Kelln Goes All Cory Doctorow

Posted 8 May, 2008 in Book News, Technology | 3 comments

Mystery / suspense author Brad Kelln, whose new novel, In the Tongues of the Dead, is due out this fall from ECW Press, has jumped on the Internet freebie bandwagon. For a limited time, he’s giving away Black Inside, the third novel in his Michael Wenton trilogy (which also includes Lost Sanity and Method of Madness), as a free download on his website.

Kelln is not a stranger to innovative Internet marketing. Last year he serialized a novel on his Facebook group, “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes Books.”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that authors who give away their material on the Internet experience a spike in sales of their physical books; we’ll have to wait until fall to find out if Kelln’s gambit pays off in sales of his new novel, which is described on his site as “a mystery thriller with religious undertones intended to evoke controversy.”

Dept. of Unintentional Irony, Pt. CLXIII

Posted 7 May, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

Apparently a mother in Lynnwood, Washington (natch) is upset that Urban Outfitters clothing stores are stocking what she claims to be sexually explicit books that are inappropriate for teenagers (who, of course, never have, think, or talk about sex, let alone download porn off the Internet).

I know it’s a cheap shot, but check out the name of the mother in question:

LYNNWOOD — Marci Milfs went to Urban Outfitters to find clothes for her teenage son.

She was surprised to find sexually charged books that she believes have no place in a clothing store for teens and young adults.

On one end of the spectrum was “Porn for Women,” a photo book showing men doing housework. On the other was “Pornogami: A Guide to the Ancient Art of Paper-Folding for Adults,” a guide for making anatomically correct artwork.

“When I saw it, I was shocked,” Milfs said.

Before she gets her moral outrage any more stoked, she might consider changing her name. I’m just saying.

(Thanks to Sarah D. for the link.)

A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence

Posted 6 May, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about violence recently.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine confessed to being a bit of a “blood junkie” when it comes to the movies, and I must confess a degree of sympathy for this affinity. Violence in art is clearly nothing new: it goes back at least to the Greeks — the only difference between Oedipus blinding himself in Sophocles’ play and the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear is that Shakespeare had the violence occur onstage. Aristotle even had a name for the vicarious pleasure that an audience takes in the artistic depiction of violent acts: katharsis.

“Since the poet should provide pleasure from pity and fear through imitation,” Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, “it is apparent that this function must be worked into the incidents.”

And while it is not at all certain that Aristotle could in his wildest fantasies have imagined Hostel or Ichi the Killer, his notion of a cathartic release through the artistic depiction of violent acts still has traction in the 21st century. In Hostel, Eli Roth uses the techniques and the approach of genre horror first as an excuse to depict some of the most visceral torture sequences in film history, but also to forge a subversive commentary on our post-9/11 psyche in the wake of the United States’ war on terror. And Takeshi Miike’s Ichi the Killer juxtaposes sequences of over-the-top, cartoonish violence, with brutally realistic scenes of rape and torture in an attempt to get the viewer to question his or her own responses to the violence onscreen: watching the film, a viewer is made uncomfortable when the screen violence stops being enjoyable and starts being unpalatable. How and where this line is drawn is one of Miike’s primary considerations.

Right up until his death, Stanley Kubrick refused to allow A Clockwork Orange to be shown in British movie theatres. He felt the film was too sadistic and that audiences did not respond to it in the proper way. Indeed, while admiring the technical skill that is evident in the filmmaking, to this day I have great difficulty with those who claim to have been “entertained” by Kubrick’s movie. Ritualized rape, torture, and murder, even set to an ironic Beethoven score, is not “entertaining.”

And yet we continue to watch television series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which routinely involves sexual and physical violence being visited on children; we continue to consume ultraviolent movies such as the Saw films and this year’s Rambo; we continue to read books by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, which regularly describe all manner of degradation and viciousness, and we claim to be entertained.

Why should this be?

I think that Bill Buford has at least part of the answer. In his book Among the Thugs: Face to Face with English Football Violence, Buford meditates on the peculiar attraction that violence exerts for those who get caught up in it:

I have so many images for it — this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as a fabric — a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight — that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around both me and others. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.

