The Lost Highway [Paperback]

David Adams Richards (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2008

A highly suspenseful story of greed, betrayal and murder, 'The Lost Highway' signals a thrilling new direction for one of Canada s greatest authors. For twenty years, Alex Chapman has been at war with his great-uncle James, popularly known as The Tyrant. Disillusioned and ill-tempered, Alex believes James has destroyed his chances in life when things do not turn out for him. He especially resents his great-uncle for ruining his chance at happiness with his one true love, Minnie, who married another. Alex seems destined never to amount to anything more than an embittered dreamer, until the night he runs into the simple mechanic Burton Tucker. When Burton says he has just sold James Chapman a winning lottery ticket worth thirteen million dollars, Alex immediately knows that his uncle must never see the money. That moment is the beginning of an enthralling mystery and an emotionally shattering tale of a family s passions and betrayals. 'The Lost Highway' is a chilling study of what happens to men and women when moral questions become matters of life and death. A page-turner with great spiritual force, 'The Lost Highway' is the work of a brilliant novelist at the peak of his powers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Prize-winning Canadian author Richards (The Friends of Meager Fortune) spins a sad, thoughtful tale around Alex Chapman, a community-college ethics teacher living in a small Canadian town of English- and French-speaking whites and Micmac Indians. Alex's lifelong feud with his tyrannical great-uncle James drives him to desperation. At the opening of the novel, James has lost his paving business. He asks Alex to take his truck in to have the oil changed; Alex refuses. James vows that Alex won't inherit, and Alex is furious, though in fact it is he who contrived to make his uncle lose his biggest contract. When the mechanic, a simple man named Burton, gives James a lottery ticket worth thirteen million dollars, Alex decides to steal it. He blames his uncle for an old humiliation that caused him to refuse to admit his feelings for Minnie, the soft-spoken girl who loved him. The novel draws on a number of different perspectives including Burton, Minnie's daughter, Amy, and Leo Bourque, the schoolmate who bullied Alex when he was a child. Richards goes to unnecessary lengths to explain his characters' motivations, and this slows the narrative pace considerably. Still, the novel presents complicated ethical dilemmas and offers sharp insights into complex emotional motives.
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From Booklist

Award-winning Canadian author Richards evokes the themes of Thomas Hardy in this pitiless account of a loner blind to his own flaws, forever pushing away the very things he needs to make his life whole and caught in a struggle with forces beyond his control. Alex Chapman is locked in a bitter grudge match with his great-uncle James, a man he blames for everything that has gone wrong in his life—his harsh childhood; the loss of the great love of his life, Minnie; and his inability to make a go of it, first at the seminary and then in academia. When he discovers that his uncle has purchased a lottery ticket worth $13 million, Alex is consumed by jealousy and schemes to steal the ticket, convinced that it will help win back the love of his childhood sweetheart. What this plan does do is give him a stark glimpse into the blackness of his own heart. By novel’s end, the academic take on ethics that bogs down the first half of the novel takes a sudden and chilling turn into a murderous crime spree. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Paperback: 394 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (February 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596922842
• ISBN-13: 978-1596922846
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,849,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "For great good a crime might be necessary", April 22, 2008

By 

Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Highway (Paperback)

Mirroring the great classics of literature this vast and unwieldy novel of betrayal centers on the winnings of a lottery ticket and those characters that become willingly caught up in an effort to find the elusive receipt and then hopefully cash it in. But what starts out as a rather depressing tale of animosity and bitterness, unrequited love, and all-consuming betrayal, soon turns into a full blown cosmic morality play where stabbings, blackmail, long held family resentments, and even murder provide the overriding themes.

Steeped in a literary flavor that is deeply reflective of the novels of the great Russian classic authors, The Lost Highway begins as the down and out Alex Chapman discovers from the owner of the local service station, Burton Tucker, that his despotic great uncle Jim Chapman has just won thirteen million dollars. Over the years Alex's relationship with his uncle, nicknamed the "the old man" has been fraught with difficulty, both of them warring off and on for twenty years, ever since the boy had left the priesthood under what were called suspicious circumstances.

Living a paltry existence in a small cabin that used to be the old man's icehouse, Alex plots and plans and ruminates on his failed life even as he's certain he's going to be kicked out of his ramshackle him. With old Jim Chapman also intent to write him out of the will, Alex is positive that his Uncle's enmity for him originates from along with his long-held dislike of Alex's father, mainly because of how he treated Alex's long-suffering mother.

