The Summer Fiction Question

When the summer fiction issue of the New Yorker hit the newsstand a short time ago did you feel a familiar twinge when again you did not buy a copy precisely because it was the summer fiction issue, and then did you fail to suppress the querulous flood, the peevish trickle of nagging familiar questions that one never speaks aloud in bookstores or libraries, or in the halls of the CBC?

What is it with fiction and summer, anyway? Why is fiction supposed to be good for you and why do we have to read it in the summer? What's wrong with me that I don't want to read a bunch of fiction all at once in the New Yorker—is this a neurosis or a psychosis, is it a phobia? Is fiction supposed to have some kind of being-in-itself, is fiction some kind of Higher Art? Or is it because fiction isn't about anything? Isn't it perfectly all right to print fiction alongside other narrative forms every now and then, making no big deal and finding an illustration to go along without illustrating so much as accompanying--or is this mere fetishism, frippery, more bagatelles? Didn't the Puritans circa 1620 censure frivolous reading, thereby forcing readers to define fiction as High Art and therefore good for you and that's why it's good for you, because its good to be good? Is that why things seem to be different in Latin America, in Europe, in Japan or anywhere in the world where people tend to read books helter skelter like people rather than citizens engaging in civic behaviour? Why does the CBC want everyone in Canada to read the same novel? Is the CBC connected to the mind police? What do "five celebrity panelists" yawning on about novels they flipped through the night before know that I don't know about novels I ought read along with everyone else in the country? What exactly is a celebrity panelist on AM radio in the morning? What do celebrity panelists do to relax, off-panel? How many weeks have already passed since the new summer lists came out again, long lists of more novels to read on the beach, in the heat, as we slumber through the days slathered in ointments rated SPF15, improving ourselves with literature? Do we look forward eagerly to those long windy passages in door stopper novels inserted by considerate authors precisely to allow readers the luxury of paging on and on, heedlessly skipping over this bit and that bit, heading out into the sea of fiction in the summer?

—from the summer letter to subscribers of Geist