Books about books are tricky to pull off. Done well, they fetishize the hermeneutic experience as well as the physical object itself. A. S. Byatt’s transcendent Possession and Jasper Fforde’s cheeky Thursday Next series, for example, slyly reverse the literary gaze, elevating the reader and the book into subjects worthy of examination.
Unfortunately, Ithaca, the latest from David Davidar, never reaches those heights. This is an ambitious novel; Davidar’s territory — the collapse of print publishing — is vast and timely, but he plays it safe. The novel feels flat and artless, a lump of unprocessed ideas expressed without subtlety or imagination.
The novel follows Zachariah Thomas, the editor-in-chief of a mid-size publishing house and an obvious stand-in for Davidar (who left his position as CEO of Penguin Canada last year after an employee accused him of sexual harassment). Zach’s success hinges on a popular series of angel-themed books by Massimo Seppi, a recently deceased Sicilian writer, who might have an unpublished gem gathering dust among his papers. Zach’s company, meanwhile, is on the verge of being plucked up by a corporate behemoth. The novel’s first chapter, in which he recalls the circumstances through which he discovered Seppi, and the last one, in which the plot takes a somewhat predictable twist, are by far the most interesting.
Ultimately, Ithaca is a soapbox disguised as a novel. Sandwiched between those two chapters of exposition are 200 pages of Zach aimlessly drifting through ideas about the future of publishing, the corporatization of small business, the writing and reading of stories. Novels of ideas can be quite compelling when they flesh out characters and situations that bring form to the concepts. But Davidar’s characters serve merely as mouthpieces for various viewpoints: a puffed-up professor prophesying the end of print; a disillusioned publisher tired of the grind; and Zach himself, a jaded but hopeful figure in the centre of an industry at a crossroads.
Ithaca is self-reflexive without being self-aware. Like most books about books, it draws attention to the art of narrative; in doing so, however, it reveals its own inherent flaws. Davidar’s failure here is somewhat ironic: he is full of ideas about stories but is ultimately unable to craft one.
