Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction by David Stouck (review)

Reviews 75 contained in volumes of London’s shorter works. Here are the tales of the Malemute Kid, Sitka Charlie, Thornton and Buck, Koskoosh and Nam-Bok, all of them living and travelling in a country where the temperature is never warmer than twenty degrees below zero. These are vintage London, though not all of the selections would rate as among the best that came out of his literary gold mine. Lachtman has provided, in his choices, colorful examples of London’s work, from the grim determinism of “The White Silence” to the labored humor of “The Thousand Dozen,” and plenty of other action besides. These are the stories for which many early reviewers credited London with provid­ ing brutally realistic pictures of life in the Far North, though some few voices suggested there was more romance than realism in them. London’s writing career extended from 1899 to his death in 1916; these selections date from his first published efforts to 1907, and it is interesting that the stories show so little real development: London simply kept writing the same stories over and over again, and was the country’s best-paid author for doing so. What both of these books under review show about the work of Jack London is that he was a very able story-teller who, on occasion, wrote some splendid prose. His stories are filled with vitality and verve, at least the ones about the North, and if his characters remained unchanged and without having learned anything about themselves, that was not, perhaps, his goal in writing about them in the first place. FRANK BUSKE, University of Alaska Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction. By David Stouck. (Lin­ coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 308 pages, $22.95.) Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction is best described as a serviceable book. It seeks to introduce American readers to “Canada’s most important authors writing in English and to give information and critical assessments concerning their work.” It does so by offering what seem to be lecture-length essays on seventeen novelists and poets. Each essay begins with a brief attempt to place the particular writer in his time, provides a short biographical sketch, then runs the gamut of the author’s output, emphasizing his particular thematic concerns, regional orientation, and achievement. With some regularity, links are drawn between the Canadian writer and an American influence or contemporary. The text includes “A Conclusion” in which brief mention is made of new voices, the place in Canadian letters of emigrant writers like Malcolm Lowry and Brian Moore, and the development of a Canadian criticism. Professor Stouck also provides appendices listing authors not included among the select seventeen and a list of the Governor General’s Award winners in Fiction and in Poetry/Drama since their incep­ tion in 1936. 76 Western American Literature So far so good. The book is bound to be useful both as a reference guide and as a starting point for serious critical inquiry. It is an introduction with body. Several of the longer chapters — on Susanna Moodie, Ethel Wilson, and Sinclair Ross — are variations on critical essays published in the mid­ seventies. Readers familiar with Professor Stouck’s fine study of Willa Cather need not be told that his style is reasoned and graceful. Nor will they be disappointed. Still, as one interested in Canadian literature from a Canadian perspec­ tive, I am disturbed by aspects of this interesting venture. I do not mean here to quibble about fine points of argument and interpretation . Readers eager to find out more about Margaret Laurence, Robertson Davies, or Frederick Philip Grove will be rewarded. Those, however, with an interest in, say, Morley Callaghan, Timothy Findley, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Atwood, or Rudy Wiebe will be disappointed. It is not just that all five are winners of Governor-General’s awards. Rather it is that each is a major writer, equally, if not more, deserving of inclusion than many who are highlighted. So important a short story writer and Catholic author as Callaghan, so widely recognized a novelist and poet as Atwood, so powerful an interpreter of Mennonite and Indian culture as Wiebe can only...