I want it and I want it now. Oh you know what I'm talking about, don't you? It's the Giller-Prize-winning novel this year - The Sentimentalists - by a young unknown author, Johanna Skibsrud, whose name was one that many of us had never heard of, and most of us could not pronounce.
The book sounds fantastic: a "tripwire taut" (as the jury put it), highly poetic, moving and lyrical look at a complex father-daughter relationship that involves a moral dilemma in Vietnam, a trailer and alcohol. Bring it on!
Except - as just about everyone knows by now - I can't lay my hands on the bloody book because it isn't in stock anywhere. Zip. Nada. Bupkiss. The delightful Ms. Skibsrud's small, "artisanal" (a fancy word in this case for out of touch and out to lunch) Nova Scotia publisher, Gaspereau Books, produced only 800 exquisitely hand-bound copies of this masterpiece, and then not only declined help from bigger publishers so that the book would be shelf-ready during the Giller season, but loftily proclaimed the reader would just have to wait. Furthermore, it added, waiting wouldn't be such a bad thing!
Well I never. You've heard of slow cooking, welcome to slow booking. I'll leave it to Ms. Skibsrud, who after receiving her $50,000 prize money, resumed her long-planned Istanbul vacation with her mother, to decide whether to fire her publisher or just light a fire under it.
But let's talk about us. Why do we need this book, like, yesterday? Is it really because we are going to immediately upend our packed lives to sit down and read a lyrical book we'd previously never heard of?
Or is it cultural currency, one-upmanship: Oh yes, of course I have the Giller Prize winner, The Sentimentalists. It's been sitting in my home library for oh, almost half an hour. How about viral urgency? I want to tell everyone on Twitter that I scored it, and I want to have an actual informed opinion about it before everyone else tweets, posts and critiques it to death.
Let's face it, you can call this lack of Skibsrud a travesty of modern marketing, which depends on a few pivotal things such as building momentum ("who will win the Giller?"), including virally stoking desire for a hot commodity - think smart phones, Xboxes and iPads - and then not only having consumers rush out to get it, but ensuring them that momentary aaah of self-satisfaction when they have it in their hot little hands. (Of course we could all just download The Sentimentalists if we had Kobos or Kindles, so maybe this is just an elaborate plot to get us hooked on the e-book.)
But while it may be a grievous insult to our instant-gratification society, it isn't really a tragedy for us, the consumers. After all, many people who use the public library patiently will put their name down on a list to receive the book. Or they haven't started their holiday shopping and will be fine to buy it in December. Even the gargantuan Millennium trilogy of the The Girl Who Topped the Best-Seller Lists started off slow before it kicked the world's book-buying butt.
However, not having The Sentimentalists on the shelves right now is a tragedy for the 30-year-old author, who has to make her commercial way in our brutally short-attention-span world. A world in which there are four other Giller finalists, all hot and ready to be bought, a world in which book stores are so laden with tempting titles and flashy covers that most consumers implore their best friend to tell them "what's good out there," rather than stand indecisively thumbing through first chapters. And a world in which two potent words, "Giller Prize," at least guarantee literary cred and a topic for your next dinner party.
I never get invited to the Gillers but I always can't wait to find out the winner. I was at the opening of Tarragon Theatre's The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play based on Joan Didion's book about grief, in which Seana McKenna elegantly knocked it out of the park. But the minute I returned home, I shouted upstairs to my husband, "Who won the Giller?"
He wasn't sure about her name or the title but he said she was "utterly charming" and wearing a great strapless dress. Okay, that's good. It took me only a minute to find out all that was currently out there about this allegedly beautifully written book and its author, who brought a Cinderella spark to a gilded literary event.
The next morning, as is my own Giller custom, I walked down to my local Book City to buy the winner. And trudged home empty-handed, trying to convince myself that this rush to get it right this minute was not only entitled and silly, it's what's wrong with our build-it-up and blow-it-away society.
How can you cherish anything that is so easy to come by and just as easy to forget? Why, in a few weeks, we'll only be more eager to buy it. Won't we?
The convincing didn't work. I still want it, and I want it now.