The Hip and the Dead

A few years ago, a cluster of talented, young Canadian authors had reason to feel confident. They were bending and breaking the canon to suit their purposes and, somehow, instead of being excommunicated for heresy, were receiving plenty of attention. It appeared as though they had only to kick in the door of CanLit and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down. They dealt in drugs, sex and urban settings; nary a wheat field within view. But this year, HipLit has decided to grow up a little, or at the very least, get a job, shave off the goatee and buy a crisp new suit. Meanwhile, the younger siblings HipLit helped inspire are vacillating between punk and Prairie, and for the most part, choosing the latter.

The recent burst of hopeful fury was fuelled by The Notebooks, an anthology of fiction and interviews with 17 contemporary Canadian writers, that arrived in the Spring of 2002, courtesy of Random House. Prompted in part by the press and success of numerous new Canadian literary voices in the late 1990s, editors Natalee Caple and Michelle Berry had, according to their intro, observed that "Young authors were hitting the international markets with their first and second books. They were winning awards, being translated, getting agents, and making connections around the globe." Influenced by technology and popular culture, often experimental or challenging, all young(ish), The Notebooks made it clear that CanLit had turned another corner, or, at the very least, was offering a few more corners with sharp edges.

Inside this thick book you could hear author and artist R M Vaughan rant against Maritime fiction ("The idea that Atlantic Canadians are the colourful peasantry of the nation enrages me"), Lynn Crosbie challenge media labels ("The word controversial seems a particularly Canadian way of deeming an author interesting yet unsuitable") and Lynn Coady debate writerly poverty ("I see people in publishing with a regular income, job security, and health benefits and wonder how it can be that the people on whose work everyone else's livelihood depends aren't able to make a living off it themselves"). The Notebooks helped codify the changing landscape of CanLit, and in the two years following its publication, best-selling success finally began visiting many of the authors in the anthology, despite, or perhaps because of, their rabble-rousing.

This cultural spring was a culmination of years of struggle, and everyone involved had suffered in their own unique way for deciding to write against the grain. And if there was one particular wordsmith in The Notebooks who claimed to have received more than his fair ration of bruisings for repeatedly writing satirical urban fiction, devoid of moose and Mountie, it was Russell Smith. As he offered in The Notebooks: "I like to think, too -- and now I am going to say another boastful thing -- that the success of my first novel did perhaps play a role, however tiny, in opening publishers' eyes to the possibility that first novels may be financially viable, and that a non-boomer generation of writers may have something to offer."

That first novel Smith refers to is How Insensitive, published in 1994. A second novel and a collection of short stories followed. But as a student, fan, and occasional stenographer of Evelyn Waugh, Smith is no doubt aware that bright young things eventually burn out, fade away, or -- God forbid -- move to Mississauga and buy a mini-van.

Not that Smith, who is now -- gasp! -- over 40, is alone in examining the mirror for crow's feet. None of the authors in The Notebooks were experiencing berserk success back in 2002, save perhaps for Yann Martel. But that soon changed. Whether through an ongoing reader and author dialogue, or pure attrition, many of those in The Notebooks had managed to convince Canadians to enjoy (or at least, buy) their prose, and many were now sheathed in impressive hardcovers.

Some authors, like Michael Turner, figured out how to convince Doubleday to publish his dirty thoughts uncensored with The Pornographer's Poem, while Lynn Crosbie's uncompromising collection of poetry, Missing Children, was snatched up by McClelland & Stewart. Lynn Coady, meanwhile, had a best-selling novel in 2002 with Saints of Big Harbour, that, if nothing else, offered Coady the knowledge that she wasn't going to be a starving artist anymore.

Despite efforts to the contrary, these authors were in danger of winning the Responsible Fiction Award, a prize Russell Smith created to mock musty CanLit in Noise. And with his new novel, Muriella Pent, even Smith appears to be nudging his way toward respectable fiction, albeit slowly still, like a frosh week freshman pushing a peanut alongside the sidewalk with his nose.

Smith, no doubt aware that his contemporaries are climbing the literary ladder, is starting to act his age. Sort of. While some of his ancillary characters are 20-nothings, providing paragraphs worth of botox, titular protagonist Muriella Pent is shaking hands with middle age. And, responding to earlier criticisms, Smith's new book is more tightly plotted -- that is to say, it has one -- and presents thematic ambitions that are mostly realized. His satiric edge has not abated (even this newspaper gets a poke in the ribs), and there are sex scenes galore, but early reviews are castigating him for being too stodgy, rather than being too bleeding edge.

