Reviewed by Paul Duder

Author/critic/professor/grouch Stephen Henighan has famously made his bones by way of the lusty swaths of scorched earth and pillage he’s cut through the various and sundry precincts of the Canadian literary landscape. As most conveniently showcased in 2002’s When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing and this year’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture -- both previously reviewed in these, ah, "pages" -- when Henighan is of a mood to take aim at his confreres/competitors, he keeps his quiver full and his environment target rich.

At times, his critical approach takes the direct, conventional route, confining itself (for the most part, anyway) to the words he finds on the page, as with:

In the arts, and particularly in literature, crisis has bred conformity, suffusing our novels with a desire to transcend history into a commercially congenial strand of non-engaged high art: to ascend the best-seller list while retaining the ‘literary fiction’ label" (WWDTW)

Other times, he’ll broaden his focus, blithely painting, for example, our creative class as pliant, co-conspiring lapdogs in the American process of homogeneization/disneyfication of world literature and culture.

When feeling puckish and (one suspects) particularly under-appreciated, it’s good old fashioned pantheon-busting that’s the order of the day (Coupland? Shields? Atwood? Don’t even ask).

But when really pissy, it seems it’s our very national genome that draws his scorn, as when he disparages the

Zeitgeist of an essentially passive middle class that yearns to get its country back, though it is unwilling--unlike nation-building middle classes elsewhere in the world--to make any sustained effort or sacrifices to achieve this goal. (WWDTW).

Whichever way you parse Henighan’s professional dyspepsia--and surely there’s ample fodder for a generation’s worth of navel-gazing, self-referential CanLit meta-theses--it’s baked so deeply into the cake as to bleed into and inform even his fictional personae. 

And so the stories collected in A Grave in the Air find Henighan, dependably, in what must now be approaching something like the twentieth unbroken year of a really, really rotten mood.

Which is all to say that both Henighan (having been so powerfully nasty about CanLit) and your correspondent (Henighan having been at least as nasty about CanCrit) are asking for trouble here.

In fairness (says he, waving a white-ish flag), his proscriptions are not without prescription; for our manifold ills and failings, he advises in particular a return to specific and local detail and consciousness. In his formulation,

…attention to local detail and literary innovation are inseparable from one another; [if writers would observe] Canadian reality in meticulous detail, circumstances would oblige at least some to generate inventive, avant-garde narrative…. (AROTAOC).

Or, as distilled by Nigel Beale in a recent Globe and Mail piece: "buy local".

Sounds nice and all--local values, what’s not to like?--and yet a little curious. A re-hash of hoary shibboleth "write what you know", however academically supercharged the presentation, seems a tad rickety as a foundation on which to erect a critical approach. And, even apart from the queer astringency of expecting writers to voluntarily restrict their palette--both entertainment and edification being difficult enough to jimmy up as it is--how goofy is it to expect anyone beyond the immediate "locals" to be able to appreciate, or even identify, the echt-ness of the localism anyway?

Still, Henighan can obviously propound whatever critical theory he pleases, with our compliments. But it’s worth bringing up because of the curious degree to which he seems to ignore his own dictum in this collection. In lieu of the fraught Prairie coming-of-age or the plucky poverty-stricken Fundy lobstermen that we might expect/dread, these eight stories instead bounce around between Romania, Poland, Germany, the U.K., Bosnia and Central America, barely touching down in our home and native land long enough for a change of underwear.

Sure, it’s unfair (I suppose) to castigate him for not hewing to his own line. But in the context of his own oeuvre, and the Torquemada-like fervour with which he denounces the apostate, the question arises: is he really neglecting his own bible, or is he instead so hubristic as to believe that he’s being faithful to it? Is he such a soi-disant citizen of the world that he sees himself as "local" everywhere? Is the whole planet his backyard?

His extensive citations and acknowledgements suggest that this may in fact be the case; he is (he seems to want them to attest) no tourist. Certainly, this rigour goes some ways towards explaining his arid, medicinal tone, AGITA’S predominant flavouring, and flaw. These stories can feel less like fiction than research papers, recitations of the pressing issues of the day repurposed as dutiful and academic travelogues.

In truth, it seems Henighan touches on localism principally through its absence; his characters are invariably peripatetic, searching, escapist. Running from war, its aftermath, or its echoes, they’re defined by little beyond their deracination. Oh, and -- here’s a shocker -- their unhappiness.

The title story, the last and by far the longest, contains all his favoured tropes: rootless, multilingual youth, romantic disappointment, career stasis, the perils of cultural amnesia and -- patently the story’s raison d’etre -- a Cook’s tour of twentieth century history, masquerading as narrative. In particular, Henighan provides splenetic run-throughs of the Balkan predations of both WWII and 1990’s vintage, styling (not unreasonably) the latter as largely an avoidable by-product of mass consensual ignorance of the former. This is Henighan’s best stuff--it has the power to grip commensurate with the heft of its material -- but it still reads like a lecture from a hectoring, self-righteous grad student.

The characters in AGITA tend to be young, and Henighan puts them through their occasional paces in the boudoir. (In Henighanian terms, what could be more immediate, elemental -- local?). But here’s how the roster reads: a teenager sleeps with her boss’s son, who’s engaged; a newly divorced man has an unhappy one-night stand with a pregnant married woman; a guy breaks up with his fiancée because of the mercenary frigidity of her pillow talk; a woman sleeps with a writer to get the rights to a manuscript. There’s more, but the message is clear: in a world riven by war, chaos and dislocation, we mustn’t forget that sex can be a massive bummer as well.

And -- another shocker -- Henighan finds ample time to slag the homeland. The Canadians in these stories have invariably flown the coop, and the only two significant characters he actually situates here are immigrants, dripping with superiority when faced with "the aggressively complacent expression that Torontonians adopted when asserting their importance in the face of Canadian insignificance"; Toronto streets that "looked as desolate as unmarked trails, [when] even the merest English footpath had more history"; the horror of the LCBO’s "wines chosen by bureaucrats"; or the comically parochial insularity of Westmount’s Anglo elite. Standing in for Henighan, the remove of their gaze sees only flaws. If this is "buying local", he can have it.

His dyspeptic, schoolmarmish prose doesn’t just throw up schematic, robotic characters, but as often clunky, didactic phrase-making. "She stared him in the eyes. Her dark-brown incisiveness pinned him from beneath eyebrows of felt-like softness" goes one unintentionally embarrassing encounter. Worse, can anyone deny that "…I came home from work and told Karolina about my suspicion that the feasibility study I was working on was being skewed by politicos from the Prime minister’s office to prod the civil servants towards the conclusion that the ideal site for a certain expensive boondoggle was in the middle of the Minister’s riding…" may be the most shockingly dull sentence ever written.. "The Killing Past", a reminiscence of a pre-WWII soccer match between England and Germany, proffers such Boy’s Own groaners as "Young men fight the war…but it is old men like us who make the war. We must show the old men in our countries that young men must do sport, not war", and "the only true victory for either of our nations is the victory of sport over politics!". Oy.

A well-meant suggestion: Henighan's writing is smart and informed, but almost always joyless and programmatic. To quote the late Warren Oates, in dopey-American-soldiers-abroad farce Stripes -- a source chosen not incidentally for the cyclonic vehemence with which Henighan would sneer at it -- he might want to just, you know, "lighten up".

Torontonian Paul Duder considers himself a Canadian, but not a "Canadian writer", and so doesn’t really take personal offense. He also buys locally-grown produce (at least when it’s not too inconvenient).