Is Fiction Dead?

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Shh! No one tell the novelists — they are tender souls — but the big book story this year was the death of fiction. Literary media, like the make-or-break-an-author’s-reputation New York Times Book Review, have cut back on reviews of novels in favour of non-fiction coverage. Globally, fiction sales are down. Publishers and agents returning from the Frankfurt Book Fair reported that Canadian fiction, despite its stellar international reputation, wasn’t generating the heat it used to. Even J.K. Rowling was in a slump, with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in her wizard series, not flying off the shelves as quickly as in the past. And at least two Canadian publishers — Raincoast Books and McClelland & Stewart — are cutting back on the numbers of books they publish each year.

Blame the war in Iraq, which has fuelled readers’ appetites for political non-fiction. Blame the new publishing industry business model, in which big blockbuster novels like The DaVinci Code and The Historian, dominate bookstore shelves and marketing budgets, sucking up a disproportionate share of attention. Blame publishers who sink too much money into these titles, forsaking more literary-minded books. Blame Oprah’s Book Club for abandoning contemporary fiction. Just don’t blame the writers, because this was a fine year for fiction.

Just about every BritLit heavyweight had a novel out this year. Julian Barnes made Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the subject of Arthur and George, while Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown was a study of brutality in Kashmir. Kazuo Ishiguro brought a spare, lyrical elegance to sci-fi in his cloning novel Never Let Me  Go; Ian McEwan’s Saturday examined a day in the life of a London surgeon post 9/11; and Zadie Smith tackled the culture wars in On Beauty. It was an embarrassment of riches for the Man Booker jury this year, which in the end, bypassed more obvious choices to select dark horse John Banville’s little-known and even lesser-read The Sea, about an aging art critic, for the $100,000 prize.

Another award upset was the Nobel Prize for Literature going to ailing 75-year-old playwright Harold Pinter, an unlikely candidate whose name was not among those bandied about as a possible recipient. In fact, controversy over the previous year’s choice delayed the naming of Pinter. One of the judges resigned in protest over the selection of the 2004 winner, Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. Husky-voiced from throat cancer treatment, Pinter used his Nobel Lecture to rebuke U.S. foreign policy, noting that “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War… Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and of course, Chile.” Let’s assume that the Bushes won’t be sending a congratulations card anytime soon.

Courtesy McClelland and Stewart.

In Canada, despite several strong titles and a number of acclaimed writers publishing this year — including Jane Urquhart (A Map of Glass), Lori Lansens (The Girls), Michael Crummey (The Wreckage) and Katherine Govier (Three Views of Crystal Water) — no single novel rose above the rest. That might explain the two very different short lists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore received a Giller nomination for Alligator, alongside, Edeet Ravel (A Wall of Light), Camilla Gibb (Sweetness in the Belly), Joan Barfoot (Luck) and winner David Bergen (The Time In Between). The Winnipeg teacher’s novel is about a troubled Vietnam vet who returns to the Asian nation searching for closure.

The GG shortlist was a head-scratching mix of the expected and the almost unknown. Joseph Boyden’s acclaimed First World War epic Three Day Road, made the list — it was the first novel acquired by David Davidar, Penguin Canada’s recently installed editor, in his plan to reinvigorate the house’s fiction list. More surprising nominees included Charlotte Gill (Ladykiller), Golda Fried (Nellcott Is My Darling), and Kathy Page (Alphabet). Toronto novelist David Gilmour won for his sixth novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China, about the disappearance of a small child.

In October, Vanity Fair writer Anderson Tepper paid a visit to the International Festival of Authors. And it wasn’t the international stars — like Uzodinma Iweala, whose harrowing child soldier novel Beasts of No Nation has received rave reviews — who dazzled him. It was Toronto’s polyglot, multicultural writers — Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, David Bezmozgis and Shyam Selvadurai — who had Tepper swooning. Crowning Toronto a “mini-New York; an anti-New York; a younger, more global, more tolerant New York,” he gave the rest of Canada one more reason to hate the city.

