Sault Saga

We tell each other stories in order to remember who we are, but sometimes the stories we tell can imprison, not liberate. British novelist and biographer Victoria Glendinning, writing in the Financial Times about her experience as a juror for the 2009 Giller Prize, commented wickedly on the prevalence of a certain kind of Canadian novel featuring “families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine.” Reading this as a transplanted Brit, I felt enraged: how easy, I thought, to make mocking generalizations about another nation’s literature; how much harder to see the clichés in one’s own.

And yet … the fact is every nation has its genres—stories of national identity, recurrent themes—and it is hard to deny, when looking back over our prize winners and bestsellers, that Canadians love their intergenerational family sagas: big...