Prismatic Identities

A review of Clark Blaise’s This Time, That Place: Selected Stories

by Mark Sampson

With a career as long and varied as Clark Blaise’s, it would be virtually impossible to select a single story that typifies his approach to late 20^th/early 21^st century short fiction as a literary form, his style and structure. Yet, if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I’d have to go with “Going to India,” a story first collected in his 1973 book A North American Education, and recollected here in This Time, That Place (Biblioasis, 2022).

“Going to India” is a tour de force of quotidian detail, a masterclass in minutiae. It’s about a man and his Indian wife preparing for and then taking a flight from New York to Bombay, with layovers in London, Paris, and Kuwait. The goal is India, but the goal itself barely appears in the story. It is the particulars of the journey – logistical and emotional – that obsess Blaise, both in this piece and in his short fiction generally. He declares time and again that the point of a story is not the story; it is the how accurately the author can hold up a mirror and reflect life back at us, regardless of what he’s chosen to write about.

Blaise, like many of his fictional doppelgangers, has led an almost preternaturally peripatetic life. He is both an American and a Canadian, with stints in Montreal, Florida, New York, Iowa, and other places during his long life. He has also maintained close ties to India, thanks to his decades-long marriage to fellow author Bharati Mukherjee before her death in 2017. Much of Blaise’s earliest stories, including “Broward Dowdy,” “A North American Education,” and “A Class of New Canadians” are intentionally autobiographical – Blaise was doing auto-fiction before it was trendy – and his overarching theme is clear. A peripatetic life can lead to a fragmented identity, and the quest for a sense of belonging often competes with one’s other desires, and, in some cases, better judgment.

The real strength of This Time, That Place is that it gives us a grand overview of Blaise’s preoccupations across many years and short story collections. Several of these piece are linked: the Thibidault family (who jokingly refer to their name phonetically: “T.B. Doe”) appear in a couple of stories, as do the Porter/Carrier clan, who show up in “Identity,” “North” and “Translation.” The slippery nature of identity crops up time and again, even in the later pieces, such as “The Sociology of Love,” “In Her Prime,” and “Brewing Tea in the Dark,” all taken from Blaise’s 2011 Giller-nominated collection The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis, 2011). Here, Blaise adopts the culture of his wife and writes impressively from the perspective of Indian men.

Yet, reading an overview of Blaise’s work in this way, one can’t help but see him struggle to create enough contrast between his stories. Reading This Time, That Place, one can’t help but long to see other themes emerge beyond those grounded in identity. Sometimes, one longs for Blaise to give his tales more lift, more narrative propulsion, rather than lingering on discrete details and reminding us, over and over again, that where we are defines who we are.

But his place in the Canadian canon – especially in the Canadian short story canon – cannot be denied. These tales, the very best of his work, remind us exactly what short fiction can accomplish. This Time, That Place stands as a monument to a quiet yet powerful body of work – stories that, while travelling across the globe, helped to shape a literature that is distinctly Canadian.

Clark Blaise (1940-), Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. In 1966, he and Mukherjee moved to Montreal; in 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University. He went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990-1998), and as President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Mark Sampson has published four novels, All the Animals on Earth (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020),The Slip (Dundurn Press, 2017), Sad Peninsula, (Dundurn Press, 2014) and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007). He has also published a short story collection, The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015), and a poetry collection, called Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016).

Canadian Writers Abroad