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FICTION 379 spatter...." The success of his revisions varies greatly from poem to poem; in some, the absence of traditional punctuation brings a new sense of mobility, while in others I find myself silently re-punctuating as I read. I hope the next edition will seek a compromise by restoring minimal punctuation to any poems that do not seem to have benefitted from the experiment. FICTION J. M. Stedmand This was not a particularly distinguished year for English-Canadian fiction, despite several books by well-known novelists and the emergence of some fresh talent. Among established writers, if one rules out the English version of Gabrielle Roy's latest book, Margaret Laurence made the most noteworthy, even though slightly disappointing, contribution. Interesting work by new novelists included Harold Horwood's absorbing tale of a boy's growing up in a Newfoundland fishing village, David Lewis Stein's thoughtful treatment of problems facing youth in contemporary Toronto, and a subtly effective story set in a small town in the southern United States by a young American writer, Anne Tyler, who has recently moved to Montreal. The year's most off-beat use of Canadian materials in prose fiction form was undoubtedly poet Leonard Cohen's excursion into a hip world of erotic phantasmagoria in his Beautiful Losers (McClelland & Stewart, pp. 243, $5.75)' The "I" of this collage, a self-proclaimed Montrealer of ambiguous racial and religiOUS background, obsessed with a certain Iroquois saint, Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-1680), is presumably meant to subsume within his frenetic monologue multiverse elements of the Canadian psyche, conscious and unconscious, past and present. There is, however, no readily discernible organizing principle relating the various fragments. At times the work seems to lean towards parody or burlesque, to be a clever take-off perhaps of pretentious pornographers of the Olympia Press kind. At others, particularly in the long letter from the narrator's mysterious friend F, which forms the second of the book's three sections, we seem to be offered an exploration of the world of male sex-fantasies, replete with sadism and masochism and the mechanistic reduction of self and other to things to be manipulated for sensual gratification. The appropriate symbol for this world is the Danish Vibra- 380 LEITERS IN CANADA tor (D.Y. for short), the fiendishly efficient sex-machine with a life of its own. On occasion Cohen seems bent on reconstructing Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the close of Joyce's Ulysses from the point of view of her cuckolded husband, transmogrifying him, however, into a Montrealer and replacing Bloom's rival, Blazes Boylan, with the narrator's friend F. Pegasus kicking off the traces, free to Hy in all directions, may in consequence arrive nowhere. Art loosed from normal restraints of fonn and content must contrive its own coherence, unless, perversely, it seeks to present an imitation of incoherence. Beautiful Losers could of course be intended as a hoax designed to guy the gullible. In spite of Hashes of virtuosity, it often comes dangerously close to self-parody. Its shortcomings are obvious when one compares it with the books of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth. More orthodox is Harold Horwood's first novel, Tomorrow Will Be Sunday (Doubleday, pp. viii, 375, $4.95), which tells of a sort of archetypal Newfoundland outport where the rhythm of existence is determined by the sea and the quest for food. The story of young Eli Pallisher's growth to maturity involves the moral and emotional development of the whole small community. The first quarter of the book gives us, in a series of almost detachable vignettes, an anecdotal account of the hero's early years and of affairs in general in the village of Caplin Bight. These sketches are well done and the local folk are drawn with a sure hand. With the entrance in Chapter Ten of Christopher Simms, the new schoolteacher, the mood of the novel changes subtly, and we begin to realize that this is in effect the world seen through the eyes of a wise child, a world which smacks of the folk tale, and is in part inhabited by types rather than individuals. Christopher is a...

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