The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

"The Master of Happy Endings" is a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his late seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.

Axel Thorstad lives in a shack on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. Once a popular school teacher and thespian who touched the lives of hundreds of his students, he now lives in retirement and mourns the recent death of his wife.

But even this stoical giant of a 77-year-old finds the isolation too much. He begins to run want ads in newspapers offering his services as a tutor, and meets the indomitable Mrs. Montana. She hires Axel to coach her precocious teenage-TV-actor son Travis for his school exams while he shoots a new episode in Hollywood. Life in L.A. is far removed from his isolated life in rural B.C., and soon Thorstad finds himself caught up in the drama of his young student s life, and the return of an old flame.

Set amidst the fleshpots, sound-stages and dining rooms of L.A., this engaging novel of lives and loves lost and found also gestures to the courage one needs in the face of the vulnerabilities of older age that all too soon beset.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Novels, Literature

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Novelist and short story writer Jack Hodgins lives on Vancouver Island where until recently he taught fiction writing at the University of Victoria. Raised in the small rural community of Merville in the Comox Valley, he graduated with a B.Ed from the University of British Columbia, and taught high school in Nanaimo between 1961 and 1981. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa between 1981 and 1983. Between 1983 and 2002 he taught in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, and was a full professor at the time of his retiring. He occasionally conducts fiction-writing workshops, including an annual workshop in Mallorca, Spain. He and his wife Dianne, a former teacher, live in Cadboro Bay within easy visiting distance of their three adult children and their grandchildren.

Jack Hodgins's fiction has won the Governor General's Award, the President's Medal from the University of Western Ontario, the Gibson's First Novel Award, the Eaton's B.C. Book Award, the Commonwealth Literature Prize (regional), the CNIB Torgi award, the Canada-Australia Prize, the Drummer General's Award, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and has twice been long-listed for the IMPAC/Dublin award. He is the 2006 recipient of the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award "for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia" and the "Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence."

His books include: Spit Delaney's Island (stories), The Invention of the World (novel), The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (novel), The Barclay Family Theatre (stories), Left Behind in Squabble Bay (children's novel), The Honorary Patron (novel), Innocent Cities (novel), Over Forty in Broken Hill (travel), A Passion for Narrative (a guide to writing fiction), The Macken Charm, (novel), Broken Ground (novel), Distance (novel), and Damage Done by the Storm (stories). Short stories and articles have been published in several magazines in Canada, France, Australia, and the US.

Jack Hodgins has given readings or talks at international literary festivals and other events in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the US. Some of the short stories have been televised or adapted for radio and the stage. A few of the stories and novels have been translated into other languages, including Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, and Norwegian. In 1985 a film of the story "The Concert Stages of Europe," directed by Giles Walker, was produced by Atlantis Films and the National Film Board of Canada. In 2001 the Victoria Conversatory of Music produced a commissioned opera Eyes on the Mountain by composer Christopher Donason, based upon three of Hodgins's short stories intertwined. A screenplay based upon the title character in Spit Delaney's Island has been optioned by a Vancouver film maker.

A number of scholars in Canada and Europe have published critical studies on his work. He has been the subject of a National Film Board film, Jack Hodgins' Island, and a book, Jack Hodgins and His Work, by David Jeffrey. In 1996, Oolichan Press published a collection of essays on his work, titled On Coasts of Eternity, edited by J. R. (Tim) Struthers. A book of essays on Hodgins's work, edited by Annika Hannan, has been published by Guernica Press, Toronto. His manuscripts, papers, letters and other materials are held in the literary manuscripts archives at the National Library of Canada

In 1990, as part of its 75th anniversary celebration, the University of British Columbia's Alumni Society included him amongst the "75 most distinguished graduates" to be honoured with a plaque. In June of 1995, the University of B.C. awarded him an honorary D.Litt for - according to the UBC Chronicle - bringing "renown to the university and the province as one of Canada's finest fiction writers and as an innovative stylist and distinguished academic." In the spring of 1998 he recei

Reviews

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this engaging novel, Alex Thorstad is a seventy-seven-year-old retired high school English teacher and widower living on the rustic, remote Estevan Island in the Strait of Georgia, BC, Canada. Tall and straight and healthy due to daily, rigorous swimming (in youth, he swam competitively), he yet feels obsolete, inconsequential to the world at large. The death of his wife and the closing of his forty-three year career as a teacher torment him and create a hollow loneliness in his soul, and he has become quite eccentric.

He was the best kind of devoted teacher, the one you wish for your children, and perhaps witnessed once in all your studies: the instructor who cared passionately about his students, and would go to vast creative lengths to turn his students onto poetry and theater, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, even if he had to use contemporary music and pop culture to bring the bygone near to the students and close the academic gap.

Still plucky after all these years, he places a newspaper ad, seeking “adoption” (room, board, meals) in exchange for tutoring. After some strange and perturbing offers, he accepts the best of them, to tutor the sixteen-year-old son of a very wealthy couple in Vancouver, a good kid who is nevertheless distracted with soccer and a recurring role in an LA TV series, one that is gearing up to giving him a more vital part in the show. This requires Thorstad to spend time in la-la land with the lad, Travis, and compete for time to prepare him for exams with a high-strung producer who wants Travis to prepare exclusively for his expanding role. Academics be damned!

