The Museum at the End of the World

September 19, 2016
In this collection of linked stories, Metcalf’s first fiction since Adult Entertainment was published in 1990, he brings his trademark humor once again to Anglo-Canadian writer Robert Forde. A present-day story, “Ceazer Salad,” opens with Forde despairing over a review of his latest book, but other stories travel in time and location. Meditating on class and culture, Metcalf’s stories takes readers on a cruise where the characters wander grumpily around Byzantine ruins, into a tale of growing up in England in the ’50s, and through North America and its politics in the ’60s. The most interesting story, “Lives of the Poets,” is an extended comic tale in which Forde hosts a poet’s granddaughter, now elderly, when the university where he teaches honors the writer with a burial in Poet’s Corner. The two spend a day drinking, reminiscing, and setting the world to rights. Metcalf combines his recurring themes of coming-of-age and the inadequacies of education with his vast knowledge of literature and music. The characters, dialogue, and situations feel rather dated, but the
curmudgeonly, pedantic narrator—an intellectual railing against the novel’s “modern” world and its curious cast of characters—is amusing, and the writing is sharp and funny.

Starred review from September 15, 2016
These four related fictions follow a British boy's coming-of-age and his older self enduring a world that rarely lives up to his standards.In the opening novella, Medals and Prizes, Robert Forde first appears in 1950s England at age 14 as he shares with his best friend a love of words, art, and jazz records. After university, Forde immigrates to Canada and turns to writing. He receives an Order of Canada medal the day he visits a fellow novelist suffering from Parkinson's whose career Forde is asked to help revive. In the short story "Ceazer Salad," Forde walks about Ottawa and rails at misused apostrophes and other abominations after his latest book is panned. The title story shows him with a travel group venting his spleen during a guided tour of Turkish cultural attractions. Both short stories also feature Forde's wife, Sheila, and the combative affection of their conversation, recalling Nick and Nora Charles of Hammett's Thin Man. Metcalf (An Aesthetic Underground, 2015, etc.), a highly regarded Canadian writer born in 1938 whose life resembles Forde's, also brings to mind variously Wodehouse, Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and Kyril Bonfiglioli. The jewel of the collection is the other novella, Lives of the Poets, in which Forde plays willing ear as the granddaughter of a 19th-century poet reminisces over the course of a long slow day and night in page after page of marvelous dialogue, the two discovering their shared tastes for precision in language, forgotten rituals, obscure artifacts, and drinking. Metcalf applies wit, humor, and fine writing to themes of friendship, culture, commitment, and integrity--and all the petty things in life that seek to quash them. This is a book that could restore anyone's faith in the pleasure of reading.

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November 15, 2016

A noted teacher and editor as well as a writer, Canada-based Metcalf offers his first fiction since the widely hailed Adult Entertainment was published three decades ago. It was worth the wait. The linked stories here form a cohesive whole as they render the life of Robert Forde from his early adolescent escapades with friend Jimbo through education at Bristol University (he went for a young woman and a Shakespeare scholar, both disappointments), a hilarious near-seduction, an eye-opening teaching job, a sojourn in New Orleans, and the abandonment of luscious Jenny because he fears she'll fade on him. He also embarks on a move to Canada and first publication (a review suggested that "Albertans, commonsensical and down-to-earth as they were, would only be repelled by the book's so-called sophistication"), marriage to the prickly Sheila, and a final, ill-fated tour of post-Soviet territory. Throughout, the dialog is rat-a-tat and the wit drily delicious, but beneath the surface there's a sense of vaguely unfulfilled longing. VERDICT Masterly entertainment for most readers.

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