THE YEAR IN REVIEW - 2011
By Alex Good
January 1, 2012
When I started this site back in the late '90s I'm not sure how
long I was expecting to keep it going. This long? Probably not. I've now
archived The Third Five Years: Reviews, 2007-2011. That's a
long sentence. But, to transpose Richler just a bit, I guess I volunteered for
it.
Is it my own jadedness that made me think there wasn't anything
new happening, trend-wise, in publishing this past year? Yes, e-books are here.
No, I haven't got an e-reader yet. And I have no plans on getting one anytime
soon. I have played with them and I'll admit they might be good on long trips,
but since I don't go on long trips (or short trips, for that matter) I think I'll pass.
Usually in this essay I mention books from the past year that I
particularly liked. And while I know I'm forgetting a few titles, here I'll
mention Julian Barnes's The
Sense of an Ending, Clark Blaise's The
Meagre Tarmac, David Hickey's Open
Air Bindery, and David Nickle's Eutopia. That three of these four
titles are by Canadian authors is no doubt mainly due to the fact that, as a
Canadian reviewer, I review a lot of new Canadian books. It is not boosterism.
By boosterism I mean the sort of tripe usually set out by the Globe and Mail
at year end. Here is John Barber's lede to a piece headlined "By
any measure it was a banner literary year":
Literary quality is notoriously subjective. But even opinions
have patterns, as the industry newsletter Publisher’s Lunch discovered this
year when it surveyed several different “Best Books of 2011” lists and
consolidated them into a “Best of the Best of 2011 list.” Going into the
Christmas season with 19 U.S. sources included, three of the list’s top 10
novels of the year were Canadian: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick
deWitt, The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje and Esi Edugyan’s
Giller Prize-winning Half-Blood Blues.
I haven't seen this consolidated list Barber mentions so I don't
know what all it included, but given that it appeared in an "industry
newsletter" and that the books mentioned were all from the media-friendly Giller
shortlist, I have my doubts. I was immediately reminded of what happened last
year when one of the Giller jurists, Ali Smith, asked by a British newspaper to
name her "best books of the year," failed to mention any Canadian
titles (including that year's Giller winner). I think that tells you something.
And so I was not surprised when I found, in my own year-end periodical reading,
that the Guardian's poll of twenty-five writers and reviewers came
up with just two Canadian books to make the cut of the year's best (out of more
than sixty selected). You will be unsurprised to hear that these were (drum
roll) Alice Munro's New Selected Stories and Michael Ondaatje's The
Cat's Table. Yawn. Next, in the New Yorker (whose list, like the
Guardian's, included non-fiction, fiction, and poetry) not a single Canadian
books made the cut, out of 44 titles mentioned.
Banner year? You be the judge. Yes, there were great Canadian books
published in 2011. But it's obvious they just aren't breaking through, at least
without the Giller's spotlight. At the point I don't know what the
answer is. Last year in my Year in Review essay I called for more Canadian book
coverage - honest, critical coverage - online. For whatever reason that just
isn't happening, and I don't expect it to happen now. Frankly I don't think it
would make a big difference anyway, but it would be nice to see more evidence
that lower-profile work was being noticed. And really, someone needs to call out
the mainstream media on their lazy genuflection before sacred cows and prizes
with big promotional budgets. Don't we want to put our best foot forward on the
world stage? I don't think we are.
Another year, another rant. And I trust my home and native land
to keep feeding me more material in the new one. What will 2012 bring? Horrors
and delights a-plenty, I am sure.
Best wishes for a safe and happy New Year,
Alex Good
