On Anne Michaels' Held

By Aaron Schneider

This review begins with an analysis of Anne Michaels’ 2024 Giller Prize acceptance speech. The full text of the speech was initially circulated on social media, but it has since disappeared, so I have included a transcript at the end of this review along with a link to a video of the prize ceremony. Michaels’ remarks begin at 39 minutes.

Anne Michaels’ Giller Prize acceptance speech should be a juncture in her career, a point of rupture that transforms how her work and how Michaels herself are perceived. After making the shortlist with both Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault, Michaels’ win for her third novel, Held, came in the midst of the controversy over Scotiabank’s investment in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems and in the face of a boycott that saw several dozen authors withdraw their books from consideration for the prize. She took the stage in the ballroom of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto to accept the award on November 18th of last year. Protesters were gathered outside. The genocide in Gaza was in its thirteenth month and the estimated death toll had surpassed 44,000. She changed glasses, telling the audience, “so that I can read to you,” and delivered prepared remarks that should be received as they were offered, as an attempt to speak to the tensions of the moment and to repair (her word) the fractures dividing the literary community. The papers she held in front her, the creases she undoubtedly made when she folded the pages into thirds to tuck them away in preparation for her win were visible. These twin seams declared that this was a text and that the words Michaels offered on that night were the product of reflection, thought, and craft, if not care. I want to begin this review of Held with that text and the words it contained before proceeding to the novel whose reception it sought to shape. 

It is tempting to start by digging into the granular detail of Michaels’ remarks, to pluck the more obviously confusing and objectionable sentences out of the speech, and hold lines such as “There is no moral righteousness. There is only morality” or “I write because the dead can read” up for examination, but I want first to consider the general trend of her remarks, the trajectory that carried her through to her concluding thank you, the vector within which these individual statements were embedded and to which they contributed the motive force. The speech was defined by a persistent and insistent (more on the affective valence of this shortly) movement towards homogeneity, simplicity, a deracinated absolute:

​Everything I write is a form of witness
 
the only hope worth offering a reader
 
Everything I write is against futility
 
there is only morality
 
Every book bears witness
 
Every book its own form of resistance and assertion
           
There are two kinds of accounting in this world
 
we need unity, not just in one community, but among all the Arts to forge practical alliances that proclaim our values
 
Every day writing Held I asked myself, what do we need now?
 
in the places we feel most abandoned, we are not alone
 
I write in solidarity with the moral purpose of every writer bearing witness
 
Every reader throughout the decades who has written and spoken to me, whose gaze has met mine on the page, has given me courage, and with every word I am speaking tonight I want to give that same courage

“Every,” “every,” “our,” “we” repeated like a drumbeat through the remarks. This was paired with a consistent deployment of aphorism (Michaels’ preferred mode), and the effect of the pairing was an ascension towards ever greater levels of generality. The words carried the speech out of the specificity of the moment, out of the concrete material of history, out of the difficult context of an awards ceremony funded by a bank that profits from genocide, out of a divided literary community and the protesters outside of the hotel towards an absolute that did not so much escape as supersede these details, that made them dispensable, transformed them into contingencies. “Every” replaced “this,” “now,” “here.” A transhistorical nationalist “unity” was asserted in the face of division.

This tracks as the expression of a deep anxiety on Michaels’ part, as the response of someone who was unequal to the moment and tried to escape it by dispensing with it while simultaneously claiming the authority of the truth in its purest, most attenuated, and therefore least contestable forms. And the delivery of the speech was, in its way, anxious. Michaels seemed confused and vulnerable—there were complexities to both her confusion and her vulnerability, particularly to her vulnerability, that need to be unpacked.
​
There was also and more importantly a violence to the speech. There was a wilful erasure of difference that was integral to its movement towards homogeneity. This was most obvious when Michaels spoke about nationalism, invoking an historical nadir of Canadian publishing in defence of a politically and morally compromised award: 

​I’m standing here tonight in solidarity with Canadian Publishers and booksellers. A short time ago, less than 70 years, we lived in a country where only 17 books of Canadian fiction were published in a year, fewer in the entire country than the long list for this prize. Our literary history is one of phenomenal assertion and now as then we need unity, not just in one community, but among all the Arts to forge practical alliances that proclaim our values. 

Note the deformation of the timeline in the second sentence: “a short time ago” turns out to be almost “70 years.” This is longer than Michaels has been alive. It is also a series of decades that have, arguably, seen the greatest changes to Canadian publishing, bearing witness to not one, but a sequence of profound transformations, so that the circumstances in which she was speaking were radically different several times over from the past she invoked. “A short time ago” would have been dishonest if Michaels had not revealed her misuse of it in the qualifying appositive phrase that followed it. She did not, however, withdraw the rhetorical importance of the truncated timeline. Rather than being cancelled out, the immediacy and the accompanying urgency of “a short time ago” was carried into and intensified by the remainder of the passage. This was the recent past, she insisted. It could soon be our present. And by insisting like this, she raised the questions, what is misrepresentation that calls attention to itself as misrepresentation while demanding that we accede to the exigency at the core of its inaccuracy? What significance do we attach to the flagrancy with which this deformation of temporality is deployed and acknowledged but not undercut by its acknowledgement? To the brazenness of this sequence of manoeuvres?

The changes in nearly seven decades of Canadian publishing and the differences they produced between the past to which Michaels gestured and the present from which she made that gesture were erased so that she could mobilize the image of the national literature under threat to compel/require her listeners’ complicity. This is a conventional move in the nationalist playbook: a threat to the nation is invoked in order to forcibly homogenize the national public, proscribe minority values, positions, groups, and ratify the interests of the elite as the interests of the community. Never trust a nationalist crying wolf. The wolf is real and it is always them. In this case, these sentences said to the protesters outside that they needed to set aside their justified objections or they were betraying Canadian literature. “A book,” Michaels said, “is nothing if it does not listen.” But there was no listening here. There was no welcoming into dialogue. No recognition of even the formal validity of dissent. There was only a barely-veiled injunction offered under the cover of care, given in the saccharine tones of the pseudo-civility of power. Concern did not so much tilt towards as emerge out of the extremity of the nationalist imperative: toe the line or be traitors.

