David Adams Richards

September 5, 2006
UNB Saint John News Release: 06-143
Patty O'Brien, Communication Officer (506) 648-5707

Renowned author David Adams Richards will read from The Friends of Meager Fortune on Monday, September 18 at 7 pm at the Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre as part of the Lorenzo Reading Series at the University of New Brunswick Saint John.

The author of 12 novels, three works of non-fiction, and several screenplays, David Adams Richards won a Governor General’s Award for Nights Below Station Street (1988) and a second Governor General’s for Lines on the Water (1998). Mercy Among the Children, published in 2000, won the Giller Prize and was selected Book of the Year by The Atlantic Monthly and named Book of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers’ Association. Whereas River of the Brokenhearted (2003) was a homage to a New Brunswick river, the new novel, Richards’ thirteenth, celebrates the province’s forests.

Set in the 1940s, The Friends of Meager Fortune tells the story of the last of the New Brunswick lumber barons and the men who worked for them. Friends is a towering lament for noble work and heroic men, “untamable, hard-living, generous” men. Invoking a vocabulary long past – double ax, bucksaw, hitch horse, skid road, stampers, scalers, and cutters – it recreates a world of woodsmen and horses, as they were in the decade before the industrialization of forestry. Richards lingers lovingly over descriptions of Clydesdales, Percherons, Belgians, the “broad-backed” draft horses that hauled loads of wood. His paean to forestry features one family in particular, the Jamesons. Having suffered innumerable setbacks, the family is faced with the loss of their business until Owen Jameson, the younger son, does the unthinkable – takes his crew up Good Friday Mountain. To get the wood down the mountain, the teamsters must negotiate a precipitous drop, one that they refer to as the “Devil’s Back.” The social world of Friends, which is the other half of the story here, is similarly dangerous. In his hometown, Owen Jameson endures conditions even tougher than those on the mountain. Adulation for his accomplishments in the war, including a Victoria Cross, quickly turns to envy. When Reggie Glidden, the friend he saved in battle, goes missing, the town and the constabulary concoct murder from circumstantial evidence: Jameson and Camellia Dupuis, Reggie’s wife, are accused of committing “the perfect crime.” Town and mountain – murder mystery and worksite – are narratively linked through the issue of union. Fueled by revenge, Cora Auger, whose father died working for the Jamesons, exploits the murder investigation to agitate for union. The townspeople conflate the political and the personal: Reggie Glidden is construed a political martyr, a man made to disappear because he favoured union and opposed the dangers of Good Friday Mountain. In exploring humankind’s “easy adjustment to vengeance” – something that occurs on the mountain as well as in the town – Richards tells a story of justice miscarried, a “great godawful tragedy.”

The reading is hosted by The Lorenzo Society and the UNB Saint John Bookstore, and supported by The Canada Council for the Arts. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend. For more information contact The University Bookstore at (506) 648-5540 or e-mail sjbooks@unbsj.ca.

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