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The Man Who Hated Emily Bronte
Hired to teach in a junior college, Will Franklyn has come to Montreal expecting a life to proceed much as it had in Nova Scotia where he grew up, or in Edmonton or Edinburgh where he studied. But `in Quebec everything -- all law, all logic, all human behaviour -- is topsy-turvy.' Trusting and bemused, Will manages -- just -- to stay sane in the midst of lunacy. In this novel, a companion to his sombre The Man Who Loved Jane Austen , Ray Smith demonstrates once again that he is a master of comic fiction, leading us a merry chase round the mountain. The familiar places are there -- Schwartz's, the St. Viateur Bagel Shop, the Big O -- but lurking behind every familiar certainty is the unexpected, the bizarre, the topsy-turvy.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
9 people want to read
About the author
Ray Smith
173 books3 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Ray Smith (the novelist) was born in Cape Breton in 1941.
For more than three decades, Ray Smith has occupied a distinctive position on the margins of the Canadian literary scene. His work is characterized by an interest in experimentation, but there is no discernible pattern of development. Each of his books is markedly different from the others, and none fits comfortably into the standard academic overviews of Canadian literature.
His first book, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (short fiction), is one of the earliest Canadian examples of experimental writing in the international tradition. (Of American writers, perhaps Donald Barthelme provides the closest analogue.) The relentless, witty interrogation of short story form underscores a parallel skepticism about received truths in other areas of life.
Smith's first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, focuses on a group of about ten characters, most of whom have known each other from their student days. The first of its seven sections depicts that period of their lives as being relatively ordinary, but as their life stories unfold, their individual narratives become increasingly bizarre and exotic. One, for example, becomes a famous poet who marries an Oscar-winning actress. Another—the least likely—becomes a major player in a world-class drug smuggling operation; eventually he is murdered in accordance with Hollywood convention. A third becomes an internationally acclaimed artist, a fourth a producer of pornographic films, and so on.
Smith does not attempt to make such lives seem believable. Instead his interest is in exploring the voices of his characters, both spoken and written. Much of the book is in dialogue, and there are many unusually long speeches; two of the sections are transcriptions of diaries. Though many of the episodes involve comic exaggeration, the novel does address serious thematic issues, especially the nature of love and art, and the factors that promote and destroy them. Taken as a whole (and despite the sometimes frivolous and cynical rhetoric), Lord Nelson Tavern professes an almost Romantic faith in the validity of romantic love and the power of art to redeem human experience.
Read more: Ray Smith Biography http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4747...
Ray Smith (the novelist) was born in Cape Breton in 1941.
For more than three decades, Ray Smith has occupied a distinctive position on the margins of the Canadian literary scene. His work is characterized by an interest in experimentation, but there is no discernible pattern of development. Each of his books is markedly different from the others, and none fits comfortably into the standard academic overviews of Canadian literature.
His first book, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (short fiction), is one of the earliest Canadian examples of experimental writing in the international tradition. (Of American writers, perhaps Donald Barthelme provides the closest analogue.) The relentless, witty interrogation of short story form underscores a parallel skepticism about received truths in other areas of life.
Smith's first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, focuses on a group of about ten characters, most of whom have known each other from their student days. The first of its seven sections depicts that period of their lives as being relatively ordinary, but as their life stories unfold, their individual narratives become increasingly bizarre and exotic. One, for example, becomes a famous poet who marries an Oscar-winning actress. Another—the least likely—becomes a major player in a world-class drug smuggling operation; eventually he is murdered in accordance with Hollywood convention. A third becomes an internationally acclaimed artist, a fourth a producer of pornographic films, and so on.
Smith does not attempt to make such lives seem believable. Instead his interest is in exploring the voices of his characters, both spoken and written. Much of the book is in dialogue, and there are many unusually long speeches; two of the sections are transcriptions of diaries. Though many of the episodes involve comic exaggeration, the novel does address serious thematic issues, especially the nature of love and art, and the factors that promote and destroy them. Taken as a whole (and despite the sometimes frivolous and cynical rhetoric), Lord Nelson Tavern professes an almost Romantic faith in the validity of romantic love and the power of art to redeem human experience.
Read more: Ray Smith Biography http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4747...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 29, 2019
Here is another of Smith's unaccountably uncelebrated works. This one was published five years after The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. It deals with some of the same themes, particularly politics and society in Montreal. But Smith wrote this one as a sort of reverse mirror-image of the earlier novel.
Frank Wilson in the third-person-narrative Austen book is replaced here by first-person narrator Will Franklyn. The blunt melancholy of the earlier work is replaced by hilarious invention and cutting satire (axe-like satire and sarcasm at some points). Close-up meditations on family in the earlier work give way here to a careening ride through stuffy Quebec nationalism, pious academic foibles, Gilbert and Sullivan, convoluted confusions of gender identity, and half-earthy, half-mystical Icelandic poetry. Wilson's innocence made him vulnerable but Franklyn's serves as a shield. Et cetera. I particularly liked a character's referring to a provincial minister of cultural development as Minister of the Weeping Soul of a Nation in Chains — a lacerating comment on some Quebec attitudes but, really, a comment as well on the global tendency to pugnacious, self-indulgent victimhood. The character who is the man who hated Bronte would likely think so. (Albertans who take the narrower view can note a couple of disappointed comments about Edmonton, where Smith lived for a year in the late 1980s.)
Was Smith experimenting here or did he decide to wash away the sadness of the earlier book with raucous comedy? One can suspect the latter, given a literature professor character's comment about "the dreary Austen novel by that drudge at the other college." The humour occasionally is heavy-handed. The performance may not be as sustained as what Richler could turn out. This is still a very funny and polished comic work reflecting deeper themes. Smith did not produce the same kind of work twice but this novel resonates a little with his first one, Lord Nelson Tavern.
Frank Wilson in the third-person-narrative Austen book is replaced here by first-person narrator Will Franklyn. The blunt melancholy of the earlier work is replaced by hilarious invention and cutting satire (axe-like satire and sarcasm at some points). Close-up meditations on family in the earlier work give way here to a careening ride through stuffy Quebec nationalism, pious academic foibles, Gilbert and Sullivan, convoluted confusions of gender identity, and half-earthy, half-mystical Icelandic poetry. Wilson's innocence made him vulnerable but Franklyn's serves as a shield. Et cetera. I particularly liked a character's referring to a provincial minister of cultural development as Minister of the Weeping Soul of a Nation in Chains — a lacerating comment on some Quebec attitudes but, really, a comment as well on the global tendency to pugnacious, self-indulgent victimhood. The character who is the man who hated Bronte would likely think so. (Albertans who take the narrower view can note a couple of disappointed comments about Edmonton, where Smith lived for a year in the late 1980s.)
Was Smith experimenting here or did he decide to wash away the sadness of the earlier book with raucous comedy? One can suspect the latter, given a literature professor character's comment about "the dreary Austen novel by that drudge at the other college." The humour occasionally is heavy-handed. The performance may not be as sustained as what Richler could turn out. This is still a very funny and polished comic work reflecting deeper themes. Smith did not produce the same kind of work twice but this novel resonates a little with his first one, Lord Nelson Tavern.
Displaying 1 of 1 review