In a post-TMZ and Perez Hilton world, where the gleeful spreading of celebrity gossip and slander has become part of peoples’ daily lives, it is almost difficult to believe that the columns collected in Lunch with Jan Wong upset so many readers on publication. Once called the “Hannibal Lecter of the lunch set”, Wong is a Canadian journalist who, from 1996 to 2002, interviewed celebrities over lunch for her column in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Her aggressively forthright accounts of those meals enraged many of her subjects (and a fair number of her readers) but mostly serve to highlight the writing skills that so many “lifestyle” or entertainment columnists and gossip bloggers today lack. She is funny and observant, sharp and, despite her reputation, sympathetic. These are interviews, not fluff pieces; Wong was not there to write only flattering, glowing things about her subjects. She was there to write about interesting people in an interesting and intelligent way. And that is exactly what she did, making this a very entertaining book.
The majority of her lunch dates are with other Canadians, though a fair number of international figures also appear. Wong is good at explaining each of her subjects’ backgrounds and accomplishments though, so it hardly matters if you’re familiar with the person already. She talks to an impressive range of people, from all walks of life: there’s a hostile Margaret Atwood, a brawling beauty queen, sex therapist Dr Ruth, Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown, hockey commentator Don Cherry (this was the only interview that made me cry), pro-choice advocate Henry Morgentaler, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, cartoonist Lynn Johnston, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, Hong Kong political activist Martin Lee, actor Anthony Quinn, and others.
Wong is tough on her subjects, there is no question about that, and, unsurprisingly, actors and writers caught up in the exhausting conveyor belt of public appearances and press interviews sometime snap under examination. But, let’s be honest, that is where some of the fun lies. The book begins with Wong’s very first “Lunch with” subject: Margaret Atwood. Neither woman is at her best: Wong was given the story last minute and didn’t have time to do sufficient prep and Atwood is easily offended, by both Wong and their surroundings. That is what makes this sort of interview fun: Wong is recording what happened during the brief period she spends with these people, not trying to provide a fair or balanced in-depth portrait of them. If they were rude to the wait staff, if they were picky eaters, if they had bad table manners, Wong is sure to say. She does not go off the record.
One of the best features of the book are the endnotes Wong provides to each interview, describing how the subject and the public reacted to the piece. Delightfully, she quotes some of the complaints she received from readers, which sometimes seem founded and sometimes not. Wong is marvellously thick-skinned about it all and I loved the balance these other perspective provide.
Though her subjects may complain and threaten to sue after publication, the majority of the pieces are positive. Some of them are not quite as detailed as you might hope (her interview with Yo-Yo Ma gives a wonderful impression of his hectic schedule and impressive energy but very little insight into the man himself) while others are fascinating glimpses into the lives of less famous but no less interesting figures. My favourite interview in the entire book was with John Cleghorn, then the chairmen of the Royal Bank of Canada, who admitted to having teared up (as I did) while reading Wong’s earlier interview with Don Cherry.
I have to admit that there was really never any chance I was not going to enjoy this book. Wong was the reason I started reading the Globe and Mail as a teenager. It is a paper with many flaws but, while Wong worked there, I always had something to look forward to, both in these interviews and in her more intensive feature pieces. I have loved her four other books (three about her time in China as first an exchange student and then a journalist and one, which I will be reviewing soon, about her workplace-caused depression) and Lunch with Jan Wong, by far the lightest in terms of subject matter, was no exception.
There is an art to telling a simple story. Some people cannot do it. They need to tell you all about the inner lives of their characters, even the aspects that have nothing to do with the story; they must describe the setting down to the smallest drop of dew on a leaf in a forest that none of the characters ever enter; and they must make absolutely sure that you appreciate the brilliance of the them, the author, as much as you appreciate their creation. But it is usually the simplest stories that attract me the most, which is why I was so happy to read Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed was published in 1969 and is the gentlest of the three books in terms of the subject matter it addresses. Covering the first eighteen years of his life, this book sees Max through infancy and childhood, his lust-filled teen years, and his emergence after graduation into a world reeling after the stock market crash of 1929.
The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car, published in 1971, picks up four years after Never Sleep Three in a Bed (years chronicled in Why Shoot the Teacher?, which I did not read this time around), after Max has survived his first years as a teacher and acquired his wife, Aileen. As the book opens, Max is trying to secure a teaching job in the town of Wannego. He gets it, beating out more than fifty other applicants through a combination of determination (rather than mailing his application, he drove to Wannego to accost the school board), connections (it turned out his father knew the head of the board), and canny politics (playing the board members off against each other, farmers versus their natural enemy: the bank manager). It is one of many reminders about the scarcity of jobs during the Depression and the lengths the unemployed were willing to go to in order to obtain a post.
The Magic Summer by Noel Streatfeild actually made me understand why people love Streatfeild so much. I had never read any of her children’s books before, just 
You want to know who doesn’t feel like a real child? Tom from Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. I know people adore this book and will hate to hear any criticism, however minor, but they will have to forgive me. He is flat but the book is not. It is a magical story, about a boy who, while staying with his aunt and uncle, discovers that when the clock strikes thirteen each night in the lobby of their apartment building he is able to slip into the past. Rather than the dreary, rundown apartment building of modern times (“modern” here being the 1950s, as the book came out in 1958) he finds himself back in the days when the building was a family home, when it was surrounded by a large garden instead of other buildings, and when a young girl, Hatty, lived there. Most people cannot see Tom when he appears in the past but Hatty can and they become playmates. Night after night, Tom visits her but with each visit she grows a little older, years passing in what for him is a single day. Thought the ending was clear from the very beginning of the book, it still made me tear up a little. I am so glad I finally read this.
But the book I am most glad to have read, the one that entertained me the most, was The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton. Until recently, I had no idea that Berton, a Canadian historian, had written a children’s book. Apparently, my father could have told me as much: this was one of his childhood favourites, having been published in 1961 when he was six years old.
The Captive Reader 