The Child Hero in the Canadian Novel

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This book ends with 18 pages of plot summaries. One suspects the worst,
and one’s fears are justified.

As its title suggests, it is narrowly thematic; the focus is
psychosociological rather than literary. In addition, it is based on a
decidedly shaky premise: that the way novelists present childhood
reflects the nature of childhood in contemporary society—even to the
extreme of reflecting the decades in which the books are written. That
eventful-but-deprived childhoods can be more stimulating for novelists
than uneventful-but-happy ones is never seriously considered. Besides,
most novels of childhood are retrospective, so they are likely to
recreate a situation in the past. Selection of texts also presents a
problem. Naturally, such a study cannot be comprehensive, but one that
totally ignores the presentation of childhood in Clark Blaise, Mavis
Gallant, Hugh Hood, and Alice Munro must be regarded as cripplingly
flawed.

The standard of literary commentary is low. Quigley can produce the
most extraordinary naivetés (“Beauchemin admits . . . that he writes
for the modern reader”), and rarely offers even the most obvious and
banal of statements without backup from an “authority.” Thus she
informs us, in case we hadn’t noticed, that the characters in La Belle
Bкte “are types rather than individuals,” but cites an earlier
critic (commenting on another Blaise novel!) to clinch the point.

Finally, the scholarship is slipshod. The title of Mitchell’s Who Has
Seen the Wind does not contain a question mark; publishers’ names
(Macmillan, Methuen) are misspelled; ECW does not publish out of
Oakville; bibliographic entries are frequently incomplete or
inconsistent.

This is the sort of book that makes one despair of Canadian literary
criticism.