SOURCE: Kearns, George. “Post-Colonial Fiction: Our Custom is Different.” Hudson Review 40, no. 3 (autumn 1987): 487-94.

In the following excerpt, Kearns asserts that the stories comprising Continent are “delicately inventive elegies for the local, the odd, the inefficient, the native, as they give way before international junk and its economic and ideological bases.”

The empire strikes back. We hear of a threatening entity, the “Pacific rim,” whose principal market we have become. The Japanese have rescued the Treasury from embarrassment. What will it be like, what is it like, to be a “debtor nation”? Dour heads on television warn that in our own immense way we are following Britain toward an age of humbled decline. May it be genteel, so gradual that we hardly notice, on any particular morning, what we can no longer afford. Meanwhile, there remains, at every point of the compass, the expensive, untidy, dangerous heritage of...