Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories

Rivendell Books
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Home Truths is, superficially, Mavis Gallant's most anomalous book. Her name has become virtually synonymous with fiction about European expatriates, so a collection of her "Canadian Stories" seems to promise a change from her favoured displaced and alienated characters. But even in Home Truths, few of her characters are ever genuinely "at home."

The finest section of Home Truths is a compilation of Gallant's "Linnet Muir" stories--a cycle that recounts a young Canadian woman's return to Montreal after years of education in Ontario and the United States and her utter failure to find a niche within her home city. Linnet, an appealing, intelligent, independent young woman, is an aspiring writer who insists on approaching the workplace as the equal of her male colleagues. Many of the other stories concern Canadians abroad in Europe, and these are classic Gallant, featuring students and diplomats who are earnestly, hopelessly lost in their adopted Europe, unable to affect the social graces necessary for assimilation and too spineless to keep their own individuality intact.

Home Truths will fascinate anyone concerned with the development of a Canadian national identity, especially because Gallant sometimes seems oblivious to her own relationship to her fiction. A stringently judgmental, mannered, and proper writer, she lampoons these same features in her characters but never manages to shake them herself. Fortunately, her personality and her incredible talent hold her stories together, making Home Truths an essential--if unusual--examination of Canada's fledgling cultural independence. --Jack Illingworth