“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” the poet tells us. This sad fact of life is comprehensively borne out by Samuel Thomas Martin’s debut novel. Set in Newfoundland, it tells the story of several generations of families entangled in a damaging human “snarl.”

Patrick, a Pentecostal preacher, has recently returned home, in part to patch things up with his father. Patrick’s wife, Anne (herself a preacher’s daughter), horrified at the prospect of a long sentence on the Rock, runs back to Ontario. Their separation messes with the mind of their son, Hab, whose girlfriend, Natalie, lives with Gerry, an English Lit student and aspiring author whose father is a pedophile – another piece of family history with tragic repercussions. Rounding things out is River, another product of a dysfunctional background.

There is something naturalistic in Martin’s insistence on the inescapability of heredity and environment, and his emphasis on poverty and crime. But he handles these themes without being reductive. Despite the lack of a strong central story, the narrative skips along in a manner that is odd but effective. Certain recurrent motifs take on the force of a family curse, while the writing does a good job evoking immediate perceptions and mental states. A pair of underwear in a kitchen sink, for example, becomes an idée fixe for Gerry, while Natalie, fleeing a fire, smells smoke “acrid and thick, like vomit on a hot sidewalk.”

The novel manages to find sympathy for these characters while not ignoring their serious failings. Anne and Natalie, in particular, come across as difficult to like. Still, as Hab is led to realize, family is a kind of emotional bondage, and if he can’t forgive his mother or understand his girlfriend, he can’t stop loving them either.

This tension is also typical of several characters’ feelings toward Newfoundland. There are a lot of correspondences between the fiction of Canada’s East Coast and that of the American South, and this ambivalence – a desire to break free and a yearning to return home – is one of the most significant. Steeped in the voices, weather, art, economy, and spirituality of the place, Martin has written a novel very much in the Newfoundland grain.