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Becoming a fiction guy
I used to call myself a nonfiction guy.
If somebody wrote an inside poltical memoir laying out incompetence and mean-spiritedness behind closed doors, I would be the first to read it. If someone wrote a book about about a world in crisis laying out a five-step plan to fix it, I would be giddy with excitement. If you gave me a book about the size of municipal councils in Ontario since Confederation…well, let’s not get too carried away here. You get the point.
Fiction had been something of an afterthought for me—reserved for summer holidays or when no book on a Serious Subject was handy. I could enjoy a John Le Carre or Ian Rankin novel with the best of them. But literary fiction, while I didn’t say it in so many words, was for those who wanted to overlook the problems of the real world. Over the past few years, however, I have become much more of a fiction guy. I am kicking myself for ignoring fiction for so long: I have a lot of catching up to do.
Fiction has recently received the social science seal of approval. Studies find that reading fiction increases the capacity to identify and understand others’ thoughts—to empathize. One put it that fiction engages the mind to think in less stereotypical ways about others, and to see them instead as “complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration.”
Of course, it has many other benefits. It allows for the imagination of something different from the here and now. It educates. It transports. It entertains.
If I had to choose one book that tipped me over to the fiction side, it would be Miriam Toews’ Swing Low, a (non-fiction) memoir of her father, who suffered lifelong depression and eventually took his own life. If she can write non-fiction with such compassion and insight, I thought, surely her fiction must be worth a look. And after reading A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows, I realized that I was correct.
Based on that success, I took a flyer on Alice Munro, even though she had no memoir to introduce me to her by. Over the years, I had convinced myself I had ‘read’ her short stories by osmosis because my wife read them. Big mistake. Now I understood why she won the Nobel prize.
This winter’s fiction reading project has been Frances Itani. For years, I pretended that I had ‘read’ her books because we both lived in Ottawa. But now I live in the County; and she has written three books set in a prosperous (remember, it’s fiction) town on the Bay of Quinte named Deseronto. Bellevile, Picton and the County get frequent mention. So I dove into her work.
The three books are Deafening, which takes place in the early part of the 20th century through WWI; Tell, which concentrates on the years right after that war; and That’s My Baby; her most recent book, which is set in both the present and the WWII years. Characters appear in all three novels, although it is not necessary to read the books in order to appreciate them.
Ms. Itani is also known for Remembering the Bones. the story of a woman whose car plunges into a ravine and who examins her own life while waiting to be rescued; and Requiem about a Japanese-Canadian coming to terms with his life experiences, which include internment as child at a camp in a remote part of British Columbia during WWII, estrangement from his father and the premature death of his wife.
Her writing evokes empathy at every turn. Whether it be the experience of growing up deaf, surviving in the trenches, sitting home while a close relative is off at war, having a romantic liason as an assertion of identity in a small town, or being forced to relocate to an internment camp because of your ancestry; she makes you feel like you are undergoing the experience right alongside the characters.
She has produced some 16 books and has received many literary honours. To produce the five novels I refer to here, never mind the others, must have taken a heck of a lot of imagination, curiousity, determination, discipline. And now I am looking out for another author to feast on. Perhaps it will be Margaret Atwood: I hear she’s knocked off one or two more since Cat’s Eye Unless I get my hands on a copy of Wellington summer resident David Frum’s Trumpocracy: the Corruption of the American Republic first. At my age, I can’t completely transform myself into a fiction guy.
Frances Itani is coming to Wellington. She will be speaking about her latest book, That’s My Baby, at the Wellington branch of the Prince Edward County Public Library on Saturday, April 14 at 2 p.m. All welcome, no charge.
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