There’s a sure-fire way to improve your chances of having your work ignored by English-reading audiences: Be Canadian.
Even if your work is published in the U.S. and gets enthusiastic reviews, you have a better chance of joining the ranks of Richard B. Wright than those of the few exceptions to the rule, such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Wright’s death back in February 2017 was remarked with appreciative tributes in most of the major Canadian magazines and papers, but not even in the New York Times in the U.S.. One of Wright’s last novels, Clara Callan (2003), did enjoy good sales in the U.S. and is still in print, but the fact remains that he’s far more likely to be confused with the author of Native Son than recognized for his own work.
I’m no expert on the whole of Wright’s oeuvre, but it’s hard for me to believe that he ever topped his first book, The Weekend Man (1971), which has to be one of the best novels written in English in the 1970s. Technically, it’s still in print: at least, Amazon still has one new copy of the 2003 paperback reprint in stock.
The Weekend Man sits side-by-side with another underappreciated Seventies classic, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974). Both Wright’s Wes Wakeham and Heller’s Bob Slocum are men of a kind that now seems almost as archaic as Bertie Wooster: white, white collar, ambitious but not inspired, sexist, unfaithful, and generally out of touch with the world around them–ironically, because it is, after all, a world made by and for men like them. “I have managed my own life rather badly,” Wakeham says at one point. Bob Slocum would certainly second that emotion.
“What is a weekend man, you ask?” Wakeham tells his readers. “A weekend man is a person who has abandoned the present in favour of the past or the future.” Wes has separated from his wife. He’s insecure about his career in the publishing house where he works. He watches a lot of television–and these were the days when you got seven or eight channels at best, and many of the empty spots were filled with old movies. So Wes tends to compare people to old movie stars. Wes’s father-in-law is “a dead ringer for Jack Oakie.” A woman “looks as happy as June Allyson” (watch any of the dozen or so movies from the 1950s where Allyson’s job consists almost exclusively of looking adoringly at her hard-working husband, or her wedding band, or both).
Wes is a case study in slow death by distraction: “If the truth were known, nothing much happens to most of us during the course of our daily passage. It has to be said. Unless we are test pilots or movie stars, most of us are likely to wake up tomorrow morning to the same ordinary flatness of our lives. This is not really such a bad thing. It is probably better than fighting off a sabre-tooth tiger at the entrance to the cave. But we weekend men never leave well enough alone. First off we must cast about for a diversion. A diversion is anything that removes us from the ordinary present.”
Unfortunately, his options are limited. The truly ambitious ones involve too much risk. A little affair on the side is good for amusement, but overwhelming passion has to be avoided. And it’s tough to kiss off the career and pursue painting or some other crazy notion when you have people depending upon your paycheck. He’s paid for an expensive German telescope to study the stars and sent for a brochure on short-story writing. But “None of these things is as good as television. At the same time, he isn’t ready to follow his father’s advice and “submit to the numbness of the daily passage.”
And so he finds himself with “a wild howling in the soul” as he sits in his apartment, feet up on the coffee table, watching yet another old movie. If he needed a theme song, it would probably be Peggy Lee’s hit from the year before: “Is That All There Is?”
There are no great revelations in The Weekend Man. And though Wes Wakeham seems, in one way, an artifact of a distant past (and the Seventies do often seem like a far more distant past), in other ways he’s like a lot of men–smart enough to catch most of the cultural references, not smart enough to take the risk of committing to something or someone no matter where it may lead. And spending a lot of nights with their feet up on the coffee table.