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Search - The Big Why

The Big Why
Author: Michael Winter

The stories collected in One Last Good Look and the journal-novel This All Happened have given Michael Winter an enviable cachet as modern Newfoundland's charming genius loci. In The Big Why, his first historical novel, he sticks to his strengths--his knowledge and love for Newfoundland, his economical and shockingly eloquent language, and his g... more »ift for a comic flourish--but moves into territory that would eat the amiable Gabriel English, his usual autobiographical protagonist, alive: the life of the American landscape painter Rockwell Kent, a dandified frontiersman with a weakness for stark landscapes and fertile women. Tired of life among the bars and bohemians of New York, Kent moves to Brigus, Newfoundland, in the spring of 1914. He settles, rents a house, and sets to work befriending the locals and painting their landscape. Several months later, he is joined by his too-faithful wife and his young children. As the novelty of his presence wears off--and as the war in Europe stokes paranoia in the British Empire--he begins to systematically alienate his hosts, until he is eventually deported as a suspected spy and alien interloper. Throughout the novel, he is at the mercy of his surroundings and his excessive faith in their benevolence--unless he is flirting, fornicating, or painting.

Winter casts Kent's tale in the form of an explicit, intimate journal. Kent's coarsest infidelities, his humiliations, and his moments of gross arrogance are interspersed with philosophical musings (sometimes banal, sometimes profound), surges of love for family, and, best of all, sketches of Newfoundland life in the early 20th century. At its best, The Big Why reaches the heights of clarity that Winter has achieved in his short stories. Anyone caught in the wilds with a knife, a dead caribou, and a copy of this novel will probably be able to work out how to skin and dress the animal. Winter's Kent is an intriguing study: an aesthete, an ugly American, a socialist, a compulsive philanderer, he moves to Newfoundland in search of a Marxian pastoral, and is greeted with a rude bucolic serfdom that somehow extorts love from its citizens. Readers who demand a likeable protagonist won't get far with The Big Why, for Kent can be an insufferable prig. He is a rich character, however, and Winter has created a sophisticated portrait of an artist out of step with his time. --Jack Illingworth

ISBN-13: 9780887847349
ISBN-10: 088784734X
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 374
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Genre Fiction

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