Lost in Transition
Young Canadian writers of urban fiction are moving on. But where are this season's hip replacements?
From the National Post, April 24, 2004

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. Influenced by technology and popular culture, 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, published by Random House in the Spring of 2002. Prompted in part by the 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." 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, author and artist R M Vaughan ranted against Maritime fiction ("The idea that Atlantic Canadians are the colourful peasantry of the nation enrages me"), Lynn Crosbie challenged media labels ("The word controversial seems a particularly Canadian way of deeming an author interesting yet unsuitable") and Lynn Coady debated 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"). If this wasn't quite revolution, it was a noticeable evolution, and a culmination of years of struggle. The Notebooks helped codify the changing landscape of CanLit, and in the two years following its publication, much attention was paid to many of the authors in the anthology, despite, or perhaps because of, their rabble-rousing.

Not that this cultural spring came without a price (or, more accurately, financial penalties). 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 (Noise, in which he mocked musty CanLit by creating the Responsible Fiction Award), 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 the suburbs and buy a minivan.

Except for perhaps Yann Martel, none of the authors in The Notebooks were experiencing significant success. But while some, like the "controversial" Lynn Crosbie, have remained fierce and uncompromising, others, like Lynn Coady in her best-selling 2002 novel Saints of Big Harbour, have figured out how to import a more youthful sensibility and outlook into their fiction, without scaring off the book-buying "mom" demographic. Others, like Michael Turner, who convinced a major publisher (Doubleday) to publish his dirty thoughts in The Pornographer's Poem, were now sheathed in impressive hardcovers. They had learned how to emulate Responsible Fiction.

With his new novel, Muriella Pent, even Smith himself 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. 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 HipLit seems curiously absent 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.

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 last June, along with a story in Zoetrope. Given such a pedigree, it is no surprise that his writing is strong. Simple but smart, it 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, 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.

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. 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.

My final draft