Bergen changes gears after year of ups and downs

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/11/2009 (6123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What are you going to say about Winnipeg’s Giller Prize winner, David Bergen?

Here is one novelist who can’t he keep his name out of the news.

Earlier this week in Toronto, he was the named winner of a relatively obscure $25,000 prize, the Writers’ Trust Notable Author Award.

Given to a Canadian for his or her body of work, it combines two smaller prizes previously handed out by the Writers’ Trust, which ranks third after the Gillers and the Governor General’s Awards in national literary prestige.

Last year, our own Miriam Toews won the Trust’s top fiction prize for The Flying Troutmans.

For Bergen, 52, a full-time novelist in Canada (read: hustling freelancer) with a family-therapist wife and four children, at least three of whom are still on the payroll, the best part is that the $25,000 is a tax-free "windfall," just like a lottery win.

The cheque arrives as Bergen is the subject of a prominent article in the December Quill & Quire, the national book trade journal, probing his recent decision to jump publishers, from McClelland & Stewart to HarperCollins, after the commercial failure of his fifth novel, 2008’s The Retreat.

This was particularly disappointing, because big things were forecast when his previous effort, The Time in Between, won the Giller in 2005. Besides its lacklustre sales here, it also did not get picked up in the U.S. or Britain, where Toews has broken through with A Complicated Kindness and Troutmans.

Bergen, who also switched agents recently, is not one to wash his business linen in public. "I take the long view," he said upon arriving home with his Writers’ Trust booty. "Some of my books will do well and others won’t."

The Retreat, about aboriginals and whites in Lake of the Woods in the mid-’70s, struck me as Bergen’s best effort to date. It has a brilliant opening and a riveting conclusion, and it works with enduring archetypes.

But his ultra-taut writing does have a forbidding quality. It certainly lacks the sexiness and warmth of Toews’ work.

In the mainstream press, where we deal in facile comparisons, Toews and Bergen have been set up as rivals. Despite their opposing styles, both are first-rate, both have been publishing for similar lengths of time, and both are Mennonites (and apostates to boot).

Both, mind you, have gone out of their ways to dismiss any sense of competition. Still, gossip around town last summer had it that Bergen was annoyed when M&S released the trade paperback version of The Retreat in the same month as Toews’ publisher, Knopf Canada, released Troutmans.

M&S is 25 per cent owned by Random House (itself part of Bertelsmann), and Knopf is a longtime RH imprint.

Bergen denies this was an issue for him. Ironically, at the Manitoba Book Awards in April, The Retreat beat out Troutmans for the two top awards, earning Bergen another tax-free $8,500.

For the foreseeable future, however, the two heavyweights will not be up against each other, at least in Winnipeg. Toews has become a Torontonian.

With their three children grown, she and her husband, Neal Rempel, sold their Jessie Avenue home in the summer and headed to the Big Smoke.

Bergen, meanwhile, is working on the edits to his next novel, about a Winnipeg syndicated columnist in his 50s trying to find his way in life.

The Matter with Morris will appear in September, and his editor Phyllis Bruce thinks this could be the commercial hit he needs. She told Q&Q: "I’m describing it as John Updike meets Woody Allen."

You can almost see Bergen smile over the phone.

"I think what Phyllis is saying is that Morris has the pathos of Updike and the self-deprecation of Woody Allen."

Whatever. It sounds like a surefire smash, and a much-deserved one. Could there be a sexier hero than a 50-something newspaper columnist? Especially one as self-deprecating as Woody.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca