Letters in Canada 1971

LETTERS IN CANADA 1971 After three years of loyal and enlightened service to 'Letters in Canada: Professor Gordon Roper has found it necessary to withdraw as reviewer in charge of the 'Fiction' section, and is succeeded in this issue by Professor Orest Rudzik. In the corresponding section devoted to French-Canadian fiction and theatre, we have accepted with regret the resignation of Professor Rejean Robidoux, who has since 1967 provided annual reviews of unusual distinction. D.M.H. FICTION It has been a year of large ambitions, in bulk and style and subject. Novels run to massive dimensions. Shorter fictions are compounded into larger wholes, as anthologies or units. Politics has become a preoccupation, at times an obsession and at its extremest, a nightmare. And so has the style and craftsmanship. It is as if the norms of the Canadian novel have shifted. To the left or ahead or backwards- the direction and distance are arguable. What seems to prevail, however, is the building into the fiction itself of such movement away - and into a new style or a new view of what is necessary to project a novel. There occur groups of novels, then, where there is some family likeness but little, except coincidental, fraternity. With an established author the first family is, of course, that of his own work. It's the likeliest context for expectation for the reader, and for the author an opportunity to continue and perhaps to coast; much less often is it the occasion for a capping off and a summation. Yet that would be precisely the major source of exhilaration in Mordecai Richler's St Urbain's Horseman (McClelland &Stewart, 467, $7.95). On the skeleton of a long involved detective story, with its crime and punishment anticipated and achieved, there is a great accumulation of Richler's own literary past. In place of the Canadian version of paleface (read intellectual emigre to London et al) versus redskin (Laurentian & Kravitz style) taking turns, there is a coming home, even if home is a paranoid London film world intersected by the court of criminal appeal. The homebody, Jacob Hersh, is a humane Duddy, enduring the condition of outsidedness but turning UTQ, Volume XLI, Number 4, SU't11mer 1972 ...