Fuck Books

Posted 24 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism |

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.

4 comments to “Fuck Books”

Kerry, April 24th, 2008 at 9:06 pm:

• Though I approached the reference a bit differently, I find your point here absolutely spot on. Well said.

Claire Cameron, April 25th, 2008 at 8:13 am:

• This is exactly what I was after.

August, April 25th, 2008 at 2:24 pm:

• It was the very same book by Mr. Not Enough A’s and Too Many O’s that put me off his work more or less for good. The general opinion amongst my friends and I was that the prose was pretty, but otherwise it was incredibly dull. And I am, or at least was at the time, one of those crazy cloistered ivory-tower academic types.

  I’ve been consciously on the lookout for Canadian books that speak to, or at the very least take place in, the world of contemporary Canada, but it hasn’t been an easy quest, and I’m finding an unsettling lack of depth in many of those books. It’s difficult to not simply returns to the work of past masters and call it a day. Michael Helm and J.M. Villaverde (the latter whom you may not know, but he put out an excellent collection of stories with Oberon last year) both meet the criteria of intelligent, beautiful and contemporary, and I enjoyed Claire’s book for many of the same reasons. The danger, I think, with making conscious efforts to avoid insularity is that working for too broad an appeal leaves you in danger of sacrificing your art for popularity. To take Ray Robertson as an example; I read his novel Home Movies earlier this year, and while I wasn’t bored by it, I found that it was too much on the surface of things, and that his prose lacked any sort of art. If that was all I wanted from my entertainment (and I do read for entertainment), then I would stick to watching movies. I come to books, by and large, for a different kind of pleasure. There’s no clear way to strike a balance, I suppose, but keeping one foot in the insular community of writers and academics may at least be a chewing gum and piano-wire solution.

  Also, I’ve got to say that the more I hear about it, the more I want to read Mr. Whitlock’s book. At the rate I’m going it will probably have to wait until June, though.

Zachariah Wells, April 25th, 2008 at 3:11 pm:

• Fuck the big wide world out there!

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