Turning the page

Poet and musician Leonard Cohen, who in 2006 released The Book of Longing, his first poetry collection in 13 years. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press)

The three biggest villains in American publishing this year, in order of severity, were O.J. Simpson, James Frey and Kaavya Viswanathan. Granted, since being acquitted of killing his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman in 1995, Simpson enjoys pariah status no matter what he does. But this year, he set a new benchmark for vulgarity. In November, Regan Books honcho Judith Regan announced she would be publishing a new Simpson title called If I Did It. In what may be a new category of book — the speculative memoir — Simpson outlined how he might have killed his ex-wife and her friend. A week before the book’s launch, media mogul Rupert Murdoch — who owns the Fox network and HarperCollins, which owns Regan Books — stepped in to quash its release, saying, “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project.” Did Murdoch pull If I Did It on principle, or because he anticipated a sales dud? We’ll never know for sure. But the press statement did appear sort of contrite.

Compared to O.J.’s crass opportunism, the James Frey scandal seemed tame. But it had wider implications for publishers. Released in spring 2003, Frey’s drug addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, had been doing boffo business. In September 2005, it received the ultimate approbation: it became an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Winfrey deemed it inspirational, and as with all of Oprah’s selections, book sales went berserk. But in January ’06, the website The Smoking Gun revealed that many of the book’s claims — about Frey’s drug benders and his subsequent incarcerations — had been embellished. As time wore on, Frey lost more and more credibility. Finally, on Jan. 26, Oprah called Frey and his editor, Nan Talese, to the carpet. On national television, Frey was forced to admit that much of the book was a fabrication. Doubleday, Frey’s publisher, appended a lengthy preface to all new editions of the book. Frey’s agent dropped him. Despite all that, A Million Little Pieces remained a sales juggernaut.

The Frey fiasco forced publishers to ask themselves some tough questions — most urgently, what is a memoir? How much fiction should we allow in non-fiction? The industry had scarcely a moment to contemplate that before it was hit with the revelations about literary ingenue JT LeRoy. While his works (Sarah, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) were fiction, they derived their power from what we knew about LeRoy’s tormented past. In the end, JT LeRoy, an androgynous man with a history of child prostitution and abuse, turned out to be a magnificent con perpetrated by two women: Laura Albert (who wrote the books) and Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop (who portrayed LeRoy in public).

Author Kaavya Viswanathan, whose first book faced allegations of plagiarism. (Chitose Suzuki/Associated Press)

Kaavya Viswanathan never claimed to be anyone but who she was — namely, a Harvard sophomore who’d scored a two-book deal worth $500,000 US. But given all that, it was fair to assume that her debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, would contain her words. Soon after the book’s release in April, Harvard’s daily newspaper exposed the author as a plagiarist. The most breathtaking thing about it was the range of Viswanathan’s, um, influences: Opal cadged phrases — sometimes whole sentences — from books by chick-lit scribes Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella and Meg Cabot, as well as Salman Rushdie. At first, Little, Brown thought it could placate the haters by printing a “revised” edition of the book. But as Viswanathan’s list of thefts piled up, the publisher nixed the revised edition and her second book, too.

More dubious charges of plagiarism were levelled at one of the world’s most lauded novelists — Ian McEwan, author of the Booker prize-winning Amsterdam and Saturday (among many others). The fracas began when Julia Langdon, a journalist for the Mail on Sunday, reported in November that descriptions in McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) of a British hospital during the Second World War were strikingly similar to those in No Time for Romance, the autobiography by the late romance novelist Lucilla Andrews. McEwan admitted in London’s Guardian that he “drew on the scenes she described” but noted that “I have openly acknowledged my debt to [Andrews] in the author's note at the end of Atonement, and ever since on public platforms.” International writers (including Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Zadie Smith and the reclusive Thomas Pynchon) offered their vehement support. Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark) put it thusly: “If it is sufficient to point to a simultaneity of events to prove plagiarism, then we are all plagiarists, and Shakespeare is in big trouble, from Petrarch, and Tolstoy stole the material for War and Peace.”

Now, let’s look on the bright side of ’06. You know who had a triumphant year? Leonard Cohen. In 2005, a Maclean’s cover story trumpeted that the poet-musician was nearly broke, having been duped out of $5 million US by his former manager, Kelley Lynch. In 2006, Cohen released The Book of Longing, an intensely personal collection of poems and free-form musings on life and love. His first poetry collection in 13 years, The Book of Longing enjoyed critical acclaim and kick-ass sales, becoming the first Canadian poetry volume to become a national bestseller.

One downer for Cohen, and indeed for all lovers of Canadian poetry, was the death in January of Irving Layton. (He was 92.) The bawdy Montrealer was not only a lyrical giant, but also a formative influence on Cohen’s writing.

While Canada lost a poet, it gained a poet laureate. Our new PL is John Steffler, a 59-year-old writer and teacher whose collections of verse include That Night We Were Ravenous and The Wreckage of Play. While the mandate of the poet laureate is to sponsor readings and compose verses for important national occasions, Steffler says he will “try to go beyond that and act as an advocate for writing across the country.”

(McClelland & Stewart)

Another advocate of homegrown lit is Noah Richler, who released a sweeping survey of Canadian letters called This Is My Country, What’s Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada. Many of our finest phrase-turners emerged from their respective geographical corners with new novels: from west to east, Douglas Coupland (JPod), Alice Munro (The View from Castle Rock), Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder), David Adams Richards (The Friends of Meager Fortune), Wayne Johnston (The Custodian of Paradise) and Kenneth J. Harvey (Inside).

On the international trophy circuit, Britain’s Kiran Desai accomplished something her mother, Anita, has not: she won the Man Booker Prize, for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. Brainy American novelist Richard Powers took home the U.S. National Book Award for The Echo Maker, while Irish author Colm Toibin scooped up the world’s richest purse, the International Impac Dublin Literary Award (approximately $150,000 Cdn) for The Master.

What made the short lists for Canada’s literary prizes so thrilling is that they passed over Canlit royalty. Instead, the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction championed upstarts like Trevor Cole (The Fearsome Particles), Rawi Hage (DeNiro’s Game), Bill Gaston (Gargoyles) and Carol Windley (Home Schooling). In both cases, the eventual winners were first-time novelists. The GG went to Peter Behrens’s The Law of Dreams, which concerns a young man’s struggle during the Irish famine of 1847. The Giller went to Vincent Lam’s story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which drew on Lam’s experience as an emergency room doctor; it’s being turned into a television series for The Movie Network. In a year filled with literary pretenders, Lam’s multi-tiered success felt like poetic justice.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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