The Globe and Mail, perhaps the only newspaper left in Canada without a completely shameful books section (and I’m not just saying that because they let me write for them periodically) has finally decided to stay vital and give writers like Sheila Heti a chance to flex their critical voices.
The last Saturday edition of the paper that I picked up featured a book review by the inestimably over-rated Margaret Atwood, that darling of Canadian letters. The review was of a book written by a fairly new author that Atwood had known since he was a child. And frankly those are the only details that seemed important to Atwood, because they are the only points that I took away from the review. I don’t recall the name of the author, his book, or if Atwood even mentioned what it was about. Regular readers of this site will know that I am by no means Atwoods biggest fan, but that I generally regard her non-fiction and poetry as being worth reading (her fiction is passable if there is nothing else at hand). Her review was not a review, it was an exploration of the author’s relationship (I wish I could remember the poor man’s name, or that I cared enough to look it up) to Atwood’s own celebrity.
Sheila Heti’s review (sorry, registration is now required) is entirely different. Regular readers will also know that I am an enormous fan of Heti’s work, and that I think she is one of the most important up-and-coming authors in Canada. Her review is not about her, it is about the author and her work, and the care she took over the review leave’s Atwood’s narcissistic slapdash affair in the dust. Behold a representative passage:
Perhaps because Berger put the stories into the first person, or because the characters were never named, the book balanced on tippytoe, threatening to fall into the world of Penthouse Letters. But Berger’s controlled, intimate and emotionally complicated voice set it apart—not from the sex, which was raw and hot and never veiled—but from being only sexy and no more. The book was brilliant—psychologically complex, frank and affecting—and it deserved praise and readers a hell of a lot more than it did prudish suspicion.
