Best Canadian Stories 02

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

For Best Canadian Stories 02, editor Douglas Glover has selected stories
by Michael Winter, Don McNeill, Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, Carol
Windley, Bernice Friesen, P.K. Page, Bill Gaston, Caroline Addison, and
Ramona Dearing. If these are the “best,” one cannot be sanguine
about the state of Canadian writing.

The book is not without its pleasures. In Bill Gaston’s poignantly
ironical “Comedian Tire,” the banal is juxtaposed with the deadly
serious as a man contends with his brother’s terminal illness. In
Ramona Dearing’s original and funny “So Beautiful the Firemen Would
Cry,” the narrator recalls tumultuous times with a roommate in
Vancouver. As might be expected, Alice Munro’s “Family
Furnishings,” an exploration of family secrets, is finely crafted.

As for the rest, there is little to stir the imagination, little that
does not seem stale and uninviting. You need only think of Wharton,
Wiebe, Martel, Johnston, Hospital, Mistry, and others to realize that
there was a whole body of fictional writing in 2002 that was better than
this “best.”