Jack Hodgins is possibly the most important new talent to emerge in English Canadian writing during the last several years….

His work has color and humor. It has a rich literacy and intellectual depth, and yet it is uncluttered by the pretentiousness of compulsive and overbearing credential-mongering which so often accompanies straining attempts at those qualities. Hodgins is both a good craftsman and a gifted stylist. (p. 70)

In these respects it is not without significance that Hodgins [in Spit Delaney's Island] served his apprenticeship as a short story writer, and that even in The Invention of the World he develops his novel almost as if it, too, were a collection of short stories…. That the novel should be focused not through the eyes of any single narrator, but through the several worlds of minor as well as major characters …, that it should be told in a plurality of...