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Arrival: The Story of CanLit
In the mid-twentieth century, Canadian literature transformed from a largely ignored trickle of books into an enormous cultural phenomenon that produced Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler, and so many others. In Arrival, acclaimed writer and critic Nick Mount answers the question: What caused the CanLit Boom?
Written with wit and panache, Arrival tells the story of Canada’s literary awakening. Interwoven with Mount’s vivid tale are enlightening mini-biographies of the people who made it happen, from superstars Leonard Cohen and Marie-Claire Blais to lesser-known lights like the troubled and impassioned Harold Sonny Ladoo. The full range of Canada’s literary boom is here: the underground exploits of the blew ointment and Tish gangs; revolutionary critical forays by highbrow academics; the blunt-force trauma of our plain-spoken backwoods poetry; and the urgent political writing that erupted from the turmoil in Quebec.
Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, Arrival is a dazzling, variegated, and inspired piece of writing that helps explain how we got from there to here.
Written with wit and panache, Arrival tells the story of Canada’s literary awakening. Interwoven with Mount’s vivid tale are enlightening mini-biographies of the people who made it happen, from superstars Leonard Cohen and Marie-Claire Blais to lesser-known lights like the troubled and impassioned Harold Sonny Ladoo. The full range of Canada’s literary boom is here: the underground exploits of the blew ointment and Tish gangs; revolutionary critical forays by highbrow academics; the blunt-force trauma of our plain-spoken backwoods poetry; and the urgent political writing that erupted from the turmoil in Quebec.
Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, Arrival is a dazzling, variegated, and inspired piece of writing that helps explain how we got from there to here.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2017
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227 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 8, 2017
I so truly enjoyed this book that I don't know where to start. Some thoughts: 1. CanLit in the 60s reads like a campy CanLit novel from the 60s. 2. Irving and Cohen were dicks. 3. The CanLit boom is dead. Long live the CanLit boom.
December 19, 2017
DNF @ 36%
Not that book I thought it was, but that's really on me for putting this title on hold at the library simply because it was about CanLit. Knowing only that I expected something similar to Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and a chapter or two in I realized my mistake.
I'm only familiar with a handful of authors discussed in the book, and most of them only by name rather than their bibliographies, so I lacked any real interest to push through until the end. Looking back on it, I should have DNFed this book long before I did but I was hopeful that the topic would eventually spark my interest.
The only real complaint I have is that this book would have benefited with academic rather than casual tone. Some of the author's comments (like describing Barbie's emergence in the 60s as 'spreading her plastic legs' were entirely unnecessary in their respective contexts and felt out of place in a book about CanLit.
But like I said at the beginning, this isn't really a bad look into the CanLit boom, I just don't have any interest in it. I tend to take a chance with library books as they're relatively easy (not to mention free) to get, so I'm not too upset at putting this one down. Maybe next time I'll learn to go beyond the title, even if it says CanLit.
Not that book I thought it was, but that's really on me for putting this title on hold at the library simply because it was about CanLit. Knowing only that I expected something similar to Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and a chapter or two in I realized my mistake.
I'm only familiar with a handful of authors discussed in the book, and most of them only by name rather than their bibliographies, so I lacked any real interest to push through until the end. Looking back on it, I should have DNFed this book long before I did but I was hopeful that the topic would eventually spark my interest.
The only real complaint I have is that this book would have benefited with academic rather than casual tone. Some of the author's comments (like describing Barbie's emergence in the 60s as 'spreading her plastic legs' were entirely unnecessary in their respective contexts and felt out of place in a book about CanLit.
But like I said at the beginning, this isn't really a bad look into the CanLit boom, I just don't have any interest in it. I tend to take a chance with library books as they're relatively easy (not to mention free) to get, so I'm not too upset at putting this one down. Maybe next time I'll learn to go beyond the title, even if it says CanLit.
August 12, 2022
(My edition has 370+ pages.)
Nick Mount does what he can with a somewhat dreary hand. He makes a case that the CanLit boom was an explosion that sent reverberations out in time and space, but that the boom was of very short duration. The shrapnel is what we feel, still, in 2022, we can't see the bang's flash (and it may have been visible for only a short time back when). His time frame is from the 1950s (with trips back to earlier in the last century) to about 1974. Due to how he set the book up, more than once he returns to the same time periods, locales, and people, and this becomes tedious.
