[In A North American Education and Tribal Justice] Blaise looks at his American upbringing knowing that he is French Canadian from Quebec. And when he makes use of his Canadian material it is with the detachment of having lived for much of his life as an American.

He calls his pieces "short fiction"—an accurate description. For they are not short stories in the accepted sense. What he is able to do is to trap pockets of sheer messy life. In the novella-length "The March", in Tribal Justice, it is not the opening and the final sections (about American university students who end up marching on Washington for a civil rights demonstration) that are important. They are there to shape the direction of the story. But it is the middle—the bridge section—where the narrator goes to Quebec City for a short while and gets involved with...