TMN Tournament of Books Winner

Posted 31 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

The Morning News 2008 Tournament of Books is over, and the champion, beating out Tom McCarthy’s Remainder in the final round, is Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. Of all the judge’s recommendations and comments about this book, Elizabeth McCracken’s hits closest to the mark for me:

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN: Perhaps all judgments should be present in the form of a disclaimer: When presented with two deeply weird, hellaciously inventive books, I will always choose the one that makes me laugh out loud.

Something to Tide You Over

Posted 31 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

My review of Reinhold Kramer’s biography, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain, is online, here.

Rereading this review, I get the sense that I was a bit too easy on the book, particularly regarding Kramer’s critical readings of the novels. His overzealous attempts to slot the fiction into incidents from Richler’s life — something Richler himself warned against, and which Nathan Zuckerman referred to in Exit Ghost as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way” — is a real stumbling block in the book. Kramer is too frequently reduced to temporizing words such as “likely” and “probably” in his attempt to forge parallels between Richler’s fiction and his life; had he stuck to a straight textual analysis, he would have freed himself to be more rigorously analytical and probing in his readings.

His book is also virtually humourless, which is ironic given that his subject is one of the most mordantly funny writers in the CanLit canon.

An An Intriguing, Compelling, and Poignant Reminder for Book Reviewers

Posted 26 March, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 1 comment

Over at the Paper Cuts blog, Bob Harris has put together a list of seven words that book reviewers tend to overuse, mostly out of laziness. I am either very proud or very ashamed to admit that I’ve used all of them at one time or another, except perhaps for employing “muse” as a verb. I will point out, however, that when I referred to Nikolski as “intriguing,” I did indeed mean to connote a mysterious quality in that novel.

And I do take umbrage with Harris’s accusation that reviewers always use “lyrical” to mean “well written.” If I want to say that something is well written, I’m much more apt to use those two words. When I say a particular passage is “lyrical,” I mean something entirely different.*

My other complaint is that he failed to include the word “unputdownable,” which is one of the great linguistic abortions of our era.

P.S. I have also been know to use the word “eschew” in conversation. So bite me.

*Usually, I mean that it’s lyrical.

Oranges vs. Bananas, or, The One in Which Yr. Humble Correspondent Gets Himself into a Whole Heap o’ Trouble

Posted 24 March, 2008 in Awards | 14 comments

The longlist for the Orange Prize has been announced, and, not for the first time, it has caused some controversy by provoking cries of sexism. That’s right: sexism. The Orange Prize, you see, is open only to women, which has prompted some critics to label it exclusionary and unnecessary.

These critics may not be the ones you assume they are. Knee-jerk antifeminists (you know who you are *cough* Christopher Hitchens *cough*) are easy targets, but when charges of sexism come from writers such as the prolific, award-winning, and (not incidentally) female A.S. Byatt and Anita Brookner, you know something interesting is going on.

Byatt told the Times that the Orange prize is “sexist,” and went on to say, “Such a prize was never needed.” She feels so strongly about the matter that she has refused to allow her books to stand for nomination. Brookner decries the prize’s positive discrimination, and the Times claims that she “is also believed” to have disallowed her novels to stand for nomination. The Orange Prize carries a cash award of £30,000; the decision not to let one’s work stand for nomination is a clear case of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. At least it can never be said that these authors lack the courage of their convictions.

Panic Girl, for one, is not convinced. Calling the arguments against the Orange Prize “boring” and “rage-inducing,” she suggests that the award is needed “until women are equal players in the world.” This reads like the doctrinaire pro-feminist position, the same way that Byatt’s accusation of sexism reads like the doctrinaire anti-feminist position (the mere fact that someone is in possession of a double-X chromosome does not ipso facto render that person a feminist, at least not always).

On the one hand, it’s easy to agree with Panic Girl’s point of view. A quick scan of Western history will indicate that much of it has been devoted to campaigns among the empowered (read: white men) to keep the powerless (read: women and minorities) down. Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with Byatt and Brookner, although perhaps not for their stated reasons.

The arguments in favour of the Orange Prize inevitably point to the lack of representation of women among the large “unisex” prizes such as the Man Booker Prize or the Scotiabank Giller Prize — both of which, I hesitate to point out, were won last year by women: Anne Enright and Elizabeth Hay, respectively. The 2007 Costa award also went to a woman (A.L. Kennedy), as did the Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award (Madeline Thien) and the Governor General’s Literary Awards for English Non-Fiction and English Drama (Karolyn Smardz Frost and Colleen Murphy, respectively).

It’s hard to tell whether a bias against women exists among prize juries. One could note that in the fourteen years of its existence, the Giller Prize has be won by men ten times (including the year 2000, when it was effectively won twice by men — David Adams Richards and Michael Ondaatje tied). But it’s unclear whether this points to a systemic attempt to prevent women from storming the barricades of CanLit, or whether the sample size is too small to get an accurate picture of the literary landscape.

But this perceived systemic bias against women — the idea that “the playing field is still not level” — is a red herring, in my opinion, when it comes to the Orange Prize. So too is the charge that the prize fosters a reverse bias against men. Although one can easily imagine the furor that would erupt should someone decide to launch a competing prize — let’s call it the Banana Prize — open exclusively to writers in possession of a Y-chromosome, this line of argument tends to obscure the real issue.

The compelling argument against the exclusionary nature of the Orange Prize, it seems to me, is that it implicitly insults women. This is a facet of the prize that the doctrinaire feminist line elides. The prize insults women by suggesting that they are not capable of playing in the big leagues, and need a special award all to themselves for validation.

Notwithstanding Panic’s assertion that one should avoid comparisons between sexism and racism, the argument here is really much the same as that which could be made against the Toronto District School Board’s recent decision to fund an Afro-centric school in Toronto. The implicit assumption on the part of the TDSB is that Afro-Canadians are incapable of getting ahead in the public system and so must be placed in an environment that gives them an edge, in which they don’t have to compete with people from other cultures or backgrounds. This, to me, flies in the face of everything that the Civil Rights protesters of the ’60s — not to mention the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education — achieved. This mentality belittles Afro-Canadians by assuming that they are inherently less able to compete in a public school environment than is everybody else.

Similarly, by hiving off female writers and claiming that they need an award of their own, the proponents of the Orange Prize implicitly suggest that Heather O’Neill, Nancy Huston, and Deborah Moggoach aren’t capable of being measured against Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. This, I submit, is a sexist assumption. O’Neill, Huston, and Moggoach have every claim to be counted not among the best female writers working today, but the best writers, period. This is where the Orange Prize comes up short.

Feminism, in my understanding, was always supposed to be about equality. One needn’t look too hard or too deep to realize that equality of the sexes is not something that we’ve achieved yet; women still face undeniable discrimination professionally, domestically, and socially. Still, it’s hard to see how a literary award that implicitly separates women writers from the front lines of literary distinction will help much in this regard.

Thanks for All the Fish

Posted 21 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner (trans. by Lazer Lederhendler). Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 cloth, 298 pp., ISBN: 978-0-676-97879-7.

Canada is a nation of regions. That’s axiomatic to the point of cliché, but literary critics often elide the extent to which Canada’s regionalism influences its literature. Despite living in Toronto, Wayne Johnston’s fiction is inextricably linked to his native Newfoundland, the same way that W.O. Mitchell will always be associated with the prairies and Rudy Wiebe with the west.

It would be reductive to presume that regionalism is the driving factor in Canadian writing, and a writer’s geographical point of origin, while in many cases laying the groundwork for the kind of writer that person will become, is not necessarily a determinant of the calibre or kind of work he or she will ultimately produce. There is one region in Canada, however, that has consistently boasted a steady stream of quality literary fiction for the last decade or so, even though much of that fiction goes unnoticed or unappreciated by the majority of English readers in the rest of the country. That one fertile region is Quebec. Since the turn of the millennium, la belle province has given us strong novels by Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Jacques Poulin, Gaétan Soucy, and last year’s Giller-nominated Daniel Poliquin, to name just a few of the Franco-Canadian novelists who have been translated into English (a distressingly small number of those actually writing in the province).

Among Anglos writing in Quebec, Rawi Hage is perhaps the best-known recent addition to a list that already includes Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen, to name just two of the authentic greats of CanLit.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that thirty-two-year-old Montreal resident Nicolas Dickner’s first novel is a startling, structurally ambitious work that leaves most of its English-Canadian contemporaries in the dust. Maybe it’s something in the water.

