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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 10:50 AM EST
Here’s to the long-form
Kudos to my colleague Ian Brown for winning the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction yesterday. His The Boy in the Moon is a potent, sometimes wrenchingly sad, sometimes surprisingly funny account of life with his son Walker, profoundly disabled by a rare genetic disorder. That Brown found a way of writing so openly, yet so responsibly, about a subject so bone-close is remarkable.
But I want to pick up on something he mentioned in his thank-you remarks, and something that’s been a nagging thorn for me for a while. I think non-fiction prizes such as the Taylor (and the Governor-General’s and the Writers’ Trust) are more important than ever, for they recognize a form of writing threatened by the fragmentation of attention that is a by-product of ever-faster technologies. At least, I think it is.
At its best, long-form narrative, whether history, memoir, science or, indeed, any genre, brings to its subject a quality of attention, a trove of research and often years of deep consideration. When coupled with good, even elegant, writing, it can open worlds for us. But we need the leisure - and the will - to engage, the attention to absorb. I worry that this capacity is being lost, or at least diluted; I feel it even in myself.
Which is why keeping our eyes on the prize(s) is one good way of keeping readers reading - and writers writing.
Link to this postThursday, January 28, 2010 4:24 PM EST
Holden Caulfield vs. the Phonies
Funny, my thought when I heard that J.D. Salinger had died was not about Salinger at all. I didn't know Salinger (few did), though I'm grateful to him. No, I thought about Holden Caulfield, his greatest creation. I read Catcher in the Rye at 15, and Holden was 17, though he seemed so beyond-me wise in the ways of adolescents -- adolescent boys anyway -- and their efforts to make their way into a psychologically chaotic and morally corrupt world. All his remarks about sex and adults and growing up seemed spot-on to me, though I was immersed in the most stable of families.
True, I didn't go to a prep school, or get expelled (came close once or twice) or, most daringly, hire the services of a prostitute, but Holden spoke directly to me as no oher character had before -- and few have since. I remember talking to a couple of similarly affected friends, and we discussed whether Holden was perhaps a little too judgmental; he was always criticizing people for being boring or vulgar, or, worst of all, insincere. "Phony" was his ultimate term of dismissal.
Since Catcher was published in 1951, Holden would be 75 now, and I'll bet he'd still find much in the adult world phony. And he'd be right.
Oh, and for those curious about the book's title, here's the relevant bit from Holden in Chapter 22:
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 5:25 PM EST
Dude, seriously
So, this weekend I was watching The Big Lebowski for the I won't tell you how manyeth time. And as always, it's very inventive and very very funny (John Goodman's Walter, the violent Vietnam vet cum moralistic bowler cum pretend Orthodox Jew, is a comic turn for the ages).
But what really strikes me is how The Big Lebowski, a sort of Raymond Chandler parody-extension, has morphed into a cultural phenomenon, more so than the Coen brothers' finest films: Fargo, Miller's Crossing, No Country for Old Men.
The Lebowski-ization of academe is apparent in a book that recently landed on my desk. It's The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, issued by Indiana University Press. It's an anthology of essays, 21 of them with serious academic pretensions, looking at the film's aura and influences: film noir, the sixties, cowboys. The greatest film ever about the relationship between marijuana and bowling has occasioned pieces with titles such as: Dudespeak: Or, How to Bowl Like a Porn Star; The Dude and the New Left; No Literal Connection: Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski; A Once and Future Dude: The Big Lebowski as Medieval Grail Quest; and Abiding (as) Animal: Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale, Dude. What! Nothing on comparing its nihilism with that in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons?
Some of the essays seem simply like fans having fun; other push the academic envelope into spaces where there are no letters to fill them. Still, Lebowski fanatics will have a fairly good time, if occasionally flinging the book against a wall. Others will not be lining up for it.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 4:28 PM EST
Remembering Paul
Paul Quarrington's death today has hit the Canadian literary community -- and, I imagine, the musical one - hard. He was so central to its reality that he seemed eternal, indestructible. But, of course, that's a fancy, for none of us is.
My own relationship to Paul was trivial, or at least began trivially. In the 1990s, we were members of rival teams in an ultra-competitive Monday night trivia league. Not bitter rivals, for there was nothing bitter about Paul. But he, and his musician brother Tony, were formidably erudite. The team I played with, the Times Squares, usually lost to Paul's team, All Over Twisted (which I'm told still exists). But one season we beat them in the finals, an especially delicious moment. Paul was sarcastically graceful in defeat -- there was a lot of banter in these games, most of it friendly, some of it even witty.
Oddly, years later we locked trivia-stocked minds in the annual charity event sponsored by Toronto's firefighters. This time, Paul was part of a team of savvy freelancers; I was on one of The Globe and Mail teams. And again we edged them out.
"We kicked your ass," I mocked with false braggadoccio (at least I hope it was false).
"And we'll kick yours next time." Thus Paul. And meaning it.
But next time never came, and today I'm regretting not having my ass kicked by Paul, at least trivially.
Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:00 PM EST
Plus ca change ...
Think this is the first generation of writers, or even the first century of them, to feel traduced by bad reviews? That's been going on for as long as we've been talking about books.
I've been reading, at an admittedly glacial pace, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, written in 1874-75 but astonishingly contemporary in many ways.
One of the major characters, Lady Carbury, a woman oversure of her own gifts, writes a book -- a derivative work called Criminal Queens -- that she hopes will be the making of her literary reputation, and some fortune. Instead, it is hammered by a newspaper she had hoped better from. Here's what Trollope has to say about reviewing in Victorian England, which sounds suspiciously like reviewing now:
"There is the review intended to sell a book -- which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him. … Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed -- been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass -- then a real success has been achieved."
Thursday, December 3, 2009 10:31 AM EST
Fall on your brain
Is it just me, or is there something profoundly ironic about hurdler Perdita Felicien choosing Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees as her book in the latest version of Canada Reads? I begin to suspect the presence of mischievous minds at the venerable CBC.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 5:47 PM EST
Triple whammy?
I'm beginning to wonder if being short-listed for all three Canadian fiction prizes in the same year carries some sort of curse. A couple of years back, Rawi Hage's Cockroach earned him short-listings for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor-General's and the Writers' Trust. In the event, he won none of them.
This year, Annabel Lyon hit the short trifecta with The Golden Mean. Last week, she lost the Giller to Linden MacIntyre. Today, she lost the G-G to Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing. Which leaves the Writers' trust…
Of course, here's a possible consolation: Denied the prizes at home, Rawi Hage won the Dublin IMPAC for a payoff of about $170,000 and all the plaudits that come with that.
And speaking of Linden MacIntyre, I imagine The Bishop's Man is already contemplated as a top choice in the second edition of the just-published Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books (Nimbus Publishing, $24.95), a fascinating compendium of just what it says it is. I doubt he's going to displace #1, Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (that would be rank ingratitude to one of the Giller jurors who chose him), or #2, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. But he could sneak quite comfortably into the Top 10 (Frank Parker Day's Rockbound currently occupies 10th spot).
In the 100 Greatest, a colourful affair, you'll also find such familiar contemporaries (their number indicates just how recent and strong is the surge of Atlantic Lit) as Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Kenneth Harvey, Michael Crummey, Donna Morrissey, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Ami McKay and David Adams Richards, as well as one of my own favourites: Joshua Slocum's wonderful memoir Sailing Alone Around the World weighs anchor at #47.
Oh, and the writers needn't be Atlantic Canada natives; setting a book there is good enough, which accounts for the presence of Farley Mowat (Sea of Slaughter is #89) and the veddy English John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is a very interesting choice at #72.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Thursday, November 12, 2009 9:57 AM EST
A modest proposal
Kudos to Linden MacIntyre for pulling off what was at least a mild upset at Tuesday night's Giller Prize extravaganza. And his acceptance speech was lucid and magnanimous. So magnanimous, in fact, that I'm going to make a suggestion.
MacIntyre as much as said that all five finalists (the others being Annabel Lyon, Colin McAdam, Kim Echlin and Anne Michaels) were equally deserving of the prize. Well, then, how about sharing the largesse? MacIntyre may be nearing retirement age, but he, so far as I can tell, is the only short-listee with a permanent job. That $50,000 might be a nice nest-featherer, but it would be a spectacularly generous gesture to share it with the others, for each of whom $10,000 would be a windfall. (Yes, I know that Colin McAdam found a twonie on the floor Tuesday night, but that's rather a pallid consolation prize.)
Of course, I'm not sure I would do it. Draw what conclusions you may from that admission.
Thursday, November 5, 2009 4:57 PM EST
Takin' it to the country
What could be more Canadian than the confluence of literature and hockey. I was in Midland, ON, earlier this week as part of IFOA Ontario, the International Festival of Authors' new road trip. As I hunkered down to do an on-stage interview with two wonderful writers of wildly variant styles and themes -- Canadian Miriam Toews, who needs no intro here, and Brit Sarah Hall, already multiply honoured and assuredly bound for more -- I could hear unmistakably icy sounds emanating from the adjoining hockey rink. It was oddly comforting -- and relaxing.
A night earlier, apparently, the readers were accompanied by the sounds of a tribute band called Almost Abba.
"Sure, and I'm almost Faulkner," quipped Scottish novelist James Meek.
Friday, October 9, 2009 4:47 PM EDT
Herta mother
I have a theory about why the Nobel committee gave the Literature Prize this year to the unheard-of (and I don't admit to Western ignorance of Euro-lit; she is unheard of) Herta Muller. It's by way of making up for Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino's film not only mocks the Nazis (no plot-spoiler here), but also the ambitions and pretensions of Germania itself. So what better response for a "neutral" country than to give the award not merely to a German author, the first since Gunter Grass in 1999 and 13th writer of German since award was established in 1901, but also to the politically dissident daughter of a member of the Waffen-SS.
Oh sure, the committee did its usual sanctimonious "let's give the award to an unknown but courageous somebody who's lived under tyranny for decades" number (Muller's a Romanian German from the town with the Marx Brothers-ish name of Nitzkydorf), but I also think it delights in withholding the prize from well-known figures who might have merited it. I have no idea whether Muller's a good writer, though she did win the Dublin IMPAC Award in 1998 for The Land of Green Plums. But for my money, which I'll admit is entirely notional, it should have gone to Alice Munro or Philip Roth. After all, Roth's literary world contains Nazis too.
mlevin@globeandmail.ca
Shelf Life Contributors
Martin Levin
Martin Levin has been Books Editor of The Globe and Mail since 1996. Before that he wrote the Climate of Ideas column for The Globe for several years. He has been a group publisher for health and safety at Southam, won several international editorial awards as editor of the Jewish Post in Winnipeg, and written about music for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement and Toronto Life.