The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit the word “quicksilvered,” a neologism used to describe the motion of a snake. Such are the ludicrous effects of Creative Writing: we laugh and stop reading.