The best-written Canadian work of fiction of the century
Plus Eskor David Johnson on prose style
COMING SOON:
—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.
—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘It is not like alcoholism, it is not like addiction. But it’s wrapped up with that — the pathetic psychology of it. The everlasting need to flee whatever there is to be fled from’: the best-written previous winner of the Giller Prize for Canadian fiction. This choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century.
This year’s winner will be announced on the 18th of November. The best-written book on the shortlist is Anne Michaels’ Held, which we also chose as one of the best-written works on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. You can read an extract here.
—’if you find yourself in a position where the entire style of a novel needs to be improved by someone else it means that the novel wasn’t yet ready to be shown to anyone’: [from our archives] Eskor David Johnson on prose style. We chose his debut Pay As You Go as the best-written book on the shortlist for last year’s Centre for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. You can read an extended extract here.
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THE GILLER PRIZE FOR CANADIAN FICTION - THIS CENTURY’S PREVIOUS WINNERS
The Russlander by Sandra Birdsell (2001)
The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke (2002)
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji (2003)
Runaway by Alice Munro (2004)
The Time in Between by David Bergen (2005)
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (2006)
Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden (2008)
The Bishop's Man by Linden MacIntyre (2009)
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (2010)
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (2011)
419 by Will Ferguson (2012)
Hellgoing by Lynn Coady (2013)
Us Conductors by Sean Michaels (2014)
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (2016)
Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill (2017)
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (2018)
Reproduction by Ian Williams (2019)
How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa (2020)
What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad (2021)
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (2022)
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (2023)
The best-written of these is
WIRELESS
Jane salutes you from an age where to be an aficionado is to find yourself foolishly situated in the world. Where to care a great deal about something, no matter how implicitly interesting it may be, is to come across as a kind of freak. It’s interest — inordinate interest — in something seemingly arbitrary, having little to do with you or the context you inhabit. Beanie Babies, say, or Glenn Gould. Jane once met a person who insisted he was “crazy about Glenn Gould,” who owned all these rare and exotic recordings. Called himself a glennerd, happily, smugly. Did other Gould fanatics call themselves glennerds? Jane wanted to know. The glennerd shrugged, didn’t care. It wasn’t about other glennerds, Jane saw, it was only about this particular glennerd, him and his fascination. This person was not a musician. Didn’t listen to classical music, as a rule.
It’s that people get fixated. People take a notion in their head. Jane, not her real name because all this embarrasses her somewhat, once had a thing for a cartoon called Robo-friendz. She was too old for Robo-friendz — sixteen, she was supposed have things for men with tawny chests, bulging crotches and leonine hair — but no, only the Robo-friendz, for about a year or so, sent her into a daily couch-catatonia. No one in her family was allowed to talk to her when Robo-friendz was on. She probably drooled as she watched, as slackly comforted — comfortably absented — as a baby nuzzling breasts. These are the obsessions that turn your brain somehow on and off at once. They come regularly, each more arbitrary than the next. Once it was mushrooms, especially the kind that look like tiny, mounted brains. Once it was an all-male medieval choir from Norway. Once it was a website with a dancing hamster who sang a different show tune every week. She checked it faithfully each Monday morning, like a prayer to greet the dawn. It is not like alcoholism, it is not like addiction. But it’s wrapped up with that — the pathetic psychology of it. The everlasting need to flee whatever there is to be fled from. Fortunately, one does not need to dwell on this knowledge, one is discouraged from beating oneself up in Jane’s circles. That’s good to know — you’re permitted to comprehend and yet ignore such things — that’s nice, that helps.
*
IT STARTED BEFORE the dream. A woman walks into a bar. Starts like a joke, you see.
A woman walks into a bar. It’s Toronto, she’s there on business. Bidness, she likes to call it, she says to her friends. Makes it sound raunchy, which it is not. It’s meetings, mostly with other women of her own age or else men about twenty years older. Sumptuous lunches in blandly posh restaurants. There is only one thing duller than upscale Toronto dining, and that’s upscale Toronto dining with women of Jane’s own age, class and education. They and Jane wear black, don’t go in for a lot of jewellery, are elegant, serious. The men are more interesting. The men were once Young Turks of publishing. They remember the seventies, when magazines were run by young men exactly like themselves — smokers, drinkers — and these men have never found one another remotely dull — not in the least. Some of them used to be in rock and roll bands. They wear their hair a little shaggy around the ears, now, a silvery homage. Some of them have even managed to remain drunks. This is something a lady discovers quickly over lunch: which of these silver foxes are recovered, and which are still sloshing around down there in the dregs. Wine with lunch, Jane? Oh well, perhaps I’ll join you. Half litre? Heck, why not a full one, how often do you get into town? Martini to round out dessert? Specialty coffee? At this point, both sets of eyes are liquid, glinting friendly light.
