Reading List: From Frederick Exley to Harold R. Johnson, literary crushes keep the pages turning
Upstart & Crow’s Ian Gill sounds off on bold, old, and new must-reads, with an eye to Johnson’s forthcoming The Bjorkan Sagas
Harold R. Johnson’s The Bjorkan Sagas is due out in October. Photo by House of Anansi Press
IT IS OUR custom at Upstart & Crow to mix the bold and the new with the bold and the old, and many things in between. Sometimes it’s as much fun to push the order button on a great book from yesteryear as from the hot list of must reads from the current zeitgeist.
So it is with Frederick Exley’s 1968 classic, A Fan’s Notes. Billed as a “fictional memoir,” and Exley himself hoping that it positioned him as a “writer of fantasy,” it was in fact a grim, sardonic, sometimes gruesome unpacking of a life of alcohol-assisted failure, laced with a bitter disdain for the course of America, and all this under the pretence of being a book about sports, specifically the NFL.
As Tony O’Neill wrote in The Guardian a few years ago, the book “uses the metaphor of Exley's own life as a tool to examine the themes of celebrity worship, self-obsession, addiction and masculinity … His entire life is driven by the morbid fear that he is doomed to be a spectator rather than a participant, not only in sports but in life itself.”
I read A Fan’s Notes in the ‘80s when in Paris on a journalism fellowship and have been a fan of the book ever since; the author not so much, as it was his one work of note.
I have other literary fan crushes too. One of them is Richard Flanagan, an Australian writer who won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the dazzling Gould’s Book of Fish before that. Flanagan has a new book, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and it is one of the most painstaking and painful books about families, and death and dying, that you will ever read. Plus, it is shot through with urgent and barbed observations about the death of the planet Earth (Flanagan is famously outspoken on environmental issues, even among famously outspoken Australians). Reading this book filled me with sadness and what I hope is a dignified admiration for a writer at the top of his form.
Speaking of literary crushes, I ask: Is it possible to litcrush on a book as an object in addition to a collection of ideas? If so, count us in as superfans of The Analog Sea Review: a journal dedicated to everything offline. Its goal? To promote contemplative life in the digital age, which it does through bi-annual collections of art, poetry, essays, interviews and other works in a beautiful, hardcover book bound in a painting, and one that’s just the right size for your pocket. We admire Editor Jonathan S. Simons’ ambition, vision, and the truly celebratory way it is executed.
Closer to home, I’ve been able to requite my fandom for Harold R. Johnson thanks to a publishing-industry feature known as an ARC, or advance reading copy. This is where publishers send potential reviewers and/or booksellers copies of a book that is on deck for publication but that often is still missing illustrations or an index or even a cover. It’s how we get the drop on what’s in the pipeline for, in this case, the fall.
Johnson, you may recall, is the author of, among other books, Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada, which has been by far one of the best selling books at Upstart & Crow (partly because we hand sell it like crazy). Anyway, his forthcoming book, due out on October 5, is The Bjorkan Sagas (House of Anansi Press), which draws on his Cree and Scandinavian heritage and his many years living on a trapline in Saskatchewan. It is at turns fantastical and fatalistic and—while not wanting to give too much away—puts him in good company with Richard Flanagan when it comes to using fiction to further establish the fact of our folly when it comes to how we choose to treat the Earth, and each other, in the time of our burning.
It turns out that Harold R. Johnson is probably a better writer of fantasy that Frederick Exley, and certainly another of Johnson’s books, Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours) is undoubtedly a more useful contribution to our understanding of booze than Exley’s ruinous ruminations. But they are fine writers of their time and its troubles, as is Flanagan.
On all counts, I consider myself a spectator. Indeed, a fan.
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