Criticism (Philip Marchand. Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature).

Henry, Richard

Philip Marchand. Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature. Erin, Ont. Porcupine's Quill. 1998. 198 pages. Can$14.95. ISBN 0-88984-196-9.

Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature collects nineteen essays and represents something of a personal milestone: a ten-year celebration of Philip Marchand's work as the book columnist for the Toronto Star. Appropriately, he opens the collection with an essay titled "Confessions of a Book Columnist," wherein he offers his two qualifications for reviewing books and publishing his reflections on Canadian literature: being well read and very intelligent. Having satisfied these qualifications, he then identifies, with only a small part of his tongue in his cheek, the real "test of literacy and/or Canadianness": having read a Margaret Atwood novel. The collection is an attempt to exceed that test: to join the "literacy" and "Canadianness" into a "Canadian Literature," specifically one that transcends Margaret Atwood in all of her manifestations. No doubt the editors of the New Canadian Library are feeling a bit miffed: forty years of publishing "Canadian literature" have apparently gone for naught.

In addition to his search for an Atwoodless Canadian literature, Marchand also believes that one of the duties of a reviewer is to offer poignant and pithy criticisms ("What's the fun of being a writer if you can't annoy people?"), just as he has lulled his readers into believing that he is celebrating the writer or work before his studied eye. In this, he is successful. For example, after affirming Margaret Laurence's standing as the moral conscience of Canadian literature, and defending her from the wildly idiotic attacks on her novels and person by the "Peterborough Pentecostals," his essay turns nasty: "It does seem in some way to be an advantage for a novelist to have an interesting mind. If so, then Margaret Laurence was always writing under a certain handicap." By that measure, his dismissal of Michael Ondaatje's celebrated novel The English Patient as mannered and forced is relatively benign, if damning. His critiques are not always so condemnatory. Offered in the "spirit of helpful, constructive criticism," his essay "Top Ten People I Never Want to Meet in Print Again" is a top-ten list of cliches in the forms of characters that frequent novels. The essay is humorous, even as the top-ten list as a genre tops the top-ten list of cliches.

Marchand's topics are wide-ranging, interesting, and engaging: from essays on the Gothic, on fathers, and on the occult in Canadian literature, to essays on individual authors-Findley, Davies, Richler, and Munro. If Marchand has failed, he has failed in his attempt to expunge Margaret Atwood from his personal literary horizon. She haunts this collection, invoked at every turn. In an essay on the Gothic-there rises the specter of Atwood. She survives all onslaughts, including an essay proclaiming "The End of the Survival school of Canadian literature." Not surprisingly, the collection ends with an essay on Atwood. Marchand's complaint-that all of her heroines, supporting casts, and their situations are essentially the same-is strange, as it comes from a critic who has made Atwood his heroine despite all his attempts to the contrary..

Richard Henry

SUNY, Potsdam