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.

For Those Who Want to Get Their Dander Up …

Posted 7 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews | 2 comments

… my review of Stephen Henighan’s new collection of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, is online, here.

Henighan is, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure. Writing in the Quill & Quire about Henighan’s 2002 essay collection, When Words Deny the World, James Grainger said that the book contained “[s]ome of the most blistering and erudite pieces of Canadian literary criticism ever published.” Responding to the same volume in The Danforth Review, Shane Neilson complained that “Henighan makes a mediocre Chicken Little but a poor explicator of how to repair the sky.”

The reasons for Henighan’s spotty reception among the denizens of CanLit have much to do with his gleeful willingness to take on the Canadian literary establishment — a willingness that is on full display in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture.

He does lay himself open to accusations of churlishness: the charge that Canadian literature has been overtaken by a parochial and greedy cabal of Toronto-area writers and publishers, first floated in the essay “Vulgarity on Bloor” from When Words Deny the World, is reiterated in the new volume, which reprints Henighan’s notorious Geist essay about Margaret Atwood’s influence on Vincent Lam’s 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize win. The essay includes Henighan’s contention that “[f]rom 1994 to 2004, all the Giller winners, with the exception of Mordecai Richler, lived within a two-hour drive of the corner of Yonge and Bloor.” The radius that allows for a “two-hour drive” to Yonge and Bloor is not only a clever way of shoehorning Alice Munro — who lives in Clinton, Ontario — into Henighan’s establishment cabal, but also disingenuously elides the fact that, by virtue of his residency in Guelph, Ontario, this rubric also encompasses … Stephen Henighan.

He is also prone to sweeping generalizations, many of which are problematic if only for being untestable:

The books discussed in book clubs … are read for a shared deadline, discussion may be channelled by the “Questions for your reading group” section at the end of the paperback edition, the level of literary debate descends to whether members of the group “liked” characters or regarded them as laudable models for behaviour, or saw them as raising salient public debates in a congenial way; appreciation of literary form or original uses of language sinks below the horizon.

This may be true of some book clubs, perhaps even the majority of them; it’s impossible to prove that it’s true for all book clubs. Similarly, Henighan asserts that “The culture of the book club novel is sentimental, ‘life-affirming,’ deflected from engagement with the world around it and often obsessed with the therapeutic reconstruction of the individual psyche.” This may indeed be true for Oprah’s book club — the most famous and visible book club in the world — but it’s impossible to show that it’s true across the board. (I’m a part of a book club: the last book we read was A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess; the next one is Dead Babies by Martin Amis. I wonder how these two novels would line up with Henighan’s umbrella view of a typical “book club” selection?)

Still, notwithstanding their evident flaws, Henighan’s essays are valuable for their ability to cut through the complacency and platitudinous drivel that so often passes for literary engagement in this country. The new book is more expansive than the previous volume — to a fault: a number of the essays are extraneous — and offers fresh perspectives on significant figures from our own literature and from world literatures. He’s not always easy to like, but Henighan is fearless and bracing, and is therefore a necessary figure on the Canadian critical landscape.

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.)

On Literary Sex

Posted 4 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted approvingly Russell Smith’s desire to see more sex in novels. Here’s the counterargument, from the Guardian:

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.*

To illustrate his argument, the author of the Guardian piece, Lee Rourke, makes reference to the novels of Michel Houellebecq, which he claims are “saturated with badly written sex scenes.” Houellebecq’s sex scenes are nevertheless “a joy to read,” because “if sex is to be used at all, it should be mechanical, dreary and, most importantly, clichéd, which is precisely what you get with Houellebecq.”

This is disingenuous, because Houellebecq’s novels are nihilistic dissections of modern anomie; they’re about the lack of human connection in a world riven by consumerism, technology, and fanaticism. The “mechanical” sex scenes are manifestations of this; complaining that they are “badly written” is akin to complaining about Patrick Bateman’s compulsively detailed descriptions of the sex in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho — it’s an indication that the complainant has pretty much missed the entire point.

