A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Books in ReviewMétis from Webster's, and the ethnicity ofour aboriginal people as "nativeAmericans." This collection of introductoryessays on fourteen living Canadian womennovelists (Margaret Lawrence [sic!] is onlymentioned twice) is obviously intended fora novice American audience. Each essay isfollowed by an extensive primary bibliography;secondary source references are cursoryand buried in the Endnotes (forexample, two journal articles and a NewYorker review on Margaret Atwood).The chapter on Alice Munro follows thethesis that "because her work is so closelyrelated to her life, and so thematically consistent. . . generalizations about setting andsubject are possible" with homogenizedlists of biographical fallacies and examplesof "fathers," "writers," "death," "sex" etc.Mavis Gallant is represented by plot summariesof five of her stories. The fifteenpages on Atwood's seven novels (up to Cat'sEye) are inevitably superficial, predicatedon the themes "that they are women's confessionalnarratives on a theme as old as'Know thyself" while "retaining that keytheme of the national literatures, the struggleto survive." The Québécois writers farebetter. Anne Hébert gets a solid, thoughbrief, introduction, and Martha M.Vertreace gives a twelve-page analysis ofMarie-Claire Blais's Deaf to the City,though never indicating why that novelshould be especially favoured.Some of the chapters on less well-knownnovelists would be useful as introductionsfor American readers. While it is not truethat "scant attention has been paid to theissues of identity that pervade [JanetteTurner Hospital's] novels," Margaret K.Schramm gives them competent, if conventional,readings. Eight pages on AudreyThomas' six novels highlight a few keythemes. A chapter on Isabel Huggan andJane Urquhart has some good insights onboth but never justifies juxaposing these"very different writers." Similarly, the sectionon Sandra Birdsell and Carol Shieldscontains some competent readings butfounders on the appalling intentionalityand oversimplification that these writers"responding to the call to explore Canadianidentity using postmodern techniques ...depict women who may be profitablyviewed as metaphorical of the Canadiancondition," and therefore the "Canadianborn"Birdsell depicts Canada with "angerand prejudice" while the "American-born"Shields writes of "the nature of happinessand of love." The final chapter on Canadianwomen of colour and the theme of immigration/assimilationbegins some interestingcommentary on Marlene NourbesePhilip, Joy Kogawa, and Beatrice Culletonand is therefore, for me, the most frustrating(and typical) section in the bookbecause, promising so much, it can deliverso little in eight pages of analysis.Coral Ann Howells, Reader in Canadianliterature at the University of Reading, hasalready written the kind of book that MickeyPearlman's should have been. Private andFictional Words: Canadian Women Novelistsof the 1970s and 1980s was a respectableaddition in 1987 to the Cancrit canon. Thepresent volume is part of the MacmillanModern Novelists series, the first of forty-sixstudies to be devoted to a Canadian (if oneexcepts Malcolm Lowry). This honour, ofcourse, confirms Margaret Atwood's internationalstature. Although these volumes areintended as "introductions" to the novelistsand their "major texts," Howells has produceda comprehensive and sophisticatedcritical study of all of Atwood's novels withdetailed close readings carefully supplementedby archival evidence and informedby a jargon-free use of contemporary theory.The first four chapters trace the "refigurations"of three significant Atwood themesacross her career with examples from earlyand late texts. The second four chaptersgive analyses of the remaining novels inchronological order, applying the same the-166