You may not have known. Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson “are writers of such inferior quality that in a truly literate society they would be recognized as a national embarrassment.” Atwood, Ondaatje and Carson are “a drone, an entrepreneur and a cipher respectively.” Anil’s Ghost is “cloyingly ‘lyrical,’ ” Oryx and Crake is “saplessly cerebral.” The English Patient, The Blind Assassin and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi are “among the most boring, uninflected and monochromatic novels ever written and published in this country.” Alastair Macleod’s No Great Mischief is “a one-note Celtic threnody steeped in banal and portentous sentiment.”
Fraser Sutherland reviews David Solway’s Director’s Cut, a new title from Porcupine’s Quill (the same house that released Henighan’s When Words Deny the World), and is astonished to find that some people dislike the pop stars of CanLit (scandalous!). He also falls into the predictable defence of Atwood and company: less popular writers are simply jealous.
These anathemas, and a few imprimaturs, appear in the essays of Director’s Cut, its author a self-described “hometown Savonarola committing most of contemporary Canadian literature to the bonfire of the inanities.” David Solway anticipates, one imagines hopefully, that his cannonades will attract return fire. But he misses one likely riposte: that he’s harvesting sour grapes about others’ celebrity.
This tired old saw is brought out so often I’m beginning to think that even fans of Atwood and Ondaatje aren’t capable of identifying anything good in their writing. Henighan was right: it has become impossible to critique any moderatly famous Canadian writer without being accused of jealousy. I don’t agree with all of Solway’s Dale Peck-style criticisms, but to dismiss him as simply jealous is absurd. He probably is jealous. Hell, I’m jealous. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t right.