Rourke goes on to complain about the sex in Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach, which he finds self-consciously literary and “laughably unreal.” (By contrast, the “mechanical,” “dreary,” and “clichéd” sex in Houellebecq “seems real” to Rourke.)

Granted, sex in novels is very difficult to pull off. Done badly, it becomes unintentionally funny or embarrassing. Not for nothing is the Bad Sex Award presented every year, and always finds a full roster of candidates to choose from. Russell Smith highlights the difficulties involved in writing sex in his introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person:

The English language is not suited to graphic descriptions of passionate acts. … [T]here are only so many words for body parts and the actions they perform (for in fact, there are only so many actions), and constant use of them becomes repetitious. And really, none of these words is satisfactory: if you use the correct, everyday word for a body part — penis or vagina, say — you risk sounding cold and clinical, like a medical textbook or a how-to guide. Slang words, on the other hand, tend to be either ugly or humorous. Cock and pussy are harsh and, well, childish, and from a register of language that I suppose you’d have to call proletarian; that register does not suit every scene and every character.

It is perhaps this limitation of language that rouses the ire of people like Rourke. Certainly it has stymied writers, even otherwise talented and worthy ones. John Updike, whose influence in breaking down barriers in terms of descriptions of erotic acts in mainstream literary novels is enormous, has always evinced difficulty in this regard. His 1968 novel Couples was scandalous at the time for the explicitness with which it threw back the veil on the sexual lives of middle class American suburbanites. However, much of the sex in that novel seems to be cut from the self-consciously literary cloth that Rourke has such disdain for:

She showed behind and between her legs a wealth of listening curves and damps. She tugged her gown to her throat and the bones of her fingers confided a glimmering breast to his mouth, shaped by an ah of apprehension; when with insistent symmetry she rolled onto her back to have him use the other, his hand discovered her mons Veneris swollen high, her whole fair floating flesh dilated outward toward a deity, an anyoneness, it was Piet’s fortune to have localized, to have seized captive in his own dark form.

The overly clinical term “mons Veneris” would no doubt have Smith cringing, but the “wealth of listening curves and damps” is equally disconcerting, as are the fingers that “confided a glimmering breast to his mouth” (”glimmering”?) and the overly twee alliteration of “fair floating flesh.” This, safe to say, is not writing that one could get lost in.

Part of the difficulty with passages such as the one above is that there is no sense of exuberance to it, nor a sense of danger. In short, it doesn’t feel as though anything is at stake. In Amy Sohn’s novel My Old Man, Powell, the screenwriter who has an affair with the book’s much younger protagonist bristles at the thought of wearing a condom during sex: “I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” Powell understands that sex needs to have an edge, which is often what is missing from literary depictions of the act, which frequently feel too dryly intellectual, stripped of all passion and spark.

It was precisely this edge that made Nabokov such a compelling writer when it came to sexual matters. Not just the fact that he took up taboo subjects — sex with an underage girl, incest — but that he wrote about sex with abandon, as though he were allowing his pure id free rein on the page. Van’s dream from Ada, or Ardor, for example:

Bad Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it, varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan, Lucette’s mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters’ avid lovely faces were now close together, doleful and wistful in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the pool of his blood.

Nabokov is intentionally pushing buttons in passages such as this, and his description of the ear of ripe Indian corn could be read as a bawdy parody of Freudian dream analysis. It is the vibrancy of the language commingled with a sharp sense almost of discomfort — due in large part to his wanton flouting of the incest taboo — that gives the passage its full effect.

The energy — of both language and substance — that Nabokov displays is also apparent in Harold Brodkey’s masterful short story, “Innocence,” which features an extended, twenty-page description of a man trying to bring a woman to orgasm orally. Brodkey’s great insight — “Bad sex can sometimes be stronger and more moving than good sex” — is rhymed off almost as an aside, and the pitch of the story follows the ebb and flow of the lovers’ exertions. It is a bravura performance, and should be more than sufficient to put the lie to naysayers such as Rourke who believe that there is no such thing as a good literary sex scene.

