Alice Munro, photo by Derek Shapton

Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters.

She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.

“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable “local” poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.

That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is enormous. Munro’s telling extends to roughly 9,000 words which she splits up into six numbered sections. Each section begins with an epigraph, a four or five-line stanza from one of Meda’s poems. The chronology of the text extends from 1840, the year Meda was born, to the mid-1980s when the story was written (a first-person narrator, someone like Alice Munro herself, tells the story from the notional present). But the crucial events of the story take place over a weekend in August, 1879.

The first section of text deals, essay-like, with Meda’s slim volume of poems; section II describes her little southern Ontario town in 1879; section III introduces the widower Jarvis Poulter and his half-hearted interest in Meda; in the fourth section, Meda wakes to the sound of wailing and fighting in the backyard, summons Jarvis and unmans him, so to speak, with a show of fluttery weakness; in the fifth section, she gets stoned, and leaves the note pinned to her front door, rejecting Poulter’s sudden romantic overture; and section VI is aftermath: Meda’s 1903 obituary and the authorial narrator’s ruminations on rescuing the experience of the past. The main action is concentrated in two of the six sections; the first two sections read like essays; and the last section contains two obituaries and some paragraphs of narrator reflection rooted in the present, the time of writing.

By “main action” I mean plot, a structure of desire and resistance (conflict) in which the same desire and the same resistance meet in a series of actions (events). Because her story organization is heterodox, Alice Munro is almost always precise and transparent in terms of her desire-resistance patterns. The first plot event in “Meneseteung” is a composite of Jarvis’s half-hearted courtship described in the third section. Meda’s concrete desire is enunciated in the following sentences:

[My italics] And she is thinking of him. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much, she doesn’t want to make a fool of herself. She would like a signal.

The notion of what this signal might be is refined a few lines later.

Nor does he call for her, and walk with her to church on Sunday mornings. That would be a declaration.

In section IV, at the climax of the Sunday morning scene with the drunk woman behind Meda’s house, in a burst of (comic) Canadian machismo, Jarvis gives her the signal she has been waiting for.

He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair – prematurely gray but thick and soft – her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?
“I will call on you later,” he says to her. “I will walk with you to church.”

However at this stage even Meda’s body is telling her that this is no longer the signal that she wants; in section V, she rushes away from Jarvis to the privy, then leaves a note on the door politely rejecting his offer. The accent on the word “signal” has shifted; Meda still wants a signal but of a different kind. When it comes, the sign is inside her own heart. Thus the plot sequence is completed when, in a drugged dream-state, she looks into the “river of her mind” and imagines the crotched roses in her table cloth floating.

They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crotched roses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves, does seem to her so admirable.
A hopeful sign.

How does Munro make this heterodox structure work? So much preamble and aftermath, the plot condensed into a narrow band of text? The answer lies in the way she deploys, develops, elaborates, and ramifies basic structural devices and the way she uses this elaboration to create rhythms, rhymes, reminders, echoes, antagonisms, under-meanings, and semantic loops – action and drama at the level of text and syntax. She uses resonating structures so that various parts of the text echo off each other. She uses a complex point of view structure to create variety and contrast in the types of text threaded through the narrative (and thus a variety of perspectives). She dances with time. She creates action, conflict, and emotion even in those parts of the story that are not directly relating plot. In other words, the setup, backfill, and aftermath are more than setup, backfill, and aftermath; the essays are not just essays; they are written into the text as what I call ancillary devices, devices for elaborating, extending, complicating, and repeating aspects of the main plot structure of the story. While they do add information and explanation, I suspect their real function is to create complex rhythmic and aesthetic effects which make the story grander and yet far more ironic than any mere summary can intimate.

Take that elusive point of view, for instance. Unstudied readers tend to think of point of view as consistent and monolithic. They barely give it a second thought. Munro explodes the notion of consistent point of view. The whole story is told by a first person narrator who comes into the text three times. The first mention occurs glancingly in the second paragraph (“. . . that makes me see . . .”), the second occurs more emphatically in a one-sentence paragraph in section II (“I read about that life in the Vidette.”) and the third, most insistently, through the final paragraphs of section VI, each beginning with “I.” The notional setup here is that the authorial narrator, someone like Alice Munro, has researched Meda’s life, read the local newspaper, read Meda’s poems, visited the family graves, and is writing the story.

However most of the story is written in a fluid third person, that first person authorial narrator transforming into the objective observer describing Meda’s book of poems and the wry interpreter of the village newspaper the Vidette (“This kind of thing pops up in the Vidette all the time. May they surmise, and is this courting?”) while here and there modulating into a third person plural corporate point of view (the townspeople) and finally into a close third person single character point of view focused very tightly on Meda (and once or twice, even in Jarvis Poulter’s mind). But even the third person plural structure has gradations of attack. It shifts from strict synopses of the Vidette to third person plural (“People talk about . . .” “All he has told them . . .”) and finally to a group interior monologue, a variation of free indirect discourse (“Anyway, it’s five years since her book was published, so perhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father encouraging her?”). It’s lovely to watch Munro’s structural segues. Here’s an example of a shift from third plural to third singular in three sentences:

Everyone takes it for granted that Almeda Roth is thinking of Jarvis Poulter as a husband and would say yes if he asked her. And she is thinking of him. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much . . .

This is not to mention the point of view shifts involved in the inter-textual play of narrative and quotation that is one of Munro’s hallmark devices. In “Meneseteung” she provides Meda’s first person narrative in the form of a quotation from the preface to her book, also quotations from the village paper, the Vidette, including the obituaries of both main characters, and stanzas from Meda’s poems along with a sprinkling of poem titles (the title of the story is a reference to the title of one of the poems). Quotation is a device for varying point of view within a text, not to be overlooked just because, on one level, it is so obvious.

Nor does it take into account another favourite Munro device, something I call the device of imaginative reconstruction: this refers to a moment in the text when the point of view shifts into a purely hypothetical or imagined mode and relates events that may or may not have happened at all.

Instead of calling for her and walking her to church, Jarvis Poulter might make another, more venturesome declaration. He could hire a horse and take her for a drive out to the country. If he did this, she would be both glad and sorry . . .

These sentences introduce a long paragraph of narrative summary of an event between Meda and Jarvis that never takes place. The subjunctive verbs “might” and “could” provide the syntactic frame.

Another example occurs when the authorial narrator describes Jarvis Poulter for the first time. Lacking photographs, she imagines what he looks like in a series of rhetorical questions (the syntactic frame device), the question marks indicating the purely speculative quality of the details which nevertheless enter the reader’s mind as story-fact.

This is a decent citizen, prosperous: a tall – slightly paunchy? – man in a dark suit with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked with gray. A severe and self-possessed air, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow?

The author uses the device of imaginative reconstruction to insert pictures (fictions within fiction) in the reader’s mind, modulating in and out of strong narrative authority using grammar (framing hypothetical text syntactically; syntactic framing is a device you often see in Munro stories).

The effect of these point of view shifts, the constant fluidity of structure, is to create a relativity machine within the text, the beat of authority skipping from sentence to sentence, more or less subverting what has gone before. This is action at the level of point of view, conflict at the level of discourse; no one is giving the conclusive picture; the work of art is not a reality but a domain of shifting and competing relations. Vladimir Nabokov says somewhere that we read with our spines; like him, I am a straight materialist when it comes to the effect of reading on the reader. Being forced to play the scales, to shift from point of view to point of view, causes fizz in the networks, causes the brain, suddenly, to be more alive in ways that are at once disconcerting, pleasurable, and illuminating.

The same goes for the way Munro manipulates and elaborates her time structure. In every story, there is an objective time scale that is chronological and runs from the very first event indicated within the text to the very last, and, in contrast, there is the way the author actually deploys time in the narrative (what I think of as the time flow). In “Meneseteung” Munro controls time with surgical precision. The objective chronology runs from 1840, when Meda is born, to the mid-1980s when the story was written. Munro carefully dates the major events in between. 1865, Meda’s photograph taken. 1873, Meda’s book published. August, 1879, the incident with Jarvis and the drunk woman. 1903, Meda dies. By calculations based on internal evidence (e.g. “My sister was eleven and my brother nine.”) we obtain more dates. 1854, Meda’s family moves from Kingston to the frontier village. 1857, her two younger siblings die of a prevalent fever. 1860, her mother dies. 1872, her father dies. These dates, in themselves, begin to tell a story.

But time in a story never flows in a straight line; it loops and eddies and suddenly compresses in a spasm of action then stretches out again. “Meneseteung,” for example, begins in the authorial present with a description of Meda’s book of poems as if held in the narrator’s hands (“Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover.”), then swoops back to the 1870s with a quote from the Vidette and then, more precisely, dates when the book was written and when the author’s photograph was taken. In this first paragraph, Munro is teaching us to read the time shifts that characterize much of the text that follows.

In the second paragraph, through the photo, we see Meda in 1865. In the third paragraph, Munro’s narrator quotes from Meda’s preface (written prior to 1873) which loops dizzyingly through the whole of Meda’s life from 1840 to 1873. The last few paragraphs of this first section summarize individual poems that limn events in Meda’s life and, though undated, clearly loop back over the life again (Meda playing games with her brother and sister, the children making snow angels, Meda visiting the family graves). Each time these poems or events are referenced in the text (including those stanzas used as epigraphs), they send the reader’s mind (remind the reader) back to an earlier time. This reminding creates a sort of temporal jazz; the reader’s mind is constantly dashing from context to some other moment and simultaneously referring to that objective chronology so the reader can gauge the relationship between the two.

In terms of time flow, Munro often uses a lovely little device I call the then/now construction, a grammatical structure that juxtaposes two moments in such a way as to imply change (story) over time. Sometimes authors use the words “then” and “now,” and sometimes the words are only implied. Here is a masterful example of a then/now with intervening moments deftly added (as technique, it’s breathtaking).

[my italics and bracket notes] In 1879 [then], Almeda Roth was still living in the house at the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets, the house her father had built for his family [ca. 1854]. The house is there today [now, ca. 1985]: the manager of the liquor store lives in it. It’s covered with aluminum siding; a closed-in porch has replaced the veranda [then, 1879]. The woodshed, the fence, the gates, the privy, the barn – all these are gone [now, 1985]. A photograph taken in the eighteen-eighties [then, 1880s] shows them all in place. The house and fence look a little shabby, in need of paint . . . No big shade tree is in sight, and, in fact, the tall elms that overshadowed the town until the nineteen-fifties [1950s], as well as the maples that shade it now [now obviously, 1985] are skinny young trees [then, 1880s] . . .

Note especially the final arabesque flurry which swoops the reader from 1885 to 1955 to 1985 and back to 1885 in less than one sentence. As with those bravura point of view shifts, I am not sure the general reader notices this kind of authorial stick-handling, though, again, I suspect it has the same neural effect on the brain as doing loop-de-loops in a biplane without a seatbelt (today, I like the word “fizz”). But Munro’s precise and adamantine control assures the reader that the story’s temporal matrix is as consistent and reliable as a ticking clock.

The time structures I’ve mentioned so far have little to do with the hoary ideas of scene and summary in which time is conceived of as being either slowed and drawn out (scene) or speeded up as in fast-forwarding (summary). If you think of summary as nothing but a plodding rehearsal of time past, you miss the point of the phantasmagoric loops and eddies in a narrative like “Meneseteung.” Munro does speed up time, covering over a hundred and forty years in a few pages. But the techniques she deploys do more than just fill in the blanks; she forces the reader to experience the passage of time, to become conscious of change, of mutability, and to taste the ironic aspect of Death that dogs all history.

Munro does, of course, slow the moment; in fact, the first four sections of the story create the effect of a step-by-step deceleration (somewhat paralleling the progressive tightening of the point of view) until we reach the fourth section which begins with Meda shocked awake on a hot August Saturday night by the drunken rumpus in the back street behind her house. She sleeps, then wakes on Sunday morning and discovers the body and runs for help. The dialogue scene that follows, between Jarvis, Meda and the resuscitated drunk, is the longest in the story, a climax of imagined horror – sordid, shocking, surprising (and somehow more real because it’s sordid, shocking, and surprising), and hilarious. The drunken woman is awful, an image of filth, poverty, and drunken animal sexuality (somehow this phrase gives animals a bad name). Jarvis is upright, bourgeois, masculine, and despicable. Meda is in shock; she has to use the outhouse. Then suddenly Jarvis is aroused. He finally sees Meda as a possible sex object and marriage option. He announces that he will walk her to church. (The fact that Alice Munro comprehends and can convey the complex and deeply comic conditions of male arousal in Jarvis’s case alone justifies calling her a genius in my books.)

This scene is the notional climax of the story, but Munro is a master of syncopation, and, besides, the story isn’t about Jarvis Poulter’s arousal. In this scene, Meda gets what the text has told us she wants (“She would like a signal.”), but by this stage she realizes she doesn’t want it (a man and a man’s reality), and so in the fifth section of the story she must escape from the ogre of her author’s creation. In the fifth section, time speeds up slightly; a whole day passes in a series of small dreamy scenes and snippets, mostly Meda’s actions and thoughts as she gets more and more stoned on nerve medicine, skillfully punctuated by a stream of minute domestic acts, external impressions, and time markers.

As soon as Jarvis Poulter has gone . . . She closes . . . she writes [and leaves a note for Jarvis on the door] . . . She sticks . . . She locks . . . she builds a fire . . . She boils water . . . several dark drops of nerve medicine . . . She is still sitting there when the horses start to go by on the way to church, stirring up clouds of dust. The roads will be getting hot as ashes [Jarvis comes and goes from the veranda] . . . Then the clock in the hall strikes twelve and an hour has passed . . . . The house is getting hot. She drinks more tea and adds more medicine . . . She doesn’t leave the room until dusk, when she goes out to the privy again . . .

The climax of this fifth section, the true climax of the story, is what takes place in Meda’s mind as she sits in her dining room sipping laudanum and tea after Jarvis has retreated from the veranda. The relevant text begins with Meda looking out (“Her surroundings – some of her surroundings – in the dining room are these . . .”), but then she peers inward and she is stoned and what floods the page is an intense and surreal confluence (the story is named for a river, after all, and the thoughts are motivated by emotional shock, hormones, opium, and poetry) of physical detail, image, memory, and theme that is at once the secret, hidden life of Almeda Roth and a bravura meditation on life, poetry, the self, language, and metaphysics.

It’s fascinating to realize that this climactic confluence is not so much an action on a plot line as an eruption of Meda’s inner experience provoked by the plot. And what it amounts to in terms of story construction is an intersection of various images, motifs, and patterns already precisely adumbrated in the text. Munro seems to realize that the inner life of a man or a woman is also a text, that in our secret hearts we are talking to ourselves, muttering, declaiming; at its deepest point this is our experience of experience. In this case, she constructs her story so that the inner text of Meda’s heart cunningly reflects and pulls together the outer text of the story. Here we re-discover the old truth that repetition is the heart of art.

Take Meda’s poems. They are not part of the surface drama of the story. They were written long before she meets Jarvis Poulter. They are contained in a book which we glimpse (“Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover.”) in the first line of the story (“Offerings, the book is called.”) The first section of the story further contains three paragraphs of quotation from Meda’s preface to the book and then a list of poems: “Children at Their Games,” “The Gypsy Fair,” “A Visit to My Family,” “Angels in the Snow,” “Champlain at the Mouth of the Meneseteung,” etc. The poem titles pick up family background motifs just mentioned in the prefatory material (brother and sister, their deaths, etc.). The river name Meneseteung repeats the title of the story. In the next seven paragraphs, Munro glosses each of the listed poems, nailing the content to an experience from Meda’s life (again, brother and sister, their deaths). The title of the Meneseteung poem is repeated and glossed: “This poem celebrates the popular, untrue belief that the explorer sailed down the eastern shore of Lake Huron and landed at the mouth of the major river.” And, of course, we remember that each of these poems is again referenced in the epigraphs that begin the story sections (it’s not difficult to puzzle out which stanza comes from which poem). At this stage, the astute reader realizes that he is witnessing the construction of a major image pattern, part of the organization of the story as a whole, a vehicle for meaning and aesthetic effect (rhythm, cohesion), that is also somehow separate from the dramatic action of the story.

Image (or word) patterns begin with mere repetition, accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary branch patterns, and, finally, discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches in what I call tie-in lines. Often, as in this case, the primary image pattern is tipped in the story title, a further sign that the image pattern controls development and meaning within the text (in a sense, the title tells us the story is more about the image than the plot). In “Meneseteung,” we have something faintly reminiscent of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, though here the work of art being decoded as an element of the meaning of the whole is not a painting or a statue but a book of poems. The words “Meneseteung,” “river,” “book,” “poem,” and “poet” appear as a branched constellation at the center of the story “Meneseteung.”

Once you begin to tease apart the branching patterns and spot the relevant associations, some fascinating story elements begin to appear. Given the title (and the way things work out in the fifth section), “Meneseteung” is the root pattern; “Meneseteung” is a river, a poem in a book, a reference to a popular but mistaken historical belief, the title of a story. “Book” is mentioned in the first line of the story and leads along a wonderful line of “bookishness,” paternal influence and popular prejudice:

[my italics] . . . preface to her book, “my father . . . My father was a harness-maker by trade, but a cultivated man who could quote by heart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the writings of Edmund Burke . . .”

But why was she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years . . . All that reading and poetry – it seemed more of a drawback, a barrier, an obsession, in the young girl than in the middle-aged woman, who needed something, after all, to fill her time. Anyway, it’s five years since her book was published, so perhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father, encouraging her?

Note how the image accumulates a precise list of associations (linked words) and also, how, depending on point of view, the list varies: what Meda sees as “cultivated” the town sees as “proud” and “bookish.” Word lists like this are a very common structure in Alice Munro stories, and, as in this instance, she often develops contrasting words lists (Meda’s list of associations with books and poetry v. the town’s list; Meda’s list of geographical associations v. Jarvis’s list; words associated with the proper part of town along Dufferin Street v. words associated with the poor part of town along Pearl Street – of course, Meda’s house sits at the corner of Dufferin and Pearl). And the effect of these branching image patterns and their associated (conflict-driven) word lists is an extremely complicated and dense cris-cross matrix of interconnected references that echo in the reader’s mind and construct a disciplined and precise semblance of experience.

This matrix of cross-reference is all the more alive, as it were, because it is inscribed with conflict; the competing points of view strive for interpretive primacy – at the end of the story which list of associations will own the image? This conflict plays out in the reader’s mind, but, more significantly, it plays out in Meda’s mind and is embodied, through story action, in her near acceptance of Jarvis Poulter as a suitor. This is Alice Munro’s version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of the novel as a battle of discourses, which is also a battle to subvert some old or conventional or authoritative discourse. In “Meneseteung,” Meda Roth battles for the meaning of the book, of poetry, of her father, of the land, and of her self against the popular, conventional discourse of the townspeople and the Vidette and against the bourgeois male, commercial discourse of Jarvis Poulter.

[my italics] He could hire a horse and take her for a drive out to the country. If he did this, she would be both glad and sorry. Glad to be beside him, driven by him, receiving this attention from him in front of the world. And sorry to have the countryside removed from her – filmed over, in a way, by his talk and his preoccupations. The countryside that she has written about in her poems actually takes diligence and determination to see.

In this passage, Meda and Jarvis compete over who will get to describe the “countryside.” Consciousness is a text; the words you use colour your experience. It takes diligence, determination, and poetry to recover experience from the conventional. And the word “countryside” here is not an isolate; Munro has carefully threaded landscape and countryside through the story as a branch of the poem-book-Meneseteung pattern. It begins in the first section with that poem “The Passing of the Old Forest” glossed as “a list of all the trees – their names, appearance, and uses – that were cut down in the original forest . . .” which later becomes (reflecting Jarvis’s values) “[a] raw countryside just wrenched from the forest . . .”

[my italics] The meandering creeks have been straightened, turned into ditches . . . The trees have all been cleared back to woodlots. And the woodlots are all second growth . . . the grand barns that are to dominate the countryside for the next hundred years are just beginning to be built –

In truth, everywhere you look in an Alice Munro story there is conflict and change. No word sits by itself; instead, each word vibrates in a dozen relationships with other words, repeating, competing, dominating, wrenching, transforming, shading, and subverting.

The moment of climax for all this comes, as I say, not with Jarvis’s priapic epiphany (I use the word ironically) and sudden access of ardour, nor when the poetess rejects him, but when Meda locks herself in her house and gets stoned. At this point she shuts out the discourse of the conventional Others (Jarvis, the town) and attends first to her surroundings which seem “charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter.” Note the word “flow” because presently the “glowing and swelling” of things begin to “suggest words,” and the words begin to suggest “Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem.” And that one poem will contain all the poems Meda has written and all the events of the story.

Here Munro inserts a classic rehearsal device, a piece of text in which previous events are recapitulated, the story rehearsed (a repetitive structure that has the effect of reminding the reader of the salient points and also giving a kind of rhythmic kick that announces the approaching end of the narrative):

[my italics and bracket notes] . . . one very great poem that will contain everything . . . Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead children at twilight – that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter’s boot and the plucked chicken haunch and its blue-black flower. Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies . . . [here Munro inserts some lines on Meda’s problematic conventional alternatives for dramatic effect, also a reference to grape jelly, another image pattern that has some sly connection with menstruation – there is no end to this] . . . She has to think of so many things at once – Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the earth . . .

Munro follows the rehearsal of events with a new twist on the things-to- words-to-poems-to-everything-in-one- poem pattern. It’s an amazing passage, the climax of the story’s linguistic acceleration, the electrical charge, transferred along the image lines (networks) from the very beginning of the story, from the title, in fact, to this point. Technically, it’s a simple modulation of the image pattern that starts with the word “channel” used as a double figure; first, as a conventional metaphor (as in “channeling my energy”), and, second, as a pun. “Channel” has the magical effect of turning the poem into a river, the Meneseteung, a mighty poem-river, an image of all things, as it were, even the story itself (it is the title, after all). And then the “river” turns figurative and becomes “the river of her mind.”

[my italics] All this can be borne only if it is channeled into a poem, and the word “channeled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be – “The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact, it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem – with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees . . . Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind . . .

This is the confluence of image patterns, the point at which the battle of discourses ceases and Meda performs the mythic rite of the naming of experience; she reclaims forever her self, her poems, and her countryside.

What Alice Munro reads, I have no idea. But the philosophy, the theory, behind her plots and patterns is clear, complex, and very contemporary. As you might expect from a writer so at home in language, the mind is a text, experience a flow of words. The struggle within every story, the struggle for identity, is always a battle for the word, the authority to give names. Perhaps all writers think this way in their hearts. And whatever is real beyond the words is problematic. In fact, it doesn’t matter. All the devices I have discussed so far in relation to this story – fluid point of view, time flow, and image patterning as deployed by Munro – serve only to relativize the object, make the object a moment of contest, never at rest. Every word in “Meneseteung” is restless and alive. And even at the point of confluence, when Meda lets herself sink into the river of her mind – Meneseteung – Alice Munro is there with her spade, ready to turn the earth of the story one more time.

In the last section of the story, Munro jumps ahead twenty-four years to 1903; the battle of discourses cranks up again; she quotes Meda’s obituary in the Vidette:

[my italics] . . . the mind of this fine person had become somewhat clouded and her behaviour, in consequence, somewhat rash and unusual. Her attention to decorum and to the care and adornment of her person had suffered, to the degree that she had become, in the eyes of those mindful of her former pride and daintiness, a familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun.

Meda is dead and the townspeople get the final word as to her “mind.” There are two things to notice here. First, Munro is extending the competing patterns already figured into the text beyond the climax; this is an example of her style of syncopation – she always adds a beat at the end of the phrase, always undercuts the conclusion. In 1879, subjectively, Meda may have won the war, but from a different point of view (in Munro stories, there is always another point of view), she merely becomes an eccentric figure of fun. In terms of the story, the state of her “mind” remains in play.

Second, this is also an example of a different sort of repetition, what I call book-ending (as in book-ends or brackets), which is also a sort of structural epanalepsis. The words of the obituary echo, with emphasis, sentiments expressed in the opening paragraph of the story:

The local paper, the Vidette, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex – or for their predictable conjuncture.

The smug condescension dripping from those quotation marks encode the story from beginning to end with an attitude of amused dismissiveness. Being a “poetess” and unmarried, Meda never achieves a position of significance within her community; her experience never recognized as a legitimate experience.

At this point the battle for Meda’s mind and the soul of the story seems lost. Note that we have gone far beyond the plot interest here; Meda has escaped Jarvis’s attentions; both characters are dead; but the conflict of patterns and discourses continues. This is a fascinating moment: our concern is no longer with the characters; at this point we are more interested in the battle of discourses than we are in how the plot action turned out. We want to know what conclusion the story comes to – about Meda, Meda’s mind and, ultimately, about itself.

Munro nails Meda’s descent on the social scale of significance with another repetition – so pretty a thing I can’t bear not mentioning it. In the second section of the story, that description of Meda’s town, Munro tells the story of Queen Aggie, “an old woman, a drunk” whom the village boys would harass, riding her around in a wheelbarrow (oh, the wheelbarrow pattern!) and dumping her into a ditch to sober up. Queen Aggie prefigures the drunken woman in Meda’s backyard in the fourth section, but she also prefigures Meda’s death as described in the Vidette – chased by village louts, the old biddy tumbles into a swamp (the swamp pattern!), catches cold and dies.

The last paragraphs of the story fall to the authorial narrator, Alice Munro’s first-person stand-in, in a sense, the umpire. She looks at the microfilm, hefts the book, visits the cemetery and, with some difficulty, finds Meda’s gravestone.

. . . I began pulling grass and scrabbling in the dirt with my bare hands. Soon I felt the stone and knew that I was right.

We are reminded here that it “takes diligence and determination to see.” As she angles towards her ending, Munro, as her alter ago, muses on what she thinks she knows about Meda Roth, whether anyone else could figure it out, whether it’s even true. But then she thinks:

[my italics] People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off the gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

The phrase “this trickle in time” is gorgeous, the sort of authorial nudge that sets up the hair on the back of your neck. It extends the river-poem-Meneseteung-mind pattern one last step. Nearly the final words of the story, the phrase washes back over the text as a whole, the little repetitive points of contact flashing like streetlights. The passage invites readers to make connections, put things together, and rescue Meda’s experience from the rubbish of conventional judgement. There is this allegorical element in everything Alice Munro writes; she is always teaching readers how to read her stories as she writes them; there are always connections to be made.