But I see it, too, as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between me and something I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns — the metaphors are arbitrary. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there — on the edge of an experience which is by its nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing — that you find what Susan Sontag describes as our “flair” (the word is so attractively casual) for high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerate self-consciousness, transcend (or obliterate?) our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being an individual in any way. What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted) — pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute of feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being in a crowd. And — greater still — being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.

Moments of violence, moments in which the fabric of civilization is rent open, are among the most atavistic moments in human experience, and they show us how little removed we are from nature red in tooth and claw.

Not being given to masochism, and tending towards pacifism in my political views, I nevertheless confess an affinity — perhaps even a troubling attraction — to displays of violent acts in movies and books. To touch that kind of atavism, to experience — even vicariously — that sense of civilization falling by the wayside, to stand unadorned by societal repressions and restrictions: this is an energizing, animal sensation. To do this within the safe confines of an artistic medium assures the acceptable release of the kind of negative human emotions that Aristotle pointed to. Better to take in a screening of Hostel than to grab a sniper rifle and ascend the nearest bell tower.

I have as yet seen no good scientific evidence to prove that people who consume violent entertainment become, ipso facto, more violent themselves. If one holds with the Aristotelian precept of catharsis, then there is a good intuitive rationale for believing exactly the opposite: those who expunge their negative impulses in the safe confines of an artistic setting need not worry about having these spill over into the real world.

On the weekend, I took in a screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’s corrosive documentary about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The film is distressing: simultaneously heartwrenching and infuriating in its implication that the participants in the abuse of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib acted with the tacit endorsement of the U.S. military and, by extension, the American government. Listening to Pte. Lynndie England attempt to paint herself as the real victim, saying that she was only twenty years old and in love, is enough to make one seethe with anger and frustration. Surely no twenty-year-old is too naive or innocent to realize that forcing a hooded, naked man to masturbate while pointing at his penis with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other, smiling broadly all the while, is inhuman behaviour. And it boggles the mind to view a picture of a naked, hooded Iraqi bound to a metal bedframe, his arms stretched behind him almost to the breaking point, and hear one of the military investigators involved in the case describe this as “standard operating procedure.”

The documentary footage in Morris’s movie is disturbing enough. But what is equally disturbing, on an artistic level, is that the director, in collaboration with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson, intersperses recreated footage of certain scenes into the documentary footage and shots of the infamous photographs. This footage is presented in glorious slo-mo photography, and has the effect of aestheticizing the experience documented in the film, in much the same way that Anne Michaels has been accused of aestheticizing the Holocaust in her poetic novel Fugitive Pieces. Here again, the viewer is brought up short on the horns of the question: with the actual violence being so potent and unacceptable, how acceptable is it to take pleasure in the aesthetic recreation of that violence? How culpable are we as viewers for looking at these sequences and seeing first and foremost a series of beautifully shot tableaux?

Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Engaging in an Aristotelian act of catharsis by consuming violent entertainment is worlds apart from the actual dehumanization and violence depicted in Standard Operating Procedure. Still, perhaps one of the reasons I feel so uncomfortable at the moment has to do with the stark realization that the line separating me from those soldiers in Iraq is a razor thin one. I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. How long is it possible to stare into the abyss and remain unscathed or unaffected?

Cameron Nominated for Arthur Ellis Award

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Heartfelt congratulations go out to novelist and TSR fave Claire Cameron, whose novel The Line Painter has been nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award by the Crime Writers of Canada.

A full list of this year’s nominees can be found here.

Revenge Is Sweet

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing, Mindless fun | No comments

From the NYTBR’s Paper Cuts blog:

It’s not often in the literary world that what begins as farce ends in whipped cream. But that’s sort of what happened last night when Rick Moody nailed Dale Peck squarely in the face with a fully loaded pie plate at a fundraiser for the writers’ retreat Sangam House, thus achieving long-overdue payback for the infamous 2002 review in which Peck called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.”

