Grief Transformed

Lisa Moore’s second novel, February, has been undeservedly singled out, in a recent and rancorous round of critical debate over the alleged unreadability of some Canadian literature, as a narrative more concerned with the expression of mood and memory than the conventional rendering of plot. This is hardly a new debate. Nevertheless, Barbara Kay of the National Post ruffled the feathers of reviewers, authors and readers alike when she referred unflatteringly to Moore’s book, which she had not actually read at the time, as an example of the “unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men.”

In Kay’s estimation, February, told from the perspective of a woman widowed by the real-life sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, should have been predominantly the brawny tale of the suffering and courage of all the men who died in the disaster. Moore’s...