cover image Resident Alien

Resident Alien

Clark Blaise. Penguin Books, $5.95 (184pp) ISBN 978-0-14-008234-0

In this seminal ""journey into my obsessions with self and place,'' Blaise (Lusts, etc.t effectively presents his fictional Porter/Carrier stories between two autobiographical fragments. In the process he reshapes his tumultuous childhood and his development as a writer into the fabric of fiction and explores the powerful, symbiotic relationship between reality and the inventive imagination. (``Who or what to believe? . . . As I reach back into these events of 30 or more years ago, I'm aware that truth is simply a matter of framing and reframing.'') The son of a feuding FrancoAnglo-Canadian couple who were constantly on the move in the U.S. and Canada, the author, a self-described ``Peeping Tom of the Interstates and the Blue Highways'' who ``achieved my own identity . . . through the places I absorbed,'' infuses his rich, supple prose with the voice of ``unhousement.''(September)