Alongside 30-year-old johanna Skibsrud and her Giller Prize-winning novel, The Sentimentalists, the other big winner on November 9, unfortunately, was The Scandalists, a “true” story based on pure speculation.
As someone who’s been at the centre of a literary award controversy (the 2008 Governor General’s Award for poetry), I’m familiar with the sort of narrative playing out in the recent furor over a Giller judge, and with how detrimental these affairs can be not only to the individuals involved (though to them, too), but to this country’s literary culture.
You have no doubt heard that The Sentimentalists was published by a small press that can’t keep up with demand for the novel. (It was announced earlier this week that a deal has been made with a larger publisher.) This is apparently a huge affront to capitalism, which considers it a sin when people cannot consume what they want exactly when 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 long list of 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 the agent’s advantage. I think that covers the basics.
Essentially, what we have is a lot of speculating and extrapolating. What we know for sure is that Smith, while a juror, recommended The Sentimentalists to her friend.
She probably shouldn’t have done that. She probably should have waited till after the winner was announced to talk to anyone about her love of the book.
It was probably a well-intended error of judgment. (Ali Smith could not be reached for comment.)
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 Sentimentalists, before the nominations were announced. The agent then sold it to British editor Jason [Arthur] for a tidy sum because Arthur 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 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 Smith really wanted to engage in corruption, she would have chosen a profession other than literature, like, I don’t know, practically any other profession on earth.
The effect, which cannot be a surprise to this year’s Giller critics, is that, intentionally or not, a cloud is cast over the achievement of the winner.
As I mentioned, I went through my own controversy in 2008. My Governor General’s Award for poetry came under scrutiny when juror Di Brandt, who, like Ali Smith, has had a long and respectable publishing career, was accused of a conflict of interest. I don’t want to rehash the details a quick Google search will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the 2008 GG controversy but were afraid to waste your time on.
What I do want is to draw a parallel between that year’s GG events and this year’s uproar, a parallel that holds true for many literary award controversies.
What happens is that the mainstream media jump on the story regardless of the facts (or lack thereof) and brand it with the word “scandal” in big, bold type. They use this word, of course, to get us to read about it. If they could legitimately add the word “sex” to the headline, they would.
Last week, in reaction to all the fuss over the low print run of The Sentimentalists, the former owner of the sadly now defunct (at least for now) independent bookstore This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Charlie Huisken, wrote on his Facebook page, “CBC types and Globe & Mail types and Annex types should just get used to the fact that someone you never heard of published by a press you’ve never heard of has won the Giller and that the press operates in a way you’re not used to. So stop asking ignorant questions about that situation, please. And maybe consider honouring the muse rather than fame and glory and commerce.”
I wholeheartedly agree, but Huisken’s probably expecting too much. The media don’t understand the relative gift economies of small-press literature, and they care about news markets, not people engaged in the difficult pursuit of producing literature in a culture that vastly under-appreciates their efforts. What a boring story that is. It couldn’t even be summed up in a headline.
But I don’t blame media outlets for that. I blame the fiction writers and poets, the ones who fuel these dust-ups by recording 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 work judged regularly, it is also in our interest to have juries as fair as possible.”
Clearly, she’s well-intentioned. But I think writers should know better and understand that the objectives of literary fiction writers and poets are different than those of mainstream journalists.
The enemies of good literature are superficiality and clichés – but those are 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 meat itself, or rather, the marrow.
When we leave our stories and poems to inflame controversy, we assist a process that exploits our squabbles to delegitimize the noble purposes of literature.
I urge all writers, when they hear the siren sizzle of juicy gossip, to stay away from Facebook and blogs and, if they must relay it, to put that gossip where it belongs – into a good story.
Jacob Scheier’s debut collection, More To Keep Us Warm (ECW Press), won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry.
