Architects Are Here
Page 1
Praise for The Architects Are Here
National Bestseller
A Globe and Mail Best Book
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Toronto Life Best of Fall
“‘The novel can do simply everything,’ Henry James wrote under the heading, the Future of the Novel, more than 100 years ago …. What Henry James wrote is worth remembering now when you read Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here, because this flamboyant gem of a novel is so wide-angled and crowded with dramatic incident that it’s likely to stretch even an unusually generous reader’s literate mind and loving heart beyond normal limits…. That puts him right alongside Barbara Gowdy in the front rank of writers worth reading no matter how daunting and inhospitable the terrain their stories take readers across.”
—The Globe and Mail
“SUPREME ORIGINALITY, SHATTERING INSIGHT:With the publication of his latest novel, The Architects Are Here, Newfoundland’s Michael Winter is well on his way to having one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian literature…. The Architects Are Here is … at once familiar and innovative, a dissection of lives born in between the Newfoundland of old and new…. The glory of Winter is his writing style, a sharp-edged yet brittle prose that cannot be quickly summarized…. Like a poem, Winter’s prose must wash over the reader in its entirety, letting his asides and quick-cut thought edits bounce around in the reader’s mind, quietly revealing character through humour warm yet grim…. Already in his short professional life, Winter has burst through the pack with his startling personal mix of lyrical cadence, imagination and warmth. The Architects Are Here is proof positive that Winter is something special.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Mesmerizing … beautifully written, doleful and comic and heartfelt, this just might be the book to bring the 42-year-old Winter the broader audience many think he has long deserved.”
—Calgary Herald
“Best of Fall; The Fabulist: Novelist Michael Winter Tackles Rivalry and Romance. [The Architects Are Here is] brainy and ambitious—just like its author.”
—Toronto Life
“The Architects are Here reveals a new maturity and sophistication in [Winter’s] writing.”
—cbc.ca
“A soaring novel that breaks every rule… it absolutely soars, with catharsis, resonance and unexpected resolution. … [A] fulfilling read…. Winter has tapped the ineffable. The Architects Are Here is not modelled on fiction, but rooted in the guts and hurly-burly of life, capturing that experience as few novels do.… It is less a novel than it is a force of nature, a bloody, ugly, ultimately uplifting taste of life itself.”
—Robert Wiersema, National Post
“It’s a mature book, in Winter’s mastery of his devastatingly effective prose style and sprawling, entrancing plot and in the concerns of his thirtysomething characters. It’s big and ambitious and exciting: it’s a Toronto novel and a Newfoundland novel and a road novel all rolled into one; a love triangle and a buddy story and a revenge epic; a boozy, funny portrait of achingly true characters you might have a beer with playing out their lives on a widescreen scale.”
—Eye Weekly
“The Architects Are Here cements the author’s position as one of our very best…”
—Edmonton Journal
“[A] wonderfully distinctive voice….”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“The quintessential road-trip novel…”
—Times-Colonist (Victoria, BC)
“Winter is the architect of this book, and though all the characters attempt to gain control, there is an implicit hopelessness haunting them on every page. Freud and the ancient Greek tragedians would appreciate the manner and style of the relentless destiny he determines for the Twomblys. Michael Winter is a skilled and confident author, adept with detail and incisive with observations. His characters are true and magnificently flawed, and his writing is peppered with random observations of the bizarre, with which life is often replete.”
—Women’s Post
“His third novel, The Architects Are Here, can do little but burnish his literary halo.… Michael Winter is a fascinating writer who takes chances…. Like fine brandy, it is hard to read just one Winter novel. When you finish this one, take a tip from me and look him up in the ‘Ws’ of your local library’s fiction section.”
—The Sun Times (Owen Sound, ON)
“Those who enjoy … Winter’s talent for ‘linguistic pointillism’ will find much to enjoy here. They will also find, for the first time, a contemporary narrative about larger-than-life characters embroiled in a plot that reaches mythic proportions. This is Winter’s most fictional fiction to date, and it is written with tremendous confidence.”
—Quill & Quire
“There is also, of course, the expected linguistic playfulness of Winter’s style … and his ability to make metaphoric leaps that reveal something of the essential nature of things.”
