Review: "The Lowering Days," Gregory Brown

 By Paul Carrier

 

When The Lowering Days, Gregory Brown’s debut novel, opens, David Ames is looking back on his early years as a carefree boy growing up in a small town near the mouth of Maine’s Penobscot River.

Back then, the community seemed poised for a rebirth of its shuttered paper mill. But that hope evaporates when Molly Greenwind, a 14-year-old Native American who hails from the Penobscot Nation, burns the place down because of the environmental degradation caused by the old mill.

Molly's radical act notwithstanding, the primary focus of the novel is on the troubled and ultimately violent relationship between two local white families, the Ames clan — Navy deserter and skilled boatbuilder Arnoux, his newspaper publishing wife Falon and their three boys — and the Creels — Vietnam War veteran and lobsterman Lyman, his wife Grace, a social worker, and their two children.

The eventual sidelining of Molly may disappoint some readers of this lyrical, memorable novel.