BOOK REVIEW : A Maine Version of ‘Tobacco Road’

Once Upon a Time on the Banks by Cathie Pelletier (Viking: $19.95; 369 pages)

This is a novel about lowlife in upstate Maine, set in the same benighted town that provided the bleak venue for Pelletier’s first book, “The Funeral Makers.” Forget Winslow Homer, Kennebunkport, L. L. Bean, blueberries and lobster rolls. There’s nothing here you’d want to hang over the sofa, visit, order by mail or eat.

If you went to Mattagash, you’d be staying in the Albert Pinkham Motel, a four-cabin establishment where guests must rent a radio from the proprietor. You’d dine at Henri Nadeau’s Quick Lunch and Gas Station, and while you were filling up, chances are the Gifford brothers would strip your car of everything but the paint job. By the time you got to Mattagash, their work would be half undone by the pot holes and frost heaves in the road, deep and high enough to loosen even welded parts.

The only reason to go to Mattagash would be an invitation to Amy Joy Lawler’s wedding, the social event of the season, heralded by a photo in the Watertown Weekly of Amy Joy and her betrothed, Jean-Claude Cloutier, posed against the refrigerator in someone’s kitchen. Though Amy Joy’s family has come down in the world since her missionary grandfather perished in China and her schoolteacher father committed suicide, her mother, Sicily Lawler, is so horrified at the thought of her daughter marrying a person of French-Canadian background that all her internal organs rebel simultaneously.

Even to a disinterested outsider, Jean-Claude hardly seems a prize. He works as a grease monkey, has a low tolerance for alcohol and considerable difficulty with the English language. Then again, since Amy Joy isn’t exactly the deb of the year either, the reader may not quite see what all the fuss is about. Still, this is 1969, and the Catholic-Protestant tension in northern Maine is as acute, if not as bloody, as in Belfast.

The wedding, planned for three weeks after the beginning of the novel, affords us the opportunity to meet the invited guests as well as those residents of Mattagash, population 456, who will probably show up anyway. Coming all the way from Portland will be the Ivy family, owners of the imposing Ivy Funeral Home, where the deceased are known as “house guests,” and the founder’s son reminds his employees to think of themselves as “hosts.” “We are not a parlor,” he tells his staff, “because we don’t give massages.”

Marvin Ivy’s wife, Thelma, is Sicily Lawler’s sister, so the Ivys must tear themselves away from the sophistication of Portland to attend the rural nuptials, a prospect that contributes significantly to the plot, providing the chance to know Thelma, hooked on Valium; Randy Ivy, the heir apparent, who prefers non-prescription chemicals; and make the acquaintance of the luscious Monique Tessier, a secretary at the funeral home and Marvin Ivy’s mistress.

We see and hear a lot about the feudin’ and fightin’ Gifford family, who have turned their stretch of Mattagash into a Down East and less sexy version of Tobacco Road; follow the diminishing fortunes of Albert Pinkham, the motel-keeper; and watch in helpless horror as Jean-Claude, the bridegroom-elect, disgraces himself. When an Ivy family disaster upstages, preempts and ultimately obviates the imminent wedding, we rejoice right along with Sicily Lawler.

Herself a one-time resident of northern Maine, the author obviously knows and may once have loved the quirky setting of the novel. She can be lyrical when describing the coming of spring, when you hear “the ancient sound of water dripping from eaves, of car tires finally touching tarred roads, of rips rattling again in the Mattagash River,” and the whole town is pervaded by the smell of Pike Gifford’s stack of stolen automobile tires thawing out in the warm sun. Now that Pelletier has moved away to Tennessee, there’s a lot more knowing than loving in this municipal portrait of the town and its denizens; a grand place for a writer to be from, and terrific people to remember from a distance of 2,000 miles and 20 years.