[Garner] has found the right title: One Damn Thing After Another; for [he] has spent his years stumbling day-to-day, like the rest of us, through the personal and public hells that make up most ordinary lives. The title also says something about the way in which the book has been put together…. Aside from a frequent overlapping of subject matter, the thread that links his work … is a belief in the old freelancer's maxim, "Waste Nothing." While his stories and to a lesser e...

Hugh Garner's 1950 novel, Cabbagetown, his second book, has dominated his reputation. It was a straight-forward naturalistic story of a young man's progress, away from poverty and toward radicalism, in the 1930s…. That Garner almost always writes about the present, that he writes about a social sensibility rather than a geographic or political stance, that half of his books have been published in the 1970s—all these facts run contrary to the accepted view that Garner has never qu...

[A] realistic novel that makes use of an accumulation of small, precise detail and concentrates on the plight of the little man is Hugh Garner's Storm Below. It is the account of the last four days of the voyage of a Canadian corvette, part of the escort force of a convoy proceeding from Londonderry to Newfoundland during the early spring of 1943. Although this is a war novel, Mr. Garner does not look outward to the big sensational facts of the conflict…. Rather, Mr. Garner wants to reveal to ...

Hugh Garner has often been praised for his good heart when it is really his good ear and sharp eye that deserve our admiration. It is no use to praise him for his compassion because it is a matter of grace whether a writer has it or not, and a matter of cultural conditioning whether a reader values it or not. But a good ear for dialogue, speech rhythms, and local semantic nuances cannot be brushed aside as easily as mere goodness of heart. The way a novelist hears words and uses them, has to do with all the...

The title—One Damn Thing after Another—says a great deal about the shape of the book, for, compared with Garner's novels and stories, it is unexpectedly loose and rambling. At first the apparent formlessness disconcerts one, but in one way it is a very natural way to write a book of memoirs, the thoughts and recollections put down as they come into the mind. It is, indeed, so much like a man talking that, as one reads, Garner's gravelly voice seems to sound in the ear and his com...

Garner is a comfortable writer. Invariably he tells a story that has both a beginning and an end and he uses a style that, while colourful, is devoid of artifice and pretentiousness. Often there is a narrator who speaks with a voice crackling with hard-earned experience. He is a regular guy, one who knows the way of the world. He may be soaked in cynicism and bitterness, nevertheless he is full of compassion for his fellow sufferers. Years ago he would have been in the thick of the story; now he is content ...

Writing a police procedural [Death in Don Mills] had its advantages as it allowed Garner to vent his authoritarian and oft-reactionary views on just about everything through the thoughts of his chief character. The disadvantages, however, are that Garner's indulgences and interjections work to the detriment of his thriller and result in an overly long flaccid book, which too often strays from the central plot and resulted in a remarkably unthrilling book.