West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Katherine Ann Roberts (review)

The border between the United States and Canada has long delineated not only the geographical spaces between the two countries but also Canada's national imaginary. In the wake of ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations and a protectionist Donald Trump-led US, new and evolving aesthetic representations of the border will certainly arise and continue to mark Canadian nationalist aesthetics. With this in mind, Katherine Ann Roberts' academic tome West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative is a welcome contribution to critical border studies. Roberts addresses how the border and American-Canadian relations in varying forms have been taken up in Canadian iterations of the Western, road, and border genres. West/Border/Road is a sweeping analysis of (primarily) Canadian literature, cinema, and television associated with the above three genres and a discussion of how these texts differ from their prevailing American counterparts.

Roberts positions herself within critical nation studies, a body of academic texts that are "questioning, critiquing, and analyzing the modalities of Canadian collective belonging within the parameters of the nation" (6; emphasis in original). In her words, West/Border/Road fills a "gap in scholarship on the Canadian-American cultural relationship by gathering together a body of isolated texts from different disciplines (literature, film studies, culture studies) to form a more substantial tableau" (12). West/Border/Road is divided into sections on the Western, border, and road genres, and each section contains two chapters.

The first chapter examines Guy Vanderhaeghe's Western or Frontier trilogy, while the second chapter analyzes some of Aritha van Herk's more recent work. Roberts argues that the texts reframe aspects of the Americanized Western genre while also maintaining an affiliation with its generic conventions; through this process, the texts reveal their Canadian cultural instincts. Vanderhaeghe's Western trilogy, Roberts argues, displaces the masculinized violence of the Western genre for a gentler model while also critically rendering visible Canada's historic (and ongoing) displacement of Indigenous peoples. Van Herk's texts, such as her novel Restlessness (1998), aesthetically celebrate local Canadian spaces bypassed in prevailing literary works; she also interrupts the gender norms of the American Western by placing female protagonists at the centre of her narratives.

In the third chapter, Roberts addresses two recent CBC television shows about the governance and policing of the border: Intelligence (2006–07) and The Border (2014-17). She suggests that both shows represent the Canadian border in a post-9/11 world as dangerously permeable, allowing for infiltration by American surveillance figures and the corruption of Canadian spaces (175). Intelligence critiques this governmental corruption by making its moral centre a relationship between the main character, Inspector Spalding (whose outsider status within the policing world, Roberts claims, is concretized by her African-Canadian and female identity), and Jimmy Reardon, a crime-ring, mob-boss type. Similarly, The Border contrasts an American-compromised federal Canadian government with the character Major Kessler, who, Roberts suggests, personifies a more ethical version of Canada.

In the fourth chapter, Roberts moves south and engages with two American border novels and an American border film. The novels, Richard Ford's Canada (2012) and Jim Lynch's Border Songs (2009), and the film, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008), render Canada as a blank space. According to Roberts, the texts "illustrate the power of genre to inadvertently exacerbate the invisibility of Canada within the Canadian-American cultural dynamic" (230).

The final two chapters of West/Border/Road address the road film in Canada. The fifth chapter analyzes Québécois road films while the sixth examines two broadly Canadian road films. Roberts applies a transnational lens to the road narratives in these chapters. She suggests that recent road films in Quebec—such as Louis Bélanger's Route 132 (2010) and Robin Aubert's Á l'origine d'un cri (2010)— seek a path forward for the nation by confronting its cultural past and...