Here are two data points that may help illustrate the current state of Canada’s book culture. First is Quill & Quire’s list of domestic bestsellers from mid-January of this year, in which half of the ten titles listed were hockey romances by Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid. Second is a social media post that appeared a few weeks after the Q&Q list, from Vancouver author Anakana Schofield, whose audacious new novel, Library of Brothel, is being published this month:
I made $31 total royalties last year. Please teach my books. Please buy my books. I am getting depressed over here.
Obviously, complaining that bestseller lists are filled with products of mass-appeal entertainment instead of challenging and idiosyncratic works of art is the ultimate act of shaking one’s fist at clouds. And yet, to have so much of this country’s agonizingly finite readership grabbing romance novels by the tote-bagful, while one of our most provocative and intriguing authors is forced to beg publicly for support? (Assuming Schofield is not exaggerating her predicament, the total income she received from her work last year is not even equal to her new book’s suggested retail price: $35.)
This is not a slam against romance fans in general, or Heated Rivalry fans in particular. Nor is it a criticism of Reid, who is navigating a freakish storm of attention with enormous humility and grace. (I interviewed Reid for my podcast a few months ago, and she was both very thoughtful about her work and thoroughly self-deprecating about its current upper-stratosphere profile.)
And it’s not as if I assumed Schofield was writing away in a remote mansion purchased with the proceeds from her books. Her knotty, profane, and fiendishly smart novels are to literary comfort food what free climbing is to a morning stretch in a hotel gym. Not to mention there are hardly any Canadian authors able to follow their muse full time, and the ones who can are likely blessed with at least one of the secret preconditions for so much contemporary writing: wealthy parents or a longanimous partner with a good job and benefits.
On the evidence of Library of Brothel, which is equal parts confounding, goofy, astute, and funny, Schofield’s mansion may remain a remote dream, even as her work grows broader in its interests and more playful in its approach.
Schofield was born in the United Kingdom in 1971 and moved to Vancouver in her late twenties, bringing the Irishness of her mother’s family along with her. Ireland is still very much present in her vocabulary, her literary sensibility, and her dogged resistance to becoming what author Rachel Cusk (who has blurbed Schofield in the past) calls luvvies, i.e., a get-along-with-everyone kind of writer, which Cusk contrasts with the kind “who think they want acceptance, but actually they can’t stand it, and they’ve got to annoy people by pointing out uncomfortable things.” (Cusk admitted to the Guardian she is more the latter kind; so, from the evidence, is Schofield.)
Schofield’s three previous novels—Malarky (2012), Martin John (2015), and Bina (2019)—comprise an emotionally unsparing and blackly comic trilogy, set within a small Irish community of compulsively chatty frenemies and neighbours, where death, illness, suicide, and psychosexual collapse are always as near-at-hand as the next rain. The voices and damaged mental states of her protagonists overflow the banks of their narratives; they tell their stories with as much poise and decorum as a hungry dog unpacking a suitcase full of steak. The prose is fragmented, profane, and messily human, driven by a core prickliness that sometimes treads close to misanthropy, but reserves empathetic space even for her most monstrous characters.
Stories is perhaps a misnomer for what Schofield writes: she creates situations, into which she flings her characters, and then, straight after, her readers, to let them scramble around and fight their way out. “Chronology and the linear feels like a falsehood to me,” she has said. “Life’s difficult! Literature should be difficult. Being a human is very confusing; I’m glad to be confused by literature.”
Schofield’s work is not book-club cozy, but it hasn’t exactly been overlooked: Malarky won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Martin John was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Goldsmiths Prize; Bina actually did appear on the Canadian bestseller lists, and won the Irish Novel of the Year Award. Plus, Library of Brothel is being published here by the corporate-owned Knopf Canada, not a scrappy indie press more interested in boundary-pushing than profit.
Cards on the table: I consider Schofield’s first three books to be among the best Canadian novels of this century. As a reader, I am thrilled by how far and how deep she drives her narratives; as a writer, I am deeply jealous of how confident, ornery, and funny those books are. I knew full well that whatever Schofield did after Bina would be daring and unexpected: “In no other art form would we be content to only revisit that which has worked,” she has said about the book world’s aesthetically conservative tendencies.
Library of Brothel, however, is even more unexpected than I was expecting.
The situation of Schofield’s new novel is this: operating out of a century-plus-old, multi-storey building in downtown Vancouver is the titular organization, a kind of intellectual bordello where clients pay to be cerebrally stimulated (and sometimes sexually so) in one of the many themed rooms. Clients can choose the pleasures of the Bayesian Analysis of Phylogenetic Trees Room, the Tax Ballads in the Eighteenth Century Room, the Puritan Bundling Board Room, and so on. Or, if your tastes are a little less highbrow, you choose to be serviced in the Giraffe Room or the Fit Hippos Room. The novel’s main characters are the men, women, and non-binary individuals who work there, only ever identified by the names of their particular rooms (i.e., Giraffe Room is always “Giraffe Room,” Fit Hippos is “Fit Hippos,” and it’s up to the reader to work out if the narrator is referring to the room or its worker; Schofield is determined to keep the reader from getting too settled).
The Library, which is “the only remaining analog, offline operation in Vancouver,” sees its mission as a necessary corrective to the crisis of modernity:
We are needed,
Like the Vatican
On Grindr.
We are necessary because humans no longer look at each other.
They are ghosting in stasis.
On the phones.
The voice of the novel alternates between sales pitches for the Library (“We want you to come. We really, really want you to do that. Do you want to come in?”) and an almost anthropological exploration of its workings, its denizens, and the predicament it finds itself in. The Library is an august institution imperilled from without by the forces of capitalism and from within by bureaucratic bungling and the inability of its territorial employees to work together toward a common goal (that is, their own survival). All of this is delivered in a mock-formal tone. Here is the vaguely omniscient narrator going on a Dickensian riff about creeping gentrification:
The freshly cooked buildings were clean and glassy-slick, certainly not unpleasant, but they’d eaten up the bathmats that belonged to the established community of low-income renters and new immigrants. They housed financially rising or arisen folks, with pre-approved mortgages and an abundance of pedigree dogs and electric blinds. A depletion of volleyball playing Tamils was observed in the nearby park. Their annual tournament and picnic were no longer.
The closest thing we get to a protagonist is Scrabble Woman, who works, obviously, in the Scrabble Room because she is “only content when playing Scrabble.” She is a familiar character: the person at your place of work who, whatever her feelings about her colleagues and her situation, has chosen to quietly, thanklessly keep the place going. “We do care about Scrabble Room because without her the Library would have been shuttered years ago.”
Most of the action in the novel consists of the Library’s workers arguing, plotting, and panicking: their Noble Leader has gone AWOL, which threatens to throw the whole operation into chaos, and the prime urban location of their building means “the developers have their sniper eye on it.” It may be because I work as a professor at a college, but I often felt the novel a parable for the state of higher education. The book is written in a way that you can substitute your own preferred under-threat institution or idea. (Literature, Art, Community, The Liveable City, Decent Employment, Society, Humanity, etc.)
“All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us down this road the true future of the Novel lies,” wrote Zadie Smith, adding that “a breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.” I can almost imagine Schofield reading those lines while donning a black balaclava.
Library of Brothel is a big swing of a novel, one that claims its intellectual territory before it even begins with an epigraph by Barthes. As always, it is enjoyable to see with how much violence and energy Schofield attacks those blocked literary exits. As with all high-concept novels, however, Library of Brothel prompts a fundamental question: Does it work? Is it all worth it?
There are, without a doubt, many readers who will adore the novel’s heady mix of Dickens, Borges, and socialist rally pamphleteering; the kinds of readers both familiar with the term Bayesianism and welcoming of the occasional mention of butt plugs. I sincerely hope there a lot of those, and that Schofield will be able to report a much more favourable royalty payout this time next year.
But I often felt, while reading the book, that I was being provided with an account of a highly contentious court case that has already been decided in the defendant’s favour. The same problem occurs with a lot of high-concept art: the people who enjoy it will almost always enjoy it, because part of their enjoyment comes from appreciating the sheer height of the concept.
The most challenging aspects of Schofield’s previous novels were not the prose and their plotting, as challenging as those were, so much as the intensely human nature of their narratives. The narrators of those books can never be pinned down, they slide around on the smooth ice of their own self-rationalizing, which means that uncritically siding with them, as you might the hero of more middlebrow fiction, is out the window; because the moment you offer these people your sympathy, they do or say something to betray it. Just like in real life. (By the way, a minor character from Bina reappears in the new novel, which is helpfully pointed out by a footnote; the Malarky-verse continues to expand.)
For all its funny and profane depictions of humanity and weakness in the face of our society’s ongoing collapse, the overarching concept of Library of Brothel keeps us at a relatively safe distance. We don’t have to worry that we might be implicated in some of the moral and economic crimes being exposed.
For example, who would read this takedown of the online manosphere and worry about seeing too much of themselves in it:
It was demonstrated, via supplied printouts, that young men especially were eating their own fingers. It was remarkable they even managed to type. They had names for the problem (Sharon Tracey Margo Kevin), they had excuses for themselves (I am 5 ft. 2, a weeny penis, uninteresting, pointy-eared), but they persisted and persisted, and were disappointed and further disappointed, and became more and more exasperated.
There is some great stuff here—I genuinely love “eating their own fingers”—but there is also more than a slight whiff of Atwoodism, where the above-it-all narrator, one eyebrow cocked, violently smacks the bottoms of the Bad Ones, while the crowd applauds from behind a rope. By embedding its critique of late-stage capitalism in a form that is self-consciously daring and puckish, the novel has left readers no alternative but to smile and nod along in agreement, lest they be called out as philistines.
What works best in Library of Brothel is the verve of the language itself. The gabbling, riff-happy prose ensures there are jokes on every page—many of the Dad variety, but even more that are sardonic and cutting: “For years this area was full of creativity, badminton, and sex workers. Other neighbourhoods wouldn’t even park their cars here.”
Ultimately, Schofield’s new novel is, like the rooms in the Library of Brothel itself, designed for a very specific audience, one that will find itself catered to, spanked a little (consensually), and bathed in pleasure at all the off-kilter treats its author has provided for it. And for any readers who find themselves, like me, less than turned on by these particular enticements, there is promise made on the novel’s final page of two more books to come, at a pace of one every two years. That’s what’s known as a happy ending.
Nahye Kim is an illustrator and designer based in Canada whose works explore magical realism through digital art.