This is a coming of twilight/golden age, a second chance for Alex, blended with the subordinate (yet, at times, symbiotic) storyline of Travis’ coming-of age story. There’s the push-pull of exasperation emanating from both young and old, and all the while Alex is coming to terms with his own past. Son of a Hollywood 1930’s stuntman who died in a fall before Alex was born, he always wanted to know more about his father. He is a movie aficionado, also sweet on memories of his first love, a (now elderly) actress who is somewhere in LA. Inundated with memories, Alex continues to have private “conversations” with his dead wife, Elena, who is both tart and lively as a ghost of a voice.

This is just a small portion of what this novel contains as far as adventure. The homeless population plays a crucial role on Estevan Island, and in Vancouver, where Travis volunteers at a homeless shelter to prepare for his role as a civic, outspoken homeless teen on TV. Then there are the drug traffickers and real-estate developers juxtaposed or intertwined with the homeless scenes, all providing background scaffolding for social edification. Best of all is the protagonist, bursting with moxie and an undying love for teaching. At times, the social messages in the book are too pronounced or transparent, and the relationship between Travis and Axel didn’t resonate as convincingly as I would have liked. There were a few convenient turns in the plot and a few feigned surprises that strained to fit in a too-tidy ending.

I would highly recommend this for a light but astute insight into what it means to be elderly or young, and on a bewildered search for belonging, relevance, and eternal happy endings for all ages.

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was privileged to hear this author read from this, his most recent novel, a few months ago. I've read all of his novels and I think I like this one best of all. As an author he is certainly not losing his touch.

Most of his books are set on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and this is no exception. The main character, Axel Thorstad, is a retired and widowed schoolteacher who has chosen to live in what was a summer cabin for the couple before she died. The cabin is on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and is home for a number of eccentric characters.

The story begins when Thorstand, fearing for his sanity in his lonely life, decides to put an ad in the paper offering tutoring services to a family willing to 'adopt' him, Then we meet the wealthy Montana family who live in Victoria, BC, who contract with him to accompany their son, Travis, to Los Angeles where he has a part in a TV series. What happens there changes Thorstad's view of himself and his own history.

Hodgins tells a great story and his characters come alive on the page. I particularly enjoy his use of personification ( a cello that only remembers certain phrases of music) and metaphor. The following paragraph describes a party:

"Even within the crammed-together forest of bodies, people had formed smaller groves. Conversations took place in tight standing circles or amongst those who'd claimed the few seats, with faces pushed in close to one another. Undergrowth doing its best in the shadow of surrounding timber."

Highly recommended.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book begins slowly and ends precipitously, leaving me bewildered and uncertain about it. During the first 50 pages or so, I willed myself to stay with it, because it had been recommended by a respected acquaintance. And then, I noticed I was thinking about the protagonist and his interior-exterior life, his decision to put himself into the world again, and what might unfold from that action.

I remain unsure about what the author was trying to say. The thing with literary writing today is that sometimes, the reader feels not quite smart enough to get the point lurking below the story. It’s as if the narrative constitutes a cloak over the essence of the book.

So that’s my issue: there is an appealing narrative arc, and our protagonist learns through an unlikely series of events—and a journey he takes—that his life has been shaped by illusion. The dominant maternal lie about his father sets him back on his heels, since he has worshipped a false hero who abandoned him and his mother.

And so, he ends up where he began, at home, on his island of misfits and hermits, where he seems to want to stay.

The book ends on several unresolved questions, so abruptly that I checked and re-checked to make sure nothing followed. This took me totally off guard, as if the tonal shift were an attempt to wake us up out of what struck me as a paced meditation of life, love, aging, and loss.

It is that meditation that I found most worthwhile.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel should have been called "The Master of Anti-climax". Every time I thought there might be something that broke away from everyday life, Hodgins came back with something mundane. For six pages (the fight) he had something going, but it always sunk back into the normal. I suppose, as a teacher, I should celebrate that Hodgins has painted a teacher in a positive light, but the impact of this teacher on his charge is rather minimal. I think Hodgins should have left Thorstad on the island. It had more intriguing characters and plot possibilities.

[Susan Ketchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly written, gentle and engaging novel by a master story teller. I was sad to finish it, as though I'd lost a friend. Books like this are hard to come by!

[Marni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Axel Thorstad is the main character of this story set on an island in the Salish Sea and L.A. He's a widowed, retired high school teacher who misses teaching so he sends out ads to board with people and help tutor teens. The book covers escapades and a story about the father he never knew.

[Bryan Edan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Hodgins is among the best that Canada has to offer. This is one of his best.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story focuses on Axel Thorstad, an elderly retired English teacher looking for purpose after the passing of his wife. In some ways I was drawn to Axel. I found the character's insights on teaching often spot-on, and I also was drawn in by his reminiscences of the past from the perspective of a septugenarian. At other times I was frustrated by his passivity. He seemed to float through the story, making interesting observations but not really doing anything about anything. At times he came across as wise...at other times wishy-washy. Other characters were flat, except for Oonagh. She seemed to have the strongest pulse in the tale. I thought the premise of the story was unique; I just expected more based on that premise.

[Ann Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written, but a tough one to get through. It kept getting buried in the stack of books on my nightstand. Every once in a while, it would make its way back to the surface and I'd read a few more chapters. Then I'd get hooked by a more compelling book again. All that said, I'm glad I persevered because the story was ultimately quite satisfying in the end and I loved the coastal BC setting where much of the story takes place.

[Karena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book, stioryline and characters. Just as funny as his previous works and much more accessible to non-coastal readers. Very quick read.

[J Gorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

March 2013. Enjoyed the first part of book but it got very tiresome when scene shifted to LA. I didn't finish book.

[Joelle Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the writing, but the story sometimes was so melancholy it was hard to keep going. Still, it was worth it in the end, and fun to read a book set in my neck of the woods.