—The Independent (St. John’s, NL)
Praise for Michael Winter
“Winter reduces the most telling moments to their purest essence, snippets of telling dialogue and minimal description. The result is utterly convincing … I was rapt—at times downright thrilled. The prose is so pure and true. Moments, reduced to their essence. Damn, I love the way this guy writes.”—Toronto Star
“Winter paints the Newfoundland landscape, its people and the business of their lives with sharp, simple—and beautiful—strokes.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[Winter]’s a natural writer … just one of the creatures born to do it … he can really grab your attention and make you feel things…. Lovely.”
—National Post
“Extraordinarily witty … [Winter] is a born poet, out to invigorate the novel form.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Dramatic and beautifully written.… Winter drives his finely honed sentences into the page like nails into wood, constructing a solid, many-layered and powerfully provocative story.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Bold and ambitious … Winter’s artistry extends to capturing the local rhythms of speech, the bleak and stunning scenery and simple domestic tableaux.”
—The Washington Post
“One of the best—and most distinctive—younger writers on the Canadian scene.”
—Quill & Quire
“Think Henry James filtered through James Ellroy.”
—The Buffalo News
“His prose is both sheet-metalled and lyrical and soaked in truth:You can read for hours without a single false quantity.”
—Toro
PENGUIN CANADA
THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE
MICHAEL WINTER is the author of The Big Why, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary Award. He divides his time between Toronto and St. John’s. The Architects Are Here is his fifth book.
Also by Michael Winter
Creaking in Their Skins
One Last Good Look
This All Happened
The Big Why
MICHAEL WINTER
THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2007
Published in this edition, 2008
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Michael Winter, 2007
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note:This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Winter, Michael, 1965–
The architects are here / Michael Winter.
ISBN 978-0-14-305570-9
I. Title
PS8595.I624A73 2008 C813’.54 C2008-902653-5
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca
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for CLP
ONE
ONE
THIS IS A STORY about my friend David Twombly and about the nature of our friendship. David is gone now, and there’s a temptation to eulogize him in some time-honoured way that would implicitly deny the intensity and texture of what we shared. I intend to avoid that. I want the immediacy of the quotidian, its take-no-prisoners feel and sharp whiff. And I want to tell as much of the truth as is important. To do that, I must tell you something about a third person, a woman named Nell Tarkington, who years ago entered our lives, Dave’s and mine, and stayed there, changing each of us in complex and idiosyncratic ways. So the beginning of this tale is also hers.
I met David Twombly one winter when we were building igloos out of snow ploughed from driveways behind the drug store. I knew him because we both played peewee hockey and carried our duffel bags full of gear down to the rink before school. He was good, and I was picked last for things. But the igloo-building made him like me. His parents were American and mine were English and so we recognized in each other the outsider in this Newfoundland milltown. We had carved out the USS Enterprise with connecting tunnels, the whole starship, with lit candles in alcoves. It possessed the muted intimacy of the womb. And one night, while we sat at the control deck, the igloo began to vibrate. Then one entire side of the igloo was sheered off and the loud orange blade of a snowplough ran past us. And there, out in the shining dark, was the city we lived in.
My father taught industrial arts, and I feared that I’d be tortured about it. But boys respected him—he was, in their eyes, a cool guy. Strict but cool. He let them build useful things, slingshots and gun racks and box kites, even a totem pole. The main plus for my father was that industrial arts was a two-hour class and he allowed the boys to smoke out by the double doors between periods. That showed real understanding.
Dave and I spent our teen years hanging out in each other’s basement. I preferred his basement because the cement floor was painted with a grey marine enamel that you could slide across in your sock feet. His brother, Zac, had a race car set and a cardboard rocket that blasted six hundred feet in the air and landed with a parachute. His father was the first person to offer me a cup of coffee made in a bodum. We shot hoops above the Twombly garage door and we drove our banana bikes down to the river and constructed dams on tributaries and in winter we made our mittens into puppets and the mittens, puddies we called them, smoked cigarette butts that were still lit. They were cigarettes we picked up after people had tossed them. We were privately childish and publicly strong. We both boxed and were in the same weight division, although I was tall and jabbed while Dave worked inside and hooked to the kidneys. Once, while sparring, Dave sent a hook to the temple. I was down. I felt the buzzle and lightness of my body. I woke up on the canvas and a dullness in my skin. I had been out. I was out for about ten seconds. It made me realize this is what death is like. There is no life after death. There is no duration in the dark of waiting.
As teenagers we grew our hair long and feathered it and we bench-pressed with Zac’s friends with a barbell and weights made of cement in gold plastic casings. We played handheld electronic sports games and stole valve caps from the wheels of fancy cars that we screwed onto the chrome rims of our ten-speeds. We grew soft moustaches.
