Alongside 30 year old Johanna Skibsrud and her Giller prize winning novel, The Sentimentalists, the other big winner last Tuesday night, unfortunately was The Scandalists: a “true” story based on a pure speculation.
You no doubt have heard that The Sentimentalists was published with a small press which cannot nearly keep up with the demand the novel is now receiving. (Though it was just announced that a deal has been made with a larger publisher.)
This is apparently a huge affront to capitalism where it is blasphemous whenever people cannot consume what they want at the exact moment they want it.
But this ‘scandal’ is of less concern then the other ‘scandal,’ which I promise, lest you be reading this till your copy of The Sentimentalists arrives, to explain as briefly as possible.
One of this year’s Giller jurors, Ali Smith, prior to the announcement of the Giller nominees recommended the book to her agent who then secured a foreign rights deal for it. So the accusation is this: Smith knew the book was about to make a splash, in no small part because of her presence on the Giller jury and used this ‘inside information’ to to the agent’s advantage. I think that covers the basics.
Another way of looking at it is this:
“Still shocked by Ali Smith, British juror for the Giller, tipping off her agent to Giller winner Johanna Skibsrud’s novel, The Sentimentalist, before the nominations were announced. The agent then sold it to British author Jason Arnold for a tidy sum because Arnold knew it had a good shot at the Giller. Smith with her insider trading broke jury protocols of confidentiality and failed to declare a conflict of interest.”
That’s what novelist Susan Swan wrote as her Facebook status, which has since been picked up by several publications.
Swan’s description kind of makes Smith sound like a character out of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Of course such people exist, but I have a strong feeling that if Ali Smith really wanted to engage in corruption she would have chosen a profession other than creating literature, like I don’t know, any other profession practically on earth.
The side effect, which cannot be a surprise to this year’s Giller critics, is that, intended or not, it casts a cloud over the achievement of the winner.
I went through my own controversy in 2008 when my Governor General’s Award for poetry came under scrutiny when juror Di Brandt, who like Ali Smith had a lengthy and respectable publishing career, was accused of conflict of interest. I don’t want to rehash the details further here, but a quick Google search will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about 2008 GG controversy, but were afraid to waste your time on.
What I do want is to draw a significant parallel between that controversy and this year’s Giller uproar, a parallel that holds true for many, if not every, literary award controversy.
What happens in these ‘controversies’ is the mainstream media jumps on conflict, regardless of the facts (or lack thereof), and stamps the words ‘scandal’ in a big bold writing. They use these words, of course, to get us to read about it. If they could, with any legitimacy, add the word ‘sex’ to the headline, they would.
But I don’t blame media outlets for that. I blame the fiction writers and poets, the ones who fuel these dust-ups, by writing their speculations on their blogs and facebook pages for the media to pick up.
Susan Swan sees it otherwise, I know. She tells me: “I think the ethics of literary juries is a discussion writers need to have. Since it’s our lot to have our worked judged regularly, it is also in our interests to have juries as fair as possible.”
Clearly she is well intentioned. But I think writers should know better and understand that the objectives of literary fiction writers and poets are different than mainstream journalists.
The enemy of good literature is superficiality and cliché – which is the media’s, if you’ll forgive the cliché, meat and potatoes – or rather the sizzle of the meat. Writers of literature are (or should be) interested only in the steak the meat itself or rather the marrow.
I would urge all writers when they hear the siren sizzle of juicy gossip to stay off Facebook and blogs, and, if you have to, put that gossip where it belongs: into a good story.
Jacob Scheier’s debut collection of poetry, More to Keep us Warm (ECW Press), won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for English Language Poetry
