When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing

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.

One does not need to agree with everything that Stephen Henighan asserts
about Canadian literature and politics in the 1990s—and I, for one, do
not—to welcome this brilliant and decidedly prickly book as the most
admirable, informative, and above all provocative analysis of the plight
of Canadian culture since John Metcalf’s Kicking Against the Pricks
(1982). As an intellectual with a professional expertise in Spanish
rather than English, he is mercifully independent of the pull of
ideology that makes most of the literary criticism emanating from the
academic “CanLit” specialists such depressing reading. As a
thoughtful and passionately committed writer of novels and short
stories, he has experienced the publishing jungle at first hand, knows
what he is talking about, and—most important of all—has the courage
to speak out.

Henighan is a master of exposé. He documents the financially motivated
corruption behind journalistic bestseller lists, condemns the
totalitarian menace of “appropriation of voice” charges, reveals the
dubious pretensions of the Giller Prize, complains with justice of the
political constraints too often placed upon newspaper reviewers, and
demonstrates the commercial processes that have produced what he calls
“homogenized book-sellers.”

Moreover, in some cruel but convincing cultural and critical analyses,
he succeeds in putting The English Patient, Fugitive Pieces, The Stone
Diaries, and Away into suitably reduced perspective. One may or may not
agree, but one cannot help but applaud the fact that a highly
intelligent and perceptive observer of the trends and fashions in
contemporary writing is engaging in serious and appropriately pungent
criticism.

This is an angry book by someone who has not only read everything by
his contemporaries but has absorbed it and come to shrewd judgments
about its implications. Unfortunately, as Henighan well knows, it will
be ignored or shrugged off by those who are most in need of its
challenge.

Above all, congratulations to Porcupine’s Quill for publishing it,
and thus making a courageous effort to keep us honest.