Recent responses to Philip Marchand’s essays have included a Globe and Mail Arts Argument piece, a column by that paper’s books editor, and letters to the editors of Saturday Night and Gravitas. But truly exquisite was the indignant cover story by Alberta writer Aritha Van Herk in the January issue of The Canadian Forum
One’s sense of patriotism must be vast to mistake Shakespeare for the enemy, but so it goes among nationalistic critics who can sneer at inspirational foreign work, yet fawn over the most unrealized domestic effort. Against this backdrop, Marchand’s crisply written essay collection, much of which previously appeared in the Toronto Star, strikes a refreshingly measured note. Margaret Atwood’s novels are repetitive. Timothy Findley is often quite clumsy. Margaret Laurence’s reputation as a moralist is inflated and undeserved. The Writers’ Union of Canada has actually debated whether its members should write across racial lines. Marchand, a one-time student and biographer of Marshall McLuhan, even manages to get in some tidy hits against McLuhan’s old faculty nemesis, Northrop Frye.

Inevitably, not every claim persuades. Marchand never reconciles his love of genre fiction’s strong narratives with his admiration for high modernism and its shattering of conventional structure. His pessimism about Canada’s literary future is misplaced. Marchand writes that “Margaret Atwood’s 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature do[es] not have the slightest relevance to new Canadian fiction,” implying that Atwood’s bit of agitprop was at some point credible.

But this is small beer. Marchand has written a book that takes literature in Canada seriously; he reads and writes with his full self, eschews boosterism, and praises real accomplishment where he sees it. This is the work of an honest critic, achievement’s only friend. Where so many others offer only genteel and safe opinion, Marchand instead provokes little insurrections in our minds. Sometimes, we are even forced to think for ourselves. It’s hard to think what else the world of Canadian letters needs today.