Up in Ontario

Leah McLaren, the Novelista Debuts

Coming at this from a roundabout way: I'll admit with some hesitation that I'm not a webstats maniac. I like to check them once in a while to see what's happening, what people are searching for and finding on upinontario.com and what posts to this blog are more popular than others.

This month, February, is the first in a long time that 'orangutan' is not the most popular search query to send traffic to Up in Ontario. Leah McLaren has ascended to become the new champ, and that, along with a flurry of additional hits to the sensory lobe, have predicated this post on herself, the haircut with a pen. I wrote a post almost two years ago now that is the number one hit in Google for the search phrase Leah McLaren: Leah McLaren Redux.

But let's get something out of the way right now. I'm not going join the pile on to slag McLaren. Sure her column in the Globe and Mail is sometimes / reliably inane. Sometimes it's about the strife her toenails have endured. She plays up her ditzy persona, immersed in the dumb washcycle of consumerism and media, and others have pointed out that her name rhymes with intellectually barren, but I think she's smarter than all that. In some ways she is to Canadian columnists as Belinda Stronach is to MPs. She's pretty so she can't be smart. Her success came too fast for her to have earned it. She's getting attention that she doesn't deserve. Cut her down!

And she's got a new book out - the perfect opportunity for anyone with an axe (or ex) to grind to crawl out of the shadows and take a swing. The Continuity Girl is the novel she's been working on for a few years, and it's received some mixed reviews. Let's recap the coverage that's reached us here on the left coast:

• Saturday, February 4th: McLaren's home paper, The Globe and Mail, allowed her to use her column to excerpt her novel. Verdict: Horseshit. They should have charged her for advertising space.

• Saturday, February 11th: Joanna Goodman reviews The Continuity Girl in The Globe. Goodman writes: 'We forgive McLaren in large part because her prose is so witty and engaging and we can't put the book down.' The words 'chick lit' are used, but we're told that the story can be 'clever, poignant and insightful.' The review contains many rhetorical glissades such as 'At times, the cast of secondary characters borders on caricature.' and 'in spite of several brief lapses into slapstick...' Verdict: Suspicious, whiffs of influence peddling, a review about the fabulous writer, some teeny shortcomings of some book, and more about that fabulous writer again!

• Sunday, February 12th: Ryan Bigge reviews The Continuity Girl in The Toronto Star. Did I mention something about axes to grind? Perhaps the most scathing review I can remember reading in Canadian fiction. Body shot! Body shot! If I remember correctly, McLaren wrote a column about 'lurpers' a few years ago for The Globe. She related an experience she'd had with a young man, into his pints, who confronted her at a bar and wanted in - into the media scene, into the fabulous life. Bigge has the article archived on his site, Lurpers: the 21st century's angry young men. Bigge says the McLaren 'hatchet job' was directed at him, and so it was. Therein lies the axe. Verdict: Small, very small all around. The thrill of the zing will fade while memories of the pettiness remain.

• Tuesday, February 14th: McLaren does a moderated online chat on The Globe website 'on being a first-time novelist.' Topics include how The Continuity Girl is clearly not autobiographical, how the plot ideas came to McLaren from travelling with a girlfriend, that she is dating someone and that one of the contributors, Bob Blob, finds that his reading of McLaren's columns has diminished as his 'maleness makes it difficult to relate sometimes.' Verdict: Garden-variety nepotism that some bored folks who want to be published have glommed onto. Oh, right. I suppose it is called 'on being a first-time novelist.' So just simple nepotism.

All I know is that I don't like the cover of The Continuity Girl and I wish McLaren good luck with it. Writing the book is hard, getting people to notice harder, making a living writing novels in Canada, hardest of all.

The Quill & Quire blog also has excellent coverage of the Bigge McLaren affair, I discovered to my chagrin when I searched for 'lurpers' and discovered that it has only been used in the McLaren article, along with Alex Good who weighs in to say that the bad review wasn't even a good bad review.