The best part of this post? There’s a video.

TSR Author Interview — Stephen Henighan

Posted 28 April, 2008 in Author Interview | 7 comments

Novelist, short-story writer, translator, and literary critic Stephen Henighan is the author of ten previous books. He is a regular columnist for Geist magazine, and his work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, and the Montreal Gazette, among other publications. His new book of criticism is A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, published by Biblioasis. Henighan agreed to be interviewed for TSR about the current state of Canadian literature and the exigencies of living in the afterlife of culture.

In the opening essay in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, you draw a connection between the killing of a Japanese tourist and his guide in Guatemala and José Saramago’s novel Baltasar and Blimunda to illustrate how the transition from a spiritual culture to a technological, consumerist culture occurs, and what effect this transition has on the broader society. Does this transition serve as the tipping point beyond which we are necessarily in the “afterlife of culture”?

Not necessarily. The presence of technology — factories, automobiles, trains — of earlier eras in Europe or North America didn’t immediately dispatch the written cultures which grow out of a spiritual vision. Even in the 20th century literature supplied the forms and governing assumptions behind much radio programming.

I suppose this begins to change with television, but it’s only when digital culture becomes dominant in the 21st century that we begin to lose the ability to perceive experience in terms of historical chronology and traditional cultural forms become empty vessels, even though people still use them — the conditions I identify as defining the “afterlife of culture.”

The chronology works differently for the Maya, of course, because they were colonized in the 16th century and their Spanish colonizers burned their written literature, leading them to become illiterate in their own languages. I evoked the Maya as an example of people whose belief systems have been shattered. This is in the process of happening to the rest of us now, even though we’ve done it to ourselves, with our own technology.

In your essay “The Reshaping of the Canadian Novel” from When Words Deny the World (2002), you quip that you “had failed to realize that in the climate of the 1990s, ‘reactionary’ had become a compliment.” But, given the fact that it’s impossible to put the genie of technology back in the bottle, is the yearning for a return to a more traditional (pre-afterlife) version of culture not by definition reactionary?

I made that comment after I called Carol Shields a reactionary and her publisher slapped the quote onto the cover of the paperback edition. It’s possible that the person choosing quotes for Random House didn’t know what the word meant and assumed it was laudatory.

I think your question is asking about a different kind of reactionary posture — that of someone who longs for cultural forms which have been relegated to the past.

It may be true that in thirty years’ time a writer of novels will be a throwback, rather like someone who makes stained glass windows and has survived into an era in which people have stopped building cathedrals.

At the same time, a concept central to my definition of the afterlife of culture is that, even when the conditions which created the cultural form have evaporated, the form itself goes marching on. Part of what facilitates this is the increasing fragmentation of society. This ensures that there will probably always be novel readers, just as there will always be people interested in wood carving or knitting. But they’ll be just one sect among many. The more difficult question is whether the novel is still “the novel” after it’s been stripped of its essential capacity to gobble up and define all of society.

You point to Michel Houellebecq as a French author whose narrative work “has consumed technology.” Japan has Haruki Murakami; England has David Mitchell and, recently, Steven Hall; why has Canada not been able to breach this barrier outside of the genre fiction of William Gibson or Cory Doctorow?

People have been asking this question since at least the 1970s, when the neighbours had Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barth and we had Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence. The answer goes back to the fact that Canada was never an imperial power like Britain or Japan, nor did it have an 18th century revolution like the United States or France. Our writing is post-colonial in its need to make sense of our history and enshrine our myths. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s more troubling is when we act like flat-out colonials, pandering to the international market by suppressing our history to create no-name historical romances, or erasing the details of our present.

The kind of writing you mention depends on a confident, clear-eyed, unashamed grasp of the quirks of one’s own environment, if only as a taking-off point and a source for off-beat insights. Many Canadian writers — and, sadly, many more now than thirty or forty years ago — are too embarrassed by their own marginalized reality to lend it the attention it warrants. Such writers — we all know them — long to be somebody else. The writing reflects that. Even so, some of Douglas Coupland’s work might fit into the Mitchell-Murakami-Houellebecq category. But it’s telling, I think, that Coupland gets reviewed more seriously outside Canada than he does at home.

