Few writers afford me the privilege of a trip home. Any place is hard to capture the spirit of, and the better the audience knows it, the harder the task. Yves Beauchemin’s portrait of the Montreal I grew up in is the most authentic I’ve encountered, surpassing even Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute in its ability to transport me. It’s not like I enter the dream of the narrative, it’s more like I wake up from the nightmare of living in Toronto.

Here’s my review of the latest volume, from the Toronto Star.

Dan Smith at The Toronto Star prints my review of the new Coupland. Dan is one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with, and fearless. He’s one of the few, scattered, real guys of Canadian literature, and in his years as book editor at the Star, as big an infuence on the literary discourse and practice  in our country as anyone. I only say that for the cheques. Keep ‘em coming, Dan, please.

Somehow, it nevers occurs to me, as I walk through the newsroom to Dan’s office, that this is the paper Hemingway wrote for, that it has more readers than the entire CBC has viewers, that it is the largest newsroom in North America. I only think of that when I’m not there. Usually I’m thinking, I hope to God I can find something worth reading in the boxes and piles and shelves full of galleys, advance reading copies, and books crowding the space. And I usually do. Half the time Dan refuses my choice, or has already assigned it. Once he asked me to “take one for the team,” and review an important new novel no one else wanted to read. But he bore no grudge when I explained, like all the others, that clearly the book would prove inferior, and it would be a case of beating up on an honoured name, and it wouldn’t stop the author’s readers from buying it or the author’s friends from nominating it, and the Establishment from canonizing it, but it would only leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and he bowed to the truth.  And that’s how an Important Canadian Novel is ignored by the most read newspaper in the country.

Somehow, Alfred Jarry has a Facebook page. Maybe that time machine works.

Also, a side-byside publication of Jarry and J.G. Ballard.

Wakefield By Andrei Codrescu

HarperFlamingoCanada, 288 pages

Originally an exile from Ceaucescu’s Romania, Andrei Codrescu is the author of many books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction and a commentator for National Public Radio in the US. In addition, he maintains a personal web site at www.codrescu.com, and edits Exquisite Corpse, a fascinating “anti-literary” zine on the net at www.corpse.org. His latest novel Wakefield,  is itself a product of the globalizing, Americanizing culture it lampoons. It’s a Soviet-style satire on our Capitalist society. At last!

Codrescu hits the ground running in this story of an aimless, affluent American professional who makes a deal with the Devil to postpone his death. While any number of lesser writers would have spent a hundred pages painstakingly describing Wakefield’s shallow, hollow life before bringing Mephistopheles onstage, Codrescu thrusts the devil front and center right away by giving him the first line in the book.

This novel is fully aware of its many literary antecedents, and declares its lineage — and at the same time its ambition and scope — within the first few pages, invoking both Goethe and Bulgakov in the same breath. In some ways it’s easiest to describe Wakefield as a combination of Martin Amis and Mikhail Bulgakov. Although Codrescu seems to like the poor slobs he’s making fun of more than Amis does.

Parallels with Faust and The Master And Margarita abound. Of course Bulgakov was intentionally playing with Goethe’s form, and here Codrescu plays with both his predecessors. But he remains faithful to the higher purpose, the broad comedy and the satire of both. The devil gets up to tricks in theatres full of bored audiences, the humans never doubt their free will despite mounting evidence they are being played with by forces beyond their control, and God remains asleep through the entire proceedings.

In addition, Nathaniel Hawthorne is often referenced, for he also wrote of a man named Wakefield. And Codrescu names another character after Soviet writer Yvgeny Zamyatin, author of the dystopian classic We, a forerunner to George Orwell’s 1984. But here, ironically, Zamyatin is the character who most enjoys his freedom. A Russian immigrant taxi driver, his job demands little in the way of responsibility and his lack of familial relationships allows him to simply enjoy life.

On the other hand, Wakefield’s job requires extensive travel, and his habit of following the line of least resistance leads him from one personal entanglement to another. With remarkable ease he slips in and out of bed with the temporary contacts he makes on his lecture tours. But just as he never delivers a scripted lecture, preferring to ad-lib and never knowing whether or not he’ll actually be able to satisfy his audience, he takes his sexual partners as they come and leaves them without emotion because he has no expectations. Late in the book his estranged daughter shows up looking to reconnect with her father, and the only thing Wakefield can imagine for them to do together is go to the movies — where, of course, they focus their attention on Hollywood fantasies, not on each other.

In fact the only initiative Wakefield shows at all throughout the whole novel is to delay his date with the Devil. In all other instances, he’s led by other characters through the landscapes of their own importance, as a reluctant tourist merely along for the ride. And like any good tourist, along the way he collects souvenirs to show the devil on his return, as proof of his attempt, if not his achievement, of finding authenticity in the world.

That’s the task the Devil sets him: to discover some authenticity in his life, some slim possibility of redemption, through a gesture or icon of the genuine. Wakefield fails not so much because what he sees on his trip is ephemeral (in fact what he sees is nothing but other people on heartfelt, almost spiritual paths) but because he simply has no idea what anything genuine might look, smell or taste like: he has no reference point to recognize for himself what might be important. It doesn’t help that he spends his time on airplanes, in hotel rooms, lecturing corporate serfs, inspecting various forms of utopia, and conferring with desert hermits, California lotus-eaters, technological gurus and even anti-globalization protesters (who are both savvy enough to use the internet to plan and organize strategic protests, and naive enough to be shocked at the resulting police violence). But this is not simply obvious pot-shots at easy targets. Wakefield is a kind of Everyman of contemporary Western society and his journey is both a Pilgrim’s Progress and a trip to Purgatory. And the devil has his own story here, with his own personal lifestyle (satyric, of course), his own career objectives, his own responsibilities and job frustrations.

All this allows room for a range of jokes and mockery from the sly, through the absurd, to the downright slapstick. But this is comedy from the pen of a serious, intelligent mind, which makes it a delicious experience for readers today. And very likely one of those novels which, with the passing of time, attains an increasing importance. Dead-on, deadpan, hilarious.

I’ve read about twenty of these, and own at least that many more. Some have been on my shelf since they were new; some I have in other editions. What’s remarkable about this list is how varied it is, running the gamut from what you’d hand around to prove sf’s worth, to the completely worthless. But still somehow memorable.

I can’t remember where I first found this link.