We were the last of the Grade Elevens—they were phasing in Grade Twelve to keep us up with Canada—and so we graduated high school at the early age of seventeen. Because we were so young we decided to stay in Corner Brook for our first year of university. There was an offshoot campus where you could do two years of a degree, and they would not accept you at any mainland university with only a Grade Eleven. So we signed up for English and physics and geography and I chose an elective offered by Dave’s father. Professor Twombly taught communications. And this is where I met Nell Tarkington. She was in the class. I noticed her because she was new—Nell was one of the only students on campus who was not from the province, and so a curiosity attached itself to her. She was tall and wore shiny dark hair and when she answered a question she leaned forward in her seat and curled her shoulders a little. I realized there were other shapes and physiques to both men and women. Because I was English I did not look much like a typical Newfoundlander. Anthropologists and linguists parachuted into our island with six-week projects that analyzed an isolated gene pool and accents that have withstood the North American persuasion for twelve generations. This was something we learned in Professor Twombly’s class. He brought in music and documentaries, and one film was about the premier visiting Cuba with Geoff Stirling, a Newfoundland millionaire who was involved in radio and television. I remember Mr Stirling standing on his head on the Cuban beach. Joey Smallwood composed questions aloud for Castro. Between Stirling and Smallwood, on the screen pulled down over the green chalkboard, was the silhouette of Nell’s shoulders and head.
Nell was someone who, if I had to be slightly perverse, looked and acted a bit like me. But I was shy back then and sat at the rear, whereas she favoured a desk up front. She was, I guess, a keener.
I paid my tuition that year with summer jobs. The only thing I knew to put on an application was manual labour. I used a drawbar and ripped thousands of linear feet of clapboard from old houses. David worked with his brother on tech assignments that involved video equipment and digital software—Dave was the first person I knew who owned a CD player. That fall I lived at home and worked four-hour shifts at McDonald’s up on the highway. I was there when they changed the sign over from 999 million served to 1 billion served. I worked with Joe Hurley and I’d meet him down in the valley and we’d ride up togeth
er on our bikes until the snow hit in November. We grilled burgers and toasted buns and drained the grease troughs into plastic cartons full of ice, and walked around the lot emptying the castle bin liners. I liked working close with Joe because we got to take down the flag, and the maple leaf fluttered over the highest point of land over Corner Brook. We felt like explorers.
That first year was pretty much like high school, though some of the harder cases were not around any longer, and both Zac and my own brother were about to leave home for work elsewhere on the planet. Zac was twenty and had been studying in Michigan, where his parents were from, and he was being headhunted by firms in Seattle and also Palo Alto, a place I had never heard of before but was the cradle of the new age about to befall us, Zac said. That of the microprocessor. Zac had started a small company that David now helped run and, before Zac left for the West Coast, he wanted, of all things, to go moose hunting with his brother. How many chances will I get to do this, he said to Dave. And we both imagined him, in hot California, driving his blue Matador into town with a set of moose antlers cinched to the roof rack.
The Twomblys have a cabin on Grand Lake and they hunted from there. Zac had applied for the hunter’s safety course and bought a rifle with his father at an RCMP auction at the Rod and Gun Club. I operated the trap shoot there on Wednesday nights through the summer, and Zac would drive up in his blue Matador and step in line as the clay pigeons exploded into the spruce brush. Zac seemed the type to smoke, but he did not smoke. Once, when I was twelve, he had told me, privately, how to masturbate in the shower. They had shot the moose up near Glover Island. They were using a seven-horsepower open boat and they’d gutted the moose and packed it in quarters into the boat. They were sitting low in the water, motoring back down the lake to their family cabin at Boot Brook. The wind was a northeasterly and the chain of lakes is a diagonal scar that follows a geological fault that cuts off the Great Northern Peninsula, sinks into White Bay, then travels five thousand miles under the Atlantic and ends up dividing the Scottish Hebrides. They came up into the wind and pulled into the lee of Glover Island to wait it out. They knew the wind dies down at suppertime. It began to slash rain, the flanks of moose wet. They were proud of the moose and did not want it to spoil. There was a pond on Glover Island and on that pond an island. It’s the only island on a pond in an island on a lake in an island in the whole world. They shouted through the storm about how one day they’d camp on that island in the very centre of what they called the planet. They were excited by the plans and they pretended everything was okay.