The great Canadian novel

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I was alerted this week to an X thread devoted to the great Canadian novel. The first two candidates were Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. As happens on X, things quickly went off the rails:

Bent Johnson appears to have been making a joke, although Engel’s book has a better claim to greatness than you would guess from that cover. (Have to admire how handsome they made the bear.)

The thread left me wondering which books deserve consideration as the great Canadian novel?

We need criteria. These are mine. Yours may vary.

1. It has to be a novel, which immediately excludes two towering figures. Alice Munro resisted calling The Lives of Girls and Women a novel and Mavis Gallant’s linked stories, however brilliant, were more collections than novels.

2. The great Canadian novel needs to succeed as literature, resonate with some large portion of the reading public, and outlast its moment. There have been great Canadian novels written in the last twenty-five years, but I’m setting them aside, waiting to see if the next generation, or a generation after, picks them up.

3. The great Canadian novel should be recognizably Canadian and say something important about Canada. So Two Solitudes is a contender, but Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is not. That’s nothing against A Fine Balance. If we’re choosing the greatest novel written by a Canadian, it might win, but it is a story about India. Also, it is not enough to reflect a Canadian sensibility: the novel needs to directly and comprehensively engage with Canadian experience and major Canadian themes. So The English Patient and Life of Pi, two other candidates for the best novel by a Canadian, are also out. Canada is important in The Handmaid’s Tale, and one might argue that obsession with our southern neighbour is the dominant feature of Canadian life, but its more direct subject is a dystopian United States, so it’s out, too. Yes, that’s arbitrary. Life of Pi and The Handmaid’s Tale indirectly say more about Canada than many books that address Canada directly. But those are our criteria.

4. I’m excluding French-language novels because I don’t read French well enough. Although I will say that Maria Chapdelaine seems to be culturally indispensable to Quebec in a way no novel is to English Canada.

Nominees? I have four, and they’re embarrassingly obvious.

Anne of Green Gables. Likely winner. Set in the nineteenth century, written in 1908, and phenomenally popular ever since. The greatest franchise in Canadian culture. An influence on generations of authors in Canada and around the world. Unmistakable Canadian setting with an identifiable Canadian take on landscape, community, rootedness. Its inclusive idea of belonging still resonates today. Weak on the bigger Canadian picture, but it’s the only novel that has become part of our shared mythology in the same manner as Huckleberry Finn in the US or Ulysses in Ireland.

Alias Grace. Deeply rooted in Canadian history and mythology, beautifully executed (without the showiness of Blind Assassin); not as popular as Handmaid’s Tale but wildly so by any other measure. Atwood’s mid-nineteenth-century Canadian society is not the peaceful, orderly, morally superior one we like to imagine, yet utterly believable. Riveting central character and a great deal of very Canadian ambiguity.

Fifth Business: Robertson Davies ripped the lid off the repressed spiritual and imaginative lives of Canadians. A brilliant, wickedly funny novel with a roomful of live characters. It ranges from small town Ontario to Vimy Ridge to Bay Street. Bestseller in 1970 and still avidly read today. Davies has a stronger case if we include the whole Deptford Trilogy.

Solomon Gursky Was Here. My choice. Inventive, daring storytelling. What it lacks in precision it makes up in vitality. A sprawling, satirical, multi-generational epic—we so seldom do epic—about a family of bootleggers who become respectable liquor tycoons. Treats Canada, its geography, history, myths, and social order, as comprehensively as Moby Dick treats whaling. Richler consciously attempted the great Canadian novel while mocking the idea of it on every page. “Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.”

I’ve shared this list with a few people and most want to swap out Alias Grace for The Stone Angel, but old Hagar never worked for me. Other alternatives have come to mind, or been suggested: As for Me and My House, In the Skin of a Lion, Obasan, The Stone Diaries, The Mountain and the Valley, The Black Robe, No Great Mischief, and, yes, Bear. Several votes for Two Solitudes, but it’s a better idea than a novel.

You will have your own thoughts. Leave them in the comments section and we’ll discuss in a forthcoming newsletter.

The more I think about this little exercise, the less convinced I am that we need to declare a great national novel. It’s a borrowed notion. The quest for the great American novel was born of US cultural insecurity vis-à-vis the UK. We should leave them to it. No sense compounding insecurities.

I’ve also developed serious doubts about my criteria. I wouldn’t be surprised if we come to agree, in time, that Canadian fiction found its surest footing in the nineties when the likes of A Fine Balance, The English Patient, MG Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets turned our gaze outward in decisive fashion. This leaves Canada less the subject of our fiction than a vantage point. But if our specific excellence is cosmopolitanism, or transnationalism, we should embrace it.

Alternatively, one could argue that our genius is the short story, with Alice and Mavis in a league of their own.

Or one might find that the strength of our national literature is in nonfiction. The Literary Review of Canada produced a list of Canada’s 100 most important books in 2006. It contained thirty-five novels and story collections, eight works of poetry or drama, and fifty-seven works of nonfiction.

The point is we don’t need a great Canadian novel to have a great literature.

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