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The Great ‘What If?’ In the History of the Canadian Novel
by Jamie
Fiction + News / May 11, 2011
I picked up this month's Walrus Magazine on the newsstand. I'm a passionate magazine reader and was struck by the provocative cover tease: 'Where Are All the Big Bold Canadian Novels?'
It delivers a little less than promised as the article in question is actually 'Supersized: How Mordecai Richler Taught a Generation of Writers to Think Big', by Charles Foran.
Foran riffs off his very well regarded biography Mordecai: The Life & Times and argues for an speculative literary history: What Solomon Gursky Was Here had won the Booker prize in 1990 instead of A.S. Byatt's Possession? What if Solomon Gursky Was Here went on to become the template for what we think of a the successful Canadian novel? Canadian novels could have become known as large sprawling stories of history and ideas instead of carefully observed novels of the domestic and the interior life that seems to predominate today. I am grossly oversimplifying Foran and in fact his own argument is a simplification of reality (there are over 14,000 trade books published in Canada every year, so it stands to reason that all sorts of novels get published).
But what I like about the article is that it displays the health of Canadian letters today. Our literature is mature enough that establishment writers like Foran, writing in establishment magazines like The Walrus can take a run at conventions, try and gore some sacred cows and generally shake things up a bit. My wife and I have completely different takes on the article, again a good thing. She has an advantage over me because she has actually read Solomon Gursky Was Here.
What do you think?
