A New, Better Way to Read Canada’s Novels

T.F. Rigelhof, Hooked On Canadian Books: the Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984, Toronto, Cormorant Books, 2010, 356 pp. HB, $32.00 

T. F. Rigelhof has been something of a secret Canadian treasure for a quarter century now, a Saskatchewan-bred boy of Volga Deutsch descent who has lived happily in Montreal for the last 35 years. He is a failed (or reformed) seminarian with both the intellectual rigour and the dry wit you’d expect of someone with his educational background, but he also possesses startling gifts as a raconteur along with the most infectious giggle in Canadian writing. In 1995, after a couple of semi-successful novels, he published A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, which was an account of his five year stint training to become a Catholic priest. The book is a small classic; the prose terse and angular, the thought restrained and elegant, and its indictment of the Roman Catholic Church is argued with gelid brilliance. It read like the work of a fine writer discovering his métier. It was followed, in 2000, by This is Our Writing, an eleven essay evaluation of Canadian writing that managed to be magisterial and deliciously witty at the same time. It was centre-pieced by a convincingly hilarious deflation of Robertson Davies and an equally convincing proclamation of Barbara Gowdy as a major force in Canadian Literature. Its prose has the same quickness that characterized A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, and together with Philip Marchand’s 1998 Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature, it signaled that Canadian writing had reached a new, more self-critical maturity.

Rigelhof was laying down some of the most disciplined, edgy prose being written anywhere in the country, and one wondered, with anticipation, what would next catch his sharp focus. But in 2003, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on the left side of his brain, and everything changed. Aside from some right-side weakness in his right leg, the initial effects seemed minimal, and a full recovery seemed eminent.

His first post-stroke publication was a rethinking of the materials in A Blue Boy in a Black Dress: 2004’s Nothing Sacred: A Journey Beyond Belief. The book was more than a hundred pages longer, and it moved differently; more sensuously, and with a kind of joyful leisureliness that told you that the writer was taking pleasure from each word he wrote, and each insight he uncovered. The result was a book that was arguably better than A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, but profoundly different—almost as if a different writer was at work, with a sweeter, wilder mind that swept through and over and around his materials instead of penetrating and deconstructing them. His reviewing, over the next several years carried similar cadences. His readings of different authors were more sweet-tempered and positive, and you got the impression that Rigelhof was a man deeply enchanted by being alive and able to read. He liked everything he came across, and what he described about the books he reviewed told us, often marvelously, about what they did achieve, and little of what they didn’t.

I know Rigelhof personally; well enough to have been able to talk to him about the cognitive changes the stroke wrought. He told me he now reads more slowly than before, and has more difficulty with dense ideation. He can handle both without diminished capacity, but it takes longer, and there is more labour involved. One of us, I can’t remember which, proposed the metaphor of a rearranged cognitive toolbox. It has the same tools, but when he reaches in, some tools easily fit into his hand, and others don’t. The hacksaws and box-cutters have sunk to the far corners, at the bottom.

At the end of 2007, there was another stroke, this time more serious (and happily, since resolved) that, I think, influenced Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984 (2010), and may even have made it possible.  It is a book that deploys all the tools in Rigelhof’s frankly enormous toolbox, and in a new and remarkable way.

Here’s what I think: Hooked on Canadian Books is, first of all, the best work of literary criticism ever written in Canada, and a literary masterpiece in its own right. Second, although its author is probably the most thorough reader of Canadian fiction we now have, this book is not an encyclopaedia of Canadian fiction. It is exactly as advertised: a reading of what Rigelhof believes are the good, the better and the best Canadian novels since 1984. It begins with the bracing premise that an abundance of interesting fiction has been written in Canada over the last 25 years, and then sets out to explicate it on the terms the novels themselves have set. Rigelhof is their mapmaker and guide, but what he isn’t prepared to be is a gatekeeper or a judge of their proximity to an ideal scheme. He reads and explicates the good/better/best for what they actually achieve, and discovers thirteen different ways of being good/better/best. Better yet, he does this in relation to world literature, not in reference to their conformity to the mind-numbing Canadian canon as taught within the country’s literature departments or to Chapters/Indigo’s widget merchandizing software and the mostly-pernicious literary prize structure invented to focus profits for it. Wise readers of this book will learn nearly as much from what novels and novelists aren’t discussed as from those that are.

So, what are the thirteen categories of excellence he deploys, and who are his favourite writers? The thirteen categories—which Rigelhof terms “Annals”, when you look carefully, deliberately defy simple categorization.  One of them, for instance, discusses inclusion envy, and is about where and when a Canadian novelists is “permissibly” Canadian. Another links Barbara Gowdy and Margaret Atwood to Henry James, and he is able, in another, to put Tim Findley and Nino Ricci into the same frame. In yet another, he yokes together Michael Ondaatje, Neil Bissoondath and Alberto Manguel. What Rigelhof is arguing with all of this, always, is the sheer multiplicity of the way it is possible to write well, and, not incidentally, the ways that it is possible to read.

His faves? Barbara Gowdy is clearly one of them, Margaret Atwood is another, Don Akenson and Mordecai Richler are a third and fourth. Joan Barfoot, Wayne Johnston, Joe Boyden, Doug Coupland and David Adams Richards rate highly, each for different reasons, and there’s even an appreciation of Russell Smith’s unique sensibility and skills, delivered in a couple of paragraphs, that would have sent any other critic in the country in a 4 wheel skid. But the list of what he likes is a very long one, and only partly because the notion that there’s a lot to like is central to everything he writes. There’s no discrimination between young and older writers—one gets the sense from both his coverage and his comments that he might even like the new kids on the block best.

Best of all, this book will show readers of Canadian fiction how to read in a new and infinitely more inclusive and satisfying way, one that dovetails accurately with Canada as it exists in the 21^st century: multifaceted, diverse and idiosyncratic. It will offer receptive readers a series of new and more open reading strategies, along with a series of trails through the marketplace and its monolithic view of human reality.

Hooked on Canadian Books is a joyful book, delivered with a combination of economy and panache that communicates its joy in every sentence. It is a book that deserves to be in every Canadian reader’s library because of the way it makes Canada a bigger, more interesting country.   We’re lucky to have Rigelhof; it terrifies me that we came so close to losing him.

Buy this book. Get hooked the way he is.

1250 words March 27

Why Canadian Novels Aren’t Selling Anymore

One of the smaller crises dogging the traumatized Canadian publishing industry is that sales of Canadian literary fiction have dropped off over the last two or three years in a depressingly precipitous and mysterious way. Sales of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, for instance, have been much weaker than expected after the success of The English Patient. Some sources report they’re a fraction of the pre-movie sales of TEP, although M&S head Doug Gibson says otherwise. Whatever the truth is, it is safe to say that the sales of other titles by the major publisher’s flock of bright young urbanite novelists are similarly dismal. The brightest recent lites they’ve had are Andrew Piper’s Lost Girls and the Oprah-induced recycling of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. With Mistry, the main impact has been in the U.S. market because most literate Canadians already have the hefty hardcover edition of that title jammed under a door to keep the drafty breezes of cultural capitalism from driving them from their pernicious habit of sitting in comfortable chairs trying to improve their minds—and out into the malls where they can have the sorts of thrilling but educationally empty retail experiences that’ll turn around the current, um, economic recession…

(He takes a deep breath, feels like Nino Ricci must after a similarly long sentence, pauses until his heart-rate returns to normal.)

A conversation I had recently with one of the country’s more unorthodox editors—who doesn’t wish to be named—offers a fascinating theory about why the sales fall-off has occurred, along with a possible solution. He believes the problem has to do with the kind of novel Canadian publishers have taken, en masse, to publishing in the wake of the two glamourous successes of the last decade, Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces.

Ondaatje’s commercial success with The English Patient–long overdue for Ondaatje in my opinion—has been a cause for no-carp celebration in Canada, partly because Ondaatje is a uniquely-gifted writer and partly because he’s a genuinely decent and unpretentious man. The success of Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces is more open to debate. It can be argued that her novel was a case of an author cynically tapping a market for tertiary guilt and hitting the jackpot. But what is much more important than picking on Michaels is establishing that both her novel and Ondaatje’s are not exactly what we’d call smooth reads. They are, for lack of a more precise term, poetically framed works that render abstract aesthetic experiences more easily than the informational kind, which is to say, they’re more likely to convince readers of the beauty of the author’s philoprogenitive abilities than of the timeliness or precision of the intellectual propositions they make. It is also fair comment to say that neither novel generates much laughter. Ondaatje’s wit with dialogue occasionally provokes a smile, but Michaels’ portentously earnest prose and subject matter positively prohibit merriment of any sort.

I’m going to stop short of doing any serious hacking at the texts of these books, because I’m pretty sure what I’m about to suggest is already clear to most readers, even if it is uncomfortable to consider. So here it is: both novels are consciously “literary” in their conception, construction and intention. As a result, the power sources and attentional focus in both novels is the poetical pyrotechnics of the language used rather than the plot or the informational action. The English Patient manages to be a readable novel because Ondaatje is an extraordinary poet and a serviceable plot mechanic, even when he’s making the sorts of mistakes about hot weather medical transport over rough terrain that offshore critics of the movie had so much fun with. But Michaels, before this book, was nothing much: a skilled if overly conventional Canadian poet, and there are thousands of those. I’ve had trouble finding readers, even among those who defend her loyally, who got through the entire book, and none who didn’t mention the beauty of her language before they recalled that the subject field of the book was the Holocaust. At a certain point in its commercial trajectory, it became enough to spare the brain and simply have Fugitive Pieces on the coffee table.

What my disaffected editor told me that is of interest here is that the entire Canadian novel-publishing sub-sector bought into the Ondaatje/Michaels model a few years back, and that the reason for the drop in novel sales is because nearly all of the novels now being published are literary and plot opaque; plot-free and hard to read; excessively literary and self-reflexive; dull, boring, and incomprehensible (choose appropriate phrase now).

Such novels, regardless of how one chooses to characterize them, draw the attention of readers not to the subject matter but to the ideaof literature, or to the issue of the relative virtuosity of the author’s language. These may be issues of profound cultural interest in the abstract, but it is blowing serious volumes of smoke up our posteriors to think that any more than about 500 of the 900 or so people Rick Salutin once said make up Canadian culture give a damn about these things. It’s similarly foolish to imagine that any more than a few hundred of the several thousand tenured and wanting-to-be-tenured folks paid by the universities to process literature with arbitrary intellectual contraptions care either. (Both groups tend to wait for free desk copies, so from a sales point of view, what they think never matters anyway).

A much larger segment of Canada’s population—200,000 to 500,000 people on a sunny day, are interested in having a good, informative read that isn’t an insult to their cultural sensibilities or their native intelligence. They want, my editor/friend believes, to read novels that are about something, and they don’t want to be bullied and suffocated by an onslaught of lilac, purple or cinnamon-scented prose. It’s an exaggeration to suggest that this means they want novels that run closer to Alex Haley or James Michener—or to Scott Young—than to Anne Michaels, but if it’s true, so be it. They also, he believes, want the novels they sit down with to be a little more fun than they’re currently getting from the deadly-earnest, self-involved literary novels currently languishing on Canada’s bookstore shelves.

Makes sense to me.

945 w. Uploaded February 7, 2002