River of the Brokenhearted
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
From David Adams Richards, winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, comes a magnificent and haunting novel about the entwinement of remembered love and unforgotten hate.
Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted tells the life and legacy of Janie McCleary, a strong-willed Irish Catholic girl who dares to marry a man from the Church of England. Their union is quickly deemed scandalous, and when her husband dies young, just before the Great Depression, Janie is left alone to raise a family and run a business—the first movie theater in town. Through the strength of her character, she succeeds in a world of men. For that she is ostracized and becomes a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. Based on the author’s own grandmother, Janie is a pioneer before the age of feminism, but her salty individualism burdens the lives of her children and grandchildren.
Writing with compassion and mastery, Richards muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of extraordinary characters. There he finds an alchemy of venality and goodwill, deceit and brotherliness, marked cruelty and true love. Once again, David Adams Richards has brought us a work of astonishing grace, rooted in his special territory on the great river Miramichi of New Brunswick, but firmly universal in scope.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Richards, acclaimed in his native Canada, draws on his grandmother's life to provide emotional resonance for his latest novel (after 2001's Mercy Among the Children), a multigenerational family saga in which some generations are considerably more interesting than others. The narrator's grandmother, Hanna Jane McLeary, is born toward the end of the 19th century in a small New Brunswick village. At 20 she marries an older Englishman, George King, who is poor in health as well as purse. They open a small cinema, which outdraws the town's other theater, owned by Joey Elias. When King dies, Janie has a son, Miles, and a daughter on the way surely she can't also run a theater. Elias cunningly uses her bank's manager and her own father in attempts to gain control of her business, but Janie remains steadfast in the face of whispered scandal and threats of violence. But while she manages to keep her theater, tragedy strikes her father is killed, and her daughter disappears while in the care of her son. Janie's story is fascinating, but while Richards' depiction of character and place remain consistently strong, the narrative slows as it focuses on her son and grandson. The trials of the family as its members progressively succumb to failure and alcoholism (even as they keep the theater running) are well drawn, but as Janie's descendants learn little from their mistakes, the tale becomes less involving. An unexpected deus ex machina in the last pages forces a rather unlikely happy ending onto a story that had been, until that point, entirely believable if not particularly memorable.
