From the early 20th century to the present, from George Orwell to Ian McEwan and, most recently, Alain de Botton, there has been a tradition of taking novelists to task for failing to represent the world of daily toil. “If you look for the working classes in fiction,” Orwell wrote in 1939, “all you find is a hole.” This turning away from documentary or social realism, a trend that has become even more pronounced in our own time, has both a gender and class dimension to it. What has gone missing from the literature of “work” is traditional man’s work: the sort of hard physical labour of “real” jobs involving skilled trades or heavy industry.

Thus conceived, WorkLit is GuyLit, the other side of ChickLit. WorkLit is also Prole­Lit, as manual labour is understood to be undesirable: demanding, dangerous, and poorly paid.

Viewed as an historical phenomenon, the decline in social realist novels shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Reports of the gradual erosion of conventional, blue-collar male lifestyles have not been exaggerated, and so it’s only natural to find this world less represented in our fiction. Today we are most likely to find it in the work of East Coast authors like David Adams Richards and Kenneth J. Harvey, who cast their working-class heroes as quasi-mythic figures of a vanishing past. 

This otherworldliness carries over into Matt Lennox’s debut novel, which takes place in 1980 and is set in a small town in Northern Ontario, where even the better-off families make only annual trips to “the city” (that would be Toronto). The main character is Leland (Lee) King, who has returned to town after a long stint in prison (where he picked up the titular trade) to help take care of his dying mother. The nature of his crime is left unexplained for too long (it’s a typical mistake for first novelists to guard their narrative secrets like this) but is finally revealed to be both violent and honourable.   

While Lee is the main character, The Carpenter is really about an entire community and the close connections among family, neighbours, and colleagues that characterize small-town life, where everybody knows you (not always a good thing). There are a number of convincing sketches of townies: important members of the cast include Lee’s nephew, Pete, a high school dropout who works at the local gas station, and a retired cop and ex-boxer named Stan, whose discovery of a dead woman’s body in a car brings forth uncomfortable memories. It’s very much a man’s world informed by a code of masculine values (of the kind evoked in Lennox’s 2009 short-story collection, Men of Salt, Men of Earth), with the women tending to be practical-minded and understanding types who are ultimately hard for the guys to relate to. 

Lennox fully recreates this small world, from the clothes people wear to the cars they drive to the churches they attend to the homes they live in. That it is a small world is the novel’s theme: its smallness forces characters together in combustible combinations, feeds Pete’s desire to escape and head out West, and finally becomes a tightening noose of fate. 

Fate is a common idea in most novels about the working class and the over-determined lives of the poor. Characters typically feel trapped and unable to make better lives for themselves due to tough economic times or abiding character flaws. Lee suffers from both, struggling against alcoholism and a penchant for violence, as well as his criminal record and dismal employment opportunities.  

There is no room for coincidence in anything that happens, just a growing sense that things occur “as though they were always meant to happen this way.” When people start to think of their lives in such terms, we can be sure nothing good is going to befall them. The fate that steps out of the dark in this case, memorably evoked in the novel’s splendid final image, is a shadow no one can escape. 

Getting there, however, is a curious trip. As a piece of carpentry, the novel is a well-built affair that could have used a bit of sanding. Lennox has deliberately constructed an odd plot that seems to delight in loose ends and the introduction of elements that are mainly included for background effect. The writing, which is generally understated, can also be wordy, with expository dialogue that comes off as clunky at times, and some very conventional posing by the characters. Lennox writes well, however, when describing people doing things, especially when they are under pressure. The struggle to pilot a boat caught in a storm is an example, and the tightly drawn finale moves quickly to its fated, but still surprising, climax.