As I mentioned in the one update, the prose is lively (and far from academic, a word used rather loosely by other Goodreaders of this book) and accessible, with the occasional neat anecdote or fine damnation of this or that particular poet, but the history is tedious. It's been about 40 years since certain figures had any importance, and Mount does his best to rescue a book here or forgotten writer there. The same names from the 1960s are today writing even worse things than they did before (Atwood, Ondaatje) or getting awards (Munro) that could go to more deserving writers from almost any other country.
Mount goes some distance in describing the lack of a literary culture in canada until the late 1950s and 1960s. (A welcome change from literary jingoists who falsely claim a long history of terrific writing in this country.) We can be thankful that more writers than those discussed in Arrival are working now, many unheralded, many young, many not tiresome realists or historical novelists, and many influenced by artists from other places and in other spheres.
This is a history book that can be a useful reference guide.
Nick Mount does what he can with a somewhat dreary hand. He makes a case that the CanLit boom was an explosion that sent reverberations out in time and space, but that the boom was of very short duration. The shrapnel is what we feel, still, in 2022, we can't see the bang's flash (and it may have been visible for only a short time back when). His time frame is from the 1950s (with trips back to earlier in the last century) to about 1974. Due to how he set the book up, more than once he returns to the same time periods, locales, and people, and this becomes tedious.
As I mentioned in the one update, the prose is lively (and far from academic, a word used rather loosely by other Goodreaders of this book) and accessible, with the occasional neat anecdote or fine damnation of this or that particular poet, but the history is tedious. It's been about 40 years since certain figures had any importance, and Mount does his best to rescue a book here or forgotten writer there. The same names from the 1960s are today writing even worse things than they did before (Atwood, Ondaatje) or getting awards (Munro) that could go to more deserving writers from almost any other country.
Mount goes some distance in describing the lack of a literary culture in canada until the late 1950s and 1960s. (A welcome change from literary jingoists who falsely claim a long history of terrific writing in this country.) We can be thankful that more writers than those discussed in Arrival are working now, many unheralded, many young, many not tiresome realists or historical novelists, and many influenced by artists from other places and in other spheres.
This is a history book that can be a useful reference guide.
December 18, 2017
An interesting account of the birth of CanLit (1950s-early 1970s), a period I lived through as a youthful reader. I was reading a lot of British, American and French authors at the time, but remember reading Cohen's Beautiful Losers, a number of Richler's books and some Atwood. I am trying to remember when I first came across the term "CanLit", but it would have been the late 60s or early 70s, when bookstores began to have CanLit sections. It did remind me of being sent on a grade 12 trip with a classmate to a symposium at York hosted by Irving Layton with, among others, Earle Birney and/or Al Purdy (the memory falls off there), and being unimpressed. Layton was a self-important blowhard, and the others efforts forgettable, but then I have never been a poetry fan (for many of the reasons that Mount criticises a number of poets in this book). It is a great, broad history of a lot of the writers, publishers, etc. of the time, and will probably be on university CanLit course reading lists. I like that Mount is a critical historian of the era, not just a dry rencounter or fan. His sidebar reviews of individual works are both useful, and pop the balloons of some that are rated too highly elsewhere, including memories, and tell which are seriously dated now. Perhaps necessarily, this book tends to bounce around and circle back quite a bit, as he approaches writers and other literary figures from different angles (timeframe, place, etc.) in different chapters.
September 10, 2017
Reading this book, two things occurred to me: That I have not read (nor even heard of) nearly as much CanLit as I thought, and also, it strongly confirmed my distaste for Mordacai Richler.
This book thoughtfully and humourously enumerates a period from the late 1950s to early 1970s when poetry and prose from Canadian authors burst through a floodgate, paraphrasing Margaret Atwood. Each chapter contains two or three capsule biographies of the relevant players, from authors, publishers and notable media reviewers and academics. This gives the book a sort of "here's some stuff that happened" free form non structure, but that's not really a bad thing. It weaves in political and social context, and describes 1951's Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the 'Massey' commission) which led to the creation of the Canadian Council for the Arts in 1957, which handed out grants to many of the authors in question. The book also suggests cheekily that many of these funds may have been spent on drug and alcohol fueled parties.
All in all, a good read. Informative without being heavy. Thorough without being oppressive.
This book thoughtfully and humourously enumerates a period from the late 1950s to early 1970s when poetry and prose from Canadian authors burst through a floodgate, paraphrasing Margaret Atwood. Each chapter contains two or three capsule biographies of the relevant players, from authors, publishers and notable media reviewers and academics. This gives the book a sort of "here's some stuff that happened" free form non structure, but that's not really a bad thing. It weaves in political and social context, and describes 1951's Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the 'Massey' commission) which led to the creation of the Canadian Council for the Arts in 1957, which handed out grants to many of the authors in question. The book also suggests cheekily that many of these funds may have been spent on drug and alcohol fueled parties.
All in all, a good read. Informative without being heavy. Thorough without being oppressive.
April 24, 2018
Even though I'm an avid reader my knowledge of Canadian Literature (with a capital L) is somewhat limited. Reading Arrival was not only entertaining but eye opening as well. When I was younger (in high school) we had to read a select list of Canadian Authors but I had absolutely no interest in them then. Now however, I gobble up as much Canadian content as I can.
Arrival is well researched, but not a stuffy analytical read. This said, it's not a book I gobbled up in a few sittings. Instead, it's a book that I picked up from time to time when I was craving knowledge and wanted to learn something about a specific author. Oddly enough, I enjoyed the political aspects of CanLit immensely. I found those parts quite fascinating.
Arrival is well researched, but not a stuffy analytical read. This said, it's not a book I gobbled up in a few sittings. Instead, it's a book that I picked up from time to time when I was craving knowledge and wanted to learn something about a specific author. Oddly enough, I enjoyed the political aspects of CanLit immensely. I found those parts quite fascinating.
September 24, 2017
A fascinating history of the CanLit Boom from the late 40s through the early 70s, this book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in early Canadian literature. The greatest thing about this book might be its inclusion of so many Canadian authors who are not often (if ever) mentioned today and the importance they played in the early days of Canadian literature.
I'd love to read a sequel that explores Canadian literature from the mid-70s through the 90s - and then maybe a third volume for the 00s and 10s in another 10 years.
I'd love to read a sequel that explores Canadian literature from the mid-70s through the 90s - and then maybe a third volume for the 00s and 10s in another 10 years.
June 13, 2017
I had so much enjoyment from reading this history of CanLit. So many of the books were old friends from years past and still so many to read in the future. Essential reading for all those readers who love our Canadian writers. Thanks to Goodreads and House of Anansi for this giveaway.
September 25, 2017
This is an enjoyable, fascinating, accessible piece of literary complaints with only two flaws: Mount doesn't quite get Rudy Wiebe and he is wearing a ridiculous hat in his author photo.
December 30, 2025
So helpful. A bible of CanLit beginnings
September 27, 2017
An exhaustive but not exhausting recounting of the story of Can Lit, written with wit and humour, and adding the social, economic and political context that makes this a kind of social history of Canada in the '60s and '70s. There is one glaring omission: although Mount spends a full chapter on Anansi and Coach House he neglects to mention one of the best and most sought-after small presses, Oberon. Michael Macklem not only published some of the new and leading writers of the '70s, he designed beautiful books and travelled across Canada from coast to coast SELLING them; e.g. Hood, Valgardson, Helwig, Metcalf, Marshall, David Adam Richards, Huggan et al. An otherwise inclusive account of an exciting period in Canadian literature.
August 31, 2017
I received a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway.
I enjoyed this exposé of Canada's literary scene. I especially enjoyed the author's style; there was quite a bit of humour in his writing. It was a treat to learn about the early lives of authors whose books I was "forced" to read in high school 🙂
I enjoyed this exposé of Canada's literary scene. I especially enjoyed the author's style; there was quite a bit of humour in his writing. It was a treat to learn about the early lives of authors whose books I was "forced" to read in high school 🙂
June 27, 2017
I have been dipping in and out of this account of the Canadian book industry. I love the sidebars with his take on “classics” of the Canlit canon and whether or not he feels that have held up over time.
February 20, 2018
I quite enjoyed this. Arrival: The Story of CanLit...reads like an engaging story of the fictional kind. Or, maybe it's more fitting to say it reads like a lively biography or autobiography. (It DOESN'T read much like poetry, in any case. I mention this because poetry is one of the main focuses of this book, the other being fiction: novels, short stories and occasionally plays.) While you are reading "Arrival" you don't really think about these things so much, as you are just enjoying yourself. That is, if you are a CanLit nerd, but truly who else would acquire and read this book? Guilty...of being a CanLit nerd even while I had almost forgotten that there WAS such a thing as "CanLit" (and not till now did I know that that is how it's spelled, I would have guessed "Can Lit" as two separate words but hey, bill bissett made up his own spelling, so... I like Nick Mount's perceptiveness, which is creative and deep, intelligent and yet written in a colloquially informal way. (I guess since he wanted to make CanLit seem interesting, any dry stuffy approach would have been a death sentence for his book.)
