Selected By Cyril Wong

In August 2010, Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie came up with a list of overrated Canadian writers in the arts pages of the National Post, stating right at the start that "Western literature has always resembled a Family Compact: those on the outside clamour for entry, and those on the inside guard their privilege assiduously." Both Good and Beattie had decided to take up the challenge to "rush in where angels fear to tread" and establish who amongst the living authors of Canada were, and still are, the most overrated. Their criteria were straightforward: "Overrated authors win prestigious literary prizes, receive fawning reviews in the national media, and are brand names, if not always bestsellers." Reading the list, I was reminded again that any recognition of "greatness" is often rooted in that desire to be considered "great" ourselves and, in this case, to be seen as aligning with a desperately imagined, self-affirming and elitist literary discourse.

David Adams Richards starts the list, and his oeuvre is summarised as follows: "a strident series of crude, reactionary harangues on the evils of modern, secular civilization. Degenerate city-dwellers, slanderous hypocrites, and anyone with a university education are lined up against...honest, stalwart, hard-working folk...Enough already." Anne Michaels, who is also a poet, is then described as writing novels "[stuffed] to the gills with abstruse metaphoric language and self-conscious, sonorous prose"; her novels are "emblematic of what gets lauded as great writing in this country: florid syntax married to heavy themes, often having to do with some combination of war, loss, and memory." John Ralston Saul soon follows with his "increasingly vague, unconvincing, and repetitive exercises in nationalist myth-making" while the too-popular Douglas Coupland is lambasted for "a seemingly endless series of twee commentaries on our post-postmodern, brand-obsessed age" and "[playing] to the lowbrow end of the spectrum."

Next in the lineup, Erin Mouré "demonstrates why people have taken to avoiding poetry so studiously" as she is "[cryptic] without being particularly interesting", while Jane Urquhart's prose is "refined to the point that all the life has been winnowed out of it." Another famous figure, Michael Ondaatje, receives the well-deserved criticism for being the "laureate of pretentious, purple prose, [a] king of cliché, a sorcerer who has improbably managed for decades now to pass off his distinctive brand of inert slop as somehow being possessed of a 'literary' value only detectable by prize juries, time-serving academics, and a handful of supine reviewers." Then Joseph Boyden, a CanLit mainstay, is "the testosterone-infused answer to Jane Urquhart" while M.G. Vassanji is noted for remaining "oblivious to the notion of a novel being informed by any personal sense of style. There are people writing prospectuses for mining companies who have more feel for the language."

The list ends with yet another bigwig, Yann Martel, who might have written a "cutesy fable" in Life of Pi, but who soon "followed that up with the misguided Holocaust allegory Beatrice and Virgil, a book that became a bestseller despite savage reviews in the U.S. and Britain (Canadian critics, as is their wont, were more polite)." But here our two scathing list-makers end by giving Martel some credit for being "unwilling to experiment with different styles and techniques. Unfortunately, to date his most successful stylistic experiment is his first novel, Self, which is, not coincidentally, also his least known."

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