winner is the one the jury can all agree on, which means it could easily be their second-choice, or even third choice.

In the end, though, I'm not at all bothered by the fact that they picked the Lam, though it would have been nice to see the award go to Cormorant or Anansi. I enjoyed the book, and probably would have ended up reading it anyway, which is more than I can say for most of the Giller winners.

Alex: Some interesting thoughts, especially with regard to Home Schooling and the "even if it's well done, we're tired of it" argument. I can buy into a bit of that, and if there were some stronger nominees to challenge Windley it might have come in to play. But I didn't think there were.

I thought we might wrap up with slapping a grade on the jury. I see there being two things to consider: (1) the selection of the shortlist, and (2) the selection of a winner.

I can't give them great marks for the short list. I thought they had two strong picks in the Windley and the Hage. I thought the Lam was a bit of a stretch, the Quiviger a slightly longer stretch, and the Soucy a mistake. Especially when you consider the rest of the field this year. They passed over some good stuff to get this list. As usual, at least in my opinion, the GG list was more interesting. I'm not sure why that is. Usually it's because the Giller is more of an "establishment" and "lifetime achievement" award. But that wasn't the case this year. This was a left-field list. And given that liberating impulse I thought they could have done better.

As for the winner, I think Nathan has a point about juries sometimes taking everyone's second or third choice. I also got the feeling Lam's book was the "safe" pick on the list. It was probably the most popular or, to put it another way, least "literary" work. Which is fine. But on the other hand, if that's the criteria . . .

I give this year's jury a C-minus.

Nathan: I'm with you on the C-minus overall, Alex. The shortlist, even allowing for its eccentricity, never felt like it was representative of the best books of the year - even the best small-to-medium-size press books of the year. It almost felt like a random sampling. As in, "these five are among the best books of the year."

I'd be more forgiving about the shortlist selections if they hadn't gone with Bloodletting as the winner. Again, I'm not saying it's bad at all - for the most part I truly enjoyed reading it. But I came out of almost every story thinking, "is that it?" The Windley stories, as old-fashioned and emotionally stodgy as they were, at least drew me a little further into the language and the fictional universe of the stories. And the Hage simply felt more alive, more immediate, whatever its faults. Lam has a lot of talent, and there were moments in most of the stories that showed he could go from strength to strength, if he doesn't get absorbed into the CanLit borg that seems to eventually transform all interesting and promising young writers into faded copies of their elders. This book was a first book, and as such, it was a great one, and he should be congratulated. But the best of the year?

Michael: Grading the jury? From the gut, I'm going to give them a B-minus. Can't really justify that beyond saying I feel for anyone who tasks on the task of reading through a stack of books and trying to negotiate with three other people a "best of." Perhaps literary juries would be better off consisting of individuals (i.e., one person). Then we wouldn't get the weaker consensus choices.

I know we've gotten through this discussion so far without mentioning gender, but I have to say that when I was talking to friends about this list it inevitably came up that this jury (the four of us in this discussion) are all male. I said to folks that there were two books on the short list that were "very female novels." My female friends were concerned that the female authors wouldn't get fair treatment, but I am now pleased to be able to say that two of the guys here picked Windley to win. My own liberated status, of course, has fallen to ruin.

I would also like to say that I think the critics have deferred too much to Lam's status as a doctor, a professional and an authority. Medicine has deeper insights than Lam has given us. Both of my parents worked in hospitals and a lot more raunchy things happen in hospitals than Lam's book suggests. And I don't mean soap opera things, though recently a friend told me about a friend of hers who took her kid to the hospital and the emergency room doctor picked her up. And I don't mean the story my father told me about the guy who was screwing around with his girlfriend when he fell off the bed and
broke his erect penis, only to end up in the hospital and phoning his wife, who came screaming into the hospital tearing a strip off of everybody. I was thinking more about medicine being a mix of the ancient art and the highly leading-edge scientific, and also a mystery. Life, the fragility and the enormous strength of it. The awe medicine has about its own knowledge and its own lack of knowledge. These are big metaphysical questions. I'm not saying Lam needed to write a novel of ideas, but to give this guy the best of the year award for a first collection, as promising as it is? Sorry. No. To win the prize it should have provided more.

