FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS In Russell Smith's second novel, Noise, Toronto freelance writer James Willing reviews restaurants, profiles celebrities - celebrity chefs, celebrity models, celebrity poets - and pines for a more beautiful world. Smith presents Willing as a lonely esthete surrounded by barbarians. Willing's exchanges with his rock-climbing jock brother, with art-video producers, with editors of any description, even with the odd but attractive fashion photographer Nicola, leave him feeling isolated and quizzical. James's sufferings offer readers a lens, focusing the satirist's sardonic light upon characters and environments familiar in contemporary life. Only less familiar incidents, like a chance meeting with someone willing to speak seriously about composers like Shostakovich or Scriabin, can interrupt James's sense of isolation. At such moments he's embarassingly over-eager, lunging desperately toward any sense of connection. Clearly, James is the opposite of cool. So what's this promo blurb inside the cover of Noise, naming Smith the chronicler of Toronto's "helplessly hip?" It drives the 35-year-old author crazy. "I cringe at that," he says, with convincing emphasis. "It turns so many people off. The book's not about that at all. It's about very typical lives of people my age." What happens, Smith hypothesizes, is that "members of the Canadian lit-crit establishment living in renovated limestone farmhouses in small university towns just see any depiction of young people who go to clubs, and are aware of pop music, as 'subculture.'" It's hard to argue when Smith points out that in reality, it's Scriabin fans who form a strange subculture. To conclusively demonstrate that his work is far from saturated with hipness, Smith points out that writer and editor John Metcalfe likes it. "Metcalfe is exactly the same age as my dad and a notorious English curmudgeon. He's the opposite of hip. He just liked the style, which reminded him of his own very conservative antecedents." Speaking of conservative antecedents, Smith has no problem with being seen in the lineage of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. At least someone who places him in that context "has read enough to recognize it." Point made. Smith is not coming from a place of hipness. The place he's coming from has more to do with being the son of an English professor, and growing up assuming that everyone felt literature was the most important thing in the world. Smith was surprised to find they didn't. ("I'm still surprised," he admits.) It has to do with studying French literature and feeling quite comfortable in the frankly elitist world of French universities. (Though he can see why, for most people, that system is "deeply flawed.") It has to do with an interest in style and esthetics, not formal innovation in art. "Formal experimentation is now dead because any conceivable formal boundaries have been exploded. Art that's about exploring the limits of art is now flogging a dead horse." When Smith meets with Metcalfe, they like to "talk about funny lines we've read." If this concern for sheer comic style somehow doesn't seem, well, serious enough, remember that Smith (who sees his men's fashion column for the Toronto Star as mostly a rent-paying type of thing) would far rather read a fashion magazine than any Canadian art magazine. "I just can't read any more about transgressive interventions in hegemonic representations of the other," he confesses, betraying a long acquaintance with graduate students and an excellent memory for jargon. What both James Willing (fictional) and Russell Smith (real) would really love to do is write in depth about contemporary classical music for an educated audience. Smith now has the chance to do this, for a CBC Ideas program. It's on rhythmic minimalism in the classical work of people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and Arvo Part, and today's techno and trance music. For Smith, it's like a dream come true. Whether it affects his satirical take on the world remains to be seen, though his upcoming story collection, Young Men (with a return appearance by James Willing), might permit an early assessment, when it appears next spring. |