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Sweetland

Michael Crummey

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September 2022: Favorites

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Jun 26, 2015 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: social-commentary, grief, fiction, rural-life, dog, favorites, survival, newfoundland, fishing

This one crept up on me and bowled me over with the stubborn and quiet heroism of a character who resists the inevitable destruction of his way of life and loss of his rural community.

Moses Sweetland lives on a Newfoundland island named after his ancestors. Decades after the commercial cod fishery shut down, most capable ambitious residents have gone to elsewhere in Canada to seek work, leaving mostly misfits and the elderly behind to cling to the old ways. Sweetland has been totally bound into This one crept up on me and bowled me over with the stubborn and quiet heroism of a character who resists the inevitable destruction of his way of life and loss of his rural community.

Moses Sweetland lives on a Newfoundland island named after his ancestors. Decades after the commercial cod fishery shut down, most capable ambitious residents have gone to elsewhere in Canada to seek work, leaving mostly misfits and the elderly behind to cling to the old ways. Sweetland has been totally bound into the lives of these people and the place his whole life. Now the government doesn’t want to pay the tab for services to the community and is enticing them to move to the mainland with generous compensation payoffs, which they all must agree to. Sweetland and one of his neighbors are the only holdouts.

Despite pressures from community members to give in, Sweetland keeps to the patterns of his life. He knows every rocky hill and meadow on the island, every shoal and cove of its shores, and he finds purpose in partaking in the rhythms of nature and changing tasks that the seasons bring. He lives alone, plays online poker, cuts a lot of wood, fishes, gardens, and snares rabbits for food. All could be fine if it weren’t for the people he loves slowly dying off or disappearing.

In his circle is a man who was addled from drinking kerosene as a kid, a blind man his school friend married out of pity, an agoraphobic woman who partakes of life through her window and trashy romance novels, a barber whose shop is a social haven instead of a place for haircuts, a retired priest hiding out from some unknown past, and a pair of loutish brothers always out for a lark. I found this cast well crafted and far from the trend of authors to create quirky characters for entertainment and humor. They have depth and bear important secrets Sweetland spins out through his memories, and most retain dignity and courage. They are broken as individuals, but somehow as a community they achieve a worthy wholeness.

Sweetland’s most significant connection is with a teen-aged boy Jesse, the child of his niece Clara and a subject to some variant of autism. Clara has recently had him checked out by a specialist in St. John:

“Have they got a name for it yet?” he asked.
“For what?”
“For whatever is wrong with the youngster.”
“There’s a spectrum…“And he isn’t typical, is what they’re telling me.”
“I could’ve told you that much for free,” he said. “Saved you the trip.”

He frequently takes Jesse along on his various forays and tasks, plays games and jokes with him. In turn the boy teaches him to use a computer, educates him on the wonders of science, shares movies like “Titanic” with him, and, through his perpetual questions, forces him to revisit many memories of family and events that shaped his soul. Such as the time Sweetland helped save a group of Sri Lankan refugees put to sea in a small boat by those paid to smuggle them. Another tie that binds is that a brother of his that died tragically when Sweetland was a kid is a constant imaginary companion of the boy. His resolve not to leave the island is supported by a deep belief he shares with Clara: “Jesse won’t be happy nowhere else than here…I knows that for a fact.”

An important wellspring of Sweetland’s memories concerns his younger sister Ruthie, Clara’s mother, dead at the time of this story. He remembers carrying her down the stairs in the morning before others were up, start the fire, frying up her breakfast, and helping her to the outhouse. Giving her a ride to pick berries, “Ruthie singing in his ear as payment for the ride”. Once their uppity rooster slashed her and he immediately bashed it to death. That memory Crummey creates for Sweetland makes him come alive for me:

That’s a waste of good meat, Uncle Char said, scraping the ragged mess up with a shovel.
Sweetland was still in a lather. He could hear Ruthie bawling in the kitchen where Hollis was holding her arms while their mother stitched the girl’s lobe in place. He swung at the animal as Uncle Char walked past him, wanting to kill the thing dead over again. The ring of wood against the shovel making his elbows tingle. He stamped on the ruined corpse where it fell to the ground.
Bist thee done? Uncle Char asked him.
I’m done, Swetland said. Though he was not, and likely never would be.

At a certain point, Sweetland figures out a way to stay behind alone on the island after everyone else has left. We come to understand why this refuge is so vital to him, why he never married, how his attempt to make a living elsewhere failed. We root for him to succeed against the tough odds that nature and accidents ply against his foolhardy choice. An abandoned dog becomes a special companion and focus of his beleaguered humanity. It becomes hard to draw the line between noble effort and madness.

Literary scholars will find plenty of metaphors and allegorical references to play with in this mélange of characters and memories. Mostly I felt them seeping underground in my experience of this elegiac tale. Tragic losses do pile up, but I didn’t feel my emotions were being wrenched just for the sake of emotional engagement and melodrama. I felt some of the same satisfaction I get from post-apocalyptic stories like Peter Heller’s “Dog Stars” and the rich rewards I gained from the mix of bleakness and humor present in Proulx’s “The Shipping News” and McMurty’s “The Last Picture Show.”.
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Feb 02, 2016 Denizen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Sweetland is a beautifully written story about a man and his home town, a small village on a Canadian island. Wanting to stop services to the dwindling population on the island, the government offers generous resettlement packages to the residents with the caveat that everyone must sign on. Segueing from the present to the past, Crummey tells the story of Moses Sweetland, the last hold-out on accepting the package. I grew to know Sweetland and the events that shaped him and shaped his love for t ...more

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