02/09/06, Aritha van Herk, A CanLit odyssey
Post
This is My Country, What's Yours?
A Literary Atlas of Canada
By Noah Richler
McClelland & Stewart,
475 pages, $37.99
This is My Country, What's Yours? is touted by the press release as a "bold cultural portrait of contemporary Canada through the work of its most celebrated novelists, short story writers, and storytellers." That's a groaner, more because it suggests this is a dull if important book than because it describes Noah Richler's accomplishment badly.
Leave it to the publicists to miss the point, to lowlight what might be the most important book in Canadian politics to appear for some years. Yes, politics. Every budding politician, all the current MPs and party leadership candidates, should read this book. It would, appropriately, terrify them out of their cagey foxholes. Because this is one book that does not lie or obfuscate, that does not seek to simplify our nation, and that argues passionately for this leap of faith that we call Canada.
This is My Country, What's Yours? is indeed a literary atlas, a shaped conversation with novelists as cultural cartographers. Richler follows different fictioneers to their sources in an effort to understand why and how they write what they do, but his book is more interesting for its commentary on our national character than for its literary analysis or biographical information. This is My Country is a long-overdue interruption in our country's cultural conversation. Most important, it is genuine and sophisticated, funny, poignant and wise.
Between his own description of where he has been and what he found there, Richler weaves the words of writers with sections from their fiction, along with their own responses to his quest for Canada. Some of these writers are articulate, piercingly aware. Some of them are anxious, determined to pronounce. Some of them should just learn to shut up. But that is the way of writers. They are often best read in their stories and poems, and while they can be pleasant company, they can also be crabby and self-centred. For the most part, Richler shines a kindly light on them, and in the process opens up this country's heart.
Our conversations about Canadian culture have of late been so shabby and inarticulate that it is both a shock and a relief to meet with Richler's erudition. The shock is pleasurable, the relief palpable. Richler's piercing observations about a country too large to imagine are precisely and eloquently conceived and expressed. The breadth of reading that informs his odyssey goes far beyond the fiction that he mentions or quotes. His wit is delicious. He is that genuine article, of which there are so few, a public intellectual unafraid of discussion and disagreement.
There are Richlers and then there are the rest. That distinction is implicit in the book's title, separating the Canadians who struggle to shape this country's sprawling culture from those who skirt the territory of culture entirely. Richler does not hesitate to make pronouncements, hesitates even less to make contentious statements. But his gentle, almost tender attention to these stories as part of the larger story of Canada colours the tone of this "atlas" so that it becomes itself not a sermon or a treatise, but a mesmerizing tale, the story of how we might read ourselves.
In the footsteps of the now over-examined models laid down in Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden and Margaret Atwood's Survival, Richler introduces a sweeping imprimatur of this country as still Nowhere, but joyfully so. Early in the journey he quotes Jane Urquhart, who says, "Here, nobody has explained away the country's magic yet." Richler manages to conjure that magic without explaining it away, opening box after box to pull out magnificent surprises, eloquent scarves of story.
I consider this a political book because Richler proceeds from the assumption that our novels raise essential questions about who we are. He contends that "all novels are inherently political, and reading them is a political act." Proselytizing instruments, novels record and direct, reflect on and question our most central concerns. As one of the writers observes, reading a novel is a social act, the novel itself a meeting place for ideas.
And Noah Richler is a perfect intelligence to grapple with this evocative space. He grew up within the Richler sphere of argument, cantankerous, embattled, willing to engage with the difficult and voice the unpopular. He has the experience of a gladiator in the world of broadcasting and editing. But most important, Richler has worked and travelled across this country, in bush, mining and prospecting jobs. He has actually spent real time in the North; and he seeks out rather than shuns the more remote corners of Canada. That makes him a superb literary tourist, interested and curious, both willing to learn and willing to be critical.
Given his inheritance, the extraordinary ambition of this meditation should come as no surprise. Noah's famous and curmudgeonly father, Mordecai Richler, does not hover in the wings of this "atlas," except insofar as he too was a fearless cartographer of his Canada. But Noah is still a Richler, and as such, he treads where angels dare not, even while he brings pungent intelligence and broad experience to bear on the question of who and what we are.
Only in the opening chapter, Nowhere as an Address of Virtue, does Richler seem uneasy, as if he were responding to an injunction to cover territory, to be weirdly inclusive, summarizing. That chapter, which cautiously sets off from Toronto's ravines and the wild sidewalks of Don Mills, is almost offside, unbalanced.
Richler moves from Canada as completely off the map of the world (meta incognita) to interpreting Canada as Nowhere in Particular. This residual state of blankness that has afflicted us is partly because of the sheer landmass that makes up this country. Our bland suburbs, our shopping mall tastes, our slavish duplication of other cultures, all contribute to this "absence." But those same dull suburbs make us desirable, the country that everyone else wants to come to and belong to. Such yearning for safety and quiet, as opposed to danger and violence, remarks a shift that Richler attributes to "Nowhere as an Address with Virtues." As Douglas Coupland observes, "Ours is the most romantic Nowhere on earth."
