Author Margaret Atwood, whose latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, establishes the literary maven as a lay economist. (Reuters)Author Margaret Atwood, whose latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, establishes the literary maven as a lay economist. (Reuters)

We always knew that Margaret Atwood was a multi-faceted woman, but who knew that one of CanLit’s most beloved figures was also a lay economist?

In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Atwood’s latest book and the subject of this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, the Toronto author turns the dismal science into something absorbing and nondenominational. Part autobiography, part literary history, part pop-culture critique, Payback combines chimpanzee studies at the Yale School of Management with clips from Pride and Prejudice and The Godfather, takes Scrooge and Shylock and Faust as case studies and even talks about her own childhood allowance. Debt is “a human construct,” Atwood concludes, and “thus an imaginative construct,” something that “mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.”

Should we be surprised by Atwood’s venture into debt analysis? Hardly. Payback is a timely reminder of the sometimes strange, sometimes brilliant detours famous authors often take. Here is a sampling of other noted literary departures.

Vladimir Nabokov on butterflies

“Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career,” Vladimir Nabokov once wrote. “On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.” What began as a childhood obsession turned into a lifelong avocation, including a seven-year spell as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Nabokov was a renowned naturalist: he adored taxonomy, named dozens of butterflies and became an expert on a group known as Blues. Indeed, the road-trip element of Lolita was likely born during one of Nabokov’s many summertime trips in search of butterflies.

(Knopf Canada) (Knopf Canada)

Mordecai Richler on snooker

On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It wound together Mordecai Richler’s Canadian roots (he came to snooker as a teenager in wartime Montreal) and his deep British tastes. Despite living in London for more than two decades, Richler often claimed — consciously quoting V.S. Naipaul — that he didn’t know what Britons did when they went home at night. On Snooker is proof that he knew more about them than most North Americans ever would.

Barbara Kingsolver on eating

Along with Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s pioneering 100-mile diet, Barbara Kingsolver’s back-to-the-land memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), helped spur our current obsession with eating local food. The Arizona-based novelist tells the story of her family’s move to rural Virginia, and their mission to eat only what they could grow or buy nearby. A one-time graduate student in biology and a longtime environmentalist who grew up poor on a farm in Kentucky, Kingsolver was well-suited to this literary leap.

Philip Larkin on jazz

English poet Philip Larkin (famous, still, for the hilarious and coarse This Be the Verse) was a great and reactionary jazz lover. All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1971, his anthology of pieces from London’s Daily Telegraph, is still admired by a particular kind of jazz connoisseur — old-fashioned, cranky, uninterested in anything edgier than Sidney Bechet.

Norman Mailer on boxing

Boxing played such a large part in Norman Mailer’s self-styled mythology that it’s easy to forget how much he knew about the sport. He himself boxed, and he trained fastidiously with José Torres for many years. Mailer’s expertise transcended the flawed machismo of his public persona. His descriptions of the first Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout, the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, in the book The Fight (1975) and the documentary When We Were Kings (1997), are classics.

(HarperCollins Canada)(HarperCollins Canada)

Joyce Carol Oates on boxing

Joyce Carol Oates seems like the last author you’d ever trust on boxing. But she’s a lifelong fan, tracing her passion back to a childhood connection with her father. On Boxing (1987) is a small masterwork — in it are some of the most extraordinary passages ever written on the sport. Boxing, Oates writes, is “an emotional experience impossible to convey in words; an art form … with no natural analogue in the arts. Of course it is primitive, too, as birth, death, and erotic love might be said to be primitive, and forces our reluctant acknowledgement that the most profound experiences of our lives are physical events.”

Haruki Murakami on running

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami started running when he was 33. “Still young enough, though no longer a young man,” he writes in his new memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. “The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life.” It was also the year he became a novelist. What I Talk About isn’t a big-picture meditation on sport, but rather a series of “life lessons” and a look at how his focus on fitness feeds the intensity of his art.

(Vintage Canada)(Vintage Canada)

Michael Ondaatje on film editing

Michael Ondaatje directed, produced and wrote films long before his books brought him international renown, so he was obviously delighted when director Anthony Minghella turned The English Patient into a movie. Ondaatje quickly became a fixture on the set. There, he befriended fabled film editor Walter Murch, who became the subject of Ondaatje’s 2002 book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. While not all Ondaatje fans relished the minutiae, The Conversations is first-rate shoptalk — it won a prize at the 2003 American Cinema Editors awards.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is published by House of Anansi and is in stores now. The 2008 CBC Massey Lectures will be broadcast from Nov. 10 to 14 on CBC Radio One’s Ideas.

Greg Buium is a writer based in Vancouver.