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

Katherine Ann Roberts attended several WLA conferences while working on a manuscript now published as West/Border/Road. Her monograph examines the presence of three tropes Roberts considers as both centrally US-American and present in the Canadian imagination as "imported but not foreign" (14). Their presence results from an asymmetrical relation between the two North American nations in which Canada is always looking to the US, which often does not look back. Canada is therefore immersed in US pop culture, while the US remains largely oblivious of its northern neighbor.

Roberts's discussion of the West includes Aritha van Herk's writings and Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy—The Englishman's Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002), and A Good Man (2011)—as well as a chapter discussing Jim Lynch's Border Songs (2009), the independent film Frozen River (dir. Courtney Hunt, 2008), and Richard Ford's Canada (2012) under the aspect of their representation of the Canada-US borderlands. Other sections examine the CBC crime series Intelligence (2006–2007) and The Border (2008–2010), the Québécois road films Route 132 and À l'origine du cri/Crying Out (both 2010), and the English-Canadian road movies One Week (2008) and Passenger Side (2009).

Roberts approaches these works from a perspective of unapologetic Canadianness, a "critical nation theory" (23) that questions certain aspects of how national narratives are constructed, but does not reject nation-building per se, taking for granted instead a "need to take pleasure in forms of national belonging that are inclusive and non-hegemonic" (337).

Bringing this decidedly Canadian critical perspective into contact with genre and Western studies approaches from Steve Neale to Neil Campbell, Roberts in the first chapter discusses Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy as a "heterogeneous, unorthodox, decentered version" (83) of the Western that not only expands its traditional playing field to include the Canadian "Whoop-Up Country" in the 1870s, but manages to present a non-ironic counter-narrative to both the traditional and the revisionist Western. The latter is identified by Roberts (who presumably thinks primarily of Cormac McCarthy and Clint Eastwood) with "nihilism" and "endless cycles of male violence, corruption, and greed" (83), a description that seems too one-sided given the breadth and creativity of many less canonical US revisionist Westerns. Nevertheless, Roberts convincingly argues for an engagement with the West in Canadian literature that is more nuanced than that undertaken by scholars like Arnold Davidson, who contrasts an ironic Canadian with a conservative US West. As Roberts argues, Vanderhaeghe's trilogy instead advocates an unironic, subtle heroism and masculinity that does not rely on violence and the domination of women.

Chapter 2 examines Aritha van Herk's writing on the West, particularly her novel Restlessness (1998) and the short pieces "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Western" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (What Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2005). Collectively these texts put forth a Canadian experience focusing on female subjectivity and "the difficulties women writers face in writing themselves into the West" (85), a difficulty that leads not to resignation, however, but to a subversive engagement with a mythic West whose presence is taken for granted.

Chapter 4 presents Roberts's engagement with US takes on the Canadian-US border, probing an overall lack of engagement with Canada in US texts. Even the works discussed do not really engage Canada, Roberts claims: Lynch's Border Songs uses Canada primarily by invoking the conventions of Mexico-US border fiction in which drugs, illegal immigrants, and violence enter the country from outside; Hunt imagines Canada merely as a Northern frozen desert; Ford uses it as "a metaphor for loss." In this fashion, these works for Roberts "illustrate the power of genre to inadvertently exacerbate the invisibility of Canada within the Canadian-American dynamic" (230).

The remaining chapters...