James Wood and the Nature of Exceptionalism

Posted 28 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism | No comments

There is a remarkable moment in James Wood’s critique of character from yesterday’s Guardian, in which he does something that most lesser critics go to extreme lengths to avoid: he admits to uncertainty. In the midst of a lengthy meditation about the nature of character in fiction Wood actually asserts that he is “not sure what a character is.” The phrase is so innocuous as to utterly belie its radical nature.

The tendency among literary critics — most evident in those who can least afford it — is to adopt a baldly authoritarian tone, to write as though individual perceptions and biases carried the weight of divine fiat. Wood, by contrast, is an essayist in the true sense of the word: he is making an attempt, a try at understanding, and feels no need to adopt the mantle of the infallible expert. Indeed, when he asserts that “a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction — from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little,” one finds it difficult to take issue.

Wood finds equal fault with the naive and unsophisticated reviewers who post on Amazon.com, demanding likable characters that they can identify with — Wood diagnoses a “contagion of moralising niceness” in such readers — and with those on the postmodern left, whose involuted and overly intellectualized deconstructionist readings render the entire point of fiction moot: “of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such an assemblage of words: this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined ‘world’, because it is just a bound codex of paper pages.”

By starting from a point of uncertainty and humility, Wood is able to chart a critical course that avoids any kind of dogmatism, but rather takes the characters in different novels on their own terms, without demanding that they perform some predetermined function or slot easily into some preexisting ideology.

Here is the crux of Wood’s argument, which could — and probably should — be pasted above every literary critic’s desk:

The truth is that the novel is the great viruoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown at it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as a “novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

Amen, Mr. Wood, and thank you.

Reading 2008: What Was I Thinking?

Posted 25 January, 2008 in Reading Life | 6 comments

Often I buy books on the basis of their covers. While this may strike some as unconscionably shallow, an attractive cover design or dust jacket helps to render the book as physical object more artful somehow, and contributes to the sensuous pleasure of reading. Far more than simply serving as a protective sheath for the pages within, a well-designed cover attracts the eye, raises questions in a reader who is unfamiliar with a book’s contents, and brings a frisson of recognition to a reader who is familiar. Handsome covers transform the book itself into an objet d’art, something that can be given pride of place on one’s bookshelves and is almost guaranteed to elicit questions or remarks from curious bystanders when one reads in public.*

By contrast, unattractive covers (or unattractive text design, for that matter) act as the literary equivalent of a cold shower. They are a complete turn-off. Just as I’ve bought books on the basis of their cover design, I’ve refrained from buying books that I would otherwise have been interested in reading because of their unattractive or off-putting jackets.**

By and large, the old cliché “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is, in my experience, utter bollocks.

There are exceptions. Case in point, the very handsome new edition of Dracula, which is part of a series of rereleases under the Vintage Classics (UK) imprint. Other titles in this series include Jake’s Thing by Kingsley Amis (reviewed in these pages not long ago), The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. These editions, with crimson spines and gorgeous covers, are little masterpieces of graphic design, and prompted me to pick up a number of titles that I’ve missed out on over the years, including Bram Stoker’s Gothic vampire classic, which I took home at the beginning of January and immediately began devouring with all the ravenous delight of, well, of a vampire.

It did not take long to discover two things about Stoker’s book, which I had never read before. First, the author had issues. I mean, serious issues. I don’t know whether Freud ever wrote about the man, but if he didn’t, he should have. The novel is a case study in Victorian repression and male sexual anxiety. Witness, for example, the scene in which Jonathan Harker — whom many consider Stoker’s alter ego in the novel — encounters three hyper-sexed female vampires during his early stay at Castle Dracula:

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer — nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited — waited with beating heart.

At which point — i.e. for those of you who aren’t paying close enough attention, the point of consummation — the Count himself bursts through the door and drives the hungry succubi off. This is a clear case of the less virile male being cowed by both aggressive female sexuality and more potently virile masculinity. Added to that is a note of repressed homoerotic desire, evinced in the Count’s imprecation to the women: “Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!”

Like I said: issues.

