Wise Guy

Guy Vanderhaeghe, perhaps best known for his three novels set in the Canadian West in the 1870s, discusses his earliest inspirations in a pair of essays in Because Somebody Asked Me To, a collection of past reviews, articles, and speeches. A mix of brief thoughts and carefully articulated arguments, the book includes several pieces that combine autobiography and literary criticism. In the first, “Influences,” from 1984, he ponders how non-literary works read in childhood may be a greater influence for a writer than the highbrow books they often like to cite. He feels free to explore his debt to The Boy’s Own Paper, a children’s periodical filled with tales of British imperial derring‑do, when he learns in Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, that the author of Lolita also read it, likely at the urging of a governess hired by his anglophile father.

Growing up on a farm near Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, some 200 kilometres...