
Leon Rooke w/ Umberto Eco & Adrienne Clarkson. Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto. 1997.
~ Rosemary Sullivan
cited in Robert Fulford’s article “Red-Hot Summer Reading”, Weekend Post
He is the high-priest of maximalist panache, the standard-bearer for a hyper-rhetoric that is at once strange, eccentric, and beautiful.
~ Douglas Glover
White Gloves of the Doorman: The Works of Leon Rooke
Leon Rooke’s ouevre is deeply rich in timbre, wit, and invention. His characterization ventures the forbidden, the crazy-edged, the malevolent, the good, and the more complicated in-between. The compelling sound of Rooke’s voice takes you on that dangerous ride through the fragility of reality and the brittleness of individual life.
~ Dionne Brand
White Gloves of the Doorman: The Works of Leon Rooke

Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Muffins launch. 1996.
~ Russel Banks
White Gloves of the Doorman: The Works of Leon Rooke
O’Hagan also generously embeds, often in footnotes, his novel’s literary predecesors Cervantes, Orwell, Colette and Tolstoy who employed non-human narators. He left out, however, a more recent addition to the canon by the Canadian novelist Leon Rooke. Better to go for a walk with Shakespeare’s Dog than Marilyn’s, if you are wanting canine company.
~ Mark Kamine
Times Literary Supplement, May 14, 2010
Really talking. That’s one of the things that Leon Rooke, here and in all his work, does best: his writing talks. It has a voice that’s stronger and sharper and more ingratiating to the human ear than any writer working in English that I know. And in The Fall of Gravity he’s at the top of his form. Not since J. D. Salinger has a writer created a more convincing voice for a precocious adolescent. Rooke’s narrator seems to float into each character’s skull, then instantly emerge speaking in the character’s voice instead of his own, before floating on to the next skull, where he does the same thing. It’s not puppetry or mimicry. It’s a kind of aural conjuring that nearly dislocates the reader, causing us to ask, Who’s telling this story, anyhow?
Well, the truth is, Leon Rooke is telling this story, and he’s large enough, skilled and gifted enough, and has a sufficiently generous heart to embody all his characters, male and female, young and old, and even to embody his narrator, that artifice, the stick-figure that most novelists either forget is as much a character as any other or, if aware of his presence, turn him into a self-admiring pomposity. By contrast, Rooke’s narrator is the reader’s friend and confidant, a fellow one can trust, even if he sometimes appears not to know where his story is going or what it’s really about. Not to worry, friend. With this novel, from start to finish, you the reader are in the best possible company and the safest possible hands.
~ Russell Banks
Foreword to the French Translation of The Fall of Gravity (Excerpt)

Leon Rooke with Brother Earl & novelist John Ehle, North Carolina Literature Award, North Carolina. 1990.
Thank you Leon Rooke, for over thirty years of fiction. Thank you for your cool eye, and your very courageous heart.
~ Anne Michaels
The Incomparable Experience of Hearing Leon Rooke
Leon’s body of work, his teaching, and his many performances over the years have helped to give the short story in Canada a new and different emphasis. In 1982 in Kicking Against the Pricks I wrote about the short story in Canada:
“Where twenty years ago Canadian stories stressed content — what a story was about — the main emphasis now is on the story as verbal and rhetorical performance. Our best writers are concerned with the story as thing to be experienced rather than as thing to be understood.”
Thing to be understood implies that the reader is outside the story and regarding it intellectually. Thing to be experienced implies that the reader is inside the story and reacting to it emotionally. Leon Rooke has been one of those who effected the verbal and rhetorical revolution.
~ John Metcalf
This Here Jasper Is Gittin Ready to Talk (Excerpt)
Like Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Rooke takes the enormous risk of writing about subjects that can easily become kitsch: very young, very vulnerable children in situations where all the parental love and tenderness in the world cannot protect them from atrocious harm, and where arch-abusive adults are far more likely to figure than guardian angels. I am thinking here of the murdered child in Bend Sinister and of the narrator’s young son in Speak Memory, both of them caught up in the cross currents of terrorism and war, menaced by “fatherly” dictators named Krug and Hitler. Where Nabokov uses complexly coded, high-cultural references and intricately plotted ironies to keep his representations of children from crossing the borders between poignancy and sentimentality, Rooke achieves the same effect by employing elements of the Southern Gothic, the domestic-grotesque, and the wildly erratic.
~ Janice Kulyk Keefer
Breaking the Reader’s Heart: Meaning in Leon Rooke’s “The Heart Must from Its Breaking” (Excerpt)
When you think of Leon Rooke at work, it is best to think of him as a performance artist. Certainly the notion is inescapable if you see him give a public reading, which is less a reading than a dramatization. No hiding behind the podium, head down, for Rooke. No — he is all across the platform, eating up the space, taller than tall in his high-heeled boots, white hair flying, a country preacher on the prowl for souls. He means that, too — which may come as something of a surprise.
But the performance begins at the keyboard, noodling about with phrases and themes — like a jazz pianist, except that Rooke’s keyboard is the word processor. The left hand carries the tradition while the right hand plays the always surprising and frequently stunning variations on common ideas or casual phrases…
Rooke’s particular success is with his knowledge and use of the language of human speech. And it is not merely that he has as we so often blithely say — a good ear. It is much more than that. In common with all good prose writing, his paragraphs are full of pattern, rhythm, and surprise; but in Rooke’s case these virtues are caught in the “language really used by men” and woman and children.
I cannot imagine better writing, anywhere… It is the equal of Flannery O’Connor’s best work, and it is Rooke’s bad luck to share with O’Connor a common background and similar concerns, because she has had the more powerful literary establishment asserting and demonstrating her virtues. She is accorded the American reputation.
But Rooke at his best is her equal, and he’s still writing. Let’s not forget either of those facts.
~ Kent Thompson
The Performing Artist (Excerpts)