SOURCE: “Caricatures & Characters,” in Canadian Literature, Spring, 1992, pp. 198–200.

In the following excerpt, Klovan provides a negative assessment of Adult Entertainment.

The cover blurb for Adult Entertainment explains that this collection of two novellas and three short stories “will introduce readers in the United States to the work of one of Canada's finest writers,” and the comments which follow declare that this work is “hilarious,” “ribald,” and “howlingly funny.” Metcalf's work is “funny,” but in a bleak and cruel kind of way, for the humour here seems to have been stimulated by an intense and bitter disillusionment. Adult Entertainment provides a relentless lesson in what might be called “the dynamics of disappointment”: in this fiction, human aspirations exist only to be shattered, leaving the protagonists and the reader with an empty feeling of unfulfilment.

Another distinguishing feature of Metcalf's work is that his protagonists are all men, flawed, but...