The Acrobats
by Mordecai Richler
McClelland & Stewart, 2002
Happiness (the novel formerly known as Generica)
by Will Ferguson
Penguin, 2002
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Look at the covers. Which one looks like a good time?
One is written by Canada's greatest literary humourist, the other by a
hard-running up-and-comer. I don't need to tell you which is which. But
the contrast is startling, eh?
At long last we once again have The Acrobats,
Mordecai Richler's first published novel (1954). While he was alive,
Richler kept it out of print. It is back thanks to his widow, who
apparently feels more generous towards the young Mordecai than Richer did
himself.
When he returned to Canada after publishing his debut in
Europe, Richler had this exchange with his father:
"I hear you published a novel while you were over
there."
"Yes, it's true."
"What's it called?"
"The Acrobats."
Pause. "What the hell do you know about the
circus?"
Richler came from that kind of family. And despite it
all at the age of 19 he started writing the novel that would mark his
debut. Needless-to-say, it's not about the circus.
Reading it now after the career has ended, knowing all
that he went on to produce (and after all of Richler's effort to suppress
it), is a revelatory experience. Revealing what? An over-earnest author. A
precocious talent. Several moments of instant recognition (the novice
author has a harder time hiding; his patterns are more transparent; we see
the early footprints on the path we know he will follow).
For example:
Suddenly Louis remembered something. He turned to
Toni. "André once told me that politics didn't interest him as
such. He said it was poverty that was ugly, and that so-called justice
was beside the point. He said that the poor must have more because they
were human and no human should be ugly."
This is the Richler who would later say he was a
socialist because he knew what poverty did to people. (After his death,
right-wing columnist Barbara Amiel said she shared all of his opinions and
The National Post continues to mythologize him as a conservative
icon, but this is clearly a false memory and a distortion. Richler was
never an ideologue; he distrusted hardliners on both the Left and the
Right.) In fact, we can read The Acrobats as part of a life-long
conversation with the self; the enduring search through a forest of
ambiguity and competing demands for that ancient Holy Grail, the good
life. In this early novel the terms of the debate are decided, and they
are often set out quite clearly, often by André, whom Ted Kotcheff calls
in his Afterword to this edition: "the most transparent projection of
Mordecai."
Here is Richler again in the voice of André, a painter:
"Look, I don't paint for audiences. I don't make
a hobby out of humanity and I don't collect workers. But Pepe likes my
stuff. So do many of his friends. But for the most part their
appreciation of my stuff is snobbery, and if they were more bourgeois
they would have about as much use for art as their fellows. It's just as
true that their tremendous concern with social justice is directly
related too their own poverty and as much expected of them as is the
puerility and such that we get from the bourgeois. Christ, there's
nothing unusual about being a bourgeois or a worker. It is the man who
is unusual - the man who rises above the restrictions of his own class
to assert himself as an individual and humanitarian. It's pretty damn
elementary to be aware of social injustice and poetic truth and beauty
but to be capable of empathy, to understand the failings of a man - any
man - even as you condemn him, well ... Look, every human being is to be
approached with a sense of wonder. The rest is crap, or
incidental."
On my fridge I have a column Richler wrote for The
National Post on January 13, 2001, titled "Retiring on a grace
note." It's about Lucien Bouchard's resignation as Quebec premier. It
concludes:
So Lucien Bouchard retires from the political scene on
a grace note. I wish him and his family well.
Richler, perhaps the Quebec nationalists' gravest
critical enemy, blessed Lucien Bouchard, who had taken Quebec to the brink
of nationhood, with his own grace note. The echo is strong: "It's
pretty damn elementary to be aware of social injustice and poetic truth
and beauty but to be capable of empathy, to understand the failings of a
man - any man - even as you condemn him, well ... Look, every human being
is to be approached with a sense of wonder. The rest is crap, or
incidental."
In the Afterword, Kotcheff calls Richler a
"humanist". He writes,
humanists like André and Mordecai [found it
impossible] to join the [Communist] party, no matter how much they
sympathize with its goal to end poverty and injustice. André knows what
he's against but not what he's for. In this state of social and
political paralysis, and in a deep depression about the future, he is
drinking himself to death. No answers are provided; only at the end of
the book is a fragile expression of unsubstantiated hope offered up.
The Acrobats shows us that the young Richler had
been closely reading his Hemingway, his Camus, and very likely his Orwell.
When he spoke about his reasons for suppressing the novel, Richler called
it derivative and implied it wasn't worth preserving. Again, we can be
glad that Florence, his widow, didn't agree with him. Not because
Richler's analysis on his novel was wrong. It clearly is derivative. Its
prose is at times wooden; its structure is simple; its authorial hand too
overt, its tone frighteningly earnest. If Richler wasn't Richler, we
wouldn't be reading this novel in 2002. There is nothing significant about
its re-release except its place in the oeuvre of its author. But that is
compelling reason enough.