As The Lost Highway opens, both uncle and nephew are embroiled in a "brutal infantile tit-for-tat." Alex has tried to live a life both fair and honest, yet he's never got ahead. Jim Chapman, however, sees his nephew as an unadulterated failure that has done his best to ruin the family fortune. Haunted by the painful death of his mother, and with few expectations, Alex begins to obsess over this money that he considers is just too much for an enemy like Jim Chapman.

To let Chapman have his winnings would be the end of Alex's life. He would never be able to live down Jim's hubris, nor would he be able to crawl back. But there is also another consideration - that of the love of his life, Minnie Patch. So with ideas twirling around in his mind like a windstorm, his life with Minnie like those of unrequited lovers, Alex hangs onto the hope that somehow Minnie really still loves him. He plans to steal the lotto ticket, from his uncle, the tyrant, to keep her respect. But Minnie has married Sam Patch, and the only way that Alex can guarantee that Minnie will come back to him is to use the moment to entice her.

If Alex could somehow get this money, he would do far more good with it than his uncle who has lost himself in anger of his failed plowing company, and Minnie might just come back to him. It is this dilemma that is central to this somewhat overwrought novel that is peppered with drunks and scabs, the characters mostly hard-noised and poverty stricken, forever damaged and always bereaved. These are people who have faced their fair share of life's hard knocks.

Alex is a man who had planned to save money, to have things in his own life, and to be happy, but it isn't until he reconnects his arch childhood nemesis Leo Bourque who knows a secret, something Alex had done to the Jim Chapman's company a year ago, that Alex - and consequently Leo - are set on a path towards self destruction.

This is indeed a powerful novel, full of misery and poverty, but often the narrative goes in circles, the author more concerned with espousing his complex philosophical views on religion, morality, and faith than propelling the story forward. A compendium of destiny and a well-crafted meditation on the human condition, The Lost Highway works as a complex portrait of a vast and rapacious ego with unchecked moral compass that ends up justifying to a horrible act, but it is also a novel that often sinks under the weight of it's own repetitiveness and self-importance.

With a plot that revolves around a dead body and a teenage girl who knows what is at a stake regarding the thirteen million dollars, life for Alex and Leo comes to a devastating climax in an ending that is riddled with a type of bitter irony. The aftermath of a violent act and the total sum of all Alex's plans and ambitions end up coming to the single sentence: "You have done what you have done." Mike Leonard April 08.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lost about why it's called the Lost Highway, June 4, 2008

By 

Darren Vandenberg (Melbourne, VIC Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Highway (Hardcover)

People always use terms like "moral" and "fierce" to describe this writer, but I'd forgotten how long winded and repetitive he could be. A couple of sections were terribly preachy; his own moral theories badly woven into the story. Worst of all, the main character Alex was portrayed as a small town ethics lecturer, but his thoughts and prejudices were akin to those of a person with half his IQ. In short, an unbelievable character in a sometimes unbelievable story.

Other people and sequences worked a lot better; the incorrigible Leo Bourque, the uncommonly insightful native Canadian police inspector Markus Paul and the breathtaking scene near the end when a 15 year old girl is pursued by two men who wish to drown her.

Particularly in the second half, the book gathered momentum and was really compelling, but at half the size it would have been every bit as effective. It's not that often I spend so much time wondering how clumsily chapters are put together, or why the same points are repeated again and again and the obvious re-stated. I have been spoiled by the sparse writing of Galgut and Coetzee for sure.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars David Richards has a formidable talent!, October 31, 2009

By 

S. Schwartz "romonko" (alberta canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Highway (Paperback)

This is probably the saddest and most broody book that I have read in some time. It does start out slow and we delve deep into Alex Chapman's mind and his motives, but about halfway through it picks up quite a bit. By that time Mr. Adams has set the stage for a great psychological suspense book that shows depravity at its very worst. Richards' plot is set in and around an unclaimed winning lottery ticket, and he shows how the thought of a large amount of money can change people's personalities entirely and how it can cause some people to step way over the line. I love the setting in around New Brunswick. It is the perfect place near this lost highway for all kinds of dark and terrible things to happen. I know there are lots of places in Canada that are in decline like this place that Richards has chosen for his setting. Rural Canada has many roads to nowhere and many people that society has forgotten that still live there. This book is a tragedy, but one that I could not put down once I got into it.