Crossing the River ed. by Kristjana Gunnars (review)

Reviews 77 Crossing the River. Edited byKristjana Gunnars. (Manitoba: Turnstone Press, 1988. 213 pp., $12.95.) This collection of essays in tribute to Margaret Laurence’sgenius provides ample indication of why she is revered as the “founding Mother of Canadian literature.” Beyond having given eloquent voice to the Manitoba prairie in her “Manawaka” series, she speaks for the tribes of all humankind—women, the old, and the oppressed everywhere. Anyone reading these essays will feel com­ pelled to know Laurence’s work better, and we in the American West have some stretching to do in that regard. As these essays make clear, Laurence was a citizen of the world—an author of the first rank, compared with Tolstoy, Cather, and Faulkner because of the rich fictionalized world she creates and the ultimate truths she tells. This book exhibits fine and insightful criticism— criticism written with unusual affection and respect. HELEN BEACH CANNON Utah State University A Ruth Suckow Omnibus. By Ruth Suckow (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. 310 pages, $9.95.) Ruth Suckow’s reputation rests principally on the fiction she produced in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although she continued to write almost until her death in 1960, Suckow went into a partial eclipse during the last twenty-five years of her life. Recently, however, her work seems to have experienced some­ thing of a revival. In 1966 this journal published an article on her late collec­ tion Some Others and Myself, and now the University of Iowa Press has issued A Ruth Suckow Omnibus, containing ten stories, some previously uncollected, and a short novel. The Suckow trademark is evident in all these pieces. As in her betterknown novels and short-story collections, she avoids melodrama or even intense expressions of emotion, preferring to achieve her objectives through under­ statement. These typically low-key treatments of small-town life reflect the usual Suckow themes: the woman whom life passes by, the conflict between elderly parents and their adult children, the persistent snobbishness in sup­ posedly classless midwestern towns, the joys and sorrows of childhood. As in most such collections, the harvest in the volume is uneven. Despite Clarence Andrews’mildly disparaging remarks about it in his generally excel­ lent introduction, “Susan and the Doctor” isoneof Suckow’sbestperformances, as its placement at the beginning of the book may suggest. The second story, “Home-coming,” is also a noteworthy achievement, with its recognition by the central character that life, though it might have been different, has to be lived ...