SINCE DAISY CREEK

by W.O. Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 16, 1985

Colin Dobbs is a middle-aged, divorced Canadian creative-writing professor only now returning to work after quite a mishap. On a bear-hunting expedition to Daisy Creek with an Indian-guide/friend, he kills a grizzly. But that's only after the beast has pretty much mauled Dobbs. A long recovery in a hospital--with extensive plastic surgery to one side of his face--does garner two things that are positive, however: the reappearance of his long-lost, once-hippie daughter Anne, plus a well-distanced, well-jaundiced outlook on the eternally smarmy-comic doings of his fellow faculty members back at the University. What does continue to nettle Dobbs, though, is the return of his bear: stuffed, back from the taxidermist. It isn't his: his was a grizzly, this is a small brown bear--and if he's had to lose half his presentable face to it, at least return to him as a trophy the actual animal that did him dirty. A lawsuit ensues--yet, as with just about everything else in this flogged-on semi-farce, it goes on too long and too inconsequentially, a spell of woolgathering. Dobbs' revived relationship with Anne is prickly but rewarding (if a little arch), but with and to everyone else Dobbs is a tiresome character, self-loving but of no recognizable dimension at all. And Mitchell, a veteran Canadian novelist, won't move away from him for a page, for a paragraph. In other words: you're read it all in dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of other individualist-in-academe novels. And, if you like, you can read it again. Here.

Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1985

ISBN: 0771061137

Page Count: -

Publisher: Beaufort

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION