Ray Conlogue’s four-year tenure as The Globe and Mail’s Montreal arts correspondent has been notable for two qualities in his work. The first, unsurprising for those familiar with his earlier position as the newspaper’s theatre critic, has been the acuity and passion of his coverage of Quebec’s French-language cultural scene. The second, definitely a surprise, has been the growing tendency in Conlogue’s writing towards didacticism and – in the months since the referendum – the use of rhetoric more typical of an ideologue than a journalist.

Impossible Nation, a book-length essay on Quebec and Canada, offers both qualities amplified. At its best, the essay is a free-ranging meditation on everything from rationalism and romanticism to the birth of ethnic nationalism and the emergence of a literary culture in Quebec. Conlogue’s quick intelligence leads him to bend time lines, skim bookshelves, and in general bounce ideas and arguments around with abandon. As does much of his journalism, chunks of the narrative read like a late-night café encounter: much is tossed about in the spirit of debate, and most of it is, at best, intellectually half-baked. This isn’t such a bad thing in an essay, even one as hastily written as Impossible Nation: for sure, no one will find the book inhibited or dull.

Nor can Conlogue’s basic contention, however controversial, be dismissed. Namely, Quebec is, and long has been, a distinct community, and communities do what they deem necessary to survive. As he points out, colleagues at The Globe and Mail have often assumed he supports the province’s independence. His stated position, in favour of a “shell” federalism in which Quebec “has most of the attributes of an autonomous country,” isn’t far off, but in Conlogue’s own mind, he is actually a “Canadian cultural nationalist.” The final pages explain this conundrum.

The final pages of Impossible Nation also help explain why Conlogue, his trenchant intellect aside, is as often irritating as he is stimulating. In his uncomfortable pose as radical thinker, he not only forgives too hastily the errors and biases of nationalists while pouncing all over those of federalists, but, more astonishingly, he reinforces some of the worst Québécois clichés about English Canada. Yet, the best writing in the book is concerned with the need for Canada (i.e. English-speaking Canada) to resume the “conversation with itself” that has been repeatedly interrupted by diversions.

Impossible Nation, in the end, winds up a plea for a unified Canadian culture, one similar to the culture that thrives now in Quebec. That Conlogue’s route to reaching this conclusion is littered with unnecessary, and indeed unwise, jabs at every individual and institution that dares to critique Quebec, is the price the reader must pay to enjoy the considerable pleasures of this essay. Objections notwithstanding, I think it’s worth the effort.