The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays

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.

A good idea—which doesn’t work out.

Galt, former senior editor of Saturday Night, has gathered what he
believes to be the best Canadian essays published in books and magazines
“in the past few years” (10 of the 25, incidentally, are from
Saturday Night itself). Nonfiction discursive prose is a notoriously
tricky genre to isolate and evaluate, and in his introduction Galt
attempts a decidedly slippery distinction between article and essay that
failed to convince me. Still, his main point is clear enough: “I’ve
called this book The Thinking Heart because . . . reason and passion
marshalled together make the most engaging prose.”

Perhaps, but it is the subtitle, “Best Canadian Essays,” that
troubles me. “Representative” I might accept, but “Best” is
another matter. Only a handful of his selections seem to me
exceptional—most notably Clark Blaise’s “The Border as Fiction”
and Joyce Marshall’s “Remembering Gabrielle Roy.” The
contributions by Rose Barris, Denise Chong, and Ernest Hillen have a
moving human interest, but most of the others hardly transcend the level
of run-of-the-mill contemporary journalism, and some are expressed in a
deplorably brash and slangy prose. In addition, the subjects discussed
are for the most part tired and forecastable: gender, poverty, literacy,
ethnicity, the media, big business, politics, Canadian soul-searching.

The editor, I fear, is to blame. I just cannot accept his “best.”
Margaret Atwood can be a brilliant writer (though rarely in nonfiction),
but her contribution here reads like a coarse parody of her worst self.
And how Galt can find a common standard of excellence in the prose of
Clark Blaise on the one hand and that of Moira Farr and Joyce Nelson on
the other is inexplicable. If the essays included here are indeed the
best that this country can produce, our literary future is bleak.