Miscellany with a Mission

My initial exposure to CanLit was not auspicious. It was 1975, and I was a grade nine student in a Jesuit high school in suburban Toronto. A charged young English teacher insisted we read a contemporary Canadian book together. Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood were all then recently published, and all being duly—and deservedly, for the most part—hyped. But anxious to connect with 30 teenage boys with short attention spans, he selected instead Johnny Crackle Sings, a diffuse, fragmentary 1971 novella about a rock singer named Johnny Crackle. Author Matt Cohen went on to a distinguished career as a novelist, but not on the foundation of this early effort.

Even so, the teacher’s enthusiasm impressed me. Curious to learn more, I began frequenting...