[In the following excerpt, van Toorn discusses the short pieces anthologized in Wiebe's River of Stone.]

Rudy Wiebe's River of Stone and Louis Dudek's Notebooks make available a selection of “minor” writings by two of Canada's major contemporary literary figures. But while Wiebe's strength in short narrative forms calls into question their “minor” ranking in the hierarchy of genres, Dudek's pompous banality causes us to question only the wisdom of whoever decided to bring these selections from his notebooks into print.

River of Stone takes advantage of, and will add impetus to, the revival of interest in Wiebe's work brought about by the publication of his latest novel, A Discovery of Strangers （1994）. The collection brings together twenty-two fictions and memories published between 1964 and 1994. Some, like “The Naming of Albert Johnson,” “Bear Spirit in a Strange Land,” and “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” have been anthologized before, and are already well known to long-time followers of Wiebe's work. Others, particularly the pieces written in the 1980s and 90s, are less widely known, having first come into print during a period of relative obscurity for Wiebe—the long, apparently dry spell between My Lovely Enemy （1983） and A Discovery of Strangers. My only complaint about River of Stone is that more of Wiebe's later writings, specifically “Dialogue at an Exhibition” and “The Shells of the Ocean,” were not included.

In some of the stories included in this collection we see what looks like （but isn't） a new element in Wiebe's work—a humorous side that has been overshadowed by the serious moral intensity of the “giant fictions” upon which Wiebe's reputation mainly rests. The construction, ranking, and mental overlaying of places is explored in “The Beautiful Sewers of Paris, Alberta,” in which Wiebe recalls a 1950s summer job as a labourer （a “grunt”）, laying down sewer pipes in a prairie town while reading the “massive romance” of Les Misérables.

The entire edifice of my understanding of Wiebe's work threatened for a moment to collapse when I came to his confession in “The Blindman Contradictions: An Interview with Rudy Wiebe” that he was not the son of Russian Mennonite refugees, but in fact the child of an English gentleman farmer who, when the farm failed, opened a store in Falconer, Alberta. （Was this the Canadian counterpart of Australia's Helen Demidenko scandal, I wondered?） But no. A moment's reflection confirmed that Wiebe couldn't be Anglo-Canadian; after all, his face was on the cover of all those numbers of the Mennonite Brethren Herald he edited in the early 1960s. Wiebe's confessional mode in the “Contradictions” enables Wiebe to make two points: first, he satirizes the critical interest in so-called ethnic writing—（“in Western Canada there's much more point to being ethnic than to being English”）; and second, he uses the interview form to suggest that the authentic selves we fictionalize are all the more convincing when discursively performed in genres of truth, such as the interview, which is presumed to offer a transparent window to the author's real self.

Wiebe's trajectory as a writer can be described as a movement from didacticism towards indirection, from overt rhetorical preachiness towards a self-consciously dialogic mode. This dialogic principle is clearly activated by the baffling photograph on the cover of River of Stone: four dark-suited men stand in the foreground; they are surrounded only by prairie grass and sky. Solemn as they are, they look funny because they hold their hats over their faces. Their fingers are interlaced, so presumably these are devout Mennonites praying. But they remain curiously unframed: they float in the open space of the prairie, cut loose from any textual or cultural context. There is no key to the image, no comforting caption to direct understanding. We are forced, or freed—or perhaps trusted enough—to make what we want of this image. …