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The swing in the garden
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July 24, 2025Before any comments on the entire New Age series, I have to make a general confession: I intended to write it myself. In fact I finished two of my own 12 volumes not long after Hugh Hood, without knowing at the time that Hugh Hood had begun The New Age. I was too young, of course. Powell and Proust and all those other role models were at or near 50 before they began the fictional recollection/representation of a lifetime. I was 27. Too soon. Poor “reviews” relatively soon led to my abandoning the fiction-writing dream.
This first volume of Hood’s 12-volume sequence is at once better than I’d feared and less than I’d hoped. Proust’s influence is more overt than Powell’s, though occasionally Powell’s precise phrasing is borrowed in similar contexts.
Matthew (Matt) Goderich is of the third generation: Proust (b.1871) creates Marcel (whose life from c. 1886-1916 is narrated); Powell (b.1905) creates Nicholas (Nick) Jenkins (whose life is recalled from about Dec. 1921 to Dec. 1971). Hood (b.1928) creates Matt Goderich (b.1930) whose childhood in and near Toronto between 1933-1939 is the principal scope of this first volume.
Hood marries his influences in a suitably Canadian manner as Matt’s father in English, his mother French. The Goderiches are Roman Catholic in religion, CCF and nascent NDP in politics. Time, memory, the sorting and interpretation of experience, growing into understanding self—these are all, logically, themes. Matt is unusual in that he has siblings—one older, one younger—and he is, inside his first decade, all over the spectrum in terms of social level, growing up in Rosedale (but North Rosedale), his father a professor, but then—his father resigning after a serious difference of philosophy with his own department—the family moves three times between 1938 and 1939, around the corner, as far north as Jackson’s Point (Lake Simcoe), and back to Toronto, but on “the islands” where the Goderich parents are hotel managers as World War II shudders into being.
I find a lot to sympathize with (much shared experience, especially in attraction to girls long before the average little boy) and some with which to disagree. My memory of Toronto is much later, and never as a full-time resident. I lived there for about 4 months (spread over 4 visits in 4 different years) between 1966 and 1975. Nonetheless, many of Matt’s Toronto childhood memories harmonize with mine, especially fascination with its transit system. Lake Simcoe, too, was family ground for me, but on the other side of the lake.
It seems to me that there is much less made of the narrator’s position in the “now” (his own present) and that The Swing in the Garden is simpler in its contemplation of time and how time and memory affect each other than the Proust/Powell predecessors. Hood’s first novel in the sequence is more or less a straight reminiscence of growing up in 1930s Toronto, with only occasional reminders that the narrator is in a position from which he is looking back. Retrospect is not absent, just not as complex. Proust’s Marcel begins with 50 pages or so of his childhood, then branches into more of an early adolescence of the character. Powell’s Nick is in chapter 1 of novel 6 before he gives anything like a similarity of childhood detail.
Yet for all that, Matt Goderich is speaking from somewhere closer to my own time than the 30s of his childhood. I like much of his descriptive language and I find his sense of a Canadian childhood familiar enough, even with a 30-year gap, that I feel at home with him in a way that I have never felt with Marcel (despite reading Proust many times, including in the original French), and felt completely with Nick after a few readings of the full sequence.
In short, 1 step of 12 ... we shall see ...
2nd reading seeing some foreshadowing and narrative subtleties that were not obvious before a reading of the full sequence. Works better for me. I wish I could buy the set; doesn't seem to be in print anymore.
4th reading -- same pattern: seeing more and feeling it all deepen much more impressively.
This first volume of Hood’s 12-volume sequence is at once better than I’d feared and less than I’d hoped. Proust’s influence is more overt than Powell’s, though occasionally Powell’s precise phrasing is borrowed in similar contexts.
Matthew (Matt) Goderich is of the third generation: Proust (b.1871) creates Marcel (whose life from c. 1886-1916 is narrated); Powell (b.1905) creates Nicholas (Nick) Jenkins (whose life is recalled from about Dec. 1921 to Dec. 1971). Hood (b.1928) creates Matt Goderich (b.1930) whose childhood in and near Toronto between 1933-1939 is the principal scope of this first volume.
Hood marries his influences in a suitably Canadian manner as Matt’s father in English, his mother French. The Goderiches are Roman Catholic in religion, CCF and nascent NDP in politics. Time, memory, the sorting and interpretation of experience, growing into understanding self—these are all, logically, themes. Matt is unusual in that he has siblings—one older, one younger—and he is, inside his first decade, all over the spectrum in terms of social level, growing up in Rosedale (but North Rosedale), his father a professor, but then—his father resigning after a serious difference of philosophy with his own department—the family moves three times between 1938 and 1939, around the corner, as far north as Jackson’s Point (Lake Simcoe), and back to Toronto, but on “the islands” where the Goderich parents are hotel managers as World War II shudders into being.
I find a lot to sympathize with (much shared experience, especially in attraction to girls long before the average little boy) and some with which to disagree. My memory of Toronto is much later, and never as a full-time resident. I lived there for about 4 months (spread over 4 visits in 4 different years) between 1966 and 1975. Nonetheless, many of Matt’s Toronto childhood memories harmonize with mine, especially fascination with its transit system. Lake Simcoe, too, was family ground for me, but on the other side of the lake.
It seems to me that there is much less made of the narrator’s position in the “now” (his own present) and that The Swing in the Garden is simpler in its contemplation of time and how time and memory affect each other than the Proust/Powell predecessors. Hood’s first novel in the sequence is more or less a straight reminiscence of growing up in 1930s Toronto, with only occasional reminders that the narrator is in a position from which he is looking back. Retrospect is not absent, just not as complex. Proust’s Marcel begins with 50 pages or so of his childhood, then branches into more of an early adolescence of the character. Powell’s Nick is in chapter 1 of novel 6 before he gives anything like a similarity of childhood detail.
Yet for all that, Matt Goderich is speaking from somewhere closer to my own time than the 30s of his childhood. I like much of his descriptive language and I find his sense of a Canadian childhood familiar enough, even with a 30-year gap, that I feel at home with him in a way that I have never felt with Marcel (despite reading Proust many times, including in the original French), and felt completely with Nick after a few readings of the full sequence.
In short, 1 step of 12 ... we shall see ...
2nd reading seeing some foreshadowing and narrative subtleties that were not obvious before a reading of the full sequence. Works better for me. I wish I could buy the set; doesn't seem to be in print anymore.
4th reading -- same pattern: seeing more and feeling it all deepen much more impressively.
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