If it doesn’t happen at lunch, she’ll go to a bar, later in the day, after dinner. She has a sense of decorum. She can wait until after dinner, especially when she’s on Vancouver time, three hours earlier than this grey, weighty city.
So a woman walks into a bar. Meets a man — it’s a cliché. The man is also a drunk, also an out-of-towner, also alone. After the first round, they are delighted to discover they come from precisely opposite sides of the continent. Oh, ho ho ho. Delighted in that dumb, convivial way that drinking people have. It’s not like it can be considered a coincidence, being from opposite sides of the country. But, oh, ho ho ho, they find it an inexplicable delight. To be meeting up right here in the middle.
His accent was a giveaway from the start. His quaint, alien accent, the way he can’t pronounce th, it’s twee, she finds it cute. You’re not supposed to find Newfoundlanders cute, they bristle at that. Some people are the same way about Newfoundlanders as others are about Beanie Babies and Glenn Gould. But his name is Ned, he’s burly, has a beard and is a fiddler. I mean, come on.
RECOMMENDED:
‘Not only is the internet killing literary reading, it is killing the quality of prose.’
Two paths for the internet novel
We have entered a cultural moment in which it is fashionable to admit to language’s futility. It is a mark of sophistication now to yawn that it’s all rhetoric, and isn’t that enough? Why try to make writing sound interesting, why try to argue something unexpected, when all attempts to mold and shape a language will ultimately fall flat? Bad writing, self-conscious writing, comes out of an essential disillusionment with the one real tool that writers have. It is writing that postures, that is ready to claim, at every criticism, that oh, you just don’t get it. The sarcasm functions as a protective armor, but unlike real irony, no hypocrisies are exposed.
Extremely online and incredibly tedious
FROM THE ARCHIVE: ESKOR DAVID JOHNSON ON PROSE STYLE
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, the Maytag Fellowship and the Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
Though this may appear as the first question it’s actually one of the last I’ve answered, given the time it took to dig through memory’s vaults. My best guess is in the books of Roald Dahl, who I believe was the first author whose writing I could easily identify.
In going back years later to read through some, I was surprised by how perspicacious his prose in fact is:
So it’s more than just the silly words—which are gloriously silly.
To speak more recently, I might have to say “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus, which I read when I came to the US for high school, and remains my favorite short story to this day. Here’s how it opens:
My name is Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve northwest of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.
Before reading this, I hadn’t realized that you could begin to reveal your world so plainly, almost with a sense of weariness for how overly familiar it is to your characters. I didn’t know how much effort a simple declaration could save you—“This is in northern Massachusetts”—nor that you could move with such grace between the eternal and internal—“I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera.” The story also made me aware of the power of a pitch-perfect detail, how the right one will do so much more for your scene than any number of high-flying adjectives will.
For some time after, I wrote a lot of old protagonists made weary by the world around them.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
Unfortunately, yes. I do understand the implied hope in the question, of there being something so indelibly human in writing that will forever evade the grasps of machines. However I think we’re only at the beginning of understanding what we’re dealing with. The AIs will be able to write like Dubus above, as well as Dante, Wharton, what have you. In fifty years’ time, questions like the one just asked will have assumed an air of dramatic naïveté.
The new question, when that time comes, will be in what we choose to value. I follow competitive chess, a world that has already had its own reckoning with the machines. The computers and phones on which your audience is reading these words would defeat the #1 ranked chess player Magnus Carlsen 100 times out of 100. Somehow, though, there remains only a fraction of chess fans who follow the computer chess competition cycles, as opposed to the comparatively idiotic games of merely human grandmasters. We are still drawn to the foibles of human players, not in spite of their malleable, error-prone minds, but because of them. It is the experience of the human chess player—as in, not the measure of their expertise, but the fact that it required a lived life to achieve it—that draws us. In seeing them, a measure of ourselves reflects on the possibility of we, too, having maybe been able to do as much, had life gone differently.
So too with writing. A memoir is beautiful not just for the power of its writing, but because in reading it you understand that that happened to someone. In a novel we know that, albeit in a much more abstracted sense, the author lived through these moments in their mind. A computer that churns out excellent prose will nonetheless never churn it out from experience, and the work will not speak to us in the way.
Will there be instances that slip through, where a much lauded work of fiction is later revealed to have been written by an AI? Certainly. But we will treat them like forged paintings. Impressive just a moment before, then suddenly devoid of value once it is revealed that no original spirit went into its crafting.
So I think; so I hope.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Pay As You Go?
For me it was in first finding that right register of vocabulary in which the novel’s prose would operate. It’s not something I hear spoken of too much, but that I think writers account for instinctively.
What it means is the range of words and phrases within your given language that—whether through their connotation, rhythm, age (how contemporary or dated a term), texture, so on—best fit the world and characters you are trying to shape. It’s a feeling-out process that does not need to be decided entirely beforehand. Rather, you venture into those opening moments adjusting for the frequency.
For example, words like ‘constitutionality’ ‘infrastructure’ ‘pejorative’ (picking at random here) would never appear in Pay As You Go, for something of their tone is too sterile, and doesn’t offer the exuberant sense of the grandiose, or of delusions of grandeur, that enlivens the story. The novel’s language draws from a mixed pool of the baroque and the banal: at one moment “That walk down the hallway was a purgatory of a thousand steps,” and at another “this shitty paint job, it’s peeling in all the wrong places.” Neither of these modes necessarily a better story makes; it’s simply that this story required a balance of both.
I remember once reading a student’s story, a historical fantasy, coming across a word along the likes of “statistical” and immediately flagging it. It was technically accurate to what was being described at the moment, but it simply was not a world or a story wherein vocabulary of that sort felt accurate. So that’s what I mean. Other elements help constitute a style of course, but I think this notion of vocabularic register is, for me, fundamental.
How important is style to your characterisation? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?
For a novel like this one written in the first person, I think they’re very clearly inseparable. At the risk of sounding reductive, a literary character is nothing beyond the words you provide for them, first person protagonists in particular. For Slide, my own protagonist, to feel alive, he needed a mode of speaking and of storytelling distinctly his own. One failed draft later, I landed upon the sentence that then became the novel’s first line, and that I’ll speak on a little, not from vanity, but because it’s the only writing that I have any authority to:
‘My first apartment in Polis, it was shit, complete shit.’
It’s a simply written phrase that immediately addresses the character’s central concern, and, on the note of style, began to right-away inform the incessant rhythm of the prose with that double-comma construction, like the pulled chain of a lawnmower before it revs into gear. From that sentence I was able to intuit someone fast-moving and talkative, who charges headfirst into situations before asking all the questions he should have, discovering his mistakes a moment too late.
Did your editor suggest anything that improved Pay As You Go’s style?
On an overall note? No, not really, and if you find yourself in a position where the entire style of a novel needs to be improved by someone else it means that the novel wasn’t yet ready to be shown to anyone. By the time I got to work with the fantastic Claire Boyle, the novel was already mostly what it was going to be, style-wise and plot-wise.
Yet, she did identify those moments where the writing could be a better version of what it was hoping to be, as well as occasionally save me from moments of misplaced ambition.
There is a scene where Slide meets his first real estate agent, for example, a character named Osman the Throned. In my original version I leaned heavy into elaborate description, as if Osman were an immobilized portrait for which the novel had paused in order to slowly examine. Claire didn’t feel that was right, and eventually convinced me of as much as well (no small feat!). Now that scene is much more fluid, preserving the momentum in order to better get to the interaction between the two wherein more meaningful characterization actually takes place. Going back to what I had mentioned about that balance between the baroque and the banal, this was an illuminating juncture: a moment in which the novel’s style might have allowed for either, and where the banal ultimately won out as the correct choice.
In other scenes, which contain spoilers so cannot be discussed, Claire also identified where really going for it and upping the prose’s lofty aim was the right call.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
It’s what gives me pleasure. My thoughts were already racing to some more sophisticated answers before I realized they wouldn’t be true.
Good writing should not be a means to an end; it should be a means and an end. Certainly there is somewhere we are headed, and the engine of plot will take us there. Along the way, why not have a beautiful view? Or make frequent stops.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
I think of it literally. The human speaking voice has many qualities. Cadence. Rhythm. Volume. Tone. All of these are writing terms as well. Simply put, for me to commit to a narrator through the many months it would take to see them through a novel, I have to like the way they sound in my head. I have to want to listen to them.
