Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Alex Good (review)

Revolutions is presented by the publisher as ‘the first book-length critical survey of twenty-first-century Canadian fiction, with in-depth essays examining subjects such as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effects of the digital revolution and the dark legacy of what has come to be known as the Canadian literary establishment’. Unlike Margaret Atwood (in The Burgess Shale: The Canadian Writing Landscape of the 1960s, 2017), Good is pessimistic about the future for Canadian literature. By the 1980s, he argues, it had become obvious that the golden years were over, ‘the ladder to those heights had been drawn up, the doors closed, the Golden Book filled’ (p. 50). The same applies to literary criticism. Art in Canada, Good claims, has now ceased to have any special value. The forty years in which Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje were producing their best-known works were years of ‘tyranny’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘enveloping dull sameness’ (p. 84).

While new writers like Douglas Coupland have entered the Canadian literary scene, Good is grudging in his assessment of their contributions. He argues, for example, that Coupland owes his popularity to ‘his denial not of an adult past but of an adult present’ (p. 94). Coupland’s writing ‘simply doesn’t have an adult gear … When he tries to be serious he falls into sentiment, banalities, and evocations of the vaguely wondrous’ (p. 100). Good also criticises the writing of David Adams Richards, describing it as ‘melodramatic drama’ that allows for ‘no moral ambiguity’ (p. 109). Equally serious is the state of contemporary Canadian literary culture. Good claims that critics are ‘essentially volunteers. There is a chasm, especially wide in Canada, not just between public and professional consciousness but between the study of literature as part of a larger, living culture’ (original emphasis, p. 235). In the final chapter, ‘The Digital Apocalypse’, Good criticises the content of works published on the internet, describing them as mere ‘crap’. Perhaps the internet is a kind of revenge on art, ‘tearing it down from its pedestal and making it finally as disposable and ephemeral, as mortal, as the rest of mere humanity’ (p. 259). Canadian writers can no longer believe in any kind of posterity for their works. The chapter ends with a nostalgic look back at the nineteenth century, when Canadian literature could educate, give pleasure, and even change life.

At best, Good’s study encourages us to view the contributions of the so-called Golden Age of Canadian literature in a new light, but it is not impartial; neither is it comprehensive. That Canadian literature and criticism are facing serious challenges is not in dispute but just a cursory reading of such studies as Carol L. Beran’s Critical Insights. Contemporary Canadian Fiction (2014) demonstrates that there is more reason for hope than despair.