RON CURRIE, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 2025. ISBN: 9798217046263

Review essay by Joan Vermette

There’s a pivotal moment in Ben Levine’s film Reveil! Waking Up French when Rhea Côté Robbins responds to the Québecois accusation that Franco Americans have betrayed their culture through assimilation. Instead of accusing us, she wonders, why don’t they ask, “what happened to you?” The film highlights the vast amount of forgetting within our community, decades and decades of it. Not only did Québec not know anything about the Franco experience of forced assimilation through legislation, news campaigns, and terror, we ourselves didn’t know. And many of us still don’t.

In the past 20 years since Côté Robbins posed that question — what happened to us? — Franco American writers have worked to answer it: Mark Richard’s various works on the KKK presence in New England and his book Loyal but French; David Vermette’s A Distinct Alien Race; Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town; Patrick Lacroix’s blog, “Query the Past,” and many others. We know a lot better today what happened to us. But it’s not enough to name the sources of generational trauma: we also need to process it. Though our elders could — and did — hide the traumatic events that occurred, their effects endure in us. If we want an authentic future, if we want our culture to persist, we need to take the next step and ask, “…and who has it made you?” In the last 20 years I have been in a lot of rooms with Franco Americans talking about our Franco American identity, and there have not been many in which we’ve delved deeply into this question, in all honesty, in all its complexity, with completely open and vulnerable hearts: “...and who has that made you?”

Refreshingly, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne sits squarely in this space of inquiry. Because that is a job that a fiction writer can do far better than a historian: create an imaginative space where the tensions of our existence can be surfaced, re-experienced, and brought into the cultural conversation. 

Babs Dionne is speculative fiction writer Ron Currie’s first foray into the realm of crime fiction. It’s not a genre I spend much time in, at least not in its more violent forms, and there is much violence in this story. Indeed there is in all of Currie’s work. And yet I’ve rarely found myself in the psychic space that I was in with this book. It’s as though the volume itself were giving off a sort of heat: I couldn’t put it down, and when I did manage to, I’d handle it gingerly for many minutes before I could open it up again; I wanted to know what happened; I just didn’t want it to end. 

Thankfully, it hasn’t ended. Babs Dionne is the first of a trilogy in its fictional universe and has also been picked up as a series by Netflix. 

There are two mysteries in the book for the lay reader, and it spoils nothing to reveal them. One is in the title: the main protagonist, Babs Dionne herself, will die — we read to find out how and why. The second, uncovered at the beginning of the first chapter, is that Babs’s younger daughter, Sis, will die, as well, the how and why still to be discovered here, too.  But for me — and other Franco American readers with New England roots — there is a third mystery that kept me reading, dropping the book, and coming back again: How does Currie represent us? Which of the threads of our common culture will he bring to the fore? And how might this land with a general audience?

For those of us who lament Francos’ invisibility in the broader American landscape, it has been empowering to see Franco characters in Currie’s prior works as hat-tips to us, dog whistles that signal that Currie is one of our own. But with Babs Dionne, we move from Franco Americans’ role as local color in Currie’s work to the very question of Franco heritage and identity as central to what he’s created here. And so this work is a positive statement — and a public one — of who we are. And that’s the paradox: once you’re no longer invisible, you get to worry about what your 15 seconds of fame will reveal.

All of Currie’s books demand an outlandish amount of suspension of disbelief, straddling a line between speculative and psychological fiction. God becomes mortal and is killed and human society is upended (God is Dead). From before his birth, a child is given knowledge of an oncoming asteroid that will devastate the earth, 36 years hence (Everything Matters). A character who is and isn’t the author fakes his death to become a busboy in the desert (Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles). Widowhood and grief result in a protagonist’s hyper-literalism that becomes the basis for a reality TV show (The One-Eyed Man). And in The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, we are to take on faith that a group of Franco-American mémères run a drug ring in Waterville, Maine, led by their kingpin, who is Babs herself. 

Here is the story in summary: Babs Dionne, a Franco woman in her sixties, with her daughters, Lori and Sis, and her gang of childhood female friends, controls the opiates market in Waterville. This draws the attention of a much larger syndicate owner from Canada who considers Babs as operating in his territory. The surgically-vicious emissary to Waterville from the syndicate,  named only “The Man” in the narrative, is sent to bring Babs’s operation under their wing by persuasion, force, or both, and we witness his arrival and progress with the dread of an impending apocalypse. In the meantime, Sis can’t be found, and we fear her fate is tied to The Man’s appearance on the scene. The tension builds toward an inevitable confrontation between the Canadian enforcers and the Franco American grandmothers.

