Storms Are Easy, Marriage Is Hard

The year was 1954, the season autumn, the climactic event a furious hurricane that swept up from the Caribbean into Canada and tore through Toronto, washing out bridges and houses, leaving 4,000 homeless and 81 dead, many of the bodies found stuck in trees the next morning by the bloated Humber River. I was not living in Toronto at the time—October 1954—but an aunt was and that is what she told me about Hurricane Hazel. “The next morning they found bodies in the trees,” she said.

Mark Sinnett could not have invented a more Canadian, more Ontario, more Toronto setting for his remarkable novel. If Hurricane Hazel was not enough, a month earlier young Marilyn Bell, only 16, had managed to swim across Lake Ontario, wading ashore in Toronto as thousands waited for her at the Canadian National Exhibition. Among those waiting (along with a real-life Pierre Berton) are Sinnett’s two main characters: Ray Townes, a Toronto cop, and his wife, Mary, a hospital...