Stephen Marche, author of the recent Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, having recently returned to Toronto from Brooklyn with his wife (Sarah Fulford, Toronto Life’s editor-in-waiting), rails in the Toronto Star against a literary culture he finds to be “so, so old: It felt like moving from a frenetic day care to an old folks’ home.” Whereas Brooklyn’s literary culture was young and hip and sparky and whiz-bang-wow, Toronto’s readers and writers need a shawl when it’s nippy outside.
It’s not just that young people write in Brooklyn; writing itself is considered a youthful activity. It’s the kind of thing that 32-year-old men who go to work by skateboard do. Literature in Toronto is something your smartest aunt does once she’s cozied up in her favourite sweater. And the work therefore is less exciting.
The popular novels here are generally ponderous, draped in sanctimony over suffering and history, melodramas in exotic settings. One thing you are not going to get out of a novel on the Giller list or indeed the best-seller list is a good laugh.
Marche specifically mentions Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers as prototypically youthful Brooklyn authors whose books are typified by their “obsession with traumatized children.” (Some might call that “arrested development,” but never mind.)
In Canada, however, everything is just dullsville, man:
Setting is everything in Canadian fiction. Plots don’t matter much. There are only a few plots anyway: recovering from historical or familial trauma through the healing power of whatever (most common); uncovering historical or family secrets and thereby achieving redemption (close second); coming of age (distant third place).
The characters are mostly the same: The only thing that changes is the location of the massacred grandmother, what kind of booze the alcoholic father drinks himself into fits with, what particular creed is being revealed, in deft and daring ways, as both beautifully transcendent and oppressive.
And thus another not-very-useful CanLit-crit dichotomy – young and cool versus old and boring – can be added to “urban versus rural” and “experimental versus traditional.” Maybe handing out skateboards and Fantastic Four comics at the next meeting of The Writers’ Union of Canada will help.
This is all fairly boilerplate “Canadian writing’s for squares”-type criticism – Douglas Coupland wrote a similar screed last year for The New York Times. And is the solution to the relative staidness of our books a literary Poochie?
All the same, many of Marche’s criticisms find their mark, and it’s always good to have more authors add their voices to the debate over whether CanLit has entered a golden age or, conversely, gone way offtrack.
Feel free to weigh in with your comments. What are the true dichotomies at play in CanLit? French versus English? Poetry versus fiction? Dog-people versus cat-people?
I agree somewhat with Marche, as that the Giller/GGs are usually filled with examples which suit his beliefs. But there is good (and funny) work out there, as any reader of Trevor Cole, Paul Quarrington, or Will Ferguson can attest. Even the stories that more fully embrace Marche’s hated plotlines can result in terrific (and entertaining) novels such as Michael Winter’s The Big Why and pretty much anything by Wayne Johnston. The work is out there, and criticising all CanLit for what he perceives as ‘faults’ does a disservice to many.
While I agree with some of the broad strokes, it’s an article riddled with inconsistencies. Yup, that crotchety old Vincent Lam and his historical novel of bitter family secrets that won the Giller last year? And that bitter middle-aged Stephen Marche himself, who last I checked was published in this country, and his rural historicals… Nope, nothing new or daring under the sun north of the ol’ 49.
Oh, dear. Some poor pampered literatist bemoans the sorry state of “canlit”, which is apparently represented by a few bad haircuts with more education than sense.
Have I heard this before? Alas, yes.
Go back to NYC, or whatever soiled metropolis that passes for reality.
At least, don’t park your skinny ass in Torontoon, where dicksucking has become the cocktail entertainment of choice.
Meanwhile, out in the boondocks, authentic voices continue to explore the bittersweeet edges.
Whatever you do, leave them alone.
Pretty funny coming from a fella who’s shacked up with some serious establishment progeny. And this from his Star spiel . . .
“‘I don’t think prizes are necessarily for young writers,’ [Seligman] said in The Globe . . . It is a remarkable sentence. There are two ways to read it. 1) Young writers don’t write well enough to deserve prizes. 2) Even if they do write well enough, only old writers deserve attention. Because that is what the Giller is, a massive dollop of attention. Seligman says it openly: Only books written by old people are worth serious attention.”
. . . Anyone who paid attention to last year’s fooferaw over the Giller shortlist knows exactly what Seligman means with that sentence. End of story.
While I *want* to agree wholeheartedly with Marche’s general point (I mean, who among us doesn’t shudder at the idea of yet another novel or set of stories featuring a quirky and angular aunt sipping herbal tea in her tattered poncho as she stares at the lighthouse and reflects on her past ), the truth is that there’s way more good work out there than he’s letting on and the Marche-ster really only betrays his own lack of knowledge about the current state of things here.
Go back to Brooklyn and get a cool tattoo, lad.
[...] CanLit hates youth [...]
