Esprit de l’escalier, the Steven Heighton edition
Earlier this year, I published an essay in Canadian Notes and Queries with the somewhat adversarial title “Fuck Books.” In it, I expended about 3,000 words gassing on about the prevalence of a certain kind of pseudo-poetic, lyrical fiction that seems to dominate the literary discourse in this country. Two writers in particular – Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje – took it on the chin in that piece. (Of course, that essay was written before I read The Winter Vault, Michaels’ follow-up to her highly acclaimed debut novel, Fugitive Pieces; although my feelings about the latter novel rem

A.J. Somerset wins Metcalf-Rooke Award
London, Ontario-based writer (and frequent TSR commenter) A.J. Somerset has won the 2009–2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award for his novel Combat Camera, the first time in the award’s history that it has not gone to a collection of short stories. From the press release: Combat Camera by A.J. Somerset is that very rare thing, a really superbly realized Canadian novel. It concerns Lucas Zane, a celebrated photographer who has burned out emotionally after covering battles in most of the wars of the late twentieth century. He has come to the end in Toronto, drunk, halluncinatory, all ambition fled. He earns the rent by taking photographs for Richard B

Eliza Doolittle in Prada shoes
The Humbling. Philip Roth; Hamish Hamilton Canada, $30.00 cloth, 150 pp., 978-0-670-06971-2. There’s no shortage of erotic fiction; what distinguishes Roth’s is its outrageousness. In a world where it is increasingly difficult to be “erotically” shocking, considerable feats of imagination are required to produce a charge of outrage adequate to his purposes. It is therefore not easy to understand why people complain and say things like “this time he’s gone over the top” by being too outrageous about women, the Japanese, the British, his friends and acquaintances, and so forth. For if nobody feels outraged the w

The historical fiction rant: The GG edition
The fact is our literature has been too easily labelled and corralled into genres – not only children’s books but science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction and so on. Which is why the recent breakthroughs of Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean and Mary Novik’s Conceit, both historical fictions, are thrilling beyond measure. – Joan Clark, The Globe and Mail I read these words with no small degree of bafflement, especially on the day that Kate Pullinger was announced the winner of the 2009 Gov

On critical responsibility and best intentions
Two adversarial pieces about the nature of criticism caught my eye over the past few days. In the first corner, arguing in favour of critical relativism, is Chris Banks: Most poetic forms are arbitrary and anyone who attacks or trivializes another poet’s work for not working within the same set of poetic conventions or formal restraints as themselves is either a propagandist or a pretender. Such talk simply propagates the pointless form versus content argument. Reviewers should be asking of every poetry collection they read what is the intent of the poet? How well have they used