This Is My Country, What's Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada

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.

I found myself regarding this book while reading it as a curious cross
between Norman Levine’s admirable Canada Made Me and Margaret
Atwood’s decidedly-less-than-admirable Survival. Like Levine, Noah
Richler returned to Canada after years abroad to explore his own
country, but the difference is that he gives the impression of being
attracted to the shabbiness and uncertainty that troubled the older
writer. Like Atwood, however, he is preoccupied here with Canadian
literature, though his focus is totally on the contemporary and almost
confined to fiction.

Richler insists, early on, that all fiction is political (which seems
to me either obvious or highly dubious, depending on how broadly one
defines “political”). Unfortunately, this also means that he is
preoccupied with novels as illustrating social problems and has
virtually nothing to offer about the novels as art. He regularly quotes
at least paragraph-long passages from the writers he interviews, but,
because of our different approaches, I often find depressing what he
responds to with enthusiasm. The English-speaking writers who come
across best (the Québécois are quoted in translation, so cannot be
judged) are significantly the already experienced and established Alice
Munro and especially Alistair MacLeod.

Most of the others tend to write sloppily, and some reveal in the
interviews distressing evidence of linguistic deprivation. Northrop Frye
once wrote “Good writing must be based upon good speech”—and by
that criterion only a handful of the younger writers qualify, notably
M.G. Vassanji and Rohinton Mistry.

As a travel book (Richler has been everywhere from St. John’s to
Victoria via Iqaluit), the work is fascinating. Richler rightly stresses
the importance of place and is skilled in evoking it. But in terms of
fiction I was unconvinced. The novels that survive from the past into
the present do so almost invariably by virtue of their style. Richler
maps his country; but mine (also seen through fiction) is radically
different.