The Cultural Queen of Canada

In the final chapter of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, set in 2022, social media have transformed many familiar terms into what the book calls “word casings,” so that “democracy,” “story,” “real” and “friend” require quotation marks to signal irony. In the context of Egan’s book, this makes sense: one of the characters has a social network of 15,896 “friends.”

Should Egan’s dystopian vision prove accurate, the word “celebrity” will surely join the other word casings. Lorraine York, the Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture at McMaster University, repeatedly acknowledges the word’s protean meanings in Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. Indeed, it is the crux of the book, which was born out of a dismissive remark by Toronto councillor Doug Ford. When Atwood raced to the defence of the city’s libraries, he told the press: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue...