Toronto author and poet Emily Schultz excels at creating intricate,
beautifully drawn worlds, encapsulated like snow globes. Her last
novel, Joyland, was set in a 1983 arcade—the lives of two
teenagers reflected through the videogames they’re obsessed with
playing. Heaven is Small takes place at the claustrophobic
Heaven Book Company, a Harlequin-style publisher in the suburban sky.
Yes, the staff of Heaven Book Co. are all dead, including its latest
recruit, proofreader Gordon Small, although no one seems to realize
they’ve met their demise. And no wonder: Schultz’s vision of heaven is
a bleak 70-storey office tower full of telephone codes, personalized
mugs, muffin stands, timesheets and bureaucratic mazes.
Small becomes a minor celebrity when it’s revealed his ex-wife is
Chloe Gold, a blockbuster novelist. When he decides to contact Gold
covertly through another author’s book, all hell breaks loose. But this
isn’t a romance novel inside a romance novel: Schultz is too
dark-minded to fall for a Ghost cliche. As it turns out,
Heaven is Small is a funny but heartbreaking story about the
publishing industry, the disconnect between authors and their readers,
and the legions of stories that are written but will remain unread or
discarded.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.