Those Americans, they really do harbour and lately can’t seem to hide their neurotic relationship with Canada. Witness the Sunday Times pan of Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach. Here’s my theory: New York literati are so fearful of offending each other in important publications that, given a chance to tear into a Canadian, they go nuts.
How else to account for the venom directed at Hage and his international success by fellow novelist Mary Gaitskill in the NYT Sunday book review section last week? Her only substantive argument is that the matière of Cockroach wasn’t as dramatic as that of De Niro’s Game, an observation most reviewers have already made. (Hage, by the way, was nominated for almost every top Canadian prize for his second novel, and won none of them. Still, his place on the list of important writers to watch was never been questioned.)
She then moves on to De Niro’s Game, attacking not his superb first novel but his success, namely winning the Dublin Literary Award (2008) “for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world”. Anywhere in the world? Her description of the Irish prize is laced with contempt, as if to wonder, where do those Irish get off, praising the world?
Next, she opines on his good reviews: “I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who has responded to Hage’s work has done so insincerely. But when I see it being compared to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Genet, Rimbaud and Burroughs – I can’t imagine that anyone with a mind believes that. In making such overblown comparisons, these ‘admiring’ critics have respected Rawi Hage far less than I have.”
Well, who in her right mind with even a middling literary education could read a novel called Cockroach about a guy who turns into a bug, and not think of Kafka? That the timbre of Hage’s remarkably strong voice borrows from – or more accurately, references – great literature is hardly surprising. All important art is in dialogue with the past. It is the work of reviewers to place a new work in some kind of literary context, an exercise which not only helps potential readers situate the new but exposes originality for what it is, a bold variation on universal themes, a high wire act taking place within a literary tradition.
Gaitskill’s tannic fury (righteousness, with undertones of jealousy) tries to settle on other critics and literary juries rather than on Hage the Montrealer, as if to set herself up as a friend of talent, while his enemies (great reviews) are doing him wrong. To overpraise, she says, is “a subtle form of disrespect, and everybody knows it”. Everybody who reads a jacket blurb or follows the connecting dots between novelists and reviews of novelists will know that the tradition of sycophancy is very well established, even at the NYT.
For a classic example of how a reviewer can demolish a writer without offending her, take a look at what Claire Dederen wrote about Gaitskill’s latest short story collection in Slate. A sample: “This writing could be called humorless and pretentious; it could also be called brave and even majestic.” Yes, it could just be called what it is, if said reviewer didn’t fear bumping into Mary at a cocktail party next week.
PS: Further to Americans, read Calvin Trillin’s essay on Poutine in this week’s New Yorker and note the curious way he introduces people and places encountered during a recent visit: “a Canadian satirist named Rick Mercer”, “a Montreal deli called Schwartz’s”, a “trendy bistro called Au Pied de Cochon”, “a young woman I met there named Emily Birnbaum”, “a restaurant proprietor named Fernand Lachance”.
As if none of these curious natives actually is somebody, they all carry these funny obscure names.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
You know Marianne, just because Mr. Hage won the IMPAC doesn’t mean his next novel can’t be bad…I can’t say that it was bad, because I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I gave it about 50 pages and finally threw in the towel. Frankly, I think that Cockroach may be the first novel in decades that I started and didn’t finish (and, who knows, I may gird my loins for another go at it some day). It’s been a point of pride with me that I finish what I start (Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land almost killed me until, at about 150 pages in, my spirit broke and I could finally stand to be subsumed by the protag’s smothering consciousness. An almost prototypically American novel–really, sans gun and Suburban, there would have been no novel there. But I digress…)
I suddenly realized, reading Cockroach, that life was too short (and there was too much to read!) to keep at a book I wasn’t enjoying. It shouldn’t feel like sawing wood. Maybe I’d have felt the same way if I’d started reading The Metamorphosis at this advanced age, who knows?
It was really liberating, dropping Cockroach. I’d been reading right-winger Mark Steyn’s book America alone and for balance, picked up Peter Scowen’s Rogue nation. But when Scowen went back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justification for 9/11, I felt free to drop that one, too. So thank you, Rawi Hage, for granting me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to read the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Bev, I had that same revelation with Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I no longer have qualms about not finishing a book. Life, as you say, is too short.
A comment to the comments. I have to confess that when I put down $35 for a much acclaimed novel, I often read the first few chapters carefully without bending back the cover, because if it’s awful the bookstore will take it back. Novels are highly personal, fragile creations. Not all readers will be able to suspend disbelief. No reflection on the writing. Reviewing is a delicate business. The art of criticism is all about making a strong and well reasoned argument, being honest and to some extent commiting oneself, so that readers can both enjoy the review and make their own judgement about the book. It’s neither science, nor morality. There is no right and wrong. Only persuasive arguments that hold up when a reader gets around to reading the actual novel. Vitriolic pans almost always say more about the reviewer than about the book under fire.
Geez Melanie, Saturday opens with a plane in flames coming in for a landing in London…how could you put THAT down? (Though the squash scenes went on way too long for my taste.) But glad you felt the freedom to drop it if you weren’t enjoying it.
Maybe we need Freedom Not To Read Week, too.
