Saturday Night Lives!: Selected Diaries

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

There’s punnish ambiguity here. This is a collection of 41 “Diary”
items gleaned by John Fraser from his monthly output during the seven
years he edited Saturday Night. The majority are about people and their
lives (n. pl.), but the exclamation point in the title suggest that yes,
Saturday Night lives (v. intrans.).

The essays are loosely grouped into categories, but there’s no
noticeable continuity: you can start anywhere and miss nothing, as each
essay stands comfortably on its own. Of such are bathroom books made.
But this is more than that. Fraser is a careful, graceful writer who
knows how to fit rhythm to topic; there’s no dull thump of repetition
from one essay to the next. So the book rewards hours of continuous
reading—no mean achievement for a pasted-up collection.

Some themes recur: the perfidy of the Chinese regime; the charm of
Newfoundland; the brutalism of our refugee policies. But mostly the
topic is someone: Barbara Frum, Brian Mulroney, Karen Kain, Northrop
Frye, and others, including some you’ve never heard of. There’s an
introductory item on Conrad Black, proprietor of Saturday Night. It’s
a mark of Fraser’s skill that he can write entertainingly about the
ferocious Black without being sued.

Another skill-marker is found in the opening of an essay on the Dalai
Lama: “On the day, 12 years ago, that we first climbed the seemingly
endless steps to the Potala Palace, the wind came swirling down through
Lhasa from. ...” It takes great confidence to pull off a sentence like
that in the 1990s. Fraser has it and does it.