The cover of Nancy Huston’s new release, Slow Emergencies, announces brazenly that she is the “Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Plainsong. Well. Sort of. This kind of truth-stretch will irk those who, when Huston’s own French translation of that book, Cantiques des Plaines, won the award for fiction in French, concocted reasons for her ineligibility. (The English version was not nominated.) Coming from Calgary, transplanted to Paris at 20 years old, Huston and her Canadian identity seemed – comment dit-on? – problematic.

Accordingly, Huston is accused of being: too Anglo, too Parisian, too smart, too theoretical; she has even accused herself, in an essay published in a slew of brainy journals last year, of being too beautiful. In 1995, she told Don Gillmor of Saturday Night, “I should have become a country-and-western singer and instead became a Paris intellectual.” She does not, it seems, imagine a woman can be both, and this may account for certain limitations of her oeuvre.

Huston is this season publishing two English translations of French successes. The Goldberg Variations came out in 1981 and won the Prix Contrepoint; Slow Emergencies (as La virevolte) was a bestseller in Paris and Quebec, winning the Prix “L” and Prix Louis Hemon. Both books intellectualize the challenges of being a female artist and betray – in a fascinating way – Huston’s own history as a writer.

The Goldberg Variations was first published following her time as a graduate student of literary theorist Roland Barthes. The pleasure of this text, predictably, is not found in plot or characterization, but in the way the novel’s musical form and word play contribute to meaning. The story – if it is one – circles a musician who invites 30 friends and lovers to witness her performance of Bach in her bedroom. The music comprises 30 variations, and a chapter evolves from each, expressed in the interior voice of different guests. Characters respond not only to the music, but to the musician, to the politics of the event, to each other and – très Barthes – to their own bodies.

The book stands as an artifact of a time, not so long ago, when such tactics were inventive, subversive, fun. Huston knows well the ideological balloons she inflates and pricks, from psychoanalytical to Marxist takes on love. But her craft does not adequately particularize each character, nor make the dullest ones interesting. She does not seem able to reflect the musings of those included as representatives of certain classes.

Huston decided at some point that, as she puts it, “Words should not call attention to themselves”; Slow Emergencies, more recently written, acknowledges the shape of plot and the lure of complex characters. This is the story of a dancer whose career is interrupted by childbirth. The narrator, Lin, enters motherhood with maternal good intentions, but is eaten alive by the daily emotional and physical monsters domesticity spawns. The challenge: creation versus procreation. Lin saves herself, abandoning her family for the other dance. While this is a lovely novel that dirties the good mother myth without apology, the characters are tiresome émigrés from The Goldberg Variations: an honoured philosophy professor, a famous and embittered poet, an international dance sensation. Who can keep up with this crowd?

A resisting reader will find Huston’s tone haughty. But read these books alongside Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, or the brilliant Alma by England’s Gordon Burn, and all implied superiority is forgiven. Huston is so smart. Be thankful she wants to articulate how the world breaks those who breathe music.