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A small town in Saskatchewan suffers a tragedy when Joey Fallow, star of the high-school's hockey team, is killed in a bus crash. Twenty-five years later, when the CBC comes to town to make a movie about the event, it becomes clear that many residents haven't moved on and that many don't want to. Mired in the past, and at the same time acutely frustrated by the stagnancy he sees around him, is Adam, Joey's best friend. Adam has more recently suffered an accident himself, one that has left his memory faulty. In a struggle to master the chronology of his own life, and rise to the new challenges put in his way, he risks alienating just about everyone who frames his past and present, including his wife Ellen and many in their long-time circle of friends. "The genesis of All This Town Remembers was a sentence overheard in a basement bar in Ottawa," says Johnston. "It was a man talking to a woman or a woman talking to a man-I don't remember-but they were leaning over a jukebox at the time, and one of them was sad and the other was trying not to make it worse. They loved each other and I wrote down the snippet I overheard. Even though I didn't remember the exact line, I kept working on the story it started. Then one spring day I was in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, with a bunch of relatives. I was standing outside somewhere and wishing I still smoked. It was pretty quiet, because inside was a funeral for my grandmother. My cousin's boy jumped as far as he could into a puddle and yelled happily. He seemed too young for the gesture to be defiant, and I wished I was that young too, and I could do something that was its own, and not opposing something else. So I wrote this story about a man who wants that too." Johnston's debut novel gives distinction to the unassuming-the everyday dialogue of married life, the muffled hum of local goings-on and the quiet frustrations of winter. Adam worries at the misconceptions surrounding people's places in the world, watching as dreams are downplayed in the wake of the reality that replaces them. Torn between wanting more and wanting what he has to be enough, he resents both inclinations as somehow inauthentic. Around him he sees a community of people struggling to articulate what they mean and to shake the old adages, all the while comforted by their persistence. All This Town Remembers is about recollection, the way some things fade and then jump back fresh; the way others are recalled so often they get ground down. Johnston's narrative hinges on the gentle wearing away that turns these memories into adages themselves, part of a mythology that both houses and jails its believers. With sharp observations about small-town insecurities, condescension, authenticity and the subtleties of social interactions, Johnston's novel is an understated, startlingly resonant portrait of a man and a town.… (plus d'informations)
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Who, in the end, owns grief? Is it an intimate, personal experience, or can it be co-opted by the community at large? And when does the act of grieving become an exercise in selfishness?
Sean Johnston does not pretend to be able to answer these questions. But if the Saskatchewan native’s moody debut novel All This Town Remembers is any indication, Johnston lays admirable claim to appreciating the underpinnings of such sorrow.
The town in question is Asquith, Saskatchewan, where the citizenry is abuzz at the arrival of a CBC film crew. The subject of the film is Joey Fallow, a high-school hockey star whose death twenty years earlier has become a defining moment in the town’s identity.
Less than impressed with the excitement is Adam Stieb, Joey’s teammate and best friend. Recuperating from a workplace accident, Adam views himself as “the man with the broken brain,” with a memory “full of gaps like air.”
Adam’s life is one of chronological challenge; “there was no rhyme or reason to what he remembered, and the things he did know…were either more important to him than they should be, or he was too cold to them.”
What Adam does clearly remember is the accident that took Joey’s life. The town’s elevation of Joey to local icon somehow rankles Adam, and he sets about alienating his neighbours with his distaste for what he sees as “endless celebrations of the one dead boy.”
Johnston, 2003 winner of the Relit Award for short fiction for his collection A Day Does Not Go By, displays a true aptitude for creating muted poetry from the mundanity of prairie life. Sentences such as “Her hair smelled to him of beer and bruises” pepper the plot with memorable imagery, yet never overwhelm with pretension.
Johnston is not overtly concerned in deeply examining the despair a single devastating event can immediately inflict upon a mass community. Such an exploration already exists in Russell Banks’ emotionally resonant novel The Sweet Hereafter, a spiritual cousin to All This Town Remembers in both setting and atmosphere.
What more interests Johnston is the effect of time upon such memories, whereby the incident becomes less an occasion of grief, and more a part of the public consciousness. It evolves into something that nourishes the community, but such an evolution denies those immediately affected by the initial event any sense of ownership of their own emotions.
It is this clash between private mourning and public adulation that drives Adam (and Johnston) to try and better define what the memory of Joey’s death should mean. But memory is slippery, especially in Adam’s instance, and cannot be inherently trusted; “To imagine, you revise—it’s the same as anything and begins innocent enough—but you think of yourself as more than you were.”
Johnston has delivered a haunting celebration of the nuances and vagaries of memory, and a cautious examination of small-town insecurities. In it’s own subdued fashion, All This Town Remembers heralds the arrival of a sterling new voice in Canadian prairie fiction.