(Thanks to Claire Cameron for pointing me in the direction of the Guardian article.)

*An odd redundancy, that.

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.

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.

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.

Get Real

Posted 4 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 4 comments

Dan Green, responding to a post on Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog:

Reviewers privilege narrative, but not necessarily realism. There is no necessary connection between “story” and “realism,” although narrative in literary fiction has been used so often as a way of nominally depicting “real life” that most reviewers–and many readers–assume that they are inseparable, that real life can only be presented to us through a summarizable “story.” Thus, I would argue that the stituation [sic] Jacob describes is a consequence less of laziness or apathy on the part of reviewers than of the widely held assumption that “fiction” correlates to “story” which correlates to “realism” in a more or less natural progression.

While my own stance is not so rigorously anti-narrative as Green’s appears to be, I do have a certain amount of sympathy with his argument that book reviewers — or, perhaps more fairly, book review editors, since it is they who decide which books to assign for review — have historically given short shrift to books and authors that do not fit into a prescribed mould of “the well-made novel.” David Markson’s anti-narrative The Last Novel was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and in the Globe and Mail’s Books section in 2007, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

What makes me a tad uneasy is Green’s and Russell’s apparently dogmatic reaction against realism as a legitimate — or, indeed, interesting — literary mode.

It is important to define our terms precisely here. Realism is often employed as a catch-all, often used interchangeably with naturalism or mimesis, which are similar, yet distinct concepts, and different critics will have different interpretations of its meaning and import. In the entry for Realism in The Harper Handbook to Literature, Second Edition, the authors assert:

Realism is a slippery term, sometimes used too loosely to be of value except as an indicator of a reader’s reaction. What seems real to one reader seems preposterous to another, and the common reader’s idea of reality is different from the professional philosopher’s. Realism is most useful in literary studies when understood in the context of the nineteenth-century movement that first applied it to literature, discussed its qualities, and in the end gave it the widespread currency it still enjoys.

The 19th-century realist movement was modelled on the French school of réalisme, which was first applied to Rembrandt, but later came to describe Flaubert and his followers. Contemporary critics of Flaubert scorned him and other proponents of réalisme for what they perceived to be the baseness of their subjects and the immorality inherent in their treatment.

But as Ian Watt points out in his seminal study, The Rise of the Novel, what set the 18th-century creators of the English novel — Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding — apart from prose writers before them was their commitment to “formal realism,” which proceeds from the premise “that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience”:

Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres. The novel’s air of total authenticity, indeed, does tend to authorise confusion on this point: and the tendency of some Realists and Naturalists to forget that the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today.

Watt’s book was published in 1957, so the revolutions of modernism and early postmodernism had already occurred, but it is clear that fifty years on, the “rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works” that Watt identified is alive and well in the culture.

Boredom can account for at least part of this. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719; 289 years later, Defoe’s formal innovations do not seem nearly as revolutionary as they must have done in the early 18th century. By contrast, when confronted with yet another carefully rendered slice-of-life novel about farming on the prairies, a reader in 2008 is most liable to roll her eyes in despair and frustration.

And yet one hesitates to dismiss realism altogether, if for no other reason than it has a large claim to being the generic characteristic that sets novels — even anti-narrative novels — apart from other forms of writing. Watt continues:

[W]e must not allow an awareness of certain shortcomings in the aims of the Realist school to obscure the very considerable extent to which the novel in general, as much in Joyce as in Zola, employs the literary means here called formal realism. Nor must we forget that, although formal realism is only a convention, it has, like all literary conventions, its own peculiar advantages.

The advantages of this kind of formal realism do not run to baldly mimetic descriptions of places and things, but rather comprise what the American critic William Dean Howells called “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” It is this more philosophical notion that is most useful in assessing realism in novels, as in any art: the authentic literary artist, whether he be Stephen Crane or Stephen Dixon, must maintain fidelity to his art, which presupposes a “truthful treatment of material.” That such truthfulness can be found in abstraction or innovative exercises in style is not something I would wish to argue against; it can also exist, indeed flourish, in more traditional modes of storytelling.

Finally, what is important is a recognition that, as Henry James put it, the house of fiction contains “not one window, but a million.” The critic Wayne C. Booth points this out in The Rhetoric of Fiction when he writes:

Fortunately, the alternative to dogmatic realism is not dogmatic antirealism. There are many other routes we can follow; whichever one we choose, our success will depend on our remembering the warning that Robert Louis Stevenson once gave James: what is the “making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.”

A New Feature: The Dialogue-Review

Posted 26 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews, Guest Blogger | 1 comment

Long Story Short, by Elyse Friedman. House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cloth, 216 pp., ISBN: 978-0-88784-219-1.

If you’re an inveterate reader of this site’s comments, you may recall me responding to Finn Harvor’s thoughts about the potential for blogs to resemble online magazines by suggesting that I’d like to get a few more voices than just my own into the mix around here. Accordingly, I’ve decided to inaugurate a new feature: the dialogue-review. These posts will focus on a specific title, but rather than me pontificating as from on high, I’ll be engaging in a dialogue with selected guest bloggers. We’ll see how this works. If the response is positive, this is a feature I’d like to continue.

In its first iteration, TSR is pleased to feature Derek Weiler, editor of Quill & Quire magazine and author of the blog Stuff in the Attic, discussing Elyse Friedman’s collection of stories and a novella, Long Story Short.

Warning: There are some spoliers contained in the discussion below.

Derek Weiler: Hey Steven,

Thanks for having me a as a guest. I’ll start with “The Soother,” since that’s the story in the book that I’ve read the most, beginning when it first appeared in Toronto Life a couple years ago. I fell in love with this one when I read the scene where Lucas – a Toronto businessman who’s in the middle of one of those breakneck heart-attack days full of errands to run and people to please – has come to his pregnant daughter’s apartment with the groceries she requested.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Well … no, it’s nothing.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Look, I appreciate you bringing this stuff, I mean, I didn’t even ask for half of this, but the thing I did ask you to get is wrong.” Megan looked as if she was going to cry. “I specifically said not to get the plain mango. I don’t like the plain mango.”

“You said mango-vanilla.”

“Yeah, together – mango and vanilla swirled together.”

“I know. I looked for it, but they didn’t have it, honey. So I got mango and I got vanilla and I figured you could mix them yourself.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s exactly the same thing. Except this way you get twice as much.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter.”

What a pitch-perfect capture of human behaviour! Your impulse is to sneer at the daughter, but after all, who doesn’t occasionally feel like a thwarted child over some tiny thing, trying not to and thereby resorting to mental contortions that come out as insufferable passive-aggressive whining?

“The Soother” sets up a hurdle with its gimmicky opening: we see the middle-aged Lucas dressed as a baby, drooling in the arms of a paid, um, fetish-enabler, I guess. But the story works for me because as Friedman proceeds to lay out this guy’s life, we see why he needs to be secretly pampered. Over the course of a day, he’s harassed, put upon, and taken for granted by everyone who’s close to him, from his surly son to his hypochondriac, cheating wife. Sure, everything is just a tiny bit … louder than real life, but not so exaggerated that it doesn’t ring true. It’s also hilarious.

That said, I’m still not convinced the baby conceit is really necessary – it feels like a kind of gaudy gift-wrap, and I think the story would be as strong or stronger without it. But “The Soother” gave me so much pleasure that I was willing to waive my reservations.

Which leads into my overall experience of Long Story Short, which I found wildly uneven. Sometimes mildly so: as with “The Soother,” I found myself overlooking minor flaws in stories that I generally loved, like the novella “A Bright Tragic Thing.” Sometimes more egregiously: there are a couple of stories here, “Truth” and “Wonderful,” that for my money should never have been included at all.

