Is debt sexy? Well, that might be a stretch, but it is certainly a pervasive and trendy topic, and when Toronto author Don Gillmor took notice, he decided to tackle it head-on in his new novel, Mount Pleasant.
“It was one of those things where I started to realize that everywhere I would go it just kept coming up,” says Gillmor over a coffee at a café near his Toronto home. “It becomes like a dripping faucet at some point, and it becomes all you hear.”
Gillmor chose to set his novel in the Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto — the bedrock of the elite. If lives and families could be torn apart by crushing debt in this bastion of “old money,” then it could happen anywhere.
“I have friends who grew up in Rosedale, and I was talking to them about how the neighbourhood had changed so dramatically,” he says. “It was just an exclusively WASP enclave and much more in a shambles, a more relaxed seat of power. Now it is just much different in terms of the demographic makeup and in a way reflects the shift that has happened in Canada.”
What worries Gillmor most, reflected in this cautionary tale, is our comfort level with massive amounts of debt.
He relates the story of his grandmother in Winnipeg, a child of the Depression, who kept a debit card with Eaton’s. But it functioned differently: she would pay money to Eaton’s, without being paid interest, and then use the debit card for purchases.
“This was in the early ’60s,” Gillmor explains.
“It was terrific for Eaton’s, which had all that money to invest. It prayed on the sensibility of the time, that fear of debt. They were so aware of the consequences. I grew up in a comfortable middle-class world where everything was always getting better … there was a sense that everything is going up. You could take on a little debt because life continues to get better, and you can always pay it off, and I think we inherited that evolution. We’ve now taken that ball and run with it in a huge way.”
Harry Salter is a hot yoga-loving, Scaramouche-dining university professor from a well-to-do family, but when he realizes his expected inheritance has disappeared, his marriage is crumbling and his son is an almost stranger, well, that’s when the real excitement begins.
“It’s a snapshot of a certain moment in history and a certain moment of the city as well,” Gillmor explains.
Gillmor started out writing for magazines such as Saturday Night and Toronto Life and is a best-selling author known for his two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, among many others. Mount Pleasant was released today.