The Wheat of Sadness: Editing Out the Chaff from the 2009 Giller Shortlist

Unfashionable. That was Leah McLaren’s implicit assessment of the shortlist for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize. “This fall, I won’t be reading any of the books that are nominated for Canadian literary prizes,” she wrote in her Globe and Mail style column. “And I don’t feel guilty about it either.”

Depressing. That’s my explicit assessment. Not of McLaren’s predictable thoughtcrimes, but the sad experience of reading the Giller shortlist: The Disappeared by Kim Echlin, The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, Fall by Colin McAdam, The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre and The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon. Depressing, in part, because of the content – murder, stillbirth, war, suicide, scalding, genocide, another stillbirth. But mainly because these are supposed to be the “best of the best” Canadian fiction published in 2009 and only one of the five reasonably fits such criteria.

Dr. Melfi, psychiatrist for Tony Soprano, once told her murderous patient that “depression is rage turned inwards.” That seems about right. Five years ago I would have slashed and burned these books, but these days my remaining droplets of yellow bile have turned black. Call it necessary pragmatism. Call it getting older. Call it selling out. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of angry men with Giller rage (always men, by the way, and often named Steve) willing to take my place:

“The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture.”
—Stephen Henighan (2006)

“The danger is that the Giller, like the CBC, will become just another institution for boomer self-congratulation. Theirs is the greatest generation in the history of the country at inventing awards to give one other.”
—Stephen Marche (2007)

“The Gillers have, in a mere fourteen years, become an institution so incestuous and sclerotic they have their own systemic biases. Of course none of this would matter if the best works of Canadian fiction were being recognized. But they are not.” —Alex Good (2008)

“By giving the prize to Joseph Boyden for his novel Through Black Spruce, the 2008 Giller jury in fact behaved exactly the way the majority of its predecessors had – rewarding the one book that most closely cleaves to the traditionally accepted CanLit pieties: obsession with geography and our psychic relationship with the land, staunch naturalism, and lyrical, poetic prose.” —Steven W. Beattie (2009)

As with ham radio aficionados, the anger and passion of Canadian literary discourse grows ever fiercer as the stakes dissolve. But without such megaphonic outbursts all that remains is tame, sanctioned commentary about manufactured non-controversy: Alice Munro withdrew her book Too Much Happiness from Giller consideration! The longlist contained ten women and only two men! Giller judge Victoria Glendinning, a British novelist, informed Financial Times readers that “there is a striking homogeneity in the muddy middle range of novels, often about families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever.” (!) Not only heresy to CanLit devotees, Glendinning’s essay appeared in early September – before the winner was announced. (!!!)

But each non-story fizzled as fast as a room temperature bottle of Baby Duck. The matriarchy dissolved when the shortlist was revealed to include both men from the longlist but not Margaret Atwood^TM. Noah Richler, meanwhile, bravely defended Canada’s honour against rue Britannia. “You want fireworks? You want literature that is invested with energy because every page is written as if it was the writer’s last chance?” he responded in the Globe and Mail. “Well, don’t turn to English novels but to the political and cultural margins of a collapsed empire that started becoming parochial more than half a century ago.”

Richler’s spleen would have been comical were our lack of literary self-esteem not so acutely embarrassing. A week later, the Globe’s book section reviewed Shandi Mitchell’s Under This Unbroken Sky – suspected to be the Ukraine flashback novel singled out by Glendinning. “These are not graceful and articulate protagonists who boast refinement and savoir faire,” wrote reviewer Aritha van Herk. “These are earthy folk whose apprehension of the world is elemental, immediate.” As awful as that sounds, van Herk spent most of her review praising the book, concluding that

Mitchell, who is a filmmaker and screenwriter, thinks visually more than narratively, and there are breathtaking moments where the overwhelming beauty of the image transports the writing to a different horizon.
Those moments make this novel much more than a Canadian cliché, but an important stone in the mosaic of our shared Canadian conundrum.

