July - December 2004

December 1/04: Pierre Berton

Pierre Berton has died at the age of 84.

There is no Canadian writer I had as much respect and affection for. I grew up with Berton. Every Christmas I was sure to get "Berton's latest" as a present, and it was the present I looked forward to and enjoyed the most. He was Canada's author and the author of Canada, a marvelous storyteller who wrote the Canadian identity.

I had heard rumors of his abrasive, challenging personality before I tried to set up an interview with him, and I was actually a bit nervous about calling him (that he even agreed to let an Internet nobody like me call him up, at home, says a lot about the man). I needn't have worried. I was hopeless, but he was such a pro he took it all in stride.  

We were very Canadian. At the end of the interview I thanked him twice, for the interview and for writing so many great books. And he thanked me for saying so.

I feel like I have lost a great friend of my youth. We have all lost our national companion.

November 16/04: Secret Jury

A little controversy has blown up over this year's fiction short list for the U.S. National Book Awards.

The fuss got started by Caryn James, writing in the New York Times. James was mainly upset at the quality of the five finalists for the fiction short list and the fact that some obvious choices (most obviously, according to everyone who has offered an opinion, Philip Roth's Plot Against America) were overlooked. But in her essay she identified two other sources of concern: (1) the five chosen novelists, all of whom were women living in New York, were not demographically representative; and (2) none of the five novels had enjoyed any popular success.

In a brief comment on the BookNinja blog, George Murray identified James's piece as a very Canadian complaint: "Welcome to our world, America." What he was referring to (I think) is the hand-wringing over books that aren't "big" enough to win national awards (James complains about a "short-story aesthetic" and the absence of the "big and sprawling" among the five finalists), as well as the backlash against the Big City theory of cultural production.

Canadians have been through all this. Every year there is another complaint (not always unjustified) about the Toronto-centric Giller Prize or some other literary award. And the absence of big and sprawling Canadian novels is a frequent topic of discussion in a country where the short-story aesthetic has been so successful.

But this doesn't go down well in the U.S. There has been a lot of ink shed over the past few years about how books are getting too big and/or too small (I've read articles arguing both positions), but in America more has always been more. A few years ago the same New York Times took Canada to task for being too small-minded and provincial (I made some remarks here). And now look at this fine state of affairs! A great big Imperial power's National Book Award nominees are . . . a bunch of women in New York City! It's un-American.

And it's doubly un-American because it doesn't reward material success. Didn't these book nerds listen to what Stephen King said to them last year about considering popular fiction for these awards? According to James, "the judges apparently went out of their way to nominate books that have scarcely been noticed." The five novels have sold less than 10,000 copies combined. How can they be any good?

(An aside, courtesy of Lewis Lapham: "The romance of the artist as an impoverished seer no longer commands belief. Under the new cultural dispensation, poverty is merely poverty, and behavior once attributed to the vagaries of genius has come to be seen as being both boorish and subversive. The phrase 'a poor artist' stands revealed as a contradiction in terms. If the artist were any good (i.e., 'a real artist' and not a charlatan) he would meet that editor's criterion of being rich. If he isn't rich he has failed the examination of the market and deserves no sympathy.")

The problem with all this, or so the argument goes, is that in order to have a successful literary prize (that is, one that will get a lot of attention and be seen as culturally relevant), you have to show that you are in the mainstream. You have to give the people what they want, not lecture to them. As Laura Miller, in a follow-up piece to the Caryn James article, remarks:

"Using the National Book Awards to bring attention to fine but overlooked novels is a noble plan, perhaps, but one undercut by the fact that it doesn't really work. The list tends to get received not as a recommendation but as a rebuke: these are the great books you should have been reading and the press should have been covering when you were wasting time and column inches on safe big-name talents and inferior crowd-pleasers, you vulgarians."

Nominating a group of "marginal" writers only has the effect of marginalizing the prize. "By trying to strong-arm readers' taste," James writes, "the judges are guaranteeing that their prize remains marginal." Far better to go with the flow. Better to be predictable. Better to be like the Oscars.

