Page "John Lent" Paragraph 14

So It Won't Go Away, the follow-up to Monet's Garden, dazzles with its open, looser structure, inviting the reader — as do each of Lent ’ s works by different means — to an engaged participation in text and in life.

Devastating critiques of late capitalism, with an attendant and demonstrable human agency, bring the writer's aesthetic, calmly, quietly, forcefully to fruition.

Cherie Thiessen writes that “ The short stories in So It Won ’ t Go Away are not plot-driven narratives.

Instead they flip around in time, place and point of view, incorporating first, second and third-person perspectives.

Lent ’ s dozen stories get as close to three-dimensional writing as is possible .” Paul Denham, notes the struggle a critic faces with the book and labels but also sees that struggle as an impediment “ from its real emotional power of a story ( or series of stories, if you prefer ) about the joy and pain of being a family .” Two reviews in The Globe and Mail concentrate on structure and theme.

Wiersema places emphasis on structure: “ Interestingly, the creator never creates a position of privilege for himself ; his story is as fictive, and as truthful-feeling, as the “ bigger, impossible story ” of the Connelly siblings, and becomes another strand in the complex and utterly winning tale Lent is spinning .” While Sandborn offers a thematic overview: “ The book works both as a straightforward story of family pain, addiction, love and redemption, and as a highly intelligent meditation on the process of writing itself .”