A Certain Difficulty of Being provides an English-speaking audience with an account of some of the most interesting narrative problems which mark the development of the Quebec novel. Anthony Purdy uses the tools of contemporary narratology to go beyond the more formal studies of the sixties and seventies. Why, he asks, are the narrators of the novels he studies telling the stories they tell, and why do they experience such difficulty in doing so ?

In the Preface to A Certain Difficulty of Being Purdy examines the kinds of discourse that deal with the novel in some nineteenth-century Quebec novel prefaces, thereby revealing a theme of generic denegation in the sense of "This is not a novel." Purdy goes on to explore the transition from epic to novel in Félix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maître-draveur; the contradictions stemming from the use of a first-person, present-tense narrative in André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; the problem of narrativity and history as it is raised in Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode; and the way in which narrative voice functions in Anne Hébert's Kamouraska. He also touches on the current debate concerning the boundaries between modernism and post-modernism.

Purdy does not offer an all-embracing system to explain the development of narrative in the Quebec novel, but leads us to an understanding of how these particular novels function, each in its own socio-historical context, and how they achieve or fail to achieve what they set out to do. The thread that runs through the different chapters is a pragmatic concern with Quebec's historical "difficulty of being" as it informs in varying ways the narrative projects of the novels in question.