When life imitates art

Alice Munro’s short story, “Dimensions,” which appears in her recent collection Too Much Happiness, is one that the author herself cannot reread.  In the story, a blue-collar B.C. father suffocates his three young children with a pillow while his wife is away. 

What makes this story even more unsettling is its resemblance to the 2008 criminal murder trial of B.C. father Allan Schoenborn, who was charged with first-degree murder for killing his three children after the story was published in The New Yorker in 2006.

Maclean’s writer Bill Richardson points out the striking similarities between the murder trial and Munro’s short story:

There are other examples of life imitating art. The 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic was foretold in the novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, in which a luxury ocean liner called Titan smashes into an iceberg and capsizes in the North Atlantic. A 2004 Hubble space telescope image of dust and gas swirling around stars in the dark has the distinct look of Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. As for Munro’s short story, it ran in The New Yorker in 2006.

At the centre of “Dimensions” and the B.C. murders is the father. Both are blue-collar (the fictional father, Lloyd, works at an ice cream factory, Schoenborn was a roofer), and seemingly threatened by the possibility of their wives leaving them. Insanity figures prominently. Schoenborn has testified about hearing voices, and that he’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia and paranoia.

 

Bookmarks: Rawi Hage, Fletch done, and more

• Is any CanLit author getting more press this season than Rawi Hage? He was profiled here a few months back, and since then he’s been covered in the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, The Globe and Mail (subscriber-only), and on the CBC Arts site, and undoubtedly much more
• Oh, right, there’s also this Andrew Davidson guy, on the Guardian site, the Post, Maclean’s, CBC Arts, the Globe (subscriber-only again), etc., etc., including here
• Gregory Mcdonald, author of Fletch and its many sequels, is dead at 71
• In search of the next bestseller (The Times)

Bookmarks: Tips for writers, tips for green readers, and more

• Allegra Goodman offers advice on how to be a writer (and begins by tweaking Margaret Atwood’s classic joke about a novelist and a brain surgeon at a cocktail party)
• So you want to live greenly but you’re feeling guilty about buying books? Here are some things you can do. (Strangely, no mention at all of the publishing trend toward printing on recycled paper)
• Maclean‘s looks at Tish Cohen and Andrew Davidson
• Next Harry Potter movie postponed to next year … just after Entertainment Weekly put it on the cover of its Fall Movie Preview issue

Bethune on Roberts

Maclean’s books columnist Brian Bethune has posted a blog entry on the Paul William Roberts plagiarism controversy. (Quick recap: a few passages in Roberts’ book A War Against Truth were found to have been lifted from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Publisher Raincoast has stopped shipment of the book and will likely include an apologetic insert in future shipments.)

To begin, Bethune outlines in some detail a previous instance of plagiarism in a story Roberts wrote for The Globe and Mail last spring – a case that the Globe, strangely, left unmentioned in its own coverage of the War Against Truth flap. The Globe also gets points for appending the most baffling, unclear “clarification” imaginable to the Roberts piece in question.

It gets interesting when Bethune links the case to last fall’s Ian McEwan controversy:

A horde of big-name peers rallied to [McEwan's] cause, fellow lords of creation who adhere to the novelist’s first article of faith: we have the right to utilize as we wish the scribblings of lesser mortals (i.e. non-fiction writers), just as we have the right to play with the lives of real people (at least those who are safely dead and unable to establish lucrative relationships with libel lawyers).

Roberts won’t find nearly as many supporters, Bethune suggests; after all, Roberts is “a non-fiction writer too, and – like the rest of us – he’s no Ian McEwan.”

New kid on the blog

Finding items for In Other Media just got a little bit easier, Brian Bethune, who has long covered the book beat for Maclean’s, has turned up on the magazine’s website with a new space called Bethune on Books. So far, there have been only three items, but they’ve been fairly entertaining. The first, from earlier this month, covered the Frey flap and the last two have been about what Bethune calls doom-lit. Bethune writes: “Since 9/11, of course, the usual suspects — the end of oil, nuclear disaster, Ebola epidemics, asteroid crashes, whatever — have had to share shelf space with terror scares. And the terror subgenre has now spawned a new sub-subgenre: worry over the death of Europe — literal, demographic or both.”

Related links:
Click here for Bethune on Books

Scott Young dies at 87

Scott Young, legend of Canadian print media, prolific author of 45 books, and father of musician Neil Young, has died this week in Kingston, ON. He reported on sports and news for newspapers and magazines across the country, including The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s, in a journalism career that spanned more than 40 years. He reported on the Second World War from London, then spent years covering major sporting events like the Olympics and the Stanley Cup. His books include the autobiographical Neil and Me, Arctic thrillers Murder in a Cold Climate and The Shaman’s Knife, and YA titles like Boy on Defence and A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp.

Related links:
Click here for the story in the Toronto Star