Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel

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 am, frankly, puzzled by this book. I began it, let me state at once,
with positive anticipations. A disciplined study of the “artist
novel” in Canada sounded intriguing, a potentially original approach
promising fresh insights. At the same time, the title raised queries.
Its relevance was not altogether clear to me: why should one confess to
being an artist? Still, I was eager to learn.

I have read it dutifully, but close it at last, regretfully, with
little learned. The writers discussed—Grove, Davies, Laurence, Ross,
Buckler, Roy, Munro, Kroetsch, Findley—provide rich fare. Yet the
selections, where choice is involved, seem idiosyncratic. Why Hagar
Shipley rather than Vanessa MacLeod or Morag Gunn? Why Dunstan Ramsay
rather than Monica Gall or Francis Cornish? And where, oh where,
is—among others—Gallant’s Linnet Muir? (To be sure, Williams
acknowledges a pro-humanist bias in his inclusions and exclusions, but
here, as elsewhere, I’m not sure that I follow him.)

Moreover, I can discover no continuing argument. Each text provides a
springboard for the exploration of discrete theoretical problems. Each
is backed up by the obligatory authoritative citations (Derrida,
Bakhtin, Lacan), and each is grist for a different intellectual mill.
Who, then, is this book written for? Not, alas, for someone who, like
me, wanted to learn about the art of the Kьnstlerroman in Canada.
Rather, I suppose, for the ultimate elite, that group of
up-to-the-minute theorists who can swap and bandy arguments about the
latest metafictional positions.

A pity. Perhaps, however, this failure to respond is merely a
confession of ineptitude on my part. Perhaps. Yet I tried—honestly, I
tried!