Unsupported Assertions

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

Unsupported Assertions is the third of Hood’s essay collections,
following The Governor’s Bridge Is Closed and Trusting the Tale.
Quality in those books varied sharply, but their best pieces were cogent
and lucid. These 12 new essays, all written in 1990 and not published
previously, give further evidence of Hood’s polymathic intelligence:
their subjects include Meech Lake, Catholic literary tradition,
abortion, Cher, mediocrity in Canada, the sentence, memory, the
philosophy of history, and Vienna.

It is sad to report that Unsupported Assertions apes only the worst of
Hood’s first two collections. As in the lesser pieces of those books,
the prose is alternately elliptical, arch, choppy, and sloppy.
Sometimes, as in the opening essay, he rants; other times, he is almost
incomprehensible (“I am ready to believe that the pure abstract idea
of the essential horse is held in the mind of Almighty God, otherwise
there wouldn’t be any horses and nobody would even suspect horses,
much less conceive of them. I’ve never formed a concept of a horse, so
far as I can tell. I talk to myself about horses: horses, horse, horses,
crazy over horses, horses, horses . . . and I see them leaping about in
fields”). The speed of Hood’s intellect also leaves him open to
silly errors and wild conjectures: his views on millenarianism were
disproven by George L. Burr in 1901, and Hood’s breezy claim that in
the next century humans will colonize Mars is laughable. (Has he thought
of the expense?) Equally embarrassing is Hood’s embrace of literary
relativism: it is, he claims, “virtually impossible for an outsider, a
non-participant in a historical myth, to understand how it appears to an
insider.” Where does that leave the writer who created a black African
hero for the novel You Cant Get There From Here? That author does not
think to tell us.