The trickle in time is the Meneseteung, the great poem-river of Meda’s mind, rescued from forgetfulness and conventional opinion by the curious narrator (much as Meda has to rescue her own experience from conventional expectation and judgement). The allegory is gentle; the mind is the hero and poet laureate of its own experience. Experience is not a passive act; it takes diligence and determination to identify, name and own the facts of one’s existence. The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants. The result may not be authentic in an objective sense. Munro, true to the flux and flow of her own narrative, is careful to suggest experience thus earned may be faulty. (“I may have got it wrong.”) In a final act of subversion, she seems to say that reality itself is a fiction, that what we rescue with poetry is, well, poetry. As Meda, stoned, watches trippy, animated roses and tombstones, the narrator opines:

She doesn’t mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality, and that is how she knows that she is sane.

McLelland and Stewart, 2009

To say that a given novelist or short story writer’s work is full of “truth” is to risk relinquishing all credibility as a critic or reviewer and to join the ranks of the professionally enthusiastic and unfailingly uncontroversial book talkers who clog most weekend book review sections and lit-themed radio shows, smothering all literature in the same warm, verbal honey.

And to say it about Alice Munro? My God, you might as well follow it up by declaring that Tuscany is “beautiful,” the immigrant owners of a local shop are “charming,” and that twelve-tone compositions “present a real challenge to the listener.”

Munro’s limitations are easily identified and enumerated. Even people who’ve only read one or two of her stories – maybe for a course on contemporary CanLit, or because they wanted to know what all the fuss was about – believe they can spot where her borders lie. She has only ever written short stories (though 1971’s Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of linked stories, has sometimes been taken – and marketed – as a novel). The many dozens of stories she has written appear, on the surface, to vary little in terms of tone or approach or even subject matter (which is usually summed up, a little dismissively, as being the very thing identified in the title of that aforementioned 1971 collection). Her settings are most often small or mid-size communities in Southern Ontario or British Columbia. They are either roughly contemporary or set within a not-too-distant past, though the thematic concerns of the stories don’t seem to change depending on whether they are happening in the Now or the Then. Her stories of the past don’t grapple head-on with huge historical injustices such as slavery or the wiping out of First Nations cultures, and she has yet to set a contemporary tale within the boardrooms of a multinational corporation with a name like CONUNEXT or Global Operating Dynamics. She doesn’t write to expose or explain complex financial and political systems. She isn’t looking to report on some bleeding edge cultural shift or to investigate subcultures. She doesn’t wield the blunt club of satire against deserving cultural villains. She never takes language itself for a run or sabotages her narratives to allow new forms and ideas to emerge from the ruins. Worst of all, the distinct reek of autobiography seeps from many of her stories.

With a writer so closely bounded, so seemingly unambitious, so content to till the same ground over and over in the same way, how can you use so grand and definitive a word as “truth”?

Though it may curse me to a lifetime of middlebrow cooing on the CBC, it can’t be avoided: the one thing that truly is constant throughout Alice Munro’s work – the thing that makes irrelevant all those concerns about too-familiar settings, similar-sounding female narrators, or cultural unhipness – is Truth. To read her best stories is to experience some of the best fiction in the English language. It’s true that there are precious few (if any) bravura sentences, elaborate set-pieces, or startling narrative risks in her work that one could present as evidence to prove this – indeed, Munro’s prose often shrinks down to the level or easy ironies or homespun insights when presented in excerpt form. The greatness of her work lies in its total effect (which puts critics and reviewers at a distinct disadvantage).

All the same, Munro has been publishing for over forty years, and has released over a dozen collections. Even if we are to concede that, yes, she is among the greatest writers of this and the past century, the well must surely be drying up by now.

How is it then, that there is not a single bad story among those collected in 2009’s Too Much Happiness, and more than a few that easily rival her best?

The collection opens with “Dimensions,” about a young woman who frequently, and somewhat clandestinely, travels to the London, Ontario prison to speak to the older husband who, in a fit or rage or pique or something else, killed their three children with his bare hands. In just about anyone else’s hands, this would have been a tale of Dark Obsession or of how Sometimes It’s A Hard World For Small Things, complete with an epigraph from the Old Testament or Johnny Cash or both. In Munro’s hands, it becomes a deeply complex story about desperate human needs that exist outside of love or hate and about the involuntary connections (and disconnections) created by pain and tragedy. How she accomplishes this is just about beyond explication, as the story and its characters grow more mysterious the more we read, though there is never a sense that Munro is engaging in literary obfuscation. We don’t sense the manipulation because Munro is a master of control: even when her tales feel haphazard and breezy, even when we feel we are being given too much incidental colour and too little decisive action, there is almost always a realization (often in retrospect or on a subsequent reading) that everything in a given story is deliberate and perfectly placed and measured.

Munro’s stories are endlessly mysterious not because they are solipsistic, but because they are every bit as expansive and boundless as they are rooted in the particular. Her settings and scenarios seem banal, but reveal vertigo-inducing depths. In “Dimensions,” the woman says she could never forgive her husband, “that terrible person, that isolated and insane person,” but wonders “what was she here for if not at least to listen to him?” This realization does not come upon her as a curse, but as a blessing. The almost mystical effect it has on her would seem ridiculous had not Munro ensured that every detail of her world is felt as real and concrete. It’s a story that, like the best of Flannery O’Connor, is infused with the spirit of a religious parable, while remaining thoroughly encased within the flesh of contemporary realistic short fiction.

The majority of the stories here have the feeling of parable or allegory. It’s surprising, given Munro’s reputation for only writing about small people doing small things in small parts of the country, how many of the stories contain elements of the remarkable or the bizarre. In “Wenlock’s Edge,” a young student befriends a young woman who is in the thrall of a deeply jealous and controlling rich man who likes to have poetry read to him by naked girls. Poetry being read aloud in a highly symbolic manner also appears in “Face,” about a childhood friendship remembered by a retired radio host with a strawberry birthmark covering half his face. A different kind of childhood memory is remembered in “Some Girls,” about a brutal and long-hidden deed carried out by two girls at summer camp.

Giving the outlines of the stories like that risks making them sound like the kind of hackish tales that filled magazines in the decades before Munro first started writing. And she does occasionally risk melodrama here, as in “Free Radicals,” in which an elderly widow must outwit a pathological killer on the run. The story is much neater and more direct than anything else in the collection, and the ending comes close to winking at the reader, but nothing in the story feels false or constructed. At worst, it comes of more like a kind of genre exercise by a literary master than an uncharacteristic slip.

The collection is not without its weaker moments, of course. “Wood,” about a man who must crawl out of a forest after twisting his ankle, has the feel of a Jack London tale of man vs nature and is thoroughly engaging, but peters out by the end. And the book’s title story, a fictionalized retelling of the last few days in the life of Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalesky, feels like the result of a momentary authorial enthusiasm, a mere project rather than a fully realized work of art. The story is not dull or poorly written, but feels oddly inert and literal.

However – and here we get back to the gushing – these few missteps only serve to throw the collection’s best moments into sharper relief, and to remind us that, despite her freakish consistency, Munro does not simply write these stories in her sleep. A story like “Fiction” – a decades-hopping story about the fallout from a broken relationship and the unsettling effect of having one’s less honorable moments converted into, well, fiction – is one of the best Munro has ever written, and great works of art are not the result of mere craftsmanship or of skill learned through repetition. With a story like this, littered with so many of the usual Munro motifs but containing nothing that is remotely stale, the rut that she is often accused of writing in is revealed to be the size of the world.

Munro, like every other literary writer who specializes in short fiction and exhibits an interest in the quotidian, often gets compared to Chekhov. It’s not an invalid comparison, but the real effect of her work is closer to that of Tolstoy. In reading Tolstoy’s fiction, as with Munro’s, there is the feeling that one has not simply witnessed an artistic performance, however excellent, but rather of being possessed by a vision of the world. It’s this effect that marks the difference between very good writers and the Great, between brilliant fictions and the Truth.

I am happiest when I‘m working on a story. Over the years I’ve written a play, a slim volume of poetry, a hockey novel, a nonfiction travel memoir on Ireland, and done some freelance articles on skiing and canoeing. I’m currently working on a novel set in the Wild West and a novel set in Italy. But last spring I took time from those projects to write a futuristic short story for Zsuzsi Gartner’s new dystopian anthology, Darwin’s Bastards. The story is called “The December Astronauts” and is set on the moon.

As the story evolved and came together in bits and pieces, I felt a kind of delirious joy rising at its creation, even though it’s a rather melancholy story.

I’m pleased when work on a novel seems to be going well, but I noted a more palpable reaction when I was jumping into this new story, I sensed a blood happiness while living inside an unknown story on the moon (even though I envision the moon as being like working in Fort MacMurray).

I had the same positive feeling when pulling a very rough excerpt from my Italian novel. Before that I was grumpy about the futile random nature of the book’s material and felt I was getting nowhere.

I decided to treat one piece like a separate story, and I worked it over. That story became “The Troubled English Bride,” a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. It became a much better piece of writing by being singled out, laid under a klieg light, made both shorter and longer, carved up, chopped and channelled into a new creature. The novels are fine, I want them to go out in the world and do well and be content, but they do not induce this kind of glee. The story does it for me. The short form has parameters, and it works for me because of the parameters. Don’t fence me in, the cowhands sing out west, but perhaps I like being confined. I think the story is the most natural form. The American writer Steven Millhauser has called it the realm of perfection and it can be that.

Yet the world sends me other signals, very different signals, that, realm of perfection or not, the story doesn’t sell, the story isn’t wanted on the voyage anymore.

It can be hard to be a story writer now. I’ve bitched about this before in Fiddlehead editorials for Summer Fiction Issues. Agents, publishers, and editors tell their stable of writers to forget writing stories and go for the big book. At the University of New Brunswick we’ve had visiting writers read a story and then say, Don’t tell my agent, she doesn’t want me to spend time on stories. The writers are being jocular, but it’d be a tad funnier if it wasn’t so true. This pressure can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy in the business. They don’t sell, so therefore we won’t sell them.

Neil Smith’s fine collection Bang Crunch was a success and sold globally, but reviews and articles held it up as an exception, an oddity, a book of stories that sells, as it was akin to someone with one leg winning a foot race.

I want to be very clear: I am not against any form, I like them all. Feel free to try a novel or a screenplay or a cookbook, but I hate to hear of active discouragement or censure of one form in favour of another. I hate to hear that you should start with stories, but then move on. Why move on? Some authors write their best stories later in their career. No one told Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor to stop writing stories. They made money on stories and they worked on novels too. I realize that writers want to pay the rent, but it is not impossible to work in several forms.

Many believe that Hemingway’s reputation will rest on his stories, not his novels. And what of Flannery O’Connor? How many pick up her novels? It’s her stories that will prevail. Cheever’s Collected Stories cemented his reputation, not his novels. Add the names William Trevor, Alice Munro, Updike, Joyce, Isaac Babel, Lorrie Moore, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Steven Heighton, Rebecca Rosenblum, Bruno Schulz, Ha Jin, Kate Braverman, Jayne Anne Phillips, Clark Blaise, Denis Johnson, Maile Meloy, Donald Barthelme, and Ray Carver. I could append dozens more. Why denigrate such a rich tradition, such a successful form?

Time’s Arrow may be Martin Amis’s best book and it started as a story and is not much longer than a story, really a novella or long story rather than a long-winded novel. Lydia Davis argues that “shorter pieces have a bigger emotional impact.” Read Steven Millhauser’s brilliant short story, “Flying Carpets.” It’s so good it makes me jealous and it would never work as any other form, other than perhaps a short film, and even that wouldn’t be as fine. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer?” It is perfect as a story, it doesn’t need to be a novel.

But if you invest your time in stories, you are made to feel part of some Legion of the Doomed. I joke with the poet Ross Leckie that short stories are like a car teetering on the edge of a big cliff and that soon we will down there with the poets and 8 tracks, down there with the other wrecked cars.

Maybe the good times will swing back, maybe the salad days will return. Russell Smith, in a recent Globe and Mail column, noted that over the centuries the story has had ups and down in popularity, mentioning the Renaissance and 19th-century Germany. I would add the Roaring Twenties, when short story writers were paid handsomely by many glossy magazines, and I look back fondly to the 1980s, when many magazines paid well for serious fiction, e.g. Esquire, Atlantic, the New Yorker, Playboy, Saturday Night, and prestige publisher such as Vintage, Atlantic, and Penguin signed short story writers and published scores of collections in beautiful editions. I didn’t know how long it would last, but it seemed normal and possible and there was a kind of optimism then about writing that is perhaps lost now.

The problem may be one of surfeit. There are so many books out there now. I think there was far more excitement for a book even in 2000 than there is now, for any book, big name or not. One editor said to me that it’s like we have warehouses of corn, but no one is eating. The bookstores stock millions of books, and we agree that books are good, that literacy is desirable, but how to compete with the crowd, how to make a dent, how to avoid being another return in the truck after a brief stint inside the box store?

This problem of making a dent is related to the problem of promotion, or lack thereof. An editor or publisher has to convince the reps and all the staff at a house that the book has merit and must be sold, and there must be a viable plan. They must really get behind a book, not just toss it out there and hope for a prize or random buzz or wonder if Kindle or the internet will save them. Publishing is the only industry I’ve experienced where most know how to make a widget, but don’t know how to sell the widget.

I don’t believe the form is the trouble. CDs have separate tracks and no one thinks that odd or impossible to market. People download single songs and no one says, Hey, I’d rather have me a fat novel. I think the form is fine. But something has altered. I know that cultures are constantly in flux, people always think there is a crisis, so I don’t want to convey just doom and gloom; instead I feel more anger and puzzlement at the fate of the story, and a perverse stubbornness. I’m going to keep writing stories no matter what they say; my story set on the moon put me over the moon. I had fun with it, but it ain’t always easy. As the old song declares, Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play.

