God Is.: My Search for Faith in a Secular World

Description

In this invaluable contribution to the continuing debate about religious belief, David Adams Richards offers an exhilaratingly fresh perspective and a voice more impassioned, heartfelt, and sometimes furious, than anything written about God by an atheist.

David Adams Richards, one of Canada’s most beloved and celebrated authors, has been wrestling with questions of morality, faith, and religion ever since he was a child. They have always informed his fiction. Now he examines their role in his own life and spells out his own belief, in what is his most self-revealing work to date. With characteristic honesty, Richards charts his rocky relationship with his cradle Catholicism, his battles with personal demons, his encounters with men who were proud to be murderers, and the many times in his life when he has been witness to what he unapologetically calls miracles. In this subtly argued, highly personal polemic, David Adams Richards insists that the presence of God cannot be denied, and that many of those who espouse atheism also know that presence, though they would not admit it to anyone — including themselves. Every follower of today’s battle between faith and atheism, and every lover of David Adams Richards’ superb fiction, will find God Is revelatory.

“I believe that all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God — or at the very least not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the universe was actually His creation. Oh, we might put Him on trial for making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy that He is here. Well, He is.”

Questions of faith, morality, the role of unseen forces in our destinies, have been central to the fiction of David Adams Richards. Now he directly addresses what these questions have meant to him in his own life, and what he has come firmly to believe. He has always been a courageous and uncompromisingly honest writer — but never more so than here.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Nights Below Station Street

Description

David Adams Richards’ Governor General’s Award-winning novel is a powerful tale of resignation and struggle, fierce loyalties and compassion. This book is the first in Richards’ acclaimed Miramichi trilogy. Set in a small mill town in northern New Brunswick, it draws us into the lives of a community of people who live there, including: Joe Walsh, isolated and strong in the face of a drinking problem; his wife, Rita, willing to believe the best about people; and their teenage daughter Adele, whose nature is rebellious and wise, and whose love for her father wars with her desire for independence. Richards’ unforgettable characters are linked together in conflict, and in articulate love and understanding. Their plight as human beings is one we share.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Customer Reviews

Nights Below Station Street By David Adams Richards
The book doesn't have a THEME or a STORY LINE.. it goes on about human struggle in relationships (people seeking belonging).
If you're looking for a book with action and a story line (i.e. someone goes to war and returns, and so on) this book isn't for you.
Again, this book depicts human struggles in relationships; we find in-depth description about the characters in the novel and some of the things that go on. The structure of the novel is much like a memoir; meaning the story goes back and forth and jumps from "one topic to the other".
Hopefully this thread didn't confuse you and simply made it easier to pick the right book.

2005-12-09 | GC (Chinatown us) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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The genuine heartbreaking book of staggering genius
What I recognize in my second adventure into this author's work is a particular truth--which is that (at least in my Canadian experience) poor communities have a singular commonality. There is a language, both spoken and experiential, about being poor that transcends its environment. In Richards' books, poor in Toronto sounds and feels a lot like poor in New Brunswick. While the physical aspects are very different, the population isn't. And there was something so familiar about some of the characters that I felt as if I'd known them in my childhood.

Poor angry, alienated to the point of sickness Adele; her mother, lovely, determined Rita, making the best of her marriage to alcoholic Joe--who just may be one of the most perfectly rendered characters I've ever encountered. One cannot help but love and feel for Joe, battling his demons and temptations that all reside within bottles; stammering, powerful Joe with his big body and battered, but still functioning heart; Joe the unlikeliest of heroes.

There is such a cast of characters in this book; they have their hopes and miseries and they all intersect at one point or another as time eases away unnoticed and fate makes itself felt in every way in the hushed, shattering beauty of a blizzard.

David Adams Richards is the consummate observer, translating his visions into quiet, apparently effortless prose; placing people before us in all their flawed splendor so that we might view the human condition and reflect upon our similarities and differences.

My highest recommendation.

2002-07-20 (CT USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Challenging but potentially engaging
You will get to know some members of a small mining town in New Brunswick, all struggling to figure themselves out, find love, and place themselves in a difficult world.

