Books&writers Girl, interrupted

books emphasizing history and geography, generally without any sense of humour and written in a vague, pseudo-poetically lush and highbrow style.” This is mainstream Canadian literature, if the Giller Prize is to be believed – “all those sad, historical novels,” in the words of critic and novelist Russell Smith.

The most striking aspect of the essays, however, is not Good’s take on individual writers, but his defence of both literacy and the culture of literacy. A certain bitterness seeps into Good’s argument, an outrage that people and institutions charged with the responsibility of fostering literacy have abandoned that responsibility. He quotes a literary scholar at a conference proclaiming, “Look, I don’t care if everybody stops reading literature. Yeah, it’s my bread and butter but cultures change. People do different things.” A reporter at that conference responds, “I can’t imagine a mathematician saying the same thing about math, or a biologist about biology.”

Good takes all this in, meanwhile. The decline of literacy extends to what is read and discussed in the classroom – Good notes that the required readings for a course in the 18th century novel he had himself taken 10 years ago had since been cut in half.

Will an undergraduate ever again read Tom Jones?

In the outside world, meanwhile, radio programs such as the CBC’s Canada Reads attempt to pump new life into the world of literary publicity. But one year they were so desperate for panellists to talk about books they chose five celebrities – none of whom were actual readers.

Literary publicity, in any case, is a double-edged sword. Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje have drawn venom – I recall a sigh of relief among some fellow Canadians when it was announced that the Nobel Prize had gone to Alice Munro instead of to a certain other fiction writer from Ontario – because of their public roles and not because of any strictly literary offences. “Atwood and Ondaatje are the alpha and omega of literary celebrity in Canada,” Good writes, “The former pursuing a program of full-spectrum dominance across all media channels, the latter cultivating the persona of a reclusive guru. Both are intensely brand-aware, and strictly police their name and image.”

Meanwhile, their best work is behind them, according to Good. “Neither has been worth reading for years,” he writes. It is also true that Good mitigates the harshness of his portrayal of Atwood and Ondaatje by reminding us that “both have played a role in encouraging and supporting younger writers.”

As for their own writing, it is good always to remind oneself that authors should be judged by their best work. If they babble away for years like Wordsworth, that may be unfortunate, but it doesn’t obliterate the greatness of his great poetry.

So here we have Margaret Atwood, author of some works of permanent interest. Someday she will die, and the work will stand on its own, with no publicity games to support it. It may then become the job of the good critic to rescue that work from undeserved oblivion, to convince future generations of readers – if there are future generations of readers – that novels such as Cat’s Eye are worth reading.

My own view is that they will succeed – always with the proviso that readers of any sort remain with us.