For its first 50 or so pages of his novel Happiness™, Canadian satirist Will Ferguson provides a quaint send-up of office politics and the book industry (historically, literature’s second most boring subject, after writers themselves).
But the humor picks up once the main story gets underway. This is really a book about a book, the ultimate self-help book, a meandering 1,000-page series of life lessons entitled What I Learned on the Mountain and credited to a pseudonymous guru calling himself “Rajee Tupak Soiree.” Our hero, downtrodden book editor Edwin de Valu, gets the typewritten manuscript in the slush pile at the middling publisher where he gruelingly toils. After some initial misadventures, Edwin has the text published with no changes.
Without the blanding-out process of the industry’s professional prose-polishers, What I Learned on the Mountain gets unleashed full-strength upon an unsuspecting world. Within days (the book biz’s notoriously slow operational pace is highly compressed in Ferguson’s fictional world), it’s the #1 best seller of all time.
And it really works!
Soiree’s turgid prose turns out to have a hypnotic effect, subconsiously leading most of its readers into a new way of thinking. (Ferguson doesn’t attempt to show us how this works; he only directly quotes from What I Learned on the Mountain in very brief snippets.)
The result: Pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.
Millions of North Americans suddenly convert to inner peace and contentment. The alcohol, tobacco, drug, fashion, and baldness-remedy industries collapse. So does the book industry, except for spinoffs and ripoffs of What I Learned on the Mountain. Vast swaths of the U.S. work force just up and quit their posts to embark on vision quests or to join Tupak Soiree’s Colorado ashram/harem. This heaven, like David Byrne’s is a place where nothing ever happens.
Edwin de Valu sees everything he’d known (including his wife and his ex-lover) disappear around him, and feels responsible for it. This milquetoast salaryman reinvents himself as an action hero (or antihero), determined to strike his revenge on Tupak Soiree and all he represents. In the process, he learns the real lesson of life—it’s meant to be a struggle. Happiness, real happiness, is a journey, not a destination.
And (spoiler alert) Edwin also finds out that Tupak Soiree is a total fraud. What I Learned on the Mountain, the book that conquered humanity’s cynicism and greed, was a cynical attempt to make money.
I found Ferguson’s ending to be a real cop-out. I wanted to read about the ultimate battle for humanity’s soul, between evil-disguised-as-good (Tupak and his blissed-out hordes) and good-disguised-as-evil (the now angry, gun-toting Edwin).
That story remains to be written.
So does the heart of Ferguson’s conceit, a sufficiently-long example of Tupak’s seductive prose stylings.
But these failings may simply mean Ferguson’s conceptual reach exceeds his stylistic grasp.
In other words, he’s also still striving.
(Sidebar 1: The novel’s original Canadian title in 2001 was Generica, referring to the uniform state of bliss people adopt upon exposure to Tupak Soiree’s teachings.)
(Sidebar 2: Could there actually be a style of writing that, like monks’ chants or recent attempts in “binaural-beat” electronic music, rewire the human mind? The story possibilities, oh the story possibilities…)
(Sidebar 3: What would US/Canadian society really look like after a mass conversion away from anxiety/depression/addiction and toward inner peace? We’d still have to feed and shelter ourselves, and we’d still have tribal/social/political differences. More story possibilities…)
No, the Canadian election results don’t mean North America’s bastion of sane politics has suddenly turned into a bunch of Bushbots. Thanks to their four-party system and the shift of a couple dozen House of Commons seats, a Liberal minority government has been replaced by a Conservative minority government. Incoming prime minister Stephen Harper may talk the same rural-oriented, top-down, lawn-and-order talk as the Bushies; but to pass any legislation he’ll have to work out vote-by-vote coalitions with the Liberals, the independence-minded Bloc Quebecois, and the progressive-left New Democrats.
The most famous brand in romance novels, “Harlequin Romance,” is apparently to be retired next year. The company’s still churnin’ out the paperbacks; but the firm’s specialty lines have taken the sales, and the shelf space, away from what had been its flagship series.
Masculine-oriented readers might scoff at ‘em, but romances are the last commercially successful branch of old-fashioned pulp fiction. They’re “adventure” stories written to precise pubilsher-decreed formulae–just as the Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow, Tarzan, and Doc Savage had been.
Horror, sci-fi, mystery, and action novels are still being published in paperback, of course; but those industry segments are, for the most part, not as centrally editorially-controlled as they used to be (with some exceptions, such as Star Trek novels).
No, it’s the romances that are still this heavily pre-planned by the home office. Each “series” brand has its own characteristics–length, setting, characters, explicitness level (some of the racier romance lines are now the only sexual material allowed for sale at Wal-Mart).
This obsession with order and contrivance can be seen in some of the “chick lit” novels marketed to women who consider themselves too hip to read romances. “Chick lit” stories might not always have happy endings, but they seem to all have perky young heroines who all live in glamorous cities and all have glamorous AND high-paying careers, just like the heroines in certain romance series. (Trust me on this: In the real world, nobody who writes for an alternative weekly newspaper can afford Sarah Jessica Parker’s wardrobe.)
We’ll leave this item with a totally unrelated aphorism from the source of this news flash, “Superromance” novelist Susan Gable: “Beware of men with expensive, flashy cars and expensive, flashy teeth.”
…but there’s a list of Canada’s top 50 pop songs that includes nothing, absolutely nothing, by Nardwuar the Human Serviette!
The National Hockey League’s team owners have canceled the whole season, having failed to make the players’ association give in on salary caps and other issues. Puck-and-stick fans will now have to find new pursuits, such as knitting, drinking, and watching Degrassi High reruns.
Mike’s Hard Lemonade is moving its (small) head office to Seattle; specifically to Pioneer Square’s Washington Shoe Building, that onetime party central for the Seattle indie art world. The company’s Canadian-born founder-CEO (whose real first name, natch, is Anthony) will hire 30 people here to handle development and marketing for the Mike’s brands, which are manufactured and distributed by subcontractors.
Imagine the implications: Boeing, Muzak, and UPS may have moved their corporate HQs to other states, but by golly we can still become the capital of flavored clear-malt coolers!
…to move baseball’s Montreal Expos to Washington DC? Might not happen after all.
The CBC, as one of several attempts to overcome the ratings disaster that is the NHL lockout, came up with a viewer contest to name The Greatest Canadian.
All summer, the network and its website asked viewers to nominate the most significant Canadian citizen, past or present. This fall, the network aired documentaries about each of the top ten figures (all male, and including two of the network’s own air personalities).
On a Monday-night live special, the winner was announced. It’s T.C. Douglas, founder of what’s now known as the New Democratic Party and originator of the nation’s universal health care system.
Douglas, a prairie populist of the old Depression-era variety, remains a big reason why Canada’s now a more progressive, more Euro-oriented land than our sorry place.
(Incidentally, among the non-finalists in the contest: Margaret Atwood, Marshall McLuhan, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, Emily Carr, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, and William Shatner.)
