Contemporary Manitoba Writers: New Critical Studies

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.

To an outsider like me, this book is puzzling. I am given no clues as to
the basis on which either the writers or the commentators are
chosen—or why four of the same names appear in both categories. No one
explains whether these authors constitute a distinctive Manitoban
writing or whether they are merely writers who happen to live in
Manitoba.

There is, however, something disturbingly inbred about the whole
collection. David Arnason writes about Robert Kroetsch, and is written
about in turn by Margaret Sweatman. Debbie D’Aoust writes about Dennis
Cooley, who writes about Birk Sproxton, who writes about Wayne Tefs, who
writes about Patrick Friesen. And Turnstone Press, the publishers,
themselves publish no less than seven out of the ten authors discussed.

Nor am I given any clues about an intended readership. Styles and
levels of discourse vary radically. Dennis Cooley undertakes—rather
self-consciously, I thought—to be chattily colloquial; the editor,
Kenneth James Hughes, offers a (successful) essay in the
postmodernistically unreadable.

The women writers (Kristjana Gunnars, Sandra Birdsell, and Carol
Shields) come off best; quotations reveal them as writing humanly about
human beings. The men seem obsessed with deconstruction, decentering,
and other fashionable but boring topics.

Ten writers, all doing different things; ten commentators, all doing
different things; a conductor not seemingly interested in achieving any
kind of unity. All in all, an odd book.