Clark Blaise’s ‘This Time, That Place’ a perfect introduction to the CanLit legend you probably haven’t heard of

Writer Clark Blaise occupies a unique place in Canadian letters. Almost revered among the literati and academic sets, he remains largely unknown to the reading public at large. This is, of course, manifestly unfair. With a stunning literary command (as beautifully evidenced in “This Time, That Place,” a new selection of his short fiction), a career spanning more than fifty years, and his role in the very birth of Canadian literature, he should, by rights, be a CanLit icon, on par with the likes of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.

His position outside the Canadian literary mainstream, however, seems strangely appropriate for Blaise; his writing revolves around his position as an outsider, an onlooker, a stranger in a strange land. His fiction draws heavily from his life, the child of “a Manitoba mother and a Quebec father,” never having “lived longer than six months anywhere, until my four-year Pittsburgh adolescence and fourteen years of Montreal teaching.” He married writer Bharati Mukherjee in 1963: “a five-minute wedding ceremony in a lawyer’s office in Iowa City … I married India, a beautiful and complicated world.”

“This Time, That Place” serves as a perfect introduction to this consummate outsider.

The twenty-four stories in the collection reveal the obsessive nature of Blaise’s mining of his own life for his literary material. Elements and concerns repeat themselves compulsively: a boyhood perpetually in motion, the poverty and racism of the American south in the 1940s and ’50s, the staggering toll of life with a deceptive, womanizing father and a tragic mother, the life of an American-raised Anglophone boy relocated to a life in Montreal (with its own xenophobia and tribalism), the slipping of biography and birthplaces, the malleability of identity and names.

Blaise writes with a plainspoken immediacy which obscures the exact nature of these works. The stories seem to blur the line between fiction, memoir, and personal essay, creating a deep intimacy with the characters and their situations, an autofictive immediacy in which one senses they are reading about Blaise, rather than his creations. It’s a powerful approach, and one which is added to here by the curation of the stories themselves. Presented in a narratively chronological manner, stories of boyhood are followed by adolescence and young adulthood, early parenthood, and aging. The narrative arc of the collection not only contributes to the sense of intimacy with the author, it also serves as a career-spanning introduction to Blaise’s work, a portrait of the artist in full.

Because “This Time, That Place” works so well as a unified book, it is difficult to single out particular stories for praise. One could open the book anywhere and be engulfed in the frank, carefully observed quality of Blaise’s work. Any of the stories would be representative of the collection, though lacking in the accrued force of their position within the book.

Take “A North American Education,” for example. From its sweeping opening (“Eleven years after the death of Napoleon, in the presidency of Andrew Jackson, my grandfather, Boniface Thibidault, was born.”) the story zooms in on the sexual awakening of its adolescent narrator. He is taken by his father to see a stripper at the county fair (“There was a smell, over the heat, over the hundred men straining for a place, over the fumes of pigsties and stockyards. It was the smell of furtiveness, rural slaughter and unquenchable famine. The smell of boys’ rooms in the high school. The smell of sex on the hoof.”) but his interest is more piqued by Annette, “the wife next door.” He first observes her sunning herself through a hole he cuts in the curtains, before attempting to set up a peep hole in their shared bathroom wall, the narrator as the consummate observer, the outsider, trying to figure out the world, literally, beyond the wall. In a stunning reversal, though, what he eventually sees through the wall takes the story in an entirely unexpected direction, and, one senses, changes the course of his life. The closing paragraphs of “A North American Education” are sheer perfection, the sort of writing any author dreams of, and which, it seems, comes so easily for Blaise.

“This Time, That Place” is not only a stunning collection of fiction, it is one of considerable importance; most readers will not recognize how much they have been lacking in their reading lives until they experience the work of Clark Blaise first-hand.

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