Road to the Stilt House

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

This is a novel often reminiscent — though not always happily so — of the works of Faulkner and Roch Carrier. It is the story of Arnold and his family, all believed simple-minded by their neighbours, who live on welfare in a nameless town in New Brunswick. Arnold’s life, despite the efforts of a social worker and an alcoholic priest, is a catalogue of misfortunes. He struggles, gamely and inarticulately, against “wrong thinking” and a sea of troubles. We watch as, unwillingly but inevitably, Arnold sinks in a mire (it is not organized enough to be called a web) of violence and arbitrary loss. His mother dies in hospital as a result of a doctor’s bungling; his brother is chased over a cliff to his death by a pack of Wolf Cubs after he deliberately burns one of them with a frying pan. Arnold’s girlfriend, Trenda, betrays him and leads him into crime; finally he burns down the family home (like Darl burning the barn in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) and is murdered by two of his friends when he tries to aid them after their escape from jail.

The novel proposes no glib, insulting remedies. No flights of angels sing Arnold to his rest. His killer is not even identified; justice is as arbitrary and as meaningless as violence in the world of the novel. Richards pares that world down to its essentials; its landmarks are disease and death, the woods and the winter cold, and the prison that is under construction outside the featureless town. Life is not a riddle to be answered — but a process to be endured, in a minimalist and symbolic landscape of pain and bewilderment.

The author’s mannered minimalism is less happy in its effect on dialogue and characterization. His style is deliberately deadpan, as befits a novel so suspicious of rhetoric, auctorial commentary, and the other conventions of the traditional novel. Though this auctorial stance is sometimes successful (as in the description of “a hatred that is almost like happiness because of the rage that descends over their heads”), it more typically reduces the author to bald statement (“we are all nothing”; “loneliness is the human condition”; “they were envious because their suffering seemed to count for nothing”; “I can never tell you what I mean”). This habit of saying what could more effectively be shown weakens the novel’s impact. So does its lack of humour. In his careful selection of his material, Richards recalls Faulkner and Roch Carrier; but —  perhaps because of the single-mindedness with which he seeks to convey the bleakness of Arnold’s world — he eschews their grotesque humor and the humanizing complexity it affords. In consequence, the novel lacks not only comic relief, but also the ability to evoke anything more than a feeling of weary pathos for its characters. We see their suffering — indeed, we see very little else — but it is difficult to feel much for these paragons of passivity (not for nothing is Arnold known to all as “Seaweed”). In much of the novel, the author’s touch is deft and sure, but his studied manner leads him astray in his characterization and mars an otherwise praiseworthy piece of work.