In “Truth,” a couple on a blind date communicate by saying exactly what they’re thinking, rather than the usual bland dissembling. Well, “exactly what they’re thinking” isn’t quite right – what these two actually voice are the subconscious impulses and motives that most of us don’t even articulate to ourselves. And here it’s all played for straight laughs. “Listen,” says the man, “my self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny. Why don’t we go to my place.” The woman replies, “Why not. I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”

“Truth” has some bite in its highlighting of modern anxieties and foibles, and I think it could be a very funny short film or comedy sketch. But for me, that was the problem – there’s no reason for it not to be a film or comedy sketch rather than a short story. It would lose nothing in the translation, and in fact it would work better in those media; the humour’s mostly mild and flat on the page here, because it doesn’t feel like it was meant to be read.

And “Wonderful,” I’d argue, has no value at all. It’s another comedy-sketch premise: a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life that imagines the angel Clarence setting out to show George Bailey that in fact his life has been meaningless and there’s no reason not to kill himself. It’s a too-obvious switcheroo that plays out too obviously for too long – 20 pages! And it’s not rendered with much imagination or verve – unlike “Truth,” I can’t see this one working in any format.

I don’t mean to come on all negative; I’ve barely even discussed “A Bright Tragic Thing,” which, as mentioned, I loved. And I thought the other stories were fairly solid too. In a more expansive collection it would be easier to overlook a couple of duds like “Truth” and “Wonderful.” But Long Story Short is a slim book – one novella, five stories, 200-odd pages – so they have a disproportionate impact.

How about you, what did you think?

***

Steven W. Beattie: You’ve pretty much nailed what most annoyed me about a number of the stories in this collection: they feel more like jokes or gimmicks than well-wrought or carefully crafted works of short fiction. And you’ve hit on the two most egregious examples of this: “Truth” and “Wonderful.”

My problem with “Truth” is that it’s basically one joke stretched out over fifteen pages. It scores all its points around page two; the rest just seemed redundant to me.

Having said that, I do admire the way Friedman pulls the rug out from under the reader in the story’s early stages. When Leslie and Martin first meet in the Starbucks coffee shop, the initial impression a reader gets of Martin is that he’s just a gigantic asshole: “I’m too cheap to pay more than a buck for a cup of coffee. Besides, I’m already buzzing. Just had two cups with another prospective partner at the doughnut shop around the corner.”

And Leslie’s tepid response – “ ‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘How did it go?’” – makes her seem like a bit of a doormat. It’s only as the story progresses that you realize what Friedman’s up to: these are two people without interior monologues, and they vocalize everything they are thinking either consciously or, as you suggest, subconsciously.

The tension between a blind date that follows a rather traditional trajectory – meeting in a coffee shop, moving on to drinks, back to his place for sex – and the absolute, brutal honesty of the two characters results in a kind of absurdism that is rare in Canadian fiction. But you’re right that the story would seem more at home on Saturday Night Live or Comedy, Inc. than in the pages of a literary collection.

And the recapitulation of It’s a Wonderful Life is really unnecessary. This is the weakest story in the collection. Although, having said that, I do admire the ambiguity in the finale. After taking us on a very predictable journey, she manages to leave us with a note of uncertainty as to George’s fate, and I found this impressive. It’s emblematic of my reaction to the collection as a whole that even in the stories I disliked, I could find something of value, even if it was only a moment at the end.

“The Soother” is one of my favourites among the shorter stories, and again I admired the kind of bait-and-switch she pulls on the reader in the early stages. The opening scene reads like a piece of straight naturalism and as a reader you don’t question it or think that there’s anything amiss until you realize that Lucas isn’t a baby at all, but a grown man. The trick over the following pages is to humanize him sufficiently for us to understand his particular fetish.

This story reminded me a lot of Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love,” another story about a man who engages in what society views as aberrant behaviour but who is humanized through the course of the story.

If I had a complaint about “The Soother,” it would be the same complaint I have about the collection overall: it’s a story that’s predicated on a gimmick and it tends to beat the reader over the head with that gimmick. We need to understand Lucas, obviously, and his interactions with his wife and his pregnant daughter are well handled in this regard. But the stuff with the other daughter’s impending marriage and the son who needs to be bailed out of jail felt like overkill to me. We get the point: Lucas is so constantly harassed by his demanding and selfish family that he needs to find succor in the arms of Irma, his surrogate mother, who allows him to return to the oblivious innocence of childhood.

I just wish that Friedman would trust her readers more and maybe pull back a little rather than constantly underlining her points for us. This is one of the signal problems with stories that depend on gimmicks for their effects. They tend to trade in subtlety for a broader, more obvious presentation. Which is not to say I disliked “The Soother,” only that I wish she’d pulled back a little.

I see the same kind of problem – the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness born of adherence to a fictional conceit (or gimmick) – at work in the novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” although interestingly it didn’t bother me as much in the longer work. Perhaps because the gimmick here was less self-conscious, or perhaps it had something to do with the room she gave herself to develop the various characters in more detail.

It might be appropriate to turn our attention more directly on the novella for a moment.

***

DW: Not to dismantle “The Soother” even more, but one major difference between that and “We So Seldom Look on Love” is that Friedman’s story is much more pat: guy suckling a soother on one side of the equals sign, everyone in his life taking advantage of him on the other. Which is why I wished the baby-fetish angle had been left out altogether; for me, Lucas’s dynamics with his family were plenty interesting and funny enough without having to be used to justify a pathology or something. “We So Seldom Look on Love” is (at least as I remember it, not having read it for a few years) more associative and mysterious, which I think is more suited to a story that is truly interested in “aberrant” behaviour.

But back to the novella. “A Bright Tragic Thing” is about two Toronto teenage boys, Dave and Todd, who like to collect the autographs of cheesy TV celebrities for their ironic kitsch value. Dave writes to Murray Mortenson, who was a teen star on Mother Knows Better in the 1980s and who now lives in conveniently-close-to-Toronto Rochester, New York. Dave is just hoping for a tacky souvenir of some kind. But Murray, who was a Z-list celebrity at the best of times and is clearly unused to fan attention, starts calling him on the phone for long heart-to-hearts – which Dave surreptitiously tapes so that he and Todd can chortle over them later. The only problem is that Murray seems to be developing an unhealthy attachment to his new phone chum.

Whew. Let me catch my breath.

Like most of Friedman’s work, this one benefits immensely from taking place in a world that is recognizably Toronto in 2007, and not, like so much CanLit, some alternate reality where supermarkets and televisions and the Internet don’t exist. And her teenage characters are also refreshing – gawky and cruel and snide but plausible and, at least in Dave’s case, still sympathetic.

Mostly, though, I liked the progression of the story. The escalation of Murray’s encroachment on Dave’s time. The way Friedman slowly differentiates Dave from his friend Todd, first by circumstance, later by temperament, and eventually by moral choices. Dave’s high school romance, which felt a bit rote but was still quite charming.

I especially liked the ambiguity of what exactly the story seems to be about. As Murray gets increasingly needy and eventually shows up in Toronto, you wonder just how much he’s going to invade/ruin this boy’s life. But at the end it becomes clear that “A Bright Tragic Thing” is really concerned with something else entirely, something much more resonant and satisfying.

That said, the novella certainly has imperfections. I won’t dispute that Murray is cartoonish, never totally gelling as a believable person. The proverbial Chekhovian gun on the wall serves as an obvious plot device. And technically, Friedman’s prose is serviceable but unremarkable. As you mentioned, she could stand to trust the reader more; she has a habit of spelling things out just a touch more than necessary. (The last two sentences of the novella, for example – are they not completely superfluous?)

And you?

***

SWB: Well, the last two sentences make explicit something that could have been inferred from the paragraph before, and you’re probably right that the ending would have been more effective if we’d been allowed to make this inference ourselves rather than having it spelled out for us. However, that didn’t really bother me.

What did kind of bother me about the two teenage boys (and Helen, Dave’s would-be girlfriend) is that they seem to suffer from the Dawson’s Creek syndrome: that is, they speak and interact at a level that seems far too advanced for what normal teenagers might be expected to engage in:

“Your unsullied Klinger is comparatively lacklustre. In short, a bore.”

“I’m depressed.”

“You should be.”

“It’s more effective to shoot yourself.”

“True.”

“Why waste good narcotics?”

