The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles by Gerald Lynch

Gerald Lynch, The One and the M any: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U ofTP, 2001. Pp. 234. Paper. $21.95. If only for the attention it pays to such under-appreciated texts as J.G. Sime’s Sister Woman (1919) and George Elliott’s The Kissing Man (1962), Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles would be a worthy contribution to Canadian literary criticism. But the book offers much more than a championing of some neglected works. In an era when literary critics often seem more interested in test­ ing a theory or establishing their ideological credentials, Lynch’s clear and sustained focus on literary texts makes for a readable and stimulat­ ing discussion. His considerable learning and attentiveness to form are effectively displayed in this study, which considers the development of the story cycle across nearly a century of Canadian writing. In his introductory chapter, Lynch argues that the story cycle is “distinctly and distinctively a Canadian genre” (4)—perhaps even the Canadian genre—for a variety of material, literary, and broadly cultural reasons. While Canadian novels at the end of the twentieth century became increasingly long and baggy—and probably unread, Lynch suspects—many of Canada’s best fiction writers (and Lynch provides an impressive list) have turned to the story cycle for its simultaneous preci­ sion and flexibility of form, its unity amidst fragmentation, and its ability to represent a particular region or community from diverse but related perspectives. Lynch structures his book around “high points of cyclical story form” (17), beginning with Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger (1896) and ending with Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)—with a brief account of Thomas King’s Medicine River (1989) in the concluding chapter. Along the way, he examines family resemblances and stylistic innovation, noting how the story cycle was shaped to accom­ modate the Modernist interest in individual psychology, with exemplary readings of F. P. Grove’s Over Prairie Trails (1922) and Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck (1941). Exploring how genre not only contains or conveys but actu­ ally creates meaning, Lynch is knowledgeable and—a surprise in a work of criticism—warm and witty throughout. The five substantial chapters that follow the introductory survey are consistently lucid and informative; in the remainder of this review, I focus on those that seemed to me most compellingly original. Although a few critics have placed In the Village of Viger at the head of the Canadian story cycle tradition, none has provided such a detailed reading of the cycle’s complex patterning or revealed so convincingly the multiple echoes W hile Canadian novels at the end o f the twentieth century became / increasingly long and baggy-and probably unread, Lynch suspects -many of Canada’s best fic­ tion writers (and l ynch provides an impressive list) have turned to the story cycle. Book Reviews | 247 and resonances that bind the stories together. Lynch’s discussion of the ambivalent anti-modernism in Scott’s defence of community is also wellhandled . Moving to Sime’s Sister Woman, Lynch makes a bold intervention in critical debate. Sister Woman has been recuperated almost solely as a feminist work, and Lynch makes good his claim that there is much more to say about the text’s formal artistry and ideological contexts than feminist critics have yet discovered. Looking in detail at how stories build on and answer others in the cycle, he presents a detailed and enthusiastic defence of its structural coherence even while addressing some aesthetic flaws. He also provides a very useful discussion of the Fabian Socialist influences on the work, considering Sime’s socialism as one cause of the cycle’s critical neglect. Even while insisting that feminist approaches cannot fully account for the work’s power, Lynch is sensitive to Sime’s attack on patriarchy; his reading of her maternalism as both retrograde and radical is a perceptive response to the peculiar intensity of motherhood as subject and metaphor in the story cycle. In discussing George Elliott's The Kissing Man, Lynch moves into largely uncharted territory, in the course of his discussion revealing...

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