Review: Northwest Corner – John Burnham Schwartz. 4 stars.

Twelve years after a tragic accident that lead to prison time and estrangement from his family, Dwight Arno receives a visit from his son Sam. Deeply unhappy and misanthropic (due in no small part to his father’s crime and disappearance) Sam has grievously injured a man in a bar fight and his future hangs in the balance. What follows is a pretty unflinching examination of a family taken to the very limit of their emotional endurance.
Northwest Corner is an excellent novel and tells its story maturely and skilfully; the rich prose delving deep into the inner worlds of its protagonists without becoming too self-indulgent. The dialogue is clipped and realistic, contrasting nicely with the characters’ tortured mental states and lending the novel a great tension that a more harmonious approach to dialogue and narration would dilute. However, as is always the danger with this style of writing, Northwest Corner’s prose can at times descend into long lists of extraneous similes and occasionally overwrought cliché (a mark of light on Sam’s cheek is described in the narration as ‘the unconscious brand of his goodness’) which clashes with the novel’s quiet grittiness.
While Dwight is certainly the protagonist, Northwest Corner is an ensemble piece, each chapter told from the point of view of one of the principle characters. It is here that Dwight’s ex-wife Ruth emerges as the novel’s most compellingly tragic character. Undergoing chemo therapy following a lumpectomy, Ruth’s horror at her rapidly deteriorating body is forcibly superseded by her son’s crime and her ex-con ex-husband’s re-emergence into their lives. Schwartz does an excellent job of giving Ruth a vitality that she, as a recovering cancer victim and the collateral damage of her husband and son’s mistakes, should by rights not possess.
Dwight (whose chapters are the only ones told in first person) is a sympathetic and well-written protagonist but his fallibility and machismo prevent him from having the kind of heroic presence within the story that Ruth does. While this is clearly a deliberate and effective narrative decision, the novel fumbles in its attempt to take a similar tack with Sam characterisation. Sam is clearly supposed to share his father’s machismo and reticence but in attempting to show this fallibility in an undiluted form Schwartz has created a somewhat shallow caricature of a young man.
However, with the novel’s emphasis clearly being on adulthood, parenthood and coming to terms with regret, the strong characterisation of Dwight and Ruth, the compelling prose and the dark subject matter overshadows and overpowers its failings.