Sibling Rivalry

In his 2014 novel, Sweetland, Michael Crummey describes a Newfoundlander living in Alberta who sends “serious” books home to her mother, Queenie, trying to rehabilitate her lowbrow taste to little avail: “Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognized and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they was written by townies, she liked to say.” Queenie may very well be referring to Crummey’s own award-winning Galore, a magical realist novel set in the fictional outport of Paradise Deep, where a whale beaches itself and regurgitates an albino man named Judah who is somehow still alive. Was Crummey having fun here with his reputation as one of the province’s most renowned chroniclers of rural or, more specifically, outport life? Or was he working through some discomfort with that reputation?

Crummey is a bit of an...