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*****

I have always been envious of people who can paint or sculpt or make poems or play the piano. My own shortcomings in these fields (which can be backed up by hard evidence) only serve to make me all the more curious about what makes a painter or a sculptor or a poet or a pianist tick. Inevitably, I suppose, I am also very interested in what drives a person to write prose fiction, and in how other people go about it. It appears I am not alone. Dozens, if not hundreds, of other Canadian novelists and short-story writers (and probably thousands if you go beyond Canada) have explored artistic processes and personalities as subjects for their work. My own scratchings of this particular itch include my novel Lay Figures, a play called Scape, and (paired this time with a focus on memory) my latest novel, Felt.

Here I offer recommendations for eight Canadian novels that I think do particularly interesting things with “the portrait of the artist.” They variously chase poets and painters, wrestle with relationships between artist and model, angst about influence and ownership and interpretation, and calculate the human costs of creativity—all while telling wonderfully engrossing stories.

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Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

As you read Jakob Beer’s recollections of his childhood in Poland and on a Greek Island, you know you are reading the words of someone who was always destined to be a poet. In this, her first novel, poet Anne Michaels lends Jakob (based on an actual person) a healthy dose of her own magical way with words. Orphaned by the Holocaust, the developing young poet is advised by his wise adoptive Greek father: “Write to save yourself and someday you’ll write because you have been saved.” When Jakob immigrates to Toronto, Michaels offers the brilliant insight that the poet, the translator, and the immigrant are all alike, trying “to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.” In the later pages of the book, the scholar Ben, who takes over from Jakob as narrator, becomes obsessed with Jakob’s work, probing the gap between the poems and the man who wrote them, and trying to close it.

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Swann, by Carol Shields

Carol Shields also adopts the chase-the-poet approach employed in the later stages of Michaels’ book, though here it is in a much more playful mood. Mary Swann is an obscure rural poet, published first in local newspapers and then in a limited-run posthumous collection (having been brutally murdered by her farmer husband.) The “rediscovery” of her work several years later by the academic community quickly kindles a highly competitive scholarly industry. Shields, at her satiric best and teetering frequently on the edges of farce, manages still to explore the eternal question of literary influences (Swann apparently and problematically had none) and the endlessly perplexing paradox that people with dull lives can write interesting stuff.

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Martin Sloane, by Michael Redhill

This novel’s title character disappears sixty-odd pages in, leaving his lover and our narrator, Jolene, to pursue all available leads. Martin-the-enigma affords Redhill an excellent way to develop the character of Jolene, who wrestles with unlocking the significances of the boxes that were Martin’s art. Filled with found objects arranged in interesting ways, the boxes evoke vague feelings of intense nostalgia and contain coded messages that not everyone can get. Martin, who resists selling his art to individuals because he wants everyone (including himself) to have access to it, also reminds us that revelations can’t be forced and will differ from recipient to recipient. He advises: “You can’t ask people to see the exact thing you want them to” and says of his works “You can’t treat them like they’re permanent. They’ll get ideas.”

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These Good Hands, by Carol Bruneau

Also focusing on three-dimensional visual art, Carol Bruneau in These Good Hands counterpoints the journal entries of a fictional nurse with letters written to an earlier self by the nurse’s patient the French sculptor Camille Claudel. As Auguste Rodin’s pupil, apprentice, and mistress, Claudel showed talent that clearly surpassed the master—with the (sadly foreseeable) result that he worked to suppress her, finally consigning her to the asylum where we, and the nurse, find her. The novel is rich in detail on art-student life and elements of the practice of sculpture, including insight on how posing as a model can inform the artist in rendering her subject. There are assorted cameo appearances by Monet, Debussy and Rilke in this thoroughly researched and evocative novel.

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All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews

The turning point in the life of Miriam Toews’s Elfrieda (Elf) may be when she belts out a piece by Rachmaninoff on her family’s forbidden piano while the bishop and elders of her small Mennonite community are visiting her father to dissuade him from sending her to university to study music. Elfrieda becomes a world-renowned pianist, whose most attuned audiences recognize the very private pain that fuels her performances. Yolanda (Yoli) is our narrator and the pianist’s sister, their relationship partly defined from childhood as one of performer and page-turner (the art of page-turning being based necessarily on talents for anticipation and silence). In the wake of Elf’s multiple suicide attempts and with an impending five-city concert tour, Yoli tries to persuade her sister to live, but Elf counters, devastatingly, that there is a glass piano inside her, ready at any minute to break through her skin, or break inside her.

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The Mythmakers, by Keziah Weir

Weir’s first novel grapples with the question of who it is who owns a story. Magazine writer Sal Cannon reads a posthumously-published excerpt from a novel by Martin Keller and sees herself as the model for a character in the opening episode. She becomes obsessed with Keller, who we discover was in turn terrified of having “his” ideas appear in somebody else’s novel first. The twist-filled story is deftly infused with references to contemporary physics (with its proposal that there are thousands of possible versions of existence) and with multiple rewarding references to the sister arts. Martin, for example, recognizes in a performance of a piece of music the importance of “leaving the thing to grow without its maker—the knowledge that that place, in the in-between, was where art resided”—an idea also explored in the next novel on my list.

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Chasing Painted Horses, by Drew Hayden Taylor

When Toronto cop Ralph Thomas spots a piece of graffiti depicting a horse and signed with a small handprint, he is reminded of his childhood on Otter Lake reserve and of the waif whose painted horses he first saw there. Danielle Gaadaw imagined a stunning and disturbing horse to life on Ralph’s mother “Everything Wall,” a blackboard space designed to encourage the children of the reserve to express themselves. The act of drawing is far more important to Danielle than the result, and though she draws only one subject she draws it differently every time. Watching her and seeing her finished work gives Ralph a glimpse through “what some have called the crack between the worlds.” Intent on finding the grown Danielle in Toronto (she must surely be the graffiti artist), Ralph enlists the aid of an unhoused man who must have witnessed the painting and seen the artist.

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Learn more about Felt: 

A family’s history is woven, unravelled, and rewoven into a tapestry spanning three generations.

Museum curator Matthew Reade’s career and marriage are in crisis in the aftermath of a recent exhibition. When he gets a worrying phone call about his fiercely independent ninety-six-year-old mother, Penelope, Matt uses the excuse of a research project to return to the Maritimes to check on her for himself. Once home, he finds he must stay on to help navigate her new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

The more Matt talks to his mother while preparing to move her into the local long-term care home, the more she reveals about his grandmother’s emigration from Norway to New Brunswick before World War I, the murky origins of the family handcraft business, her own complicated past relationships, and Matt’s beginnings. But how much of it can he trust and how much has been rewritten by the disease?