We live in dark times. Bookstores are closing, the few surviving newspaper book reviews have atrophied like the legs of a man with a spinal injury, and Toronto, which once claimed to be the cultural capital of our fair nation, is governed by asshole philistines who appear to have engineered a budget crisis with the aim of closing libraries. But it gets worse: according to CBC’s Canada Reads, the essential Canadian novel of the past decade – the one book that all well-read Canadians really must read – is The Best Laid Plans, by Terry Fallis.
This is rather like declaring that the major musical milestone of the 1960s was “Yummy Yummy Yummy, I’ve Got Love in my Tummy.”
How did it come to this?
It begins with an online poll. Online polls run by their own strange rules. Consider the disparity between editors’ and readers’ selections for the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Editors selected James Joyce; “readers,” Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, two writers who more resemble cult leaders than novelists. Their cult members, of course, had stuffed the ballot boxes.
And, as might have been expected, partisans of various stripes stuffed the ballot boxes of Canada Reads. Three of the novels on the resulting list were typical Canada Reads fare: Amy McKay’s The Birth House, Carol Shields’s Unless, and Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage. But the others were unexpected. The Best Laid Plans was the self-publisher’s Cinderella champion. And an organized campaign to get out the graphic-novel vote gave us The Complete Essex County to round out the list.
Two of these things, to borrow shamelessly from Sesame Street, are not like the others. Setting aside any tendency towards evaluation, three of these novels can claim to be “literary” in intent. One – The Best Laid Plans – makes no pretense of joining that company. And another, The Complete Essex County, should have been excluded on the grounds that it is not even a novel – which criterion, I hasten to add, came from the show’s producers.
The loudest fuss kicked up by the latest iteration of Canada Reads was not provoked by the move to an online vote, nor even by its unaccountable outcome, but by that single, innocuous word: “novel.” In calling for readers to vote on the essential Canadian novels of the past decade, the CBC had excluded short stories and poetry – and Canada’s poets and short story writers, struggling under the weight of the chips on their shoulders, were quick to object.
The wording was no accident. As Ann Jansen, senior producer of Canada Reads (and a “self-identified poetry lover who adores short stories”) explained, it was all about a level playing field:
Canada Reads is about five people debating their favourite books and somehow agreeing on one to recommend to a country. It’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges and pomegranates and gooseberries, or some such fruity comparison. And that’s just the novels. When you think of adding poetry and short stories, it’s probably the equivalent of comparing a variety of fresh fruit with a set of bottles of icewine (that’d be the poetry) and maybe my favourite apricot-raisin buns from Cobb’s Bakery (short stories, anyone?). More distilled language in poetry, different intentions, more characters to get to know in short stories, different numbers of journeys, a variety of locations, etc., etc.
The producers repeatedly stressed their affection for poetry and short stories – so Canadian, so determined not to give offence – but they made it clear that short stories and poetry just didn’t belong. It would be too difficult to compare such diverse forms.
But when graphic novel fans asked if a graphic novel was a “novel,” and therefore eligible, the producers found themselves equally unwilling to give offence. Of course a graphic novel is a novel! And the graphic novel was in.
Narration carries the novel. Turn that novel into a movie, and lens and lighting become our narrator. Have an artist draw the scenes as storyboard, and you have a graphic novel. Instead of a narrator, we have drawings. Sara Quin, who defended The Complete Essex County on Canada Reads, pointed out this distinction and said, in fact, that reading a graphic novel requires a different set of skills – a different form of literacy.
A Globe and Mail review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise by the cartoonist Seth – no stranger to readers of CNQ – puts that different form of literacy on full display:
The powerful diagonal graphic thrust of this panel leads you in.
Your eye starts in the top left at the word balloon (“Come in,” he says). Now, follow that dramatic tail from the balloon to the figure and then follow the figure’s widespread hands, which lead you right into the store.
Observe how the lighting leads you in as well. Note the bleached solar lighting of the street compared with the inviting dimness of the store’s interior. Even the passerby’s shadow points into the store.
Seth is not speaking the critical language of prose narrative. No one will ever discuss the bleached, solar lighting of The Best Laid Plans, the dramatic tails of Angie Abdou’s word balloons, the inviting dimness of The Birth House, or Carol Shields’s powerful diagonal graphic thrust. Yet the producers of Canada Reads felt that The Complete Essex County – which, to split a hair, is not even a graphic novel, but a collection of graphic novellas – was not icewine, nor baked goods, but fruit. A pineapple, perhaps.
Yet if the graphic novel is a pineapple, how is the short story a muffin? It works through the same narrative machinery as the novel. Indeed, people usually find themselves unable to explain the difference between the short story and the novel, and lapse into generalities. The difference may be as small as Jim Harrison has explained: “Short things are short all over, and long things are long all over.”
Yet graphic novels were permitted, when the same rationale the producers used to exclude poetry and short stories argues strongly for their exclusion. The explanation is obvious: audience.
Whatever interpretation is placed on Ann Jansen’s grocery-related explanations, there is no denying another significant difference between the forms Canada Reads included and those it chose to exclude: sales. No one will ever get rich writing poems in Canada, and your risk of pulling off the same feat by writing short stories declines if your name does not happen to be Alice Munro. Novels – preferably those aimed squarely at book clubs – have the sales.
