When writer Ian Williams was recently announced as the 2024 Massey lecturer, I pulled his Giller award-winning novel, Reproduction, off my bookshelves. I’d picked it up the previous fall at our neighbourhood street sale. A woman had put a blanket on the ground in front of her house to display several dozen books, many of which I wanted to buy. 

I don’t think she wanted to sell them. She had the unhappy look of someone forced to be sensible, in this case either by her overloaded bookshelves or by a firm-looking woman standing behind her whom I took to be her wife or partner. A familiar dynamic: one packrat in a relationship, one minimalist. Picturing my own overloaded shelves, I put down several of the books I picked up, and the woman looked relieved. But among the ones I kept was Reproduction, and she turned a little angsty when I asked the price. I have no idea why she was selling a book she clearly loved. One of life’s small mysteries.^[1]

Williams has now published six multi-award-winning books, including an essay collection, poetry and short stories. He’s an English prof at the University of Toronto and director of its creative writing program. Reproduction is his first novel, brought out by Penguin Random House in 2019. I hadn’t read it earlier because you can’t read everything, and I always assume that if a book is as good as critics say, it will be good five years later. If not, if it rode a trend that quickly passed, well—street sales. 

It’s a big book of almost 450 pages, a multi-generational saga of the kind that takes up space in the brain as well as on the shelves. After the Massey announcement, when I finally sat down to read it, I found it brilliant, quirky and enjoyable, even though I usually don’t like quirk. I also got the feeling that Williams had fun writing it. I’m sure it was as hard to write as any book, but Williams often seems to peer out mischievously from between the lines, especially as he plays with form and typefaces.

They help him make his point: that families are constructs, people who aren’t always blood-related trying to make the best of a bad deal (i.e. life) and often failing. His main character, Felicia, is a Black woman from a small unnamed island in the Caribbean. When she’s in her late teens, Felicia meets an older white man named Edgar in a Toronto hospital and they have a child. Woven into the story are issues of race and sexual abuse, although Williams isn’t campaigning or didactic. He’s more of an eavesdropper, a listener, a reporter of the ways people are messed up and complicated, and of the fact the complications reproduce themselves as surely as the generations.

In a sense, the dialogue-heavy novel is a series of long overheard conversations among the characters, and Williams recently said that his Massey lecture^[2] will focus on the theme of conversation. “We’re living at a point now where we can barely talk to each other, right?” he told CBC Radio host Tom Powers on Q. “Like it seems incredibly urgent these days, with increasing polarization, and online forms of talking. It seems really timely that we kind of step back and say, ‘Why can’t we talk to each other? How can we talk to each other? What do we need to talk about right now in 2024? And create an environmental space to make that happen.’”^[3]

Earllier this year, a friend and I went to a lecture Williams gave as part of a different series, this one a co-production by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and the CBC Radio show Ideas. Williams was riffing off Crow’s recent mounting of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya^[4] (and I now wonder if it was partly an audition for the Massey. But that’s rampant speculation.) The title of his talk was The Endless Progression of Days, and his theme was time.^[5]

Put together his preoccupation with conversations and time, and you get an idea of what’s going on in Reproduction. (That plus quirk.) The hospital in which Felicia and Edward meet in the late Seventies has been flooded by a burst pipe, so the main floor is partly underwater as they sit marooned upstairs with their dying mothers, who share a palliative care room. They talk, usually at cross-purposes, while starting to care grudgingly for one another. It’s not a spoiler to say that Felicia’s mother soon dies. But Edgar’s mother is discharged into his incompetent care, and he persuades the teenage Felicia to move into his tony house to take care of her. 

Mutter, she’s called, speaking of conversation. There’s also the mutter of attraction between Felicia and Edgar. Felicia is a kind and competent person and Edgar tries to be, although he isn’t, not really. They continue to talk, often failing to communicate, yet sometimes managing to reach one another. Edgar is also exploitative, a rich white man who’s soon having sex with a teenage Black woman. He kicks her out when she gets pregnant. Boom.

In the second of four parts in this long book, it’s the late Nineties. Felicia has a 14-year-old son named Army—christened Armistice—a born entrepreneur with a million ideas, ranging from cutting hair in a garage to renting out porn to neighbourhood teens. Felicia finds an apartment in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, the basement suite in a house owned and occupied by a divorced Portuguese-Canadian man named Oliver. As the section opens, Oliver’s 16-year-old daughter Heather and his young son Hendrix are staying with him for the summer, although they usually live in the States with his ex-wife. 

It is a spoiler (cover your eyes) that the teenage Heather gets pregnant while visiting Oliver, and ends up having a son when she’s about the same age as Felicia was when she had Army. Heather names her boy Chariot—he’s known as Riot—and Riot represents the third generation in this multi-generational novel. By the time Riot is a teenager, the locks on the doors between the basement apartment and Oliver’s place upstairs have long been taken off, and the two families have become one—with the eventual addition of Edgar. Edgar’s son, Army, moves him into the house after he gets a bad diagnosis, and Edgar remains as grateful, annoying and exploitative as ever.

There’s a lot going on in Reproduction, although a good deal of the action takes place offstage. Williams doesn’t do much, ‘Then he did this, and she walked to the corner and did that.’ He isn’t exactly a storyteller, spinning a narrative from the beginning through twists and turns to the end. Instead, he gives us a succession of increasingly short scenes, dropping readers into evolving conflicts. He lets the characters tell us between the lines what’s going on and how they feel about it. Williams is like Chekhov that way, slicing off meticulously thin cross-sections of life and asking us to look at them through his microscope. And since Williams does this mostly via conversation, it’s just as well he’s exceptionally good at dialogue.

