Hugh Hood: Montreal, The New Age & a Life in Canadian Fiction

Born on April 30, 1928, Hugh Hood became one of the most ambitious and intellectually distinctive figures in modern Canadian literature. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist, teacher, and critic, Hood spent decades trying to capture the texture of Canadian life in fiction, particularly the worlds of Toronto, Montreal, Ontario cottage country, universities, politics, art, religion, and the ordinary middle-class communities through which people build their lives.

His most extraordinary undertaking was The New Age / Le nouveau siècle, a twelve-volume sequence of novels published between 1975 and 2000. Following the life of Matthew Goderich across decades of Canadian history, the cycle attempted something rarely undertaken in Canadian fiction: an enormous interconnected portrait of a country changing through the twentieth century and beyond. Yet Hood was equally important as a short-story writer, beginning with Flying a Red Kite in 1962 and continuing through a series of collections that established him as a remarkably attentive observer of everyday experience.

What makes Hood particularly interesting is the way he joined apparently different worlds. He could write about hockey, buses, politics, family life, shopping, painting, religion, suburban streets, and Canadian Tire while insisting that ordinary reality contained spiritual significance. His fiction was rarely mystical in an obvious sense. Instead, he tried to show how meaning might already be present in the everyday world if people learned to look closely enough.

🏙️ Growing Up in Toronto

Hugh John Blagdon Hood was born in Toronto on April 30, 1928. His father was anglophone and came from Nova Scotia, while his mother was French Canadian, giving Hood a personal connection to the two linguistic cultures that would later become especially important during his long life in Montreal.

He grew up within a strongly Catholic environment and attended Catholic schools before entering St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Religion would remain central to his intellectual life and fiction, although Hood rarely approached faith simply as a subject for explicitly religious stories. Instead, his Catholic worldview became part of the structure through which he understood human experience, history, morality, art, and the possibility of grace within ordinary life.

Toronto itself also remained important to him. Although Montreal eventually became the city most closely associated with his mature career, memories of Toronto and Ontario repeatedly entered his fiction, particularly in the early volumes of The New Age. Hood’s work often treats geography as something inseparable from memory. Streets, neighborhoods, houses, parks, highways, and lake country become places in which personal history and national history overlap.

🎓 An Academic Education

Hood pursued literature seriously at the University of Toronto, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1950, his master’s degree in 1952, and his doctorate in English in 1955. His scholarly education gave him an unusually broad literary background, and later critics frequently commented on the intellectual density of his fiction.

He knew the literary tradition extremely well, but that knowledge did not lead him toward fiction concerned only with books and ideas. Hood was fascinated by ordinary surfaces: advertisements, household objects, public transportation, popular music, sporting events, clothing, commercial products, television, and the visual appearance of Canadian cities.

The combination became one of his defining characteristics. Hood could think about a grocery store or an automobile with the same seriousness another writer might reserve for mythology. To him, culture existed everywhere. High art and ordinary commercial life belonged to the same lived world and could illuminate one another.

🇺🇸 Teaching in Connecticut

After completing his doctorate, Hood entered university teaching. He spent several years at St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut, before returning permanently to Canada.

The late 1950s were also the period in which he began producing short fiction seriously. Hood later described the beginning of his writing career as comparatively instinctive. He knew literary criticism and theory well from his academic training, but when he began writing stories he did not initially set out to belong to a particular movement or school.

Instead, he wrote about recognizable people in recognizable circumstances while allowing unexpected emotional, moral, and spiritual dimensions to emerge from apparently ordinary situations.

This approach would eventually become what Hood called super-realism, his own way of describing fiction that paid meticulous attention to physical reality while suggesting that reality contained more than could be explained through material surfaces alone.

🍁 Returning to Canada

In 1961, Hood joined the Université de Montréal, where he would teach English literature for more than three decades.

The appointment placed an English-language writer inside one of Quebec’s major French-language universities at precisely the moment when Quebec society was undergoing enormous transformation.

The Quiet Revolution, changing relationships between French- and English-speaking Canadians, debates about nationalism and federalism, the rise of Quebec separatism, and Montreal’s cultural transformation all unfolded during Hood’s decades in the city.

Montreal became one of his great subjects.

Rather than viewing the city primarily through political abstractions, Hood observed streets, neighborhoods, buses, parks, businesses, restaurants, churches, and the small encounters that reveal how people actually inhabit an urban environment.

🪁 Flying a Red Kite

Hood’s first major short-story collection, Flying a Red Kite, appeared in 1962 and immediately established many of the qualities that would characterize his work.

