2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner: Elizabeth Hay

Posted 7 November, 2007 in Scotiabank Giller Prize | 8 comments

The wrong book won. Again.

Not that the jury left themselves much to choose from this year. But even given the relatively lacklustre quintet of books on this year’s shortlist, in my estimation there were at least two — A Secret Between Us and, despite its problems, Divisadero — that were demonstrably better than the eventual winner, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. I’d even suggest that, notwithstanding my lack of enjoyment of it, Effigy is a better book: better writing, more fully realized characters, a more successful structure.

To illustrate why Hay’s book is not the best of the five, take as an example a single paragraph from the very first page:

It was the beginning of June, the start of the long, golden summer of 1975 when northern light held that little radio station in the palm of its hand. Eleanor Dew was behind the receptionist’s desk and behind clever Eleanor was the studio. She looked up, surprised. Harry rarely darkened the station door except at night when he came in to do the late shift and got away with saying and playing whatever he liked. He paused beside her desk and with a broad wink asked about the new person on air.

This paragraph is replete with shopworn phrasing (”the long, golden summer,” “darkened the station door,” “a broad wink”), expository writing meant to stand in for character development (”clever Eleanor”), and prose rhythms that are, at best, twee (”saying and playing”). The clichéd writing and verbal counters continue throughout the novel: “Harry knew the coastline like the back of his hand” (p. 12); a woman hired to read the news in Dogrib is “a real live wire” (p. 116): “Gwen stood rooted to the spot” (p. 204); “He’d told them they were barking up the wrong tree” (p. 212).

Then there are the passages of exposition that stand in for character development, informing us or clarifying for us things that would be better left implicit:

To hear herself spoken of disparagingly — it hadn’t happened since she was a child at camp. At the age of ten she’d stormed into the tent with her objections: I heard you. I heard what you said. And all the other girls looked at her, embarrassed, but also sorry for her. And what had come after the anger? More anger, but in a different form. Anger with herself for having spoken out, and with the situation that goaded her into speaking.

There is the heavy-handed use of the changing seasons to represent shifting tones or subjects in the story: “They were heading towards the first day of August, the street lights were noticeable again, and a few leaves were turning yellow, indicating in their minimal, elegant way an end to this long, warm summer and the beginning of a darker chapter.” Or this: “By late April, the long hours of light were back. In town all the snow was gone, and all the garbage, so thinly but effectively disguised, had resurfaced, soft and soggy and in unbelievable amounts. It was the time of year when winter secrets got revealed.”

This is writing with a sledgehammer; it beats the reader over the head with things that — provided the reader is at all attentive — it should not be necessary to make explicit. Similarly, the constant foreshadowing (”There would be a later letter, too, signed by others”; “February brought a second loss, which unfolded far from town. March would have its own misfortunes”; etc.) is intrusive and annoying.

I dwell on these points because Late Nights on Air was awarded this country’s most lucrative prize for best work of English-language fiction this year, and to say that the writing in Hay’s novel is better than that in Ondaatje’s or Poliquin’s or York’s is demonstrably false. None of those three writers (four, if you include Donald Winkler, Poliquin’s translator) stumble the way Hay does. It therefore becomes necessary to ask, by what criteria did the jury determine that this book was the “best” out of the five candidates?

I’m no conspiracy theorist, and far be it from me to point out that Hay is published by McClelland & Stewart, which also publishes David Bergen, one of this year’s jurors. (If you want to win a Giller, it helps to be published by M&S; since the prize was inaugurated in 1994, the house has published the eventual winner eight times, more often than any other publishing house.) Nor would I suggest that the award has anything to do with the fact that Camilla Gibb, another of this year’s jurors, was nominated for her novel, Sweetness in the Belly, in 2005, the year that the jury consisted of Warren Cariou, Richard B. Wright, and … Elizabeth Hay.

However, while I honestly do believe that there were no backroom deals being made to determine this year’s winner, Canadian writing is, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, a small pond, and there can’t help but be the appearance of back-scratching and quid pro quo under such circumstances. (Remember back to last year, when Vincent Lam was given the prize by a jury that consisted in part of Michael Winter, who was listed in the book’s acknowledgements.)

It might behoove the prize administrators to consider a jury composed of journalists, critics, or other less interested parties rather than writers. I’d be fascinated to see what kind of a list a jury composed of, say, Sandra Martin, Ben McNally, and Geoffrey Taylor would come up with.

Beyond the appearance of conflict-of-interest, however, watching the Giller broadcast last night solidified in my mind the impression that this is an award given by the literary establishment to the literary establishment. Scanning the room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, I would have guessed that the average age was around fifty-five. Remove Vincent Lam and the average age spikes to sixty.* I was vividly reminded of Howard Davies’ comments in his preamble to awarding Anne Enright this year’s Man-Booker Prize: “I think a little more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers, together with greater readiness to notice new names.” The same might be said of awards juries.

*Okay, math was never my strong suit, but you get my point.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 5

Posted 6 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | No comments

The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji. Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cloth, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-66351-9.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: 2004, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (winner)

1994, The Book of Secrets (winner)

Other Awards: 1990, Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (The Gunny Sack)

From the Publisher: “A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and the modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning — The Assassin’s Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.”

From reviews: “Intertwining a 700-year-old family epic with a mystical mystery, Vassanji … crafts an intense and haunting work of fiction.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The chapters set in the present, especially those in the 1960s and ’70s — American hippie culture, Karsan’s marriage and fathering of a son — become increasingly clichéd. The connection hinted at between Mansoor and Nur Fazal — the repetition of religious violence through history — is clearly intended to be central but is never sufficiently explored. As a result, the tension established in the initial chapters leaks away.” — Vancouver Sun

“There are echoes of Rohinton Mistry in Vassanji’s lampooning of post-independent India’s frenetic nationalism, of V.S. Naipaul in the insistence that solutions can arrive only from a thorough understanding of the past, of Salman Rushdie in the disclosure of a history composed of personal narratives and myths. But the quiet lyricism of Karsan’s contemplations, the careful evocation of place, the writer’s obvious warmth for his characters, the sense of compassion layered into the story — these are all Vassanji’s.” — Washington Post Book World

Representative passage: “I imagine Bapu-ji sitting on the floor in his beloved library, his writing table across his knees, addressing his apostate son, uncertain about his own life and fearful for the ancient shrine of which he is the spiritual lord. Extreme violence has spread across the state, narratives of the horror out there keep arriving with every fresh batch of devotees, and this time it looks impossible to stanch the flow outside the village, there seems to be an absolute intention to its fury and no force to counter it. The police are nowhere. I can’t see his face: that old official photo won’t do, and I don’t have a recent picture in my mind to help me visualize him. He must have retained those outlines of his face that I always knew — though how much did that beatific smile shrink over the years? The elongated face I recall, and the large flat ears; the hair must have grown white and thin … There is no preaching in this letter, only a confession of sorts. Does this portend closeness or distance?”

My assessment: What begins as a coming-of-age story about Karsan, the next in line to be the Saheb, or lord, of the Shrine of the Wanderer in Pirbaag, India, becomes a story about filial duty and the cost of pursuing personal freedom.

There is a sense that Vassanji has attempted to do too much in this novel, incorporating the history of India post-independence with the story of a young man who is in line to be a lord, interspersed with the history of a fictional thirteenth-century sufi. The theme of filial duty and tradition clashing with the forces of modernity is certainly not new to post-colonial literature set in India, having appeared in the work of authors as diverse as Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shyam Selvadurai; it’s not entirely clear that Vassanji has anything particularly new to add to this rather well-covered literary territory.

Still, the scenes in 1960s Pirbaag are the most successful in the novel, largely because they are the most fully developed. Karsan’s interaction with Mr. David, a teacher at his school, is presented as a complete arc (although it’s patently obvious from the outset where this particular subplot is headed), and his involvement with a nationalistic youth group provides some good moments.

But by the time Vassanji bundles his character off to Harvard, and then to British Columbia, the narrative has dispensed with any pretence of developing dramatic scenes and become little more than a synopsis of Karsan’s adventures in the West. Poorly fleshed out characters appear and disappear within pages; in one instance a putatively tragic event befalls one character, but since the character in question was introduced a scant ten pages prior to this event’s occurrence, it’s impossible for the reader to work up any emotional investment and the scene falls flat. Even using the word “scene” is stretching a point: the “tragedy” is dispensed with in a single sentence.

Vassanji tries to cram so much into the second half of his book that the whole thing comes off feeling rushed and underdeveloped. He ignores the hoary old writing school directive to “show, don’t tell,” and even goes so far as to include the kind of plot-advancing letters I was complaining about in the Poliquin novel.

The Assassin’s Song does deal, if only peripherally, with terrorism and the clash of religious ideologies, and so has a contemporary resonance; it’s hard to escape the feeling that the Giller jury nominated this book more for its subject matter than for its literary merit.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 4

Posted 5 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 2 comments

A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, trans. by Donald Winkler. Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 paper, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1-55365-272-4.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: None

Other Awards: 2007, Ottawa Book Award (La Kermesse)

2001, Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing (In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism)

1998, Trillium Award (The Straw Man)

From the publisher: “A startling evocation of a pivotal era in Canadian history, from one of French Canada’s most esteemed writers.”

From reviews: “This kind of thing lives or dies by its writing, and here, at least in this translation, the prose is mannered and monotonous. In the end, it’s all just one damn thing after another, with the characters weaving in and out of each other’s lives over the years, everyone’s dreams unrealized and their lives inconsequential.” — Quill & Quire

“Though Essiambre and the secret between them does form one plotline in the novel, La Kermesse is the better title, with its nod to the church (kerk/mis) and to the funfairs it most typically suggests. Lusignan is the local character in one of those fairs, and this book is his midway.” — Globe and Mail

Representative passage: “We played Brébeuf after Sunday mass. Naturally, I was often the Jesuit and Gertrude was Mother Marie de l’Incarnation, transfixed by my suffering. She also had the right to go to the kitchen for biscuits to feed the famished Iriquois. For authenticity’s sake Hector and Donatien stripped to the waist, and I allowed myself to be tied to the stake, saying, ‘Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.’ We never failed to tell the story as we went along, as children will: ‘Me, I’m wounded in the chest, you’re attacking me with the tomahawk.’

“There too things went badly from time to time. One day when it was Hector’s turn to be Brébeuf, he who had been a decidedly cruel Iroquois, Donatien and I tied him solidly to the torturers’ stake and left him out in the rain for an hour. Hector Brébeuf yowled, ‘Come untie me, damned asshole Iroquois! I’m going to tell the good Lord!’ On that occasion the good Lord took the form of their father, who saw red when he got angry. I escaped in time.

“Another time it was their mother who punished them, because Donatien had invented a new torture that consisted of tying up Father Brébeuf so he couldn’t move, and farting in his face. That day I was the Jesuit.”

My assessment: If you’re like me, you’ll notice something about the passage quoted above that instantly sets A Secret Between Us apart from the other books on this year’s Scotiabank Giller shortlist: it’s funny. Not funny in a droll, chuckling-wryly-over-tea-and-crumpets kind of way, but really funny. This alone puts Poliquin’s novel in a category by itself vis à vis the other shortlisted books.

The first-person narrator of A Secret Between Us, Lusignan, is a drunk and a liar and a thief. This makes his narration somewhat suspect; he encompasses many of the traits of the quintessential unreliable narrator. But it also makes his narration lively and enjoyable: the reader laughs at his jokes and his bad behaviour, all the while engaged in an enterprise of trying to decide how far he can be trusted. Truth, for Lusignan, is a malleable quality; as a novelist, he says, “I rewrote history according to my tastes. All I needed was a credulous public for everything to be true.”

The novel takes place during the first half of the twentieth century, and travels from the trenches of World War I to Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats. But this is not the kind of ponderous, oh-so-earnest novel that is typical of Canadian historical fiction. At least, not entirely.

The novel has a flaw, one that almost does it in. Although Lusignan’s own narration is engaging, it is frequently interrupted to make way for long letters written by Amalia Driscoll, the lover of Essiambre d’Argenteuil, a lieutenant in the war, with whom Lusignan shares the titular secret. Driscoll’s letters are everything the rest of the novel is not: plodding, dull, overly detailed, and tedious.

There is a technical term for using letters, journals, diary entries, etc. to convey information in a novel: cheating. Novelists usually resort to these devices because they can’t think of a more creative or integrated way to get this information across in the story. In A Secret Between Us, this problem is compounded by the way in which the letters force the narrative — which was ticking along so well under its own steam — to a virtual standstill for their duration.

Still, while far from perfect, Poliquin’s novel is certainly the most enjoyable of the bunch thus far.

Next: The Assassin’s Song

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 3

Posted 3 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 1 comment

Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay. McClelland & Stewart, $32.99 cloth, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-3811-2.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, A Student of Weather (nominee)

Other awards: 2004, Ottawa Book Award (Garbo Laughs)

2001, Marian Engle Award

From the publisher: “Hay has a skewering intelligence about the frailties of the human heart. Weaving stories from the past into the present, she builds a fresh, erotic, darkly witty and moving tale, replete with sentences that stop you dead because of their unexpected wisdoms and startling beauty.”

From reviews: “In the course of her story, Hay swoops down like a raven on odd, shiny bits of information about the North. The tufts of soft muskox hair that snag on branches in the bush are called qivuit; the violet shades of the northern lights are due to nitrogen; the sound of someone crawling into a tent pitched on dry lichen in the tundra is a dry crackling, like wrapping paper. Nothing escapes her.” — The Walrus

“Hay seems to have fallen too much in love with her own words, too much in love with the North (where she once lived), too much in love with real-life explorer John Hornby (what is it with novelists’ need to jam a square peg of historical context into every round-holed narrative?) and too much in love with her characters, whom she gives too much rein to meander about the tundra as they see fit.” — NOW Magazine

“Late Nights on Air isn’t a page-turner in the sense of having an action-packed plot; it’s gripping in the more satisfying sense that it’s psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.” — Toronto Star

Representative passage: “This was the night, July 17, Eleanor elected not to go to bed at all in order to experience the brief middle-of-the-night twilight with its profusion of violet clouds directly overhead and its yellow gleam in the northern sky. Dressed in wool pants, wool jacket, gloves, with bug repellent smeared on her face and neck, she lay on her back on the warm, mattressy tundra whose thick growth held on to the day’s heat. Tweedy smells rose from the soft tangle straight into her nostrils. The colours and textures at eye level, the russets, browns, blacks, reds, formed an embrace so gently erotic she dozed off with a smile on her lips, only to come awake when a ptarmigan whirred by, or a snowy owl flew down and sat on a big stone twenty feet away, or loons cried in the distance. The loon’s long call seemed to her like a statement of the hour, a horizontal sound that tapered off into the horizon, while its laughter was vertical, high, flashy, rippling. The Barrens themselves were horizontal, but vertical, too, she thought. A vertical world of air: a country of clouds, and abundance of wind.”

My assessment: With its Yellowknife setting, and a final third that features a lengthy canoe trip through the Barrens in the Arctic wilderness, place is a dominant feature of Late Nights on Air. Hay’s descriptions of the northern landscape are extensive, and contain the kind of supple, sensuous detail that might appeal to fans of the two American Annies: Proulx and Dillard.

Those who are not fans of either writer, however, and those who prefer novels that privilege story over place, are likely to find much of this book plodding in the extreme. What story there is on offer involves a group of people who work at CFYK, the local Yellowknife radio station. Much of the first half of the book — before that extended canoe trip — is taken up with characters chattering away to each other in dialogue that is baldly expository and not terribly engaging:

The smile widened on Dido’s lips. She shifted and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Gwen. “Why are you sitting on a chair? All the rest of us are on the floor.”

“I’m comfortable on the chair.” But she didn’t feel comfortable. And didn’t look it either, she knew that.

“You don’t look comfortable.”

“I’m as comfortable as I ever am.”

“But you’re apart from us, sitting up there. You’ve set yourself apart.”

“I know. I know I’m sitting on a chair and everyone else is on the floor.”

Hay’s tendency to take the reader by the hand and explain everything in explicit detail derails much of her narrative’s potency: “Ralph was saying, ‘A day like today makes me appreciate a day like yesterday.’ He meant coming to a standstill made him appreciate a day of hard slogging.” And her incessant, heavy-handed use of foreshadowing does the novel a disservice: when the much-anticipated tragedy finally occurs, it has the effect of being palely anticlimactic.

Like the canoe trip that the characters embark on, the act of reading this book feels like a tough slog over unforgiving terrain.

Next: A Secret Between Us

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 2

Posted 31 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | No comments

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje. McClelland & Stewart, $34.99 cloth, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, Anil’s Ghost, winner

Other awards (selected): 2000, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Irish Times International Fiction Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Prix Médicis (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

1992, Booker Prize (The English Patient)

1992, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (The English Patient)

1979, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do)

1970, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid)

From the publisher: “Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakeable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.”

From reviews: “Truths amply demonstrated by character, imagery, and action are repeatedly double-underlined for the reader with ponderous generalizations such as ‘There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known only briefly.’” — Quill & Quire

“The work is written like a well-prepared meal, with the perfect amounts of appetizer and main course and dessert; just enough and not too much.” — January Magazine

“The more you reread Divisadero, the more you come to understand the sleight of hand that Ondaatje performs here. The sleuthing, for the novel is a detective story of the heart. The craft, for the author blends sex, drugs, and gambling with homesteading, caravans, and war. Every story it tells is really one story; every account of loyalty and betrayal, of people divided, is one account.” — Georgia Straight

“There is something endearingly human about this book, for all its art: who can’t forgive a hopeless romantic?” — New York Times

Representative passage: “There were nights when Lucien startled himself awake at his daughter’s wildness. How had she, the one daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a person? Was it simply that Pierre was the man she demanded above every other principle? There was this live coal of desire on her tongue that had altered her, so that she could no longer be sheltered by the husk of a family. And he realized he loved even more this proud indelible daughter, his Flammarion companion, who had leapt beyond him into the life of this dangerous stranger, a man he was unable to like except through the knowledge that Lucette had placed herself in the cup of his hand, just as she had bent over and moved back into his body, defenceless with pleasure in the garden shower.”

My assessment: Divisadero is really two separate books, written in two divergent styles.

The first book is about a ranch hand, Coop, who has an affair with Anna, one of the daughters of the farmer for whom he works. When the father discovers the affair, he beats Coop almost to death. The story follows Coop’s adventures as a cardsharp in Vegas and Tahoe, where he becomes a “mechanic” — a cheat who is proficient at dealing stacked cards in such a way as to avoid notice.

The second book focuses on Anna, who flees the farm after the incident with her father and winds up in France, researching the life of a writer named Lucien Segura.

With a title like Divisadero, it is not surprising that the novel features diverging storylines. “Divisadero,” Anna says, “from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ … Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’” And lest we feel that the two halves of the novel are unconnected, Ondaatje provides numerous parallels between the two stories: both feature rural settings; both involve makeshift families; both feature an illicit love affair that a father discovers; both feature acts of violence in which shards of glass play a key role; and both are touched by war.

The problem is not the substance of these two narratives, the problem is their wildly divergent styles. The first half of the book is tough, direct, and often violent, propelled forward by strong storytelling and a seething undercurrent of menace.

When the focus shifts to Anna and her musings about the French writer, Ondaatje capitulates to the kind of flowery, mannered, purple prose that characterized The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, and the book comes to a complete standstill. In place of the lean, crisp prose of the first half, this part of the book showcases the Ondaatje who never encountered a metaphor he didn’t fall instantly in love with: a purloined wooden flower retained by the thief is “a stolen thing like a live alouette in his pocket,” and a sexual liaison is described as moving “the heat of her cave onto his coldness.”

This is the kind of writing that has won Ondaatje accolades, but it generally comes off feeling overwrought and cloying. Following immediately upon the much more satisfying, less show-offy first half, it has the net effect of rendering Divisadero one of the most frustrating and disheartening reading experiences of the year.

Next: Late Nights on Air.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 1

Posted 29 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 5 comments

Effigy, by Alissa York. Random House Canada, $32.95 cloth, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-0-679-31472-1.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: None

Other awards: 2001, John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer

Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher (Any Given Power)

1999, Journey Prize (”The Back of the Bear’s Mouth”)

1999, Bronwen Wallace Award (Short fiction)

From the publisher: “Set on a Mormon ranch in nineteenth-century Utah, and inspired by the real events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, Alissa York’s Effigy is a haunting story of a polygamous family united by faith but separated by secrets.”

From reviews: “Exquisite detail in Alissa York’s historical novel Effigy ensures that readers are transported to 19th-century Utah, specifically the ranch of a polygamous Mormon family, where seething tensions do not remain below the surface.” — Globe and Mail

“York’s writing is graphic and impressionistic, sharp-edged and sensual. Though both style and landscape at times bring to mind Annie Dillard and Cormac McCarthy, York’s voice is very much her own.” — Quill & Quire

“York writes with severe precision, each word pounded into place, no give to the language. This makes for slow-going sometimes — Effigy is not an easy read — but it also allows her to capture the casual brutality of frontier life with particular force.” — National Post

Representative passage: “The scene beneath the outcropping entered him with the slow-flowing force of a dream. The pack horse hauling back into its haunches, the black giant thrashing, all hooves and whipping spine. For now, the fight was enough to keep the cat from biting, working its long teeth between bones to snap the hidden cord. It was holding on tight, though, a fat, cream-coloured saddle with a glaring face. Spotting the Tracker, it added its own voice to the squealing song of its prey. The black horse rocked forward, baring the cat’s white chest. On the back-surge the mare’s head and breast obscured the shot. The trick was in the timing. Crooking his finger, loosing the ball a hair’s breadth before the next plunge.

“It was a kill for the telling, the first shot rendering the second one unnecessary. Claws let go, retreating into their sheaths the moment the Tracker’s ball met heart. The lion was airborne on the following buck. It landed in a crease of the outcropping, both horses dancing in the wake of its death. Hammer broke upon the aftermath through the thin smoke drifting from the Henry’s muzzle.”

My assessment: Notwithstanding its Utah setting, Effigy may be a quintessentially Canadian novel. It’s set in the past, on a ranch; it’s about familial strife; it uses animals for metaphorical resonance (in this case, wolves, horses, and crows); it’s relentlessly bleak and depressing; and it privileges a precision of style over a compelling story.

There’s no question that York’s writing is impeccable; she is a master of voice and her polyphonic approach involves numerous shifts in points-of-view, at times incorporating everything from dream narratives to a mother’s letters to her daughter. (York’s stylistic flourishes are often subtle; it took several letters for me to realize that the mother never uses commas.)

However, while the prose is crystalline, it is also — like crystal — inanimate, devoid of life’s seething essence. One telling experience occurred while I was reading this novel: as I opened the book, my bookmark slipped from its spot and fell to the floor, losing my page. I flipped back to what I thought was roughly the spot I’d stopped reading and took up the story. After about three and a half pages, I came across a single sentence that I recognized, and realized that I’d read the entire passage already, but save for that one particular sentence I had absolutely no recollection of it.

This is a dilemma that seems to pervade much of what is lauded in Canadian fiction: although the prose is burnished to a fine sheen, there’s no life to it. It’s all irredeemably beautiful, but in its very beauty the muddiness that is life’s essence goes missing. I’ve quoted Virginia Woolf before, but it seems appropriate to do so again:

We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh — Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? … Life escapes: and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.

Woolf was writing about the novels of Arnold Bennett, but she could as easily have been writing about Effigy. It is appropriate that one of the main characters in York’s novel is a taxidermist for, like the animals her husband brings home to be stuffed, the novel has the surface veneer of life, but none of life’s animating spark.

Next up, Divisadero.