Arrival: The Story of CanLit by Nick Mount (review)

Nick Mount’s Arrival covers the ‘long decade between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s’ (p. 12). He follows Margaret Atwood’s 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, and the witty ‘survival/arrival’ rhyme is not coincidental. However, writing a few decades after the CanLit boom means that Mount has meaningful perspective but also more ground to survey as he maps the changing landscapes of the Canadian literary scenes. Surprisingly for a survey-type book published in English, CanLit en français is both present and well-explained. Mount’s overview is admirable, if perhaps overly scrupulous at times (in an insightful section on Michel Tremblay, we are reminded that ‘joual’ is ‘the French of working-class Montreal’ (p. 255)).

Arrival’s 18 chapters are full of sometimes bawdy anecdotes – for example, Margaret Laurence once ‘tried to have sex with Al Purdy, but they were both too drunk’ (p. 185) – but its many tales are firmly kept in check by two types of glue. First the superglue: Mount downplays the popular story that Big Government stoked the CanLit fires. Instead, he adopts a rather materialist viewpoint, convincingly arguing that affluence (a word that appears 25 times) fuelled the flames. Writers such as Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee ‘became writers just as the largest, most affluent generation in Canadian history became readers’ (p. 33), just as consumers were looking for ways to lighten their pockets. Indeed, the ‘proliferation of coffee-table books was driven by the proliferation of coffee tables’ (p. 33). Though some might be put off by the plump comparison between ‘high literature’ and mere objects, to my ear Mount is spot-on in describing a time before Canadian English majors had to take a CanLit course.

Mount’s other glue is a glittery variety guaranteed to polarise. Confessing his ‘naïve’ belief that ‘enjoyment is part of art’ (p. 39), Mount provides sidebar evaluations of 109 Canadian books. His out-of-five rating system for poetry, novels, and non-fiction will infuriate some readers. I, however, loved the pithiness and the fact that he brazenly (blasphemously?) bestows one star even on big names such as Irving Layton, Rudy Wiebe, and Mordecai Richler. For example, ‘[S]taying awake while reading’ (p. 84) Wiebe’s Temptations of Big Bear (1973) is a challenge; Richler’s Incomparable Atuk (1963) is little more than ‘a silly book’ (p. 58) about an Indigenous poet from Baffin who takes literary Toronto by storm. The snappy sidebars are of course fun to agree or disagree with, but they also usefully portray the changing of the guard and predict future changings – while ‘Hugh Hood, Dave Godfrey, and Audrey Thomas are mostly unread today’ (p. 317), Mount optimistically imagines ‘the Harry Potter generation’ (p. 45) progressing to the magic-obsessed Robertson Davies. Taken together, these mini-reviews portray what was hot back in the day and what went on to become canonical.

Arrival is equipped with fun and informative notes, gorgeous photographs, and a solid index that includes a tellingly Canadian entry: ‘women writers dominate boom’ (p. 431). Especially in terms of what remains, CanLit is female.