Maybe I should downgrade the jury now. Okay, yes. Now that I think again of Kenneth J. Harvey's Inside, which the jury could have chosen. That's a far better book than Lam's. Stark simple prose. Not a big novel of ideas. But one profound about the limits of life. That's the book that should have won. In a pass/fail system, this jury gets an F. But we're not a society that gives failing grades anymore. So, I guess I'll concur with the C-minus grade. (Sorry, Alice! I still love you with all my heart!)

Alex: Oh, I would have given an F if I thought it was deserved. But this wasn't a disaster. 

I'm still a bit concerned about the Michael Winter angle. In his Acknowledgments Lam credits seven authors, including Winter, with helping him "begin to learn the art of writing." Unless he's just name-dropping, which is a possibility, I assume that means they were of some assistance in the writing of this book. And yet there was Winter standing on stage giving him the prize. I don't think that should have happened.

Like all of you, I'm mostly just a little surprised that Lam won, not really upset. As I said earlier, it was a "bit of a stretch."

Finally: I did think about the gender issue you mention Michael when I set this panel up. But what can I do? Female? Opinionated about books? Send me an e-mail! (And no, I'm not looking to hook up.)

David: I do feel a bit more charitable, so I'll call it a C. 

Granted, most of that comes from my complete bafflement at the Soucy book being on the list. There was something to like in each of the others, and who knows, Lam and Hage may grow into something quite wonderful. 

I'm with Nathan, however. There's something to his supposition about the "CanLit borg" and I have to think it comes from a subconscious realization that muse or no muse, the Canadian novel rests on a pretty shaky perch in terms of what can hope to be sold. 

Of course, there are exceptions and that becomes a wider debate, but I also read the new Cormac McCarthy in the midst of the Giller five, and was struck by how different it was from his other work. I'm hard pressed to name a major Canadian author who could pull off such a radical work as deeply into their careers as McCarthy is into his. I'm not sure the industry would reward it or even allow for it much. Some of you have sung the praises of Kenneth Harvey, a guy I've never read, but probably should do so now. 

It's simply easier for prospective publishers to replicate a "Heather's Pick" than feed and water a young writer over the course of three books. For that reason, I give some credit to the short list being something that runs counter, but best books of the year? No.

Nathan: Dave, you're right: the rarity of established Canadian novelists changing direction in any radical way is something that really marks contemporary CanLit. The market forces, obviously, do anything to prevent it, but I'm sure those forces are in place everywhere else in the world to roughly the same extent. It seems that, once you're on the elegant, 400-page novel
train, it's very, very hard to get off. You have to give credit to someone like Margaret Atwood, who still pushes herself to engage with new forms and techniques. I don't know if it's always successful, but it's more interesting than simply putting out another doorstop novel every three or four years, with diminishing critical returns.

Back to the Giller: It's not really their fault, but I would be a lot more generous to this jury if there was some effort made to break this code of silence that surrounds the selection process. Booker judges routinely spill the beans on what went on in the meetings, and why certain books got picked and others didn't. I think there needs to be more transparency about the whole thing, not because I think there are conspiracies at work, but because it would be interesting, period, and would genuinely add to the understanding of how writing and publishing and the rest of it works. There is a vested interested in maintaining this illusion that books appear before us and are rewarded through means far too sacred and rarified for us to ever comprehend. For us mere mortals to be told that, say, Vincent Lam's was the book the entire jury could agree on, but was no one's first pick (not saying that was the case, but it's just as likely as any other scenario) would not disillusion us all and send us spiraling into doubt about the worth of awards. And yet, we are supposed to take everything the jury says at face value and believe they picked the absolute "best books."

Imagine if, say, Munro admitted afterward that there was no way she was going to vote for the Windley because it was too Munro-esque? (Again, just a wild theory.)

Instead, we are left to indulge in the silliest CanLit Kremlinology every single year.

Why Canadian publishing people have not yet learned the lesson of publicist-planted gossip and leaked songs as promotion is baffling to me, and just further cements CanLit's reputation as an institution always a few decades behind the times. People love dirt; they get excited about it, and if they get excited about something, they are more likely to see the thing behind it all - books - as something with a bit of life to it.

Is finding out why and how the jury picked the books they did really too much to ask?

Alex: I think the short answer to that is Yes. And the deference/politeness of the media just makes it worse.

Which is one reason for discussions like this. But I guess we're done now so it's time to declare this Green Room closed. Thanks to all the participants, publishers, and, yes, even authors. Perhaps we'll meet here again next year?