The city of Toronto has been called many things “ the centre of the universe (but only by Torontonians), “New York run by the Swiss” (Peter Ustinov), a place where “[t]hose from other countries look as if they’re trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they’re trying hard to remember” (Margaret Atwood). It is a thriving city of immigrants and neighbourhoods, home to the Canadian stock exchange and provincial house of parliament. Why then, asks Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star (echoing a question Philip Marchand posed in the same paper way back in 2006), do writers have such a difficult time characterizing the city in our literature?

As I read books that trade in the particular histories and mythologies of cities “ as Chronic City does with New York’s, William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms or Ian McEwan’s Saturday do with London, or Brad Leithauser’s The Art Student’s War even manage for Detroit “ I’m always struck by the scarcity of this kind of literature sprung from Toronto. I’m not talking about books merely set here, though even those are conspicuously under-represented considering the city’s size and state of constant flux, but those that spring from a certain shared idea of what the city is. Novels that can imagine what a city might be or become because there’s a consensus “ at least between the writer and ideal reader “ of what the city is.

Given the city’s heterogenous populace “ half of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada and 30 per cent speak a language other than French or English at home “ such a “shared idea” is probably a chimera. Indeed, Pevere notes a shift in fiction about the city from novels by “established citizens” to books from a vast diaspora of writers such as M.G. Vassanji, Shyam Selvadurai, and Neil Bissoondath. In both their work and the simple fact of their presence, Pevere argues, these writers are “situating themselves in a place where culture is literally changing under their feet.”

One person who might argue about the relative inability to define Toronto via its literature is Amy Lavender Harris, whose ambitious Imagining Toronto project (which is a website, a book, and a York University course) is a comprehensive attempt to map the city as it is represented in its literature. In Harris’s view, “Toronto is a richly imagined city, albeit one whose literature has been unjustly understudied.”

Or, if you don’t buy that, there’s always Sheila Heti’s view of Toronto: “Everybody is in their own room, doing their own thing. And at parties, no one really talks about books.”