An Unconventional Memoir of a Life in CanLit

Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit is, as its subtitle indicates, a memoir of Robert Lecker’s life as a professor, critic, and publisher of Canadian literature. But who is this Dr. Delicious character? In the introduction, Lecker explains that after a student told him that his surname means “delicious” in German he began to reconceive himself:

The idea of being Dr. Delicious instead of plain old Professor Lecker made me think about the kind of writing I would have done if I was really the tasty version of myself. Professor Lecker would be reluctant to tell stories about his own life. He would resist the temptation to make his life in Canadian literature personal. He would not gossip. He would write scholarly articles and books that no one would read. But Dr. Delicious would lead a completely different life. He would delight in his classroom experiences. He would take liberties with his life story. He would talk about the ups and downs of being a Canadian publisher. He would bring in music, painting, hypochondria, malt whisky, deranged students, government grants, questionable authors, bank debt, termite infestations, a teaching stint in Brazil, lawsuits, the pleasures of hot sauce. He would write about his passions, his failures, how the whole business of CanLit drove him crazy, lost him sleep, drove him on.

I can appreciate how the idea of Dr. Delicious helped Lecker to abandon academic convention in embarking on this book, but in the early going I found the Dr. Delicious persona off-putting. To me it smacked a bit of an aging professor trying too hard to be cool. (No doubt my sensitivity to this stems from my own fears of venturing into that territory as a professor just past forty and no longer as conversant with my students’ pop culture references as I once was.) It was only when Lecker shucked off the Dr. Delicious veneer to describe the unabashed passion for the study of literature that he developed in graduate school that I was hooked by the narrative. The jaded academic is a familiar figure in the public imagination, and Lecker does go on to catalogue many of the frustrations of academic life with great insight and humour. But the passionate scholar is all too rarely represented, and it was a great pleasure to encounter one here.

Ultimately it is not a sharply drawn Jeckyll & Hyde conflict between what Lecker refers to as his “multiple book personalities” that makes this book so interesting, but rather their mostly peaceful co-existence. That Lecker is deeply suspicious of the CanLit canon in his critical work, yet contributes to its formation in what he chooses to teach in his professorial guise and what he chooses to publish as co-founder and long-time partner of Canadian small press ECW. That he is a champion of Canadian fiction and poetry, yet opts to devote a substantial amount of time and energy to the publication of dubious non-fiction titles (a low-carb cookbook, a glossy biography of Jennifer Lopez, WrestleCrap: The Very Worst of Pro Wrestling) to keep his press afloat. These are, of course, the realities not just of Lecker’s professional life but of academic life and small press publishing more broadly. And thus Dr. Delicious is a very satisfying read for anyone who is interested in the pleasures and frustrations of academic life, of small press publishing, or in the formation of and challenges to the CanLit canon. It was a bulls-eye on all three counts for me. Indeed, I was sufficiently intrigued by the snippets about the CanLit canon to buy a copy of Lecker’s previous book which is wholly devoted to the subject, Making it Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature.

So, although I was not so keen on Dr. Delicious the persona, I highly recommend Dr. Delicious the book.

The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

All of the pre-publication buzz about The Calling, a crime novel by Inger Ash Wolfe, has focused on the identity of the author. When advance publicity revealed Wolfe to be the pseudonym of a well-known North American writer of literary fiction, the guessing games began at once. Speculators constructed a pool of likely prospects drawn from writers who share an agent with Wolfe, have the requisite knowledge of the part of Ontario in which the novel is set, and have been long enough between books to have completed a new one. I confess to some curiosity about this. But now that The Calling has hit store shelves, I’m content to turn my attention to the more important question of whether it’s a good book.

It has a couple of significant flaws. First, despite the occurrence of a murder within the first ten pages, The Calling gets off to a slow start. As is too often the case with a book that is to be the first in a series, there’s an awful lot of back-story shoehorned in in unwieldy chunks in the early chapters. Second, there’s just too much plot for one novel. More than once, upon encountering yet another twist in the plot, I found myself eyeing up the pages still to be read and asking in a peevish “are we there yet” sort of tone what could be left to uncover.

But there is much that warrants praise as well. The cast of characters is a fascinating lot, each of them very interesting in his or her own right, and so too are the dynamics of the relationships between them. At the centre is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, acting chief of the Port Dundas police detachment, sixty-one-years old, recently divorced, and fighting a reliance on the painkillers with which she soothes her bad back and the carefully concealed bottle of whisky with which she washes them down. Serving alongside her is Detective Sargeant Raymond Greene who, despite an outlook much more conventional than Hazel’s, appears content to answer to a female boss. And then there are the recent additions to Hazel’s team: Detective Constable James Wingate, a young, technologically-savvy officer, newly arrived from Toronto, and Detective Sargeant Adjutor Sevigny, a French-Canadian officer of intimidating size on loan from the Sudbury police, both of them with personal secrets that they must strive to keep concealed. This diverse group is thrown together to pursue, with little experience and few resources, a serial killer who is dispatching terminally ill individuals, one after another, in gruesome fashion.