The second thing I realized fairly quickly is that Dracula is really, truly, staggeringly boring. Stoker’s formal conceit of constructing his novel as a compendium of letters, journal entries, and the like becomes wearisome very quickly, and in truth it took me close to three weeks just to approach the halfway point in the book.

At which point, fate, or my subconscious, intervened. As I was engaged in a furious round of cleaning my office, I inadvertently piled a stack of papers for recycling on top of the volume, which I then scooped up and tossed in the apartment building’s industrial-sized blue bin.*** Didn’t Freud once say that there are no such things as accidents?

I do miss that gorgeous cover, though.

Following Dracula, I picked up another book that had fallen through the cracks in my literary education: André Gide’s The Immoralist. The story of Michel, who marries Marceline and quickly develops tuberculosis (any association between these two events is strongly encouraged by a reading of the novel). After a period of extended convalescence, Michel decides to pursue a life of unabandoned sensual excess, devoid of any moral code to guide him or encumber him.

Again, fairly salacious stuff. However, despite my having finished the book (it runs to a lean 171 pages), I find that I have very little to say about it, since Gide’s muted and contemplative style — which does seem to be at odds with his material — left me cold. I’m not sure I can remember a book that I felt more indifferent towards. Ironically for a story about unbridled excess, Gide’s novel left me feeling nothing at all.

The foregoing is a longwinded way of apologizing for the lack of original reviews here over the past three weeks. At the end of last year, you may recall my pledge to spend my discretionary reading time in 2008 on books that I wanted to read as opposed to those other people told me I should read. It’s not that I haven’t been reading since the start of the new year, it’s just that my scheme, which seemed so sensible at the time, hasn’t worked out quite the way I anticipated it would.

So, we’re changing gears. Next up is a new book, Stephen King’s Duma Key. With a little bit of luck, I’ll be able to find something in its 600+ pages that will rouse my interest or my ire. The first sixty pages look promising, but that may just be a result of my French lit hangover. I hope that I’ll be in a position to let you know soon.

Oh, and by the way, I put my aesthetic sense on hold where the King is concerned. It has a truly hideous cover.

*Reading in public is a favourite activity of mine, in large part because it exists at the nexus of private and public life: the reader is engaging in a private, not to say intimate, activity, and the observer is transformed into something resembling a voyeur. You would think that sitting at a bar with an open book in front of you would be like hanging a sign around your neck that says “Do not disturb,” but in fact the exact opposite is true: people can’t help but ask what you’re reading, and from there, if the reader is willing, it’s not that much of a leap into an entire conversation. Single readers out there, take note.

**In this regard, the easiest way to get me to pass over a book in disgust is to slap a movie tie-in cover on it. Anyone out there who knows how to get their hands on a pre-tie-in edition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, please do let me know.

***This is one reason why this post is not constructed in the manner of a review or a full critical analysis. I do not review books that I haven’t finished, since that would be an abdication of critical responsibility. So, what I present here are merely half-formed thoughts based on a partial reading of the text. Whether I return to the text in the future is an open question.

Hav U Red My Novl?

Posted 24 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Writing Life, Technology | 2 comments

Genji had only grown more thoughtful as he rose to new heights of glory, and he ordered things so well that he wrought a wondrous change, for her residence was soon amply populated. Where once rank foliage had cast a dismal and pervasive pall there now ran a newly diverted stream, while shrubbery near the house yielded cooling shade, and junior household staff, barely noticed so far but zealous to serve him, so clearly discerned his deep interest that they danced most assiduous attendance upon her.

Those words were taken from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (trans. by Royall Tyler), an 11th-century Japanese epic that is widely considered to be the world’s first novel. What is most apparent about the lines above is their sensuous detail, the specificity of the “dismal and pervasive pall” cast by the “once rank foliage,” and the subtle eroticism of the junior household staff who “danced most assiduous attendance upon” their mistress.

Now imagine that those lines had been composed on a cellphone.

You can’t, because there’s no way that those lines ever would be composed on a cellphone. They are too long, for one thing, too full of description and elevated vocabulary. The Tale of Genji, which in its unabridged English translation runs to 1,120 pages, is replete with passages such as this, and remains in print to this day.