I had some trouble getting used to his unique style of writing - David Adams Richards writes as if observing his characters and describing their actions and thoughts as if he's from another land altogether. This was very distracting for me, and tended to take away my flow of reading. On the other hand, it was also challenging, in that it made me think about the characters and what their words and actions meant.

The last 20-30 pages are by far the best of the entire novel and well worth the read.

2001-11-23 | cathst (Toronto, Ontario Canada) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Pretty good
Slow going at times, but it wraps up nicely and the reader is feeling as though everything is as it should and always has been.

2000-09-07 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Ok, but not great
Had to read this for an English course. Incidentally, I live in the same town the book is set in. The town or the people in it are not as presented, at least it isn't right now.

Great character development, but that's about all there is. Cared a lot for the chareacters, but nothing really happens to them until the end.

2000-08-02 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Lord Beaverbrook

Description

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Customer Reviews

The Little Giant
He wasn't physically large, but his physical presence was never in question. His horizons were endless, but he had the drive and ambition to strive to reach them all. Max Aitken's story reads like a modern fairy tale, but the people and circumstances are real. From a Newcastle, New Brunswick childhood, during which his ability to maneuver people for his own ends was manifested early on, Max rose to become a Peer of the Realm, much to the distress of several of the other peers. At the same time he had become the most influential newspaperman in the world. All this before the age of forty!

David Adams Richards was the ideal choice to portray Max. As a novelist, his approach to Aitken's life bears an intimacy few historians possess. A native of Beaverbrook's home town, he has a fine writer's touch for bringing Max Aitken to life. The author's style is well-tuned to the personality of his subject. Aitken's career seems to have left him little time for reflection, there was always something else to accomplish.

Aitken's drive for success emerged early - he started a newspaper at 13. After a short term as an office boy in a law office, he moved to Halifax, where he came under the tutelage of John Stairs, who taught him financial matters. A somewhat shady business affair led him to leave Canada for Britain. There, he moved upward with amazing speed to earn a Knighthood in 1911. The outbreak of WWI prompted the Canadian government to put him in charge of an archive of Canadian activities in the conflict. Not a record-keeper, Max used the role to promote Canada's role in the war. Before the Armistice was signed, Max Aitken had become Lord Beaverbrook - title taken from the region near his home.

In the interwar years Aitken had his foot in two, related realms. Intelligence and propaganda were closely related in those days. But his other interest lay with the newspaper business, and his takeover of the 'Express" papers rejuvenated the chain. Among other causes it promoted was Free Trade among the members of the British Empire. As a Canadian, Max had suffered a good many snubs and sneers for being a "Colonial", but his wish for equal status really was based on economic issues. The culmination of all these activities, of course, was the appointment of newspaper baron Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, to being in charge of aircraft production shortly after the breakout of WWII. How incongruous - a publisher doing manufacturing? On reflection, the answer is dead easy. Aircraft production requires organisation and management skills. Max Aitken had demonstrated such abilities from an early age. This is a little giant of a book about a little giant of a man. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

2008-10-10 (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Mercy Among the Children: A Novel

Description

At the age of 12, believing he has killed a friend, Sidney Henderson vows to God never to harm another human being. In the years that follow, the brilliant, self-educated, almost pathologically gentle Sidney keeps his promise, even in the face of hatred and persecution in his insular, rural community. So when a small boy dies in a botched act of sabotage and revenge and Sidney is blamed, his son Lyle takes matters into his own violent hands to defend the family. Rejecting both God and the books on which he was raised, Lyle must determine the legacy his family's tragedy will hold.

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Transpose Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure to New Brunswick's rugged Miramichi River. Surround Job with loose fists, malicious boots, and cold, gallon wine. Invite the Macbeths over for drinks. Add a lame dog named Scupper Pit and you've got the raw ingredients of David Adams Richards's Mercy Among the Children. Set in an isolated, wind-besieged house with bullet holes in the tarpaper walls, Richards's novel wonders-- pointedly, beautifully--whether goodness is merely a luxury.

