Author Jean Marc Ah-Sen.Justin Lagacé/Supplied
Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s new novel, Kilworthy Tanner, offers a playful portrait of the clashes and jealousies that animate art scenes. Set in a fictionalized version of Toronto – Ah-Sen’s hometown– it follows Jonno, a 21-year-old newcomer on the scene who has decided to give up on the indie music circuit and take up the authorial pen. When he becomes the lover and protégé of Kilworthy Tanner – eponymous heroine and bona fide A-list CanLit star – his own path to stardom seems assured.
Tanner is a paradoxical figure. She’s a bestselling enfant terrible whose punk novels are embraced by the multitudes and make her famous. Jonno falls in love with her after reading Sugarelly, a novel whose plot involves a woman intoxicating her neighbours with licorice water, brewed in her bathtub, then smashing them over the head with a wooden oar. Somehow, it’s a hit.
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Kilworthy Tanner by Jean-Marc Ah-Sen.Supplied
A woman in her 30s, Tanner parties with a coterie of drug-addled twentysomething writers and musicians in her stately home. She’s an anti-establishment rebel who insists on Michelin ratings when it’s time to eat. Not only a venerated artist in her own right, Tanner is also the trust-fund-child of a famous artist father, who, like her, is deeply decadent and white.
There is a word for her ability to cross boundaries so effortlessly: privilege – something Jonno sorely lacks.
Much of the plot concerns Jonno’s efforts to write a Tanner-style “party novel.” Yet, as one of his rivals puts it, “he’s got the wrong skin colour for anyone to greenlight it.” No-holds-barred debauchery is fine for white trust-fund kinds like Tanner, but for folks like Jonno – who, like Ah-Sen himself, is of Mauritian background – the only way to get published, he is told, is by performing “trauma-excavation” and penning “a penitent confessional.”
“The modern novel,” Jonno complains at one point, “has to offer social commentary in order to be relevant.”
Elaborating on his narrator’s predicament, Ah-Sen decries “the paranoiac need for writers to be legible – that their politics are legible, that their affiliations, social and ideological, can be cleanly inferred.”
“That is all well and good if the writer is interesting, or if their sentences don’t read like field manuals,” he continues. “That is usually not the case, though, so all you are normally left with is balderdash with ‘good politics.’”
Describing his own novel, Ah-Sen relies on Jonno’s terminology. It’s a “party novel,” he says – a genre he defines as “up tempo, carousing, hedonistic. It has to give in to a kind of literary excess. There has to be a palpable sense that it takes certain subjects too far.”
Kilworthy Tanner’s hijinks and tension arise mainly from the improbable match of Tanner and scruffy, young Jonno. The couple is not so much Romeo and Juliet as Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen: Sex, drugs and petty acts of vengeance are the hallmarks of their union. The relationship has other complications, as well. Tanner lives with her high-profile manager husband and is orbited by a crew of vindictive fans and former lovers who call themselves “the Worthyboys” and hold weekly meetings.
For a while, Jonno leads an existence most writers could only dream of. Tanner provides housing and a stipend, so he can write to his heart’s content. She also holds bacchanalian drug parties, to the chagrin of her upstanding neighbours in the affluent Wychwood Park. Yet Tanner doesn’t let Jonno forget the tenuousness of the situation, or who holds the cards. When he challenges her status at one point, she flatly informs him, “If you were any lower, you’d be a cranberry bog.”
Jonno holds power as the book’s narrator, where he is able to display to the reader the paradox of Tanner’s situation. Indeed, a notable conflict sparks when Tanner mistakenly believes that Jonno publicly pegged her as a bourgeois writer who “peppers platitudes” in her work for political clout. She is enraged: Jonno has pressed one of her buttons, perhaps the biggest.
Ah-Sen comments further on the double standard existing in “certain corners of the publishing industry,” according to which “writers of colour can only manage books about race, diaspora, cooking and everything in between.” He has written about these subjects too, in his first novel, Grand Menteur, and his story collection, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. “But I was reasonably confident that I also had the ability to produce something as superficial and breezy as anything else out there on the shelves,” he says.
In writing Kilworthy Tanner, Ah-Sen was inspired by the style of musician biographies, in particular “off-the-wall rock memoirs,” calling them “documents that hold up as literature, as artistic, but without the guardrails of academic settings.” He was motivated by a “very self-conscious attempt to implode the high-literary style” he had developed in his prior books, though switching modes did not always come naturally.
“It was fun but also challenging to adopt a different vernacular,” Ah-Sen admits. “There would be times when I would dip back into old familiar habits and I’d rip everything out in the editing stage because I thought, ‘This is too intellectual, this is too sculpted, this isn’t fun enough.’”
When asked whether he thinks an apolitical party novel can be interpreted as a statement, Ah-Sen reiterates that he does not see Kilworthy Tanner as political, “even if there was some kind of frustration or intention behind it.”
The book he has written is the kind he himself is drawn to. “I really love books that are antidotes to profundity and cleverness,” he says. “Those latter books can be too calculating and self-congratulatory, and all they do is preen about, especially when they are unironically trying to bowl a reader over.” Who, after all, would say no to a good time?