Marianne, I think Gaitskill’s description of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize made your blood pressure hit ding-ding, but I didn’t find it “laced with contempt.” Sometimes meaning is in the eye of the beholder. But I very much admire your instinct to protect Montreal’s writers.
And, if we’re trading confidences, I have to admit that much of what I read comes from the library…
While on the subject of the subjectivity of reading, here is an American friend of mine’s take on Martel’s Life Of Pi, which he claims to have thrown down in disgust without ever getting to the end:
“Because I’m sensitive to the sensibilities of our neighbors to the north, I won’t say what I think about this bestselling defense of every form of benighted religion on the basis of zookeeping ethics. I just want to know how this cat snookered his way to the top of the heap up there?
“Even Dame Atwood has given her imprimatur to this piffle. I got my copy out of the free remainder pile at the bookstore, but I reckon this cat has racked up real gelt behind this
preposterous fairy tale. HOW CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
“When I was seven I wrote a pretty good story called “Journey to Death Mountain” that featured numerous wild animals, dinosaurs and an intrepid adventurer (myself) who survived innumerable attacks and floated in a lifeboat down a primeval jungle river. Basically a King Kong riff with “And I alone am left to tell the tale” material. It got me an “A” but it didn’t get me on the bestseller list….”
Michael, Yann Martel gave a talk at my currently defunct local independent library (he’d been booked way before Life of Pi hit the big time and I thought he was quite the mensh for keeping the engagement…the place was so full, people would have been swinging from the rafters, had there been rafters). Anyway, Mr. Martel explained that he’d structured the book in 3 main parts, intending each section to be more difficult to believe than the one before it. An investigation into suspension of disbelief, he called it. He wanted to see how far he could bring the reader before she/he (and of course, 90% of the audience was female and most were white-haired) balked…I have to say, I walked out of the talk with a much greater appreciation of the book (not having had much faith in the third section).
It is too bad your friend didn’t make it to the end because frankly, the final codicil packed quite the emotional wallop (I thought) and made the thing something quite different than it was otherwise…
Still, would Life of Pi had the success it had if not for 9/11? Doubtful.
Timing is everything.
And Melanie, congrats on “Law of Attraction”!
What a good discussion. I’ll weigh in — I found Cickroach slow but stayed with it and was very glad I had. Life of Pi, though…I admire Yann Martel for many reasons, but Life of Pi is not one of them. I finished it but wish I”d done something else with that time instead.
Oh Elise–you’re making me reconsider Cockroach! Or at least, reactivating my guilty conscience…
Okay, so now that we’ve gotten the confessionals re. Cockroach, Saturday, and Life of Pi out of the way, how about all interested parties weigh in on your fave books (of the season, the year, the decade, the century–why not, it’s that time of year!), with special reference to Canadian and even Montreal books? That is, if anyone is interested.
I can’t remember well enough to do a “best of” list, but I will say I just finished Colm Toibin’s Mothers and Sons and enjoyed it thoroughly. The story “Three Friends” in particular is beautiful and touching and ends with a kind of restrained joy that made me feel life is full of possibilities.
A great frame of mind in which to be closing out one decade and welcoming another…
some great things i’ve read this year that i’d recommend:
-the island walkers by john bemrose (canadian)
-the glass castle by jeannette walls (memoir)
-the heart specialist by claire holden rothman (MONTREAL)
-because I have loved and hidden it by elise moser (MONTREAL)
-‘night mother by marsha norman
-water for elephants by sara gruen (canadian)
-olive kitteridge by elizabeth strout
-the white space between by ami sands brodoff (MONTREAL)
-rush home road by lori lansens (canadian; corny but compelling)
-you never know, by Isabel huggan (canadian)
-fault lines by nancy huston (canadian)
-cellist of sarajevo by steven galloway (canadian)
-holy days of obligation by susan zettell (canadian)
-the elizabeth stories by isabel huggan (canadian)
-BARNEY’S VERSION by Mordecai Richler (MONTREAL; one of my all-time faves, read 3 times at least and deserving of capital letters!)
-boys adrift by leonard sax (non-fiction)
-the milk chicken bomb by andrew wedderburn (canadian)
-the facts behind the helsinki roccamatios by yann martel (MONTREAL?)
-Maus I and II by Art Speigelman (non-fiction)
-Skim words by Mariko Tamaki ; drawings by Jillian Tamaki
-At home in the world by Joyce Maynard (memoir; canadian?)
-A sport and a pastime by James Salter (back when anal was risque)
-Tell me a story, tell me the truth by Gina Roitman (MONTREAL)
-Rather laugh than cry by Malka Tzipora (MONTREAL)
-The beginner’s book of dreams by Elizabeth Benedict
-My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike by Joyce Carol Oates
-The little prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
-A Nice Gazebo by Robyn Sarah
-Promise of shelter by Robyn Sarah
-Are you there God it’s me Margaret, by Judy Blume
-Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff (canadian)
i’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours!
Wow, Bev, you are very impressive. A fabulous reader and a wonderful writer — no wonder you were nominated for the Pushcart Prize!
Elise, you’re sweet…now if I can just figure out this novel thing…