This is an historical novel based on the life of Rockwell Kent, an American painter from New York who spent a year and a half in Newfoundland from 1914-1915. He was a man who sometimes preferred to be a human being on a quest for the good life rather than be an artist. Now later in life, he looks back on the time he spent in the small town of Brigus pursuing that goal and how that experience almost broke him. We go back in time to shortly before the war. Kent is fed up and bored with the superficiality of New York and the current movement in the art world away from realism to impressionism. He wants to go to Newfoundland to lead a pure and natural life and have its customs and culture influence his work, making it unique. He had tried a move to Newfoundland once before and failed, but this time he is determined to succeed. Rockwell is not a sympathetic character. He is a bohemian, an arrogant, vain and selfish man who neglects his family. He has a condescending manner and feels the world should mold itself to fit his needs. He hurts those who love him and does not experience remorse when he does so. He feels he just is who he is, and should not apologize for it. When he married his wife Kathleen, he told her he loved her but he might not always be faithful to her. He found other woman attractive and was always ready to press himself against any woman who would allow it. Kent acknowledges he is a man with large appetites, but he feels he is honest about it and therefore should not be judged. He is a man of strong views, and against many things. He staunchly believes the way to be against anything is to rant and argue and never be conciliatory. Eventually, that proved to be his undoing.Kent travels to the small town of Brigus Newfoundland, finds a small abandoned home and starts to renovate it so his family can move in later. During this time he lives a solitary bachelor life and enjoys it. He makes a few friends, among them Tom Dobie a young sixteen year old farmer, fisherman and carpenter who helps with the renovations, and Bob Bartlett a famous Artic explorer who had been the captain on Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. Kent is invited to participate in the town’s life. He helps out in the fishery and the locals welcome and include him in their community. In the summer, his wife and two children arrive and settle in. Kent feels content and confident he has found a place where he will live the rest of his life. He feels that living among these people, he will become a better man and thus a better painter.But it is not long before Kent’s behavior begins to bother people. He openly flaunts his wealth as he pulls five dollar bills from his pocket while others are living on credit. They stare outrageously at the carved figurehead of a naked lady he has nailed above his door. They are stunned by his concern for his tools lost at sea on a downed freighter rather than for the ship lost at sea with many of the men from the town. And then tries to rile up the fishermen to form a union. The mood shifts quickly. They begin to notice he never seems to work. They do not understand the solitary and isolated life of a painter and they openly wonder what he does all day and how he gets his money. The people who had once involved him in their life no longer want to see him and seem annoyed at his presence. They begin to question his motives and his loyalties, and feeling he must respond, he goes out of his way to antagonize them further.The war brings another precipitous downslide in their affections. Kent questions the men’s desire to sign up and join the European War, saying it will never benefit the working class. He openly talks of his love of the German culture and language, and some interpret that as a love for German political action, quickly pegging him as a German sympathizer. Kent feels he must respond, but he does so by taking provocative action, writing letters of complaint to the press and painting a German eagle on his studio door underneath the sign Bomb Shop. He refuses to have his mail opened by the customs inspector and is accused of secreting maps to the enemy. His midnight walk on the rocky shore with a lantern has the locals thinking he is sending coded messages to German submarines in the harbor. He openly cheers on POWs at work in the fields. Soon he is openly accused of being a spy, and the prime Minister expels him. As he digs himself in deeper with the locals, his wife begins pushing away from him. Her anger grows and her love for him begins to leave her. Eventually Kent realizes he is spending his entire time building up his defenses rather than growing as a person. He comes to accept that the move to Newfoundland is a doomed venture and agrees to leave with his family. His marriage to Kathleen will last five more years, and then there are two other marriages that follow, also accompanied by divorce.As an older man, Kent has settled down on a farm (again with another woman), and looks back on his life from a different point of view. He seems to be a happier man and a better person. He now realizes that in the past he thought he was a good artist, but now he knows for certain that he was only mediocre. The question, “the big why” for Kent was whether he ever got to be the person he really thought himself to be. As we met him toward the end of his life, he seems to have at least part of the answer to that question. Winter has an unusual writing style, avoiding the accepted grammatical conventions of apostrophes, quotations for dialogue and complete sentences. The text is also filled with wonderful Newfoundland expressions which are scattered throughout the text. They certainly bring a smile to you face.I didn’t especially like this book, mainly because I could not identify sympathetically with Rockwell Kent. He was so condescending and selfish, demanding the world fit to his needs but not ready to make any significant personal effort to fit in. He was a man who wanted everything for himself. A man with an oversized ego who could not fathom the way a newcomer should act when trying to fit into a small isolated community. And he probably never could. His personality was not the type that could disappear in a small place. Not all men are destined to blend in and it is not always a matter of choice. Kent was one of those men who are never destined to settle down and disappear in such a small place as Brigus Newfoundland.But as a reader I can’t help but admire Winter’s effort as a writer. He is adept at describing characters and their inner lives as well as the beautiful cold and rugged Newfoundland landscape.
While this was a great piece of fiction, it was also an excellent introduction to the life of Rockwell Kent AND a great look at life in Newfoundland at the first part of the 20th Century.-Page 269"When the war began the tree lost their leaves. And I thought, Why trees, why green, why the futility of it. I was caught up in the belief of profress, and now I saw turmoil. There was chaos. I read about entropy. If you left a pile of bricks and time was infinite, then a moment would arrive when the bricks and time was infinite, then a moment would arrive when the bricks, through random change, would form a wall. That was my thought. But this is not true. The bricks, without work injected into the system, will become a simpler structure. They prefer to turn to dust. I saw the world now starved of energy from the sun. It was turning to dust. It was returning to a simpler form. It was becoming nostalgic. Nostalgia can be good. It is incorrect to think of nostalgia as merely the pain one feels in returning to home. Memory never matches the reality of home. Nostalgia is the friction between home itself and the memory of home. A friction that turns time to dust.All my life I've wante to strip sentimentality from nostalgia and be left withe the hearkening. With the strange newsness of return."
What do You think about The Big Why: A Novel (2006)?
This book by Michael Winter is a very different sort of historical fiction. It recalls a specific time in the life of the American artist Rockwell Kent when he goes to Brigus Newfoundland just before the beginning of the First World War. A lot of the book is spent exploring Rockwell's inner thoughts as they especially relate to whether in life we got to be who we are, and if not, why--that is the big why. His descriptions of those early fishermen and sealers is riveting. In one incident, when a long overdue boat finally came into harbour, he describes the crew carrying a frozen seal "but the seal was not a seal. It was the pelt of a seal, and inside the pelt was a frozen man." Hearing about the Newfoundland of these early years and listening to the thoughts that Kent struggles with in his relationships with the community of Brigus as well as his personal ones keeps this book humming along.
—Sharon
