Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction

By Alex Good

Revolutions is the first book-length critical survey of twenty-first-century Canadian fiction, with in-depth essays examining subjects such as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effects of the digital revolution, and the dark legacy of what has come to be know as the Canadian literary establishment. Throughout, close reading is given to many contemporary authors, with particular attention paid to such central figures as Douglas Coupland and David Adams Richards. Alex Good explains and contextualizes this period in Canadian fiction for the general reader, providing a much-needed critical re-assessment of Canadian writing in the new millennium.

By offering a contrary yet thoughtful position to that taken by our nation’s most prominent literary tastemakers, Good offers a vigorous commentary on the state of Canadian literature—where we are and how we got here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Mar 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771961202

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REVOLUTIONS

Copyright © Alex Good, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

first edition

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Good, Alex, author

Revolutions : essays on contemporary Canadian fiction / Alex Good.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77196-119-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-120-2 (ebook)

1. Canadian fiction--History and criticism. 2. Canadian fiction--20th

century. 3. Canadian fiction--21st century. I. Title.

PS8187.G66 2017 C813’.509 C2016-907948-1

C2016-907949-X

Readied for the Press by Daniel Wells

Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

Typeset and designed by Chris Andrechek

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

For Kylie

Beauty. Patience. Forgiveness.

Introduction

The fundamental challenge facing literature in the twenty-­first century is its need to find—somehow, somewhere—an audience. Writers can’t simply be tossing their words into the void, down a wishing well, or (what comes to the same thing) posting them online. That the audience has to be a paying audience is just as essential. Even if writers were to be motivated solely by a perverse inner compulsion, literature, even in the digital age, is produced by an industry that still has bills to pay. And so it seems proper to preface any discussion of the state of Canadian literature with a consideration of the health of that industry.

A quick look at the patient’s chart: In 1987 John Metcalf provocatively wrote that If you choose someone at random on the street they’d be just as likely to have AIDS as to have bought a Canadian novel this year. A decade later, Philip Marchand came up with a figure of four thousand as the number of people in this country who are highly committed to serious Canadian fiction. In other words, he reckoned literary novels at the time could be expected to sell in the neighbourhood of four thousand copies—not enough, in Marchand’s opinion, to sustain a national literature.

That was then. Having been a book reviewer for over twenty years, and having been a commenter on the literary scene for nearly as long, I’ve been witness to a further erosion. I think it’s fair to say that Marchand’s serious readership of four thousand would today be considered pie-in-the-sky. Or Pi in the sky, if you allow for the odd blockbuster. My understanding is that a well-received Canadian novel published by a mid-sized or small press today will have trouble selling more than five hundred copies. Even established authors published by larger presses will sometimes have trouble breaking a thousand without the help of a prize sticker or some other promotional tie-in. This in a country with a population of over thirty-six million. Statistically, Marchand’s readers of serious literature are now extinct. We live in a post-literate age, one in which, Douglas Glover concludes, books have become irrelevant.

That said, determining exactly how many people still read has always been a tricky business, since reading is (or at least before the advent of e-readers, was) a private, hard-to-monitor activity, and the most accurate sales numbers remain closely guarded trade secrets that are rarely discussed in public. This has opened the door to much speculation in the media about the demise of reading, especially in the wake of the publication, in the U.S., of the 2002 National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk. Among the bombshells dropped in that study was the fact that the number of adults who read at least one literary book in the course of a year dropped by 14 percent between 1992 and 2002 (with the fall-off, ominously, being much worse among younger readers). But then questions were raised: Just what counts as serious reading anyway? Franchise fiction? Comic books/graphic novels? Browsing the Internet? And isn’t serious reading an elite, minority activity by definition?

Though the numbers were capable of being spun and interpreted in many creative ways, and they were, you had to look hard to see any silver lining to them. Subsequent studies have come up with different results, some of them more optimistic, but the general trend still seems bleak. In 2014, for example, a Pew Research Center report chimed in with the news that the number of Americans who claimed not to have read a book, in any form, in the past year had nearly tripled since 1978. For people of the book this is depressing news, and ten years from now I expect the numbers to be much worse, mainly due to fallout from the digital revolution. I have to say that, despite being a cultural pessimist of long standing, I had no idea that I would be witness to reading becoming such a marginal activity in my own lifetime. And yet, here we are.

In trying to understand what went wrong, I don’t want to beat up on the degraded tastes of the common reader, or make an appeal for the government to do more to address stubbornly high rates of illiteracy. Surely by now these may be taken as givens. Instead, what I find of most concern and significance is the rise in aliteracy, the growth of a population that can read but simply doesn’t want to.

I should begin by pointing out that there is nothing new about the fact of mass aliteracy. Writers like Daniel Boorstin, Richard Poirier, and Neil Postman were raising the alarm decades ago. In 1982 Poirier took it as axiomatic that in an affluent, democratic age people have acquired enormous cultural power, but they do not exercise it by reading. Their cultural power is expressed by their choosing, as they could never have done before, not to read, or at least, not to read Literature. It is this exercise of choice that makes our own time different from previous eras of mass illiteracy, when the vast majority of people couldn’t read. But the twenty-first century has lowered the bar still further, as aliteracy has come out of the shadows, encouraged by its public, sometimes even proud display not just among our vulgar celebrity classes and undereducated young people but among the very people—the intellectual gatekeepers, tastemakers, and cultural elite—that previous generations looked to as guides and role models. This advanced aliteracy is something new, and it has had damaging effects. In much of what follows I will be talking about what I perceive to be the misdirection of Canadian literature. Advanced aliteracy offers a partial explanation of how we lost our way.

The author of the surprise bestseller How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard, is a standard-bearer for today’s highbrow aliterates. Bayard is a college professor of French literature, a position that paradoxically leaves him with no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven’t even opened (or, for that matter, has ever had any desire to open). And this is nothing he feels any shame or anxiety about. Not reading, Bayard believes, is in many cases preferable to reading, and may allow for a superior form of literary criticism: one that is more creative and doesn’t run the risk of getting lost in all the messy details of a text. Actual books are thus rendered hypothetical, replaced by virtual books in phantom libraries that represent an inner, fantasy scriptorium or shared social consciousness.

Still, assuming that his tongue isn’t stuck too far in his cheek, Bayard believes that not reading books can itself be a cultured activity, a way of expressing one’s faith in and affection for literature. More often, however, top-down aliteracy only expresses a weariness, cynicism, and even contempt for the written word.

My first exposure to this type of thinking came, naturally enough, while studying English literature at university. Academics, for no good reason whatsoever, are expected to publish a great deal of stuff that nobody—and I mean nobody—reads. Bayard, referencing David Lodge, is only stating the obvious when he says that most academics don’t read their colleagues’ work. I remember being a grad student and visiting a professor who had just been selected to read the publications of another scholar at the same institution who was up for tenure. I thought this seemed like a minor inconvenience, having assumed that my acquaintance was already familiar with much of the material, since he published in the same area and was a friend of the tenure-seeker. But I found he was livid at the imposition. If they, meaning the tenure committee that had dropped this unwanted assignment in his lap, "think I’m going to waste any part of my weekend reading all that shit, they can think again!"

I don’t want to belabour an obvious point. Scholars are forced to skim academic publications in order to plump up their own work with footnotes and scratch a few backs, but in terms of actually reading academic journals or the critical monographs put out by most university presses, you can forget it. Meanwhile, the authors of this dreck know that their work is worthless and will never be so much as glanced at, even by their peers. They nevertheless have to keep churning it out because that’s what the system (read: their job) demands. This dismal state of affairs has, in turn, had a knock-on effect, our English departments having become privileged ghettoes of cynical and demoralized intellectuals.

But our current system of higher education is in enough trouble without me piling on. Whether a bubble exists in North American university education today, or whether it’s about to undergo an inevitable contraction without suffering a catastrophic pop, is open for debate. Either way, I actually have some sympathy for the situation academics find themselves in (at least the younger, non-tenured ones). I don’t blame the collapse of the humanities on intellectual fads so much as on a broader economic reordering over which universities themselves have little to no influence. The point I want to make here is that we shouldn’t expect much help from the professoriate in stemming the rising tide of educated aliteracy. Mark Bauerlein, in his book The Dumbest Generation, recounts a damning and, I’m afraid, all-too familiar instance of anti-literary sentiment in higher education:

The surveys [on the decline in reading] I’ve invoked usually produce a chorus of newspaper stories and public commentary on the descent of popular culture into ever coarser and more idiotic enjoyments, and they identify a-literacy as a signal trait of heedless youth. Just as predictably, however, comes a small counterresponse as academics and the more hip, youngish intellectuals pooh-pooh the alarm and yield to, or even embrace, the very advents that worriers decry. I witnessed one example at a meeting of literary scholars in Boulder in 2004 after I presented the findings of Reading at Risk. With my dozen PowerPoint charts lined up and commentary completed, a distinguished professor of Renaissance literature on the panel had heard enough. Look, I don’t care if everybody stops reading literature, she blurted. Yeah, it’s my bread and butter, but cultures change. People do different things. What to say about a hypereducated, highly paid teacher, a steward of literary tradition entrusted to impart the value of literature to students, who shows so little regard for her field? I can’t imagine a mathematician saying the same thing about math, or a biologist about biology, yet, sad to say, scholars, journalists, and other guardians of culture accept the deterioration of their province without much regret.

I don’t care if everybody stops reading literature. Coming from the mouth of one of our stewards of literary tradition this smacks of the treason of the clerks—and it gets worse. Is there a text in this class? was a hot question back when I was a student, with everyone debating issues of canonicity and the dominance of theory (sometimes spelled with a capital T). Even at the time I thought these were idle arguments, papering over what was an obvious and ongoing gutting of the real content of any literature course. That is to say, literature itself. Only ten years after leaving university I went back and saw that the reading list for a course I had taken on the eighteenth-century novel had been cut in half. The core texts of the period (Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy) had been dropping like flies. "Why bother making Tom Jones a required text? one professor responded when I mentioned my concern at all that was being lost. They [the students] aren’t going to read it anyway." Hard to argue with thinking like that. Or with the professor of Canadian literature I met in a bookstore around the same time, who, upon my inquiring if he’d read a new Canadian novel I was interested in, responded as though I’d asked if he enjoyed molesting his children.

"I never read anything, he replied, unless I’m paid."

In more recent years, however, theory has come to the rescue of our obviously overworked and underpaid academics and made the disposability of the text more respectable. Enter distant reading.

What is distant reading? Kathryn Schultz, author of a 2011 piece in the New York Times, sets out to explain: In an age of information overload, with far too many books being published for any one person to get through, our only way of coping is to not read them. One imagines Bayard nodding his head. Stanford University literary scholar Franco Moretti, founder of a new school of computer-generated, quantitative macroanalysis of texts, has it all worked out:

We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let’s say you pick up a copy of Jude the Obscure, become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England—to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.

There now. Wasn’t that easy?

Academic professionalism, however, is only a symptom, and a mostly harmless one at that, of a deeper cultural malaise. In 2008, in an essay in the Globe and Mail, author Russell Smith attacked the shortlist for that year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize on the grounds of its being characterized by ecstatically lauded, good-for-you Canadian books… that you can’t bear to even begin. This was, he went on to say, an opinion shared by many of his fellow writers­—and if this gave the impression that these Canadian fiction writers don’t have a whole lot of time for the work of their Canadian peers… that impression may well be correct. Smith’s criticism of the shortlist, however, could go no further since he admitted he hadn’t read any of the books on it; indeed had no intention of ever reading them, and therefore couldn’t judge them.

Obviously he hadn’t been liberated by Bayard.

