Journal Article

The crisis of non-fiction

Kostash, Myrna

2003

Overview

Brian Bethune writing in Maclean's magazine (November 11/02) in the wake of the announcements of the Governor-General's prizes, argued on behalf of nonfiction that, for all of our fiction writers' accolades and celebrity abroad, \"its [fiction's] global influence pales beside [nonfiction] works by Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye.\" This was cheering to hear. But six months later, Andrew Nikiforuk's publisher went out of business. And Nikiforuk was quoted at the same time as not being sure he could afford to stay in the business of writing. As Gary Ross put it in the Globe&Mail (April 23/03), \"I can't believe how little winning the Governor-General's Award did for Nikiforuk.\" Well, I can't say I was surprised, although I was terribly disappointed to hear it. I was aware that among the people I know in Alberta, for instance, who read Canadian writing, there had been tremendous discussion about Guy Vanderhaege's new novel, The Last Crossing, which had not won a prize, and Carol Shield's Unless, which had also been overlooked, but precisely no conversation about the Nikiforuk book, which had not only won a national prize but had addressed a public issue of the first importance in Alberta, the environmental crimes of the oil patch. Those of us working in the genre, as writers, publishers and editors, don't need to be persuaded of that argument. The real crisis lies in the apparent indifference of the large majority of readers and media to the national discourses on society that circulate as our nonfiction. It was the National Post's Noah Richler who wrote acerbically about the alternative: \"Our writers of prose fiction are Canada's literary celebrities, singing the landscape, often badly, and revealing our history to us in dollops generally swallowed without too much pain.\" [Nov 27/02] Compared to the novel as entertainment, does our nonfiction seem somehow too difficult to read, not action-packed enough or lacking a dramatic story to keep us interested? How many times have I heard otherwise thoughtful people, literate citizens, claim never to read nonfiction as a matter of some principle: they find it too \"depressing\" or \"fatiguing\" to read at the end of a stressful day. Richler believed that the imbalance in the market for literary fiction and nonfiction was almost \"perverse\" and invited us to consider what it says about ourselves that, while literary fiction flourishes and is nurtured at every level of production from writing grants to business-sponsored prizes to proliferating workshops to protective criticism, we do not support a national public affairs magazine in this country, the sort of magazine like The New Yorker, or Harper's or Granta, that is the seedbed of our next generation of nonfiction writers? (Nov 27/02)(1)

• Publisher: Association of Canadian Studies
• Subject: Canadian literature / Nonfiction / Reading