Aesthete: The Frank Diaries of Michael Coren

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Literary biographer, reviewer, and newspaper columnist Michael Coren has
been writing a regular page in the satirical magazine Frank for some
time now, in the form of a fictional diary in which he meets or comments
on the newsworthy. This is a selection from his “diary” during its
first two Frank years. Although some of it is funny, laced with
corrosive wit, it is not a book I could recommend to anyone I did not
know well. In fact, I would not recommend it to many people I do know
well. In an interesting introduction, Coren says that he has offended
legions, “but that had been my intention.” If his purpose is to
offend as much as it is to amuse, he has succeeded. Surely what
politicians do and say is open to ridicule and parody, but, Coren writes
in a diary entry, “for sanity’s sake almost everything could and
should be parodied.” He apparently thinks readers will be amused by a
description of Lester Pearson as “an old pederast who dribbled a lot
in public.” Perhaps some might find this funny; the rest of us regard
it as witless and vile. No doubt Coren would file this comment with what
he calls “the petulant, semi-educated criticism that is vomited in my
direction,” but to quote from another of his diary entries,
“[h]umour is one thing, but this is bordering on the perverse.”