But this compelling summary of our Ultima Thule sits uneasily with the deliberate multiculturalism that jigsaws the first chapter, making it an awkward introduction to the fine balance of the rest of the book. It is almost as if Richler were asked to toss a range of writerly opinion into the salad of introduction. There are flashes of light. Jane Urquhart is astute, Margaret Atwood pronounces with her usual oracular flair, and Wayne Johnston demonstrates his keen awareness of the treacheries of history.
Almost ironically, the main problem for Richler's project is inadvertently revealed. How does a public intellectual get himself out of central Canada, and Toronto in particular, in order to start reading this country? So my advice to readers and politicians alike is to skip the introduction and start with Part One, The Age of Invention. Return to the opening later, after the book has traced its myriad journey. From that perspective, The Virtues of Being Nowhere gains a resonance that it lacks as an opening, less irritating and less virtuous.
Overall, though, the book is quite simply wonderful, exquisitely structured and fabulously written. This "atlas" is the work of a genius magpie, an eclectic reader, a passionate traveller. Richler amplifies a metaphor for different aspects of Canada's character, which he explores as The Age of Invention, The Age of Mapping and The Age of Argument. This is not a linear, geographical or historical rendering, but a generative investigation, curious and clairvoyant.
Given how large and palpably indescribable this country is, it is a given that Richler would have to employ metaphors in order to make the parts cohere, to make the whole accessible. The metaphor of mapping, our great scientific preoccupation and achievement, sketches the contours of reading in terms of its continuing mystery. In Richler's hands, it resonates as an art, one that shapes our imaginations more than we acknowledge. And while the metaphorical impulse can trap an unsuspecting voyager, Richler manages to evade the tentacles of cliché.
His discussion of aboriginal writing and its debt to oral storytelling is original and refreshing, without a trace of the abjection to which most critics succumb. His distillation of our mercantile debt to the company store, and how that initiated a subtle class system, is brilliant. His engagement with our Canadian investment in myths of disappointment is melancholically sensitive. And he diverts high seriousness with an entertaining discussion about the ethics of invention and replication with Newfoundland's literary collective, the Burning Rock. He approaches Quebec literature's internal strife and territorial possessiveness fearlessly. One of the funniest vignettes is his account of literally bearding Victor-Lévy Beaulieu in his garden. It is only in the Quebec chapter that a trace of Mordecai seeps in. His son does not mince opinions in discussing Quebec's alternative writing, the political urges of the francophone novel, and the old guard's "fatigue" in laying claim to a static definition of Quebec culture.
Most impressive of all is Richler's nuanced reading of the North. Often dismissed as cold and threatening, the space that we must acknowledge but would rather ignore, Richler knows it is as important to Canada's literary destination as Vancouver or Toronto. He is one of the few writers comfortable with the North's discomfort, assimilating its character without fetishizing it to death, as so many others have done.
Perhaps all these descriptions sound too much like warnings. What is best about This is My Country is that it is playful, tongue in cheek, discerning and, best of all, brimming with ideas, ideas that demand a response, incite a discourse, a return engagement. Idiosyncratic and wayward, this book is an armchair journey that travels far into the region of delight.
And the illustrations, by Michael Winter, provide comic interruption. Who knew that Winter's sketching pencil had a mordant wit equal to his writer's pen? Turning a page to find a line-drawing of a beaver on Yonge Street is one of the unexpected pleasures of reading this exploration, and in the middle of a serious discussion, can make the reader stop to laugh out loud.
By embarking on this odyssey, Richler has initiated a new discussion. This story, our story, will never be complete. One aspect of This is My Country, What's Yours? is that it asks us to engage in the story of our country. My one regret is that although Richler talks with a number of Alberta writers, he is shy about Alberta itself, as if that has become unruly territory, the one that does not quite fit the country's literary mythology. And so, here is my invitation, Noah. Come west, and we'll take a trip to discover some of secrets that you might have missed. I make this invitation in the spirit of your book -- as I hope every part of this country will respond to your question.
This is My Country, What's Yours? is ultimately something of a conjurer's gift, and Richler a consummate magician who pulls out of this crazy, battered beaver hat a flag and a map, a home and a history. His observations do not pretend to be comprehensive or final. They are whimsical and evocative, a bit rueful, as self-deprecating as any Canadian. He has his doubts and fears. But they are also valuable and moving, an invitation to all of us to engage in this exercise of Canadian culture, the most important part of us and the one that we have neglected most.
Aritha van Herk is a bibliophile who lives in Calgary, where she writes books and teaches Canadian literature and creative writing.
