Revenge of the Book Nerds

Before we get started, a disclaimer. I got my hands on a copy of Corey Redekop's first novel, Shelf Monkey, from an employee at his publisher. Said employee also happens to be my girlfriend. Knowing that, you are free to take what follows with as much or as little salt as you see fit. Here goes:

Timothy Findley once burned one of his own manuscripts, which Stanley Colbert, who was his agent at the time, told him was "not creative -- not a legitimate exploration of style -- not a declaration of purpose -- and not the transcription of any true voice." In fact, Colbert charged, Findley's pages were "a crime." And so Findley burned the book. This story, which Findley recounts in his memoir, Inside Memory, has always stuck with me, not so much because it is potent and heart wrenching, although it is both of those things. Rather it has stuck with me for the coda that Findley provides to this anecdote:

"Margaret Laurence burned a manuscript once, in her backyard incinerator.

No one else should burn a writer's book.

The only books you can burn are your own. And you have to know why. It is really not so that no one else can read them. It is so they will be gone from who you are. I mean, who you are as a writer."

I was reminded of this story while reading Corey Redekop's novel Shelf Monkey. Redekop's protagonist, Thomas Friesen, is an ex-lawyer who now works in a Winnipeg megabookstore called READ. (Pronounced variously REED or RED, depending upon who's speaking. One of the book's running jokes involves an uncertainty as to the correct pronunciation of the store's name, even among the employees.) READ is "a massive expanse of novels, textbooks, music, DVDs, and book-related paraphernalia" that people flock to "by the thousands," despite the fact that it "has all the architectural charisma of a wedge of rancid feta."

At first, the furloughs of printed material seem like the perfect environment for Friesen, a self-confessed "pack rat of literature," who has constantly endured the taunts and jeers of those who don't share his innate love of reading. "Of course," he says, "these are the same people who come in their pants when heavily armoured figure skaters manage to flick a lump of rubber into a goal with a piece of wood." Friesen quickly makes friends with a trio of co-workers -- Aubrey, Warren, and Danae -- who share his abiding interest in all things literary.

But it's not long before the cracks begin to show. Friesen is assaulted daily on several fronts. First, there is the musical drivel that serves as the store's aural wallpaper: Gino Vanelli, Bette Midler, and that "Hakuna Matata-singing motherfucker," Elton John. Second, there are the questions from the store's patrons, who are, to be polite, not aficionados of great literature. One person asks for a science-fiction novel to give as a present, then becomes utterly befuddled by Friesen's thoughtful recommendations of writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Roger Zelazny, preferring the more lowbrow havens of books based on video games and Star Trek. Another patron can't understand why the legal thrillers aren't separated from the rest of the fiction. Another wants "the newest book" that was featured on the radio that morning: "It's about this guy who's afraid? Of something? I think it was in Africa, or Italy. No, Kansas. It sounded really good, it just came out, I'm sure you must have it." When Friesen says that he'll need more information, the incensed patron asks rhetorically, "Why don't they ever hire people who understand books?"

All of this is amusing, if a tad obvious, but the book really comes into its own when it "goes a touch Palahniuk" and introduces the Shelf Monkeys, a cabal of disgruntled bookstore employees, teachers, librarians, and the like, who despair at literature's debasement in our modern, media-saturated world and hold regular meetings to redress this situation, during which they ritualistically burn books by authors they feel are responsible for lowering society's collective IQ.

Many of these authors are published by Munroe Purvis, a television talk-show host whose book club reaches millions of viewers and who has his own literary imprint, but who has never advocated a challenging, stylistically adventurous, or intellectually stimulating title, preferring instead to shill bottom-of-the-barrel, sentimental drivel about children struggling with crippling diseases, and their mothers, who find renewed faith in God through their encounters with adversity. When they discover that Munroe Purvis will be making a personal, in-store appearance at READ in Winnipeg, the Shelf Monkeys begin to hatch a plot designed to stop him from poisoning the collective literary well any further.

It's not giving anything away to let you know that things don't go well. From the beginning of Shelf Monkey, Friesen is on the run from the law because of his part in an unspecified incident involving the famous talk-show host. Most of the novel is presented as e-mails sent from Friesen to Canadian author Eric McCormack, who Friesen saw at a reading once and with whom he feels a bond. Interspersed among these e-mails are newspaper clippings, transcripts of FBI tape recordings and telephone calls, and excerpts from the Munroe Purvis show. This is a stylistically playful way of telling the story, and is reminiscent of Stephen King's approach in Carrie. That it feels neither redundant nor artificial is a testament to Redekop's control over his material and his ability to push his story effortlessly forward.

What is most praiseworthy about Shelf Monkey is its tone, which is blackly comic, and not afraid to get its hands dirty. There is an hysterical scene involving the humiliation of one of Purvis's authors, a vapid dilettante named Agnes Coleman, which is bracing and edgy and skirts the line of cruelty without ever quite tripping over it. (The front-page headline in the next day's paper reads "TASTELESS PUNKS MAKE AUTHOR CRY.")

There is a dramatic tension at the heart of Shelf Monkey between the literary ideals that Friesen and his clan hold dear and the kind of intellectual snobbery that they engage in, looking down upon anyone they deem to be less sophisticated, less serious, or less weighty than themselves. Redekop plays with this tension nicely throughout the novel, providing a critique of a literary culture that prizes shallowness and false sentiment over an authentic engagement with difficult texts, while at the same time assuring all of us who love books that, whatever our literary tastes or predilictions, and for better or for worse, we're all in this together.

(Shelf Monkey is due for release in April.)