Hugh Hood Critical Essay | Critical Review by Dave Godfrey

Critical Review by Dave Godfrey

SOURCE: “Turning New Leaves,” in Canadian Forum, Vol. 42, January, 1963, pp. 229–30.

In the following essay, Godfrey offers a mixed assessment of the stories comprising Flying a Red Kite.

Mr. Hood, with three degrees from the University of Toronto and a position at the University of Montreal, is a member of that growing new corporation known as the academically supported writer. It appears to have done little but aid his prose style, which is as lyrical, precise, individual, and witty as that of anyone writing today; and he seems well aware of the strictures its inbred nature can produce. In “Where the Myth Touches Us,” (which will probably be the most discussed story if only because of its ad hominem portrayal of one David Wallace, née Morley Callaghan), Mr. Hood delineates the tightness of the modern literary marketing family:

Long before a new writer's name is known to the...
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