From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross

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 collection of essays about Sinclair Ross’s fiction consists of
papers presented at the 1990 Ross Symposium at the University of Ottawa.
These annual conferences on authors or topics important to Canadian
literature have now been taking place for some 20 years, and this is one
of the best in the series. Nine papers examine Ross’s work from a
diversity of critical approaches. The focus, inevitably, is on the
ever-intriguing As For Me and My House, but one essay concentrates on
the scandalously neglected Sawbones Memorial, and several others pay
attention to various short stories.

Critical diversity is not necessarily a virtue: it is the quality of
the commentary that counts. The standard here is high. I found only one
dud—an essay on “Sinclair Ross’s ‘Foreigners’” that makes
claims for Ross as “cultural historian” but does little more than
show how he portrays representatives of minority groups and indicate the
ways in which they are (in the current cant) “marginalized.”
Otherwise, the contributions are fresh and stimulating even if one
disagrees over details. It is typical of the freshness that two
commentators, Wilfred Cude and David Carpenter, stress the neglected
humor of a writer so often categorized as relentless and dour. Dennis
Cooley is fascinating on the use of names and nouns in these writings,
and Frank Davey jolts us into thinking more carefully about Ross’s
names and signs. Other highlights for the present reviewer were David
Stouck’s information drawn from unpublished letters and Helen Buss’s
deeply interesting personal account of reading As For Me and My House at
various stages in her life and responding differently each time.

From the Heart of the Heartland also contains an up-to-date
bibliography of writings by and about Ross. This is a book to be
recommended for high school and university libraries wherever Canadian
literature is taught. Needless to say, admirers of Ross will find their
appreciation of his fiction both consolidated and enhanced.