What prompted me to write In the Frame
I’ve always liked satiric and comic novels: Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, any of Carl Hiaasen’s riotous Florida capers. But the books that are closest to my motivation are Small World, by David Lodge, and The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, by Giles Waterfield.
I read Small World soon after it appeared in 1984 and loved its skewering of academics and their conferences, rivalries, and machinations. By that time, I was working in an art gallery and had a hunch that the same beady eye could be applied to that milieu, but I didn’t do anything about it. For awhile I was more focused on travel writing, and I did not start thinking about a satiric novel about a public art gallery until the late 1990s. Work was becoming such a roller-coaster that I decided to keep a running account of crazy incidents, as a cathartic, sanity-preserving exercise, if nothing else. But I had a hunch that I was recording the seeds of a story. Then in 2002, The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner appeared. As this was written by a former director of a British public art gallery, it bolstered my desire to create a workplace comedy in a Canadian setting. I’ve re-read these two books several times, and laughed as much as I did on first reading.
Novels about the art world often focus on forgeries or heists, but I wanted to break away from that in favour of a peek behind the scenes. Another inspiration derives from the small screen—Slings and Arrows, one of the best Canadian television series ever produced. As a New York Times critic wrote, it’s both “a salute to and a send-up of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.” In between my bouts of laughter, I could see the parallels between a theatre company and a public art gallery. What Slings and Arrows, Small World and The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner do, among other things, is treat a rarefied milieu as a workplace comedy. I think that’s the secret to getting behind the scenes and deflating some of the mystique.