In the following essay, Hulcoop provides a stylisticc discussion of Findley's work, examining how Findley uses textual and sensual markers in his early fiction as a means of drawing the reader into the text.

York is an educator. In the essay below, she delineates Findley's focus on war and conflict in The Last of the Crazy People, "Lemonade," and other early works.

[The protagonist of Pound's modernist poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"] is the main character—initially, at least—in Timothy Findley's new novel, Famous Last Words. Immediately, one recognizes it as a brilliant idea that sparks a variety of possibilities in the reader's imagination. Findley has re-invented Mauberley for his own purposes, making him a younger man than Pound's, American, and a novelist. But any artist—according to Brecht, anywayȁ...

In the following, Bemrose assesses the plot and principal theme of The Piano Man's Daughter.

Draper is a libratian. In the review below, he praises The Piano Man's Daughter for its focus on the past, its characterization, and its readability.

In the favorable review below, Tonkin discusses Findley's focus on history, historical figures, and nostalgia in Famous Last Words, noting the book's contemporary relevance.

Like Ben Piazza, who three years ago wrote a moving first novel about boyhood called The Exact and Very Strange Truth, Timothy Findley is an actor. Again like Piazza, he is interested in boyhood and its relationship to the adult world, and he has an actor's ear for dialogue, an actor's eye for scenes. After three years, scenes from the earlier book remain vivid in the mind; it is probable that those created by Mr. Findley [in The Last of the Crazy People] will also linger for a long time, if l...

Ezra Pound in his poem sequence "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" claimed that "The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage." With benefit of a hindsight denied to Pound, Timothy Findley in Famous Last Words takes up the challenge in a "prose cinema" of dazzling brilliance. Like his earlier novel The Wars, the story revolves around a man trapped in wartime events. Transforming Pound's poetic persona Hugh Mauberley into a pla...

[The Butterfly Plague] resembles an appreciative description of a fantastic film, the kind that depends on surrealistic images and a voguish "sense of period", more interesting to see than to read about…. A quick succession of intricate, brightly-coloured scenes must have been the aim; but Timothy Findley cannot, as a novelist, rival a film-director's pace. Instead of being fixed in cinematic images, the details of landscape, facial expression, physical appearance and (especially...

1930's Hollywood, with its overripe stars, larger-than-life styles, extravagant successes and even more extravagant failures, and the nightmare barbarities of Hitler's Germany, make a strange juxtaposition here. "The Butterfly Plague" is full of unlikely juxtapositions, but they work to make the book consistently interesting, often disquieting, Mr. Findley's novel is an ambitious one, for he has chosen to deal with the nature of reality, the meaning of life and death and l...

["The Last of the Crazy People"] is almost as pleasing as its odd title. An attempt to explain the far too frequent and inexplicable headline, "'Nice Boy' Massacres Family," it is memorable not so much for its explanation (or for its gore) as for a surprisingly gentle, nostalgic quality which is wholly charming. Story and style may seem at variance, but I look forward to Findley's second. Anthony Boucher, in a review of "The Last of the Cr...