Category: General News

Mad Men.  The Walking Dead.  Breaking Bad.  True Blood.  The Wire…

The best of cable TV over the past few years has re-invigorated the medium.  People talk about television drama now in a way they haven’t for a long time, that is, with irony-free interest and brainy passions.  The dinner party intelligentsia can analyze Don Draper at length without shame, without worrying about the conversation being dumbed down or a fellow guest wondering if she has shown up at the wrong address.  You hear fewer educated sorts bragging about not owning a television and more of them buying whole seasons of favourite shows and viewing them, in a ravenous swallow, over the course of a few evenings.  So how did TV manage this turnaround (or at least partial turnaround) from dismissably vapid to meaty substance?  Simple.  TV became novels.

People still read, of course.  They will always read.  But I have this theory:  as much of so-called serious fiction has turned its back on story in favour of message or affirmation or obvious theme – as it specializes in handy book club discussion points over raw narrative – TV drama has stepped in to fill the gap.  The best of cable (and some broadcast) storytelling does what novels do, or used to do:  it draws flesh-and-blood characters and inserts them into high stakes situations and then surprises us with how they respond, what they do, the mistakes they make.  The best examples of this (Breaking Bad, in my opinion) don’t show essentially good people doing essentially good things (the Oprah model) but nakedly real people doing nakedly real things.  These shows trouble us as they entertain us, leaving aside the pre-chewed moral lessons of so much so-called literary fiction.  They trade instead in ambiguity, understandable villainy, the grey zones that make up our actual lived lives (as opposed to life as we might wish it to be).

This is not to say, by the way, that TV has trumped the novel.  Not yet.  But there are now a growing number of dramas on our screens so good – so literary, in the true sense of the term – that they offer a pointed reminder of not only what television can be, but books too.

I am currently re-reading a thicket of short stories of mine, plowing through basically every non-novelized bit of fiction I’ve written since Kiss Me, my first and only story collection.  Some of the pieces go back a decade or more (the oldest being “Haunted Hayride,” published in The Ottawa Citizen in 1998!)  It’s like riding a time machine:  I remember so vividly the physical places and, even more vividly, the mood and emotional circumstances of their writing that I’m often surprised at the different people I’ve been.  No, not different people, exactly, but the different themes I’ve returned to in my life.  I can see myself in the preoccupations of these stories more clearly than if I stared at myself in the mirror for a whole afternoon.

It makes me think that what we call personality – the way we know others, know ourselves – is really a walking bundle of themes.  For some, it’s Lost Love and Missed Opportunity.  For others, Second Chances and The Cost of Lies.  Whatever the big concerns might be, they aren’t usually too numerous, as each of them are more then enough to buoy (or plague) a life to the end.  So not only are we understandable as themes, but we typically are comprised of only one or two.  Three if you’re an especially complicated soul.  And there’s not much you can do about changing them either.  Just try jettisoning one of your themes for longer than a week or two.  They always come back.

My last novel, The Killing Circle, is on a couple of university syllabi that I’m aware of (at both my alma maters, in fact – McGill and UofT).  Why does this tickle me so much?  I think, quite aside from the fizz of pride, it is the thought of young English and Canadian Literature scholars reading my work, just as I read others during my undergrad years.  It’s a bridge between two selves:  the student and the practitioner.  Sure, it makes me feel a little old.  But sometimes the years can bring new and unexpected pleasures.

I bring all this up because the novel that precedes The Guardians, The Killing Circle, is on the reading list of a great course Professor Nick Mount teaches at UofT.  Part of its greatness is that some of the authors on the list are invited to present a talk and converse with Nick and answer questions…and this hour is open to the public.  The Killing Circle session is coming up on Friday, March 18, at 3PM in the Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West.  If you feel like bailing from work a bit early, come on by.  Leafy quads!  Bright young minds!  Hitting the pub afterwards!

There’s a Readings & Appearances page on this site which has a list of, well, my readings and appearances.  But there’s a couple coming up soon I’d like to make special mention of, as they represent “home turf” to me (both are places/hosts I’ve done readings for before, and are close to my heart).  First off, on Wednesday the 16th, 7:30 PM, I’m at Harbourfront in Toronto, reading with Roberta Rich and Keith Hollihan.  Then on Wednesday the 23rd, also at 7:30, I’m reading with Ian Hamilton at the Princess Cafe, 46 King St. N. in Waterloo, hosted by Words Worth Books.  I know these are both mid-week things in godforsaken February, but it would be great to see you.