Deloume Road

Random House was nice enough to send me some of their New Face of Fiction books to review, and a couple of weeks ago, they arrived in a brown paper package tied up with string. Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton was one of the three novels I received and I chose to read it first because it took place on Vancouver Island, near a place called Mill Bay. A place familiar to me, actually, and the setting piqued my interest. Also, I was very curious because the author graduated from the same writing program at UVic that I did, and I always love to see someone from my alma mater get published!

Taking place during the first Gulf War, Deloume Road is set, well, on Deloume Road - a small rural community scattered along an old country road. The inhabitants of this community vary in background and experience: Irene is very close to giving birth and just lost her husband in the Gulf; Al is a native artist awaiting news about his son, whose plane had gone missing near the Alaskan border; The Butcher, a Ukranian immigrant, slaughters pigs and runs a small deli on the street as he tries to come to terms with leaving his wife and son behind in the old country; and Bob Ford, a nasty, abusive piece of work who buys and sells junk for a living and beats his son. But the guts of the book revolve around some of Deloume Road's children, namely Andy, Matthew, Josh, and Miles Ford. One day, Matthew finds an old object related to Deloume Road's past, and this one simple object will change their lives forever.

Hooten writes with an amazing eye for detail. His descriptions of Deloume Road and it's tiniest intricacies are incredibly well-rendered and give the setting an unmistakable authenticity. If there was one thing drummed into our brains at UVic, it was know your setting - and Hooten obviously knows his. On the other side of the coin, though, some of his descriptions of less pleasant things going on in the book were downright macabre and almost made me sick to my stomach.

Although I would love to have loved this book, in the end I just couldn't. For one thing, there were way too many characters and way too many story lines, some of which had, for me anyways, unsatisfactory resolutions, or resolutions that seemed to come too easily. The story lines that didn't involve the children and the main event of the novel almost seemed extraneous when all was said and done, and seemed to distract from the guts of the story. And as for the guts of the story, I had a very difficult time relating it in anyway to anything else going on in the novel. There was a patchwork feel to the book that didn't work for me, a lack of cohesion and focus that relegates this to my "just OK" category. Unfortunately. I will say this: for CanLit, it was kind of refreshing not to have to deal with any weird sexual stuff or the typical coming of age trappings I am so cynical about. Though, perhaps because this is CanLit, there is a healthy dose of the depressing in Deloume Road that has been hard to shake.