Alistair MacLeod Critical Essay | Critical Review by James Wood

Critical Review by James Wood

SOURCE: Wood, James. “Clearances.” New Republic 224, no. 4509 (18 June 2001): 31-5.

In the following review, Wood discusses the principal characteristics of MacLeod's fiction in Island: The Complete Stories, contrasting them to the prevailing modes of American short story writing.

A mystery, a glow of unrecognizability, hangs over the work of Alistair MacLeod. A Canadian in his mid-sixties from Cape Breton, the nakedest finger of the Nova Scotia peninsula, he has been writing stories since at least 1968, with patient intermittence; only sixteen are collected in this book [Island: The Complete Stories]. That he is still widely unknown in the United States may have less to do with his reticence than with the source of his eloquence: Cape Breton, where his stories are rooted, an area remote geographically and culturally, where—to judge from MacLeod's fiction—the heirs of Scottish and Irish immigrants continue to work the land and the sea...
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