The wild southern writer Barry Hannah was teaching at Iowa when I went to school there. His collection of stories, Airships, was a huge influence on me; it was liberating to see the way he’d mash up a sentence; he made me realize it didn’t have to be noun verb, noun verb. And his language was a weird risky inspiring mix of Elizabethan and cracker. “Testimony of Pilot,” from that book, is a great, great story.

Barry died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi this past March and I saw his obituary in the New York Times. The obit spoke of his novels and his attempt at Hollywood screenplays, but he said he was a short story writer first, a fragmentist, with an imagination calibrated to the short burst. I like that idea, I think I’m calibrated that way and I’m going to keep living by that line from a dead man.

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.

Bishops' Man, Linden MacIntyre, Random House 2009

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.

***

The Disappeared, Kim Echlin, Hamish Hamilton, 2009

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.

Rebecca Rosenblum

Syl had put up pictures of Brian in every room in the house – she had the ones Evan and Angie emailed printed at Blacks because she wanted the baby around all the time, as if he lived in their house instead of so far away. The snapshot in the kitchen was from the boy’s first moments on earth, flushed and scrunched, pink and blue, wailing and naked. Even Laurence could admit he smiled at the little striver whenever he opened the fridge.

Under the gaze of the magneted picture, Syl had been cooking all day. Margarine tubs of stew, lasagna, and taco casserole, labeled in ballpoint on masking tape, were bricked in the freezer, fortifications against her husband’s ruin.

When Laurence finally, slowly came downstairs from the office, Syl was at the counter, chopping vegetables. The room smelled of unseen fruit and sugar. “Get everything done?” She began plopping celery sticks into an orange Tupperware half-full of water.

He sat awkwardly at the kitchen table: left hip canted up, weight on the cane, watching her. “Mainly. Muellers’ dog barked for a while. Got a couple emails to write up tonight.”

“I hate that damn dog. Those boys take advantage of you; you retired so you wouldn’t have to write emails in the evenings.”

Laurence grunted.

Syl sighed. “So there’s celery in the orange and carrots in the blue one, and I’ll do just one salad because that will wilt after the second day . . .”

“The travel agent got back to you?”

“It’s booked.” She hacked sharply through the flared part of a celery stalk. “Direct to Seoul. The lady said I got a good deal for $1200.”

Laurence whistled. “If you say so. I still don’t see – ”

“It’s not like we can’t afford it.” Syl waved her hand, seemingly dismissing the whole abundant house, thick drapes and satellite radio and all. “Angie called me in tears, Laurence, and Evan could barely form a sentence, he was so tired. Brian cried nearly the whole night. Again. At least I can sit up with him.”

“Evan and Angie are almost 30. They’ll survive.”

“Well, of course. But we could help them do a little better than that.”

Laurence watched her snap the lid onto the orange container. “We?”

“There’s still room on the flight . . .?”

He pictured his webmail homepage, all those bold-faced unread messages, the nuclear-bright streets of Korea.

“I’m still healing.” He gestured down at the knob of swell and bandages bulging through the knee of his trousers. “And the boys at the office, you know . . .”

“It’s been healing a while now. And Ev is your own boy.”

“Sanjeet and Mark ask for my help. Ev, thus far, has not.”

The oven timer dinged, turning her towards it.

“You’re really going to go, just cross the world? Do you even know about the lunatic in the north and his missiles? How are you going to get to Evan’s place? You can’t just expect everyone to understand English.” He imagined Seoul ominous and vague, narrow streets, shouted strangeness, labyrinthine confusion.

She gripped the oven door. Blue veins showed in her thin white skin, but it was still smooth. She was three years younger than Laurence; if she’d worked, she wouldn’t have been retired yet. “Ev will meet me at the airport.” She opened the oven, bent her round bottom towards him. “Well, at least the pie turned out.”

“You know I’ve never cared for sweets.” For some reason, this had always been a lie he enjoyed telling. “And if I needed something, I’m sure I could make it myself.” That one was new.

“Well.” Syl straightened with the pie and hipped the oven shut, hard. “This one cherry pie is for Mr. Carbone. Not sweets, just sweet.”

“Corey Carbone?”

“You can take it over tomorrow. I saw him go out this morning, and with the Muellers’ cats around, I hate to leave it on the step.”

Laurence leaned back in the chair and a gentle pain swabbed at his knee. “Those cats are a menace – should be able to leave a pie for a few hours without fear. I’m gonna plant some marigolds next year.”

“It’s bugs that hate marigolds. You’ll take the pie to Mr. Carbone?”

“Fine. But what do cats hate, then?”

“You, I’d imagine. We have to leave in three hours.”

*

The afternoon was cool and bright, deep sunny fall. He couldn’t drive her with the knee still weak, but he went along in the taxi, through baggage check and all the way to customs. When they came to the “Passengers with boarding passes only” sign, Syl had a crisis of conscience. Laurence sighed and fiddled with her carry-on. Always when things were paid for, she regretted.

“You know you can’t put the margarine tubs in the microwave, right? You have to dump them out on a plate, and then drape a paper towel over so it doesn’t splatter.”

“I live in the house, Sylvia. I know how things work.”

“Are you sure you’ll manage? I mean – ” she held up a hand “ – with your knee and all.”

He was bent over, one hand raised above his head to grip the cane, the other tugging her bag’s zipper tight. He gazed up innocently. “And if I wouldn’t?”

She relaxed at this, rolled her eyes. Then he straightened and hugged her with his hands tight at her shoulderblades. When she walked away down the long blue-carpeted hallway, he felt as if the plane had crashed into the sea.

*

The evening was much the same as any. He showered and checked his email in his bathrobe (his brother updating his birding life list; lawyer-joke forward from former colleague; thanks from the young turks at the office for projections he’d sent). Then he watched The National while sitting on the foot of the bed, until there was a story about Kim Jong Il’s plutonium stores. Laurence shivered, and flipped off the set before the human-interest story about llamas, which weren’t human anyway, and slept quietly on his side of the bed. He dreamt of kimchi, a food he had never eaten but was surely vile.

But it was only the next morning that things really started to go to hell.

He did seven crossword clues waiting for toast before recalling that Syl kept the toaster was unplugged for fear of electrical fires. Straight from the fridge, the butter was hard and punctured the bread. He forgot to make the tea until he wanted to drink it, and then the first bag he found turned out to be utterly not Earl Grey but something gingery that promised, upon inspection of the packet, to ease gas pains with natural effectiveness. He didn’t know what that meant or what this product was doing in his home.

Tea slopped down the sink, Laurence was halfway to the door and a roll-up-the-rim-to-win tea before he recalled he’d had his right knee replaced six weeks ago and couldn’t press the gas or brake. He was, as usual, devastated.

After the newly found and brewed Earl Grey (in the back of the cupboard, behind the celery salt – why?) and torn-up cold toast, the day clenched before him, thick and dense as rain forest. He did ten across – “megaton” – read a few lines of a movie review – “compelling fluff.” Finally Laurence hauled himself up, nodded at enraged and distant Brian (in actual fact, he spoke to the baby, as he often did when alone. This time it was, “Why you gotta cause us all such heartache, huh?”) and went to the kitchen window.

On both sides of the street, neighbours were departing on their days of useful employment. He could only see a few driveways through the oak leaves, but with the dual-income trend, he got to witness seven individuals striding down their driveways with purpose, energy, briefcases.

Then it was 9:30, on a weekday morning in Indian summer. His inbox had no new messages and he couldn’t walk even as far as Tim Hortons and everyone he loved was in Korea, where it was the middle of the night. Laurence Brunswick was a 66-year-old man with all of his mental faculties, and most of his physical ones, intact, who was only 4 crossword clues away from utter redundancy.

Corey Carbone lived four houses down from the Brunwicks. He was in his eighties, though Laurence couldn’t fathom who in the 1920s would have named a boy-child Corey. The Carbone mailbox, with an orange cardinal painted on it, seemed to have always been a fixture of the street, but in decades of four-houses-downness, the two men had only exchanged half-waves over car roofs and muttered apologies over windblown recycle bins. Syl took the neighbours all their misdirected mail, did all the chatting about tulip bulbs, all the neighbourly surveillance from the veranda. She had always been more than equal to all the block parties and yard sales and, until retirement, Laurence’s work had been so richly complex and demanding that his own four walls were as much beyond it as he could handle.

One summer morning about eight years prior, Syl had been watering the freesia when she realized that Corey Carbone had not come out to check his hummingbird feeder by 11:30, an event that traditionally marked the endpoint in her gardening mornings. Syl had noted over the past several years that the gentleman four houses down had become, if not infirm, then perhaps “less active.” But he always minded the birdfeeders – hummingbird syrup in summer, finch seeds in winter – once before noon and once after. Until the day that he didn’t.

Syl had sat on a lawnchair with a glass of lemonade (Laurence was imagining now; he didn’t know this part of the story) waiting for Corey Carbone to emerge. And he hadn’t and he hadn’t and that afternoon Sylvia Brunswick chopped extra apples and kneaded extra pastry and baked an extra pie for Corey Carbone. And extended her lunch break long enough to bring it over to him, and discovered him lying behind the azaleas, having suffered a stroke on the way to the bird feeder. His clothes were covered with sticky red syrup.

Laurence came to know of this only because that night at dinner, their own pie seemed less full of apples than usual. Syl replied that the doubled recipe had not quite worked out, and that she had spent three hours in the emergency room with the man four houses down because he’d had a medium-severity stroke. This, in addition to causing Laurence to doubt his wife’s arithmetic skills, had given him some confusion. The other pie, it turned out, had been left at the nurses’ station.

Laurence accepted a tiny piece of pie, to calm her. He could not imagine his wife at the bedside of a stranger – would she be teary, or as firmly practical as she was on family vacations? He pictured the same sort of chaos, uncertainty, with gurneys instead of roller-coasters.

When Laurence had been wheeled down the hall with a cartilage knee and returned with a plastic one, he learned how Syl behaved in a hospital – just as he’d suspected, as she did at Disneyworld – but he still could not picture her with this stranger, Corey Carbone. But this was not a comment on Corey Carbone; Laurence had difficulty seeing Syl anywhere he himself was not present.

Now, Laurence was accountable to this stranger for one pie. He peered into the fridge at slightly fogged saran over the pink-and-white lattice. Syl’s handiwork was solid and elegant, both saran and pastry. The kitchen still smelled of ginger. At Disneyworld she clutched the purple-shaded map and grinned at Evan’s excitement and refused to go on any of the rides herself. He missed her.

He shut the fridge and did a limping lap of the house, observing the dead hang of curtains, mounds of molted shoes in the bottoms of closets. Syl’s white handbag, the summer one, was on top of the hamper in the guest bathroom, like hidden treasure. He sat down on the toilet lid to open it, but it was only fully of bobby pins.

One more lap and back to the kitchen window to gaze at Syl’s dead fall flowerbed, of all the years past, until he was good and depressed. Back at the fridge, Brian silently shrieked at the injustice of his exile from his homeland, his people, his grandfather. Laurence balanced the pie on his free palm, and, leaning heavily on his cane, shuffled to the door.

*

Corey Carbone’s lawn was smooth as a tucked-in bedsheet, but the flowerbeds were all woodchipped over, the birdfeeder empty, and the cement of the third stairs had cracked. By the time Laurence reached the porch, Corey Carbone was standing behind his screen-door, leaning leftwards on something out of view, watching him.

“Hello, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone was short, jowly and bald; it was hard to make out finer details through the screen. The hem of his fawn-coloured bowling shirt hung several inches in front of his fly, suspended by a stiff spherical gut. His voice was nervous, high-pitched, and slightly slurred; like a drunk waiting to get hit. “What brings you by?”

“Well, I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Carbone.”

“Oh, oh, no.” He still did not open the door.

“You know how Syl loves to bake.” Laurence gestured with the pie, but the head beyond the screen remained impassive. Suddenly furious for Syl’s wasted effort, his own wasted painful walk, Laurence bent awkwardly to set the pie on a Muskoka chair. “She baked you this pie, asked me to drop it off. The pie is from Syl. Hope you enjoy.”

“Thank you,” said Corey Carbone, voice even squeakier than before.

Laurence nodded sharply, pivoted on the canetip, and called, “You’re welcome. It’s cherry,” as he staggered down the steps. For all he knew, Corey Carbone watched him stump all the way to the sidewalk. So what if he did?

*

Once the pie was gone, that and his family became all that Laurence craved. He regretted letting Syl’s beautiful pastry go to that ingrate with the silly name, and he regretted Brian’s unseen colic across the ocean, and his son and daughter-in-law’s stress and distress. He regretted the boys at the office, Mark and Sanjeet, their nervous idiocy driving the company closer and closer to ordinary. He supposed his own life had been ordinary, in some ways. Many ways. It hadn’t seemed so at the time.

He thought about all the cakes and pies Syl had baked for Evan. There was so much less after the boy moved out, because of Laurence’s insistence on not liking sweets. Now he pictured sloppy swirls of blue icing on a birthday cupcake, imagined the creamy grit of cocoanut cream. He remembered Evan sticky and greedy, reaching for more while Laurence nibbled unnoticed on a “sliver.”

