SOURCE: “A Scriptible Text,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vol. 50, Fall, 1993, pp. 256–63.

In the following assessment of The Isolation Booth, Mills maintains that although the collection contains “a fair amount of interesting and diverting material, it is, generally speaking, of low quality.”

Recently I found myself in the dead centre of what used to be called West Germany teaching CanLit to a fourth-year university group of about a dozen highly articulate and well-motivated young women, students at the Institute of English and American Studies. Unlike our own people, these students approach Canadian fiction with no preconceptions about national distinctions; neither are their literary intelligences contaminated, at least so far, by that North American tenure-track obsession with critical theory. Their more off-the-cuff comments on the four novels I chose for them were therefore fresh and interesting to me. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing they found needlessly complex; Alice Munro's Friend of...