The title story follows a father and daughter attempting to fly a kite on Montreal’s Mount Royal. The situation is modest, almost deliberately so. There is no enormous adventure and no dramatic historical event.

Yet the ordinary activity gradually acquires emotional and symbolic depth.

This is quintessential Hood.

A father trying to launch a child’s kite can become a story about frustration, tenderness, inadequacy, persistence, and grace. The physical act matters because the emotional meaning grows directly from it rather than being imposed from outside.

Hood’s gift was finding significance without abandoning the ordinary world that produced it.

🌄 Montreal as a Literary Landscape

Hood continued exploring Montreal in Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life, published in 1967.

The title refers to Mount Royal, the geographical landmark around which much of Montreal’s urban life is organized. Hood structures the book as a movement through the city, turning geography into a way of discovering different communities and social worlds.

Montreal offered him an ideal literary environment because it resisted simplification.

French and English cultures intersected.

Immigrant communities reshaped neighborhoods.

Catholic traditions confronted rapid secularization.

Political tensions intensified.

Affluent districts existed near working-class streets.

Modern architecture appeared beside older churches and stone buildings.

Hood could walk through these different worlds without pretending they formed one perfectly unified culture.

His fiction often finds meaning in precisely that coexistence.

📚 The Montreal Story Tellers

During the early 1970s, Hood became part of an influential group known as the Montreal Story Tellers.

The group included Hood, John Metcalf, Clark Blaise, Raymond Fraser, and Ray Smith. Together they promoted the public performance of short fiction, reading stories before audiences in schools, colleges, universities, and other venues.

At a time when poetry readings were already familiar literary events, public performances of prose fiction were less common. The Montreal Story Tellers helped demonstrate that short stories could work effectively when spoken aloud before an audience.

The group also reflected an unusually productive period in English-language Montreal writing.

These writers had very different voices and approaches, but their interactions contributed to a growing confidence within Canadian fiction during the 1960s and 1970s. Canadian writers were increasingly publishing stories unmistakably rooted in Canadian cities and experiences rather than treating Canada as merely a peripheral setting for literature modeled elsewhere.

🎨 White Figure, White Ground

Hood’s first published novel, White Figure, White Ground, appeared in 1964.

Art would become one of the recurring subjects of his career.

Hood was deeply interested in painting, visual perception, aesthetics, and the relationship between artistic representation and the visible world. He often wrote about painters and artworks because they offered another way of exploring one of his central concerns: how do people interpret what they see?

Two people can look at the same landscape and understand it differently.

A painter chooses what to emphasize.

A novelist does the same.

Every artistic representation is therefore both an observation and an interpretation.

Hood’s fascination with visual art eventually became increasingly important within The New Age, where paintings, museums, architecture, and artistic traditions continually intersect with Canadian history.

📸 The Camera Always Lies

The title of Hood’s 1967 novel The Camera Always Lies neatly captures another recurring concern.

A photograph seems objective.

The camera records what was physically present.

Yet the photographer chooses where to stand, what to include, when to release the shutter, and what remains outside the frame.

Reality has already been arranged before the viewer encounters it.

For Hood, fiction operates similarly.

A novelist cannot reproduce the world completely.

The writer selects.

A scene begins somewhere and ends somewhere else.

Certain details become important while countless others disappear.

The storyteller therefore creates meaning not by inventing everything but by choosing how reality will be framed.

This concern with representation would continue across Hood’s novels, stories, essays, and art criticism.

🏒 Canada in the Everyday

Hood was deeply interested in what made Canadian life specifically Canadian.

He did not always look for answers in spectacular national symbols.

Instead, Canada appears through ordinary objects, habits, institutions, sports, public spaces, political conversations, consumer culture, and the way people speak to one another.

Hockey naturally belonged to that world.

Hood wrote Strength Down Centre: The Jean Béliveau Story in 1970, focusing on one of the great stars of the Montreal Canadiens. He later collaborated with artist Seymour Segal on Scoring: The Art of Hockey, bringing sport and visual art together.

These projects were not distractions from his supposedly more serious literary work.

They belonged to the same imaginative project.

If a writer wanted to understand Canada, hockey mattered.

So did highways.

Department stores.

Election campaigns.

Television.

Churches.

Cottages.

Advertisements.

And the countless other things through which people experience national life without necessarily thinking of themselves as participating in history.

🍎 Grace in Ordinary Things

Religious belief remained one of the foundations of Hood’s fiction.

Yet he generally avoided writing stories in which religion appeared only through priests, churches, or explicit theological discussions.

Instead, he was fascinated by the possibility that grace might be present within ordinary material experience.

A family outing.

A relationship repaired.

A moment of unexpected generosity.

A work of art.

A landscape.

A small act performed correctly and lovingly.

Such moments could reveal something larger than themselves.

This outlook explains why Hood’s realism is often accompanied by symbolism without ceasing to feel realistic. Physical objects remain completely themselves while simultaneously suggesting another level of meaning.

The kite is still a kite.

But it can become more than a kite.

📖 A Game of Touch

By the time Hood published A Game of Touch in 1970, his ambitions as a novelist were expanding.

The book reflects his growing interest in constructing fiction that could encompass social institutions, politics, personal relationships, and intellectual life rather than concentrating on one isolated protagonist.

Hood increasingly wanted to write fiction large enough to contain the world he saw around him.

That desire would eventually lead toward the enormous project that occupied the final quarter-century of his life.

He wanted nothing less than to create a sustained fictional chronicle of modern Canada.

🌎 Conceiving The New Age

During the late 1960s, Hood began imagining an interconnected sequence of novels large enough to follow Canadian life across generations.

He was influenced particularly by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, works in which individual lives unfold against enormous social and historical backgrounds.

Hood believed Canada deserved a comparable literary undertaking.

He initially conceived the project during the period surrounding Canada’s 1967 centennial, when national identity, history, and cultural achievement were receiving unusual public attention.

The result became The New Age / Le nouveau siècle, a twelve-volume roman-fleuve, or novel sequence, that would occupy Hood from the 1970s until the end of his life.

It was the largest undertaking of his career.

🌳 The Swing in the Garden

The series began in 1975 with The Swing in the Garden.

Its central character, Matthew Goderich, looks back upon his childhood in Toronto and Ontario during the 1930s.

Memory immediately becomes important.

The novel is not simply concerned with what happened.

It is concerned with how the past changes when viewed from later life.

Childhood scenes acquire meanings unavailable to the child who originally experienced them. Political events that seemed distant later become historically significant. Family relationships reveal patterns that were invisible at the time.

The garden of the title also carries symbolic weight.

For Hood, gardens inevitably suggested ideas of innocence, loss, time, and Eden.

Yet the garden remains an ordinary Canadian garden.

That combination of literal place and symbolic resonance is characteristic of his work.

🏛️ Building a Canadian Epic

The later volumes of The New Age steadily expanded the scope of Matthew Goderich’s world.

A New Athens, Reservoir Ravine, Black and White Keys, The Scenic Art, The Motor Boys in Ottawa, Tony’s Book, Property and Value, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, Dead Men’s Watches, Great Realizations, and finally Near Water carried the sequence across decades of personal and national history.

Politics enters the story.

So do universities, cultural institutions, business, marriage, art, popular music, technological change, and the shifting identities of Canadian cities.

The books follow individuals while simultaneously attempting to document an entire society.

That scale made The New Age unusually demanding for both writer and reader.

Hood was attempting to create not merely twelve related novels but a single immense structure in which later events continually changed the meaning of earlier ones.

🇨🇦 Canada as the Main Character

Matthew Goderich may be the central figure of The New Age, but the deeper subject of the sequence is Canada itself.

Hood wanted to capture the country changing across the twentieth century.

Canada moved from the Depression through World War II, postwar prosperity, urban expansion, political conflict, cultural nationalism, technological transformation, and the uncertain approach of a new century.

The sequence also reflects the growing confidence of Canadian culture.

When Hood began publishing fiction, Canadian writers were still frequently measured against British or American models.

By the time he completed The New Age, Canadian literature had developed an enormous international reputation through writers such as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler, and many others.

Hood’s great project belongs to that transformation.

🎼 Black and White Keys

Music became especially important in Black and White Keys, the fourth volume of the cycle.

The title suggests the piano but also introduces Hood’s fascination with patterns, oppositions, and the possibility of harmony emerging from difference.

Music offered another model for the architecture of fiction.

Themes can appear.

Disappear.

Return in altered form.

Different voices can coexist.

A later passage can transform the reader’s understanding of something heard much earlier.

Hood used similar techniques across The New Age.

Characters, images, ideas, locations, and historical events return across volumes, creating patterns that cannot be understood completely from any one novel.

The sequence asks readers to remember.

🚗 The Motor Boys in Ottawa

The sixth volume, The Motor Boys in Ottawa, published in 1986, brought the sequence more directly into Canadian political life.

Ottawa becomes another Hood landscape in which national institutions intersect with individual ambitions and personal histories.

Politics interested Hood not simply as ideology but as lived experience.

Governments are composed of people.

Policies emerge from meetings.

National decisions eventually affect houses, jobs, families, roads, schools, and communities.

The abstraction called Canada is continually being constructed through practical decisions made by individuals who themselves possess hopes, weaknesses, loyalties, and contradictions.

Hood’s fiction attempts to hold both scales in view.

The nation matters.

So does the person sitting at the table.

🖼️ Art and the Search for Meaning

Art runs throughout Hood’s work because it provides one of his richest metaphors for human understanding.

A painting takes the visible world and reorganizes it.

A novel does the same with time.

Both forms ask viewers or readers to discover relationships among details.

Hood was therefore intensely interested in artists, museums, art history, and aesthetic theory.

His novella Five New Facts About Giorgione takes its title from the mysterious Renaissance painter Giorgione, whose biography and body of work contain numerous uncertainties.

The attraction is easy to understand.

Art survives.

The artist partially disappears.

Facts remain incomplete.

Viewers must reconstruct meaning from fragments.

That is not far from what Hood believed readers do with life itself.

✝️ A Catholic Writer in a Secular Age

Hood once described himself as thoroughly Catholic, and his faith remained one of the distinguishing elements of his work during a period when explicit religious commitment became increasingly uncommon within mainstream literary culture.

Yet calling Hood a Catholic writer can be misleading if it suggests that his fiction merely illustrates doctrine.

His larger concern was how spiritual meaning might exist within the material world.

Catholic sacramental thinking offered him a way of understanding visible things as potentially carrying invisible significance.

Bread remains bread.

Water remains water.

A landscape remains physical geography.

But physical reality can also become a sign.

That idea lies behind much of Hood’s fascination with everyday objects.

The world does not need to disappear in order for spiritual meaning to emerge.

Meaning may already be inside it.

📝 “Super-Realism”

Hood eventually used the term super-realism to describe his approach to fiction.

He did not mean surrealism.

His characters generally inhabit recognizable places and ordinary circumstances.

The “super” exists because the visible world is not the entire world.

Material reality contains moral, symbolic, and spiritual dimensions.

A realistic description of a street can therefore be both documentary and symbolic.

The important thing is not to abandon the street.

Hood distrusted forms of abstraction that separated ideas from lived experience.

He wanted thought anchored in concrete detail.

People wear particular clothes.

They travel on particular buses.

They buy particular products.

They live on named streets.

History occurs through actual bodies occupying physical places.

That attention gives his fiction something approaching an archival quality.

🚶 Montreal on Foot

Hood’s Montreal fiction is particularly valuable because he was a writer who noticed how cities feel at street level.

Walking becomes a form of knowledge.

A pedestrian notices storefronts, hills, traffic, architectural transitions, languages, neighborhoods, public transportation, weather, and the changing social character of streets.

Montreal is especially suited to this approach because its geography is so distinctive.

Mount Royal organizes the city visually.

Neighborhoods spread around it.

Language changes from street to street.

Architecture reveals different historical periods.

Hood’s fiction maps these layers not through tourist landmarks alone but through everyday movement.

The city becomes readable.

🤝 The Literary Community

Hood was not an isolated writer.

His long career placed him within an extensive network of Canadian authors, editors, critics, teachers, and publishers.

His friendships and associations with writers such as John Metcalf and Clark Blaise helped strengthen the culture surrounding Canadian short fiction during an important period of literary growth.

Teaching reinforced this public role.

For more than thirty years at the Université de Montréal, Hood worked with generations of students while continuing to produce fiction, criticism, and essays.

The combination of academic and creative life suited him.

He possessed an enormous appetite for ideas but remained equally committed to storytelling.

The scholar and storyteller were never entirely separate.

🏅 Recognition

Hood received numerous honors during his career and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988.

Yet his literary reputation has always occupied an unusual position.

Critics who admire Hood often describe him as one of the most intellectually ambitious and technically accomplished Canadian fiction writers of his generation.

At the same time, he never developed the enormous international readership achieved by some Canadian contemporaries.

Part of the reason may lie in the very qualities that make his work distinctive.

Hood asks readers to notice complicated patterns.

His religious symbolism can be demanding.

The New Age requires commitment across twelve volumes.

His fiction assumes that politics, theology, painting, popular culture, history, and daily life can all belong inside the same literary structure.

He did not make things easy.

📘 Completing The New Age

The most remarkable fact about The New Age may simply be that Hood finished it.

Long literary sequences are easy to imagine and extraordinarily difficult to complete.

Writers age.

Publishers change.

Audiences change.

Interests shift.

Health declines.

Twenty-five years passed between The Swing in the Garden in 1975 and Near Water in 2000.

Hood continued.

The final volume was published in the year of his death, bringing Matthew Goderich’s immense fictional journey to its conclusion.