The start of a chapter called Exegesis:

Army was talking to Heather on the phone, trying to figure out how to make more money. He walked into the kitchen with the cordless.

Let me ask. Mom, would you have a problem if I sold drugs?

We are going to church this weekend, Felicia said. 

I wouldn’t be using them. I’d just be selling them.

I need to place you before the altar.

Put aside your moral objections for—

That’s all I have.

I haven’t mentioned before that the novel is often very funny. It’s also entirely everyday, following the passage of time in non-superstar lives. (The Endless Progression of Days). Yet there’s a slight air of fairy tale about it. Not every novel features a flooded hospital, a character who can’t remember whether he’s married and doesn’t bother to get divorced, not to mention kids named Armistice, Chariot and Hendrix. There’s also an increasing amount of textual experimentation, which means the third part is divided into 256 short sections. Each of these is headed by a character’s name and a topic touching on Heather’s pregnancy, which at first the scattered bi-national family is unable to acknowledge, each in their own way: 

19.       THE PARTS OF A LETTER, A CLASS ASSIGNMENT (Hendrix)

            Dear Army,

            How are you? I am fine. Are you still cutting hair? I made it to level 5 of double dragon. You have to click fast when the guy throws die dynamite. How’s Dad? Something happened to Heather but I cant tell you what.

            Sincerely,

            Hendrix

20.       SHE SAID (Heather)

            Heather said, I can’t talk long, but she was saying she was pregnant. She said, Are you alone? but she was saying she was pregnant. She said, Even if your cast is off, your ankle’s gonna hurt every time it rains, but she was saying she was pregnant. How much clearer could she be? When she finally said, I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant, she was saying, Do you think I’m a slut?

I’ve often found that by the time a multi-generational novel reaches the third generation, it can get repetitive and tired. Maybe the writer is getting tired, or a bit desperate not to bore readers. I wonder in this case if Williams (looking at the increasing length of his manuscript) started to splinter the narrative so it didn’t feel all, ‘And then. And then. And yet another then.’ I found the inventive forms kept me engaged for much of the book…

although I wasn’t fond of the section where some of the type gets very small, as Williams drops sections of tiny words in the middle of lines of dialogue so we know what characters are really thinking…

while they say what’s expected of them.^[i] But when we reach the section where a teenage Riot is driving the action, I can’t help feeling that things get a little sketchy. One character, who’s central to the middle part of the book, disappears for close to 20 years before we learn what they’ve been doing in one paragraph (during which they die inside brackets). There’s another more important death that seems tacked on. When you take Reproduction as your title, repetition is important. But it’s also one of the hardest things to pull off without getting, like Edgar, a little annoying. 

Still, Williams illuminates core issues ranging from racism to rape to responsibility and love, all of which he shows tumbling around destructively inside a family—since of course love can be as destructive as anything. It took me a while to read this almost 450-page novel. (To be precise, 446.) I found it was so busy and compressed, I couldn’t take in much at once. But that’s fine, and it really is brilliant, and I remain convinced that the woman who put it out so reluctantly in the street sale was sure she would re-read it someday, but there’s always so much else to read, and she caved and put it on the blanket. Finis.

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Footnotes: 

Since Reproduction is a novel that plays with form, I thought I’d veer away from my usual formatting to include some add-on information.

^[1] I didn’t feel bad about buying a used copy of the book. Winning the Giller means very large sales, and since Williams is also a tenured university professor–a full professor–I figured he probably didn’t need the money. My usual policy is to buy new copies of most Canadian books as well as books by emerging writers from wherever. Others I get at the library, online used book sites, street sales, from those cardboard boxes of books people put out on the sidewalk, from friends who are purging and from Little Libraries (where, by the way, I’ve been distributing copies of a couple of my early books, since the publisher went out of business and sent me two boxes. Look for them at a Little Library near you). 

^[2] The Massey Lectures began in 1961 as an initiative of the CBC, which has now partnered with House of Anansi Books and Massey College. Martin Luther King was among the speakers, along with Northrup Frye, R.D. Laing, Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Margaret Atwood, Wade Davis, Thomas King and, most recently, Esi Edugyan in 2021, Tomson Highway in 2022 and Astra Taylor last year. Ian Williams will give five lectures in five different provinces, with the dates, cities and ticket prices to be announced soon. The lectures will be published in paperback by Anansi this fall. You can listen to some of the older ones here.

^[3] You can also listen to the entire Williams interview with Tom Powers here. 

^[4] The main character in the novel I’m currently writing is obsessed with Chekhov, so I ran off to get tickets. Or at least, I clicked on their website. It was one of the best Chekhov productions I’ve ever seen, adapted by Liisa Repo-Martel and directed by Chris Abraham, with as diverse a cast as the one in Reproduction. Tom Rooney played Uncle Vanya, Ali Kazmi made a particularly excellent Astrov, Dtaborah Johnson was Maria and Eric Peterson played a magisterial Alexandre. The production later moved to the CAA Theatre, where Williams taped his Ideas talk with the play’s set behind him. 

^[5] WIlliams’s lecture was one of five Ideas talks given about five different plays mounted at Crow’s Theatre. You can listen to all of them here.

^[6] The type really is very small. And while I wanted to drop 9-point type into the middle of the sentence the way Williams does, WordPress wouldn’t let me go any smaller than this, and insisted I put the lines in a separate paragraph. A web designer could probably do it in one click, but after trying for 10 minutes, I decided that life is too short.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel, Far Creek Road, was published last October. It’s not the least bit like Reproduction, although it also has funny bits. You can get a copy here.