Fiction 2

20 LEITERS IN CANADA 2000 Lyon, Annabel. Oxygen. Porcupine's Quill. '52. $16.95 MacDonald, Mark. Flat. Arsenal Pulp. 136. $14.95 Maxwell, David. Men Lie. Insomniac. 256. $19.95 Mcllwraith, Hiro. Sha/maz. Oolichan. 368. $18.95 Metikosh, Anne. Terra Incognita. Ronsdale. '44· $8·95 Mitchell, Gilaine E. Film Society. Dundurn. 332. $18.99 Osborne, Ralph.Jllst for Comfort. Insomniac. 256. $19.99 Rhenisch, Harold. Camival. Porcupine's Quill. 206. $15.95 Robinson, Grant C. Great ExpectatiOlls: A Survival Manualfor theCalladiall Entrepreneur at the Dawn oftile New Millennium. Porcupine's Quill. 2 70. $19.95 Sabatini, Sandra. The One with the News. Porcupine's Quill. '40. $15.95 Sonik, Madeline. Drying the Bones. Nightwood. 224· $18.95 Stachniak, Eva. Necessary Lies. Dundurn. 266. $'9.99 Theis, Leona. Sight/ines. Coteau. 278. $16·95 Thornhill, Jan. Drought & olher stories. Cormorant. 150. $18.95 Webber, Jennifer Wynne. Defijing Gravity. Coteau. 304. $16.95 Wilcox, Alana. A Grammar of Endings. Mercury. 150. $17.95 Young, Terence. Rhywes with Useless. Raincoast. 198. $18.95 2 / NE IL SESNER What is fiction for now? Forgive the utilitarian and ahistorical edges of the question, which arose as I considered last year's books: fiction as inquiry, as experiment, as a mode of learning; fiction as history redeployed; fiction as entertainment; fiction-making as one of language's highest vocations? Too seldom, fiction satisfying our appetite for a well-shaped story, or exploring how such an appetite leads us astray; too often, fiction as an advertisement for the writer, as if Alice Munro's famous remark some twenty years ago, in her essay 'What Is Real?: were now turned to point in the opposite direction. (Munro commented that Canadian readers did not seem to know what fiction was.) As I write in late September, two other cross-currents rush at each other: the question poses itself against a demonically cartoonish image of airliners swerving into the Twin Towers - a visual image as powerfully recurrent as it is razor-thin - and yet, bringing home language's infinite vitality and indirection from a place suddenly more remote, but in what seems a silent rebuke to many of this year's fictions, there persists the powerful experience of rereading As For Me and My House in Montreal for the last two weeks, in a course entitled 'Understanding Western Canada.' The current global political crisis, with its visually melodramatic images and its hyperbolic rhetoric, and a manylayered fiction, a text that makes and unmakes its meanings through taut local metaphors: horizon; sun, wind, and dust; horses and houses. FICTION 21 I began reading last year's fictions in mid-March, towards the end of a Brazilian summer, and finished after the end of a Canadian one; a tropical canopy still lingers over Elizabeth Hay in early April, the shade and pungent chill of an early autumn evening gathers around David Adams Richards, late September. Both seem appropriate. I Munro again: what she has said, consistently, about the purpose of stories has always seemed to me to apply to all fictional forms. Most recently, she comments in an interview with Peter Gzowski: 'In fact, I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and that's probably why J write stories, because every story is an investigation for me' (Globe and Mail, 29 September 2001, F4). It seems to me that fiction as inquiry and exploration as a form that asks rather than answers questions, and that surprises reader and writer alike rather than simply asserting, confirming, reporting, or observing - is on the wane in Canada. It has been supplanted by fiction that in one way or another announces the writer, and does so at the expense of the story. But the story as an investigation into the real persists, although it has often hidden its inquiry beneath the quiet ironies and wry resignation that Linda Hutcheon among others has pointed to as a signal Canadian mode. This is the art that animates Matt Cohen's superb collection, Getting Lucky, a book that shows us more clearly than many of this year's that realism, invention, pointed social commentary, and a distinct style and morality need not be elements at odds, and that the...