What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A fine example of a literary novel,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

An unabashedly literary novel is what I’m sending you this week. You might find the statement surprising. Haven’t all the novels I’ve sent you been literary, you might ask? They have. But the book you now have in your hands, Flaubert’s Parrot, by the English writer Julian Barnes (born in 1946) is more self-consciously literary than most of these other books (an exception jumps to my mind: the 27th book I sent you, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse). The attempt to lure the reader with an intriguing story and interesting characters, the writing style that seeks to be like a pane of glass, invisible so that the story appears to be seen and felt directly, as if the writer were not the intermediary, all these are less prominent in Barnes’s novel. Which is not to say that there aren’t stories and characters and clear writing in Flaubert’s Parrot. There are, of course. But their proportion is different. The author is not so self-effacing here, not so wholly dedicated to pleasing the reader.

The definition of a literary novel might be this: a literary novel is novel that makes the reader work. A non-literary or genre novel builds on conventions. So a murder mystery or a thriller or a romance novel will have characters whom the reader will quickly seize and plot developments that will create definite expectations, which the author will then play with, either shattering them (it’s not the doctor who committed the murder but the little old lady you didn’t think twice about) or confirming them (the boy will get the girl, don’t you worry). A literary novel relies on fewer conventions. The characters are more complex and layered, not so easily reduced to stereotypes, and the plot may hold many surprises. To read such a work is a more demanding experience, a train trip in which the reader isn’t coddled by comforts or told of the final destination.

The literary novel is a daring gamble for its author. The risk of spectacular failure is considerable. A novel that adheres to the conventions of a genre can feature terrible writing and characters as thin as cling wrap, yet still be thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, many novels that are artistically trite sell very well precisely because they’re enjoyable. A bad literary novel, on the other hand, has few redeeming qualities. It often commits the worst sins of a book: it is boring and it lacks credibility.

This is not the case with Flaubert’s Parrot. The work the reader has to put in is worth the effort. Why is that? Because the reader has to think. And this leads to a second definition: a literary novel is a novel that makes the reader think. This actually follows from the first definition; if a reader is working, so to speak, it is because that reader is thinking. And therein lies the strength of literary fiction, why the risk of failure is taken on: because thinking is a good and necessary activity. Whereas in our emotional lives we favour stability, seeking and staying with the familiar, keeping in touch with our parents, for example, long after they’ve stopped parenting us or settling down and living with the same person for years on end, establishing a routine that may last a whole adult life, such fixity is the enemy of intellect. In our intellectual lives, we seek change and evolution, we want to learn and “move with the times”. In the realm of ideas, comfort and excessive familiarity is a sign of stagnation, not of security. And so the constant thinking required, because new ideas only come from thinking.

All this to say that be prepared for a slower ride with Flaubert’s Parrot. It does not shoot forward like an express train. Regularly, I’ll bet, you’ll say to yourself, “That was well put,” or “That’s a word I haven’t seen in a while.” I also bet you’ll regularly stop reading, as if you were getting off at a station. You’ll stop because you’ll feel the need to think, to decide whether you agree with this or that point in the novel, or if you’ve understood the point at all. But if you get back on the train, you’ll find the journey worthwhile and you’ll be pleased with your final destination. What is that final destination? It’s not for me to say, but I was impressed with the verbal and formal play in Flaubert’s Parrot and I felt some of its knowledge and intellect rubbed off on me.

Dear, dear, I’m losing myself in abstractions. Concretely, Flaubert’s Parrot is about a retired widower doctor who is obsessed with the 19th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary and was one of the great stylists of the French language (don’t worry, you don’t need to have read anything by Flaubert to enjoy the book). There’s a lot about Flaubert in this novel. It’s not linear in its development and it’s full of opinions and observations, each of which the reader is expected to react to. This is the thinking I was referring to. It’s a peevish, proudly persnickety, highly intelligent novel, very much like Flaubert himself. And it’s thoroughly enjoyable, if you make the effort.

If you don’t make the effort, well then, you’ll just find it boring and you’ll want to hurry back to your received ideas. I rather hope you settle into this curious English novel that choo-choos along so nicely.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…