Art Roebuck Comes to Born With a Tooth

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Thirty-nine-year-old McBain’s first novel is set in and around the
imaginary Saskatchewan town of Born With a Tooth, and involves the
reincarnation of James Cole, comatose for 14 years since a henhouse
run-in with a bellicose rooster. Cole’s sanity is restored by Little
Dothan, a touring child evangelist from the United States. The problem
is that Cole is reborn not as himself but as Art Roebuck.
Cole/Roebuck’s long-suffering wife, Ida, their son, Hartland, and
Sarah, Ida’s daughter by her oafish lover, Warren Putnam, are all in
different ways and for different reasons forced to gradually accept this
new member of the family.

McBain’s writing is strong and sure. His ear for dialogue is
remarkable: Dothan’s Southern accent, Hartland’s asthmatic stammer,
Roebuck’s mouthy confidence. Language and character are basic to the
book; so basic, in fact, that the lack of an explanation for Cole’s
transformation into Roebuck hardly matters. With his attention to detail
and his knowledge of Saskatchewan weather and farming, McBain invests
his story with so much verisimilitude that the reader is swept along by
a relentless current. This is an auspicious debut by a Canadian writer
from whom much more will be heard.