A year later it was fellow Globe columnist (and novelist) Leah McLaren’s turn:

It’s award season in book world. Short lists for the Triple Crown of Canadian literature—the Governor-General, the Giller and the Roger’s Writer’s Trust—have all been announced and the jury selections pored over like tea leaves in a mug. Ah, the comforting brew of Canadian literary culture. High in antioxidants, low in caffeine.

Like everyone else, I have followed the coverage and pondered the obvious: When exactly did Douglas Coupland find time to write another novel? Who does Annabel Lyon’s hair? Is Margaret Atwood pissed?

One thing I have not wondered, however, is which of the anointed books to add to my shelf, worthy efforts though I’m sure they are. You read that right: This fall, I won’t be reading any of the books that are nominated for Canadian literary prizes. And I don’t feel guilty about it either.

No anxiety here! And McLaren’s friends, like Smith’s, certainly weren’t exerting any peer pressure on her to get with the reading program. She even quotes the opinion of one of them (another shortlist non-reader, one assumes) that the Gillers have thus far only been successful at calcifying CanLit into a predictable brand. Which is to say, good-for-you books that you can’t bear to even begin.

And this was before the anointing of The Bishop’s Man and The Sentimentalists as the very best this country has to offer!

Smith and McLaren aren’t the only ones who have taken a principled stand against reading the Giller shortlists, and I am, in fact, in complete agreement with their attitude toward most recent Giller nominees. I wouldn’t have read more than a couple of the books shortlisted from the past several years but for the fact that it was, occasionally, my job. But that’s the point. Some time ago a friend of mine, an author as well as a prolific book reviewer, was asked to compile a list of his Top Ten Books of the Year for a magazine feature. What surprised me about the list when it came out was the fact that I knew my friend held a very low opinion of many of the titles he had included.

So I popped the question: How many of those ten books—and mind you these were his cream of the crop—would he have read if he hadn’t been paid to read them?

His forthright answer: None.

John Metcalf’s concern seems apposite: "It has been borne in on me during the last forty years that it is unusual to find Canadian writers who even read other Canadian writers… If the country’s writers do not read each other—an aesthetic and competitive necessity, one would have thought—why should we expect an audience to read us? If writers do not care, why should anyone else?"

A question to be asked.

Does anyone else care? Not writers, but reviewers perhaps?

I think not. Sticking with Giller nominees, in 2003 M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall made the shortlist and a review copy duly appeared at the office of the mid-size newspaper I was then writing for. When my editor attempted to pass it off on me I reacted as I think any sensible person would: there was no way they were paying me enough to read that. Nor was I the only one to have such a reaction. None of the hardcore readers who regularly contributed to the newspaper’s book section—and we had a full stable at the time—had the slightest interest in cracking those covers. When Vassanji’s book improbably went on to win the Giller, my editor made another round of attempts to drum up interest, but to no avail. The last time I saw it, it was sitting on a prize table as part of the paper’s annual charity auction.

My own experience as an editor of a literary journal having to assign new books for review met with the same kind of dismaying response. Intelligent, opinionated, well-informed Canadian readers have politely, but firmly, and with some regularity, declined to accept the challenge of reviewing their home and native land’s most critically acclaimed and highly touted new releases, even for (admittedly modest) pay. I might also mention here the fact, perhaps not widely understood outside media circles, that not every book review you see in a newspaper or magazine has been written by someone who actually read the book. Far from it. My own occasional protestations against being asked to review a heavy set of galleys in short order have generally been met with by shock on the part of editors, who never dreamed that I was going to read the assigned book. For many reviewers, a look at the dustjacket will be enough. Others make use of publicity packages that include helpful breakdowns of the book’s highlights and major findings, complete with pull quotes compiled precisely to aid reviewers disinclined to do any further reading themselves.

The result of all of this has been to conceal a lot of Canadian fiction behind what I’ve called a critical cloaking device. And again I have trouble casting stones at the tribe of