Aboriginal horror books, anyone? (Scariest monster I ever faced in D&D was a version of the Ijiraq from Inuit stories… don’t even look it up. Terrifying);
If literary careers are like games, and they are, then Sally Rooney has won: the massive bestselling debut, the even more massive, even more bestselling follow-up, the successful television adaptation, the profiles, the prizes. “I write to you from Paris, having just arrived here from London, where I had to go and pick up an award. They never tired of giving me awards, do they? It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them,” she writes in her new book Beautiful World, Where Are You (no question mark). Her own celebrity, for Sally Rooney, is evidence of insanity, both in the people who envy it and in the society that values it.
“Okay, it’s been a small experience in its own way, and it will all blow over in a few months or years and no one will even remember me, thank God,” she writes. “And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five year old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.” Her new novel is, in a sense, the collapse that has been impending. Sally Rooney has jumped through the world’s hoops, and found, at the end, the emptiness of all hoops.
But Beautiful World, Where Are You is more than a young, healthy, successful, rich, famous woman in love complaining about youth, health, success, wealth, fame and love. It arrives at a particular moment in literary history, a point of transition, or properly speaking two simultaneous transitions. The literature of the voice is dying. The literature of the pose has arrived. The basis of literary style has shifted.
Given that my new and selected is probably not eligible for the Griffin, I feel free this year to comment without repercussion on the announcement of the jury… It’s amazing;
The Snowy Day was on regular rotation at bedtime here… When both sons eventually noticed and asked why the boy had brown skin (we live in an extremely White place), I just said, “…because most people do” and we had a good chat about the world;
My new book was officially released last week. It’s called Problematica: New and Selected Poems, and it represents 25 years of me screwing around in the poetry world. I’m telling you this because there’s probably only three or four major review spaces left in Canada and, given how many books come out each year, it’s unlikely any of them will feature it.
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