Mmmm...I've put in Joni Mitchell's Hits to listen to while I write this...Her voice and the melancholy it implies with all her songs, especially "The River" and "Urge for Going," coursed through my head while I was reading David Adams Richards' Nights Below Station Street. I looked up Joni Mitchell's bio to see if she had grown up in New Brunswick...She did not, she grew up in Saskatchewan. Richards' book was fabulous...very different from Salverson's which I just read, but not so much in some ways. Salverson's was an epic work about people and their struggles over many years, this novel is about people just as they are in the moment. Richards' prose is very stark and simplistic, but in a deceiving sort of way. There are no big words here, no flowery passages, just descriptions of people living their lives in their own way. And, these ARE people, like you and me, not romantic characters fighting lofty philosophical imaginary battles with their souls. The characters in Nights live in trailers or small houses they keep up themselves, they work hard, they don't know what to expect from their lives, they need sustenance both in terms of food and emotions: love, acceptance. They are dependent on each other as much or as little as they want to be, and when struggling with their inner selves, they come to realize this...and if at first it is frightening to them, the actual admittance is almost a relief.
My favorite quote from this book is this: "An object falls, it has no idea where it will land, but at every moment of its descent it is exactly where it is supposed to be" (Richards 220).
Some reviewers claimed that Richards depicted the people of New Brunswick very well, even using true sorts of speech patterns. I don't know about that since I have never been to New Brunswick, but I do feel Richards depicted people in general well, in a wonderfully honest and true way. I looked on Amazon.ca to read customer reviews of this book and one person said that they had to read the book for school and that they were from the same town as the book took place; that the characters in the book were nothing like the people in his/her town. The town must have been overtaken by pod people or something, because I grew up in a small town in the U.S. (and it's not like the U.S. is Mars or anything), and I can see something of all the characters in people who still live in my hometown. Now I live in a moderately sized city and I can still see some of these character traits in the people I know.
People are people are people...I've realized this as I've aged(and I know I know, I'm not that old), and though they are all different, they are all the same. I find too, that the books I read now, that I love, are simply about the human race, our relationships, and basically how we just survive...Wait, I think that sums up all of literature! Coincidence? I think perhaps not;).
Shakespeare did say it best: "What a piece of work is man!"
Well, after all that stream of consciousness thinking, I'm off to clean, fill my head with more novels, write some poems, and basically become the Lady of Shalott as I work on a tapestry for my mom and watch some episodes of LOST. I should get out for a little bit, but my house has everything I need: books, television, music, computer...Maybe I'll treat myself to some dinner later. A brain is not fed on words alone, I suppose. GGs-13, Pulitzers-14.