In this context, the vulnerability that characterized Michaels’ delivery must be read as an exercise of privilege. It did not signal her exposure, but her access to the mechanisms of power. It was, like her presentation of the timeline of Canadian publishing, a deformation, a bending of sympathy away from the largely young and marginalized protesters outside, away from the murdered Palestinians whose spectres haunted and continue to haunt the speech, to Michaels herself, the award-winning, nationally and internationally lauded writer located firmly within the institutions that dominate Canadian literary culture. She could and did present herself as vulnerable because she was immunized against harm by this litany of privileges. She was safe enough to seem susceptible, and the effect of that appearance of susceptibility, of that seeming, was to recenter her. I am, here, ascribing a specific intentionality to Michaels. I am situating her within both my sentence and the moment to which it refers as the subject of the verb “present,” positioning her as the agent shaping the scene. I am doing so without any evidence of her motivations/intentions/interiority, but not without reason. Like the nationalist invocation of threat, the presentation of oneself as vulnerable is a coercive manoeuvre deployed by the powerful not so much to limit as to dispense with dissent by delegitimizing the voices of dissenters, and, crucially, expelling them from the category of valid political actors, by tone policing them into silence. The decision to present herself like this was a choice. She wrote the words. She delivered them. And, in a context where dissent is managed by the interlinked and rigorous application of tone policing and intentionality, so that dissenters are often forced to account for the reception of their words as well as their content, it is uniquely necessary to hold those who speak from and for power to a similarly rigorous standard. This is also, to some extent, beside the point. Whether intended or not, conscious or not, these moves are the reflexes of privilege, the flexing of exclusive muscles, and holding Michaels accountable for her specific words is less a question of volition than a mechanism for calling the structures in which she has embedded herself over her career, which she represented and continues to represent, and to which she offered cover with her performance of vulnerability to account. Michaels’ vulnerability in the moment of her victory was one of a series of deformations whose function was to shore up the status quo against its disruption, a status quo that was slipping as Michaels read, and that has slipped even further in the months since the ceremony.

Perhaps the most glaring of these deformations are the pair of statements on morality sandwiched between her declarations that she writes against futility and that books must listen: “There is no moral righteousness. There is only morality.” My initial response to hearing this was to dismiss it as nonsense. It might be your response as well. But as much as I wanted to dismiss it like that, I felt compelled to unpack it, to explain myself and my response to it. You might feel the same reservation about allowing your initial dismissal to stand. You might ask yourself: Did she really say that? What did she mean? She did say that, and rather than reaching past those words towards an intended meaning that matches her stature in Canadian letters, I would encourage you to inspect your impulse to find meaning in her words. I would suggest that that reservation, that sense that we cannot make a simple declaration that something that is on its face nonsensical is in fact nonsense and allow that declaration to stand, that we cannot say what something manifestly is without elaboration, is a minor twitch of the seismograph needle registering the fluctuations of power and authority. Who we are comfortable dismissing out of hand, without justification, and which dismissals we must support with explanations tell us about privilege and inclusion in the same way that Michaels’ statements and her liberty to make them tell us about her relationship to power. 

So, let’s articulate the particular nature of the nonsense we should simply be able to declare as nonsense. “There is no moral righteousness” means that one cannot be morally right, one cannot live in accordance with moral principles. On its own, as anything other than a clumsy articulation of the limits of human fallibility, it is already pushing the boundaries of sense. “Morality” is the system by which we determine right or wrong, by which we establish the principles that we become morally righteous by living in accordance with. In other words, what Michaels is doing with these paired statements is asserting the conditions of possibility while denying what those conditions make possible. It is, as I have already said but bears repeating, nonsense. It is particularly nonsensical because there is no time when moral righteousness is more clear-cut and necessary than in the midst of a live-streamed genocide, no time when the calls to moral accountability from the protesters outside of the ballroom are more important or warranted. The ambiguities fall away. The ethical quandaries resolve into a stark choice: complicity or justice. What does it mean in these circumstances, at a moment in time like this one, faced with a choice like this, to declare without qualification or explanation that there is no moral righteousness? And to do so with a statement that subverts its own premise, that decomposes, as it proceeds from one clause to the next, into absurdity?

At least a partial answer can be arrived at by reading through the content of the statements and the tone of their delivery to place them within the structure of the moment, to locate them within the networks of privilege and marginalization defining the ballroom and the street outside. The protesters on the street were writers, but largely less commercially and institutionally successful ones, younger ones, writers on the margins of literary power. The guests in the ballroom were members of the Canadian literary and corporate elite. They were dressed in evening wear and bathed in a garish, ruddy light. Michaels addressed them from a low stage that made her visible to the room without separating her from it. The division between inside and outside, dissent and complicity is the key to understanding the function of statements whose lack of content would otherwise render them indecipherable: because they are meaningless, they cannot be statements about morality, about its possibilities or impossibilities, or even about Michaels’ ability to pronounce on morality. They must be, they can only be, statements, tout court—that is to say, statements whose total emptiness reduces their function to signalling the ability of the speaker to make statements. They are pronouncements about the capacity to make pronouncements. And they are primarily about power. They point to its location, but also deploy and affirm it. They perform a wholly contentless and therefore crass centring of authority as authority in Michaels and in the institutions of power that ratify her importance. These statements say nothing about morality or moral righteousness, they say nothing at all in the literal sense, but by saying nothing in this particular way, at this particular juncture in time, from this particular room, they make it abundantly clear that Michaels, the stage from which she spoke, and the forces that produced the pageantry of the ceremony are the point from which both morality and moral righteousness are adjudicated, the sole locus from which speech as truth is permitted to emerge, and because of their emptiness, they reduce truth to the action of speaking from a position of privilege, to an empty form ratified by power.

There is a brutishness to all of it, to the statements and to the moment in which they are embedded. It is an instance of naked entitlement that reveals that Michaels considers herself exempt from the general injunction to make statements that have meaning, to accord with the basic rules of discourse, and to accept the constraints of the propriety called for by a moment of deep crisis. The statements themselves are brutish in the specific way that they mark her out as both separate from and superior to the protesters. This may seem extreme. However, it is worth pausing to recall that, on the one hand, the protesters were speaking out against the prize sponsor’s complicity in an active and ongoing genocide, and, on the other, Michaels was demonstrating that she did not feel an obligation to make sense.

How you hear these statements, whether you think they are brutish or not, whether you are willing to hold Michaels accountable for the words she presented as the product of thought and care, as premeditated, depends on where you hear them from. Your response locates you. It either bares your identification with the institutions of power or reveals your independence from them. Here again is the violent erasure of difference. The statements offer you a choice: compromise yourself and your critical faculties by acceding to nonsense disguised as insight or be expelled from the circles of privilege, become someone who says the aphorism has no clothes, and by saying this dispels the illusion of their own belonging. After Michaels made these statements, the camera switched from a narrow focus on the novelist to a wide shot that included the audience sitting at the tables, the people turned towards the stage, listening and nodding sagely along. The change in shot read not as a mark of planned coordination or collusion between the production and the speaker, but of the extent to which both are unconsciously in lockstep, symmetrical elements of a pageantry whose purpose is to situate the viewer/listener in the audience nodding along to the nonsense, or outside of the ballroom, on the street, off the rhythm of the speech, discordant, to place the critical viewer/listener in the smaller, lonelier circles of dissent, and to make the viewer/listener who is placed like this feel their loneliness and smallness. It is deeply and painfully (I should more appropriately write “hurtfully” here) ironic that these statements appear in a speech that proceeds to explain that the novel being awarded “says, in the places we feel most abandoned, we are not alone.”
​
There is more to say about this speech, about how it understands bearing witness, about how it articulates the relationship between writing, reading and morality, about how Michaels frames her connection to her readers, about how she deploys concepts such a repair and solidarity, and of course, about the speech’s most obviously objectionable statement “the dead can read.” I’ll return to this sentence by the end of this review, but now I want to turn to the novel that was being celebrated on that November evening. Towards the end of the speech, Micheals explains:

​Every day writing Held I asked myself, what do we need now? What voice might be small enough to be heard? Margaret Atwood’s embrace of Held and her word, ‘timely,’ could not have meant more to me.