At the age of 12, having borne more suffering in his child's body than any adult should endure, Sydney Henderson vows never to harm another human soul. Turning his back on the violent alcoholism of his upbringing, self-educated Sydney wins the honest respect of the beautiful Elly and the children they bear. Honest respect, however, is rarely a match for fear and base human opportunism. Manipulated, attacked, and abused by a small community eager for a scapegoat, Sydney loses his job, the health of his wife, and, most importantly, the respect of his son Lyle. "There is no worse flaw in man's character," Richards knows, "than that of wanting to belong."

The superb, controlled, and unapologetic Mercy Among the Children is nothing less than an inquiry into human strength. Richards uses the crack of ribs on a frigid night to remind us of the opportunistic populism of much so- called morality. Mercy, which shared Canada's premier fiction award, the Giller Prize, with Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, combines the hound dog's attention to locale of fellow Maritimer Alistair MacLeod with the quotidian insight of countryman Timothy Findley's The Wars, especially its reminder that the emotions behind war also drive fights over who should scrub the dinner dishes. --Darryl Whetter

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Customer Reviews

Heartbreaking poverty
This is really quite an incredible read. I was captivated by this story, and by the three generations of complicated Henderson men who just couldn't catch a break. The characters were very intriguing, and a lot of what happened was largely unexpected. The writing is exceptional, and it captures the loneliness of the place (rural New Brunswick) and the desperation of the people who live there very well. These people will stay with you for a long time afterward. Highly recommended.

2010-02-10 (Los Angeles, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Fine Dialogue, but the idiot plot triumphs.
Richards has an engaging writing style. It's simple and direct. The plot however concerns a family victimised by townsfolk you'd see in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The villains are written as completely one note. There is no depth to them and the Richardson clan is so meek and idiotic (confessing to crimes for no reason) that you feel nothing for them. Save your money and read the co-winner for the Giller Prize.

2008-02-01 | cmleidig (Akron, Ohio United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Fine Writer, but depressing, ridiculous story
Richards has a way with dialogue and the book is readable, but the story is so gloomy and the characters do not ring true. Everyone is either too noble or too villainous. The plot requires characters to behave like idiots. If they didn't, the novel would much, much shorter. Because the characters are one dimensional, it's impossible to feel anything for them.

2008-01-17 (London) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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I gave up.
Fine writing, beyond a doubt. I read widely and skip the fluff, but this was just sooooooooo unmitigatedly depressing, page after page of utter misery, that I could not go on. If you are really STRONG, get it, read it. Otherwise, you may never reach the mercy. I didn't.

2007-05-07 | book fiend (Ecuador) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Fiction on a Monumental and Profound Scale
Don't miss this one!

I have just completed this amazing novel, after devouring it in three days. David Adams Richards is a novelist of such staggering power that it is not at all a stretch to compare him with Hardy, Melville, and Tolstoy. His story of Morality, Poverty, Family, Violence, and the inevitable hand of Fate is a controlled steamroller of mounting tragedies, set in motion by a collection of common saints, fools, and monsters, characters in a town bound together by generations of interlocking lives.

Author Richards's unflinching portrait of a family destitute and battered by the condemnation of their community reminded me of the great novel "The Dollmaker" by Harriet Arnow, while the awesomely constructed plot that unfolds with such terrifying inevitability reminded me of that greatest of thrillers, "A Simple Plan" by Scott Smith.

That a book can be such a profound comment on our Humanity, and still be such a monster of a gripping story that you'll be unable to stop reading, is a gift to the lover of great novels.

And it is as affecting to the reader as Greek drama -- it will take me days to come down from the experience of reading it, and perhaps years to find a novel as perfectly formed as Mercy Among The Children.

2006-09-24 (New York City) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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The Lost Highway

Description

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Customer Reviews

David Richards has a formidable talent!
This is probably the saddest and most broody book that I have read in some time. It does start out slow and we delve deep into Alex Chapman's mind and his motives, but about halfway through it picks up quite a bit. By that time Mr. Adams has set the stage for a great psychological suspense book that shows depravity at its very worst. Richards' plot is set in and around an unclaimed winning lottery ticket, and he shows how the thought of a large amount of money can change people's personalities entirely and how it can cause some people to step way over the line. I love the setting in around New Brunswick. It is the perfect place near this lost highway for all kinds of dark and terrible things to happen. I know there are lots of places in Canada that are in decline like this place that Richards has chosen for his setting. Rural Canada has many roads to nowhere and many people that society has forgotten that still live there. This book is a tragedy, but one that I could not put down once I got into it.

2009-10-31 | romonko (alberta canada) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Lost about why it's called the Lost Highway
People always use terms like "moral" and "fierce" to describe this writer, but I'd forgotten how long winded and repetitive he could be. A couple of sections were terribly preachy; his own moral theories badly woven into the story. Worst of all, the main character Alex was portrayed as a small town ethics lecturer, but his thoughts and prejudices were akin to those of a person with half his IQ. In short, an unbelievable character in a sometimes unbelievable story.

Other people and sequences worked a lot better; the incorrigible Leo Bourque, the uncommonly insightful native Canadian police inspector Markus Paul and the breathtaking scene near the end when a 15 year old girl is pursued by two men who wish to drown her.

Particularly in the second half, the book gathered momentum and was really compelling, but at half the size it would have been every bit as effective. It's not that often I spend so much time wondering how clumsily chapters are put together, or why the same points are repeated again and again and the obvious re-stated. I have been spoiled by the sparse writing of Galgut and Coetzee for sure.

2008-06-04 (Melbourne, VIC Australia) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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"For great good a crime might be necessary"
Mirroring the great classics of literature this vast and unwieldy novel of betrayal centers on the winnings of a lottery ticket and those characters that become willingly caught up in an effort to find the elusive receipt and then hopefully cash it in. But what starts out as a rather depressing tale of animosity and bitterness, unrequited love, and all-consuming betrayal, soon turns into a full blown cosmic morality play where stabbings, blackmail, long held family resentments, and even murder provide the overriding themes.

Steeped in a literary flavor that is deeply reflective of the novels of the great Russian classic authors, The Lost Highway begins as the down and out Alex Chapman discovers from the owner of the local service station, Burton Tucker, that his despotic great uncle Jim Chapman has just won thirteen million dollars. Over the years Alex's relationship with his uncle, nicknamed the "the old man" has been fraught with difficulty, both of them warring off and on for twenty years, ever since the boy had left the priesthood under what were called suspicious circumstances.

Living a paltry existence in a small cabin that used to be the old man's icehouse, Alex plots and plans and ruminates on his failed life even as he's certain he's going to be kicked out of his ramshackle him. With old Jim Chapman also intent to write him out of the will, Alex is positive that his Uncle's enmity for him originates from along with his long-held dislike of Alex's father, mainly because of how he treated Alex's long-suffering mother.

As The Lost Highway opens, both uncle and nephew are embroiled in a "brutal infantile tit-for-tat." Alex has tried to live a life both fair and honest, yet he's never got ahead. Jim Chapman, however, sees his nephew as an unadulterated failure that has done his best to ruin the family fortune. Haunted by the painful death of his mother, and with few expectations, Alex begins to obsess over this money that he considers is just too much for an enemy like Jim Chapman.

To let Chapman have his winnings would be the end of Alex's life. He would never be able to live down Jim's hubris, nor would he be able to crawl back. But there is also another consideration - that of the love of his life, Minnie Patch. So with ideas twirling around in his mind like a windstorm, his life with Minnie like those of unrequited lovers, Alex hangs onto the hope that somehow Minnie really still loves him. He plans to steal the lotto ticket, from his uncle, the tyrant, to keep her respect. But Minnie has married Sam Patch, and the only way that Alex can guarantee that Minnie will come back to him is to use the moment to entice her.

If Alex could somehow get this money, he would do far more good with it than his uncle who has lost himself in anger of his failed plowing company, and Minnie might just come back to him. It is this dilemma that is central to this somewhat overwrought novel that is peppered with drunks and scabs, the characters mostly hard-noised and poverty stricken, forever damaged and always bereaved. These are people who have faced their fair share of life's hard knocks.

