SOURCE: Review of There Are No Elders, in Books in Canada, Vol. 23, Summer, 1994, p. 51.

In the following review, Sumi is critical of Clarke's There Are No Elders for its heavy-handed prose and morose themes.

With its title and epigraph taken from Derek Walcott (“There are no more elders / Is only old people”), Austin Clarke's There Are No Elders promises insights into deep social problems. In particular, one expects it to address the much-discussed lack of role models—or “elder statesmen,” as it were—in many urban communities.

What we get instead is a poorly edited book of stories, each with a theme lifted (it might seem) from afternoon talk-shows. Child abuse, rape, wife assault, prostitution—each topic has its own story. Other stories evoke questions such as “What if your brother was an alcoholic?” or “What if your children left you for your ex-spouse?”

Perhaps these topic-driven stories...