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Lastfoundland >> What the Newfie said when he made the cover of The New York Times Book Review by JULIET WATERS
I'd had The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Newfoundlander Wayne Johnston sitting on my shelf since the fall. I wanted to read it, but the timing never felt right. I never had that morning when I woke up feeling that this was the week that everyone would want to go out and buy a massive novel based on the life of Premier Joey Smallwood. Then the publishing industry started to shut down for the month of August and review copies dwindled down to an uninteresting few and finally it felt right--if for no reason than there was nothing else. On Saturday I opened the book, and was happily transported into the tragicomic romance between Smallwood and the hard drinking, swaggering newspaperwoman he would never stop loving, columnist Sheilagh Fielding (pretty much the Fran Leibowitz of turn of the century St. John's.) Then on Sunday morning there was the book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. "How bizarre," I thought. The NYTBR cover is pretty much reserved for literary heavyweights: Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore. Wayne Johnston is nobody in the U.S. Yet, suddenly here he was, not just being reviewed, but having his literary career launched into the stratosphere, a NYTBR cover being second only to Oprah for boosting booksales. This must be the work of super-literary agent Anne McDermid, I figured. McDermid, a top agent in London, moved to Toronto in 1996 and has had a pretty seismic effect on the Canadian literary scene. This year alone she scored six-figure advances for two first novels. Johnston recently became one of her clients. But it turns out I wasn't the only one wondering about this anomaly. A few days after the Johnston cover, Laura Miller, editorial director of Salon, wrote a piece titled "How to Get on the Cover of the New York Times Book Review." There's just something about a Canadian historical epic by an unknown Canadian writer, based on (to Americans at least) an obscure political figure that just jumps out at you. Miller's answer: push your book during the weeks when there's nothing else to review, and if you're really lucky, like Johnston, you'll get on. Not content to believe that this was just a fluke, I immediately I e-mailed Miller my superagent theory. A couple of hours later I got a friendly, chatty response thanking me for my little insight into the Canadian literary industry, admitting that, yes, there was some industry weight behind Johnston's book (her review copy had arrived with a handwritten note from the editor at Doubleday), but insisting that a highly reliable source at the NYTBR had told her off the record that, "Colony only got the cover on account of the summer drought." This was of course the same reason I had for reviewing it this week, so I don't know why I had such a problem accepting it. I guess because it still felt like such a strange coincidence. As though some kind of cosmic forces were conspiring to push it to the top of book editors' slush piles everywhere. If this creates the impression that Colony is a book you should read when there's nothing else around, let me correct that. If I had to pick one Canadian book this year that deserves megapublicity, this would be it. It probably hasn't even gotten as much hype in Canada as it deserves. And what did the Newfie say when he made the cover of the NYTBR? Well, I don't know what Johnston has to say. But there's a great line at the end of Chapter 1: "They should have called it Old Lost Land, not Newfoundland..." Maybe now that this Newfoundland epic has been miraculously salvaged from the last literary slush pile of the millennium he might say: they should have called it Lastfoundland.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston, Knopf, hc, 562 pp, $34.95 |
It seemed like such a weird coincidence.