River of the Brokenhearted [Hardcover]

David Adams Richards (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1559707127 | ISBN-13: 978-1559707121

From the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Mercy Among the Children comes the utterly beguiling, big-hearted story of one woman's resolute struggle to overcome small-town prejudice and deceit. Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life and legacy of Janie McCleary, a brave Irish Catholic girl who dared to marry a man from the Church of England. Their union is quickly deemed scandalous, and when her husband dies just before the Great Depression, everyone in town, led by the unscrupulous Joey Elias, turns against her. Janie is left alone to raise a family. Her solution is to open one of the first movie theaters in North America, which she runs with such success that she manages to ostracize herself even further. She is a pioneer before the age of feminism, and the burden of her salty individualism will shape the lives of her children and grandchildren. Written with compassion and mastery, River of the Brokenhearted muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of extraordinary characters, where Richards finds an alchemy of venality and goodwill, deceit and brotherliness, and marked cruelty and true love. Once again, David Adams Richards has brought us a work of astonishing grace, rooted in his special territory on the great river of New Brunswick, but firmly universal in scope.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Set in a small town on a river in New Brunswick, River of the Brokenhearted, David Adams Richards's first novel since his Giller Prize-winning Mercy Among the Children, is told by Wendell King, son of Miles King and grandson of the feisty, willful Janie McLeary King, who made her fortune running the town's first cinema. Set against this trio is the lower-class family of the Drukens, especially Rebecca Druken and her uncle, Joey Elias, bitter because their own early cinema failed. Established early on, the feud plays out across three generations, spanning successes, failures, murder, and dissolution. Yet despite the somewhat bleak subject matter, tremendous humour and vitality persist in this story. The characters leap off the page, and in the person of Miles King, Richards has imagined a fully human soul of stunning believability. Miles is fatally flawed, committing slow suicide by gin as his cinema too begins to fail in the face of the TV's small screen. A sensitive eccentric, a target of small-town narrowness, he is subtly tortured psychically, for years, by Elias and the vicious Rebecca, who have made the downfall of the Kings their life's ambition. Miles King is a character of great loneliness, pathos, humor, and compassion, one of the finest creations not only of Canadian writing but any literature.

River of the Brokenhearted is the story of a river, the Miramichi, but it is mostly about the river of time that passes through Miles King, his mother, his son, and their enemies, carrying all to their ultimate fates: "She had left a river in New Brunswick that would swallow you with its life, shout in its rapids, laugh in its eddies, create industry in its currents, a river of Irish and Scottish myth, wedded to the soil." An outstanding work of fiction. --Mark Frutkin

From Publishers Weekly

Richards, acclaimed in his native Canada, draws on his grandmother's life to provide emotional resonance for his latest novel (after 2001's Mercy Among the Children), a multigenerational family saga in which some generations are considerably more interesting than others. The narrator's grandmother, Hanna Jane (Janie) McLeary, is born toward the end of the 19th century in a small New Brunswick village. At 20 she marries an older Englishman, George King, who is poor in health as well as purse. They open a small cinema, which outdraws the town's other theater, owned by Joey Elias. When King dies, Janie has a son, Miles, and a daughter on the way—surely she can't also run a theater. Elias cunningly uses her bank's manager and her own father in attempts to gain control of her business, but Janie remains steadfast in the face of whispered scandal and threats of violence. But while she manages to keep her theater, tragedy strikes—her father is killed, and her daughter disappears while in the care of her son. Janie's story is fascinating, but while Richards' depiction of character and place remain consistently strong, the narrative slows as it focuses on her son and grandson. The trials of the family as its members progressively succumb to failure and alcoholism (even as they keep the theater running) are well drawn, but as Janie's descendants learn little from their mistakes, the tale becomes less involving. An unexpected deus ex machina in the last pages forces a rather unlikely happy ending onto a story that had been, until that point, entirely believable if not particularly memorable.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (June 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559707127
• ISBN-13: 978-1559707121
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,473,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unraveling the Laws of Human Morality..., December 5, 2004

By 

Chantal Moore (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: River of the Brokenhearted (Hardcover)

This is the best book that I have read in a long time. David Adams Richards writes about dichotomous themes--good and evil, love and hate--in a world that seems to have lost its sense of distinction between such binary oppositions. Richards's novel spans four generations and tells the story of two families--the Drukens and the Mclearys--and their conflict-ridden estrangement from themselves and from each other. Janie Mcleary, the protagonist, is an assertive and successful business woman who is left widowed by her husband. She and her children are tormented by the Druken family. Her daughter, Georgina, is murdered and her son, Miles, grows up to be ghosted by his past. Characters in this novel are haunted by memories and stuggle with their faith, morality and integrity. Richard's capacity as an author, stems, in part, from his astute perception into the nature of human greed and faith. River of the Brokenhearted is not a sensuous romance novel; it is a journey into the moral struggles of humanity. Richards conveys the notion that the "good" people and the "bad" people are not always cut in black and white colors; some seemingly "immoral" characters (i.e. Miles the alcoholic) emerge as the unsaid heroes of this text. Past wrongs are translated into bodily ailments that afflict the characters on a physical level, but these wrongs are erasable. Characters are given the chance of redemption. This book resonates with spiritual undertones. It may increase your faith...