A Literary Atlas of Canada
By Noah Richler
McClelland & Stewart,
475 pages, $37.99
This is My Country, What's Yours? is touted by the press release as a "bold cultural portrait of contemporary Canada through the work of its most celebrated novelists, short story writers, and storytellers." That's a groaner, more because it suggests this is a dull if important book than because it describes Noah Richler's accomplishment badly.
Leave it to the publicists to miss the point, to lowlight what might be the most important book in Canadian politics to appear for some years. Yes, politics. Every budding politician, all the current MPs and party leadership candidates, should read this book. It would, appropriately, terrify them out of their cagey foxholes. Because this is one book that does not lie or obfuscate, that does not seek to simplify our nation, and that argues passionately for this leap of faith that we call Canada.
This is My Country, What's Yours? is indeed a literary atlas, a shaped conversation with novelists as cultural cartographers. Richler follows different fictioneers to their sources in an effort to understand why and how they write what they do, but his book is more interesting for its commentary on our national character than for its literary analysis or biographical information. This is My Country is a long-overdue interruption in our country's cultural conversation. Most important, it is genuine and sophisticated, funny, poignant and wise.
Between his own description of where he has been and what he found there, Richler weaves the words of writers with sections from their fiction, along with their own responses to his quest for Canada. Some of these writers are articulate, piercingly aware. Some of them are anxious, determined to pronounce. Some of them should just learn to shut up. But that is the way of writers. They are often best read in their stories and poems, and while they can be pleasant company, they can also be crabby and self-centred. For the most part, Richler shines a kindly light on them, and in the process opens up this country's heart.
Our conversations about Canadian culture have of late been so shabby and inarticulate that it is both a shock and a relief to meet with Richler's erudition. The shock is pleasurable, the relief palpable. Richler's piercing observations about a country too large to imagine are precisely and eloquently conceived and expressed. The breadth of reading that informs his odyssey goes far beyond the fiction that he mentions or quotes. His wit is delicious. He is that genuine article, of which there are so few, a public intellectual unafraid of discussion and disagreement.
There are Richlers and then there are the rest. That distinction is implicit in the book's title, separating the Canadians who struggle to shape this country's sprawling culture from those who skirt the territory of culture entirely. Richler does not hesitate to make pronouncements, hesitates even less to make contentious statements. But his gentle, almost tender attention to these stories as part of the larger story of Canada colours the tone of this "atlas" so that it becomes itself not a sermon or a treatise, but a mesmerizing tale, the story of how we might read ourselves.
In the footsteps of the now over-examined models laid down in Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden and Margaret Atwood's Survival, Richler introduces a sweeping imprimatur of this country as still Nowhere, but joyfully so. Early in the journey he quotes Jane Urquhart, who says, "Here, nobody has explained away the country's magic yet." Richler manages to conjure that magic without explaining it away, opening box after box to pull out magnificent surprises, eloquent scarves of story.
I consider this a political book because Richler proceeds from the assumption that our novels raise essential questions about who we are. He contends that "all novels are inherently political, and reading them is a political act." Proselytizing instruments, novels record and direct, reflect on and question our most central concerns. As one of the writers observes, reading a novel is a social act, the novel itself a meeting place for ideas.
And Noah Richler is a perfect intelligence to grapple with this evocative space. He grew up within the Richler sphere of argument, cantankerous, embattled, willing to engage with the difficult and voice the unpopular. He has the experience of a gladiator in the world of broadcasting and editing. But most important, Richler has worked and travelled across this country, in bush, mining and prospecting jobs. He has actually spent real time in the North; and he seeks out rather than shuns the more remote corners of Canada. That makes him a superb literary tourist, interested and curious, both willing to learn and willing to be critical.
Given his inheritance, the extraordinary ambition of this meditation should come as no surprise. Noah's famous and curmudgeonly father, Mordecai Richler, does not hover in the wings of this "atlas," except insofar as he too was a fearless cartographer of his Canada. But Noah is still a Richler, and as such, he treads where angels dare not, even while he brings pungent intelligence and broad experience to bear on the question of who and what we are.
Only in the opening chapter, Nowhere as an Address of Virtue, does Richler seem uneasy, as if he were responding to an injunction to cover territory, to be weirdly inclusive, summarizing. That chapter, which cautiously sets off from Toronto's ravines and the wild sidewalks of Don Mills, is almost offside, unbalanced.
Richler moves from Canada as completely off the map of the world (meta incognita) to interpreting Canada as Nowhere in Particular. This residual state of blankness that has afflicted us is partly because of the sheer landmass that makes up this country. Our bland suburbs, our shopping mall tastes, our slavish duplication of other cultures, all contribute to this "absence." But those same dull suburbs make us desirable, the country that everyone else wants to come to and belong to. Such yearning for safety and quiet, as opposed to danger and violence, remarks a shift that Richler attributes to "Nowhere as an Address with Virtues." As Douglas Coupland observes, "Ours is the most romantic Nowhere on earth."
