SOURCE: “Rambling through John Metcalf's ‘The Estuary,’” in Malahat Review, Vol. 70, March, 1985, pp. 98–117.

In the following essay, Vauthier underscores the role of storytelling in Metcalf's “The Estuary.”

Written to appeal to the prospective buyer and make things easier for the reader, the blurb on a book jacket often provides us with a convenient handle for getting at the meaning of the text, thereby tending to encourage us in outdated or lazy ways of approaching it. Thus, when we read John Metcalf's story “The Estuary” in the New Canadian Library edition of the Selected Stories, we are given a neat capsule of the story, in the guise of a short character sketch: “There is … the young psychiatric patient who strives to preserve a private experience by making an art of bogus amnesia.”¹ Except for the word “psychiatric,” which is too loaded, the summary per se is unexceptionable. Yet it...