Narrating North American Borderlands: Thomas King, Howard F. Mosher, and Jim Lynch by Evelyn P. Mayer (review)

National borders are complex markers of identity. In addition to demarcating the territorial limits of countries, they highlight how societies see themselves and the world, not the least by revealing who is welcome—and who is not—at any particular time. Given the political and economic disparity between the United States and Canada, perhaps it is not surprising that the discourse on the frontier between the two countries tends to privilege the United States. This is certainly the case of Evelyn P. Mayer’s Narrating North American Borderlands, which both captures the power imbalance between the two polities and reflects it.

Mayer’s main thesis is that “borders are increasingly important” in what was supposed to be a “borderless world,” and that, since the events of September 11, 2001, the Canada-US boundary has gone from a “friendly, open, and permeable” border to a “closed” one (13). She further asserts that while historically it has been “in the shadow of the US-Mexico border, the Canada-US border is now holding its own due to increased interest related to security issues” (37). Mayer, however, is not persuaded that borders can ever be truly hermetic. That is, that they can really contain what lies beyond them. For her, the porousness of borders is most evident in the lands contiguous to them, whose denizens do not always respect the national sovereignty that boundaries are designed to evoke. She illustrates her argument with close readings of three recent novels: Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999), which explores Indigenous life along the Alberta-Montana border; Howard Frank Mosher’s On Kingdom Mountain (2007), set in an isolated area of northern Vermont abutting Québec; and Jim Lynch’s Border Songs (2009), which depicts post-9/11 international coexistence at the western end of the British Columbia– Washington border.

Narrating North American Borderlands is a welcome addition to border studies in general and to the scholarship on the Canada-US boundary in particular. Although critically informed, it has little jargon. That said, the text is somewhat repetitious. Mayer favors the non-national, or unnational, over the national, so she repeatedly informs us that King’s novel is “subversive” and Mosher’s “utopian” for challenging the jurisdiction of the two official nation-states in the regions they portray. Also, considering that Mayer focuses on only three novels, it is surprising that she does not situate them in relation to the oeuvre of each author. This strategy becomes especially questionable in the case of Mosher, the author of North Country: A Personal Journey through the Borderland (1997). While she cites the text, she does so only in reference to the author’s biography, conveying little sense of the richness of detail and insight in Mosher’s account of his travels along the boundary from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In addition, Mayer should have acknowledged that Lynch’s novel, even though published as recently as 2009, has in some ways already become a historical document. In Border Songs, the two chief instances of Canadian difference are an unrelenting antagonism toward US foreign policy and a casual attitude toward soft drugs. But since Washington State legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2012, Lynch’s novel underscores the fluidity of both national borders and cultures, for that which was perceived as intrinsically alien could so easily be legislated into the law of the land—or at least of a growing number of states.

According to Mayer, one of the merits of her book is its “bilateral Canada-US focus” (29), but Canada is presented very much as the junior partner. For instance, she often states that Canadians, particularly the English-speaking populace, need the international boundary “to distinguish” themselves from Americans (35), reflecting the fact that the Canadian relationship to the international boundary is “marked by identity insecurity” and the American one by “homeland...