What most reviewers tend to mean by voice in fiction is narration that is a bit frenetic and self-involved. I am perhaps picking the wrong time to make this critique, since it’s what can be said of Pay As You Go’s protagonist Slide! Nonetheless, voices run a much wider spectrum. Tolstoy’s narrator’s voice in Anna Karenina is gracious, wise, and omnipresent, like that of a kind god. Rachel Cusk’s protagonist’s voice in Outline is serene, reserved, and penetrating, like that of a spiritual surgeon.
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
Yes, musicality can be taught, though much in the same way as childhood manners: after a certain point, it’s too late. Growing up, I had a long-ish stint as a poet, which I would recommend to any young writer, particularly teenagers. At my best I was only ever a good poet, debatably, yet the lessons of the practice were invaluable. Poetry gives you an approach to pinpointing your precise mood or impression, as well as finding the exact choices in wording best suited to expressing it. It is also more explicitly concerned with beauty and sound. Such skills transferred to the realm of prose allow you to sit longer in those moments of your story when a choice in language feels important, and to intuitively feel your way through the labyrinth of language until finding what you are looking for. I am reminded of the old Soviet viewpoint of gymnastics being the mother of all sport—learn to control your body, then any other athletic challenge is made simpler. So too is poetry the mother of all good writing. Today whatever musicality I have does feel as if it comes naturally, but it’s from having played around so much in poetry first.
Other things help too: learning songs by heart, telling stories out loud, talking to yourself, as well as knowing another language. This lattermost I cannot quite claim—unless you count some rudimentary Portuguese mostly useful for going out to bars—but with every multi-lingual writer I know or read there is often this musicality to their English that I credit to the lessons learned from those other more naturally sonorous languages: Spanish, Arabic, French, Farsi, so on.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
Absolutely.
Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.
Someone waking up? No. But certainly someone falling asleep. They seemed peaceful! Although perhaps I had simply bored them into slumber.
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
Woe be it upon me to edit Mr Saunders! That said, I think the editing process is certainly where a voice can be refined, but it hasn’t been my experience that it’s been where voice emerges in the first place.
I am going to sound pedantic, yet there is a reason why the term is ‘voice,’ and it’s well chosen. The voice emerges in the mind, and becomes a mode of experiencing. Every time I’ve latched onto a good one, it’s been this suddenly additional way of seeing the world: once through my usual lens, and then once again through the alternate eyes of whichever character or narrator is coming into being, who notices and expresses different details than I otherwise would have, in language other than mine.
After that the job is to get them to the page and follow them around for a bit. That starts off rough, since you don’t necessarily know where they’re going with it, which is where the editing comes in. Still, you have to let the voice play around first, and to make sure it can safely make its journey from your mind to the page without losing too much of itself while en route.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration and boredom at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
I’m more of the pace-in-circles-and-moan type, though the point remains.
The feeling is that of an unscratchable itch, just beyond the reach of your grasp if only you could get the angle right. It has to do with that divide between the truth you know you can intuit, in your soul, your spirit, what have you, and the gap that must be crossed by language in order to get there. There comes this overwhelming sense that the exact right words are floating just beyond reach, but how to get to them remains a mystery, or changes constantly. Do you sit still? Do you try phrasing after phrasing? Do you wait until tomorrow?
Nothing gives quite the same rush as finally figuring it out. My body tingles.
Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?
That’s a fair theory. Although I think it’s also because the rewards for obsessed-over prose are no longer as commensurate as I imagine they once were.
My friend Samsun Knight wrote a recent piece about the tyranny of agent slush piles, how their vast scope that no single human being can realistically manage leads to an inevitable short-handing on many agents’ part. The writing that floats to the top, and stands a chance of making it to publication, is that which allows for immediate readability. That sort of reveals all its secrets at once, like an ad.
This isn’t to say that stylistic prose cannot be straightforward, only that its ultimate nature is not always obvious. It sometimes has to teach the reader how to read it, which takes time. ‘Time’ here meaning a couple of pages. Some of these make it through. But on a large enough scale, these are the pieces that get put to the side in favor of more simple fare that agents and editors can entirely digest a mere one click away from their inbox.
So why obsess over unique phrasings and quirks of style if the most likely reward is that you remain in the slush?
This masterclass continues at the page below.
