“I was also quite taken by Aaron Peck’s The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and not only because I read it while on a road trip through BC and Alberta, some geographic details of which make their way into the novel. Anyone who works Revelstoke and the Enchanted Forest — kitsch BC highlights — into a precocious Künstlerroman has my vote. Framed as a discovered manuscript — found on Toronto Island, no less — The Bewilderments is part Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and part Keroauc (Subterraneans) road trip. Like Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, the found novel recreates an artistic bohemia: in this case, Vancouver (from Boundary Road to the Coliseum-esque library) and Toronto (from the Allen Gardens to Kensington Market). But it’s the recent past that is on display here, and thus Peck (or is it Willis), turns in this evocative description of Moshe Safdie’s controversial Vancouver public library…[excerpt from the novel, describing Central VPL]…As the passage indicates, Peck is adept in weaving the philosophical into the everyday. Like the photo-conceptualist artists he name-checks, he uses reality as a profound archive.”
Clint Burnham. “First Fiction.” University of Toronto Quarterly. Vol. 79. No. 1, Winter 2010. p.201-202.
