If all stories can be reduced to a finite number of archetypal plot points, then the true genius of the novel lies in its talent for potentially telling the same old story in ways that make you feel as if you are hearing it for the first time.
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In his debut novel, The Return of the Nish, author Tyson Stewart, associate professor of Indigenous Studies at Nipissing University in Thunder Bay, wastes no time confronting us with the stuff of myth in this fraught tale of reckoning between father and son. The father, in this case, may not be Saturn as depicted in the haunting painting by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, but he’s not above sinking his teeth into bare flesh and drawing blood.
The Return of the Nish Tyson StewartCormorant
The first chapter is equal parts beginning and ending as 27-year-old Gerry Smith sits in a courtroom watching his shocked father weeping as he’s sentenced to 10 years in prison. Dale King may be guilty, but it’s Gerry who feels guilty for turning him in and testifying against him.
“What kind of a son am I?” he asks himself, knowing it would never occur to Dale to similarly inquire: “What kind of a father am I?”
His sour, singular, criminal experience of the father who abandoned him in the womb, launches Gerry, the novel’s blond, freckle-faced narrator and protagonist, on a harrowing journey of self-discovery that achieves fuller universal expression when viewed through the powerful lens of the Anishinaabemowin word, biskaabiiyang, or “returning to ourselves.”
Sensitive but walled-in, the product of a teen pregnancy, Gerry, raised in New Liskeard, near Temagami, by his mother, Amy Smith, and her parents, knows Dale, a star athlete, only by reputation — local admiration for his athleticism juxtaposed against Amy’s simmering resentments for the high-spirited boy she loved who did not love her back.
Not until he’s an adult, a pilot, a husband and the father of a little boy, does Gerry get to know his father’s Anishinaabe family, who are kind and welcoming, even as Dale, his hockey career behind him, declines to meet him — until he’s in a jam and realizes his son’s ability to fly a plane is a highly exploitable resource for a man who “travels” for a living.
As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent the father and the son lead mirrored lives, marred by imperfection, rootlessness and careless choices. Both men are flawed and yield to life-altering temptations, but while the father revels in the subsequent disarray and dismantling of things, the son yearns for restoration and reconciliation. Gerry is dealing with more than the effects of an absentee father, he’s looking to fill the vacancy within himself.
Reconnecting with his Anishinaabe origins encodes his journey with spiritual longing. It’s an understated transformation he undergoes, conducted in lowercase, especially when compared to the almost hysterical swagger that accompanies Dale, who treats life as if it were one long amoral binge.
