[In the following review of Teeth of My Father, Brennan praises Metcalf's satirical and bitter tone.]

One is not surprised to learn that a couple of John Metcalf's avowedly autobiographical characters were eager collectors of butterflies in their past. The patience to wait, to stalk and then to pounce, the ability to skewer the victim and devote careful attention to his variegated hues are all key elements of Metcalf's story telling style. There are not many writers in Canada who have real venom. There is Richler, of course, but few others who can, like Metcalf, make you laugh out loud at the accuracy of their barbs.

In “Beryl” for example, he presents the stumbling comic opera of an inexperienced, romantic university student and a blunt, practical factory girl. He reels off a string of incongruous and unpromising settings for the progress of the romance, culminating in the ultimate seduction on an orange living room carpet while three vicars natter away on TV about miracles, and a bed-ridden grandmother hammers on the bedroom floor aloft for a cup of tea. It is that kind of juxtaposition—the pursuit of heroism and romance in ludicrous conditions that is Metcalf's strong suit. He is here in territory heavily clumped over by Amis but he does not share the nasty glee which makes Amis at times seem like a drearily superior adolescent.

In “Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones” we are treated to the mock-heroics of survival against the philistines by a poet who combines the acerbity of Amis and the cunning of Donleavy's Sebastian Dangerfield. Metcalf pursues a delicate balance in writing the story. He counterpoises against the poet's steady, restless search for an artistically satisfying adaptation of a Martial epigram, the detritus of a day of mundane events in the writer's attempt to stay afloat and feed himself. He swims against a tide of eviction notice, book store browsing, calculations about who he can hit up for money or a bed, an afternoon reading for Jewish matrons, some groping with a frustrated housewife in the back seat of a car, and always his aim is for the beacon light of a fully achieved poem.

Four of the eight stories in this collection have that ‘don't let the bastards get you down’ embattled quality that was the essence of Metcalf's novel Going Down Slow. The danger of this mercilessly precise tone is that the stories draw us in successfully only when the main character seems to be fired with some of Metcalf's own splenetic bile. He writes best about those bitter ex-patriate English intellectuals maddened by the feeling that they have come down in the world, savagely certain that their newly adopted country does not come up to their high standards. They are so furious at the middle class pieties that they use up much of their vitality sabotaging the lives of those who annoy them or hopelessly trying to find some niche from which they can continue their guerrilla warfare against the dull clods who dominate the world. “The Practice of the Craft,” the slightest story in the collection, fails for me because Metcalf gives Neil Peters none of that inner flame flickering to stay alive against all the odds with which he usually energizes his main characters. The actor on tour in New Brunswick worries about his wife's infidelities at home in Toronto, acts in a play about a wife's infidelities, reads himself to sleep in a lonely hotel room with a biography of Neville Chamberlain—it all seems a little too glib and predictable. The detail though accurate is wearily contrived. I cannot care much about Neil Peters because the writer doesn't seem to care much about him. It is the only story in the collection which has the air of being cranked out a little mechanically. It is not the slightness of the story which is disappointing. “A Thing They Wear” about the initiation of two boys into the mystery of the menstrual pad is even slighter and yet it is brilliantly brought off with just the right emphasis, shading and detail.

Like Alice Munro and Hugh Hood, with whom Metcalf can be grouped as an outstanding practitioner of short fiction, the skill which forces itself on your attention is the way he produces the right tonality out of a mosaic of detail. Munro's particular gift, in my view, is her ability to make the reader do much of the work. She nudges you along so that you constantly have the sensation of discovering things. That technique produces a sense of richness, of many layered textures and puzzles enseamed in human relationships. Hood has something of the same awe before the flood of detail he produces. Metcalf does not pursue the same kind of openness. He knows his characters and situations with certainty. He does not hint and nudge. He delights you with pinpoint accuracy, the exactly right quality of a word as it locks into place—you know that it has been searched for carefully, that Metcalf was not satisfied until he got it right. “The Years in Exile” about an aging writer living in Canada but drifting back constantly to memories of his boyhood in England is a tour de force of accumulated detail. Metcalf's credo as a writer is what the story itself celebrates—particular life. An anecdote about Wedgwood indicates Metcalf's own dedication to precision:

I remember reading that Wedgwood used to tour the benches inspecting work. When he found an imperfect piece he smashed it with a hammer and wrote on the bench with chalk: This will not do for Josiah Wedgwood. I have always liked that story. We would have understood each other, Josiah and I.

(pp. 98–99)

Metcalf is very good at catching what he himself calls “reverberations” and tonalities—the delicate shifts in human relationships. In the title story he sews together fragments of autobiographical fiction with tatters of memory about his eccentric father. The events described are not dramatic turning points but rather random selections from the flow of life which give us, nevertheless, an intimate sense of character and place out of all proportion to the brief space they take up. There is here a kind of Carlos Williams' concentration on the ordinary to make it yield up secrets.

In “The Strange Aberration of Mr. Smythe” the chaotic concert of a German Boys Brass Band in the Edinburgh Pleasure Gardens whereby a drunken MC ex-R.A.F. type gradually grows more and more insulting until he is leading the audience in a chorus of ‘Hitler had only got one ball’ to the band's rendition of Colonel Bogey we have the funniest piece of sustained humour in recent Canadian fiction. Metcalf chooses a neutral reference point of view, an anonymous traveller, to fix the story. A camera crazy American snapping pictures of every ghastly moment also gives us the sense of the alien outsider peeking in on the British family game of glibly brutal chauvinism.

I do not always have the same feeling about the rightness of the total structure of the stories. In “The Years in Exile” the juxtaposition of past and present, the luminous childhood memories of England and the flat routine of old age in Canada seems a little flimsy, arbitrary and undeveloped. In “The Practice of the Craft” the weaving of time sequences does not have quite that sense of inevitability that the detailed observation within the stories so often has.

The blurb on the book's jacket tells us that “As always, Metcalf is poised, urbane, affectionate, amused.” Three of the tags one cannot quarrel with, but affection is only spasmodically present. There is a warm sympathy in the memories of childhood and of his father but not notably elsewhere. Hopefully he will develop this side of his talent and avoid the kind of wallowing disgruntlement Amis has fallen into. At the moment, however, the territory still most easily within his grasp is that inhabited by what Mencken termed the ‘boobery.’ In “The Flowers that bloom in Spring” we have the embattled schoolteacher being overwhelmed as he stems the tide of mis-education by trying to get his students to focus on the object, the particular detail, the real world. Even though we have come across it before in Going Down Slow it is a fitting close to this book. David fights gamely to clear away all the crud that the ignorant smear over the beauty and ugliness of the quotidian world. Metcalf picks off the agonies of schoolteaching with seeming effortlessness:

His free period, the one following recess, had been taken away by Grierson who had commanded him to muster two hundred kids to form an audience for a visit from the McGill Chamber Orchestra. Grierson, forced by Board policy to suffer these cultural intrusions from time to time, had instructed him not to disturb regular classes but to press only Practical Classes and the basement inhabitants of the Wood, Metal and Auto Shops. These retardees had then been regaled with a program of Bach and Vivaldi while he and three of the basement men walked the floor trying to prevent whistles, groping, match-ignition and loud speculations on the sexual habits of the lady cellist.

(p. 138)

The weight and flow of the sentences, the placing of the words are just right. The writer's job is to teach us how to see and absorb what is before us. Metcalf insists that nothing be left out: a reality that is edited or excerpted produces cripples. He insists also that “no philosophical cast of mind can do justice to particularity” (p. 89). His exiled, wandering heroes are a kind of Sancho Quixote indulging the flesh but hoping for more than mere survival. He gnashes his teeth at the second-rate, convinced that if you give them an inch they will usurp your position—the caterpillars on Parnassus, for instance:

The prospect of being forced to stay with Jackie was depressing. In the gloom of obligatory candles he would have to listen to the latest fragment of Jackie's novel—the action of which all took place in Jackie's head during a seven hour freak-out on top of Mount Royal and involved him in varieties of Cosmic Union with stars, planets, and a bi-sexual guide called Big Bear.

(p. 33)

The teeth of the title are the ill-fitting choppers Metcalf's father endlessly remakes with a do-it-yourself kit. He realizes years later that his father would have been broken hearted had he ever produced an undeniably perfect pair. One has the same feeling about Metcalf's response to the imperfect world. He keeps his teeth sharp because he enjoys the task of chewing it out. Since there is little chance of the world achieving perfection immediately we can look forward to many years of Metcalf's brilliant observations of particular life. If you like a wide range of humour, devastatingly accurate character portrayal, consistently high quality, and a delightfully skilled handling of language you should buy Metcalf's collection of stories right away.