​This aligns the novel with the speech, at least in their shared relevance to the current historical moment, and I want to carry what I have outlined here (the proclivity towards aphorisms that collapse in on themselves, the ascension towards ever greater levels of abstraction, the homogenizing and often violent effect of this movement, and the complex enmeshment of privilege and power in the formal structure of the absolute statement) over to reading the novel that Michaels’ remarks so clearly and intentionally echo. 

---

Held follows four generations of a family over more that a hundred years, shuttling back and forth in time, and between France, England, Estonia and two war zones, one identified and one not. A soldier returns from the first world war and becomes a photographer. Thirty years later, his assistant sits as a model for a fictionalized version of Lucian Freud. Several decades after that, her granddaughter is a trauma surgeon who falls in love with a journalist she meets in a war zone. The plot, however, is beside the point. The novel is meditative in its method, focused not events or characters but on a handful of ideas—love, death, memory, history, science, grief, etc.—that Michaels returns to with an obsessive regularity. The effect is to relegate what is happening and to whom it is happening to the margins of a book in which insights take centre stage, acquire a substance and clarity, a living weight that the characters—really, the ghostly suggestions of characters—drifting past them in the background never manage to approach.

Held is written in a style that readers will recognize from Micheals’ previous two novels, and that has been variably referred to as poetic prose, beautiful writing, or lyrical realism, and that I think is most appropriately termed sentimental realism. It is a mode that weights the smallest units of prose, the word, phrase, sentence, with a superabundance of meaning, and whose distinguishing stylistic feature is the aphorism. The result is a novel that is epic in the scope of its thought as well as its time frame, that pronounces confidently on the ideas I have already listed and more as it shuttles across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but that is at the same time economical, truncated in its word count, coming in in the hardcover edition at 220 modestly sized pages printed in a large font. I’ll return to the tension between book’s length and its intellectual ambitions later in this review. Now, I want to start at the beginning, with the novel’s first sentences, and the entry point they offer into unpacking the complex ramifications of Michaels’ style and into thinking through how the novel understands itself, the role of the novelist and the particular form of pleasure it offers its readers. 

Held opens with two sentences separated from what follows by a dinkus. The first section of the book is peppered with similarly short, sometimes only sentence-length, segments of text that invite being read as lines, couplets, stanzas rather than sentences and paragraphs—that is to say, with a slowness and attentiveness that is most often reserved for poetry. Set at the beginning, the two opening sentences have an extra structural gravity that is reflected in their subject matter: “We know that life is finite. Why should we believe that death lasts forever?” They are eerily reminiscent of one of the more objectionable statements in Michaels’ acceptance speech: “There is no moral righteousness. There is only morality.” In both pairs of sentences, the first sentence establishes a fact and with it a logical parameter, and the second sentence turns, breaching the parameter, reconfiguring the order established by the first sentence and recontextualizing the fact stated by it in a move that is meant to be read as revelatory: here is truth; see, the truth you accepted is not what you thought it was, and there is something greater, more substantial you must reckon with. It tracks less as a bait-and-switch than as an attempt to swerve in the second sentence towards both greater complexity and more durable truth: moral righteousness, the action of according with morality that is by its nature limited to the individual actor, the institution, the collective, but always limited, circumstantial, is denied in favour of the assertion of the transcendent absolute of morality; the basic fact of mortality is not so much subverted as supplemented by the assertion by way of a rhetorical question that death is also a state of being that has an end.

Both sets of sentences arc towards significance but miss the mark, in the fist instance collapsing into contradiction, and in the second foundering on a category error: life is the state of being alive. Death is the negation of life. It is life’s end, but not its opposite or inverse, at least not in the way that green is the opposite of red but both are colours, or east is the opposite of west but both are directions. Or, in other words, life and death do not belong to the same category, they are not both states of being, and they are not defined by the same attributes. Death does not have a duration any more than east has a hue. What Michaels does in these sentences is treat death as if it belongs to the same category as life and carry an attribute of life over to death. It is comforting not only in its assurance that death comes to an end, but also to the extent that by aligning life and death it momentarily erases death as a pure negation. It is a basic mistake in reasoning, but a significant one because it introduces both the central conceit of the novel (that the dead persist in the world and in the lives of those who survive them long after they have died) and the primary stylistic device of the book (the sweeping, assured, and embarrassingly incorrect absolute pronouncement in the form of an aphorism). The structure of the error is also notable to the extent that it prefigures the constricted and, I will argue, anxious solipsism that defines the novel in slightly different ways, but with the same determinative force with which it defined her acceptance speech. 

The suggestion (really, the assertion) that, like life, death also has an end is not the outcome of an investigation, of the accumulation of evidence, or a narrative that has been even briefly elaborated. It is not the product of an outward movement towards content (of any kind) beyond the terms laid out by the two sentences. Instead, it’s a logic trick, a miscategorization meant to transform, or at least disrupt, our understanding of death without exiting the closed circuit of the two sentences. It offers transcendence without extension, tracking along the vertical axis of truth while foreclosing the horizontal axis of the world in such a way that insight is posited in contradistinction to knowledge. In her acceptance speech, Michaels says that when writing the novel, she asked herself, “What voice might be small enough to be heard?” and there is a commitment to a specific type of smallness in these sentences that is picked up and perpetuated by the aphorisms that follow them. It is also worth noting that this opening operates within an inherently conservative understanding of truth. Even though it disrupts our conception of death, it does so with reference only to the established parameters of the concept, never introducing anything new, working entirely and exclusively within the confines of received knowledge.

It would be easy to point to these opening sentences and accuse Michaels of sophistry. There is the logical sleight-of-hand that is typical of the sophist and the equally typical inversion that turns sureties on their heads. Even the rhetorical question has a touch of bullying slyness to it. However, I don’t think Michaels is insincere. I don’t think she is being deceptive or manipulative. It’s worse than that. I think, and the novel that follows these sentences shows, that she believes both in the truth of what she has written and in the method by which it arrives at its insight.

​Aphorisms proliferate through the book:

​“We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known.”
 
“Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.”
 
“What we give cannot be taken from us.”
 
“What is fate? When struggle is the same as surrender.”
 
“How can we doubt the existence of what is invisible? How can we conflate invisibility with inexistence?”
 
“To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.”
 
“...the mechanism that disproves something is also the very mechanism of proof, and what we do not believe teaches us what we do believe. Faith is a mechanism, just as love is, proving itself, once and for all and again and again by its disappearance.”
 
“History is liminal, the threshold between what we know and can’t know.”

Some are banal, obvious truths presented with a portentousness that tilts towards self-parody without letting go of its self-seriousness. Some are, at best, of limited validity. Others decompose into nonsense under inspection. Consider “To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.” From a 10,000-foot perspective, this looks accurate. Historians are concerned with the concrete specificities of events that of necessity ramify into difference, philosophers with abstractions that converge on similarity. However, the more you think about it and the closer you look, the less sense this makes. Specific details are as likely to be the foundation for identities and linkages as differences—this is the basis of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance and the cause of countless instances of recognition and misrecognition throughout anyone’s day. Abstraction reduces specific details but can just as easily widen differences as erase them. And then there is the sentence’s use/abuse of history and philosophy. History is a complex vibrant discipline with schools, camps, competing and overlapping theories and methodologies in which there is no agreement about what history is let alone the relative differences of battlefields. Philosophy is an even older and richer discipline with even greater degrees of variation, and, as anyone who has had the pleasure of sitting in on a conversation between a Heideggerian and a philosopher of science rooted in the logical positivist tradition will know, even deeper divisions, divisions so deep that they stretch the limits of mutual intelligibility. In other words, Michaels’ declaration only makes sense if you see both history and philosophy not as disciplines, fields, debates that circulate around a collection of subjects and methodologies without ever fixing or reifying them, not as living forms of thought and inquiry, but as fetish objects.

There are two important things to say about this. First, it is founded on a basic ignorance of its subject matter on Michaels’ part, and presumes a similar ignorance in the reader. This might seem harsh, but anyone who has taken first-year history and philosophy courses, and many people who haven’t, are more than well-equipped to recognize the problems with these statements. “to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same” is the kind of declaration that calls into question whether Michaels has read any philosophy, and presumes that her readers either haven’t or are willing to dispense with their knowledge for the pleasure of reading the line. I will say more about this ignorance and the pleasure derived from indulging it shortly. Second, these declarations perform a foreclosure that recalls that of the book’s opening sentences. I said the discipline of history is “vibrant” and that of philosophy is “rich” in order to draw attention to and acknowledge that both of them derive their vitality from their heterogeneity. They are meaningful and worth engaging with because neither of them are one thing, because they are contradictory, fractious, expansive, etc., because they have much to say about many things and many things to say about any one thing in particular. The collapsing of these complex disciplines into a pair of singular positions is a reductive simplification that requires an absolute break with reality. You can write “To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same,” but you can only write it if you detach “historian” and “philosopher” from actually existing historians and philosophers and from what both of them do and think. The sentence does not so much truncate the world as isolate itself from it while pronouncing on it. I used the image of vertical and horizontal axes in my discussion of the opening sentences of the novel. If we return to it in this case, there is no horizontal axis, there is only the still point of ignorance from which the line of assertion ascends towards the absolute.

A reader might ask, aren’t I being too hard on Michaels? Aren’t I holding her to an inappropriate standard? Why am I treating a novel like an academic book or a philosophical monograph? What’s the harm in playing with the idea that death is finite, or using history and philosophy to get at the difference between the specific and universal features of events? My response is that the assessment of statements should be calibrated to the authority they claim, and Michaels claims a great deal of authority. Moreover, questions like these can distract us from considering what is more important than the validity of Michaels’ statements: what Michaels does in making them, and what pleasure they offer her readers.

Michaels claims for her herself as a novelist the right to pronounce, to offer TRUTH, italicized, bolded, all caps, without qualification. It is not unprecedented, but it is worth noting that, in part, the premise of this book is that what readers want from a novel and that what it can offer are quasi-academic insights into the nature of history, the limits of knowledge, etc. More significant is that Michaels positions herself to offer them. If her speech asserts her authority to speak as pure authority, as power denuded of accountability for content, then her novel claims the right to declaim. It is a case of the novelist not as chronicler or investigator of reality, but as oracle. Oracles, however, have a direct connection to the divine that ratifies their statements, and even if you like her prose, Michaels isn’t a conduit for transcendent wisdom. By positioning herself as equipped to articulate absolute truths, by pronouncing in the way that she does, she comes across less as an oracular speaker, and more like the most assertive person in your book club, the person who is there not to tell you what they think of the book, but to explain to you how the world works, whether you want them to or not, the person who might think they are oracular, but is really only overbearing, annoying, and hogging the cheese plate. This may seem excessively cruel to say, but remember, Michaels is offering insights such as “We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known” with a sententious and utterly unironic gravitas.

It is worth pausing for a moment as I did when writing about her speech to register this impulse to qualify, explain, the urge to justify what is essentially ridicule of ridiculous statements that are made particularly ridiculous by the fact that Michaels offers them with affected solemnity. This impulse is both reflex and signal, or rather, reflex as a signal that registers the force field of power/propriety that was welded to vulnerability in her acceptance speech and is in the novel continuous with a (perhaps, uniquely Canadian) bourgeois seriousness. It is a disapproval that manifests interpersonally as withdrawal, a coldness that suggests that your dislike is too disruptive, your tone too fill-in-the-condescending-adjective, your criticism insufficiently measured, and therefore out of bounds. This is how power moves through personal interactions and reaches out to curtail the critical impulse. And Michaels’ pronouncements are, at base, about power.

Michaels is both fascinated and repelled by science, fascinated by it as a fetish object in the same way that she is drawn to history and philosophy, and repelled by what she sees as its aim to master the world. Towards the end of the book, a companion to Marie Curie writes in a voice that is indistinguishable from Michaels’ (all of her characters’ voices are essentially hers) of “the avarice of science, its conflation of knowledge and control.” I want to say that it is ironic, but it is not so much irony as a deep cognitive dissonance that stems from Michaels’ inability to recognize that she has projected herself into the object of her criticism. Consider the opening sentence of the book and the lists of aphorisms I have quoted above. Like most pronouncements and like all absolute statements, their animating impulse is towards mastery, control, to sharply and unequivocally define their subject. There is no grey area. No soft edges. No room for doubt or uncertainty, for possibilities that escape the frame of the concept. In “To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same,” the copula insists with a definitive force.

