General Ludd

by John Metcalf

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Falco_rules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewing a book long out of print might strike you as a strange thing to do. If that doesn't make the book inaccessible enough, it is also written by a Canadian author who stocked it with all kinds of (now obsolete) Canadian cultural references.

OK, I grew up in Canada, so I get those references. However, I would still love this book, even if I had never set foot in the Great White North. (Take off, eh?)

The story is univeral enough to trancend any particular cultural obscurities. James Wells is a writer-in-residence at a small liberal arts college, which places him at a perfect vantage point to comment on the characters that inhabit academia. All of that is amusing enough. However, most of the events that drive the plot forward all involve the interaction between James and his new love interest, Kathy, a professor of English literature at the college.

Kathy has her own demons related to the death of her husband and child three years previously. She has reached some sort of equilibrium in her life that James seems to have never achieved in his manic-depressive life-style. The two are a good fit, until James' eccentricities start to push her a bit off kilter.

The novel manages to smoothly accomplish two goals at once: It explores the psyche of a poet while railing against the superficialities of modern culture. Maybe frozen french fries are not intrinsically evil but in the book they are symptomatic of a culture that is all convenience at the expense of quality.

[Simon McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good. I disliked how much I liked the main character. Definitely not what I thought it would be.