Beginnings & Endings

Ten years ago my first book, Thirteen Shades of Black & White (Turnstone Press, 1999) came out. Let's just say it wasn't a best seller.

I don't often get asked about it, but I did last night, because I met a CEGEP professor from Montreal who recently taught two of my stories to 17 year olds.

Apparently, they quite liked them. And they didn't like the Margaret Atwood story included in the same course pack.

Now Atwood is going to be the first Canadian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, so I don't mean this as a slag at her. What the professor wanted to know from her was what else I thought her kids might like. What else her kids, often from working-class backgrounds, might relate to.

I told her I would think about it and get back to her.

Upon reflection, I wondered again why Canadian literature isn't able to connect with the teenage audience. Why it doesn't even try. Why the publishing industry creates "teen-themed" books that startle in their naivete. Especially when compared to the subway advertising we're bombarded with daily. Plus the mass marketing machines of popular movies, music, magazines, iPods, cell phones, etc. Teens live in complicated worlds. Why is teen fiction still so Archie and Jughead-like?

The best readers of Thirteen Shades of Black and White have been teenage girls. Which is not something I could ever have predicted.

For example, "Beginnings & Endings" is the title of the story taught at that CEGEP. It's about a teenage girl runaway who crosses paths with a 30-something man in a coffee shop. They get to know each other a little. They both come away from the experience a little bit changed. Yet nothing much dramatic happens. It's a story about a subtle meeting of two people who are each damaged, each moving cautiously and gently through life.

Of course, there is also sexual tension in the story. Are they going to come together physically? They each have the potential to take advantage of the other, but they don't.

"Things come together, then the come part." This line appears in my new book The Lizard (Chaudiere Books, 2009). How things start and end is one of my narrative obsessions, appearing in various forms in high percentage of my stories.

I asked the professor if the girls understood the story better than the boys.

"Yes," she said. "But they are more mature at that age."

I'm not sure I agree, but I won't dispute this. All of the students, the professor told me, responded strongly to my stories. Why did I think that was?

On the one hand, I have no idea. On the other, this is the natural audience for the book. In many ways, I wrote the book I wanted to have read when I was a teenager.

I'm now 41, and the stories are still strangely finding new readers.

Interesting.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com

Fiction vs Fiction

[It would please me if readers took the title to refer to Spy vs Spy]



It makes me spinny, the discussion about the place of "popular fiction" within "Canadian literature."

Today I discovered an article William Deverell published in The National Post (September 14, 2009). The article concludes:

The Brits knight their genre writers, the Yanks lionize them, but the Canucks (or at least our persons of letters) continue to treat them like unwashed in-laws tracking mud into the parlour. So sad.

The article begins with a poke at Marian Engle, who once told Deverell:

she occasionally enjoyed the "guilty pleasure" of reading a mystery. That sums up a common notion: A properly brought up Canadian is expected to feel guilty about reading a book that claims no pretension but to entertain. (I didn't feel guilty about reading BEAR.)

Mud in the parlour? Guilt? No pretension but to entertain?

I don't know how to reconcile these thoughts. Why the "sadness" about not being knighted or lionized?

Deverell quotes Andrew Pyper:

I bristle at prejudice. It's a problem in Canada -- constipation about what we call literature, a teetotal-ling Presbyterian reflex, guard the gates against the barbarians. Someone told a lie about literature in Canada early on, someone who prefers books that are morally obvious, quiet, settled. It's a lie that became institutionalized.

At first, this statement couldn't have made less sense to me if it had been written in Greek.
Generally, literature is known for its complexities, often its moral ambiguities. Whereas one turns to "genre writing" for "a book that claims no pretension but to entertain." To mix media, I give you on the one hand, WAITING FOR GODOT. On the other, STAR WARS.

What can Pyper be talking about?

Earlier in his article Deverell notes that Margaret Atwood (our pre-eminent literary lioness) has been won a crime fiction award (as did Carol Shields), yet William Gibson (our pre-eminent literary entertainer) hasn't won a Giller or a Governor General's Award.

Actually, what Deverell writes is that "it is to Canada's utter shame that William Gibson, with his vast trophy case of awards, has not been honoured in this country with a Giller or a G.-G."

Guilt? Shame? Am I detecting a theme? Is this too morally obvious?

Deverell is pissed off, no doubt. And I can agree with his assertion that readers have often been "made to believe that Hugo and Dostoevsky, Maugham and Conrad had not written crime and spy novels."

And yet it is not (just) the entertainment value of these works that have kept them in the hands of readers through the decades.

Deverell's focus also shifts within his article. He begins asking about the state of Canadian literature, quickly reframes his focus on the state of "popular fiction" within Canadian literature, and by the time he gets to the Pyper quote he's arguing that Canadian literature generally is "the cutting edge of blandness."

