Why hasn’t the literary world been able to pin down Toronto? Is it because the city lacks character or because it’s still “becoming”?

As author Jonathan Lethem told me in an interview concerning his most recent novel Chronic City – which is an epic, hallucinatory riff on the past and possible future mythologies of New York City – “You’re lucky. Toronto is a city that’s just comfortable being a city.”

Why lucky? As I read books that trade in the particular histories and mythologies of cities – as Chronic City does with New York’s, William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms or Ian McEwan’s Saturday do with London, or Brad Leithauser’s The Art Student’s War even manage for Detroit – I’m always struck by the scarcity of this kind of literature sprung from Toronto. I’m not talking about books merely set here, though even those are conspicuously under-represented considering the city’s size and state of constant flux, but those that spring from a certain shared idea of what the city is. Novels that can imagine what a city might be or become because there’s a consensus – at least between the writer and ideal reader – of what the city is.

In this regard, Michael Redhill’s Consolation remains one of the most astute fictional accounts of what living in this city is like. His Toronto is a place that disregards its history, that, in its struggle to become something, literally buries all traces of what it was. History disappears in the process, but with it goes the necessary conditions to build from that history. Projecting a city’s future is only possible if the past is sufficiently present. Without it, the Toronto of tomorrow remains as murky as the skyline of a March dawn.