The extremity of the conceit —mémère as mob boss — is a thought experiment. In various interviews, Currie has explained that Franco women were the dominant presences in his family and neighborhood all throughout his childhood. The men were doing shift work, heading to the bar afterwards, or had been killed — whether in wars or poisoned by the pulp room at the paper mill — and in general were not around. Anything that needed to be done was done by women. Female agency, female leadership is intrinsic to how Currie perceives the Franco American community in the Little Canada of his youth. So what if you imaginatively stretched this agency as far as an organized crime ring? What if you imagined your tête de pioche, no-nonsense, impeccably clean, opinionated grandmother as running an empire? 

What this experiment gives us is a cast of forceful female characters we’ve never seen in literature before — most notably, 62 year-old Babs and her daughter, Lori, a former Marine — that draw their force from their identity as the Franco women of Currie’s childhood memories. But through this trope, Currie is betting the entire fictional enterprise on his audience’s understanding of Franco cultural logic, Franco ways of knowing and being. 

Whether this bet will succeed remains an open question, but what makes it even possible is that Currie doesn’t just write about Franco culture from the outside, he writes from within Franco consciousness itself. His narrative choices reflect the same cultural logic he’s asking readers to understand. The way he structures time, handles individual versus collective identity, and approaches storytelling all emerge from distinctly Franco ways of thinking about the world. For Franco readers, this creates an experience of recognition and aids our cultural processing. For general audiences, the real question is whether they can grasp this cultural logic or will simply experience the story as crime drama spectacle.

It’s important to note that Currie starts with a character who is particularly tough, canny, and cynical: Evangeline LeNormand, a Fille du roi and the first immigrant ancestor to Québec in Babs’s maternal line, who, unlike her fellow shipmates, isn’t hopeful about her future in Nouvelle-France and leaves the ship that brought her here "dragging [her] chest through the mud, trusting no one to carry it but [her]self." (4) But Evangeline isn’t just herself. She is also all of the women in her line to follow her, for in the Prélude to Part 1 of the novel, Currie offers this speculative framework: that our lineage is

a chain, one link leading to and binding the next, and all of them —even the most distant— forever connected and inseparable... So: think of them all as yourself. A single entity, spanning centuries. Finding its current but by no means final iteration in you. (3)

Through the use of the second-person perspective, Currie’s Prélude effects a sort of metempsychosis, placing us first into the consciousness of his main character’s maternal immigrant ancestor, then into another maternal ancestor 100 years later, and finally into the perspective of Babs Dionne, herself, as a 14 year-old girl, whose frustration with corruption and hypocrisy in her community leads to the catalyzing opening scene where Babs is raped by a culturally-assimilated Franco policeman whom she’d antagonized. Thus, we the readers become this single consciousness as it transmogrifies and materializes in the character of Babs, sharpening our attention to the details of her particular incarnation and experience. 

As we move into the events of the main story, the voice shifts from second-person to third-person limited omniscience, for in this time, 2016, our single entity is two: it is not just Babs, but Lori, her daughter, who is also that entity’s incarnation.  And so we gain distance from them. It’s as though we’ve drifted down through the centuries within a single spirit, and then, along with the entity itself, we have somehow become mortal — individuated and limited — in the shift between the Prélude and Chapter 1. 

This is a literary device, but one with roots deep in the Franco spirit: that rather than embracing mainstream American individuality — the self-made-ness of a Jay Gatsby — Franco culture respects our debt to the collective and the historical while acknowledging the responsibility of our individual choices in the present. 

This idea of ancestral continuity also reflects the temporal sensibility that governs how time itself functions in the narrative world of Babs Dionne. Currie’s manipulation of time in this work reflects a distinctly Franco sensibility, what Stewart Brand calls living in a ‘Longer Now’: a sense that what ‘now’ means for us encompasses more than just this second or this day or last week or 2025. We are, as Nabokov termed himself when writing about memory and exile, “epicures of duration.” We like to remember, to play with imaginative time travel, to see a bridge or a neighborhood not as just a place, but as a portal back into our community’s — and our family’s — past. This positions us in direct contrast to the dominant American culture’s way of experiencing time.

In the novel, Currie gives this temporal sense full rein: we speed through the centuries in the Prélude, skip from 1968 to 2016, and then the main story happens in eight days in the end of June through the first week of July, telescoping gradually down to the final event, the death of Babs. In fact, most of the events in Part 1 of the book — nearly 40% of the text — take place on a single day, building the world of the characters and their relationships, and leading up to when Lori discovers that her sister has been murdered. This sets her off to unravel the story’s second mystery, as the days speed up towards the story’s end.  

Time is also folded in on itself: Franco America in the novel is the Franco America of Currie’s Waterville childhood — a close-knit community of francophone women, visiting and solving the neighborhood’s problems; elders using their first language to keep secrets from the children; and French spoken on every corner. This is not the Waterville of 2016, but that of the 1970s and ’80s. In order to build tension, this device gives the culture tangibility, to show that coherent, self-governing social ways of being and knowing are under threat from forces both within and from the outside. For us Franco Americans, whose death as a culture has been proclaimed by outsiders for nearly a century while we all stand there waving and yelling like the Whos on their dust speck, this imaginative porting of the past into the present is defiance. This is resistance, to our invisibility and our assimilation, both. Our capacity and hunger for our own particular ways of being and knowing are still with us. It’s gratifying to see this reversal in print. 

There are other passages in the book where we find that time has become fused with space and place. In a passage where Lori drives out of Little Canada into Waterville’s outlying countryside, we learn:

This bridge had witnessed eighty years of log drives, the transition from trolley to automobile, hand-to-hand combat between Franco strikers and Pinkerton’s, and every roll of newsprint the mill had relentlessly produced over a century. It had also seen twenty-three suicides since its erection in the late 1800s, including those of three members of Lori’s family... Lori drove across the span of all this history, climbed the steep incline on the opposite side of the bridge, and continued out into the winding darkness of the hills. (132)

Finally, there’s a sense that time is running  backward, in that we know the end of the story from the very beginning. In the opening of the first chapter, the narrator asks:

When did a person’s future become locked in? Consider: on this evening, Sis Dionne was still alive, but in twenty-four hours she would be dead, murdered, in fact. Was it possible for a different choice to be made between now and then that would forestall her departure from this life, and the violent dissolution of a family and a neighborhood that followed? (3)

and continues soon after: 

Her end could be viewed, on a long enough time line, as the result of innumerable choices stretching back centuries, the clash of armies and ideas, the appreciative glance and fertilized ovum, every ripple and undulation of history even remotely connected to her life, a change to any one of which might have kept her from such a violent demise.  But practically speaking, in our lives, we make our choices and things happen as they happen and that, as they say, is that. (3-4)

There is likewise a sense of foregone conclusion in the final scene, as, when locking eyes with a fox, Babs receives:

A warm assurance that everything, no matter how horrible or trying, had always been exactly as it should be. The relief of understanding that she had never, not once, been in control. Of the world, of the neighborhood, of those she loved, of herself. (346)

There’s a deep fatalism in this work, where we hear the echoes of the idea that we are “nés pour un petit pain” — not destined for much in this world, and the choices we’re offered are few and narrow. Yet there are hopeful notes, too. In an essay titled “The Grotesque Cruelty of Human Nature,” the author wrote, “I think that life, far from being a gift, is actually an irredeemable evil.”  And yet, he continues:

I’ve done my best, over the years, to smother hope with a pillow while it sleeps, but despite all the ways in which it seems to have no place in how I think or feel, hope has proven harder to kill than bedbugs. You can find it, tenacious as weeds, in my novels. In one of them, the world comes to a definitive end, but life, and its worth, are somehow affirmed in the process. I didn’t put hope there, or even give it permission to show up. It just keeps crashing my nihilist party, over and over.1 

As well as embodying Franco consciousness in his narrative techniques, Currie’s novel surfaces the psychological effects of Franco American history, answering that crucial question of “who has that made you?” There is much here that is hard to face, that had not until now been part of the story I tell myself about who I am and where I came from.

Among the  difficult threads that Currie brings to the fore are ones of gender identity violently enforced by fathers on their sons, as is the case with Sis’s husband, Bruce. The fierceness of Franco women’s love, but also of our inflexibility, is both Babs’s strength and her undoing. Also familiar are bullying within the family, the tyranny of birth order in our habitually large families, and the pressure brought to bear on family dynamics when, as in Québec of old, a family depends on each other economically as well as emotionally, though Babs’s family business is not a farm but a drug ring. And there is here, as in all of Currie’s works, a theme of apocalypse, of impending doom that I recognize as a sort of epigenetic dread, and that I wonder if other conquered and ethnically-cleansed peoples also carry.

