Review: "The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne," Run Currie

By Paul Carrier

As Ron Currie’s latest novel opens with a prelude, it’s 1968 and 14-year-old Barbara Levesque is working alone in her uncle’s convenience store in a Franco-American section of Waterville, Maine, known as Little Canada.

In short order, the teenager falls victim to a horrific crime. She reacts in such a way that she has to leave town quickly, and for an extended period of time, only to return five years later.

Fast forward to 2016, when most of the action in the novel takes place. Now widowed, with two drug-addicted adult daughters and a deceased son, Barbara Dionne (Levesque’s married name) is now known to one and all in Little Canada as Babs, a crime boss who controls the prescription drug trade on her turf.

Babs and her small circle of longtime female friends, who effectively help her run Little Canada, are Franco-Americans, descendants of Canada’s 17th-century French settlers. They speak French easily and often, especially when animated or to prevent children from understanding them. They are Catholic, at least technically. Despite their white skin, they have an intimate understanding of bigotry. They have learned, through generations of prejudice, that Anglos, especially the wealthy and the well-connected, look down on them as inconsequential laborers and mill workers.

Babs is domineering, stoic and patient, with a take-no-prisoners outlook. She reigns over her fiefdom. But things are not going well. The French language is fading fast in Little Canada. One of her daughters, Lori, a Marine veteran who served in Afghanistan, routinely sees ghosts. The other daughter, nicknamed Sis, has gone missing. Sis’s husband, Bruce, has a serious drinking problem and a dangerous temper. When Bruce physically assaults his young son, Jason, Babs bashes Bruce with a nightstick and takes the boy home to live with her.

Worse still, at least for Babs, a fixer for a Canadian drug kingpin who is losing business in Maine fingers Babs as the culprit who has been stealing customers and diverting sales. The fixer, referred to in the novel simply as The Man, is a cold-bolded creature, but Babs is nothing if not self-confident. Will this crisis be her undoing?

While Babs grapples with that problem, she also has to cope with a death in her family. That is especially devastating to her because she is feverishly devoted to her shrinking clan. ”If you loved like Babs does, it would break you," one character says. A subsequent death threatens to destroy Waterville, if a raging wildlife  that is barreling down on the city doesn’t do so first.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a mélange of gruesome violence and uplifting devotion, humor and tragedy, inspiration and revulsion. And, as the title suggests, nobility. Although it is a crime novel, focusing exclusively on genre would not do justice to the novel or its author. Currie, who grew up in a Franco-American family in Waterville, clearly crafted his tale through a loving, even mystical, ethnic lens.

The opening pages feature a quote from Franco-American author Jack Kerouac, whom Currie pointedly refers to by his full (and very French) name: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac. Currie, who has said he was raised in a matriarchal culture, dedicates the novel to his Franco-American and Québécois ancestors. In a genealogical snippet, he lists five generations of his grandmothers by name, adding “and so on, until the very beginning.”

“Je vous aime,” he writes to those who preceded him in the family tree, “et je me souviens de vous.” (I love you, and I remember you.)

Ancestors “are not footnotes to the Very Important Life you’re living now,” Currie tells his readers. “Their ghosts are all around you, clamoring to be seen and heard, like Marley rattling his chains. And like Marley, they have things to teach you.” Think of them all “as yourself,” he advises. “A single entity, spanning centuries.”

When National Public Radio’s Scott Simon asked Currie, in an interview lats year, how he felt about living in the world he created, Currie replied that it was “almost a relief . . . because that world that I grew up in is so completely gone now.” Currie said he is “so thoroughly anglicized and secularized now that it feels like a fantasy or a phantom limb, and it haunts me. And I wanted to be able to make a version of a record of that world before my memories were too fuzzy to do so.”