Portrait of a Writer

Why should we believe in the orderliness of memory? Memoirists, whose soul-baring genre is thriving as never before, have convinced us that daily life has a clean structural shape, that writerly remembering can impose meaning and inspiration on all those bygone highs and lows and in-betweens through the symmetrical logic of storytelling.

It’s a pleasing fiction, not quite malevolent enough to be branded an outright lie but too convenient a marketing ploy to be treated as gospel truth. David Macfarlane, whose sense of craftsmanship is visible on every page of this dense, deliberate memoir of a dying son, is too smart and too experienced and too refined a writer to accept a reductive view of memory. He has chosen his title, Likeness, with the same care for detail that has marked so much of his work (including his masterpiece about a doomed Newfoundland Great War regiment, The Danger Tree). The act of remembering, for Macfarlane, is an artistic endeavour...