Dysfunction brings family to a crossroads
Family with too many children and too little parenting tries to come to grips
In 1929, Lucy Maud Montgomery, of Anne of Green Gables fame, wrote, after a drive through Cobalt, site of Ontario’s turn-of-the-century silver boom, “Such a desolate, unlovely town surrounded by ghastly leprous hills! I could not live in such a place if I discovered a new gold or silver mine every morning.”
Welcome to Mary Lawson’s northern Ontario. As it so happens, Lawson is a distant relative of the venerable Maud. Lawson doesn’t live in northern Ontario, but the invented town of Struan — located to a fictional northwest of Cobalt — has taken her very far indeed. The two previous novels she has set there, Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, were bestsellers, and the latter was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. This fall’s Road Ends should bring more of the same success.
Readers are reunited with some of the characters from Crow Lake, but the focus is on a new family, the Cartwrights. Lawson alternates between the points of view of three characters: daughter Megan, son Tom and father Edward — three people at altogether different levels of conscious- ness. Megan, 21, knows that her family, with too many children and too little parenting, is entirely dysfunctional; older brother Tom is beginning to suspect that something is wrong, and Edward is clueless, not noticing until too late that his wife, Emily, is losing it, or maybe never really had it in the first place. In some ways, Emily is reminiscent of Michelle Duggar, of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting. At 45, she is having trouble giving up on the idea of having one last baby. Unlike Duggar, who has won an award for her parenting, Emily has significant trouble caring for her existing children, and has been relying on her only daughter, Megan, to pick up the slack ever since Megan was but a child herself.
Megan has finally had enough of indentured servitude. She decamps to England. She only feels free to leave because her mother is 45, and has strict orders from the doctor to not risk trying for any more children. After a rough start in London, Megan gets a job that makes good use of her parentified-child helper skills, setting up a small hotel. These sections of the novel provide a higher level of detail about the ins and outs of setting up a new operation than might, strictly speaking, be necessary, but there is also something Maeve Binchy-ish, and therefore warming to the heart and pleasing, about these “Megan abroad” bits. Binchy was good at describing efficient characters using their skills to overcome their woes, and Lawson is, too.
There is another reason why the London bits may be so entertaining: verisimilitude. Like Megan, Lawson, who is a native of central Ontario and has a psychology degree from McGill, moved to England in the late ’60s, where she still lives today. Her love affair with northern Ontario stems from summers spent there in childhood.
Megan’s departure doesn’t keep Emily Cartwright from trying for — and getting — one last baby. After giving birth, she doesn’t get out of her room to bathe, feed or otherwise tend to her older but still dependent children, not even the especially vulnerable 4-year-old Adam. As Megan knows, and as Tom, and even the very dim Edward, are coming to realize, Emily “didn’t actually care for her children very much once they passed the baby stage.”
Road Ends reminds me of novels with unreliable narrators — The Dinner by Herman Koch, or Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen — even though only one of the characters, Edward, is actually narrating in the first person. Tom and Edward have blinkers on when it comes to their family situation, and what I enjoyed most about the book was how believable it is as these characters rationalize and refuse to accept responsibility for what they are seeing — children going hungry while the adults of the house neglect them. It’s as though Tom and Edward have an image in their mind of what a healthy household looks like, and have superimposed it onto their home, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary.
If they have trouble seeing what is going wrong in their family, it is even more true for the people in town, who make it clear that the Cartwrights are one of the “good” families, unlike the less fortunate Picketts, who are judged harshly for their more public failings. In an unusually insightful quote, Edward encapsulates the message of the novel: “If Joel Pickett is responsible for his own actions, then I am responsible for mine. If you don’t accept that, then your life is not your own. You are nothing more than a puppet, with your ancestors pulling your strings.” There may be hope for Edward yet.
Road Ends
By Mary Lawson Knopf Canada 336 pages, $29.95