The aqueous metaphor is only partly glib, since Nikolski is, if nothing else, a waterlogged novel. Images of the sea and of seafaring suffuse the book, including repeated allusions to the greatest seafaring novel of all time, Melville’s Moby-Dick. The 1851 novel is referenced directly in Dickner’s book, but long before it makes a literal appearance, the attentive reader will have noticed how Nikolski’s opening line — “My name is unimportant.” — sounds suspiciously like an ironic inversion of the iconic imprecation to “Call me Ishmael.” The attentive reader will also recognize that the town from which Joyce, one of the novel’s three main figures, hails is called Tête-à-la-Baleine, literally, “head of the whale.”

Joyce holds down a job filleting fish at the Poisonnerie Shanahan in Montreal, while she dreams of following in the footsteps of her aunt, who was a pirate. Meanwhile, Noah, an archaeology student, foregoes studying in the American History or Georgraphy and Anthropology sections of the university library, preferring “the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents).” It is here that he meets Arzina, a transplanted Venezuelan who disappears at night into what Noah describes as “the Bermuda Triangle.”

As the novel opens, the final member of the narrative trio, the unnamed first-person narrator, is cleaning up his mother’s house after her death. His mother once lived on Water Street in Vancouver, and when the garbage truck hauling off her worldly possessions disappears at the end of the first chapter, a moving van pulls up “[i]n its wake.”

The repeated water motifs are only one of the many strands uniting our three protagonists. Each shares a familial connection — Noah and the unnamed narrator are half-brothers, their father is Joyce’s uncle. Early in the novel, Joyce, the would-be pirate, wonders if she would “have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree”; prior to this Noah’s mother speculates that his father “had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks.” Noah is interested in the archaeology of trash, and Joyce becomes a bin diver, looking for discarded computer parts that have been disposed of throughout Montreal. While evading security guards and policemen, she discovers “piles of broken-down computers, display screens smudged with fingerprints, keyboards with missing teeth, modems, printers, hard disks, floppies, fragments of printed circuits,” all of it “so obsolete, so covered in grime, that Joyce often feels she has stepped into the shoes of an archaeologist.”

The internecine connections between and among the book’s three central characters provide Dickner with the mechanism for a structurally coherent story in which the structure never feels imposed from without. Everything in this novel appears organic; the disparate parts, far from being random or scattered, all tend toward a central purpose. This is a rare example of a novel in which the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts in isolation.

Dickner doesn’t really need to include the repeated leitmotif of a coverless book that passes from one character’s hands to another, or the narrator’s “Nikolski compass,” which points at the Mickey Spillane section of the bookstore in which he works, beyond which lies the tiny Aleutian island of Nikolski, where his and Noah’s father may — or may not — have decamped. Still, these elements provide additional layers of connectivity in a story that otherwise might be in danger of appearing overly diffuse or obscure.

Nikolski is a mass of contradictions: it is virtually plotless, yet never seems wayward or boring; it is an urban novel set in the recent past (in the decade between 1989 and 1999), yet it is redolent of history and anthropology; it is a novel in translation that nevertheless depends on the buoyancy of linguistic play for its effects (and, to this end, much credit should go to Lazer Lederhendler for a seamless translation). Above all, Nicolas Dickner is an author who is robustly unafraid to take risks, and for the most part the risks pay off.

His is a story of life in all its manifest contradictions, absurdities, and coincidences. Its ease of readability belies its weighty thematic heft, and its humour is grafted onto a deeply philosophical meditation about the nature of existence, the meaning of place, and the definition of home. The result is an intriguing, beguiling novel that may just be the CanLit find of the year.

Don’t Bother Reading Me

Posted 17 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Go read Mark Anthony Jarman, one of the unsung heroes of Canadian literature. My review of Jarman’s new collection, My White Planet, is online, here.

We’ll Slide ‘Cross the Surface of Things

Posted 16 March, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 3 comments

Book reviewers for major Canadian newspapers and magazines are largely stymied by the space restrictions placed on them; there’s rarely enough room to present a nuanced or measured account of how one reacted to a given book. As a result, many book reviews devolve into little more than glorified plot summaries, or cheers and jeers on the order of “I loved it!” or “I thought it was trash.”

In some cases, however, reviewers get caught up short by a too-limited reading of the book under review, which provides a skewed or faulty perspective on the work under consideration. Case in point: Aritha van Herk’s review of Paul Quarrington’s new novel The Ravine, from Saturday’s Globe and Mail.

In her penultimate paragraph, van Herk writes: “The Ravine ends on a hopeful note, with Phil making at least a stab at reconciliation with his wife and his life.”

