The Canadian author W. P. Kinsella has published two novels and over one hundred short stories, anecdotes, and brief “surreal” sketches (which he calls Brautigans after the late American humorist) since he first began to publish fiction in the mid-1970s.¹ Kinsella revitalizes old images and situations (the joy of playing together, the chill of isolation), blends romantic fantasy with baseball humor, and brings people out of the cold or off the Indian Reserve and into the pages of humorous books.

Humor is the basic ingredient in Kinsella's books. From the earliest collections of Indian stories, through the experimental forms of his non-Indian narratives and his celebrated first novel, Shoeless Joe (1982), to his most recent Indian stories and second baseball novel, Kinsella has depicted life's amusing incongruities.² The humor of Kinsella's narratives derives from both plot and character, which are interdependent but amenable to separate discussion.

First, with respect to plot (in Kinsella's case: comic complications of action), this humor includes the pratfalls of farce, the slight tribulations of love affairs and business dealings, the more profoundly comic relationships that often develop between individuals or groups and the institutions (religious, legal, educational, and the commercial “media”) which are supposed to support, not disrupt, human life and harmony; and there are also the special cases of situational comedy, involving various perspectives (physical, metaphysical, supernatural), where dislocations of space and time transform the mechanics of farce into fantasy. At its farthest remove from realism, a Kinsellan plot posits a world in which degrees of anarchy are undoubtedly justified and unquestionably funny. This is a traditional domain of comedy—once called carnevale—whose spirit is inseparable from the fiber of the people.

Second, with respect to characterization in his works, Kinsella's people are most engaging when they strike the chord of our common humanity. Overall, there is little viciousness in their actions and little vitriol in their words. Kinsella's narratives fit the definition of humor as a relatively harmless species of the genre comedy.³

We are drawn toward Kinsella's world because of its essential goodness and gentleness. Despite the risible social commentary, the anticlericalism of a few stories, the political wisecracks in a number of others, Kinsella is not known as a satirist; despite the racial context of much of his work, only a minority of his readers (perhaps they are the perceptive ones?) see him as a racist. Kinsella's humor is inseparable from the freshness and the benign unreality of his world; as one critic writes, in reviewing Kinsella's recent Fencepost Chronicles, he reminds us that “prairie fiction need not follow the rigid strictures of an outdated naturalism.”⁴ Kinsella's characters often say uncommonly funny things because they dwell in a comic world; but their creator does not play elaborate wordgames. Kinsella is not a “witty” writer devoted to verbal ironies and seven (magic number!) types of ambiguities. Like other memorable writers, he gives us the vivid image, the arresting simile, and he has the ability to revive dead language: as when grass is secretly put in place of artificial turf at a ballpark and the old-time fans “raise their heads like ponies, as far away as the parking lot, when the thrill of the grass reaches their nostrils.” W. P. Kinsella is one of those rare storytellers who can turn writing into a mode of magic—so enthralling is his spell. Kinsella is a wit, moreover, in that he can perform his magic in “alternate universes” as adroitly as other contemporary authors...