Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism

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.

Over the years, Ross’s As For Me and My House has come to occupy a
place in Canadian fiction rather like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in British and
American literature, respectively. These are all texts so rich in
potential meaning that they respond prodigally to virtually any approach
or interpretation that is applied to them. Recognizing this, Stouck has
performed a useful function in bringing together a selection of critical
commentary on Ross’s novel that illustrates the variety of readings
offered in the half-century since the book originally appeared.

Strouck begins with a judicious selection of the 1941 reviews, goes on
to offer relevant extracts from books and articles devoted to larger
topics, and then reprints representative essays that explore the novel
in terms that range from the formal, the psychological, and the
philosophical to the erotic, the semiotic, and the feminist. The
resultant gathering will be of considerable value, at both the senior
high school and the university level, to teachers who wish to enlarge
their students’ imaginative responses to a complex and fascinating
novel.

Not surprisingly, I have some reservations about Stouck’s choices. In
reprinting Evelyn J. Hinz’s and John J. Teunissen’s “Who’s the
Father of Mrs. Bentley’s Child?”, he apparently takes at face value
a text that can only be read, it seems to me, as a hilarious parody of
the absurdities of one kind of literary criticism. And Janet Giltrow’s
linguistic study (especially written for the volume) leads us into the
dry desert of sentence classification and leaves us there, reminding me
that a study of the rhythms and nuances of Ross’s prose— how he uses
words to their full effect—is conspicuous by its absence. Instead of
these, I would have preferred to see Morton L. Ross’s provocative
“The Canonization of As For Me and My House” included as a goad to
further thought. Despite this reservation, however, I strongly recommend
this collection as a useful addition to any bookshelf of Canadian
literary criticism.