Alex is a man who had planned to save money, to have things in his own life, and to be happy, but it isn't until he reconnects his arch childhood nemesis Leo Bourque who knows a secret, something Alex had done to the Jim Chapman's company a year ago, that Alex - and consequently Leo - are set on a path towards self destruction.

This is indeed a powerful novel, full of misery and poverty, but often the narrative goes in circles, the author more concerned with espousing his complex philosophical views on religion, morality, and faith than propelling the story forward. A compendium of destiny and a well-crafted meditation on the human condition, The Lost Highway works as a complex portrait of a vast and rapacious ego with unchecked moral compass that ends up justifying to a horrible act, but it is also a novel that often sinks under the weight of it's own repetitiveness and self-importance.

With a plot that revolves around a dead body and a teenage girl who knows what is at a stake regarding the thirteen million dollars, life for Alex and Leo comes to a devastating climax in an ending that is riddled with a type of bitter irony. The aftermath of a violent act and the total sum of all Alex's plans and ambitions end up coming to the single sentence: "You have done what you have done." Mike Leonard April 08.

2008-04-22 | MikeonAlpha (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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River of the Brokenhearted

Description

Janie McCleary runs one of the first movie theatres in New Brunswick. A successful woman in a world of men, she is ostracized, a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. She trusts nobody other than family. Spanning generations this title explores the life of this formidable person.

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Set in a small town on a river in New Brunswick, River of the Brokenhearted, David Adams Richards's first novel since his Giller Prize-winning Mercy Among the Children, is told by Wendell King, son of Miles King and grandson of the feisty, willful Janie McLeary King, who made her fortune running the town's first cinema. Set against this trio is the lower-class family of the Drukens, especially Rebecca Druken and her uncle, Joey Elias, bitter because their own early cinema failed. Established early on, the feud plays out across three generations, spanning successes, failures, murder, and dissolution. Yet despite the somewhat bleak subject matter, tremendous humour and vitality persist in this story. The characters leap off the page, and in the person of Miles King, Richards has imagined a fully human soul of stunning believability. Miles is fatally flawed, committing slow suicide by gin as his cinema too begins to fail in the face of the TV's small screen. A sensitive eccentric, a target of small-town narrowness, he is subtly tortured psychically, for years, by Elias and the vicious Rebecca, who have made the downfall of the Kings their life's ambition. Miles King is a character of great loneliness, pathos, humor, and compassion, one of the finest creations not only of Canadian writing but any literature.

River of the Brokenhearted is the story of a river, the Miramichi, but it is mostly about the river of time that passes through Miles King, his mother, his son, and their enemies, carrying all to their ultimate fates: "She had left a river in New Brunswick that would swallow you with its life, shout in its rapids, laugh in its eddies, create industry in its currents, a river of Irish and Scottish myth, wedded to the soil." An outstanding work of fiction. --Mark Frutkin

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Customer Reviews

Unraveling the Laws of Human Morality...
This is the best book that I have read in a long time. David Adams Richards writes about dichotomous themes--good and evil, love and hate--in a world that seems to have lost its sense of distinction between such binary oppositions. Richards's novel spans four generations and tells the story of two families--the Drukens and the Mclearys--and their conflict-ridden estrangement from themselves and from each other. Janie Mcleary, the protagonist, is an assertive and successful business woman who is left widowed by her husband. She and her children are tormented by the Druken family. Her daughter, Georgina, is murdered and her son, Miles, grows up to be ghosted by his past. Characters in this novel are haunted by memories and stuggle with their faith, morality and integrity. Richard's capacity as an author, stems, in part, from his astute perception into the nature of human greed and faith. River of the Brokenhearted is not a sensuous romance novel; it is a journey into the moral struggles of humanity. Richards conveys the notion that the "good" people and the "bad" people are not always cut in black and white colors; some seemingly "immoral" characters (i.e. Miles the alcoholic) emerge as the unsaid heroes of this text. Past wrongs are translated into bodily ailments that afflict the characters on a physical level, but these wrongs are erasable. Characters are given the chance of redemption. This book resonates with spiritual undertones. It may increase your faith...

2004-12-06 (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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