SOURCE: “Cultural Alternatives?” in Canadian Literature, No. 108, Spring, 1986, pp. 160–62.

In the review below, Brydon describes Clarke's short story collection When Women Rule as misogynist, and suggests that Clarke loses control of his material.

Meredith Carey's critical study Different Drummers: A Study of Cultural Alternatives in Fiction purports to examine the cultural alternatives offered the reader by fiction devoted to the lives of people “who don't fit in.” Her system would probably classify the short story collections by Trinidadian-born Bissoondath and Barbadian-born Clarke, both Canadian residents who write of dislocated immigrants in Canada, under her chapter title “Ethnic Alternatives”—if it could be stretched beyond her limited focus on English and American novels written by women.

But Carey's approach would provide very little guidance for understanding the different dynamics of these collections. Her book is a simple-minded thesis-style survey about the theme of “living differently” in a host of...