Emergent Fiction

When we consider why we read fiction, two dominant strains of response emerge again and again: we read for aesthetic reasons – looking for works that put together language in surprising or unique or beautiful ways – and we read for moral reasons – returning to works that are able to address in their full complexity the issues that trouble us as humans, issues around personal moral responsibility, family relationships, social structure, male-female interactions, race relations, gender, class hierarchies, politics, and many others. To argue that the works that follow are the most notable prose works by emergent Canadian writers in 2013 is thus not to claim that they give us the proper way to frame a particular issue or that they have (by virtue of their authorship) special implications for the Canadian polity. Many do. Rather, it is to claim that, whether primarily because of literary skill, insight into the human drama, or understanding of the power relations between people and groups, each of these works – particularly Kenneth Bonert’s epic The Lion Seeker and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth – gives us a compelling way to understand what it is to be alive and human (or, in McAdam’s case, chimpanzee) in the twenty-first century. The writers come from diverse parts of Canada, sometimes from diverse cultural backgrounds. They are men and women, gay and straight, and they sometimes write about Canadians, sometimes about people who are far removed from us in time and space.

I begin with a trio of novels that are deeply concerned with the lives of girls and women. In very perceptive ways, these novels treat issues around female emancipation, reproduction, and romance, always attentive to power relations, exposing not only the patriarchal elements in male-female relationships but also, beyond gender politics, the less obvious pressures that humans exert on each other. Janie Chang’s Three Souls returns to 1930s China to tell the story of a woman who tries to defy her father in hopes of getting an education and marrying a handsome but low-status Communist poet. Chang, born in Taiwan and settled in Vancouver, knows how to tell a good story, and she revisits the past in a way that will be familiar to readers of women’s historical fiction (think of Amy Tan or of the future past in The Handmaid’s Tale), showing contemporary readers the various and infernal forms of arbitrary authority that women had to endure. Narrated by a headstrong ghost, Song Leiyin, the novel is emotionally resonant – worrying about the fate of Leiyin, her daughter, and other women too. The major engagements of the Chinese civil war steer clear of Leiyin’s city, but against this background the patriarchy becomes doubly oppressive: if Leiyin stays with her Nationalist father, she will get neither an education nor the man she loves; if she flees the paternal estate, she may get an education, but she will lose status and will be dependent on the whims of the poet Hanchin, who, though he preaches revolution and radical equality, has no plans to remain faithful to Leiyin. The novel’s women form a kind of underclass engaged in their own, more subtle, revolution against the authority of men.

One weakness of Three Souls is that the complexity of the female characters isn’t granted to the men. For male characters, we are given two authoritarian patriarchs (a father powerful over Leiyin and a father-in-law who is less so), a powerful child molester (as a potential arranged husband for Leiyin), a brother who betrays Leiyin and tries to procure young girls for the molester, and the handsome philanderer Hanchin. The only male who comes off well is Baizhen, the uneducated man Leiyin marries, who defers to her in almost everything. Nevertheless, the novel is far from being a politically correct tract. The female characters and even some of the male villains are human figures, expressing the complex interplay of tradition, the political will to power, and family dynamics. Leiyin’s father, for example, had a Western education, but “those few years” abroad can’t compete “with a thousand years of tradition.” On...