In 2006, I volunteered briefly with our wonderful local reading festival Read By the Sea, which invites Canadian authors to the North Shore of Nova Scotia to read excerpts of their work to appreciative audiences. That year, my husband and I had the pleasure of accompanying the authors to lunch, and so I ate chowder in the company of Steven Heighton, Janet Lunn, Lisa Moore, Harry Thurston, Catherine Safer and Deborah Ellis.

Since that summer, I have wanted to read Lisa Moore’s Alligator: A Novel and cannot fathom why I have not done so before this. Ah well, the wait was worth it.

From the dust jacket:

Meet Colleen, a seventeen-year-old would-be eco-terrorist, who barrels down the rocky road of adolescence while her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. Frank, a benevolent young man without a family, believes that his success will come from his hog-dog stand–a business he’s desperate to protect from socio-pathic Russian sailor Valentin.

Set in modern day St. John’s, Newfoundland, the book tells its story through alternating chapters about one of the main characters mentioned. Moore’s word pictures shine. Through them, and many seamless flashbacks, she provides character development, background and plot advancement simultaneously.

There’s a housefly near the jar, bluish and iridescent, cocooned in a spider’s web and dust. The fly has been there, lying on the cracked paint of the windowsill, since Frank moved in a few months before Christmas, two days after his nineteenth birthday.

Although most of the characters are satisfactorly developed, to me, Frank was the most clearly drawn of them. Having lost his mother recently to cancer and being left truly all alone in the world at eighteen, he is a sympathetic figure. His loneliness becomes palpable when his thoughts at seeing Colleen dance in a bar emerge:

He wants to tell her about his hot-dog stand and how hard he’s worked to get it and how much money he makes. He wants to say I can make this much money in a night. He doesn’t want to say it, but he wants her to know it.
He would like to say, I don’t do drugs.
He would like to tell her about the Inuit guy who hanged himself in the apartment over his at Christmastime…
He would like to tell her, or have her intuit, how much respect he had for his mother and how empty the world is without her. He would like to explain how he feels like he has a hole in his chest. He would like her to put her hand on his chest and show him once and for all there is no hole.

More than a plot, the book holds a slice of the characters’ lives and their interactions, although there is a climatic event that affects several of them. The prose in this book sings. Moore’s writing style is fresh and seems to move swiftly.

Alligator is a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year award. I look forward very much to reading Moore’s latest novel February

This is a stop on my Literary Road Trip through Atlantic Canada.

Solid four of five stars.

Links for my Canadian readers:
Alligator
February

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

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