This Time, That Place – Clark Blaise (Biblioasis, 2022)

“He’s the eye at the keyhole,” writes Margaret Atwood in the introduction to the career-spanning anthology of Clark Blaise’s fiction This Time, That Place. “He’s the ear at the door.”

It’s perhaps as good a way as any when summing up Blaise’s fiction. His characters make mistakes and suffer the consequences. They slip through cracks, come apart at the seams, and they look on as their cottage window shatters and the winter snow gets all over everything.

In a career that stretches back to the early 1970s – his first collection, A North American Education was published 50 years ago – Blaise has roamed around the edges of CanLit. Over the decades he’s published fiction with small presses, written about living in India (Days and Nights in Calcutta) and the Lockerbie Bombing (The Sorrow and the Terror). His novel Lunar Attractions won the 1980 Books in Canada First Novel Award. This is a writer with an impressive resume. But while peers like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro broke into the mainstream, Blaise never quite did.

When reading This Time, That Place one wonders why. Blaise’s fiction is well crafted: his characters feel real and his Montreal feels lived-in, right down to the looks one gets on the streets. His characters are outsiders trying – one might say trying too hard – to fit in. The family moving to Cincinnati from the deep south, the Indian transplant to the Bay Area. Perhaps most memorably of all: the anglo who moves to Montreal and tries to become more French than the Quebecois.

“He had worked on conversational French and mastered much of the local dialect, done reviews for the local papers, translated French-Canadian poets for the Toronto quarterlies, and tweaked his colleagues for not sympathizing enough with Quebec separatism. He attended French performances of plays he had ignored in English…” (pg 225-26)

These people are recognizable with their zeal of the newly-converted, the way they dive into an identity as a way to recreate themselves in new surroundings. It’s a trait one sees in the corners, be it the anime fangirl who forces herself to swear in Japanese or the person at church who tries hard not to let his straight male mask slip off.

Blaise grew up all over. According to one account, he moved over 30 times as a kid: Fargo to the deep south, then the American midwest, Winnipeg and Montreal. This history bleeds over into his fiction where the characters have similar arcs. This Time.. opens with “Broward Dowdy” a story about growing up poor in Florida during World War Two “How I Became A Jew” follows a student transferring from Georgia to Cincinnati. A few follow families who snuck back into Quebec to pick up a life they thought they’d left behind.

It’s tempting to read these stories as autofiction, or at least a rewriting of his own story. The way the same kind of people reappear or how the same background unravels before the reader. Even the same cottage landlord reappears: in “Words for the Winter” he’s a car dealer, but in “At the Lake” he works at a hardware store. Even the way they’re sequenced has the feeling of watching him grow from a small child in the south to an adult in Montreal before settling down in San Jose. There’s a clear arc to them.

And yet, and yet. One doesn’t read Blaise because they want to learn about him, no more than one reads Munro or Atwood for clues to their lives. For one, Blaise is too minor a figure – this collection, part of Biblioasis’s reSet series, is essentially an introduction to his work. And secondly, his life is beside the point here. Blaise’s stories follow people who are facing a crisis of a sort: a marriage falling apart or an identity that’s hit the skids. Conflict is inside these people and is a reflection of what they’ve tried to convince themselves – something that, as a trans woman, I can identify with all too well.

Taken as a whole, This Time, That Place is a great place to start with Blaise, and there aren’t really any duds among the whole – although perhaps one might want a trigger warning for sexual abuse in “In Her Prime.” It would’ve been nice to have some indication of when these stories were written, too: the book says one was previously unpublished, but it takes some legwork from readers to figure out exactly which one.

But those are minor gripes. This Time, That Place does a good job of establishing Blaise not only as one of the major voices in Canadian fiction in the last half-century, but as a deeply entertaining writer to boot. It’s one best enjoyed slowly, giving each of these stories time to settle and let them linger on. Recommended.