But the plain old novel is so, like, yesterday; it’s the kind of thing your mom reads with her lame book club friends and they’re all drinking, like, Chardonnay and munching on, you know, hors d’oeuvres and stuff like that, and listening to Canada Reads. Because who listens to Canada Reads? Certainly not the members of (in Sara Quin’s somewhat less than unequivocal words) “a generation that has sort of given up a little bit on reading.”
When Jeff Lemire’s book was the program’s first casualty, howls of dismay were heard from supporters of the graphic novel: there, they proclaimed, goes all your audience under forty. Including a graphic novel allowed Canada Reads to hook in a new audience and, in keeping with CanLit orthodoxy, the graphic novel was held to be important because of its useful social function, specifically as a gateway drug to the heady pleasures of reading. And apparently it worked, however briefly: one commenter on the CBC Books website, singing the praises of The Complete Essex County, noted that she had read only fourteen books in her adult life (the word “adult” enclosed, quaintly, in quotation marks).
What nobody has yet explained is why Canada Reads should appeal to an audience that doesn’t.
It is difficult to decide which was the greater travesty: that one of the Canada Reads panelists, Debbie Travis, could not muster the mental resources to finish one of the books, or that the winning book, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, was so outrageously bad that her failure to finish it vindicates her.
The story is a cliché, the writing turgid, the chapters padded with filler, the dialogue clumsy. I cannot comprehend Fallis’s notion of the paragraph, which seems entirely arbitrary. But worst of all, this comic novel is not funny. Fallis does not grasp that the art of humour is the art of surprise; he overreaches, bludgeoning us with joke after joke, and when in doubt, has Angus McClintock fart. This book has all the subtlety of a drunk armed with a ball-peen hammer.
It is popular these days to excuse a book like The Best Laid Plans by arguing that writers come in two forms. There are the writers, those people who form wonderful sentences and write books of high seriousness with which educated people are gosh-awfully impressed. And then there are the storytellers, who are successful because they tell good stories that people actually want to read.
There may be some truth to this, but that superficial truth conceals a terrible fallacy.
All storytelling derives from an oral tradition. The oral storyteller, who relies on memory, builds his story from recycled bricks, a set of oft-repeated phrases and ideas rather like the floating couplets of traditional folk music. And as in traditional folk music, the art of oral storytelling lies entirely in performance. A vast gulf separates the earnest and respectful rehash made by a thousand college folkies, circa 1962, from the early recordings of Bob Dylan.
Writing freed the storyteller from the recycled bricks of the oral tradition, creating a new emphasis on originality. But writing did not put paid to the storyteller’s obligation to perform. It simply moved the performance from the present to the page. A new medium demands a new way of surprising and delighting the audience. Those who excuse poor writers as “good storytellers” forget that “story” is a mere noun, and “tell,” the verb. And if the art of storytelling is in the telling, then The Best Laid Plans is an abject failure.
Except that it won Canada Reads and, thanks to the CBC’s rather silly claims for Canada Reads’ mandate, is now considered the essential Canadian novel of the past decade.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
Canada Reads, in its search for “essential” Canadian books, arbitrarily excluded some of Canada’s best writing, using a dishonest explanation involving fruit and baked goods to gloss over the fact that the producers wanted popular books. The producers included graphic novels in an attempt to appeal to an audience that doesn’t care about books. And through the dubious mechanism of an online poll, they labeled as “essential” a novel completely lacking in literary ambition or merit. Clearly, Canada Reads had sort of given up a little bit on reading.
It is time to face facts. The CBC does not care about books: not one iota, not one whit, not to the extent, even, of a rat’s patoot. The CBC is not in the book business. The CBC is in the business of audience. And in the business of audience, all that matters is the number of earlobes turned to the radio.
You can’t be a snob in the business of audience. If your aim is to engage a group of people, you must inevitably seek the lowest common denominator, and the larger the group, the lower that common denominator becomes. And so the online CBC Books portal became the “CBC Book Club,” where the emphasis is decidedly populist, and Canada Reads began with an online poll.
But in its rush to build a new audience around an online community, the CBC is also destroying any credibility its book coverage had. Set aside the complaint that CBC books coverage is relentlessly “middlebrow”; The Best Laid Plans does not rise to that level. And The Best Laid Plans appeared on Canada Reads only because the CBC threw out a perfectly good model – find interesting panelists, and ask them to champion interesting books – in favor of asking the audience to stuff the ballot boxes.
At one time, you could hear short stories read aloud on the CBC. You could wipe the sweat of a day’s honest toil from your brow, sit down in your easy chair, smile indulgently at the happy children playing quietly on the carpet, and hear a story called “The Peace of Utrecht,” by an unknown writer named Alice Munro. In all likelihood, you owned a pipe and a spaniel, or your husband did. It was, presumably, a stodgier time, even for spaniels. But then progress happened, and we became a nation of pygmies rapt in the glow of Dancing With The Stars.
If CBC radio still aired readings of short stories, Alice Munro might now be followed by something pulled from True Confessions, all in the name of audience. It is not the CBC’s fault that times have changed. If the CBC were to return to broadcasting readings of short stories, surely our nation would just tune out. We have Twitter to keep us occupied. No, we can’t blame the CBC for the decline of the national attention span – but we can fault the CBC, as a public broadcaster, for its happy embrace of that decline.