As the cool quotient of The Notebooks grads slowly evaporated, it seemed safe to assume a new crop of understudies would serve as hip replacements, ready to challenge the new guardians of CanLit. But no. The lack of HipLit is a curious omission from this season's catalogues, since traditionally, publishers take more chances with their spring titles. The strange, the quirky, the mid-list and the no-list (debut authors) seek their fortunes as the snow melts, a kind of spring training league for writers. Meanwhile, the fall offers a big ripe harvest of Important Fiction: the Atwoods and suchlike. Very responsible fiction, perhaps, but it pays the bills.

This spring, the literary powerlines are crackling over David Bezmozgis and his soon-to-be-released collection Natasha and Other Stories. Bezmozgis, a Toronto writer, had a story published in Harper's and the New Yorker only a few weeks apart from each other last June, along with a story in Zoetrope. Given such a pedigree, it is no surprise that his writing is strong. Simple but smart, his writing reverberates around family, religion and relocation. But if the 29-year-old Bezmozgis is a hipster, he's been careful to erase any trace of it from his perfectly groomed fiction.

Not that Bezmozgis is the only somber youngster this year. Penguin has given us debuts from Ania Szado (a solid novel of death, grief and rebuilding called Beginning of Was) and Carrie Snyder's collection of short stories entitled Hair Hat. With a quick glance at the cover illustration of the latter (by graphic novelist Chester Brown) and the knowledge that these interlinked stories share in common a strange man whose follicles resemble a chapeau, it would seem that here resides the requisite quirky spring book.

But despite an over-obvious attempt by Penguin to position Snyder as the next Sheila Heti (whose 2001 collection The Middle Stories smuggled some McSweeney's cachet into CanLit) the language in Hair Hat doesn't deliver on its promise. Where Heti offered strange, subversive urban fables with an elusive quality that charmed, Snyder's prose and purpose is too traditional to achieve pure quirk (children drown, relationships implode), yet her level of craft is not deft enough to allow the reader to ignore the book's lack of heft. Declarative sentences abound, with occasional moments of metaphorical exhilaration squeezed in-between, offering a meandering collection of interesting moments in search of a more thorough editing process.

Meanwhile, Annabel Lyon, a Vancouver author with pyrotechnic skill to spare (see her dazzling short story debut Oxygen), has decided to dim the fireworks in The Best Thing For You, her new collection of novellas. As literary critic Bert Archer wrote in recent review, "It's as if Lyon had spent the years before writing Oxygen reading Elise Levine, Barbara Gowdy and David Sedaris, and the years since reading Janice Kulyk Keefer and Jane Urquhart."

And Miriam Toews, a promising Winnipeg novelist, dilutes the rebellious posturing of her 16-year-old, pot-smoking protagonist Nomi by suffocating the poor girl with Mennonites in A Complicated Kindness. This, her second novel, is set in a small town in Manitoba, and serves to illustrate the conundrum many younger Canadian authors face -- how to mash-up our literary tradition of rural geography with the urban nation we have become.

And so, revelations in style, topic or form are hiding below ground this Spring, not yet ready to bloom. Last spring saw the publication of Please, by Peter Darbyshire, a strange, compelling novel filled with chronological jumps, absurd situations and bursts of abrupt dialogue. Despite a prose style more suited to short stories, Darbyshire managed to prevent his manifold fiction from unraveling. But Please did more than avoid implosion; it won the Relit award for best novel in 2003.

Perhaps the assumption that it only takes six months to foment another breakthrough is misguided. The angry, hungry young men and women of Canadian letters have decided to hibernate a few extra months this spring -- or are looking toward graphic novels as the preferred medium of innovation. (Indeed, the crack smoking and shoplifting is left to Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, in Down to This, his new, non-fiction account of the 10 months he spent in Toronto's Tent City.)

Even independent publishers seem muted. So Beautiful, from Porcupine's Quill, is a debut collection of stories from Ramona Dearing, a member of Burning Rock, a Newfoundland writer's group that nurtured Lisa Moore and Michael Winter (featured in The Notebooks). So Beautiful is more lively than many other books reaching shelves this spring, but is modest in aims and will reassure, not confront, most readers.

Winter, meanwhile, a minimalist who likes to make his readers work for their pleasures, is hard at work on a -- gasp -- historical novel set in Newfoundland. Safe isn't a bad word, nor is respectable. But for the sake of keeping CanLit fresh, we need a few more authors doing everything possible to avoid earning a Responsible Fiction Award.