Contemporary Literary Criticism | Kroetsch, Robert (Vol. 132) - Douglas Glover (review date February 1993)

Douglas Glover (review date February 1993)

SOURCE: A review of The Puppeteer, in Books in Canada, Vol. XXII, No. 1, February, 1993, pp. 40-41.

[In the following review, Glover calls The Puppeteer “a literary confection of the first order,” but concedes that it may not be for everyone.]

I once knew a man in New York who worked as a buyer of rare works of art, which he collected worldwide, mostly as a tax dodge for wealthy clients who paid low prices and then donated the works to institutions at inflated paper values. One of his clients happened to be a Calgary oil baron who might have been a model for the mythically rich, half-blind transvestite millionaire named Jack Deemer who narrates Robert Kroetsch’s clever new avant-garde novel The Puppeteer.

Jack Deemer is a collector extraordinaire—of people as well as objects d’art. He has warehouses full of the latter, but people he has found somewhat...

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