But this compelling summary of our Ultima Thule sits uneasily with the deliberate multiculturalism that jigsaws the first chapter, making it an awkward introduction to the fine balance of the rest of the book. It is almost as if Richler were asked to toss a range of writerly opinion into the salad of introduction. There are flashes of light. Jane Urquhart is astute, Margaret Atwood pronounces with her usual oracular flair, and Wayne Johnston demonstrates his keen awareness of the treacheries of history.
Almost ironically, the main problem for Richler's project is inadvertently revealed. How does a public intellectual get himself out of central Canada, and Toronto in particular, in order to start reading this country? So my advice to readers and politicians alike is to skip the introduction and start with Part One, The Age of Invention. Return to the opening later, after the book has traced its myriad journey. From that perspective, The Virtues of Being Nowhere gains a resonance that it lacks as an opening, less irritating and less virtuous.
Overall, though, the book is quite simply wonderful, exquisitely structured and fabulously written. This "atlas" is the work of a genius magpie, an eclectic reader, a passionate traveller. Richler amplifies a metaphor for different aspects of Canada's character, which he explores as The Age of Invention, The Age of Mapping and The Age of Argument. This is not a linear, geographical or historical rendering, but a generative investigation, curious and clairvoyant.
Given how large and palpably indescribable this country is, it is a given that Richler would have to employ metaphors in order to make the parts cohere, to make the whole accessible. The metaphor of mapping, our great scientific preoccupation and achievement, sketches the contours of reading in terms of its continuing mystery. In Richler's hands, it resonates as an art, one that shapes our imaginations more than we acknowledge. And while the metaphorical impulse can trap an unsuspecting voyager, Richler manages to evade the tentacles of cliché.
His discussion of aboriginal writing and its debt to oral storytelling is original and refreshing, without a trace of the abjection to which most critics succumb. His distillation of our mercantile debt to the company store, and how that initiated a subtle class system, is brilliant. His engagement with our Canadian investment in myths of disappointment is melancholically sensitive. And he diverts high seriousness with an entertaining discussion about the ethics of invention and replication with Newfoundland's literary collective, the Burning Rock. He approaches Quebec literature's internal strife and territorial possessiveness fearlessly. One of the funniest vignettes is his account of literally bearding Victor-Lévy Beaulieu in his garden. It is only in the Quebec chapter that a trace of Mordecai seeps in. His son does not mince opinions in discussing Quebec's alternative writing, the political urges of the francophone novel, and the old guard's "fatigue" in laying claim to a static definition of Quebec culture.
Most impressive of all is Richler's nuanced reading of the North. Often dismissed as cold and threatening, the space that we must acknowledge but would rather ignore, Richler knows it is as important to Canada's literary destination as Vancouver or Toronto. He is one of the few writers comfortable with the North's discomfort, assimilating its character without fetishizing it to death, as so many others have done.
Perhaps all these descriptions sound too much like warnings. What is best about This is My Country is that it is playful, tongue in cheek, discerning and, best of all, brimming with ideas, ideas that demand a response, incite a discourse, a return engagement. Idiosyncratic and wayward, this book is an armchair journey that travels far into the region of delight.
And the illustrations, by Michael Winter, provide comic interruption. Who knew that Winter's sketching pencil had a mordant wit equal to his writer's pen? Turning a page to find a line-drawing of a beaver on Yonge Street is one of the unexpected pleasures of reading this exploration, and in the middle of a serious discussion, can make the reader stop to laugh out loud.
By embarking on this odyssey, Richler has initiated a new discussion. This story, our story, will never be complete. One aspect of This is My Country, What's Yours? is that it asks us to engage in the story of our country. My one regret is that although Richler talks with a number of Alberta writers, he is shy about Alberta itself, as if that has become unruly territory, the one that does not quite fit the country's literary mythology. And so, here is my invitation, Noah. Come west, and we'll take a trip to discover some of secrets that you might have missed. I make this invitation in the spirit of your book -- as I hope every part of this country will respond to your question.
This is My Country, What's Yours? is ultimately something of a conjurer's gift, and Richler a consummate magician who pulls out of this crazy, battered beaver hat a flag and a map, a home and a history. His observations do not pretend to be comprehensive or final. They are whimsical and evocative, a bit rueful, as self-deprecating as any Canadian. He has his doubts and fears. But they are also valuable and moving, an invitation to all of us to engage in this exercise of Canadian culture, the most important part of us and the one that we have neglected most.
Aritha van Herk is a bibliophile who lives in Calgary, where she writes books and teaches Canadian literature and creative writing.
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