The scene to which she is referring is a passage of unattributed dialogue presented as a telephone conversation between the book’s protagonist, Phil McQuigge, and a female interlocutor. In other, similar passages throughout the novel, the speaker on the other end of the phone is identifiable through the details of the conversation or by name. In the final passage, however, there is no indication whatsoever that the person McQuigge is speaking to is his wife. Indeed, he could plausibly be speaking to any one of three different women. For those who have read the book — and not wanting to give too much away — it is possible to argue persuasively that the reference to Anthony Trollope in the scene strongly suggests that it isn’t McQuigge’s wife on the other end of the phone.

By assuming that the other speaker is the protagonist’s wife, van Herk reveals more about herself than she does about the ending of Quarrington’s novel. Van Herk wants it to be McQuigge’s wife, because that would provide the story with the kind of happy ending, involving a return to domestic tranquillity, that she feels most comfortable with. But there is no evidence in the novel that this is the correct reading.

The ambiguity in the finale is central to Quarrington’s approach in the book; by applying a more explicit reading than the text encourages, van Herk diminishes the force and effect of the novel.

Hill, Richardson Win Commonwealth Prizes

Posted 14 March, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Heartfelt congratulations go out to Lawrence Hill and C.S. Richardson, who both won Commonwealth Prizes in the Canada and Caribbean region:

In the Canada and Caribbean region, Best Book went to Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, the true story of one woman’s journey from her village in west Africa, through slavery in South Carolina to a hard-won liberation. CS Richardson won Best First Book with The End of the Alphabet, the story of a man who develops a rage for travel after hearing he has only weeks to live.

I haven’t read either of these, but a Canadian publishing insider whose opinion I trust calls The Book of Negroes “a masterpiece,” so perhaps I should give it a go.

The rest of the Commonwealth winners can be found here.

Hey Hey, My My, Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die … Until Someone Tries to Write a Novel about It

Posted 13 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Music | 3 comments

Reviewing Ibi Kaslik’s new book The Angel Riots on the CBC website, Kevin Chong ponders whether it’s possible to write a great rock ‘n’ roll novel:

Writing about rock ’n’ roll is, more often than not, a fool’s errand. Frank Zappa’s withering description of rock journalism as “people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read” is not only pithy, but reflects the widely held opinion on the matter.

I’d argue that it’s really not possible to write a “great” rock ‘n’ roll novel, if by “great” one means authentic or capturing the essence of the source material. Great rock ‘n’ roll is built on a kind of anarchic energy that can’t truly be replicated in prose: as Craig O’Hara said of Warren Kinsella’s book Fury’s Hour, “a book about Punk is not Punk Rock”; in the same way, a description of a horde of sweaty, writhing, drunk and stoned headbangers can’t adequately capture the sheer body rush and sonic assault of a Motörhead concert.

Chong points out that Kaslik adroitly avoids this problem by mostly leaving the descriptions of the band’s performances out of her novel and concentrating instead on their personal interactions offstage, but there is nevertheless something oddly static about the result, and stasis is the very antithesis of the rock ‘n’ roll ethos.

In Chong’s conception, Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet constitute enjoyable rock ‘n’ roll novels; I’d be more inclined to tilt towards Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo or Ray Robertson’s Moody Food, which, although it too suffers from an unavoidable literary sedateness, is adept in capturing the mood of Yorkville in the ’60s, and his Gram Parsons stand-in is well-rounded and believable.

However, to come closest to nailing the manic energy and electricity of a great rock show, you have to look at novels that don’t deal with rock per se, but nevertheless brandish a youthful vigour, and work flat out to provide an adrenaline-fuelled body blow. In that sense, the greatest “rock ‘n’ roll” novels I’ve read — neither of which have anything to do with rock ‘n’ roll — are Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Craig Davidson’s The Fighter.

Ramble on.

(My own review of The Angel Riots appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Quill & Quire.)

I Wish I’d Written That

Posted 10 March, 2008 in Envy | 1 comment

From Nathan Whitlock’s review of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, in Sunday’s Toronto Star:

Witness what happens when an august literary critic and scholar describes the act of cunnilingus: “Only then might one proceed to the inner grotto, now scented and alive with wetness as is a fountain hidden by moss (cf. Petrarch).” The Tongues of Eros was the planned title for this book – Close Your Eyes and Think of Petrarch being insufficiently romantic, perhaps.