Friends of Meager Fortune

Hard Times

Why do Canadian writers get so little respect south of the border? Unless they're caught writing "color" as "colour" or "center" as "centre," you'd think they could waltz into the unsuspecting arms of American book buyers. But the tendency to dismiss them is so strong that not long ago an American publisher told me she was stripping all mention of a novelist's Canadian identity from her publicity material in hopes of increasing the writer's chances.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions: Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro can always get in. But most Americans probably think Michael Ondaatje is British (try selling "The Canadian Patient"); although Douglas Coupland lives in Vancouver, he says he's often introduced at book events as German. Meanwhile, Canadian treasures such as Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani and Alistair MacLeod garner so little attention here that they'd be lucky to get arrested. And the most shameful American blind spot of all may be for David Adams Richards, who keeps piling up awards in Toronto but can't find a stable publisher in New York.

Which is all the more reason to be grateful to MacAdam/Cage, a small publisher in San Francisco that brings us Richards's new novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune. For 30 years, Richards has been writing deeply moving stories set in northern New Brunswick with the kind of moral intensity that Thomas Hardy brought to Dorset. His characters are simple people caught in the furnace of disappointment and loss. The Friends of Meager Fortune is told by a narrator who keeps his identity secret until the final pages, but it's clear that he has doggedly pursued the details of a tragedy and rolled them under his tongue for decades. That long, emotional investment gives his story the luster of legend, complete with prophesies of doom, a chorus of fickle townspeople ready to praise or pounce, and feats of physical labor so brutal you can't help but feel bruised just to read about them.

At the center of this tale are the Jamesons, a family of prosperous lumbermen "near the end of the world." When the elder Jameson died, his 15-year-old son, Will, took over the business and quickly attained Paul Bunyan status, crushing competitors by driving himself and his loyal men into ever more arduous and dangerous forests. But he died at 19 in the first of several spectacular lumber accidents of unimaginable force and ferocity.

Returning from World War II, his younger brother, Owen, finds himself embraced as a hero by the town. Intoxicated by their attention, he foregoes his education to run the family business, though he never showed any interest in it as a child. It's a fateful decision -- like most of the decisions in this intensely analytical, portentous novel. Owen has a sharp mind and the courage to take on dangerous work, but he's naive about the forces arrayed against him, and he labors under the burden of fulfilling his brother's mythic status among men who regard him as a cold, cerebral substitute. Determined to save the business, he leads his crew to a particularly hazardous stretch of mountain forest while back in town rumors involving him and the wife of one of his employees grow into a scandal.

You'd have to go back to Steinbeck's farmers, Hurston's turpentine workers or Melville's whalers to find the kind of reverence Richards conveys for hard physical labor. "Each day," he writes of these lumbermen in a dying industry, "they did a job that would make most men pale," and his descriptions of hewing and hauling giant trees on dark mountains in 30-below snowstorms should make even the most rugged readers feel lazy and effete. But it's not just awe for the punishment these men endure, it's a profound respect for their spirit: "There were men who worked and lived and died here who had never seen a provincial capital or knew an MP who claimed to work on their behalf, but who cut the wood that fashioned that man's oak desk, and the cedar that had made his sauna at Sugar Loaf Resort. Men who worked here would be laughed at with such ignorance by people in Toronto, one would sometimes wonder who was actually primitive. For those who believed that acquisition of things made you understand the world would always mistake these men as less than themselves until the time they had to rely upon them, either in kindness or in battle."

Richards moves deliberately, but chapter by chapter the story picks up momentum, involving moral and physical forces that lead to a series of tragedies. Fifty tons of lumber falling is no more deadly than the combined force of a town's vicious gossip; lives are crushed and mangled in both situations. Such is the moral physics of Richards's work: He's particularly interested in the way people set avalanches of misery in motion with little acts of cruelty. And he's not afraid of employing the kind of heavy symbolism that went out of fashion in literary fiction even before the lumber industry stopped using horse-drawn carriages: The climax of the novel takes place on Good Friday Mountain. A simple, Christly lumberman named Meager Fortune explains to a member of the crew that meanness among people stems from the fact that "men have rid themselves of God, and are famished, and therefore do terrible things to make such famine go away."

That insight may offer explanation, but it offers no relief from the punishments set in motion. Despite the best efforts of good people, despite the tardy apologies of scoundrels, despite everything, the horrible price must be paid. "All is cut out, muted, torn away," Richards concludes. It's the kind of fearsome silence only the most powerful novels can leave.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.

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