Nights and Days In the Miramichi

Faulkner, Hardy and Richards are three very different novelists. But reminders to William Faulkner and Thomas Hardy do come easily with David Adams Richards.  The naturalism, looming and inexorable, suggests Hardy in the English novel.  And where Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County, so too there is Richards's Miramichi Valley.

Unlike the fictional Yoknapatawpha, the Miramichi is real.  It spreads out along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada. Similar to Faulkner, Richards has made a region, the Miramichi, a specific focus for his work.  Three short novels by Richards have indeed come to be known as the Miramichi trilogy. <1>

II.

Nights Below Station Street <2> begins the trilogy.  The setting is a milltown in the Miramichi, and winter is on.  Joe Walsh has had to abstain from drinking in the holiday season, to manage his alcoholism.  Joe has a massive physique, but this attribute at his various labour jobs has been undermined by his drinking problem. So Christmas 1972, Joe unemployed, and having to work hard to keep sober.

With her husband unemployed, Rita Walsh has turned her care of the neighbourhood children into a modest job.  Rita and Joe have two children of their own, daughters Milly and Adele.  Adele is actually Joe's stepdaughter, Rita's child from an earlier relationship.  Adele is the older daughter, a moody teen with a sharp tongue.

III.

Beyond the Walsh family, Richards moves across the working-class neighbourhoods, to explore the routines and lives of the other town inhabitants.  Richards's prose is of a measured simplicity, and the narrative builds momentum through its contiguous structure. There are the Richards passages too about Maritime nature, awesome in its indifference.  Nights Below Station Street is a compelling introduction to David Adams Richards's Miramichi trilogy.
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<1>Nights Below Station Street (1988), Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990), and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993).
<2>Richards, David Adams. Nights Below Station Street. 1997 Emblem Editions: McClelland&Stewart Ltd.