Description

pp. 291, “An Aesthetic Underground charts Metcalf’s ambitious, itinerant passage from a literary education in England to the Montreal of the late ’60s and his various travels within Canada, all in pursuit of another book to write, edit, or compile. This latest book’s accomplishments are at least threefold: (1) it portrays Canadian literature’s birth out of thin air just three decades ago; (2) it debates, both directly and obliquely, aesthetic taste in literature, asking what makes writing, especially prose, successful, and why successful prose doesn’t matter more in Canada; and (3) restrainingly, humanly, it offers a life behind the letters, revealing personal sides of a Metcalf better known for his polemics (e.g., Don’t fund writers and the writing will improve) or his attacks on sacred literary cows (Dennis Bock’s The Ash Garden and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient are both “ill-written”). “