An ardent defense of a Canadian sod-hut novel? Now that’s comical. Too bad only a small, non-urban piece of Canada is recognized as contributing to “our shared Canadian conundrum.” In a cute squib for the ailing National Post, Ray Robertson explained why none of his six books (including his latest, the quasi-historical novel David) have received Giller notice:

the tender sensibilities of that year’s distinguished arbiters of taste would no doubt be chafed by some damning reference of mine to either bodily functions (because we all know that people in works of literature don’t go to the bathroom) or popular culture (because we all know that people in works of literature spend the majority of their time . . . sitting in abandoned lighthouses . . . brooding upon those timeless day-to-day concerns of time, loss, and memory) . . .

Robertson is partially wrong –The Golden Mean contains urination (“my flow lands in a good couple inches of yellow”), defecation (“steam rose from the little pile”) and vomiting (“a thin yellow gruel onto the floor”). Fall, meanwhile, notches two farting incidents, performed by two different characters, in the same chapter. So it’s possible to write potty and appear on the shortlist. Winning the Giller with a Rabelaisian carnival of the orifice is, of course, another matter.

But before discussing winners and losers, I must slog past my least favourite literary tradition, the Globe’s inexorable Giller bookclub roundtable. This year, John Barber, Sandra Martin and Alison Gzowski were the three arts reporters who drew short straws:

Sandra: The novel is a very expandable thing. It can be used however anyone wants to use it. There are many, many forms.

It was almost as though The Disappeared was a spoken book, an oral book, and I would say The Winter Vault is a written book.

Alison: Is it ever. You can’t hear the dialogue. It’s the opposite to Colin McAdam’s Fall. These people with their intelligent soliloquies. . . .

John: It’s so unnatural. But Tom Stoppard plays are unnatural too. I like Michaels because she’s not trying to create some sort of false pattern of kitchen-sink realism. It’s not really a novel and that’s what I like about it. We don’t need a narrative arc.

How depressing that such graceful and articulate critics, who boast refinement and savoir faire, can get things so totally fucking wrong. Not content to leave it there, Barber concludes by saying that, “The Winter Vault should win. It’s the most ambitious work here and I think people just have to be rewarded for taking chances and doing things that are new and unrecognizable.” I can only imagine the violence this statement must provoke in someone like Michael Turner, whose 2009 un-novel 8×10 is truly ambitious, new and unrecognizable.

Here, for Barber’s benefit, is what an intelligent human being sounds like when talking about literature:

I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online. They show quasi-bloggish tendencies: They’re relatively short, deeply style-conscious, and built out of text fragments narrated by radically diverse voices.

That’s Sam Anderson, writing in New York magazine’s Best of the Decade issue. While Turner’s book would fit within this assessment, it goes without saying that none of the five books on the Giller shortlist show evidence of jittery hyperlinkage.

Indeed, the only unifying element across an otherwise eclectic five-pack is the presence (or more often absence) of what Zadie Smith calls the “smart stranger.” In the June 2008 issue of The Believer, Smith reprinted her Columbia University lecture on craft, which included this nugget:

You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

Willful repression is a lot to ask, but vital given that this year’s shortlist demonstrates what happens when authors trust professional editors to think smart on their behalf. Smith again:

Underneath Pound’s markings The Waste Land is a sad proof like any other – too long, full of lines not worth keeping, badly structured. Lucky Eliot, to have Ezra Pound. Lucky Fitzgerald, to have Maxwell Perkins. Lucky Carver, we now know, to have Gordon Lish. Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, mon frere! Where have all the smart strangers gone?

Most of them have moved into advertising, I suspect. The pay is certainly better. As are the long-term job prospects.

The good news is that Annabel Lyon has reliable access to her inner smart stranger. The bad news is that Giller winner Linden MacIntyre does not, while Colin McAdam and Kim Echlin listen to theirs on a part-time basis. And Anne Michaels? She only takes heed of a gnomic stranger named Zoltan.

These opinions are not unique to me. Even the Globe’s Alison Gzowski was brave enough to say of The Bishop’s Man that “Sentence by sentence, this isn’t the best writing of the five” while John Barber observed the frequent instances of “purple writing” in The Disappeared.

Let’s pick up where Gzowski left off and provide a thorough exegesis of the disciple of God:

“I am the son of a bastard father. My mother was a foreigner, felled long before her time by disappointment and tuberculosis.”

These are the two sentences that should open The Bishop’s Man. They grab the reader and toss them inside. But this pair of vivid sentences are blocked by two full paragraphs of expository preamble. This is how the novel starts: “The night before things started to become unstuck, I actually spent a good hour taking stock of my general situation and concluded that, all things considered, I was in pretty good shape.”

There are five tired phrases in this flabby sentence (“good hour”; “taking stock”; “general situation”; “all things considered” and “pretty good shape”). And while it might be less gripping than “I am the son of a bastard father” MacIntyre’s opening sentence is honest, providing an accurate indication of the narrator’s dry, rambling prose style throughout:

There was a large black housefly staggering along the windowsill and it reassured me in a way. A small imperfection to humanize that sterile place. The window in the bishop’s room is full of them. Where do they come from? Hundreds clustered in black, miserable clumps. Are they dead? Or hibernating? How did they get in there?
I stifled a yawn.

That makes two of us. A second example should suffice: “The sign on his door said Dr. Arrowsmith. You wonder where a name like that comes from. Maker of arrows, I suppose. A medieval occupation.”

The narrator, Father Duncan MacAskill, has confused himself for J. M. Coetze, but lacks the requisite philosophical gravitas and command of language. The Bishop’s Man contains 300 decent pages of novel stretched across 400. This is a serious problem. A serious editing problem. One of many. MacIntyre’s dialogue is also sick with ellipses:

“Our only concern is the well-being of your son. And of course . . . and this is why I want to talk to him . . . any other possible . . . victims. We have to know the extent of this . . . situation.”

Forgivable if only MacAskill paused like this, but everyone suffers the same problem:

“Was he from here or . . . there? Your failure.”
“From there,” she said without a pause. “I don’t know if you understand that . . . about commitment . . .”
“Indeed I do. Indeed I do.” Finally I asked. “Who was he? Your . . . failure.”

Ellipses . . . should be used . . . sparingly. Lest they lose . . . their . . . effectiveness.

Attacking MacIntyre’s punctuation habits might seem petty, but his lack of finesse at the sentence level ripples through the novel as a whole. Attempts at building suspense are brittle and transparent, and I sighed audibly when the first of many italicized diary excerpts appeared on page 25. Spoiler alert: MacAskill sinned in the 1970s in Central America. With a woman named Jacinta. Or should I say:

MacAskill sinned in the 1970s in Central America. With a woman named Jacinta.

Clunky as this novel can be, the subject matter is suitably ambitious (the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests) and MacAskill is a complex character, even if his motivations and actions are too often telegraphed. And while his dialogue never slips past perfunctory, MacIntyre does manage to make his Nova Scotia yokels sound realistic. But such minor triumphs should not be sufficient to pocket a Giller award.

Is it a miracle MacIntyre won? No. More like a venial sin.

***

Thank god Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared is not overlong. She accomplishes more in 228 pages than The Bishop’s Man is able to at almost double the length. But in this case, the Globe’s John Barber is correct – there are far too many purple passages. The Disappeared is about a Montreal teenager named Anne Greves who falls in love with an exiled Cambodian named Serey. She loses contact with him for 11 years when he returns to Phnom Penh, alone, to locate his family. But her love endures until their eventual, inevitable reunion:

That night, I knelt face down on the bed, knees spread, and I gave myself to your love. My body was yours. I trusted you. When we lay apart, side by side, I could still feel the print of your hands on my breasts, the thickness of you trying to make yourself reborn between my legs.

This exploding mauve paintball requires no further commentary.

What’s depressing (or frustrating, if you’re still capable of getting so exercised) is that Echlin can be a powerful, A-list writer. But neither her smart stranger, nor her editor, can effectively distinguish between black and purple ink:

The body remembers. I opened myself to you as if I could be unzippered front and back. In the first moments you touched me as an unknown territory, slowly, remembering a softness I think you had forgotten. Your arms, the taste of your skin, your eyes. I could hardly breathe. I received your touch, you received my relief as if we were giving agonized birth to each other. But I could not stay shy, I wanted you, I had wanted you for eleven years and we became cannibals swallowing flesh and breathing prayers. I was not shy, and even if I could have you only this one night I did not care.

The passages I’ve emphasized are the musical equivalent of sour notes, and it’s sad to hear Echlin waver in mid-sentence. To quote literary critic Thom Yorke, “[S]he’s like a detuned radio.” Such tonal shifts are especially maddening given her ability to produce lines like:

“I did anything I wanted and the dirty sheets of Bleury Street became my world.”

“Will Maracle opened massacre sites, released the bones.”

“These were lives cut in two, the time before they stepped on the landmine and the time after.”

“We had pared the argument from both sides and left nothing in the middle.”

But even when producing clean, uncoloured prose, Echlin can mistake technique for artistry:

Mau stopped for a group of villagers crossing the road, pushing a house on stilts. […] In the sway of a stilt house people learn to move lightly. A woman rolling over in her sleep can sway a stilt house. A boy climbing up the steps with a heavy load can sway a stilt house. Even the wind sways a stilt house.

My marginalia comment beside this stilted passage reads “quit saying gummi so much.” By which I mean the “Homer Badman” episode from Season Six of The Simpsons:

Homer: Ooh. Gummi bears! Gummi calves’ heads! Gummi jaw breakers! Ooh. What’s that?

Candy Man: That is the rarest gummi of them all, the gummi Venus de Milo. Carved by gummi artisans who work exclusively in the medium of gummi.

Marge: Will you two stop saying “gummi” so much?

While my pop culture habit will, at least according to Ray Robertson, forever deny me a Giller, I quote Marge Simpson in service of a serious point. Repetition can be a powerful writerly tool. But repetition can also be nothing more than saying the same word over and over again if it fails to generate a rhythmic melody along the page. Echlin includes an unfortunate trio of sentences that begin “I remember . . .” only to later double-down on this emotive cliché by starting seven sentences in a row with “I wanted . . .” Echlin wishes us to understand that her novel is filled with Powerful Prose but The Disappeared can be read as a workshop on writing devices that distract as often as they impress.

In terms of subject matter, Echlin is more ambitious than MacIntyre, revisiting the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, with a stillbirth and the murder of a political dissident thrown in for good measure. If anything, Echlin is overly ambitious in how she juxtaposes personal and political traumas. Still, given her command of narrative, it’s a shame the novel fails to sufficiently cohere and provide the reader with what Echlin calls, in her Acknowledgments, “the kind of truth that fiction tells.”

***

How is it that Colin McAdam, whose second novel contains farts (farts! plural!) has once again managed to appear on the Giller shortlist? Well, for one thing, McAdam writes as though there’s a lit firecracker taped to each finger:

I feel tall. Or lighter.
Nobody in this store had a night or morning as fun or dirty as I did.
Did they.
Everyone’s quiet.
Everyone’s plucking oranges and meat for houses full of bellies.
Can anyone see what Fall and I did this morning. Can anyone smell how much I’ve lived?

That’s Julius, the son of a US ambassador situated in Ottawa. He and his roommate Noel unevenly split the narration duties in Fall, a novel about gassy and horny private school boys. They also unevenly split an obsession over the same girl, Fall, who is sleeping with Julius, to the consternation of Noel, who believes the situation should be reversed.

In terms of inventive wordplay and raw technical prowess, McAdam is the best of the bunch. A shame, then, that McAdam has little use for restraint:

Mm.
Phoo.
Ooo.
Aah.
Mm.
Sss.
Pha.
Sh.
Ga.
Ga.
Gah.
Sss.
Listen to the noises I’m making her make.
Sh.
Ss.
Ga.
God.
God.
J.
Oh!
Listen to that.

No thanks. After the 5,147th one-sentence paragraph, even the most patient of readers would be forgiven for tuning out Julius. It is left up to co-narrator Noel, who is given more of the novel’s real estate, to formulate thoughts and sentences that exceed 140 characters. Possessing a vaguely sinister air, Noel is a reliably unreliable narrator, erudite if occasionally unhinged:

I began to realize the role of a pretty girl in our society. No one attracts our solicitation as much as a pretty girl. She is a vessel of our hopes, we suggest her future, instinctively give her guidance, love to watch her, expect to watch her move through extraordinary spaces. And if something goes wrong, we instinctively imagine her as the victim, a passive player in a beautiful tragedy, a flower which was never meant to survive in our bitter soil. But what we hate to acknowledge is her volition. That a pretty girl should have agency or choice. It’s repugnant to think she could choose to do wrong.

The portions of Fall voiced by Noel are smart stranger certified. “Unimaginable disappointments had filled her body like water from a hose,” Noel observes of a former classmate 10 years after graduation, “and there she was, looking swollen and red behind the register of a store selling cigarettes and unnecessary treats.” The Julius material is another matter.

McAdam’s debut novel, Some Great Thing, established his talent in a clear and unambiguous manner. The Globe’s review of that book, however, contained an eerie premonition courtesy of T. F. Rigelhof:

McAdam is self-indulgent and indulged by his editor: There’s a false start that makes the first 20 pages dispensable, and there are longeurs in Struther’s amatory adventures. But Some Great Thing is as smart, as wickedly funny, as unexpected and as good as a couple of the very best of the Giller Prize-winners.

I agree with Rigelhof, even though I find words like “longeurs” and “amatory” to be pretentious, if not self-indulgent. But McAdam, instead of heeding this wrist-slap, decided to make Fall even more profligate:

I kiss her.
We bang teeth and I’m not gonna come.
Sorry she says.
Tongues tell secret stories she told me.
That’s my cock.
I hope she thinks it’s big.
Hoa she says.
I want to hurt her and love her, o god how good does that feel I’ve gotta tell someone.
Her panties are red and Christmas is coming and wet red velvet all over the house, it’s so SECRET and BEAUTIFUL how wet she is, I love that she’s let me touch her.
Hoa god.
Tongues.

Yuck. And yet some of this jackrabbit prose stuck with me long afterward, as tough as it was to endure at the time. Conveying teenage love-slash-lust-slash-infatuation in a fresh way is a formidable challenge, but McAdam has found a way to make it new. This is no small thing – in fact, it is some great thing. But this breakthrough comes at a cost, and McAdam has no compulsions about EJACULATING gobs of ink across the page until it STINGS the reader’s eyes. And this is neither BEAUTIFUL, nor GILLER-WORTHY.

Gah.

***

I recall zero farts in The Winter Vault, which is not to say the novel doesn’t stink. But its waft is a sophisticated, multi-note, artisanal assault. Cunnilingus according to Anne Michaels goes something like this: “His hand on his wife in the place their child would some day open her, where his mouth had already so often spoken to her, as if he could take the child’s name into his mouth from her body.”

That’s memorable writing. Memorably bad. And damagingly unerotic. Most men will undoubtedly require these words surgically removed from their brain before ever being able to contemplate another muff dive.

Anne Michaels lives in “Poetryworld” according to Adair Brouwer’s review in Quill & Quire, “a hermetic, overperfumed dimension in which characters start out as sensitive, artistic, professorial, and tasteful, and then become even more so.” CNQ is pleased to offer a brief land excursion through Poetryworld at no additional charge:

“Each river has its own distinct recipe for water.”

“How can place enter our skin this way, down into the very verb of us?”

“Exhaustion that had penetrated him so deeply it was almost a smell.”

“When she stepped into the invisible water, it was like stepping into a voice.”

“Everything we do is false consolation, said Lucjan. Or to put it another way, any consolation is true.”

Reading The Winter Vault reminded me of Toronto music journalist Carl Wilson and his book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Ostensibly a 161-page review of a Celine Dion album (the one with “My Heart Will Go On”), Let’s Talk About Love is really about Wilson interrogating his aesthetic preferences with the knowledge that we define taste as much through negation as affirmation. (It’s not enough, in other words, to praise Michael Turner. I must, in the next breath, also snub Anne Michaels.)

While not a fan of Dion, Wilson sees no point in ending up where he started in terms of his criticism. As he writes in the conclusion, “What counted in the end was to give ‘Let’s Talk About Love’ a sympathetic hearing, to credit that others find it lovable and ask what that can tell me about music (or globalism, or sentimentality) in general.”

I tried to bring the same spirit to my task. And while The Winter Vault did not make me an Anne Michaels fan, it’s instructive to engage with the type of writing that a significant demographic considers the apex of literary-ness. Whatever the Celine Dion equivalent of a five-octave range is to writing, Michaels possesses it. But technical prowess is not sufficient, and the best critique is contained within the novel itself, like the horror movie cliché of the babysitter realizing the menacing telephone call is coming from inside the house:

My father could really draw, he had such a brilliant hand. […] But when he tried to paint landscapes, my mother used to say . . . there was something missing, something he could never capture – they weren’t breathing somehow, is what she would say; there was no oxygen, no wind in his landscapes, as if they were under glass.

The Winter Vault is dense, suffocating. It’s a history of the Aswan Dam, repainted with poetics and burdened by loss. So strong is the running theme of negation (“How much of our not noticing is a kind of relief”), so all-pervasive are the physical and emotional ruins that Michaels eventually slips into unintentional self-parody: “I met my husband on a river too, thought Jean. Though it was not frozen. And contained no water. And perhaps was no longer a river.”

An aphorismic lacquer is applied to most every page, an impervious assemblage of ponderous ponderings that Michael’s editor was unable or unwilling to modify. I defer to the literary criticism contained in Nathan Whitlock’s debut novel A Week of This: “This book wasn’t simply too smart for her, it was condescending, and for that there was no forgiveness.”

Yet when Michaels does depart Poetryworld, even momentarily, her prose floats off the page. Here is a description of the Stray Dogs, a jazz orchestra comprised of old Polish men, playing a dirge:

It tormented the air with its clockwork irregularity, a mechanical breakdown of stops and starts, notes grinding, grating, surging, limping. It was the music of revellers too old to be staying out all night, too dwindled to walk another step. Impatient and sad. A tonal meagerness.

I have nothing other than a checkmark beside this passage. The same goes for this:

How many one-minute love affairs these old men had enjoyed, full, not of simple lust, but of complicated passion and promise, and never enacted, not so much as a wink, so there was never the burden of an unhappy ending.

The rarity of this type of writing in The Winter Vault is unfortunate. Most of the book is glued into place with ornate metaphors, like a frozen river with a distinct recipe for entering the very verb of our false consolation. If that is the pinnacle of Canadian literary excellence, then I want no part of your Giller revolution.

But I like this novel, said the Globe’s John Barber to the rest of the roundtable. Though it contains no narrative arc. And perhaps is no longer a novel.

***

To mangle Tolstoy, the four Giller shortlisted novels already discussed make me unhappy each in their own special way, while good novels are generally all alike – a watchmaker’s eye for sentence construction, crisp dialogue, compelling characters and a sprinkle of invisible magic that is hard to describe and even harder to create. The Golden Mean, a novel about Aristotle, is not flawless, but is close enough not to matter. There’s a bit of clunky exposition on the third and fourth pages of the novel, a handful of anachronisms (atoms, dandy) and an unfortunate, punny word choice on page 51 (“he was at his softest with a labouring woman, speaking gently, cajoling but not babying”).

But excepting these minor blemishes, this is a book of checkmarks. Multiple checkmarks on some pages. I will admit a possible lapse in critical judgment given that Lyon is the only author on the shortlist to have written a book I enjoyed reading. But after the grim duty of reading the other four Giller nominees, I was certainly owed some pleasure of the text. “A more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment,” argues Wilson in Let’s Talk About Love, “with all its messiness and private soul tremors – to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare.”

It’s a great suggestion, although tougher than it sounds. My best attempt at articulating some private soul tremors is: The Golden Mean is good. Really, really good. So rather than have me fumble further, read this instead:

Something lands on the table between us: the ball of rags the actors used for Pentheus’s head. It’s come unwound, trailing a rag-tail like a shooting star. The grubby, soft white bundle lands almost soundlessly, not even overturning our cups. The paint on it, eyes and mouth and some pinky gore, is smudged like a child’s drawing.
“That wouldn’t scare anyone.” The boy steps from the shadows. I wonder how long he’s been listening to us.
“It’s you, is it?” Carolus winks at me. “Monkey. What would scare us, then.”
The boy looks up at the ceiling. “A real head,” he says.
Childish bravado, but Carolus is nodding, eyebrows raised. A show of seriousness; I’ll play along.
“And where would I get one?” the director says.
The boy looks blank, as though the question is so stupid he wonders if he’s missing something. “Anywhere.”

As I mentioned before: really, really good.

My fear going in was that Lyon had decided to write a pointless historical novel in order to reach a broader audience. Instead she’s managed to jump 2000 years or so into the past and create something more contemporary than anything else on the shortlist. (Call me uncultured and uncouth, but it helps that everyone in the novel swears almost as much as the characters on the TV show Deadwood.)

Evidence of the smart stranger is everywhere in The Golden Mean. Lyon’s confidence, intention and compression of thought snaps off every sentence and paragraph:

“It seems to fall from nowhere, bits of pure colourlessness peeled off from the sky and drifting down, thicker now.”

“She smiles pacifically, with an infant’s mild aristocracy.”

I should, however, acknowledge that almost any idiot can isolate good and bad sentences in a novel. That’s not literary criticism – it’s a nattering algorithm of prim self-satisfaction. Playing gotcha with Michaels or Echlin or McAdam or MacIntyre leads nowhere – even Nabokov wrote the occasional clunker. My larger concern is that time or financial considerations are preventing editors from doing their job to the best of their abilities. When fewer editors are being asked to churn out more books (most of which will never earn back their advances) there is little incentive to provide the Gordon Lish treatment. When a non-editor like myself can identify serious overall problems with this shortlist, an industry reboot appears necessary.

“The Giller Prize nomination for Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game has generated huge buzz for the first-time novelist, but also shone a spotlight on typos in his book.” That’s according to a CBC Arts article from November 2006. Hage was not the only shortlisted author to suffer from shoddy editing that year, according to CBC: “Critics have also pointed out grammatical errors in Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.”

Never mind wailing about smart strangers when basic speeling mistooks aren’t being caught.

***

If it is somehow not clear by this point, I think The Golden Mean deserved to win the 2009 Giller. Not only because, sentence by sentence, it has the best writing of the five, but because awarding Lyon the Giller at this point in her career makes sense and would help Canadian literature as a whole.

In her 2008 book Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton spends an entire chapter exploring the semi-notorious Turner Prize for contemporary art. As she puts it, “The Turner Prize, like any award that aims to stand for something coherent, needs to be conferred at the right time.” Given that Lyon began with Oxygen (a collection of short stories), then published The Best Thing For You (a collection of three novellas) and now The Golden Mean (her first novel) one can make a rudimentary argument that it’s the right time for Lyon. As Thornton writes:

The Turner Prize honors artists on the cusp between what the art world would call “late emergent” and “early midcareer.” Lifetime achievement awards present little drama, as they can’t go seriously wrong, whereas prizes that recognize promise in very young artists offer less excitement because the stakes are so small.

Doesn’t this sound better than the current Giller strategy of not having a coherent mandate? Putting past winners like Vincent Lam and Linden MacIntyre on the same shelf as Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler is to pair matter with anti-matter. Since there’s no such thing as the single best book written in Canada in a given year, why not instead select an author who could help inspire other authors to produce novels and short stories that move beyond the narrow fixations of what Aritha van Herk calls “our shared Canadian conundrum.” It pains me to admit this, but given its prominence, recalibrating the Giller would do more to improve literary culture in this country than smug little essays like mine. The Golden Mean might not quite be an axe for the frozen sea of CanLit, but it’s an excellent start.

Until then, I’ll continue to sigh. I’d be even more depressed if Lyon hadn’t won the Writer’s Trust award for fiction. Near suicidal if Anne Michaels had triumphed.

“It’s not really a novel and that’s what I like about it,” said the Globe’s John Barber about The Winter Vault. “We don’t need a narrative arc.”

You’re wrong Mr. Barber. We need a narrative arc. We deserve a narrative arc. And while The Bishop’s Man is unworthy of the Giller, it does contain a plot. Given the tyranny of earthy and lyrical CanLit over the past few decades, this represents, if not a happy ending, then at least a meager degree of progress.

Tags: Canlit, Scotiabank Giller Prize

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Current Issue, Featured Articles, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.