Claims have been made about its significance, including M&S's own claim in 1957 that this book was a "classic." Although the novel experienced poor initial sales in 1941, its courted ambiguity and classically unreliable narrator make it an object for boundless speculation and argument.
As For Me And My House is popularly thought of (and studied) as a Canadian novel, as it was written by a Canadian author, but there is nothing in the novel that definitively states that either the setting or the characters are Canadian, and "Horizon" could conceivably located in one of the Canadian prairie provinces OR in any number of northern US states such as Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, etc. The 1939-40 dating lends further weight to the idea that "Horizon" is somewhere in the US, as Canada entered WWII in September 1939, which would have placed considerable strain on any Canadian community (and the war and its effects on the community would surely have been noted in any Canadian diary of the time). However, as the US did not enter the war until December 1941, it is quite plausible that an American diary of 1939-40 would have had no mention of WWII and its effects.
Despite this, Paul Denham's 1980 summary of the novel states:
There are some very good reasons why the novel has come to be so important to the Canadian tradition. It is a study of the failed artistic imagination, and of an eroding puritanism; it is also ... a good example of Frye's concept of the garrison mentality, in its exploration of the peculiarities of the Canadian experience of nature and its relation to civilization. It is, then, a powerfully mythical novel in which many of the characteristic themes and attitudes of Canadian literature are sharply focused. Also, the patterns of imagery through which much of the novel's meaning is conveyed are densely and carefully worked... If we approach the novel as a poem, through its imagery, or as a model for the Canadian identity, we are likely to find it a very important work indeed.[2]
