Synopses & Reviews
In the 1920s, Janie McLeary and George King run one of the first movie theatres in the Maritimes. The marriage of the young Irish Catholic woman to an older English man is thought scandalous, but they work happily together, playing music to accompany the films. When George succumbs to illness and dies, leaving Janie with one young child and another on the way, the unscrupulous Joey Elias tries to take over the business. But Janie guards the theatre with a shotgun, and still in mourning, re-opens it herself. “If there was no real bliss in Janies life,” recounts her grandson, “there were moments of triumph.”
One night, deceived by the bank manager and Elias into believing she will lose her mortgage, Janie resolves to go and ask for money from the Catholic houses. Elias has sent out men to stop her, so she leaps out the back window and with a broken rib she swims in the dark across the icy Miramichi River, doubting her own sanity. Yet, seeing these people swayed into immoral actions because of their desire to please others and their fear of being outcast, she thinks to herself that “…all her life she had been forced to act in a way uncommon with others… Was sanity doing what they did? And if it was, was it moral or justified to be sane?”
Astonishingly, she finds herself face to face that night with influential Lord Beaverbrook, who sees in her tremendous character and saves her business. Not only does she survive, she prospers; she becomes wealthy, but ostracized. Even her own father helps Elias plot against her. Yet Janie McLeary King thwarts them and brings first-run talking pictures to the town.
Meanwhile, she employs Rebecca from the rival Druken family to look after her children. Jealous, and a protégé of Elias, Rebecca mistreats her young charges. The boy Miles longs to be a performer, but Rebecca convinces him he is hated, and he inherits his mothers enemies. The only person who truly loves her, he is kept under his mothers influence until, eventually, he takes a job as the theatres projectionist. He drinks heavily all his life, tends his flowers, and talks of things no-one believes, until the mystery at the heart of the novel finally unravels.
“At six I began to realize that my father was somewhat different,” says Miles Kings son Wendell, who narrates the saga in an attempt to find answers in the past and understand “how I was damned.” It is a many-layered epic of rivalries, misunderstandings, rumours; the abuse of power, what weak people will do for love, and the true power of doing right; of a pioneer and her legacy in the lives of her son and grandchildren.
“David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive,” wrote Lynn Coady in the Vancouver Sun. From this winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor Generals Award comes a story of a womans determined struggle against small town prejudice, and her sons long battle against deceit. Richards own family ran Newcastles Uptown Theatre from 1911 to 1980, and Janie is based on his grandmother. Cast upon this history is a drama that explores morality and “the question of how one should live,” as The Atlantic Monthly said of Mercy Among the Children, his previous novel.
Reviewers agree that Richards fiction sits firmly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by concerning itself explicitly with good and evil and the human freedom to choose between them. Once again, in River of the Brokenhearted, his twelfth novel, Richards has created a work of compassion and assured, poetic sophistication which finds in the hearts of its characters venality and goodwill, cruelty and love.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, the third of six children, David Adams Richards found his calling at the age of fourteen after reading
Oliver Twist. He had never read a novel before, and was first disappointed that there were no pictures. Then he picked up the Dickens novel almost by accident one day, and after reading it was determined to become a novelist.
He studied literature at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, attended an informal weekly writing workshop, received encouragement from established writers and published a book of poetry. When the first five chapters of the novel he was working on, The Coming of Winter, won the Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing in 1973, he left university to write full-time; the book was published the following year, and translated into Russian.
He then pursued a life of writing with extraordinary resolve, in spite of the small rewards early on. Leaving university without a degree meant giving up the possibility of an academic career. Instead, he took ticket stubs at his fathers theatre in Newcastle; “I came from a family that did all right, but after I got out on my own, from age 19 to 27, I had almost no money. I cut my own wood for the winter with an axe one year.” For his first five novels, he didnt have a reading outside his province of New Brunswick.
However, in 1985 his fifth work of fiction, Road to the Stilt House, was nominated for the Governor Generals Award, and soon he was recognised as one of the ten best Canadian writers under 45. In 1988 he won the Governor Generals Award for Nights Below Station Street, and was named by Macleans magazine as a Canadian who made a difference; he began to win various other literary awards. Ten years later he won a second Governor Generals Award for his memoir Lines on the Water, becoming one of only three writers to win for both fiction and non-fiction (along with Mordecai Richler and Hugh MacLennan).
Still, it was not until his 2000 novel Mercy Among the Children that he made a real breakthrough internationally; the novel received effusive praise and was a national bestseller for months. The epic story of a mans pact with God and its far-reaching impact on his familys destiny, it was nominated for the Governor Generals Award and the Trillium Award, and won the prestigious Giller Prize. In the U.S., it was given the Editors Choice award by The Atlantic Monthly. The Washington Post called it “a contemporary masterpiece that, in the tradition of Tolstoy, Camus and Melville, reminds us that redemption is to be found in the suffering of innocents.”
