‘Cadillac Cathedral’ by Jack Hodgins

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

After a particularly trying winter we’re all plotting our escape, to the tropics, perhaps, into the garden if the soil ever thaws, or into the kind of story that transports us to an exotic locale, one populated by the uber-rich, the lovably incorrigible or the horridly evil. The next crop of diverting beach-reads is in transit, ready to strain wrists and tote bags, and we’ll gobble these pulpy page-turners as eagerly as we’ll shed layers of clothing and turn our faces to the welcome sun.

Cadillac Cathedral, Jack Hodgins’ latest offering from his fictional version of Vancouver Island, is an escapist novel with a difference. While distracting us from personal concerns and the ills of the planet, it also nudges us gently towards small, humane corners of possibility. No one reading him for the first time could call Hodgins a strict realist, although his is a believable, attractive community. His characters, fully formed and familiar, evoke those of Stuart McLean and Garrison Keillor but with harder edges. His land- and seascapes are vividly rendered. Names of authentic Finnish dishes pepper the text. What sets this and his previous stories apart from the present publishing vogue is their tone, which at heart is kind and irony-free. Like Anne Tyler, wise doyenne of quirky novels about eccentric American families, Hodgins seems to truly like his oddball characters, respecting them enough to let them get into a spot of bother before reeling them back to safer ground.

As in his 2010 novel, The Master of Happy Endings, Hodgins has made his hero a tall, thin, laconic, Scandinavian senior, in this case a widowed Finn who can take care of himself and who jealously guards his privacy but understands the peril of loneliness. He is Arvo Saarikoski, a man in his seventies who as a career mechanic fixed trucks and locomotives in the island’s logging camps. Now he restores abandoned and wrecked cars, selling them at a modest price to those who can’t afford a new vehicle. His ramshackle workshop across the street from the one store in Portuguese Creek, BC is the locus of a small circle of contemporaries: Bert Peterson, Bert’s roommate Herbie Brewster, Cynthia O’Brien, a retired school teacher and former owner of a drive-in movie theatre, and Martin Glass, recently deceased and at one time the riding’s member of parliament. Estranged from his only son and without other family or friends, Martin named Arvo executor of his estate. Now, having succumbed to a sudden illness, the honourable member lies peacefully in a hospital morgue in the city.

Rather than hire the local funeral director to drive down and pick up Martin’s corpse, Arvo and his troupe decide to acquire their own hearse to transport their old friend’s body in grand style. The car they have in mind is a 1930 Cadillac Cathedral that Arvo remembers from his youth and which he once restored as an adult. They believe the vintage funeral-car is being used to haul logs somewhere back in the bush. This fact infuriates Arvo, who remembers fondly a stately conveyance with ornate windows showcasing the casket, and an open-air, leather upholstered driver’s cab up front.

His strong emotional connection to the hearse stems not only from his love of antique cars: the original owner, a man named Birdsong, ran a funeral parlour in the city neighbourhood where Arvo grew up. Birdsong’s pretty, yellow haired daughter Myrtle was Arvo’s first childhood crush, an unrequited love he has nurtured all his life. Thus the quest is set: find the Cathedral, get it roadworthy and use it to retrieve Martin and bring him back to his final resting place in Portuguese Creek, before returning the hearse to Myrtle, its rightful owner, a woman Arvo has not seen in over forty years.

From Hamlet’s irreverent gravediggers to the pathological brilliance of TV’s Dexter, death and all things funereal have given us memorably funny, often unsettling writing. The Wrong Box (1889) co-written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, received a rave review from Rudyard Kipling, who admitted the story made him laugh “dementedly.” Evelyn Waugh’s delightfully sardonic novel, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948) may have inspired The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé of the funeral home industry, which she called a “huge, macabre and expensive practical joke on the American public.”[1] Teenager Bud Cort falls in love with octogenarian Ruth Gordon at a funeral in Hal Ashby’s cult classic, Harold and Maud, written by Colin Higgins. Barbara Gowdy’s creepy short story, “We So Seldom Look on Love” (1992) was adapted as Kissed (1996), starring the enigmatic Molly Parker. Alan Ball’s critically acclaimed series Six Feet Under (2001-2005) brought a novelistic approach to television drama. The hilarious Death at a Funeral (2007), directed by Frank Oz and written by Dean Craig, gave rise two years later to an unnecessary remake starring Chris Rock.

In Cadillac Cathedral Jack Hodgins ignores the bizarre comedic potential of misplaced corpses, drain-table trysts, suicide fetishists and necrophilia, choosing instead to concentrate on the sedate road trip and its several detours on the way to the city. Alternating between the journey’s meandering path and Arvo’s memories of Myrtle as a child and adolescent, the novel sidesteps the allure of the outrageous big laugh, favouring instead a quieter register more in the vein of movies like My Girl and Waking Ned Devine.

Funny things do happen, nonetheless. When the hearse goes missing, Arvo has to retrieve it from a pleasant but frustratingly headstrong clan intent on employing it in their not-quite-dead grandfather’s funeral. A motley accretion of cars, trucks and vans attaches itself to the slow moving Cathedral, turning one stretch of the halting journey into a raucous train. An innocent wave in passing to a neighbour pulls Arvo inside the man’s house to listen to his granddaughter play the fiddle. It’s a blessing the young woman and her two musical associates have talent. They play old-time stuff, a mix of gospel and folk, not exactly Arvo’s favourite genres, but like the novel itself the performance is entertaining without making strenuous demands on the audience.

This is a novel that cleverly lulls us into complicity, inciting us to chuckle softly as we recognize types and familiar predicaments, foibles that make us smile because we see the same in ourselves. It’s nothing that will keep us awake at night. We’re confident that Arvo et al will reach their destination… eventually. The escapade holds little risk. Martin Glass isn’t going anywhere without assistance. The worst that can happen to Arvo in his plan to see Myrtle Birdsong again is that she will refuse to have anything to do with him. Given their past mutual regard, such outright rejection seems unlikely. Still, it raises the question of his proposed gift. What woman of an age closer to death than to birth would relish being presented with a hearse, even if it were the same one she used to drive in funeral parades when she was a girl of twelve, her indulgent father seated protectively beside her? Really, you have to wonder what’s going on in good Herra Saarikoski’s mind.

In his defence, our hero is somewhat rusty in matters of romance, having spent the years after his wife’s death rebuffing the advances of women his own age. As Hodgins tells us, when Arvo “dropped hints of a broken heart that had never completely mended,” his prospective suitors “decided not to waste their time on a man who would rather restore life to old cars than reawaken passion in an ageing woman’s heart.” One of them hasn’t given up, however, a late but pleasurable revelation for Arvo and for readers who keep their seats in this finely tuned comic roadster.

Ronsdale | 220 pages |  $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1553802983