Can Liberal Candidate Evan Solomon Cross the Distance?
Adam's Notes for April 17, 2025
Hello folks, and welcome to Adam’s Notes. This week we’ve got a big interview related to the upcoming Canadian federal election. You might remember Evan Solomon as the television host unceremoniously fired from the CBC after the Toronto Star caught him taking commissions brokering art sales to people he had contact with through his job—among other things, he sold a Kim Dorland to Mark Carney. Solomon is currently running as Carney’s Liberal candidate in the riding of Toronto Centre, but before all this, he was more of an arts type, co-founding a culture magazine and hosting what I think was CBC’s last attempt at a television show about books. He also wrote what I have to presume is a very shitty novel, Crossing the Distance.
I say presume because although I was able to track down a copy, I wasn’t able to bring myself to read more than about twenty pages of it. That’s why this week I’m talking to WokeShrekTO, who first alerted me to the book’s existence and who was able to stomach much more of it than I could.
Adam: Woke Shrek, how did you become aware of Crossing the Distance?
When news broke Solomon was going to run for the Liberals, I wanted to revisit the interview he did with Noam Chomsky on his CBC show Hot Type, in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s rather remarkable how visibly annoyed the usually implacable Chomsky gets, as he patiently explains the hypocrisies of American foreign policy to a naive and incredulous Solomon. Anyways, I stumbled on a mention of this out-of-print memory-holed novel that’s half mystery-thriller, half satire of Canadian media, and I knew I had to read it.
Adam: And how much of the book were you able to actually get through?
Most of it! I’m very interested in the esoteric, mostly inconsequential world of Canadian horse-race politics, especially at the local level, so I was intrigued to enter the mind of someone who would choose the life, even a dullard like Solomon. I also love bad books written by pompous, pretentious dilettantes: politicians, rock-stars, celebrity chefs—a classic of the genre is Kitchen Confidential—the kind of book that keeps the lights on for the publishing industry. I enjoy the inept writing and the big swings. Solomon’s prose isn’t bad, but the outlandish plotting, characterization, and dialogue made me laugh like a maniac.
That said, I raced through the novel’s boring, navel-gazing media satire segments. Very banal observations about reality TV and desensitization to violence. If this satire worked in 1999, it’s utterly toothless now, especially since Canadian media has been decimated over the past 30 years.
Adam: So this book, I take it that it’s about a hot-shit tv reporter whose girlfriend is a star academic with a book that made headlines for its controversial thesis that videogames in 1999 were actually good for kids. He’s also got a brother who’s an ecoterrorist or something. Is that right?
Yeah, the protagonist with the Boaty-McBoatface name of Jacob “Jake” Jacobson hosts a talk/call-in current affairs show on “The Network” called The Jake Connections. Can’t recall any program like this on Canadian TV, but it’s portrayed as sensationalist and tawdry like Jerry Springer. The novel begins with Jake discovering his girlfriend Rachel in mortal peril after getting shot. Her ridiculous thesis is that “video games teach children how to manage chaos.” In 1999, she’d be talking about Tony Hawk and Mario Kart. Anyway, we don’t get much more detail about her other than she’s a 10/10 smokeshow and a bit freaky sexually.
So it’s a whodunit, but that plot keeps getting derailed by Theo, Jake’s ideologue brother. He’s on the lam after he kills a guy in an anti-logging protest. He doesn’t approve of Jake’s career. Theo is uncompromising where Jake is cynical. Dad is dead; mom is an alcoholic. There’s an obvious allusion to the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, but it’s unclear how it connects and what moral Solomon got from that story. Too much is going on here, and it makes everyone’s actions incomprehensible.
Adam: I’m assuming the story is a thinly-veiled roman à clef about people working in Canadian TV at the turn of the millennium? Given that there’s a coffee chain called Sunbucks I figure it shouldn’t be too hard to crack the code?
That Sunbucks scene was absolutely grim. Four pages of an insipid riff on Starbucks’ complicated ordering system. “Can’t a guy just get a normal coffee?”
In many ways, this CanCon world barely exists anymore, so the satire doesn’t hit. Solomon is really trying something with the ridiculous names he chooses for his characters, but I’m not sure what. The ball-busting head of “The Network” is named Greta Watt. It’s owned by reclusive billionaire Kingston Marble. There’s Executive Producer Ludwig Zeemanvitz, who’s a Jewish Texan that Solomon writes with rather offensive stereotypes. There’s a news anchor, William Stonebane, who seems suspiciously like Peter Mansbridge. He’s kind of a villain. Theckla Garrow, Martin “The Gimp” Gimper. My favourite character, though, is the Jamaican cab driver Leon Pastiche. Solomon tries out phonetic transcription for his dialogue, and he sounds like Jar Jar Binks.
Adam: Let’s not forget about—and this is verbatim from the novel—“the financial wiz reporter, Tobias Kantor, or T-Bill as he’s known on Bay Street.” But moving on, can you tell us a little bit about the hospital sex scene on page 318?
Sorry, those pages are stuck together. No, that was a joke—it was actually deeply unsexy and disturbing. Jake is reunited with Rachel in the hospital. She asks that he lay with her, and he gets horned up. It’s mentioned a few times how turned on Jake is by her injuries. He attempts intercourse with her, and she seems to remove consent (she is high on painkillers). Luckily this rapey scene is interrupted as Rachel reveals the final clue to who her assailant was.
Theo also has a terrible sex scene. In Bangkok, he “rescues” sex workers by returning them—against their will!—to their villages. But not before having sex with them, naturally. There’s some very problematic stuff in this novel about sex work.
Adam: That Quill and Quire review you dug up is interesting, it’s a lot harsher than a lot of reviews you find in the world of CanLit. People really didn’t like this book, I take it.
Well I didn’t! The book got a surprisingly positive blurb from Richard Ford, who is a real writer. Perhaps Solomon flattered him. He’s notorious for taking bad reviews very personally. But yeah, the Q&Q review is correct that there’s too much going on and the pacing is all over the place.
It was a different time. This novel was published by McClelland & Steward, which was the great Canadian publishing house until later getting bought out by Penguin Random House. Perhaps people felt more comfortable taking down a wunderkind star like Solomon than they would now. Does Canada even have news celebs like Solomon anymore? Not really.
Adam: You’re in Toronto, what do you make of Evan’s chances of winning Toronto Centre? Is he going to be our next Minister of Culture and Identity?
Oh he’s running in one of the Libs’ safest seats. It’ll be a slamdunk. As for Cabinet, I do think Prime Minister Carney is going to want someone he trusts rather than the bunglers from Trudeau’s team. Carney and Solomon have a long history. Don’t forget that Carney was nicknamed “the Gov” during Solomon’s ill-fated career as an art dealer. For as bad as this novel was, Solomon is a good communicator. I could see him take on the same role former weatherman Seamus O’Regan had for Trudeau. But Carney will have a lot of handsome white boys to choose from, so maybe not. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in this novel that gives a clue to Solomon’s worldview.
Next week: I’ll make my long-awaited endorsement.
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