One wonders if the same fate will befall If You, the 142-page novel by twenty-one-year-old Japanese author Rin, which was composed entirely on a cellphone. Certainly, If You and its literary compeers are enjoying popularity in the short term in their native Japan. According to a recent article in the New York Times, five out of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were cellphone novels, “mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

These novels appeal largely to a younger cohort, who grew up with text messages and emoticons and who are not even terribly used to typing long-form sentences on a computer. But, if these ad hoc novels — which devoid of incidentals such as “plotting or character development” may in fact stretch the definition of the word “novel” — are getting young people to read, then everything’s fine, right?

Not necessarily.

The most aggravating part of the Times article for me is Rin’s own assessment of cellphone novels’ place in the literary pantheon, as against more traditional novels:

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

So traditional Japanese novels by writers of repute — Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, say, or even genre fiction like Natsuo Kirino’s Out — are not read by younger readers because of the difficulty of their sentences, as opposed to novels tapped out on the miniature cellphone keypad, which, by necessity to avoid early onset carpal-tunnel syndrome or arthritis, are composed of short, choppy, fragmented sentences and paragraphs more closely resembling the dialogue bubbles in a manga comic book.

I am reminded of a story Sven Birkerts related in his volume The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (which, notwithstanding the fact that it was published fourteen years ago, seems more relevant today than it ever did). Birkerts is discussing the frustration that a group of college students experienced with a short story by Henry James:

These students were entirely defeated by James’s prose — the medium of it — as well as by the assumptions that underlie it. It was not the vocabulary, for they could make out most of the words; and not altogether the syntax, although here they admitted to discomfort, occasional abandoned sentences. What they really could not abide was what the vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were communicating. They didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves a cowl of ill-tempered apathy.

Or by reading readily accessible adolescent love stories written on someone’s cellphone. Birkerts’ students’ complaints about Henry James are exactly analogous to Rin’s comment that readers of her generation don’t read professional novelists because “their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”

So what is the problem, you ask? Why should college students and Japanese youth read traditional novels as opposed to novels composed on technology that they are more familiar with, that speaks to them in a way that traditional novels don’t? Birkerts supplies the answer by characterizing what James does that his students weren’t getting:

He is inward and subtle, a master of ironies and indirections; his work manifests a care for the range of moral distinctions. And one cannot “get” him without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language.

It should not be necessary to point out that James’s inwardness and subtlety, his “ironies and indirections,” and his “care for the range of moral distinctions” cannot — simply cannot – be replicated using the denuded language available to a cellphone texter. Moreover, the fact that James’s implications are impossible to grasp “without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language” presupposes a level of concentration and deep engagement with the text that would be anathema to most of today’s distracted, media-addled youth.

It’s not difficult to see that we risk losing something in the translation from page to cellphone screen (or computer screen, for that matter). We risk losing an appreciation of subtlety and irony, we risk losing an ability to recognize indirection or to delineate between fine moral distinctions. In short, we risk losing some of what makes us essentially human. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement to make, nor do I think it’s a risk we should be willing to take.

It’s a Good Thing He Wasn’t Around to See Dr. Phil

Posted 18 January, 2008 in Bookish | No comments

“Today’s public no longer forgives an author for failing, after the action he describes, to give his verdict; indeed, in the very course of the drama he is told to take sides, to declare himself for Alceste or Philinte, for Hamlet or Ophelia, for Faust or Marguerite, for Adam or Jehovah. I do not claim, of course, that neutrality (I was about to say: indecision) is a sure sign of a great mind; but I do believe that many great minds have been greatly disinclined to … conclude — and that to state a problem properly is not to suppose it solved in advance.”

– André Gide, in the preface to The Immoralist (trans. by Richard Howard)

A Quick Hit

Posted 14 January, 2008 in Book Reviewing | No comments

Gaa! Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines! After a fallow couple of months, I’ve had three big projects land on my desk in the span of a few days, all of which I was foolish enough (or desperate enough) to take on. So, I’m just a wee bit stressed at the moment.

