Richard B. WrightRecensioni

Much of this book is epistemological, but so well done that it adds to the flow and personality of the book. Both Clara and Nora are well drawn and believable and even though Clara react quite differently to the situations she finds herself in than I would think normal, we are given enough of her unique character to find the reactions consistent with who she is.

I didn't want to put this down until I reached the end. I was rooting for Clara all the way. Nothing pleases more than characters about whom you really care.

I've read five of Richard B. Wright's novels, including his surprisingly successful debut, THE WEEKEND MAN, and his best known one, the best-selling CLARA CALLAN, which won pretty much all of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. So I'm a confirmed fan, and very much enjoyed this memoir about his childhood as a dreamy kid, the youngest of five, growing up in a small Ontario town in the 40s and 50s. After college, where he majored in Radio and Television Broadcasting, he took some very low-paying jobs with small newspapers and radio stations, before landing a job in publishing with Macmillan's of Canada. He married, had a child, and took a year off to write. The happy result was THE WEEKEND MAN, which launched him as an important young writer in Canada, and a literary life that had its ups and downs. His books never made him wealthy, so he spent many years teaching in a private school. Wright was several years older than me, and Canadian, yet there was plenty here I could relate to, especially the books and writers he read and admired.

While A LIFE WITH WORDS (2015) was informative, entertaining - and often funny too - my enjoyment of Wright's story was marred by the knowledge that he died in 2017, after a fall and a subsequent stroke. He was 79. I was also a bit disappointed at the end of his narrative, which just seemed to trail off, concluding with a transcript of a speech he delivered at a college commencement. But I'm glad the book was published and I got to read it. And I'm even gladder that there are still several more Wright novels I haven't yet read. But I will, I hope. Because this guy was a damn fine writer. RIP, Richard.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

This book was cruising along at three stars, I didn't think it was that good, but afterword wrapped the story nicely. Not enough likeable characters the trip through the era was fascinating 1930s era New York, Italy and Ontario and even a glimpse of Hollywood. If it weren't for the afterword the novel would be pretty uneven.½

Charlie is an alcoholic, divorced father who sees his only child, Johnathan, on Saturday afternoons. One day, 12-year-old Johnathan doesn't return from a run to the local store....something that usually takes about half an hour. It isn't long before the police discover that Johnathan was brutally murdered. We watch as Charlie tries to deal with this most devastating news.

A twist comes when an anonymous caller offers Charlie information about the killers. And Charlie doesn't go to the police, but is instead drawn into a series of events that are brutal and tragic.

I loved the portrayal of Charlie. He was a flawed but likable characters. The character of Donald Stewart, the informant, was also excellently done. The story itself was too much like an action movie for my taste.

One dimensional characters, simplistic writing, clumsy narration technique. A neat idea can be hamstrung by all these things singly, but with all three in the mix the story is slaughtered. Too bad :(

I loved this book. Richard B. Wright is a wonderful writer, with an ability to gt deep into the minds of his characters.

Dan Fielding is having an affair with a younger colleague -- the first time he's ever even contemplated such behaviour in his 17-year marriage. But something unthinkable happens -- the young woman is murdered in the resort town they've sneaked off to. And Dan has to deal with the police, the woman's family and his own wife and daughter as his affair becomes the lead story on the evening news and in the press. This novel explores forgiveness and examines unforeseen consequences of our actions.

Engaged. Engaged is the word I would describe how I read Clara Callan. I think I read it in four days. Despite its name, Clara Callan is actually about two women, sisters in fact. Clara is the elder, living in their deceased parents house in a small rural town outside Toronto. She is a no-nonsense serious schoolteacher who loves to play the piano, read and write poetry; a perfect candidate for spinsterhood and self righteousness despite the fact she no longer believes in God. Since it is the 1930s and Clara is so mysterious, she is also fodder for constant gossip and worry in her village. Meanwhile younger sister Nora Callan has flown the coop to America and the Big Apple to seek fame and fortune as a radio star. Despite their vasts differences the sisters remain close, sharing letters to keep in touch. Clara's journal rounds out the epistolary tale and fills in the gaps.
Probably my favorite subliminal element to Clara Callan is how Wright weaves current events into to the story. Nora, being in show business, complains of a bratty young man hanging around a pretty brunette. The talented brunette would go on to star in a little movie about a wizard from Oz. Or the radio program designed to sound like a real newscast scaring the bejesus out of everyone. Or the new sensational book, Gone with the Wind. It is very tempting to put together a list of every book Clara reads or every song she mentions.
The novel has a Bridges of Madison County kind of feel to the ending. I was a little disappointed with the tactic.

It's not a perfect book for me, but definitely in the top category. I was hooked from the first page. Undoubtedly a sad story, featuring the dying and death of two people who are important in the life of the narrator - one obviously so, his daughter, one less obviously, a childhood friend (Gabriel) he hadn't seen for decades. I think many readers won't feel comfortable with the narrator's approach to these deaths and so will be inclined to give the book a low ranking. On the other hand, I felt his rather indifferent approach to the demise of his childhood friend and its explanation in terms of their original relationship made great reading. The narrator's relationship with his daughter was dealt with somewhat more superficially despite being obviously more significant. I think this was present in the story, not to be the major part of the narrative, but to be a kind of standard for comparison - or contrast. Others have quoted from towards the end of the book when the daughter is dying, and this section also impacted me significantly. The narrator has been to Zurich with his childhood friend to accompany him as he goes through assisted suicide. The narrator suggests this possibility to his daughter:

" If those people were down the street, I'd go in a minute. But Europe? The plane ride? All that hassle?" She allowed herself a small mirthless laugh. "I guess I'm just too tired to die."
Six weeks later she was dead, and we buried her in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, not all that far from the graves of my parents and Aunt Margery and Uncle Chester, distant ghosts, awakened briefly by my chance encounter with Gabriel Fontaine in front of a London hotel one afternoon in October."

Well, I didn't think this was as good as Clara Callan but, since it was written in 1990, it probably took Wright some years to hone his craft. I did think it showed the promise that was fulfilled in Clara Callan.

This book tells the story of life in a senior citizens' home over a few months in the fall of some unspecified year. It starts with the arrival of Miss Ormsby, a retired English teacher, who decided after a stroke and setting her settee on fire that she should move out of the home she had lived in all her life. Miss Ormsby smokes cigarettes and likes Johnnie Walker but mostly she likes to listen to her classical music and read poetry. This makes her suspicious to her next door neighbour, Mrs. Lucas. However, Mrs. Lucas is suspicious of almost everyone and she absolutely despises her other next door neighbour, Lorne Truscott. Truscott is a dirty old man but at least he admits it unlike Mr. Wilkie, another retired teacher. Wilkie had numerous affairs when he was younger but now he thinks all the women residents are after him and he wants nothing to do with them. These citizens of the home interact in expected and unexpected ways. Miss Ormsby is the centre of the book and she is the most interesting. At 75 she figures she has at most 5 years to live and she plans to live them with as much enjoyment as possible. She has made plans for her funeral and burial and talks frankly about death. She would be a good model for aging gracefully (except for the smoking part).½

Richard Wright deserves to be better known in Canada I think. His book Clara Callan was an amazing insight into a woman's mind and feelings. In this book Wright deals with the difficult subject of death but is never maudlin nor insensitive. I was caught up in the story from the first even though it strikes close to home right now and I wondered if I would be able to get through it. I'm glad I did but I have a feeling it will haunt me for quite a while.

I haven't read October, which could be the reason why I didn't like this book much. Oh, the writing is beautiful, but I found the story a bit soap-opera-like. The characters were interesting, but there was too much telling vs showing how they felt.

I haven't read a bad Richard B. Wright book yet. They are all EXCELLENT. And CLARA CALLAN is no exception. Easy to see why it won both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in Canada.

I was reminded of old classic potboilers I had read forty and fifty years ago - books like MILDRED PIERCE or SO BIG. By this I mean this is simply old-fashioned storytelling, and in the most literary sense. Clara Callan's story is told in the form of letters and her personal journal, and spans the years 1934-38, with an important Afterword tacked on. The title character is a woman who will linger in my imagination for a long time. Clara is a thirty-ish small town school teacher in Ontario in the mid-1930s, on her way to spinsterhood, when a series of unexpected events occur which irrevocably change her humdrum life. I hate to say anything more than this, because it would be so easy to spoil this finely crafted tale. And there is her younger sister, Nora, who goes off to New York City where she becomes a star on a radio soap opera, "The House on Chestnut Street." Meanwhile, against this backdrop, Clara's life on Church Street, back in tiny Whitfield, begins to reflect those of the soap opera folks. I mean, somehow, Wright has managed to craft an utterly human drama that is ... well, it's like a soap opera, and absolutely, grippingly believable, and is simply, as so many blurbs and trailers often say, "compelling human drama." The years between the wars come alive in these pages.

I've already mentioned the MILDRED PIERCE comparison, and, in fact, Clara is, at one point, fascinated by James M. Cain's even more famous book, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. As a school teacher, Clara is a reader, and one who appreciates classical music (she plays the piano too) and fine literature, but she is not above indulging her curiosity in pulp magazines like True Detective. Hence, perhaps her interest in Cain. She also knows poetry, Shakespeare, and other writers of the era. Taylor Caldwell is mentioned peripherally, as a 'new writer' (her first novel, DYNASTY OF DEATH, was a sensation in 1938).

I know I have not done justice to CLARA CALLAN, mostly because I don't wish to give anything away that might spoil the story. But trust me, this is just a wonderful, eminently readable novel. A rare treat for book lovers like me. I loved it.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

What we may think of as simpler times weren't really all that simple, at least not to those living in those times. So Canadian writer Richard B. Wright makes clear in this absorbing 2002 novel. Set during the years from 1934 to 1938, Wright's characters wrestle with confusing new technology like party-line telephones, home entertainment delivered via radio, long-distance air transportation and the conversion of coal furnaces to oil. And as for personal relationships, well they were certainly as complex then as now.

Clara Callan is a young school teacher, introverted and unmarried, in an Ontario village a few miles outside of Toronto. Her younger sister, Nora, more beautiful and outgoing than Clara, has just moved to New York City and very quickly become a star on a popular radio soap opera. The entire novel is told through Clara's diary entries during those years and in letters exchanged between the two sisters and with a few other characters.

Clara's quiet life is disrupted when she is raped while walking along some railroad tracks. When she discovers she is pregnant, she enlists Nora's help, without telling her how the pregnancy happened, in getting an abortion in New York. Wright leaves hints that Clara might seek revenge against the man who raped her, as she seeks him out and stalks him, but then she meets a man in a Toronto theater and, for the first time in her life, falls in love. Of course, Frank turns out to be married. And so this bland schoolteacher has another secret she must hide from the nosy people of her village, made all the more difficult when she gets one of those party-line telephones.

How this timid teacher ultimately becomes the bravest, if not the wisest, resident of her village makes fine reading.

poignant and well written.

This short novel revisits the characters of Wright’s earlier novel, October. Readers might want to read this latter book first though they might then find Nightfall repetitive because passages from October are directly inserted. On the other hand, October does, as the author’s note in Nightfall states, “clarify the relationship between James and Odette at quite different stages in their lives.”

James Hillyer is a 76-year-old widower and retired professor. Despondent after the death of his daughter, he starts thinking about happier times in the past. He decides to try and find his first love, Odette Huard, whom he last saw in Gaspé, Quebec, in 1944. The two of them do reconnect and start a new relationship after 62 years.

Chapters are narrated from various viewpoints (James, Odette, Odette’s developmentally challenged sister, Odette’s former boyfriend) but always in third person. This narrative structure allows the reader to see events, like the first meeting between James and Odette, from the perspective of both characters.

This approach, however, has a drawback. There is considerable repetition. For example, we learn, in one of Odette’s chapters, that she worked at the Green Mermaid when she was young; then in a conversation with James, she gives him that same information. Frequently, things are mentioned via a character’s thoughts and then repeated via dialogue.

