Coming of age in Edmonton inspires tale of booming city
My bookshelves are filled with novels set in London and New York and Hong Kong and Mumbai and Toronto and Montreal.
Novels set in Edmonton are harder to come by. Oh, we have fine exceptions. Henry Kreisel first put downtown Edmonton on the map, literally, back in the 1960s. More recently, Ian McGillis captured the truth of growing up in the northeast suburbs in A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry. Todd Babiak deployed an Edmonton setting for The Garneau Block. And Marty Chan and Lauralyn Chow have written pieces inspired by childhood memories of Edmonton’s Chinatown. But it took Robert Everett-Green to give literary life to Inglewood and Woodcroft. Everett-Green is best known as an arts writer with the Globe and Mail. Now, he’s written his first novel, In A Wide Country, a coming-of-age story inspired by and rooted in the Edmonton where he spent his early boyhood, just off Groat Road, a block north of Westmount Mall.
“I didn’t think, ‘Gee, I want to write an Edmonton novel,’ ” Everett-Green said. “I started working on this book when my children were young, at a time when I was being flooded with memories of when I was a kid.”
In A Wide Country takes place in the summer of 1961. Our narrator, Jasper, is a sensitive 12-yearold who’s had to grow up too fast. His beautiful mother, Corrine, a narcissistic model and glamorous grifter, dazzles the men around her, including her own son.
Driving west from Winnipeg, running from their past, Jasper and Corinne arrive in boomtown Edmonton, and rent a suite in the Bel Air apartments — known today as Baywood Park — on 114 Avenue and 132 Street.
Jasper, largely left to fend for himself, spends his days exploring Westmount Mall, the old Sahara Restaurant, the original Westmount Theatre. He discovers Coronation Park and the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium, and embeds himself in the complicated family of the astronomer who runs the observatory.
The novel is a poignant story of Jasper’s quest for a father figure, and his ultimate loss of innocence. But it’s also a sharp portrait of mid-century modern Edmonton, an ambitious, multicultural city under construction, a city of newcomers, of hustlers looking for new opportunities and new identities.
Edmonton in the early 1960s, said Everett-Green, was full of confidence, a booming city where oil prices were high and land prices were cheap. At the same time, the early ’60s were a time of Cold War dread.
He wanted to capture that tension between optimism and fear.
But the book, he stresses, is not autobiographical.
“I’ve taken things I remember and given them a twist, and turned them.”
Jasper, his protagonist, is 12 in
1961. Everett-Green himself was only five at that time. So while he drew upon his own early memories, growing up right across the street from the Bel-Air to ground his narrative, he also he did a lot of reading and looking through archival photos.
“I did research. I really enjoyed putting some hooks into actuality.”
And while there are parallels between Jasper’s mother Corinne and his own mother, musician and TV personality Jo Green, there are profound differences.
Like Corinne, Green was a model, and Everett-Green drew on his own memories of his mother sitting at her mirror, putting on her makeup, as he described Corinne.
“But Corinne is not really like my mother, who was a very loving mother and very rooted in where she lived.”
For Everett-Green, who’s spent a career fielding story pitches from all kinds of musicians and writers and artists, it’s a strange experience to be on the other side.
“There’s been a real turning of the tables,” he said.
Stranger yet was the gulf between fiction and non-fiction.
“As a journalist, you plan things out. You feel like you’re in control, pretty much. But with this, I didn’t know where I was going, where things were going to be able to fit. I spent lots of time stumbling about and discarding things.”
You wouldn’t know it from the crafted narrative Everett-Green unfurls, from his sensitive handling of Jasper’s growth, his detailed evocation of Edmonton’s own coming of age.
“I don’t know if a book set on the Prairies is going to get as much attention in Toronto,” he says. “But location means a lot, if you’re going to root your story in a place.”