Michael Ondaatje … has set himself apart from [the dogmatic certainty of much mainstream Canadian writing]. He works by suggesting the final unknowability of the world. He disrupts comforting pieties and surrounds his characters with an almost absolute darkness. His urgent interest has always been to drive the reader away from familiar settings and expected motivations. What he seems to want is to maximize our terror of, and fascination with, our own ignorance. As protagonists, he favours the "possessed" of the world—the mad, the outlaw and now most recently, the dipsomaniac paranoid—whereas standard Canadian fiction is about decent, reasonable though often disappointed citizenry.

The main difference between his earlier fiction and Running in the Family is that this time Michael Ondaatje has turned his shrouded vision on himself. The new work is an existential biography. Ondaatje renders family life ignoring verifiable data, choosing to tease to the...