What's Toronto's story?

London and Paris have the literary weight to warrant starring roles in iconic novels, written by history's greats, whose plots weave around their skylines, their curiosities, their souls. So why not Toronto? From jealousy to unfamiliarity and ignorance, novelists have their reasons for staying off o

Nov. 5, 2006. 01:00 AM

PHILIP MARCHAND

What would Paris have been without Balzac? London without Dickens? In the real estate of the mind, they would have been undeveloped properties — like Toronto.

Our city awaits its great novelist. We sense the lack, even in the midst of Giller Prize hoopla. The long list of finalists for that literary award, announced two months ago, contained the names of two novelists — Wayne Johnston (The Custodian Of Paradise), and David Adams Richards (The Friends Of Meager Fortune) — who live in Toronto, and who both have the talent and inclination for writing on an epic scale. Yet Johnston, in his fiction, seems unwilling to stray far from his native Newfoundland. The same is true of New Brunswick-based Richards and the Miramichi.

"I have thought about it," Richards comments, in an email response to a query on this matter. He has set portions of certain novels in Toronto, he points out. "But to set a complete book here — I am not so sure. I do have it in mind, but it always seems to be for the next book and never the one I am (working) on at the moment."

Other writers, such as Rohinton Mistry, whose fiction has viewed life in his native India from the vantage point of Brampton, inspire the same sense of unease. Is there something about the Toronto landscape, or the Toronto soul, or lack of soul, that discourages writers from fully engaging this city in their fiction? "We can't wait to set a book anywhere but here," stated novelist Andrew Pyper in a "round-table discussion on Toronto literature" published last August in Toronto Life.

Pyper is a Toronto writer whose most recent novel, The Wildfire Season, is set in the Yukon. His previous novel, The Trade Mission, is set in Brazil.

The other participants in the round-table were novelists Shyam Selvadurai and Sheila Heti. The former was born and raised in Sri Lanka but has resided in Canada since the age of 19. He lives in Toronto. His first novel, Funny Boy, is a coming-of-age novel set in Sri Lanka. His other novel, Cinnamon Gardens, is set in Sri Lanka of the 1920s.

Heti is also a Toronto writer. Her novel Ticknor is set in 19th-century Boston. "I find it kind of comical to write about Toronto," Heti told her two fellow authors.

Certain theories exist that purport to explain this state of affairs:

1. Not enough writers were actually born and raised here

"You write about where you grew up," comments Barbara Gowdy, who was born in Windsor but enjoyed, or suffered, much exposure to Toronto in her youth. "That haunts you when you write fiction. It doesn't leave you." Her Fallen Angels, a 1889 novel redolent of Don Mills, is one of the great fictional statements of 1950s Toronto, and a case in point.

Richards agrees with Gowdy. "The place of my childhood and youth is the place I keep going back to, even though, in many ways, it no longer exists."

2. The city is just too bloody big and amorphous

"Some other cities have a much clearer presence in the world," Selvadurai stated in the Toronto Life round-table discussion. "Like Vancouver, for instance." Vancouver! City of people who think a great cultural experience is walking around the seawall.

"The mountains and the sea — or the East End, which is so awful — are so strongly present," Selvadurai continued. Heti more or less agreed. "Everything about Toronto seemed so humorous to me, because it's not an easily mythologized place."

As hard as Torontonians might find some of these comments to take — please, let's not talk about the mythology of Vancouver — critic and fiction writer John Metcalf, now in Ottawa, maintains there is substance to them. "Toronto is a place where people go to from everywhere else, but it has never established itself as a place, except many years ago when it was very British," he comments. "It doesn't have much of a mythology attached to it.

"Continued immigration means that every year people come to the city who, in many ways, don't belong to what culture there is. So there is constant instability and lack of a centre that people can adhere to." Metcalf pauses. "Also, I don't mean to be insulting because you live there, but it's a brutally ugly place."

We'll save that comment for a later discussion. What does it mean to say, however, that there's no "centre" in Toronto?

"I was driving near Steeles and Dufferin recently," comments Antanas Sileika, a lifelong Torontonian whose Buying on Time, a collection of short stories about growing up in the suburbs in the 1950s (as a member of the Lithuanian community) is another classic work of Toronto fiction.

"I realized I had never been there in my life. I'm driving through this 1970s suburb, where the houses are in need of their first reno, and I'm looking at a place that I've never seen before.

"Then I stop at Tim Hortons and there are all these kids with Hasidic curls. I mean, this is my city here and there are whole societies, whole ways of living, that I don't have a clue about. I don't know what they're thinking at the Scarborough Town Centre."

There are "cities within cities" in Toronto, Sileika points out. Does this mean it's impossible to get a fix on the city as a whole?

