Kinsella's latest Hobbema stories obnoxious, insulting

Page 16

REVIEW

Brother Frank's Gospel Hour

W.P. Kinsella

Harper Collins, 190 pages, $23

As books go, W.P. Kinsella's latest is like a badly behaved and unrepentant teenager. Brother Frank's Gospel Hour is full of deliberately obnoxious attitudes and habits.

For his 16th book, Kinsella revisits his fictional favorite, a rowdy group of Natives he first created years ago who are loosely based on the four Hobbema bands. Frank Fencepost, Silas Ermineskin, Fat Etta and the others are once again up to their old tricks in these 11 short stories.

Most often, the stories are funny. In Miracle on Manitoba Street, Frank Fencepost carefully carves and then ages a portrait of Jesus on to the door of an old refrigerator. Then, he declares the appliance a miracle and charges people admission to see it.

Elsewhere, Kinsella turns in a romance titled Turbulence, a crime story called Conflicting Statements, and a lovely reverie about a man who tends railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere long after they've been abandoned.

So far, so good. But this is Kinsella we're talking about. And since this is one of his books of Aboriginal stories, rather than one of his baseball books, the issue of cultural appropriation rears its ugly head.

It doesn't matter how you look at it, Kinsella's use of dialect and many of the attitudes he ascribes to Natives are downright insulting. Kinsella's Native narrators present their stories in a fractured English. His Native characters are portrayed as wily clowns.

But don't think for a moment that Kinsella isn't smarting from past accusations about how he presents his characters, and whether it's even proper for him to assume Native voices. In Turbulence, one character grouses: "Story writing is story writing no matter the color your skin."

That may be true, but much may be discerned from the author's attitude. The problem isn't that Kinsella is a white man writing about Natives. Rather, the problem is that Kinsella is a white man writing disrespectfully about Natives.

It's easy and lazy to push stereotyped ideas, rather than trying to bring some depth and understanding into the writing. They're called cheap laughs for a reason.

The suspicion that Kinsella really enjoys being politically incorrect. How else to explain a story like Ice Man. In Ice Man, Jason Twelve Trees is a boy who wants more than anything else to become a chef.

He's talented at food preparation and so when the chance to enter a school cooking contest comes up, he leaps at the opportunity. But there's a catch. The contest is open only to girls.

So with the assistance of his friend Delores, who a year earlier fought for the right to play hockey with the boys, Jason goes to court to gain the right to cook.

This is all fine, nice and heart-warming, but for one thing. Little boys already have all the opportunities. They don't generally have to fight to win the right to do anything, be it cooking or hockey. Kinsella just doesn't get it.

Actually, it's hard to believe that he is not being perverse on purpose. that is what's so damn annoying about these stories. When he sets his mind to it, Kinsella writes beautiful prose.

He's lucid, vivid and other very amusing. Yet Kinsella's continual determination to incite controversy ruins his writing. No one's going to fault Kinsella's ability, but his ideas sure leave a lot to be desired.