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414 JOHN C. CAIRNS liberation of the Lyon region where he lived. 'Maurice Blanchard' was seized on 8 March 1944. Three months later, on the evening of 16 June, they kiUed him. This is a worthy biography, thorough, plain, declarative. It does not lack the personal diaries and correspondence that create at least the illusion of penetrating private lives, but the glimpses are episodic. Bloch's devotion to his family, as to his country, is transparent. His vaulting professional ambition is as clear as his intellectual achievement. If he was not as single-mindedly ruthless as Febvre in pursuit of the vision, he was made of stern stuff. Some observers have wondered whether, had he survived the war, something of the annalistes' intolerance, occasionally verging on an intellectual terrorism, might have been avoided. But about aU that this biography is silent, perhaps rightly so. Only The Historian's Craft is left to keep the question alive. Overall, certain inconsistencies of outlook, if not of character, are apparent. Bloch has sometimes been threatened with professional canonization. His dossier is formidable but perhaps not immaculate. For a man 'proud of his cosmopolitanism / he was considerably resistant to welcoming German scholars in the Annales enterprise of the 19205. He took no stand on the famous Franco-Belgian 'invasion' of the Ruhr in 1923, though he later claimed to have perceived the abyss which the Treaty of Versailles and this military action opened up. Heroically determined not to be stripped of his nationality, he apparently did not identify with foreign Jews against whom the Vichy government behaved inhumanely. Like his father, we are told, he did not accept the reality of an indigenous French anti-Semitism (a state of mind still extant in his native land). Yet he was a direct victim of it, albeit accepting a personal derogation for the sake of his family. It may seem insolent, but one might wonder if - for all his brilliance and bravery (two croix de guerre, the Ugion d'honnellr Ii titre militaire, and what could be seen as the almost gratuitous sacrifice of his life) - Bloch ever quite discerned how profound and generic the evil was. If he did, we must read it in his final actions, for no literary expression of it is to be found in his writings or this excellent life which tells us so much. He was an optimist. At most, he referred to 'an unjust destiny' that had struck his country. One can scarcely conceive of such restraint, if that is what it was. Suburban Ambush LINDA H UTC HEON Robert Siegle. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency Parallax: Re-visians of Culture and Society Series. Johns Hopkins University Press. 405. us $42.50; $14.95 paper Robert Siegle's first book, The Politics of Reflexivity, marked a veritable watershed for work on metafiction and on the imbrication of theory and fiction. It is by far the most provocative and exciting study of the subject presently in existence. His second book, Suburban Ambush, displays the same range of competence and interest, and adds to this a wonderful care and even love for language that is palpable in the text's lucidity and wit. This book should go far to right the wrong of the neglect of a group of important New York writers of experimental narrative. While these writers are non-canonical, even in some postmodern circles, Siegle makes a most convincing case for their being both significant and indeed the very exemplars of postmodernism. That this work was undertaken by an 'outsider' to the Lower Village is important no accusations of self-serving or economic or social or political stake can be made against his bringing this work and indeed the entire community to our attention. In the process of doing so, this study also gives new meaning to the notion of urban regionalism. Siegle takes the insights of his first study beyond the intersection of the reflexive and the political (and historical and social) to include a critique of culture. He achieves this linking of the texts and what Edward Said calls the 'world' through the detailed study of fiction which constitutes its own theoretical...

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