Architects Are Here

Praise for
The Architects Are Here

National Bestseller

A
Globe and Mail
Best Book

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Toronto Life
Best of Fall

“‘The novel can do simply everything,’ Henry James wrote under the heading, the Future of the Novel, more than 100 years ago …. What Henry James wrote is worth remembering now when you read Michael Winter’s
The Architects Are Here
, because this flamboyant gem of a novel is so wide-angled and crowded with dramatic incident that it’s likely to stretch even an unusually generous reader’s literate mind and loving heart beyond normal limits…. That puts him right alongside Barbara Gowdy in the front rank of writers worth reading no matter how daunting and inhospitable the terrain their stories take readers across.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“SUPREME ORIGINALITY, SHATTERING INSIGHT:With the publication of his latest novel,
The Architects Are Here
, Newfoundland’s Michael Winter is well on his way to having one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian literature….
The Architects Are Here
is … at once familiar and innovative, a dissection of lives born in between the Newfoundland of old and new…. The glory of Winter is his writing style, a sharp-edged yet brittle prose that cannot be quickly summarized…. Like a poem, Winter’s prose must wash over the reader in its entirety, letting his asides and quick-cut thought edits bounce around in the reader’s mind, quietly revealing character through humour warm yet grim…. Already in his short professional life, Winter has burst through the pack with his startling personal mix of lyrical cadence, imagination and warmth. The Architects Are Here is proof positive that Winter is something special.”

—
Winnipeg Free Press

“Mesmerizing … beautifully written, doleful and comic and heartfelt, this just might be the book to bring the 42-year-old Winter the broader audience many think he has long deserved.”

—
Calgary Herald

“Best of Fall; The Fabulist: Novelist Michael Winter Tackles Rivalry and Romance. [
The Architects Are Here
is] brainy and ambitious—just like its author.”

—
Toronto Life

“
The Architects are Here
reveals a new maturity and sophistication in [Winter’s] writing.”

—cbc.ca

“A soaring novel that breaks every rule… it absolutely soars, with catharsis, resonance and unexpected resolution. … [A] fulfilling read…. Winter has tapped the ineffable.
The Architects Are Here
is not modelled on fiction, but rooted in the guts and hurly-burly of life, capturing that experience as few novels do.… It is less a novel than it is a force of nature, a bloody, ugly, ultimately uplifting taste of life itself.”

—Robert Wiersema,
National Post

“It’s a mature book, in Winter’s mastery of his devastatingly effective prose style and sprawling, entrancing plot and in the concerns of his thirtysomething characters. It’s big and ambitious and exciting: it’s a Toronto novel and a Newfoundland novel and a road novel all rolled into one; a love triangle and a buddy story and a revenge epic; a boozy, funny portrait of achingly true characters you might have a beer with playing out their lives on a widescreen scale.”

—
Eye Weekly

“
The Architects Are Here
cements the author’s position as one of our very best…”

—
Edmonton Journal

“[A] wonderfully distinctive voice….”

—
The Gazette
(Montreal)

“The quintessential road-trip novel…”

—
Times-Colonist
(Victoria, BC)

“Winter is the architect of this book, and though all the characters attempt to gain control, there is an implicit hopelessness haunting them on every page. Freud and the ancient Greek tragedians would appreciate the manner and style of the relentless destiny he determines for the Twomblys. Michael Winter is a skilled and confident author, adept with detail and incisive with observations. His characters are true and magnificently flawed, and his writing is peppered with random observations of the bizarre, with which life is often replete.”

—
Women’s Post

“His third novel,
The Architects Are Here
, can do little but burnish his literary halo.… Michael Winter is a fascinating writer who takes chances…. Like fine brandy, it is hard to read just one Winter novel. When you finish this one, take a tip from me and look him up in the ‘Ws’ of your local library’s fiction section.”

—
The Sun Times
(Owen Sound, ON)

“Those who enjoy … Winter’s talent for ‘linguistic pointillism’ will find much to enjoy here. They will also find, for the first time, a contemporary narrative about larger-than-life characters embroiled in a plot that reaches mythic proportions. This is Winter’s most fictional fiction to date, and it is written with tremendous confidence.”

—
Quill & Quire

“There is also, of course, the expected linguistic playfulness of Winter’s style … and his ability to make metaphoric leaps that reveal something of the essential nature of things.”

—
The Independent
(St. John’s, NL)

Praise for Michael Winter

“Winter reduces the most telling moments to their purest essence, snippets of telling dialogue and minimal description. The result is utterly convincing … I was rapt—at times downright thrilled. The prose is so pure and true. Moments, reduced to their essence. Damn, I love the way this guy writes.”—
Toronto Star

“Winter paints the Newfoundland landscape, its people and the business of their lives with sharp, simple—and beautiful—strokes.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“[Winter]’s a natural writer … just one of the creatures born to do it … he can really grab your attention and make you feel things…. Lovely.”

—
National Post

“Extraordinarily witty … [Winter] is a born poet, out to invigorate the novel form.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“Dramatic and beautifully written.… Winter drives his finely honed sentences into the page like nails into wood, constructing a solid, many-layered and powerfully provocative story.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Bold and ambitious … Winter’s artistry extends to capturing the local rhythms of speech, the bleak and stunning scenery and simple domestic tableaux.”

—
The Washington Post

“One of the best—and most distinctive—younger writers on the Canadian scene.”

—
Quill & Quire

“Think Henry James filtered through James Ellroy.”

—
The Buffalo News

“His prose is both sheet-metalled and lyrical and soaked in truth:You can read for hours without a single false quantity.”

—
Toro

PENGUIN CANADA

THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE

MICHAEL WINTER
is the author of
The Big Why
, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary Award. He divides his time between Toronto and St. John’s.
The Architects Are Here
is his fifth book.

Also by Michael Winter

Creaking in Their Skins

One Last Good Look

This All Happened

The Big Why

MICHAEL WINTER

THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2007

Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Michael Winter, 2007

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note:This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Winter, Michael, 1965–

The architects are here / Michael Winter.

ISBN 978-0-14-305570-9

I. Title

PS8595.I624A73 2008    C813’.54    C2008-902653-5

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

for
CLP

ONE

ONE

T
HIS IS A STORY
about my friend David Twombly and about the nature of our friendship. David is gone now, and there’s a temptation to eulogize him in some time-honoured way that would implicitly deny the intensity and texture of what we shared. I intend to avoid that. I want the immediacy of the quotidian, its take-no-prisoners feel and sharp whiff. And I want to tell as much of the truth as is important. To do that, I must tell you something about a third person, a woman named Nell Tarkington, who years ago entered our lives, Dave’s and mine, and stayed there, changing each of us in complex and idiosyncratic ways. So the beginning of this tale is also hers.

I met David Twombly one winter when we were building igloos out of snow ploughed from driveways behind the drug store. I knew him because we both played peewee hockey and carried our duffel bags full of gear down to the rink before school. He was good, and I was picked last for things. But the igloo-building made him like me. His parents were American and mine were English and so we recognized in each other the outsider in this Newfoundland milltown. We had carved out the USS
Enterprise
with connecting tunnels, the whole starship, with lit candles in alcoves. It possessed the muted intimacy of the womb. And one night, while we sat at the control deck, the igloo began to vibrate. Then one entire side of the igloo was sheered off and the loud orange blade of a snowplough ran past us. And there, out in the shining dark, was the city we lived in.

My father taught industrial arts, and I feared that I’d be tortured about it. But boys respected him—he was, in their eyes, a cool guy. Strict but cool. He let them build useful things, slingshots and gun racks and box kites, even a totem pole. The main plus for my father was that industrial arts was a two-hour class and he allowed the boys to smoke out by the double doors between periods. That showed real understanding.