Bad first novel syndrome

Several hundred loyal readers have inquired as to why Mordecai Richler’s The Acrobats fell off my “Reading (Paper)” list so quickly. The answer is simple: the book is bad.

To be fair, this was the late Mordy’s first novel, written by a then somewhat naïve and idealistic young writer not yet twenty years old. Perhaps “bad” is too harsh an evaluation. Brash and precocious, to be sure. Original, barely. Enslaved to its time, definitely.

In the early 1950s Richler quit Montreal and its cold winters and fled to Paris. A year or so later he went to Spain to live cheaply and write. He was anti-Franco, and heroic stories of the Spanish civil war that he heard as a boy, such as the doomed defense of Madrid, had left a lasting impression on him. I suppose he felt that by crawling into the belly of the beast (Franco remained in power until 1974) he would be among the oppressed and the downtrodden and could draw inspiration from them. He always felt a moral responsibility, as a writer, to be “the loser’s advocate.”

He could also live there, in Ibiza and Valencia, for about $30 a month, including all the cognac he could drink.

That’s where he wrote The Acrobats. Later in life, he denounced it as painfully derivative. Legend has it he deliberately kept it out of print and would buy up used copies whenever he found it, to keep it out of circulation.

After Richler’s death in 2001, The Acrobats was republished by McCLelland & Stewart as part of their New Canadian Library series (read: cheap paperbacks of Canadian classics). I eagerly obtained a copy, which sat on my shelf for about a year before I picked it up last week. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Richler’s assessment — it is painfully derivative. Although you can plainly see the wit and satire that would later develop into Richler’s unique literary voice, it is buried under heaps of cut & paste stylistic flourishes — borrowings from hipsters of the day which have not stood the test of time. A Baskin-Robbins of literary flavours of the month.

I made it about a third of the way through the novel before finally admitting I was not enjoying it. With almost 100 unread books on my shelf, each screaming to be next, why should I endure? So I put it down and picked up Spain: a Traveler’s Literary Companion from Whereabouts Press.

How should I feel about that? Was this novel a failure? Should we dismiss it outright and shove it into the bottom drawer of literary history?

I think not. After all, this was the first novel of a writer who went on to much greater literary accomplishments. In its day, it was probably considered to be quite hip — the way some so-called “chick lit” novels are now. (They, like The Acrobats, will age badly.)

It was good enough to catch the eye of editors at André Deutsch, London’s hippest publisher at the time. As far as I know, it was Diana Athill who brought The Acrobats into print. That is the 1950s equivalent of Cory Doctorow asking me to incorporate the Blork Blog into BoingBoing.

More importantly, it gave Richler the boost he needed to start acting like, and being treated like, a serious writer. Had he not found a publisher, would he have gotten discouraged and quit? Would he have moved to California and sold his soul to Hollywood? Who knows? I know this however: although I did not finished the book (and likely never will), it will remain on my shelf as both a literary curiosity and a reminder that one’s first novel need not be one’s best. In fact, statistics overwhelmingly show that a person’s first novel is usually their worst. Fear not the bad first novel syndrome!