And on the journalism novel front, I’ve tracked down a copy of William Weintraub’s 1961 novel Why Rock The Boat set in Montreal where the author worked for The Gazette and Weekend Magazine. And hung out with the novelist crowd (Mordecai Richler, Hugh Hood, Brian Moore, etc.). I remember reading it with great fondness some decades ago and can’t wait to read it again — once the Giller list is done, it will be very near the top of my list. Stay tuned.

from Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell
Alexandria Quartet

Invisible behind the lens itself that morning stood Keats – the world’s sort of Good Fellow, empty of ill intentions. He smelt lightly of perspiration. C’est le métier que exige. Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist’s neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has happened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to “send.” This haunting fear of missing a fragment of reality which one knows in advance will be trivial, even meaningless, had given our friend the conventional tic one sees in children who want to go to the lavatory – shifting about in a chair, crossing and uncrossing of legs. After a few moments of conversation he would rise and say “I’ve just forgotten something – I won’t be a minute.” In the street he would expel his breath in a swish of relief. He never went far but simply walked around the block to still the unease. Everything always seemed normal enough, to be sure. He would wonder whether to phone Mahmoud Pacha about the defence estimates or wait till tomorrow. . . . He had a pocketful of peanuts which he cracked in his teeth and spat out, feeling restless, unnerved, he did not know why. After a walk he would come trotting back into the café, or barber’s shop, beaming shyly, apologetically: an “Agency Man” – our best-integrated modern type. There was nothing wrong with John except the level on which he had chosen to live his life – but you could say the same about his famous namesake, could you not?