I don’t know why I’ve never bothered with Richards. I’ve heard of him. I’ve seen his books on the shelves of my local bookstores. Maybe I’ve overlooked him because the critics and reviewers have overlooked him, and so I’ve never felt any of the urgent hype to take up his books. I have no idea if that’s true. Or maybe, as he sometimes hints, he is the victim of urban centrist elitism. He writes of life in and around the Miramichi, fishing and hunting, mining and logging, working class men and women living rural lives. He writes in plain language, the literary equivalent of iconoclasm, bare prose stripped of clever conceits and the hyperintellectualized twists and turns that are the raw stuff of grad student papers. He views himself an outsider, at least in relation to PEN and the literary establishment and the critics and the CBC. And he champions his own kind, working class men like the late Alden Nowlan, who drink a lot and have a kind of knowledge that never makes its way into classrooms. Unsurprisingly, writers like Malcolm Lowry and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are his guiding lights. If not for his wife, Peg, he’d be right there with them, drinking himself into oblivion. Russian novelists also hold a special place in his heart. I imagine him passing a cold winter’s night, sipping from a hot thermos of tea with a spine-cracked translation of War and Peace splayed on his knees.
Like Richards, I have a feeling I can barely articulate, a sense in my bones, that geography is somehow twined to my personal identity. I’m from a place, born and lived all my life and, for better or worse, that fact informs who I am. The problem is: the place I was born is the brunt of Richards’s considerable disdain. Apparently, Richards lived in Toronto for 13 years. Although I could be wrong, I get the impression he resented his time in Toronto; his time here may have been professionally necessary, but it kept him from the place that he loves and that he calls home. I suspect, for a lot of people throughout Canada, Toronto is a necessity they have to put up with, but would rather do without, like a stiff tie at a funeral. Toronto is touted as the financial, industrial, cultural, literary, technological, academic, creative heartbeat of the country. And every time somebody from somewhere else has Toronto’s virtues shoved in their face, they say: But what about where I live? Things happen here, too, you know.
In politics, admitting you’re from Toronto is career suicide. Even though our former PM, Stephen Harper, grew up in Leaside, he submitted himself to a radical rebranding as a Westerner, complete with cowboy hat. In the same way, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, grew up in affluent Etobicoke but presents himself as the buck-a-beer working man’s man who addresses people at his press conferences as “folks” and “friends” and calls libraries libarries and bombs around cottage country on his snowmobile all while ragging on Toronto elites. The posturing makes sense as Ford’s latest success at the polls amply demonstrates.
I don’t doubt that Richards has had run-ins with the worst sort of Toronto elites. They do exist, the fart-sniffing academics who wouldn’t know one end of an axe from the other, and the CBC executives who run their platitudes of regional programming through a Toronto-centric blender, and the PEN Canada proselytes who assume that anybody who writes must share their milquetoast center-left politics. But when you point a critical finger at Toronto, or any place for that matter, you risk reducing it to a homogeneous entity that has more to do with your personal grievances than with the place itself. Worse, you risk slighting those whose identities are intimately tied to that place, and tied for reasons, like birth, that are beyond their control.
The Toronto I’ve come to know is considerably different than the one Richards sometimes mentions in his book. But first, a brief account of how I came to live in this city which, it turns out, follows a path that passes through Richards’s beloved New Brunswick. In 1761, a United Empire Loyalist named James Barker ventured up from New England and settled in what came to be known as Maugerville (now Sheffield) on the St. John River. This is nothing to brag about as I suspect he was a proper asshole who, if he didn’t hold slaves himself, certainly moved amongst those who did, and was instrumental in founding the Maugerville settlement on unceded lands. Still, his descendants lived and died there, as you can see today from the accumulation of Barker headstones in the local United Church cemetery, down to my great-grandfather, who ran a general store there and my grandfather, who was born there in 1904. Whatever material advantages settler colonialism gave to James Barker, my grandfather relinquished when he answered a call to the ministry which consumed the rest of his life. Even my father was born in New Brunswick, but it wasn’t long before the peripatetic life of the ministry took hold and bandied the family all around the countryside.
It was my father who made the leap from rural to urban life. At the age of 24 and newly married, he and my mother rented an apartment on Yonge Street just north of Finch Avenue and, three years later, put a down payment on a house within walking distance of the as-yet-unbuilt Finch subway station. Their decision to settle in Toronto and raise children within proximity of the subway meant that I became the first unequivocally urban child in our family in at least 350 years, maybe ever. Naturally, I had no say in the matter, but it seems like a decision ideally suited to my temperament and I have ratcheted things up a notch or two, moving further and further downtown, never straying far from Yonge Street. Richards might style me an urban Marlow working my way upriver into the heart of darkness.
