Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

MENTAL HYGIENE

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MENTAL HYGIENE Essays on Writers and Writing

RAY ROBERTSON

INSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 2003 by Ray Robertson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Edited by Richard Almonte Copy edited by Adrienne Weiss Cover Designed by Bill Douglas at The Bang Interior Designed by Marijke Friesen National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Robertson, Ray, 1966Mental hygiene : essays on writers and writing / Ray Robertson ISBN 1-894663-43-8 1. English literature —History and criticism. 2. American literature —History and criticism. 3. Canadian literature (English) —History and criticism. 4. Authorship. I. Title. PN771.R568 2003

820.9

C2003-900711-1

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO

— Oh, rocks! she said. Tell it to us in plain words. — M. Bloom

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements /9 Introduction /ll PART ONE: US

I Am (Not) Canadian /19 Slash and Burn /22 Ricci Redux /25 Carver Country /31 Not Doing Well What Shouldn't Be Done /34 Region of the Soul /37 The Girl Can't Help It /40 So You Want to Be a Famous Canadian Novelist /43 Really, Really Dance to It /46 Running on Empty /51 Working for the Man /54 Nirvana, Almost /57 In Spite of Itself /60 Experiment Successful /63 The Danger of Competence /66 Don't Steal This Book /69 Abracadabra /73 Love Drunk /76 Misplaced Talent /79 Good Guys and Bad Guys /82 Cranky, Elitist, True /85 Richler Rolls On /88 Short Back and Sides /94 East Facing West /97 Standing on Guard for Mead /100 This Is The End /103 Saving the Planet and Impressing Your Friends /106

Heaven in a Rage /109 Music Is Best /112 Lost at Sea /115 PART TWO: THEM High Plains Drifter /121 He's Come Undone /125 High Art /128 Lights, Camera, Inaction /131 Well Done /134 Scary Writing /138 Two Out of Three Ain't Bad /141 More Required Reading /151 Paying the Gas Bills and More /154 So Smart it Hurts /157 Bold, Brilliant and Beautiful /160 All By Myself /163 Me, Tarzan /166 What a Drag it Is Getting Old /170 Socrates in the Suburbs /173 PART THREE: ME Mental Hygiene /181 Building the Perfect Umbrella /186 The Right to Write /188 Does Size Really Matter? /192 How to Cook a Novel /195 Good Golly Miss Molly: An Autobiographical Poetics /198 A Few Friendly Tips for Writers, Readers and Publishers /202 The Will to Schizophrenia /205

Acknowledgements Many of the following pieces first appeared in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Books In Canada, Canadian Bookseller, Fine Print: The Magazine, and side/lines: A New Canadian Poetics. All have been rewritten, some extensively. I am grateful to the editors and publications for permission to reprint them here, and to the Ontario Arts Council.

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Introduction

D.H. Lawrence called the novel ''the one bright book of life" and pronounced the novelist "superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog." As usual, Lawrence's characteristic hyper-hyperbole isn't far from the mark. I passed through puberty wanting to be Jim Morrison, discovered the Beats in high school and decided to be a poet and stumbled across Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian at a church book sale in grade twelve and settled on being a philosopher. After surviving one university degree in the intricacies of clear thinking and two mental meltdowns (chicken or egg, I still haven't figured out which), the right books, the right woman and dumb, wonderful luck all converged to put me on the road I'd been travelling all along but didn't even know was there. Three novels later, the only time I feel like I can sing and dance and rant and rave and somehow make it all make sense is when I'm knee-deep in a brand new fictional world of my very own making. But one can't be happy all the time; nature, wisely, won't allow it. A working novelist's model state of mind is invariably manicdepressive—ecstatically high when slapping down the words on Monday, gloomily low when skeptically reading them over on Tuesday. The body, too, needs a break from the fatiguing fall from exaltation to despair, from the pounding physical effect of, day after

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day, going from knowing—knowing — that one has written something truly exceptional, to the pained —and painfully humiliating—disbelief that one ever thought oneself worthy of putting words on paper for public consumption. As usual, the truth is somewhere in-between, but level-headedness never helped anyone finish a book. Of course, alcohol and drugs are time-honoured modes of soothing mood moderation, but these, too, have their downside, and not just the sometimes frustrating inability to get enough. So one writes book reviews. Yes, there's money to be made —not much, but some — to buy blue jeans, dog food and paperbacks; and, as Wordsworth argued, there is the no-less self-interested desire to help create the critical taste by which one hopes one's own work will be understood and enjoyed. But even if a temporary ceasefire in the daily war with one's mercurial self-esteem has been reached, most fiction writers and poets I know can work for about three hours a day, usually no more than five days a week. More than that, and one tends to write because one feels like writing, as opposed to writing because one has something to write. My wife knows when my work is going well. If I'm prone, whatever the question, to mumble monosyllabic answers and find reruns of Sister Sister a little too complicated to follow, the novel is progressing nicely; if, on the other hand, I can't answer "How are you?" without launching into a five minute diatribe about the evils of urban sprawl, why the fiction of Edmund Wilson is so markedly inferior to his essays and what the real Hank Williams was actually like, I'm not, as I should be, leaving everything I've got— intellectual, emotional, spiritual —at my desk. A novelist writing a book review is like a marathon runner undertaking a five mile jog: true, there's not that same feeling of bone-deep satisfaction when the outing is over, but one's muscles have been given a workout and the sweat on one's brow is honestly earned. And, as a bonus, book-reviewing forces a writer to rely—to a degree that one ordinarily doesn't when making art—on the analytical portion of one's brain, the part that primarily pulls apart rather than puts

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together. One still attempts to infuse the language with verve and swagger and supply as much wit and wisdom as the form will allow, but explaining why someone else's novel doesn't work is always easier than sitting down and showing everybody how it's really done. No matter how superb the book review, one thousand words of equally excellent fiction is one hundred times harder to write. Yet, outstanding book reviews have been, and continue to be, written. Kingsely and Martin Amis, for example, represent two generations of novelist-reviewers who gave, and continue to give, enormous pleasure by way of both their fictional and critical work. If one enjoys Lucky Jim, one will likely appreciate Amis pere's typically smart and smarmy assaults on modern jazz, experimental poetry and public education. Likewise, anyone who delights in the energetic prose and fierce humour of Amis fits' Money will undoubtedly equally savour his lively appreciations of his prose heroes Bellow and Nabokov as well as his spirited skewering of Robert Bly's Iron John and the cult of Princess Di. As with any first-rate writer, the essential style does not — cannot—change. What one enjoys in the fiction or poetry, one finds, to varying degrees, just as enjoyable in the non-fiction. Sometimes more. Solely on the basis of his collected essays United States and The. Last Empire (which are primarily composed of long book reviews), Gore Vidal will, I believe, be eventually acknowledged as a latter-day Montaigne, a sort of twentieth-century personal litmus test for all that is good, beautiful and sane. Does it really matter, then, that no one but airport-orphaned businessmen and highbrow housewives are capable of stomaching Hollywood, Lincoln or Burr? Similarly, the theatre reviews Mary McCarthy wrote when barely out of her teens for The Partisan Review will outlive her already dated, best-selling novels. I know Mordecai Richler's five volumes of essays and reviews better than I do his fine, fine fiction. I read, and continually reread, Anthony Burgess' three collections of book reviews, Urgent Copy, Homage To Qwert Yuiop and the posthumous One Man's Chorus, as well as his two volumes of memoirs, for the exact same reasons I'll

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reread Hemingway's short stories or will occasionally pull Philip Larkin's poems or a Thomas McGuane novel from the shelf and start reading wherever the book happens to fall open. I know these voices — I receive pleasure; I find sustenance; I'm reminded again of why I do what I do as best I can. It's all any reader can ask.

Most of the pieces collected here are less than a thousand words long, the customary cut-off point of a book reviewer's craft. In this sense they are decidedly informal essays —violently personal, openly prejudicial and unapologetically unsystematic attempts by the author to better understand both the subject matter under consideration and, perhaps just as importantly, himself. In other words, those in search of formal academic examinations of the role of northwesterly snow squalls in the early novels of Margaret Atwood or of how Hemingway and Fitzgerald were so transparently high modernism's biggest closet queens, are advised to look elsewhere. Or, as Montagine, that greatest reviewer of that greatest book, the human spirit, put it: "Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject." Forewarned is forearmed.

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PART OWE: US

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I AM (NOT) CANADIAN The New Yorker Stories by Morley Callaghan Exile Editions, 138 pages Maybe there's something to be said for the provincial government's desire to chop such superfluous pedagogical items as books from the curriculum. Force-fed Hugh MacLennan, Earle Birney and a menu full of other governmentally-approved CanLit superstars in Grade 13 Canadian Literature class with the understanding that reading Canadian fiction and poetry was good for you, like fresh orange juice or having plenty of bran in your diet, I count myself fortunate I'm capable of enjoying the few writers born north of the 49th parallel I was lucky enough not to have been introduced to in the classroom. Richler's novels likely viewed as too long, Layton's poetry as too racy, in their place we got Margaret Laurence and F.R. Scott. And Morley Callaghan; They Shall Inherit the Earth, in particular. Which was my first and last Callaghan encounter until second-year university when a friend and I saw a notice for a talk he was giving at Hart House Library. My appreciation for all things CanLit hadn't ripened in the interim years, but we misunderstood the notice for free refreshments and thought that instead of the cookies and tea we were eventually served there'd be beer. Ah, the illusions of youth. The talk we'd been promised didn't materialize, either — Callaghan was around 85 at the time and looked frail and not quite up to a full-fledged lecture—but the question-and-answer period that did result more than compensated. The audience that packed the

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library lobbed over the usual inanities all writers have to answer —Do you base your characters on real people? When did you decide to become a writer? Where do you get your ideas from? —but the majority of the afternoon was given over to Callaghan's free-flowing reminiscence of some of the people he'd known over the years. People like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson and others. Before the first post-talk cookie was crunched, my friend and I were on our way to Abbey Books to get our hands on some of this Callaghan guy's stuff. What we found were a shelf full of novels and collections of short stories that, if not possessing the same groundbreaking stylistic impact of his friend Hemingway ("No man had meant more to me than Ernest," Callaghan claimed in his wonderful memoir of youth, That Summer in Paris), nonetheless remained forcefully readable, their clear, deliberate prose an excellent tool for scrutinizing all the messy metaphysical implications of living in a seemingly anti-metaphysical world. The pre-eminent literary critic of the 20th century, Edmund Wilson, was notoriously blind when it came to judging the merits of his friends' work, but, for what it's worth, ventured in 1966 that "the Canadian Morley Callaghan, at one time well-known in the United States, is today perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world." Callaghan was once well-known in America because at the time of the appearance of his first novel, Strange Fugitive, in 1928, Canadian writers, if they were serious artists, published with American publishers, and Callaghan published with the best —Scribners —counting among his stablemates Hemingway and Fitzgerald, all writing under the editorship of the justly famous Maxwell Perkins. Aside from the succession of novels Callaghan published, he was also developing an American audience through the appearance of his short stories in The New Yorker. In all, Callaghan published 21 stories in the magazine between 1928 and 1938 (including the first short piece of fiction they ever

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printed, "An Escapade"), all of which have now been collected in The New Yorker Stories. Anyone acquainted with Callaghan's later work won't be surprised by or disappointed with these early stories (some of which appeared in 1959's Morley Callaghan's Stories). There's the same careful rendering of character ("Timothy was a very fair young man who never thought of wearing a suit coat with trousers to match, and yet somehow he looked carefully groomed and even distinguished'7); the same capacity to capture in a deceptively simple phrase an entire story's essence ("Ever since he had been a kid Fred Sloane had wanted to be a cook, not just any cook but a man who might some day be called a chef"); the same cast of lonely and confused salesmen and saleswomen, waitresses, bartenders and lower-level office workers desperate for love, happiness and maybe even a dose of meaning in their lives. Morley Callaghan's early American success is no more an indication of his importance as a writer than his relative obscurity in his native country today testifies otherwise. But aside from the worth of his actual fiction, the considerable respect Callaghan received from his more famous friends like Hemingway and Wilson—and the international readership he assembled over the years —serves as an indispensable example to every new generation of writers in this country who too often forget that there is no such thing as Canadian writers but only writers who happen to be Canadian. Let Callaghan himself have the last word. "Forget all about the words 'identity' and 'culture,' just never mention them. Seek only excellence and in good time people all over the world will ask about Canadians."

SLASH AND BURN Skin Hound: (There Are No Words) by Kenneth J. Harvey The Mercury Press, 220 pages Give the Canadian book industry credit. No one more than I regularly finds reason to pull out what little hair I have left at the seemingly endless capacity of the CanLit establishment to be bamboozled by high-power publishing houses, the know-nothing, sound-bite-propelled media and its own general lousy taste, into accepting mediocre art as worth talking about and praising. What a pleasant surprise, then, that Kenneth J. Harvey's obvious attempt at making a flashy publicity splash by purportedly including a sample of his own flesh in the bookmaking process of a limitededition sample from his newest novel, Skin Hound: (There Are No Words), has created such a near-nothing ripple. Maybe there's hope for CanLit yet. There's far less reason to be optimistic about Harvey's novel. Skin Hound tells the story of William Merriam, "a seemingly intelligent man, a tenure-track professor ... a decent man," who murders his wife and children as well as butchering and skinning lots of lovely young ladies along the way. The murders are confessed to early on, so the novel isn't a whodunit but, rather, a whyhedunit. How, in other words, any seemingly upstanding sane individual could do such heinous things. Or, in the words of Merriam himself, the goal is "to understand the ornamental human condition wrapped around the sonorous 'why?' "

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Merriam talks a lot like this. He says things to Doctor Cabeza, his prison psychiatrist, like "Inarguably, we are distinct individuals at various points in our lives" and "Any deviation from the sublime — heavenly, splendid, lithe, willowy, statuesque, elegant, poised—form, any stuttering of grace, left most feeling uneasy" and "I find no fault in tormenting —and then murdering — the selfish and spiritually destructive, thus plucking them from the claustrophobia of their insufferable opulence." Merriam is a professor of literature, and he's not nearly as frightening as he is pedantically irritating. Hannibal Lector was at least sort of lordly charming. Merriam sounds like a Ph.D. student in Victorian literature who likes to spin revenge fantasies. A good deal of Skin Hound is given over to Merriam's descriptions of his sexual encounters and fatal conquests. Most sound like rejected letters to Penthouse spiced up by somebody who has studied Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho for all the different ways to fillet your sexual partner: I continued to speak lovingly despite her obvious interest in the doctor the previous night, despite the fact that his sister, Gassy, had pulled me into the bathroom of the doctor's villa and pushed herself upon me, immediately forced her mouth to mine and grabbed my hair, kissed me with such startling ferocity, then dropped to her knees. The shame of her advances. The appalling shame! I dared not utter a sound of protest for fear of drawing attention to my rape. Skin Hound is composed of two very different, alternating narratives. And just to let us know how postmodern this all is, Harvey has affixed a second subtitle to his book, spelt out in oh-so-po-mo lower case letters. Skin Hound, apparently, is "a transcomposite novel." Meaning, I think, that there are the long, first-person conversations/confessions Merriam has with Doctor Cabeza, recorded as journal entries by Merriam himself, as well as a number of chapters written

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in the third person that take place between the same Doctor and "Patient X," presumably Merriam. In spite of Merriam's tendency toward professorial purple prose, his first-person chronicles are much more alive and interesting than the conversations in these later sections. Harvey is the author of eight other novels and collections of short stories, and Merriam will occasionally whip off a gorgeous line like "twisting up the volume to the crescendo of scholarly blood opera" to describe a killing spree. For the most part, though, the doctor will ask a question of Patient X and then gladly supply his own answer, telling the reader just the sorts of things we'd like to —in fact, need to —ascertain ourselves instead. Too often what we get is canned psychology and ready-made philosophical explanations effortlessly delivered by the good doctor himself. Cabeza asks Patient X: Couldn't it be possible that you're not so one-dimensional? Because you're an educated man and educated men can't believe that educated men commit acts of senseless violence. It's all too animalistic. That's what you were writing about in your journal. The brutal must be stupid, ignorant, incapable of rationalization... You could be an educated brutal man. Maybe. The question of what makes human beings — "how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties," as Hamlet reminds us—the most dangerous (to themselves and others), sadistic and cruel creatures in nature is a good one. The answer, if there is one, isn't going to be found here.

RICCI REDUX Lives Of The Saints Cormorant Books, 238 pages Where She Has Gone McClelland & Stewart, 322 pages In A Glass House McClelland & Stewart, 339 pages by Nino Ricci When my first novel was accepted for publication and I answered the inevitable question of "Where?" with "Cormorant Books," most people would blink a couple of times, stare back at me a good bit, scratch their heads, and then, almost apologetically, manage, "Cormorant, Cormorant. I think I've heard of them." But when I added, "They published Nino Ricci's first book, Lives Of The Saints," all ambiguity would instantly disappear. "Oh, Cormorant. I have heard of them." Fame by association, perhaps? Not quite. While Lives Of The Saints went on to win the F.G. Bressani Prize, the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Governor General's Award for fiction, was translated into seven different languages and sold over seventy thousand copies in Canada, most first literary novels are considered a success if they sell a couple thousand and get a few reviews in the right places. Needless to say, Lives OfTlie Saints was a tremendous success for any work of serious literature, let alone a first novel.

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In the seven years since the publication of Lives Of The Saints Ricci has written In A Glass House (1993) and, now, the third and concluding volume of his trilogy, Where She Has Gone (1997). With the appearance of this last novel, something like an appraisal can be made not only of the story Ricci has to tell of Vittorio Innocente and his family, but also —and perhaps more interestingly—of Ricci's development as a writer. It's always slightly puzzling to try and understand how a work of genuine literature manages to catch the public's fancy and sell in legion with the latest crime/horror/romance schlock that routinely clogs the best-seller lists. The case of Lives Of The Saints is less mysterious. Ricci's first novel tells the relatively simple story of Vittorio, his mother and the enigmatic blue-eyed stranger who helps to tear apart Vittorio's family, makes them virtual outcasts in their small Italian village and eventually forces them to leave Valle del Sole and emigrate to Canada. Most of all, it delivers a well-crafted, engaging tale; in other words, it's the kind of story that allows readers who are often put off by linguistic experimentation and/or non-linear narrative — the hallmarks of much contemporary serious literature —to read and actually enjoy a book for a change that the Globe and Mail and the CBC say is the real deal, a genuine piece of honest-to-goodness, capital "L" literature. Too often, story or plot is dismissed by so-called "serious" artists and critics as contrived or even manipulative. But the fact remains that many readers, even those like myself who believe that the language used to tell a story is just as important as the story it relates, nonetheless value highly the powerful human desire for structure and some sort of narrative movement. Twenty-five hundred years later, Aristotle's call for a beginning, middle and end still rings true. Of course, taken to its furthest extreme, where plot is valued as almost the only literary virtue, and language is relegated to a mere means by which we find out if the butler really did do it, "literature" turns into mere "fiction" and there remains no real reason to reread

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the work. We read the book; we find out what happened; we sell the thing to the second-hand bookstore. In literature, however, what got us from Point A to Point B allows us to re-experience as readers again and again the simple joy of making that progress. In literature, getting there is half (and sometimes more than half) the fun. But if Lives Of The Saints manages to nicely balance this mix of linguistic artfulness and sustained story, In A Glass House, if even more powerful in its use of language, suffers from a significant lack of narrative structure. At times, Vittorio's observations of his new Canadian home are so startlingly poignant that the effect is almost hallucinatory. More than once, one's own memories, impressions and emotions of childhood long buried and thought forgotten burst into consciousness due to Ricci's sharp observatory and descriptive powers. Describing the bus ride to and from school, Ricci so acutely evokes the class misfit, George, and Vittorio's understandably cruel adolescent feelings toward him, that one becomes momentarily convinced afterward that George went to one's own school and that this — embarrassing but true—was exactly how one's self felt: I didn't want to be like him, didn't want other people to think I was like him; but whenever I was forced to sit beside him I'd feel a kind of rage build in me at his stupidity and strangeness. When other kids had to sit with him they'd call attention to themselves by making fun of him or by touching other people in the seats around them to pass on his germs. But I couldn't do these things, didn't have the right feeling inside to do them, and I knew my failure made me seem more like George to the others, even made me, in a way, more despicable than he was. Yet, for all its verbal facility, In A Glass House reads more like a memoir than a novel; or, if a novel, a novel told in the form of a memoir, much like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. (Perhaps not

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so coincidentally, the epigraph to Lives Of The Saints comes from Proust's mammoth six volumes of reflections.) In fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of Ricci's prose style closely mirror those of Proust's. Both are meticulous in their use of language, every word carefully chosen for its precise effect and absolutely necessary placement. At the same time, the seemingly endless self-analysis that both authors' protagonists are given to is often overwhelming in its solipsistic repetitiveness. The reader of Proust and In A Glass House can be excused if, at times, a kind of cerebral claustrophobia occasionally descends, making one wish for something besides the first-person protagonist's troubled soul as an organizing narrative device. Vittorio is a complex, oftentimes remarkably astute observer of himself and those around him, but something more tactile than his observations about himself, his family and the small southwestern Ontario town they live in would have made this second volume of Ricci's trilogy more than what it ends up being: a sometimes engaging but just as often frustratingly hyper-self-conscious reading experience. Which brings us to Where She Has Gone. Lives Of The Saints concludes with Vittorio's mother's death during childbirth on the ship to Canada and the birth of his illegitimate sister, Rita. In A Glass House, lacking as it does any strong plot or structure, ruminates upon many persons and ideas but—especially towards the end —is given over to Vittorio's growing obsession with his sister, who, by the time she is seven or eight years old, has moved in with a neighbouring family because of Vittorio's father's quiet resentment of her and his own physical attack upon her. Where She Has Gone picks up this obsession and, indeed, is almost entirely given over to it. Vittorio (now Victor, an adult) and Rita are reunited in Toronto where both are university students and where each attempts in his or her own awkward way to discover in the other the sibling that circumstance never allowed him or her to be. Adding to this awkwardness, or perhaps underpinning it, is the sexual tension that exists between

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the two, especially on the part of Victor, who becomes physically ill over the thought he might lose Rita, dreams about her constantly and pursues her across the ocean on her summer holiday to Europe. Here, he and Rita rendezvous in Valle del Sole, the birthplace (or rather place of conception) of each of them, bringing the trilogy full circle. But they do not reach the understanding they both crave: of who they are in and of themselves, and to each other. More unified than In A Glass House because of Victor's singleminded fixation upon his sister, Where She Has Gone again demonstrates Ricci's impressive gifts as a conjurer of mood and place (the evocation of Toronto through the seasons is one of the best I've read anywhere) but still doesn't manage to strike that difficult balance between style and story so impressively achieved in Lives Of The Saints. The focus Victor's obsession with Rita provides to the novel is, in the end, compromised by the same sort of unremitting self-examination that so characterized In A Glass House. A problem with the form of a work of art usually indicates where a problem with content lies. In WJiere She Has Gone Victor is often seen dropping off to sleep. Here, in the realm of heavily symbolic dreams, he can most effectively do all that he really seems to want to do in the novel: directly, explicitly ruminate on Rita. Their actual conversations are usually banal—filled, it's true, with the sort of awkwardness of expression that is faithful to their alienation from each other, but, still, not satisfying dramatically since they usually reveal little about who they are or why they are both confused and unhappy with their lives. In an appreciative but uncommonly perceptive review of another best-seller of literary value, one critic warned that while Jack Kerouac's On The Road was undoubtedly the work of a fresh new voice and a genuine talent, the road Kerouac travelled in the book could only be taken once. One can't help but wonder if one of the sources of the flawed novels that followed Lives Of The Saints is that the story of Vittorio Innocente only needed to be told once, and that Nino Ricci's obvious talents might have been better employed on

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entirely different themes, people, places. Highways are usually the quickest and safest way to get from one place to another, but sometimes it's the side roads that make for the most interesting trips.

CARVER COUNTRY People Leaving by Ian Roy Buschek Books, 198 pages While obviously not as culturally significant a claim as the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's assertion that all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, it's as equally true to say that—both for better and for worse —most North American literature of the last 20 years has in some way been influenced by the fiction of the American short story writer Raymond Carver. Even those who reject Carver's less-is-more prose style and domestic-dilemma subject matter usually do so fully cognizant of the prevailing literary aesthetic that they're writing against. With the publication of his first collection of short stories, People Leaving, Ian Roy clearly declares himself in the pro-Carver camp. The people in Roy's stories move from dull, low-paying job to dull, lowpaying job, drink too much booze in their cramped, noisy apartments, think about cheating on or leaving their partners when they're not actually doing it and generally attempt to get through another difficult, tedious day as best they can with little hope of things ever getting better. Typical is the narrator of "Dancing": So we're good; things are fine. I mean, they're good enough, I suppose. I should mention at this point that every once in a while I do think about what it would be like to be on my own again. It's not that I don't love Geoff, I really do. And of

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course I love the kids more than anything. I suppose it's just— well, boredom. Roy, then, isn't likely to contribute to the glut of recent Canadian literature where self-obsessed artist types probe their tortured psyches against a dazzling background of Canadian landscape, in the process doing us all the enormous favour of helping to define that irritatingly invisible thing university professors and high-minded journalists like to call our "Canadian identity." Roy's characters are more likely to be at a corner table at Hooters trying to figure out how to make the next car payment. Stylistically, too, Roy follows the Carver company line. Sentences are short, syntax is simple, language is utilitarian. There's an immense difference between simple and simplistic writing, however, and, happily, Roy usually manages to achieve the former. His austere prose and sterile tone, for example, work wonderfully well in conveying the soul-sucking wasteland that is a 10-year-old's endless summer vacation in vapid suburbia. From "The Sad Dark Eyes of a Dead Dog": I sat on the porch nearly every day of that summer: reading and playing with bugs and watching the neighbours come and go... The old woman across the street, Mrs. Taylor, waved to me with her short, fleshy arm as she reached for her mail in the morning. It was one of the few times I saw her venture outdoors and even then it was really only her arm that left the house. The woman who finally acknowledges her husband's infidelity in "God Loves a Broken Heart"; the stood-up groom in "A Beautiful Day For a Funeral"; the man separated from his wife who lies about her and their daughter dying in a car crash to a stranger at a bar in the title story: all of these characters are alive—we believe their pain and their ineffectual but no less real attempts at self-healing—because Roy is,

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for the most part, a conscientious craftsman, one who breathes life into his fictional people the same way any competent writer does, with telling dialogue, crisp language and a firm sense of narrative structure. There are a couple of missteps. "Like A Newborn Baby'7 reads like the first draft of a novella or even a novel, the protagonist Lou not nearly developed enough to earn the potentially powerful ending of finding himself outside his ex-lover's house forlornly blowing on his tuba in a snowstorm. And "How Art Thou Fallen?" is simply a mistake (and especially since it is the collection's incongruous concluding piece), its dialogue so hopelessly stilted and camp that one can only wonder if it is some sort of ineffectual parody. How else is one to understand a character who says things like "When I was just a boy, my mother asked me where I had been. I made something up and told her a lie. I can remember neither the lie nor the truth. But I remember telling the lie. The ease with which it slipped out of my mouth, between my lips like a cool slice of peach"? On the whole, though, Roy's stories are like good pop songs: maybe not likely to remain in one's mind for all that long, but wellcrafted and enjoyable all the same. For every master like Carver who is able to wrench the metaphysical from the banal with seeming ease, to wring the poetic out of the ostensibly profane, there are bound to be less talented but no less sincere disciples such as Roy. There are far worse apprenticeships to serve.

NOT DOING WELL WHAT SHOULDN'T BE DONE Making A Killing by Warren Dunford Penguin, 334 pages Gore Vidal defined commercialism as doing well something you know you shouldn't be doing. And what a successful commercial novel does well is put language, theme and even, to a degree, characterization on the back burner while allowing plot to happily boil away on the front. There's good beach-reading and there's not-so-good beach-reading, and what usually defines the former is that the reader cares about what's going to happen next. Warren Dunford's second novel, Making A Killing, has an inventive storyline and just enough narrative twists and turns to satisfy the most demanding page-flipper. In an attempt to catapult himself out of the ranks of struggling young writers, Torontonian Mitchell Draper decides he "needs to jump through my window of opportunity before it closes for good. So I'm going to write the best screenplay of my life. Something totally commercial. A shameless box-office smash that'll help me get rich quick. Because a big-budget movie can pay a writer a million dollars." Soon Mitchell hitches his high hopes for fame and fortune on not only telling the story of a particularly grisly, long-ago murder-suicide in Toronto high society, but also on solving its mystery through interviewing survivors of the incident. Mitchell becomes a detective without a badge, and the more material he assembles for his screenplay,

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the more he discovers about the carnage. Adding to the fun, the fatalities took place at a mansion that is now home to a New Age cult run by a Dr. Bhandari, the same cult that Ramir, one of Mitchell's two best friends, has been trying to interest him in since his own conversion. Mitchell's other confidante, Ingrid, a visual artist, also gets caught up in the case, all the while preparing for her first big exhibit in Europe and attempting to rekindle things with an old flame. So far so good. Contrary to the prevailing McCanLit wisdom that has made a virtue out of boring, static fiction about humourless, selfobsessed protagonists, even novels of the most literary sort need a compelling story line to allow the reader the opportunity to participate in significant character study and real thematic exploration. That's why Crime and Punishment is not just a profound examination of good and evil, but also an entertaining detective story told in reverse; that's why we wonder what will happen to Alex in A Clockwork Orange, even while we're pondering the subtleties of free will. But even the most heavily plotted, crassest commercial fiction is conveyed through language. Meaning, you don't need to be an accomplished prose stylist to write an engaging whodunit. Graham Greene in his self-dubbed "entertainments," or a genre writer such as Raymond Chandler, never allow linguistic banality to get in the way of plotted pleasure. Too often, Dunford does. Encountering the infamous house for the first time, it's simply not enough to say that it "looked spooky," or, "It didn't help that the raging thunderstorm was a cliche right out of a horror movie." It's not the house or storm that are the cliches —this is, after all, a mystery novel—but the language that is used to describe them. In the same paragraph as "raging thunderstorms" we also get "stately old mansions," "ominous trees" and a street where "there was not a soul to be seen." Such limp, pre-packaged language has little sensory impact on the reader, and what's more, distracts from the story. Likewise, when Ramir assures Mitchell that the cult will help him as a screenwriter and smiles "in that way that's so infectiously

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enthusiastic, you can't help but go along/' maybe Mitchell knows what that smile looks like, but the reader doesn't. Which is unfortunate. Because if we did, Making A Killing might have turned out to be the entertaining novel it could have been instead of merely a very promising idea.