To Brian’s snapshot, he revealed his years of sugar dishonesty. “Chocolate-chip cake, gingersnaps, black-bottom pie, peach coffee cake . . .they’re all sublime, when she makes them. Every birthday, she made herself a lemon pie, shaved little bits of the rind onto the meringue.” The microwave pinged, interrupting Laurence’s chat with the fridge door and embarrassing him somehow. He silently took his reheated lasagna to the table. Throughout the meal, Laurence mourned the pie he could not eat for dessert. There was nothing suitably sweet in the pantry, not even boxed cookies or a tin of pears – he’d already checked.

When Syl called – he had just closed his still-empty inbox – he was spellbound at his desk for 45 minutes, listening to her tales of flight delays, kimchi, baby wipes. He could hear Brian rioting in the background, a fierce soprano siren. She described this fat angry grandson, then her emaciated son and his 80-hour workweeks, exhausted Angie’s obsession with Dr. Spock.

Despite knowing the per-minute costs, Laurence asked about the city, the luggage, her health (but not the ginger tea), their meals. Then he asked, casually, chattily, almost academically, about pie. It was only when she said the baby was spitting up that Laurence consented to let her go.

The next morning, he dug through the basement deep freeze, frost beading his cheeks, until he found the cottage-cheese container marked “Pie cherr. 09” in Syl’s tight cursive. The pastry recipe on the back of the lard box took most of the morning, but it finally cohered into something resembling a pie shell. It was early afternoon before Laurence finally put the fruit into a saucepan. After twenty minutes of ardent stirring, medium heat, and a half pound of sugar, the cherries showed no evidence of a will to be pie. There was a tap at the back door.

Once again, Laurence saw Corey Carbone’s big baby face through a screen door. This time, though, his arm was draped around a small Filipina woman.

It was Laurence’s turn to say, “Yeesss?”

The woman beamed blankly until Corey Carbone said, “Came to thank you. For the pie.”

“It was from Syl.” Laurence waved his wooden spoon absently.

The woman took this as invitation to open the door wide and gracefully pilot the big man through. She looked like a nymph dancing with a tree. Laurence let his irritation go as soon as he saw the sweat glistening on the side of Corey Carbone’s neck.

Laurence set the spoon in the spoon rest, and padded (still barefoot at 2pm, with company!) over to the woman who was manipulating Corey Carbone into the kitchen chair closest to the stove. It was not Laurence’s dinner seat, but it was the one he sat in when Syl was cooking and he was watching her. His guest looked so thankful to finally be safely seated that Laurence could not begrudge him the spot. The woman began backing away.

“I come later?”

“Yes, Ciara, thanks.” Corey Carbone leaned back cautiously Without the screen door intervening, Laurence could see that Corey Carbone’s face was smooth-shaven as a baby’s, with the right side mannequin-still. If there were such things as old-man mannequins.

“When I come back? How long?”

“I won’t stay long, Brunswick.”

Laurence breathed in deeply through his nose. “I’ll take you home, Mr. Carbone. No need to trouble . . . her.” He had forgotten the name already. Pathetic.

When the woman was gone, Corey Carbone shrugged and smiled, and his tiny voice said, “ Sorry about this. She tries to get me out of the house regular. But she don’t think too much about where besides out. Sorry.”

Laurence smiled – the second apology was all he needed to feel generous. “No trouble at all. Syl’s more the stickler for scheduling than I am.” Another lie from the clear blue. Laurence felt like cupping it fondly in his palm.

“Whatcha making? Another pie?”

Laurence considered. Finally: “Bake sale. Church. Syl wouldn’t want them to miss the donation, just because she had to go out of town.” He was staring into the pot of bubbling watery cherries. It looked liquid, drinkable, utterly unpielike.

A shift of chair legs. “Things all right, Brunswick? Syl’s ok?”

He saw an expectation of tragedy in Corey Carbone’s leftside features – not smug, only fearful “A celebration, actually. Our first granbaby got born. How ’bout that?” Where had the slang come from? To match Corey Carbone’s happy-hour slur, perhaps.

“How ’bout that? Fantastic, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone slapped his right knee and Laurence winced. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Brian. Seven weeks.” Laurence pointed at the fridge picture – the fat mottled face and blue-veined skull. All children were ugly at birth, but Brian looked like a champion anyway. The cherries were making little splashing noises. “Syl’s gone to help out a bit.” When Laurence bent over the pot, red bubbles popped and splattered his arm.

“Glad for the quiet? Or you miss ’er?”

Laurence turned down the burner, frowning.

“I could never stand it, myself. Rysa and I spent maybe ten nights apart, all told. Maybe less.”

“Rysa?” Laurence searched his mind for an image of a woman in the Carbone driveway, but he came up empty. It was another strange name, or perhaps only a standard one that Corey Carbone’s tongue could no longer render. He hoped she wouldn’t turn out to be a Doberman as he asked, “You folks were married a long time?”

“Thirty-five years, but that don’t seem long when you start at eighteen.”

Laurence did the math from the apparent age of the man – Corey Carbone had likely been a widower for twenty years. The cherries were starting to sink in the goop. He stirred forlornly. “In all those years of married life, Rysa ever tell you how to make a cherry pie?”

“Well, no, not that I . . . . Why?”

“Why? What do you – That’s what I’m doing here. Trying to do.”

Silence. Laurence looked up. Corey Carbone sat with both legs kicked forwards, one elbow on the chair arm, the other hand rested atop his cane, which was leaning on his thigh. It should have been a casual pose, but for Corey Carbone’s stiff body, it looked like the rack. “Sorry, Brunswick.” He shrugged; only the left shoulder rose.

Laurence sighed. “Sorry, man, sorry. Tough morning.”

“What’s gone wrong? Smells good.”

Laurence sniffed dismissively. To him, the smell was oversweet, syrupy, wrong. “Thank you. But it’s not like a pie filling. From here, it’s like cherry soup.”

“Such a thing, y’know. Cherry soup. Had it on a cruise once.”

“A cruise?” Laurence abandoned the question. “I don’t want soup. I want pie. I was trying to boil down the juice to . . . gel, you know. But it won’t.”

Corey Carbone shook his head, and his jowls wobbled equally on both sides. “Too much juice? Or not enough thickner?”

Laurence stood completely still and felt his neck crack. “Thickener?”

Corey Carbone’s good eye squinted. “Whaddya put in?”

“Cherries. Frozen ones.” The pebbly piecrust looked grayish in the slight sun through the kitchen window.

“And . . . ?” Corey Carbone nodded stiffly, left-leaning, encouraging.

“Sugar. Because they weren’t all that sweet.”

“Pie cherries are, uh, sour cherries, yeah. You hafta add the sugar . . .and . . .”

“And . . . ?” Laurence asked. He set the spoon on the spoonrest. A little of pink dripped on the white stovetop.

“Dunno . . .flour?” Another uneven shrug.

“Flour? Flour goes in the crust, I found a recipe for the crust.”

“Didja find one for the filling?”

Laurence turned off the stove. “I don’t think she uses one. Anyway, I couldn’t find it. Her files are a mess.” He went over and took a seat at the table.

“First time she’s been away in how long?”

“Not that long.” Laurence slouched forward, arms on the placemat, chest pressing down. “I used to travel a lot, on business. I only just retired.”

“Ah.” Corey Carbone grinned. His eyelid and mouth stayed flaccid on the right, but both eyes were bright. “First time she’s been away in . . . ?”

Laurence whistled. “Ever, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

The pink smell of cherries was starting to stifle. Laurence wondered if it would be rude to open a window. “I had work to . . . cover.”

“I thought you retired.”

“The new team, they need a little saving, sometimes.” Laurence had said this dozens of times, always in a hearty, resigned tone. Today, the words sounded almost violent.

Laurence had a momentary flash of Syl’s perfect puff of white hair wandering down an ugly alley of thugs and thieves. “Plus, it’s hard to travel, laid up like this.” He waved his cane, then glanced at Carbone’s own and felt bizarrely guilty.

“Oh, well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough of the world.” Corey Carbone squirmed in his chair, both hands pressed on the cane top as he hauled his butt forward, then shifted his weight onto his left hip.

“You all right?”

“Sok,” Corey Carbone said tightly. It was several seconds before he finally leaned back again and relaxed his grip on the cane. “If yer giving up on that pie, we could just eat the cherries, you know. With spoons.”

“Pretty sad thing to offer a guest.”

“Well, I’ll take what I can get. Be a proper dessert with a little ice-cream, if you got it.”

Laurence got obediently to his feet, though he felt himself listing far more leftward than usual, white-knuckling his own cane. An apology for inhospitality fished around in his brain, but all that came out was, “I think we might have, not ice-cream but sherbet – ” he opened the freezer and foam-white air fogged his glasses “ – shoot, sorry, Corey Carbone, it’s raspberry.” He shut the freezer with a sad thump.

“You think I care about clashing shades of pink?”

“Right.” Laurence nodded and reopened the freezer.

“And whatcha call me by my full name for? Think some other Corey will pop in, demand ice cream – sherbet?”

Laurence jolted again. “No, sorry, Carbone. Your name just sorta slides off the tongue all in one piece, you know?”

“Never heard that one. Course, nothing slides off my tongue, these days.”

Laurence tried to picture the pre-stroke Corery Carbone, sober-spoken and smooth, or at least not sounding quite so boozily meek. He couldn’t.The thin red juice dribbled to the bottom of the bowl, and the cherries clung like slugs to the sherbet. It looked revolting. Laurence took the dishes and spoons to the table, sat and asked, “What was your profession, Carbone? Before you retired?”

Corey Carbone swallowed his first bite and smiled. “Professor. Physics. Quantum. The way I worked, no one does any more. But then, I don’t do it either.”

The cherries were sickeningly sweet; Laurence figured he’d overdone the sugar in his frustration. Corey Carbone’s pants were a shade of an unripe banana, pulled up topside of his gut. He did not look like an intellectual. “You miss it?”

“Must’ve, once, I guess. Twenty years ago now. Too much else to miss, in the meantime. I miss Rysa, smartest lady in Weston and a damn fine ornithologist. I miss walking to the can without having to hang off that little girl like a lecher.” Corey Carbone dug his spoon into his pink mess again. “This is damn good, like that spun sugar crap kids get at the fair.” His speech was smoothing out, slightly.

“Cotton candy.”

They were silent a moment, eating. Finally, Laurence had to ask, “Corey Carbone, do you remember what happened when you had that stroke, and Syl came over, all that? Could you see her?”

“Sure I remember, sure I saw her, sorta.” Corey Carbone smacked his lips, glanced down at his empty bowl, then over at Laurence’s, still mainly full. “Sorta long to explain, I guess.”

Laurence pushed the pink swirl towards him. “Me, I got nothing but time. You don’t mind?”

There was a pink drip of raspberry on Corey Carbone’s lower lip that he made no move to lick. It seemed suitable just there, like a beauty mark or a freckle. “You got it right – nothing but time.”

If you want to make any progress as a moral being, you have to own up to your biases and grapple with your unexamined assumptions. So in the spirit of self-correction, I’ll freely admit that prior to reading Leon Rooke’s The Last Shot, I was intensely prejudiced against pastiches.

The Last Shot, Leon Rooke, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2009

I once thought of pastiche as an inherently second-rate genre, a parasitical form redolent of self-satisfied bookish in-jokes. Pastiches, I believed, should be best left to the nerdy arrested-development types who try to map out the genealogies of Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan (sometimes proving that the great detective and the Jungle Lord are distant cousins). The attempt by various contemporary writers, working under the unhelpful rubric of post-modernism, to ennoble pastiche by making it subversive – I’m thinking here of the appropriation of genre tropes by Robert Coover, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon – has generally left me cold since the novels they’ve produced lack either the unpretentious, light-hearted thrills of sincere pulp fiction or the emotional intensity of genuine literature. The core problem is that a pastiche is always literature about literature rather than literature about life, hence one step too far removed from the lived experiences that must, in however distorted or imaginative a form, make up the seed of truth around which fiction builds its shell.

But, as Leon Rooke has shown time and again in a career unprecedented in its inventiveness, there is no literary rule that can’t be broken by a writer with enough audacity and moxie. “Gator Wrestling,” the novella that makes up the heart of The Last Shot, is a pastiche of the southern fiction of Clark Blaise, with echoes of Blaise’s own lodestar William Faulkner. Yet there is nothing derivative or second-rate about the story. Readers of Blaise’s superb novel Lunar Attractions or his essential collection Southern Stories will repeatedly experience déjà vu while reading “Gator Wrestling” which features a torpid, musky small-town Florida locale complete with alligators and insects, wayward French-Canadian clans (with names like Thibidault and Coombs) who have made their way south, and a furniture store that goes defunct leaving family disaster in its wake. One character uses the phrase “a North American education” (title of a key Blaise story), another character is shamelessly named “little Blaise” and even a “Struthers” shows up (a tip of the hat to critic J. R. Struthers, who edited the volume Short Story, which was dedicated to Clark Blaise, where Rooke’s story first appeared).

All of this might make “Gator Wrestling” sound hopelessly coy and self-referential, like a televised “celebrity roast” where the stars rib each other for flubs they made decades ago on the set of a long forgotten B movie while the audience gawps in puzzlement. Yet “Gator Wrestling” isn’t just an expert joshing of a Blaise story but rather something much deeper than that, perhaps comparable to the musical genre of “the cover.” Think of Joan Baez doing a cover of a Bob Dylan song, where she sings the same lyrics but also reveals new shades of meaning and comments on Dylan’s influence on folk music. Or imagine Miles Davis doing a cover of a Duke Ellington number while also paying tribute to their common debt to Scott Joplin and you’ll get an idea of what Rooke achieves by both covering a Clark Blaise story and also laying a wreath at the tomb of their common father, Faulkner.

Rooke can get away with doing a Blaise cover because the two men share a similar life-trajectory as reverse carpetbaggers, Southerners who have headed (or returned) north. Rooke was born in North Carolina, and Blaise spent his crucial formative years in Florida. Both men are haunted by the South in the same way a defrocked clergyman will remain haunted by Christ. “Gator Wrestling” recreates the country of Blaise’s youth to chronicle the shift from the Old South to the new. As so often in Rooke’s fiction, generational conflict lies at the heart of the drama, in this particular tale the tension between the racism of the traditional south and the rise of a younger generation formed in the wake of the Civil Rights movement.

The characters in “Gator Wrestling” aren’t just crackers and hicks, they are self-conscious crackers and hicks, whose very dialect is knowingly exaggerated. As the narrator observes of two girls, “No one could put [them] in the shade when it came to talking cracker talk.” So when a character refers to a car as “a awe-tee-mo-beel” we’re to think not just of Faulkner but also the long tradition of comic hillbillies such as Al Capp’s L’il Abner. The Old South is no longer a region but rather a giant open air theme park, and even the reactionary politics of the area has an aspect of play-acting. Ultimately “Gator Wrestling” is an elegy, albeit a hilarious one: the south of Blaise and Faulkner, for better or worse, is long gone, and the story offers up a high-spirited obituary.

Blaise and Faulkner are only two of the many writers alluded to, celebrated or even gently tweaked in The Last Shot. The first shot in The Last Shot makes reference to almost all the major modern short story writers from O. Henry to Raymond Carver. J.D. Salinger, no less, shows up in another tale, although he’s only a teeny-bit more forthcoming in Rooke’s rendition than he was in real life. The process of writing also gets foregrounded in the book, as witness titles like “All True Stories have Loose Ends” and “How to Write a Successful Short Story” (the latter allluding to a Ring Lardner collection with a title that has an extra edge of irony when we realize there is no one alive who can offer better advice on this topic than Rooke).

I’ve mentioned my prejudice against “literature about literature” and my distrust of post-modernism. Well, just as some of Rooke’s southerners overcome their racism and indeed transcend the condition of whiteness, Rooke has conquered my literary bigotry. With an author as wide-reading as Rooke, and as skilful as he is in doing riffs in the style of other writers, literature is part of life and a fit subject for stories.

With all its literary allusiveness, The Last Shot almost seems designed to provoke reflections on Rooke’s own status in the pantheon of modern fiction. At this late date in his career, more than forty years after the publication of his first story collection, appraising Rooke’s oeuvre seems both daunting and unnecessary. He belongs in the small, select company of Canadian masters, a peer of Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Clark Blaise. Like them, everything he writes is, almost by definition, worth reading and re-reading.

Tellingly, reviewers faced with the task of surveying the Rooke phenomenon often resort to the same tactics used by hapless tour guides at Niagara Falls, statistics. Rooke has given us more than 300 stories, many but not all of which can be found in his 18 collections, as well as 7 novels, plus sundry plays and poems.

Such quantitative measures tell us nothing about quality. More impressive is the fact that Rooke’s prodigious prolificness is achieved without the vices of prolixity and repetitiveness. Although he’s given over to swooping flights of rhetoric, Rooke’s verbal virtuosity always serves a purpose. There is scarcely an unnecessary word in The Last Shot. The stylistic variety on display is remarkable: aside from his impressive resurrection of Flannery O’Connor’s flint-eyed portrayal of shiftless poor whites (in “The Last Shot” and “A Good Radio Voice”) we also get a sentimental story about angels told by a narrator who is as bluff and breezy, as clubby and cool, as Anthony Trollope unfolding a tale about the doings of a small town vicarage.

What holds the collection together is a concern for family life. In “Gator Wrestling” a family saga is summed up in a crisp sentence: “Junior had been wanting to leave town since he was a boy, the father bound and determined to keep Junior under his thumb and properly beholden, as a child should be.” Here is Rooke’s recurring concern, which is not just the way the old weigh down the young but also the way the young trap the old. Family life in Rooke’s universe is like a spider web, both a home and a sticky constraint. And if they do escape from home, Rooke’s people perversely desire to return there. This desire for home even effects Dark, the personification of death who is the hero of the last story in the collection.

The great cliché about Rooke is that he’s primarily an oral writer, one who flourishes best when he’s on stage. Annie Michaels has called Rooke “a preacher” while Kent Thompson says he’s a “performance artist,” a description echoed by John Metcalf. Like most clichés, Rooke-as-performer is true enough, but it allows readers to ignore the fact that he’s as much an eye-writer as a tongue-writer. To simplify, tongue-writers are the great rhetoricians and monologuists of literature – Joyce, Faulkner, Philip Roth – who hold our attention with a torrential outpouring of words. Eye-writers are the cooler, more observant sorts who like to linger on the surface of things: Nabokov, John Updike, Nicholson Baker.

Rooke’s impossible-to-ignore skills as a tongue-writer have prevented readers and critics from noticing how visually attentive he is. In “Gator Wrestling” a bicycle is limned with these words: “a near-spokeless, wired-together bike . . . seatless but for a protruding metal spike, the bent pedals dragging the dust, the handlebar misaligned, as though an axe heel had been taken to it.” This remarkable bike is a thing of beauty not only in and of itself, it’s a perfect emblem of an entire way of life and region. That region, the American South, gave birth to Leon Rooke, and remains the ground of his being, the wellspring of his remarkable literary career. Just as Dark returns to his mother, Rooke has taken one last trip home, a journey that enriches us all.

A few years ago, I suggested that the short story (despite its brevity) is an expansive literary form, and the novel (except for its page-length) is miniaturist. A story includes all that can be said about a confined number of moments, incidents or anecdotes. The novel shortcuts through thousands more. The conventional description of short fiction implies that stories (because of their brevity) must shrink the stage, reduce complexity, and direct their energy to a single, blinding revelation. If that were true, Alice Munro among many others, would be considered a muddled and ineffectual storywriter.

Novels, it’s said, deserve higher status because they exhaust the limits of narrative ingenuity: a marathon not a sprint; an epic, not a lyric; giga and mega, not nano and micro. As a culture, we’re easily intimidated by size and scale. Less might be more, but more is always best. My friend Lee K. Abbott, master storyist but novel-free, once observed, “I never had an idea I couldn’t treat in under twenty pages.”

I realize these are familiar claims and grumbles coming from a dedicated storyist. We don’t get respect. Even when we do well, it looks so breezy and natural it must be luck, not strategy. Most “novels” these days are really inflated, or linked, stories. And that’s been true for a very long time: The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are novellas. I leave it to greater minds to define the genre of Moby-Dick. The lasting achievements in American writing – Cheever, Carver, Hemingway, O’Connor, Malamud, for starters – and Canadian writing, are in shorter forms.

These observations get us absolutely nowhere. I’ll try a different approach.

Let’s stipulate that a good or great story is the equivalent of a good or great novel in its construction, implication and evocation. The only problem is how to corral it, critically. We don’t know how to talk about stories. It doesn’t seem worth the effort. Story collections and anthologies must be reviewed, but the normal baker’s dozen of stories practically guarantees that the singular qualities of each story will be shortchanged. Justice dictates that a single story collection could well demand the same commentary-space as at least a half-dozen novels, and that’s not going to happen.

That challenge has been addressed in this issue. I hope that future issues of CNQ will contain dedicated essays on single stories, in the manner of Doug Glover on Alice Munro’s “Menensteung,” Michael Darling on Audrey Thomas’ “Local Customs” and Jeet Heer on the “pastiche” of Leon Rooke’s “The Last Shot.” Collectively and individually, these are brilliant and utterly accessible feats of literary criticism. Grandiloquence has not infected the short story discourse. (I’m not discounting other noteworthy reviews in this issue; it’s merely to point out what can be done with a single story).

Let’s further stipulate that a great storywriter’s life’s work – say, Alice Munro’s or Mavis Gallant’s, or certainly Cheever’s or Updike’s or Rooke’s or Barry Hannah’s, or Joyce Carol Oates’ – looked back upon from a distance, forms an intact, coherent, autobiographical entity on the order of Proust’s Remembrance. You can find in the collective density of their life’s achievement a cast of characters to rival any novelist’s, acuity to match any historian’s, moments of passion, rage, reflection and humour that can only be called cinemagraphic, a catalogue of national traits that would please an ethnologist, but weaving through them all is a line, a single character with many disguises, a single voice with many registers. It is that human dimension of the story that defines its uniqueness.

A few months ago, the New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter, reviewed the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of ink drawings by Agnolo de Cosimo di Mariano Tori, otherwise known as “Bronzino” (1503-1572). A few striking reproductions accompanied the article, in particular, “Head of a Young Man,” whom Cotter describes as “someone the artist might have met on a beach, a surfer at Santa Monica.” Whimsy aside, I too took note of the face, neck and shoulders, particularly when that remarkable face was detected in its later, near-anonymity in a large, densely populated painting.

I’m going to quote liberally from Cotter, because his discussion of Bronzino’s drawing (as opposed to the larger painting) is a parallel discussion to the ongoing distinctions between short fiction and the novel. If it’s not too obvious, here’s the finale to the essay:

Then look at a reproduction of the painting . . . for which the drawing is a study. There we see the sitter at half length, his neck encircled by a lace collar; his shoulders encased in a rich black coat, his hair covered by a plumed cap. His face is more perfectly composed but looks tranquilized, inelastic, masklike; his glance is off to the side, away from us, fixed on nothing in particular. The picture is fascinating: a seductive, princely invention. But it’s more about haberdashery and attitude than about character. The face in the drawing is the one I remember, the face of someone real, someone I might actually know.

Drawing versus painting. (Even the title of Cotter’s review, “A Line Both Spirited and Firm” suggests the interchangeability of art and literary criticism). “Line” (drawing) versus filled-in blocks of colour (painting). When I read a good story, I feel I’m getting “the whole picture.” But too many novels I read come across, in Cotter’s words, as “tranquilized, inelastic and masklike” with a focus “off to one side,” all haberdashery and attitude. Or, quoting Cotter again, “Painting was all about finish, the smoothing over of discrepant textures, the hiding of the seams. Drawing occupied a far looser and more relaxed aesthetic category.”

Patrons demanded paintings. Artists preferred drawings. Drawings (stories) are looser, their seams show, their textures are discrepant.

Then Cotter goes on to the heart of the matter:

The drawn line, disegno, was the root element of the Renaissance tradition from which he came. Its character varies from artist to artist among his Mannerist contemporaries. Parmigianino gave his line a swoony, ribbony lift; Jacopo Pontormo infused it with the encephalographic jitters.
Bronzino does something in between, less extreme. His line, or sense of movement, is vivacious but purposeful, hot but not wild. It was the energy source for his art.

Or think of the cartoons in any issue of The New Yorker, and their lines – the sketchy, the jittery, the staid, the martial precision of some, the corporately slick, the faux-naif – matched to, or playing against, the perfect caption. Think of the lines that thread their way through a favourite story (certainly that is the point of Glover’s essay on Munro). Check it out in Rebecca Rosenblum’s “Sweet” in this issue, or a lovely story by Montreal’s Michael Libling, “Why that Crazy Old Lady Goes up the Mountain” in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction (metaphysical and utterly realistic at the same time) or the typical lines that define the Irish, the American, and of course the Russian story.

This is what we know. Stories are the equivalents of novels. Great storyists are the equivalents of epic novelists. The analysis of a story is as demanding (or more) than the analysis of a novel. Stories expand, novels contract. It’s not a matter of scale; it’s more a question of key. Ballads, jazz, opera; we get wedded to a form, a voice, and then we build, room by room, and someone might say, when it’s all over, “what a mansion you’ve built!” Others would go inside and admire the many rooms, all of them decorated, all of them of use to the living or dead.

Some cultures – Canada, the US, Ireland, New Zealand – excel at the story. Others – UK, South Africa, Australia – are novelists. In the end, it’s all the same. Gershwin and Verdi, Coltrane and Sondheim. Sit back and enjoy.

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood, McLelland & Stewart 2009

Margaret Atwood doesn’t like hearing her novels called science fiction. In an article originally written for Book-of-the-Month Club/Bookspan and reprinted in her 2004 collection Moving Targets, Atwood explicitly disavows the term, which in her mind involves intergalactic space travel, teleportation, and Martians. Referring specifically to her 2003 dystopian epic Oryx and Crake, Atwood avers that “it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?”

The answers that Atwood comes up with are not likely to soothe hearts made anxious by early 21st-century existential malaise. Set in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, Oryx and Crake posits a world that has been vanquished by human meddling. Before the plague that wiped out most of humankind, society has devolved into a sort of social Darwinian nightmare: wealthy corporations such as HealthWyzer set up compounds to seal off their denizens from the “pleeblands” where “the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies” hold sway. Security has been outsourced to a group of corporate commandos – the CorpSeCorps – and genetic engineering projects have been allowed to proliferate beyond all reason. AnooYoo is in the business of developing and selling products to alter a person’s physique in any way imaginable: “Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier.” For amusement, the Web offers an interactive game called Extinctathon, which measures a user’s knowledge of extinct animals and plants, and there is a practically unlimited traffic in child pornography.

How slippery is the slope on which we currently find ourselves? If the Atwood of Oryx and Crake is to be believed, very slippery indeed. It should go without saying that our devotion to a kind of cutthroat consumerism is increasing the gap between rich and poor in Western societies; the Boomer generation’s defiant refusal to age gracefully has resulted in a vibrant market for plastic surgery, cosmetics, and other palliatives to disguise the body’s inevitable decay; genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have given rise to modifications in food products as varied as rapeseed, soy, and tomatoes; and the Internet is a locus of virtual reality and pornography of all stripes (legal and otherwise). All of these things are extant in our world; Atwood merely ratchets up the volume and pushes them to their logical extreme.

Still, her brusque dismissal of the term science fiction to describe the results seems odd, especially when seen in light of her remarks about another, earlier book, one which was hugely influential on both Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, 2009’s The Year of the Flood. In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atwood asserts that Wells referred to his tales as “scientific romances,” but only because the specific generic classification science fiction had yet to be coined. About Doctor Moreau, Atwood writes:

photo by George Whiteside, courtesy of Giller website

There are several interpretations of the term “science.” If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. As Jules Verne remarked with displeasure, “Il invente!” (“He makes it up!”). The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a world-view that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley, and has to do with the grand concern that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This too may account for his veering between extreme Utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man derived from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood also belong to the debit side of the account book, in that they chronicle the latter days of a species – homo sapiens – that seems hell-bent on returning to a pre-evolutionary state along a road that is ironically paved by our own ingenuity: we are involved in the wholesale pursuit of the very technologies that will serve as the instruments of our destruction. Although The Year of the Flood is ultimately a more hopeful book than its predecessor, there is nevertheless a strain of “the deepest pessimism” running through it.

Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Therefore, by Atwood’s own admission, it is “scientific” in the sense that “it implies the known and the possible.” Why, then, the almost preternatural aversion to the classification science fiction? Likely, Atwood’s hesitancy arises out of the suspicion (at best) and outright marginalization (at worst) that novels designated as such have experienced in this country. As a literary genre, science fiction is ranked somewhere just above chick-lit romances and Westerns in the pantheon of legitimacy. William Gibson and Robert J. Sawyer may be among the bestselling authors in the land, but it’s unlikely they will ever find their way into the kinds of discussions about great Canadian literature that are carried out by our self-appointed cultural gatekeepers, who generally react to sci-fi the way they might be expected to react if they caught someone defecating on their front lawn.

Then again, Atwood is equally cagey when it comes to the matter of The Year of the Flood’s precise relationship to Oryx and Crake. Although her Canadian paperback publisher, Vintage Canada, reissued the earlier book in 2009 as “The First Book of the MaddAddam Trilogy,” Atwood bristles when it is suggested that The Year of the Flood constitutes a sequel. The author told the U.K. magazine The Bookseller, “It’s not a sequel and it’s not a prequel. It’s a ‘simultaneouel’ in that it takes place during the same time span and with a number of people in it who are peripheral in Oryx and Crake but are central in The Year of the Flood.” Ah, yes: a simultaneouel. Right-o, then.

All of these semantic distinctions – science fiction vs. speculative fiction, prequel vs. sequel vs. “simultaneouel” – are little more than window dressing, a lexicographical parlour game that only serves to obscure the matter at hand: does The Year of the Flood work as fiction, on its own terms and with its own internal logic and integrity? It does, but at more than 400 pages, the book is also slower and more diffuse than its predecessor. It’s a bleak work that nevertheless ends on a note of marginal uplift, but the relentless satire that drove Oryx and Crake is diluted, replaced by something that closely resembles melancholy.

The story begins in the same situation as the earlier novel: a pandemic, which Crake developed while working in a biotech lab, has been set loose and created a wasteland where genetically altered animals – pigoons and wolvogs and rakunks – run rampant and the CorpSeCorps security contingent has clamped down. The two survivors we meet at the book’s outset are Toby, who has taken refuge in the AnooYou spa where she was working when the plague broke out, and Ren, a trapeze dancer at the Scales and Tails strip club, who was quarantined just prior to the outbreak because she was bitten by a client who might have been carrying a sexually transmitted disease.

Toby and Ren are erstwhile members of a strange eco-cult known as God’s Gardeners, a back-to-the-earth group of vegetarians with bad fashion sense led by a scientist-turned-prophet called Adam One. In stark contrast to the brutal and misogynistic theocracy that dominated Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the religious faction depicted in The Year of the Flood is largely benign: they grow their own food on rooftop gardens and sing atrocious hymns and prepare for the coming of the Waterless Flood:

A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to over-population and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to replenish the Earth. Or something like that.

Readers will forgive the Gardeners a certain theological fuzziness because they are for the most part benevolent, especially when compared to the rapacious CorpSeCorps guards who protect the wealthy corporation workers and ruthlessly put down insurrections from the impoverished pleebmobs. When Adam One discovers Toby, she is working at SecretBurgers (the secret involves the burgers’ key ingredients: suffice it to say that stray corpses don’t last long in the pleeblands), where she is repeatedly raped by her boss, Blanco.

Atwood has often had difficulty with her male characters and Blanco is no exception; a broad caricature of a sexual sadist, his function in the novel is purely to antagonize Toby to such an extent that she is willing to flee with Adam One, and then to hide out at AnooYou once her whereabouts is discovered.

But, strangely, in this novel the women also seem like ciphers, or at the very least somewhat underdeveloped, each one evincing a dominant trait or characteristic that is sounded again and again through the novel like a chorus. Toby is the tough one. Ren is the naive one. Amanda is the artist who creates living eco-art. There are a host of other characters, including Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake), who reappear from the earlier novel; Zeb, one of the Gardeners who goes on to create MaddAddam, the online entity that runs Extinctathon and becomes a nexus point for the survivors of the Waterless Flood; and Rebecca Eckler a solidly built black woman who unfortunately shares a name with a skinny white journalist (who won the opportunity to have a character in the book named after her in a charity auction). None of these characters makes a huge impression on the reader during the course of the novel, and none remains in the reader’s memory for very long afterward.

This is because The Year of the Flood is more a novel of ideas than a novel of character. Atwood is more focused on the details of her plague-ridden, Apocalyptic wasteland than she is on the nuances of the people who move across it. This is evident from the opening page:

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it’s been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.
There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there’s no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier?

This is what sticks with a reader long after the final page has been turned. The persistent feel of rot and decay, of stink and ash, but at the same time, the determination of life to find its way through the wreckage. The finale of the book brings us full circle to the final scene in Oryx and Crake, and while we discover the identity of the three mysterious figures at the end of the previous book, there is still ambiguity: What do the figures carrying torches off in the distance portend? Is it redemption that approaches, or final annihilation? (After all, Crake has been compared to Dr. Frankenstein, and we all know what the figures with torches portended in that story.)

Critics have suggested that in her speculative mode (to use Atwood’s preferred term), she is acting as the figure of Pandora from Greek mythology, opening up her fictional box and allowing the chaos to swirl out around her and her readers. I prefer to think of her as a different mythological figure: Cassandra, who warned of impending doom, but in vain, for the gods saw to it that there was no one who would believe her. Atwood has been eerily prescient in the past (her 2008 Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth predicted the global economic downturn in scarily precise terms); if it is true that The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent,” then the novel should stand as a cautionary tale about the slippery slope that we are all on, and what we can do to reverse our course before it’s too late. As prophecy, The Year of the Flood is not so much a dystopian thought experiment as it is a horror story. Just don’t call it science fiction.

When contributing editor Zachariah Wells read Andre Alexis’ critical essay “The Long Decline” in a recent issue of The Walrus, he had a nagging feeling of déjà vu. A couple of days later, he realized why…

February 1, 2010

Dear Mr. Alexis,

Thank you very much for submitting your essay, “The Long Decline,” to Canadian Notes & Queries. We are by no means averse to critical prose that casts a harsh light on the work of CNQ editors, as yours does, and we certainly sympathise with your frustration in the face of the inarguable and, it would seem, ineluctable decline of book coverage in Canada’s major dailies (although our Senior Editor, John Metcalf, might demur, since he was already saying, thirty years ago, that “our newspaper reviews are not unusually illiterate”). We also, as I’m sure you know, appreciate pugnacity in the criticism that we publish and your piece is imbued with that quality from beginning to end. That said, I’m afraid we can’t accept your essay, at least not in its present shape.

Because your work shows a fighting spirit we like and because critics willing to be blunt are thin on the ground, our editorial board thought that instead of sending you a form rejection letter, we’d provide you with an editorial critique of your essay, in the sincere hope that if it’s not useful to you in revising this piece, it at least helps you sharpen any future critical undertakings.

Some of the problems with your essay are architectural and others are more in the details. I’ll start with the big picture concerns.

STRUCTURE

I hope it doesn’t seem condescending to trot out a bit of standard-issue undergraduate advice: before you start writing, you should figure out what your thesis is and plot an outline of your essay, ensuring that all major points and sub-points of each paragraph are pertinent to that thesis. It’s clear that you haven’t done this by your second paragraph, in which you ask “Where to start?” The muddle you’re in becomes apparent again later, when you write: “How we reached this pass is difficult to articulate. Or, rather, there are so many interesting narratives, it’s difficult to settle on any single one.” But the demands of the critical essay are such that, before submitting a draft to an editor, the critic, as a minimum requirement, needs to have figured out what narrative it is he’s trying to articulate. The most disappointing aspect of your essay is that it fails to do this, repeatedly.

At the outset, it seems that you are intent on excoriating the tattered hide of newspaper review sections. But you’ve barely got started on this essay about editorial and publishing problems when you abruptly change topics, lamenting how “woefully incompetent” reviewers are “these days.” You make a token gesture back to the disappearance of reviews from “our dying newspapers,” but this is a non-sequitur in your new topic; is the problem not enough reviews, or is the problem too many badly written ones? Some combination thereof, presumably, but you don’t spend enough time developing your arguments for the reader to know what exactly you’re getting at. Another non-sequitur in this paragraph is the assertion that Canada has failed “to produce a single literary critic of any worth, at least since the death of Northrop Frye.” Besides the fact that this is objectively incorrect (since, for example, Peterborough’s own Hugh Kenner, a critic with a substantial international reputation who is widely credited with restoring Ezra Pound’s literary credibility and whose book The Pound Era is a critical classic, was still alive and writing for a good decade after Frye’s death; if by “produced,” you mean that we haven’t had a new critical voice of that stature emerge, I would remind you that Frye has only been dead for 18 years, so we can’t possibly know what critics the country will produce in the post-Frye era), by including this statement in a paragraph about the incompetence of reviewers, you elide the manifest differences between someone who writes a review for a newspaper or periodical and a scholarly critic. Such distinctions between practitioners and genres must be made if a reader is to have a proper idea of what it is you are writing about.

From there, we have another awkward transition to a long, rambly paragraph about British critic James Wood—whose relevance to an essay about Canadian newspapers/reviewing/criticism you don’t make clear—and from there, somehow back to “our reviews,” which begets another non-sequential shift to a paragraph about how John Metcalf—who to the best of my knowledge has never been an employee of a newspaper—is to blame “for this state of affairs.” By this point, you’ve taken so many quicksilver twists that the reader must be forgiven for wondering precisely what state of affairs it is you’re talking about.

Next, we move on—again with no connective tissue to speak of—to a third topic: Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood, whose “academic” approach, we learn, was the burr under Metcalf’s saddle. If you were writing an essay about John Metcalf’s criticism, this might not be a bad place to start. Indeed, the seven paragraphs of this section are easily the most cohesive of your essay—although even here, you tend to wander, saying in one breath that Metcalf is at fault and then later saying that it’s not so much him as the people “who have been influenced by him,” which seems to me a bit like blaming Christ for the sins of St. Paul. Were this section focused on and fleshed out, I have every reason to believe—well, to hope at least—that you’d be able, with editorial assistance, to produce a piece of criticism we could publish.

However, your need to tie in this relatively extended take on Metcalf to the Problem With Today’s Reviewing—the former, given the structure of your essay, amounts to a lengthy digression—sabotages any such hopes. Before you can say anything of real substance about Metcalf’s criticism, you are making another abruptly clumsy segue—“So, one could legitimately say that Metcalf has turned a generation of reviewers away from “academic” evaluations of literature”—back to your original complaint: that Canadian book reviewing has been going downhill for twenty years.

Finally, for reasons that are again far from clear, you end your piece on Canadian review culture by talking about James Wood. It is perhaps apposite that a series of ill-connected pensées should be capped by one last non-sequitur—but it is nevertheless unfortunate.

I have spent so much time on the structure of your piece because I believe that this major flaw of your essay is the chief begetter of its manifest infelicities. Your failure to plan and plot your structure, your negligence when it comes to measuring twice before you cut, has led to a house in which, to borrow from American poet Alan Dugan, “nothing is plumb, level or square.” In such a house, one must force things into place, stretching, bending and cutting in a graceless, Procrustean manner to make everything fit.

Some examples:

LACK OF QUOTATIONS TO SUBSTANTIATE ARGUMENTS

Because you have tried to cram so many things into one essay, you have left yourself little space in which to quote. There are no quotations of any length; the longest you use is no more than a few words. This is a significant lacuna in an essay that is almost 3500 words long, and it calls into serious question the authority of your arguments.

One of the only things you do quote is a remark by Philip Marchand to the effect that

…anyone who does not appreciate the greatness of Tolstoy is “deficient in taste, period.”A dubious opinion, given that Henry James, who has as great a claim to “taste” as Marchand, disliked War and Peace, and the late-career Tolstoy felt that his own early work was too verbose. … Marchand’s statement is about himself, his belief in War and Peace’s greatness. He offers no defence of his opinion, believing that none is required.

