JOHN METCALF'S What Is A Canadian Literature? (Red Kite Press, 104 pages, $9.95 paper) is a book that takes the Canadian literary academy by the scruff of its neck and rubs its nose in the mess it has made. It is a superb polemic, witty and consistently thoughtful. John Metcalf's essential point is that until very recently there has been no native tradition of writing in English Canada, with the result that Canadian writers have had to draw on "international modernism" for inspiration (Alice Munro reading Eudora Welty and Sherwood Anderson, for instance) instead of turning to writers in their own country. A simple and indisputable point, it would seem, but it has striking consequences, and they are skilfully drawn out by Metcalf. There are now young Canadian writers who emulate Alice Munro, for example, or William Gibson, or W. P. Kinsella, but this is a very new thing: such matter?of?fact emulation didn't exist 30 years ago. Hence Metcalf's corollary point ? what makes a tradition real is the fact that writers use it. Once this point is grasped, Metcalf suggests , most CanLit criticism begins to seem grotesquely inflated. Ernest Buckler and A. M. Klein, for instance, are part of Canadian literary history?, they are not part of a tradition of writing, and criticism that doesn't understand this will end up animated more by wishful thinking than by any thing else. Metcalf's touch is light, but he is tough intellectually, one of those writers who make point after point until finally it is the sheer force of the thought that dazzles. At 104 pages his book is a triumph of organization, so neat and compact it might easily seem a smaller work than it is.