Sydney Lea, a former poet laureate of Vermont whose work has been praised by E. Annie Proulx and Howard Frank Mosher, lives in Newbury, Vermont, but has a camp in Washington County, Maine. From there, according to the jacket copy of this book, “he led two campaigns that conserved over four hundred thousand acres, sixty thousand of which became community forest in one of the state’s poorest counties.”

“Now Look” by Sydney Lea. Down East Books, 240 pages. $26.95
So, he knows the territory of northern New England, and knows its people. And it shows in this tough yet tender novel, “Now Look.” An ambiguous title – how is one to say it out loud? – Lea makes it obvious soon enough in the telling.
In the first chapter, Mattie Butcher, a 78-year-old woman, whose chin had sprouted a few hairs when she was a young newlywed, now a mother and grandmother, is reflecting on her life with Evan Butcher, a formerly vigorous log-roller and woodsman who has become a drunkard:
“Once Evan Butcher hewed 32 A-grade railroad sleepers in one day. His shirt was white as his teeth. He wrapped her up in his hard arms all night long, hairy chin and all, even in the belly of a canoe.
“Now look.”
Now look at her husband, who no longer does much of anything but drink. Now look at this couple riven by tragedies that only become fully apparent in the novel’s concluding pages. Meanwhile, we are told their story, and his own, mainly through the point of view of George Mayes, a recovering alcoholic himself and owner of a bus transportation company in Glassburg, Pennsylvania. Evan Butcher had befriended George in the northern Maine wilderness.
Right before Mayes’ graduation from Yale in 1961, where he begins to drink and indulge his penchant for telling tall tales, “George Mayes whispered the word north.” He buys a canoe and rack, packs up his VW Bug, drives north into Maine and ends up at Semnic Lake, presumably in Washington County. (The names of some of these places are, as far as I can tell, fictional.)
There, he meets Evan Butcher in the act of feeding a “mud chub” to a loon. When George asks him if the loon and he know each other, Evan says, “ ‘I guess probably.’ Evan’s three-word reply had been quiet, and yet it bore some quality that seemed near mystical. George suddenly imagined him as the Ancient of Days, who spoke with the voice of many waters.”
Evan teaches George how to build his own canoe and become an able woodsman. He also tells stories that George will always remember, and even recycle, in the many bars he frequents in his drinking days.
Lea gives us then two northern New England men, one educated, one not, who turn to alcohol to assuage trauma. George’s parents, we learn, were killed by a drifter who robbed their store when George was 9; he was raised by a prosperous but emotionally unavailable great uncle. The uncle’s live-in servant, an Irishwoman who went to 5:30 mass every morning, becomes George’s surrogate mother.
Despite her love and comfort, and Evan’s mentorship, George becomes an alcoholic, one who somehow manages to build up a school bus business without ever causing a school child’s death in a bus wreck, a fact that astounds him when he manages to get sober.
Now married – his first marriage, due to his drinking, did not go too well – with children and a successful business, George is basically happy despite outbreaks of dry drunk syndrome, when he becomes irascible, driving away his wife and two daughters. It’s Evan who has turned to drink. The hinge of the book, then, is how, or if, George can help Evan sober up.
At a deeper level, this novel is about memory, both its positive and negative aspects. The story is told from varying points of view, often George’s, but, interestingly and compellingly, even the murderer of his parents narrates the plot for a chapter. Unfortunately, too many chapters from George’s point of view consist of him sitting in his office gazing out the window and remembering his life. And a suspenseful plot element was lost, to this reader anyway, in the complex interweaving of the many points of view. The novel tries to be both lyrical and plot-driven, two things that are hard, but not impossible, to successfully fuse. Lea mostly, but not entirely, succeeds.
These drawbacks aside, “Now Look” is well worth reading for the character studies, the music of the way northern New Englanders talk, and the descriptions of nature that reveal the poet at work. Sometimes, as here with Mattie, you get all three in one passage:
“She felt a change brewing even now, no matter the weather stayed warm. Two ravens were fighting a blow to get upstream, gathering two yards and giving up one, flopping around like laundry. She could just make them out against the gray. The mountain ash berries in her dooryard weren’t even ripe yet, but the waxwings were mobbing them already. Oh, the light off those birds!”
Frank Freeman is a poet and book reviewer who writes from Saco.
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