Crimes Against My Brother
By David Adams Richards. Doubleday Canada, 400 pp, hardcover

It’s no stretch to say that David Adams Richards is the Feodor Dostoyevsky of Canadian fiction, a comparison that honours both the moral stance of his writing and its distance from the literary mores of Toronto and Vancouver. A New Brunswick native, he has taken as his subject the lower reaches of the Miramichi River, home to some of the most fabled salmon fishing on the planet and also to generations of ingrained poverty, inadequate education, and near-feudal exploitation.

If salmon feature at all in his new book, they swim by so quickly that they barely register. Instead, we’re given three cousins turned blood brothers in the form of Ian Preston, Evan Young, and Harold Dew; a small-time crook and would-be pimp named Lonnie Sullivan; and the guileless and manipulative beauty, Annette Brideau, who ultimately leads them all to their doom, in the process finding her own. What unites them is their intelligence, and the impossibility of ever finding adequate expression for the same. Their lives, like those of their neighbours, are scrunched and flattened by a collective lack of vision, by the weight of working-class apathy and bourgeois control, and by the tall-poppy syndrome in particular; Preston, who uses a contested inheritance to set himself up in business and then develops an environmental conscience, is destroyed by malevolent gossip and by his own lustful hubris.

But there’s another canker here, and it’s given a decidedly ambivalent treatment: religion. Richards’s New Brunswick, like its real-life counterpart, hews to an Old Testament, shame-based sense of morality, and Crimes Against My Brother’s anonymous narrator—an obvious, bookish stand-in for the author himself—argues that its protagonists are ruined because they have turned their backs on God. But why wouldn’t they? The power that rules the river valley is no deity of infinite kindness, and its cruelty is meted out to believers and innocents as well as to apostates. Richards argues at length that belief in God’s design is the only buffer against merciless fate, but fails to differentiate the two in any meaningful way.

Beyond this lapse in logic, though, his writing remains brutally stark and disturbingly effective. Urban sophisticates might doubt Crimes Against My Brother’s small-town realism, but Canada’s least celebrated province will recognize itself in Richards’s honest mirror, and it will not like what it sees.