Canada, as satire, is more believeable

It's too easy to say that foreigners (particularly Americans) don't understand Canada. I'd say that to understand our culture, you just have to appreciate our brand of satire.

So American writer Gary Shteyngart has nothing to apologize for when he said that Canadian literature is too beholden to cultural granting bodies to be able to create truly original stories.

It's not easy to be original when your livelihood ultimately depends on policy made by the prime minister's office.

This year, we support a vibrant CanLit community; next year, maybe 10 per cent less. We need to save tax dollars, so that wealthy Canadian couples can split incomes for tax purposes.

This year, we'll make tax concessions to major private funders to support a vibrant CanLit community for us. Next year, we're more worried about sponsoring foreign welders who can build us a pipeline.

In that kind of environment, can you really expect all our writers to be a Mordecai Richler or a Will Ferguson?

Gary Shteyngart was born Igor Shteyngart, in Leningrad. His family left Russia for the U.S. in 1979, when he was seven years old and his biography notes young Gary grew up in an apartment with no television.

Now there's an upbringing that would help a young mind appreciate absurdities. Thus, he was able to compose stories in a manner that Wikipedia describes as “elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.” Like Absurdistan.

Too bad the name was already taken, because since Shteyngart claims to really love Canada, he could write the next Great Canadian Novel under the same title. In Canada, it's allowable for a Russian-American to do that.

Our government that creates the grants allowing Canadian writers to both create our national literature and eat, takes weeks to follow a 12-step formal protocol to write a 140-character tweet.

The collective salaries of every assistant-to-the-assistant, right up to cabinet-level tweaking and wordsmithing of spontaneous social media chatter must cost millions of dollars a year. This, to produce: “Browse the Mobile Protection Toolbox to learn facts & find tips to protect yourself. GetCyberSafe.”

Word-perfect.

Not only that, but high-level interdepartmental meetings are arranged (probably over a nice lunch), to produce agreements to re-tweet each other's spontaneous tweets, thereby creating the appearance the government is using social media successfully.

With all that effort, they still cannot come up with enough material to make it appear that our government is social-media-savvy, so they actually copy and paste each other's material, and send it as their own.

And people say the tax money that helps sponsor the Scotiabank Giller Prize is wasted.

If the above scenario appeared in a new novel submitted for consideration by the Giller jury (which in 2012 included Shteyngart), it would probably be tossed as too unbelievable.

As would a story about the mayor of a fictional Canadian megacity who admits to using illegal drugs, who is frequently publicly drunk and profane, who consorts with underworld agents and professes that what he does on his own time, legal or not, is none of your business.

And, who stands an even-money chance of being re-elected, because people believe he can save them a hundred bucks or so on their property taxes.

Now, if you could sew both scenarios into the same story, then you'd be talking prize money. Or, in Canada, you could publish the whole mashup in a daily newspaper — and not get sued.

Maybe the reason Canadian fiction writers don't take the kinds of risks that Shteyngart would like to see, is that the truth of Canadian life is already too incredible.

In Canada, this kind of behaviour is called your basic run-of-the-mill conservative governance. How could fiction compete with that?

We do much better when our fiction leaves our weather behind, as in Ferguson's novel 419, which won the Giller in the year Shteyngart was a prize jurist. Start and end the story in Calgary, but all the good stuff happens in Africa.