Authors used to preserve a stoical silence when dragged to the aesthetic woodshed by reviewers. Lately, some novelists have been lashing out at their critics. The normally phlegmatic Alain de Botton logged on to reviewer Caleb Crain’s website to rant at him for a mildly negative review of his latest book. De Botton’s peevish tirade concluded: “You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that.”
I think his concern is exaggerated. I’ve had enough happy reading experience of de Botton to overlook one bad review. Ironically enough, though, I’m chary about experimenting with any Canadian author who gets a good review, especially for a novel that’s up for the Giller Prize. I’ve been burned several times by Giller-endorsed, but virtually unreadable CanLit. They’re all jumbled together in memory as feminized paeans to a sepulchral past, mired in poetically lyrical, but navel-gazing narrative stasis. So I tend to view boosterish reviews of this genre through a cynical lens.
Take, for example, Katherine Laidlaw’s gushy July 9 Post profile of twice-nominated Giller contender Lisa Moore and her new novel, February. I don’t know Katherine Laidlaw, but from her uncritical admiration for the novel’s preternaturally CanLittish values, she would doubtless be shocked to discover that her selected quotations from, and observations about, Moore, while honorifically intended, smothered—rather than aroused—my interest in reading the novel.
On Valentine’s Day, 1982, an oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, went down off the coast of Newfoundland, killing 84 men. Such a disaster is a natural fictional platform for an enthralling blockbuster along the lines of Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book The Perfect Storm. In February, typically, it serves instead as background for the novel’s actual subject: the feelings generated by the tragedy in the male victims’ female relations.
Female grief and loss. Sound familiar? The tone is set in Laidlaw’s two opening paragraphs: “Lisa Moore didn’t know any of the 84 men who died … in 1982, but that doesn’t stop her from crying about it. ‘Like everyone in Newfoundland, it’s a story that makes me cry whenever there’s a conversation about it,’ [Moore] says. ‘It touched everybody. It emotionally tore me up.’ ” (emphases mine).
Not torn up enough to make it her subject, alas. Yet Moore claims she was “startled” at the paucity of writing to come out of the tragedy. She notes to Laidlaw that a 1985 Royal Commission report revealed: “A lot of safety practises were ignored. The men weren’t trained properly. There weren’t enough survival suits. They didn’t have a safe exit plan.”
And what does Moore do with this treasure-trove of thematic bullion? Something very postmodernly Canadian. The “startled” Moore deflects attention from the tragedy and its male victims to hover solicitously over a surrogate victim, her protagonist, 31-year-old widowed Helen, “a creation rooted in the lives of Moore’s own mother and herself.”
Imagine if, instead of narrating the actual drama of the 1917 Halifax Explosion in his riveting 1941 novel, Barometer Rising, Hugh MacLennan had chosen to focus, as we are told February does, on the “swelling loneliness and eventual letting-go” of one woman bereft of a beloved husband in the conflagration. Zzzzzzz.
Not only are her characters plucked from her own experience, Moore boasts to Laidlaw that “she intentionally didn’t interview any families affected by the disaster.” Imagine: There are many people still alive—though they won’t be forever—who actually remember the tragedy as it happened, yet in terms of “research,” their doubtlessly compelling survivor experience is trumped by Moore’s memories of the personal sadness evoked when her 41-year-old father “died of natural causes” (again, emphasis mine).
Me, me, me and my extraordinary capacity for sadness. Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men: men immobilized in situations of physical, psychological or economic impotence (that is when they’re not falling through the ice and nearly drowning), rather than demonstrating manly courage in risk-taking or heroic mode.
Moore gives the game away when she says (according to Laidlaw, “her voice cracking”—Katherine, we get it already!), “The kind of lonely and terrifying death that those men faced … It’s something I think we all need to think about when we ask people to do dangerous jobs” (my emphasis).
The fact is, we don’t ask “people” to do dangerous jobs, we ask men to do dangerous jobs. Men account for 95% of work-related deaths, and that is because it takes manliness to endure the long-term cruel conditions of jobs like those on an oil rig.
But a sympathetic narration focused on the “lonely and terrifying deaths” of strong, psychologically unconflicted men nobly attending to work no woman would do, the appalling cataclysm of the oil rig’s collapse, an exploration of the individual lives that were cut short so horrifically and, of course last and least, the impact of their loss on the survivors: This is a novel I would be interested in reading, but that no feminist writer in good standing in Canada—and those are the only types considered for the Giller Prize—is interested in writing.
Instead we are informed: “Moore is clear about one thing: This is a book about vulnerable, irrepressible love, and what it feels like to have that torn away.” Female grief and loss, loss and grzzzz.
Novelists who are offended by bad reviews should suck it up, because it is infra dig for artists to shoot an honest messenger. But what about a reader who’s offended by a good review? To whom does one take exception? I am Canadian, therefore wouldn’t dream of ranting on anyone’s website. Instead, while watching the Giller Prize-giving (on TV, because somehow I feel sure I will not get an invitation), I will discretely, but quite defiantly, frown.
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