REGION OF THE SOUL Habits And Love by Rod Schumacher Insomniac Press, 191 pages Certain rites of passage every writer experiences: the first exceptional review, the first scathingly bad review, the first review that, while complimentary, seems, puzzlingly, to have been written about some book other than the one you've authored. Recently I had the privilege of receiving my first in-print ad hominem attack. Noting my "retro sideburns and smarmy smirk," the writer went on to condemn me as a "self-styled urban hipster" intent upon damaging the reputations of several older, superior scribblers. I only wish I were so worthy. Unfortunately, that my novels tend to be set in urban areas — Toronto, usually—and their suburban satellites is as beyond my control as much as my apparently unpleasant appearance and inability to sufficiently squirm before the giants of McCanLit. I grew up in suburbia and live in Toronto, so I tend to write about these places. Indeed, if I could "self-style" myself, I'd probably be an earnest teller of heartbreakingly tender stories set in bucolic Newfoundland at the turn of the twentieth century—apparently, that's where the real money is these days. The back cover of Albertan Rod Schumacher's debut collection of short stories, Habits And Love, boldly declares that the author is "tired of big-city narratives and devoted to western storytelling, representing the regional experiences of small-town people." Thankfully for Schumacher, his stories succeed in spite of this provincial polemic.

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The only regionalism any real writer can safely recognize is the region of the soul, and Schumacher knows this territory well. Even if you've never been further west than Etobicoke, if you've ever struggled through 14 hard-fought rounds with Life yet somehow managed to answer the final bell no matter how bloodied, you'll recognize the world of Habits And Love. That said, Schumacher's stories are parochial in that things happen in them that wouldn't, say, in one of Mordecai Richler's metropolitan narratives. In "Boys and Arrows" two teenage friends share an epiphany while killing a porcupine with a father's shotgun. In "Acts of Forgiveness" a fatally wounded doe writhes in pain on a midnight highway, "attempting to crawl into the bush on the other side of the road, lifting herself on her front legs, dragging her damaged hind quarters across the pavement . . . her front hooves . . . clawing and clacking against the road, sounding like stone-on-stone." In "Scars," the narrator, returning home to Saskatoon for his father's funeral, goes for a walk around the old neighbourhood only to discover "an old man crumpled on the ice, his face flat against the frozen surface, a small pool of blood puddled by his forehead." Yonge and Bloor, this isn't. Yet, for all the dead wildlife, raging prairie winds and out-ofwork miners, Habits And Love is really about the same things all good literature is: love and hate, life and death, happiness and sorrow. An exasperated father exclaims: "What I want is to get this ridiculous holiday over with so I can go back to work for another 50 goddamn weeks and get some peace and quiet." A young woman discovers the unwinnable wars we all fight all our lives long, knowing that "the Germans were supposed to be evil. But that was far away, in another world, in another galaxy; and she was here, now, 18 years old and sharing a bedroom no bigger than a closet with two sisters, constantly cleaning and cooking, breathing the same stale, used air that was silently but surely killing her mother." A lonely widower faces the end the same whimpering way everyone does, not with a bang but by putting "Belafonte on the console

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stereo that still has the original needle in it. He turns the lights out, settles into the recliner, his good ear facing the speaker, the volume just loud enough to be heard . . . He sips his drink. Closes his eyes. Fingers the loose skin under his chin." Schumacher writes a spare but crisp sentence. While occasionally guilty of a forced, faux-poetic epiphany ("Alone, always alone in this dream, he reaches out, touching the vibrant edge of the mystery. And then he will fall and weep over the smallness of the light and the cruel dark path that brought him here"), his stories are, for the most part, rock solid, honest and real. Just like a parched prairie field. Or a downtown Toronto intersection.

THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT 13 by Mary-Lou Zeitoun Porcupine's Quill, 142 pages

It might have been a bartender I know, it could have been Ralph Waldo Emerson, but somebody once warned me to be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it. Mary-Lou Zeitoun's debut novel 13 is everything I've always argued a small press book can and should be: attractively designed, engaging in subject matter, smart and funny in the telling. And yet, and yet... First, the cover. Immediately one is grateful that the hallmarks of McCanLit book design are nowhere to be found. No moody nature scene denoting the awe-inspiring yet terrifying temper of the Canadian landscape, for example; no grainy, out-of-focus shot of a thought-tortured woman in the throes of a mental breakdown and/or spiritual epiphany. Instead, the cover of 13 delivers something slightly less staid: jailbait. More specifically, a (presumably) 13-year-old private-school girl hanging from a set of monkey bars, tartan skirt riding high above her dimpled knees, a tantalizing glimpse of pubescent mid-section flesh peeking out from underneath her untucked school blouse. And, oh, yes—with rapturously narrowed eyes and an unlit cigarette dangling between her pretty little lips. Add in the nearly half-page glam shot of Zeitoun on the back of the book and one can't help but feel a twinge of nostalgia for sublime waterfalls, majestic snow owls and a stampsized headshot of the author with her cat.

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Story-wise and thematically 13 is slight, but intentionally so, with just enough narrative curveballs to distinguish it from most comingof-age stories. True, the protagonist, Mamie Harmon, is the quintessential literary outsider, suffocating in the suburbs of Ottawa while daily suffering the insulting slings of bad music, bad friends, bad parents, bad teachers and bad fashion (she's particularly piqued by disco and polyester). But Zeitoun has the good sense to push the narrative envelope far enough to make 13 more than another Catcher In The Rye knock-off. Marnie, you see, after attempting to kill her media studies teacher, has been banished to an all-girls Catholic school. Here, as Lou Reed would say, "her life was saved by rock and roll," in particular punk music, and she discovers the joys of drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and hanging around strippers — her very own hell-raising Holy Trinity. But what Marnie really wants to do is meet John Lennon because, as she says in the letter she writes him, she thinks he is " incredibly deep" and her "goal is also to change sexism and racism in the world and I think I can help you with your peace campaign." She also thinks he's real sexy, just not during "the May Pang period when he was drinking with Harry Nilsson and wearing Kotex on his head." Whereas a less plot-conscious writer might have Marnie marinate for 140 pages in her own emotional juices, stewing in the sop of her oh-so-sensitive soul, Zeitoun cleverly uses Mamie's obsession with meeting Lennon as a simple but effective storyline to hang a series of witty observations about the life of a properly alienated teenager. In any novel, a little bit of narrative tension goes a long way. The question of whether Marnie will raise the cash to make the bus trip to New York and actually meet Lennon isn't why we read on, but it does provide the narrative arc enabling us to enjoy the pleasures of Zeitoun's sharp eye and tart prose along the way. There's Mr. Bennett, for example, the possibly pedophiliac teacher, whose "crotch looked like a nest of bunnies under polyester." There's Marnie and her friend Edna's take on '70s dinosaur rock: "We

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both thought Pink Floyd sounded like grown-ups doing bad acting in a musical." There's Marnie's reaction to her mother's nauseatingly incessant optimism: '"Marnie, don't be so Negative/ my mother always said. Mom would get mad at Anne Frank for being scared of the Nazis. She would think Anne Frank was being Negative.'" 13 is rarely boring, often humorous and full of clever observations — exactly the kind of book I would give to a young woman like Marnie Harmon desperate to imagine a life different from that of Green Vista, the suburb she's marooned in. For the rest of us, though, its non-stop talk of boys, boob size and how uncool one's parents are does tend to wear thin, 13 becoming just a little too close to Bridget Jones For Beginners for comfort. Which may have been Porcupine's Quill intention in publishing it. Which —whether or not that's actually a good thing—is certainly worth thinking about.

SO YOU WANT TO BE A FAMOUS CANADIAN NOVELIST The Worlds Within Her by Neil Bissoondath Knopf Canada, 448 pages So you want to be a famous Canadian novelist. Start with a solemn, humourless tone. This will signify both the sincerity and downright profundity of your approach and materials. You're deep, you see, and haven't got time for such literary inessentials as humour, wit or irony. Be sure, though, to focus on nothing more complex in your novel than (a) the difficulties of romantic love and/or (b) the difficulties of sorting through one's familial past. Don't forget, you're writing for an audience primarily interested in soap operas thinly disguised as high art through the abundant use of such terms as "memory," "loss" and anything with the prefix "post-" attached. As well, remember to write in a style that demands virtually no readerly appreciation of all the wonderful things language can be made to do. Write to the lowest literary common denominator, in other words, the central idea being that the easier you are to understand, the more honest and insightful you are. Finally, if at all possible, include an exotic locale in your book, preferably setting it in the near-distant past. This will not only help your agent secure film rights, but appease most readers' very Canadian suspicion that no really interesting stories can ever take

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place in the present tense in a country where most of us are busy working, drinking beer and watching hockey on TV. Faithfully following this formula, Neil Bissoondath's third novel, The Worlds Within Her, is no doubt destined for much critical praise and swollen sales. The protagonist of The Worlds Within Her is 40-year-old Yasrnin, who flies from her home of many decades in Montreal to bring her mother's ashes to the Caribbean island of her birth. The reader is made to understand, however, that this is no ordinary act of filial duty. When Yasmin's husband Jim says he doesn't understand why she insists on travelling alone, Yasmin gravely answers, "Neither do I, Jim. I just know I have to." Serious protagonist, serious novel. The slightly cloudy significance of her mission established, Yasmin arrives on the island and meets the cast of characters who will eventually lead her to the realization that the reason she had to come by herself was to learn all sorts of important lessons through an uncovering of her own disregarded past. There's Uncle Cyril and Aunt Penny; there's Ash, the abandoned boy the couple have taken in; there's Arnina, the eerily mute maid. These and others do their best to assist Yasmin on her steady climb toward personal enlightenment. When, for example, Cyril comments on Yasmin's success back in Canada as a television broadcaster and Yasmin humbly deflects the praise, Cyril is quick to inform her, "What you doin' is important. You helping people find out what happened in their world. You helping them remember —and forgetting is a terrible thing." That Cyril is obviously speaking directly to the reader here not only about Yasmin and her own repressed past but the worthiness of the theme of historical recovery at work in The Worlds Within Her is indicative of the clumsy parcelling out of moral truths and ready-made epiphanies that plagues the novel. Bissoondath clearly cares about his characters. And the political terror that pervades the island provides an interesting backdrop. But The Worlds Within Her is, unfortunately, full of a lot more than these

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two things. And a lot less. Not that this is likely to stop the novel from eliciting all sorts of critical oohs and aahs; in fact, it's exactly the sort of novel that most middle-brow, book-skimming Canadians love to love. Write your own version today, and witness the publishing world descend upon your doorstep tomorrow.

REALLY, REALLY DANCE TO IT Badass On A Softail by T.R Rigelhof Goose Lane Editions, 222 pages At a bar in Toronto several months back I had that rarest of experiences for a writer of literary fiction: someone who had bought one of my books recognized me and told me how much they enjoyed it. Well, maybe not so rare for some writers, but anomalous enough for this one, anyway. What remained with me afterward wasn't so much the kind things the man had to say about my own novel, though, but, instead, what he'd expressed about the majority of the other Canadian novels he'd read over the last few years; namely, that most of them were so, well, boring. Not boring as in nothing interesting happened in them (filled as they were with the usual titillating novelistic fare: sexual depravity, dysfunctional families, obsessive love affairs gone sour, et cetera), but boring as in the way the authors told them. It seemed to him as if most of these books could have been written by the same person, so lacking were they in a distinct voice or style. For the most part, we as a literary nation are rigidly, even dogmatically, conservative. A few exceptions aside, most publishers, book reviewers, awards councils, grant-bestowers and writers themselves all basically agree on what an author needs to do to create a successful work of fiction: keep it simple, keep it plain and above all don't draw attention to yourself stylistically. Sure, style is necessary to a writer, just not too much; like recreational drugs and rich food, style is a clear case of where a little is a good thing, a lot potentially disastrous.

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The American poet Donald Hall's well-known lament about the increasing dull sameness of the McPoem or, for that matter, the McStory, is only a symptom of—and, in fact, is entirely dwarfed by — the increasingly fatiguing sameness of our streets, cities, country, world. McLuhan's global village has, for decades now, not been an intriguing idea to be debated at university colloquia, but the very real disappointment of driving Highway 61, the entire distance from northern Ontario to Memphis, Tennessee, and never escaping the steady stare of the same billboards plugging Burger King, Coca-Cola and Taco Bell and rarely seeing a change in the architecture, or even the people for that matter. It is Baywatch being the number-one-rated television program in Germany. It is the ubiquitous two-cars, two-TVs and two-kids philosophy of what constitutes "the good life" that has claimed most of the world as its happy victims. It is the Super Bowl being broadcast to approximately 200 countries. It is Euro-Disney. The fact that the Americans seem to have their green thumb (green as in cash, not petunias) all over this sad state of world affairs is not the real issue. If it wasn't Uncle Sam attempting to manifest himself all over the place it would surely be someone else's uncle. The real issue, as one enduring symbol of stylistic defiance against sameness, e.e. cummings, saw it, is: "To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybodyelse means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." And for the writer, this battle is even more difficult, for he or she must "express nobody-but-yourself in words because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else." No one could mistake the prose of T. F. Rigelhof's novel Badass On A So/tail for anyone else's. Rigelhof's sentences do all the things the literary tastemakers tell us time and time again "well-written" prose isn't supposed to do. Stuffed full of alliteration and internal rhyme, his wonderfully crafted sentences constantly test the bounds of "correct" grammatical structure, his prose, in the process, emerging ten times tastier than most served up by the McCanLit factory.

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Savour the second paragraph of the novel, for example, a place where most of our "best and brightest" writers would still be idling in prose neutral but where Rigelhof is not content to do anything but give it all the gas he's got: Doo wah diddy diddy, noontime sex on sheets as white as snow or dove feathers can knock a man out for a long count. And Hoffer hasn't had a good daytime good time in such a long time, a year and counting, that it drenched him in dreams when he shouldn't have been asleep this deep. And when sex knocks him out cold, it leaves me punch drunk too singing the oogum boogum song um um mow mow check out the poosah, check out the poosah um um um. This is a problem right now. A very immediate problem. Oogum boogum, we've got to get ready and steady and go. Godamn, we've got to get up and get it together with me back inside his head. Godamn, I'd like to kick him right where the monkey keeps his nuts but sweet baby sweetums, I've got no feet. Pedal power isn't all I need. In an essay on Dante, T. S. Eliot wrote that "genuine poetry communicates before it is understood." Which is really what Dick Clark meant for all those years on American Bandstand when he said that eight out of ten kids liked song number two because, whatever it was the singer was saying, you could really, really dance to it. Before turning the second page of Rigelhof's novel, the reader knows it's going to be a loud and fast ride with, happily, plenty of wheelies and glorious wipeouts along the way. Badass On A So/tail tells the story of David Hoffer, former bass player and songwriter for a sixties rock and roll band called D.O.P.E., who today runs a successful video production company in Montreal specializing in music videos for Canadian popular music acts Hoffer believes are all about the music and not T-shirt and lunch-box corporate

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tie-ins. But all is not middle-aged bliss for Hoffer, as evidenced by the novel opening up with him riding his Harley Davidson Heritage Softail to the funeral of his mentorial best friend Woody, who has just succumbed to prostate cancer (with Hoffer worrying if the literal pain in his own motorcycling-butt is the beginning of the same). He has also mistakenly sold some of the adjoining land near his business to a religious cult called Children of the Sun to finance an equipment upgrade for his expanding business. And although he's living with a brainy and sexy teenager named Roberta, he is still prone to publicly pine for his previous lover, Lou. Rigelhof's impressive linguistic facility aside, Badass On A Softail runs on your basic How-did-I-get-here-after-all-these-years-and-allthose-drugs? and Who-the-hell-am-I-now? storyline. Hoffer's nemesis David Assmole (yes, Assmole) and Hoffer's aged lesbian mother (who wants to pack up her house in Fredericton and take her lover along with her to Australia to break the news to her pen pal of decades, face-to-face, that's she's gay) head up a rich collection of inventive and convincing secondary characters. Of course, because a language-driven author like Rigelhof usually allows sound to lead sense, there is the occasional snap, pop and hiss in a novel that otherwise plays clear and strong, places where the good sense of lyrically restrained, hard-headed revision would have made for a stronger novel. I quit counting at fifty, for example, all the pop music lyrics and titles embedded in the narrative. Early on, the technique is both inventive and structurally appropriate, as there is nothing so important to Hoffer as music, so music should dominate the prose of his story. Pushed too far, though, and an inventive technique can become a repetitive, mannered gag, and when we start getting sentences like "Why yup, great balls of fire, this sure enough sounds like as good as a seven-day weekend" and "If your girl was such a sweet child of mine I'd be running scared of what might be happening to her anywhere Bolo was leader of the pack," the references begin to irritate rather than deepen our understanding of Hoffer's

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character. And the decision to have Hoffer's ego serve as a distinct character to narrate the novel is an interesting strategy in theory, but here, at best, inconsequential because it isn't developed enough to really do much more than any third-person narrator would, and, at worst, simply wrong-headed, as any reader of the otherwise welldrawn (not to mention delightfully surprising) last chapter will testify. Let's hope Badass On A So/tail gets all the readers it deserves who will get there. And fellow novelists, please: a little less about your painful, haunted adolescence or how your last girlfriend never really understood what a wild and crazy but ultimately charming rogue you really are, and a little more badass in your sentences. Do it for the guy standing at the bar. The one who doesn't want to be bored.

RUNNING ON EMPTY Freedom's Just Another Word by Dakota Hamilton HarperCollins Canada, 344 pages Rare is the novel that actually lives up to its dust jacket puffs; rarer still that its weaknesses are prophesied in these very same endorsements. W. P. Kinsella's claim on the cover of Dakota Hamilton's first novel, Freedom's Just Another Word, that it is "fast paced" and that he "can't wait for the movie," seem entirely justified. Even at nearly 350 pages, Freedom's Just Another Word is a quick, easy read, mainly because it is 90 per cent dialogue. Composed as it is primarily of reasonably witty, rapid-fire conversation that is for the most part instantly forgotten as soon as one finishes reading it, it goes down like slightly-better-than-average television. And, yes, it probably would make a wonderful movie. Biker gang intrigue; a murder; a jailbreak hatched by a group of women seemingly irreconcilably disparate but ultimately bound together by each woman's respective standing in the School of Hard Knocks —all the necessary ingredients are there for a Thelma and Louise and Friends Break Out of the Big House blockbuster. Which is just one of its problems as a novel. Maggie Hoffer finds herself in maximum security for a crime she claims she did not commit. Unfortunately, she can't explain her scrubbing away the bloodstains on her dead biker husband's shirt and ends up thinking non-stop about escaping from prison. Eventually she rounds up a tough-talking but (we will soon come to

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see) endearing group of misfits who, under the guise of a self-help group called Feelings Anonymous, plan their escape, indulge in a lot of wisecracking chat about men, share a lot of sob stories and ultimately—by sticking together and learning from each other's hard-won life lessons — discover they will make it, whether inside or outside prison. Roll the credits, please. Not movie-friendly enough? How about a Native American woman named Stella who "gives off a vibe she'd cut your throat with the lid of a tin can if you pissed her off" but, once you get to know her, is really full of a lot of, you know, mystical wisdom. Just as damning as the rather formulaic storyline of Hamilton's novel, however, are the stylistic choices she makes in telling it. Freedom's Just Another Word is narrated in first-person, present tense. Which means we get entire paragraphs like: "Darlene tells me if I want to get scissors I better go see Tony. I'm tired of using the same ones from the flower shop. They're too clumsy. Plus they're never sharp enough. I go to his office." Or: "Before I got picked up for murder one, I sent my recipe for chocolate pecan hash brownies to High Times. It was the only magazine we had a subscription to. Here's the recipe." And we get the recipe. How many cups and how many teaspoons and everything. If one didn't know William Gass had published his essay "A Failing Grade for the Present Tense" a few years ago in The New York Times Book Review, one might think he was reflecting on the prose style of Hamilton's novel when he wrote: "Sentences are invariably short, declarative and as factual as a string of fish. Images are out. It is fraudulent to poeticize. Kept simple, quick, direct, like a punch, the sentences avoid subordination, qualification, subtlety. Subordination requires judgment, evaluation; it creates complexity, demands definition." In Hamilton's defence, Maggie does wrestle with the death of her husband Mongrel throughout the novel, the author cleverly fusing Maggie's fluctuating feelings of guilt and responsibility with diverging remembered accounts of the event of his death. And the final understanding she comes to regarding his demise and the true

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role she played in it is marginally emotionally affecting. But for the most part, Freedom's Just Another Word keeps everything on the surface: the dialogue may be nimble and occasionally amusing, but character and theme are merely implied, rarely developed or explored. Which won't be a problem for whoever writes the screenplay. Unfortunately, for the novel, it is.

WORKING FOR THE MAN Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask by Jim Munroe HarperFlamingoCanada, 248 pages I suppose none of the really cool kids are going to like me anymore. Prevailing wisdom would seem to indicate that you should like former Adbusters Magazine managing editor Jim Munroe's first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask. It's anti-capitalist, anti-mass media, anti-sexism, anti-all sorts of bad stuff. What's more, it's easy to read, kind of like a comic strip with dogma-spouting speech balloons. It's the perfect sort of novel for people who don't like literature all that much and can't be bothered with all those dastardly Eurocentric things that make literary fiction such a dead white male tool of hierarchical oppression. You know: inventive use of language, satisfying structural design and development, thematic subtlety and various other laughably outdated concepts. The storyline of Flyboy is, in spite of an occasionally enlivening dose of magic realism, simplicity incarnate. Ryan, the novel's firstperson protagonist, is a Toronto university student with a predilection for hanging around hip bars and restaurants and drinking plenty of coffee. He also possesses an ability to turn himself into a fly. Cassandra, a waitress and former member of a Vancouver hardcore punk band, is able to make things disappear. Soon they fall in love and together embark as politically correct superheroes in a war against a variety of dark corporate villains such as newspaper pin-up girls, cigarette companies and the all-enveloping patriarchy.

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Along the way the reader is exposed to (quoting from the novel's back cover) "all manner of real-time urban denizens: political revolutionaries, zinesters, indie rockers, hard core feminists, rave kids and slackwater poets." The word is out, and the message is clear: if you want to know what the youngsters are up to these days, folks, this is your textbook. Munroe himself has entered into the publicity fray by recently self-publishing a Mea Culpa that attempts to explain how it's possible to play a part in the revolution for social justice and still toe the line making money for the Man. Presumably the paradoxical marriage of radical author and the corporation who deemed to publish him will pique our interest. Why, we're supposed to wonder, did a big, bad multinational like the Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins ever decide to publish such a (pick your favourite promotional bromide) edgy, rebellious, subversive novel? Certainly not for its literary value. Painfully lacking even the rudiments of linguistic ingenuity or basic character development, what we get are lots of speeches. Like Cassandra explaining how one of her old songs doesn't quite suit her new understanding of its subject: "It's a good song, I like it, but it doesn't give a... complete picture, I guess. It presents one perspective really... strongly, but I think it's too simple. 'Cause I was feeling more than that, it was more complex, and that song is only one of the least compromising. But since then, I've revised what I think a strong woman is. All the conflicting ideas and desires, paradoxical even, have to be part of the equation." Even more uplifting, she is "reminded of how money-inspired media distorts everything. And then I started to realize how ludicrous it was to think I was powerless. I'm probably the most powerful person on Earth!" And, of course, by implication, Munroe's ideologically savvy readers as well! Clearly, HarperFlamingo is banking on enough commentators either ignoring or not being able to comprehend how utterly sophomoric Flyboy is pieced together, and, instead, focusing on how the book is filled up with plenty of neato "true to life" characters

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living on the other side of the cultural tracks who are up to all sorts of socially good deeds (in their own zany way). For a giant like HarperFlamingo, it's a smart and crafty way to appear hip while safely publishing a book any reasonably competent 10-year-old can digest. Ironically, because it is written in banal, paint-by-numbers prose, Flyboy is as inherently conservative as the same institutions Munroe's characters point their self-righteous fingers at. As Nabokov maintained, books are to be judged revolutionary not by what they say — who among those who will pick up Flyboy is really going to disagree that multinationals, Sunshine Girls and media monopolies are nasty things?—but, instead, in the way in which what they say is artistically communicated and explored. Was Lynn Crosbie, for example, author of Paul's Case, merely declaring that Paul Bernardo was a bad guy and killing women is wrong? Of course not. Paul's Case, whatever its particular strengths and weaknesses, is a work of art that, by its very form, forces the reader to come along for a dark ride into one psychopath's inner world. With Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, we're left standing by the side of the road with our thumbs in the air, vainly waiting for the author to take us somewhere we haven't been before.

NIRVANA, ALMOST Buddah Stevens ,and Other Stories by Steven Hayward Exile Editions, 110 pages Right from the opening piece in Steven Hayward's first collection of short stories, Buddah Stevens, one knows this isn't the usual McCanLit fare. Entitled "August 7, 1921," the story follows the fortunes of seven people sitting in the crowd at Yankee Stadium on the aforementioned date, which just happens to also be Bat Give-Away Day at the park. In the space of little more than ten pages, the narrator —a young boy attending the game with his father —manages to capture simultaneously the exact instant when: Lyman Labrow's affair with Jackie Hubbs is discovered, with disastrous results, by his wife Mary Labrow; an anti-Semitic, drunken off-duty policeman meets his match in a Yiddish typewriter salesman; Babe Ruth gets knocked out at the plate by a wayward souvenir bat; and, most forcefully, the narrator's appealingly roguish father repents of his raconteuring ways and becomes "a quiet, ordinary carpenter who earned his living building porches and installing kitchen cabinets." That Hayward is able to achieve such a rich scope of character development in such a limited number of words shouldn't seem so incredible. It does, though, simply because the majority of fiction writers who get published and praised in this country lack either an understanding or appreciation of a basic fictional axiom—it is only through following characters around the paces of an actual story that

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readers come to truly understand who these characters are and what their lives mean, both to them and to us. Since life rarely conforms to a neat narrative curve, it's the writer's responsibility to transform the raw stuff of existence into a well-structured story. In other words, it's necessary that the author use his or her imagination. Unfortunately, most contemporary short stories and novels are usually thinly disguised autobiography— about how smitten the author is with his fickle girlfriend, for example, or how depressed he was last summer for a variety of reasons no doubt fascinating to the author and his immediate family. Thankfully — refreshingly — Hayward is not, for example, afraid to set stories decades before he was born, as in the opening piece; make himself into a hockey-stick wielding murderer as in "Umbrella"; or, in the title story, transform himself into the bitter former childhood buddy of a famous crank spiritualist. In "The Obituary Of Philomena Beviso," by far the most inventive piece in the collection, Hayward cleverly illustrates just how much can be done with even the minutest amount of information located in the realm of reality. Essentially a formulaic obituary announcement to be found in any local newspaper amended by six pages of evaluatory footnotes, the story manages to wring from the dull datum of the 100 word notice, an entire life tale concerning the deceased, her parents, husband, children, grandchildren and a long-ago family secret. As well as being a convincing, wonderfully unorthodox short story in itself, "Obituary" also serves as a textbook lesson in illustrating the power of imaginative storytelling. Despite its obvious and impressive strengths, Buddah Stevens is not a faultless debut. "To Dance the Beginning of the World," for example, is a little too clever for its own good, with Hayward trotting out the footnote device he so effectively used in "Obituary," this time to annotate a 17-year-old's account of losing his virginity, with plenty of sagacious reflections from the perspective of the newly divorced, 30-something author years after the fact. It's not clear how the impact

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would have been lessened by simply telling the story straight, without the metafictional appendage. As a prose stylist Hayward writes a clear, spare sentence, sometimes to his detriment. After only a few stories, one begins to long for something other than the ceaselessly simple, grammatically-perfect utterances of his narrators. Compare the following. "My name is Paul Bunce and I am employed as an auditor by Revenue Canada. I mention these details for their own sake. As an auditor, I am a man habituated to detail, and it is detail which interests me most." And: "They never let us watch anything sexual or violent. They frequently show us plays by Shakespeare, but only the comedies. I've seen Twelfth Night 17 times since the experiment began." And finally: "Philomena was making pizza dough when she felt the pain in her left arm. She dropped the dough and tried to steady herself by gripping the kitchen counter. Then her knees buckled and she fell to the floor." Three different stories, three different narrators, three virtually identical instances of diction, tone and sentence structure. Still, there is much to praise in Buddah Stevens. Hayward is already an accomplished storyteller, whose work is filled with enough bright bits of truth and compassionate humour to make whatever he tries his hand at next well worth watching for.

IN SPITE OF ITSELF What's Left Us by Aislinn Hunter Polestar, 200 pages How nice to like something you don't ordinarily like. Proof, too, that the thing being enjoyed is an exceptional example of its kind, sort of like knowing that deconstructivist jazz isn't exactly your aesthetic cup of tea but not being able to help being impressed anyway with, say, Ornette Coleman ripping to shreds and then piecing back together what passed for "normal" music only six months before he got his lips on it. I've ranted long and loud enough about one of the telltale symptoms of tepid McCanLit—namely, the prodigality of " domestic dilemma" fiction—so for now it's enough to simply say that a national moratorium on short stories and novels about parental emotional neglect and love affairs gone painfully awry might be something the Canada Council of the Arts should look into. Something along the line of "2002: The Year of Tear-Free Fiction." Vancouverite Aislinn Hunter's debut collection of six short stories and a novella, What's Left Us/shows many of the ostensible signs of sentimental rot that kills off so much contemporary fiction, but rarely collapses under the weight of, for example, a back cover description of the title novella's protagonist, Emma, as a "hip, postmodern heroine" given over to "meditation on love, loss and memory." Get Calista Flockhart on the phone and bring your own box of Kleenex, right? Not quite.