In lieu of actual content, here’s a link (courtesy of Claire Cameron, author, blogger, and would-be diarist) to a post by the sci-fi editor at Publisher’s Weekly describing how she goes about choosing which books to review:

I review good books because our readers count on us to tell them about the good books. I review interesting books because I like drawing attention to them and they make for good reviews. (I never forget that PW lives and dies by the quality of its reviews.) I review important books–books by major authors, lead titles, books that are going to get a lot of press–because our book-buying readers care about our opinion and will want to have it to compare with other review venues, and also because it’s a service to the publishers. Maintaining good relationships with publishers is vital to our business and I wouldn’t dream of pretending otherwise. Of course it’s also vital to maintain our independence, which is why I will almost always review an important book but I will never guarantee a favorable review.

From my experience, this seems fairly standard as criteria for selecting books to review. Here at TSR the criteria are a little looser, based largely upon whether I feel I have something valuable to say (positive or negative) about a given title. It’s also been my ambition (more or less well realized, depending) to give space to books that might otherwise go wanting in the mainstream press.

I do appreciate Fox’s avowal never to guarantee favourable reviews for books; I recently declined a reviewing gig because the publication in question didn’t accept negative reviews. I have a problem with this policy, since what results ceases to be criticism (or even reviewing) and becomes advertising.

Apocalypse Now?

Posted 11 January, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray. Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN:978-0-385-66265-9.

“The modern world began with wars of religion.” So states John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author of the alternately frightening and enraging new volume, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Frightening, because of Gray’s considered analysis of how secular utopian projects are giving way in the post-9/11 era to a kind of apocalyptic thinking fuelled on both sides — East and West — by openly fundamentalist religion. Enraging, because his detailed and carefully constructed arguments underline how little humanity has learned from history, despite having its lessons hammered home again and again on bloody battlefields around the globe.

Exactly how little have we learned as a result of our unforgivable short-sightedness and ignorance of history? Gray provides a potent example by opening his discussion of the Iraq war, which he calls “the first utopian experiment of the new century,” with a quote reading in part: “It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.” The man who uttered those words was not an American general nor any of the policy advisers giving counsel to the American administration in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of March 2003. It was Maximilien Robespierre, in a 1792 speech to the Jacobin Club.

It is entirely appropriate that Gray invokes one of the key figures from the French Terror to give context to his discussion of Iraq, since he is able to draw a direct line from the Jacobin revolution in France through the secular revolutionary movements of the 20th century — Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany — to the current American imbroglio in the Middle East. What each movement has in common, Gray argues, is a secular utopian vision, a belief that humanity is perfectible and that a revolutionary conflict can lead to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the point after which ideological, civilizational battles would cease and the world would exist in harmony.

The problem with this utopian ideal is that it is fantasy. In addition to eliding certain important aspects of human nature — the tendency towards opportunism, for example — in the specific case of Iraq, it assumes that the popular sentiment will run to the same kind of liberal democracy that exists in the West. If, however, the popular sentiment tends more towards a fundamentalist reading of the Koran, then certain groups that might have found some protection under a secular despotic regime — women, for example — will actually find themselves less well off when that regime is displaced. “No constitution,” Gray writes, “can impose freedom where it is not wanted or preserve it where it is no longer valued.”

Gray is by no means the first person to point out that the American supposition that it could export democracy to a region mired in thousands of years of tribal conflict is a delusion: Gwynne Dyer has made the same point in his books Future: Tense and The Mess They Made. What separates Gray’s analysis is his positioning the neo-conservative American ideology firmly within the context of repressed religion. Many people today forget that America had two founding groups. The first were the (relatively) secular individualists who authored The Federalist Papers and drafted the American Constitution. The second were the Puritans, and they’ve never gone away. As Gray saliently points out, “Where America differs from other nations is in the persistent vitality of messianic belief and the extent to which it continues to shape the public culture.”

In its utopian fervour, its notion of human perfectibility through violence, the current American administration is not sui generis, although its close links to Christian fundamentalist groups that believe the Rapture is imminent does tend to tie it more closely than other governments to the early Christians, who Gray refers to as an “eschatalogical cult.” However, as Gray rightly asserts, “The political ideologies of the last two hundred years were vehicles for a myth of salvation that is Christianity’s most dubious gift to humanity.” That myth found its secular outlet in the revolutionary movements of the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Nazis in Germany. Clearly, the wanton violence that can be unleashed by an adherence to notions of earthly utopia is frightening to contemplate.

