Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler

Dennis Denisoff teaches English at McGill University and is the author
of Dog Years.

The cover of this book sports Gail Gestner’s painting Closed System,
which incorporates Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, the man in the bowler
hat from various works by Margitte, and an image of a couple kissing
passionately, which, since the pop artists of the 1960s, has become a
stock reference to commodified romance. The sampling, the
self-referentiality, the returned gaze—these are all common features
in postmodern writing, and they are all to be found in this excellent
anthology of short stories by Canadian authors.

Hutcheon makes it clear that this collection is a small sample of
Canadian postmodern prose, and that it should not be preferred to any
other. She also implies that the postmodern presence is obscure in some
of the pieces. When one reads the list of 23 authors, including Margaret
Atwood, Matt Cohen, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, and bp Nichol, one
senses that, besides their post-modern quality, the pieces in this
collection were also chosen because of the popularity and possibly even
canonical status of their authors.

As would be expected from a list of such familiar authors, every story
in this diverse collection is well written and entertaining. I had the
pleasure of not only re-experiencing some beautiful works that I had
forgotten about (such as Audrey Thomas’s gentle yet poignant “The
Man with Clam Eyes”), but also of reading such pieces as David
McFadden’s complex and sensitive “Hiroko Writes a Story” for the
first time. I also admired the wide variety of postmodern strategies
that the authors used for sociopolitical purposes.

Neither editor claims that the works in this collection are
cutting-edge—though the title of Hutcheon’s foreword, “Canada’s
‘Post’: Sampling Today’s Fiction,” implies as much. Regardless,
it seems somewhat overcautious to present, as contemporary, works that
were first published 10 to 15 years ago, as a number of the pieces in
this anthology were. More a lament than a critique, it seems unfortunate
to me that more current, radical, and possibly unpublished material was
not included, especially since there is so much writing going on in
Canada right now which is taking postmodern prose in various new
directions, some of it being written by the very authors included in
Likely Stories.