3. Writers don't want to write about Toronto because it will upset people in Vancouver

"There's a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place," Pyper commented in the round-table discussion. "There's almost an apologetic reflex to set stories elsewhere so as not to upset fellow Canadians. `Oh, here we go, not Toronto again.' I'm writing a novel right now that's set in Toronto — and no one's going to stop me, damn it — but I'm aware of that being a factor."

Give that man a medal for persisting in setting his next novel here, despite the fact everyone else hates us. "I think there certainly is a bias," comments unashamed Toronto writer Russell Smith. "It is partly to do with the age-old resentment of Toronto that comes from other parts of the country, particularly from other cities. I don't think people in Moose Jaw care much about Toronto, but they care a whole lot in Vancouver and Calgary and Montreal. I think it also comes from a Canadian intellectual and emotional tradition that is suspicious of cities generally ... a Protestant morality that cities are competitive and corrupt and simply not nice. And Toronto's the worst city of all."

This reminds me of the late novelist Matt Cohen, who was a Torontonian through and through in everyday life — he had a house in the Annex — but who was always more comfortable in writing about rural characters.

"I'm not a society novelist," he once said to me. This attitude still seems to resonate in our literary culture as more profound and more moral than the attitude of a Russell Smith, born and raised in Halifax, and educated at Queen's in Kingston, who recalls of his youth, "I was just desperate for some kind of big-city living."

4. Wait a minute. Who says there's no Toronto literature?

I talked to Amy Lavender Harris, who is described, on the Imagining Toronto website, as an "environmental phenomenologist and geographer" and as "the originator and shepherd of the Imagining Toronto project." She told me she had "well over" 200 works of fiction set in Toronto in her home library.

The members of the Toronto Life literary round-table, she commented, "clearly have read very little Toronto literature." No Toronto mythology? She mentioned a number of works of fiction that deal in a serious imaginative way with this city's icon, the CN Tower — works ranging from Gwendolyn MacEwan's collection of short stories, Noman's Land, to Catherine Bush's novel Minus Time to sci-fi writer Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring to Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep With Me to Bruce Powe's Outage. In their work, the mighty tower is not just a phallic symbol, either. Hopkinson treats the tower as a kind of postmodernist totem pole. Powe sees it as the source of disembodied voices sweeping through the urban landscape.

In similar fashion, there are numerous books about Kensington Market, Yorkville, and other supposedly non-mythological focal points in the city. Harris calculates that there are over 50 detective novels set in Toronto, by such writers as Eric Wright and Maureen Jennings.

"There's a booming literary industry about Toronto that nobody will admit exists," Harris points out. "There's a perplexing amnesia about it. I don't know if it's the reading public at fault or ... I'm more inclined to blame literary arbiters, who are convinced Toronto can't be a setting for great literature because it's not New York City."

Caught between these literary arbiters and our national tendency to, in Harris's words, "fetishize" stories about Newfoundland lobster fishermen, it's no wonder we minimize the literature of Toronto.

The question remains, however: how good is this body of literature? Perhaps the amnesia is merited. "A lot of it is beautiful, a lot of it is wretched, and it goes out of print no more quickly than the literature of other parts of the country," Harris says. "Its authors are less likely to receive grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council." (Another topic for further discussion.)

The nagging sense that Toronto somehow has not been done full justice by the literary imagination, however, cannot be dispelled by Harris's 200 titles. We still seem to be waiting for something. "Everybody has been waiting — or at least anybody with any sense, in my opinion — for the big immigrant novel about Toronto," Metcalf comments.

That might be a clue — a novel big enough to connect Sileika's cities within cities.

I have a guess. I think a major Toronto novel will appear when we stop doting on all these great brooding meditations on Toronto of the 19th century, and great brooding meditations on nature, and great brooding stories of how grandfather raped sis and took the secret with him to his grave. The case of Margaret Atwood may be instructive.

In the '70s she wrote thematic works on Canadian literature, such as Survival, which hardly dealt with urban literature — it was all wounded animals and settlers terrified of January in Huntsville. Her novel Surfacing, about a canoe trip in the wilds of Northern Ontario, seemed to confirm this tendency in her to confront the dark heart of nature and re-write primordial myths with a boost from feminism.

But Atwood's work flourished when she turned her gaze to Queen Street West and became an urban satirist, in such novels as Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride.

All the best writing about Toronto has a satirical flavour, whether in Atwood or Russell Smith or Sileika or even Barbara Gowdy. (This is why I feel disinclined to elevate the Rosedale soap operas of the late Timothy Findley, or the mannered set pieces in Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion, to the rank of great Toronto fiction.)

It is through the satiric gaze that this city comes alive in print. Satire captures the grotesque, the compulsive, the moralistic, the pretentious — the very atmosphere, in short, of Toronto circa 2006.