Troutstream

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Gerald Lynch, a transplanted Irishman, has to his credit two short-story
collections and a critical study of Stephen Leacock. His novel
Troutstream, about a bedroom community of Ottawa, shows how much or how
little society has changed since Leacock’s humorous look at Mariposa
in Sunshine Sketches.

Within Troutstream, a modern, model town with Izaak Walton street
names, are dark little thumbnail lives. The community has a signal
malignancy running through its three social levels: garden homes, the
complex, and the shabby project. Its citizens include a frustrated
bureaucrat, a quirky fortuneteller, hippie pot growers, a high-school
teacher running mad, a psychic blind boy, and a peeping Tom, among
others. Popular culture underlines many of the vignettes. A very sordid
murder is left unsolved in the ambiguous conclusion.

The characters strut and fret their hours, now and then linking up to
weave another layer of fabric in the narrative. Their voices are
engaging enough, though, with the exception of one
Ilsa-of-Death-Camp-Seven grotesque, the men have more life than the
women. Humor—black and strong—carries the reader through the book,
with its puns and jokes and Rabelaisian whimsy, until the last page is
turned, shutting the door on the microcosmic hierarchy of pride and
prejudice around which the action revolves. Troutstream amuses with the
best.