Cataract City

Starred review from March 24, 2014
Childhood friends pursue lives on opposite sides of the law in this sweeping literary crime novel from Davidson (Rust and Bone). Owen Stuckey and Duncan Diggs meet as children, growing up on the streets of Cataract City, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. One night, during the chaos of a brawl, the 12-year-old boys are abducted, and spend a hellish week lost in the woods. From this point on, their trajectories split: Owen becomes a high school basketball star, and later a cop; Duncan becomes a boxer and small-time hood. Yet they remain tethered, not only by friendship and shared trauma but also by Edwina, a fiery free spirit they both love. When dogfighting, smuggling, and then murder ratchet up the stakes between the two men, old bonds are pitted against current loyalties. Davidson makes Cataract City itself a character, and brilliantly evokes life in a gritty industrial town—the men and women smell like their respective product lines at the local Nabisco factory, and drink at the same bleak bars their entire lives. Although Davidson takes a few small missteps—as children, the boys have confusingly similar nicknames, and some plot points strain credulity—the characters, audacious sweep of the story, and propulsive noir writing make this novel a standout. To live in Cataract City, Duncan observes, is “to accept many disappointments”; Davidson’s novel, on the other hand, lives up to its promise.

July 1, 2014
Snowmobile chases, cigarettes and snub noses: Canadian novelist Davidson's (The Fighter, 2007, etc.) latest is a down-and-dirty look at life on the quiet side of Niagara Falls.Canadians are reserved, polite and law-abiding, non? Not so. Davidson opens as if with a country song, as Duncan Diggs is preparing to leave prison after 2,912 nights, of which "two were the longest: the first and the last." Even if the prison is glad to see him gone, and even if he makes a halfhearted vow to get things right this time, Dunk can't help but be a screw-up; he's a jailbird now-"a distance had settled into his eyes," our narrator says-and about the first thing he does is look for fresh trouble. He finds it. How could he not in a town where everyone's high on bath salts or malt liquor, where the only growth industries are bare-knuckle boxing and petty crime? Dunk aims to improve his lot with a slightly better class of criminal, a reservation rat who runs counterfeit cigarettes from one side of the Niagara River to the other, grabbing at whatever other illicit opportunities present themselves. If Dunk is somewhat one-dimensional and elements of Davidson's storyline are predictable-of course his childhood friend is going to be a cop, of course they're both going to have their eye on the same woman, of course things aren't going to end well-criminal mastermind Lemmy Drinkwater is a fully rounded hoot. It stands to reason, too, that any character named Bovine is a font of comic possibilities, if not ones for the squeamish. The story goes on a few beats too long, especially its protracted conclusion. Still, the icy chase scene that brings things to a head is worthy of Hitchcock, and Davidson's writing is assured and nuanced even while giving tough-guy noir a good working over."It's a big world out there," our narrator tells us. So it is, and while you wouldn't want to live in this corner of it, it's well worth a visit.

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Starred review from June 1, 2014

Growing up in Canada near Niagara Falls, close friends Owen Stuckey and Duncan Diggs become even closer after their abduction by a broken-down wrestler they had admired. Duncan's plunge into the criminal world as an adult puts pressure on Owen, now a cop. VERDICT A swiftly told, matter-of-fact unfolding of lives threatening to derail, this Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist will be appreciated by most fiction readers.

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