Northrop Frye's Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings.

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.

The space occupied by “Fiction” consists of only 40 pages made up of eight short stories and parts of an unfinished novel (though there are additional notes and memoranda). This is the most original material in the volume, and certainly the part most likely to spark the interest of general readers. The stories are best categorized as allegorical; they are almost always clever but essentially cerebral. Frye seems unable to create interesting individuals: his characters function simply as mouthpieces for ideas, while his best stylistic effects are epigrammatic one-liners that would fit just as well into his more characteristic discursive writings. The novel fragment, The Locust-Eaters (not, surely, the happiest of titles), clearly draws on his fledgling years as a reluctant preacher in Saskatchewan. There are some effective details, but the action never gets off the ground.

Of the rest, the section entitled “Autobiographical Reflections” is easily the most memorable—in particular, a moving memoir of his first wife that was originally delivered at a memorial service. Similarly, the notes on music, apart from being amazingly early, are fascinating. One knew that Frye was technically a highly accomplished pianist, but the depth of his theoretical knowledge and expertise is abundantly illustrated.

The rest is inevitably a ragbag, covering many Frygian topics from the Bible to Blake’s illustrations, Canadian culture, etc. But here a problem with the whole edition becomes evident. Many items consist of notes for essays available elsewhere (though one at least is not identified as already published in the Collected Works), and are of interest only to the most dedicated of specialists. Moreover, a good percentage of them would seem to have fitted comfortably into earlier volumes devoted to specific genres or subjects. Subsequent researchers may well find it difficult to track down all the relevant materials in this increasingly labyrinthine project.

The editing, as usual, is admirable, though I did notice that “DG” (employed on p. 201) did not appear in the list of abbreviations.