The difference between statements like this and science’s “conflation of knowledge and control” is in their relation to knowledge, a relation that I want to begin to unpack by considering the length of the aphorism. This may seem odd to move from knowledge to magnitude/duration only to return to knowledge, but knowledge has dimension, it is an accumulation that can be measured in time, length, etc. To the extent that both work through extension, that they are both measured by length, there is an homology between knowledge and the novel. The aphorism, on the other hand, is defined by its lack of extension. It may be founded on knowledge, based on duration, on a wealth of learning and evidence, but it contains the insight derived from it, not that accumulation of knowledge itself, and because it is a formal structure, it can take the shape of insight absent any grounding in knowledge. If science is the “conflation of knowledge and control,” the aphorism, as least in the hands of Michaels, is the assertion of control in the absence of (sometimes, in opposition to) knowledge. Remember, “To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same” is grounded in multiple zones of ignorance—ignorance of the complex relationship between specificity, abstraction and difference, ignorance of history, and ignorance of philosophy—at the same time that it asserts mastery over what it demonstrates it doesn’t know.

Take “We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known,” for example. It is superficially accurate, but it is also essentially superficial. It homogenizes the relationship between what we do and what we don’t know, foreclosing knowledge in an epistemological circuit of solipsism at the same time that it asserts mastery over the entire field of knowledge with an audacity that is both striking and commonplace. We have all heard versions of this before. “It’s all subjective,” someone has said to us. And we have felt the pressure of what is almost always an attempt to assert power, a rhetorical move designed to render discussion moot, to claim the high ground of absolute statement, foreclose debate, and most importantly, insulate their own opinions from criticism. Often, the person who has said this or something similar to it is that person at our book club who is dominating both the conversation and the cheese plate, and we have recognized as they have said it that their need to monopolize the conversation comes from a deep-seated anxiety. Micheals’ tone is less hectoring, more consistently committed to the gentleness of a specific kind of literary propriety, but she is at base no different from this (imaginary in this case, but often too real) bully. She shares their need for control. The impression Held gives the reader is of a novelist troubled by a world totally beyond her capacity to reckon with it, whose reflex is to reduce the extraordinary complexity of what is to the narrow confines and the banal simplicity of what she can know. In that reduction, in that reflex, there is a dangerous valorisation of ignorance as authority, of mastery without knowledge, and it is a valorisation that is particularly dangerous because it is one of the pleasures the book provides its readers.

To read Held is to be repeatedly offered the experience of absolute mastery of something (history, philosophy, death, etc.) without even a gesture towards knowledge of it. Here, the book says, you know, but you don’t need to know. There is not even the invitation to learn or think more. “We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known” won’t push a reader to plunge into the complexities of epistemology. “To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same” won’t prompt them to reconsider and expand their understanding of history and philosophy. These subjects have been mastered, transformed by that mastering into fetish objects, and exhausted. Instead, these aphorisms and the countless others in the book invite the reader to luxuriate in the pleasure of a totalizing knowledge and the sense of their own significance/importance that follows from this without expending effort on even a proforma attempt at understanding that exceeds the narrow limit of the aphorism. It is not a rich experience, but it is a heady one. If you can hold my criticisms of these aphorisms at arm’s length for a moment, you can feel the resonant depth of significance they offer, the weightiness of an insight that fills and validates you. It is a superficial feeling, an appearance of depth rather than actual depth, but it can exert real force on a reader who embraces it.

​There is something very Canadian middlebrow about all of this. A bourgeois entitlement moves through Michaels’ speech and that same entitlement circulates through and around the novel. On Michaels’ part, it is the entitlement to pronounce without taking the care to make sense, the entitlement to assert mastery not so much without as against knowledge. On the part of the reader, it is the entitlement to enjoy the aesthetic and intellectual pleasure of a mastery grounded in nothing but its assertion. I don’t want to push this too far, and I don’t think you could make the case for it without a fairly robust ethnography of Michaels’ readership, but her writing seems to be subtly class-coded, tilted in minor but indelible ways towards a reader whose affiliations are with power, who feels themselves to be without question a part of the in group, someone figuratively in the ballroom of the hotel where she delivered her speech, and whose relationship to mastery has been naturalized by their longstanding proximity to the institutions of power. As I have already noted, in her speech Michaels explains that “Every day writing Held I asked myself, what do we need now? What voice might be small enough to be heard?” That “small enough” is the tell. It is difficult to imagine anyone who is not insulated by privilege from the countless struggles for justice animating the present moment thinking that what voices need to be heard is to be small. It is even more difficult to believe that the protesters outside of the hotel and anyone working towards holding the Giller Prize to account thought that what they needed to do to be heard, to be effective, to have the kind of impact that they have was to make their voices as small as they could. I want to close this section with two questions meant not so much to echo Michaels’ as to dog them: what do we need now? What is the value of a novel that is, at least in part, a machine for delivering the pleasure of mastery to the privileged? 

---

If the aphorism is the defining aesthetic device of the novel, the quieter, less showy, but equally definitive double of the sentences in which Michaels reaches towards the absolute are her descriptions. Her approach to concrete detail is also a useful place to begin to unpack why I think, as I wrote at the beginning of the preceding section, her work should be understood as sentimental realism, or, to more appropriately capture how her sentimentality appropriates and transforms the material of reality, as sentimental anti-realism. Readers who dislike Michaels’ style most often complain about her baroque, overwrought description, about metaphors and analogies that push the bounds of both credulity and good taste. There is certainly some of that in Held. Michaels will write lines like “The rail tracks were shadowed by the slow river, like a mother struggling to keep up with her child.” It’s a clumsy but distinctive image that is made clumsier by the fact that, for all its suggestion of deeper relevance, it is a throwaway image that doesn’t fit into any larger thematic framework, a moment of portentous lyricism and nothing more. There are also inaccuracies. A few paragraphs later Micheals writes about darkness: “it was dark—profound country darkness.” As someone who grew up in the country, I can tell you from some two decades of experience that this is wrong. In cities, artificial light deepens the darkness in the areas it doesn’t reach. Outside of cities, there is a clarity to the darkness that, with the exception of overcast nights, makes it possible to see a long way. This a minor inaccuracy, although it is symptomatic of a broader disavowal of precision and veracity. What is a more persistent, and in some ways more interesting, feature of the novel is the tendency of Michaels’ descriptions to lean towards abstraction, to move away from the concrete and specific towards the archetype, but the archetype as generic rather than substantial.

​Take, for example, the description of the English inn where the novel’s first couple meets, and one of the earliest setting descriptions in the book:

Looking into the front window, Helena saw a room enclosed in a time of its own. An inn of legend, of folklore—warmth and woodsmoke. Faded upholstered armchairs, scarred wooden tables and benches, stone floors, massive fireplace, with a store of logs to last the coldest winter, stacked from floor to ceiling, the self-perpetuating supply of a fairy tale, each log, she imagined, magically replacing itself over the centuries.

