Canadian book challenge - 14th post

So on beyond 13.  I actually read Morley Callaghan's A Fine and Private Place basically at the same time as Barometer Rising (switching on the bus and so forth).  I found this novel a bit more engaging from the get-go, though it is somewhat meandering.  It is set in Toronto.  The basic plot is that a graduate student, Al, finds himself in a relationship with Lisa, a former classmate, who now works in the news media.  She supports him as he struggles to complete a dissertation.  While he initially expects to write on Norman Mailer (an obvious topic that Lisa feels is a bit beneath Al), with some prodding, he finds himself fascinated by the writings of Eugene Shore, a local writer who is generally unappreciated in his hometown but has a bit of a claim to fame elsewhere.  Shore is a fairly transparent stand-in for Callaghan himself, given that he writes books about outcasts and tends to sympathize with criminals over cops.  While this is a bit of an over-simplification, a number of Callaghan's books like Such is My Beloved and More Joy in Heaven were upsetting to the members of the literary establishment that wanted "moral" and uplifting fiction.  (While I haven't read enough of Callaghan to know for certain, it strikes me that he is intrigued by the same themes as Graham Greene.) Callaghan definitely has a negative take on reviewers and academic critics of all stripes, or at least he voices these sentiments through Shore.  Nonetheless, with Lisa's intervention, Shore agrees to meet Al and they fall into a bit of a mentor-mentee relationship.

Lisa begins to get concerned as Al seems to be getting lost in his new topic, pretty much starting over after having written dozens of pages, because he just can't seem to get the angle on Shore.  She begins to despair he will ever finish and regrets pushing him towards Shore in the first place.  (She might have some things to say to the wife in Kroetsch's Gone Indian where the narrator has finally exhausted everyone's patience by switching dissertation topics repeatedly.)  This section does seem to go on a bit too long for my taste, so I was glad when one of the subplots took over in the third act.  I don't want to reveal too much about this aspect of the book and certainly not the ending.  I will note however, that, just as in Bissoondath's The Innocence of Age, a cop gets involved in a shooting.

I wonder how many cops show up in novels and don't shoot someone? Pretty few, I'd wager. It's probably a corollary that if a gun shows up in the first scene (of a play or movie), it has to go off in the last scene. (Sometimes attributed to Hitchcock or Godard, it is more likely that it stems from Chekhov.)  The ending is just a bit ambiguous, at least in terms of whether we really think Al and Lisa have emerged from a rough patch and are now are on firm ground as a couple.  Al is clearly going to have to stop relying on Shore as a kind of crutch or an excuse to keep from writing (in fear that Shore will write something new to overturn all of Al's previous judgements).  As an aside, while this isn't the only lesson to be learned from this novel, it generally is a bad idea for English lit. students to write dissertations on living writers.

I wouldn't say that Toronto emerged as a strong backdrop in this novel.  There were certainly shades of "Toronto the Good" when the newspaper reviewers had a particularly moral take on Shore, but there weren't too many times when I didn't think the novel could have been set in Winnepeg or Edmonton.  The Innocence of Age, despite some shortcomings, was more thoroughly a Toronto novel than this one.  I expect that the next three novels I tackle will be Toronto-based novels.  The plan is to reread Atwood's Cat's Eye and Findley's Headhunter.  If there is still time remaining before the challenge ends, I will tackle (for the first time) Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls.  And if I don't get through them, they will be the first reviews for the next challenge.