Now here is the real problem:

The National Book Awards are an industry-sponsored award. Like every other cultural prize they are essentially a promotional tool. You judge these things by their "bounce": increased box office for Oscar nominees, or the carefully tabulated increase in sales for a Man Booker winner (provided in some detail on the Man Booker official Web-page). The bigger the bounce the more successful the award.

While they presumably involve some kind of critical process, prizes are not, as James Wood has it, "the new reviews." They don't speak. In fact, according to an NBA spokesperson the judges are barred from discussing their choices. And so you get a situation where speculation swirls around the secret motives of Rick Moody, chairman of the National Book Award fiction panel. "These (books) represent the taste particularly of the chief judge," says John Baker, a columnist at Publishers' Weekly. It is something a lot of people are wondering about. But aside from totally non-descriptive blurbs accompanying the press releases (blurbs that can even be interchangeable, as the recent Danuta Gleed award mix-up showed), there is no accounting for the process of selection. I would have thought it highly unlikely that five literary people could be found who had read all of these books, much less all agree on their nomination (a former co-chairman of the National Book Foundation said he had never heard of any of them). But we'll never know.

"The judges," Miller writes, "apply very writerly, if not downright esoteric, criteria in making their decision." This sounds good to me. If it's a book award, I think writerly criteria should be applied. What other criteria would you use? 

But these criteria need to be clearly expressed. If awards are to be a form of critical response, even a totally subjective one, we have to understand that response. Why not let us inside? Why not ask the jury for their reasons? They are, after all, writers. In fact, why not make a reality TV program out of the whole thing? Talk about visibility!

(Since I've been talking about doing this for a while, in December I'll be participating in an "open book jury" on the 2004 Governor-General's poetry in English prize. The time has come for some transparency. The Runaway Jury is on its way!)

October 20/04: A Gay Novel

Alan Hollinghurst has won this year's Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty.

In addition to the now obligatory discussion of how much winning the prize is likely to transform sales of Hollinghurst's book (something the official Man Booker press release itself goes on about), initial reports also alert us to the fact that The Line of  Beauty is a "gay novel."

According to the Reuters story, "Organizers confirmed it was the first time in the 36-year history of the Booker that a gay novel had won the prize." This was picked up by the Telegraph, which ran the story under the headline "Gay novel wins Man Booker Prize." The Telegraph goes on to point out that this year's jury was "chaired by Chris Smith, the former Labour Culture Secretary and Britain's first openly gay Cabinet minister."

It makes you wonder. "Children's literature," for example, is usually defined as such by its target audience. Children don't actually write children's literature, and it isn't always about children. A children's book is something to be read by a child. But what is a "gay novel"? One that is written: (a) for gays; (b) by a gay person; or (c) about the gay lifestyle? (I will leave aside the possibility that the pronouncement made by the Man Booker "organizers" means that the novel itself is somehow gay--perhaps a novel that likes other novels.) How can a novel be gay?

More to the point: How did the organizers of what is (arguably) the world's most prestigious literary award come out with something so stupid? Do they think that labeling a work of fiction a "gay novel" and giving it a prize means that they are opening doors?

Next year someone should tell them to just shut up and hand out the award.

September 2/04: Bad Booking

Penguin Books (UK) has launched a promotional campaign that has men seen reading books in public being awarded with cheques presented by beautiful models. The campaign is (supposedly) based on a survey that shows women find men who read more interesting and attractive than those who don't.

When the "Good Booking" promotion started several months ago I didn't think much of it at all. I assumed it was a clever little stunt that would give Penguin a good name by promoting literacy among British lads. A visit to the Good Booking Web-site has crushed all thought of that. I'm not talking about the girls in bikinis (or the bare-chested stud for the gay crowd, because "it's not just straight guys who need to get Good Booking"). And I'm not talking about the cutesy icons that let you know which books contain "Drugs", "Fast Cars", "Sex", "Kinky Sex", "Satan", "Booze", and "Vanity" (whatever, given the context, that is supposed to mean).

Instead I was upset (though I know I shouldn't have been surprised) to see that you have to be reading one of the Good Booking selected "Titles of the Month" to win the prize. These books belong to "a new category of books" that Penguin has created to "directly appeal to the young male audience." They are, in other words, "Dick Lit". Ghetto fiction. 

"Men under the age of 25 read less than any other group, spending an average of only 2 hours a week reading for pleasure. . . . This is compounded by the fact that over 40 per cent of British men say that they never read books." But the campaign isn't a solution to this problem. If you're a young man not very interested in books why would you read Nick Hornby on pop music when you could listen to pop music? Why would you read a book about a serial killer copying a video game when you could play a serial killer in a video game? 

If it's all the same to the bottom line, why can't lads get money for reading Penguin Classics instead of being given cash for trash? The studies don't mention what books turn women on. Surely there is an intellectual repulsion factor as well. I can still remember a hasty retreat made after spying The Celestine Prophecy on a bedside table by candlelight. Is there an award for bad booking too?

July 2/04: Blitzing Books

Former US President Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, My Life, was officially released on June 22. Launched as a "news event", the book was the subject of a number of "instant reviews" by major media outlets the next day.

Jack Shafer, writing in Slate, asks: "Can you really review a 957-page book in 24 hours?" His answer: No. Not only can  you not review it, at least properly, you can't even read it. The "critics" he canvasses admit as much. "Did I read the whole thing? No" he was told by one. Another said he read it all but "Closely enough to take a short quiz? No." In other words, he simply skimmed it.

They all did. Hence all the fuss over the mess the index was in. Do you think people would have noticed the state of the index if that wasn't what they were using to skim the book for the parts they thought might be important - especially for a review?

In a thoughtful piece for the Independent, Boyd Tonkin sees the Clinton affair (that is, the handling of Clinton's book), as indicative of a greater malaise. What happened to My Life was no accident. It was deliberately launched as an event book to make an end-run around criticism. Instant reviews are part and parcel of the media blitz that surrounds a launch:

"The traditional discipline of reviewing - of impartial appraisal by well-informed critics who enjoy fair access - offends today's entertainment industries. They can't always stop it. They can't buy it (though they try). They can endeavour to make it look irrelevant, by exploiting the media hunger for news and so re-framing their prize properties as happenings, not as mere artefacts."

The book business, like any other part of the entertainment industry, requires the production of a large volume of disposable products. "Artefacts" are economically self-defeating. Our culture is not one to hold on to things that long. Tying Clinton's book to the "24-hour news cycle" is not a huge stretch. Most major newspapers won't touch a book that is over a week old any more than they would review a movie that opened last week (and has already had a 75% drop-off in box office). 

But the point I find even more depressing in Tonkin's piece is this:

"With the most shameless celebrity tomes, even the "author" will not have read the book. In many other cases, the PR people won't have read it. The media interviewers won't have read it. The commentators on the interviews won't have read it. If the circus does its job, hordes of people will still acquire it - increasingly, as an impulse buy at a hefty discount from a supermarket rack. But many of those won't read it. In this Platonic ideal of publicity, a book may pass along a chain of hype from producer to consumer without anyone ever having to consider if it might be worth your money and your time."

This Platonic ideal of publicity is the industrial sublime: a model for the arts in our time. In fact, the situation is worse than Tonkin puts it. Of course celebrity authors, PR people and media interviewers don't read these books. We've known that for years. But we now have to add to that list the agents who buy and sell the manuscripts, the prize juries, and even the reviewers. Over the last few years there have been several stories telling of representatives of each of these groups who have confessed as much - and never with a bit of shame (indeed, in the case of agents, not having read a manuscript you just spent a few hundred thousand dollars on is a point of pride). 

Though there is some commercial pressure on Internet reviews to post a fast review as well (to take advantage of a book that promises to "open" big through affiliate linking), I think it's a bit ironic that it's also the Internet that offers the best opportunity to slow things down.

We'll have to wait and see. I know I'm not in any rush.