The “of legend, of folklore” cues the reader to expect a particular archetypal quality in what follows, and is a reasonable reflection of Helena discovering a refuge after getting off at the wrong train station and thinking she has been stranded in the middle of the countryside. The details that follow, however, are utterly forgettable. It is not a place of refuge, but a non-place, the idea of a place denuded of the specificity required to believe that it might actually exist.

​The book is filled with settings like this. The seventh section takes place in the countryside outside of Paris. “Beyond the city, out among the white fields, it could have been any century,” Michaels writes. A character stands “at the edge of the forest.” A few paragraphs later, this character wonders at what has fascinated a photographer: 

[she] tried to see what he was looking at, why that particular tree, in the whole forest. And then she understood it was the shape of the sky behind the tree that occupied him. And she felt the sudden intimacy of the world, the intimacy between trees and sky, the changing and countless ways they knew each other. 

The section stops there. Fields, Snow. Forest. Trees. Sky. Countless ways. Always the most general possible noun. The category rather than the thing itself. The countless ways but never a way. It is a sighing prose that mostly avoids the thud of the real. Places are named, characters move into and through these places, but none of the locations is described in a way that would provoke that unique elation that comes from recognizing somewhere you know intimately, somewhere you have lived long enough for it to become part of you, in the pages of a book. Because of this, despite the twelve sections of Held being named for places, the novel has a floating, almost dreamlike quality, as if the characters are moving through a haze of abstractions rather than through real geographies.

​It is not just the attenuation of abstraction that produces this effect. At times, the novel sacrifices realism and facticity to desire. Towards the beginning of the book, she describes how the fishing villages a character is from each have their own stitch they use to knit sweaters, so that a fisherman who is drowned and washed ashore can be returned to his home village, and explains that the women who knit their husbands sweaters introduce deliberate errors into the sweaters that will allow then to identify the men who have been returned like this. It is an enchanting story, redolent with a complex interplay of meaning, but it is just that, a story. Six pages later, after several detours, Michaels returns to the subject to explain: 

​Some maintain this is hearsay, that there is no evidence of sailors ever being returned home by way of a knitted cable crossing the wrong way. But, like everything we find hard to believe, it need only have happened once to be true.

On the one hand, this is accurate—it need only have happened once to be true. On the other hand, this is not the impression that the story she told of village-specific stitches and wives tethering their husbands to them with errors deliberately introduced into their knitting was meant to give. It was meant to be believed, and the delayed qualification allows the belief to settle into surety before it is qualified. It is not a bait-and-switch because the switch is incomplete. The fantasy is qualified, but not fully retracted, and the delay of six pages is particularly destabilizing. One never feels entirely on firm footing after this: what seems certain because it is offered with certainty could at any moment be revised into hearsay, folktale, myth. It never is. There is no similar presentation and semi-retraction, but coming in the first twenty pages, this gives everything that follows it a tenuousness that contributes to the dreamlike quality of the novel, and torques the experience of reading towards the particular discomfort that comes from the sense that at any moment what seems real and solid might be revealed to be a fabrication.

What is perhaps most interesting about this particular element of the novel is how it demonstrates the way in which desire, specifically Michaels’ desire, bends reality towards itself with a rarely-subtle and pervasive gravitational force. In this example, the fantasy Michaels wants to be true is moved into the foreground, while the grudgingly-admitted reality is shuffled into the background, given less space, and positioned so that it exerts less force on the reader. Affective payoff; feeling is privileged over fact. This makes sense. Michaels is, above all, a sentimentalist. And there would be nothing particularly wrong with this if her work operated within a closed system, following the logic of feeling and desire rather than fidelity to reality. But Michaels is not only a sentimentalist. As I said at the beginning of my discussion of Held and repeated at the start of this section, she is a sentimental realist. She cannot relinquish the need to connect her narrative to the world, to have her characters inhabit the sweep of history, and to ground her pronouncements in a stratum of significance that underpins and determines the lives of her readers. In short, Held is not offered as a fantasy, but as a meditation on what is, and this does not so much produce a tension between the force field of Michaels’ desire and the counterweight of the real as create a distorting effect, a hologram rising out of the pages of the novel to supplant the world: desire is projected onto reality, it is vectored through it, but this is never an alienating extension or reckoning with what is; desire moves outwards into the world while always remaining its own primary referent, always curving backward to return to itself and complete a circuit of solipsistic affirmation. It is a closed system, but a closed system that appropriates the world to itself, warping it to match its own logic, rather than existing separate from it. The effect is to render the real, at best, secondary to the operation of desire, to transform it into an object that is appropriated to and instrumentalized within the narrow confines of Michaels’ vision, or, at worst, to empty out the real and fill the space it used to occupy, so that the fantasy exists not in relation to the real as either superior or inferior, but is located at the coordinates of the real, in the place of a world whose markers of significance it mobilizes but whose content has been dispensed with. This substitution whose condition is an erasure, a doing-away-with, is why I called Michaels’ preferred mode sentimental anti-realism.

Consider both her description of the inn and the countryside outside of Paris. The inn is “a room enclosed in a time of its own. An inn of legend, of folklore.” In the countryside, “it could have been any century.” These are both real locations, places in the world you and I inhabit. A reality that is reinforced by Micheals naming each of the twelve sections after a geographical feature or location. But both of these places are introduced by being severed from their temporalities so that they can be transformed into generic absolutes. They are any time, and that allows them to become not an everywhere, but an attenuated every place-like-this-one, essentially everymen of locations, an every inn, an every margin between forest and field. The actual place is substituted for a speculative place, a type. In the case of the countryside, this clearing away of specificities sets the stage for a transcendent (escaping entirely the confines of a particular moment, landscape, place, almost escaping particularity entirely) insight: “And she felt the sudden intimacy of the world, the intimacy between trees and sky, the changing and countless ways they knew each other.” In other words, the place is identified, situated in the maps both of the imagination and of the world, and then dispensed with in favour of an insight that can be arrived at only through the negation of the place out of which it emerges. This is only a field on the edge of a forest within sight of Paris. When the place is more consequential, this aspect of the novel is most troubling.

