by Guy Vanderhaeghe
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by Guy Vanderhaeghe
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Product Description
Amazon.ca
Although Homesick won Guy Vanderhaeghe the Toronto Book Award, given to honour books "evocative of Toronto," it is really a very orthodox Prairie novel. Set in the tiny Saskatchewan town of Connaught, Homesick sympathetically explores the confines of a shattered family with the sensibility of a latter-day Sinclair Ross.
As Homesick opens, the Monkman family lies in a state of emotional ruin. Alec Monkman lives alone in Connaught, dreaming of drowning and half-heartedly tending the local businesses that he has come, almost accidentally, to dominate. His widowed daughter, Vera, whom he has not seen or spoken with since she left home to join the Women's Army Corps during the Second World War, is returning to Connaught on a bus with her teenage son, Daniel, who has been showing signs of running wild in Toronto. Alec attempts to treat Vera's return as a simple reunion, but she is having none of it--the old conflicts in the Monkman family have been aggravated by their years apart, allowing the old father-daughter feud to become even more venomous. As Daniel and Alec grow closer to one another, and as a mining operation turns Connaught into a thriving western boomtown, the Monkmans enter even more treacherous territory: old family secrets begin to come to light, threatening to further shred this already fragmented family. Vanderhaeghe tells a straight, sympathetic story, giving all his characters the benefit of a compassionate hearing, sliding into their pasts in order to justify their disjointed present, and vividly imagining their cold, bleak prairie town. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Canadian writer Vanderhaeghe ( Man Descending ) here examines the alienation plaguing three generations of a stiff-necked provincial family. In the late 1950s, widow Vera Miller returns home to her elderly father Alec in Saskatchewan after an absence of 17 years. Her teenage son Daniel has been getting out of hand--he is the cause of their homecoming. Once bitter because her father forced her to quit school to care for her younger, motherless brother Earl, proud Vera now takes a job as a movie usher while her son struggles to make friends and turns to his increasingly dotty grandfather for comfort. Daniel learns from Alec that Earl, whose whereabouts are unknown to his sister, died some years ago of meningitis while hospitalized for a mental breakdown. Told in alternating voices and flashbacks, the narrative does not always hang together, and skimpy characterization sometimes renders Vera, the novel's emotional center, shrill and unsympathetic. However, the author's skillful depiction of the growing relationship between Daniel and Alec is warm and real, as is the gradual breakdown of barriers between father and daughter. The novel ultimately succeeds as a quiet, moving story of family forgiveness.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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