Tarcadia

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

The author was raised in Sydney, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island.
Tarcadia’s protagonist is a teenager from that regional centre who
watches his unconventional family turn dysfunctional.

The reader must figure out what decade this story is set in. Canadian
boomers have the advantage when Michael Chisholm, the narrator,
remembers that “at that time I only listened to Bachman-Turner
Overdrive and April Wine.” People who are unfamiliar with classic
1970s Canadian rock bands are finally clued in when the boy’s father
summons his family to the television set to watch U.S. President Richard
Nixon announce his resignation.

That decade’s progressive ideals sour, a process reflected in the
personalities of Rory and Gloria. In the beginning, they are permissive
parents who encourage their children to call them by their first names
and smoke in the house. The father is initially an enlightened union
organizer and family man. After he takes a fellow employee as his
mistress, with Gloria’s and Michael’s knowledge, he becomes a
self-righteous political hypocrite and a bully.

His liberated wife backs her family by persuading parochial-school
authorities to allow her daughter Heather to wear jeans to class. Gloria
justifies their unusual domestic arrangement by telling Michael that he
has to accept “an alternate family structure based on positive
feelings towards individuals.” Even when she asks for a divorce, she
projects her jealousy onto the girlfriend. Eventually, the children have
to get used to her neglect.

Tarcadia may be packaged as a boy’s story, but it is also a study of
his society.