Why are so many of my Canadian friends exhorting me, on social media, to vote for someone called Bernie Sanders? We are all Canadian. We cannot vote there, guys.
This is one of the strange consequences of the borderless media landscape. Canadian intellectuals, particularly in Toronto, where the media are centred, read deeply into U.S.-based culture journals. They read, naturally, more about U.S. culture than about any other country's disputes.
This is natural: American intellectuals are fascinating and fiery; their debates are more polarized; their issues (especially the racial divide and the legacy of slavery) are so much more dramatic; and there is simply more of American culture than there is of anything else. The Internet is basically American.
(A recent controversy illustrated this: Meryl Streep, wearing a T-shirt bearing a slogan written by early British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst – "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" – was berated for somehow making a careless reference to American history, which Emmeline Pankhurst absolutely wasn't.)
We start to absorb U.S. politics and think of them as our own. We have extremely strong views on the role of Brooklyn in literature. We start to think of getting "our" troops out of Iraq; we encourage people to choose candidates in a foreign election. We forget that there still actually are borders and differences among cultures.
It's bracing to run into European intellectuals sometimes. They look on from a greater distance.
Last weekend at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, I was on a panel discussion (about sex and gender in fiction) with a visiting French author who is quite famous in France and, up to now, unknown here. His name is Éric Reinhardt and his new novel – his first translated into English – is called The Victoria System. It has made a massive splash in France, nominated for all the big prizes, including the Prix Goncourt, and its reviews are stellar.
It is billed as an erotic thriller; it concerns a sexual liaison between a man and a powerful woman (and there is quite a lot of sex in it); but it also delves into the world of high finance and construction. It is a rare thing in contemporary French literature: not a tortured introspective intellectual monologue, but a Big Novel, the kind of sprawling contemporary-society analysis, the novel that attempts to portray how economic systems work.
Its ambitions are reminiscent of those of the 19th-century novel (one reviewer called Reinhardt the new Alexandre Dumas), and they are something that Americans are better known for right now. (Compare new wunderkind Garth Risk Hallberg, whose 900-page family saga City On Fire is being hailed as societal commentary and generally Big Book.)
Reinhardt is pretty French: handsome, dressed in black, careful with his words. He was asked how to explain the ascendancy of the contemporary "erotic novel" and he expressed some bafflement at the idea, even at the label. Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't such a big deal in France, he shrugged. It was a bestseller but we didn't talk about it much. And my novel (he said through an interpreter) is more about the emotional pull between two people. He spoke easily about the almost embarrassingly passé notion of love at first sight. The French can be completely unawkward about the most romantic of notions.
Besides, he added, my book did not attract so much attention because it was graphically sexual, but because it was political. "We don't have a culture of erotic fiction," he said.
That was rather amusing, because French fiction has always been more erotic than its Anglo-Saxon counterparts – they have the Marquis de Sade as their artistic forbear; we don't – such that France in the early 20th century was the only place an avant-gardist author such as James Joyce could publish a book as earthy as Ulysses. And, actually, Sade was a political writer, too. To someone like Reinhardt, the erotic is not a separate category.
It must be a relief to live at just a slight remove from the gigantic pulses of U.S. trends, to not be following their publishing numbers and their blogs the way the entire Canadian industry (and its media commentators) do. To not have Fifty Shades of Grey looming over every fictional sexual encounter that might involve a power imbalance or an unusual act.
And perhaps, too, to not worry so much about what Slate or The New Republic might say about poetry controversies happening in Iowa or ratings for Lena Dunham.
The French government cultivates its writers somewhat more generously, too, of course. Reinhardt had been brought to Toronto with the assistance of the French consulate here. Awaiting him after his reading was his French government handler, an impossibly gorgeous and elegantly dressed young woman. She took him off somewhere.
I have often travelled abroad on Canadian government money; never have I been given a local fixer. France is a foreign country; they do things differently there.