Legendary U.K. agent Pat Kavanagh dies

The Bookseller is reporting that Pat Kavanagh, the British agent and wife of novelist Julian Barnes, has died.

Kavanagh represented some heavy hitters in the literary world, including Joanna Trollope, John Irving, and William Trevor (not to mention her husband), but she was perhaps equally well known for the scandals that seemed to follow her throughout the upper echelons of the British writing and publishing community. In 1995, she was dropped by her most famous client, Martin Amis, in favour of Andrew Wylie, nicknamed “The Jackal,” who managed to secure the author a £500,000 advance for his novel The Information. The split with Kavanagh caused a very public falling out between Amis and Barnes, who had previously been close friends and snooker buddies.

Then last year, Kavanagh caused a stir once again by resigning from the British agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and inciting a raft of other agents to follow her. Kavanagh’s departure and its attendent fallout caused the editorial director of one British publishing house to confess to the London Times that the sedate and sophisticated bonhomie of London’s literati is largely a façade: “On the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all f***ing loathe each other.”

The notice in The Bookseller is very brief, and gives no indication of the cause of death. The only direct quote in the piece is from a spokesperson for United Agents, the firm that Kavanagh helped establish after leaving PFD:

“Pat Kavanagh was an exceptional agent and a great friend. We all owe her a tremendous amount. She was an extraordinary presence who was much loved and will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her clients. All our thoughts are with Julian at this difficult time.”

Constance Rooke dead at age 65

Some sad news from over the weekend: Constance Rooke, editor, critic, and former president of PEN Canada, succumbed to ovarian cancer at age 65 on Saturday. Rooke, the wife of novelist Leon Rooke, was a professor at the University of Victoria for twenty years, and she was the founding chair of the Women’s Studies department there. She was also the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Guelph University.

As a writer, Rooke authored several critical works, including Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. She also edited several anthologies for PEN Canada, most recently 2006′s Writing Life.

Sandra Martin has a brief obituary in today’s Globe and Mail:

Born in New York City on Nov. 14, 1942, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1964, a master’s degree from Tulane University two years later and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1973. By then, she had met and married short story writer and novelist Leon Rooke.

Together, they went to the University of Victoria in B.C. There she edited The Malahat Review and began her illustrious career as a literary critic and a champion of Canadian literature.

There will be a public celebration of Rooke’s life at a future date, yet to be determined.

Banned books

It’s the American Library Association‘s Banned Books Week, and their website features lists of frequently challenged books covering various eras on their website. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is 37th on the ALA’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s.

In honour of Banned Books Week, the Guardian asks whether or not you’ve been exercising your freedom to read, with a quiz about censored books past and present. Here’s one to ponder:

Who was the ALA’s most frequently “challenged” author of 2007?

1. Mark Twain
2. Richard Dawkins
3. Maya Angelou
4. Robert Cormier

Here is a look at some books that have been challenged in Canada, and some of the reasons why. The list includes a number of Canadian authors, including Deborah Ellis, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler. And, going local, the Fahrenheit 451 blog for the Pelham Public Library in Fonthill, ON, discusses censorship issues and provides lists of books that have been banned at the library challenged in various locations, including schools and libraries, over the past few years.

American novelist David Foster Wallace dead at age 46

Some sad news from over the weekend: David Foster Wallace, whose mammoth, 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923-2005, was found dead of an apparent suicide on Friday.

Wallace was the spiritual and linguistic heir to the American postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s – figures such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Wallace’s exuberant, flashy prose style – which included page-long sentences and paragraphs, copious footnotes and digressions, and extravagant verbal contortions – won him as many detractors as admirers, but he staked out a place in the forefront of a new generation of hip, urban, edgy American novelists that also includes figures such as Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Rick Moody. He in turn influenced younger writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers.

Wallace’s first novel, 1987′s The Broom of the System, owed a large debt to Pynchon, but by 1996, when he released his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, Wallace had found his own voice. Infinite Jest is a comedy of epic proportions, about a jacked-up, hyper-consumerist America that is addicted to every kind of excess: mass consumption, drugs and booze, sex, and television. Wallace was a particularly acerbic commentator on millennial North America’s conspicuous consumption: practically alone among well-known American novelists, he maintained a consistent critique of the dehumanizing and deadening effects of modern Western society.

He was also a prodigious and wide-ranging essayist, who wrote about everything from growing up in Tornado Alley to attending a porn convention in Las Vegas to riding John McCain’s Straight-Talk Express campaign bus in 2000. His essays, like his fiction, were stamped with his bracing intelligence, scabrous wit, and keenly observant eye.

Wallace’s ambitious prose style was also compulsively readable, and his energetic verbal acrobatics injected new life into a literary culture that was threatening to become irredeemably moribund. He was a maverick, an original, and a brilliantly uncompromising craftsman. The loss of his voice is an occasion for sadness; the legacy that he left us in his short life is cause for joy.

The website The Howling Fantods! has a fairly comprehensive roundup of coverage, and Bruce Weber’s piece in the New York Times makes reference to Wallace’s depression, which he had apparently been suffering for several months prior to his death.

NAR: Greatest American litmag ever published?

The legendary American literary editor Ted Solotaroff died last week, and in the days since there have been a number of heartfelt tributes to the man. One of the most recent is from Solotaroff’s friend and editor, Gerry Howard, who reminisces about Solotaroff’s New American Review, arguing that it was the greatest American literary magazine ever published.

In 26 issues, from September 1967 through November 1977, under the successive sponsorships of New American Library, Simon & Schuster, and finally Bantam, NAR reliably bottled the cultural lightning flashing about in those thrillingly depressing years. [...] As soon as NAR was launched, it became the place where young readers hot for the newest new things in literature and experience rushed to get The Word. Man, did it deliver.

Howard goes on to list the roster of talent that wrote for New American Review, and it is indeed an impressive roll call, including Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Susan Sontag, V.S. Pritchett, Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and dozens of others.

New American Review died, we can see now, a natural economic and aesthetic death. The countercultural project dissipated, its audience matured (and maybe lost energy and interest), the accountants had their way. Literary Postmodernism gave way to Raymond Carver-style minimalism, and a more personal and reportage-based style of essay came to the fore – two developments that another editor of genius, Bill Buford, championed when he grabbed the torch and launched the next great literary magazine, Granta. But there are thousands of people of a certain age, many of them in magazine and book publishing, who still cherish the excitement that NAR reliably delivered and had their sensibilities shaped and enlarged by its mind-altering contents.

Arthur C. Clarke R.I.P.

Sci-fi author and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90 at his home in Sri Lanka. Author of more than 100 books, of which 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most famous, Clarke was also uncannily prescient about space exploration, having predicted the invention of geosynchronous communications satellites more than a decade before the fact.

Obits appear in The New York Times, the Times, and the Guardian, to name a few. The latter offers this candid portrait:

Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and increasingly thin on top, he tended to be described by his friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor.

And, for your contemplation, here are Clarke’s Three Laws of scientific discovery, excerpted from The New York Times:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Stephen Marche on Robbe-Grillet

Experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has been dead for only a few weeks, but it looks as if the touching eulogy phase is already over. Salon has just posted an essay by Canadian author Stephen Marche (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) on Robbe-Grillet’s influence on the modern novel, and it’s clear that Marche wasn’t too sorry to see him go.

I should have felt grief at the news of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s death last week. Instead I recognized in myself only confusing relief. He was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[...]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the ’50s, writers like Nabokov could produce Pale Fire or Lolita and feel themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the ’60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least countercultural.

This Quillblogger, for one, tends to agree with Marche’s overall sentiments, but he seems a little misguided in pinning everything on poor Robbe-Grillet, especially when he makes groaner statements like this:

The relief I felt when I heard about Robbe-Grillet’s death was also partly hope. Now we can go on, I was thinking.

The comments section following the piece is worth a read, too, if only for a number of strong counter-arguments.

Suicide is painful

How-to books on the subject of suicide don’t seem to be welcome in New Zealand. The Australian author and assisted-suicide advocate Philip Nitschke was detained by authorities in a New Zealand airport earlier this week, and several copies of his book – The Peaceful Pill Handbook – were confiscated from him. According to TV New Zealand:

Nitschke arrived in Auckland ahead of a meeting on Monday with New Zealand’s Chief Censor Bill Hastings, when he planned to resubmit the Peaceful Pill Handbook for classification.

Nitschke, who also plans to conduct a series of workshops while in NZ, said he had been “taken aback” by the incident. “I have occasionally been detained … but this is by far the most detailed and thorough and heavy encounter I have ever had with any authority,” he said from his hotel in Auckland.

[...]

The handbook was originally submitted last year but was banned in June when New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the handbook an “objectionable” rating. The two copies taken from him were amended versions he hoped would be approved for sale by authorities.

Coincidentally, the Times Online has just compiled a list of “ten extraordinary literary suicides,” and reading it, you kind of have to wonder if some of those people couldn’t have used a few tips from Nitschke’s book.

Robert Weaver remembered

An industry tribute to the late Robert Weaver, who died last Saturday at the age of 87, was held in Toronto’s Massey College last night (see photo below). Though it was a small, closed gathering, many of the biggest names in the industry were there, including Michael Ondaatje, Robert Fulford, and Scott Griffin. (Alice Munro sent word that she had intended to attend, but poor weather in her part of the province made traveling difficult.)

Margaret Atwood took the podium early in the evening, remarking that Weaver was able to achieve so much at the CBC because the network didn’t feel the need to compete with the “so-called entertainment industry” the way it does now. “It was a golden age,” said Atwood, “and like all golden ages, we didn’t know we were in it until it was over.”

Media tributes to Robert Weaver are manifold. There are obituaries in the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail (the latter featuring what seems to be Munro’s only public comment on the late Weaver) as well as a first-person remembrance by Robert Fulford in the National Post. And here’s a full Weaver biography.

Jane Rule, 1931-2007

Jane Rule, the B.C.-based author known for her pioneering treatment of lesbian themes, has died of cancer complications. Rule was born in New Jersey and moved to Vancouver in the 1950s. Her novels include Desert of the Heart, which was made into the film Desert Hearts, and The Young in One Another’s Arms, which was recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press under its Little Sister’s Classics imprint. There are major obituaries of Rule at Xtra and at The Globe and Mail.