The Hamilton Spectator

The story of a sickly boy

Wayne Johnston’s family felt he wasn’t long for this world

ROBERT J. WIERSEMA ROBERT J. WIERSEMA’S LATEST BOOK IS “SEVEN CROW STORIES”

“Jennie’s Boy,” the stunning new memoir from Newfoundland writer Wayne Johnston, begins with the Johnston family once again in motion, having been evicted from another short-lived home in St. John’s (referred to largely as “town”) and forced to return to their hometown, the Goulds, “back to where we came from with our tails between our legs.”

“Dad had spent the rent in some bar that was close to where we lived,” Johnston recounts. “It was bad enough that he’d spent the rent, Jennie [Wayne’s mother] said, but to do it right under our noses was an all-time low.” The family dynamic comes quickly into focus, with Wayne’s father adopting a selfpitying approach to his wife’s recriminations. “Dad continued to expound on his utter worthlessness, as if he was giving someone else the dressing-down they long had coming to them,” he writes, “until, at last, Jennie relented and told him he was being too hard on himself.”

Wayne — then seven years old — becomes the focus of some of their issues. Now one of Canada’s foremost and most celebrated writers — perhaps best known for “The Colony of Unrequited Dreams” — Johnston was a sickly child, underweight and undersized. Beset by health issues, including a chronic cough, insomnia and an inability to keep his food down, Johnston is the brunt of family scorn and derision, a factor, it is felt, in their downward trajectory: “‘We don’t always have a car,’ Dad said, ‘but we always have Wayne, and there’s no telling when he’ll have to be repaired.” In fact, Wayne and his family believe that he’s not long for this world at all.

It’s a harsh opening for a book which follows, unflinchingly, about six months in Johnston’s life. The story, however, moves beyond this harshness (while never leaving it behind) to incorporate moments of beauty, loss, and a dry humour, which will be familiar to Johnston’s readers (and anyone who has spent time in Newfoundland). Key to the book’s success — and to Johnston’s life — is his grandmother Lucy, who lives across the road from the Johnston family in the Goulds. Kept out of school, both for his own sake and the peace of other students, Wayne spends his days with Lucy, being bathed by her, accompanying her to her shrine to pray, and drinking his beloved Quik (Nestlé’s chocolate powdered milk mix). It’s a lovely, complex relationship, recounted with an affection that does not obscure its difficulties.

The same is true of the other relationships in the book. While his brothers, for example, seem to resent Wayne and his issues, inflicting the sort of bullying only older siblings can get away with, they are also fearsomely protective. Johnston’s family is a complex and often contradictory set of relationships, perhaps the most realistically depicted family in recent memory.

While the book’s most apt comparison is likely Frank McCourt’s story of his Irish childhood in Limerick, “Angela’s Ashes,” “Jennie’s Boy” is, if anything, even more powerful: a compressed, restrained account of a life lived on the edge, not only in poverty, but at the cusp of mortality. A simple fishing trip, for example, becomes a near-tragic event, a life-shaping incident depicted with an emotional directness. Never overblown or sentimental, “Jennie’s Boy” is as vivid as one’s own memories, a glimpse into a past of pain and wonder, of loss and joy.

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2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thespec.pressreader.com/article/282286734149297

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