Achieving 'Progress' This Summer

[Editor's note: This is one of an occasional series of short book reviews arising out of the question we've posed to some of our regular Tyee readers: What are you reading this summer?]

British Columbian author Michael V. Smith's second novel, Progress, is a moving tale of family love and betrayal, death and deception, love and sex, all set in a small Ontario town that is on the brink of being flooded out by a huge dam. The protagonist, Helen Massey, sees a workman fall from the face of the dam being built to drown her home town and runs into a brick wall of denial and cover up when she tries to report the disturbing sighting. Progress, it would appear, requires that keeping of secrets, and this is a book, most fundamentally, about secrets, the ones that support an unjust social system and the ones that structure and deform the lives of dysfunctional families like Helen's.

The plot thickens when Helen's drug-addicted gay brother Robbie shows up after a long absence, hoping for one last look at his family home before it disappears underwater. As the narrative unfolds, the reader learns about the secrets that Robbie took away with him, and the real reason he left in the first place, a revelation that forces Helen to re-think her own version of the past. All of this family drama could, in less skillful hands, be reduced to melodrama or cheap Jerry Springer show material. But Smith is a consummate prose stylist with a deep insight into human character, as was evidenced by his stunningly effective first novel, Cumberland, which was deservedly nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel award when it was published in 2002.

Progress is a remarkable book, with at least one passage, an account of Robbie's fall back into drug use and anonymous sex in response to the terrors of facing his own and his family's past, that is impressively strong and effective, and many memorable characters and scenes. While not as flawless as Cumberland, this new novel is an entirely respectable second work from a novelist who is going to give Canadian readers powerful and moving fiction for a long time. This is not the last we'll hear from Michael V. Smith, and that is good news. Buy and read this powerful study of family life and death beneath the looming shadow of progress.