One of the most inventive and affecting reimaginings of the hero’s journey in recent fiction ... The book reads quickly, but not lightly; its brevity belies the density of ideas packed into each section ... Evokes the grandeur of Greek and Roman epics ... Strange and funny and unsettling, pulsing with both hope and dread.
Brilliant ... Vivid ... In choosing the title for Canon, Lewis is both nodding to the Western texts that serve as the novel’s foundation, and offering an audacious mission statement: that something original can indeed be made from used parts. It can also be funny, chaotic, warm, and impossible to put down.
Canon is a novel that takes some concepts of Judeo-Christian religion seriously, then explores those concepts in a parodic fashion ... The overall work is a grand blend, although sometimes distractingly flippant, and the individual reader may wish for more or less emphasis on different aspects of the novel ... I read here a sort of prophecy: that a form of literature is coming—if it has not already arrived—of ironic, all-too-human, quite neurotic protagonists wrestling with godlike and magical forces. Canon may very well be one of the flags of this ship, coming to port.
Unfolding in short chapters and divided into multiple books, the story is told by a humorous, omniscient narrator who often addresses the reader directly. Turning the hero’s quest on its head, Lewis’ unique story features intriguing characters and a worthy examination of purpose and heroism.
Highly meta ... Lewis is in line with the postmodern satirists of the 1960s and ’70s—John Barth, Robert Coover, William H. Gass—but with a new sensitivity about gender and sexuality, and a wit sharpened by the social media age. Lewis is questioning narrative, but their story is all cool assurance ... A brash, informed, and funny anti-epic.