Like other reviewers, I truly dug the nostalgia that "Arrival" offered, to those of us of a certain vintage at any rate. (Guilty, of being of a certain vintage.) It helps that my dad was a professor of Literature (now retired and living out his years in a care home.) I grew up with a good percentage of the books mentioned and reviewed in "Arrival." Indeed the photographs show the very same editions, in many cases, as the ones that lined our family bookshelf when I was a kid and dad was still teaching. I'd read a lot of them but not all of them, and of course there were those books that for whatever reason, we did not have around our house. The Double Hook, for example. I'm curious about that one now.
Naturally Mount's choices and awardings of stars are his personal opinion. You can tell who his favourites are, and also those whose writing did not impress him as positively. It's not just there in his ratings but also in his gossipy bits about the writers' personal lives. It's fitting that those less likeable characters generally produced less likeable work. Is that a bias, on the reviewer's part, or is it just justice served with enough time to truly reflect upon fads?
Arrival; The Story of CanLit has me wanting to search out the books that I have not read, such as all Marie Claire Blais's novels minus "Mad Shadows" which I read many years ago. Arrival already led me to take time out from reading it to simultaneously read "The Fire-Dwellers" by Margaret Laurence. Thanks Nick!! If he were not constrained by a certain time period I guess Mount would have also mentioned Carol Shields, and Anne Marie Macdonald, maybe Evelny Lau, and on and on. Gail Anderson Dargatz? Also the much older book, "Tay John" by Howard O'Hagan, written in the 1930s, which I HAVE read, and which strikes me as a kind of rugged and unique peice of brilliance much like The Double Hook is described. Revisiting my copy of Tay Johh, indeed is see Michael Ondaatdje has written a stunning afterword in which he also mentions The Double Hook, as one of the books that influenced him strongly...as was mentioned in Arrival.
Occasionally the ins and outs of the publishing world and a piling up of unfamiliar names from it and from the Toronto and Quebec literary scene created a bit of a lull in my reading experience but all in all Arrival has made me nostalgic as all hell and very proud to be Canadian even if i will NEVER be able to write like Munroe, Gallant, Atwood, Ondaatdje, Laurence, MacLeod, Well done old friends!
Like other reviewers, I truly dug the nostalgia that "Arrival" offered, to those of us of a certain vintage at any rate. (Guilty, of being of a certain vintage.) It helps that my dad was a professor of Literature (now retired and living out his years in a care home.) I grew up with a good percentage of the books mentioned and reviewed in "Arrival." Indeed the photographs show the very same editions, in many cases, as the ones that lined our family bookshelf when I was a kid and dad was still teaching. I'd read a lot of them but not all of them, and of course there were those books that for whatever reason, we did not have around our house. The Double Hook, for example. I'm curious about that one now.
Naturally Mount's choices and awardings of stars are his personal opinion. You can tell who his favourites are, and also those whose writing did not impress him as positively. It's not just there in his ratings but also in his gossipy bits about the writers' personal lives. It's fitting that those less likeable characters generally produced less likeable work. Is that a bias, on the reviewer's part, or is it just justice served with enough time to truly reflect upon fads?
Arrival; The Story of CanLit has me wanting to search out the books that I have not read, such as all Marie Claire Blais's novels minus "Mad Shadows" which I read many years ago. Arrival already led me to take time out from reading it to simultaneously read "The Fire-Dwellers" by Margaret Laurence. Thanks Nick!! If he were not constrained by a certain time period I guess Mount would have also mentioned Carol Shields, and Anne Marie Macdonald, maybe Evelny Lau, and on and on. Gail Anderson Dargatz? Also the much older book, "Tay John" by Howard O'Hagan, written in the 1930s, which I HAVE read, and which strikes me as a kind of rugged and unique peice of brilliance much like The Double Hook is described. Revisiting my copy of Tay Johh, indeed is see Michael Ondaatdje has written a stunning afterword in which he also mentions The Double Hook, as one of the books that influenced him strongly...as was mentioned in Arrival.
