EMILIE-NOELLE PROVOST, The River is Everywhere. Athens: Vine Leaves Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780645436532

 reviewed by Joan Vermette

In an interview with Orion Magazine about her book Mill Town, writer Kerri Arsenault discussed how exploring her heritage as a Prince Edward Island Acadian sparked her journey towards the book's main focus on environmental justice. The interviewer inquired if there was any aspect of her Acadian cultural heritage Arsenault  felt tempted to "reinstall." As someone with a background in tech, this turn of phrase caught me — is culture something one can reinstall, like correcting a corrupted application or data file? What would that mean, to reinstall an aspect of our culture? How could that be done in a way that's both faithful to one's heritage and authentic to the present?

This idea of cultural reinstallation is the central theme explored in The River is Everywhere, Emilie-Noelle Provost's second novel. The River is Everywhere is a coming-of-age story that, given its 16-year-old protagonist, could be considered Young Adult fiction. However, its themes of death and grief; poverty; child physical and sexual abuse; teen sexual exploration; abortion; and loss of faith make it a challenging read for a young audience. In light of this, you'll find the book on the literary fiction shelves instead.

The book’s simplicity of form makes it fast-paced and compelling. Its first-person, retrospective mode in strict chronology brings its main character, Ernest "Ernie" Benoit, fully to life. This is the way a 16-year-old boy would tell a story — without formal artifice. But Ernie is a keen observer, awake to the sensual details of everything around him, and Provost’s artistry shows through in her skillful balance of rich detail conveyed with a teen's vocabulary and voice. When the pet of his protector, Roland Laliberté, is cruelly killed and must be buried, Provost’s prose  illustrates Ernie's feel for his surroundings:

We stood there for a while staring at the mound of fresh earth, the dirt mixed up with small rocks and roots and chunks of rust-colored clay. The smell of it reminded me of spring. The snow surrounding Maurice's grave was soiled from all the digging and had been trampled flat by Roland's boots. The only sounds came from the snowflakes pattering on the ground, like rain, but softer. (97)

Though the novel is formally and linguistically straightforward, the plot is fantastically complex. When Ernie's best friend drowns in a riptide during summer vacation, his inability to process his grief sets off  a series of events that lead to his leaving his comfortable middle-class home in suburban Massachusetts. The first chapters show a slow downward slide into danger, including a vehicle accident; his first experience of rural poverty; rescuing an abused child from foster care and trying to return her to her mother; and coercion and exploitation at the hands of a woman who temporarily harbors the children. After escaping, they are taken in by Roland, a sort of modern day coureur-des-bois, who, once he learns that their former captor has accused Ernie of a crime, smuggles them over the Canadian border to safety at his mother's home in St. Quentin, New Brunswick.

In St. Quentin, the children are quickly assimilated into the Lalibertés’s boisterous extended family. CL, the rescued young girl, is given a new identity and adopted by Roland's sister. Ernie is put to work in a local lumber yard, helps with the maple sugaring, and begins a relationship with Joelle, Roland’s distant cousin. For six months, Ernie and CL heal physically and emotionally from their ordeal, until news from Joelle sets Ernie on the move again, leading to his return home to the States. There, he is exonerated of the crime and gets help to process all that he has experienced.

All told, Ernie’s sojourn away from home lasts little more than seven months, and six of those take place with the Lalibertés in St. Quentin. The world in which we first meet Ernie is materially very different from Mémère Laliberté's: there are no private schools, Audi coupes, granite countertops, or Lili Pulitzer aprons here. Instead, there are lumber mills, Ford F150s, pine furniture, and hand-braided rugs. Yet the overall impression of the Benoit's more wealthy home is of cold order, while the Lalibertés' farmhouse is one of warmth and abundance.  This environment becomes the catalyst for Ernie's transformation. All around him are echoes of his own family's experience—from obvious cultural signals like tourtière and raisin pie, the New Year's Day blessing, snippets of the French language, and the ubiquity of religious symbols in the Lalibertés' decor, to subtler cues, such as how Mémère Laliberté's command of the household reminds Ernie of his own mother, down to how she inhabits the rooms of her house.   

The familiarity of these cultural markers makes Ernie receptive to the nuances of how they are integrated and practiced in this different context. Cajoled by Joelle into attending Mass — something he'd refused to do at home — the wish to connect with her finds Ernie piled into her family's truck, crushed between her siblings. When they arrive at the church, Ernie observes:

Saint-Sacrément had the look of a place that had been built by and for working people. The pews were made from the knotty white pine that grew in the surrounding forest, the stained-glass windows all paid for by the laborers who risked their lives working the area's sawmills and lumber camps. (135)

Where attending church felt merely performative back in Massachusetts, in St. Quentin, Ernie finds that church and religion are part of the active practice of belonging to a family and community—a way of expressing and solidifying their bonds to each other and recognizing their sacrifices to maintain these connections.

While religion is one core value of this community, the second core value — one which seemed fully absent in Ernie's life in Massachusetts — is work. The character of René, the sawmill foreman, embodies what Denis Ledoux, in his book French Boy, has called vaillance, the characteristic of going the extra mile through dedication to the quality of the work itself. Of René, Provost writes:

René was one tough bastard. Never in my life have I known anyone who could work such long hours with the intensity he did. He seemed to be in every part of the mill at once and could tell by the sound a saw made whether the finished lumber would be of high quality or would need to be sent to the scrap pile. (140-141)

And again, like religion, work is also about participation and cooperation. Whether working at their sawmill, gathering to make maple sugar, or when “the entire Laliberté family shifted into overdrive” (155) to ready the farmhouse and grounds for Roland’s upcoming wedding, work, like religion, seems to be about the community enacting its communal nature.

In the home of the Lalibertés, sustaining the welfare of all is the work of all. The loosely-knit Benoit siblings and parents, unlike the Lalibertés, do not depend on each other for their existence and well-being. Yet in this context, Ernie begins to yearn for his own family bonds, and that signals his turn towards reintegrating his new perspective into his life. 

So, to return to the original question of whether culture can be "reinstalled," it seems that according to Provost, it can — though as with software and data, it largely depends on how complete your backup disks are. One of the things I questioned while reading the novel was how likely it is that a 16-year-old in 2023 in Massachusetts would have been so well backed up. Do Franco American teens still eat tourtière and raisin pie at the holidays and hear their elders murmur family gossip in French?

I've spoken elsewhere about the difference between surface culture and deep culture, and I hypothesize that, while surface cultural elements like food ways and language may be lost, these deep cultural elements—values like vaillance, cooperation, and interdependence—may be more persistent. I believe it’s these that constitute what I’ve heard Franco American scholar Joey Leblanc call “the Franco spirit” : deep cultural values, attitudes, and ways of interacting that still drive contemporary Francos, sometimes without our notice. If we care about the vitality of our culture, perhaps we should let these deeper values be our guides, follow their scent, immerse ourselves in various aspects of the culture, and share our insights with our community. Reading works by, for, and about Franco Americans is an important part of this inquiry, and Emilie-Noelle Provost’s The River is Everywhere provides a valuable contribution toward our understanding. It's a quick and absorbing novel that presents key themes inviting deeper exploration.