But if the era of faith in utopia is, as Gray suggests, coming to an end, only to be replaced by an adherence to eschatalogical religious thought based on notions of the end times, how are we to survive the coming sea change?

Gray’s answer is by returning to “the lost tradition of realism” championed by Machiavelli. In this endeavour, Gray argues, the “cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings.”

I would quarrel with Gray on this point: the notion of humans as fallen creatures is not necessarily the great stumbling block to a Machiavellian realist way of thinking. Indeed, the great religions all take human fallibility and weakness as their starting points, so this mode of thinking is not confined to the realist camp. The chief stumbling block to a rigorous realist philosophy is the human need for myths, for stories and narratives that provide structure and hope for the future.

Gray is clear on the dangers of viewing history as an extended narrative: “this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written.” History, for Gray, is not a coherent narrative with a plot that can be followed in the way one would follow the plot of a novel. This idea is comforting to human beings who crave structure and meaning, who are most afraid of history that “is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.”

The “meandering flux” of history may indeed be the correct reading, but it is also clear that it will be inimical to humanity’s need to impose a coherent structure on historical events. If the idea of an earthly utopia is a secular political fantasy, so too is the notion that human beings can abandon their need to turn the events of their lives, and the world around them, into stories. That abandoning the comforts of historical narrative for the rockier shores of a history devoid of meaning or coherence may be humanity’s best hope for survival is a tough pill to swallow, and to his credit Gray doesn’t try to candy-coat it. Where he stumbles is in his assumption that such an intellectual sea-change may be possible given humanity’s need for hope and structure.

Gray’s analysis throughout is rigorously dispassionate and intellectual. No dogmatic academic liberal, he is equally critical of folly on the right and the left of the political spectrum. Liberals, with their knee-jerk adherence to “rights” as a political and social trump card, come in for just as much criticism as do their conservative (and neo-conservative) counterparts. This dispassion will prove difficult for readers used to Oprah and The View, but it is a welcome alternative to the liberal platitudes of the CBC on the left and the histrionic conservative screech of Fox News on the right.

The fact that Gray’s final prescription for humanity may be unachievable adds to the discomfort level inherent in his book. Black Mass is a difficult, discomfiting read, but nonetheless a necessary one.

Which Book Are You? — The 2008 Edition

Posted 9 January, 2008 in Mindless fun | 4 comments

Those of you who read the old site might remember the “Which Book Are You?” quiz from last year. You know, the one that told me I was Nineteen Eighty-Four? Which, upon reflection, is either dead on or utter bollocks.

Anyhow, there’s another quiz online, which I found courtesy of the Artful Kisser (who, by the way, is The Sound and the Fury). This one gave me a different result, with which I am on the whole more pleased:

You’re Pale Fire!
by Vladimir Nabokov

You’re really into poetry and the interpretation thereof. Along the
road of life, you have had several identity crises which make it very unclear who you
are, let alone how to interpret poetry. You probably came from a foreign country, but
then again you seem foreign to everyone in ways unrelated to immigration. Most people
think you’re quite funny, but maybe you’re just sick. Talking to you ends up being much
like playing a round of the popular board game Clue.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Click on the link above if you’ve got some time to waste and want to find out which book most represents you. Until the next Internet quiz comes along, that is.

Is It Me?

Posted 9 January, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Or did the cover compositor on this Buffy comic not notice the effect that the woman in green’s left hand has on the book’s title?

Semiotics, people, note the semiotics!

(via Chasing Ray)

Book Prices and the Canadian Publisher’s Dilemma

Posted 9 January, 2008 in Publishing | 1 comment

Arguably the biggest homegrown publishing story in 2007 had to do with the pricing of books in the wake of the surging Canadian dollar against the American greenback.

When the Canadian dollar hit parity last September, consumer grumblings about the price differentials between Canadian- and American-produced books began to reach a fever pitch and publishers started scrambling to redress the issue. In late October, Penguin Group Canada announced a plan to sell U.S. books in Canada at prices as close to par as possible. HarperCollins Canada began restickering books to close the price gap, and Random House Canada announced a rebate to booksellers who discounted their cover prices in-store.

