The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

For the industrious freelancer nothing is lost. Publish enough short pieces and together they add up to a book. The pieces from which this book is glued come mostly from Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, Books in Canada, and Canadian Forum. They are gathered into twelve groups, some dedicated to a single writer such as George Woodcock or Alden Nowlan, some to a topic such as film or political cartooning. They are all good, middlebrow articles and reviews on arts and culture written in a readable, basically expository prose that is the freelancer’s meat and potatoes. The oldest piece in the collection goes back to 1972. It is a testament to Fetherling’s acuteness as a critic that 14 years later his book reviews still make interesting reading. My only complaint is that he sticks to conservative subjects, particularly in the writers he reviews. One of the critic’s jobs is to challenge his readership into trying the new and the experimental. This, alas, Fetherling does not do.