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Jane in chains >> Urquhart on the selling of Can Lit by JULIET WATERS
Mirror: The fact that you're reading at Paragraph comes as a pleasant surprise. Jane Urquhart: I worry about whether the big chains will still take risks once they've dominated the market. Right now it's fine. You can find poetry and experimental fiction in Chapters. But what's going to happen when there's no competition left? I just came back from a tour in the States where the independent bookstores are dying like flies because of the success of Barnes & Noble. There are maybe other factors, but certainly having a big chain bookstore move across the street from you can't be a positive thing. M: But haven't the chains contributed to the recent upsurge in sales of Canadian literature by giving books like yours better promotion? JU: Well I don't know if that has anything to do with the chains. In my case, I know it didn't. In fact, the chains did not pick up Away until it had been on the best-seller list for six months already. And it was put there by independent booksellers hand-selling it across the counters of their little stores because they loved it and talked about it to their customers. What worries me is if a younger version of me were to come along now, what would happen to her? Now it's fine because the independents are still there. But what if they weren't? I think it's ironic that the people who have worked so hard to make Canadian literature what it is now are going to have to suffer because of their own success. M: In a recent article in Saturday Night, in which books columnist Phillip Marchand ripped into the recent boom in Canadian literature, he described you as an author who writes Canadian Gothic. Would you put the Underpainter into that category? JU: No, and oddly enough neither did he. He loved this book which is really weird. I don't think he expected to. M: I'm not surprised because I think your main character, Austin Fraser, represents many of the frustrations Marchand has with Can Lit. Marchand accuses Canadian writers of being way too art driven, and isn't that Austin's tragic flaw? JU: When you're looking at the effect of being art driven, I think it's important to make the distinction between vocation and career. Vocation being the actual making of the art and career being what you do with the product after it's finished. What's involved in marketing the product makes me want to throw up. But that's the way it goes. On the other hand, if you take the character of George in my novel, what I loved about him is that he really was an amateur and in the tradition of the amateur, he did it for love. And I think that's the way all art should be. I think, however, at times in the 20th century fashion has taken over almost completely from that kind of wonderful awakening of the spirit that is the making of a work of art... There's also this business of listing everything, which I think is very new for literature anyway. It's always been there for Danielle Steele and writers like her, but we know where they're coming from. Everything seems to be on a list these days. You're No. 1 on the list, or No. 3 on the list. God forbid you're No. 7 on the list, or not on the list at all. I think that's something to pay attention to, and I'd cast a pretty suspicious eye on all that. Certainly if I were a newer author, one that was new to the scene, I would try not to take that too seriously. Because if you do, you're in trouble. The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart, McClelland & Stewart, hc, 340 pp. $29.99
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Jane Urquhart doesn't have to worry too much about selling her latest novel, The Underpainter. It was on the Canadian best-seller list months before it won the 1997 Governor General's award for fiction. And her previous novel, Away, stayed on the list for 132 weeks. What does she worry about instead? When the Mirror sat down with her before her reading at Paragraph this past Tuesday, we found her worrying about the fate of independent bookstores.