But there were other more positive threads that resonated in my reading, as well. In this passage he beautifully describes our particular form of sociability, which he names as "visiting" or visite culture:

’Visiting,’ or rendre visite in French: this was the colloquialism used to refer to the regular casual gathers of women in Little Canadas all over New England, always in the kitchen, with coffee hot and plentiful, and tarte au sucre or pets des soeurs on the countertop. ’Visiting’ required no invitation, or rather, was an open one: come whenever, for whatever reason or none at all, and there would be friendship and counsel and good humor and honesty, all served straight up, no bullshit and no words minced... (339)

Another positive thread is his portrayal of our humor, as in the way that Babs speaks to tourists who are looking for lobster rolls; a passage where two of the gang members ineptly conduct an interrogation; the quipping when three gang members are finally captured by Ogopogo, the Canadian drug lord who wants to take over their business; and the last laugh that Babs and her sister Rita share as a wildfire licks at the edges of their neighborhood and they await their certain death at the hands of their opponent.

Further, Currie exposes a paradox of our character that’s illuminating. Most Francos do not stand for much dissimulation or pretense. And yet, we also have a bent towards a type of spiritualism that is not part of, bound to, or governed by the Catholicism in which most of us were raised. We simultaneously have a high tolerance for magic and a low tolerance for being bamboozled, and we do not see a contradiction there. And both show up in this novel. Characters having full-blown conversations with the dead and foxes who can see into our souls to nudge us to self-acceptance? Yes. A neatly wrapped-up story where no one curses, abuses substances, argues, incurs any bruises or broken bones, and the heroes win? That feels implausible. Our world is getting more cruel and absurd by the day, and it goes against the Franco grain to ignore that. And so Currie writes about violence and absurdity. But also, there is peace in this book, and wonder, and hope.

Despite a story replete with meaningful cultural signifiers, the question of how Currie represents us — and particularly how that representation might land with non-Franco readers — remains. How will crime drama as a cypher for our generational trauma come through to a general audience, to whom we have hitherto been invisible? Currie may have moved Franco identity from background to foreground in this work, but there are ways in which we’re still obscured here, in costume. We Francos do not have a tradition of gang culture or organized crime. The flow of fentanyl from Canada represents less than one-tenth of a percent of the seizures of the stuff crossing into the US.2 The streets of Waterville do not ring with the sound of French these days, and if you visit a cafe there, the taste of your caramel oat milk latté is unlikely to be ruined by the stench of some tough old woman’s Virginia Slim. And apparently, you can totally get a lobster roll there — at several places, my informants tell me. We Francos can recognize the deep ways in which  Currie is connected with our experience, and yet the sensationalism of the broad central trope of the book, and of the genre of crime drama in general, will likely override any sense of verisimilitude  for the casual reader looking for a page-turner or a new series to binge.

A few of the blurbs from the book jacket illustrate this point:

“The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne reads like a French-Canadian The Godfather…”  - Michael Koryta

Another claims:

 “What Dennis Lehane has done for the Irish of South Boston, Ron Currie does for the Acadians of Maine — lifting the lid on a community bound by the fiercest bonds of history, with all its love and pain. Heartfelt, beguiling, gritty, and true.” - Justin Cronin

There are Acadian communities in Maine, but Waterville is not one of them. Babs’s Filles du roi ancestor came to Québec, not Acadia.  But Koryta and Cronin could be forgiven for their confusion. In choosing to tell a story about organized crime, Currie may have intended to take an imaginative, speculative leap like those taken in his previous novels. Nonetheless, in so doing, he borrows the cultural frameworks of Irish and Italian Americans. He tells a compelling story that still manages to hide Franco Americans in plain sight. 

Is it not possible on a mass-market scale to interest readers in Franco stories that are rooted in the realities of our community? Or does Currie — or do Francos collectively — simply lack the self-awareness or confidence to do so?

This lack of confidence shows up not just in genre choices, but also in a key dialogue about the Franco American relationship to whiteness that occurs midway through the novel. In the scene, Babs dresses down the president of Colby College, to which she plans to make a sizable donation. The class dynamics at work are complex enough to merit their own essay, but Babs frames her attack along racial lines. It is telling that nearly every slur Currie has her repeat in this passage is one that compares white Francos to Black and Brown people. It is a framing that I have heard Francos use before, and it obscures both the lengths to which we have gone historically to distance ourselves from people of color and our complicity in the harms those communities have experienced. Francos, as a community, carry whatever generational pain we carry, and the attempt to recognize and heal from it is noble; erasing the specificity and degree of others’ pain by facile comparison is not.