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A small town in Saskatchewan suffers a tragedy when Joey Fallow, star of the high-school's hockey team, is killed in a bus crash. Twenty-five years later, when the CBC comes to town to make a movie about the event, it becomes clear that many residents haven't moved on and that many don't want to. Mired in the past, and at the same time acutely frustrated by the stagnancy he sees around him, is Adam, Joey's best friend. Adam has more recently suffered an accident himself, one that has left his memory faulty. In a struggle to master the chronology of his own life, and rise to the new challenges put in his way, he risks alienating just about everyone who frames his past and present, including his wife Ellen and many in their long-time circle of friends. "The genesis of All This Town Remembers was a sentence overheard in a basement bar in Ottawa," says Johnston. "It was a man talking to a woman or a woman talking to a man-I don't remember-but they were leaning over a jukebox at the time, and one of them was sad and the other was trying not to make it worse. They loved each other and I wrote down the snippet I overheard. Even though I didn't remember the exact line, I kept working on the story it started. Then one spring day I was in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, with a bunch of relatives. I was standing outside somewhere and wishing I still smoked. It was pretty quiet, because inside was a funeral for my grandmother. My cousin's boy jumped as far as he could into a puddle and yelled happily. He seemed too young for the gesture to be defiant, and I wished I was that young too, and I could do something that was its own, and not opposing something else. So I wrote this story about a man who wants that too." Johnston's debut novel gives distinction to the unassuming-the everyday dialogue of married life, the muffled hum of local goings-on and the quiet frustrations of winter. Adam worries at the misconceptions surrounding people's places in the world, watching as dreams are downplayed in the wake of the reality that replaces them. Torn between wanting more and wanting what he has to be enough, he resents both inclinations as somehow inauthentic. Around him he sees a community of people struggling to articulate what they mean and to shake the old adages, all the while comforted by their persistence. All This Town Remembers is about recollection, the way some things fade and then jump back fresh; the way others are recalled so often they get ground down. Johnston's narrative hinges on the gentle wearing away that turns these memories into adages themselves, part of a mythology that both houses and jails its believers. With sharp observations about small-town insecurities, condescension, authenticity and the subtleties of social interactions, Johnston's novel is an understated, startlingly resonant portrait of a man and a town.
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Sean Johnston does not pretend to be able to answer these questions. But if the Saskatchewan native’s moody debut novel All This Town Remembers is any indication, Johnston lays admirable claim to appreciating the underpinnings of such sorrow.
The town in question is Asquith, Saskatchewan, where the citizenry is abuzz at the arrival of a CBC film crew. The subject of the film is Joey Fallow, a high-school hockey star whose death twenty years earlier has become a defining moment in the town’s identity.
Less than impressed with the excitement is Adam Stieb, Joey’s teammate and best friend. Recuperating from a workplace accident, Adam views himself as “the man with the broken brain,” with a memory “full of gaps like air.”
Adam’s life is one of chronological challenge; “there was no rhyme or reason to what he remembered, and the things he did know…were either more important to him than they should be, or he was too cold to them.”
What Adam does clearly remember is the accident that took Joey’s life. The town’s elevation of Joey to local icon somehow rankles Adam, and he sets about alienating his neighbours with his distaste for what he sees as “endless celebrations of the one dead boy.”
Johnston, 2003 winner of the Relit Award for short fiction for his collection A Day Does Not Go By, displays a true aptitude for creating muted poetry from the mundanity of prairie life. Sentences such as “Her hair smelled to him of beer and bruises” pepper the plot with memorable imagery, yet never overwhelm with pretension.
Johnston is not overtly concerned in deeply examining the despair a single devastating event can immediately inflict upon a mass community. Such an exploration already exists in Russell Banks’ emotionally resonant novel The Sweet Hereafter, a spiritual cousin to All This Town Remembers in both setting and atmosphere.
What more interests Johnston is the effect of time upon such memories, whereby the incident becomes less an occasion of grief, and more a part of the public consciousness. It evolves into something that nourishes the community, but such an evolution denies those immediately affected by the initial event any sense of ownership of their own emotions.
It is this clash between private mourning and public adulation that drives Adam (and Johnston) to try and better define what the memory of Joey’s death should mean. But memory is slippery, especially in Adam’s instance, and cannot be inherently trusted; “To imagine, you revise—it’s the same as anything and begins innocent enough—but you think of yourself as more than you were.”
Johnston has delivered a haunting celebration of the nuances and vagaries of memory, and a cautious examination of small-town insecurities. In it’s own subdued fashion, All This Town Remembers heralds the arrival of a sterling new voice in Canadian prairie fiction.
All This Town Remembers by Sean Johnston - thoughts (