Occasionally the ins and outs of the publishing world and a piling up of unfamiliar names from it and from the Toronto and Quebec literary scene created a bit of a lull in my reading experience but all in all Arrival has made me nostalgic as all hell and very proud to be Canadian even if i will NEVER be able to write like Munroe, Gallant, Atwood, Ondaatdje, Laurence, MacLeod, Well done old friends!
February 7, 2022
It rather insufferable read of and interesting time that falls into the tired trap of narrowing and minimizing the progression of Canadian culture. It reads as if Mount took Atwood’s Survival as a comprehensive text, and did little to improve upon the mistakes Atwood herself would acknowledge before this book was ever published.
Like Survival, it lacks the curiosity to investigate its own questions. It dismisses what came before, and refuses to acknowledge how the past set up the questions he strives to answer. Its depth ranges from deep cuts to vague references to questions easily answered or fleshed out with basic research.
The age, gender, and race of this author is clear in the text. Text that insists on including personal short reviews slammed into the margins that do nothing for the text. That insists on “clever” phrasing about Barbie’s spread legs and Buddy Holly falling from the sky like some “We Didn’t Start the Fire” fanfic. That laments The Torontonians not having a wider audience today, while failing to consider how a failure to say a single thing about its author contributes to that. That treats race more like this was written in the sixties and not the 2000s.
Like Survival, it lacks the curiosity to investigate its own questions. It dismisses what came before, and refuses to acknowledge how the past set up the questions he strives to answer. Its depth ranges from deep cuts to vague references to questions easily answered or fleshed out with basic research.
The age, gender, and race of this author is clear in the text. Text that insists on including personal short reviews slammed into the margins that do nothing for the text. That insists on “clever” phrasing about Barbie’s spread legs and Buddy Holly falling from the sky like some “We Didn’t Start the Fire” fanfic. That laments The Torontonians not having a wider audience today, while failing to consider how a failure to say a single thing about its author contributes to that. That treats race more like this was written in the sixties and not the 2000s.
October 20, 2024
A witty, opinionated review of the 60s/70s emergence of CanLit in a newly prosperous society, Mount surveys the economic and political conditions that gave government money to authors and began to celebrate our own identity and stories. With gossipy asides and (quite often harsh) blurbed starred reviews of dozens of early CanLit books on nearly every page framing the main text, what emerges are the artists and egos and sputtering fits of Canadian identity, including a lot of poetry and all the big names.
Mount opens and closes with Harold Sonny Ladoo, but concentrates on the mostly white writers that are still read today: Richler, Atwood, Purdy, MacLeod, Munro, Cohen, centralized around Toronto but going east and west and even surveying Quebec nationalism (in translation). Champions like CBC’s Robert Weaver and publisher Jack McClelland, the Yorkville scene, a great last chapter on the question of why the boom produced so many women writers.
Essential reading if you want to become more familiar with the classics and feel that glow of Canada. And Mount has my support if only for naming Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook as the greatest Canadian novel.
Mount opens and closes with Harold Sonny Ladoo, but concentrates on the mostly white writers that are still read today: Richler, Atwood, Purdy, MacLeod, Munro, Cohen, centralized around Toronto but going east and west and even surveying Quebec nationalism (in translation). Champions like CBC’s Robert Weaver and publisher Jack McClelland, the Yorkville scene, a great last chapter on the question of why the boom produced so many women writers.
Essential reading if you want to become more familiar with the classics and feel that glow of Canada. And Mount has my support if only for naming Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook as the greatest Canadian novel.
June 19, 2019
This is a wonderful book for anyone who likes or looks for "CanLit". Mount's book meant a lot to me as I studied CanLit back in my university days in the 1970's (shortly after the time that CanLit "exploded" on the scene). I enjoyed finding out more about some of the authors and poets that I studied and I plan to dig up some of my old poetry books to read Acorn, Layton and others again.
October 23, 2018
The CanLit class I wish I had at university!
June 20, 2020
An excellent book, that should be of interest to anyone interested in literature. The only disappointing part is that it ends too soon and isn’t a more expansive survey of Canadian literature.
November 25, 2017
Enjoyed this book on the CanLit boom of the 60s, it made me realize how many Canadian authors I have never read and need to. I won this book in a giveaway and found it to be an eye opener and realized that I took for granted that there always was an abundance of Canadian authors. I think it is a shame that Canadian authors are not mandatory reading in the schools and that it is an injustice which should be rectified.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews