You think that love is over there somewhere, close to the menorah. (She said his desire to be Jewish as a secret wish for tenderness and affection. Morris wanted to be Jewish. He imagined that this might have made him a more interesting person more spontaneous, passionate and complicated, though Lucille had already called him complicated in the extreme. Morris is going on the far side of middle age, and he isn’t sure what his life means. In the beginning, when reading about Morris Schutt as he became increasingly erratic and alienating, I thought often of Julian Treslove in The Finkler Question, not least because of this passage:
Despite his idealistic aspirations in his column, his life is falling apart around him, starting nearly two years earlier when his son Martin was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. “Morris longed for the true and the beautiful and the good in his column, and though he could not be certain, he anticipated that we are saved by hope.” When the novel starts, it is 2007, and Morris is 51 years old. Morris Schutt is a successful syndicated newspaper columnist based in Winnipeg. Bergen has honed his skill to the point where he is not in the way of his story. Though a novel of abstract ideas, the writing remains clear. Yet, without having read three of the five finalists, I suspect Bergen’s book to the be the weakest on the shortlist.įirst things first: Bergen’s writing is not showy and it is fluid. In fact, other than a short story collection here (Winter) or a book of poetry there (Skibsrud), the other finalists are new authors in the book publishing world. Bergen is the heavy-weight, the seasoned professional. None has ever been on the longlist, either. The other authors on this year’s shortlist are all first-time Giller finalists. Bergen won the Giller in 2005 for The Time in Between, and he was shortlisted in 2008 for The Retreat. My second stop on this year’s Giller shortlist is David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris. The Matter with Morris by David Bergen (2010) HarperCollins Canada (2010) 256 pp
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