Pick me! Pick me!
Is a little first-novel recognition too much to ask?
BY John Degen
Illustration by Graham Roumieu
Publishing a first novel in Canada can be a lot like tossing a note-laden bottle into Lake Superior. First of all, you’re littering, so there’s that to feel guilty about. And who needs another book, wonder the trees. Then, you have to ponder the long odds of anyone actually finding the damn thing—there’s a lot of cold, angry water out there and endless kilometres of unpopulated shoreline, metaphorically speaking.
Let’s say someone finds the bottle—will she open it? Will she read the note and be at all interested in what you’ve written? There’s just no predicting. Or is there? As in any statistical analysis, you can make a judgment based on probabilities, and the probabilities for the first-time Canadian novelist say no—no one will find it; no one will read it; no one will care. Try to find the “Canadian First Novel” section at your local Wal-Mart or Indigapters big box store, where the vast majority of books are sold in this country. Then see above about the cold, angry water.
If you put a sticker on the bottle that says, “Oprah likes this bottle-note,” your chances marginally increase. Just ask Ann-Marie MacDonald. She took her book, Fall on Your Knees, unto Oprah, and now she’s a multi-dollaraire. I sometimes see her in downtown Toronto, throwing her Oprah money around like a Californian teenager at a cell-phone kiosk. She’s an inspiration to all young Canadian fictioneers.
While I have paid my CanLit dues trolling the stacks at Chaptigo, wondering why, why couldn’t there be just one Degen between the Defoes and DeLillos, I actually have nothing to complain about. My first novel, The Uninvited Guest (“satisfying and resonant ... a very fine book” —The Globe and Mail), managed to bob up on shore this summer as one of six titles short-listed for the prestigious Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Land ho!
So good—hell, better than good. I’ve defied all the odds and received a nomination. Now what? Well, when the announcement of the short list was made, my buddy George Murray over at BookNinja.com wrote that he was pleased to see my book on the list. And then he wrote: “He’s up against some stiff competition though.” Thanks, George. Very Canadian of you. The whole short-list thing was about to go to my head until you put it in the proper perspective.
George’s point, I believe, was that one of the short-listed titles, The Law of Dreams, by Peter Behrens, had already won the Governor General’s Award for fiction this past year, while another, Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O’Neill, was chosen by the entire CBC radio-listening nation as their favourite book on Canada Reads. Behrens’ novel involves immigration during the Irish potato famine, while O’Neill’s is a Holden Caulfield-like story of lost innocence on the streets of Montreal. Um, my book has hockey in it.
The CBC cemented the award as a two-book race with its own announcement of the shortlist, which ran like this: “Peter Behrens’ Governor General’s award-winning book The Law of Dreams and Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals were among six finalists nominated Wednesday for Canada’s First Novel Award.”
On the off chance anyone else actually gets the prize, I fully expect the CBC to report that neither Behrens nor O’Neill won. If disaster strikes at the awards ceremony, watch for this headline: “Peter Behrens and Heather O’Neill among six injured when chandelier crashes onto shortlisted table.”
So, I have begun to practise my delighted-for-Peter-Behrens-or-Heather-O’Neill face.
“On the other hand, it is an honour just to be nominated,” the first-time novelist said grimly, as the last rays of sunlight sank beneath the cold, angry waves of the big lake they call Gitchigume. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy....
* * *
The First Novel Award will be given out on Thursday, October 4, in Toronto. Here are the other excellent titles on the shortlist:
Certainty, by Madeleine Thien; about the vagaries of memory, crossing long stretches of time and geography;
Empress of Asia, by Adam Lewis Schroeder: a tour de force performance of character and voice, about an aging Canadian car salesman on a journey of rediscovery in Southeast Asia;
Stolen, by Annette Lapointe: the story of an observant young thief on the prairie.