Actually, that last quote is attributed to Stephen Marche. It is also preceded by a quote from Douglas Coupland: "There is a grimness to CanLit."

Against this backdrop, Pyper's quote makes sense. Crime fiction, we are led to conclude, isn't grim or bland. It is the cutting edge of the anti-Presbyterian.

(Though one suspects the Calvinists would be more impressed with popular fiction's business model, than the economic viability of, say, short story cycles....)

Perhaps crime fiction is even the source from whence true literature springs?

No, Deverell doesn't go that far. He moves on to take a swipe at MFA programs: "too many wannabes are keener in being a writer than in writing." He also calls Ann Beattie "once a best-selling novelist," implies that Beattie's status has sunk because of an "overcapacity" of books, and has not a word to say about the dramatic shifts in the literary marketplace in the past decade: from the rise of internet book selling, to the post-9/11 rise of non-fiction, to other dramatic changes in popular culture (iPods, etc.) that are affecting book-buying habits.

Then he concludes that the Canadian literary culture is "sad."

And all this was generated by a line of thought about books that claim "no pretension but to entertain."

I found this article two days after Linden MacIntyre won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His win was reported as a surprise. The "more literary" THE GOLDEN MEAN by Anabel Lyon had been the odds-on favourite.

Does this represent a shift in Canada’s "popular vs literary" fiction debate?

I hope so, if only for the futility it engenders in me.

I would like to see this polarization of categories avoided as much as possible. I don't think we need more "popular fiction" or more "literary fiction." Deverell’s article may, in fact, offer some pathways toward a readers’ covenant. We could certainly use fewer "grim" books. And "bland" and "morally obvious" is to be avoided. Even this literary snob would agree to terms of reference, such as that.

So what is this apparent disagreement about then? Is it more than just "spin"?

*

Long time readers of mine (okay, I don't have any) will notice that I have changed my tune over the past 20 years. I used to be firmly in the "literary" camp, but I am have drifted to "neutral."

"I am tired of literary log rolling," Douglas Glover told me once.

Me, too!

Also, I'm now married to someone with quite different reading tastes from mine. It was easy to stick to "first principals" when I wasn't married, when I didn't realize what such a negotiation all of life really is. Marriage is a great teacher (but I knew some of that stuff before...).

Which is another way of saying I'm not sure what Pyper means by "prejudice." We all have our assumptions, our tastes, our point of view. Prejudice, per se, isn't a problem. It's only a problem when prejudice is aligned with power and become discrimination.

Is popular fiction discriminated against? Arguably William Gibson deserves better. Deserves another trophy for his already heavily weighted trophy case.

On the other hand, recently I read on Lemon Hound a post (I can't find right now) that noted poetry is more than confession. How true, I remarked to myself.

Fiction is more than entertainment, I must conclude. My prejudice is deep within me.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

The Death of the (Canadian) Novel

[First published in The Danforth Review, 2001]

The year would have been 1990. The Wall had just fallen. The Cold War was over. I was an undergraduate studying English at the University of Waterloo, and one of my professors told me the novel was dead. "It can’t be," I said. "I’m going to write one." I went to meet with him in his office. He called me a "reactionary." (Really!) Flustered, I went home and looked up that label in a dictionary: "one who supports movement in the direction of political conservatism or extreme rightism." Not me, I thought. I was just a confused kid trying to figure out how to write.

Later, I figured out that my professor proclaimed the novel dead he did not mean all novels, just the traditional, realist novel: the form usually associated with the Victorian Era of the mid- and late-19th century; the novels of Dickens, Thackery, and the Brontës. I learned this when I found his argument in a slim volume of essays on Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (subsequently lost), which referred to Ronald Sukenick’s influential 1969 title, THE DEATH OF THE NOVEL. There, Sukenick argued that a new generation of American writers (including Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Gary Geddis) emerged in the post-WWII era. This new generation of writers was suspicious of contemporary politics and the ability of language to represent reality.

Sukenick argued, in other words, that the novel was dead because reality was dead. Reality was unknowable. There was no connection between writing and reality, and the realist novel – and its attendant assumptions – was a sham. The novel’s claim to be a form of reportage was bunk. Journalism was a black art. All narratives were subjective. Every utterance was infused with rhetorical ambiguities, assumptions about the speaker and the audience, and unavoidable political implications. Marx had uncovered hidden forces in the economy. Freud had uncovered hidden forces in the mind. McLuhan had revealed the hidden structure of communications media. Novelists responded to these changes by telling different kinds of stories. American novelist John Hawkes, for example, famously claimed he tried to write without concern for plot, character or setting.

This was a new, and fascinating, argument to me, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it before. As a teenager growing up in the 1980s, the strongest literary arguments I encountered had to do with the definition of Canadian literature. What was it? No one seemed to know, but whatever it was it was doing better than ever. It had produced a couple of millionaires. After "coming of age" in the 1960s, it had finally "matured."

