The Yank’s Progress

Michael Winter has signed, sealed and delivered a new book that reminds me a smidgen of Coming Through Slaughter. They are very different creatures, but they share some attributes in that Michael Ondaatje’s classic, about Buddy Bolden the New Orleans cornet player, is also about Michael Ondaatje. Very little is known about Bolden, he is a tabula rasa, so Ondaatje had to layer in events and ideas from his own life, his own era. The same process may be at work in The Big Why; Winter’s novel may be as much about Michael Winter, known rascal, as it is about the book’s protagonist, Rockwell Kent, the disillusioned American artist who moved to Newfoundland from New York City around the time of World War I.

Like Ondaatje in Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Winter blurs borders and genres: history, biography, fiction, creative nonfiction, even poetry. The book’s pages are a hybrid of old and new, with characters squabbling about sex...