It seems there’s more agreement with Marche here than disagreement. Did he actually say there wasn’t much good writing going on in Canada, or did he say it wasn’t getting enough attention?
And by attention we really mean sales. Maybe Marche should have written about how the only people buying books in Canada are the old guard.
It’s a widely promulgated notion (at least in the media I’ve read) that the only people who buy books in Canada are middle-aged ladies. But maybe that’s because middle-aged ladies are the only audience that publishers are cultivating. What kid wants to read “The View From Castle Rock”?
If publishers and agents took bigger chances, they might find themselves a bigger market.
The Life of Pi won Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was short listed for the Govenor General. Before that Yann Martel won the Journey Prize and his novel Self was nominated for best first novel by Books in Canada.
Is Miriam Toews too old to be in this crowd (odd considering that she’s born the year after Yann Martel). How about Lisa Moore (Giller nominated)? Where do writers like Rohinton Mistry and Ann-Marie MacDonald fit in all of this?
The History of Love, a melodrama set in an exotic setting, could almost be mistaken for a stereotypical Canadian novel (such as Certainty by the rather young Madeleine Thien). Ditto The Mineral Palace by Heidi Julavits (McSweeney approved writer).
In the end, the grumpy Stephen Marche does bring up a few interesting points, but reading was like listening to a grumpy tourist who really just wants the place he’s in to be like the place he left behind.
At best, what Steve is saying is obvious to the point of banality. Are things really different in the States? Do more people read Eggers than Smiley? Updike? Bellow? Roth? McCarthy? Young writers eventually become old writers and if they’ve had some success, it accretes and they become established. The establishment, even. This isn’t merely how the lit world works–it’s how fucking EVERYTHING works.
Wait your turn, Steve, neither one of us is the wunderkind of King’s College any more. In the meantime, try and come up with some more critically insightful observations and comments.
For such a big fan of young writers, I think it’s funny that he got the name of Heath O’Neill’s novel wrong. It’s Lullabies for Little Criminals, not Lullabies for Little Children.
Steve, may I use Steve instead of Stephen, which seems old and rather smarmy, have you read The Journals of Susanna Moodie, written when Atwood was just 27 years old and for which she did not win a GG? Have you written anything as good? I’d be more concerned with that than with her forays into long pendom. And Steve why don’t you try living on Guilford Avenue in Baltimore rather than gentirfied Brooklyn, get some grit in your panties. You might learn some real lessons on what words can do among the real exiles of publishing.
Here — and just in the nick of time — is the screed-antidote (link via James Wolcott) to young Steve’s Brooklyn dreamin’:
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/wonder-bukiet.html
And anyway, how young is this Marche whippersnapper, really? Today’s bashful practice of omitting the author’s birthyear in CIPdata permits far too much spurious “yoof.” I demand a firm cut-off date (be it 30, 40, 50, and don’t forget 60 is the new whatever) so that we know just who is too geezified to be relevant. Otherwise our only recourse is to try to figure out if the writing’s any good based on what’ s actually on the page. Egad!– that way madness lies….
CanLit not youthful? It’s morbid, depressing, self-obsessed, self-righteous, pedantic, cliquish, fashion-following, and it loves to talk about itself. Why, CanLit is positively adolescent!
Working at the margins as I am, I have only the except above to go on, but … the 2007 Giller prize confirms what Marche has said.
The Elizabeth Hay book is a creaking bore, cluttered with stereotypes and postcard imagery. It doesn’t even give a satisfying bounce when you throw it against the wall.
I don’t see why a few of you are put off. Maybe he didn’t mention a lot of the great writing in Canada–but his point is pretty hilarious, no? probably because it has a hint of truth?
Yes, the E-Hay book is a creaking bore and it’s more of the same, yawn, etc. Yes, there is a hint of truth to what Marche says. But his argument is full of holes, too, and very clunkily written. People generally want to agree with what he’s saying but he needs to pen a rought draft or two before he goes running off to his friend at the newspaper.
[...] (True to fashion, Marche complains about all the attention given to boring old-growth forests instead of hip, young trees that grow in Brooklyn. Just kidding.) [...]
[...] Love it or hate it, Brooklyn has long been the stomping ground of young(ish), hip American writers. Now, it seems to be the preferred locale of indie publishers, too. According to New York Times reporter Rachel Donadio, Verso, the British indie, and Melville House, the literary publisher – as well as New Left Review and N+1, the literary quarterly – have all pulled up stakes in Manhattan and set up shop across the East River in Dumbo, “the gritty-chic Brooklyn neighborhood whose acronym means ‘down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,’ home of million-dollar condos, the York Street Projects, artists’ studios and high-end boutiques.” (The London Review of Books is also rumored to be scouting the location.) Reportedly, the companies were lured by the subsidized rents offered by maverick tycoon and developer David Walentas, the self-proclaimed “Pied Piper of Dumbo.” [...]