In the month or so after my professor called me a reactionary, he confronted his class with the question: "What is writing?" Is it an imitation of dialogue, and therefore a lesser art (which was Plato’s opinion)? Or was it some other thing? A mirror to the world, for example. Or perhaps a kind of lamp, illuminating a transcendent reality, as the Romantics believed. On the other hand, perhaps writing was just a string of arbitrary symbols with no relation to anything but itself, which was the post-modernist position.

Again, the arguments intrigued me. They also undermined my confidence in Canadian literature’s "grown up" status. Northrop Frye had accused Canada’s writers of suffering from a "Garrison Mentality", of taking a defensive stance against the world’s larger artistic influences. But by 1990 it was out of fashion to call Canada a literary backwater. The 1960s had changed all that. The 1960s: when wave after wave of nationalist emotion was sweeping the land, and George Grant was lamenting the nation. For the first time, Canada had its own flag. Trudeau was about to burst on the scene. Then in 1967 (Pierre Burton’s "last good year"), Montreal’s Expo kicked the party into high gear. In the years that followed, the rising nationalist project attracted many literary stars of the era. Margaret Atwood’s SURVIVAL: A THEMATIC GUIDE TO CANADIAN LITERATURE dates from this period. So do the numerous university and college Canlit survey courses. The question "What is Canadian about Canadian literature?" dominated many people’s minds. To find their answers, most followed the thematic approach proposed by Atwood, herself a student of Frye. Canadian literature was born; the Garrision Mentality was defeated. Or so the story went.

The resulting irony, of course, is that at the same time as many Amerian novelists were giving up on realism – or at least challenging its outer boundaries – the strongest movement in Canadian letters was the push to define a nation. Post-modern approaches to literature could not aid in this effort; if fact, they tended to push in the opposite direction, questioning the very existence of reality itself. Thus the significance of post-modernism in Canadian letters has been significantly underplayed. What is Canadian about it? Nothing. Then how can it be of value to Canadian literature? The roots of this conflict continue today, and it has taken on a generational tone, as the younger generation of writers has abandoned the self-imposed duty of the older generation of writers to define and defend the nation. Writers as diverse as Michael Turner, Lynn Crosbie, Hal Niedzviecki, Natalie Caple, and Tony Burgess have brought a renewed sense of urgency to literary writing in Canada, and yet none have won any significant awards.

I started this essay with a story from my undergraduate days as a youngster trying to learn how to write. Let’s go back there for just a moment.

Like many young people, I thought of myself as a writer because I felt a compulsion to mark up blank pages. The decision to write was a recognition of an impulse inside: a recognition of an inner drive, like the drive for food, or sex. I pursued my compulsion the only way I knew how, writing confessional poetry at first, then made-up narratives, blissfully unaware of the aesthetic and political controversies I would soon confront. Such as being called a reactionary because I had named J.D. Salinger as someone whose writing I wanted to emulate. Like Holden Caulfield, the hero of Salinger’s THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, I wanted to attach myself to what was real in the world. I had no place for "phonies." I saw art as a means of transcending the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I had no sense of post-modernism or the writers I would soon come to admire: Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, and Terry Southern. I had just read Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, and I was filled with Kerouac’s Whitmanesque desire to burn, burn, burn. The novel was dead? Impossible! But I soon learned that in the bi-polar culture war world of the early-1990s sharp lines were being drawn. To many – like my professor – if you questioned the skepticism of the post-modernist position, you stood opposed to the progressive evolution of the 20th century.

And the fact is, I’m sympathetic to this position, as outrageous it sounds (and as ineptly presented as it was by my professor). On the other hand, I believe literature’s greatest gift to the world is the diversity of its riches. The novel is not dead (not even the realistic novel; which will never die). In fact – surprise! – there is little new about post-modernism, except its new schools of jargon and ever finer intellectual abstractions. Everyone from Cervantes, to Spenser, to Laurence Sterne qualify for the pomo All-Star team. The narrative strategies often hailed as the invention of the late-20th century crop of innovative writers have been around for centuries. Milan Kundera makes this explicitly clear in his excellent book-length essay, THE ART OF THE NOVEL.

The history of the novel has more than one line.

Even in Canada.

Kundera connects himself and other pomo writers like Rushdie back through time to the Spanish great Cervantes. The other line connects from Jane Austen, through Charles Dickens and the other Victorians, to today’s realist apologists, perhaps most strongly exemplified by Tom Wolfe and the other New Journalists. Each line is legitimate, strong, vital, interesting, challenging, rich with narrative potential, and a solid breeding ground for rewarding reading experiences.

Why don’t we usually see the history of the novel in Canada this way? The interference of nationalism in the literary process is one reason. Another reason is that there are partisans on both sides who refuse to include the other (my professor is a perfect example). The extent to which we allow this to continue undermines our ability to both understand our literary heritage and forcefully encourage the most innovative of our up-and-comers.

