SOURCE: Smythe, Karen. “The ‘Home Truth’ about Home Truths: Gallant's Ironic Introduction.” In Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Linda Hutcheon, pp. 106-14. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Smythe argues that “the ironic introduction to Home Truths is the perfect vehicle for Gallant's resistance to a limited and limiting definition of herself as a Canadian writer.”

Mavis Gallant has come to be known as one of the ironists supreme in Canadian letters. Her fiction is characterized by detached narrators and an ironic tone, producing the effect of what one critic has called “something rather chilling” (Rooke 267). I would argue, however, that Gallant uses irony not only as a distancing technique for her own voice or as a subversive strategy that challenges forms and values, but also as a strategy that invites readers to enter into a...