If the afterlife of culture involves the marginalization of artists — in particular, writers — is this necessarily a problem? Isn’t being on the margins of society and critiquing it what writers have always done? Could the argument be made that it’s impossible for artists to function usefully anywhere other than on the margins?

Yes, yes! God help the writer who becomes a corporate courtier and grows too cautious to speak or invent freely!

But I see the marginalization of the writer under the afterlife of culture as being qualitatively different from that of bohemian cultures of the past such as Paris in the 1920s, Bloomsbury in the 1930s and 1940s, or Greenwich Village between the 1940s and the 1960s. Those formations had an internal, literary coherence and trafficked in a high-art form of the written culture that was the stuff of daily cultural and social debate. This gave them influence on the centre from an outpost on the margins. The Refus global manifesto in Quebec in 1948 is a good Canadian example of the same phenomenon, even though many of the participants were visual artists.

It’s different today because literacy itself has lost its centrality and the countercultural pretensions of a “marginalized” bohemianism have been gutted by the voracity of a globalized capitalism that turns even the most wild rebellions into one more drab commodity. Just as Greenwich Village itself has disappeared from the geography of New York in recent years as a result of rampant property speculation, so has the cultural position represented by that sort of self-selecting marginalization.

In A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, you write: “The transition from a sacred world defined by the word to a technological world defined by the image promotes the primacy of urban life.” Is one of CanLit’s primary problems not a refusal to grapple with exactly this modern urban experience?

Absolutely. It’s precisely that period of civilization — which I’d say we’re now approaching the end of — when you’re living in the urban world but still have access to literary languages elaborated in a sacred, ritualized context which gives you great potential for literature, offering a dense variety of experience and the opportunity to rev up literary language in response to the beat of the city, to collisions between people from different cultures who’ve flocked together in close proximity and so on. At the same time, I think it’s important to avoid falling into the common trap of Canadian cultural commentators of contrasting the “cool, multicultural downtown” to the “white, reactionary hinterland.”

We can’t write urban novels for the same reason that we have difficulty writing any kind of novel about our present, namely a neo-colonial shame of recognizing and playing imaginatively with the details of Canadian social and cultural realities. That’s a Canadian problem, not a specifically urban or rural one. The urban versus rural duality so beloved of journalists denigrates our history and distorts the problems of our present.

You point out that the volume of literature in translation is distressingly thin in Canada. Given that we live in an officially bilingual country and some of the best Canadian writers working today (Gaétan Soucy, Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Nicholas Dickner) are Francophone writers writing in French, why is this resistance to works in translation so endemic in this country?

As the larger partner in this bilingual country, English-speaking Canadians have the responsibility to make the smaller partner feel secure. In spite of the adoption of official bilingualism, we’ve never made the move to a more open mentality.

And our history is bad, bad, bad.

Remember that from 1913 to 1928 it was illegal to teach in French in Ontario public schools. Well-off English-speaking parents leapt on French immersion in the 1980s as a way of segregating the public school system between rich and poor and achieving private schooling without having to pay for it; few people have shown much interest in whether French immersion actually teaches kids French (which in most cases it doesn’t). The snob appeal was always more important than whether little Tara or Tyler would be able to converse with a logger in Moncton or Chicoutimi.

When someone speaks French on television, the CBC dubs their voice as though they were speaking Klingon. If we had a “bilingual” mentality, the CBC would let us hear our Francophone compatriots’ voices, providing subtitles if necessary. The shocking editing-out of Claude Dubois, one of Canada’s greatest singers, from the English broadcast of the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall of Fame Gala in March 2008 is typical of this: the CBC execs were terrified that the Anglo bourgeoisie would channel-surf over to CNN at the sound of a song in French.

The hard — very hard — work that needed to be done to challenge and break down the ingrained francophobia of the old-stock Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie has never been completed and now many of those insular attitudes have been transmitted to people of more recent immigrant backgrounds who have assimilated into English-speaking Canadian culture.