Like his literary heroes Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte, Richards evokes universal human struggles through the events of a small, rural place, where one persons actions impact inevitably on others in a web of interconnectedness. The TLS, comparing Richards to Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence and Alistair MacLeod, says, “Like them, Richards is a regional writer, but not in a limiting sense; circumscription of place concentrates and clarifies the universal issues of motive and moral responsibility.”
Each of his sixteen books of poetry, essays and fiction is set in rural communities of New Brunswicks Miramichi Valley. After years of travelling, Richards found he could write about the region regardless of where he lived; he says, “I carry what I do inside.” He portrays real rural men and women, brilliant and strong characters in spite of their deprived lives, sometimes based on people he grew up with. Wayne Johnston, hearing Richards read in 1983, was struck by the authors unqualified love for all his characters.
Richards meditation on fishing, Lines on the Water, and his earlier book Hockey Dreams, reflect enduring childhood passions; his interests beyond literature and history are hockey, boxing, hunting, and fly-fishing on the Miramichi River. His love for the place and its people permeates his work, while his belief in the existence of good and evil and human choice between them, his ability to catch what Macleans magazine called “the beauty and loneliness of the search for moral truth,” gives it an uplifting quality. He admits there are hard lessons in his books, but hopes there is joyousness too. “Its more optimistic than not.”
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
1. Does Wendell Kings point of view influence the telling of this story? Is he “damned”?
2. Richards is interested in the theme of power and its capacity for corruption. He has said his own experience of this was at university during the Vietnam War, when he saw friends misuse the peace movement for their own gain; he saw people bullied and humiliated, and was ostracized because he refused to participate. Show how characters in this novel abuse the power they are given, and consider where the author feels true power lies.
3. Wendell says Jane McLeary became “in all her dancing tragic scope one of our great Maritime women, though she never wanted greatness.” In Richards previous book, Mercy Among the Children, he explored the idea of sainthood. Does Janie see herself as a kind of saint? What is the nature of the legacy she leaves Ginger, and how does Ginger cope with it? Is it a blessing or a curse?
4. The theme of illness and medicine runs throughout: George Kings illness, treated with “medicine from Dr. Giovanetti and what he called stingers -- that is, gin and beer mixed;” the mixture of sulphur and milk with rotted herring that Elias sold to the mother of Rebecca and Putsy for her young triplets. Gin is dispensed in spoonfuls like medicine. Then ‘Abigail Mahoney insists on being called ‘the Doctor. How do sickness and alcoholism affect the lives of the characters?
5. Macleans magazine has spoken of David Adams Richards “swimming successfully against the tides of literary fashion” for exploring “the idea that reality has an underlying moral structure.” How does his differ from the vision of some other contemporary writers?
6. When the patriarch Isaac McLeary arrives from Ireland in 1847 and is shipwrecked, he takes his family to live in a cave; five of his children die over the winter. “Unfortunately the old man did not know there was a church and a school and stores a few miles away. And when he did find out he did not tell the others, because he was mortified by his lack of resolve in finding this out before half his family was dead.” Later, while Janie defends her theatre, her son Miles is left alone in the house with his dead father. At various times, people defend their actions as being “for the children.” How are the weaknesses of adults visited on the children?
7. Winston Churchill is portrayed as a figure of strength because he is maligned and criticized for years, and yet eventually is needed to save England. How does the desire to be liked and to belong in a community become a negative force on individuals?
8. When the first movie is shown at the Regent and Tom Mix fires his gun, men go running from the theatre; women emulate the beautiful actresses. Gradually, as talking pictures are overtaken by television, and the drive-in is overgrown with weeds, the family business becomes less and less glamorous. How does this affect the fortunes of the McLeary family? How do Wendell and his father react as they find themselves old-fashioned and conservative?
9. How do rumour and lies become more powerful than the truth? Does Rebecca at times seem as powerful a woman as Janie?
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Q&A
Can you tell us how you became a writer?Read Oliver Twist when I was 14 -- never wanted to do anything else after that.
What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told?
It’s a story about my grandmother.
What is that you’re exploring in this book?
Freedom and individualism
Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book?
The book is in two major sections -- dealing with Janie, and then her son Miles -- both are fascinating in their own way.
Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Bronte, Alden Nowlan, Alistair MacLeod, and many others.
If you weren't writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life?
I’d be dead from over-fishing and over-hunting and over-curling.
If you could have written one book in history, what book would that be?
I can’t imagine writing War and Peace.
From the Hardcover edition.