‘Mount Pleasant’ by Don Gillmor

By Hubert O’Hearn

Novels exist for one vital reason: they make money for publishers and authors. My suspicion is that the level of agreement you have for that statement will be directly proportional to your enjoyment of Mount Pleasant. If you are still young and idealistic, perhaps a philosophy or psychology major still in university, you will likely find an opinion equating artistic works with hog belly futures or fracked oil sands an appalling notion. After idealism has been squeezed out of you like lemon rind before being plopped into a martini glass, you will increasingly admire author Don Gillmor’s skill in discussing exactly that.

Mount Pleasant is one of those worthy novels that attempts to Make Sense of All This. Make Sense of All This novels tend to involve hot news topics, a wide span of character ages, a certain corruption indicating where we all went wrong, and usually a pretty good breadth of economic ranges. There are several authors who work in the Make Sense of All This ouevre. Martin Amis did it brilliantly in Lionel Asbo, John Lanchester created many memorable characters who never did find a plot in Capital, and then of course there is Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is very much the parent or grandparent of Mount Pleasant, the latter being the more pleasant, quieter Canadian relative. Yet both books are fictional essays based on financial corruption along with laser beamed accuracy in disseminating the social mores of New York in Bonfire and Toronto in Mount Pleasant. The principal difference is that Gillmor’s book is not as panoramic, not as noisy as Wolfe’s, so perhaps an accurate summation would be Mount Pleasant: Fireplace of the Vanities.

Your plot summary: Harry Salter, about to turn fifty is an untenured college professor after losing, because of budget cuts, his position as a pundit on a certain public broadcaster (which if it ain’t TVOntario, I’m my Aunt Nancy’s tea cozy). Harry and his wife Gladys are living one of those drifting apart sort of marriages, with one son and no other offspring other than debt. Harry’s father Dale dies – I was not clear if Dale was a broker, an investment counsellor or what, but he should have died with millions of dollars. He doesn’t. Complications arise.

Like Wolfe, Amis, or you know throw Balzac in here if you’re in the mood for it, Gillmor’s thin plot line of ‘whatever happened to Dad’s money?’ is a MacGuffin of a line on which to hang all the stuff the author really wants to talk about. Some of these opinions can be quite interesting. For instance, Harry’s media class discusses the Occupy Movement and he says:

Dedication is admirable. But the question here may be: Can you have a revolution without a leader? In the age of social media, can Twitter and Facebook replace Che Guevara or Mackenzie or Gandhi? Was the Arab Spring a new trend or a blip? In a way it comes down to physics – how to create and sustain revolutionary energy. Usually, there is a charismatic, galvanizing leader. But can we do it through sheer connectivity? When those people dispersed, what did they leave?

As much as one enjoys a picnic basket-sized Food for Thought such as the above delivered into a novel, the shame of it is that these provocative, debatable ideas are left to hang. In response to Harry’s opinion, a student named Verma remarks, “…The next stage will be implementation, but this time as a political party, or a plank in someone’s platform.” However, Harry’s attention immediately drifts off into space and his own life, leaving what might have been an intriguing two to four page section of dialogue instead just left to rot. That is the problem with introducing big ideas into a novel; they then demand completion, not just observation.

Mount Pleasant, as its title suggests is as Toronto-y a novel as you’ll ever see. There are all kinds of historical lessons about dear old Hogtown scattered throughout the novel, right from the creation of the grid pattern of streets, through Glenn Gould’s CBC documentary on the city, and even an imagined (and bloody bizarre, one must say) conversation between the graves of Timothy Eaton and Robert Simpson, founders of the competing retailers that bore their names.

At that, when I lived in Toronto during the late 1980s, I made an observation about the city which I believe holds true to this day. Toronto is not so much a city as it is a series of villages or enclaves stapled together. Mount Pleasant is set in white upper-middle class Toronto. Apart from one obnoxious panhandler, the multi-cultural and the underclass are about as visible in Gillmor’s story as they are in the New York of any episode of Friends. No one ever is in real risk of ending up poor in this novel; at worst one might have to sell the house and move into a $400,000 condo. Well Lord pass the harmonica and heat up a can of beans if life has come to that.

I may well be giving off the impression that I was disappointed in Mount Pleasant and that is not true. One has to admire any novelist who dares to write big, and many of the insights into the bumpy part of life’s highway known as middle age are deft and often funny. However, much like the polyps discovered in one character’s bowels with the possibility that some are cancerous, there are too many ideas raised in Mount Pleasant that are left unresolved.

Random House | 304 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307360724