At the same time, the peculiar form taken by Canadian nationalism has resulted in a situation where, unlike both Great Britain and the United States, we have no national institution which funds incoming translations from other countries. The result is that we fund Canadian translations from French, then bury them, and we close ourselves off from the rest of the world, leaving it up to the Brits and the Yanks to decide what gets translated into English. The combination is stultifying.

What is the most pressing challenge facing Canadian literature and Canadian writers and critics in the afterlife of culture?

Probably the survival of literary education. Even students whose interests lie in the humanities often graduate from high school these days without having read a book. There’s more and more pressure to divert library budgets into buying computers which will be obsolete three years after their purchase, accompanied by a strengthening credo that reading is elitist and teaching literature is demeaning to kids whose parents aren’t English-speaking or whose primary interests lie elsewhere, or that classroom discussion of novels, poems, and stories risks calling into question various vested belief systems, from fundamentalist Protestantism to market capitalism to Islamic dogmatism, which, of course, is part of what literature does best and one of the reasons to immerse yourself in books.

There’s a confluence of interests between elements of both the right and the left which promote these suffocating views. Rather than reinforcing kids’ mouse-click attention-spans, schools should be working to instill an ability to engage in extended concentration. Without this, kids will be trapped in an eternal present, lacking the ability to put their experience in context or make effective judgements. Incidentally, they won’t vote or read either. Then, to return to the image of the Maya with which A Report on the Afterlife of Culture opens, we will be living in a culture whose literary experience is no longer accessible to its citizens.

(Author photo by Lorena Leija.)

Fuck Books

Posted 24 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 4 comments

Nathan Whitlock’s first novel, A Week of This, involves a close-knit group of characters who reside in the small Ontario town of Dunbridge, a fictional stand-in for Pembroke. The characters are closely observed denizens of the lower-middle class and, although I won’t review the book, for reasons I’ve already made clear, Whitlock makes an excellent point in the course of his novel, which I would be remiss if I did not highlight.

One of the novel’s main characters, Manda, works at a call centre and her husband Patrick operates a sporting-goods store. One Friday afternoon, Manda goes to the library in search of “a novel that they’d been talking about on the radio for a week now, one about the building of the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto.” Whitlock is cagey about the year in which his novel is set, but anyone familiar with the inaugural iteration of the CBC radio program Canada Reads will be able to position the year as 2002. Manda can’t find the book and asks one of the librarians for help. “Turns out she had the author’s name wrong: not enough A’s and too many O’s.”

For anyone who is still unclear as to what book and what author are being referred to here, Whitlock doesn’t become more explicit, and I certainly won’t either.

Whitlock has in the past criticized CanLit for its insularity and its irrelevance to the realities of modern life in this country, and he has some fun with this subject in his novel. The payoff comes when Manda shows Patrick the book she’s borrowed from the library:

“I’ve been trying to read this,” she said, picking her library book off the floor and holding it out to Patrick. “And you know what? It put me right to sleep. Look: I’m only twenty pages in and it’s boring as all hell.”

Patrick read the back cover. He made a face like he was reading about some unnecessarily strange and useless animal, something that only lays its eggs every twenty years, and in some ridiculous place like the tears of a horse. The look only intensified when he opened the book at random and read a few sentences. He quickly closed it again, and after taking a peek at the author’s photo out of a sense of morbid curiosity, he handed the book back, a truth he had believed since he was a kid — fuck books — having once again been affirmed through direct experience.

Whitlock is taking the piss here, but he also makes what I consider to be a very salient point. It is all too easy to complain that nobody reads Canadian literature these days, but the reasons cited for this often elide the fact that precious little of the literature being produced in this country today speaks to the realities of living in Canada in the 21st century.

We have umpteen books that are set during the Great War, or in the 1800s, stories of our military history or of the pioneer experience, rendered in graceful, elegant prose, that are devoid of relevance to all but a small cadre of like-minded writers and readers. We have sprawling fictionalized biographies of Norman Bethune and Rockwell Kent; stories of several generations of a Mormon family on a ranch in Utah in the mid-1800s; and delicately rendered character studies about two boys in Quebec who meet again as old men, one of whom is dying.

Even many of the Canadian novels set in the present or the near-present feature beautiful yet oddly lifeless prose that reminds one of “some unnecessarily strange and useless animal.” As a collective, Canadian writers appear largely to have forgotten Ray Robertson’s edict about “the literary value of not being boring.”

It would be wrong to suggest that Whitlock is disparaging his characters for their relative lack of education or literary sophistication; Manda and Patrick’s experience is more likely the rule than the exception. This is the point that I hope readers — and, perhaps more importantly, writers — take from Whitlock’s passage: the insularity of a closed literary culture, in which everyone comes out of the same MFA program and writers write for other writers and perhaps a small group of sympathetic academics, creates a vacuum that chokes off the air and prevents the culture from flourishing.

Unless we want our children to harbour the feeling that their direct experience of novels validates their original impulse — fuck books — we would do well to ensure that we break out of our self-satisfied insularity and start speaking more immediately and engaging more closely with the big, wide world out there.

On Technique in the Canadian Novel

Posted 20 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 2 comments

Stephen Henighan, from his 2002 essay collection, When Words Deny the World:

The Stone Diaries is mediocre fiction but brilliant calculation. It plays to two mutually hostile constituencies, charming the “just folks” market with its tale of a nice, simple, rich woman, complete with family photographs and easy-to-read letters, recipes and lists; these same photographs and lists thrill the academics and avant-garde critics, who see in them a postmodern questioning of traditional narrative techniques. Shields is taking both groups for a ride. The folksy readers aren’t getting the full, fleshed-out story they deserve and the academics, if they are honest about it, will recognize that Shields’s forays into postmodernism are facile and desultory. Planting a recipe in the middle of a chapter does not an Italo Calvino make. Postmodernism is not simply structurelessness; it has its own rigour and discipline, none of which is on view in The Stone Diaries (though the offhand elegance of Shields’s phrasemaking is undeniable).

To me, this reading of Shields’s magnum opus — still the only novel to win both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize — is pretty much unimpeachable. There are writers in Canada who employ postmodern devices to worthwhile effect — Leon Rooke, for example, or Douglas Coupland — but Shields is not among them. It’s hard to think of a more rigorously traditional writer in the CanLit pantheon.

The grafting on of postmodern devices in The Stone Diaries is, as Henighan suggests, an attempt to appear au courant, but it rings hollow; Shields was always more concerned with crafting phrases of “offhand elegance” than she was with attempting any real kind of formal or technical innovation. On a sentence-by-sentence basis her novels always glittered like cut glass, but stylistically they tended to leave this reader flat.

This is true not just of Shields; it’s something that’s fairly endemic throughout Canadian literature. In the last year alone, two widely touted novels — Effigy by Alissa York and The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik — have featured prose that is honed to a pristine beauty, but grafted onto a stylistically flat narrative. Both writers employ stylistic tricks — York uses letters, dreams, and flashbacks to tell her story, and Kaslik splits the narrative into two overlapping voices — but in neither case are these devices deployed in a way that seems vibrant or organically relevant. It’s the beauty of the sentences, not the stylistic flourishes, that a reader is apt to notice.

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, another novel with painstakingly crafted sentences, does depend upon the postmodern conceit of two competing narratives, the second of which is meant to illuminate and refract the first, to achieve its effects, and to this extent it is a more ambitious — if not entirely successful — work. But even Ondaatje’s technical facility and playfulness — so much in evidence in Coming through Slaughter and Running in the Family – have, post-English Patient, taken a back seat to his obsession with the surface shimmer of his prose.

The problem with all these novels (and the above certainly does not constitute an exhaustive list) is that the form and the content of the works seem extricable, when they should not be. As Mark Schorer writes in his seminal essay, “Technique as Discovery”: “The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly its essence.”

Readers who are looking for writing that recognizes the essential coherence of subject and technique, of form and content, would be advised to steer clear of the above-mentioned novels and instead pick up a copy of Mark Anthony Jarman’s new collection, My White Planet, which provides a kind of master class in how to seamlessly marry musical prose and technical innovation.

Oranges vs. Bananas Redux

Posted 17 April, 2008 in Awards | 1 comment

Remember the post in which I jokingly suggested the outrage that would accrue to the creation of a male-only literary prize as a counterweight to the female-only Orange Prize? Seems this idea has been seriously floated … by one of the shortlisted authors for this year’s Orange Prize:

ONE of the six authors shortlisted for the women-only Orange Prize yesterday backed calls for a new literary award – for men.

Sadie Jones was speaking after critics of the 12-year-old prize complained loudly of sex discrimination. A men’s prize could help get more boys reading, she said.

While I don’t believe that a male-only prize is the way to get boys reading, it’s interesting to note that the article that Jones’s comments appear in points out that the British publishing industry is dominated by women and women make up the majority of book buyers, so the Orange Prize may be having a positive effect.

On the other hand, from what I know of the Canadian publishing industry, although it is predominantly composed of women, proportionally few of those workers are in upper management, which is still largely an old boy’s club. So there’s a way to go before we reach parity.

And — just in case anyone thinks I’m trying to open another Pandora’s Box here — I don’t think that a male-only prize is necessary (or even desirable) at this point. (In fact, if you really want to know, I’m of the mind that there are already far too many literary prizes out there. We need to scale back on their number, not continue to add more. But that’s a controversy for another day.)

In related news, Panic Girl has some nice things to say about your humble correspondent over at her site, and she links to another piece that articulately argues for the continued relevance of the Orange Prize, in this case by deconstructing the Tim Lott article that started the whole fracas in the first place.

On the Disposition of Writers

Posted 14 April, 2008 in Writing Life | 3 comments

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Mordecai Richler during one of his very infrequent teaching gigs. Richler was somehow finagled into teaching a summer course at the Humber School for Writers, and on the first day (so the story goes) Joe Kertes, who administered the program, walked past Richler’s classroom and observed the professor sitting on a window sill gazing out at the sky while his students sat in uncomfortable silence. Poking his head in the room, Kertes is said to have uttered cheerfully, “Well, shall we get started?” At which point Richler turned his head and said, “What would be the point?”

Whether this story is true or not is immaterial: it might as well be. Richler was, by all accounts, a fairly prickly sort who didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. He had a pronounced cruel streak, and wasn’t afraid to cut someone off at the knees if he felt they deserved it.

The question is: does this make a reader less inclined to like his writing? According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, it should. Writing in the Evening Standard, Alibhai-Brown explains why she will never again buy a book by acclaimed novelist V.S. Naipaul:

Patrick French has just published an unflinchingly honest biography of Nobel prize-winning writer VS Naipaul, who comes across as unpleasant and stuffed with conceit. That, I guess, is true of many other authors, too. But Naipaul is exceptionally malevolent, a man without grace or humanity, sadistic to those who have dared to love him. So why do we tolerate such behaviour in writers?

This is a peculiar, and all too prevalent, brand of literary dilettantism that makes my blood boil. By all accounts (not just French’s), Naipaul is not a very nice man. But what does the fact that he is “unpleasant and stuffed with conceit” have to do with his artistic output? The obvious answer to this rhetorical question is: precisely nothing.

It has always astounded me that certain people think that those who create art must of necessity be paragons of virtue and decency. No doubt some of them are. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was an inveterate gambler. Philip Van Doren Stern refers to Edgar Allen Poe as a “charlatan, plagiarist, pathological liar, whimpering child, egomaniac, braggart, and irresponsible drunkard.” Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite. Kingsley Amis was a serial adulterer.

So freaking what?

The truth is that many great artists were — and are — reprehensible human beings. The two are not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to feel “contempt” for a writer and still admire that person’s writing. The art and the artist are discrete entities, and each should be judged on its own merits.