Alma Lee, the founder, artistic director and the spiritual centre of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, stepped down this year, ending her 18-year tenure. Also, on the West Coast, a group of Vancouver-area writers calling themselves “the FCC” championed literary non-fiction, publishing some of the country’s most energetic writing.

Political firebrand Stephen Lewis released his collection of lectures on the devastation of AIDS in Africa, Race Against Time, a condemnation of the failure of the developed world to respond to the crisis. Other notable Canadian non-fiction offerings included Douglas Coupland’s lovingly designed Terry, a tribute to hero Terry Fox, and Laura Penny’s Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, a companion-piece-in-spirit to Princeton professor Harry G. Frankfurt’s novella-length essay On Bullshit, also published this year. (It seems there’s been a lot of it flying around lately.)

Two terrible deaths were the subject of true crime books this year, Susanne Reber and Rob Renaud took inspiration from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, for Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, their book about the young native man dumped in the cold by Saskatoon police. Rebecca Godfrey spent months earning the confidence of Vancouver Island teenagers involved in the death of a schoolmate, for her gimlet-eyed study of adolescent bullying and violence, Under the Bridge: The True Story of Reena Virk.

Courtesy Random House Canada.

Peter C. Newman’s The Secret Mulroney Tapes was the year’s non-fiction headline maker — a reminder to politicians that when a journalist is in the room and the tape recorder’s running, there’s no such thing as “off the record.” In Newman’s book, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney comes off as a potty-mouthed curmudgeon, with nasty, but not surprising, attacks on political figures like Lucien Bouchard and Jean Chretien. Mulroney is suing Newman for a “breach of confidence.” Newman was also served papers by another old friend, Conrad Black. Black is seeking more than $2 million in damages for Newman’s allegedly libelous portrayal of Black in his 2004 biography There be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power. In the future, Newman might want to forgo friendships and just keep a lawyer on retainer for companionship.

Is there anything Margaret Atwood can’t do? There was no new novel this year from Canada’s first lady of letters, but she did release Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, part of an international writing project about mythology that involves several noted authors and 26 co-publishers. If that didn’t keep her busy enough, in a MacGyver-ish fit of invention, she developed the LongPen, an electronic device that enables authors to autograph books remotely. It seems even the indefatigable Atwood can’t sign every fan’s battered first edition of Surfacing.

In the U.S., several publishers filed a lawsuit against the search engine Google, which has plans to create a searchable database of copyrighted books. (Online book retailer Amazon has a similar system in the works.) In an attempt to beat the internet companies at their own game, HarperCollins has announced it will convert 20,000 books in its catalogue to digital form.

Some of the finest U.S. fiction this year came from first-time novelists and writers on the artistic vanguard. Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut Prep was a deft look at privilege at a tony private school; and Indecision, the first novel by Benjamin Kunkel (the founding editor of the McSweeney’s-esque, n+1 magazine) put a post-post-modern spin on the coming of age story. Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional autobiography (that’s not a misprint), featured a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who may or may not be the author; and Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica was a searing meditation on beauty, cruelty and decay.

But it was literary lioness Joan Didion who topped the U.S. best-of lists this year. Bringing a novelist’s sensibility to her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote sparingly, yet wrenchingly, about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter.

Finally, the year in books ended with literary eyes on the trial of celebrated, bestselling, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. He faces a possible three-year jail term for “insulting Turkish identity and Turkishness.” In an interview, Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that a million Armenians were massacred 90 years ago and 30,000 Kurds were killed in recent decades — issues the writer says are ignored in Turkey. The case has been adjourned until February amid growing concerns by supporters of Turkey in the European Union that the case infringes upon freedom of expression.

Which raises the question: If one novelist can threaten an entire nation’s identity and draw the world’s attention to his cause, just how dead can fiction be?

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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