In his imagination Hugh Hood has outlined a twelve-book epic on Canadian life entitled The New Age/Le nouveau siècle, which he intends to complete by the year 2000. The first part in this extraordinary project is The Swing in the Garden, a fictional story of an art historian's boyhood in and near Toronto during the thirties. The Swing in the Garden is a novel, an extended "digressive" essay, an autobiography, a topographical map, a snapshot album or documentary film, a history book, a philosophical work, a piece of socialist rhetoric, a commentary on national economic policy, and a dream-vision allegory. The Swing in the Garden is all of these things; but in essence it is the beginning of an elaborate social mythology, a detailed examination of part of the Canadian style.

Hood focuses on a great social revolution in the mid-thirties [which involved a radical lengthening of...