Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature

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.

A weird endnote to the first chapter of this book informs us that
“Chinese restaurants or cafés are staples of small prairie
towns”—and then backs up the assertion with three literary
references! This is symptomatic, I fear, of the oddities and confusions
that dog the whole enterprise.

To start with, Keahey’s argument in this oppressively thematic study
seems dangerously circular. She takes pains to choose “individual
texts to represent a diverse and interesting range of approaches” to
her topic, and in order to achieve this end “some very
well-established writers have been passed over so that [she] could
present a selection of newer and less-established (or less-studied)
writers.” This means, however, that we are subject to a series of
texts—novels, short stories, poems, plays, plus various kinds of
nonfiction—that have little in common with each other. In the end, we
are left with the impression that “home” and “place” mean
different things depending on one’s gender, race, age, class, bank
balance, etc.—which is probably true, but hardly gets us very far. And
why such a conclusion should be demonstrated in literature is never
explained.

The study began as a doctoral thesis, and most of it is written in
dourly impersonal academic prose. But the “prologue” is
conspicuously (even desperately) personal, beginning with one of
Keahey’s own poems and even telling us that she is about to move into
“a (yes) mobile home”! Unfortunately, however, I find nothing of
value in the poem, and little of literary-critical relevance in the
biography.

The writers discussed are Martha Ostenso, Robert Stead, Kelly Rebar,
Ian Ross, Kristjana Gunnars, David Arnason, Laura Salverson, Frederick
Philip Grove, Lorna Crozier, Dennis Cooley, Emma Lee Warrior, Maria
Campbell, Rudy Wiebe, Uma Parameswaran, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van
Herk, and Fred Wah. For the most part, however, their texts do not
“measure up” to what the widely read consider to be literature at
its best. In presenting them as representative of “Canadian Prairie
literature,” Keahey could be rendering her subject a disservice.