The Friends of Meager Fortune

David Adams Richards is one of the major Canadian novelists of his generation, and The Friends of Meager Fortune sets a long, careful story in the New Brunswick logging country he has written about for his whole career. The book follows the Jameson family in the 1940s, near the end of the era when log drives still moved timber down the rivers.

Richards writes in long, accumulating sentences. The book is dense with characters, families, and the small-town politics of a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and most of the families have been there for generations.

The central tragedy unfolds slowly. Richards is patient with his foreshadowing. The reader knows something is coming long before it arrives.

For readers who like Cormac McCarthy’s slower work, or who have read Alistair MacLeod’s Cape Breton stories, this is in similar territory. Distinctly Canadian. One of Richards’s best novels in a long catalog.