John Raulston Saul

Canada is a Metis nation, says John Raulston Saul.

He makes the startling claim in his book A Fair Country (Viking, 2008). It was also a thesis prominent in a lecture Saul gave this past Wednesday (Oct. 28, 2009) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he gave the 17th annual McCready Lecture, which I attended.

The lecture was ostensibly about visual art and architecture ... Canadian style. Saul structured it around a slide show of scenes and art from the new Frank Gehry-designed AGO.

It was the first time I had been to the new gallery since it re-opened late last year. It was, as all reports had promised, spectacular. And Saul began the lecture saying as much. And saying that everyone had said as much.

But, he said, he didn't think that people had really understood why it was so spectacular. Then he outlined his thesis.

It was because, he said, Frank Gehry, who had grown up around the corner from the Dundas Street gallery in downtown Toronto, had absorbed into his subconscious the culture of the orginal inhabitants of Canada, the Aboriginals, the First Nations, the Indians.

Just look at the staircases. They serpentine, Saul said. Snake-like. And we all know what snakes represent, don't we? They represent evil -- and knowledge. The Adam and Eve story says so. Except these staircases aren't evil, so they come from a different cultural tradition. One that sees snakes as benign. As welcoming and integrated with our human experience.

Saul went on to say that the Group of Seven aren't post-impressionists. They shouldn't be viewed as a failed extension of a dying European tradition. The Group of Seven are "all about movement," just like Gehry's snake staircases ... and the Aboriginal cultural tradition.

European "rational" art, Saul said, is about statis. Standing outside of nature. Rousseau's view of nature was going out into his ordered garden and viewing the moutain in the distance. Tom Thompson in Algonguin Park was trying to get in touch with a different tradition, a different reality. Not nature as something apart.

Saul showed an image of a sewn Iroquois pouch, depicting a "lake panther," a cat that lived in the water and stirred up storms with his tail. This is the creature, and the stormy water, that was stirring Thompson's imagination, Saul said.

He showed various slides of the art currently in the gallery, art from various Aboriginal communities, Canadian artists (hey, Emily Carr's paintings look a lot like Haida totem poles), and European traditions.

Then he came to Henry Moore. Now, anyone my age (41) who grew up in Toronto remembers going to the gallery and seeing the Henry Moore statues. First of all, there's a big one on the corner outside the gallery. There's also "The Archer" outside City Hall at Nathan Phillips Square.

Moore, we were told, was a great artist. A world-renowned symbol of Toronto-born success.

And he is all these things, Saul said. But in the old days one walked into the Moore gallery pretty much directly after entering (or so it seems in the foggy morass of my memory). One came upon Moore through the context of the Western tradition, said Saul.

Now the only way to get to the Moore gallery is after passing through the First Nations exhibits. One sees Moore as the culmination of an entirely different tradition.

Like Picasso, Saul said, Moore was trying to break the Western Tradition and take it new places. He was trying escape the Western Tradition ... and he did it (as much as he could) by reconnecting to the natural tradition of this land.

We are Metis nation, said Saul. He owe our true identity to our shared heritage with this country's Aboriginal people.

How do you like them apples?

Saul didn't address the fact that the "Metis" are included in the Constitution Act, 1982, which includes:

PART II
RIGHTS OF THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLES OF CANADA
35. (1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.
(2) In this Act, "aboriginal peoples of Canada" includes the Indian, Inuit, and Metis peoples of Canada.

Which means, if we're all Metis, we all have "Aboriginal rights."

I'd be interested to know if Saul addresses this thorny question in his book.

In the meantime, I report that it was a provocative lecture. The audience listened keenly and responded warmly. The questions were respectful, perhaps too much so.

When Saul was asked how people had responded to his book, he said that he'd expected the Aboriginal community to be silent and the non-Aboriginal community to be outraged. Neither happened. (How he expected the Metis to react, he didn't say.)

Saul said that the book had been warmly treated by many Aboriginal leaders, and that the two most common responses to the book were:

• "I've always thought that, but didn't know how to say it"
• "I've never thought that, but I think you're right"

Saul said he thought that the country was held back by a lack of language to articulate its dept to the Aboriginal traditions which are part of our broad collective unconscious.

I confess that the slide show as interesting and compelling. I also confess that I agree that the country needs better words to admit its debt to the many diverse Aboriginal cultures that have grown, struggles, sustained themselves, died, revived and evolved as Canada has slid from colony to Empire to nation state to near dissolution to post-modern whatever we are now.

Somewhere out there Crow is laughing.

If you are Canadian, you need to know what this means.

At the same time, there's something wishy-washy about this thesis, too. I can readily agree, for example, with Saul when he says that Canada only survived its first couple of hundred years because the Aboriginal population helped sustain the Europeans in their midst.

Saul said, for example, that Canada's official military policy before about 1820 was based on the assumption that the country could not be held, because there were just too many damned Indians. Without First Nations military allies, Britain would have lost Canada to the United States in the War of 1812, for example.

Earlier, the Iroquois were rewarded with the Halidmand Tract for staying loyal to the Crown after the American Revolution of 1776. The Tract has more recently been in the news as the source of controversy in Caledonia.

This earlier graditude and dependency of the Europeans towards the First Nations, of course, gave way to policies of cultural eradication, Victorianism, and general stupidity. Which only in the past couple of decades have we begun to work ourselves out of.

Saul showed a painting of William (or was it Robert?) Baldwin, whose 18th house abuts the AGO, and who represented the European Tradition in 19th century Toronto. It was a painting of a Victorian gentleman in fine clothes in a fine chair. Saul said the painting was saying, "I'm not here." I'm not sure where I am, but I'm most certainly not in Algonquin Park. I'm not in nature, not part of nature; I am apart, away. In London, likely. I am there in my mind, if nowhere else.

This is a painting about the Family Compact, Saul said. The cultural elite that has never really left Toronto, though the new AGO is a sharp stab in its heart.

Toronto is like a little Belfast, Saul said. Strict, straight, plain. Presbyterian.

At this point, my interest was starting to wane. Saul, while an innovative thinker, was showing his age. My high school had 75 ethnic communities represented. That was more than 20 years ago.

Still, Saul had a point when he said the Family Compact lost political power, but maintained its cultural control. It packed the universities with its presidents and chancellors. It controlled the dominant strains of thought. It sought to align Canada with the European traditions. It didn't give a rats ass about Aboriginal cultural traditions or developing a unique made in Canada philosophy.

The made in Canada philosophy basket is where Saul has placed all of his eggs. He's been critiqueing European rationality his whole career, from Volataire's Bastards (1992) on, but A Fair Country has pushed his far more into the open, in the new, than he has ever been before.

"We are a Metis nation" is an unsustainable conclusion, in my opinion, but the basic structure behind that thought is sound. The Aboriginal cultural tradition ought to be ground into all of us. It ought to be alive in all of us.

If Saul is right, maybe it already is. It's just waiting to be given words.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Richard Van Camp

The Moon of Letting Go (Enfield & Wizenty, 2009) is Richard Van Camp’s second short story collection and his latest work to explore (in words borrowed from the back cover) "the notion of healing through individual and community bonds."

By which I assume the publisher meant "good sex and big laughs," because that’s what these stories are about. They’re also about honouring the "magic" of stories in those old time Indian ways.

I know some readers may stop at this word, "Indian," finding it incorrect. But I have chosen it deliberately and use it with the deepest respect. The alternatives – Aboriginal, Native, First Nation – do not convey the connotation I want.

I do not mean to convey the simplicity of stereotype or anthropological curiosity. I also do not want to convey a patronizing urban, modern smugness of knowledge about "the other."

What I want to convey is that while these stories depict contemporary situations, they also reach back to a mysterious kind of storytelling.

They honour the "magic," a word Van Camp uses in this book over and over.

Magic is something that cannot be explained; it is something by definition anti-modern, outside of reason or rationality. It operates by logarithms only understood by magicians. In this case, storytellers, of which Van Camp is clearly one.

Here is where I confess that Van Camp is also a buddy of mine. In 2007, he, Harold Hoefle and I took a trip to New York City. Richard and I went to Starbucks in Trump Tower. We walked through Central Park. We saw a punk band from mainland China play in a cave of a club in Greenwich Village (the opening band played Ramones covers; it was almost 1970s).

We also scooted all over town looking for Star Wars toys. We went to FAO Schwartz, one of the largest toy stores in the world, where Richard was unimpressed: "Is this all you’ve got?" He told me later: "You can get all that same stuff in Vancouver."

We wandered through Times Square, visited the World Trade Centre site, and went to the Museum of Modern Art, which had an airstream land yacht in the lobby (which reminded me of Ken Babstock) and an exhibit by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall. Walking around looking for a place for lunch, we passed HarperCollins. We took a group picture. Our future publishers, hey. (Give us a call, NYC!)

Okay, maybe this tangent into travelogue isn’t necessary, but the afterwords of The Moon of Letting Go includes a list of dudes who Richard says he "adore[s for] welcom[ing] me into the full grace of the blood in men." Harold and I are on the list. The fact that there is a list is testament to the type of man and the type of writer that Richard is. His stories are about "healing through individual and community bonds."

Hey ya hey. Let’s get on with this review.

The Moon of Letting Go includes 12 stories. The table of contents divides them into four sections: healing, medicine, teachings, and love. While this is a useful organizational structure, as a reader I found the categories blurry. Virtually all of the stories are about all four of those things, and more.

Like Van Camp’s earlier works – the novel The Lesser Blessed (Douglas & McIntyre, 1996) and Angel Wing Splash Pattern (Kegedonce Press, 2004) – this new book largely revolves around life in Fort Smith, North West Territories. It’s about First Nations people and communities in the north. It includes drugs, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and talking animals. It includes medicine men. It includes three buddies running naked down the highway after dark, honouring one of their friends who committed suicide.

As that image indicates, these stories often juxtapose humour with a slow boiling terror. The reader is left with the impression of a community struggling to find the right way forward. A struggle that is especially evident among the young people. There is a reaching back to the past (the traditional ways) as a means to find a path to the future. It is a path lit by stories, lighted by storytellers. Van Camp himself is deep in this role, telling the stories of his people caught in a moment of tremendous transformation.

I saw Richard talk about his writing once, at a First Nations cultural festival at Harbourfront in Toronto, and he spoke about the stress of modernity on Aboriginal communities in the north. His stories attempted to capture that. I told him afterwards that I had seen Mo Yan say something similar about his work. It was about capturing the stress of modernity on rural communities in China. Yan had said he had learned to write about that partly from William Faulkner.

Strange connections? Not at all. I keep going back to Richard in FAO Schwartz, looking for Star Wars toys, and asking a clerk at one of the largest toy stores in the world: "Is this all you’ve got?" What would Faulker say? Maybe, "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The future forces change upon us, and we must manage our legacies.

There’s a lot going on in The Moon of Letting Go. The stories are often fun to read. They are full of humour and optimism. But they are often raw, sexually explicit, darkly violent. The combination creates complexity – a high literary quality. The stories are not easily reduced or paraphrased. Ponder them with care.

With this book, Van Camp has continued to expand his vision and rededicated himself to an important project. Telling the stories of his people. Promoting the healing of individuals and communities. Creating literature worthy of readers, here, now, tomorrow, everywhere.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Trudeau, Bono, Updike

[First published in The Danforth Review, 2006]

Terrorist
by John Updike
Knopf, 2006

Bono
In conversation with Michka Assayas
Riverhead Trade, 2006

Young Trudeau: 1919-1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada
by Max and Monique Nemni (translated by William Johnson)
Douglas Gibson Books, 2006

Teenage boys play at revolution. Not all wish to blow themselves up. Some go on to be rock stars and statesmen. This past summer (2006), I read three books and was startled by the interconnections.

In the first, John Updike decided one is never too late in life to strike out in a bold new direction. His new novel Terrorist imagines a teenage boy in New Jersey allows himself to be persuaded to drive a truck carrying a large bomb: twice the size of the bomb that brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City.

In the second, the front-man for the Dublin-launched, international super-group, U2, allows himself to be interrogated over a period of roughly two years by a French journalist with long-standing ties to the band. The result is as intimate a portrait as has yet emerged of the globe-trotting, world-saving, spectacle-wearing activist/singer.

The third book is Young Trudeau: 1919-1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada by Max and Monique Nemni, a vivid, densely researched biography of Canada's late Prime Minister. The authors had access to Trudeau's private papers, previously unseen, and what they uncovered was as shocking to them as it is strangely thematically linked to Updike's new novel.

No, the Nemnis don't suggest that Trudeau was a terrorist. But they do uncover evidence that Trudeau was a revolutionary, and not just a vague "pinko" as his critics in the 1970s used to call him. "Oh, yes. All that was known a long time ago," someone said to me, when I discussed what the Nemnis reveal in this book. No, actually; it wasn't. Trudeau had warm relations with Castro, yes. But what the Nemnis found in Trudeau's private papers was that he was, as they say in their title, a "son of Quebec." A nationalist, plotting Quebec's separation from Canada. By violent means if necessary.

This is the same Trudeau who out-manoeuvred Quebec's other favoured son, Rene Levesque, to repatriate the Constitution, following the defeat of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty association. The same Trudeau who championed the rights of individuals over the rights of majorities, specifically ethnic majorities. The same Trudeau who always claimed he had from the beginning gone his own way, had never accepted received opinion, had been from the earliest a rebel at heart. It is this last myth that the Nemnis dismantle most severely.

Trudeau, amazingly, apparently kept boxes and boxes of his schoolwork. He was Jesuit-trained as a teenager in Montreal, where he was a star student, routinely at the top of his class and rarely in trouble. His father died before he finished what we would now call high school, but the family was well taken care of financially by the inheritance his father left behind. Trudeau's life-long bond to the Catholic Church began early in his childhood, and his education was traditional for the period: highly religious. The Nemnis also find evidence that Trudeau submitted himself to the direction of church authorities well into his twenties, when he was at Harvard and still writing to the church for permission to read "banned books" (i.e., books placed on restricted reading lists by Rome).

Most shocking is the period between 1939 and 1944, when this books ends, just as Trudeau heads out of province to Harvard to continue his education. These years, of course, correspond with World War II, which, in Quebec, was a divisive, unpopular conflict. In particular, it was unpopular with the Catholic Church in Quebec, which was heavily tempted by fascist ideologies. "Corporatism" is the term the Nemnis tells us was the euphemism of the period, and Trudeau, by the evidence of his own notes, compares it favourably to democracy, which was considered weak, ineffectual, morally corrupt.

Now we are starting to align with the Updike's narrative in Terrorist.

Convinced by the Jesuits that the Allies were no more morally sound than the Axis Powers, Trudeau actively campaigned against conscription in 1942, making a fiery speech at a by-election rally that caught the attention of the press. The Nemnis argue that by this time Trudeau was against more than conscription; he was part of an underground network that was planning violent revolution. Thankfully -- and somewhat comically -- the plot disintegrated, and Trudeau stopped writing political articles and started writing about the joys of canoeing. He also went back and read Adam Smith again, and this time discovered currents in The Wealth of Nations that had been denied him by the Jesuits. He was on his way to becoming a Liberal Prime Minister, much later than anyone had ever expected.

The Nemnis have written a startling book, one all the more startling given the temptations towards violent political/religious action Muslim teenagers in Mississauga apparently face. I'm speaking, of course, of the recent arrests in the alleged plot to behead Prime Minister Harper, blow up the Parliament Buildings and cause other mayhem. When these arrests hit the newspapers, it was reported that John Updike said the arrests reaffirmed for him that the plot of Terrorist was plausible.

That a novel's plot is plausible is no doubt a good thing. The overall quality of the novel, however, is measured on other scales. How is the writing in Updike's new novel? I must say it's marvellous. I haven't read an Updike novel in years, and I will certainly be reading more. His prose is first-rate. His evocation of current reality is jarring for being so contemporary. Is it because it's Updike, and when I think of Updike, I think of the 1960s? Yes, I think so. Oliver Stone just this month (August 2006) is releasing a movie about the Twin Towers. We've already had a movie about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, following a revolt by the passengers over the 9/11 hijackers.

Either history is passing more quickly into art, or I'm not used to living in interesting times. As a GenX-er, I'd been raised on Baby Boomer nostalgia. Everything interesting has already happened. Everything of importance has already gone down. Evidently, not so. (Though I did see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in Toronto in July, and they sang 40-year-old anti-war songs and sounded very urgent and earnest and out-of-tune.)

Where is Terrorist weak as a novel? Some of the characters seem half-formed. Strangely, not the youthful Muslim protagonist. This character Updike has imagined in startling detail and his judicious quotations from the Koran show Updike has been diligent in his research also. The Secretary of Homeland Security, however, is a cardboard cutout, as is the Secretary's secretary. There is also an implausible connection between all of the key characters that is key to the resolution of the narrative. But the story, per se, is not why you should read this book. You should read this book for the beautiful prose and for the journey through the mind of the protagonist; to imagine with him what it's like to be a Muslim true believer in the homeland of the Infidel. A true believer and not a terrorist, because this boy is not converted to the cause until very late in the book, and only then through a bit of trickery. Would he have taken that step eventually, on his own or under the persuasion of a different leader-figure?

Interestingly, both Trudeau and Updike's protagonist are fatherless youths. Trudeau was led towards fascism by his teachers, both the individuals and the overall Quebec culture of his youth, yet he learned to read Adam Smith through re-opened eyes and eventually gave Canada, and the world, his towering legacy, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At the end of Terrorist, ... well, do you want to know?

Stop here if you don't.

At the end of Terrorist, Updike's protagonist is not incinerated along with his cargo and dozens of innocents. His future is open to many options. One suspects, however, he will never be a rock star.

To some, Updike's novel has been controversial. The novelist Amitov Ghosh, for example, wrote in The Washington Post (re-printed on Amazon.com):

With innumerable lives at stake, when Jack Levy finds himself faced with the task of giving Ahmad a reason to live and let live, he says: "Hey, come on, we're all Americans here. That's the idea, didn't they tell you that at Central High? Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans; there are even Arab-Americans." Not a word about humanity, family, friendship, sport, poetry, love, laughter.

It is as if a belief in American multiculturalism is the only good reason a human being could have for staying alive. Why indeed do the billions of non-Americans who walk this Earth refrain from blowing themselves up? I suspect that Updike really cannot see that they have any good reason not to.

This is, in my opinion, unnecessary mean-spiritedness, "as if" nothing less than an overt denunciation of American exceptionalism is what is required. At the point in the novel highlighted by Ghosh, the protagonist does not want to remain alive, and it is not Jack Levy who convinces him to change his mind. It is the children playing in the back seat of the vehicle travelling beside him. The children who would be among those who would surely die if he triggered his bomb. Updike, the novelist, uses the children as a symbol of universalism -- not American multiculturalism -- as the saving grace. Shame on Ghosh for missing this point. The children must live. All children must live, including those tempted with blowing themselves up.

Which bring us to Bono: In Conversation.

"I'm all about the big idea," Bono tells French journalist Michka Assayas, stating the obvious: billions of dollars of debt relief, cheap AIDS drugs, food for all affected by famine, U2's Zoo Tour: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Yes, we know. Bono is all about the big idea. Make Poverty History. Je me souviens.

What we perhaps didn't know is that Bono was a motherless son, whose father had been a wanna-be musician who became (even before the death of his wife) a bureaucrat instead. His father equally tried to scale back his energetic son's ambitions: a job at the post office or the like. Nothing big. Nothing fancy. Don't expect too much from life. It'll help you survive. By the time he was twenty-one, Bono had blown that strategy to bits a million times over.

These micro-details about Bono's early life were new to me, as was the depth of Bono's Catholicism. For example, as a teenager Bono lived in a house run by the Church. It was home to a number of youths who were led in Catholic practice by a live-in Priest. The problem was, Bono had this little side gig: the band, U2. The Priest wanted him to give up the band and devote himself fully to the household and its mission: good works to the community et al. What's clear now, decades later, is that Bono has maintained the same pattern of living, even though he left the house of the Church for the house of rock and roll. He has gone from being a teenager in a garage band who helped with social causes around the corner to being the face of the world's biggest touring band and helping with some of the largest social causes around the globe.

As a social activist, Bono is surprisingly polite. Yes, he says history will judge the West harshly for its inadequate response to the AIDS plague in Africa. But one of the more compelling sub-plots of this book is Assayas' attempt to get Bono to say something nasty about George W. Bush. Time and again, Assayas offers Bono the opportunity to put-down the U.S. President, but Bono skirts such contemporary issues as the "War on Terror" and the war in Iraq and U.S. foreign policy in general by saying that Bush has stepped up to the plate on AIDS in Africa: "He gets it."

While it's easy to say that history will judge Bono harshly for oversimplifying his relationships with the rich and powerful, one anecdote might prove illustrative: Bono tells Assayas a story he heard from Harry Belafonte. Apparently Belafonte was part of the group around Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s when Bobby Kennedy was named by his brother to be the Attorney General of the United States. This was seen as bad news to those in the civil rights movement, because Kennedy was considered to be regressive on race issues. So there was much grumbling in the group around Martin Luther King. But King quickly put a stop to that: "Hasn't anyone got anything good to say about Bobby Kennedy?" No one did. So King told them to go away and not come back until someone had found something good to say about Bobby Kennedy. And what they found good to say about Kennedy was that he was close to his Bishop back in Massachusetts. The Bishop would be how they would get to Bobby Kennedy. The King group talked to the Bishop and the Bishop talked to Bobby Kennedy, and by the time Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 he was one of the leading figures fighting for civil rights in America.

In other words, people can change, if you give them a chance. It's a very Christian, forgiving approach; this belief in transformation. Bono has clearly taken it to heart, in every way that cliché implies. He is willing to take his message of the need for transformation into the corridors of power around the world, pleading his case with hard-line partisans of many stripes. He is a true evangelist, full of fiery truth and fed by the belief of the justness of his cause. Which is based on a universalism others fired up with big ideas (Bin Laden comes to mind, substitute also Updike's youthful protagonist and the Jesuit-brainwashed Trudeau) can't quite seem to grasp. He tells the story, for example, of visiting U.S. senator Jesse Helms, a hard right Republican. He had been told the visit would be a waste of time. He came away with an admiration for the man and a new ally in his cause.

Transformation is possible! That is the message of Bono's life. The other is that transformation is the goal; the Gospels of Jesus are the guide. The third message is that it's okay to party and live like a rock star (albeit one who married his high school sweetheart and speaks to former U.S.S.R. surpreme leader Mikhail Gorbachev "every couple of months"). Yes, he is a man of contradictions, our Bono: Paul Hewson. Acting out on Shakespeare's stage: the world. Playing it large. Not backing down.

*

Before I sat down to write this review, I didn't realize that each of these books was about someone who'd lost a parent. I wonder what that means. What I had wanted to do was connect the threads of these books: Trudeau's plotting with Updike's imagined terrorism, the confused nationalism of Quebec circa 1939-1945 with the confused ethnic "Islamofascism" that we've learned can germinate in places as odd as Mississauga, the transformative spirit that animates Bono with the "re-born" Trudeau post-1945 and the hope for Updike's protagonist at the end of the novel, which is the hope of all of us: that the children will live.

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Leafs Jokes

Okay, they're funny.