Mara, the one character Michaels refers to by name in her speech, is a surgeon working in war zones in the 1980s. She is in “refugee camps, field hospitals, the most dangerous places.” She is in places where “neighbourhoods [are] bombed into oblivion,” in places where a hospital is bombed when she is out visiting a patient, in buildings, camps, installations, always in danger, but never in a specific country. Wherever Mara works, Michaels never names it. The best guess I can make is that she is working in the Lebanese Civil War, but there is no detail in the text that allows this to be anything more than a guess. The place exists as an abstraction of violence, chaos, harm. This is what we know about it, this and that it is indisputably foreign, a plane ride and a world away from the safety of Mara’s father’s house located in the security of the global north. This is pure exoticisation, a schematization across the global south/north divide that is independent of particular countries, histories, conflicts. However, its level of abstraction does not make it any less objectionable. It is effectively emptying the foreign elsewhere of its concrete specificities, stripping it of any vestige of individuation, but maintaining it as an other. Hospitals are bombed. People die. Cities are ruined. We never know where or who or why, only that this is meaningful for Mara. There is a cowardice and an entitlement to all of this, a cowardice because Michaels avoids any kind of politics, any kind of meaningful investment and the disagreement that will inevitably come with it, by refusing to name the place(s) or the conflict(s), an entitlement because she feels that she can take hold of this material, this suffering that contains uncountable narratives, and compress it into an unvariegated mass of generic details which exist only to serve the story of a western doctor. Catastrophe is instrumentalized to limn a character without ever being allowed to take on a shape of its own. Here, the interpenetration of the desire of a sentimental realist and ideology becomes clear. Both produce a fiction which is projected outward onto the world to regiment, truncate, reduce, but most of all, to control it. I began with Michaels’ speech, which contained the line “I write because the dead can read,” and the instrumentalizing of the suffering of anonymous others is one piece in the puzzle of how you arrive at making this kind of callous pronouncement.

​Michaels’ sentimentalism, its distorting effect, and the implications of it are clearest when she writes of about one of the book’s central preoccupations, love. Predictably, love in the novel is always a limit case of the emotion, but it reaches extremes that are surprising even for a sentimentalist. When Mara leaves for another war zone, her father, Peter, says goodbye to her at the airport:

​Peter held his daughter as he always did—as if for the last time. To remember every inch of her, every moment, each goodbye another tree ring of the vascular cambium around his heart. 

​On the one hand, this makes sense—a father is saying goodbye to an adult daughter who is going into the kind of danger from which she might not return. It is, also, however, the most obvious emotional response to this situation, the least complicated, and, despite the stylistic flourish of “every inch” and “every moment” and the imagery that follows it, it is the flattest, shallowest response. She is going into danger from which she will not return, so he holds her “as if for the last time” and tries to commit the feeling of her to memory. There is no ambivalence, no understandable reticence on the part of a parent to endorse their only child exposing themselves to this danger, an ambivalence that could and often does coexist with the endorsement of the politics of the decision, with the recognition of the rightness of the choice the child is making, no, in short, attempt to represent one of the central experiences of parenthood—the requirement to support a child doing something you believe in but don’t want them to do. In this moment, Paul is a uni-dimensional cutout of filial affection, a father, but barely a person. The scene itself is similarly one-note. After Peter, Alan, Mara’s journalist lover, holds 

​her desperately, which he regretted almost immediately, as soon as she had disappeared through the gate, the howling regret that he had not allowed himself to really feel her, take her in, one last time. 

The contrast, such as it is, is between a love that is desperate (Alan) and a love that is desperately mnemonic (Peter). What is notable is what is absent from the scene. Despite the fact that it is Mara who is departing, she appears in it only as an occasion for Peter’s and Alan’s responses to her departure. There is not even the slightest glimpse of what it might be like to be held like this, of her reaction to the burden of feeling it might impose, of her ambivalence or lack thereof. There is no reciprocity, no give to Alan’s and Peter’s take. Love appears as a singular action, as a projection severed from connection, from relation, from the dynamic transactions of loving another who loves you back, but not always in the way that you want them to. The result is a scene that is simultaneously charged with feeling and strangely inhumane, detached from the realities of the reciprocal dynamics of relationships and from emotion as a lived experience.

​The detachment of love from the lived human experience of it becomes even clearer when we look at how the couples in the book meet. In all of the cases, it is love at first sight. In the inn which I have already written about, Helena meets John. When his table is taken by a couple, she asks him to share hers:

​Later, she would tell him of the feeling that passed through her, inexplicable, momentary, not even a thought: that if he sat down she would be sharing a table with him for the rest of her life.

Alan falling for Mara is only slightly less abrupt, but substantially more dramatic and extreme. He is wounded, she performs surgery on him, and he wakes “out of the anaesthetic” to see “her eyes full of kindness.” He watches her as she does her rounds on the ward and is “fascinated, awestruck.” “Peter,” Michaels writes, “imagined the scene, like cinema.” And it is like cinema to the extent that there is an unreality to it. Patients don’t wake to see their surgeons. Everything is too easy, convenient, contrived, like the plot of a romance novel with the obstacle removed, and it gets even more preposterous as it proceeds. Mara leaves the hospital. Alan tracks her down. He finds her asleep in the ruins of the war zone and lies down beside her. She wakes to see him next to her. When they return from the unnamed place whose violence ratifies their intimacy, Alan locks himself in his apartment and lies in bed for days “until he was absolutely certain he could not live without her.” A third couple meet at a party and we get “Yet, he felt certain they would leave the party together. As if they already belonged to each other.” It is difficult to say anything about this other than it isn’t real. This isn’t how love works. This isn’t how people fall into and out of it. Even the formulaic predictability of the romance novel plot cleaves closer to the lived reality of love. This is love as banal fetish object rather than as human experience.

More important and more interesting than its reality or profound lack of it is what this says about Micheals, her limitations as a novelist, and her capacity or lack thereof for empathy. For every couple in the book, falling in love is an instantaneous event. When Peter thinks about Alan and Mara, Michaels writes that “Peter knew love was a sharp blade slicing an apple: cleaved—both blade and bond.” Love is a before and after. It isn’t, therefore, a process. This may seem obvious. It essentially amounts to saying that falling in love at first sight is an event rather than a process. What is perhaps less obvious and certainly more important, is what is contained in that process, but not in that event: love at first sight dispenses with relationality. It is, Michaels is correct about this, as clean as a cut. But that image is apt in another way: to commit so exclusively and emphatically to this version of love is to do violence to the lived experience of love, and, in fact, to cut yourself off in a crucial way from your own humanity. What the romance novel understands and Michaels does not is that love is both relationality and process. The meet-cute is the beginning of a narrative arc whose end is love, but that end is a long way from the meet-cute, a great deal happens between the two points, and the lovers learn about each other as they move through these events. Attraction is instantaneous, love requires duration, but as I pointed out when discussing Michaels’ use of aphorism, she prefers the singularity of the baseless insight to the extension of knowledge. Love is a kind of knowing, and Michaels wants the appearance of both love and knowledge without the duration, the commitment to engagement, the human and long-term action of relating to a person or an idea that is the essential foundation of both.

