McLaren vs. Bigge: Round 2

Here at In Other Media, controversy makes us as giddy as the recipients of brand new puppies on Valentine’s Day morning. In the last month or so, we linked to as many stories on James Frey as there were alleged lies in his book A Million Little Pieces. Now, on this side of the border, we have a little bookish hilarity to call our own.

Yesterday, we linked to a review in the Sunday Toronto Star in which writer and reviewer Ryan Bigge scoured the English and German lexicons for words to describe just how bad he thought Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, was. Today we combed the archives to find the article that may have started it all: a column featured in The Globe and Mail in 2001, written by one Ms. McLaren about Bigge’s debut, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy. Like Bigge did in his review of The Continuity Girl, McLaren chose not to review the book so much as defame its writer. To this end, McLaren used more than half of her column to define a term that she coined and that no one ever used again. Lurpers, she writes, are the angry young men of the 21st century – cynics who have a hate-on for all that they don’t have but secretly want: “success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder…. He is Holden Caulfield 10 years later, a grown boy, who in the words of Philip Roth, approaches life ‘with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing.’”

“Like so many Lurpers, Bigge is an established legend in his own mind. He even has his own Web site to prove it. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy, will be published by Vancouver small press Arsenal Pulp this month. The title could actually be Anatomy of a Hard-up Lurper.”

Ouch. From whence comes such a personal attack? Do these two know each other? Couldn’t McLaren, who has now written of a childless woman, have had sympathy instead of vitriol for the perpetually single Bigge? One thing seems clear: riffling through the discount tables at Pages the other day, In Other Media found copies of Bigge’s book. We can all be somewhat sure that, someday, in that very same spot, will be McLaren’s. So can’t we all just get along?

Related links:
Click here for McLaren’s review of A Very Lonely Planet, as featured on Bigge’s website
Click here to read comments posted in response to yesterday’s installment of the McLaren-Bigge feud

The new-style book award

Award-watchers love to gripe about the subjectivity and secrecy of jury-panel decisions. But lately a couple of book-related sites have gone one better and tried to create alternatives.

Late last year, Ontario’s Good Reports site staged a “Runaway Jury,” in which site proprietor Alex Good and poets Steven Laird and Zach Wells selected their own winner from the 2004 poetry shortlist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. (The Runaway Jury’s pick was David Manicom’s The Burning Eaves; the actual winner was Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida.)

And now the American site The Morning News is running an ambitious competition in which more than a dozen writers and book-blog types will select the most worthy book of 2004. “The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books” will start with 16 notable literary novels published in ’04. The books will compete against each other in pairs, sports-playoff-style, until only two remain, at which point a final winner will be chosen. Each round of the competition will be judged by a different writer; in the first stage, posted on Monday, February 7, Claire Miccio compares Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America with Karen Shepard’s The Bad Boy’s Wife. She’s not too crazy about either, but gives Roth the nod. The Roth novel will go up against either Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay or T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle — whichever one gets chosen by judge Choire Sicha. The “Tournament of Books” runs on The Morning News every weekday until the end of February.

Related links:
Click here for the first installment in The Morning News’ “Tournament of Books
Click here for the introduction to the Tournament, and a downloadable list of the “playoff schedule
Click here for the Good Reports’ “Runaway Jury”

Canada’s “ice queen” set to conquer world

A story on the Independent site claims to have inside knowledge on which authors are being considered for the new International Man Booker Prize, which will be awarded next year for an author’s “literary achievement” (not, as in the case of the regular Man Booker Prize, for a single book written by an author from the Commonwealth). Though the three judges for the new prize will not be announced until next week — with the shortlist announcement scheduled for early next year — the article claims that the five serious contenders for the £60,000 are V.S. Naipaul, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, and Margaret Atwood, who is described as “Canada’s ice queen.”

Related links:
Read the Independent story