It's Too Hot For CanLit: Canada Day Weekend At The Cottage

I write this from the porch of my cottage. It's part of the Adler family complex on Lake Simcoe, just north of the onion farms of Canal Road.

I write because I can't read. It's been a beautiful day; the sun's been shining, the weather's been perfect. A nice breeze, no humidity, and great light. It's not the kind of day that you can be out there reading The Time In Between. And I tried, I really did. But you can't read Canadian literature on a nice day.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a Muskoka chair, reading Elizabeth Hay's A Student of Weather. It was 105 fahrenheit, and the tremclad paint on the softwood lumber was starting to melt. But I was really into the book. I kept thinking, "Maybe I should get out the toboggan. Is it too early to tap for maple syrup? Rosh Hashana went by so fast this year."

Every Canadian book makes me think of fall. I was just thinking of Anne Hebert today--just thinking! And I swear that I looked up at a maple tree and wondered why the leaves hadn't turned orange.

A particularly nice friend sent me a copy of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip, and for a couple hundred pages I was in the South Pacific. People were sleeping on woven mats. Then I read The Cellist of Sarajevo, and for the next eleven days I watched the lamp lit at noon.

A friend--a professor of literature--once told me that he could never be a protagonist in a Canadian book because he didn't think that he could ever really lose his sense of humour. He was writing a novel which I thought had a lot of promise. The plot, briefly, concerned a university student who witnessed a school shooting. He survived, and was overcome by a sense of guilt. At the same time a family of women--three daughters and a mother--experienced the loss of its patriarch (who was killed in a car crash). The family retreated to their cottage, and the (male) university student--who had been excused for the duration of the semester-- was hired on as a kind of groundskeeper. They would all be isolated together in another take on the Heart of Darkness/Ulysses (not the Joyce) plot. They would be wrecked on each other, would sleep with each other, and finally one would emerge as strong enough for the postmodern world.

I really liked the plot. And the book was written. I read it; it was terrific. When he went to shop it around, the rejection slips all said the same thing: "Interesting, but too funny. Why all the jokes? Canadian or not?"

"David," he told me, "just because the guy sees people getting killed doesn't mean that he turns into a stone. But that's what they want. And this 'Canadian' bullshit! What the hell is that?

"David, not everyone thinks emotional navel-gazing is beautiful. Nothing ever ends well, but it doesn't end now. Plenty of people live."

So I sat on the deck playing Phil Ochs's I Ain't Marchin' Anymore on my cheap Gibson acoustic guitar. I would've played Sundown, but I felt like smiling.