Coping with Canada Reads
Let’s say you’re a writer on a sketch comedy show and you want to do a send-up of CanCon. So you come up with a bit where a bunch of B-list Canadian celebrities (the only kind there is, really) get together, and every day for an entire week, they spend an hour batting at one another about Canadian literature over the public radio waves. So if you were writing this sketch, you might feature, say, a flustered, aging supermodel who cries on air more than once; an ’80s TV dad who insists on homegrown “indigenous” Canadianness as primary to literary merit; an eerily calm, academic-but-weirdly-not-in-an-assholeish-way rapper; a big-haired Quebecois firebrand who glibly agrees that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. The usual suspects.
If you listened to this year’s non-fiction edition of Canada Reads—our public broadcaster’s ten-year-old, annual, gameshow-style battle of the books—then you’ll know what I’m on about. To fill you in, if you weren’t similarly glued to your radio/computer screen all last week, the book-championing near-celebrities were Shad (rapper), Stacey McKenzie (alleged supermodel), Alan Thicke (advice-dispensing TV dad), Arlene Dickinson (Dragon’s Den dragon, which I think means having some sort of spidey sense for getting rich or something), and Anne-France Goldwater (Quebecois judge and apparent badass). They were going to bat for Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre, On a Cold Road by Dave Bidini, The Game by Ken Dryden, Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat, and The Tiger by John Vaillant. Jian Ghomeshi hosted, naturally.
It doesn’t take much to make Canada Reads look like a parody of itself. The Survivor-style CanLit slugfest-slash-lovefest is easy to be smug about, and if you let that feeling get the best of you, you can work up a really keen, snarky hate-on for it. I know because I’ve done that lots of times. Pretty much every year, really.
But then a weird thing happened. I followed a week’s worth of Canada Reads debates from beginning to end, along with all the supplementary blog posts and live chats and post-debate Q&As, and I had a realization: Canada Reads might just be a better venue for talking about books than, say, an M.A. classroom English. I know because I’m doing an M.A. in English.
On the very first day of the debates, Anne-France Goldwater accused the other books of non-fiction crimes ranging from distributing false information to just being boring. The highlights were her assertion that Marina Nemat “tells a story that’s not true and you can tell it’s not true when you read it” and her calling Carmen Aguirre, whose book ultimately won, “a bloody terrorist” (the Nelson Mandela comment came later in response to Shad’s defence of Aguirre). Goldwater ended her dissing spree screeching “so take that, y’all, take that!” over the other panelists’ protests. Then the Internet went crazy, and Nemat’s book got booted off right away, and Aguirre’s book stuck around until the last, and none of it really mattered all that much, except that everyone’s name got in the news even more than they would have already. Sure, Goldwater’s wasn’t the most collegial approach, but there was something refreshing about seeing someone get legitimately worked up about literature. Same goes for Stacey McKenzie’s tears—a cringe-worthy move, to be sure, but at least McKenzie (like the other panellists) seemed to care about these books an almost unnerving amount.
In other venues where people talk about books (like grad school, for example), we tend to lose sight of why anyone likes reading to begin with. It’s supposed to make us feel stuff. Right? The Canada Reads conversation may have been a little heavy-handed, and the term “Canadian Spirit” was definitely tossed around, and I might have barfed in my mouth at least once, but at least talking about feelings—as opposed to canon formations and constellations of national identity—wasn’t off limits, and nobody seemed getting their rocks off to the sound of their own name-dropping.
Sure, Canada Reads may be an easy target. But for all the petty, well-publicized squabbling, it succeeds in putting a little fire back in CanLit’s belly.