Literary critic takes aim at CanLit

Alex Good has two rare qualities – rare these days – that make him a valuable literary critic. He knows how to read, and he never pulls his punches.

In Shackled to a Corpse, an essay in his new collection entitled Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction, he demonstrates the latter skill in the course of examining a highly regarded Margaret Atwood novel, The Blind Assassin. Good quotes a sentence describing the protagonist’s hair: “A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.” Good reminds the reader that this is the heroine’s own hair she’s talking about. “Why is she describing it like she’s watching a shampoo commercial on television?”

Perhaps, the reader might object, this sentence is atypical, a momentary lapse on the author’s part. This hypothetical objection reminds me of a critical essay written by Norman Mailer in the long ago, attacking John Updike. Mailer had many faults, but he knew a good metaphor when he saw one – and likewise a bad one. After quoting an objectionable, metaphor-laden sentence from Updike, Mailer pointed out that the sentence came from the early part of the novel – as does the quote from Atwood’s book. “The beginning of a novel is usually an index of taste in the writer,” Mailer wrote. “In the run of Updike’s pages there are one thousand other imprecise, flatulent, wry-necked, precious, overpreened, self-indulgent, tortured sentences.”

Updike was obviously never as bad as this, but it is the kind of overkill that is generated in the psyche of a true reader – someone who pays close attention to words. In my experience of reviewers, it is unusual to encounter one as attentive to words as Good. If he doesn’t lay claim to the discovery of a thousand wry-necked and flatulent figures of speech, a la Mailer, he detects, in Atwood, “awkwardly introduced straining after poetic similes, which clutter nearly every page in self-regarding, bathetic splendour.”

As to not pulling punches: here he is on the subject of the Giller Prize. “Looking back over the recent shortlists and winners of different Canadian literary prizes, I think a strong argument can be made that the Gillers have done the worst job, choosing far less inclusive, diverse and interesting titles,” Good writes.

Good includes two essays on the Giller in this collection, which might be considered excessive – but then this literary prize is always an inviting target. There have been certain kinds of books not likely to make the Giller list, among them, according to Good, experimental fiction and comic novels. By contrast, Good points out that Giller Prize jury members seem to have a weakness for “very serious