Each new book by Michael Ondaatje seems wholly different from those that preceded it, and wholly the same. [Running in the Family] is a family reminiscence…. A far cry, I thought when I began it, from a cycle of poems about Billy the Kid, or a prose poem on the New Orleans jazz scene and cornetist Buddy Bolden. Not so far a cry, it turns out.

But how does it seem different? First, it has the flavour of autobiography. Of course the narrative "I" is always present in Ondaatje's work. The little kid in the cowboy clothes at the end of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is the author. And the narrator of Coming Through Slaughter enters the work at various points with a similar kind of identification: "When [Buddy Bolden] went mad he was the same age as I am now." But in Running in the Family the identification appears to be more direct. The characters in this book are the author's real family: his father, Mervyn, his grandmother, Lalla, and the rest. Autobiography, in other words, is not simply a motif here, but a part of the narrative surface as well.

Different but the same, for the characters keep outgrowing the confines of fact. Thus the narrator (who is usually "I" but sometimes "he") and the author may not be any more or less strictly interchangeable than elsewhere in Ondaatje's work…. Like Alice Munro, Ondaatje takes what look like very personal risks in his fiction. It is always hard to know where the line is drawn. Maybe that's part of the point. Ondaatje is continually slipping through the net of categories: documentary slides into fantasy, prose into poetry, and history, personal and otherwise, into myth.

There is, I think, a good deal more comedy here than in previous books. That's one kind of difference. But the similarity to the other works is this: that the comedy is seldom more than a step away from darkness. Ondaatje tosses the coin of remembrance into the air, and its two sides—laughter and tears—alternately catch the light as it falls. (p. 19)

Photography is an important metaphor throughout Ondaatje's work. Billy the Kid opens with an empty, four-inch square, and under it the words, "I send you a photograph of Billy …" And in Coming Through Slaughter: "There is only one photograph that exists of Bolden and his band. This is what you see." Running in the Family includes some wonderfully evocative pictures that are more than simply illustrations of the text. Like the prose, they have the surface of documentary but the presence of magic. (pp. 19-20)

In some ways, in fact, Running in the Family is like a box of snapshots and tapes. From the frozen, still images, and the fragmentary stories told in familiar voices, emerges a complex and many-sided family portrait. There are some outstanding individual shots here, of Lalla and of Mervyn especially, but the whole pyramid of family is revealed by the time the box has been emptied.

What else is familiar? There are thematic echoes, and repeated images: as elsewhere, dipsomania plays an important part in this book. There is Ondaatje's astonishing sensitivity to language, the perfectly timed shifts of tense, the transformation of sound into meaning.

Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled.

Like a gymnast, Michael Ondaatje does difficult things with such grace that they look easy. (p. 20)