David Adams Richards: Essays on His Work (review)

David Adams Richards: Essays on His Work, edited by Tony Tremblay, is the latest release by Guernica Editions examining the work of a contemporary Canadian writer. As Tremblay himself notes, there has been surprisingly little critical attention paid to Richards, who is easily one of the nation's most prolific, profound, and controversial writers. Selecting from a relatively narrow body of available critical material, the Guernica edition features four insightful articles, including Herb Wyile's effective analysis of Richards's humour, J. Russell Perkin's investigation of the religious impulses which structure the later novels, William Connor's convincing thematic reading of Richards's values as revealed through his hero's actions, and Tremblay's own examination of Richards's role as a iconoclastic critic of current intellectual trends. For reprinting these essays, along with an insightful and engaging interview with the author, Tremblay deserves our thanks. Yet at the same time the book foregrounds two weaknesses which currently characterize the study of Richards's work.

The volume reminds readers that major aspects of Richards's texts have yet to be examined. Richards has produced twelve major works of fiction, yet the collection does not include essays examining his use of literary form, his creation of a Miramichi setting, or his political/ideological commitments. Frances MacDonald's brief essay examines Richards's female characters, but full analyses of his fiction from a feminist, postcolonial, or ecocritical perspective have still to be written. And if little has been said about his fiction, even less has been written about Richards's other literary work. Tremblay points out that Richards is an award-winning script-writer, but no one has explored how he has adapted his fiction to the screen. Virtually nothing has been said about his non-fiction, which includes his collection of essays, A Lad from Brantford, and the two long texts Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play and the Governor-General award-winning Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. In the absence of a wide range of critical material, Tremblay cannot help but turn to other forms of writing, and the collection leans heavily on biographical sketches and memoirs. Seven of the collection's essays are recollections from Richards's fellow writers and close friends; these provide interesting insights into the writer's personality, but say less than we might wish about the texts he has created.

Tremblay is correct to note that Richards has been neglected over the last thirty years. But then, perhaps one of the reasons for this lack of critical attention is revealed in the collection itself. Almost from the first reviews of Richards's work, critics have been at odds as to how he should be approached, and this collection tends to replicate rather than heal that wide critical chasm. Some have celebrated Richards's gifts and that vein is represented fully in this book. Tremblay states that 'Richards will endure as one of the literary giants of the twentieth century,' Sheldon Currie calls him 'the most important novelist' of the century,' and Alistair MacLeod declares that 'he may someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature.' As many of the writers in the book note, however, not all critics have been laudatory, and unfortunately for the collection, no critic who perceives weaknesses in Richards's fiction is represented. Indeed, in twelve of the book's eighteen essays, writers either attack reviewers for their insensitivity to Richards or they apologize for taking an analytic approach to his fiction. One writer speaks of the 'sense of guilt that plagued' her while writing her thesis about Richards, and another strikes an apologetic tone for 'not respond[ing] very positively' to one of his novels in an earlier review. The collection so frequently attacks those critics who have reacted negatively to Richards's work that an imbalanced and unnecessarily polemical tone emerges. This abrasive attitude reaches its peak with Laurence Mathews's scathing attack on Frank Davey, Chris Armstrong, and Herb...