Up on the Roof.

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.

P.K. Page made her reputation as a modernist poet, and now presents herself as a postmodernist short-story writer. There is a certain kind of intellectual who will be impressed by that kind of categorization; if, on the other hand, you are as bored by the postmodernist concept as I am, you are likely to shrug grumpily and pass on to something else. But you would be wrong. What is important is not the academic pigeonhole but the quality of the writing, and Up on the Roof contains some of the finest writing of our time.

The subject matter of these stories is, to be sure, “postmodernist”: the creation of fantasy, the relation between truth and imagination, autobiography and fiction, the paradoxes of modern life, etc. But the quality of these stories depends upon Page’s powers of perception and the excellence of her style. Her prose is unpretentious, colloquial, even grammatically fragmented at times, yet it possesses a dignity and an accuracy that makes most contemporary writing seem casual and slack. These stories are intriguing to read, yet they do not give up their best secrets at a first reading. They need to be read slowly, reread, and savoured.

The range of tone is remarkable. We encounter subtle humour (“Eatings”), the wonders of a death that is also a rebirth (“Birthday”), and the bizarre complexities of current living (“Stone,” a magnificent long story with the substance of a novella). Yet the book has a unity and integrity determined by Page’s sensibility and literary skills. Above all, here is a civilized attitude to the world in which we find ourselves, expressed in the delicate and distinguished prose of a major poet. Even if Page were not in her 10th decade, and writing as well as ever, the publication of this book would be a major event, not only in the development of the Canadian short story but in the history of Canadian literature as a whole.