David Adams Richards - River of the Brokenhearted

Acclaim for David Adams Richards
RIVER OF THE BROKENHEARTED

If theres literary justice in this world, River ought to be a notable commercial success. Richards merits the kind of plaudits that were frequently lavished on [Robertson] Davies. As a pure storyteller, Richards has it all over just about every male writer in this country. His comedy is so deeply rooted in an absurdists delight in the illogicality of thinking processes raddled by alcohol and drugs or addled by greed and vengeance. River of the Brokenhearted delivers a highly readable study in kinds of damnation that are as common in the towers of Bay Street as on the banks of the Miramichi.

The Globe and Mail

River of the Brokenhearted is one of the most ambitious of Richards novels. [It] evokes pity and fearthe fate of these characters is not so different from our ownto a degree rarely seen in our literature.

Toronto Star

Richardss gift is to make these people human in their resiliency and fragility and to transform them from the pitiable to the iconic by the moral force of his vision, the absolute sincerity of his voice and his uncanny ability to internalize the rough majesty of the Miramichi. His mode is tragedy, but there is humoureven if blackly satiricalsneaking out of the shadows.

Times & Transcript (Moncton)

River of the Brokenhearted has the robust feeling of a Shakespeare play.

The Vancouver Sun

Brilliant. Is it worth it, diving into Richardss river of misery ? A thousand times yes. And once youre in, youre in until it spits you up on to dry land, for like all great literature, it has everything about life you need or want to know and you must ride to the end, to make sure you get every drop of what this astonishing writer has to offer. A great gift to English literature.

The Daily News (Halifax)

There is a dark, sly current of humour in Richards work, the humour of the downtrodden and the unbelievably unlucky, and that washes over River of the Brokenhearted, the latest addition to the authors distinguished Atlantic oeuvre. Its hard to believe that a single imagination can produce characters as large as these, but it has been done here.

The Hamilton Spectator

River of the Brokenhearted is a wonderful, sad novel that reflects our capacity for strength, loyalty and forgiveness. With its strong sense of justice, this book is also a testament to the power of faithin all its many forms.

Edmonton Journal

Richards is a remarkably mature writer, whose confident, compassionate narrative voice makes fine fiction of the tragic randomness of human life.

The London Free Press (ON)

Richards [is] a Maritime Dickens.

Toronto Star

David Adams Richards has become Canadas contemporary master of the novel. Intricately plotted, River of the Brokenhearted must be read slowly so that every clue and character can be understood. Richards prose is something to linger over, to enjoy in slow motion.

The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

Fiction
The Coming of Winter
Blood Ties
Dancers at Night: Stories
Lives of Short Duration
Road to the Stilt House
Nights Below Station Street
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
Hope in the Desperate Hour
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
Mercy Among the Children

Non-Fiction
Hockey Dreams
Lines on the Water

Copyright Newmac Amusement Inc. 2003
Anchor Canada edition 2004

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Richards, David Adams, 1950

River of the brokenhearted / David Adams Richards.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37509-4

I. Title.

PS8585.I17R48 2004 C813.54 C2004-900584-7

This is a work of fiction; the characters and settings found within are imaginary composites and do not refer to actual persons or places.

Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website:
www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

For my cousins Mary Baldasaro
and Cathy Richards Green
who know that though this is based
on incidents in the life of our grandmother
Janie, it is a work of fiction.

And for Bob Gibbs and Fred Cogswell.

Because of their enmity you will be left alone.
They will cast you out and forsake you.

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton

The graves of the Drukens and the McLearys are spread across the Miramichi River valley. If you go there you might find themrun across them is not the exact phrase one might want to use for gravesin certain villages and towns. I dont think we have hamlets here, but if we do, then in certain hamlets as well.

What is revealing about these graves is their scarcity. The scant way they are impressed upon the soil, dispersed here and there about the river. A river that stretches 250 miles from the heart of our province, a river of lumbering and fish and of forests running tangled to the waters edge. Our ancestors came and founded communities, and over time abandoned them for the greater lumbering towns of Newcastle and Chatham, so that only graves are left. One might go years without stumbling upon one, and when one finally does, an immediate reaction might be to say: Why in Christ is old Lucy Druken buried way out here?

I suppose some of the brightest of my relatives have lain forgotten for decades in the woods, forgotten even by their own descendants, in fields that have become orchards or mushroomed into forests again, the descendants having moved on, first to the towns and then west to the cities of Montreal or Toronto, or south to the great and frantic United States. The graves occupants unremembered. Yet in what love and sorrow might they have been placed?

Two hundred years have passed to find what is left of us still here. Last October I came back from the train station in the debilitating gloom of a rain-soaked autumn day. He had demanded the key that morning, when I said I was leaving.

He spoke to me in his slightly limey waybeing the only memory he ever retained of his father, and so the thing he held onto, come hell or high water, for a memory gone over sixty years. A limey with a Miramichi brogue.

Yeswell, thenyou can just give me the key, can you notleave it here His hand shook as he pointed to the table. And we will think no more of it; I will not even call you a traitorjust remember I could not leave people in the lurchas much as I wanted toif they were lurching Id stay! he said turning away at that moment.