River of the Brokenhearted by David Adams Richards.
Arcade Publishing, 2004. $25 — 400 pp.

Certain generally recognized attributes help mark Southern literature sui generis. A marked concern for place is one of these attributes. Eccentricity of character and speech is certainly another point of recognition. An intense preoccupation with the past and with family history is assuredly another mark of Southern writing. Finally, the willingness to make an investigation of God, or, more particularly, of man’s interpretation of God, seems a distinguishing mark of great Southern literature.

Of course, these same characteristics may be found in the writings of non-Southern authors as well. One author who certainly deserves some sort of honorary Southern award for exploring all these themes in his writing is not even from the United States. He is a Canadian named David Adams Richards, and his latest novel, River of the Brokenhearted, shines a light on these attributes that burns with the intensity of a William Faulker or a Cormac MacCarthy.

In River of the Brokenhearted, the McLeary family moves to the Miramichi River valley in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1847. Eventually, a strong woman of this Catholic clan, Janie, marries George King, an Anglican who dies at an early age, leaving Janie a widow with two children to raise by herself. For various reasons, she opens the town’s first movie theater, which is soon a great success, but then finds herself in a rivalry with various factions in the town. Her son, Miles, and even her grandson become victims of these family enemies.

Richards possesses many talents as an author. His plots are complicated, his characters as complex as real life, but he has the talent to lead us through the jungles of the human heart and personality without compromising these complexities. His books — he is the author of at least three other works, including the absolutely brilliant Mercy Among The Children — hug the Canadian towns and countryside with the passion of a lover, the ferocity of a wrestler. Like so many Southern writers, Richards gives a prominent place to family and family history in his books.

Richards also gives us post-moderns a way of thinking about God, about good and evil, particularly evil, without sentiment or cynicism. Evil for Richards begins not with the deed but with the impulse, the thought; evil arises out of envy, lust, greed. In River of the Brokenhearted we see this evil first flare up and burn in Joey Elias, Janey’s principal financial rival in town. Later it is a woman, Rebecca, Joey’s protegé, who follows the yearnings of her dark and twisted heart to attempt a grand act of vengeance against the remaining Kings, Miles and his son.

Richards also brilliantly depicts redemption in his novels. Until their last breath, his characters are free to seek forgiveness from their victims, to change their lives. Surely there are few other writers today who can so vividly depict these alterations of the soul. To reveal the characters in this novel who undergo the more drastic of these changes would be to reveal too much of the book’s ending, but even in certain secondary characters Richards shows us certain massive changes. Here, for example, is Putsy, who has used sex and lies to advance herself, but who has come to the very end of that self:

Carmichael listened to her and then told her it was possible to change if she did not lie. If she did as he said, she would begin to change. If she lived as he said she must, if she gave everyone what she herself most desired others to give, kindness and respect — when she did this, she would not find lying easy. “Do not speak, and you will not lie,” the priest said.

As absurd as it sounded, she tried this about town during the day, and it worked, more or less. She found she could not meet old friends without lying because they expected her to lie, because they were liars themselves. So, standing mute in front of them, she would shun their questions or answer in monosyllables. Not only was this painful, but people teased her, saying she had lost her mind over Elias. So she would turn away when she saw any of them, and walk in another direction.

Rebecca came and berated her, telling her that she was a huge disappointment, and then, what was worse, bringing some of her things back from Joey’s.

“What has gotten into you?” Rebecca said.

“Christ, I suppose,” Putsy answered.

She worked, and lived in her room behind the convent, and ate sparingly, and touched no alcohol. When friends from her bad days would come by, thinking she had struck it lucky and would drink with them again, she would send them away. And she began to realize that she would never have to take another drink. And this scared her more than anything else in the world.

In case any readers may be misled by the above passage, this book does not in any way fall into the genre of religious fiction; you won’t find the works of David Adams Richards on the shelves of Christian bookstores, more’s the pity. Nor will you find his books prominently displayed at most general bookstores; Richards is Canadian rather than American, and his books are not easily categorized. Nevertheless, Mercy Among The Children and River of the Brokenhearted qualify, I believe, both as great literature and as holy books, talking to us and telling us about ourselves — our hopes, our fears, our joy and sadness — in a quite extraordinary way.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)