I put A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry on my list of books to read before I die a number of years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about my home turf, as it were. Or close enough. Two of my siblings went to "O'Connor" High School, I played soccer within that track on my community league and high school teams, and fished soccer balls out the front yards of those row houses.
What does it mean to have a local literature? The comments Neil's teacher left on his essay address this concern. "Your choice of topic and treatment show a lack of seriousness. Hopefully, you will one day find a theme worthy of your talent." Writing the local, especially when that local is Edmonton, is worthless. Good writing tackles great ideas and great cities.
Fruit, by Brian Francis, is a book also described as being about small ideas. Here's a synopsis: "It’s 1984 in Sarnia, Ontario, and 13-year-old Peter Paddington is mortified. He’s overweight, has few friends and a crazy family and, to top things off, he’s just sprouted a pair of talking nipples." Despite its unusual topic, Fruit was the runner up in the 2009 CBC Radio's Canada Reads. It beat out novels by David Michael Adams, Michel Tremblay, and Gil Adamson, and was beaten in the end by Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. These other books were for the most part about big ideas, but Fruit held its own and nearly won the contest.
A worthwhile topic doesn't need to win awards. A well-written book about ice fishing on Lesser Slave Lake might appeal to only a small population of readers, but if it provides for them a sense of their own connectedness to their community, it's done good work. And if it's written as well as McGillis's book is, all the better.
Despite the best efforts of certain Russian novelists to the contrary, a worthwhile book is not determined by how big it is, inside or out. A worthwhile city isn't either.
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i just read Fruit two days ago! and i totally agree with you: it's about small ideas that, uh, *weigh* large...
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely post! I am already looking forward to reading fruit!
ReplyDeleteI agree though, that sometimes it's the small ideas that deserve the big attention! I think as English students sometimes we are so focused on looking for these huge overarching ideologies or theories or social commentaries. I'm a big believer in reading just for the sake of reading, and I think sometimes we get too bogged down with the search for the deeper meaning in a book. It is perhaps these hidden gems that should be given more attention, just like perhaps we should be paying more attention to small towns and small areas within the cities. Who knows what you might find when you stop looking so hard :)
Why did you have to go and deflate my elitist literary ego? Here I was so smug and self-satisfied at having read works like War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, thinking myself a true connoisseur for having done so, and you had to go and cruelly disabuse me of that notion by positing that literary virtue isn't indelibly linked to "large" ideas or page counts. Excuse me while I shed a sad tear for literary capaciousness.
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, though, I agree, and think the notion of what is 'worthwhile' in literature is largely determined by the reader, and not inherent in any text. Now excuse me while I return to my Archie comic book.
There is beauty in simplicity.
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