Barclay Family Theatre, The

In The Barclay Family Theatre, his second collection of short stories, Jack Hodgins extends his earlier themes. There are still the unforgettable and often eccentric characters of Vancouver Island: the young boy caught between the ambitions of his mother who wants him to become a concert pianist and his father who wants him to follow in his steps as a logger; the youthful professor who falls in love with a Russian translator and whose mother travels across the country to rescue him from the Soviet clutches; the larger-than-life Number OneO real estate agent who believes he is offering all those who come to Vancouver Island (usually with broken dreams) a small piece of paradise. There is also a writer (somewhat resembling Jack himself), who travels to Ireland and struggles to resist a famous Irish woman writer who offers him a new sense of place. Through it all, Jack's characters believe they live in a world that has order, but they are continually brought face to face with the fact that they are in an unstructured reality which either overturns their efforts, leaving them fragmented, or which forces them to look inward to make an order. In the end, Hodgins suggests that while the world is unknowable there are personal tactics available to offer provisional ordering principles.