Rocks and Hard Places

My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. — Saint Augustine, Confessions, I.5

As an image of the resettlements forced upon the outport communities of Newfoundland and Labrador in the mid 20th century, there is none sadder or more astounding than that of a wooden house being floated miles over open water. None, that is, except the image of such a house in the opening scene of Donna Morrissey’s What They Wanted. The family we first met in her third novel, Sylvanus Now, had spurned the government deal. But nowthat the fish are all gone, “sucked into the bowels of a thousand foreign factory ships,”they must launch their house into an economically plausible future. Ah, but it is a narrow channel that leads there—so narrow that the house must be sawn in half.

Houses, both divided and whole, sum up...