I don’t know if the Marlow comparison is apt. For one thing, I don’t have a boat. I live in a condo; what would I do with a boat? Instead, I walk everywhere. Like Geoffrey Firmin’s adoptive family in Malcolm Lowry’s novel, I’m a prodigious walker. Or sometimes I’ll ride my beloved subway, taking it to the end of the line and walking back to my starting place. There’s something about walking. When I walk, the city reveals itself to me in unexpected ways. I discover how little I know of this place I’ve passed all my life. I’m walking along the Lower Don Trail, as I often do, when I come upon a man standing in the middle of the Don River in hip waders, fly fishing. In the middle of the city. Another time, I’m walking along the abandoned rail line above the Evergreen Brick Works when I come face to face with an eight point buck. In the middle of the city. I’m passing through Dundas Square when a Black man stops me and asks if I’ll take his picture, which I do, and then he pulls out a flask and we share some whisky. In the middle of the city.
Every time I ride the Bloor/Danforth line, I fall in love with the city all over again. The other day, as I was walking down the steps to the platform, I heard the train arriving, so ran down and leapt through the doors as they closed behind me. I made quite a scene, and when I caught my breath and looked up, I saw what I often see. I was the only white person in the car. All around me swirled a dozen different languages. And it felt like home. Or I think of when Pride comes to town. I live near the top end of the Village and at the end of June the neighbourhood explodes with colour and thumping house music. In truth, it’s more interesting during the rest of the year, ordinary times when people haven’t got so much cover but are still out in every sense of the word. Or the Palestinians gathered outside the Israeli consulate down the road. Or the people protesting Modi outside the Indian consulate across the street. Or the crowds on Bremner after the Raptors have won the NBA championship. Or I step outside to go grocery shopping and find that police have closed the street both ways because someone from the Extinction Rebellion has set up a step ladder in the middle of the road. All these people—people of colour, immigrants, transgendered folk, refugees, protesters—all of them remind me daily that this is a place where they—where we—can feel safe enough to share our different stories. That safety is the precondition to freedom which seems such a precious thing in today’s world. It’s messy, and it’s flawed, yet it lives here.
When I hear people engaging in Canada’s national pastime, which is not hockey but Toronto bashing, I grow suspicious. While I have no doubt some Toronto bashers have legitimate grievances, sometimes what they say makes me think of dog whistles: it’s a covert way of passing racist tropes, anti-immigrant sentiments, anti-gay and transgender slurs, accusations of elitism with its associated political correctness. Richards teeters here on a fulcrum and I’m not sure yet which way he swings. Observing how the book was published in 2019, immediately before the pandemic, when the far right in Canada revealed itself as a movement divorced from both facts and the usual social constraints, I am initially inclined to cut Richards some slack. It’s me, not him. The sudden shift in our context—with the “Freedom” Convoy, weekly anti-vax protests, the ascendancy of Poilievre—has coloured my reading. When he rails against political correctness, when he challenges feminist students who want to claim solidarity with his gritty grandmother, when he celebrates the working men and women of rural New Brunswick, I assume the hackles I feel on the back of my neck have to do with the fact that I’ve been sensitized by intervening events. After all, a lot has happened in three years.
But I get on the Bloor/Danforth line and head west at 6 am for a photo gig. I’m riding with all the shift workers and I think to myself: Aren’t these working class men and women, too? They may not be miners or loggers. But don’t they count, too? As far as I can tell, there’s only one thing that distinguishes these working class men and women from his working class men and women, and it isn’t that they work in Toronto. Then I flip again through the book. There was that reference … Ah, yes, there it is. For the courage to stand on your convictions when all around you people say otherwise. And the source of this courage? Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. All this to bolster himself against the political correctness that comes from the elites in central Canada. At least he didn’t look to Jordan Peterson for support.
Richards casts himself as the aggrieved outsider. But given his output and the accolades he’s garnered, he reminds me of the white male Insta celebrity with 50 million followers who complains about cancel culture after a post gets taken down for violating the User’s Agreement. Richards is too subtle to go that far, but he does make it hard to take his grievances seriously. At least now I have an explanation why I’ve never encountered him before now. I’m too fucking elite.
Murder and Other Essays, by David Adams Richards, was published in 2019 by Penguin Random House Canada. His next novel, The Tragedy of Eva Mott, will be released on October 11th, 2022.