| Lashing into a plate of mussels at a Kensington pub last week, David Adams Richards was full of smiles and anecdotes.
The New Brunswick novelist, now based in Toronto, has every reason to be happy. Nearly 30 years into his fiction career, Adams has truly been discovered. The adulatory reviewers of his last novel, Mercy Among the Children, practically draped him in the weighty mantle of "Canada’s Tolstoy." Richards would not complain about the comparison – he knows his Russian fiction so well that the plot from a Chekhov story tumbles easily into his conversation, between a fishing tale and the one about the kid in his school who believed in Santa until he was 15.
"Oh, we were terrible to him," he recalls with slightly remorseful laughter. "We chased him home and rubbed snow in his ears."
Though the reception of Mercy Among the Children is hard to top, one thing makes Richards even happier now that his new novel, River of the Brokenhearted, has appeared.
"I think reviewers got the idea of humour in this book, which some people found non-existent in Mercy Among the Children," he says. Richards agrees that what he finds comical in his own work or that of authors like Malcolm Lowry and William Faulkner may not leave everyone chuckling. What is more comical, though – when seen in a certain light – than the self-deceptions and compulsions that make us the puppets of envy, vengefulness or alcohol? The deluded certainties that make films like A Simple Plan so grimacingly funny play a large part in River of the Brokenhearted.
So does the atmosphere of early cinema – those eerie Cabinet of Dr. Caligari shadows would not be out of place during some of this book’s scenes of peril and scheming. At one point, Richards says, he planned to pack the novel with allusions to films: "I told my wife, Peg, ‘I’m going to put in every movie I’ve ever watched that has anything to do with the book.’" Though he toned down what he calls his "game" of movie references, a few films such as Gaslight are used to illuminate the characters.
Richards’ own family history in the movie business provides much of the story. His grandmother Janie dared to be a single female businesswoman in the 1920s, continuing to manage her small-town cinema after her husband’s death. In what Richards calls her "entrepreneurial masterstroke," she locked up local rights to talkies when they first appeared. For this success, neither she nor her children were forgiven.
"They tried to blow her up, to burn her out, to foreclose on her mortgage. But she was a matriarch and she exhibited the flair and confidence of a matriarch," says Richards. He makes her into a fearless, but not a flawless, heroine.
Her fictional son Miles sacrifices his life to serve Janie – how could he refuse when she was persecuted from all sides? He numbs his frustrations with a large daily dose of gin. His exchanges with his almost equally alcoholic son Wendel offer some of the novel’s funny bits, as does the colourful cursing by the local thugs-for-hire who help make Janie’s life truly dangerous.
Wendel, known by the familial nickname Wendy, narrates the novel in an effort to understand what happened to his much-diminished family. In Wendel’s own generation there is no longer one dominant female character like Janie. Instead, two women take centre stage, one virtually a saint and the other – her sister, no less – a truly nasty piece of work. Rebecca, this female villain, makes an apt spoiler of Janie’s legacy. As a charlatan psychologist, "she uses the very thing that Janie would have wanted on her side," says Richards. "She uses the education of women that Janie never had a chance at."
The simple plans of Rebecca and her ilk work because, as Richards observes, people like to be fooled. Rebecca can manipulate Wendel’s sister Ginger because Ginger "wants to be gulled into believing her because it makes everything safe."
But the longer she fools herself, says Richards, "the harder it is going to be to face what is actually true. I think all of us have faced that in our lives, where we know something can’t be true, but we keep the faith and we believe it until we gull ourselves into thinking maybe it is true." Like that kid who believed in Santa too long, we can all fall prey to reassuring nonsense.
In this year of CEO fraudsters and faked intelligence reports, Richards’ story of the power of illusions and the price to be paid when they fail makes his Miramichi fable especially timely. |
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