The Macken Charm by Jack Hodgins (review)

Reviews 91 previous four books than as an authentic expression of Eleanor’s charac­ ter. But if inventiveness is at times a weakness, it’s also one of the book’s chief delights. Tales of Burning Love is as trashy as a beach book, as improbable as a sci-fi story, as unpredictable as a murder mystery, and as (if not more) insightful about love as many a book that takes the subject more seriously. Assured of a firm place in American letters, Erdrich is not afraid to flout the conventions of so-called “serious” works of literature by flirting with popular genres. In short, she is not afraid to entertain. I predict you won’t be able to put down this book until you’ve read the last scorching page. ELIZABETH BLAIR Southwest State University The Macken Charm. By Jack Hodgins. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995. 294 pages, $18.99 [Canadian].) In The Macken Charm, events from a twenty-four-hour period—a funeral during the day, followed by a wake that night—are spun into a rol­ licking novel by the tried-and-true narrative device of beginning the story near the end and then going back and filling in. The adolescent narrator, Rusty, tells us just enough about his parents and their generation, and about Glory, his deceased aunt, to allow us to make sense of the funeral and wake. It is the considerable temporal span between the narrated events and the storytelling event that merits close attention: The Island Highway was still a strip of pleasant tarmac in the year of Glory’s funeral—1956. A whole half hour might pass between cars. More than three hours of driving and two hours of steamship away, Vancouver could have been in a foreign country. You expected to see it two or maybe three times in your life: optometrist appointments, the Exhibition. Ferries hadn’t yet been built to haul tourists by the thousands every hour across the Strait and set them racing up our roads, trucks and Winnebagos nose to tail from dawn till night. Rusty’s “our roads” reveals Jack Hodgins’s narrative intent. Historically, islanders have tended to feel a sense of community. They have seen themselves, like their islands, as self-contained and indepen­ dent from the outside world—separate from the rest of humanity, closer to 92 Western American Literature their fellow islanders. Population influx brings a contradiction: as much as islanders want to stick together, they tend to distinguish between natives and those who are newly arrived, between those who belong and those who wish to belong, between those whose island this is and those whose it is not. This sense of community available to islanders is severe­ ly challenged in an era of satellite dishes, the Chunnel, and high-speed catamaran ferries—the universe is made up of very different stories in 1996 than was the case in 1956. Jack Hodgins wants his readers to reflect upon the difference, and to extend the analysis beyond Vancouver Island to culture at large. As an edge-walker of the continent he shows us how preposterously our culture has become tangled in the century’s and the center’s glitter. Hodgins reconstructs the island, the coast, and the region as a com­ munity—of flesh and blood, and of narrative—in order to challenge its portrayal as a frontier ordained to supply the center with raw materials, consumers, and rustic movie sets. In “The Lepers’ Squint,” a short story that first appeared in 1978, Hodgins had an aspiring Irish writer point out to a visiting North American novelist the inevitable commodification of the region. “Some day,” she said, “they will have converted all our histo­ ry into restaurants and bars like this one, just as I will have converted it all into fiction.” She explained that “this place” existed for her because a great regional writer “made it real. He and others, in their stories.” Hodgins’s narrative project has long been to make his region real. His superior achievement in The Macken Charm is to manifest that region in place and time as direct comment upon the contemporary Western world. JOEL MARTINEAU University of...