A simple description of Girl Crazy’s plot makes it sound like a heterogeneous mess: Lolita meets a David Lodge academic satire by way of Elmore Leonard. Indeed, for the first two-thirds, Justin’s deepening obsession with Jenna — and the increasingly dark places to which that obsession drives him — is so potent that the satire of a corporate-run education system appears to be fifth business, an unnecessary distraction from the novel’s central concerns. But this belies the canny subtlety of Smith’s structure. As the book progresses, Jenna becomes less and less of a physical presence; her last appearance is as a voice on the phone. As Justin moves through the novel’s final stretch, the various elements coalesce into a darkly comic study of fractured masculinity.

Unsympathetic readers will likely find fault with the characterization of Jenna, who remains somewhat underdeveloped throughout. And Justin occasionally teeters on the edge of becoming a caricature of the drooling, leering horndog: in a departmental meeting, he doodles “a series of breast-like blobs,” which he turns into raindrops when he worries a colleague might notice.

But there is an honesty in the portrayal of Justin’s sexual urges that is rare in modern fiction. Novelists who want to appear refined, or those who expect their books to stand as endorsements for their feminist bona fides, will often ignore the tendency for a man’s eyes to roam over a woman’s body and for his mind to occupy itself by wondering what kind of undergarments she might be wearing. Smith, by contrast, freely acknowledges this aspect of the male psyche. The nicely ambiguous conclusion can be seen as either the recognition of a kind of atavistic male impulse, or a cautionary tale about the perils of pursuing desire to its most dangerous extreme.

— Steven W. Beattie

The Authenticity Hoax

by Andre Potter, McClelland & Stewart (2010)

In the summer of 2008, a twenty-eight-year-old Frenchman named Florent Lemaçon quit his engineering job and set sail for Zanzibar with his wife and child. What he was looking for, according to Andrew Potter, was authenticity, a life free from the superficialities of modern society. What he found, unfortunately, were pirates. His quest ended abruptly in a gunfight at sea.

In The Authenticity Hoax, Lemaçon’s story serves as both a cautionary tale and a fine metaphor for our contemporary search for authenticity — a fool’s errand with ugly consequences. Jumping through a cultural studies syllabus’s worth of philosophers and theorists, Potter’s latest work argues that this quest — from ecotourism to Oprah’s Book Club to the local food movement — has become our primary vehicle for finding meaning in a world that can feel alienating. His central point is that authenticity is a positional good, only valuable because not everyone can have it. The search for the authentic, then, becomes a status race, where the elite compete to see who can vacation in the most obscure Portuguese village or eat the organic pear grown nearest their backyard.

Over the past few years, Potter, whose previous book was The Rebel Sell, has carved out a career for himself as a contrarian. He takes obvious delight in slaying the left’s sacred cows, and The Authenticity Hoax is filled with ostentatiously counterintuitive statements like “The contemporary struggle for genuine, authentic forms of living cannot be the solution to our problem, because it is the cause.” But though this contrarian streak at times acts as a corrective to sloppy “countercultural” thought (Potter has an excellent section diagnosing much anti-suburban writing as simple lifestyle snobbery, for example), his eagerness to contrast himself with the conventional left sometimes leads him to characterize his adversaries unfairly.

The worst example is probably his suggestion that the “hysteria” over global warming is “almost entirely driven by a ratchet of authenticity-seeking that progressively rejects more and more of the comforts and privileges of modern life.” Instead of engaging with the issue — and he is far too intelligent to actually argue against the science behind climate change — he’s content to simply get in a few shots at the yuppie environmentalists who shop at Whole Foods. In the end, then, while The Authenticity Hoax’s riffs on Obama, David Suzuki, and James Frey are entertaining enough, one begins to get the distinct feeling that Potter is so busy scoring points that he may be missing some of the more important ones.

— Nicholas Hune-Brown

Curiosity: A Love Story

by Joan Thomas, HarperCollins Canada (2010)

Twelve-year-old Mary Anning is a fatherless, impoversished, and barely literate girl who passes her days hawking mollusc fossils tarted up as lucky charms to genteel tourists. But when she discovers a petrified Jurassic ichthyosaur embedded within a cliff near Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, her life takes an unexpected turn. In God-fearing Lyme, circa 1812, locals consider all such petrifactions to be satanic detritus dating back to the Flood. Undeterred, Mary continues digging throughout her life, and despite her growing frustration at being denied official recognition for a host of significant geological finds, her famed ichthyosaur (uncovered an impressive half century before Charles Darwin’s 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species ) serves to unearth a cataclysmic cultural divide: in contrast to the creationist belief that God’s perfect forms “endured,” life under the geological notion of deep time embraces the virtues of utter transience.

Winnipeg writer Joan Thomas’s second novel, Curiosity, is a rueful, grim, and beautifully sensate historical fiction that not only documents Mary Anning’s actual navigations through the trappings of scientific opportunism, fear-addled scripture, heinous colonialism, and sexist conventions, but also explores the exquisite fragility of a love story that turns upon the lovers’ unblinking curiosity before the metaphysical change their work uncovers.

At one point, Mary’s eventual lover, Henry De la Beche, a geologist and accomplished visual artist, wonders, “How do you paint curiosity? ” It’s a telling moment, for while Thomas takes evident pleasure in the generative act of naming (lists vividly abound here for the sheer pleasure of variation, and words like “jommetry,” “wizening” and “downdacious” demand very simply that we dwell ), she also transforms her words into sepia-stained canvases of heightened sensuousness. Curiosity is a species of Künstlerroman that traces the artist’s luxuriant descent into visionary immediacy — an embrace, as Mary so gracefully offers, of “life to no purpose except as life.” A beautiful, erudite, and deeply pleasurable work.

— Karen Luscombe

Therefore Chose

by Keith Oatley, Goose Lane (2010)

In the early twentieth century, the problem of communication haunted Europe. Wittgenstein and Heidegger asked if language wasn’t itself a hurdle to understanding, while psychologists such as Freud wondered whether our outer words and actions hid inner turmoil. On the political front, peace groups and diplomats tried, with heartbreaking futility, to convince nations to talk to each other rather than go to war. In this ambitious and unusually cerebral historical novel, Keith Oatley tells the story of a love triangle that ties all these threads together. Juxtaposing a love story with the backdrop of Hitler’s Germany, he demonstrates that the difficulty of “communication between minds” links personal anguish with philosophical problems and outbursts of international violence.

In 1935, while studying to be a doctor at Cambridge, George Smith, the novel’s bluff and diffident protagonist, meets an intense German philosophy student named Werner Vodn. Over the next decade, their friendship is tested and tattered by the divisions of war and George’s romantic entanglement with Werner’s future wife, the aristocratic literary editor Anna von Kleist.