The Canadian novel and its discontents

 

Am cleaning out my mom’s bookshelves. The original plan was utilitarian; get rid of all except a handful of special volumes. But finding that hard. It’s a good library, with, unsurprisingly, a strong contingent of Cdn books. 

Reading these, though, is a mixed bag. Am currently reading a novel by a prize winning author described as “beloved” on the dust jacket. He died a few yrs ago and was instantly forgotten. Why, exactly? Who knows. However, no great injustice that the novel I’m reading is not still talked abt; it’s abt first love during the 1940s, and while it has its moments, it’s generally a static read. Scenes rarely come alive. 

My mom and brother often used to discuss why CanLit struggled being as vital as Am or Brit lit. Reading this novel, two explanations come to mind: one (a point my mom liked to make): Canadian novelists (and their publishers) often fixated with being “worthy”; the novels function as moral lessons, not a mix of entertainment and art. Another is the anemic state of criticism in Canada now. @stevenwbeattie has remarked that a literature can only be as good as its criticism. The novel I’m reading now received high praise in a major news outlet and Q&Q. The two criteria intertwine; an urge toward moralizing and emotionally fake criticism lead to a static literature in which better work struggles to break through. 

What then is to be done? Cdn movies have some of the same shortcomings but not quite as noticeably. Part of the solution is to write fictional narratives for print that more closely resemble movie scripts. This would at least force Cdn writers to avoid the stylistically pedestrian introspection that sucks the life out of so many of their scenes (the point here being that timid criticism allows Cdn writers to keep doing this). At least with the format of a script, a writer is forced to bring the reader into current action. Narratives using this strategy can still be “quiet”. But they need not so often remove the reader — and the narrative — from the present. In other words, they need not privilege moralistic reflection over action. Examples of how this might work to follow.