It is not just that Michaels misunderstands love, or that she wants an unrealistic version of love that is most problematic, it is that what she dispenses with is relationality, and that she does so within the genre of the novel. Relationality is not only at the heart of love, it is also central to empathy. We come to love each other by learning about each other, and we come to empathize with each other through a similar process of understanding. This is why someone like Iris Murdoch will place love at the centre of her moral system, and why she will assert with justifiable force the importance of the attentiveness of love. Seeing, learning, understanding, loving, empathizing are all interlinked, not continuous or contiguous, but locked in a constellation in which, if one star winks out, the remaining ones soon follow. In Michaels’ case, these dots of light have all but disappeared. This is particularly strange given that Held is a literary novel, the genre that is now most often defended by pointing out its capacity to build empathy, but it is a feature of Michaels’ writing, and of the understanding of the world that informs both her novel and her acceptance speech. As I pointed out in my discussion of her speech, she talks about the importance of a book listening, but shows no evidence that she has listened herself. The speech and the novel are both characterized by a refusal of relationality, which makes the lack of empathy in Michaels’ statements unsurprising, and, perhaps, inevitable: it is hard to see how someone who repeatedly refuses the relationality at the core of the essential human emotion of love would be capable of anything more than a blithe and superficial performance of empathy, and at key moments the speech does not even offer that. 

When I closed my discussion of her speech, I promised that I would return to Michaels’ most objectionable statements: “I write in solidarity with the moral purpose of every writer bearing witness. I write because the dead can read.” It possible to see what Michaels is trying to say here: she feels a deep commitment to the victims of history and that commitment informs her writing. But that is at best what she is trying to say. What she did say, and what she should be held accountable for because she crafted her words with care and offered them as the product of that care, as words she changed glasses to read from folded sheets of paper rather than delivered off the cuff, was that the dead form part of her audience. She said this in the midst of an ongoing genocide, implying, in what can only be characterized as an act of callous cruelty, that murdered Palestinians form part of her readership, and implying this while accepting an award funded by a bank that was at that moment profiting from their deaths. What I have tried to do in my reading of Held is to see how an author could arrive at making this kind of statement, to discover and trace the filiations of that callousness and cruelty in the novel that was being celebrated that night, to find not so much the author in the work as to limn the psycho/political/aesthetic complex, the cast of mind that contains both: there is the urge towards mastery articulated by her use of the aphorism that, because it does not so much discount knowledge as set itself against it, is implicated in the same kind of entitlement that informed her speech. There is a refusal of the individuating specificities of the world that substitutes abstractions for locations. And there is parallel/related refusal of the relationality at the core of love. All of these elements of the book can be captured under the rubric of sentimental realism, or a sentimentalism that does not reject reality but appropriates it in order to substitute itself for it. What one finds in the book is, in short, the egoism of a wilful solipsism. And it is in the context of this outwardly-directed solipsism, in the context of a desire to force the world to conform to a narrow and self-referential vision rather than to expose oneself to the rich ambiguities and contradictions of its complexity, to, in Michaels’ word, “listen,” that the kinds of statements that she makes in her speech become inevitable. They are not accidents or missteps, but a reflection of a specific form of moral blindness.

​It is possible to make the case the Michaels is the quintessential neoliberal novelist. Her career tracks not with the entrance of neoliberalism into the political sphere in the late seventies and early eighties, but with the intensifying of its effects in the nineties that was carried forward into this century, with the dilation of the ideology across the political spectrum and through society. Her characters are not so much insulated from relationality as removed from its possibility, configured as atomized units of feeling, as pure individuals. Her books circumscribe both knowledge and affect into easily consumptible units of text, at every turn refusing duration and extension in favour of the smallest, most digestible units of experience. Her work deploys abstraction in the same way that financialisation systematically reconfigures the economy to move it further and further away from the material realities of production. Neoliberalism has not run its course. But the structures of power and authority, the rhetoric that has subtended it have begun to fracture, cleavages are opening in the armature of ideology, and dissenting ideas have begun to leak through into the mainstream. As the economy teeters from one collapse to the next, the sureties that characterize it are sounding more hollow and empty with every passing day. I began by saying that Michaels’ speech should mark a rupture in her career, a moment that fundamentally transforms how we see her and her work. I don’t think it will. I think that she is too thoroughly embedded in the institutions of Canadian literary power, too thoroughly safeguarded by privilege. But maybe she isn’t. Maybe the speech will in time be seen for what it is, and she will be shuffled off into the obscurity she has earned with her words.   

---

Anne Michaels’ Giller Acceptance Speech:
 
(approximately 39 minutes into the video)

Let me switch these so I can read to you. Um. It’s been tremendous to get to know the other shortlisted writers with whom I feel a really great solidarity. They have written beautiful books, and I hope you will read them and pass them around to everyone you know. Everything I write is a form of witness against war, amnesia, indifference of every sort. From when do we begin to count the dead? I have asked that question all of my writing life and I have been seeking in the darkest moments of history a specific hope, a hope that is inevitable, unassailable, a hope that one can trust with one’s life, the only hope worth offering a reader. When writer and reader meet each other’s gaze on the page, there is the possibility that something can be mended. Literature situates us morally. It recognizes the crucial distinction between what is impossible and what is futile. Everything I write is against futility. There is no moral righteousness. There is only morality. A book, especially this book, is nothing if it does not listen. Every book bears witness. Every book its own form of resistance and assertion. I’m here tonight in solidarity with that purpose, in solidarity with the long listed and short listed writers, and every writer inside and outside of this room. I am here because a book is not about the writer but the reader. It is the reader who holds the true moral power that a book can offer.  Held makes a distinction between rescue and repair. The character of Mara who works as a doctor in war zones describes being in the operating room alert to the meticulous order and detail of the human body in defiance of everything that has been done to it. The fact that the operating room might be bombed five minutes later makes the act of repair more important, not less. There are two kinds of accounting in this world, and between them exists an unconscionable link. Complicity is knot within knot. We can cut through it, or harder, much, much harder, we can untie the knot. I’m standing here tonight in solidarity with Canadian Publishers and booksellers. A short time ago, less than 70 years, we lived in a country where only 17 books of Canadian fiction were published in a year, fewer in the entire country than the longlist for this prize. Our literary history is one of phenomenal assertion and now as then we need unity, not just in one community, but among all the Arts to forge practical alliances that proclaim our values. For over 30 years, I have been published in Canada by McLelland and Stewart and Penguin Random House. There is no team more committed to what matters. The incredible Stephanie Sinclair, Kristen Cochran, Jared Bland, Anita Chong, Tara Walker, Cameron Waller. The jury citation is deeply meaningful to me. Writer to writer. Artist to artist. Reader to reader. Every day writing Held I asked myself, what do we need now? What voice might be small enough to be heard? Margaret Atwood’s embrace of Held and her word, “timely,” could not have meant more to me. Held says, in the places we feel most abandoned, we are not alone. I write in solidarity with the moral purpose of every writer bearing witness. I write because the dead can read. Every reader throughout the decades who has written and spoken to me, whose gaze has met mine on the page, has given me courage, and with every word I am speaking tonight I want to give that same courage. Thank you.

---

Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books, 2023) is his first novel.