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Anyone who can begin a short story with "Sophie believed she had been called by the Divine to work at the Ormand Quay Triple X Cinema. First of all, she was good with numbers" has already lost most devoted followers of the so-solemn-it-hurts school of Canadian fiction. Hunter keeps the bathos at bay as any good writer does, by dosing it with healthy doses of laughter and irony. In this same story, "Hagiography," Sophie eventually acquiesces to marriage to a garage mechanic, thereby forsaking her carnal calling and her frenetic love for James, a theology student with a higher vocation of his own. In the end, Sophie "happens upon a story in an American fashion magazine in which the heroine is bedded by a Montana plains man. Sophie discovers masturbation. Her happiness lasts close to six months." Hunter, who grew up in Ontario but spent several years in Ireland before settling in Vancouver, sets her stories in London, Dublin, Vancouver and southern Ontario but without creating nearly as much contextual or thematic diversity. In "We Live in This World," a young woman flees a dinner party into the rain because her husband may or may not be conducting an affair with one of the guests and because a telephone call delivers the news that her brother is in a drug-induced coma. "Unto Herself" concerns itself with a slightly older woman who attempts suicide because of a failed pregnancy and the fact her husband most definitely is having an affair. In "The Last of It" another young woman contemplates suicide, this time because she finds her graduate studies in art history pointless, herself rootless and because her present lover had an affair years before with the person they're staying with in Ireland. And so on. The centrepiece of What's Left Us roams much of the same terrain. In the title novella, Emma is young and pregnant, made so by a married man who may love her but isn't going to leave his wife and children. Emma herself is fatherless, which sends her off in the month before the baby's birth in search of one of the staples of McCanLit — family, history, memory. But except for the unfortunate decision to narrate the entire piece in second-person—"You smooth his tousled

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hair, brown strands sticking out between your fingers, and hope for the best. He takes your hand and puts his lips on your wrist" may work for some of Hunter's audience, but not this segment—"What's Left Us" succeeds just like the majority of the collection, and for the very same reasons. Consider the following, far-gone reflection: This is what leads you to believe that there is always some consolation for what comes undone... First it was the struggle for adulthood, all that incessant wanting, and now it's the weary reversal. How quickly you'd trade your practical loafers and the stacked washer-dryer for that thin rubber tire swinging out in wide circles over the back garden. How quickly you'd trade womb for womb, giving your small body back to your mother rather than bear this child alone. Smart, linguistically supple, often humorous and always serious about the destinies of the characters who populate it, the fiction of What's Left Us triumphs almost in spite of itself. What a pleasant surprise.

EXPERIMENT SUCCESSFUL Lenny Bruce Is Dead by Jonathan Goldstein Coach House Books, 155 pages Someone writes a doze-inducing novel and defends it by saying it's an exploration of that most profound postmodern malaise, boredom. Someone else shotgun-blasts a few tubes of paint on a canvas and explains away the rainbow of chaos on the grounds that it's an exploration of, well, chaos. The same goes for any piece of literature trumpeted as "experimental" by writer or publisher. If you like it, great, you got it. If not, the fault lies not with the artist, but you. Understand? It's experimental. The way I conceive an experiment, however, is that you try something new to see if it works. This leaves us with just two kinds of experiments: those that succeed and those that fail. Jonathan Goldstein's novel Lenny Bruce Is Dead could be described as experimental in that it tells the story—of its youthful Jewish protagonist, Josh, and his life growing up in Montreal in the '70s and '80s —through a series of episodic, linguistically charged sequences, most no longer than a paragraph or two. It makes the book it most resembles in both subject matter and style, Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game/seem positively mainstream in comparison. Despite a few blemishes endemic in its structure, the book also triumphs, oftentimes wonderfully. After teenager Josh's mother dies, he decides to return to his childhood home and live with his father, Chic. Here he conducts his desultory love life, works at the Burger Zoo, trades wits with his best

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friend Kaliotzakis, and raps with the local rabbi about the corning of the Moschiach. Like Cohen's novel, it's pretty much your basic comingof-age story with a tartly Yiddish twist: "My dad once took me to a movie when I was ten," Josh tells us. "It was Passover and we weren't allowed to eat popcorn. That popcorn smelled like God to me. God was right there and he was begging me to eat him." What separates Lenny Bruce Is Dead from the plethora of firstperson, self-reverential first novels published every year is the way Goldstein recounts Josh's slow grope toward something like maturity. Narrated in a series of almost-prose poems with a logic more associative and cumulative than strictly linear, Lenny Bruce Is Dead is jam-packed with electric language, laugh-aloud humour and hard-earned insights. It's the kind of novel in which nothing much happens, but what does, matters. There's the forever-foiled, doting Jewish mother who: would bring over food she made for him. Sometimes Josh ate it from a pot because all the dishes were dirty. He called it 'cowboy style.' When the coffee table was too cluttered and he had to eat it off his chest, he called it 'deathbed style.' One time someone came over and left a skateboard behind. He ate off that for a while, wheeling it behind him on a shoelace as he went from room to room. He called it 'little boy lost.' There's Josh's out-of-work, grief-stricken father, who "dreamt they had made him the Pope. 'I can't speak Latin,' he kept telling them. He sat in the park, all dressed up like the Pope. He felt very sad and depressed about it." There's the Burger Zoo run by the despotic Bob, the blight of every underpaid, overworked teenager's existence. " 'Did you check the timer?' asked Bob. 'Did you even look at the fucking timer?' Bob was holding a big metal strainer of black fries. All the old people at the Burger Zoo stopped playing cards. Everyone was looking at Josh. 'Do you even understand what

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you've done?' asked Bob. The fries smelled like everything wrong in the whole world." Mostly, though, there are the women of Josh's life, both real and imaginary. Goldstein's evocation and celebration .of the female mystery as seen from the eyes of an 18-year-old man-child should put most socalled poets to shame: "Kay came trotting down the stairs into the basement. She was in her underwear and he was playing video games, his philosophy textbooks spread out all over the floor. He watched her, the sound of men dying in the background." Or: "The girl selling kisses was named Jill. She had frizzy red hair. There was something about her that made him think of a glass of orange juice slimed with ketchup fingers, but she was selling kisses and he was hard up." The problem with this kind of poetically frugal, hit-and-run style of narration is that because we never stay with any one character for very long, the corners tend to feel rubbed off the individual personages. Kay, Jill and the others all magnificently evoke teenage lust and (maybe) love, but are also virtually indistinguishable from one another. Similarly, because there's no real narrative drive to the novel, there's rarely any felt sense of growing tension or even urgency in the unfolding of Josh's life. What we do have in Lenny Bruce Is Dead is a thick stack of sensoryarousing, thought-provoking Polaroids of a thoroughly spent youth. That alone makes for a very worthwhile experiment.

THE DANGER OF COMPETENCE We Could Stay Here All Night by Debbie Howlett Beach Holme Publishing, 159 pages It's a fiction writing truism (or cliche, take your pick, the two really aren't that far apart) that a writer can write about anything because everything has already been written about, anyway. Love/loneliness, the spectre of death—all are such elemental human experiences, the argument goes, that writers can't help but tread over the same thematic ground. What is the Odyssey, after all, but the West's first great road movie, with all the black-and-white moral conflict, blood and gore and shameless T and A thrown in for good measure that any Hollywood producer could ask for? But even if it's theoretically permissible to once more ride such tired fictional war horses as first love, first heartbreak, middle-age discontent and the pain of putting grandma away in the nursing home, there has to be a simultaneous realization on the writer's part that because we as readers have travelled down this road so many times before, we need—we demand —a guide who will perceptively provide us with access to views and vistas along the way we'd never noticed before. Debbie Hewlett's first book, the linked collection of short stories We Could Stay Here All Night, quite capably charts (to quote from the book's back cover) "the bittersweet wonder years" of a Montreal teen. Even if as a witness to adolescent joy, confusion and eventual maturation Howlett doesn't add much to the literary cannon, she often

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impresses with her technical skill and sharp eye for the minutiae of human life. The twelve stories revolve around Diane Wilkinson, a girl growing up in suburban Montreal in the 1970s. As in Alice Munro's Lives Of Girls And Women, it is through the book's young protagonist that we meet and grow to understand the other characters that fill up her world: Diane's alcoholic father; her mother and the parade of boyfriends she dates after the dissolution of her marriage to Diane's father; her older brother Wayne; Diane's self-proclaimed more experienced friend, Patty. Hewlett skillfully brings each of these characters to life in vivid, exact prose, her obvious faith in the method of literary realism making the best of her characterizations instantly identifiable. In "Still in the Dark," worldly Patty informs Diane, " 'Did you know that if you sneeze and have an orgasm at the same time, you die?' I shook my head. 'It's true,' she said. 'Can you imagine?' 'Really?' I gulped, then I coughed to cover up the gulping sound in my throat." We've all known a Patty, just like we've all been expertly bullied by someone like Diane's brother Wayne, who "told me to get out of his room before he told Pierre Letorneau, a French boy I'd worshipped since kindergarten, that I was in love with him." Politics, weather and other ephemeral matters aside, apparently things weren't all that much different for Diane in Montreal 25 years ago than they were for me in southern Ontario around the same time. Hewlett also exhibits a nice light touch in her stories that in no way undercuts the significance of the subject matter she chooses to explore. Whereas a lesser writer might make the story of one's mother beginning to date again a solemn, ponderous affair, Hewlett's chronicle of Diane's mother's new life is all the more perceptive for the ample doses of humour she uses in the telling. From "Undertow": Mum met Claude on the rebound, two weeks after she'd been transferred from handbags to hosiery, when her affair with the

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rug man fizzled out for good. 'Shag/ she said. 'Who needs it/ She was standing up at the kitchen table, mulling over the rug swatches Henry had left behind. In her hand, she held her favourite —a deep-pile shag the colour of the Mediterranean. He'd promised wall-to-wall, eight hundred square feet of it. 'Imagine the ocean floor, Ruth/ he'd said to her, stretching his hands out over the hardwoods in a big gesture. Here's another fictional axiom: what you do well in your work is probably the flip side of what you're most lacking as a writer—as when the novelist who dazzles with linguistic flights and lyrical bursts is compensating for the dearth of simple story and plot in her work. Hewlett's adolescent characters—and they're all, even the adults, adolescent characters, because it's through an adolescent that we experience them—do strike a chord, do resonate with "real life." But so do countless other novels and short stories detailing early romantic infatuation, the joy/bewilderment of sex and familial undoing. Hewlett's skill at bringing Diane's world so crisply alive is to be praised, but ultimately judged as not quite enough. In her essay "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," Flannery O'Connor hints at what that element lacking in Hewlett's collection is: "So many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it." Let's hope that in her next book, a novel she's working on, Hewlett manages to achieve this difficult coupling.

DON'T STEAL THIS BOOK Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock, edited by Carl Spadoni Broadview Press, 321 pages Contrary to what the sunny caretakers of CanLit would have us believe, Stephen Leacock was a much more interesting man than he was a writer. Naturally, this can't be said in polite company—it being everyone in the culture business's best interest to maintain the profitable illusion that we have just as many literary geniuses per square hectare as any other country—but the litmus test of any writer's lasting worth is whether or not he or she continues to be read voluntarily. Meaning, being compelled to read Hugh MacLennan in high school doesn't constitute a contribution toward literary posterity, but stealing a copy of Tropic Of Cancer from the school library does. No one steals Stephen Leacock's books; in fact, except for indifferent secondary students, the occasional chest-thumping nationalist and enterprising academics, no one much reads them anymore. Carl Spadoni, the Research Collections Librarian at McMaster University Library, certainly has read them—all of them—and, with especial attention, Sunshine Sketches Of A Little Town. Considerably augmented by Spadoni's dedicated labours, Sunshine Sketches has recently been reissued by Broadview Press as part of their Broadview Literary Texts series (a reprinting of scholarly editions of works of literature which have entered the public domain). The author of A Bibliography Of Stephen Leacock, Spadoni thoroughly introduces and annotates, includes a list of textual variants, an extensive bibliography

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and several contextual materials (e.g., Leacock's outline for the book, correspondence with his publishers, contemporary reviews), and even appends the text of Leacock's own stage adaptation. (Scholarly apparati actually outnumber —one might even say entomb —the original book by 93 pages.) More than the usual reason of authorial egotism, it's a project of accomplished academic fastidiousness that likely would have thrilled Leacock. Born in England in 1869, Leacock's family immigrated to Canada when he was seven, settling on a farm near Lake Simcoe. After focusing on languages at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, Leacock went on to study the relatively new discipline of economics with the well-known, iconoclastic thinker Thorstein Veblen at the University of Chicago. Armed with his Ph.D. (earned with a dissertation entitled "The Doctrine of Laissez Faire"), Leacock began lecturing on economics and political science at McGill in 1903 where, by all accounts, he was an outstanding teacher. Five years later he was appointed Chairman of the Departments of Economics and Political Science, a post he held until 1936. If most people aren't aware of Leacock's distinguished professorial record, fewer still know that the most commercially successful book he published in his lifetime wasn't Sunshine Sketches or Arcadian Adventures Among The Idle Rich, but Elements Of Political Science, a textbook he wrote soon after joining the McGill faculty. Over time, thirty-five universities in the United States and several more in Britain adopted it as their standard political science text. In fact, such was the shine of Leacock's academic star that several friends and colleagues discouraged him from gathering together the various humorous pieces he had written sporadically over the years for the self-published Literary Lapses (1910). It was, they argued, simply not befitting a respected, 41-year-old university professor and economist. Leacock's vanity production caught the attention of English publisher John Lane who brought out an expanded edition of the book, and the career of "Canada's Mark Twain" (dubbed thus by Leacock's publisher, The Bodley Head, who had also been Twain's

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publisher until his death in 1910) was off. By the time of his own death from throat cancer in 1944, Leacock would go on to publish over fifty books, including the purely humorous, social criticism and, as he grew older, works that attempted to synthesize the two disciplines. He was a leading figure at a highly regarded university, and both the world's most popular living humorist, idolized by readers and writers around the globe, and a sought-out political analyst who, more than once, was called in to assist Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden in plotting Canada's economic policy. Imagine Alice Munro being beckoned by Jean Chretien for her thoughts on hammering out the Kyoto Protocol and you get an idea of Leacock's sphere of influence. He hosted parties at his home in Montreal attended by Charlie Chaplin, W.B. Yeats and Mary Pickford, and he was probably the most popular public speaker of his time. He was rich, feted and, at the time of his death, certainly Canada's most famous citizen. Add in the death of his wife in 1925 that he never entirely recovered from, and an adored, only son plagued by a growth defect and general poor health who bitterly denounced his father after his death, and one has the makings of an exceptionally rich life story, perhaps even a novel. (All of which and more can be learned from the revised edition of Albert and Theresa Moritz's highly informative Stephen Leacock: His Remarkable Life.) But what of the books themselves, and in particular Leacock's most well-known—the still-taught, still-in-print Sunshine Sketches, Leacock's kindly lampoon of small town Canadian life? Even Leacock enthusiasts admit he wrote too much, and that the quality of his humour dipped considerably as time went on. Robertson Davies: "That his work became mechanical and stale and that there was sometimes an hysterically forced note in his fun were less to him than that he wrote a funny book every year." Still, many concur with Davies' assessment that Leacock is "at his best, worthy of the admiration that was lavished on him" during his life, and that Sunshine Sketches is equally worthy of its place in the CanLit canon.

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Which, accepting that damning adjectival qualification, it probably is. Canadian literature is still in its infancy, and Leacock's earliest work, including Sunshine Sketches, is, if a little too gentle in its satire, a little too genteel in its subject matter, a little too cute in its overall tone for contemporary tastes, nonetheless undeniably lively and entertaining. Do young writers cut their teeth on it, though, as they do, say, on Tom Sawyer, finding their own literary voices through losing themselves in Twain's; do people read it long after they should be asleep if they aren't to be exhausted the next day at work; do friends force it upon friends? No. And no amount of scholarship, no matter how well-intended or erudite, is going to change that.

ABRACADABRA The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington Random House Canada, 304 pages One of the drearier aspects of so much recent Canadian fiction is that nothing ever really seems to happen in it. What we usually get is thinly disguised autobiography where the reader is permitted to listen to either (a) thought-obsessed character X ("My memory of that moment haunts me now and always will—which reminds me of something else about myself...") or (b) pain-racked character Y ("Because of this wound I carry within me ..."). Aside from the boring solipsism, the real problem is that the authors of these books —and too many critics and readers — think that simply by being oppressively solemn their work is somehow more serious than those authors who write books that do bother with such trifles as plot and well-told story or — wow! — even humour. Paul Quarrington is one of Canada's few legitimate first-rate novelists, mainly because he bucks the accepted wisdom that says less action is more, and that an absence of wit guarantees weighty significance. Quarrington's first novel in five years, The Spirit Cabinet, adds to his reputation. Jurgen and Rudolfo are the biggest magic act in Las Vegas, with a show that is, if entirely successful, also as three-dollar-bill phoney as the neon Nevada strip itself. And this suits Rudolfo just fine. Jurgen's magical cohort is a hilariously English-butchering, weight-pumping, consummate professional who doesn't understand why Jurgen has

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grown so unsatisfied with their show—which has, after all, won Act of the Year four years in a row. With wealth and a desert mansion filled with Rudolf o's adored animals (especially Samson, an albino leopard who can expertly operate mechanical devices), why shouldn't they be happy? But Jurgen yearns to make real magic. And when, against Rudolf o's wishes, he outbids every other enthusiast in the world to the tune of nearly five million dollars for a collection of manuscripts and artifacts once belonging to Harry Houdini, he discovers he might just get his chance. (Although not quite quickly enough—The Spirit Cabinet would have been even better if it were about ten per cent shorter and its pace that much brisker.) After secluding himself and intensely studying the books, Jurgen begins to physically disappear, growing thinner and thinner while growing spiritually more and more robust, eventually starting to emit a certain mystical light. Soon he's performing miracles on talk shows (how else to reach the greatest number of people? If Jesus came back tomorrow, it's a safe bet that he'd be on during prime time) and real magic in place of the well-crafted Jurgen and Rudolfo act on stage. And even as Rudolfo remains ever skeptical about Jurgen's transformation and increasingly distressed over the distance it's creating between them, Jurgen moves farther and farther from his old partner and their cardboard routine. This growing conflict between the two men—and, more, between the realms of the material and spiritual each come to represent —pushes the novel toward a climax built around the Davenport Spirit Cabinet, a treasured part of Jurgen's Houdini haul. All of which is to say that Paul Quarrington has given us another novel about something other than his own tortured soul, and for this we should be grateful. Whether it's religious fundamentalists and long-haired freaks playing a baseball match to determine who gets to stay in town, as in Home Game, a burned-out rock star and his battle back to normalcy in Whale Music, or any one of the other tales he's told in his five other novels, Quarrington is that most uncommon of

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contemporary authors, a storyteller. And because he is an artist worthy of his international readership, Quarrington knows that because the first rule of good fiction writing is "Thou Shalt Show, Not Tell/' it is out of the plots he spins and the rich characters he creates that all that deep thematic stuff critics love to talk about is born. Given that Quarrington is one of the funniest novelists writing in Canada today, it's not surprising that one of the richest gifts The Spirit Cabinet delivers is wave after wave of laughter. It's an embarrassing truth to have to admit that the acknowledgment Quarrington makes before the novel even begins ("The author is deeply indebted to the Canada Council of the Arts —I mean I owe them a debt of gratitude. I'm not giving back the money") is in itself more humorous than most of the novels I've reviewed over the last year. The fact that Quarrington's multi-faceted sense of humour (jokey, satiric, physical) causes one to actually enjoy his books never undercuts his substantial thematic reach. As Nabokov was fond of saying, "The only difference between comic and cosmic is the letter's/"

LOVE DRUNK Love & the Bottle by Don Kerr Coteau Books, 171 pages Alcohol didn't appear in the world by accident—like God, because it didn't exist, human beings had to invent it. From the first day the inaugural page of the world's calendar was turned, to right now, as you read this, alcohol has and continues to do it all: addict, alleviate, comfort, depress, destroy, dull, enliven, fortify, gladden, inspire, madden. Naturally, literature —humankind's ongoing record of what it means to be alive —is full of references to booze. Shakespeare's Falstaff might be the most eloquent drunk in the annals, but it's hard to find a contemporary novel or collection of poems or short stories that doesn't have at least some reference to getting drunk. Given the vogue linked collections of short stories have had of late, it's surprising no one has done something of the sort with the drinking life. Don Kerr's first collection of short stories, Love & the Bottle, fills this gap. Kerr teaches English and drama at the University of Saskatchewan and has published five volumes of poetry. The influence of both art forms shows in Love & the Bottle. If too many of the assembled stories share a certain blanched sameness, usually concerning as they do middle-aged professional men (mostly teachers and writers) trying to outsmart time, and desperate for one more chance at love, lust and happiness, their frequently fresh and lively execution more often than not compensates.

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"Baby Duck" nicely exhibits Kerr's way around a sentence. It's become simply too easy to compare any short story writer who doesn't write sentences longer than ten words to Raymond Carver and label them a literary minimalist. There is an art to aesthetic brevity, a way of making far less do far more. This is the essence of what a good poet does, and Kerr's attention to the language of his prose is clear and commendable. Not much more than a sketch of a man who falls in lust with a girl in the check-out line at the liquor store, "Baby Duck" shines brightest on the micro level, when the narrator wonders "Could you love a woman who drinks Baby Duck?" and goes on to answer in the affirmative when he describes how "I walk down the street under the trees so it's part shade part sun and suddenly I see the houses as if I hadn't seen them before. It's afternoon and they all look asleep. Hot summer eyelids closed, nobody looking out as I'm just what I want to be, anonymous ... I go into the confectionery and even the proprietor, mother of how many I don't even know, looks good in this heat so I know I'm in real trouble." Good playwrights know dialogue is the engine of their work, and too many fiction writers forget that this applies to them as well. Kerr hasn't. Much of Love & the Bottle crackles with smart, funny exchanges that don't just fill up the page but consistently push the narrative forward. In "Round The Corner," another story about another guy on a barstool who knows that "If you start drinking early enough you got a better chance to go farther," the narrator finally gets to talk to the woman across the room he's been eyeing over his drink, the woman whose "ass looks like her cheeks are having a conversation with each other." "So, what's Bonnie short for? Bonofsky. Bonnard. Bonnert?" "Just Bonnie. My mom thought it was cute." "Mom's have a lot to answer for." "You were better when you weren't talking." Love & the Bottle isn't 12-year-old scotch. Most of Kerr's stories resemble enjoyable, well-crafted vignettes rather than full-bodied

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narratives. But it's not light beer, either. Besides, there are worse things than giving cold comfort on a hot July afternoon. Like staying sober, or not falling in love.

MISPLACED TALENT Misplaced Love by Maggie Dwyer Turnstone Press, 136 pages You really can't blame the bigger commercial presses. They're supposed to produce what the public wants. It's Capitalism 101: create a need and then supply that need until satiation. Besides, some of the larger houses occasionally subsidize actual works of art through the assembly-line production of this year's must-read, best-selling dreck. One mustn't be blindly cynical: for every ten self-serving quasicelebrity memoirs there is one new Don DeLillo novel. The smaller presses do —or should —have a different mission. When an author's book sells two thousand copies and is considered a wild success, none of them is in it for the money. What they are in it for — or, again, should be in it for — is to publish fresh voices, writers either saying things that aren't being said elsewhere or saying them in a way no one else is. Otherwise, what's the point? To produce miniature versions of what already dominates the publishing landscape? Set mostly in Winnipeg's Jewish community and downtown Toronto, the subject matter of Maggie Dwyer's Misplaced Love is the staple of contemporary McCanLit: husbands and wives falling in and out of love; middle-age discontent and youthful coming of age; the trials of nursing home residency. But mostly love. The essence of Domestic Dilemma fiction is the same as MuchMusic's Top Ten: Baby, I love you. Baby, why don't you love me? Baby, why don't you love me like you used to? And of course this is an immensely popular

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subject matter with nine out of ten readers. Above all, people enjoy reading about themselves, and the most profound thing most people concern themselves with is the condition of their romantic and/or family life. Ergo, the success of Ally McBeal, Bonnie Burnard and Carol Shields. Dwyer is exactly the kind of writer who floods the majority of Canada's little magazines, whose stories fill the airwaves of CBC's literary programs and whose work gets taught in Canadian Literature classes. Stylistically, Dwyer also gives the people what they want. Short sentences. Unadorned language. And lots and lots of dialogue about, what else? From "The Beautiful Inclination": She leaned forward and rested her head on Matt's chest. "Excuse me. Please, I didn't really mean that. I'll take it back. This is some fucking Hell/ Her eyes shimmered with unspilled tears. 'All I want is to be the love of his life. But damn him, he won't let me. I've been making excuses for him for so long it's become my major mental vice. Every day I make up my mind to go back to him. In the end, the sentences in a work of fiction never lie, the prose a writer uses to tell his or her story always denoting the essence of what it is they're saying. Don't bother with the publisher's fawning dust jacket build-up. Don't believe the hyperbolic blurbs from famous authors on the back. Open at random and read the sentences—the breath of the book's existence. From Dwyer's "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams": Life with Emil Jorgenson had been bare of ... surprises. He was a good provider, with a sharp eye for livestock and a taste for simple pleasures. Greta married him right out of high school and never regretted a day of their life. On their half section the seasons rolled round like they should and a strong

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rhythm governed every hour. The corn and hay grew; their cows gave sweet milk. Everything they put their hands to thrived, except their son. After Emil died, Greta couldn't make up her mind to sell the land, though she knew Teddy would never be able to run it. She agreed to rent it out to Jake Hudyma, who farmed next to them. He wanted to try his luck with canary seed. So invitingly easy. So identifiably ordinary. So inarguably competent. And, ultimately, so what?

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS Iced: The New Noir Anthology of Cold, Hard Fiction edited by Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers Insomniac Press, 188 pages The Journey Prize Anthology selected by Elyse Gasco, Michael Helm and Michael Nicholson McClelland & Stewart, 194 pages Even within the confines of a literary genre such as romance writing there are good and bad ways of going about one's job. Just like "literary" fiction. All things being equal, though, we prefer the latter because, although including whatever virtues are inherent in the former, we get these and more, potentially much more. In this sense, The Brother's Karamazov is, yes, a lengthy whodunit, but also a wrenching examination of Death of God theology and an exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) dissection of three very different but equally compelling characters. Unfortunately, things are rarely equal, in literature or elsewhere. Sometimes the admittedly smaller pleasures of a lesser art form are preferable to the accumulated deficiencies found in a more "significant" work. Meaning, a half-hour episode of The Simpsons is probably a lot more fulfilling than a 400-page novel chronicling the life and times of three generations of Manitoba Mennonites as told by a retired schoolteacher who's spent one whole summer studying creative writing at Banff and whose friends have always told her she has a real knack for storytelling.

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There's no such conspicuous gulf between Iced: The New Noir Anthology of Cold, Hard Fiction and the annual The Journey Prize Anthology, self-dubbed "Short Fiction from the Best of Canada's New Writers," but there are enough discrepancies between the two to produce some profitable food for thought on the not-nearly-enoughdiscussed subject of what capital "L" literature can learn from its lower-case cousin. First, subject matter. In The Journey Prize stories we get, among others, a teacher who falls for his student, a woman who breaks up with her boyfriend and moves to a different city to escape from her past, a single mother who revisits familial conflicts when her sister moves in with her and a troubled teen who leaves home to live with her uncle. Of course, there's nothing a priori right or wrong about any fictional subject matter, but it is troubling that most literary fiction being written today (at least in Canada and the United States) is usually of the Domestic Dilemma sort—broken hearts, bad parentchild relations, uneasy childhoods. For better or for worse — and I, for one, am definitely on the side of worse —most Canadian fiction is thoroughly middle-class in every possible sense of the word. In Iced, on the other hand, an opium-taking Hong Kong art dealer chooses stolen antiquities over honouring the first commandment, a hitman offers volume discounts and a wide variety of people of different backgrounds get themselves threatened, beaten up or killed. Probably too many. Like any genre, Noir has its own prerequisites, and one of these seems to be that at least one act of violence must occur on every other page. But at least things happen in Iced. Too often, the central requirement for works of fiction to be considered "serious" by critics and readers alike is that nothing really occur, that people have to merely sit around and talk a great deal about their deep spiritual woes. Stylistically, each book has its share of ups and downs. As well, the authors in both volumes favour short sentences, the basic less-ismore aesthetic currently the going currency in literary culture, both

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high and low. Interestingly, though, while the majority of the stories in The Journey Prize maintain the sacred McCanLit dictum that solemnity is one of the central tenets of good art, one is struck in Iced by how many, if not entire stories, then at least significant portions of stories, are infused with a smart, apposite humour. What dry invective, for example, could castigate every pathetic strip-club Romeo who's ever been positive that the stripper on stage notices him more than every other drunken yahoo in the place better than Matthew Firth's "Can You Take Me There Now?7'?: "She's changed out of the leathers and is now decked out in a slutty red number. Frilly. Folds of fat drop out from her tight panties and bra. A little drunk, I start to applaud as soon as she steps onto the stage, trying to whoop, but my mouth's full of mashed potatoes." Maybe it's because by working in a defined genre the authors in Iced allow themselves the liberty of telling interesting stories and using humour in a way that too many literary writers don't. Maybe it's time they did.

CRANKY, ELITIST, TRUE For Your Eye Alone: Letters 1976-1995 by Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Skelton Grant McClelland & Stewart, 402 pages Much like the journalism of Mordecai Richler, the letters of Robertson Davies are closer to art than 90 per cent of the literature that gets published in this country every year. Always probingly intelligent yet never dry or academic, quite often hilarious but always rooted in the weighty stuff of our lives, sometimes iconoclastically enraging (and engaging) although never for mere effect, For Your Eye Alone: Letters 1976-1995 confirms that above all else, Davies — Canadian cultural pioneer, esteemed university instructor, grand old man of Canadian literature — was a writer. Novel, essay, letter or grocery list, the man was simply incapable of writing a boring or inelegant sentence. Which isn't to say that For Your Eye Alone is the ideal collection of Davies' letters. Judith Grant, author of the massive 1994 biography Robertson Davies: Man Of Myth, has done an admirable job of tracking down a wide range of letters that Davies wrote during his period of greatest fame (to the equally famous, to friends, to strangers), but this in itself poses its own problem. Why, if as Skelton herself says in her preface, "it was clear that there was more than enough excellent material for two volumes" (including pre-1976 letters to such literary luminaries as Alfred Knopf and H.L . Mencken), do we begin when Davies is already in his 60s? Publishing first those letters Davies wrote as a young man would have seemed the logical chronological choice,

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and even an expanded, single edition containing these alongside the latter letters would have been preferable. Grant has also done a good day's scholarly work by supplying a generous set of notes at the back of the volume. But if the reader is thankful to be informed that Bear is a novel by Marian Engel and that the Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium is a gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver, academic fastidiousness borders on the purely pedantic when Davies' reference to James Joyce elicits from Skelton, "James Joyce was an Irish writer best known for his novel Ulysses," and similar mention of Yeats results in "William Butler Yeats, eminent Irish poet and playwright." Anyone considering buying a book by a writer of Davies7 literary worth should be denied right of purchase if such explanations are actually required. But it is for the letters themselves that people will pick up For Your Eye Alone, and the only disappointment here is that one wishes there were more. As with any piece of genuinely accomplished writing, the temptation is to resist paraphrase and explanation and simply let the author speak. Davies was often pleasantly out of step with his time and, as a result, provides a bracing antidote to the gospel of today's literary fashion. Of his novel World Of Wonders, he admits to one correspondent that "I am delighted that its romance and the wonder of life give satisfaction, and apparently a kind of reassurance, to so many people. Not many authors nowadays seem to like life or think it rich, and often I feel very lonely and somewhat odd; but people—just readers who do not suffer from literary ennui and sourness of spirit—agree with me." Comforting words in a time when every other Canadian novel, it seems, is proudly self-obsessed, tiresomely solemn and painfully boring. Davies was also highly skeptical of government support of artists in an age when the only question on this matter most artists are willing to entertain is how they can get more of it. Whether or not one agrees with Davies' belief that the marketplace should entirely dictate the business of publishing literary fiction—I don't—it is refreshing to

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hear at least one person loudly call into question the seemingly bottomless bucket of support so many truly bad works of art (or non-art) receive. Writing a letter of appreciation to the critic Bronwyn Drainie for a review she wrote in which she asks why, as Davies puts it, "a novel so lacking in merit was supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Ministry for Multiculturalism and Citizenship," Davies argues: "Of course the position of the writer in Canada and everywhere else, is not a happy one, when he is trying to establish his reputation, but the wholesale encouragement of obvious ineptitude hardly seems the way to improve it." Belying his silver-bearded, kind-old-man-of-letters persona, to a group of high school students who had written him with some questions and criticisms of his novel The Rebel Angels, Davies responds: "Several of your members thought the book above the average reader's comprehension because of its vocabulary. May I suggest to you, as gently as possible, that the book was written for average readers, and that a Grade XIII class in a collegiate institute cannot quite claim to have reached that status. You hope some day to be average readers but that is not your status at present." Cranky? Sure. Elitist? No doubt. True? Absolutely. And although Davies is at his witty best castigating the intellectually dense ("So far as I am concerned a Canadian novel is so because it is written by a Canadian. I cannot think of any other definition that has any value") and generally not suffering society's fools ("Canada has the artists, but it has not the critics who should lead the way in suggesting what is good about them, as well as what is bad. They don't know good writing from bad, can't distinguish one individual style and another, and have no notion of technical skill"), he can also write a comforting letter to an ailing friend. "And so, dear friend, Dr. Merryman takes farewell of you for a while, urging you to keep your spirits up for, as the Good Book says: 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine/ " A good book, too, Davies might have added.

RICHLER ROLLS ON On Snooker: The Game And The Characters Who Play It by Mordecai Richler Knopf Canada, 208 pages The British writer Cyril Connolly warned that "All excursions into journalism/broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion." But how is it then that I still divide prospective friends into two camps, those who have and those who have not yet read Connolly's brilliant mish-mash of literary criticism, memoir and philosophical nuggets, The Unquiet Gravel And who today bothers with Connolly's one contribution to seemingly lasting literature, his novel The Rock Pool? Not that Mordecai Richler has to worry about his various forays into non-fiction outliving his novels. Even if those busy custodians of McCanLit, the university professors, one day decide that Duddy is too much a white Eurocentric male for the syllabus, the majority of Richler's fictional oeuvre will survive the old-fashioned way: people will continue to read him for pleasure. And reread him. But it's not just the novels that will endure. Whether describing writing for the movies, following the fate of his beloved Montreal Canadiens or demonstrating why he's the best book reviewer this country has ever had (although, lamentably, he doesn't do reviews anymore), Richler is consistently smart and funny, using language with a zeal and exactitude that most poets should envy.

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Which means that although I've always considered a pool table a waste of barroom space, Richler's latest foray into non-fiction, On Snooker: The Game And The Characters Who Play It, is a joy. Not a major work, by any means —at just over 200 pages it feels like a magazine article that someone thought might do double duty as a book—but clever and humorous and entertaining enough that it reads better than most of this or last season's must-read fiction. Give me Richler on the beauty of a bank shot over one more novel about one more guy looking out his window having one more epiphany any day. On Snooker starts and finishes autobiographically. The book begins by chronicling both Richler's youth as a school-ditching, pool hustling wannabe at Montreal's Rachel Pool Hall and a lifetime of sports fanaticism before segueing into a brief history of snooker before finally turning to its main subject, the time he spent covering a recent WPBSA Embassy World Championship. He concludes with a brief examination of why so many writers, particularly North American writers, are fixated on sports. Even the seasoned snooker follower will likely enjoy the autobiographical sections best. The snooker world does have its fair share of local colour —the belligerent but groupie-hounded Ronnie (The Rocket) O'Sullivan, for example, whose father, before being convicted of murder, was a pornography entrepreneur ("Ron's the name, porn's the game"). Richler also includes the case histories of a couple of Canadians, Alex (The Hurricane) Higgins and Cliff (The Grinder) Thorburn, who each made their Canuck mark on the Brit-dominated sport before being busted and banished for drug use. But as Richler points out, Yogi Berra and Muhammad Ali and a few others aside, athletes are essentially beautiful machines whose opinions, even on sports-related matters, are rarely worth hearing. Commenting on his time spent with Canada's one and only Great One, Richler writes, "Gretzky, his immense skill undeniable, has to be one of the most boring men I ever met, inclined to talk about himself in the third person. To come clean, neither was the far more appealing

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Stephen Hendry [arguably the greatest snooker player ever] the wittiest of luncheon companions. But, to be fair, Gore Vidal hasn't registered 50 hat tricks, and neither has he ever scored a maximum [snooker's ultimate play]." But maybe the athlete and the artist aren't all that different after all. "I always start out pledged to a dream of perfection, a novel that will be free of clunky sentences or passages forced in the hothouse, but it's never the case. Each novel is a failure of sorts....But if Higgins [the Irish Masters Champion] could achieve perfection, maybe, next time out, I could too." Well, not this time —maybe none of us ever do. Still, Richler at less than perfect beats any other writer in this country's best nine times out of ten. And you don't need to play the horses to know that odds even half that good don't come along very often.

Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler Knopf Canada, 295 pages Canada lost more than a top-shelf novelist when Mordecai Richler died last summer; it also lost its last true man of letters. While his less talented contemporaries believed themselves above the common babble of book reviews, travel essays and political think pieces, Richler happily joined in the long conversation that is the only real definition of culture. Maybe it was his immigrant, working-class Montreal background that made it difficult for him to turn down an offer to review slop like Intimate Play: Creating Romance in Everyday Life or spend a week with the Trail Smoke Eaters at the world hockey championships in Stockholm, but the simple truth is that we, his readers, are really the richer ones for it. Richler always maintained that he was foremost a novelist, that the screenplays, magazine profiles and book reviews were for when

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he wasn't at his real job, writing one or another of his ten novels. And this is as he should be remembered, as a prolific fiction writer who, as he said, "earned life-sustaining cigar and cognac money scribbling for the mags." But —and this is what distinguishes Richler's non-fiction from everyone else's in this country —the same vigilant irony, the same stoical humour, the same vibrant language: all are omnipresent in everything he put his name to. Meaning you're probably better off rereading Richler on Guy Lafleur than persevering through this season's bright new light of fiction wrestling with the eternal verities. John Updike, one of only a handful of other recent novelist-critics in Richler's class, maintains that his forays into non-fiction directly benefit his art, either because he can feed his interests or be paid to learn about subjects he knows very little about, a handy part-time job for someone who, like any serious novelist, spends most of the day alone at a desk. Richler's life-long love of sports falls into the former category. Of the 20 pieces collected in Dispatches from The Sporting Life, nine have already appeared between hardcovers. Readers of Richler's five books of essays will recognize, among others, "The Fall of the Montreal Canadiens," his agreeably cranky chronicle of the decline of his beloved hockey club's fortunes in the 1980s, and "Jews in Sports," a daring piece of speculative probing into the Jewish athlete's psyche circa the mid-twentieth century in the guise of a simple book review of the Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, a book that, without irony, proudly lists "Hertz, Steve Allan. Infielder. Played for Houston in 1964. Total Games: 5. Batting Average: 000." Each of these previously published selections is vintage Richler, but it does seem a little overdone to have them collected yet again, their second time now in book form after their initial magazine appearance. As well, a novel excerpt from St. Urbain's Horseman describing a middle-aged men's softball game and the inclusion of a selection from On Snooker, a book published less than a year ago, suggests editorial padding.

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The real appeal of Dispatches from the Sporting Life lies in the previously uncollected pieces. Connoisseurs of Richler's prose will be pleased to discover hard-to-find items from Signature, Inside Sports, GQ and The New York Times Sports Magazine corralled together in one tidy place. True, it's easy to see why Richler decided not to include any of them in previous collections. "Eddie Quinn," for example, a 1960 profile of a flashy Montreal wrestling czar written for Maclean's, is merely competent juvenilia, the only piece of Richler's I've ever read where I couldn't tell by the style alone that it was Richler. But addicts aren't particular about quality when quantity runs low. How nice, then, to hear the old Richler wit once again, this time putting a fresh face on the Canadian identity dilemma. "Canadians, your nice neighbours to the north, are not merely pseudo-Americans. We are different. While fastidious New York beer drinkers, for instance, will continue to insist on a Molson's, Labatt's or a Moosehead, their modish northern counterparts would rather be seen nursing a Budweiser or a Miller High Life, now that they are both licenced in Canada." Or see the skillful way the novelist in him reconstructs his interview with Gordie Howe to deliver a punishing portrayal of the soulless modern athlete, as empty on the inside as he is beautiful in front of the mirror: "Howe led me into his garage. There were cartons, cartons, everywhere, ready for delivery. Cosmetics. Gardening materials. It looked like the back room of a prairie general store. 'I understand you write novels/ Howe said. 'Yes.' 'There must be a very good market for them. You see them on racks in all the supermarkets now.' 'Right. Tell me, Gordie, do you deliver this stuff yourself?' 'You can make a lot of money with Amway,' he said, 'working out of your own home.' Say it ain't so, Gordie."

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Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a nice start at getting Canada's greatest writer's non-fictional house in order. Now it's time for someone to put together a definitive Collected Essays. Richler deserves it, and — more — we need it.

SHORT BACK AND SIDES One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair by Allan Peterkin Arsenal Pulp Press, 277 pages Hopelessly backward-thinking white Eurocentric male that I am, Cultural Studies is one section of the bookstore you aren't likely to find me in. University professors deconstructing Madonna lyrics or trend-driven journalists giddily championing the Internet as anything more than the glorified telephone/home shopping channel it is are right up there for me in terms of pure reading pleasure with concrete poetry and historical novels written in "hauntingly lyrical prose." An underappreciation for all things culturally ephemeral is my sad but appropriate punishment. Then along comes a book such as Allan Peterkin's One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. Some things are so very much a part of the fabric of our lives that we need someone to dispassionately stand back from them once in a while to assist us in appreciating what they ultimately mean. When the average child spends 30 hours a week on-line, for example, it's worthwhile to listen to what Professor So-and-so has to say about its real or even probable effects, even if he or she writes like, well, a professor. Thankfully, Peterkin isn't a jargon-spewing academic but a Toronto psychiatrist who writes a well-scrubbed sentence and who has composed a highly informative yet breezily enjoyable account of all things facially hairy. If I hadn't read his book I might never have known, for instance, that the world's longest beard was 17 feet, six

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inches, or that the heaviest weighed 59 kilograms. The central appeal of One Thousand Beards, however, is its more substantial goal: to provide a capsulized world history of the various whys and hows of facial hair through the ages. The first chapter, "The Antique Beard," is also the best. Appropriate to his mission, Peterkin begins at the very beginning, noting that "the history of shaving—a parallel, if antithetical phenomenon—began well before 2000 BC. . . .Until the propagation of Christianity, which viewed hair as demonic and libidinous, beards were revered as signs of divinity, class and distinction." We discover that "the much-criticized Philistines of the Old Testament had many flaws, not the least of which was shaving off their beards"; that "the Greeks were generally hairy and bearded until the rise of Alexander the Great" in the third century BC; and that in 1535 "the syphilitic Henry VIII had the nerve to impose taxes on those with beards, although he continued to proudly wear one himself." Next best is "The Anti-Beard: A History Of Shaving." As made clear in his historical treatment, the wearing of beards, sideburns and moustaches was and largely still is dependent upon the vagaries of those in power (in the Middle Ages, the Church; in the later part of the twentieth century, advertising and the media). But what's what when razor is finally put to chin? Peterkin reports that anthropologists date the first disposable razors around 3,000 BC and the creation of permanent copper razors during the Bronze Age. The third century BC Egyptians were the first society to believe en masse that head and facial hair was uncivilized, but only with the coming of the Middle Ages did "the grooming industry" arrive. One Thousand Beards is crammed margin-full of choice quotations and hirsute facts as well as countless photographs of whiskered people and antiquated barbering products. Along the way, Peterkin covers all the bearded bases, devoting entire chapters to the shaving industry, "The Religious Beard," "The 20th Century Beard," and even something he calls "The Postmodern Beard" (soul patches, for example,

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dyed fluorescent colours). Peterkin also includes "The Feminine Beard" —although learning that "with few exceptions, facial hair on women has been the object of both neglect and scorn of the ages" isn't particularly revelatory. A few other small blemishes mar an otherwise smooth surface. An entire chapter consisting of headshots of people with beards ("Beards Of Fame And Infamy") is at best superfluous. And the last in the book, "The Personal Beard," a how-to section for prospective goatee-wearers and sideburners, is simply out of place in a book of good-natured but essentially serious purpose.

EAST FACING WEST Anatolia Junction by Fred A. Reed Talonbooks, 320 pages At one point claiming, among others, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and parts of Hungary and Russia, the Ottoman Empire (from the Arabic "uthman" for Turkish Osman, considered its founder) lasted six centuries before it came to an end in 1922 when Turkey became a republic. Since then, Turkey has rarely been out of the international news, though usually for all the wrong reasons: political corruption, religious, ethnic and political persecution and crippling natural disasters. It is also, as Fred A. Reed points out in his study of the country, Anatolia Junction, "the great laboratory of Westernization in the world of Islam. And the epic battleground of resistance to it." And this is precisely what Reed, a Montreal journalist and the author of two other books, on Iran and the Balkans, is most interested in exploring in his most recent volume. While supplying a fairly detailed account of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth pangs of the modern secular state of Turkey, Reed's "self-ascribed mission" is "to explore the spiritual heartland of ... a concealed yet stubbornly powerful Islamic revival, often carried out by Sufi mystics." Anatolia Junction is unique in that it is a history book and travelogue informed by an unapologetic, overt political thesis. Reed writes that while the book "began as an exploration of what we in the West call Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey... it did not take me long to realize

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I had it backwards. We are the fundamentalists. Things must be done our way, the Western way, or not at all. Who was the pathetic yet shadowy Osama bin Laden, what could he hope to achieve against the cruise-missile arsenal of the Clintons, the Blairs and the Albrights of our fine, bright, inevitable world?" If you're as sure as Reed is that what the world needs more of is religious fundamentalism, and that any attempt to check Islamic fanaticism is simply narrow-minded Westernizing, this is your book. Doubtless, Salman Rushdie won't be special ordering a copy from wherever it is he's hiding these days. Reed guides the reader through a short history of Turkey then and now, as well as providing a street-level account of its modern citizens (although, unfortunately, usually introducing only those who support his political hypothesis). Unlike, say, V.S. Naipaul in Among The Believers, who attempts to allow Westerners access to the sometimes perplexing world of Islam by utilizing his storytelling skills as a novelist (for irony, setting, dialogue, even metaphor), Reed is a careful, respectful tourist. Despite his politics, he makes no claim about being able to provide his reader with what it feels like to be part of a realm of experience so different from his own. "In writing about Turkey, and about Islam in Turkey," Reed notes, "I would speak not from the point of view of the Islamists themselves, of whatever persuasion; that would have been presumptuous, and opened me to accusations of voice appropriation. I would write from the perspective of a Westerner who takes the simultaneous criticism of our own cultural and historical tunnel vision as his duty." Neutrality is a virtue in matters of judicial inquiry and when attempting to break up bar fights, but never in the creation of works of literature, even of the humble travel writing variety. The writer of convincing fiction or non-fiction needs to believe not only that a world manifestly outside themselves can be brought to life, but that he or she is the only one capable of doing it. Not only can writers not

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help being wildly egotistical and presumptuously voice-appropriating, they must be —if their books are to be any good, that is. The essence of Anatolia Junction is Reed's belief in the heroic effort of Turkey's religious "renewal movement" to resist the West's attempt (both from without and within) "to destroy Islam as a vital, unifying force, as a social cement of unmatched adhesive power and a political potentiality." There is no denying that over Turkey's nearly 80 years as an officially non-Islamic state, shameful examples of religious oppression have and continue to occur. As an historian and travel writer, Reed is wise to keep an eye on the American-manipulated West and its plans for the entire world to one day define happiness as owning ten pairs of Nikes and dreaming of going to Disneyland. He would be even wiser to keep his other eye on those who would deny us even that sterile delusion.

STANDING ON GUARD FOR MEAD Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada's 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry by Allen Winn Sneath Dundurn Press, 431 pages If, as William Faulkner claimed, "civilization begins with distillation/' then Allen Winn Sneath's Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada's 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry is this country's Magna Carta. What could be more Canadian than a tall cold one? Ignoring the cultural bureaucrats who will blather otherwise, hockey, freezing temperatures and beer are what makes us, well, us. If that isn't enough to satisfy everyone's nationalistic criteria of self-esteem, that's a subject for another time, perhaps to be discussed over a pint in a nice warm pub at a corner table near the TV so you don't miss the third period of the Leafs game. Even for the hardcore historian, however, the Canuck connection to beer must be conceded a legitimate subject of study. How many people know that the Canadian brewing industry predates Confederation by over 200 years, or that Canada is home to the oldest continuously operating brewery in North America? There'll be a lot more if Brewed in Canada finds its intended audience (not so hard to imagine: the well-read and the well-lubricated are frequently the same person, though not necessarily at the same time). Befitting the author's background —he was an ad agency executive and brewery account specialist for more than 25 years, plus a founding

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partner of Ontario's Algonquin brewery — Brewed in Canada is one long infomercial for the beer industry. Sneath begins at the beginning ("the economy of New France was built on the supply and demand of a few basic commodities—fish, furs, lumber and beer") and takes us up to the present, reporting that in 2001 Canadians spent $6.5 billion on beer alone (depending on one's taste buds, either an awe-inspiring or melancholy statistic). In between, one learns about the country's first brewery (1650, in Montreal); that the ban on selling liquor to native people was lifted in 1678 by the sage Sovereign Council (75 per cent of its members being merchants who desired to sell the stuff for furs); that at one time Quebec City averaged one inn for every 90 citizens; that in 1966, 20 people in Quebec died after drinking Dow beer, necessitating the dumping of close to a million gallons of freshly brewed suds. Apparently, there is no truth to the rumour that if one has had enough hops, one can still hear the outraged cries echoing throughout certain Montreal streets. Predictably, the most compelling material in Brewed in Canada concerns American Prohibition. The enactment of the Volstead Act in 1920 was bad for thirsty Americans but good for many Canadian businessmen, most notably the Bronfman brothers, Sam and Harry. Sneath is good at supplying plenty of savoury details about the immense amount of illegal traffic that took place between the two countries during America's 12 teetotalling years. There is, for example, the case of Henry Hatch, a small-time entrepreneur who became rich by supplying Americans with Canadian Club rye, often in deftlydesigned, short, stubby bottles meant to limit breakage during covert transit. The closer Sneath comes to our own time, however, the more his book drags, although the chapters chronicling the rise of the micro breweries in the 1980s are interesting in their examination of the consumer dissatisfaction with the beer monopolies that led to a growing demand for more specialized products. On the whole, though,

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knowing that "Phil Gosling retired from active participation in his Wellington brewery/' and that "the ownership and day-to-day responsibility of the operation [were] signed over to Michael Stirrup and Douglas Dawkins," is more insider information than anyone needs. Brewed in Canada is a fine coffee-table book to put on the downstairs bar; it would have been twice as good if half as long.

THIS IS THE END The End: Closing Words for the Millenium by Mark Morton and Gail Noble Bain & Cox, 176 pages Scholars are like radical environmentalists and the police: we need them, but on the whole we feel better when they're not around. Each provides a valuable public service, of course, but there's something about a cop slowly cruising your neighbourhood or an eco-warrior cornering you at a party that makes one a little uncomfortable. Most full-blown academics have the same effect. Anyone who spends the majority of their adult life studying the significance of the colour red in early Shakespeare has my intellectual respect but rarely my ear. Life is too short. But if you're making up the guest list for your New Year's Eve 2000 party and feel the need to invite one or two of the tweedy sort, you could do a lot worse than Mark Morton and Gail Noble, he a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and University of Winnipeg professor, she a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama and freelance Toronto editor. As a bonus for your fin de siecle celebration, Morton and Noble are the authors of The End: Closing Words for the Millenium, a highly informa tive yet entertaining attempt to put the swelling millennial hype in perspective. Although the majority of The End is a sort of narrated anthology of centuries-old newspaper articles, letters, diaries and the like, Morton and Noble's introduction is a short history in all things millennial. As the authors point out: "Centuries don't exist, and yet we

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act as if they do. We treat them like they dropped down from heaven along with cherry pie and hot dogs. But they're actually just a product of our imaginations, an arbitrary construct/7 Sensible enough. But Morton and Noble go one step further in providing the historical goods to back this up, just as good scholars should: To figure out why we're going to make such a fuss at such an arbitrary moment, we've got to travel back in time to AD 525. See that monk scribbling Roman numerals by candlelight? That's Dionysius Exiguus, hired by the Pope to figure out a more effective way of calculating the date of Easter. Now, imagine that above the desk of Dionysius is a calendar: this chimerical wall item doesn't read AD 525. It reads 1278, because Dionysius used the Roman calendar up until the moment that he sat down at his desk and invented a new one. He decided to re-date and Christianize all of history, making the starting point the birth of Jesus. So, come 12:01 a.m. this New Year's Eve, remind the drooling drunk blowing the reptilian noisemaker in your face that if it weren't for a sixth-century monk it would actually be 2753, and he would have missed the last millennial celebration by about 750 years. The End's real aim is to allow history to speak for itself, to let previous end-of-century celebrants show us how silly they (and we) really were (and are). An article from the Chicago Tribune, Dec. 29, 1900: "Physicians with sensitive patients and people 'with nerves' are viewing with alarm the noise that will usher in the new year and the 20th century. With the expectation of an 'unusual pandemonium' on Monday night some are sending letters to the Mayor asking that he prevent the noise and permit the new century to be born 'under humanitarian considerations/" Dozens of the newspaper articles, illustrations and even pieces of sheet music Morton and Noble have gathered as source material are

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reproduced in The End, lending a real feel of historical immediacy to their findings. Your Grade 10 history class on the rise and fall of the fur trade should have been half as alive and as much fun. Naturally, the authors have much to say about end-of-century doomsayers. As expected, today's increasing rise of religious fervour and California death cults isn't unique. "In a speech made to the Irish House of Commons on June 7, 1800, Francis Dobbs argued that the proposed union of Great Britain and Ireland —a union that was to take effect on the first day of the nineteenth century—was a precursor to the second coming of Christ. 'We are not living in ordinary times/ he told them. 'We are living in the most momentous and eventful period in the world.' " Dobb certainly wasn't alone in his apocalyptic prophecy. Edward King writes in his Remarks on the Signs of the Times, "We approach the latter days. I tremble whilst I write!" A bumper sticker I spotted while walking my dog last week read, "Human Beings Aren't the Only Species on Earth. They Just Act Like It." For whatever reason, Homo Sapiens seem to have an innate propensity to monstrously exaggerate their own self-importance. And the passing of one century to the next is often just too good an opportunity for humankind not to blow whistles, scream predictions about the end of Time and generally make a monomaniacal ass of itself. There are sane exceptions, though, and thankfully Morton and Noble don't forget to include these rare and soothing voices. John Burroughs, American essayist and naturalist, writes in his journal on Jan. 1,1901: "Finish Bluebird poem in the morning. Lunch with Dr. Cleghorn. We walk to Boston and back. A good start on the new century."

SAVING THE PLANET AND IMPRESSING YOUR FRIENDS The No-Nonsense Guides Various Authors Between The Lines/New Internationalist, 144 pages So little time, so many things to do if one is to save the world by next Thursday. But where to begin? The decaying environment, the inequitable economy, the plutocratic governmental system? Dizzy at the thought of merely comprehending the complexities inherent in any one of these issues, let alone doing anything to address them, it's enough to make even the most determined do-gooder sit out the demonstration and stay home to watch Friends instead. But that's human nature: when in doubt, do nothing. How convenient, then, to have Toronto small press Between The Lines' newest enterprise. The No-Nonsense Guides, published in conjunction with New Internationalist Publications and based in part on essays from the pages of New Internationalist, the Oxford-based magazine and political action co-operative for the global Left. Between The Lines has been making trouble for the bad guys for 25 years now, and doing it very well, my only complaint being that some of their publications aren't palatable to the non-specialist (although, to be honest, many aren't intended for the lay reader). Their set of eight No-Nonsense Guides, however, is delightfully accessible, written, as advertised, "in plain language, and ideal for students and libraries" —meaning that one need not have worked their way through the collected works of Marx and Chomsky or have

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a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies to get past page one. Which is how it should be. All citizens, and not just tenured radicals, should have easy access to analyses of the key environmental, economic and political issues of our time not brought to them by the Disney Corporation or the oil companies or whoever else it is who is paying the bills at the major television networks, newspapers and magazines. There are eight subjects in the series: Democracy, Sexual Diversity, World History, International Migration, Globalization, Fair Trade, Climate Change and Class, Caste and Hierarchy. Given the fairly heady material the authors are dealing with, each volume is surprisingly readable, even—gasp —enjoyable. Who knew escaping Plato's cave could be so much fun? Here's Richard Swift, for example, the Canadian editor of New Internationalist, on how the American right wing put the "mockery" in " democracy" during the last presidential election: Of the tens of millions of votes cast it boiled down to a few hundred votes in the state of Florida. This close contest hung on voting machines that didn't properly record the voter's intentions (particularly in poor areas), badly designed ballots that misled voters, police intimidation of some voters, the refusal by the highest court in the land to recount the vote, the exclusion of a significant portion of the electorate (mostly black) because they had (often trivial) criminal records, the use of vigilante mobs to stop the re-counting of ballots and the role of prejudiced authorities in adjudicating the outcome of the election. Or how about Dinyar Godrej of the Netherlands on how "free trade" is rarely ever free? Whilst many poor people in the Majority World work in conditions akin to slavery, producing crops for the world's

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food giants for a pittance, and whilst speculators make their fortunes on the futures of these commodities, institutions like the World Bank insist on a level playing field' —that is, the removal of all price supports which might bring these workers something more than a starvation wage. Even simply thumbing through any of these books can't help but turn up nugget after nugget of clear, straight talk about hard facts and terrible truths. Additionally, there are plenty of graphs and charts to spice things up, even if the news isn't any more cheering when made pictorial. How pleasing can it be, after all, to learn that a quarter of the planet's population consumes more than 70 per cent of the world's commercial energy? Or that in a planet of dwindling water resources, 2,113 pints are needed to produce 2.2 pounds of wheat while it takes 211,000 pints of water to produce an equal amount of beef? Still, if, as Gunter Grass said, "The job of a citizen is to keep his/her mouth open," it's better for everyone concerned if what comes out actually makes sense. Each No-Nonsense Guide is the same length (144 pages), the same price ($15), the same handy pocket-size and equally attractive—no small matter when most politically progressive reading material is about as aesthetically inviting as the instruction manual in the glove compartment of a rental car. Collect them all, impress the other kids on the block and change the world. Or at least get started on understanding why it's so messed up.

HEAVEN IN A RACE Blood Relations: Animals, Humans and Politics by Charlotte Montgomery Between The Lines, 337 pages William Blake, who saw angels in his vegetable garden and took visions with his afternoon tea, understood more clearly than any other Western writer the symbiotic relationship between human beings and how we interact with our fellow animals. From Augeries of Innocence: "A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage. / A dove house fill'd with doves and Pigeons / Shudders Hell thro' all its regions. / A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State." Judging by the findings of Toronto journalist Charlotte Montgomery as found in Blood Relations: Animals, Humans and Politics, the state is not in very good shape. True, there is today an increased level of understanding of, and concern for, the plight of animals as evidenced by the rising political clout of organizations such as PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals). But the usual sources of human evil — avarice, ignorance and plain, slothful indifference — provide the sorry impetus for enough animal abuse horror stories to make Blood Relations as disheartening a reading experience as it is revelatory. It is, nonetheless, a story that needs to be told, and Montgomery is to be commended for having both the analytical skills and moral foresight to tell it. One of the main strengths of Montgomery's writing is her ability to clearly spell out the central terms, questions and—most compelling— moral elements at work in her topic. As with any so-called "hot button"

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social topic, such as abortion or gun control, there is no lack of loud voices on each side of any question of animal politics boldly declaring the unquestionable veracity of their position. Not surprisingly, there is a scarcity of dispassionate fact-finding and simple defining of issues. Montgomery begins by laying out the most basic elements of her subject, differentiating, for example, between people who believe in "animal welfare" (those who attempt to ensure "that animals are treated humanely, or as humanely as possible given whatever humans have decided it is essential to our interests to do with them") and people who believe in "animal rights" (those who "believe, basically, that animals —like humans —have lives to live that are valuable in themselves and that humans must accept this"). Whether one is discussing moral philosophy or issues of political sovereignty, these seemingly purely academic distinctions and explications are, in the end, usually found to be at the heart of any eventual answer. God and truth are always in the details. As her history of Canadian commercial and scientific research on animals, genetic engineering, domestic animal abuse and torture and agricultural slaughter unfolds, Montgomery supplies several inventive metaphors to intellectually enliven those on both sides of the debate. To those who glibly respond that animals are obviously inferior to humans and are therefore ours to do with as we wish, she counters, "there was a time when it was Obvious' that blacks were less intelligent, when women were 'obviously' not up to voting, and when what happened to children was considered 'obviously' their family's private business." I can't help thinking of a hunter I know who defended his right to kill moose on the grounds that his father and his father before him also hunted. When I told him that this was the same basic defence former slave owners used for many years after the end of the American Civil War, he said it wasn't the same thing and stomped away, dismissing me over his shoulder as a hopeless tree hugger. Naturally, I would have much preferred "moose hugger."

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As each chapter devoted to a specific industry of animal abuse succeeds another ("Research: Keeping Animals Alive," "Agriculture: Keeping Humans Fed," "Wild Lives: Keeping Humans Happy," "Pets: Keeping Humans Company"), one is forced to the conclusion that nothing so much as human greed and a near total void of moral sense lies at the heart of the staggering amount of suffering we inflict daily upon the cats, dogs and monkeys blinded, maimed and killed to test our hairspays, nail polishes and skin graft techniques (the University of Guelph alone utilizes about 75,000 animals a year for its experiments). How else to explain the Canadian agricultural industry knowing that anesthetizing animals before their throats are slashed is obviously the more humane way of slaughtering, but steadfastly claiming there is no scientific proof that animals really feel pain? Or that calves, separated as early as the first week of life from their mothers and so severely restricted in their movements that their lives essentially consist of standing in place and drinking a milky liquid feed so they can be slaughtered at five months and marketed as "milk-fed veal," suck on the ears, tails and navels of other calves in lieu of their mother's teats? Or that Eastern Canadian politicians, instead of rightfully taking responsibility for the collapse of the fishery industry, blame seals, thereby justifying Canada's barbaric seal hunt? It was another British writer, the historian James Anthony Froude, who said, "Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself." Most people don't think of the suffering inflicted upon animals when they bite into a nice leg of lamb dressed with mint sauce or buy sweet-smelling toiletry products from a company that inflicts brain damage on conscious baboons. Most people should think about it, though, and Blood Relations goes a long way toward explaining why.

MUSIC IS BEST Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa by Kevin Courrier ECW Press, 553 pages I've always been more of a Captain Beefheart man myself. Although the good Captain—Don Van Vliet, actually—and Frank Zappa were teenage misfits at the same staid California high school in the '50s and crisscrossed each other's musical paths for years (most famously, when Zappa coached Beefheart out of his first but not last retirement from the music business in 1968 and produced the latter's Trout Mask Relica), to me, Beefheart's music is thoroughly, innately, splendidly twisted while Zappa's is merely —if cleverly —self-consciously weird. And there's nothing more boring than someone intent upon not being boring. But Zappa the human being was anything but boring. Born in 1940 in Baltimore to Sicilian-American parents, Zappa eventually, and appropriately, ended up in California. Here, the precocious teenager got expelled from high school for conducting a pyrotechnical display that went wrong and began his polyphonous love affair with R&B, doo-wop, Igor Stravinsky and the French musical experimentalist Edgard Varese. By the time of Varese's death in 1965, Zappa was ready to carry on his hero's work; to, as CBC writer and broadcaster Kevin Courrier reports in his musical biography of Zappa, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, "[not] just make records, but change the face of music." From his first album, 1966's Freak Out!, Zappa's musical mission was clear. Here, he and his band, The Mothers of Invention, castigate

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the straight world ("Hungry Freaks, Daddy"), puncture the Western worship of romantic love ("I Ain't Got No Heart"), attack American consumerism ("Who Are the Brain Police?") and even manage to alienate their own audience ("You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here"). No other long-hair at this time dared to critically comment on, let alone attack, the hippie lifestyle except for Zappa. 1968's We're Only In It For The Money, for example, is given over almost entirely to ruthlessly skewering flower-power values, right down to the album's cover, a hilarious parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. In time, Zappa would be taken to task for writing such non-P.C. fare as "Jewish Princess," "He's So Gay" and "Titties and Beer." Not just lyrically, but musically, Zappa ruffled feathers. As Courrier writes of another track from Freak Out!, "How Could I Be Such A Fool" [is] "a pretty straightforward love ballad, except that it's based on what Zappa calls, 'a nanigo rhythm... We call it [a] Motown Waltz.' Sometimes Zappa would create the basis of something familiar and then employ a rhythm completely foreign to the style of the song. Like Stravinsky, Zappa used the past merely as the foundation for something new." Purposefully off-key barbershop quartet, atonal piano, electric guitar solos, blues harmonica and, on one track, the twelve minute "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet," "screams, yelps, electronic tapes filled with voices (that in one instance echo Lawrence Welk), nonsense syllables, and later shouts of 'Creamcheese!'" — all this and more contributed to Freak Out'.'s attempt to wean listeners from the lazy assumption that musicians exist merely to provide a cozily familiar jukebox experience. When not touring and churning out records over the course of his 25-plus year career (including posthumous releases, Zappa's recording catalogue approaches the mid-century mark and is still growing), campaigning against censorship before the U.S. Congress and speaking out against general right-wing lunacy, serving a brief stint as an overseas trade representative to the post-communist Czechoslovakian government (President Havel was a fan of Zappa's

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work, but the first Bush administration forced the fledgling government to overturn the appointment) or pursuing an increasing devotion to having his more "serious" works performed by full orchestras, Zappa led a paradoxically fairly conservative domestic life. A virtual symbol of American countercultural insurrection who was adamantly antidrugs ("marijuana . . . gave me a sore throat and made me sleepy"), here was an artistic connoisseur of the sexually extreme and downright creepy who was also a happily married, devoted father for more than a quarter of a century Those who pick up Dangerous Kitchen hoping to better understand this private side of Zappa, however, will be disappointed. As Courrier states in his preface, his book "is most importantly a book about music, and about a composer who had an unbridled love affair with it." Perhaps this is how it should be. As Zappa himself famously said, "Music is best," and to write about his music—which Courrier does with clarity, insight and discrimination —is perhaps the most appropriate way to truly understand the man. Still, before his death in 1994 of prostate cancer, Zappa did a lot, saw a lot and made a lot of friends and enemies. Someone will eventually write the book that will open the door on the famously self-shrouded Zappa's skeletons, and it will definitely be fun to hear the rattle they make. As for Zappa's musical legacy, most people are either rabidly for or dourly against—in many ways the ideally desired aesthetic response. Courrier is understandably in the former camp, while many can't nod along emphatically enough when music journalist Ian Penman, in his acidic denunciation of Zappa's music, "Don't Do That On Stage Anymore," rhetorically asks: "[Tjell me this: if you were stuck on the proverbial desert island, which disc(s) would you rather have —one solitary song by Brian Wilson or the entire Zappa back catalogue?" To Zappa's credit, he probably wouldn't have cared what you did.

LOST AT SEA Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy by Jon Stebbins ECW Press, 244 pages It's an accepted publishing truism that small presses are supposed to lose money. The more money a small press loses, the argument goes, the greater its literary reputation. If you asked every person who lamented the demise of the Stoddart empire how many of its titles they actually purchased, the answer would probably be a sour silence, with maybe an icy insinuation thrown in that you voted Tory last time around. Art and money don't mix, you see, and even to insinuate as much is to mark oneself as the crassest of Philistines. Unfortunately, in an era of government cutbacks to anything not deemed technologically progressive, such literary purism is not only naive, it's dangerous. If serious literature is going to survive in this country it's going to have to start paying a good part of its own way. Such is one of the foundational principles behind Toronto's ECW Press. Long known as a respected literary press publishing the likes of the poet David McGimpsey as well as scholarly critical studies of such CanLit figures as Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, ECW is able to produce significant but light-selling volumes through profits earned from more popular titles intended for a broader North American audience, particularly celebrity biographies. Books such as Jon Stebbins' Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy. While Brian Wilson has his own autobiography (Wouldn't It Be Nice) and the Beach Boys are the subject of several biographical studies

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(the best being Steven Games' Heroes And Villains), the emphasis is always on Brian and his troubled pop genius. For the most part, this is as it should be. Contrary to the hyperbolic cover claim that Dennis was the "founding member" of the group, the Wilson boys' mother had to literally order Brian and Carl to include their hyperactive brother in their fledgling band — a fact Stebbins himself acknowledges early in his narrative. And aside from a handful of above-average ballads dotting Beach Boy albums throughout the years, Dennis' central claim to artistic merit, his one solo album, 1977's Pacific Ocean Blue (along with the widely circulated bootleg, Bamboo), is, contrary to Stebbins' arguments, a collection of no more than a half-dozen good songs, all unfortunately woefully overproduced. In terms of both musical significance and pure human drama, Brian Wilson's life is the one that matters most. Not that Dennis' isn't worthy of a book-length telling, something Stebbins does well. Born Dennis Carl Wilson in 1944, Dennis was the one Beach Boy who actually surfed, the one who, according to big brother Brian, came home to their suburban California home one day and announced, "'Listen you guys, it looks like surfing's gonna be the next big craze.' He said I should write a song about it. So it happened we wrote a song just due to Dennis' suggestion.'" Ergo the ditty "Surfin" and the birth of the Beach Boys (named by their first producers, who hated the band's original handle, The Pendletones). Brian might have written about little deuce coupes and surfer girls, but it was Dennis who was bedding them in the back seat of his juiced-up hot rod. Dennis was also the one whose gruff voice most often got lost in Brian's magical vocal mixes and whose drumming was usually replaced by that of session musicians (normally Hal Elaine) because, as Carl charitably put it, they were "more reliable than Dennis." Although always happy to admit that "all I want out of life is a good time," Dennis was one of those legendary partyers who give hedonism a bad name. Brian's descent into addiction and mental

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illness is already legendary, but Stebbins does a good job of sensitively yet honestly detailing Dennis' rapid decline —the what and, more important, the why. Stebbins convincingly argues that "the personal problems that dogged Dennis throughout his life had their source within his own family. His father berated him constantly, and Brian was forever being held out to him as a shining example, the person he could never hope to be." What else is one to make of Dennis' pathetic (if nonetheless true) claim that "Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We're his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We're nothing. He's everything." It could also be argued that Dennis' brief but aggressive championing of Charles Manson as both musician and hippie messiah was rooted in the same sad source. By the time he died at age 39 in a booze-assisted drowning, Dennis had philandered his way through five marriages (he was the founding, uhm, member of an L.A. boy's club called "the golden penetrators," and once bragged of having sex with a woman on the front lawn of his house the very night his wife was giving birth to his child), was broke, chronically alcoholic and living as a virtual transient around Venice Beach, prone to walking into bars and announcing "I'm Dennis Wilson, buy me a drink." He looked at least 20 years older, thanks to years of massive self-abuse, his voice a painful husk from just as many years of chain-smoking. The epitome to millions of the bronzed, hard-bodied California dream died a bloated rock and roll casualty to cocaine, heroin and vodka. There's no record of anyone singing Brian's "When I Grow Up to Be a Man" at the funeral.

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PART TWO: THEM

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HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER The Cadence of Grass by Thomas McGuane Knopf, 238 pages Some people might hold it against him, but Thomas McGuane is the reason I wanted to be a novelist. More specifically, The Bushwacked Piano, McGuane's second novel, with its compulsively readable combination of linguistic fireworks, ribald wit and bitingly smart humour was just the vocational wake-up call I needed. A review quote on the back of the paperback perfectly summed up the novel's allure: "McGuane makes literacy a joy, not an obligation." For a long time the fun never stopped. From The Sporting Club, McGuane's 1969 debut novel, through Ninety-Two in the Shade, Panama, Nobody's Angel and Something to Be Desired, Thomas McGuane produced some of the most consistently interesting fiction written in the United States. A merely competent collection of short stories, 1986's To Skin a Cat, was an excusable blip on the screen, McGuane switching stylistic gears, one suspects, in the belief that a change is as good as a rest. More troubling was the entirely forgettable Keep the Change published three years later/and the almost as equally pedestrian Nothing but Blue Skies, which appeared three years after that. And then ten years of silence. True, the interim saw the appearance of two collections of entertaining essays—one on fishing, another on horses—but that a writer of McGuane's immense gifts should, for a decade, remain fictionally AWOL seemed nearly criminal. Now, with The Cadence of Grass, McGuane returns with his ninth novel.

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The Cadence of Grass has all the hallmarks of vintage McGuane: a dysfunctional Montana family (the Whitelaws) headed up by a despotic patriarch (Sunny Jim) who posthumously stirs the already simmering pot of familial craziness by insisting in his will that, for the family to reap his considerable fortune, his daughter Evelyn remain married to her contemptible husband, Paul Crusoe. There's also Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman, who is the sane counterpoint to the frenzied consumerism of Natalie, Evelyn's sister, and the general urban dementia that has gripped the entire family. And there's rural Montana itself, McGuane's home since the mid-'70s: The air was so cold it felt like heat... Night birds flew between his legs, and when he walked past a snowy owl perched at eye level, it merely rotated its head with his passing; but when he'd gone another while into the darkness, he noticed the owl was not far behind him, easily seen because of its terrible whiteness. Several coyotes returning from a hunt came downhill, and he stepped aside to let them pass, thinking that if they had anything to say to him, surely they would have stopped. That McGuane is still capable of writing brilliantly about the natural world is obvious, but, in the case of The Cadence of Grass, unfortunately only serves to highlight how thinly drawn his human creations have become. This is largely the fault of the novel's design. For most of his career McGuane has been a master of structural proportion, fond of speaking of the necessity of finding a novel's correct "power to weight ratio." Here, 238 pages is simply far too small a canvas to successfully portray everyone he wants the reader to learn to love and loathe. Evelyn, attempting to balance paternal loyalty with personal contentedness (she despises Paul yet is under constant pressure to reunite) as well as her love for a pastoral way of life at odds with the

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modern West (horse ranching versus mechanized farms and the creep of condominiums) is the novel's real centre, in any other McGuane novel the narrative's clear protagonist. Here, she shares a crowded stage with her kleptomaniac sister, her demonic husband and most especially, Bill Champion, a character of such absolute integrity and John Wayne-like independence of spirit that he borders on the sentimental, his tag-name all too appropriately cliched. Then there is the farm family that rescues Evelyn when her car breaks down and she almost freezes to death walking to find help. The Aadfields are pure American Dubious, wonderfully reminiscent of McGuane's earliest fictional treasures of cartoon realism, novels whose casts of characters are, by way of their author's masterful mix of profundity, hilarity and linguistic dexterity, the sum total of how human beings live and die today—Flannery O'Connor's famous "Grotesques" with a cocaine and cable-TV twist. Mother and father Aadfield are armed believers of private property rights, have got a dead grandfather in the basement ready to be unfrozen and incinerated once the weather is just right and a son named Donald, a hard-working, dutiful lad but also a self-confessed "once upon a time ... honest to goodness California faggot," one who regrettably spends his days "on the wrong end of a number-three irrigation shovel or hitting the zerk fittings on Dad's front-end loader with a half-frozen grease gun!" Yet, like all the other characters in the novel, because of McGuane's hit-and-run narrative technique, the Aadfields entice but never entirely compel. The Cadence of Grass is either half as long as it should be or filled with twice as many people as it can support. Either way, because the characters only live in fits and starts, so does the language — too much of the novel is spent setting the scene and connecting the narrative dots instead of being utilized to exhibit McGuane's lexical mastery, his principal appeal as a writer. Speaking of his friend Delmore Schwartz's work—another source of youthful worship of mine—John Berryman wrote in one of his

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Dream Songs: "I'd bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so." Heroes are hard to find. They're harder still to say goodbye to.

HE'S COME UNDONE I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb HarperCollins, 897 pages Every semester at least one of my creative writing students can be counted on to challenge my assertion that there's a big difference between what normally tops the best-seller lists — "fiction" — and what we're going to be studying and, hopefully, writing —"literature." In a nutshell, the question goes something like this: Isn't it just academic snobbery or even (hint, hint) professional envy that keeps a best-selling novel from being considered high art? Which brings us to Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, the second novel from the author of the New York Times best-seller and Oprah Book Club selection, She's Come Undone. I Know This Much Is True resembles Lamb's first novel in that it chronicles the painful but ultimately triumphant journey toward selfdiscovery of one central character, in this case Dominick Birdsey. No question, Dominick does have a lot in his life to feel pain over, most particularly Thomas, the schizophrenic twin brother he alternately adores and hates. There's also Ray, the cruel stepfather the boys live in fear of, and their mother Concettina, the quintessential long-suffering mom, complete with a cleft lip and a maddening aptitude for unquestioning obedience to both Ray and, before him, her severe, new-immigrant father. Finally, there's the dissolution of Dominick's marriage to another good woman done wrong, the warm-hearted and beautiful Dessa, with whom he is still madly in love.

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So far, not so bad. Whether we call it fiction or literature, conflict is an essential part of any story, and Dominick's many dilemmas both within and without are, even if a little on the made-for-TV dysfunctional side, clearly laid out in the novel's first 100 pages. It's how he overcomes these demons (and, not to worry, overcome them all he does) that rankles. In the course of his nearly 900-page recovery to mental wellness, two primary routes are taken: eager study of his grandfather's handwritten memoir (left to his mother when her father died and, in turn, to Dominick now that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer); and Dr. Patel, an oh-so-wise and wonderfully nurturing female psychiatrist. First there are the numerous paint-by-number lessons to be learned from the memoir. "We resemble him, you know? Thomas and me," Dominick tells Dr. Patel the day after reading a harrowing account of his grandfather drowning a domesticated monkey. "The more I get into it, the less I can stand the son of a bitch .. .but at the same time, I can sort of recognize him, you know? Relate to him, on some level—Last night? After I read how he drowned the monkey? I started thinking about how I'd gotten trapped by a promise, same as him." If the sledgehammer-to-the-head connections to Dominick's life aren't quite obvious enough, Lamb is considerate enough to supply plenty of italicized words to help us understand exactly what Dominick learns about himself. But it is Dr. Patel's omniscient probing of every crinkle inside Dominick's troubled cranium, and his own unclouded understanding of how each piece of his psychic puzzle is to be slowly but surely put together, that is most disturbingly simplistic. Certain passages are bad even by basic beach-reading standards. At one point, Dominick recounts how he can "remember standing there on the shore, naked still, panting like a bastard. Just looking at my reflection in the water. Not looking away. Not lying to myself for once in my life. Facing who I really was." Leaving aside the language Lamb uses to tell Dominick's story (painfully pedestrian, like most works of out-and-out "fiction,"

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though the sort often falsely trumpeted as "spare/' "raw" or "unadorned"), I know this much is true: certain books might look and sound like life on first acquaintance, but, given enough time to reveal their true natures, really don't have much to tell us about the permanently chaotic but boundlessly rich world we're all lucky enough to be born and die in, a place where daily epiphanies aren't our birthright, and absolute happiness, unfortunately, can't be achieved in a 12-step program.

HIGH ART The Last Opium Den by Nick Tosches Bloomsbury, 74 pages To A.E. Houseman's claim that "Malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man," Nick Tosches would undoubtedly add, "Right idea, wrong drug." For Tosches, American journalist, biographer and sometimes novelist, "Opium is the perfect drug." Opium, he argues, is unique among human-made and natural intoxicants in its capacity to help create "the eloquence of a silence that not only contains all that has ever been and all that ever will be said, but also drosses the vast Babel of it, leaving only the ethereal purity of that wordless poetry that cfnly the greatest poets have glimpsed in epiphany." In other words, j good shit. Tosches comes to have this, his vejry own epiphany, flat on his back in an isolated Cambodian hut a couple of arduous weeks after he'd set out for the Far East to find ati honest-to-goodness opium den—"dark, brocade-curtained, velvetjcushion places of luxurious *decadence" filled with "wordless, kowtowing servants" and "recumbent exotic concubines of sweet intoxication." That Tosches finally ends up sampling the genuine ambrosial article alone but for his dirty, barefooted, slightly derangetf dealer while staring up at the black Cambodian night through a Ijiole in the roof of a thatched hut doesn't stop him from pronouncing that "When God put His mouth to the nostrils of Adam, there Was probably opium on His breath."

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When it comes to a lot of things, and drugs are only one of them, it's probably not a bad idea to listen to Tosches. Uncategorizable as a writer —several of his essays approach art (see the wonderful Nick Tosches Reader) while most of his attempts at a loftier form in his longer works, like the recent The Devil and Sonny Liston, are merely competent journalism—Tosches the man is no less heterogeneous. Starting out in the late '60s writing bounteous record reviews a la Lester bangs for a small Boston magazine, Fusion, Tosches is as equally capable of explaining organized crime (Power On Earth) as he is of turning the life of a showbiz irrelevancy like Dean Martin into a full-scale human tragedy (Dino). Tosches is the kind of writer who, at each of the appropriate stages of his life, has sniffed glue, read everything, worshipped the early Stones, been feted by the beautiful people and lived to love and hate and tell it all. Essentially, Keats' Negative Capability on the rocks, straight up, no chaser. Opium, Tosches discovers, "is older than any known god. Its origins lie in the prehistoric mists of the early Neolithic period. It was glorified in Mesopotamia and Egypt, emerged in the Mediterranean region with the primal Great Mother and remained tied to her, in her evolving guises, through the archaic and classical periods." But if opium itself has always been with us, opium dens have not, at least not in North America. It was the Chinese immigrants who arrived here to build the railroads and work the mines who brought with them the traditions of the opium den. And while most cities had banned the smoking of opium by the late nineteenth-century, as the Chinese population spread throughout North America, so did the institution of the den, and not just among the Chinese. Tosches even speculates that the term "hip" may have evolved from the standard, side-lying position opium users use when wallowing on the floor. But times change, and not, Tosches laments, always for the better. As the old Chinese den lords died off, so, seemingly, did the desire for opium-assisted epiphany searching. As the twentieth-century rolled

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on, what were now coveted were opium derivatives —morphine and heroin—drugs that "offered oblivion, not ethereality, a rush into the void rather than a slow drifting to blissful serenity." Tosches finally does find an opium den, although it ends up resembling the dives of his New York, bar-hopping youth more than those of Thomas de Quincy's most drug-fueled opulent fantasy. Along the way he also finds out that the Hong Kong government is attempting to bring a Disney World theme park to town, and that Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken are what is really hip in the Far East today, not a bunch of geezers sitting around a grimy room trying to listen to the cosmos breathe. And George Bush wonders why we just can't say no.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, INACTION My Movie Business: A Memoir by John Irving Knopf Canada, 170 pages Now we definitely know that the publishing world's obsession with memoir has gotten out of hand. Previously, it had been enough to scratch one's head and wonder at the glut of recent novelists who've felt compelled to write a non-fiction account of their bittersweet youths. With the appearance of John Irving's My Movie Business: A Memoir, however, the question now becomes whether or not a loose collection of relatively disparate reflections on the author's grandfather, abortion rights and the movie business should even be called a memoir. One can't help but be skeptical that opportune marketing strategy had as much to do with the publication of My Movie Business as anything else (the book was also timed to be published in conjunction with the release of The Cider House Rules, the movie that Irving spends a portion of the book discussing). Not that there isn't plenty of interest in My Movie Business. The heart of this slim volume is concerned with the 13-year struggle Irving endured to get one of his novels, The Cider House Rules, made into a film. Reading his account of the four separate directors at one time or another involved with the movie, the screenplay's countless drafts and redrafts and the numbing big-money bureaucracy that had to be endured over the life of the project, the ten-plus years of toil Joyce spent on Finnegans Wake seem almost trifling in comparison.

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Because the issue of abortion is so central to the movie (which chronicles the life of a Depression-era orphan trained by the doctor who runs the orphanage to become a doctor and abortionist to the poor), Irving includes a brief history of abortion in America, a spirited attack on the anti-choice side of the argument and a character sketch of his grandfather, a progressive obstetrician Irving believes would have approved of the humanitarian, pro-choice sentiment of The Cider House Rules. It's done in the best journalistic fashion (lots of levelheaded prose, statistics and convincing argumentation), but belongs more in an op-ed piece than in an account of a fiction writer working in the motion picture industry. When Irving finally does get around to his intended topic, My Movie Business is, happily, no Hollywood insider tell-all. Irving isn't afraid to point an accusing finger when he feels it's justified, either. "In the world of would-be producers, you can meet some truly vile people. In the landscape of Hollywood they're as familiar as litter. I think of them as the foam-plastic coffee cups around a construction site, the debris the workers leave behind." Because Irving is foremost a novelist (nine and counting), he's best at dissecting the distinction between writing literary fiction and mass entertainment, both in terms of the process that goes into each and the individual industries that support them. Usually it is the business of moviemaking that is found lacking: The constant burden of compressing a story [for a screenplay] means that somebody's character is going to get compromised. In a novel, there is no reason all the characters can't be fully as developed (and/or sympathetic) as the writer chooses to make them. In a film, you're always fighting the constraints of time. There are characters that will be given short shift. It's not a choice I like. (Another reason I prefer my day job.)

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Likewise, the often maligned world of publishing appears downright virtuous next to the bottom-line philistinism that dominates so much of the film industry. Irving rankles at "the presumption on the part of the people putting up the money that they have an unassailable right to interfere with what happens in the screenplay and with the outcome of the film. Publishers, among them even the toughest editors, ask writers to make changes; they don't tell you that you have to make the changes, or simply make them for you." Irving also briefly discusses the failure of his first novel to make it to the big screen, as well as two others that did, but for which he didn't write the screenplays, The World According To Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire. If he'd limited himself to his experience in attempting to turn those novels into films, My Movie Business might have been an entertaining examination of what happens when a writer of integrity grapples with big-business. Which, in part, it is. The memoir part.

WELL DONE Off to the Side: A Memoir by Jim Harrison Atlantic Monthly Press, 313 pages "But this prying into the family life of a great man. I mean, when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? Peeping and prying into the green-room gossip of the day, the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have King Lear, and it is immortal/' So says George Russell in Ulysses. The poetry and prose of the American writer Jim Harrison may or may not be immortal —thankfully, Harrison has so far held off the process of posthumous appraisal by refusing to die —but, whether we need it or not, we definitely do have a record now by Harrison's own hand of how he lived: not only his drinking and his debts, but also his views on such sundry matters as nature, religion and stripping. Harrsion, we learn from his memoir Off to the Side, was born and raised in rural Northern Michigan just before the outbreak of World War Two by his second-generation Swedish-American parents. It is here that his abiding love —or, more accurately, need—for nature is nurtured, a theme that dominates his autobiography. Ministering a broken adolescent heart in the woods near his house: ... my mind emptied out into the landscape and my preoccupation with the girl and other problems leaked away. In the stillness garter snakes emerged to feed on flies that buzzed close to the ground among dead leaves and burgeoning

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greenery. Birds came very close because I had ceased to exist to the birds, and gradually to myself. I had become nature and the brain that fueled my various torments had decided to take a rest by leaving my body and existing playfully in the landscape . . . It did not so much begin to rain as the air quite suddenly became full of water. Given the circumstances the rain could not help but be a baptism. Anyone who has read Harrison's many fine novels or collections of novellas such as The Road Home or Legends of the Fall will testify that one of the greatest pleasures of his prose is in the fusing of his storytelling talents with those of his other central occupation, that of poet, particularly when discoursing on nature and, collaterally, food. And even if, as he says, "nothing is less interesting, except to his future scholars, than a writer in the midst of a productive period," Harrison has lots to say —and says it very well —about many matters nonnatural, including the literary life. Striking out from the farm for New York as a teenager to assume his secular calling of poet, for example, Harrison recounts how his — very exotic for a rural Midwesterner, this—Jewish girlfriend and he would go to the MOMA and "neck right in front of Monet's 'Water Lilies/ or Picasso's 'Guernica/ our hormones overcoming the suffering in the latter painting, a wayward eye catching the howling bull." Later, recalling his existence as a poor graduate student at Michigan State, he drolly observes how "the study of Eastern literature, where flow rather than whirl is king, is wonderful if you're not obligated to function in the West other than nominally." Recollecting his time working in Hollywood as an overpaid, undervalued screenwriter, "I remember that I with Orson's [Welles] diminutive black driver had to brace a foot on the rocker panel to get Orson out of his limo. Welles advised me to avoid hatcheck girls who would inevitably cheat on you with musicians. I filed this away with other advice I was unlikely to use."

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Now, a successful writer critically and financially (ordinarily an oxymoron), happily married for over four decades as well as a proud grandfather, Harrison can still be awed by the apparent arbitrariness of it all —how "those of us who are married, divorced or not, remember the thoroughly haphazard and sometimes accidental way we made love, and the singular sperm that met the singular egg that created so much of the nature of our children." Not only are we not here for very long, he seems to say, but—and here's the real tragedy or mystery, depending on what side of the cosmic bed you fall out of—no one appears to even know why we're here rather than not. Off to the Side is divided into three parts: "Early Life," "Seven Obsessions" and "The Rest of Life." Structurally, the first and last sections constitute a fairly conventional, chronological account of Harrison's life, while the middle segment is exactly what it is says it is, seven thoughtful, wry essays that explore seven steadfast—and sustaining—fixations: "Alcohol," "Stripping," "Hunting, Fishing (And Dogs)," "Private Religion," "A Short Tour De France," "The Road" and "Nature and Natives." Naturally, elements of the biographical bleed into the essayistic and vice versa, enough so that it's difficult to see what would have been sacrificed had Harrison either limited himself to the purely sequential or shaped his self-portrait entirely by way of the essay form. No matter. What ultimately emerges from this hybrid is not only an extremely engaging self-portrait of one of America' best living writers, but a sort of prolonged meditation on the nature of sanity, both physical and mental. Even if Harrison's book-length paean to the regenerative powers of nature is compromised by a slight myopia — Harrison appears unaware that today, and particularly in his own country, only the very poor or the very rich can revel in the early morning whir of the hummingbird or the soothing gurgle of a nearby stream—the essential wisdom of his deeply humanistic, wonderfully pagan vision remains clear.

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All exceptional autobiography— Flaubert's letters, for instance, or, more recently, Anthony Burgess' Confessions — approaches genuine art in that it uses the particulars of an individual life to explore the deeper riddle of human existence. Off to the Side strives for and achieves this status. Thomas Carryle was right when he said that "A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one." Jim Harrison has accomplished both.

SCARY WRITING On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Scribner, 288 pages Thank, or blame, Amy Tan. It was the author of The Joy Luck Club who, according to Stephen King's introduction to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, "told me in a very simple and direct way that it was okay to write it." Apparently, one night King asked Tan what is the one question she never gets asked as a writer. (King and Tan share membership in The Rock Bottom Remainders, a celebrity writer rock and roll pickup band good enough, King assures the reader, that "you'd pay to hear.") After some deliberation, Tarn replied, "No one ever asks about the language." Humbly dismissing the notion that just because "someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say," it turns out the real reason King decided to share his secrets of the writer's trade is that he "cares passionately about the art and craft of telling stories." Or, one assumes, at least as much as some of the other dedicated servants to le mot juste in King's merry band of fellow music makers and literature lovers such as Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver and Roy Blount, Jr. Presumably intended to capture two of the publishing industry's most profitable market segments — memoir and self-help — On Writing is divided into several parts. The first and third-to-last focuses on King's life, with the middle and end sections given over to detailing some of the writing do's and don't's he's picked up over the years. In

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the first section, "CV," King attempts "to show some of the incidents and life situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be." Not surprisingly, like many writers, as a child King suffered a long, isolating illness (nine months in bed with the measles) and was a voracious reader ("approximately six tons of comic books," Jack London and hundreds of science fiction titles). He also attempted his own tiny-tot tomes to be proudly presented to his slightly puzzled elders before he was old enough to actually understand any of the things he was so precociously writing about. Unlike most young aspirants to the writer's life, though, one of King's fondest youthful memories is of turning a Vincent Price horror film into a short novel. What's most striking is King's admission that, novelization completed, "my thoughts were focused almost entirely on how much money I might make if my story was a hit at school." Because the novel he wrote was first a film, presumably no thoughts of big-movie-money sugar plums danced in the pubescent writer's head. Later we learn that King spent some time as a cub sports reporter, was a high school English teacher who cranked out fiction no one wanted and how much of an advance he got for his first novel, Carrie. For the aspiring writer not particularly interested in how much money King made from the sale of the paperback rights to Carrie ($400,000 U.S.) and how his wife cried when she heard the news, or how Steve liked his Budweiser a little too much and how, in an epiphanistic moment, realized "holy shit, I'm an alcoholic," the second and third sections of this book—"Toolbox" and "On Writing" —will be of most interest. In one of the few places in the initial autobiographical section of his book to actually concern itself with creative writing, King's newspaper editor tells him, "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story." Commonsensical —perhaps, to the non-writer, even startlingly simple—but so is most received wisdom about creating

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successful fiction. When King declares "if you want to be a writer you must read a lot and write a lot" or "description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story," there's not much to either disagree with or add. The problem is, there are countless other books by better writers that say more of what King says and say it much better (in particular Flannery O'Connor's indispensable Mystery and Manners and John Gardner's dependable The Art of Fiction). Of course, anyone willing to fork over nearly $40 for King's book may want to hear such creative commonplaces delivered from the master, but their main wish is probably to know more about his life. To this latter end — and what will likely attract most book buyers — there is something called "On living: A postscript." In this short chapter King relates the already much media-discussed story of his being run over by a van in the summer of 1999. The accident broke his leg in nine places, derailed his hip, chipped his spine in eight places, and broke four ribs. King assures his readers that despite several operations, a very serious bout of infection for which he still takes about a hundred pills a day and a lot of pain and self-doubt, he is slowly feeling much better and writing again. A happy ending after all. About the writing life itself, King concludes with some final words of wisdom. "Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work." And what about the question of language—his inspiration from Tan, after all, for completing On Writing? Don't worry about it. "Book buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages." And, no doubt, enrich them as well.

TWO OUT OF THREE AIN'T BAD Experience by Martin Amis Knopf Canada, 406 pages Near the beginning of Experience, Martin Amis declares, "I want to set the record straight (so much of this is already public), and to speak, for once, without artifice." Thankfully for the reader, this is, for Amis, nearly impossible. Unlike so many literary memoirs, Experience is more than the mere facts of the author's life collected in neat chronological order. Experience succeeds where most other memoirs fail because it's really a well-written novel starring Martin Amis as its amusingly self-deprecating central protagonist, his crotchety but ultimately lovable father and fellow novelist, Kingsley Amis, as his foil and with all the difficulties and joys of family life firmly in place as its central theme. Experience is saved from being a mere recitation of some of Martin Amis' choicer experiences, because, as one of today's most interesting novelists, he correctly observes how "the trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity." In writing the story of his own life to age 50, Amis the novelist wisely relies upon his "organizational principles (which) derive from an inner urgency . . . the novelist's addiction to seeing parallels and making connections." One such connection is between himself as a son to Kingsley, and as father to his own children. In many ways, Kingsley is the book's real main character. Life as an offspring of the celebrated author of such staples of post-World War II British fiction as Lucky Jim and The Old Devils was

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apparently no silver spoon affair. To begin with, there was Amis' mother's divorce of his father for, among other crimes against domesticity, an almost pathological adulterous nature. "My father," Amis relates, "once took my mother to dinner at the house of his married mistress. Another husband was present, accompanied by his wife; and that night Kingsley made a date with her." Like most children, Amis believed unquestionably that "my parents' marriage loomed like a translucent horizon." Then one day the sun suddenly sets when the family maid brusquely informs 12year-old Martin, "vYou know your father's got this fancy woman up in London, don't you?'" As for any child, things for Martin are never the same. On the whole, though, Amis and his father maintained a close, if occasionally strained, relationship. ("We had fights and rows and many hot exchanges, but never anything that wasn't cleared up the next day") Usually the tiffs were over Kinglsey's avowedly rightwing politics, which understandably chafed against the younger man's more progressive ideals, and caused the older to chastise his son for pathetically blowing in the "winds of trend." But even when, for example, Amis outs his father as a latent anti-Semite, one can understand why Amis continued to love and respect, even venerate, the older man: "'What it's like being mildly anti-Semitic?' 'It's all right.' 'No. What's it feel like being mildly anti-Semitic. Describe it.' 'What's it feel like? Well. Very mild, as you say. If I'm watching the end of some new arts program I might notice the Jewish names in the credits and think, Ah, there's another one. Or: Oh I see. There's another one.' 'And that's all?' 'More or less. You just notice them. You wouldn't want anyone to do anything about it. You'd be horrified by that.'"

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Might all our political adversaries be so self-aware, intelligent, funny. Actually, there's a good deal of laughter in Experience, much of it self-directed. On his sense of personal style in the '70s, for example, Amis records: "I was almost certainly sporting a dagger-collared flower shirt and green velvet flares — crushed velvet, too. It amazes me, now, that any of us managed to write a word of sense during the whole decade, considering we were all evidently stupid enough to wear flares." And after enduring a hailstorm of attacks from the pernicious British press in the early '90s over the simultaneous breaking with his agent of 23 years, Pat Kavanagh, the consequent dissolution of his close friendship with fellow novelist Julian Barnes (who just happens to be married to Kavanagh), a painful divorce and finally deciding to have a lifetime of dental woes alleviated by having every one of his teeth removed and replaced (eliciting charges of greedy vanity), one would have to have a sense of humour. Either that or take up arms. So, of the infamous Amis teeth themselves, he can ask: "Question: How many of these three noted stylists—James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis — suffered catastrophic tooth loss in their early-to-middle 40s? Answer: All three." Of his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and her native New York, after a particularly torturous date with the dentist who rebuilt Amis' face (thus allowing him to comfortably smile in public for the first time in decades): "While I paused to spit blood into the gutter she said, 'Remember, this is freak city. Look around. Nobody's going to notice you.' I looked around. It was true. It was great. Babblers, brown-bag artists, panhandlers ... I walked with my head held high, unregarded and unremarked. There even seemed to be room for significant deterioration." Of course, the other side of comedy is always tragedy. In chronicling and meditating upon, among other things, his father's slow, painful physical decline and death and his cousin Lucy Partington's abduction

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and murder at the hands of Britain's most notorious serial killer, Frederick West, Experience marks Amis' first real departure from his signature satirize-and-sizzle prose style. For a fellow writer, the appeal of Amis' usual mode of exposition, irony, is that you can't get hurt, you can only hurt others. The flip side, however, is that by refusing to risk anything emotionally, little of emotional significance is given fair play in one's work. What makes Amis' novel Money good, for example, is that it's acerbically smart and funny and always stylistically fresh; what keeps it—and all of Amis' fiction, for that matter—from being great is that we don't particularly care about its monstrously self-obsessed narrator, John Self. In Experience we do care. We care when Kingsley, reduced to a mentally and physically deteriorating shell of his former self, calls out to his family, "I don't want to see anyone . . . anyone," and turns "emphatically on his side." We care when Lucy's grieving brother, David, recounts the hours of agony at her unspeakable loss, how he rose in the night to "swear and weep." We care when Amis tries to explain to his two young sons that they have a 19-year-old stepsister— one even Amis hadn't known existed until days before. By going certain places in his memoir he's never really ventured as a novelist, Amis risks sentimentality and moral simplicity—the potential price one pays for occasionally lowering one's shield of irony and dealing head-on with the frailer side of human nature. But except for an unfortunate Appendix that attempts to even some old scores—but only temporarily lowers him to the level of some of his rightful enemies (second-rate germalists, primarily)—Amis never stumbles. It leads one to hope that his future novels will follow the memoir's lead by allowing more room for this sort of vulnerability and —dare one say it—tenderness. At one point in Experience Amis claims, "The fit reader, the ideal reader, regards a writer's life as just an interesting extra." But if the writer himself decides to talk about his life, then his readers are entitled to demand that the confession conform to the same high standards of

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the art. Amis' many readers needn't worry. Experience is a long, wise poem in typically ebullient Amis prose in praise of all that endures: creativity, friendship and love. Most novels should be so richly fulfilling.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis Knopf Canada, 306 pages When the historian Robert Conquest—long-time friend of Kingsley Amis and, later, his son Martin—published The Great Terror in 1968, it was seen by many of the intelligentsia as a reactionary treatise, a distorted, agenda-heavy ("Cold Warrior") account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. Conquest's essential point here and elsewhere (he was eventually dubbed "anti-Sovietchik number one" by the Moscow Central Committee) was that Russian communism was responsible for killing more human beings than any other political or religious idea (including Nazism), and that communism was the world's great plague. Conquest's then-dubious postulation has now, post-glasnost, been almost universally validated, enough so that when approached by his publisher for a new title to a revised version of The Great Terror, he responded with, "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" By 2002, then, Conquest's voice isn't a shrill, conservative cry in the woods any more; the list of permissions for Martin Amis' Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, for example, runs three-and-ahalf pages long, most of it taken up with scholarly, journalistic and literary accounts of how the Russian government—and Stalin's in particular—tortured, starved and murdered millions of "enemies of the state." So, the question obviously becomes: What does Koba the Dread (the title refers to Stalin) add to this already substantial and still growing body of literature? One can only conclude that Amis' intention is to popularize, to inform as widely as possible what he himself has recently learned.

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And while no one can doubt his sincerity—he describes reading Solzhenitsyn's account of Red Terror torture as "unendurable/7 and only proceeds to relay it with "caution and unease" — the fact remains that Koba the Dread ultimately emerges as not much more than an earnest, extremely well-researched undergraduate level essay written by a recent convert to the faith (or, in this case, the anti-faith). Amis the novelist has elsewhere deftly described the process of finding the appropriate narrative voice for a particular book as being like a musician warming up before getting down to actually playing— the guitar player, for example, tuning and strumming until he or she finds the precise sound they're looking for. And when they hit it, when they write the right sentence, they know it—the reaction is almost visceral, and never false. Since it comes three years after Heavy Water, a collection of short stories, two years after Experience, a memoir and just a year after Writing Against Cliche, a gathering together of 29 years of book reviews, maybe it shouldn't be surprising that, from its first paragraph, Koba the Dread sounds wrong. Maybe Amis' fingers are tired. Precisely because his objective is so pedestrian, so, too, is the language he uses to achieve it. Long-time readers of Amis' normally energetic prose can be excused for thinking that sentences like, "The trouble with Lenin was that he thought you could achieve things by coercion and murder," and, "There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the history of the universe," simply don't sound like the author of such verbal feasts as Money, London Fields or even Amis' many fine essays and critical pieces. Koba the Dread isn't so much an analytical examination of the infamous Red Terror as a well-knit quilt of quotes, Amis making his case early and often through the mouths of countless other writers (Conquest alone is referenced 37 times). Not that what these authors have to say isn't both terrifying and morbidly fascinating, but Amis gets lost amid the patchwork of quotations and historical summary, his voice that of the dutiful anthologizer rather than the inventive

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synthesizer. As well, just in case you didn't get a point Amis considers pivotal—usually made first by someone else—he insists upon restating it ("It is, I repeat"; "To be clear"; "I have been saying that"). Amis is much more interesting when attempting to understand the fundamentalist (e.g., orthodox communist) mind, if only because he spends less time processing historical information and more on independent thought. For example, he simply cannot fathom how otherwise intelligent individuals (like his father as a young man and his close friend, journalist Christopher Hitchens) could have been blind enough to the mass executions, manufactured famines and systematic genocide to remain communist sympathizers. His point is that the loss of one human life isn't worth even the most Edenic political reformation ("A paradise so bought is no paradise"). It's a defensible, if not particularly original theory, but one that can't help being compromised by Amis' glaring incapacity to even imagine why anyone would advocate revolution, bloody or otherwise, in the first place. Amis is eager to point out Bolshevik atrocities, but never those of czarists—not unlike American politicians who can reel off every one of Fidel Castro's human rights violations, yet are willfully ignorant of those committed by his U.S.-supported predecessor, Fulgencio Batista. Perhaps the reason for this imaginative block lies in an early section entitled "Background," where Amis admits, "In 1968 I spent the summer helping to rewire a high-bourgeois mansion [his parents'] in a northern suburb of London. It was my only taste of proletarian life." If understanding evolves from empathy, and empathy from experience, Amis as working-class sympathizer is clearly, if understandably, clueless. The beginning and concluding snippets of memoir, in attempting to weave philosophical speculation with personal remembrance, are the only truly absorbing parts of Koba the Dread, places where Amis' customary wit, ironical eye and lively prose make their only, too brief, appearance. Reading them, and rereading them, one can't help but

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imagine what Koba the Dread might have been like if it had been written by Martin Amis the novelist instead of Martin Amis the amateur historian and polemicist.

The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis Knopf Canada, 506 pages In an essay from his first collection of non-fiction, 1986's The Moronic Inferno, Martin Amis pays Gore Vidal the backhanded compliment of being "too clever to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at: you can't be too clever for them." That Amis' fiction occasionally suffers from the same excessively analytical straightjacket that tends to stifle Vidal's novels can be considered elsewhere. Here, it's enough to say that the promise of The Moronic Inferno and Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (1993) has been fulfilled with The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000. Amis is our best living writer-critic. Some may wonder at the hyphen. Isn't a critic, ipso facto, also a writer? Not any more than a Big Mac and fries is a balanced meal. If you want to know what's wrong with the engine of your car, ask a mechanic, not a professor of physics. Because Amis spends the majority of his time under the hood of his novels doing what novelists tend to do—tearing out limp language, cleaning up loose plot ends, installing a better climax —he's sensitive to what makes fiction work in a way that the non-writer simply cannot be. Discussing a novel, journalists tend to talk in generalized fashion about theme, content, ideas; Amis, in his book reviews and essays, comes to the page so highly qualified by virtue of being so thoroughly covered in the literary grease of what does and doesn't allow a book to succeed. Who else but a writer would notice that J. G. Ballard, in his novel Crash, uses the word "perverse" 16 times, "geometry" 21 times, and "stylised" 26 times? That D. M. Thomas's novel Ararat includes such

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sense-deadening cliches as "through to the bitter end" and "make the most of every moment"? Would anyone else, before venturing to opine on Lolita, have read it no fewer than seven times? The truth of any fiction always lies in its sentences, and Amis doesn't allow reputation or surface shine in the form of heady or trendy subject matter to detract from his dedicated labours. As the author of nine novels and two collections of short stories, Amis is also aware of the difficulty of fashioning a wholly satisfying work. He's sympathetic, in other words, willing—eager, even—to see the good along with the not-so-good. Justly knuckle-rapping John Updike for the "sudden collapse into near-sadistic garrulity" in his painfully prolonged account of the Updike lineage in his memoir, SelfConsciousness, Amis can stop on the dime and just as aptly praise the last section of the book for being "the best thing yet written on what it is like to get older." Accustomed to dealing in the grey of life in his novels (the only colour on the genuine artist's palette), he's able to see it in the books he reads as well. In a piece on another eminent writer-critic, V. S. Pritchett, Amis rightly observes that "All artist-critics are to some extent secret proselytizers for their own work; they are all secret agents." Amis is no different. Whether reviewing a best-selling self-help guide to sexual gratification or the latest Don DeLillo novel, or arguing for the classic stature of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March or the somnambulist quality of much of Don Quixote ("Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his dirty pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences and terrible cronies"), Amis promulgates a literary agenda that, not so surprisingly, sounds like a recipe for a Martin Amis novel. First there is the language. On Bellow, whom Amis thinks is the best novelist of the past half-century: "Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. And style is morality. Style judges."

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Next there is intelligence. On Norman Mailer: "He isn't afraid of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened." Finally, there is that oh-so-unhip element called not boring the reader, that once-upon-a-pre-postmodern thing known as telling a good story. On Pride and Prejudice: "Why does the reader crow and flinch with almost equal concern over the ups and downs of Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley? And, even more mysteriously, this tizzy of zealous suspense actually survives repeated readings." It's so obviously a logical truth it's become a book-chat cliche: every reviewer brings his or her prejudices to the book under examination. Consistently fresh language, bone-deep contemplation, a genuinely engaging story—Amis' obsessions are a writer's prejudices. And for a critic, there are none better.

MORE REQUIRED READING Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadsides, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-85 by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite Faber and Faber, 377 pages In an interview with The Paris Review reproduced in his first collection of non-fiction, Required Writing, Philip Larkin described his daily routine as "simple as I can make it. Work all day, then cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink and television in the evenings." Regardless of this low estimation of his journalistic achievements, Larkin was actually a more prolific literary journalist than poet, publishing only five slim volumes of verse in his lifetime as opposed to the aforementioned Required Writing, which gathered together 27 years of book reviews and essays, as well as All That Jazz, a hefty compendium of the jazz column he wrote for the Daily Telegraph for eight years. Besides, Larkin's humility —or self-disparagement—is as legendary as his trademark melancholy, black humour and cheerful pessimism. (In this posthumous sequel to Required Writing, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadsides, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-85, Larkin's response to an interviewer's inventory of his awards and prizes is typical: "Yes, well they have to go to somebody, you know.") Larkin the book critic and essayist was certainly no hack writer, but neither was he an artist of the 1,000-word review like fellow English writer/critics Anthony Burgess, V.S. Pritchett or, in our time, Martin Amis. Which doesn't mean his own non-fiction shouldn't be required reading.

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It must be admitted, though, that Further Requirements isn't nearly as required as its predecessor. Aside from the 46 pages of material published between the appearance of Required Writing and Larkin's death in 1985, the contents of Further Requirements are essentially everything Larkin decided not to include in his first collection of nonfiction. As a result, while certainly interesting to admirers of Larkin and his poetry, it's entirely understandable why such slight material as the transcript of his appearance on BBC's Desert Island Discs and the introduction to a collection of poems by amateur poets from Hull, the city where he lived from 1955 until his death, were not considered worthy of bringing to the attention of a wider audience. But, then, even something as minor as a short interview with A.N. Wilson delivers Larkin's gem of a response to the question of whether he's writing poems at the moment: "Well, I haven't given poetry up, I rather think poetry has given me up, which is a great sorrow to me. But not an enormous crushing sorrow. It's a bit like going bald." Which is precisely why even the seemingly ephemeral asides of major artists are often worth more than the most ambitious efforts of minor ones. Not that Further Requirements doesn't contain its share of top-shelf material. Larkin's review of John Betjeman's Collected Poems, for example, is near definitive, as well as an indirect argument for the same twin standards of intellectual and stylistic clarity that guided his own poetic aesthetic. Every good book review is one-third analysis, one-third autobiography and one-third aesthetic propaganda. Larkin's are no different. The chief significance of Betjeman as a poet is that he is a writer of talent and intelligence for whom the modern poetic revolution has simply not taken place. He has been carried through by properties and techniques common to all but his immediate predecessors: a belief that poetry is an emotional business, rather than intellectual or moral one, a belief in

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metre and rhyme as a means of enhancing emotion, a belief that a poem's meaning should be communicated directly and not by symbol. Anyone who's ever grown tired of pretending to enjoy the poetry of Ezra Pound or the music of Frank Zappa has much to choose from in terms of finding aesthetic ammunition in the arsenal of Larkin's non-fiction. Even when the work under examination is decidedly non-experimental, Larkin is a dogged flag-bearer for that most undervalued, even scorned, of modern literary qualities: the capacity to provide pleasure. Many beleaguered readers of so much banal contemporary poetry, for example, cannot but happily nod along in agreement when, in the course of a review of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Larkin concludes: "These writers are (for the most part) serious, non-extravagant, carefully and even ingeniously observant, responsive to the real or imagined situation, but in the last analysis this is only to say that they are not very interesting." Likewise, in the face of prevailing modern theories of gender/racial/class relativism, his defence of a shared human nature comprehensible to all through art is, ironically, fairly radical. "I suppose the kind of response I am seeking from the reader is 'Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that'; and for readers to say it not only now but in the future, and not only in England but anywhere in the world." Naturally, Larkin's deep artistic and intellectual conservatism created its own problems—his devotion to the trifling novels of Barbara Pym, for example, and his shockingly naive admiration of Margaret Thatcher—but to wish to erase a writer's weaknesses entails denying his strengths as well. Better the good with the bad than neither.

PAYING THE GAS BILLS AND MORE One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings by Anthony Burgess Caroll and Graff, 380 pages It's like telling a proud member of Mensa that you love them for their body: the compliment is appreciated, it's just not the one they wanted to hear. Anthony Burgess wrote over 30 novels before his death in 1993 at age 76, and I've been able to finish exactly two of them—A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers. Why this is so isn't important here, only that Burgess the novelist and Robertson the reader have never been particularly chummy. Burgess the non-fiction writer, however—from such previous collections of journalism as Urgent Copy and Homage to Qwert Yuiop to Rejoyce, his study of James Joyce—embodies such a high level of critical excellence that much of what Burgess often deprecated as merely what he did "to pass the time or pay the gas bills" I've read again and again. Burgess the travel writer, Burgess the book critic, Burgess the Grub Street philosopher: all are simply that good. One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings, a posthumous collection of the non-fiction Burgess wrote in the last decade of his life, is an extremely welcome addition to what was an already enormously impressive body of work. The sheer breadth of Burgess' learning is illustrated by this book's necessary division into four sections of roughly the same length: "Genius Loci" (travel writing); "In Our Time" (current events); "Ars

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Poetica" (critical writing); and "Anniversaries and Celebrations" (essays of appreciation and evaluation). In his introduction, Professor Ben Forkner recounts the day Burgess came to his university as a guest lecturer. The author was asked by a jealous faculty, resentful of Burgess' easy captivation of the student body, to teach five different classes on five different, highly specialized topics such as Chaucer's scientific knowledge and the problem of Celtic myth in Joyce's Ulysses. Forkner relates how "Burgess, without batting an eye, transformed what would have been a gruelling death march through a day of duty for a normal academic mortal into a one-man parade of spectacular virtuosity" —in the process demonstrating to "tomb-stiff graduate students" how "literature did not mock the grave because it was printed on the page, but because it could be carried around alive in the brain." Like Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and others before him, Burgess was what literary and cultural circles so clearly lack today— the public intellectual, the roving scholar free of the confining chains of narrow, academic specialization. But inevitably it's not the Olympian heights of his level of erudition that makes Burgess so attractive a guide to such topics as (to choose from just of a few of the essays in One Man's Chorus) "The Art of Liking Rome," "What Makes Comedy Comic," "First Novels" or "Rudyard Kipling and the White Man's Burden." After all, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is also a wealth of varied knowledge. But it is usually opened in the studied search for answers, seldom to be dipped into at random for pure pleasure. In the end, it is the plain force of Burgess' pleasingly idiosyncratic personality that one savours so much, essay after essay. It is witty ("If Mrs. Thatcher could abolish in Britain intellectuality she would be glad to do so. The bulk of the citizens would not care. This is sometimes known as democracy"); iconoclastic ("Nabokov's Lolita is as much a love affair with the OED as a passion for a nymphet"); and eloquent ("For the serious artist does not satisfy needs —instead, he creates values. Values, to the world at large, have —alas, alas, and again alas —no value at all").

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Indispensable as a better-read and better-spoken fellow companion trying to make sense out of history, art, popular culture, sex—everything life throws one's way —Burgess on the page emerges much as he portrays Irish novelist Flann O'Brien in an essay on the latter's work: "Too wise to be optimistic, too quirky to be everybody's meat, too subtle for the stupid, too learned for the mob." We all should be so lucky to be so coveted for either our bodies or our brains.

SO SMART IT HURTS When the Kissing Had to Stop by John Leonard The New Press, 362 pages John Leonard is one of those critics who, if only for the sake of one's own self-esteem, you simply don't want to believe exists. As with George Steiner, John Updike and the late Anthony Burgess, it is almost necessary to deny the possibility that any single human being could be so well-read and comfortably conversant in so many different fields of learning if the reader isn't to burn their library card in a self-pitying rage and give up all hope of being a reasonably educated person. Unfortunately or thankfully, depending on how you look at it, John Leonard is the flesh-and-blood real thing. A former editor of the New York Times Book Review, Leonard is now a sort of cerebral gadfly at large, just the kind of public intellectual the cultural landscape in Canada so desperately needs. Here, and to a lesser degree in Leonard's United States, the goal of the thinker is to be so cozily tenured in academia that he or she need never lower themselves to venture an opinion in a newspaper or magazine about what is artistically good and true and what is hype and schlock. Leonard, on the other hand, isn't afraid to go down to the marketplace and take sides about right and wrong. In "Killing The Philosophers," a five-part exploration of contemporary serial killers and books with philosophers as their subject (how's that for comparative lit!), Leonard struts his theoretical stuff

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with the best of them. At the same time, what Ph.D. worth his tweed would dare to write: "I have no doubt that cultural psychoanalysis, feminist deconstruction, postcolonial studies, queer theory and identity politics have enriched our appreciation and skepticism about the face of the world and its secret subjunctives. But we still have to drip the coffee, raise the children and wonder if we've behaved honourably before we go to bed at night." In his learnedness and critical standards Leonard is as high-brow as they come, yet in his essays (most first published in The Nation) he is insistent that just as the wall between the private and public self is non-existent, so is the division between art and philosophy and the society it emerges from. As a result, Leonard comes across as neither a pure literary critic nor simple cultural historian, but, instead, as an incredibly efficient intellectual custodian, using some of the best recent works of literature and thought as bucket and broom to aid him in his attempt to tidy up a sickeningly squalid society filthy with obscene delusions of virtue and wisdom. In "California Screaming," quotations from the novels of Joan Didion and the poems of Randall Jarrell fit right alongside long thoughtful treatments of Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (summarized by Leonard as "Chinatown meets Blade Runner and Volcano at the corner of Hollywood and Watts") and Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World by David Rieff. No mere PoMo dabbler eager to flaunt his interdisciplinary cleverness, however, Leonard uses his bibliophiliac binoculars to better understand the mess we've made of things down here on planet earth. And as a bonus, he's committed to telling us all about it in a rich, engaging style: The sky is falling and so's the yen. For the City of Angels it's a Slim-fast diet and a deep-pore cleansing of fire and flood, earthquakes and drought, tornadoes and tsunamis. Plus robber barons, master builders, real-estate swindlers, offshore funny

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money, class war, race hate, labour violence, immigrant hordes, psychotic cops, colour-coded gangs, death-wish cults. Notice that I haven't mentioned global warming or El Nino. If only all our wise men and women should sound this good. In fact, occasionally there's almost a danger of getting so caught up in the pure pleasure of Leonard's prose that the point at hand gets overlooked. Discussing Don DeLillo's Underworld, for example, Leonard comes up with, "The poster boy of postmodernism is a secret Holy Roller." A great line, sure, but also a powerfully perceptive observation about a frequently misunderstood novelist. And although Leonard's fondness for alliteration, long, intricately-constructed sentences and lists sets him apart from not only the majority of today's critics but also most of its paint-by-numbers creative writers, the cataloguing, admittedly, does wear a little thin at times—more than one list comes in over at 230 words, approximately one-third of the length of this review. For the most part, though, what Leonard writes of William Gass in his essay "Underground Gass" could be as adeptly said of himself: "Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark... a lyric laced with acid." Aside from the simple joy of being in the written presence of one so clearly smitten with the delightful capabilities of the English language (like Nabokov, who Leonard writes about in "Lolita Lights Our Fire"), there is an energy in Leonard's prose that mirrors the deep intelligence he brings to the tasks he sets for himself—whether a critical overview of the career of Joan Didion, why government support for public television is doomed in a capitalist society or why Bret Easton Ellis is a lousy writer. It's a rare combination to both envy and applaud.

BOLD, BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy New York Review Books, 389 pages Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Mary McCarthy: an aspiring undergraduate egghead's hot and holy trinity of brains and good looks. McCarthy, especially. Emily, after all, was a little on the plain side and did die a spinster's death in her childhood home, the only one she ever knew, while Edna, another vixen versifier, seemed, somehow, simply too ethereal —even for a poet—to be really real, not quite the kind of woman you could fantasize duking it out with intellectually before hitting the sheets. Mary McCarthy seemed real. Too real, for some people. "Mary's smile is very famous/ opined Dwight Macdonald, a friend and fellow American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century. "When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open." Jason Epstein, a New York editor, put it simpler. "She was trouble. You could see it a mile away." Among her many nicknames was 'Bloody Mary.' Born in Seattle in 1912 to loving, well-off parents, McCarthy was an orphan six years later when both her mother and father died during the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. Raised, first, by an abusive and brutally stupid aunt and uncle in Minneapolis whom she castigated thirty years later in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and then by her wealthy grandparents back in the Pacific Northwest, McCarthy went on to attend Vassar before moving to New York soon after graduation

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in the mid-1930s. Here, she swiftly dumped her husband from college, cultivated as many affairs with as many interesting men as she could manage and set out to make a name for herself as a book and theatre critic for, among others, The New Republic, The Nation and The Partisan Review. By the time of her death in 1989, she'd written five novels, three volumes of autobiography and several collections of assembled short stories, book reviews and essays. Although, for a time, McCarthy was one of the most discussed, if not read—the two activities are not necessarily synonymous—novelists in the United States, her fiction has not aged well. In novels like The Group and The Groves of Academe and short stories such as "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit" McCarthy got the tongues of Eisenhower America flapping by writing about young, intelligent women going on the pill, having anonymous sex with strangers and still managing to be unhappy in the most materially affluent nation in the history of humankind. Now, no longer titillated by such subject matter, what remains for the reader is the fiction itself: the characters, the shape of the narrative and the language used to weave it all together. McCarthy was, to be kind, a utilitarian writer, and, stripped of its ephemerally scandalous veneer, her fiction seems rather thin, plain, even bland. As A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays, a new selection of 28 non-fiction pieces, testifies, her criticism has fared much better. Like many writers too cerebral for their own creative good, the paucity of McCarthy's language, her incessant intellectualizing and her dogged realism instantly became virtues when she turned her attention to non-fiction. Raising a characteristically contrary voice of dissent over Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, McCarthy writes: ''O'Neill belongs to that group of American authors ... whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat. What they produce is hard to praise or to condemn; how is one

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to judge the great, logical symphony of a tone-deaf musician?" Lucid, bitingly intelligent, steadfastly matter-of-fact—McCarthy the critic is an excellent literary watchdog, always on guard against fashion, fools and inflated reputations. An interesting, little-discussed irony inherent in McCarthy's large body of criticism is highlighted in A Bolt from the Blue. In Ideas and the Novel, of which "Lecture I" is excerpted here, McCarthy makes a spirited case against the modernist drift of the novel post-Henry James away from realism and toward novel-as-linguistic-artifact. James' "reluctance to furnish [his characters] with identifiable traits that might let us 'place' them in real life has curious consequences," she argues. "These figures, one realizes, must be accepted on faith, as ectoplasms emanating from an entranced author at his desk, in short as ghostly abstractions, pale ideas." It's a criticism that can be made even more forcefully today. At the same time, maybe her best known individual pieces of criticism are her reputation-bolstering book reviews of Nabokov's Pale Fire and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, two very modern, or, more accurately, postmodern, novels. McCarthy calls Pale Fire, essentially a 999-line poem combined with an insane editor's preface, notes, index and proof corrections, "one of the very great works of art of this century," while singling out Naked Lunch, a book-length tour of a drugged consciousness that in her own words reads "as though Finnegans Wake were cut loose from history and adapted for a Cinerama circus" for the highest praise as well. But perhaps this is not so much a theoretical inconsistency as a manifestation of McCarthy's personality, an entirely congruous illustration of her fundamentally contradictory nature. As her friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, "She thoroughly believed in offending people. She believed in provocation as incitement to thought, to reform, to life itself." Happily, Mary McCarthy, if not in the flesh, then on the page, is still with us, still intent upon offending and provoking, still bold, brilliant and beautiful.

ALL BY MYSELF How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen HarperFlamingoCanada, 256 pages The strategy is familiar, if harmless, enough: to catch lightning in a bottle twice, or at least capitalize on the still resonating buzz of an author's most recent loud success. And by almost any possible estimation Jonathan Franzen's previous book, The Corrections, was a success. Winner of the prestigious National Book Award, the novel — or at least its author—was also widely and hotly discussed in the mainstream media, primarily for Franzen's abrupt disinvitation to Oprah's Book Club by Her Oprahness herself. A decidedly less than prolific author (three novels in thirteen years), Franzen has helped support himself through fallow fictional periods by writing essays for, among others, Harper's and the New Yorker, and it is a collection of these that his publisher has assembled for both Franzen devotees and the hopefully-still-titillated. Considering that the pieces in How To Be Alone were written over the course of seven years and published in a variety of magazines, it's surprising how unified they are in theme. Whether examining the profitable industry of "Supermax" prisons, what's really wrong with American cities, the dissolution of the Chicago mail system or individual versus corporate culpability in the cigarette debate, Franzen returns again and again to his pet obsessions: the connection between the personal and the political; the emotional disconnectedness of contemporary existence; and the question of how an individual can

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maintain purpose and dignity in a culture that sees him or her as little more than a potential consumer. Franzen has seen the future, and it sure isn't what it used to be: For my part, I'm willing to admit an almost physical craving for the comforts of the suburban mall. Natural opiates flood my neural receptors when I step from the parking lot into the airlock. Inside, the lighting is subdued, and every voice sounds far away. Never mind that Waldenbooks doesn't stock Denis Johnson and that Sam Goody has no Myra Melford; I have cash in my wallet, my skin is white and I feel utterly, utterly welcome. Is this a community? I don't know... I'm too busy enjoying the rush of purchase to pay much attention. Mindful perhaps of Yeats' enjoinder that out of arguments with others we make rhetoric, out of arguments with ourselves, art, one of Franzen's most attractive traits as a book-reviewer-cum-essayist is his ability to view his subject matter from the inside, thereby encouraging the reader to do the same, each entering into an emotional and intellectual act of empathy—occasionally even against one's will—with the issue at hand: For all that I distrust American industry, and especially an industry that's vigorously engaged in buying congressmen, some part of me insists on rooting for tobacco. My sympathy with cohorts who smoke disproportionately . . . expands to include the companies that supply them cigarettes. I think: we're all underdogs now. Wartime is a time of lies, I tell myself, and the biggest lie of the cigarette wars is that the moral equation can be reduced to ones and zeros. Or have I, too, been corrupted by the weed?

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For a practising novelist, surprisingly few of the essays in How to be Alone have explicitly literary subjects, and the ones that do, like "Why Bother?" and "The Reader in Exile," reflect Franzen's roots as an avowedly social writer, one who believes that "History is the rabid thing from which we all... would like to hide. But there's no bubble that can stay unburst." For this reason, Franzen claims to "mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of the suburbs . . . I still like a novel that's alive and multivalent like a city." He also laments the fiction being produced by many younger writers today, which he cleverly categorizes into three groups: "My Interesting Childhood," "My Interesting Life in a College Town" and "My Interesting Year Abroad." The essay most readers might already be familiar with—"Why Bother?" (originally published in Harper's under the less bellicose "Perchance to Dream") — is a 1996 analysis of the state of the contemporary American novel. Here, Franzen bemoans a shrinking readership for serious fiction, the tendency of writers to market themselves as products to attract the public's evanescent attention and an overall anti-intellectualism that reduced Franzen to a long battle with depression in the '90s. His reaction to the reception given to his second novel, Strong Motion, is typical: " [T]he result was the same: another report card with As and Bs from the reviewers; decent money; and the silence of irrelevance." This occasionally detectable snivel of self-pity is Franzen's only significant vice as an essayist. Still, Franzen is right; the world doesn't need novels, especially well-written ones, any more than it does poems, paintings or, for that matter, kindness and generosity of spirit. But even if most people don't want these things, they nonetheless remain things worth doing, things good in-and-of themselves, things writers and non-writers will continue to practise for as long as there is a world left to do them in. How to be Alone is one of these things.

ME, TARZAN Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan by John Taliaf erro Scribner, 400 pages The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of the character Tarzan, should make for an interesting read. Turning to writing for "the pulps" at the age of 36 only because he had failed to make his mark in every other occupation he tried, by the time of his death in 1950 Burroughs was the best-selling author of the twentieth century and had a large hand in helping to create (for better or for worse) the religion of popular culture. Burroughs became a war correspondent at age 67, a firm believer in eugenics and the extermination of moral "inferiors" and a rapid anti-Communist. He hardly needs to be appreciated as an artist to be an attractive biographical subject. In writing Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan, however, John Taliaf erro, the author of one other book, a biography of cowboy artist Charles M. Russell, has managed to make his subject almost as lifeless as one of the two-dimensional space heroes Burroughs pumped out at the rate of a new novelistic adventure every few months (when he wasn't trying to keep up with the public's seemingly insatiable demand for the further adventures of Tarzan). Taliaferro demonstrates all too well that in any piece of creative writing, how one handles the materials at one's disposal is at least as important as the materials themselves, no matter how ostensibly fascinating. Burroughs was born in 1875 in Chicago. Until he began writing in his mid-30s, his adult life was spent at a dizzying number of occupations

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right across the United States. A partial list: failed soldier, employee of his father's American Battery Company, ranch hand on his brother's farm, gold prospector, depot policeman, door-to-door salesman, office manager, head of the stenographic department at Sears and Roebuck, a peddler of quack medicine ("Alcola," an instant "cure" for alcoholism). It was while working for a Chicago company that sold pencil sharpeners that Burroughs first encountered All-Story and Argosy, magazines he picked up only because they carried ads for the company's product. All-Story, Argosy and a growing number of likeminded others catered to the public desire for light escapism, the same function most television programs and formulaic Hollywood movies provide today. From the beginning, Burroughs' motives were clear. It sure wasn't about art. "I remember thinking that if other people got money for writing such stuff I might, too, for I was sure I could write stories just as rotten as theirs." Burroughs' first attempt was successful—A Princess of Mars, the first in what became the John Carter of Mars series, sold to All-Story for the sum of $400. The story provided the blueprint for almost all of Burroughs' work. Although he wrote countless other space stories, westerns and, of course, the Tarzan adventures, the central protagonist of each was usually a man's man, like John Carter of Mars, "a splendid specimen . . . with the carriage of a fighting man. His features were regular and clean cut... while his eyes were a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type." Almost without variation, Burroughs' heroes are confronted by an obvious evil they, and only they, are capable of conquering if the world (or their little part of it) is to be safe. He always does, usually getting the beautiful if vulnerable girl, too. After rushing off another adventure story along the same lines as A Princess of Mars that was eventually rejected, Burroughs wrote an editor with plans for his next work: "The story I am now on is of the

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scion of a noble house who was born in tropical Africa where his parents died when he was about a year old. The infant was found and adopted by a huge she-ape, and was brought up among a band of fierce anthropoids/' The story, of course, is Tarzan of the Apes, eventually published in 1912. Anyone living in the West in the twentieth century can't help knowing at least the rudiments of Burroughs' creation. Estimates differ, but 20 million copies of Tarzan books sold worldwide seems a fair guess. Burroughs' loin-clothed action hero has been translated into rnost known languages and spurred several cinematic treatments. Every kind of merchandise Burroughs could profit from having Tarzan's name or face attached to —Tarzan bread, Tarzan ice cream, Tarzan bubble gum, Tarzan bathing suits —was manufactured and sold, the forerunner to today's marketing tie-ins to Hollywood movies. There was even something called the Tarzan Clans of America, a sort of Boy Scouts for aspiring vine-swingers. Tarzan was, and still is, immensely popular (the dictionary in the computer I write this on accepts the word "Tarzan"). But aside from a few cultural theorists who would joyfully make the case that Shakespeare's plays and Mickey Mouse cartoons are aesthetically equivalent "texts," most people would agree that Burroughs' stories make for pretty thin reading. Formulaic to the extreme (Burroughs tried to drop the noble savage theme for "realistic" fiction a couple of times, failing critically and financially) and frequently cliche-ridden, the fiction Burroughs churned out aren't worth much consideration. Even Taliaferro admits Burroughs was "metabolically and psychologically incapable of narrative subtly." Yet a tiresomely significant chunk of Tarzan Forever is given over to careful summary of nearly every one of Burroughs' tales, for no other apparent purpose than to illustrate that Taliaferro has read every piece of pulp Burroughs wrote. Maybe all that time he spent poring over all those millions of words explains why the private side of his subject is so sketchily covered.

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We come to know that Burroughs had two wives and learn their names and birth dates along with that of his children, but they never emerge as anything more than voices talking off-camera, characters who should be sharing the screen with Burroughs but don't. Even Burroughs himself remains only on the brink of being a fully-realized character. Taliaferro seems to have spoken to virtually no one who knew either Burroughs or his children, or even read more than a handful of accounts of them. Burroughs' journals and letters are essentially Taliaferro's only slender source of biographical information. A passionately private man (one of the reasons he created the secluded oasis of Tarzana, an opulent ranch in California), Burroughs — and, by extension, Tarzan Forever—reveals very little. For example, because Taliaferro relies so heavily on Burroughs' journal, for nearly three-quarters of the book we're led to believe that Burroughs and his wife Emma enjoy a nearly perfect relationship. When, later on, Taliaferro finally reveals that Emma has been a problem drinker for many years and divorce is near, the reader is no more prepared than the contemporary public must have been reading about it in the newspaper. By the time Burroughs dies as a reclusive convalescent in a twobedroom bungalow in L.A. —his greatest creation world famous, himself only less so, his precious Tarzana long lost through debt to the cookie-cutter architects of contemporary suburban vapidness—we don't know a whole lot more about the man than before we started. Too bad. We already knew Tarzan.

WHAT A DRAG IT IS GETTING OLD Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of The Rolling Stones by Stephen Davis Broadway, 591 pages To be fair, it was Pete Townshend and not Mick Jagger who wrote that he hoped he died before he got old. But it was the man with the most recognizable lips in music who avowed that he wouldn't be singing "Satisfaction" when he was 50. And here we are, just a year and a few months away from Jagger's 60th birthday, and the spectre of Mick and the boys once again hitting the road and blasting out the songs that helped rock and roll grow up is still upon us. In fact, according to Stephen Davis' Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40Year Odyssey of The Rolling Stones, the Stones—minus bassist Bill Wyman, who retired from the corporation in 1992—were all set to launch a 2001/2002 world tour to celebrate Mick and Keith's both turning 60 "but were advised to lay low in an economic climate of recession and cutbacks." And who can begrudge a rock and roller if he wants to spend more time with his grandchildren? It wasn't always like this. True, it was the band's first manager, Andrew Oldham, who cooked up the famous "Would You Let Your Daughter Go With a Rolling Stone?" campaign meant to differentiate his lads from the boy-next-door Beatles (prompting Tom Wolfe to write that "the Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn your town"), but for a few years, anyway, the Rolling Stones were everything rock and roll can and should be: loud, lewd and loutish.

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In the beginning was Brian Jones, a bright, blues-obsessed manchild who fathered two illegitimate children before he was 20 (and who would go on to sire several more), the same guy teenage pals Mike Jagger and Keith Richards discovered wailing away one night on a bottle-neck guitar at The Haling Club, a suburban blues bar, and couldn't keep their eyes off. The two 18-year-olds had their own blues band (their relationship cemented after Richards discovered Jagger carrying copies of Little Walter, Muddy Waters and —Keith's favourite—Chuck Berry records on the tube) and soon latched themselves onto Jones' rising star and the Rollin' Stones (named by Jones after a Muddy Waters' tune) were born. Davis —the author of several other rock biographies, most notably Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga —is at his best when scrupulously cataloguing the band's early ascent, and, in particular, the charismatic Jones' indefatigable quest to separate his group from the spate of other blues-inspired white-boy bands gigging around London in the early '60s. If you want to know the date of drummer Charlie Watts' first show with the group or what songs were on the demo tape the band recorded for their BBC audition, Old Gods Almost Dead is your book. But the story of the Rolling Stones isn't just the tale of a single rock and roll band; it's also the story of the 1960s itself—full-blown musical, pharmaceutical and sexual experimentation (particularly for Brian, who was booted out of the band in 1969 for going musically AWOL while taking a permanent drug vacation, and a few months later ended up face-down dead in his swimming pool). Unfortunately, Davis, a journalist by trade, dishes up surprisingly little dirt on these matters, mostly keeping to meticulous chronology when what's really needed are salacious anecdotes. When it comes to the Stones' collected chemical and amorous adventures, truth really is stranger than fiction. Look up Tony Sanchez's Up and Down with the Rolling Stones or Nick Kent's The Dark Stuff tor who took what and how much, who was sleeping with whom and who was pissed off enough about it to try and overdose.

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Of course, the reason Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street are landmarks of popular music isn't because of Richards' years of colossal drug use (culminating in the early '70s with him being unable to get through a single show without the aid of several "DCs," heroin-packed cigarettes, and once showing up at the airport for a world tour with nothing but a bottle of his adored HP sauce) or Jagger's rabid carnality (he seduced close friend John Philips' 18-year-old daughter Mackenzie by locking her father out of the room and announcing, "I've been waiting for this since you were 10 years old"). What endures is the music. The Stones went from derivative blues purists to spirited interpreters to, finally, groundbreaking, funky fusionists, serving up a uniquely soulful concoction of blues, R&B, hard rock and even country (this last, thanks to the influence of one of Richards' favourite drug buddies, Gram Parsons). Davis knows what he's talking about when it comes time to assess each successive album, and even allows himself to become more than a factual bystander when the song deserves it. "Gimme Shelter" is "haunting heroin music, the aural equivalent of cooking junk in a tingling fever of anticipation, conflating sex, violence, drugs and music in a boiling stew of rambling blues harp, guitars, scrapers and maracas." The Stones' mid-'90s' Bridges to Babylon tour didn't gross $300 million because of the lasting music the band created in the late '60s and early '70s, though. Anyone who wants to experience that can simply slip a CD in their stereo. The yuppies, suburban high-schoolers and classic rock zombies who flocked to see a stageful of old men pathetically parodying their youthful selves were there for the nostalgia, the party, the chance to punch their fists in the air and pretend like Mick meant it—everything but the music. It's not fair to ask our rock and roll Gods to die before they get old. But it's only right that somebody tell them when it's time to fade away.

SOCRATES IN THE SUBURBS Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness by Ray Monk Jonathan Cape, 574 pages When I was 17 I wanted to be Bertrand Russell. Intellectually shipwrecked in deepest, darkest suburbia, I bumped up against Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian at an annual book sale sponsored by the local nuns and things were, as they say, never quite the same. Not that I understood much of Russell's acerbic critique of the Argument from Design or the Natural Law Argument, but sitting in the backyard in my frayed lawn chair in the August muck of southwestern Ontario's humidity and heat, I discovered something much more valuable than why the First Cause Argument is logically flawed. I discovered that it is perfectly allowable to ask questions about God and morality and what it means to live a meaningful life. More than that, I discovered that to ask these questions is one of the things that makes human beings human, that gives us what little dignity we possess. Of course, Why I Am Not a Christian, alongside almost everything Russell published after his groundbreaking collaboration into the foundation of mathematics with Alfred North Whitehead, 1913's Principia Mathematica, isn't regarded by "real" philosophers —that is, university professors — as "real" philosophy at all. Russell wrote more than 50 books over the course of his dizzyingly productive 97 years, but, according to Russell's most recent biographer, British academic

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Ray Monk, the majority are nothing more than "pot-boilers/" mind candy for the undoctored masses. That Monk set himself the task in Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness to chronicle these —to him—fallow years in such depth and length must have been quite a challenge. As he laments in his introduction, "Few who know Russell from his great writings on logic have taken the trouble to read the vast quantity of journalism that he produced in the second half of his life; those who do would, I think, be shocked at how sloppy and ill-considered much of it is... how bad most of his writing on political, social and moral questions is." Fortunately, Monk relates/he had a second goal in following up the equally dense first volume of his biography, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude; namely, to illustrate "how emotionally maimed Russell was," a man "simply not capable of loving another human being." Whether Russell was ever as wise in Eros as he was in Logos isn't debatable. He left his first wife, Alys, in 1911, although he lived with her for nine years after realizing he no longer loved her. This did not stop him from attempting to give her the child she desired, although common sense would seem to have dictated otherwise: "Last night for the first time I made the last possible sacrifice. In return I am to have three weeks liberty. Perhaps that will give me time to recover myself for the moment: till it all begins again." Over the course of two more unsuccessful marriages — the first to an energetic free-love advocate who bore several children to other men while still married to Russell; the second to a student 40 years his junior, whose two dominant passions seem to have been adultery and threatening suicide —three children were produced, one of whom he several times attempted to have "certified," and another who moved to America and became a Christian. There is no record of which child Russell was more disappointed in. The last, Conrad, named after Russell's friend Joseph Conrad, was forbidden by his mother after her break with Russell from ever contacting him under threat of absolute matriarchal rejection.

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Russell finally did find lasting happiness when, well into his 80s, he fell in love and married his fourth wife, Edith, to whom he dedicated his autobiography with the lines: "Now, old & near my end, / I have known you, / And, knowing you, / I have found both ecstasy & peace." This seems to disappoint Monk. The only way he can understand why any woman would both love and stay with Russell is by concluding that Edith was "a rather remote and frosty figure . . . someone who decided, at the age of 50, to devote herself utterly to Russell, her admiration of whom seems to have been entirely without reservation or criticism." A non-person, in other words. Otherwise, Monk implies, how could she live with someone as emotionally dead and inherently selfish as Russell? Monk's reaction to Russell's writings during this period is even more puzzling. If, as he claims, "Russell was almost unable to theorize about politics" and most of his views on anything but logic were "breathtakingly naive and implausible," why does he spend page after page in tedious analysis of them when the space could have been more profitably devoted to other aspects of his subject's life? For a nearly 600-page book, it comes across as nothing less than shocking to read on the fourth-to-last page that Russell "drank whisky heavily" when, previous to this revelation, there has been exactly one other reference to Russell imbibing (wine, at a picnic in the 1950s). Two particular elements of Russell's work irk Monk more than others. Commenting on Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Monk notes how the "general message ... does not differ from (literally) thousands of others that Russell delivered in his lifetime." Approvingly, then, he quotes Russell's daughter Kate on the crisis that led to her conversion to Christianity: "Again she looked to her father's books for an answer. She read Sceptical Essays, Unpopular Essays, In Praise of Idleness and Marriage and Morals, 'but they all offered the same solutions: reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened selfinterest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair/"

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Undoubtedly, fewer appeals to intelligence, altruism and breadth of perspective would make the world a much happier place. As well —and somewhat incongruously —Monk is at pains to criticize the "inconsistency" of Russell's beliefs. So, when in the 1960s Russell exchanged his distrust of Communism as typified by Stalin's murderous purges for the more pressing threat of American imperialism—culminating in his championing of an independent socialist Cuba and helping to organize a war crimes tribunal to try the United States government for crimes committed in Vietnam—Monk can only lament Russell's tendency "to adopt hasty, ill-considered and intemperate political opinions." But as Monk himself well knows, Russell was, above all, a skeptic — someone philosophically committed to altering his views on any subject if new information or insights compelled him to do so. For this reason, although he was probably the twentieth century's most famous critic of religion, he steadfastly identified himself not as an atheist but as an agnostic. I never did become Bertrand Russell. I never even got around to attempting to read Principia Mathematica. But whoever I am now—for better and, perhaps, for worse —is partly because I did read many of Russell's books on religion, morality, politics, the history of philosophy and education. None of which will likely ever earn the respect of professional philosophers, but all of which helped me to understand what Socrates — another guy without a Ph.D.—meant when, 2,500 years ago, he said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Even if you come from the suburbs.

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PART THREE: ME

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MENTAL HYGIENE Brian Wilson knew he wasn't Beethoven. Just like he knew "Little Deuce Coupe" wasn't the "Moonlight Sonata." He also knew that to do a small thing well is preferable to doing a large thing poorly or — worse —passably. "In My Room" is timeless; Infinite Jest is not. Even though we should encourage writers to attempt something fresh, adventurous or weighty every time out, it doesn't follow that we're obligated to applaud the result. Art is wonderfully elitist—what works, we honour; what doesn't, we ignore. And what could be more negligible than a weekend edition book review? As J.J. O'Molloy, failed lawyer and would-be wit in Ulysses, put it, "Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof." And, of course, there's Cyril Connolly's well-known denunciation in The Unquiet Grave: All excursions into journalism . . . however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is the nature of such work not to last, so it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary activity which is not their attempt at a masterpiece are their own dupes. Most contemporary fiction writers, poets and dramatists in North America, and particularly in Canada, evidently agree. In the United States, only a few names of the really first-rate — Cynthia Ozick, Joan Didion, and, of course, the utterly dissimilar but equally astonishingly

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still-fecund John Updike and Gore Vidal —come immediately to mind as true dual artists/critics. Here in Canada the cupboard is even barer. In fact, since the death of Mordecai Richler, it's downright empty. (Margaret Atwood does write reviews —and good ones—but, curiously for a self-defined Canadian nationalist, only for foreign publications, particularly The New York Review of Books.) Instead, we have academics, something called "literary journalists" and the occasional slumming author eager to collect a cheque and get their name and the title of their latest book in the newspaper. Connolly, one would presume, is smiling somewhere unquietly. Yet, it is a bit odd. One doesn't usually ask a lawyer to look under the hood of one's smoking and snorting car, just as a mechanic isn't the first person to consult when one is looking to sue. Novelists, it would seem, are the best people to judge novels, just as poets, poetry and dramatists, drama. If it's true that it takes one to know one, it's equally true that it takes one who does to know how it's done. Granted, there are any number of professional book reviewers across the country willing and more than able to deliver The Three Ps of Canadian Book Reviewing (plot, paraphrase, platitude). And, sure, with the aid of a detailed dust jacket and a plump press kit, university professors are capable of noting the many, many layers of profundity buried within this season's oh-so-serious novel even if they do tend to have a hard time seeing certain other things, things that someone whose profession isn't playing pin-the-tail-on-the-literary-symbol might see. Things like a book being boring. Or being badly overwritten. Or the characters being static, didactic and laughably unconvincing. Things, in other words, you can't test students on or write a doctoral dissertation about. Of course, even if this is true, Connolly's contention might still be valid: Great—read Richler to see if Book X is any good, either buy the book or don't buy the book and don't forget to put the newspaper the review was printed on on the floor by the door because the puppy hasn't quite gotten the concept of outdoor plumbing yet. Looked at

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this way, a good book review is like an accurate weather report: handy, but hardly worth keeping around. Except, just like superior fiction, poems and plays, a well-written book review isn't nearly so much what it says as how it says it. One rereads Richler's Cocksure, for example, not because one has forgotten how Mortimer makes out by novel's end, but, instead, to once again cackle embarrassingly at the author's humour, to feel the burn of his satire, to feed on his graceful way with a sentence. Richler himself acknowledged as much, saying, "The style is me, it's there. That's really what you have to offer as a writer. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, if somebody else could write it the same way there's not much point in doing it." Pick up Hunting Tigers Under Glass or Shovelling Trouble or Broadsides or another of Richler's collections of reviews and essays and start reading anywhere. Chances are you'll hear the same inimitable Richler voice—funny, smart and acerbically observant—that powers the novels. Why, then, don't more North American writers —particularly its better known—consider book reviewing the authentic, if minor, art form it plainly is? In virtually every other part of the world it's not unusual for a country's leading persons of letters to appear regularly in print appraising this novel or biography, answering so-and-so's egregious charge of literary this or that and generally feeding the fragile flame of cultural heat. In Britain's recent past, for example, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, V.S. Pritchett, Anthony Burgess, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis (to name only a few) were equally adept at their respective artistic passions and their part-time critical vocations. More recently, David Lodge, AS. Byatt, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis carry on the same British tradition of happily walking both sides of Dr. Johnson's Grub Street. In the U.S., the university is the modern patron of the creative writer, not only usually providing more money in one academic year than he or she will make in a lifetime of writing (therefore eliminating the economic necessity of book reviewing), but also often contaminating

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the novelist or poet or dramatist with the same dangerous sense of detachment he or she shares with his or her scholarly colleagues. Snug within the cerebrally cozy walls of "higher" learning, how can one possibly get worked up about the surely ephemeral scribbling the little people outside the tower are diverting themselves with this season (one's own most recent masterpiece excepted, of course)? Of the making of fiction, poems and plays there is no end, you can look it up. In Canada, where the proliferation of creative writing programs hasn't happened yet, a similar sense of intellectual sanctuary is, if not as easily attained, certainly as aspired toward. Cop a fat grant, teach a few weeks at Banff and then kick back in Victoria for the summer and do what all great artists have always done: drink, dream, have an unhappy love affair (it's all material, you know) and, on good days when the muse is smiling your way, commit a bon mot or two to your journal. And if you're one of the really big boys or girls on the scene, win a few prizes, sell a movie option and do your aesthetic ruminating in Greece or Spain or Italy. Anyway, be above the fray. You're an artist, after all. Admittedly, it's not bad work if you can get it (especially the part about drinking and Victoria in the summer). Still, if for no other reason than pure egoism—something no writer lacks —it would seem as if the idea of book reviewing would appeal to any writer hoping to not only be read but understood. Amis fils: "For certain self-interested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it's more likely that people will get the hang of it." At its most basic, good literary criticism is nothing less than attempting to teach people how to be better readers. When Richler's novels were seen by many Canadians in the 60s as, because funny, not serious, he felt compelled to instruct his countrymen on the nature of satire as understood in the tradition of Swift and Waugh. He did this primarily through book reviews. Writers have a responsibility to help maintain the mental hygiene of their time. Richler put it simply: "I do think a critic's job fundamentally

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is to praise good books and bring them to the public's attention, and to excoriate bad books, to preserve standards." Good writers get excited about good writing, are bothered by bad writing and feel a need to share the news with the world. In the process —if they're real writers with real voices and a real style—we're left with one more record of their unique way of seeing, saying, being. In the same chapter of Ulysses in which J.J. O'Molloy foredooms all journalism to the garbage dump of time, Myles Crawford, the local newspaper editor, exhorts Stephen Dedaulus to write something for his paper, to, in his words, "Give them something with bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy." Stephen, impudent young punk that he was, surely did just that. And with what was left over, he probably put into a book review.

BUILDING THE PERFECT UMBRELLA In the beginning is the book. Your book. The book you're going to write and see published someday. The book that's going to mean every time your dog gets sprayed by a skunk or you've got a particularly gruesome hangover, all you'll have to do is stand before the bookshelf to achieve instant and sustaining spiritual nourishment at the simple sight of your book proudly rubbing shoulders with all the books that made you want to be a writer in the first place. Short of the conclusion of life's final chapter, nothing it can toss your way will be able to bother you too much ever again because you will be the author of a book. That book. That one right over there. Your book. As delusions go, this isn't a bad one. For one thing, it tends to keep neophyte writers working away when all the usual signs — lack of time, the world's general indifference to art, the difficulty of the task itself—say stop. I suspect that most authors start scribbling for the same basic reason I wanted to write my first novel. Having been moved by some book or author—in my case, Thomas McGuane, in particular The Bushwacked Piano —they decide that they want in on the fun, too. Later, though, up to their neck in plot development snafus and, later, form-letter rejection slips, the motivational power of imagining having their very own bibliophilic umbrella to guard against whatever the world rains down on them is not to be underestimated. Not that this makes it any less a delusion. Just as only a vigorous tomato juice bath will get rid of skunk stink and nothing satisfactorily erases hangovers except plenty of sleep and water, the same thing that started you writing in the first place is, in the end, what will keep you writing your next book and all the others after that. This particular

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truth was brought home to me last summer when I was in the fairly unique position of working on the final rewrites of my second novel while simultaneously pushing forward with my third. Over the several months that this intentional amnesia went on, two things became clear to me. First, that the human mind has a remarkable ability to deceive itself, to believe that something is vitally true when it knows very well that it isn't. When I worked on Heroes on Monday I was a dipsomaniac Ph.D. in philosophy with a specialty in Greek skepticism and a suicide-clouded past. When I sat down to Moody Food on Friday I was living in Yorkville 30-plus years ago and had a real fondness for fringed jackets and hallucinogenics. More importantly, though, I discovered —or, rather, rediscovered — why I write. The closer I got to sending Heroes off to the printer, when I should have been excited about little else but adding to my slim oeuvre and how there's no way the world could possibly mess around with me now —me, the author of two published novels—what I was actually most pleased about was how well Moody Food was progressing. Writers know what I'm talking about: the lines that shone even after repeated tinkering; the humour that caused me to laugh aloud alone in my studio; the sure feel of the plot progressing under its own mysterious energy. When the finished copies of Heroes arrived, celebratory drinks were drunk, the book was pronounced a success and a good time was had by all, believe me. I've got several slightly blurry Polaroids from that night to prove it. The next day, though, after putting the empty beer and wine bottles in the recycling bin and reshelving the scattered CDs, I put Heroes in its place on the shelf beside Home Movies and went back downstairs to my studio and, in the end, the only thing that really works at making the world keep its proper distance. But before too long Moody Food, too, I knew, would be just another spine on the shelf and what would matter most would be the next book. The mystery of the writer's life is the enigma of never quite arriving. But that's all right. That's life. And I already had a great new title ready for the next one.

THE RIGHT TO WRITE Every new semester, a friend and former teacher of mine, the American novelist Tom Grimes, begins his undergraduate creative writing course with the same sober declaration: "Welcome to Introduction to Creative Writing. First lesson: none of you deserves your imagination. Not yet, anyway/' What I tell my students is a little less traumatizing but no less true. "Each of you,"1 say, "has undoubtedly led a much more interesting life and had many more absorbing experiences than most of the authors who will publish books this year. Great. Now let's see if we can turn some of your stories into successful fiction." The confrontational tone is intentional. By the end of the term I'll have one or two students who still can't understand why I and the rest of the class don't find their novel about their successful fight with prostate cancer or their memoir of living under South African apartheid as inspiring and moving as they do, but if I'm doing my job well, most will come to understand to varying degrees that the facts of one's life, no matter how compelling, are merely the raw stuff of fiction, that making lasting art takes the diligent application of hard-won skills. The graduation gift for learning how to write well is one's own biography, to do with it as one pleases, to ignore or embrace it as much as one chooses. Robertson Davies used only bits and pieces of his life in his novels, Thomas Wolfe whole chunks. I tell my students that if they assemble even a fraction of the technical virtuosity either of these writers possessed, then they can include as much, or as little, biographical detail as they like. Which would be just teacher-pupil peachy if that's where it started and ended. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

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As of yet, mandatory creative writing classes aren't a part of every published writer's standard contract. A few years ago Margaret Gibson won the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award for Opium Dreams, a book that told the unabashedly autobiographical story of " grown poet and sometime short story writer Maggie Glass" who had scored a handful of Canada Council grants, published "one award-winning short story book and one award-winning poetry book" and suffered from epilepsy. Gibson's guiding aesthetic principle was simple: the narrator related how tough it is to live with epilepsy, how wicked the medical establishment is and how no one, not even the narrator's family, understands her. Judging by the accolades the book received upon publication, Gibson's narrative strategy worked. According to the critics, she'd written a sage, brave book. Opium Dreams isn't, however, a publishing anomaly, but an unfortunate symptom, only one of countless recent examples of the transparently sermonic fiction that, for the most part, successfully manages to bamboozle the critical establishment—and, by extension, the reading public —into believing they are reading a profound piece of literature. Contrary to prevailing literary wisdom, to successfully explore a significant theme in a work of fiction requires telling a story. In other words, it's not enough to simply inform the reader that sexual abuse is painful or that misogyny is bad or that love is confusing. As Flannery O'Connor says in her essential book on the craft of fiction writing, Mystery And Manners, "fiction convinces through the senses." Only by the reader actively and sensually participating in a character's existential dilemma —only by following him or her around through the character-revealing twists and turns of a plot —can we come to truly understand the depth and subtleties of the ideas under examination. To philosophize in fiction, one must first make the reader believe and care about the destiny of one's characters. Only out of the construction of these fleshy particulars does the writer buy the right to sniff around the universal.

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Who really believes in Anne Michaels' characters? Or those in Timothy Findley's more recent muddles? Or those that populate too-many-to-mention small press novels, their self-described avanteverything authors presuming they are too sophisticated to be bothered to tell a story? Because writing is difficult to do well and entails a dedicated concern with craft, many writers often attempt to justify their general ineptitude with plot by pointing to Proust and Joyce (whom they haven't read) and by quoting a few French structuralists (whom they haven't understood) and cleverly declaring that linear narrative is a tool of mere entertainment and, hence, passe. Since these authors are neither Proust nor Joyce, however, what they tend to produce is page after page of swirling, sophomoric reflections recited by sombre, first-person narrators who — surprise, surprise —uncannily resemble the author, resulting in quasi-autobiographical novels about people with artistic temperaments (usually writers or aspiring writers) who announce, usually in the first few pages, that if we forget our past then we can't know who we are now or how memory is a complex, beguiling chimera or some other firstyear philosophy platitude. A remarkable amount of recent fiction by Canadian writers falls clearly into this camp; that is, thinly disguised journal writing chiefly concerned with the domestic dilemmas faced by boring, middle-class, self-absorbed writer-types but ostensibly about life's BIG questions. And all of it entirely humourless, of course. Because it's serious. You can tell because the narrator seems pretty unhappy. Democracy is a fine system for deciding which political party is going to curl up with the corporations and take advantage of the public trust for the next four years, but it doesn't work for art. Everyone should be encouraged to grow up and be prime minister someday, but, sorry to say, not everyone has a story to tell. Or, rather, everyone does, but not everyone can tell it. If this sounds cruelly elitist, so be it. Anthony Burgess put it best: "Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it."

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The fiction writer worth reading tells a story that makes you miss your subway stop or want to read a sentence aloud to the stranger sitting next to you. Writers worth reading go way down deep into the dark stuff and don't come up until they've discovered something we knew all along but didn't really understand until they showed it to us. The genuine fiction writer does all these things, all in the same book, and often with a wicked grin. No one has ever learned about life from a fiction writing class, but no writer will ever make anyone care about the fictional world they create unless a few of the things that get taught in such a place are picked up somewhere along the way and endlessly practised and mastered. The right to write must be earned.

DOES SIZE REALLY MATTER? Let's start with two very different but equally mistaken, if widelyheld, views of the small presses. On the debit side, most small press publishers are viewed as the book industry's minor leagues and their authors as simply paying their artistic dues before moving on to bigger and better things. Others argue that the only truly interesting writing going on in this country is done under the auspices of the small presses, and that everything they publish is somehow endowed with an intrinsic artistic worth simply because a small, literary house brings it out. As is usually the case with any belief, both notions are equal parts truth and nonsense. To begin with, Canada's small presses are not, as is generally thought, some sort of aesthetic breeding ground for talented lesserknowns to hone their literary skills in relative anonymity before emerging fully-formed on the bright stages of Random House or Harper Collins or McClelland and Stewart. Small and large publisher alike produce their fair share of poorly written books, the former specializing in pretentious, aimless "experimentation," the latter in formulaic mediocrities intended straight for your Aunt Mable from Etobicoke's coffee table, ably assisting her in illustrating just how darn cultured she is. And while it's fair to say that more unqualified bad books are published by the smaller houses, if one has to take sides, it's probably better to be baffled than bored. Any talk of so-called artistic "growth" is likewise fictitious. Just because Author X received an advance for her second novel fifty times greater than that of her first doesn't mean that said novel is fifty

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times better. Quite often, the exact opposite is the case. Go into any decent second-hand bookstore and scope the shelves for the second and third novels of various one-time CanLit bright lights originally published with the small presses. Chances are you'll find lots and lots of these latter, inferior books. The unfortunate truth is that most writers have only one book in them, and this book is frequently published by a smaller press. That these same authors manage to manufacture a career out of a single volume says more about the cultural hothouse that is Canadian Literature, where reputations are often created, not earned. Don't misunderstand, though: no matter what anyone tells you, bigger is usually better. In spite of the odds against it happening in a world increasingly entranced by Play Station, "Reality TV" and celebrity boxing, writers like to be read. And a larger publisher simply has a better chance of making this increasingly unlikely event happen because of the greater resources it has at its disposal. The books themselves tend to look better, more money is spent on their promotion and, right or wrong, people pay more attention to books emblazoned with a big press logo. Which is why Doubleday published my third novel — in the simple hope that more people would hear about it, buy it and actually read it. Cormorant and Dundurn, publishers of my first two novels, were and are excellent houses, either of which any author would be extremely fortunate to work with, either of which I can easily imagine myself being published by again. So, except, perhaps, for an increased readership — not always a given, as evidenced by Nino Ricci's smallpress Lives of the Saints, which has out-sold his three novels with M&S and Doubleday combined —things remained pretty much business as usual when I changed editorial neighbourhoods. I didn't, for example, contemplate the creation of my own Web site, complete with adorable pictures of me as a charming pubescent, book-club hints about all the wonderful ways to humbly approach my staggeringly complex novels over wine and cheese or an exhaustive

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resume listing, among other things, my Grade Eight perfect attendance badge and several personal testimonies from famous older writers who also happen to be my friends. I also didn't trade in my Blundstones and T-shirt for Pradas and an Armani jacket, abandon my neighbourhood bar and its jukebox for this week's College Street house of hip or henceforth refuse to blunt that oh-so delicate instrument—my mind—with mere book reviews because every molecule of my brain and soul was needed to ensure the arduous and courageous completion of MY NEXT MAJOR WORK. The quality of any book has absolutely nothing to do with how much the author gets paid or how much fawning press coverage it receives. In literature, as in life's other exalted activity, it's what's between the covers that counts.

HOW TO COOK A NOVEL Moody Food was the first book I wanted to write. That two entirely different novels needed to be written first is typical of the decisions writers like to think they make about their art. But we don't make these decisions at all. Our stories always know more than we do. And twelve years ago, the story of Moody Food simply wasn't ready to be told yet. Not until I became a better novelist, and not until I lived with one of the novel's main characters, Thomas Graham, for several years, his personality slowly ripening in my mind over the course of time just like the object of anyone's love does: from infatuation and obsession to domestication and disenchantment to, eventually, unconditional acceptance and true, full appreciation. I was 20 the first time I heard the music of Gram Parsons. What sent me scurrying through Toronto's used record bins wasn't anything I'd heard, though, but what I'd read. One book, Rock And Roll Babylon, detailing Parsons' brief, meteoric career and, most of all, his spectacular death at age 26 of massive drug abuse, the theft of his body from the authorities by two friends and its fiery immolation in the Joshua Tree Desert, got me started. The album I eventually found at the Vinyl Museum on Yonge Street, a battered, barely playable copy of the Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace Of Sin, finished me off. It wasn't long after that I realized that one of the things I wanted to do before I died was write a novel about Gram Parsons. To say that Parsons was a tremendously influential musician is to state the obvious. Forefather of the entire so-called "country-rock" movement (a term he despised) of the late-1960s (and later, in the '90s, long after his death, the alt.country or insurgent country scene), no

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one Parsons came in contact with was ever quite the same after falling under the spell of what he called "Cosmic American Music/' "Goose Bump Music" or, sometimes, simply "White Blues." Not The Byrds, a band he was a part of for only a little more than four months yet nonetheless convinced to record a country and western album and thereby alienate much of their devoted rock and roll fan base, and not the Rolling Stones, whose albums from Beggars Banquet on all show the unmistakable influence of Parsons' close relationship with Keith Richards. He had long hair, took lots of drugs and loved rock and roll. He also possessed the impeccable manners of any good Southern gentlemen, was known to weep when performing country legend George Jones' songs on stage and knew as well as any secular saint does that you have to sin if you're going to have any chance in hell of being saved. So the music was obviously part of it; was inextricably tied up with it. But it was Parsons the man who made me want to tell his story: his Southern upbringing full of alcoholism, suicide and a bulging trust fund; his messianic musical zeal to turn a generation of hippies on to steel guitars and tender two-part harmonies when country music was seen by most of the counter culture as the epitome of conservative America; his insatiable desire for drugs and alcohol; his tragic, in the true, Greek sense of the word, death. Parsons' life was a novel. All it lacked was the right person to tell it. But Moody Food isn't simply a fictional recreation of Gram Parsons' life. Not just because the majority of the novel is set in Toronto's Yorkville district, a '60s Canadian hippie enclave that Parsons never set foot in. Nor because another fascination of mine, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's ill-fated, never released masterpiece, Smile, wound up playing a significant part in the plot line of Thomas Graham's slow descent into drug-fuelled psychosis. Nor even because the novel is narrated by one of charismatic Thomas' most devoted converts, a Toronto-born '60s-survivor named Bill Hansen who plays Nick Carraway to Thomas' Jay Gatsby, witnessing the rise

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and fall of Thomas Graham's wild ride into pop culture history and living to tell the tale. Genuine art attempts to convey the truth. The truth of a personality, the truth of a generation, the truth of the power —both ecstatic and destructive — of music. The mere facts of a person, an era or a few songs can only deliver information, not the core of what makes these things what they really are. The English novelist Ford Madox Ford practised something he called literary impressionism, employing facts much as a painter uses paints, selecting, mixing and even changing them in order to get the effect he was looking for, the impressionistic essence of the thing-in-itself he was writing about. Most writers I know hate to be asked what their latest book is about, as if you could sum up the mystery of several years worth of obsession and hard work in two minutes of polite chit-chat while waiting for the bartender to get the cold Heineken from the back of the fridge. When someone would ask me what my new novel Moody Food was about, I usually said it was "a kind of Great Gatsby of the '60s, with lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll." Which it is, in a way. And which it isn't, either. Which is as good a place as any to start cooking up any novel.

GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY: AW AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POETICS Neither of my parents having attended high school and no heady reading material lying around the house handy (save for The Hockey News — still a staple around my own home now), I have no tales to tell of reading Rememberance of Things Past by the tender age of 18 or composing amateurish but endearingly precocious sonnets at 12. I can recall listening to my father's large collection of '50s rock and roll 8-tracks over and over again in the green carpeted spare bedroom and forgetting myself for several pleasant hours in the verbal wizardry of "Bebop-a-lu-la" and "Blue Moon" and the wonderfully wonky harmonies of all those deceptively simple songs ("Lucille," "In the Still of the Night," "The Great Pretender"). Not Mallarme and the French Symbolists but Little Richard is responsible for initially enlightening me in the pleasures of sound divorced from purely representational sense. True to my early obsession, I have never found any piece of literature truly absorbing that was not written with a strong sense of individualized rhythm and evidenced by the author's simple joy of verbal playfulness. All of my novels are filled with alliteration, internal rhymes and grammatically-incorrect sentences, exactly the kinds of things the McCanLit style-police say you're just not supposed to do. Later, it was philosophy that brought me to the University of Toronto, not literature. One course, an introduction to American Literature, was enough to convince me that the whole topic of literature as treated in academia was simply too dreary to allow for any further study in that direction ("In 500 words what is Faulkner's Theory of

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Time?" "Are James' protagonists homosexual?" "What is Hemingway hiding behind his tough-guy pose?"). Wrestling with the categorical imperative and Freud's theory of the unconscious directly, sans the fictional coating, seemed like the most honest way to solve the intellectual mysteries of 2,500 years of Western thought. Five years later, these mysteries still safely intact, I emerged with the same basic beliefs as my grade-eight educated father, but equipped with the ability to refute the ontological argument quicker than a Bobby Hull slapshot. The tens of thousands of dollars that went into acquiring my B.A. with High Distinction were not, then, entirely wasted after all. Still, literature was not absent from my life at this time. Excepting a handful of texts leaning more toward the existential theological than the analytical style of thinking that dominated the philosophy department, it was fiction and poetry that most engrossed my friends and I. By day, and to our parents at vacation times, we were soberminded aspirants of the academic life, dutifully reading Hume and Locke and diligently working away on our truth-tables. By night, and to each other over beer-bottle-littered kitchen tables on weekends at the house I shared in Kensington Market with two anarchists and a cat named Pushkin, we were poets, short story writers and novelists. The novel each of us was going to write was never spoken of, though, it being somehow understood that it was only a matter of time before each of us wrote our own version of the Great Canadian Novel—the Great Canadian Novel being something like the Great American Novel, but not as big nor as confident of itself as being all that great. Mostly, though, we were readers. Unconstrained by foot-long reading lists of novels and poems we were supposed to read, or blunted by spending years developing the wonderful academic gift of deconstructing great works of art down to political jigsaw puzzles truly understood only by those trained in French literary theory, we read what the hell we felt like reading. And what I lack today in breadth of literary knowledge (I regret to say I still haven't made it all the way through Piers Plowman) I made up for

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in intensely reading —and, I see now, studying—the works of various authors not on the English Department syllabi but who seemed to share my interest in the wonders of language and the exploration of significant themes, writers like Carson McCullers, Barry Hannah and Thomas McGuane. For me, McGuane especially. Smart, funny, linguistically gifted, I'd never come across such a total literary package before. Still haven't, in fact. And aside from the labour of sitting down and simply writing, the novice writer learns most about his or her craft by reading and aping in their own early work the style and effects of other writers. I'm convinced that my own style as a novelist, such as it is, was accelerated in its development by my being allowed to pursue in depth and at my own pace the writers I thought were speaking a version of the sort of language I myself was interested in one day speaking, and not those the academy thought I needed to know if I was going to be something called a well-rounded English Major. So: rock and roll; a formal training in philosophy; gluttonous reading of like-minded authors; two mental breakdowns and recoveries helping to build a budding novelist's faith in the shaping power of the unconscious; the youthful, sometimes painful friendship of Messrs. Beam and Daniels, taking me places and introducing me to people I certainly wouldn't have known otherwise; meeting my wife, a painter, the perfect live-in antidote to a word-soused writer too often dangerously indifferent to the frugal beauty of a freshly sliced tomato or the shimmering contour of a perfect harvest moon: all have contributed to the development of who I am. All have contributed to how I write. All have contributed to the fact that who I am is how I write. And for me to write in a style that would betray who I am would be as fundamentally dishonest as a non-writer communicating with his fellow citizens in face paint and a disguised voice. This, in spite of the army of McCanLit critics and publishing types who would have us believe that there really does exist such a thing as a "correct" and "well-written" prose style (short sentences simply constructed that

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don't draw attention to themselves) and that to write any way else is to write badly. It also wouldn't be as much fun. Because to know that my soul is stamped onto every paragraph I send out into the world is to know that, with the composition of each new sentence, I hurl my own little spitball at the soulless McWorld that every day more and more engulfs us. Not quite the sledgehammer that is needed, of course, but a wet streak of DNA-stoked ME that says I was here all the same. Just like any other honest author who aspires to make his or her every written utterance a direct expression of their own intensely personalized way of seeing, feeling and experiencing the world. And Good Golly Miss Molly, isn't that what we all should be looking for as writers and readers, anyway?

A FEW FRIENDLY TIPS FOR WRITERS, READERS AND PUBLISHERS Occasionally— usually after the appearance of a particularly flattering or inflammatory book review that I've written—someone will corner me in a bookstore or club or even on the street and ask where the hell I get off praising/damning such a horrible/wonderful book? Normally, especially if the location is a bar and my interlocutor is buying, I welcome such exchanges in the name of cultural dialogue and free beer. But sometimes one wants only the purr of Patsy Cline on the jukebox and not the hysterical whine of an offended bibliophile. So, to carve myself out a little more solitary drinking time, here's my gift to the respective worlds of writing, reading and publishing. To begin with, there's the matter of the author photo. When we pick up a book, we usually look at the author photograph first (unless you're an unpublished writer—in that case you usually first check the author's age in the hope he or she is older than you). Except for the book's cover art, the author picture is the reader's first impression of what lies within. Unfair —downright lookist, even—but true. Here, then, are three rules for the taking of all future author photos: (1) Keep your hands away from your face (particularly damning is placing a wistful forefinger to your chin); (2) No smoking (even though, undoubtedly, you're a tortured soul—hence the nicotine addiction—and, obviously, you're incredibly busy with important literary matters, hence the fact you can't put down your cigarette for the ten seconds it takes to snap a picture); and (3) No pets in the picture, please (your acute sensitivity and deep humanitarianism will doubtlessly come through in your writing). (Note: If you can somehow

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manage to have an animal on your lap while simultaneously puffing away and stroking your temple or chin, feel free to ignore the previous piece of advice.) Book reviewers also tend to get a little nervous when confronted by a page and a half of acknowledgments. A dedication? Fine. Thanking a few individuals without whom the book wouldn't be possible? Sure. But Over-50 Persons with Lupus Support Groups, long-dead German poets who never heard of you and "all the wonderful people out there—you know who you are!—who have made my life so wonderful in so many wonderful ways!" can be shown their proper respect somewhere other than in the realm of the supposed literary. In private, for example. In terms of what's actually inside a book, grand theoretical pronouncements about what literature should be about or how it should be written are not only silly, they're dangerous. If the McCanLit police had its way, for example, we'd all be writing tender family dramas in the exact same paint-by-number prose style that wouldn't offend your Grade 8 English teacher. Soap operas for people with B.A.s., in other words. But there are some particularly disturbing tendencies in a lot of contemporary fiction and non-fiction in this country that, at least for this reviewer, can condemn a book right from its very first paragraph. Foremost is the common misconception that for a book to be thematically serious it has to be solemn, as if most authors didn't realize that Plato was a world-class wiseass, or that Joyce's wife had to yell at him from the other room when he was writing Ulysses to can the laughter and keep it down. Readers and writers alike should keep in mind Laurence Sterne's smartly tart observation that "Gravity is a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind." It would also be nice if the literary value of not being boring somehow came into vogue in this country. Admittedly, that's likely impossible since books and culture in general in Canada have always been viewed as something not unlike a flu shot: unpleasant, it's true,

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but something, thankfully, you only have to do once in a while, something we all know we'll be healthier citizens for going through with. As much as it might offend the average Canadian reader's cherished If-I'm-bored-with-it-it-must-be-art belief, as a general rule enlightened hedonism has rarely let anyone down. Meaning that the next time you're having trouble keeping your eyes open every time you pick up that critically-acclaimed, award-winning 600-page saga about five generations of Nova Scotian fish filleters, maybe you should consider that perhaps you aren't a shameful philistine and maybe it's the author who is a Governor General's Award-sized bore. As for the language most authors use to compose their books, readers should demand that getting there be half the fun. If what an author says is all that he or she is saying—if the sound, taste and texture of how their sentences come across is as antiseptic as the bureaucratic prose pumped out by governments, corporations and the worst kinds of germalists —then the reader is being criminally shortchanged. Imagine buying not a new CD but only the enclosed lyrics. "Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance," Ezra Pound argued. "Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music." Exactly. Publishers can do their part, too. If, for starters, such choice promotional puffery as "intellectual tour-de-force," "hauntingly lyrical," "painfully honest" and "breathtakingly written" were heretofore banned from all future dust jackets, all would surely be better in the publishing world and beyond. Naturally, none of the above is likely to stop someone from poking their finger in my face next week while delivering a lecture on why I need to read their best friend's book-length prose poem about William Lyon Mackenzie's dog and the birth of eco-feminism, but such is the life of a book reviewer. But giving away advice, even if no one is listening, really is such fun. And just how easy to do, too.

THE WILL TO SCHIZOPHRENIA Nietzsche says somewhere that "genius is the will to stupidity." Like most people, I realized early in life (in my case, approximately one minute after the doctor's inaugural welcome-to-the-world whack on my infant behind) that, willpower or not, being a mental marvel was one particular burden I wasn't going to have to endure. I also realized that, in lieu of genius, an occasional peace of mind and something like a well-earned sense of achievement didn't seem like a half-bad compromise to hope for. As is true of most things, both are more easily wished for than accomplished. Especially if one is a writer, when the two more than occasionally seem to be in conflict with one another. Peace of mind for a writer is theoretically really quite simple: the pleasure of doing one's work, and, to a lesser degree, the satisfaction of having done it. Michael Ondaatje has claimed that he ensures that every new book he writes contains a new set of technical problems needing to be confronted, worked out and eventually crafted into the form of the new work. This act of creative engagement, Ondaatje argues, is what keeps him from becoming bored with the writing process, is what actually gives him the most pleasure as a writer. Writers who don't enjoy locking themselves away with such problems and musing over the wonders of language and what it can and cannot be made to do are simply in the wrong business. To be —there really isn't any other more appropriate analogy for it—virtually God-like in the ability to shape and reshape a brand new fictional world is one of the deepest forms of hedonism human beings have yet managed to come up with, that rarest form of self-indulgence that doesn't inflict

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misty guilt the next morning or give one the shakes but, on the contrary, only whets one's appetite for more of the same. But at one point or another every writer gets disappointed, disgusted and sometimes even depressed over bad book reviews written by no-nothing/no-talent germalists disguised as real critics, or bottomline besotted publishers more concerned with moving product than promoting that which is excellent and will endure. And even if the going is good, as some Elizabethan poet who authored a few books of his own once wrote, "If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work/' So there are the times when the writer willingly flings open the studio door and tramps off happily (if a little guiltily) in search of those obviously less nourishing but exciting-all-the-same pleasures that can only be obtained by getting the hell out of one's room and out there in the "real world": radio and TV chit-chat meant to pump one's new book; readings and boozy receptions to pump one's vanity; freelance writing assignments to pump one's pocketbook. Besides, it's fun to act like a normal person for a change and actually be concerned with a profession, worldly success, making a buck. But, inevitably, if one is a real writer, the conversation becomes banal, the readings begin to inspire the desire to cut one's throat at the mere sound of one's tired voice reading from that same old tired book again and, for whatever it's worth—and it is worth something, even aside from its monetary rewards—journalism isn't the same as playing God. So, happily, one skips off back to the seclusion of one's room empty but for the desk, the page and whatever the imagination manages to come up with. But something's wrong. The signs are subtle at first—they might not even be noticed right away—but there's definitely a sinkingstomach feeling that something's amiss. For me it usually begins when I start answering the phone. Among my friends I'm legendary for never picking up. They know I work from home and don't want to be disturbed, so they

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simply wait for the beep, leave their message and wait for me to call them back. But now, no matter what I'm working on, no matter how pivotal the scene I'm writing, I've got the receiver to my ear by the second ring. Of course it's only someone wanting me to consider changing long-distance companies or my wife calling to ask if I've taken the dog to the vet to see about that suspicious lump on his side, but it might have been... what? The novelist Walker Percy has written about what he called the "re-entry problem" of finishing a novel and coming back to the buzzing world and all its very different demands. The same principle can be invoked the other way when attempting to regain the detachment and calm necessary to write a serious work of literature when one jumps every time the phone rings and spends far too much time plotting the arc of one's career and not enough time on the unfolding of the new novel. But—and here is where the rationalizations begin to pile up and the slow-but-sure slide down that slippery slope to thinking about writing not as a sacred calling but as something called a "profession" starts — one has to be practical, one tells oneself. There are lots of other talented writers out there, you know, and sometimes talent alone isn't enough; sometimes it takes a willingness to do things one might not want to blah blah blah. Which is all true, every bromide blah blah blah of it, but still no help at all in relieving that sickening feeling inside that says that somehow one is going against one's deepest instincts. Which leads us back to Nietzsche. But in place of a will to stupidity, how about a will to schizophrenia? If there's no sense in attempting to carefully balance the entirely antithetical needs of monkishly pursuing the muse with all the worldly requirements and pleasures that come from being a published author, maybe the goal is to begin thinking of the writing life in the same radically segregated way Plato understood human beings. On the one hand, there's the real thing, the form or soul of the person; on the other, there's the admittedly superficial but no less essential

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part that one meets on the street and shakes hands with. Each are important in their own unique ways; one should just never lose sight of the fact that the former is really the essence of the individual and that neither really has any reason to have much to do with the other. So next time the phone rings, ignore it; head down, fingers on the keys, there is nothing but you and your people and the fictional world they inhabit. And after the day's work is done and you're back in the shiny world of agents, publishers and newspaper editors, check your messages and make your calls. But tomorrow, when back behind your desk, don't forget to forget that there's another world on the other side of the door. Remember to remember that there's only the one on the page in front of you. The real one.