DARRELL SQUIRES
The Western Star

Newfoundland and Labrador novelist Trudy Morgan-Cole will be in Corner Brook on Tuesday, as part of a cross-island tour promoting her new novel “By the Rivers of Brooklyn.”

Morgan-Cole’s blog, Hypergraffiti, gives insight on the inner workings of this self-effacing, but super-talented writer. She enjoys talking about herself, but is never tiresome about it in the least. Disarming honesty is never boring, and, clearly, Morgan-Cole opens up about herself so that others will find her life amusing.

Take for instance her love of music. She’s got a real head for song lyrics, but admits that this gift is “absolutely useless because I cannot sing on key to save my life.”

No such concerns about Morgan-Cole’s writing ability. 

The character-driven, Austen-esque “By the Rivers of Brooklyn” is a deft and impressive work of fiction in which the prose style is spare — controlled and assured. It’s also a large and ambitious work about leaving home and cultural dislocation, themes relatable especially to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. It’s also about guilt and the search for (and being able to accept) grace and redemption.

As in the novels of Jane Austen, the deadly serious concerns for women around the risks involved in not marrying, or not marrying well, underlie the family story and the amusing — often crackling dialogue. One might contend that Newfoundlanders have rarely been as capably or as truthfully represented on the page as they are here.

The setting for the novel marks something of a departure for Newfoundland fiction, taking place as most of it does outside of Newfoundland; it stretches from St. John’s to Brooklyn, New York from the 1920s to the 21st century. Morgan-Cole’s characters — the restive and yearning Rose, the tragic Ethel — become outsiders looking in — looking back, in fact — from Brooklyn to which they’ve emigrated.

In the 1920s, Jim, Bert and Rose Evans all move from St. John’s to Brooklyn in search of work and a better life. “By the Rivers of Brooklyn” transforms into fiction the experience of the 75,000 first- and second-generation Newfoundlanders who once lived in Brooklyn. Many left home in order to find work in New York’s booming high-rise construction industry.

The novel mainly concerns three women: Rose, who can’t wait to leave St. John’s to experience big, exciting city of New York; Rose’s sister Annie, who never wants to leave home; and their sister-in-law Ethel, who lives out her life in Brooklyn, longing for home but never finding a sense of belonging, even in her marriage. She struggles lifelong under the burden of guilt over a perceived act of sin committed not long after her relocation to the American city.

The novel is about St. John’s in the 1920s, Brooklyn in the 1920s, and the changes that come to both of these very different places over the years. Morgan-Cole’s impeccable research into the history of Brooklyn and its cultural make-up, and her concern for accuracy, give this historical novel much of its authenticity. Brooklyn, in fact, is so vivid it becomes a sort of character in itself.

“By the Rivers of Brooklyn” is about people coping with change; more specifically, it captures emblematically the experience of Newfoundlanders throughout history who have gone away to find work and prosperity.

But doing so always implies success or failure at making peace with the idea of “home” — returning to it, or making a new one. It’s a purely mental process either way, and Morgan-Cole captures it with breathtaking acuity.

The author will do signings at Newfoundland Emporium on Broadway from noon to 1:30 p.m., and Island Treasures at Corner Brook Plaza 2:30-4 p.m. At 7 p.m. that evening, she’ll do a reading at Corner Brook Public Library.

Darrell Squires is assistant manager of Public Information and Library Resources Board, West Newfoundland-Labrador division. You can contact him at: dsquires@nlpl.ca or by phone at 634-7333.