If I could interject into that conversation with the Colby College trustees, I would acknowledge, it is true that on the spectrum of white people in the United States, white-appearing and -identified people of Franco heritage are not seen to be high-quality white people. That’s what the news campaigns in the late 19th century and the New England KKK and the eugenicists’ forced sterilizations in Vermont taught us 100 years ago, and what our stunted economic and educational progress and persistent slurs tell us today. And yet, here I sit, looking at the world through a pair of blue eyes that I promise have been visible at every job interview I’ve ever had. We can choose to be on the side of empathy and humanity; we can choose to learn and heal from our own generational trauma; we can choose to acknowledge the harm we’ve caused other communities and make reparation; we can support the rights of other communities to thrive and preserve their ways of knowing and being in the world — just as we can choose to drop our French and our regional accents, mask up and be Anglo-identified, work our pale faces and blue eyes in job interviews, and vote for white supremacists. And that, I would say to Babs, is where our privilege lies: we can choose to hide. 

It feels a bit like that’s what Currie is choosing to do, at least where the broader audience is concerned. This scene, as well as his choice to frame his story around criminal enterprises that feature prominently in other peoples’ literatures, reveal the same fundamental problem: a reluctance to examine our actual cultural position without borrowing others’ frameworks. It’s not just Currie’s problem; it’s a problem we as a culture need to contend with.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne represents both a breakthrough and a missed opportunity for Franco American representation. Ron Currie has moved Franco identity from background to foreground and demonstrated fiction’s power to process generational trauma in ways that historical documentation never could. The novel invites us to understand our debt to our ancestors and our dead as inseparable from ourselves, to lean into our interdependence rather than deny it. It suggests we might use our fading memories of past cultural organization as a template for reconstituting ourselves in the present, drawing on Franco women’s sense of justice, powers of coordination, and fierce love to re-infuse our community with energy. And it opens space for us to live into our innate non-secular spirituality and let it guide us toward peace and reconciliation. For Franco readers, this cultural processing work is invaluable.

But despite its groundbreaking representation, the novel doesn’t fully commit to the cultural confidence its subject deserves. Currie dresses Franco stories in crime fiction costume — which allows them to be marketed as the French Canadian Godfather, rather than as distinctly Franco narratives, thereby obscuring the very cultural specificity that makes the work valuable. His compressed treatment of the Franco American relationship to whiteness perpetuates false equivalencies and makes the community appear to engage in “whataboutism.”

So much of the effectiveness of the next two novels and the television series will rely on how this is handled. What Franco Americans need are writers to simply stand in their own cultural clothes, to explore our complex position as both marginalized and privileged without appropriating others’ frameworks, and to create narratives that don’t require genre camouflage to justify their existence. Does Currie’s work open the door for this kind of literary courage? I await the continuation of this saga with anticipation in order to find out. 

In an interview on News Center Maine’s “207” program, Currie said:

I fully am aware and accept that just about every person of Franco extraction in this state is going to disagree with how I told this story, and that’s fine: so long as we’re actually talking about our heritage and not just ignoring it or pretending that it has passed entirely into history.3

The answer may depend on whether other Franco voices rise up to join the conversation he’s started, contributing their unique perspectives, and bringing the honesty and self-examination that this work, for all its breakthrough insights, still lacks. We’re still behaving as though we’re né.e.s pour un petit pain — it’s just that now we’ll be doing it on Netflix, for all to see.

Notes

(1) Ron Currie, “The Grotesque Cruelty of Human Nature,” Electric Literature, March 27, 2025, https://electricliterature.com/the-grotesque-cruelty-of-human-nature/.

(2) Canada’s Fentanyl Czar: Interim Report (June 2025),  Government of Canada, Privy Countil Office, accessed 09/10/2025 https://www.canada.ca/en/privy-council/services/publications/canada-fentanyl-czar-interim-report-june-2025.html.

(3) Ron Currie, “Ron Currie’s tough-minded new crime novel was inspired by his boyhood in Waterville,” interview by Rob Caldwell, 207 News Center Maine, WCSH TV, March 31, 2025, video, 1:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoH55cAmrEM.