“You’re right. Especially since my father owns several pistols.”

“Well there you go. Pistols at dawn.”

“I can challenge myself to a duel.”

This dialogue is self-consciously ironic and witty, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of dialogue teenagers – even smart, self-consciously ironic teenagers – would actually carry on. This lends a note of artificiality to the story for me, but is not enough to entirely mar the experience of reading it.

“A Bright Tragic Thing” evinces the same kind of repetitiveness around a central conceit that is evident in “Truth” and “Wonderful,” but the gradual escalation in the relationship between Dave and Murray, the ex-TV “star,” prevents this from becoming boring or tedious.

Some elements of the novella do capitulate to the obvious: the gun on the wall is not just proverbial or metaphoric – it’s an actual gun, and there’s little question from very early on about how the story is going to end. I would have been happier with a more cynical ending, which would have had the effect of implicating the reader in the story’s satire. As it is the reader, along with Dave, is allowed off the hook: we can laugh at Murray’s gormlessness while always retaining the moral high ground. This feels ever so slightly like a cop-out.

I realize that to a certain extent I’m criticizing the story based on what I wish Friedman had written rather than what she actually did write, which is unfair. And I don’t want to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the story – I did, I just wish that she’d been a little more uncompromising with it.

I agree with you that “We So Seldom Look on Love” is superior to “The Soother,” and perhaps I link the two in my mind only because they’re both about fetishists of one kind or another. Gowdy’s story is much more allusive and subtle, whereas Friedman tends (here and elsewhere in the collection) to make all of her connections explicit for the reader.

In this regard, we haven’t even touched upon “Lost Kitten,” which is the one story that largely eschews this kind of explicitness. It’s a darker story, with an ambiguous ending that opens out into some very creepy areas of implication. The woman in it is obviously touched in some way, but exactly how is never made clear. And the relationship between the two roommates – their respective moral codes (or lack thereof) – is nicely handled. This is the darkest story in the collection, but also, I think, the most elliptical and least contrived.

Or is that just me?

***

DW: First, to defend “A Bright Tragic Thing” a bit: the dialogue doesn’t seem that implausible to me, given that these are seniors about to graduate, and brainy/geeky seniors to boot. Sure, it’s a little stylized and more polished than the way real people would talk, but hey, that’s true of almost all dialogue. (I think it was Van Wyck Brooks, though I might be misremembering, who wrote an essay pointing out that it’s a mistake to think that Huckleberry Finn captures “real speech,” because if it did, the book would be repetitive, incoherent, and boring.)

I’m also not sure that your proposed ending would be more effective; in fact, I feel like a more cynical “oh, what a crazy world we live in” ending would just end up letting everyone off the hook, reader included. There’s something almost refreshingly old-fashioned in the story’s finale, with its insistence that the choices we make matter. Though I will concede that the moral victory Dave appears to earn – by, um, showing some compassion and no longer acting like a complete asshole – is a pretty minor one.

But yes, “Lost Kitten.” I absolutely agree that the woman is one of the most memorable characters in the book, exactly because we know she’s off in some way but we don’t know how or why. And I thought Friedman brilliantly handled the scenes in which the reader picks up significance that eludes the woman: the visit from the two sons of her mother’s “friend,” or the description of the Late Serial Killer décor in the guy’s apartment. For me, the revelation of the split personality of the “roommates” (OK, I guess you should really make sure that spoiler warning goes up) still felt a little gimmicky, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy the story. And I agree that the weird moral distinctions that the psycho “roommate” makes were very well rendered.

Personally, I didn’t find the ending ambiguous, though; I just assumed she was a goner. Similarly, I assumed that the man had jumped into the river at the end of “Wonderful.” But in neither case are we shown anything definitive, so it is open to interpretation.

***

SWB: It’s those moments that are open to interpretation that really mark the collection for me. They tend to open the book up in ways that the more obvious, contrived conceits don’t allow for. I think that if Friedman could just allow for her readers to make certain connections for themselves, rather than insisting on beating them over the head at every turn, she could produce something really spectacular.

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