Travelling the Lost Highway

The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards. Doubleday Canada.

In past articles, I’ve confessed how I experienced literary alarm when the late, great Timothy Findley died back in 2002. While I could read his books over and over, there would be no new stories. Whose books, then, other than Margaret Atwood’s, would I be able to look forward to on a regular, gleeful, basis?

The answer came fairly quickly: New Brunswick’s sage of the Miramichi, David Adams Richards, quickly assumed his rightful place at the top of my favourite Canadian authors. (Atwood doesn’t mind sharing top billing.)

When we spoke in the late summer of 2006, Richards told me he had another novel nearing completion, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see The Lost Highway being announced in bookstores. As expected, the novel is set on the stage that Richards knows so well, and writes of so lovingly: the communities that cluster along the mighty Miramichi river in northern New Brunswick.

This novel is reminiscent of the morality plays of the fifteenth century, when theatre offerings were designed to teach good lessons to those that came to watch. The main character is Alex Chapman, a sometime-academic who has quarreled fiercely with his great-uncle James for most of his adult life. He considers himself an intellectual, a good man who believes he’s had much bad luck and suffering through no fault of his own. When he learns that his uncle has a lottery ticket worth thirteen million dollars (which the uncle doesn’t realize is a winning ticket), Alex makes a decision that plunges him into a web of deceit, betrayal, and death.

Richards always creates characters that are memorable, either for their goodness or their truly odious natures. They’re shaped by the economic squalour they live in, and while some rise above their surroundings, others succumb to being all-too-human. Alex is a bit of a split personality in this regard. He isn’t a likeable character at all, yet as we travel the lost highway with him and learn of his past, he becomes someone the reader can feel sorry for, at times. His cohort in plotting, Leo Bourque, falls into the ‘truly odious’ category, a manipulative, sly and vicious individual who plays Alex like a fiddle. It’s fascinating to travel inside Leo’s and Alex’s heads, through the voice of the narrator, and see glimpses of explanation for their actions. Bourque “was possessed of what so many were, a great ignorance about things outside of himself and his surroundings,” and the chilling way in which he justifies his actions is a tasty bit of character exploration. His contempt for Alex, who he torments in any number of ways, is at times almost too much for the reader to take. But it does serve to show the nature of bullies, and even generates a little sympathy for Alex’s plight, even though it’s his own deluded ego and actions that have locked him into his ultimate fate.

As anodyne to the scheming characters of Alex and Bourque, we meet Minnie, the woman Alex fancied he once loved, and Amy her teenage daughter. Amy has Madonna-like qualities about her—there are threads of religion and faith throughout the novel—but beyond her love for tadpoles and skunks, there’s a human girl with moods, fears and longings, who will ultimately be the undoing of Bourque and the redemption of Alex.

There are flashes of goodness in Alex, flashes of recognition that he could be so much more than he is. In thinking about his mother, he realizes that “he only wanted to love and to forgive”, and not to blame anyone for the way his life has unfolded. As the novel slouches to its ending, the ethics that Alex had long pretended to embrace—he had been, after all, a lecturer in ethics at the university—actually show up in a kind of heroism when he finally stands up against his ‘friend’ Bourque to protect Amy.

Some will say that this is one of the darkest novels that Richards has ever published. Some will take issue with the sly digs at academia, with the biting humour with which Richards skewers the politically correct set with their corduroy jackets and sandals, where “the truth did not have to be present to pretend you were truthful.” It does falter slightly at times with a little too much exposition, but the characters are compelling even when they are despicable. Richards’ prose is clean and sure, and has crafted a novel that will remain on my “always keep” bookshelf.