‘That House in Manawaka’: Margaret Laurence’s ‘A Bird in the House’ by Jon Kertzer, and: Rachel’s Children: Margaret Laurence’s ‘A Jest of God’ by Nora Stovel, and: River of Now and Then: Margaret Laurence’s ‘The Diviners’ by Susan J. Warwick (review)

HUMANITIES 213 life of the body are inevitably generalized and ignored; all is subsumed in the struggle to resist 'art's wish to be form, to be system, to be, in effect, one with nature itself.' Although the stated thrust of Stubbs's study is to present Mandel as a poet always suspicious of tradition - of the 'essential vulgarity of shrinking 'the world to a symbol systeln' - the constant focus in Myth, Origins, Magic on the operation of language and literary form makes it difficult to appreciate the underpinnings of Mandel's suspicion, or to understand its relatiortship to recent history, to the workings of state power, and to the petty tyrannies of the kitchen. (One of the causes of this may be that in his use of Jacques Derrida's work Stubbs tends to refer only to texts regarding form, genre, and linguistic play, choosing not to invoke some of the most provocative and politically charged aspects of Derridean deconstruction.) About his last revision of Saskatchewan as literary muse, Mandel said, 'I think that there's a huge weight of history and time in Out of Place, which I'm glad about. I think at the same time it is, in fact, a book that discovered a way of thinking about the Prairies.' Myth, Origins, Magic carefully examines the latter discovery, in its consideration of poetic process and the tangle with language and tradition that is often the focus of Mandel's poetry. But it brushes too swiftly, too disinterestedly, over the 'huge weight of history and time.' (NORMAN RAWIN) Jon Kertzer. That House in Mal1awaka'; Margaret Laurence's 'A Bird in the House' ECW 1992.95. $14.95 paper Nora Stove!. Rachel's Cl1ildrell: Margaret Laurence's 'A Jest of God' ECW 1992. 109. $14.95 paper Susan J. Warwick. River of Now and Tllel1: Margaret Uzurence's 'The Diviners' ECW. 87. $14.95 paper ECW'S Canadian Fiction Studies series introduces major Canadian writers to a high school or college market and includes three recent works on Margaret Laurence: Jon Kertzer's 'ThafHouse in Manawaka'; Margaret Laurence 's 'A Bird in the House,' Nora Stovel's Rachel's Children: Margaret Laurence's 'A Jest of God,' and Susan J. Warwick's River of Now and Then: Margaret Laurence's 'The Diviners.' While both the ideas and the language are often too difficult for a college or high school student, the books offer easy access for the novice teacher - a sort of 'Laurence-lite' approach. Jon Kertzer opens the discussion of A Bird in the House with the importance of the work, noting on the one hand, the link between the stories and the rest of Laurence's 'grand Manawaka cycle.' On the other hand, Bird 'subtly challenges the unity that is the goal, not only of the whole 214 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 cycle, but of each book within it.' Not quite a novel, not quite a collection, not quite an autobiography, Bird has been 'relatively neglected' by critics, used in comparison to other works, seldom alone. Kertzer provides various critical 'readings' of the book: confessional memoir, fictional memoir, imaginative and female vision and revision. 'Memory and Coruession/ the weakest part of Kertzer's text, utilizes Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare to sununarize 'the ambitions of the fictional memoir'; the use of an obscure work for the purposes of analogy is unhelpful in the teaching context of the ECW series. The main body of the criticism examines each story in turn and involves not only individual textual analysis but also the suggestion that most themes and patterns can be applied to other stories, thereby broadening the scope of the book. For example, in 'The Mask of the Bear,' Kertzer focuses on Grandfather's need for control and Vanessa's discovery that his mask conceals and also reveals what lies beneath. But in this and other stories Vanessa must discern an interplay of illusion and reality (or enchanhnent and disenchantment). When Vanessa sees the ordinary world as too ordinary, she creates an escapist fantasy which ultimately fails to satisfy. Some shock makes her see the ordinary world in an extraordinary (often frightening) way. Paradoxically...