Emergent Fiction

The seventy-four novels and collections of short stories received this year showcase that it is tough to be a Canadian writer; there are so many new and emerging authors who possess literary talent that it is difficult to stand out. Not too long ago, the dearth of good reading was a muchlamented trait of Canadian literature. Now, the opposite is true; the Canadian publishing industry excels at finding and supporting new voices who are able to pen competent fiction. The bounty represents a gift and a challenge to readers of Canadian literature; how does one find time to read and make sense of all the exciting new fiction being written in Canada? This article offers a tentative answer through the critical review of the featured texts; it is organized into sections on literary experiments, feminist fiction, and literary short fiction. The sections are overlapping, and many of the texts could make an appearance in each category. The sections identify broader patterns in emerging Canadian fiction and suggest how they continue, and/or break with, what has come before.

Many of the texts contribute to an emerging experimentalism that takes playful delight in the unexpected and wonderful. While thematically diverse, they express a shared ethos – great fiction has the ability to surprise readers through the combination of formal risk taking, novel characterization, and unexpected plotting. These characteristics are, perhaps, best exemplified by Michelle Winters's I Am a Truck, a novel about three characters whose fates are interconnected by a passion for trucks. Winters transforms the joys of trucking – cruising a pristine beauty through town, off-roading doughnuts through thick mud, participating in brand wars – into a stunningly creative novel that refreshes long-standing regionalist themes and introduces a new style of comedy to Canadian literature. The texts celebrate how experimentation reconfigures the banal into the extraordinary.

Authors this year demonstrated a heightened thematic interest in feminism. Many writers pursued creative means to take issue with patriarchy, particularly how the reductive sexualization of female bodies facilitates exploitation. It is difficult to situate the texts in relation to CanLit Accountable and #MeToo. Most of the texts were, in all likelihood, completed prior to November 2015 when the Steven Galloway controversy was revealed and, most certainly, published prior to the emergence of the #MeToo movement in October 2017, although these specific crises were the product of long-standing institutional practices that facilitated and blinkered sexual assault and harassment in the Canadian literature community. For insights or critical stances on CanLit Accountable, it is perhaps best to ask the authors directly. Nevertheless, three texts do critique sexual harassment in Canadian art: Marianne Ackerman's Mankind and Other Stories of Women, Jowita Bydlowska's Guy, and Meredith Quartermain's U Girl. They expose different ways influential males abuse their power for sex, the harm their exploitation inflicts upon young women, and how institutional power compels women to modify their bodies, mannerisms, and art to conform to patriarchal expectations. The section does not delineate a new genre or movement of feminist writing, but the volume of works developing themes relating to sexism and gender-based inequity, and the quality of the writing, merits flagging as a significant trend in 2016 fiction.

The concluding section highlights accomplishments in literary short fiction. The texts share a similar aesthetic approach to the short story: they tend to create heightened characterization through psychological realism and an economy of form. Intestines may serve as tentative metaphor for literary short fiction; our intestines fit into a remarkably small space considering they span an average of 6.5 metres, and, if you were to slice them open, they would reveal much about what the person has been up to and where they might be going. The collections are thematically diverse, yet they share an aesthetic that tinkers with form to produce expansive characterization in otherwise compact literary space.

Literary experiments

Michelle Winters's I Am a Truck is a unique contribution to Canadian literature. It experiments with cartoony playfulness and the sudden transformation of the mundane into the wonderful to produce a delightful novel. Set in small-town New Brunswick, it tells the story of...