A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This beautifully shaped novel covers a single day in the life of
nine-year-old Neil McDonald while the boy moves around in his town. The
year is 1971, the setting perhaps Edmonton. Told in the first person as
Neil’s reflections, the fictional memoir is peopled by Neil’s
parents, teachers, and school friends.

Baldwin, a substitute teacher encountered by Neil one evening in a
diner, calls the young boy “our pocket Tolstoy.” Baldwin knows that
Neil is an aspiring writer, and advises him to “Simply choose a day,
any day, and write down everything that happens to you. ... There’s no
room for squeamishness in your trade, lad.”

Back-cover comparisons hark back to J.D. Salinger and Mark Twain.
Certainly their works afford models for this engaging fictional memoir.
One of Neil’s schoolmates tells him, as she is about to move to
another town, that “it was nice to have someone with at least some
intellectual capacity in the class.”

This whimsically titled “tourist’s guide” to the mind of a
preteen is shrewd and thoughtful. Yann Martel calls it
“psychologically dead-on, minutely observed—and very funny.” I
would not disagree.