July - December 2005

November 19/05: Canada's Top 100

The Literary Review of Canada has announced its list of "the 100 most important Canadian books ever written."

These lists are always somewhat silly exercises, but they are popular with the public and I'm sure this one will help the LRC (which dubs itself "Canada's pre-eminent review of books") to raise its profile a bit. Be honest: How many of you had even heard of this publication before now?

Anyway, since one of the purposes behind such lists is to provoke discussion, here are some quick thoughts:

(1) It's a bit of a mystery how the list was compiled. Apparently the LRC "threw the doors open to its contributors and readers for suggestions," and then a "selection jury" winnowed the list down to 100. I can only imagine how many votes there were for the 1863 Geological Survey of Canada. The only criterion for selection was that the books be ones that "changed our country's psychic landscape." 

I would note that an important Canadian book was not necessarily one that changed our psychic landscape. These are different categories. Frye's Bush Garden did change the landscape, but was not that important when considered alongside the rest of his body of work. His Anatomy of Criticism was a very important book by any standard of measure, but one that did nothing to affect our psychic landscape. Both are included.

(2) The list is presented in chronological order. This is a bit of a cheat. It stands to reason that some of the books on the list are more important than others, just as these 100 books have been deemed more important than the books that didn't make the list.

(3) People who might be a bit pissed off: Michael Ondaatje, Alistair MacLeod, David Adams Richards. Rolling over in their graves: E. J. Pratt, Ralph Connor (don't laugh, that guy was huge), Al Purdy, Robert Service. Robert Service! Anyone hear of him? Do you think he maybe changed the landscape? He invented the Yukon! Poetry gets no respect. And I'm sure I'm missing quite a few other names.

(4) What the hell is with all these political books? I suspect a real bias among the contributors and the selection jury at the LRC here. I can take the Royal Commissions, some of these really were significant, but in general there's way too much history and political biography. History doesn't change our psychic landscape, it describes that change. And since things like Royal Commissions are being included, what about the British North America Act and Constitution Act?

And there you have it. Proof, if any more were needed, that Canadians can be just as silly about these things as anyone else.

October 14/05: Where is Here?

In an essay appearing in the Globe and Mail, Hal Niedzviecki writes about his experience judging a student assignment that asked the members of a summer program in book publishing to develop a publishing business. "Students were given a budget and asked to come up with a theoretical, yet viable publishing model, including a sample catalogue of titles, the covers of those titles, how the titles will be marketed and publicized, and a detailed budget showing expenditures and predicted income."

Obviously this was a corporate rather than a creative assignment. The corporate world likes to pay lip service to things like personal initiative, imagination, character, vision, and "thinking outside the box," but as anyone who has ever seen an episode of The Apprentice knows, demonstrating so much as a hint of any of these qualities is simply the fastest way to get your ass booted out of the boardroom. Better not to surprise Martha, the Donald, or any of the hypothetical publishing investors with something unfamiliar. And so the student teams provided prospectuses "eerily in step with global and domestic publishing trends." No fiction. No short stories. No poetry. No surprises.

And Niedzviecki is not surprised. But he is disturbed. He sees a looming danger: 

"Increasingly attuned to the fickle winds of global cultural trends, there is reason to believe that new generations are not excited about a type of writing that resists easy packaging and relies heavily on the dynamics of communities rooted in specific times and places. As the proposed publishing houses dramatically demonstrate, even Cancon is going placeless and faceless. . . . The five proposed publishing businesses all had, at their core, a rootless universalist ideology -- books that could be published and read anywhere."

So far, so good. Down with rootless, placeless, globalist culture! As Northrop Frye once remarked, "culture has something vegetable about it, something that increasingly needs to grow from roots, something that demands a small region and a restricted locale" (words I had occasion to quote just recently in a review of George Bowering's Left Hook).

But then we have a problem. Where is local? What is local? And here's where Niedzviecki's argument falls apart.

You see, for Niedzviecki the local is "an urban, multi-ethnic, pop-culture-attuned Canada." 

It's hard, if not impossible, to imagine a more generic locale than this. What place is Niedzviecki talking about? What urbs? Is it a spot on the map or just a domain name? Aren't all cities these days multi-ethnic? What could be less local, more rootless and ideologically universalist, than pop culture? What could be less local than the local Starbucks? And yet Niedzviecki wants Canadian publishers to start scouring Starbucks for "this country's equivalents to Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Michel Houellebecq and Haruki Murakami." Which of these writers explores the dynamics of a community "rooted in a specific time and place"? What is "stubbornly, opaquely local" about them? I have read some of each and I would have to say "Not much." They not only write "books that could be published and read anywhere" (which, by the way, is hardly something to hold against them), but books that could have been written anywhere. And if anything their voices are only becoming less rooted and more generic all the time (following "universal inchoate trends" about which Niedzviecki seems less aware, or at least less concerned). 

Is this what Canadian writers should aspire to? More "urban, multi-ethnic, pop-culture-attuned" fiction? I'm sure it travels well, and might sell at book fairs, but I thought those were the wrong considerations?

There's an old argument in the background here, between the country and the city parties in CanLitCrit. Niedzviecki is clearly in the city camp, and there's nothing wrong with that. Canada has plenty of good writers rooted in an urban locale. But their cities are particular places, not flabby constructs like "an urban, multi-ethnic, pop-culture-attuned Canada." If the students tried to pitch a line like that in the boardroom they'd probably keep their jobs. But I think I might go for the coffee-table book instead.

August 30/05: The Passing of the Establishment?

Established literary authors are having a rough go of it.

With all of the deference given to today's literary lions by the mainstream media and (especially) the publishing industry, this is a story you have to pick up in bits and pieces and try to sew together. But the evidence is there.

Item: The Man Booker longlist is announced and a column in the Guardian ("A new life for the novel") crows about how this is "perhaps the richest year for contemporary British and Commonwealth fiction since the launch of the Booker Prize in 1969, with most of our best novelists . . . publishing exceptional new works." But in the Guardian's own "Culture Vulture" blog this point of view was immediately challenged by people complaining of the "same old, same old" and "the usual, tedious, subjects." McEwan in particular came in for some harsh words, reflecting what was a definitely mixed critical response to Saturday.

My response: The blog-posters have a point. Saturday and Never Let Me Go were both interesting, technically accomplished novels. I thought Saturday a triumph. At the same time, neither book was the author's best (or second, or third best even). You can't expect the Booker judges to go out on a limb. The last time they tried that was for Vernon God Little, and they took their lumps. Better to stick with a longlist of big names (even those whose books haven't been published yet).

Item: John Irving's memoir/novel Until I Find You receives a critical drubbing.

My response: Irving writes beach fiction, so what's all the fuss? The only twist to this story was the apology the Washington Post had to run after their reviewer was outed as someone with a personal, albeit indirect, connection to Irving (and, presumably, an axe to grind).

As an aside, I should say something about Martin Levin's comments on this matter in the Globe and Mail. Here we go (again): "The problem in a pool as small as CanLit is that so many writers have some sort of acquaintance, intimate or passing, with one another that it can be difficult to find a reviewer sans some sort of affiliation with an author. This is especially true for fiction and poetry." 

How many times do we have to hear this same old line? Apparently you can stuff everyone in Canada who knows how to read into a phone booth. Every Canadian writer knows every other Canadian writer. They all go to the same parties, have the same agents, and write for the same newspaper. If you aren't a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail then you're not in the CanLit pool. I am so sick of hearing this bullshit. There are plenty of alternative voices out there, especially when it comes to fiction and poetry. But moving right along . . .

Item: Hillel Italie has a column on how publishers are still looking for this year's Great American Novel (defined, by publishers, as a literary novel that sells). It's worth quoting a bit:

"'Looking across the landscape, there were supposed to be some literary novels that blew everybody away. But for various reasons they didn't quite perform,' says Jonathan Burnham, vice president and publisher of HarperCollins . . . "

"'I think everyone is still waiting for the book that everyone greets as the big literary book,' says John Sterling, president and publisher of Henry Holt. 'People thought it would be a strong year for fiction, but it hasn't turned out that way.'"

"With the presidential election over, Sterling and others had expected fiction to reclaim the attention given to topical books. But anticipated novels such as Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received mixed reviews at best and the fall doesn't look a lot better."

My response: "For various reasons they didn't quite perform"? Could at least one of those reasons be that they weren't very good? The last paragraph quoted points out how two books that were supposed to "perform" had mixed reviews at best (the same treatment McEwan and Ishiguro received). I can't speak to the Foer, but Cunningham's book was a real disappointment. And he isn't the only one to be letting the side down. A few years ago I would have put Haruki Murakami very near the top of my list of the world's best writers. That judgment took a hit with After the Quake, but I was still with him. There was, however, no way to excuse a book as dreadful and intellectually limp as Kafka on the Shore. The only thing good I could say about it was how close it seemed to a Stephen King novel (yes, that was meant as a compliment).

Then there's this new Bret Easton Ellis book (Lunar Park), an unashamed homage to Stephen King (is there a clue here as to what's going wrong?). If you haven't read it yet, don't. It's one of those books that's so bad it actually makes you question whether the author was ever any good, or if he's just been fooling us all this time (and keep in mind: this is coming from someone who liked Glamorama!).

What gives?

Item: Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is getting some, um, "mixed" reviews. In fact, its one unqualified booster so far is Christopher Hitchens (someone who has now sunk below the level of self-parody) in the Atlantic. So much for conflicts of interest! As Bob Hoover correctly points out in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this kind of back-scratching was "more prevalent in the cozy days of long ago, when authors and review editors were always trying to help friends and lovers. It was a smaller literary world then, as well." Someone needs to tell the Washington Post. Someone needs to tell Martin Levin. 

My response: After The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury I wrote this guy off completely. 

Item: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man is getting panned.

Hey! What's going on? What happened to the establishment? By the time Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men came out I was actually feeling a bit nervous. (For what it's worth: it's better than the Border Trilogy, but nowhere near what he was writing fifteen, twenty years ago. And it too has been receiving "mixed" reviews.)

Are critics just getting punchier? I don't think so. If anything there is still a bias in the media towards being overly generous toward writers with established reputations. But the general rule is that most writers, even the greats, only have a limited number of great books in them, a window of super-productive years. For at least some of the big names canvassed here it's obvious that the window has shut.

Now: Next!

August 5/05: The Consumers' Choice Awards

Nominees have been announced for the first annual Quill Awards.

The Quills style themselves as a "populist" literary award. The suspicion is that its impetus came from the fallout over things like the "five [unknown] women from New York" shortlisted for the National Book Awards last year, and Stephen King's dismal tirade about not getting enough love from the pointy-heads. But whatever its boardroom origins, it is now receiving lots of media oxygen (NBC is a sponsor and will broadcast an hour-long "star studded ceremony" on October 22).

The populism being celebrated is of a very specific kind. The winners will be determined by something called "consumer voting": "Consumers will vote on the 5 nominees selected by the Nominating Board in each of the 19 categories." They can do so online or at Borders book stores. 

Consumers. Not readers. Consumers.

I suppose it would be easy to dismiss this as just another mindless marketing exercise and vulgar celebration of consumerism, but . . . 

That's really all it is, and what more can you say?

As I've made clear on many occasions in the past, I don't think much of literary awards. One of the few things they can do, however, is give a bit of publicity to some books that otherwise wouldn't be noticed. This is not what the Quill Awards are about. This is about the man who has being given more. Think about it: The consumers' choice book awards have already been handed out. J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, Dan Brown and Deepak Chopra won. They all went home with a big prize. The consumer voters have been filling out their ballots at Borders and online for the past year. We know the results. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is the consumers' choice for Children's Chapter Book. If it doesn't win the prize on October 22 then something will have gone terribly wrong. Maybe non-consumers (do library borrowers count? digital book pirates?) will conspire to somehow sabotage the vote! Perhaps there will be some genuine confusion over what it means to be the "best" cook book (best written? best recipes? easiest to follow instructions?). But then these awards aren't really about picking the best of anything. Given the context, what would such a judgment mean? The easiest to buy?

According to a press release these will be the "first consumer-driven awards program that acknowledges the power and importance of the written word and celebrates literacy." This is puzzling. How can a consumer-driven awards program acknowledge anything but the power of consumers? The release must mean the economic importance of the written word and the profits of literacy, but it's a nice fudge.

The rest of it just seems bizarre. Presumably Langston Hughes is included in the Poetry category because John Kerry quoted him on his campaign. As for a new translation of Gilgamesh also being included . . . well, the poetry category couldn't have been easy for the nominating committee. Nora Roberts is nominated twice in the Romance category, which may be unfairly limiting that author. Religion/Spirituality and Health/Self-Improvement (a category that includes Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) might almost be the same thing, to guess from the nominated titles.

But criticism is, as they say, superfluous. These awards aren't about being critical. They are a celebration of money made and spent. Even so, I'm still not sure if it will make good TV.

July 13/05: Speak No Harry

After a Real Canadian Superstore in Coquitlam, British Columbia inadvertently sold 15 copies of the latest Harry Potter book before the official release date of Saturday, June 16 (12:01), Canadian publisher Raincoast Books went to B. C. Superior Court to get an injunction barring anyone (aside from what the CBC story refers to as "the book's official public relations machine") from revealing the plot or any information about the book.

And they got it!

Has it come to this? Let's try and keep things in perspective: We're talking about the orchestration of a giant publicity campaign for a children's book. An injunction is considered to be an extraordinary form of legal relief, available only when a party is threatened with immediate, irreparable harm. This motion didn't even deserve to be heard in court. I have to wonder what Justice Kristi Gill was thinking. Aside from making state power into a tool of the Potter machine, the injunction is absurd. How could it be enforced? Are the people who bought the book criminals? And note that Justice Gill didn't just order people not to talk about the book, she ordered them not to read it! Remember that the next time Banned Book Week rolls around and everyone is complaining about Harry Potter being pulled from school library shelves. Rednecks and dictators (and Heather Reisman) aren't the only ones who want to control what you read. 

Does it sound like I'm going over the top? I don't think so. Going to court to get an injunction prohibiting people from reading a book is going over the top. I'm sorry, but that's taking marketing just a bit too far. 

Of course you can understand Raincoast's concern. The publication of the new Harry Potter is an event. In fact, that's all it is now. And orchestrating the kind of consumer herd behaviour that pre-sells a million copies is fine. But breaking the embargo is not a matter for the courts. So what if a dozen copies were sold a couple of days early? Do you know why they were sold early? Because the folks stocking the shelves and working the cash at the mega-grocery store hadn't been following all the buzz. They probably thought it was just another book.

And they were right.

July 12/05: The Christians Write

According to a report in the Denver Post, "Despite early predictions that the religious book market was just a flash-in-the-pan literary phenomenon, the growth of Christian books outpaced the adult trade category in 2004, with sales expected to soar in coming years." According to a consultant with the Book Industry Study Group the growth in Christian publishing is not a bubble or a fad but "a significant trend in the marketplace."

Admittedly, a lot of the numbers refer to the growth in sales of "religious books", a category that includes most of those self-help titles that have been the bread-and-butter of the publishing biz for a while now. I suppose even those Chicken Soup for the Soul books could be considered religious. But what the piece in the Post, and another report in the Guardian on the same subject, are really interested in is the growth in Christian fiction: everything from Left Behind-clones to Christian westerns to Christian chick-lit (where the young woman's goal is to find an honest god-fearing man committed to family values). The message of these books is that life is actually pretty simple. There is good and evil and it's always obvious which is which. There is no room for mystery or doubt about spiritual values. It is a message people find comforting in the current "us vs. them" political climate. Also comforting is the notion that the Rapture is approaching - which tells you something about the level of spiritual certitude enjoyed by true believers as well as how much they hate their everyday lives.

But there's no mystery to the popularity of Christian fiction. People want to believe that religion is still a vital force in modern life, that it still means something. Take a look at two of the most wildly successful novels ever published in America: The Exorcist and The Da Vinci Code. I don't think either of these books would be categorized as "Christian fiction" (in fact they were both criticized by the Catholic Church) but the same buttons are being pushed. They're the same buttons Alice Sebold pushed in The Lovely Bones, and that Stephen King has been pressing for years. Let's face it, the whole Left Behind series is just a clumsy rip off of The Stand. The only thing different is the marketing.

And what marketing! You see, the great thing about Christian fiction is that just by buying it you are demonstrating that you  are one of the elect. Of course you're reading the exact same romantic fantasy or violent pulp as the person in the seat next to you on the bus, but the thin shellac of Bible catch-phrases, bigotry, and comic book morality lets them know that you are better than they are! Christian fiction's popularity mirrors that of the "For Dummies" books, only instead of proclaiming yourself a Dummy or Total Idiot you identify yourself as one of the Saved.

All for the price of a paperback!

July 11/05: The State of the Review

Norman Mailer is in the press again for attacking New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani in a pre-emptive strike, calling her a "one-woman kamikaze" who "disdains white male writers" and who can't be fired because she is an "Asiatic feminist."

You have to wonder at the power of resentment that drives Mailer (and, earlier, Caleb Carr) to such embarrassing outbursts. For the record, Kakutani is a worthless reviewer, not because she's a woman or "Asiatic" but because she's a bore with no ear for good prose. Is there some editorial policy that restricts her from offering any personal insight into what she's writing about? Her reviews are the equivalent of public school book reports. You just want to give them a "B" for comprehension and be done with it ("comprehension", back in the day, meant that you demonstrated to the teacher that you actually read the whole thing, not that you understood any part of it). It's a review style that fits a publication like the Times, which, as ridiculous as it may seem after all it's been through in the last couple of years, still advertises itself as a "paper of record."

I've been off on vacation for a month but from the book headlines I've been browsing I'd have to say it's not a good time to be a reviewer. The one bright light is the woman I read about who writes four reviews a day for Amazon.com. 

Are we supposed to be impressed by this? She might as well be wiping her ass with those books.

Of course what makes her a bright light is where you read her, which is in the checkout line. Her reviews are a form of marketing - not for the individual books but for Amazon. And marketing is what it's all about. A column that appeared in the Bookseller about a month ago by Scott Pack said it all. According to Pack reviews "should inspire reading . . . should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books." Excitement, stimulation, agitation . . . you know where this is going. And it doesn't take Pack long to get there: "Reviews no longer sell books in the volume that they used to."

I think this is nonsense not just because reviews aren't supposed to sell books but because I don't think they ever have. Dan Brown and Stephen King don't need reviews. What bad reviews they get don't hurt them. And what good reviews literary fiction receives don't help much. Hell, winning the International Man Booker Award didn't give much of a bounce to Ismail (Who?) Kadare. (What a funny story that was! I still don't have any idea what the point of that award is, but giving it to someone whose work is virtually unknown in English was quite the poke in the ribs.)

Another alternative is suggested in a piece that appeared recently in the Guardian. These are the book blogs. In an odd column Hephzibah Anderson considers the blogs as an alternative for publishers who have "their doubts about review coverage as an effective means of shifting units." What I found odd about this is that I thought the bloggers, or at least some of them, were writing reviews. But maybe not. According to Anderson they are "online reading journals - digital marginalia on books they've loved and loathed, supplemented by cut-and-paste montages of mainstream reviews. In tone, they offer the same abrasive mix of passion and gunslinging opinion that makes the political bloggers so refreshing."

"Online reading journals," "digital marginalia," "cut-and-paste montages," "abrasive mix of passion and gunslinging opinion" - this sounds a bit like Pack's excitement, stimulation and agitation. Which means . . .

According to Pack our book review pages are "very dull." I agree, and as evidence I'd start with someone like Kakutani. But I don't think we should be too quick to shoot the messengers. A lot of books today are very dull, and a lot of what passes for literary culture is pretty bland (I don't have to name the usual suspects, do I?). This is a big problem if you believe, as I do, that a lot of literature comes out of the conflict of ideas and personalities. The current mindset is like what I criticized when I wrote "Speaking Out," and what A. N. Wilson alludes to when he says the "thing to remember is that it is very rare to have a critic say exactly what they think these days. Most critics will not tell you that the vast majority of books published are crap." But it's not enough just to say so. Critics have to try and help find a way out of this mess. They have to have a vision as well as the will to express it. Great writers need critics for more than buzz.