Books in Canada

NOT LONG AFTER SHE LEARNEDTHAT I WAS ON THE ENGLISH-FICTION JURY for the 1994 Governor General's Awards, a writer friend wrote, "I'm terrified of being or on that jury -- I've been asked to do it twice and both times I turned it down." I understand her fear, because the prospect of being on that particular jury has always struck terror in me too. And until this past summer all my experience as a juror had been on "blind" juries, which are the ones I still prefer -- the only fearful thing about them being that there's never enough money to support the often extraordinary work of many young, unknown writers. (And it is the discouragement of these beginning and as yet not very confident artists that a culture should care about most.) So that any arts-council office where those juries meet turns into a kind of Heartbreak House by the end of jury day.

Still, that sort of jury job was relatively anonymous work, unlike the work of being a GG juror, which is a bit like sitting inside a fish bowl that almost everyone feels the compulsion to hurl a rock at now and then. And jurors who serve on the GG jury do sometimes worry about being paid back (getting bad reviews, being turned down for grants, losing friends), and so when I got a call last June asking me if I would do it I at first said no. But there was a salary and the jurors would get to keep the books and I did (as usual) need money, and so, after a few days of thinking it over, I said yes.

The experience has led me to think a good deal about writers and prizes: are they good for writers? Do they lead more people into bookstores and in so doing also bring attention to the writers who do not win? Or do they perpetuate a kind of teacher's pet syndrome long after we all thought we'd finished with school? And how does one choose between a book that's ironic and witty and doesn't put a foot wrong, but is at the same time too distanced, and a book that's intimate and passionate and awkward and flawed? It's not a matter of "best" in this case, but a matter of taste. Or sometimes not even a matter of taste but a matter of mood. Even Time, the great adjudicator, can be moody. Consider the way some books are resuscitated in one century, only to be left to die again in the next.

The Governor General's Awards in particular seem to symbolize a sort of parental approval. Perhaps this is why the decisions of GG jurors arouse such intense outrage. One doesn't hear of the same sort of anger being aimed at CanLit's flashier relations (Uncle Trillium, Aunt Giller). And so I also considered the difficulties the Canada Council has annually in getting juries. Because if the Council were to advertise for jurors, the ad for the fiction jury would have to go something like this:

The traditional fury reserved for the GG fiction list was intensified last year by the presence of a new and extremely lucrative literary award, the already mentioned Giller Prize. Each jury worked in the dark in relation to the other's list, which is as it should be, but when the GG short list was announced a few weeks after the Giller's, it was quickly judged by some members of the media to be a rejection of the canonized Giller short list. And so, during the weeks that followed, I wasn't all that surprised to read in the press that accusations were being levelled against the GG jury, one of them being that it was somehow inappropriate for the jurors to have chosen a novel dealing with a social issue like inflammatory bowel disease. But it was the imaginative way that Donna MacFarlane's Division of Surgery transcended the clinical facts of its story (and the sloppiness of its copy editing) that made it so stunning, at least for me -- made it such a deeply felt (but weirdly buoyant) book about almost unbearable physical pain, and so also made it a book that had, as one reviewer once wrote of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, the "salt of recklessness that makes art sting."

I suspect that many Canadian writers, when they try to imagine the deliberations of a GG jury, picture a little clique of deranged colleagues secretly rewarding their friends while vengefully disposing of their enemies. But what was true last year has probably been true in most other years: the members of the jury barely knew one another and we all arrived for our meeting with radically different lists. (We each brought a short list of 10.) We also had to give up many books. Books that we loved, or loved parts of. Did we choose the best books? I believe that we chose some of them, I certainly don't believe that we chose all of them. How could we, when we could only choose five out of the 130 entries and a smaller list of 30?

But the fact that the Giller and GG short lists were totally different seemed to me to be a happy development. Because with two different lists more writers could get attention and there could be more controversy and more excitement. But many media people seem to have expected the two lists to be identical and therefore also felt that a sacred trust had been violated. But then writers and media people often have very different agendas. Representatives of the media are into star-making. In a way it is their job to be. Writers, on the other hand, except for the career writers who want only to be famous, do tend to long for something else: passionate acknowledgement from their readers and peers. And of course they do also long to someday be solvent. Most writers are also aware of how divisive media attention can be in a writing community, although prizes and rave reviews are certainly less divisive than the spectacle of some writers being lifted up above the crowd of writers for extra-literary reasons -- because they have media savvy, or photogenic good looks, or protective friends at court.

What is very sad about the Canadian literary scene at the moment is that there is more and more a tendency to reward, recognize, review, and celebrate only a very tiny handful of writers. Take the CBC literary competition as an example: for many years it offered three awards in each of four categories, but once Saturday Night magazine had kicked in a huge amount of money, the prize became both much more lucrative and much more restrictive. Where formally there was a small amount of money distributed among 12 winners, now there is a larger pot, but it is to be divided between only three winners. Is this progress? The people with money for cultural hoopla seem to think so, but I'm certain that most writers consider it a tragedy. (Not that I am suggesting that distinctions should not be made. But they should be made at the potentially more thoughtful level of the review and the literary panel. And if prizes are also a good idea, then we need more prizes, not fewer.)

And of course the media "massage the data" as well. Consider the best-seller lists in the weekend papers. When M. G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets appeared on the Globe and Mail's list in late November or early December, it was identified as the winner of the Giller Prize. But when Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers also made the list, Wiebe's equally recent Governor General's Award was not mentioned. The Globe list also describes some books objectively and others subjectively. (Perhaps other lists do this as well, but the Globe list is the one I am most familiar with.) "Lyrical" is a favourite subjective description. And then the bookstores, affected by the hype for selected books, over-order titles that will turn out to be difficult to sell, so that when a newspaper contacts a bookstore to find out what's selling the most, the store's owner casts a cunning eye on the tall stack of books that are not moving and tells the newspaper person that those very books are the hot sellers. And once such a deviously anointed book has been added to the best-seller list, a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible Canadians do in fact rush out to buy it. In this way the crimes against art are crazily compounded.

As for the whole concept of "best book," it does so often seem misconceived. After all, most writers know that the voices of juries are only the voices of three or four people coming from a small room, they are not the voice of God. And as a reader who is also a writer, I must say that I would never go into a bookstore and buy a book because it had won a Governor General's Award. Or because it had won the Giller Prize, either. I would instead rely on intelligent reviews, or on my own sneak previews of the book while browsing, or on the recommendations of friends. But if one subscribes to the belief that literary prizes do writers more good than harm, then the really good thing about the arrival of the Giller Prize on the literary scene is that the ways in which its future short lists will continue to differ from future Governor General's Award short lists can only add to the energy of cultural debate in this country. And can also only work to demystify the whole romantic and deluded idea of "best book."