How does a Clark Blaise story feel? The tactile emphasis is crucial. Blaise's characters are inseparable from the things they touch—gooey, sticky, dirty, infested things that "ooze" through swamps, broken buildings, jungles. But if we read only for sensation (consider: "his brains are coming out of his mouth") or only for repugnant shock ("the hiss of a million maggots") the rawness metaphor seeps by us. (p. 26) If you ask someone what they think a Cla...

"I am writing a biography of Rachel's life, incorporating your autobiography and a little of my own—and together we might be writing a novel." So wrote Rosie Chang of the Department of English at Berkeley to Richard Durgin, novelist and former husband of the celebrated and deceased poet, Rachel Isaacs. Replying from Faridpur, Rajasthan, in India, Durgin, no longer writing and now operating a cabinetmaking business for diplomats in New Delhi, is intrigued, but not necessarily impr...

[A North American Education, a] collection of Clark Blaise's fiction, is most impressive, if at times not fully satisfying. Both these facts arise from the use Blaise makes of an autobiographical voice, the ability, which is his particular talent, of creating the illusion that the reader is the confidant of an author relating anecdotes of an intimate and revealing nature. This sense that one is dealing with autobiographical fiction is unavoidable; it comes from the feel of the stories, it is insisted...

[For] the three characters who unify [A North American Education,] borders are … elusive things: they are hard to locate precisely, much less to cross. Blaise's characters are … eager to move onto new ground, but the passages are [hard] for them, the dividing lines … terrifyingly divisive, and the outcome unlooked-for disaster. Blaise's protagonists turn out to be "North American" men because in moving from America to Canada, they have come to exist on both s...

Clark Blaise's first novel ["Lunar Attractions"] covers some familiar ground both for him and for us…. [The] growing-up of a precociously observant, highly imaginative narrator in the South (or anywhere else) is tried and true, as is the alienation felt by such a character. But the ploy is not worn out, and Mr. Blaise does some original things with it. David Greenwood, son of a French Canadian traveling salesman and a German-educated Englishwoman, identifies with the aliens in th...

Like A North American Education, Clark Blaise's second collection of stories [Tribal Justice] invites a thematic reading. It is about tribes and tribalism—Southerners, Jews, Negroes, Crackers, Quebecers, and assorted other characters caught somewhere between the recognized social groups—dominate these fine stories. But they are concerned as well with the general failure of justice in modern life. Not political justice, though that is dealt with more directly here than in the previous bo...

Clark Blaise gives us in Lunar Attractions what almost amounts to an anthropological study of the initiation rites that an American boy, David Greenwood, passes through in the 1940's and 1950's. The boy elaborates, in a childhood in Florida and an adolescence in a northern city named Palestra, a magical world of myth, ritual, and totemic significance that seems as strange and exotic as that of a primitive tribesman in New Guinea…. The book moves the hero along steadily through experienc...

[In A North American Education and Tribal Justice] Blaise looks at his American upbringing knowing that he is French Canadian from Quebec. And when he makes use of his Canadian material it is with the detachment of having lived for much of his life as an American. He calls his pieces "short fiction"—an accurate description. For they are not short stories in the accepted sense. What he is able to do is to trap pockets of sheer messy life. In the novella-length "The March", ...

The main characters in Lusts, including [Richard Durgin, widower of poet Rachel Isaacs,] a Chinese-American professor who is writing Isaacs' biography and an American-Indian librarian who marries Durgin on his way downhill, are all unable to belong. Blaise, who attended 25 schools across North America before Grade 9, has turned his highly personal sense of displacement into a graphic metaphor for the experience of modern life in North America. The novel does have irritating faults. Blaise is careless...