The Mother Tongue

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher and editor of the Toronto women’s
magazine Feminie.

This collection of essays covers the usual broad scope of topics:
nature, language, youth, art, and literature. Percy tackles these
ambitious themes manfully, attempting to achieve universal axioms in
limited space. The meaning of “Beauty and Utility” is contemplated,
along with the plight of “Poetic Injustice” and an utterly
unnecessary polemic, “In Defense of Adjectives.”

Contrary to the title, the author of these columns writes with the
language of the fathers, and I found myself glad to be excluded from his
archaic prose. Weighted down with bizarre anthropomorphic metaphors,
Percy casts the strangest of ideas into female/male stereotypes. Writing
for the sake of writing, he has little original to say, and his
witticisms, while lacking grace, are couched in a self-congratulatory
tone. His style is stilted, the metaphors are unoriginal, and the topics
chosen for erudition inspire no passion in either the reader or himself.
While the syntax could be considered “well-crafted” in the old
boys’ school of proper writing, the convoluted sentence structure is
unnecessarily complex.

Percy has written a number of novels and short stories, which should
give this book a place in many libraries; the reading population will
find it incomprehensible.