Fiction at the 49th Parallel

Robert McGill readies for the Fall launch season.In anticipation of Robert McGill’s new novel,  Once We Had a Country (which officially launches this coming Wednesday), Puritan editor Tyler Willis poses a few questions about writing from both sides of the Medicine Line.The Town Crier: As an author and teacher who has worked on either side of the Canada/U.S. border, what differences have you noticed between the literatures of these two countries and how do they affect the consumption of literary texts? How have these differences shaped your perceptions as a reader and educator?Robert McGill: U.S. literature and Canadian literature are both so diverse that it’s risky to generalize about either one, but I see the attraction of viewing the two in oppositional terms: for instance, by contrasting a U.S. tendency to celebrate life on the road with a Canadian celebration of home, or by characterizing U.S. literature as masculine in its preoccupations and Canadian literature as feminine. Certainly, it’s true that the canonical American writers are mostly men, while in Canada, female writers have had much more prominence for a long time. Canadians who read literature can’t help but notice that kind of difference, even if only unconsciously, and such an awareness can’t help but affect how they think of their country. And once you start thinking about Canada as a country with a relationship to the United States that’s analogous to women’s relationship to men, you’re working with a very compelling, if complicated, idea of North America.Growing up in Canada, I was drawn to oppositional thinking about Canadians and Americans in order to explain why Canada was a country and in order to justify why it should remain a country. Then I lived in the U.S. for a few years and realized that much of the Canadian disdain for aspects of the United States is shared by many Americans. I still think that there are good reasons for Canada to remain a sovereign country, but I’m less trusting than I used to be of binary oppositions. Whether I’m writing novels or teaching, I’m drawn to having conversations about the seductiveness of oppositional thinking and about the need to ditch that thinking.TC: How has thinking about these demarcations shaped the thematic or narrative style of your writing, specifically, your new novel, Once We Had a Country?RM: It was living in the States during the war in Iraq that got me thinking about U.S.-Canadian relations and how they came to resemble what they are today. That took me back to the Vietnam War and parallels with Iraq: Canada’s refusal to participate militarily, the U.S. war resisters fleeing north across the border. It was striking to me that the Vietnam War era was also an incredible time for Canadian literature. Writers like Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Michael Ondaatje made their names then—and in their work during those years, they were engaging with the war in all sorts of ways. The writing tends to be fiercely nationalist, but it’s also deeply engaged with the American protest movement of the time.So in Once We Had a Country, I tell a story about Americans coming to Canada in 1972 partly to avoid the war and partly because they think that Canada will give them room to live a different kind of life—a life, paradoxically, that’s very much American: a frontier life of radical freedom and radical self-fashioning. But they end up struggling with challenges of community and mutual care that are ostensibly rather Canadian, too. The truth of their experience ends up involving something more complicated than the stereotypes of either national experience would suggest. I think that this space of complication and in-betweenness is a particular niche of fiction; at least, it’s the space in which I’m interested.

McGill's sophomore novel.TC: What does the “literary border” offer in terms of both challenges and opportunities as a member of the Canadian literary community?RM: Canadian writers tend to be highly aware of the fact that you can’t writing a novel assuming a homogenous readership with a common frame of reference. You can’t write just for Canadians. It used to be that many Canadian novelists avoided writing about Canada at all. Nowadays, there are plenty of novels set in Canada, but their authors usually have one eye on the international market. How do you write about Canada in ways that are meaningful for Canadians but also intelligible to people whose idea of Canada doesn’t extend much beyond igloos and maple syrup? It’s an interesting challenge.My first novel, The Mysteries, was set almost entirely in small-town Ontario. I wrote most of it while living in Europe and reading James Joyce and Alice Munro and feeling compelled, like them, to write about the local—about home—and to make that place comprehensible to people who’d never been there. The book was picked up by publishers in UK, France, and the Netherlands, as well as in Canada, so I figured I must have accomplished what I’d set out to do. Then the proposed U.K. cover design came through, and it had a picture of Alaska on the front—all snowy mountains. Pretty funny to anyone who’s seen rural Ontario. I realized that those stereotypes of Canada are pretty resilient.Once We Had a Country plays with some of the stereotypes. Because the main characters are Americans in Canada, they bring stereotypical expectations of Canada with them, and they have some of their expectations upended. Other ones get confirmed. That’s the thing about such stereotypes: some of them turn out to be true, at least in certain cases, in certain ways. For some Canadians, it’s part of being Canadian to embrace the stereotypes, to embody them, to play them up. I imagine that it might be tempting to do that in literature, too: to play to expectations in writing about what Canada is. But it’s more interesting—and for me, more rewarding—to write books that set out to unsettle people’s ideas and estrange them from their usual ways of seeing things.Robert McGill’s novel  Once We Had a Country is published by Knopf Canada. He teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Visit him at robert-mcgill.com.