On a “favorable” review in the Times of London: “[It] began with these chilling words: ‘To speak of a good novel from a Canadian writer sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.’”

“Point of view is the problem that everybody’s been up against since Joyce, if not before. I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.”

The writer and critic Frank Kermode, who died last month at the age of 91, was, for the many colleagues and readers who loved and admired him in America and England, sui generis. Over more than sixty years, in more than fifty books and hundreds…