Pittsburgh Stories: Selected Stories, 2

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.

Clark Blaise has been a palpable if elusive presence in Canadian writing
for three decades; yet, perhaps because he was born in the United States
and has spent much of his life there, he has not received his due from
nationalistic-oriented critics. In addition, his books often inhabit a
no-man’s-land between the novel and the short-story collection, and so
trouble the neat-minded. His work is not trendily flamboyant, but it
haunts the mind and is built to last.

It is heartening that Porcupine’s Quill has decided to present four
volumes of selected stories, this being the second. The first, Southern
Stories (2000), reflected Blaise’s early Florida experience, and at
least one of the last two projected volumes will clearly focus on
Montreal.

But Pittsburgh? In the final story, the narrator describes it as “the
very definition of third-rate, a dirtier, remoter Philadelphia, a
joke-butt town with talent-drain and losing teams.” It represents the
shabbier aspects of contemporary America, and we watch the young male
protagonists (bright, inquisitive, artistically inclined, depressed at
their surroundings and intent on escape, all reflections of Blaise
himself) painfully growing up, succeeding—when they succeed—against
the grain of their environment. These are angular, disturbing, often
curiously indeterminate stories, exercises in the bold redemption of the
tacky and the commonplace.

Some of them have appeared in earlier collections; others have hitherto
been published only in magazines. Personally, I was fascinated to see
how a story like “Identity,” which seemed so integral to its context
in Resident Alien, both stands on its own and becomes intriguingly
different when relocated here. These are the effects that endear Blaise
to connoisseurs of fiction.

Blaise is a serious and important writer who, when the dust settles,
will be recognized as one of our major contemporary literary figures
alongside Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, and Norman Levine—important for
their intelligence, their oblique but probing insights into the world in
which we live, and above all the supple quality of their prose. A
publishing venture to be welcomed.