A second strength of the novel is the sense of place evoked within it. In highlighting this facet of the book, I’m not referring simply to the vivid depiction of the landscape of the bit of Ontario where the fictional town of Port Dundas is located, but also to its relationship to the rest of Ontario and to the rest of the country. The novel brings to life the contrasts between rural and urban policing, and, as the scope of the case broadens with the identification of more victims, the tensions not just between rural and urban Ontario, but also between Ontario and other parts of Canada.

Finally, there’s the plot. I noted that there are a few more twists and turns to it than fit comfortably in a single novel but, nevertheless, it was altogether riveting for long stretches, and ultimately it wound its way to a very satisfying conclusion.

The Calling is not a great crime novel, but it’s a good one. And I very much hope that it is the beginning of a series because I suspect that, with the initial hiccups of establishing a series out of the way, the second book will be even better. I could very happily spend several more books in the company of Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef.

The Stone Angel Then and Now

I was fifteen when I first read Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel and it made an enormous impression on me. I welcomed the opportunity to reread it when it was voted this month’s selection by the Slaves of Golconda, but I was a bit nervous as well. What if it fell flat for me so many years later? I need not have worried. The novel has retained all of its power for me, and this time around I had the added pleasure of being better equipped to understand the source of that power.

What I recall most vividly about my teenage response to the book was that, after reading it, I never looked at my grandma quite the same way again. My grandma was in her late seventies then and was nothing like Hagar Shipley, the ninetysomething narrator of The Stone Angel. My grandma survived into her nineties as well and must have had a ribbon of steel at the core of her. But she chose the path of least resistance always whereas Hagar runs headlong at every obstacle no matter how fruitless her opposition may seem in any given circumstance. Nevertheless, witnessing Hagar showing the face of a rather meek and sentimental old lady to the world on the bus home from the doctor’s office, yet knowing the passion and anger and regret that roil within her all the while, I couldn’t help but realize that a great deal more than I could know must also be going on beneath my grandma’s cheerful old lady facade and, indeed, in the hearts and minds of random old ladies that I encountered on buses.

I also clearly remember from my teenage reading of The Stone Angel how strongly I identified with Hagar throughout. The conventional wisdom of those who market books to teenagers seems to be that to get kids reading you have to give them characters that they can “relate to” which much of the time translates into giving them characters of roughly their age who are grappling with what are thought to be universal teenage problems. Perhaps then my firm identification with Hagar was surprising. But, then again, perhaps not. After all, that sense of being at the mercy of others, of being perfectly capable of making decisions for yourself but being prevented from doing so, is something shared by the young and the old. Although the primary source of frustration for the young teenager is being thwarted while on the very cusp of independence, whereas for the very elderly it must run much deeper, having once had that independence and now being deprived of it with no prospect of ever regaining it. I think that Laurence plays on this identification directly, albeit briefly and subtly, in the relationship that develops between Hagar and the girl in the next hospital bed near the end of the novel.

That was The Stone Angel then. What about now? What did I see in the book as an adult reader that may have escaped me as a teenager? I think that this time around it was much more apparent to me how skilfully Laurence structured the novel and depicted Hagar’s character such that the reader is drawn fully into her head yet can simultaneously see her from the outside. She’s such a strong character and the reader can’t help but stand with her and rail against the indignities she suffers by virtue of her failing body, and also the wrongs that have been done to her by unsympathetic characters throughout her life. But at the same time, the reader can’t help but recognize how impossible she is, how difficult she must be to care for, and also to recoil at the wrongs that she has perpetrated against others throughout her life. Hagar is a thoroughly unsympathetic character herself who nevertheless generates much sympathy. This double vision is made possible and made incredibly vivid, I think, by virtue of the fact that Hagar shares it. And ultimately that’s the chief tragedy of the book. She has gained enough self-knowledge over the course of her life to be able now, at least periodically, to see herself as others see her, but she can’t go that step further to change how she behaves, even toward those that she loves most deeply.

The other facet of the novel that I was very much struck by this time around was the earthiness of it, both in the depiction of Hagar’s physical decline and in its evocation of sex. Sex and sexual desire are described euphemistically, as one would expect given Hagar’s vintage and character, but never coyly. The enduring sexual desire that she felt for her husband that she was never able to communicate even to him seems to me another of the great tragedies of her life. This aspect of the novel may have been somewhat controversial when it was first published in 1964. I’m not sure about the history of this novel in particular, but I know that several of Laurence’s novels were banned on the basis of sexual content and that this caused her much anger and pain.

This has been a rather rambling post, but rereading The Stone Angel sent my thoughts spinning in a number of directions. I relished the experience and I’m keen now to reread the rest of Laurence’s Manawaka novels. For those of you new to Laurence’s work, she set several novels in and around the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba, Hagar’s hometown. But each focuses on different characters from different segments of the town’s population and they range across different time periods, so you may catch glimpses of characters from one novel in another, but only peripherally. For example, the Tonnerre family with whom Hagar’s son John gets up to no good is mentioned only in passing in The Stone Angel but plays a central role in The Diviners. I would recommend any of Laurence’s novels, but the ones that stand out for me particularly are The Diviners, which I consider her masterpiece, and A Bird in the House, which is an early exemplar of the linked short story collection.

To read what other bloggers have to say about The Stone Angel, head over to the Slaves of Golconda, and to participate in a discussion of the novel, drop by the Metaxu Cafe forum dedicated to that purpose.