MOREFUELFOR KINSELLA’S CRITICS
Biography tells us a lot about author’s life, but may reinforce his reputation for racist stereotyping
Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella W.P. Kinsella, the Canadian novelist and short story writer, rocketed to international fame in 1989 when his whimsical baseball novel Shoeless Joe was adapted into the Kevin Costner hit film Field of Dreams.
The prolific author, who produced seven novels, 19 short story collections, and a volume of poetry during his career could well have adopted Jonathan Swift’s epitaph (“He has gone where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart”) for his own gravestone as he planned his doctor-assisted death in 2016.
Like many humorists, and like Swift, Kinsella rooted his comic writing in an angry response to the cruelties and injustices of life.
But Kinsella’s many critics would argue that the Canadian was less successful than Swift in performing the authorial alchemy that transforms pain and anger into healing, cathartic laughter.
Like Kinsella’s fellow Prairie author Rudy Wiebe, these critics often point to racist stereotypes in the way Kinsella portrays First Nations characters in what he called his “Indian stories.”
The critics say that Kinsella is staging a kind of First Nations minstrel show in these stories, ridiculing the characters and appropriating Indigenous voices and culture to malign ends. The Indigenous characters in Kinsella’s work, they suggest, are two-dimensional and played for cruel laughter. They have a point. There are some real problems of racism there, and Kinsella’s biographer, William Steele, a professor of English at Lipscomb University in Nashville, does not flinch from dealing with the issues, despite his own clear affection and respect for his subject.
Another round of controversy erupted when poet and essayist Evelyn Lau emerged from a romance with the much older Kinsella and published an unflattering account of the experience, and of Kinsella.
In a typically Kinsella moment of pugnacity, the embarrassed older man sued his former lover for libel.
So, what are we to make of Kinsella? This authoritative biography provides detailed and persuasive materials that will help us answer that question.
His many fans will appreciate the detailed account of Kinsella’s life, and some will regret Steele’s more cursory attention to the fiction itself, while those who have been tempted to dismiss him as a cantankerous, marginally racist and sexist curmudgeon will find fresh material to support that verdict.
I would argue that even before the problematic racism is factored in, Kinsella does not stand in the first ranks of 20th-century Canadian writing. But even flawed and mid-rank authors deserve a good biography, and that’s what Steele delivers here.