Mr. Hood, with three degrees from the University of Toronto and a position at the University of Montreal, is a member of that growing new corporation known as the academically supported writer. It appears to have done little but aid his prose style, which is as lyrical, precise, individual, and witty as that of anyone writing today; and he seems well aware of the strictures its inbred nature can produce. In “Where the Myth Touches Us,” (which will probably be the most discussed story if only because of its ad hominem portrayal of one David Wallace, née Morley Callaghan), Mr. Hood delineates the tightness of the modern literary marketing family:

Long before a new writer's name is known to the general public, sometimes several years before, the little group centred on New York, with trading posts in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toronto, knows all about him, what he can do, what his prospects are, whether he is ever likely to be any good. The writers themselves, though not so concentrated geographically, are even more inbred.

He is a little too kind, at least to the writers in the academic enclaves I have visited. They are not only inbred, but uncaring. You yourselves, readers, still hold the right to prove or disprove the concluding part of his thesis, “it is sometimes doubtful whether anybody reads new fiction except the two thousand men who write, edit and try to market it.” Mr. Hood writes, at his best, polished and complex stories. If you decide to add fuel to this slightly paranoiac conclusion, I can only sorrowfully admit that it will be your own loss. If you read them, they will stir and delight you.

There are nine of them in Flying a Red Kite, plus two autobiographical pieces. Although I doubt that the order was intentional (beyond saving the two flag-wavers for the last), I can't help using it to support my own theories of what a good formal short story should accomplish. The first pair are duds of frippery. You can tell how delicate is the style from the titles alone, but a hurricane could not lift the matter. “Fallings from us, Vanishings,” concerns an Arthur Merlin of Pulse Magazine who attempts to scuttle backwards in time onto a twenty-three-year-old Gloria whom he used to safeguard from the waves while enraptured of her butterscotch-flanked mother. Gloria has a little too much insight into Arthur, “she couldn't compete for his attentions with a host of spirits, and least of all with the spirit of her mother,” so that it becomes somehow possible to guess that no matter how often she ejaculates her “oh God, didn't you bring me here tonight to tell me that you love me's” at him, Arthur is going to find his consolation, when she dumps him, in a torch song tune. “I'd rather be lonely,” he sings, “than happy with somebody new.” In “O, Happy Melodist,” Miss Alexandra Ellicott of Signorina magazine (seemingly a companion television-side favourite to Pulse Magazine), plays games not with the past but with her peer and peasant groups. Occasionally she finds herself interested in her neice or nephew, “surrendered herself to the sweetness of the perception, the unawareness, the piteous drift and sleep of the affections, of the little girl”; but the lifeless manner in which she buries herself in the In-Out games of the New York affluent is neither satirically, nor bloodlessly, nor accurately enough presented to Daumiate her caricature.

The two autobiographical pieces, on the other hand, reek pleasantly of life. There is no sudden revelation of character, no bending of the iron bar: but there are unimitated people running around playing silver bugles for the Oakdale Boys Band and patching holes in Huron and Jarvis Streets. “Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks” leaves the “bugle bells” of Tommy “The Best Drum-Major in Canada” Thompson (even if those bells did have a fatal flaw and “gave the correct sequence of notes, but only very softly, having neither ring nor resonance”), ringing and resonating softly in the reader's ears. I have only one slight quarrel to pick with “Recollections of the Works Department”; that Mr. Hood very accurately describes a dialect known as “cityese: an exotic English, rhythmic, heavily cadenced, comically obsence, with an unmistakable structure”; only to even more carefully refrain from letting us hear any of it. He is not the only Canadian writer whose prose might be improved by a dose of that: “an exotic English, rhythmic, heavily cadenced, comically obscene, with an unmistakeable structure.”

After these, Mr. Hood falters, but nevers fails. “Three Halves of a House” adds an intensity and power, the intensity of madness and the power of the St. Lawrence and of a good house in a poor land. “After the Sirens” is an experiment in Esquire sleek horror, which fittingly follows right after this moving piece of Gananoque Gothic. “Three Halves of a House” is a piece which I had trouble reading when it first came out, but that was my fault. After the third reading I finally caught on to it, and was swept right out of that strangely historied house into the “sleety impassible, impassable Gulf” on the heels of the mad fantasies of the soft-brained, dying virginal at sixty, Ellie Haskell. Writing about the bomb, in “After the Sirens,” Mr. Hood very wisely restrains himself from pulling the horror fuse until the final sentence: “they were the seventh, eighth, and ninth living persons to be brought there after the sirens.” The rest of the story is at least as frightening as the President's manual on Civil Defense and The Shithouse as a Shelter.

“Nobody's Going Anywhere” and “Flying a Red Kite” both deal with father-daughter relationships, although creating vastly different moods. There is a particularly fine use of detail to strengthen meaning in “Nobody's Going Anywhere”; a picture of W. C. Fields which has become the god Peter Haggerty.

The comedian wore and wears his Micawber hat, a frock coat, peccable gloves unbuttoned at the wrists, and an expression of profoundly mistrustful contempt for his species. He guarded, guards, a poker hand against his chest and is about to place a card on the table, probably the King in a royal flush, and his face, in which the eyes are the arresting features, moves and slides in a living ecstasy of detesting and detestable calculation, the ultimate caginess.

The story proper concerns, eventually, Peter's necessity to decide whether or not to innoculate his daughter with the life-after-death myth. He does. “George's father is with God, and someday George will see him again, and he won't be sick.” The way in which Hood then unites the W. C. Fields picture with Peter Haggerty's wish, fear, and the emblem of death in a final dream sequence is too striking and moving to spoil by explication. The Fred of the title story, “Flying a Red Kite,” is faced with a more mundane problem, getting a kite he has bought for his daughter Deedee up into the air, but here too the life-death contrast is subtly introduced. On the way home with the red kite Fred has run into a beautifully drawn “spoiled priest,” or at least what Fred's wife called a “spoiled priest.” This grey-haired bucko of close to sixty has said, as they pass by the cemetery over which Deedee's red kite is triumphantly soon to fly, “it's all a sham, they're in there for good.” This Fred is not bothered by questions from his Deedee and he realizes, when the kite flies and his daughter finds a rare wild raspberry bush, that the priest is all wrong. “They gazed, squinting in the sun, at the flying red thing, and he turned away and saw in the shadow of her cheek and on her lips and chin the dark rich red of the pulp and juice of the crushed raspberries.”

The final two stories are anthology pieces, where everything works: style, form, detail, reality, character and meaning. It is impossible, I suppose, to read “Where the Myth Touches Us” without playing a game which might be called How Closely Does David Wallace Derive From Morley Callaghan? but I suspect that the story would be interesting even without that distraction. The concept of a man possessed by a literary myth, as so many popular authors now seem to be, has flowered beautifully into an image of truth by the conclusion of the piece.

“The End of It,” the final story, fascinates me. Again we have what seem to be Mr. Hood's most successful materials: contemporary detail, a love of childhood, fear of death, desire for achievement, and a sense of usually ungrasped connections. Philip Sanderson is a producer for the Film Board, possessed by a filming of The Race of the Century, infected by a desire to do a single sequence documentary of his childhood, gifted with a beautiful, thirty-four year old ex-wife from whom he cannot accept the gift of remarriage, fearful of being fifty, tired of making paradoxes about art and life, and as I have said, possessed by a film of the Landy vs Bannister race. The way in which Mr. Hood weaves these together, completely unobtrusively, to obtain not only a sense of character but of life, would serve well not only as an explanation to apprentices of what a story can accomplish, but to readers as an example of what can be observed everyday about them in the way of entertainment and enlightenment.

I am getting a little tired of seeing young writers labeled “talented” and “promising.” Some of Mr. Hood's references are more academic than natural, occasionally his fine style could stand a little burlapping, I have a tendency to distrust his dialogue, and he will not be remembered as the master of the present tense, but his stories are more accomplishments than signs of talent-to-be. They not only stand on their own feet, they often lift you up into the rarer realms. “They gazed, squinting in the sun, at the flying red thing, and he turned away and saw in the shadow of her cheek and on her lips and chin the dark rich red of the pulp and juice of the crushed raspberries.” That is a fine sentence, and I would suggest that you might find it even more powerful when read in context.