This fiction review first appeared in EVENT 43/1.

Craig Davidson, Cataract City, Doubleday, 2013

Michael Winter, Minister Without Portfolio, Hamish Hamilton, 2013

One could (and many do) write thousands of words on the connection between place and identity in Canadian literature. The English-Canadian desire to see oneself anchored to this place is intense, the product of being a settler culture in a vast and imposing land. But how we connect to the land—and our regional identity—also shapes our understandings of social and gender roles. The stories we read about these experiences do, too. Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (short-listed for the 2013 Giller Prize) and Michael Winter’s Minister Without Portfolio (2013 Giller Prize long list) are two recent English-Canadian novels deeply invested in space and place and how each defines and reflects the protagonists’ masculinity. Cataract City’s gritty urban realism and Minister Without Portfolio’s rural Newfoundland landscape both reflect how working class masculinities are defined through labour and experience in these spaces. In both novels, the protagonists are products of the places they inhabit, for better or for worse or, far more often, something that resembles both.

For those not in the know, ‘Cataract City’ is a nickname for Niagara Falls, Ontario. It comes from the Latin for waterfalls, but it also reflects the gathering blindness that overtakes the young men of this working class city, limiting their options and choices. At the centre of this narrative, Duncan and Owen (or Dunk and Owe, as they know each other) are two such young men, whose plans to escape Cataract City and the imposing spectre of the Nabisco factory (the ‘Bisk,’ as the men in town call it) are systematically foiled. In the opening vignette, we learn that Dunk has made it as far as the Kingston Pen, and Owe has escaped the pore-infusing scent of the Chips Ahoy line at the Bisk only to become the heavy-drinking cop who put Dunk away for eight years. Such is the relationship that frames the narrative of the text, as Davidson takes us simultaneously backward through the moments that lead to this moment and forward to what happens next.

The relationship between Dunk and Owe is, perhaps unfortunately, rooted in the stereotypical notion that the criminal and those who seek to stop them are really only two halves of the same identity. In using this trope, Davidson is able to demonstrate that class and opportunity make all the difference for young men in an industrial town. Owe’s father works his way into an office job at the Bisk, granting his son access to private schooling and a better neighbourhood in town that allows him to escape the endless repetition of the factory floor and become a police officer and not the hapless criminal that Dunk, after failing to sustain a monotonous life at the Bisk, becomes. But the cost is made clear throughout the narrative: Owe’s father has no friends and is not seen as a real man by the factory labourers he once worked with and now manages; likewise, Owe is beloved by the community when he looks like he will make a name for himself in college sports, but loathed as a turncoat when he chooses police college. In this vision of life in the manufacturing belt of Southern Ontario, especially as the factories close around men prepared to do nothing else, social mobility is suspect rather than sanctioned.

The novel is overwhelmingly masculine in its scope and focus; the narrative shifts between the hypermanly, class-marked spaces of the factory floor, the world of low-rent professional wrestling, the dog racing track, the dog fighting club and the boxing ring. These young men idolize the physical and avoid the emotional, preferring demonstrations of bodily prowess to meaningful conversation. But as Dunk and Owe grow up, sometimes together and sometimes apart, they find ways to build unique identities within the proscribed world of Cataract City. As Owe tells us, in the world he and Dunk inhabit, ‘you come through hard if you come through at all. But I think people can be more beautiful for being broken.’ And the men of Cataract City are all broken—unfixable, in fact—which makes Cataract City a heavier and more difficult read than Minister Without Portfolio. In Michael Winter’s novel, the concluding message seems to be that we mend ourselves through the hard work of building connections between one another. In Cataract City, however, all the characters remain isolated and largely unknowable. But this works for Davidson’s novel. It would not if the characters were one breath away from a perfect life; it’s not something any of these men are honestly seeking, anyway.

Whereas Cataract City opens with a character leaving prison, Minister Without Portfolio opens with a protagonist leaving town. Henry Hayward has been left heartbroken by his once-girlfriend, Nora, and in piecing himself together in the aftermath he comes to realize that the way he has lived his life—working hard, playing hard and studiously avoiding long-term commitments (the competent but unencumbered ‘Minister Without Portfolio’ of the title)—is no longer what he is looking for. This is a realization grounded in space and place; in an attempt to get over the loss of Nora, Henry takes the advice of a friend who tells him he has to get out of Nora’s city, St. John’s, because she is inextricably linked to its urban landscape. From there the narrative takes us first to Afghanistan, where Henry takes work as an independent contractor and experiences the tragedy that rocks him and shakes the rest of his life; to Fort McMurray, where Henry determines he is cursed; and to the tiny, aptly named community of Renews, Newfoundland, where Henry figures out how to reframe his life. On the advice of a neighbour, he sets out to prove that he can build a home for himself and find a way to ‘take care of his hundred people.’ This desire for connection and the slow-burning love of a widow named Martha allow Henry to rebuild.

In Henry Hayward, fans of Winter’s writing will find a familiar protagonist. This is not the semi-autobiographical Gabriel English of Winter’s earlier novels—Henry is not a reader or a writer, but a man who works with his hands and defines himself by his ability to solve problems practically. But Winter’s own voice and experiences echo through this protagonist just as they did in those earlier texts. For example, in Minister Without Portfolio, Henry falls into an incinerator and survives; this is an event that happened to Winter himself in 2006 and that he has retold on the CBC and in an essay published in The Walrus in 2012. The scene of Henry’s fall is almost word-for-word the essay from The Walrus, including the tiny, specific details like the two open cans of Pepsi that Henry/Winter drinks on the way home. Winter has never been shy about using real life in his fiction (indeed, his 2010 novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, was entirely reconstructed from existing court documents from a trial in St. John’s). The results are characters and moments that spark with life and honesty, motivations that feel utterly authentic, and a voice that jumps from the page, echoing next to you as you read.

Like many of Winter’s other protagonists, Henry seems like a meditation on definitions of masculinity. When a conceptually masculine life of independent living and contracted labour that always takes him away from Newfoundland proves to be ultimately unfulfilling, Henry must redefine his sense of what it means to be a man. Returning to Newfoundland and finding his way to Renews a broken man—broken-hearted after Nora, and broken in spirit from his traumatic experiences in Afghanistan and Fort McMurray—he attempts to own and rebuild a broken-down home and find a place for himself in this tiny community. This becomes the means by which he rebuilds and redefines himself, by the novel’s end, as a man, a partner and a father.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Michael Winter is one of Canada’s finest prose writers of recent years; the poetic delicacy in his descriptions and the honest philosophy in the way he builds characters resonate immediately with readers. We all know these people, and opening a novel by Michael Winter is more like coming home than starting a story. Minister Without Portfolio represents Winter at his best, connecting his compelling characters to a beautiful story of rebuilding a life in charmingly ordinary circumstances.

 —Review by Brenna Clarke Gray