One of the aspects I most enjoyed is comparing the elderly characters with their younger versions. They have had numerous life experiences, but both James and Odette are much like their young selves. When James first hears Odette’s voice on the phone, he comments, “Hints of the old Odette. Temperaments never change. We are what we were, only in old bodies” (23). Odette remains blunt and worldly; James is sedate and continues to have “a rather melancholic side” (160).

What is also emphasized is that though the two are old and their expectations have been tempered by time and life, they have the same emotions as the young. They want companionship and love and even sex, that “old itch” (103). Odette comments that, “it was good to have the comfort of someone to love and to share whatever time was left to them” (165). Both are aware that they are in their twilight years, but they hope they “would have some time together. And it must be time well spent.” And isn’t that a lesson for everyone?

The book is a short, easy read, a meditation on love and aging. It suggests that people, regardless of their age, are capable of being happy. James comments that “’happiness is largely a matter of temperament, a disposition or attitude, a genetic inheritance. It helps, of course, if the circumstances in your life are agreeable; if you’re not worried about, say, money or health. . . . I do believe that our culture is obsessed with happiness and people try too hard to find it. I sometimes think happiness finds you, and you don’t need to look for it all the time. . . . It could come from something as simple as listening to, say, a cardinal singing in a tree on a spring morning’” (159 – 160). And isn’t that, too, a lesson for everyone?

Please check out my reader's blog (http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).½

so... i think i made a mistake in reading this book the way i did. i should have gone back and re-read October. nightfall has excerpts from that earlier novel, and revisits characters - showing us what's transpired since. and while i remember loving october, most of the details are lost to me. i feel like i would have been more engaged with nightfall if october was fresher in my mind. while i do think nightfall functions as a standalone work, if you are particular about continuity in your reading, go back to the 2007 work first.

i am feeling a bit torn over this new novel. parts of it were terrific, but at moments things felt sloppy, and choppy in the flow. also, i can't decide if i am totally sold on the idea of long italicized excerpts from october being worked into nightfall? i did appreciate the exploration of memory, and how our early lives stay with us, and how easily we can circle back. but, overall, i am just sort of sitting here going 'hunh.'

There is no fault to be found in Richard B. Wright's OCTOBER, but the subject is sad. A melancholic study of death and dying paired with memories of one special wartime summer for a fourteen year-old boy, James Hillyer. Forced unwillingly into a friendship with another boy, sixteen year-old polio victim, Gabriel Fontaine, the two boys vie for the attention and affection of Odette, a hotel chambermaid at a summer resort in Canada. From a vantage point of sixty years later, James, a retired professor of Victorian literature, reflects back on that summer. It all comes back to him when he meets Gabriel again in London, where James is visiting his daughter, Susan, just diagnosed with terminal cancer. He reluctantly agrees to accompany Gabriel, also fatally ill, on a final trip to Zurich. I know this all sounds rather grim, but Wright has woven all of these elements into one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching novels I have read in a long time. The writing here is simply beautiful. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

IN THE MIDDLE OF A LIFE is a damn good title for this story. Forty-two year-old Fred Landon is an unemployed salesman, divorced for a dozen years, who sees his daughter, now seventeen, only occasionally. He lives in a seedy Toronto apartment, is overweight and worries about his health. A child of the Depression, his great ambition was to write for TV and films, but no dice. For eleven years he worked for a greeting card company, first writing sappy verse, then selling. His heart was never in any of this, but now, downsized and using up his savings, he is beginning to feel a little desperate.

Here's a guy whose head is full of random lines of poetry and lyrics from old songs. He suffers from occasional tachycardia, probably high blood pressure and flatulence. Yeah, gas. All kinds of serious problems for Fred all come to roost at once. His ex-wife returns from New York, as does his daughter, in the company of a doper US draft dodger, who gets them both arrested. His aged father, a stroke victim in a distant nursing home, is causing waves for his estranged sister and guilt pangs for Fred. And yet Fred still worries too of more minor things - things that make you laugh out loud. He frets over allowing his "socks to ripen on his feet" and farting in bed. Things his ex-wife Vera of course could not abide. But things begin to look up, he finds a job with a second-rate real estate firm, with a boss who, incidentally, also suffers from gas. During his job interview, the guy lets 'em rip. "Before he sat down, he broke wind, a fierce brassy emission." And a little later: "He leaned slightly sideways in his chair. Squeezing out a silenter, thought Landon. Well, I've done it myself in company."

Ya see what I mean? Here's poor overweight outa-work divorced and friendless Fred. And yet ya can't help but laugh! Fred's other overdue good fortune, besides the job offer, is a relationship he has recently begun with Margaret, the woman upstairs, a forty-ish Polish immigrant school teacher, whose old shrewish mother has just (finally) died.

I felt such sympathy for poor Fred, but he has such a good heart, I figure things are gonna improve. There is an interesting and surprise twist toward the end which I'm not gonna reveal. Because this is a sweet, funny book about a guy you might not even notice on the street, but hey, Wright makes you realize that everybody has a story, that all lives matter. If I had to compare this book to anything else I'd read, it would probably be Frederick Busch's novel about another couple at mid-life, HARRY AND CATHERINE, a book I've read a few times now. Love Fred Busch's stuff. And I'm starting to feel the same way about Canadian writer Richard B. Wright. This is my third Wright novel. But it certainly will not be the last, because he's written quite a few. Your writing ROCKS, Richard. Highly recommended.

Richard B. Wright, although he's been writing good books for forty years or more, and is very highly respected in Canada, is still kinda new to me, but I admire his work tremendously after reading only THE WEEKEND MAN. And now here's THE TEACHER'S DAUGHTER (1982), a deceptively simple story, but the central characters are as tangled and complex in their thoughts and emotions as any you might find in the work of the old masters.

The title character, Janice Harper, is a high school English teacher in the Toronto suburb. On the brink of "old-maid-hood," Janice is trying to rebound from a summer affair with a married man. She becomes involved with an unemployed and uneducated man several years younger. James Hicks, compared more than once in the narrative to "that actor, John Travolta," has an estranged wife and young son. A high school dropout with a prison record, he aspires to a better life. He latches desperately onto Janice, hoping she can help, but his own brutishness and lack of sophistication dooms their affair from the beginning. Aided and abetted by a superb cast of supporting characters from the pasts of both principals, the story moves briskly along and drew me quickly in. Janice, who lives in a basement apartment of her parents' house - her teacher father has died two years before the story open - feels life passing her by and longs for change, which Hicks certainly supplies.

Janice Harper reminded me in some ways of Rachel Cameron, the teacher heroine of Margaret Laurence's classic Canadian novel, A JEST OF GOD. Wright's tale is, however, considerably darker and injects elements of danger and physical violence not found in the Laurence book. In fact, the get-rich-quick plans and plotting of Hicks and his shady friends also brought to mind the noir fiction of Jim Thompson. An odd comparison perhaps, but sorry, there it is.

The ending of THE TEACHER'S DAUGHTER rather surprised me, but actually, it is perfect. I won't say any more. Except that I enjoyed this book very much and will be reading more of Richard B. Wright. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

THE WEEKEND MAN is seriously good fiction. It's my first time reading Canadian author Richard B. Wright, but I already know I want to read more of his stuff.

Here's how Wright's antihero protagonist, Wes Wakeham, defines a "weekend man" -

"The weekend man simply never learns to live with the thundering ironies. He is forever looking backward and being afflicted by a painful sense of loss or he is looking forward and being continually disappointed. What to do? Well, you'll have to work it out for yourself. I myself just drift along, hoping that the daily passage will deliver up a few painless diversions. Most of the time, however, I am quietly gritting my teeth and just holding on."

And with this definition of terms, slipped so seamlessly into the narrative that you could almost miss it, Wright quietly sets the scene for this darkly funny, bleak tale of one man's daily struggles with those "thundering ironies" of everyday life.

In this early Wright novel, first published in 1970, Wes Wakeham has reason to know about painful losses. His father, a WWII veteran, worked unhappily at the local flour mill - an early example of a weekend man. Both of Wes's parents died in an auto accident when he was in college. Wes is inordinately frightened and forever changed by the Cuban missile crisis in '62. His marriage to Molly seems a bad match, but, given Wes's life philosophy of just 'drifting along' from job to job, maybe marriage was a bad idea in the first place. But Wes does love women, fantasizes sexually about them daily - the women he works with, random females sighted on the street - despite still loving his wife. The fantasies and inner monologues are almost Thurber-ish, but with dark twists. Wes's character is perhaps most reminiscent, though, of Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, in the way he flees responsibility and any prospects of upward mobility, looking for those 'painless diversions.' And he finds them. In a story that covers less than a week, Wes manages a quick roll in the hay with his estranged wife, another one-night liaison with a lonely teacher, and a few frustrated gropes of his middle-aged secretary at the office Christmas party.

Think Thurber, Walter Mitty lusting in his mind over other women. But closer to RABBIT, RUN, to my mind. (Full of sixties trivia about TV and old movies that drew me in, made me remember it all.) Mostly Richard B. Wright though. Because this guy has his own unique voice, and I want to hear more of it. Wright is, it seems, famous in Canada, but down here? Well, maybe it's just me, but I'd never heard of him. Now I want to tell everyone about him. More about Wright later in subsequent reviews, I'm sure. LOVED this book! Very highly recommended.

I gave up on this after a few chapters as everyone in it - apart from the protagonist - seemed like they were written by someone who hadn't met many people but had watched a lot of TV drama, especially the women. The key feature of the plot should give plenty of scope for thoughtful, engaging writing, but this was plodding and lifeless. I presume his previous novels were better; this one is all telling and no showing.

Getting to know these two sisters and sharing their lives was the most important part as well as the most enjoyable part of Wright's book. The sisters, Clara and Nora, are from a village in Ontario bound by the typical social mores of the 1930s. The story is told through their letters after the younger one goes to work in the glamorous world of radio soap opera. Clara, a teacher, remains at home. I loved the gentle writing, the look back at life in the 1930s. It's hard to believe the author is male yet was able to portray the women so perfectly.½

Set between the wars in north-east North America, this is to some extent an "historical" novel, by which I mean that there are lots of references to historical events whose notoriety has endured (Hitler, Mussolini, The Depression, communism & anti-communism, the Hindenburg disaster etc). However it is also a study a social conventions of that era and, more importantly to me, an apparently realistic story of a person's life. I liked the diary+letters style of the writing, perhaps because I am a regular diary and letter writer myself. The contrast between Clara and her sister was also an interesting focus which kept me reading. This won't make it to my Favourites list, but the fact that I didn't find the 500 pages too daunting is a testament to its success.½

Clara Callan ist Lehrerin in dem kandadischen Dorf, in dem sie aufgewachsen ist und immer noch lebt. Das Buch beginnt 1934, Clara ist 31 Jahre alt. Ihr verwitweter Vater ist vor kurzem verstorben, ihre Schwester Nora nach New York gezogen. In den Briefen Noras und Claras sowie anderer Personen und in Claras Tagebucheinträgen wird Claras und Noras Geschichte über die nächsten vier Jahre erzählt. Clara lebt ein unspektakuläres Leben, ist innerlich jedoch reich. Begleitet wird das Buch durch Bezugnahmen auf die Literatur, Politik und Musik der damaligen Zeit, wodurch der Kontext gut vorstellbar wird.
Das Buch ist ausgesprochen lebhaft erzählt. Jede der Personen wird vollkommen glaubwürdig und plastisch dargestellt. Einen Punkt ziehe ich ab, da es irgendwann doch beginnt sich zu ziehen - andererseits ist ja das echte Leben auch nicht immer spannend. Das Buch ist wirklich toll zu lesen.

I'd give this a 3.5 if I could. It's a quick read for a 400 page book. There's something distinctly Canadian about it for me. The writing reminds me a bit of a somewhat less poetic Stone Diaries. It's not earth-shattering, but I found it to be very enjoyable and definitely worth my time.