Life in a small town perfectly captured
Writer recognizes the complexity of humans and our communities
“Things Worth Burying,” the powerful new novel from Toronto writer Matt Mayr, begins with a confrontation.
“A hunter from the south reported the camp,” the narrator, Joe Adler, recalls. “It had stood for fifty years but an outsider believed it didn’t belong.” Adler’s grandfather built the cabin on Crown land, and, following orders, the new cop in town, an OPP rookie, burns it to the ground while Adler watches.
As Adler watches his family heritage burn, he says of the fire, “there was comfort in its presence: to destroy something that had once been beautiful, because there was no beauty now, just a sorry structure and an old man’s wasted life. Piss on it.” That confrontation, and Adler’s complex reaction, serves as a perfect overture for a novel that has, at its core, a series of ongoing confrontations and crises with no easy answers and, crucially, no simple heroes.
Adler is the third generation of loggers to work in the woods near Black River. The town was once a once successful mining and logging town, but has been fading since the mine closed. Adler, who works as a foreman for a hardscrabble independent logging company which survives from small job to small job, seems intent on accompanying the town in its death throes.
Mayr, who grew up in northern Ontario, perfectly captures the tone of small town life, of men who work in the bush, where, as Adler says, “Death … was measured in minutes and small errors.” This is a world of friendly neighbours and vicious gossip, of mutual support and petty grudges, where the hotel bar is the only public place left to drink.
Adler and his family are at the heart of the story. His wife, Sarah, who also grew up in town, is chafing at its limitations. When a creative writing class takes her to Toronto, it soon becomes clear to Adler that she isn’t coming back, and Adler is left to raise their daughter, Anna, on his own. When an accident claims a man on the job site under his supervision, tensions rise amid accusations against Adler, a situation further complicated when he begins spending time with the man’s widow.
Mayr gives the novel plenty of time and space to develop; things change at a slow, inexorable pace. Readers will feel they come to know not only Adler — a genuinely sensitive man who is also prone to flashes of temper, with a propensity for drinking he inherited from his father and grandfather — but the community as a whole.
“Things Worth Burying” isn’t a complicated story, but a recognition of the complexity of human beings, relationships, and communities, as pressures build from without and within.