Writing the City

As Canada is one of the world’s most urban­ized coun­tries, a reader know­ing noth­ing of con­tem­po­rary Canadian writ­ing might expect to find a sur­feit of urban nov­els in our book­stores. Yet nov­els explic­itly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our nov­el­is­tic pro­duc­tion. Literary dynam­ics are always evolv­ing, but there is lit­tle deny­ing that among the Canadian nov­els that have received the most crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial atten­tion dur­ing the last fif­teen years, most are set in other coun­tries, in the Canadian past, or in parts of Atlantic Canada where the present can be made to feel like the past. A Fine Balance, The English Patient, Fugitive Pieces, The White Bone, Fall on Your Knees, Away, Alias Grace, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, No Great Mischief, The Englishman’s Boy, Anil’s Ghost, The Stone Carvers, Testament, Crow Lake, The Last Crossing, The Polished Hoe, Deafening, Mercy Among the Children: this roll call bypasses engage­ment with the cities where we live.

Not long ago, a young Toronto jour­nal­ist inter­viewed me about my novel The Streets of Winter, which is set in Montreal. As our con­ver­sa­tion pro­ceeded, I detected a cer­tain reduc­tive dual­ism in the fram­ing of her ques­tions. For this inter­viewer, every­thing urban was good and every­thing rural was bad. This, I sug­gested to her, was the wrong rea­son to pro­mote urban nov­els. We are only occa­sion­ally inter­ested in urban fic­tion for its urban­ity, let alone as a way of snub­bing rural com­mu­ni­ties or assert­ing that our cities have finally become “world-class.” We read the urban novel because urban life is the dom­i­nant dimen­sion of our present. The neglect of urban nov­els is part of the broader dis­par­age­ment of the Canadian present. During the 1990s and arguably until Jean Chrétien made us feel good about our­selves again by remain­ing aloof from George W. Bush’s sor­did col­o­niza­tion of Iraq, Canadian self-deprecation plunged to a deep nadir. Bludgeoned into sac­ri­fic­ing our pub­lic cul­ture to the malev­o­lent deity of com­pet­i­tive­ness, many Canadians retreated into local, eth­nic or com­mer­cial­ized cul­tures, spark­ing a rise in region­al­ism, iden­tity pol­i­tics and bland no-name art. This mood com­bined with struc­tural changes in the pub­lish­ing indus­try to pro­mote the his­tor­i­cal romance as the nov­el­is­tic form best adapted to the inter­na­tional mar­ket. When large pub­lish­ers ceased to main­tain slush piles, rely­ing instead on lit­er­ary agents to pre-select the raw mate­r­ial for their lists, the urban novel was sidelined.

I observed this ten­dency first-hand when I sent the man­u­script of The Streets of Winter to an agent. “All the scenes in this novel,” the agent said, “are about peo­ple talk­ing to peo­ple! I want scenes that are big-big in every way … !” The mes­sage was clear: think film rights. A writer friend told me that after he sub­mit­ted a sec­tion of his new novel to his agent, the first ques­tion was: “Who do you see play­ing the lead?” Jane Austen wouldn’t have stood a chance under this inter­dic­tion against scenes blem­ished by “peo­ple talk­ing to peo­ple” (even though Austen’s clever con­ver­sa­tion­al­ists have mor­phed into pleas­ing screen char­ac­ters); the aes­thetic of the “big scene” would rule out of order the great urban nov­els of Charles Dickens, Honor? de Balzac, Henry James, James Joyce, Robert Musil. Would Mordecai Richler find a major pub­lisher if he were start­ing to write about St. Urbain Street today? It is telling that some sig­nif­i­cant Canadian writ­ers who used to prac­tise the urban novel, such as Margaret Atwood and M. G. Vassanji, no longer do so. In the race to cap­ture the atten­tion of an increas­ingly visual world, the urban novel is at a dis­ad­van­tage because, unlike the his­tor­i­cal romance, it does not fea­ture the epic bat­tles, gory mas­sacres, bliz­zards or ships trapped in ice that whet the appetites of film producers.

This bias is com­pounded by a fear that detailed ref­er­ences to the Canadian present will not travel. Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Andrea Levy may write about mul­ti­cul­tural neigh­bour­hoods in London, but, we are told, if you try to do the same with Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or, God for­bid, Edmonton or Ottawa, no agent will take you on because you’ll never sell for­eign rights. I don’t think this is nec­es­sar­ily true; but the belief among agents and pub­lish­ers that it is so, con­tributes to mak­ing the Canadian urban novel pre­dom­i­nantly a small-press form. In the spring 2004 pub­lish­ing sea­son, unusu­ally, a hand­ful of urban nov­els did appear; since none of them became best­sellers, the cur­rent dynam­ics are unlikely to change.

Our nov­els’ fix­a­tion with for­eign loca­tions and the nine­teenth cen­tury means that many denizens of the mod­ern city get short shrift in our fic­tion: immi­grants, peo­ple of colour, gay men and les­bians, ser­vice employ­ees, sin­gle adults, the home­less. By elid­ing the impor­tance of city life, the nov­els pro­moted by our larger pub­lish­ers prop­a­gate a Canada that is white, straight, set­tled, and a few gen­er­a­tions behind the Canada most of us live in. In every coun­try the largest cities are attended by myths, many of them elab­o­rated by lit­er­a­ture. The fee­ble­ness of the Canadian urban novel means that we rarely mythol­o­gize our cities as, for exam­ple, Dickens mythol­o­gized London. Thanks to the descrip­tion of “Fog up the river … Fog down the river” that opens Bleak House, rein­forced by Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes sto­ries, fog became an endur­ing ele­ment of London mythol­ogy (even though it is no longer a salient fea­ture of London’s weather). For those who tire of quaint Victorian images, a mythol­ogy of mul­ti­cul­tural London is tak­ing shape in the fic­tion of Smith, Ali, Levy, Hanif Kureishi, Hari Kunzru and others.

In Canada the mythol­o­giza­tion of the mul­ti­cul­tural expe­ri­ence is left to the media. This is not healthy. No Canadian city, with the dif­fi­cult excep­tion of Montreal, where the myths are dis­jointed by their expres­sion in two lin­guis­tic tra­di­tions that pay scant atten­tion to each other’s cul­tures, has been imag­ined deeply enough to radi­ate a con­vinc­ing lit­er­ary mythol­o­giza­tion. By turn­ing their backs on our cities, our best-known nov­el­ists have failed to offer us myths by which to reimag­ine ourselves.