On the absence of hatchet-work amongst Canada’s Book Reviewers

Martin Levin, the Globe and Mail’s long-time book editor, wrote an entertaining piece in last Saturday’s paper about the fun writers sometimes have hacking one another to pieces  in print. He quotes mostly from Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, edited by Gary Dexter, and the barbs are from everyone from the Athenian Greeks to Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. It’s good fun, too, until this more or less inevitable bit of folk-lorish disingenuousness at the end of the piece:

“It pains me, though,” Levin writes, “that Canadian writers have fallen invectively short. Are we too nice? Too deferential? Sure, there’s no shortage of private whingings, resentments and jealousies, but wouldn’t it be a treat to have, say, Alice Munro opine of Robertson Davies something along the lines of: ‘The man was a blowhard. All that cloudy, mystical Jungianism hung on the slenderest of twigs; and never a character you could faintly believe in.’”

Levin has been the gate-keeper for Canada’s most prestigious newspaper book review venue for 14 years now.  The disingenuousness of what he writes lies in the fact that his own editorial policies at the Globe have been among the principal causes of the shortfall of public hatchet-swinging amongst Canadian writers. If you administer a serious beating to a writer when you review in the Globe, you’re almost always punished for it by not being offered another book to review for at least two or three years. Way back in 2002 I savaged the ridiculously self-advertising Grant McCracken’s Plenitude in a review for the paper, and I didn’t hear from Levin for 7 years. Admittedly, I didn’t call him either, since I was busy and I knew, given the 4 pages of acknowledgments McCracken included with the book, that I was about to make some powerful enemies.

I have some sympathy for Levin here, because he works with a uniquely 21st century hatchet poised above his own neck: newspapers today, with their shrinking readership and advertising base, are under severe constraints in the way they review books. Only the big corporate publishers in Canada can afford to advertise in a national newspaper like the Globe and Mail, and they don’t want their authors savaged because the three or four marketing graduates who do the book buying for Chapters/Indigo (which sells 70 percent of the books in Canada) base their shelf-space allotments on what Levin’s reviewers have to say about newly published books. They read the Globe because it is the last paper left in the country that has a substantial review section.

Ergo, consciously or not, Levin, in an effort to keep his review section from shrinking more than it already has, has learned to bring in the wankers to review books, more often than not knowing that his reviewers have career or temperamental reasons for “being positive” about the books they’re reviewing. It keeps the advertising dollars coming in, and it wards off the bean-counters upstairs, who aren’t interested in discursive cultural fun and have their own kind of hatchets, along with the mandate to use them without the slightest regard to the cultural consequences. That the Globe and Mail’s book section has survived to the degree it has is a testimony to Levin’s tactical smarts in avoiding them.

550 Words February 5, 2010

Remembering Val Ross

Val Ross died this past week of brain cancer. She was only 57. Val, who was a highly successful freelance writer before taking up editorial posts at Maclean’s, Saturday Night, and finally The Globe and Mail, will be remembered by her many friends and colleagues for her integrity, her passion, and her no-nonsense approach to the frequently nonsensical trade of journalism.

But I’ll remember her in slightly different terms. She was, after all, my first.
Val Ross published my first piece of freelance journalism, all the way back in 2005, on the subject of mandatory retirement. She gave me the rest of the day to do it, and if I could finish it in time she’d consider running it. I did, and she did, and that set the tone for the relationship that we had, a writer and his first editor. I would ask Val for advice, on who to approach with a particular piece or how to approach them, and she’d respond quickly, honestly, and often tersely, the last feature a byproduct both of her responsibilities at the Globe and the fact that she had no time for formal niceties and false politeness. Once, I toyed with the idea of working at the Globe as a copy-editor, and Val, being Val, simply left her copy of the Globe’s style manual at the front desk for me and told me to figure out the rest.

Val was one of those rare writers who didn’t believe that she was playing in a zero-sum game where any success that’s shared with another writer, be it through collaboration, editing, or professional guidance, reduces the amount that’s available to them. She opened doors – hell, she kicked them down – as a force of habit, not as a favour, and I doubt that she never expected anything in
return.

She promised that she’d come by one day for a drink, although I now understand why she didn’t. But I can picture what she’d look like if she had, sitting at the bar, glass of wine in hand, with those eyes that seemed to send light out rather than take it in.

Her eyes are what I’ll remember most about Val, in fact, because they symbolized the giving spirit and vitality that defined her too-brief presence in my life.

Toronto, February 27^th 2008 – 575 w.