In my review of Alice Munro's Selected Stories (December), I describe a character in the story "Vandals" as a "destructive beast". Professor Gerald Noonan (of Wilfrid Laurier University) has brought to my attention a number of details that I did not register, details that strongly imply that the character, Liza, had been subjected to sexual abuse by another figure in the story.

I am grateful to Professor Noonan for his insight, and want to pass it along to my readers.

Dennis Duffy

University College, Dublin

Wilde Stratagem

In his March column, "Corporal Wilde", Michael Coren seems much put out by Oscar Wilde's sexuality and physical appearance. The over-thirty Wilde, according to Coren, was a "fat poet" who slobbered over his young male lover. Coren is equally unimpressed by the Irish author's writings. Despite his current high status, Oscar Wilde deserves only a place in the "footnotes of literary greatness". Our age, declares Coren, overrates Wilde because of his "decadence".

I'll leave other readers to ponder the pathologies of Michael Coren's fixations. As for the legacy of Oscar Wilde, it is worth mentioning his pioneering forays into what we now call cultural deconstruction or-apologies for the jargon-post-colonial thinking. Wilde devoted his creative and to some extent his personal life to inverting England's suppositions about Ireland and the Irish, in turn a reflection of the Empire's own largely unexamined self-image. He lived among the enemy in order to make fun of the supposed conflict; he mocked the master to undermine the notion of masters and slaves. A century later, the stratagem still strikes many as audacious. Some even consider it a worthy intellectual model.

None of this concerns Wilde's love life or his weight problems. I can't see why it should.

Charles Foran

Peterborough, Ont.

If I were a Saviour

In a letter to the editor (February), Marya Fiamengo makes a plea for tidy, "unfoamy" book reviews. Her world, it appears, has been ruffled by Judith Fitzgerald's brief review of Stephen Morrissey's The Yoni Rocks (September). Fiamengo is not out to defend Morrissey's twenty-odd brain-dead poems-an impossible task, no matter how you look at it. She's out to save us from the Fitzgeralds of the world, i.e., from those (and they are precious few) who, as reviewers and as writers, do have something to say, to share, and to give. Fitzgerald's reviews-and this also goes for the brilliant essays she has penned in BiC recently-are challenging, intellectually invigorating, and, to boot, written with superb Webern-like concision. There's no huckstering here. In short, Fitzgerald is a demanding critic. She has high standards. But isn't this what a reader, especially a BiC reader, expects from a reviewer? If Fiamengo finds Fitzgerald's ethical and stylistic heights, her altitude, dizzying, might I suggest she look into the scads of ground-hugging publications that litter the newsstands. Why not a glossy, recipe-filled restaurant mag or the weekly TV guide where eateries and movies are rated in a no-sweat "forks 'n' stars" system?

All foam and no argument, is what Fiamengo says in substance of Fitzgerald's review. Oh? I'd call it trim and tight-con velocità (with velocity). The proof? Fitzgerald sets the stage with Robert Graves, provides us with the book's vital stats, takes aim at the content (poetry that hasn't evulved), takes further aim at the form or lack of it (mixed metaphors, shaky grammar, bad syntax, etc.), raises the crucial question of readership, quotes Morrissey himself (the only dull part in the review), and ends with a mock prayer-all in seven short paragraphs! There's bang for the read, here!

If there was even a mild streak of the saviour in me, I'd try to save us from the Fiamengos of the world, with their plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face approach to reading and reviewing. I might even take a crack at saving us from the Morrisseys of the planet-whose poetry has the rather dubious quality of making even the rocks yawn.

Murray Browne

Vancouver

Proof of effectiveness

With his remark in a review of her American Notebooks, that Marie-Claire Blais is published by "a small regional house", Keith Nickson (April) has delivered-perhaps unintentionally-a gratuitous insult to Talonbooks and by extension to some of the most dynamic, imaginative, and courageous publishers in the country. Why should a book's release in trade paperback by such a house be any less indicative of "this is an important writer" treatment than release in hard covers by "a large national publishing house"?

It has been my experience as a translator of contemporary fiction from Quebec that it is the "small regional houses"-houses such as Anansi, Cormorant, and Talon-that are most deeply committed to publishing with loving care and informed enthusiasm books that could get lost on the lists of the bigger houses.

You want proof of the effectiveness of their work? The latest issue of Books in Canada devotes three full pages to reviews of Blais' book and of my translation of a novel by Lise Bissonnette which was published by Anansi.

Sheila Fischman

Montreal