This four-word quotation, for which you provide no context, comes from the autobiographical essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” which serves as the introduction to Marchand’s book Ripostes—not from a review or a work of criticism. Marchand’s essay, I would add, is considerably more nuanced than you seem willing to admit. He even confesses to the sorts of doubts you say earlier that reviewers never admit to:

Every critic must sometimes suspect, upon feeling baffled by a book, that there are other, more acute readers who actually have understood the author’s intentions—understood them, and relished the results. They are not baffled. But meanwhile, intelligence has failed you, the critic. In a few cases, it may have failed so badly that your remarks will serve to amuse posterity.

He also says that Cat’s Eye—a novel written by a poet, which you say he’s against—is a good book, if not a major one. Marchand is not talking about something so picayune as liking Tolstoy (and let the record show that he has elsewhere sided with James and Tolstoy so far as to prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace, to which he does not actually refer explicitly in his essay, by the bye). He’s saying that Tolstoy is a major writer who cannot be ignored; unfortunately, Henry James isn’t around to consult, but it’s hard to imagine him disagreeing, since he, after all, couldn’t ignore Tolstoy either. This isn’t about pleasure at all, but about perspective. He’s saying that it makes no sense to put Atwood next to Tolstoy and determine that Atwood is in the same league. By providing a sound-byte and by failing to contextualise that byte, you misrepresent what he is saying. Rather than engage with his argument, you opportunistically poach a pull-quote so that he might serve as your tackling dummy.

Your failure to use quotations is particularly troublesome in an essay that argues against criticism as mere opinion. Of Metcalf, you complain: “He takes sentences or paragraphs that he considers examples of brilliant writing and then does the written equivalent of pointing and saying, “There, you see?”” This is a fair criticism, if true, but not only do you provide no examples of this pointing, you fail to avoid it yourself. Metcalf’s approach, as portrayed by you, at least gives a reader some basis on which to agree or argue with him. As Marchand puts it in the same essay from which his maligned Tolstoy remark was untimely ripped (after juxtaposing two paragraphs and saying, in precise terms, what he likes in one and dislikes in the other): “The reader may feel free, at this point, to make his or her own judgements about the writer’s critical tastes.”

In consistently failing to provide examples, you go one worse than Metcalf and co. Consider, for example, your claim that Metcalf “tends to like finicky prose, and he particularly likes English versions of finicky prose. His own sentences, those he quotes as examples of “good writing,” are often overwritten and, at times, awkward in their frank desire to be good.” One expects at this point to see at the very least an example of such an overwrought, pre-pubescently awkward sentence, but one’s expectations are frustrated. It is truly unfortunate that you didn’t quote anything here because the “finickiness” of a sentence is something that can actually be quantified, using such mathematical tools as the Gunning Fog Index or the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Test. This is precisely the sort of analysis that Marchand does provide in his comparison of sentences by Michael Ondaatje and Russell Smith. The latter, it should be noted, is a writer whose fiction has been edited and published by Metcalf, and yet Marchand’s example of what he sees as a characteristic Smith sentence is demonstrably unfinicky in its diction and syntax. The least you could have done is provide an equally concrete example of what you deem to be “finicky prose.”

Rather than pointing, you gesture vaguely in the general direction of something and sniff, “Need I say more?” Your essay pays lip service to the idea that mere opinion is bad, but its manoeuvres betray another message: their opinions are bad, but mine are good—so good I don’t even need to defend them. You actually make this explicit when you say, “On the evidence, I think Metcalf and I have similar sensibilities. But those who have been influenced by him — Ryan Bigge, for instance — are not on the same level [ed: as Metcalf and by extension as Alexis] and don’t possess the same credibility, though they allow themselves to make the same kinds of pronouncements.” (Ah, so credibility justifies opinion. And how does one go about amassing this capital you call credibility? Or is it bestowed upon one by divine fiat like a birthmark, discernible only to those similarly endowed?) The assumption of one’s rectitude and others’ wrongitude is of course at the heart of most debates and there is nothing inherently wrong with it as a starting point, but it is disingenuous to pretend that one is against opinion as such—in an opinion piece.

POT AND KETTLE-ISMS

This is far from the only example of failing to practise what you preach. In the same essay in which you decry “personal attacks and collegiate vitriol,” as well as certain critics’ practise of “insulting” their targets, you write disdainfully of “a short, pompous man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses (a self-styled “critic”).” Just because, unlike Starnino and Bigge, you don’t name the person you’re belittling doesn’t mean that it isn’t an insult. It just means you’re less brave than they are in dishing it out. Either that, or this bespectacled little man’s a character you’ve invented.

In an essay that begins “Toronto is the city in which I have been disabused of any number of notions, where I have lost a certain innocence,” you later proclaim: “This is neither criticism nor reviewing but autobiography. Marchand is telling me something about himself. Starnino is telling me about his sensibility and how much he believes in his beliefs. Bigge is settling a personal vendetta with McLaren.” (By the way, while I am aware of the details of Bigge vs. McLaren, it is not safe to assume that all your readers will be, so if you’re going to cite the conflict, you really need to explain it.) Throughout your piece, which you admit is prompted by your “idealism,” you tell us of your preferences, your sensibilities, your beliefs. You tell us that Stan Persky is “one of [your] favourite Canadian reviewers,” but you say absolutely nothing about why he is, never mind—pardon the repetition—quoting something from one of his putatively wonderful reviews.

BROADSTROKE GENERALISATIONS

By sidestepping the specific, you wander into the wilds of the general. A few cases in point, besides the aforementioned dismissal of all post-Frygian critics:

1. You argue that the 80s era Globe Books was “an inspiring venue for Canadian intellectual life.” In defense of this thesis, you mention Persky (again, without reference to what made him a worthy critic) and nothing else. One can only assume you’re working from memory and can’t actually recall any other contributors. You do mention Jay Scott, but then admit that he didn’t write for the books section; what you don’t seem to be aware of is that this makes him an irrelevant addition to your essay, unless you think the fact that he quoted Barthes renders him sufficiently bookish to merit a mention.

   
   

2. As noted above, you say that “Canadian literary reviewers are so woefully incompetent, it makes you wonder if there’s something in our culture that poisons critics in their cradles.” A reader can only assume that you believe that there is not a single book reviewer in a country of over 30 million who is even competent at his or her job. This in spite of earlier saying that Globe books editor Martin Levin “still manages to dig up capable reviewers now and then.” Is a capable reviewer not a competent one?

   
   

3. By promoting Metcalf as the prime mover of all incompetent and vicious critics, you do exactly what you say Metcalf is guilty of: you paint yourself into a corner. You concede that it is “rhetorical to blame any single person for the current state of critical affairs.” Personally, another “r” adjective comes to mind to describe such a perversely hyperbolic statement—Metcalf himself would be more than a little surprised to learn of how widespread his pernicious influence has been—but in spite of your caveat lector, you proceed to make the case against Metcalf anyway. Because the case is, by your own admission, dubious, the “facts” you corral to bolster it do not hold up to scrutiny. You say that Solway, Starnino, Marchand and Bigge are followers of Metcalf, as evidenced by the fact that Metcalf has “edited or published” them. While it’s true that Metcalf has edited collections of prose by Solway, Starnino and Marchand, it should be noted that Solway is only a couple of years younger than Metcalf and was engaged in sorties against the literary establishment long before he made contact with him. Further, one could with some accuracy claim that Starnino learned a thing or two from Solway, who actually was a mentor to the younger critic, but the Montreal Gazette had far more to do with giving Starnino his start as a reviewer than Metcalf did. Much as Marchand, as you’ll know from having read “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” cut his critical teeth in the pages of the Toronto Star. All three of these writers have indeed published books edited by Metcalf, but the vast majority of the content in those books had been previously published by people other than Metcalf. It is certainly reasonable to posit that all four of these men share a certain outlook or sensibility, but it is a Reed Richardsesque stretch to call Solway, Marchand and Starnino Metcalf’s “children,” as you do. With Ryan Bigge, the case is weaker yet—no better than speculation, really. The only piece of evidence I know of linking Bigge to Metcalf is Bigge’s publication of a review of a book by Andrew Pyper in Canadian Notes & Queries. While Metcalf has long been on CNQ’s masthead, he is not the reviews editor. That job, at the time of Bigge’s review, belonged to Michael Darling, who also once commissioned me to write a review for CNQ. I subsequently joined CNQ as an editor and replaced Michael as reviews editor when he stepped down in 2006. I have served in that capacity for approximately four years, during which time I have had very limited exchanges with John Metcalf, who has never once told me what to have reviewed, nor whom I should hire to write for CNQ. I therefore think it entirely probable that Ryan Bigge has never had so much as a conversation with Metcalf, never mind the paranoid notion that Bigge is some kind of Metcalf acolyte.

   
   

4. If the Metcalf, Marchand, Starnino or Bigge of your essay appeared in a novel, say, the author of that novel might justly be charged with creating cardboard characters. It strikes me as a singular failure of imagination on your part—a failure made wilful by the suppression of facts—that you can only see, or choose only to portray, one dimension of these rather complex individuals. You speak of “the shallow, self-aggrandizing rhetoric that now passes for criticism.” Do you really want to go there? In this essay? Do you really believe that all Carmine Starnino does is insult poets? Or was this another rhetorical flourish? You leave an informed reader in the position of having to decide if you’re being ignorant or dishonest and neither option, needless to say, redounds to your credit. Is Bigge’s review of Leah McLaren’s book actually representative of his normal reviewing approach? Is this someone who reviews for the sole purpose of avenging hurts suffered? Is he allowed no mulligans on your course? I’ve already pointed out nuances in Marchand’s writing that you’ve missed/glossed over. Do I really need to remind you that Metcalf—whom you paint as an occasionally amusing curmudgeon with good taste but bad judgment—was appointed to the Order of Canada for his contributions to culture in this country, most notably for his role as mentor and editor to dozens of writers? Don’t take my word for it; how about Alice Munro’s: “I have the feeling he is the one person who can tell what’s fake, what’s shoddy, what’s an evasion, maybe even mark the place where a loss of faith hit you … It won’t matter what compliments you’ve been getting from other quarters.” You should be familiar with those words, as they appear on the jacket of An Aesthetic Underground, a book to which you refer. This isn’t to say that Metcalf is or should be beyond criticism. He isn’t. But he has earned a great deal more respect than you seem willing to grant him. And here’s the thing: your failure to give him his due does no harm to Metcalf, but rather to your own argument against him; assaults this feeble invariably wind up with the assailant more badly wounded than the intended target.

   
   

LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF THE FIELD

All of these leaps, stretches, elisions, omissions and errors of fact accumulate to convince this reader that you have a very limited knowledge of the field you are writing about. That James Wood’s name is “the one” you hear mentioned is a rather dismal indictment of the literary company you keep. In conversations I have with other writers, names like David Orr, Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, Tom Paulin, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Hoffmann, Ange Mlinko, James Fenton, the recently deceased Thomas Disch, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Clive James, Stephen Burt, Edna Longley—to name randomly a few off the top of my head—come up routinely. One can certainly argue about the relative merits of each writer’s criticism, but they are by no means low-profile figures; several of them are practically celebrities, at least as well known as Wood, if not better. They are, it is true, primarily critics and/or reviewers of poetry; that they occur to me is reflective of my own primary interests and reading habits. It could be that the fiction field is comparatively barren—my own knowledge of it is too limited to agree or disagree with such a statement, though even I can at least summon the name of Sven Birkerts without undue strain—but if so, you would have done better to restrict the scope of your essay to fiction reviewing or fiction criticism, instead of using the broader “literary” rubric. Since you have invited Solway and Starnino into your essay, however, it is clear that you did not intend to focus exclusively on fiction reviewing. At any rate, if you hope to salvage anything from this essay, I urge you to acquaint yourself with the writing of today’s prominent literary critics. If nothing else, it should provide you many hours of pleasure and stimulation.

I hope you can see, Mr. Alexis, why CNQ can’t accept your submission. If nothing else, it is an affront to the array of very talented reviewers whose work has graced our pages in recent issues, but which seems to have flown over your radar, set as it is to scan the ground immediately in front of you. I suggest you sample some of our back issues before submitting to us again. Read, for example, Anita Lahey’s mettlesome re-appraisal of Gwendolyn MacEwen; James Pollock’s bracing overview of the oeuvre-to-date of Jeffery Donaldson; Carmine Starnino’s generously spirited assessment of Karen Solie’s achievements (a far cry from the insults you seem to suggest is all he’s capable of dispensing). I don’t mean to suggest, either, that CNQ is the only venue for thought-provoking literary reviews. While the newspaper situation does indeed seem rather sad, there are a few smaller-circulation publications dedicated to criticism that is substantial in terms not only of column inches but also in rigour and erudition. Some of these are print magazines, such as Arc and The New Quarterly. Others are internet-based. Speaking of which, I’m puzzled, if not altogether surprised, that you neglected to tell readers that the reviews of Stan Persky, for example, can still be read online at Dooney’s Cafe. Clearly, he’s moved on from the Globe and Mail. Would that you followed his lead.

I’ll detain you no longer, sir. If you decide to rework the material in your essay, you are more than welcome to resubmit the results to us. If, however, you decide to seek another market for the piece as is, I’m sure you’ll have little trouble finding one. As you say, editorial standards in this country are, by and large, depressingly low.

Best regards,

Zachariah Wells