Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Scene by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The personas writers invent (often subconsciously) for their non-fiction usually attempt or pretend to show more or less of the private self. In Because Somebody Asked Me To, bemedaled and oft-rewarded Guy Vanderhaeghe favours a straight speaking tone, whether reviewing Richard Ford or talking to historians. He speaks on a level you might hear if people on, say, George Street talked about Primo Levi while waiting outside a bar, and that consistency may explain why his writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail and The Walrus and in forewords to books by others.

Yet there is a problem that runs throughout the collection, which means through the years from the earliest piece to the latest. That workmanlike tone is the vehicle for a lawnmower engine of ideas. For example, here’s a standard sentence from his 2013 lecture “Apprehending the Past: History Versus the Historical Novel”: “For English speaking Canadians, the definition of identity is the perpetual question and anxiety, and the recent rise of the historical novel may be just another revisiting of that perennial, nagging subject.” Here, much angst is attributed to NAFTA and globalization. It speaks more to Canadian writers of his generation than to authors of today while sidestepping the essential feature of art: instead of identity and, by extension, identity politics, most Canadian authors I know concentrate on aesthetics. Vanderhaeghe offers nothing useful on that subject. He offers, instead, enthusiastic summaries of works by Annie Proulx and Peter Handke, and he never seems to have reviewed a bad book. Odd, since so many exist. You read one just the other day or last month.

I approached this collection hoping for memorable phrasing or startling insights. The nearly 40 pieces cover, among other subjects, influences, other writers, and the city in Western Canadian fiction, but most of the time I noted “nothing here” because of Vanderhaeghe’s underpowered thinking and writing. Turns out that persona and tone only get you so far, and serious readers look for richer material and other features. A reader of Because Somebody Asked Me To won’t come across an article that sharply realigns their attitudes, a sentence that has a snap or a pithy take. Plainspoken Guy is a harmless Joe.

It is only in “Apprehending the Past,” one of the two substantial essays here (the other is on Cromwell in literature), that Vanderhaeghe offers deeper views on writing historical fiction. He asks: “Why have so many Canadian novelists chosen to adopt a form likely to encounter criticism and disapproval from two fronts, to have their flanks nipped by both historians and literary critics?” My hand is raised, sir! They do so partly due to the demand of publishers to have grindingly realistic and potentially prize-winning (or at least long-listed) novels with approachable characters that will sell and sell, partly out of a love of history, and, sometimes, partly due to insufficient creative imagination to grapple with the present. We all know Modernism only recently entered CanLit, and Postmodernism barely has a toehold, so that leaves realism, and historical realism, like St. John’s, is a natural port. The answer Vanderhaeghe provides, aided by the late academic Herb Wyile, is, basically, Canadian authors did that in the 1960s and 1970s and we’re over it. Hardly sufficient.

As an unofficial spokesperson of exploratory fiction, I would say that there are so many ways Canadians write today that leave official historical fiction to the side. Tim Conley, Douglas Glover, W.D. Clarke, and Spencer Gordon are writers in “the passing scene” Vanderhaeghe mentions in his subtitle, but they aren’t mentioned, and he doesn’t assess contemporary writing very well. He rightly says that Canada’s “print media now shows little if any interest in the literary culture of this country.” Added to that is the fact that very few authors review their colleagues, and that some writers resist even reading reviews. Chad Pelley deathlessly said, “Why do I care what some critic I dunno thought? And what’s exciting about reading a review for a book I haven’t read?” Vanderhaeghe says, with disdain, that what “passes for reviewing is now shunted off to Amazon.ca and Goodreads, where inanity proliferates.” I would say that the reviews on Goodreads can be good or bad or in between. What’s most revealing is that he doesn’t note The Winnipeg Review and Numéro Cinq, both defunct now, that were homes to long reviews by and of Canadian writers (and others), or Canadian Notes & Queries. Perhaps past
scene wasn’t as catchy a subtitle.

Self-help advocates often say that the most powerful word is “Yes,” but as this collection shows, “No” is equally strong. Maybe Guy Vanderhaeghe should have said that more often when asked to consider this or that novel.

Guy Vanderhaeghe is a three-time winner of the Governor’s-General Award for English language fiction for his collections of short stories, Man Descending and Daddy Lenin, and for his novel, The Englishman’s Boy, which was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize and The International Dublin Literary Award. His novel, The Last Crossing, was a winner of the CBC’s Canada Reads Competition. August into Winter, his most recent novel, won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and the Glengarry Book Award and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize. He has also received the Timothy Findley Prize, the Harbourfront Literary Prize, and the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Prize, all given for a body of work.

Publisher: Thistledown Press (September 17, 2024)
Paperback 6″ x 8″ | 324 pages
ISBN: 9781771872584

Jeff Bursey is a Canadian fiction writer and literary critic and author of numerous books.

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