Meanwhile, on the retail side, independent booksellers like Ottawa’s Collected Works began offering books at American prices, despite the loss to their bottom line that this policy was expected to take. Indigo, Canada’s largest bookseller chain, offered free shipping on online orders greater than $39.00, and deep discounts in-store (blithely ignoring the fact that it was Indigo’s practice of deep discounting that helped put many Canadian publishers behind the fiscal eight ball in the first place, but that’s another story).

All of this may seem like good news for consumers, who will enjoy lower prices at the cash register into 2008. But it’s not good news for retailers, whose profit margins are often not significant enough to allow them to sell books at American prices, or for publishers, who still have to pay editors, book designers, typesetters, printers, sales staff, and so on.

The problem, which consumers don’t see, or don’t take into account, involves economies of scale. The Canadian market is one tenth the size of the American market. American publishers are able to set prices lower than their Canadian counterparts because what they lose in individual sales, they make up for in volume. David Davidar, the president of Penguin Group Canada, told the Bookseller that “[w]e have entered an era of significantly lower prices, with new US hard-covers priced around $27, fully $10 less than they were two years ago. However, we’ll hope to make up in volume what we have lost in terms of price.” But Canada only has a population of 33 million, so his prognostications about increased sales volume seem a tad on the overly optimistic side.

In his book, The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada, 1946-2006, Roy MacSkimming points to a 2004 survey conducted by the Canadian Publishers’ Council. “The CPC study divided respondents into ‘heavy,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘light,’ and ‘non’-buyers, finding that heavy buyers (eighty books per year) represented 23 percent of the survey population, and moderate buyers (thirty-five books per year) 24 percent. These two groupings totalled 47 percent and between them bought 71 percent of all books purchased.” What this sunny portrait elides, of course, is the salient fact that more than half the respondents claimed to buy few books each year, or none at all.

That survey is now four years gone. A more recent Ipsos Reid poll indicated that one in three Canadians didn’t read (let alone buy) a single book for pleasure in 2007. (On the upside, the survey did find that of those who did read (totalling 69 percent of the survey respondents), the average person read twenty books in the past twelve-month period.)

Still, those numbers aren’t sufficient to allow a publisher — especially a medium-sized or small Canadian-owned publisher — to price hardcover books at $25.00 (the average American hardcover price) and hope to survive. The disparity between what consumers expect and what publishers are reasonably able to weather is daunting.

It appears that, just over one week into the new year, this situation has claimed its first victim. On Monday, Raincoast announced that it was folding its publishing division. Although the cynical account has Raincoast “long barely masquerading as a Canadian publisher,” before it stopped publishing adult fiction in the fall of 2006, it was responsible for bringing us Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing, Anosh Irani’s The Cripple and His Talismans, and Alison Pick’s The Sweet Edge, among others. It also maintained a vibrant and interesting children’s and YA program.* So its disappearance is not a moment to be trumpeted in Canadian publishing.**

It may, however, be the thin edge of the wedge for indigenous (read: not foreign-owned — this exempts you, M&S) publishers, particularly if, as is widely expected, the country slides into a recession and consumers’ discretionary income dries up. However you look at it, the best advice for Canadian publishers in 2008 seems to be a paraphrase of Margot Channing in All About Eve: fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy year.

*Full disclosure: as editor, I worked on a number of Raincoast books, including Adam Lewis Schroeder’s novel Empress of Asia, Nathan Sellyn’s short-story collection Indigenous Beasts, Patrick Conlon’s memoir No Need to Trouble the Heart, John Burns’s YA novel Runnerland, and John Lekich’s YA novel King of the Lost and Found, all of which I admire greatly.

**Raincoast is the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter series, but the revenue from this endeavour was apparently kept distinct from its indigenous publishing program. Whether some of these funds should have been funnelled into the Canadian publishing program as a means of salvaging it is open to debate.

Ba-zing!

Posted 5 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Marketing | No comments

Kerry at Pickle Me This has already pointed this zinger out, but it’s just too good to pass up. Philip Marchand, on Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero:

The [Governor General’s literary] award also made it clear that if Vassanji was a “mystic,” Ondaatje was no slouch in the spiritual department either. “Grace, after all,” the jurors noted, “is the ultimate gift which Ondaatje offers us in Divisadero.”

Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.