National Post's "Canada Also Reads"
project highlights an armful of some of the overlooked Canadian books
published over the last two years that demand further discussion. This
week, the eight members of our inaugural panel will present short
discourses on why you should also read their chosen book. We will post
two each day from Monday until Thursday (at 11am and 2pm). On Friday,
March 5, we will open the polls and ask you to vote for the one book
that should carry the title of our premier Canada Also Reads selection.Here, in our seventh essay, Jacob McArthur Mooney (author of The New Layman's Almanac) defends The Last Shot by Leon Rooke:  The Last Shotby Leon Rooke(Thomas Allen)What I’d like is for this to be a slightly more imaginative country. I don’t want to detract from what appears to be quite an imaginative shortlist of Canada Also Reads books, but you could do a lot worse than vote for Leon Rooke’s collection of late-career “I still got it, baby!” short stories, The Last Shot.I’m worried that Rooke, with his Governor General’s Award and his membership in the Order of Canada, strains the limits of this competition’s underdog spirit. However, despite a career spent receiving compliments for his fiction, the consistent strain of outsiderness that haunts his good words qualifies him for the Canada Also Reads award.Here’s how the great Russell Banks blurbed Rooke’s Painting the Dog (2001): “In the last two decades [Rooke’s] literally hundred of stories have made him into one of the very few writers the rest of us have to read in order to know what the short story can and cannot do, for he works way out there in terra incognita, mapping limits.” The “rest of us” includes the vast majority of mainstream Canadian fiction writers who define our literary centre and wins our awards, including CBC’s Canada Reads.The Last Shot is a late-career work that simultaneously presents us with an author assured of his skills and talents, and determined to pump his pagesfull of every last thing he feels the need to say.There’s vintage Rooke weirdness throughout, exemplified by the three-page explosion of The Legend of the Flaming Moths, which charts a town’s descent into a sort of pestilence of sadness. But there’s also an odd, and often touching, pedagogical streak throughout the collection (perhaps I find it so because I, like many other young Canadian authors, have been touched by Rooke’s advice and gentle mentorship).The first story, How to Write a Successful Short Story, mocks the earnest 20-something would-be author who serves as its narrator while giving him space for growth. Reading it as an earnest 20-something would-be author filled me with an intense and reverent paranoia, like having a stranger look you over, then correctly guess your name and home town.My favourite story is the rambling and delirious All True Stories Have Loose Ends, which reminded me that Rooke’s circuitous and mesmerizing structures aren’t means to avoid the human imperative at the heart of good stories but rather means to find new routes for exploring that humanity. Leon Rooke andAlice Munro, in the end, have the same aspirations.What I’d like is a reading (and reviewing) culture that values the wildchilds, the impossibility merchants and the avant-garde as partners in a community of bibliophiles that sees a vibrant and replenishing fringe as necessary to a vibrant and replenishing middle. Our imaginative country is well-represented by artists we export from other literary genres (including speculative fiction, with folks like John Clute and William Gibson, who shares Rooke’s status as an American-born Canadian-by-choice) and in other art forms, from our spacey rock ’n’ roll to our visceral cinematic imaginers at the fringe (David Cronenberg) and centre (James Cameron) of international film. Maybe we already have an imaginative country, and we just need one that’s willing to own that imagination. Luckily for us, this is a cause that can actually be helped in a literary popularity contest. It gives us an opportunity to say what we already know to be true. That this is an imaginative country worth exploring. And that the people who have mapped its limits deserve to be remembered.VOTE FOR YOUR PICK FOR 2010 CANADA ALSO READS HERE. • On Monday,
March 8, The Afterword will host an online panel featuring the authors
and panelists of 2010 Canada Also Reads. Enter your email below and
we'll send you a reminder just before the live event begins next week: