Jack Hodgins is possibly the most important new talent to emerge in English Canadian writing during the last several years….

His work has color and humor. It has a rich literacy and intellectual depth, and yet it is uncluttered by the pretentiousness of compulsive and overbearing credential-mongering which so often accompanies straining attempts at those qualities. Hodgins is both a good craftsman and a gifted stylist. (p. 70)

In these respects it is not without significance that Hodgins [in Spit Delaney's Island] served his apprenticeship as a short story writer, and that even in The Invention of the World he develops his novel almost as if it, too, were a collection of short stories…. That the novel should be focused not through the eyes of any single narrator, but through the several worlds of minor as well as major characters …, that it should be told in a plurality of voices and perspectives, is one of the novel's most important ideas. The maintenance of several discrete points of perspective in such a format allows, happily, for the deployment of his superb short fiction skills and style. In the novel, as in the stories, one meets with an intensity and concreteness of insight, dialogue and event, set within almost lyric qualities of character revelation. The result is narrative tour de force which conjures with—and rivals—the stories of Flannery O'Connor.

Because the center of Hodgins' geographical world is his native Vancouver Island …, and because the grotesque extravagance of his characters might seem plausible only in such a place, it is tempting to extend the analogy with O'Connor and treat him as a gifted regional writer, adding some of the usual cliches about the greater universality his characters express. This will not quite do for Hodgins. His characters are regional enough, as anyone who appreciates the North Island will cheerfully affirm…. [But] Hodgins is more accurately to be appreciated as a subcultural writer. The distinction is not so subtle as it might seem. The regional writer's work is imbued with particular landscape, manners, colloquial speech and local tradition. At his best he or she makes of the local world a microcosm, and so 'translates' it to the world at large. The subcultural writer, on the other hand, adds to these features his community's prepossessing sense of contest with the 'outside world,' and strives to articulate their desire for peculiar magic, or as the adolescent heroine of The Invention puts it, their essential difference…. The regional factor is inescapably a material element of expression, but motive in the subcultural writer, perhaps especially these days, has been shaped by the much wider struggle around him for differentiation.

If Hodgins is much more interesting and accessible than many subcultural writers working out of the contemporary mosaic, it is partly because the particular form of subcultural proclamation, of which Vancouver Island is an extravagant paradigm, is in itself a sort of historical cartoon by which a much wider and contemporary psychosis may be vividly dramatized. The Island to which Hodgins invites us on his mythic ferry boat is not so much a state of nature, or of civilization either, as it is a modern and especially North American state of mind. Here is a kind of reserve of lost causes, misty nostalgia for a tarnished and compromised Europa, thoroughly mixed up with innumerable back-yard versions of the original American dream, and set in a place where history has been condensed and motives and patterns made more visible (and usually far more interesting) by force of particular extremes. What Hodgins writes about is the Island Mind itself, its bizarre dreams, its truncated perspectives on the world, its frenetic ambivalence about history, its flight from the world—above all its unending pursuit of the private mythology—but what he mirrors in fact is the frustrated questions of a whole frontier-less continent now increasingly turned in upon itself and unable to discern where mythology stops and reality begins. (pp. 70-2)

Like other characters in an apocalyptic age, Hodgins' personalities look for a conclusion they can believe in, some dream which could put time and the world back together. Unable to find such a form outside themselves, many of them, each in his or her peculiar way, is driven to invent the private world, an island, an island in an island, an island in the mind.

Yet Hodgins doesn't stop here. The real problem for his characters is personal in the larger sense; it is not in the singularity of the self, but in the mutuality of personal realities that the theme and issue of his work is forged. The line between reality and mythology is, abstractedly, much too hard to determine from within the solipsism. If we could construct it in a more complete and yet practical way, as that same line between Self and Other, then, he suggests, the real frontiers might perhaps be recognized and mutually crossed….

One laughs easily with him at the astonishing hilarity afforded by human foibles in pursuit of their own cosmos, but one winces, too, at the personal agony which is bred by evasion, by lack of mutuality and shared vision…. Far too many of his voyeuristic moderns don't see any better than did the tyrants of old their own selves or the personal reality of other lives, and end up discerning in history or immediate events barely the shadow and nothing of its personal substance. (p. 73)

[It] is not at all inappropriate to see in Hodgins … a writer of evident religious concerns. In the broadest sense, part of the appeal of his first two books is that they do pursue religious questions without being "religious." There is no sense of any doctrinaire perspective here—there are touches of everything from Christian Science to Alan Watts to a kind of Christian humanism, but Hodgins, in that he is fundamentally concerned with spiritual issues, is Chaucerian not Presbyterian, more catholic than Catholic. He is centrally concerned with the issues, but grinds no axe; he leads to the questions, and doesn't push.

No book which deals with Island as subculture or as paradigm could do without its various religious phenomena … whatever faith or anti-faith structure might be imagined. What animates all … [the] options is that they offer some sense of personal control, some defense against confusing and insecure times. The Invention of the World, particularly, bears the stamp of literature written for an apocalyptic age and culture, one which is afraid that the end might well come upon it before there can be any real sense of personal conclusion. It records, therefore, the yearning for a sense of story with conclusive personal meaning, and for the elaboration of defenses around that meaning. It records also the contemporary desire to flee history, the script already written, and to become fully the author of one's own mythology, to escape creation for invention.

But the book says more: that islanders don't escape history and that no man really writes his own script…. Nobody ever really invents a successful private mythology, says Hodgins, and nobody owns the story—not even his own story, all temptation and fantasy to the contrary.

What is the real story? Where was it written? Where can it be read? These are questions with which Hodgins prods his readers at every step…. But he gives us hints concerning the relationship between story and life, creation and creativity, which are not to be evaded either. (pp. 76-7)

What most separates Hodgins from most other West Coast writers of fiction … is that he is willing to write freely out of where he is, the West Coast, the world in which he finds himself rather than some world he wished he could invent. Taking his own point, that one discovers reality by entering one's own story head first and living it out with all its unruly characters and unpredictable contingencies, he has created the first Canadian West Coast fiction of first-rate quality, and it will seem to some an ironic truth that it is in his whole hearted identification with the individual and local culture of his own home in the world that Hodgins' work has already become far more attractive to readers outside it than almost anything from the displaced and often disaffected pens of his predecessors. (p. 78)