A plot summary: An expatriate Canadian painter, André,
camps out in post-revolutionary Spain, attempting to escape a dark past in
Montreal. He frequents a bar and has a relationship with a local dancer,
who is the object of secret affections of a decommissioned Nazi colonel.
There is much talk of politics and things end poorly. There isn't a decent
joke in the whole book. Oh, Mordecai. Lighten up! We know he would. But he
kept the moral tone he developed early and against large odds.
Richler wrote:
It is the man who is unusual - the man who rises above
the restrictions of his own class to assert himself as an individual and
humanitarian.
Richler succeeded in being the nation's brightest
literary light for many years, and he did it by carving himself a place
where he could create, a place where he could ask the big questions, and
craft his answers into narrative. He did it despite his family and despite
the dead weight of the colonial Canada of his youth. It behooves us to
remember that. And to admire it, and emulate it.
Will Ferguson's Happiness (the novel formerly
known as Generica) tries to do just that.
I thought often of Cocksure (1968), perhaps
Richler's most fully sustained satire, while reading this book. How do
they compare? Imperfectly. Both create worlds within which their authors
explore their comic conceits, but Richler is better at the one-liner:
"What the hell do you know about the circus?" Ferguson spreads
his joke out over 339 pages. His prose also often reads like regurgitated
social theory, which is where he's made his money so far, writing
non-fiction books like Why I Hate Canadians and his exploration of
our Prime Ministers, Bastards & Boneheads.
Here's an example:
Onwards they drove: an ex-Commie, an ex-Hippie, and an
ex-X. Three generations, lost and adrift, traversing a vast empty
landscape littered with fallen heros: Steinbeck, Kerouac, Knight Rider.
This isn't so much literature as demographics. As
satire, it's about as pointed as Ferguson gets.
A second point of contention. Based on internal
evidence, Happiness is about as Canadian a book as you'll come
across. But where Richler had the courage to make his protagonists
Canadian, Ferguson sets his novel squarely in the USA. Not that Canadians
don't get mentioned, "both English and French" as he says at one
point. One character even mentions Grey Owl, surely dead giveaway for a
Canadian in drag. Perhaps Ferguson thought his satire would be stronger if
it was set in the heartland of the capitalism and feel-good-culture that
are his largest targets. On the other hand, one can't escape the thought
that there was discussion around the publisher's table about sucking up
Yankee dollars.
Which is ironic, because at the bare bones level, this
is a novel about sucking up Yankee dollars - and the balloon it aims to
pop is the ever-brimming hope of American optimism. The self-help book
craze, to be specific.
A plot summary: A disgruntled young editor at a New York
publishing firm pulls a mangled manuscript of a self-help book off the
slush pile. In an attempt to both save his job and screw his boss, he
publishes it as is - and voilà! It not only become a best-seller, it
"saves the world," persuading its readers to be happy and
putting the tobacco companies and every other sin-based industry out of
business. Seeing this as a bad thing, the editor tries to un-do his wrong.
I won't give away the ending.
A self-help book that actually works. That's the central
conceit. To his credit, Ferguson makes it work. However, publishing
industry insiders will get a greater chuckle out of this book than the
general reader.
Here's one of the slyer jokes:
"You know, I really hate it when a writer tries
to disguise exposition as dialogue," said May.
Which is just what Ferguson is doing, he knows he's
doing it, and he wants us to know he knows he's doing it, while at the
same time telling us he knows he knows he's telling us that he's doing it.
Etc, etc. Nasty, cutting stuff, but pretty limited in appeal.
In The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis reviews The
Best of Modern Humour, edited by Mordecai Richler. Amis writes:
Like Richler's fiction, the anthology divides fairly
equally into two unrelated categories: first, prose that is incontestably,
fanatically funny and is (therefore) not funny at all; and, second,
prose that is going about its business as prose should and is only
incidentally or secondarily funny, or quite funny, or (in many cases)
not funny at all. ...
Some of these offerings are no more than mildly funny,
and were never meant to be. They are loosely comic as opposed to
humourous, comedy being defined as a world where the greatest sins are
folly and pretension, and where the ultimate deliverance is merely one
of laughter. Your response to these writers at their best, is a
persistent smile of admiration - a response that Mr. Richler should
perhaps have aimed for all along.
Trust Amis to put everything in context. Happiness
tries very hard to be funny, and it sometimes succeeds. Where it doesn't
succeed in being funny, it manages to be clever and lets us know that
Ferguson was an attentive undergraduate - as he frequently drops names and
theories, such as Marx and Skinner. But Happiness does not provoke
"a persistent smile of admiration"; it is too earnest for that.
In this respect it too closely mirrors The Acrobats. The author's
hand is too eagerly shown throughout, and it is the hand of the social
scientist, not the novelist. Ferguson needs to let loose the reigns, set
free "folly and pretension." Let's hope he will next time and
give us a real comic novel.
Michael Bryson is the publisher/editor
of The Danforth Review.
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