Noah Richler on Books

My Books, My Place
Canlit on the beach
Noah Richler takes time out from reading on Sandy Cove Beach. Canlit's baying snipers should not read anything into the fact he appears to be sleeping. The Globe and Mail

Noah Richler on three universal stories rooted in the places they are written
Noah Richler

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Sandy Cove, an exquisite and storied village halfway down Nova Scotia's Digby Neck, is the hideaway I could not do without. This week I have been reading three Canadian novels – not a plan, just the way it is.

The first of these, Allan Donaldson's Maclean, is a short, crisply written novel of a soldier returning to his New Brunswick village from the Great War, and his alcoholism and inability to fit in. There is the toughness of David Adams Richards here, and an eye for male estrangement of the early Richard Wright – and in all this weariness, there is light.

Kathleen Winter's novel, Annabel, is another that is absolutely riveting from the very first page. At its most basic, Annabel is the story of a hermaphrodite child raised in Labrador. It is about the struggle of genders within one child, and how that struggle makes the child another thing entirely, though effectively about any kind of suppression. Its language is breathtaking and her subject is thrilling because – hard to manage these days – it is so very new. I have friends I worry about handing this novel to, because of its subversive, but beautiful, power.

I have followed the work of Kathleen's equally talented brother Michael for years. He is a clever and highly original writer whose every book is entertaining, but at the same time a declaration against his craft. In his new novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, he has decided that the best way to write the murder of a woman who was stabbed 31 times in St John's, Nfld., is to hand over all right of representation to the characters themselves, selecting verbatim from their court testimony. True to form, his book puts the value of the novelist's contribution on trial, though still doesn't manage to convict him. There is artifice here, plenty of it – and, as with his sister's and Donaldson's novels, there is not just a rooting in place but an outright love of it. Pace CanLit's tedious, baying snipers, there is nothing provincial at all about any of these books. Great literature is local.

Noah Richler is the author of This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada.