FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| BOOKS RIPOSTES (REFLECTIONS
ON CANADIAN LITERATURE) Compiled from his Toronto Star book columns, Philip Marchand's essay "What I Really Think" (published last October in Saturday Night) dropped an anvil on the CanLit teacup. Taking the boots to the once untouchables, Marchand exposed The English Patient as an overwritten Gothic novel (and Ondaatje a one-voice wonder), called Timothy Findley on lazy and maudlin writing, and seriously questioned Margaret Laurence's beloved role as Mommy Moral Compass. Somewhere, on a mountaintop perhaps, a beaver wept. Ripostes collects the "What I Really Think" source columns along with other like-minded essays. Marchand's measured, biting prose makes for compelling and hilarious reading; he does not suffer fools gladly, and the outmoded "canoe trips up north, blizzards on the prairie" national pulse-taking which has virtually defined CanLit (as outlined in Atwood's 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature) even less so. As a prick, Marchand's mots justes are the justiest ("It does seem in some way to be an advantage for a novelist to have an interesting mind. If so, then Margaret Laurence was always writing under a certain handicap"), but he's more than a poison pen. Ripostes contains a lot of sharp stuff, like the heady McLuhanist reading of Douglas Glover's The Life And Times Of Captain N and Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery Of Strangers in terms of "acoustic" versus "visual" space and literacy-as-conduit-for-abstract-thought - with (gasp, wheeze) asides on the Noble Savage and the present's inescapable influence on historical imaginings. (The title? "Why Everybody Loves Indians.") Unlike, say, Baffler editor Thomas Frank (a similarly whipsmart, necessary voice of dissention, but ultimately too uptight to dig the Taco Bell chihuahua), Marchand doesn't hate everything. He applauds Russell Smith, Eliza Clark, Douglas Coupland, Daniel Richler and Canada's other "wired writers" for bucking the "Survival school" via humor and playful blurring of the fiction/non-fiction distinction. Generation X and Kicking Tomorrow (both published in 1991) may seem stale examples of refreshment (such is the shelf life of topicality), but when a just-published anthology of "the new fiction of urban Canada" earnestly pulls its epigraph from Survival, you know the goose feathers have only just begun to fly. |
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