What had begun as a daring idea inspired partly by Proust and Anthony Powell became a uniquely Canadian structure of its own.

💧 Near Water

Near Water, the twelfth and final volume of The New Age, appeared in 2000.

The novel brings an aging Matthew Goderich toward the end of the life readers have followed across the sequence.

Age changes the meaning of everything that came before.

Events once experienced as immediate become memories.

Friends disappear.

Relationships accumulate history.

The body becomes less dependable.

The future narrows.

Yet memory expands backward.

For a sequence obsessed with the relationship between past and present, this is an appropriate conclusion.

The individual life may end, but the patterns connecting one moment with another remain available to the imagination.

Hood had spent a quarter-century constructing those patterns.

🕯️ Hugh Hood’s Death

Hugh Hood died in Montreal on August 1, 2000, at the age of 72.

By then he had written 32 books across fiction and nonfiction and had spent more than forty years teaching.

His death came only months after the publication of Near Water, meaning the enormous project that had occupied much of his mature life reached completion just before the end of his own.

There is an unusual symmetry in that timing.

Hood spent decades writing about time, memory, pattern, completion, and the possibility that individual experiences form parts of structures people understand only much later.

His own career eventually acquired exactly that shape.

The early stories.

The Montreal books.

The essays.

The novels.

The art writing.

The hockey books.

The twelve-volume sequence.

Seen separately, they can look extraordinarily diverse.

Seen together, they reveal a writer pursuing many versions of the same question.

How do the pieces fit?

🍁 Why Hugh Hood Matters

Hugh Hood matters because he believed ordinary Canadian life was large enough to deserve extraordinary literary ambition.

He did not need to send his characters to imaginary kingdoms or distant historical periods to discover complexity.

Toronto was enough.

Montreal was enough.

Ottawa was enough.

A cottage was enough.

A hockey rink was enough.

A city bus was enough.

A family trying to fly a kite was enough.

Everything depended upon how closely the writer looked.

This faith in the significance of ordinary experience gave Hood an unusually generous literary vision.

The world is full of details.

Those details form patterns.

The patterns may contain meaning.

The writer’s responsibility is to pay attention long enough to reveal them.

📚 Beyond The New Age

Although The New Age dominates discussions of Hood’s later career, his short stories may remain the most accessible introduction to his work.

Collections such as Flying a Red Kite, The Fruit Man, the Meat Man, and the Manager, Dark Glasses, None Genuine Without This Signature, August Nights, A Short Walk in the Rain, The Isolation Booth, and You’ll Catch Your Death demonstrate his range across several decades.

The stories frequently begin with something modest.

A trip.

A conversation.

A domestic inconvenience.

An encounter in a city.

Gradually another dimension becomes visible.

The ordinary event begins carrying moral or spiritual weight without ceasing to be ordinary.

At his best, Hood makes that transformation seem completely natural.

🪁 The Kite Still Flies

The image of the red kite from Hood’s first collection remains an especially appropriate symbol for his writing.

The kite is tied to the ground.

It rises into the sky.

Both conditions are necessary.

Without the earth, the kite has no one holding it.

Without the sky, it cannot fly.

Hood’s fiction works in much the same way.

It remains tethered to material reality while continually reaching toward something beyond it.

The streets must be accurately observed.

The people must feel real.

The bus has to travel an actual route.

The hockey game must resemble hockey.

Only then can another level of meaning emerge.

The spiritual does not replace reality.

It rises from it.

🎂 Hugh Hood’s Literary Legacy

Born on April 30, 1928, Hugh Hood devoted his career to the extraordinary possibility that an entire culture might be understood through careful attention to ordinary life. He wrote about Toronto childhoods, Montreal streets, politics, painting, religion, hockey, universities, families, commercial culture, technology, aging, and the shifting idea of Canada itself.

His short stories established him as a master of concentrated observation, while The New Age / Le nouveau siècle pushed in the opposite direction, expanding across twelve novels and twenty-five years of publication in an attempt to create a vast fictional chronicle of modern Canadian experience.

Few writers would have attempted something so large.

Fewer still would have finished it.

Yet scale alone is not Hood’s real legacy. His most important idea may be much simpler. The world around us is already full of meaning, but most of the time we move too quickly to notice it.

A street can contain history.

A painting can contain an argument about perception.

A family can contain a nation’s changing values.

A child’s kite can contain failure, hope, love, and grace.

Hugh Hood spent his life looking for those connections.

His fiction invites readers to do the same.

“Nothing ever tasted any better than a cold beer on a beautiful afternoon with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.”
-Hugh Hood

🔗 Related Articles

Alice Munro: The Nobel Prize-Winning Master of the Short Story