Writer Michael Winter
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Michael Winter returns to WordFest this weekend with his fifth book, The Architects are Here. Blood-spattered and brilliant, troubled and tender, the novel is the story of deep friendship between two old friends. Gabriel is a writer and the novel’s narrator; David is his money-soaked best friend. Together they make a return odyssey from Toronto to Newfoundland, via a winding road trip. Of course, any story about two guys must have a woman at the centre.
Nell Tarkington is the warm heart of the book. She has known both the men, first as young university students, and now 20 years later. Winter makes her the granddaughter of Booth Tarkington, who wrote The Magnificent Ambersons, and an outsider to Newfoundland, which she shares with Gabriel and David. She is absent for a vital stretch of the novel, which just makes the reader wonder about her more.
The title, The Architects are Here, refers to a scene described by Suetonius where the assassins of Nero were greeted by this coded phrase. Over the phone from Toronto, Winter explains, “Nero thought he was getting experts at creation, when really they were the seeds of his death. I wanted this for the novel — a statement that contained both death and creation.”
Winter and his wife, the writer Christine Pountney, are the tickled new parents of a six-week-old baby boy. "Little Leo is completely gorgeous with his big barrel chest," says Winter. Leo was born on September 1 in Newfoundland, in an old house without running water or central heating, where Winter and Pountney spend the summer months.
One of the things Winter addresses in this novel is what it is to be in your 30s. "All my friends in Newfoundland have kids. None of my friends in Toronto have kids,” says Winter. “When I used to go back to Newfoundland to housesit and write, the neighbours would drop by and peer in and say, well, what are you doing all day?"
There is an exchange in the novel where Gabe asks David:
“What is the meaning of life?”
“Kids.”
When I put this question to Winter, he says, "That deep promise into the future filled me with a kind of dread, that I couldn't do it, that I couldn't be a parent. But then I met a great woman. And Christine is so good. We laugh all the time.”
Three years ago, I spoke to Winter about his last novel, The Big Why, a lively historical fiction about painter Rockwell Kent. He told me then, “Oh, terrible things are going to happen in the next book.” He wasn’t kidding. The Architects are Here is ominous from the first page, where as young boys digging a USS Enterprise-shaped snow tunnel, “one entire side of the igloo was sheered off and the loud orange blade of a snowplow ran past us.”
“The book is like a group of confessions,” says Winter. “I've hardly made anything up.” This sentence will shock readers who reach the traumatic conclusion.
Winter continues, “It's a strange thing to enjoy someone's suffering. Characters want to be at peace. But as soon as I've set up one thing, I want the characters to do the opposite. And then — how far can I go, how far can I push? One of a dozen things the book is about is, do you believe the world is a good place or do you believe the world is a bad place? Gabe is vexed with this.”
For a writer barely 40, Winter is a masterful stylist. There is an enduring, kind-hearted warmth in Gabriel’s voice. Winter’s fictional alter ego also narrates the robust millennial memoir, This All Happened, as well as appearing in Winter’s two collections of stories from the 1990s.
There are a dozen sentences that will not make this article, but that stop the reader in his tracks. One I had a bittersweet laugh at was, "The closer we got to the States, the more maple leaf flags we saw. Then federal buildings with the Canada logo. Such a weak typeface for a national identity."
“In the end I don't care how the book is described,” says Winter. “I knew I wanted to write a book about cars and men, and men being intimate with each other in cars.” Winter delivers this last line with a laugh. He is talking about the intimacy that comes from conversation, from close friends talking. Guys stuck in a car together. Bound to return home, again.
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